“Never,” Emma replied. “She loves me too much, and she’s spoiled by her life of luxury at Main Station. She gets an apple every morning and a carrot each night.”
“You’ll miss her when you leave for school,” he mentioned perceptively.
Emma turned to Captain Harris, so handsome in the morning light, which turned his hair to auburn at the tips. Looking at him, she felt the same exhilaration she felt on the beach whenever she galloped with Willow.
“I’ll miss her very much.”
She gave Willow a friendly tap on the rear flank and watched her and Mrs. Miniver trot jauntily toward the pond for a drink.
“Shall we walk this way?”
Emma led the captain through narrow, winding paths among hardy cranberry bushes and wondered what he thought of this place. And what he thought of her.
Oliver followed Emma in silence for quite some time. They tramped through sandy meandering pathways. Occasionally, he paused to scan the horizon for a glimpse of a wild herd, but for some reason, the horses stayed away.
Emma raised a hand to shade her eyes from the sun. “I don’t understand. They always come here in the mornings.”
“Maybe it’s my fault,” he said. “They can smell a foreigner at fifty paces.”
Emma laughed. “I’m glad you can keep a sense of humor after everything.”
Oliver immediately thought of his ship, lying on her side, stuck on the sandbar with waves pounding against her hull. He felt Emma’s eyes on him and had the distinct impression that she was guessing, correctly, at his thoughts.
It always seemed to be that way between them. Whenever they spoke privately during their walks and rides, there was a natural understanding, an agreement about most things they both considered important, and he felt no need to hold anything back. He’d shared a great deal of his inner self with Emma and had revealed things he’d never revealed to anyone.
But today, he didn’t want to go down that road and talk about loss and failure. It was their last day together. He wanted to be positive.
“I’ve learned to soldier on,” he said.
She regarded him knowingly, with compassion, and strolled toward another pond.
Oliver decided to saunter in the opposite direction because this strange emotional connection to Emma had the potential to become problematic. He was feeling too good on this island, too buoyant and optimistic, but it wasn’t the real world. It was fantasy. What he needed was a moment to remember his true reality: His unhappy marriage. His failures as a father. The wreck of his ship. These were important issues he would need to confront after he left this place. He couldn’t continue toavoid them, because day by day, inch by inch, they were digging deeper holes into his heart and mind.
This was a fact he now understood. His brief descent into madness—when he’d wanted to go down with his ship—had been a distress signal.
Because he didn’t want to die. He wanted to live. He wanted to do better for his children.
Oliver stopped on the path and turned to look back at Emma.Bloody hell.What was it about her that made him so introspective? Whenever he spent time with her, he talked and talked. Then he listened and ended up reflecting on his past and future and wondered how he’d ended up here—a disgraced captain and a failure as a husband and father.
Pondering all this deeply, Oliver veered off the path into a clearing of clean white sand. In that moment, just ahead, a dark mass on the ground brought him to a halt. The breeze shifted, and he was struck by a fetid stench.
It was a dead horse. He raised his forearm to his nose and breathed through his sleeve.
Emma must have detected it as well, because she came running. “Oh no.” She stood beside him, staring. Then she untied the patterned scarf from around her neck, held it to her nose, and approached.
Oliver followed. The ocean breeze blew strands of the horse’s mane and tail, while buzzing flies made Oliver’s skin prickle.
Standing upwind, Emma lowered her scarf. “This is Willow’s mother,” she said, her voice breaking.
Oliver turned to her and frowned. “You’re sure?”
“Yes. I know her well, and she knew who I was to Willow. Sometimes I fed her apples.” Emma raised the scarf to her face again. “I wonder what happened to her. Old age, I guess.”
The waves on the beach reverberated gently in the distance, and Oliver found himself sinking deeper into the rhythms of the island, the essence of life and death, so very different from what he’d known during the war. Violence had played no part in this.
While the breezes off the ocean hissed through the marram grass on the high dune, Oliver looked around at the rolling landscape. “Maybe this is why we haven’t seen the herd this morning, because they want to leave her in peace.”
Emma strolled back to where he stood. “I was just thinking the same thing. But who knows? It’s springtime, and they often go looking for sandwort at the west end of the island.”
