Extract: The Fisherman’s Gift by Julia Kelly

Prologue: Scotland, 1900

Joseph knows the storm is coming. He sees the yellow glow of the halo around the moon and the ice-glitter of the winter sky when he comes up from the beach, pausing every now and then to give his knees rest from their groan and creak.

Later, the wind shifts, swinging from west to east and, waking in the night, he feels the beast of it crouched far out to sea, its arctic breath, its changed salt-smell. He could have warned the villagers who’d forgotten how to read the signs – the low flight of the gulls, the night sky, the wind – but why should he? Let the storm take their chimneys, fright their dogs, send shirts and sheets flying like winged banshees over rooftops. After all, what had anyone done, all those years before, when the storm had taken so much more from him?

A squall has picked up now over the Tops where cattle huddle in the barn and sheep lean together in the field. It rushes between the houses and the shops of Copse Cross Street and past the open window above the Grocer’s where Mrs Brown, still awake, peers down the narrow street and beyond to the black sheet of the starlit sea. She smells change on the wind and, securing the shutters, returns to her stove, scoops the dog, Rab, into her lap and waits.

Further down the hill, in a cottage near the Steps leading down to Skerry Sands, Dorothy lights a lamp and places it on the ledge of an upstairs window, a light in the darkness to guide home those lost in the heave and surge of the sea.

When the storm lands, there are things it steals from the little fishing village clinging to the cliffs. It takes roof tiles and sheep; it fells trees and splinters two boats against the Rocks. But it brings something too, something which Joseph will find when he goes back to check on his own boat in the watery light of the next day’s dawn.

A gift.

Now
Dorothy

Eager to get home to fires and cooking pots, the women hurry round Mrs Brown’s shop, dirty slush seeping under the door with the wind still bitter from the storm. As usual, Dorothy pays no heed to the rise and murmur of voices by the counter. It is the silence she notices. Basket almost empty – a few potatoes, some onions – she sees the way they are gathered at the window, and the strangest sensation comes over her. The skin on her arms tightens, a chill moves up to the back of her neck, and she puts her basket down and goes to the window too. She wipes the mist from it and peers out. The sleet is settling between the cobbles and the skies are leaden. She looks up the hill and sees the villagers toiling up the narrow street, huddled into themselves, heads down, eyes squeezed shut, and then she looks down towards the Sands and that’s when she sees him.

Joseph.

He is walking in the middle of the road. When she realises what he is carrying, a cry is torn straight from her chest, an animal’s sharp keen. Joseph’s face is as shocked as hers must be – white, wide- eyed. The hair of the child he is carrying is dark silver from the sea, the body limp, the skin of his face grey. His body is still slick with water, beads of it in his hair, clothes dark and sodden. And then she hears the gasp of the other women, feels their faces turn to her. Mrs Brown places a red, weathered hand on her arm, and Dorothy turns, understands that the shopkeeper is saying her name, though her ears are ringing now, because she has already seen it –

The way one small foot dangles in its brown boot, and the other hangs blue and cold and naked.

She steps outside, dream-like. All the women do, and some are watching her, and some are watching the man with the child. Dorothy is a piece of knitting, unravelling, for surely she’s seen a ghost. She moves towards them and stretches out her hand, but he walks on, up the cobbled street, and the women from the shop follow, like mourners at a funeral. At the corner he turns and shakes his head to stop them and then they see it, all of them – the naked foot twitching, the limp arm stiffening, and suddenly the child gives a choking cough, and Joseph starts running now, as well as he can in the freezing rain, round the corner to the Minister’s house and out of sight.

Dorothy hasn’t moved. She tries to separate then from now, but it’s too hard. She nearly goes with them, almost believes it’s him, but instead stumbles home and drags herself up the stairs, not even closing the front door, her body too heavy or too light, she’s not sure which. She hardly recognises her bedroom as she passes the cupboard she never opens and drifts towards the chest of drawers.

The sleet, blowing in sideways from the sea, thuds and rattles at the windowpanes, and the wind cries through the front door and up the stairs and finds her on her knees on the floorboards, opening the lowest drawer. She feels her way through woollen vests and undergarments, till her fingertips touch it. For a moment she is shocked it is not still wet. She feels the familiar creases of the leather and she pulls it out and places it in the cradle of her apron, hands cupping it gently. She closes her eyes and leans her forehead against the chest of drawers and breathes in the smell of the small brown boot, still with its whisper of saltwater, even after all these years.

Back in the shop, Mrs Brown picks up Dorothy’s basket, puts back the onions and potatoes and, despite the early hour, turns the closed sign out to the street.

That night Dorothy dreams of Moses for the first time in years. He is playing in the water, in the shallow waves. She leans against the rock, feels its warmth through the thin cotton of her dress, lets it seep into the skin of her shoulder blades. She watches him, silver hair lit by the sun, by the spangled light from the sea, by all the differences memory lends. In her dream she drifts into sleep, and when she wakes, it is winter, the sky low and dark, the storm wild. The waves are huge and she runs along the shoreline, up and down, calling for him, but the wind catches her voice and throws it at the sky. And just when she thinks he is lost, she finds him again, pulled along the beach by the tide, standing just as before, waves crashing over him, over and again. He turns and makes his small, quiet smile, eyes green and shifting like the sea.

‘Mamma?’

When she wakes up, really wakes up, the wind is wailing outside the window and the pillow clutched in her cold fist is wet.