Frenchmans Creek - Daphne du Maurier

"What is the matter?" he said quietly, breaking in upon her thoughts. "Do you not want to fish any more?"

"I was thinking about this afternoon," she said.

"Yes, I know, I could see that by your face. Tell me about it."

"You should not stay here any more. They are beginning to suspect. They were all talking about it, gloating over the possibilities of your capture."

"That does not worry me."

"I believe them to be serious, Eustick had a hard, obstinate look about him. He is not a pompous dunderhead like Godolphin. He means to hang you from the tallest tree in Godolphin's park."

"Which is something of a compliment after all."

"Now you are laughing at me. You think that, like all women, I am afire with rumours and gossip."

"Like all women you like to dramatise events."

"And you to ignore them?"

"What would you have me do then?"

"First I would beg you to be cautious. Eustick said that the country people know you have a hiding-place."

"Very possibly."

"And one day someone will betray you, and the creek will be surrounded."

"I am quite prepared for that."

"How are you prepared?"

"Did Eustick and Godolphin tell you how they proposed to capture me?"

"No."

"Neither shall I tell you how I propose to evade them."

"Do you think for one moment I should…"

"I think nothing - but I believe you have a fish on your line."

"You are being deliberately provoking."

"Not at all. If you don't want to land the fish give the line to me."

"I do want to land it."

"Very well then. Haul in your line."

She proceeded to do so, reluctantly, a little sulky, and then - feeling suddenly the tug and the pull upon the hook - she began to haul faster, the wet line falling upon her lap and down to her bare feet; and laughing at him over her shoulder she said, "He's there, I can feel him, he's there, on the end of the hook."

"Not quite so fast," he said quietly, "you may lose him. Gently now, bring him to the side of the boat."

But she would not listen. She stood up in her excitement, letting the line slip for a moment, and then pulled harder than ever, and just as she caught the white gleam of the fish streaking to the surface it jerked upon the line, flashing sideways, and was gone.

Dona gave a cry of disappointment, turning to him with reproachful eyes. "I have lost him," she said, "he has got away."

He looked up at her, laughing, shaking the hair out of his eyes.

"You were too excited."

"I can't help it. It was such a lovely feeling - that tug on the line. And I wanted to catch him so much."

"Never mind. Perhaps you will catch another."

"My line is all in a tangle."

"Give it to me."

"No - I can do it myself."

He took up his own line once again, and she bent down in the boat, gathering the hopeless tangle of wet line into her lap. It had twisted itself into countless loops and knots, and as she strove to unwind it with her fingers it became more tangled than before. She glanced at him, frowning with vexation, and he stretched out his hand, without looking at her, and took the tangle from her. She thought he would mock her, but he said nothing, and she leant back in the bows of the boat and watched his hands as he unravelled the loops and turns of the long wet line.

The sun, away in the west, was flinging ribbons across the sky, and there were little pools of golden light upon the water. The tide was ebbing fast, gurgling past the bows of the boat.

Farther down stream a solitary curlew padded in the mud, and presently he rose in the air, and whistled softly, and was gone.

"When shall we build our fire?" said Dona.

"When we have caught our supper," he answered.

"And supposing we catch no supper?"

"Then we cannot build a fire."

She went on watching his hands, and miraculously, it seemed to her, the line became straight again, and loosely coiled, and he threw it once more over the side and gave her the end to hold.

"Thank you," she said, her voice small, rather subdued, and looking across at him she saw that his eyes were smiling in the secret fashion she had grown to expect from him, and she knew, in some strange way, that the smile was connected with her although he said nothing, and she felt light-hearted suddenly, and curiously gay.

They continued with their fishing, while a single blackbird, hidden in the woods the other side of the river, sang his intermittent song, meditative and sweet.

It seemed to her, as they sat there side by side, without a word, that she had never known peace before, until this moment, that all the restless devils inside her who fought and struggled so often for release, were, because of this silence and his presence, now appeased. She felt, in a sense, like someone who had fallen under a spell, under some strange enchantment, because this sensation of quietude was foreign to her, who had lived hitherto in a turmoil of sound and movement. And yet at the same time the spell awoke echoes within her that she recognised, as though she had come to a place she had known always, and deeply desired, but had lost, through her own carelessness, or through circumstance, or the blunting of her own perception.

She knew that it was this peace that she had wanted when she came away from London, and had come to Navron to find, but she knew also that she had found only part of it alone, through the woods, and the sky, and the river, it became full and complete when she was with him, as at the moment, or when he stole into her thoughts.

She would be playing with the children at Navron, or wandering about the garden, filling the vases with flowers, and he away down in his ship in the creek, and because she had knowledge of him there her mind and her body became filled with life and warmth, a bewildering sensation she had never known before.

"It is because we are both fugitives," she thought, "there is a bond between us," and she remembered what he had said that first evening, when he supped at Navron, about bearing the same blemish. Suddenly she saw that he was pulling in his line, and she leaned forward in the boat, her shoulder touching his shoulder, and she called excitedly, "Have you caught something?"

"Yes," he said, "do you want to pull it in?"

"It would not be fair," she said longingly, "he is your fish." Laughing, he gave her the line, and she brought the struggling fish to the side of the boat, and landed it on the bottom boards, where it jumped and flapped, coiling itself in the twisted line. She knelt down and seized it between her hands, her dress all wet and muddied from the river, her ringlets falling over her face.

"He is not so big as the one I lost," she said.

"They never are," he answered.

"But I caught him, I brought him in all right, did I not?"

"Yes, you did very well."

She was still kneeling, trying to take the hook out of the mouth of the fish. "Oh, poor little thing, he is dying," she said. "I am hurting him, what shall I do?" She turned to him in great distress, and he came and knelt beside her, taking the fish from her hands and releasing the hook with a sudden jerk. Then he put his fingers in the mouth and bent back the head, so that the fish struggled an instant, and lay dead.

"You have killed him," she said sadly.

"Yes," he said, "was not that what you wanted me to do?"

She did not answer, aware for the first time, now the excitement was over, how close he was to her, their shoulders touching, his hands beside her hand, and that he was smiling again in his silent secret way, and she was filled suddenly with a glow hitherto unknown to her, a brazen, shameless longing to be closer still, with his lips touching hers and his hands beneath her back. She looked away from him, out across the river, dumb and stricken with a new flame that had arisen within her, fearful that he might read the message in her eyes and so despise her, like Harry and Rockingham despised the women at the Swan, and she began to pat her ringlets into place again, and smooth her dress, silly little mechanical gestures she felt could not deceive him, but gave her some measure of protection from her own naked self.

When she was calm again, she threw a glance at him over her shoulder, and saw that he had wound in the lines, and was taking the paddles in his hands.

"Hungry?" he said.

"Yes," she answered, her voice a little uncertain, not quite her own.

"Then we will build our fire and cook our supper," he said. The sun had gone now, and the shadows were beginning to creep over the water. The tide was running fast, and he pushed the boat out into the channel so that the current helped to carry them down stream. She curled herself up in the bows and sat with her legs crossed beneath her, her chin cupped in her hands.

The golden lights had gone, and the sky was paler now, mysterious and soft, while the water itself seemed darker than before. There was a smell of moss about the air, and the young green from the woods, and the bitter tang of bluebells. Once, in mid-stream, he paused, and listened, and turning her head towards the shore she heard, for the first time, a curious churring sound, low and rather harsh, fascinating in its quiet monotony.

"Night-jar," he said, looking at her an instant, and then away again, and she knew, at that moment, that he had read the message in her eyes a little while before, and he did not despise her for it, he knew and understood, because he felt as she did, the same flame, the same longing. But because she was a woman and he a man these things would never be admitted to one another; they were both bound by a strange reserve until their moment came, which might be tomorrow, or the day after, or never - the matter was not of their own choosing.

He pushed on down stream without a word, and presently they came to the entrance of the creek, where the trees crowded to the water's edge, and edging up close in-shore into the narrow channel they came to a little clearing in the woods where there had once been a quay, and he rested on his paddles and said:

"This?"

"Yes," she answered, and he pushed the nose of the boat into the soft mud, and they climbed ashore.

He pulled the boat out of the tide, and then reached for his knife, and kneeling beside the water cleaned the fish, calling over his shoulder for Dona to build the fire.

She found some dry twigs, under the trees, and broke them across her knee, her dress torn now and hopelessly crumpled, and she thought, laughing to herself, of Lord Godolphin and his lady, and their stare of bewilderment could they see her now, no better than a travelling gypsy woman, with all a gypsy's primitive feelings too, and a traitor to her country into the bargain.

She built the sticks, one against the other. He came up from the water's edge, having cleaned the fish, and knelt beside the fire, with his flint and tinder, and slowly kindled the flame, which came in a little flash at first, and then burnt brighter. Presently the long sticks crackled and flared, and they looked across the flames and laughed at one another.

"Have you ever cooked a fish, in the open?" he asked.

She shook her head, and he cleared a little place in the ashes beneath the sticks, and laid a flat stone in the centre, and placed the fish upon it. He cleaned his knife on his breeches, and then, crouching beside the fire, he waited a few minutes until the fish began to brown, when he turned it with his knife, so that the heat came to it more easily. It was darker here in the creek than it had been in the open river, and the trees threw long shadows down to the quay. There was a radiance in the deepening sky belonging only to those nights of midsummer, brief and lovely, that whisper for a moment in time and go forever. Dona watched his hands, busy with the fish, and glanced up at his face, intent upon his cooking, the brows frowning a little in concentration, and his skin reddened by the glow of the fire. The good food smell came to her nostrils and to his at the same moment, and he looked at her and smiled, saying not a word, but turned the fish once again to the crackling flame.