Chapter Text
William watched the wreck of the Fearless drift further and further away from shore. It hadn't been very close to the rocky beach to begin with, but now the tide seemed to have caught it, as if to truly hammer home the idea that it was not coming back. There was a distant, splintering crack as the hull of the ship scraped against a massive floe of ice – many of which littered the water for as far as the eye could see – and then a very ominous, much larger roaring and rushing as the ocean sped in to claim its spoils.
Miss Flagstaff's Elite Finishing School hadn't taught him anything useful for this sort of situation but, freezing cold and soaking wet, huddled at the bottom of a rowboat berthed on a deserted, frozen island, he nonetheless found himself turning back towards her teachings, as if he might find some kernel of wisdom in the half-remembered words of a stuffy old bird now many thousands of miles away.
A lady must retain her poise at all times, he remembered, advice that seemed solid enough, despite the fact that he wasn't a lady. She must be calm under duress, for the needs of the household fall to her.
William looked again at the sinking Fearless, now listing dreadfully to the left, her proud sails limp, her prow dipping dangerously close to the water such that the figurehead of the mermaid which had been Captain Mercer's pride and joy (and which William had been forced to clean more than once whenever the captain was feeling capricious) was now being angled straight for a face-first dunking into...well, what William assumed was still the Indian Ocean, though he was not willing to put money on the idea.
"Calm," he said aloud, and the sound of his own voice – thready with fear and exhaustion – was so startling that he immediately stopped speaking again. He had half assumed that he was already dead, and all of this a sort of...dreaming prelude to lead him to the Pearly Gates, but no. He was alive, for better or for worse, and he was alone, and he was very, very cold.
For a few minutes more, after hauling himself upwards in order to hang heavily over the side of his little boat, William watched the Fearless disappear inch by inch beneath the waves. There wasn't much else to watch. There was the beach on which he'd woken up, and the ever-present drifts of ice that pocked the ocean's swells, but beyond those he and the sinking ship appeared to be the most interesting things for many miles around. Even the seabirds were giving the beach a wide berth, likely due to the commotion caused by the ship.
Marcus quite liked the birds, he thought, and this, innocuous as it was, seemed to be enough to put a chink into the dam around his emotions, and William burst into sudden and alarming tears. They seemed boiling hot compared to the rest of his freezing body, but even that didn't last for long, and his tears cooled rapidly on his cheeks until it felt as though he had a thin sheen of ice encasing his entire head.
Stop it! he told himself, but tears, like the ocean, heeded no master. He was beginning to make an awful, hiccupy-gasping noise, and so, trembling, he slipped off his heavy, waterlogged gloves and clapped his hands over his mouth. He wasn't sure why – anyone who might have been around to hear him was almost assuredly dead.
He cried for what felt like hours, but couldn't actually have been because by the time the tears started to slow he hadn't frozen to death yet. His clothes, however, were beginning to feel like they were made of lead, and the dinghy that he had escaped in provided very little shelter from the wind that whipped across the beach.
Another ephemeral bit of advice from Miss Flagstaff drifted into his mind. When you find yourself lacking, remember that it is a man's job to provide, but a woman's job to organize. You must make do with what you have.
William sniffed, and rubbed his cheeks until they felt raw and tingly, but blessedly ice-free, and said, "If you could see me now, Miss Flagstaff." No one answered. He would have been very surprised if someone had. Still, he almost wished that Miss Flagstaff could see him now. His first month at sea had pared him down to his barest essentials, and the following two had built him back up again, until all the 'blubber' that the girls at Miss Flagstaff's had been so fond of mocking him for had hardened into solid muscle. From almost every angle he was now indistinguishable from any of the other sailors. Or, he had been, at least. There was no longer anyone for him to compare himself to.
William bit down on his lip until he felt a hot trickle of blood coat his tongue. Then he leaned over the side of the dinghy and spat. Better to have bloody teeth, he thought, than to sit around crying and letting himself freeze to death. Miss Flagstaff might offer him the bones of advice, but he had learned quite a lot more from Marcus and Hernandez and the other sailors. He'd learned how to tie and cast rope, and he'd learned how to patch sails, and he had learned how to make a fire.
That was what he needed. A fire. Hernandez had shown him how to take two sticks and spin them together until a spark caught, but, seeing as he was currently lacking in sticks, he would need to find some other way.
And he was still cold. Freezing, in fact. His hands, still bare, were beginning to turn an alarming shade of red, and so William quickly shoved them back into his now-frozen gloves. They had all taken to wearing full winter clothing within the last two weeks, many of them preferring to sleep in their coats and boots, just in case they were needed on the deck in the middle of the night. William was glad for it, because it meant that, underneath his thick coat, the rest of his clothes were...well, if not precisely dry, then at least not soaked through.
He vaguely recalled some of the sailors saying that you ought to take your clothes off after you'd fallen into cold water. Something about the sea sapping all the heat from you. The last thing William wanted to do was to take off his coat and expose more of himself to the frigid air, but he also didn't want to die.
He might die either way.
Shivering, he did as his memories bade him and slowly unbuttoned his coat. It was an ulster that he had taken from his father's wardrobe, made of herringbone tweed with a seal fur lining. His father had been very proud of the fur, and had made a point of telling William that it cost at least as much as his tuition had, but at least it was earning its keep by being warm.
William had hated the coat, and had intended to take it and throw it overboard as soon as they were quite far out to sea. The only thing that had stopped him was Marcus, who had asked to borrow it once while he was in the middle of patching his own greatcoat. Thus it had cemented itself in William's mind as not his father's coat, but the ship's coat. A coat that he could offer to his mates.
His shivering grew worse as he slid the coat from his shoulders and draped it over the side of the dinghy. He wasn't sure if it would dry that way, but there was no better place to put it.
Then, teeth chattering miserably, he took stock of himself and his surroundings.
If he were to organize from largest to smallest, he could see the following: the sea, which remained inscrutable and hostile and which continued to slowly devour the wreck of the Fearless; the beach, which consisted mostly of rocks, with a few patches of frozen dirt to keep things interesting; the dinghy, which was his only source of wood that he could see, and also his only reliable way off the beach, should he make the attempt to venture forth; and himself. This prompted him to start patting his pockets down, which unearthed several promising new developments: his knife, which he must have grabbed on his way out of the crew's quarters, as well as a tin whistle and, God bless him, a case of matches. His hands were shaking fierce enough that he took three tries to flip the catch, but when he finally managed William felt a great rush of relief go speeding through him.
The case was only a little damp inside. The matches, wrapped in a little square of waxed paper, might still work.
William's legs chose that moment to give out from under him, and he slid down the side of the dinghy until he was sitting in the bottom of it, feeling like he might start crying again. His emotions were like a compass, swinging wildly back and forth; when he opened his mouth, what came out instead of sobs was a bark of wild, exhilarated laughter, which quickly overtook him, and had him clutching at his mouth and his nose to try and find some semblance of balance. He laughed until his eyes started to sting with tears again, until his chest was heaving and his sides were sore, and then when he couldn't laugh any more he hung his head over his knees and made a hideous whistling noise at the back of his throat like a tea kettle with consumption.
Father would tell you to get a hold of yourself, he thought. He wouldn't have a hysteric daughter under his roof.
Then, on the heels of that thought, But I'm not his daughter, am I? I'm William Caldwell.
Slowly, William reminded himself how to breathe properly again. Everything hurt, he was realizing, from his frozen fingertips and toes to the tip of his exposed nose to his heart, which hadn't stopped hammering since he had first woken on the beach. He remembered another thing that his mates on the Fearless had taught him: it was a good sign if something still hurt. It was when you started not feeling pain that something was very wrong.
He needed to find shelter. And he needed to make a fire, and find food.
It seemed so simple, laid out like that.
Shelter was likely the easiest. The dinghy wasn't large, but if he flipped it over he could pile sand and rocks around it to help keep out the wind, and then he could at least crawl beneath it and have a little bit of cover. William carefully shut the case of matches and put it in his innermost pocket, and then gathered his coat – now frozen stiff – and clambered out of the dinghy.
The dinghy was of a standard size, so far as William knew, but he had never needed to move one by himself before. He'd had help dropping this one into the water, from one of the sailors that he'd not known half so well as Marcus or Hernandez or Sully. Then the Fearless had lurched, and while William had gone into the dinghy, the man who'd helped him – Michael? Had his name been Michael? – had been thrown backwards. If William tried he could still bring back the memory of all the screaming with horrible alacrity.
He shivered, and this time it wasn't from the cold. Moving the dinghy was hard, purely physical work, and gave his mind nothing to focus on. So, like a lodestone, he was drawn back again and again to the last full memories he had of...he supposed it was last night, now, because he could see the sun rising over a bank of thick, storm-grey clouds to the east.
It must have been close to midnight, because William had vague recollections of the ship's bell sounding some seven or eight times at one point; he'd gotten up to relieve himself and was returning from the head when he'd felt the ship rock the first time. It had felt like something had hit the ship, hard enough that it had set the whole vessel listing. His first thought had been that they were under attack, but there'd been no lights out on the water save for the few that illuminated the deck, and when he'd rushed to the starboard side there'd been no other ships in sight. Just the shadows cast on the water by their oil lamps.
Then the second hit had come, and the entire ship had exploded into action. Men had been shouting from below deck – breach! they'd cried, breach in the hull! – and Captain Mercer had appeared in the doorway to his cabin, bedraggled and bleary. Someone else had been shouting that there were things in the water, but then the chaos of it all had swept him up, and William hadn't heard anything else. The last thing he'd seen before the dinghy was dropped had been Captain Mercer standing at the helm, his rheumy, rage-filled eyes trained towards some distant point on the horizon. As though he'd intended to fight God for the chance to keep his ship afloat.
He had been a piss-poor captain, but in that moment William felt he had understood a fraction of his mind, something he had not even tried to fathom before. It was not only that Mercer longed for fame and glory; the man had been insane.
With a grunt, William shoved his shoulder as hard as he could against the dinghy's edge, elation bubbling up when the thing finally flipped, scudding a few centimeters across the rock and frozen sand before settling again. It wasn't a very good shelter, but if he could get a fire started, and then hang his coat up in front of the largest part of the opening...then he could fill in the rest of the gaps with rocks...
William shoved his hands into his armpits, the sting of the cold air beginning to turn to numbness at his fingertips. He didn't have any memory of the time between the dinghy dropping and when he'd woken up safe on the beach, and so he had no idea how much time had actually passed. It could have been hours. It could have been days, though he doubted it. He had the feeling that he would be a lot hungrier if it had been longer than a day.
Fire was the next thing to worry about, and also likely to be the hardest to come by. The beach was a barren strand, nothing but rocks and pack ice in the distance, and further inland he couldn't see much different. There were a few shadows, hidden in swirls of pearlescent grey mist, that he thought might be large rocks, but the only signs of life that he could see from where he stood were some patches of grass a bit further up the beach. He supposed he could try and dry the grass with his body heat and then use it as tinder, but that still didn't solve the issue of what he was going to use as fuel.
There was the dinghy. He couldn't burn the dinghy. Not only was it his only source of shelter, but it was also his only chance of escape. There was the shipwreck, but that would mean flipping the dinghy back over, somehow shoving it back down into the water, and rowing out all by himself. As much muscle as he'd built over the past three months, he wasn't sure he was capable of that just yet...at least, not in his current, half-frozen state.
You could go wandering down the beach, he thought wildly, like that mad woman in that book your sister was reading. It hadn't been a beach, though, it had been a moor. Isabella had read bits of the book to him, late at night when neither of them could sleep. William had thought it an alarming sort of book, about a woman falling in love with a monster, but Bella had insisted it was a love story. Being able to love someone through their monstrousness was a sign of true devotion, she'd said.
William hadn't told her about his plans. About how he'd worked it all out, how he was going to cut his hair and tie down his chest and then maybe he would finally feel like he was in his own, real skin, and how he would slip down to the docks in the dead of night and find the first ship that was hiring...How he would escape.
He hadn't told her, but he'd had the thought, when she'd said what she said about monsters, that she might understand. And he still hadn't told her, and now he was here, alone on a God-forsaken beach, and he was going to die here with no one knowing where he was, or what had become of him.
The urge to cry was still there, fiercely present, but this time around William didn't have anything left in him to offer up to it. He'd wasted all his tears on dead men and now he didn't have any left for himself. What he wanted, more than anything else, was to sit down on the lonesome beach and hang his head between his legs until things became miraculously better, but he wasn't going to get that, either. There was nothing for it but to keep moving forward.
Forward, in that case, meant scrounging along the beach looking for bits of the sinking ship. He could still see it out there, drifting amongst the early morning fog, but it still seemed to be remarkably intact. He had the mad thought that if he could just get out to it he might be able to somehow patch the hole in the hull that people had been shouting about – perhaps they had all just been caught unawares, and the sheer speed of the water rushing in was what had killed them. Perhaps William, with more time to formulate a plan, might actually be able to do what more than a score of seasoned sailors had failed at.
It was a mad thought, but it gave him a fantasy to linger on as he shuffled up and down the beach, kicking at rocks with his sodden boots and trying desperately not to give in to the repeating thought in his head that, someday soon, this beach would be his grave. And there wouldn't even be anybody to give him a proper burial, he would just be left out in the open for the birds and the crabs to pick at...if birds and crabs even ventured this far south. He knew they'd been somewhere close to Australia a week or two ago, and then not long after that they had started running into trouble with navigating the increasingly ice-studded waters, which had slowed them considerably. Now he had no earthly concept of where he was, which meant that no one else would, either. Even if by some miracle there was a rescue mission mounted for poor, insane Captain Jack Mercer, it was hard to imagine, even in a fantasy, that anyone would stumble upon this one empty stretch of unlivable beach out of the whole, wide ocean.
William flipped over a stone with his boot, and then leapt backwards with a gasp, nearly turning his ankle, when something small and shiny-wet and dark skittered out from under it. It was only about half the size of his palm, but it moved so quickly that it reminded him of an insect, like the wasps that nested in their garden at the height of summer. It went trundling off through the rocks and the dirt and the frozen sand, then stopped several feet away.
That answered his question about crabs, then.
William took a step forward, and then another, having the vague thought that he might catch the thing and eat it – surely it must be better than eating a fish raw – but the crab was small and lightning-fast, and before he could make a dive for the thing it was scuttling off again, this time towards the water. William followed it, because if nothing else he was more likely to find wood if he wandered a bit closer to the sea. As the sun rose it dried his hair and made his cheeks feel warm again, but all the rest of him was still shivering, and his toes were disconcertingly numb.
If you get frostbite on your toes you'll have to cut them off, he told himself firmly. Just the thought was enough to make his gorge rise, and only a powerful exercise of will kept him from vomiting right there and then. It was the truth, though. There was no ship's surgeon to quickly and deftly sew up some little cut he'd gotten, or to give him charcoal and ginger tea when choppy seas made his stomach queasy. He was not only going to die alone on this beach, but he was going to be alone the entire time before that, too.
He didn't have any tears left, but he did have enough energy to make a noise as he stopped at the lapping, trembling shoreline. William bent over his knees and just managed to hold his palm against his mouth before the urge to scream overtook him.
It wasn't any better of a sound than his crying had been. It was a rough, barking noise, his throat raspy from seawater or from his crying earlier, he wasn't sure which, and it went on and on, until he was sure that his next exhale was going to fleck blood against his hand. By some miracle it didn't, though, and his screaming petered out into just the sound of his own heaving breaths, and his blood pounding in his ears.
Slowly, he took his hand away from his mouth. There were teeth marks in the palm, from how hard he'd pressed, and a smear of spit that would have disgusted him before he had left for sea. Now, he wiped it on his trouser leg without thinking much of it; that was another thing he'd learned from Marcus and the others: how to say things like 'piss' and 'shit' and to not grow immediately faint at the sight of blood, his own or someone else's, and in all other ways how to be a man. They had raised a better son than William's father ever had, and in a splintering fraction of the time, to boot.
William stood very still for a few minutes, gathering his strength again. The crab he had been wandering after was long gone, and there was nothing except for him and the dark, silent sea.
"God," he said, and then swallowed. He'd hardly prayed at all for the past three months, more interested in relearning how to be his own earthly self. He hadn't given any consideration to what his soul might be like – as far as he'd been concerned, his soul had always been a man's. It was just...everything else that was off. It occurred to him that this was the sort of thing that God might have an issue with, the body being made in His divine image. Still, he was going to die here anyway, and whether he died damned or saved didn't change the fact that dead was dead.
"God," he tried again, and for good measure clasped his hands together and bowed his head over them, both to pray and also to try and keep his fingers warm, "I don't know if you're listening, but I don't want to die here. I...I want to see Bella again, and I want to find out if Tansy married that bloke she liked, and I...I do think I'd like a husband, someday, if he could see his way past calling me his husband, too, and I want to live, God, please, I want to live, please let me find some...some firewood, please, oh God, please..."
There were more words set to come spilling out of him, more of the same, just meaningless begging with no expectation of being granted any respite, and William would have been quite content to continue in that vein for another few minutes if it hadn't been for the low, quick snorting noise that suddenly rose from somewhere just ahead of him.
He lifted his head.
There, out in the water some twenty feet off, was something bobbing amongst the swells. It was oval-ish and silvery, with wet, dark eyes and a plush, dark nose, the nostrils of which flared as it made the snorting noise again, a fine plume of sea mist rising above it.
It was a seal.
William had seen seals before, cavorting alongside the ship, but none even half so large as this one. He could only see its head, but that alone was more than a foot long, and as he watched it opened its mouth and made a noise at him that was like a bird's trilling call, but so guttural that he swore he could feel the vibration of it in his gut. Most of its head, he saw, was actually made of mouth, and inside that mouth were very many large, sharp white teeth.
It could eat my head in one bite, William thought. It wouldn't even have to chew. It could just...swallow, and I'd be done.
Hernandez had been fond of telling him that it wasn't sharks he needed to worry about on the open ocean, but things like orcas, which were much more naturally aggressive and would sometimes attack ships. No one had ever mentioned anything about seals with teeth like knives.
It was, at the very least, in the water, and he didn't think that seals were particularly graceful creatures on land. It did seem to be drifting a bit closer, but he thought that as long as he could keep ten or so feet between himself and it, he would be able to outrun it. He wasn't sure where he would run to...further inland? There were no trees for him to climb that he could see, but the shore quickly turned into rocky bluffs and grassy hills. With any luck, if the seal decided to pursue him it would grow tired before William ran out of land on which to run.
Assuming he could run. His feet were still very cold, and his toes still very numb.
He paced a few more feet down the beach, trying to keep an eye on the seal at the same time as he tried to search for driftwood. It was slow going: the seal followed him, drifting gently along in the waves, and though it seemed to show no interest in berthing itself, William couldn't help but return again and again to that flash of teeth, and the bright pink of its tongue, longer than his hand, and how wide its throat had been.
After ten minutes of fruitless searching, William cleared his throat and stopped. The seal stopped with him, bobbing slowly in place and keeping its dark, fathomless eyes trained on him.
"I'm not very tasty," William told it. "I'm...I'm all gristle, at this point. No more fat. See?" He patted his belly as emphasis. Thankfully, his clothes were thick enough to disguise the fact that he did still have something of a belly, though beneath the layer of fat was now a hard core of muscle. Also thankfully, seals couldn't understand English. William dropped his arm to his side and blew hair from his eyes.
"Don't suppose you know where I can get firewood?" he asked the seal. "I imagine you know this place much better than I."
The seal blinked at him. It had a curious way of doing it, squeezing its eyes shut very hard as if to wring all the water from them. It waggled its head back and forth, and a little bit more of it surfaced, revealing huge swathes of silver-grey fur speckled with charcoal spots. Even from this distance it looked enchantingly soft, and he thought of the seal fur lining of his ulster, and how he wished the coat wasn't frozen near-solid.
"No," William said. "I didn't think so."
+++
William continued down the beach at a plodding pace, focusing a bit less on the seal, now that it was seeming less and less inclined towards launching itself out of the water towards him. It was still drifting steadily closer, twenty feet down to fifteen, inching towards ten, but that could have just as well been the tides carrying it as its own flippers. It didn't seem aggressive, anyway, and he supposed that dying to those teeth might actually be a bit faster than dying of starvation or exposure, so...
But he didn't want to die, was the thing. He wanted, really very badly, to live. It was an odd thing, to feel simultaneously the crushing depths of despair buoyed only slightly by the tenuous raft of hope. Hope for what, though, he wasn't sure. Rescue was quite beyond him, and the thought of trying to make a life here...of being here alone...
He thought he would go mad. Really, truly mad, and not just dashing out into the rainy moors in a petticoat and no shoes mad.
He might be going a bit mad now, he thought, because the beach was all the same, and it was beginning to blur together. A little ways down the shore he could see the first difference since he'd woken up, a hump in the landscape that, as he grew closer, resolved itself into a craggy cliff face that rose up and up, and then disappeared into the mist. He couldn't see anything above it, and the solid line of the cliff continued on deeper into the interior of...he supposed it must be an island, mustn't it? The nearest continent was Australia, and they had passed it some weeks ago.
A deserted, rocky, frozen island.
William stopped and put his hands on his knees, hunching over them and forcing himself to breathe quietly for a few minutes. Screaming hadn't done anything to help, but it had made him feel better, if only temporarily. His throat hurt, though, and he realized abruptly that whether or not he could make a fire was irrelevant, because even if he didn't freeze to death, he still needed water. And all there was, for miles and miles around, was the sea.
William shuddered, and his legs, which were already sore and tired, gave out underneath him. He sank down onto the ground with another awful, hiccuping bark of despair, and covered his face with his hands. There was grit and sand coating his gloves, and it rubbed uncomfortably wherever he touched, which seemed just one more injustice piled on top of a great heap of injustices. It wasn't fair, he thought. It wasn't fair that he should spend twenty years under his father's oppressive roof, suffocating beneath the weight of crinoline and corsets, listening to his father tell him that he was a disappointment of a daughter when in his heart he had been screaming then name me your son! It wasn't fair that he should finally find the opportunity to escape, to shed those heavy dresses and emerge from them the stalwart seafaring man he had always known himself to be, only to have his metamorphosis cut short by death, it wasn't fair that he should finally feel some semblance of home in his own skin only to have it ripped away from him! It wasn't fair!
The sound of his own agonized voice shocked him from his rage and his sorrow, and William realized that he had been screaming the last few thoughts down into his cupped palms. Nothing answered him except for the cry of a gull some ways off, muffled by the mist that was slowly burning away beneath the rising sun. He had managed to find a few more tears somewhere, as his cheeks were once again hot and wet, and his eyes were stinging something fierce, gritty with more than just the sand that flecked his lashes.
He didn't want to die. He didn't, but what was the point of continuing on like this? Spending the last few days of his life in misery and loneliness? He had his knife. He could...he could make it quicker. He didn't have a strong grasp of anatomy, but even a dullard could figure out how to slit their own wrists, it was only a matter of depth...
From very close to him, concerningly close, there came a raspy, coughing sound. Like a dog, if a dog were barking down into an empty well. William spread his fingers, and between the shadows of them and the dark leather of his gloves he could see silver and grey, and a single black, wet eye.
This is it, he thought. This is how I'll die. His mind was racing: he could run, but to where? He could stay and fight, but to what end? Or he could let the creature take him, and if he were lucky it would rip out his throat in one go and he wouldn't suffer too terribly. But on the other hand, oh God, he didn't want to die, he wanted to go back to London and find a husband who could love him and he wanted to learn how to play the flute, and he wanted to see his sister again, and...
The seal coughed at him again and, shuddering, William slowly lowered his hands. Marcus and Hernandez and the others hadn't died just so he could be a coward. If he was going to die, then he was going to face it head-on.
The seal was much larger than he had thought. Impossibly large. Numbers and measurements completely escaped him at the moment, but it looked larger than any shark he had ever seen swimming alongside the ship. The only thing he could think to compare it to was a tame bear that he had seen at a circus when he was young, a huge, brown thing that had ambled along slowly after its trainer and had been taught to stand on its hind legs and wave like a person. He remembered that he had cried when he'd seen the bear, because his mind hadn't been able to conceive of something so large. His father had told him that he was being a silly little girl, and it wouldn't hurt him because it was under its tamer's control. But this seal wasn't under anyone's control. It was a wild thing, and it was massive, and beautiful, and it was very, very close to him. Close enough that he thought he could reach out and stroke its sleek, soft sides. Close enough that he could see the sand and the dirt flecking its wet nose, and its eyes, which were so dark and so shiny that they could have been purest onyx.
It stared at him, and William stared back, waiting for the huge jaws to open, for the sharp teeth to come down upon his neck and put an end to his admittedly short time of suffering, but nothing happened. Gradually, though, the seal started to look away from him, little flicks of its eyes at first, and then it turned its head, making soft croaking noises. He wasn't sure that he wanted to look away from it, but then the creature started to slap its flippers against the dirt, and William finally looked towards where it seemed to be indicating.
There was a plank of wood on the ground.
It was a good size, as long as William was tall, and soaked through in seawater, but it was wood. He was willing to bet that it was a piece of the ship, still drifting serenely out in the little harbor, but from which part he couldn't tell. William looked back at the seal, which was once again staring at him. It was a very handsome creature, he thought. The sort of thing that was perfectly suited to its environment, like a bird or a fish. Beneath all that soft, velvety fur he could see muscles rippling, and though he knew seals to be ungainly on land he couldn't help but think that this animal wouldn't have any trouble moving fast enough to catch whatever prey it wanted, whether that was on a beach or in the water.
"Thank you?" he said, voice turning up at the end, because surely he couldn't be thanking a seal. The wood must have washed up onto the shore without him noticing, that was it. He knew that dogs could be trained to fetch things like newspapers and shoes, but...but this was a wild animal.
You prayed, though, the little voice of hope chimed up. You prayed, and didn't God send a dove to tell Noah when land was near? And didn't he make the lions lie down with Daniel?
An angel had come and closed the lions' mouths. That was a bit different. He didn't have any refutation to the dove, though.
Well, there was one way to find out, wasn't there? William lowered his hands slowly, keeping a weather eye on the seal as he did so, but all the animal did was continue to watch him. When he reached out for the plank it shifted a bit, prompting him to freeze, but after another minute of not doing anything he gathered up the tattered remnants of his courage and snagged the piece of wood closer with the tips of his fingers. It looked no less damp or sorry up close than it had at two feet away, but at least it was now directly in his possession.
And the seal had not tried to bite him. It hadn't so much as flinched when his hand had come near it. Are there tame seals? he wondered. It would make more sense to him that this was an animal that had escaped a circus, rather than a wild beast that was deciding to...to help him. For what purpose? Out of the goodness of its heart?
Still. "Thank you," he said again, this time with a bit more confidence. He considered the wood. He had noted the grass earlier, and that it might make for decent enough tinder, but a single plank of wood wasn't enough to keep a fire going for very long. He cleared his throat and, feeling very much like the silly little girl his father had once accused him of being, asked the seal, "I don't suppose...you could get me more? Only, this will burn for maybe an hour, if it even burns at all...God, if it burns. If I had lamp oil, maybe..." He hadn't, in truth, been thinking much beyond 'getting firewood.' Now the actual logistics of it were coming into play, and William wondered again if the effort was even worth it. If there was no fresh water on the island, he would be dead within the week, and even if there was...how long did he think he could last here, really? How long could he go without losing his mind from loneliness?
The seal regarded him with its wet, dark eyes. The sun flashed through the mist for just a moment, haloing its silver fur in light, and then the seal snorted, and turned on its hip away from him. It began a waddling, sliding journey back down to the water, moving with surprising alacrity considering its lack of legs, and within seconds it had disappeared beneath the waves, and William was alone again.
He waited for a few minutes, counting seconds under his breath until his teeth started to chatter and he lost count. Then, grunting with the effort, pushed himself to standing and, plank of wood in tow, he headed back down the beach the way he'd come.
There was, if nothing else, a curious freedom to being here. When he had been aboard the Fearless, especially at first, he had been so terrified of the sailors, or worse, the Captain, discovering his secret that he had spent the first two weeks barely speaking to anybody. His voice had already been husky, but he had practiced each night to make it lower, until it had come second-nature to him, and he had tried to teach himself how to walk in a more masculine way by studying the sailors during the day, and he had even taught himself how to piss standing up, if the need so arose. It had been exhausting, though, always keeping his guard up, always on the alert for anything that might give him away. Things he had actually enjoyed doing, like embroidery and dancing, became forbidden topics of conversation out of fear that one of the others might become suspicious. In some ways he had been more restricted than he had ever been under his father's roof, though the elation of being able to call himself William had far outweighed any sorrow he felt over not being able to bring along an embroidery hoop.
Here, though, he didn't have to worry about revealing himself to anyone, because there was no one but him. Well, him and the seal, assuming it ever came back, and he didn't think an animal would care what bits he had.
He wasn't feeling any less hopeless by the time he reached his makeshift shelter, but despair had become a sort of numb shock, and so William laid the plank underneath the dinghy to protect it from the mist, and then he sat down with his back leaning against the rowboat's curve. He judged by the position of the sun – or what he could see of it through the constant, grey clouds – that it had perhaps been an hour and some since he'd woken, and he still couldn't remember anything that had happened between when he'd fallen into the dinghy and when he'd opened his eyes on the beach. He had very vague flashes of darkness and cold, but that could have been him recalling the ship sinking. Everything had been so chaotic and loud...he couldn't even remember if he had seen any of his mates, before the end. Just that man who'd helped him with the ropes, and who had never been able to reap the fruits of his labor.
No more tears seemed forthcoming, thankfully, but a worse thing than sorrow was setting in: exhaustion. It seemed silly that he should feel so tired when he couldn't remember doing anything to become that way, but there was no denying that his arms and legs were beginning to feel like they were filled with sand, and he couldn't keep his head from nodding down. Several times he started, blinking awake from some fugue state, not-quite-dreaming, and on the third such occasion, as William's chin snapped up from his chest, he saw the seal again.
It was approaching him at a good clip, using its own momentum to bounce itself forward, and in its mouth it had a large wad of fishing net, which trailed behind it like a cape. The net was full of things, all jostling together and rattling and clinking, and if William hadn't already been startled into wakefulness by how fast the seal was coming at him, he would have surely been woken by the sheer racket of its approach.
The seal came to an abrupt halt perhaps three feet away, and it opened its huge, dagger-lined mouth and let the netting drop. Or, it tried to – its teeth were so large that the net had gotten twisted around several of them, and William watched it try and use its tongue to pry the cotton loose, to no avail. Like everything else about it, its tongue was very large but not, it seemed, dexterous. It gave a good attempt, turning its head this way and that to try and dislodge the net, but eventually it seemed to give up. It turned its large, dark eyes to William instead, and he was reminded of the old parable of the mouse who took the thorn from the lion's paw. The moral of that story was that you oughtn't judge someone for being smaller or weaker than you, but William had always thought that the mouse had earned a very powerful favor indeed.
He cleared his throat. Maybe it was the shock, or maybe it was madness already setting in, but he felt he couldn't just watch the animal suffer when he could easily help it. Besides, it had...it had brought him things. He could see, now that the net was no longer being dragged at speed, that there were more wooden planks caught up in the netting, as well as several metal and wooden containers, some cloth...He didn't think that seals just went about dragging fishing nets around for fun. Which lent more credence to his earlier thought, that the seal was...was tame, somehow.
Or sent by God, a little voice whispered. He ignored it. God sent angels and rings of fire and burning bushes, not...not seals.
"May I...?" he started, and the seal listed towards him, lowering its broad head until it was nearly touching the ground. It kept its mouth open, so that William could see the pink ribbon of its tongue and, as he scooted a bit closer, precisely how large its teeth were compared to his gloved hand. Still, the thing didn't move, and so William swallowed, and closed the last foot between them by getting his knees underneath him and waddling the last bit of the way.
"I'm...I'm going to untangle this now," he said. The seal, predictably, said nothing. He wasn't sure why he expected it to, because it was an animal and animals couldn't talk...except that this close, looking into its eyes, there seemed to be an almost human intelligence within them. And he could see, too, that its eyes weren't black as he had thought earlier, but a deep, dark brown, several shades darker than his own eyes, and its pupil was barely more than a little black slit. William swallowed again, harder this time, and tentatively began to remove his gloves. They wouldn't provide any protection if the seal chose to bite him, after all, and he would be able to get a better grip with his bare hands.
The sun being out provided little comfort to his fingers, which were cherry red at the tips, and his palms were red as well, and chapped from months at sea. If nothing else, he thought, he wouldn't have to haul ropes any longer. Then he gritted his teeth, squared his shoulders, and reached for the net.
There was a moment where he and the seal locked eyes, and he was sure that it was going to bite down. That no amount of near-human smarts would be enough to convince this animal that he meant it no harm. Then it snorted softly, blowing a fine, icy spray of mist up into the air, and William's fingers made contact with the seal's teeth.
Its mouth was startlingly hot, its breath like a furnace bellowing over his hands. His fingertips immediately started to tingle, the pins and needles sensation nearly making him yank his hand away because, for half a second, he could have sworn he was being nibbled. But when no actual pain followed he relaxed, leaning forward a bit, both to get a better look at the seal's mouth and to also, guiltily, bask in the warmth of its breath. It smelled like metal, he thought, like a new penny and like brine, and very faintly of something high and sweet. It blew across his face in huge puffs as he began to gingerly untangle the fishing net from the seal's teeth, and at one point his hand touched the animal's tongue – which was even hotter than its breath, and soft as velvet – and the seal made a low, trilling sound in its throat which made its breath huff out in staccato little gusts. By the time that he'd managed to get the netting free of the animal's teeth he'd grown quite used to the smell of its mouth, and when he leaned back and got a lungful of the cold air it seemed to be missing something, and it was so frigid that it made his lungs burn as he breathed it.
The seal snapped its mouth shut, perilously close to William's hand before he could yank it back. Its tongue was still sticking out from the very front of its snout, a half-circular blotch of pink amid a forest of silver and grey. It reminded William of a kitten that his friend Penelope had kept when they were both children, and how it had tended to fall asleep in front of the kitchen stove with its little tongue poking out in precisely the same way. This wasn't a kitten, though. A kitten would barely even be a snack for something this large.
Still, it was...it was charming, in its way, and for a few seconds William was able to forget how close his face had been to all those sharp, pale teeth, and how the metallic odor of its breath had been uncomfortably similar to the smell of a butcher's shop.
"There you are," he said, voice shaking only a little. "Good as new." Then he turned his attention to the net that the seal had brought him, hoping that the animal, having gotten what it needed from him, would go back to ignoring him.
He wasn't quite so lucky. The seal wasn't ignoring him – he could feel its eyes upon him – but it once again seemed content to just watch him as, wary of making any sudden moves, William shuffled slowly sideways on his knees until he could rifle through the fishing net without overextending himself. It was nearly as tangled around itself as it had been around the seal's teeth, but patience rewarded him, and after several minutes of swearing and picking at waterlogged knots he managed to unfold the entire thing, and shake its contents out onto the dirt.
There was more wood, that much he had seen earlier, but there was a lot of it. Enough, he thought, to keep a fire going for the full day, or perhaps longer if he was prudent. There were also several tins that he recognized as coming from the ship's mess, a wad of cloth that might have been one of the hammocks from the crew's quarters, and...
"Lamp oil," he breathed, scrabbling forward and seizing the canister. It was one of the large tin ones that they kept in the hold, from which they filled all the rest of the smaller, more portable containers that had been peppered about the ship. How the seal had known to take it, he wasn't sure, but he could have kissed the thing right on its broad, silky head. Even if a bit of seawater had gotten into the canister, surely it would still work. Water and oil did not mix, after all.
He looked at the seal, which was still very steadily looking back at him.
Perhaps, he thought, if angels could come in the shape of a fiery wheel, or a man bearing a trumpet...perhaps an angel might come in the shape of a seal, too. As silly as it sounded.