The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits (12 page)

Sarah watched her cousin, who was directing half a dozen fishermen to fire off the Apparatus. Anyone would think their forebears—Anna's and hers—had been naval heroes, not Quaker wool merchants. How well this particular spirit would have hounded Bonaparte's fleet, Sarah thought, if it hadn't had the ill luck to be lodged in the body of a crippled female.

She'd mentioned that one evening, while they were toasting muffins at the fire. But Anna would have none of it. "What earthly use are
what ifs
?" she'd asked, pulling a golden muffin off her long fork and reaching for the honey. "I was born in the body allotted to me. Of course, if I hadn't been dropped on the stairs at two months, I might have been an elegant dancer today at twenty-seven years old." Her mouth curled up to show Sarah how little that vision impressed her. "But I get by. I may be a crippled old hulk, but I get enough breeze to fill my sail. I can swim and shoot as well as Cousin Fowell, can't I?"

Sarah nodded obediently.

"I can wheel myself to our carriage and go to Meeting"—Anna counted these feats on her fingers—"I can grub around in the literatures of several ancient nations, I can mount petitions on behalf of the emancipation of the slaves, and someday, Sarah"—she threatened her cousin with the blackened fork—"someday before we die, you and I will journey to the Baltic Sea."

Sarah had smiled back at her, foolishly glad.

But today what faced them was not the Baltic Sea but the English Channel, a steely monster that was clawing the foreign ship to bits. Sarah heard a muffled bang from the Apparatus now, and the first rocket went off; the thin woven-hide line snaked out of the basket as the mortar carried its tail high in the sky like a kite. The powder left an after-scorch on the chilly air. Another bang followed, then another—like fireworks on Midsummer Eve, except without the splashes of coloured light. Some of the foreign seamen were waving, Sarah saw; one was at the rail, locked on with one elbow, straining to grab the flying rope so he could make it fast and pull himself in to shore, hand over hand. She felt his panic in her bowels, and had to look away for fear of letting out a moan. She squinted into the gray howling morning, but couldn't see where the mortars had landed. "Did it work?" she called to her cousin.

No answer: evidently not. The men were reeling the mortars back in now, like leaden fish. Anna was almost at the water's edge, her wheels deep in the scored sand, her frantic arms over her head, signalling orders. The wordless fishermen put their backs to the Apparatus and ploughed it right down to where the waves covered their boots. Ah yes, Sarah saw it now with a thrill, that would get the ropes ten yards closer to the seamen. Not much of a distance, except that it might mean life rather than death. Another flash, and this time Sarah could see a mortar soar across the sea maybe three hundred yards—but fall just short of the ship. Twenty-four pounds of iron, dropping like a clay pigeon.

This time when the men hauled the ropes in, two of the lines came all in a rush; their mortars were missing. Ned Sylvester examined one frayed end; Miss Anna waved her fìnger in his face like a desperate schoolmistress. "I told you to soak the ropes at Easter, didn't I? Didn't I warn you they'd break if they were allowed to diy out?"

It seemed to Sarah now that there was an awful slowness to everything, because there was nothing left to do. The little soaked figures on the deck had stopped moving. They were no longer individuals, about to catch the lifeline thrown to them, but a body of strangers watching for their death in every wave.

Next time she looked away from the ship, she saw Anna's chair stranded in half a foot of water, the rim of her skirt dark with water. "What were you thinking?" Sarah scolded her cousin, hauling her back up the beach.

"I was thinking of the seamen," said Anna shortly, her eyes locked onto the ship. "Thousands of souls choke to death on salt water on British shores every year, and all for lack of equipment and readiness."

"I know," said Sarah, her throat sore.

The men were in a little huddle over the Apparatus. Anna squinted up the beach. "They told me the Boat had been sent for, but where is it?" She let out a harsh sigh, and pushed her shoulders back. "We can't expect much of the poor. It's up to people of property to organise matters and set an example of courage. Those who can, I mean," she added bitterly.

Sarah stared at Anna, whose forehead wore its old badge of pain: three lines across, one down. "Cousin," she said, halting. "My dear. You've saved many lives."

"Vicariously," came the answer, very crisp.

"What difference—"

"The difference is this," said Anna, twisting round in her chair to face Sarah, "that in my library I can act for myself but here on the shore, when lives hang in the balance, I'm shackled to this chair, as feeble as an infant. As trapped as a rabbit in its hutch. Besides," she added, cutting Sarah off, "I've saved no one today, have I?"

Their eyes turned back to the ship. A gigantic wave smacked it from behind and there was a terrible groaning of old wood.

"She's breaking up," said Anna through her teeth.

"No," said Sarah, but only because she couldn't bear it, not because she didn't believe it. After a minute, she added, "I sometimes wonder..."

"What?"

She spoke with some diffidence. "What sort of God lets these things happen."

"These things, meaning wrecks?" asked Anna harshly.

"Yes," said Sarah, "and other things," her eyes on her cousin's motionless knees, skinny as a dog's under their blanket.

Anna kept staring out at the splintering ship. "The same God who made the seas for us to sail on," she said finally.

"But—"

"We can't have it both ways," snapped her cousin. "Either we're free, or we're safe; take your pick."

But Sarah hadn't picked, it occurred to her now. There had never been a moment where her life had forked like a pair of paths in front of her. She'd come to the Cottage as a child to do lessons with her Cousin Anna, and she'd never left, that was all; she'd been content to let her life happen to her, like weather. Perhaps she lacked a sailing spirit.

A yelp went up now from one of the fishermen, and turning, Sarah saw Fowell come loping down the beach. His servants behind him toiled to drag the little wooden Life Boat.

"Cousin Fowell, at last!" called Anna.

He was breathless, red-faced; his neckerchief hung dishevelled on his broad chest. He opened his mouth to speak to the ladies, but there was a terrible ripping in the air, and they all stood and stared as the foreign ship broke apart. Tiny figures slid, disappeared into the dark cave in the waters. Sarah thought it almost obscene to watch, but couldn't turn away. She seemed to feel the water in her own lungs.

"All lost," wheezed Fowell.

But Anna pointed mutely.

"What?" asked Sarah.

"There," said Anna, "among the wreckage. I'm sure I saw a head."

Sarah looked at her cousin's red-edged eyes and pitied her as she was never usually allowed to pity her; pitied her more than she pitied the drowning seamen, though she couldn't have said why.

"My dear—" began Fowell kindly.

Anna let out a scream. "There! Two of them, holding to the mast!"

And then for a second they could all see the foreigners, the two dark, minute heads, the bodies dragging along behind the broken mast as it heaved and dropped on the waves.

"The tide is washing them this way. Get the Life Boat into the water."

"It's too rough, Anna," Fowell told her. "The men won't risk it."

"Poltroons! I'd go in myself if I had the strength."

At that he turned his back, as if offended, but he was heading for the Life Boat, Sarah saw; he was beckoning to the servants to drag it down to the slashing edge of the waves. The wreckage had drifted in another twenty yards on the tide. Sarah's mouth was diy with excitement.

After a brief discussion the ladies couldn't hear, Ned Sylvester got into the Boat with Fowell Buxton and hauled on the oars, face wide in a grimace as he fought the incoming tide. As soon as they pulled away from the sand, the Boat was tossed and spun about like sea scum.

"Still a good ten yards between them and the sailors," muttered Anna.

Sarah rested her hand on her cousin's bony shoulder, delicately, and Anna took hold of it with cold fingers and held tight.

The waves blocked the ladies' view; one moment it looked as if the Boat was almost upon the wrecked mast to which the two sailors clung, the next, as if the whole ocean had rushed between them. Sarah wanted to pray, to ask for these men's lives as a favour, but she knew that was sheer superstition. All she could do was wait on the Spirit.

"Ned's throwing a rope," yelped Anna. "One of the sailors has hold of it ... yes, they're hauling him in!"

The seaman looked like a waterlogged bag of grain as Fowell Buxton pulled him from the sea. The ladies watched the little Boat swing and dip under its new weight. "And the other?" Sarah peered into the salty wind.

"They've thrown him the line," said Anna. "It's no more than two yards away. What's wrong with the man?"

Despair, thought Sarah suddenly. All he had to cling to was this splintered mast. What could persuade him to let go of it? Why should he believe a skinny rope would save him?

"Cousin Fowell's kicking off his boots," Anna reported in a chilled voice.

"What?" Sarah stared, wiped her eyes to clear them.

"He's going in."

"No," said Sarah. "Not at his age. Surely he wouldn't dream—"

But Anna was already halfway down the beach, her wheels grinding through the sand. "No. Cousin, no!"

The men in the Boat gave no sign of hearing her shrieks. Fowell Buxton stood up in the wavering Boat for a moment, then dived over the side. The first wave ate him up.

"No!" Anna shrieked again, though she must have known he couldn't hear her.

Sarah was by her side. "He's a strong swimmer. I'm sure he's got a rope around his waist. The water's not too cold for October..."

Annas teeth were bared to the wind. "It's my fault. I called him a poltroon."

There was nothing to be said. All they could do was watch for Fowell's graying head between the blades of the waves.

He emerged at last where they weren't expecting him, on the other side of the mast. His soaked head was barely recognisable, more like a seal's than a man's. He was struggling to break the seaman's armlock on the wreckage. It looked more like a murder than a rescue. Anna muttered something Sarah couldn't hear. A gigantic gray wave came up and covered everything.

It could have been a matter of years, rather than minutes, later, when the ladies glimpsed Ned Sylvester leaning from the Boat to pull the two men in. Sarah kept counting heads, unable to believe.

The Boat's keel made a musical scraping on the shore. As the fishermen's wives surrounded the seamen to lift them out in blankets, Fowell Buxton staggered up the beach. "Ladies," he said, as if a little drunk, at a ball. Brine poured from his sleeves, and there was a twist of bladder wrack in his hair.

"Cousin Fowell," said Anna, with a hint of amusement.

Sarah wrapped him in her arms, not minding the wet. She started to cry.

"Now now, no need for that, my girl," he said. "Come, Cousin Anna, we've need of your tongue. Surely among all your twenty-odd languages there'll be one these poor foreigners understand."

She rolled her eyes at his exaggeration, but wheeled herself directly towards the huddled group around the seamen. One of the foreigners was being sick on the sand, retching up salt water. Anna addressed herself to the other, who was looking round him in a dazed way. After a few minutes, she called back to her cousins. "Good day," she said, almost laughing. "He says good day, or perhaps that it is a good day; I can't be sure."

Fowell was drying his head on a towel that one of the women had brought him. He cleared his throat with a wet roar now and wrapped a blanket round his shoulders. "Lift them into that barrow," he ordered, "and have them come up to the Hall. There's plenty of room in the barn and I'll send for someone from Cromer to nurse them."

But as the two men were being wheeled up the beach, the more alert one wailed in protest and climbed out of the barrow. Anna caught up with him as he was crawling down the beach; she bent out of her chair to touch his wet head.

"What is it now?" asked Fowell, his nose streaming. He looked at Sarah and raised his eyebrows. She gave a little bewildered shrug.

"Wait," Anna told them. Then, after another exchange of strange guttural phrases, she said over her shoulder, "As far as I can tell—though the dialect is a strange one—they want to save themselves."

"Save themselves?" shouted Fowell. His nose was purple. "Save themselves from what? Why would we have bloody well saved them from drowning if we meant them any harm?"

Anna went into another huddle with the sailors, then straightened up in her chair. "I have it now. How stupid of me. The word must correspond to
salvage.
It appears they want to stay to see what can be saved. From the water, you know."

Fowell let out his breath in a baffled puff. "Nonsense. What's there to salvage that's worth their catching their death?"

Sarah stared out at the gnawed, splintered remains of the Russian ship. She wondered what detritus the tide might bring in, tonight or tomorrow. A barrel of spirits? An odd shoe? A scattering of wet letters from home? The bodies of their lost shipmates?

But Anna wheeled herself past Fowell up the beach to Sarah. Her face was marked with the wind's radiance. "Let them be. Come along," she said. "We'll fetch them more blankets and flasks of hot wine."

Sarah tucked her numb hands in her armpits, turned, and followed the snaking tracks of the wheels up the sand.

Anna Gurney (1795–1857) and her cousin Sarah Buxton lived in Northrepps Cottage, near Cromer on the Norfolk coast, and their neighbours called them the Cottage Ladies. As well as being a linguist and historian who published the first modern English translation of the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
in 1821, Anna was known for her attempts to rescue drowning sailors.