didn’t, it was all over. For her to come off that beach alive was bad enough, but to come off with an injured leg which meant she was confined to the safety of sleeping quarters where no accident could possibly befall her, was nothing short of a disaster, especially with Vítor and his companion sticking to her like birds to lime.
‘Don’t you want to see your first glimpse of Iceland?’ Vítor urged. ‘Isabela, won’t you allow me to carry you up?’
‘No, no. I can manage.’ She brushed his extended arm aside.
For a moment I thought I glimpsed an expression of fear in her eyes. It was not the first time I had witnessed such a look since she had returned from the beach. What had passed between them that night? Had the bastard tried to force his oily little carcass on her?
Isabela levered herself to her feet, steadying herself against the bulkhead as the ship rolled. She limped to the bottom of the short flight of steps. Once more, Vítor put out a hand to try to assist her, but she pretended she hadn’t seen it, and with grim determination hauled herself up the steps.
Over these past two weeks she had daily practised walking until she was exhausted. Even the ship’s surgeon had told her to rest, and that was certainly a measure of the seriousness of his concern, for it was rumoured he’d once told a man on his deathbed to shift his arse and stop lounging about cluttering the place up. But Isabela took not a jot of notice. She was going to walk without a crutch and splints if it killed her. And give the girl her due, she’d done it, though it was obvious her leg still pained her, not that she’d admit that to anyone.
Sometimes her stubbornness reminded me of my Silvia when she was working up to a fight, though Isabela was not the kind of woman who would shriek dockside obscenities and hurl her boots at a man, more’s the pity. Sweet Jesu, how I missed Silvia. Without warning, the maggot-white, bloated face of that woman’s corpse swam up before my eyes and I pushed it firmly back down again before racing up the steps behind Vítor.
To be honest, I had no idea what sight was going to greet me on deck. I hadn’t given much thought to what manner of place Iceland was and I’d never had any desire to find out. Ask me to imagine parting a wealthy widow from her jewels and I would have no trouble in picturing such a scene in exquisite detail. But tell me to imagine a place I never really believed existed except in tales of drunken sailors and I could no more picture it in my head than I could see heaven. And, to tell the truth, since the day we set sail I’d never believed I would actually get as far as Iceland.
My plan, if you can call it such, was to somehow dispatch the girl long before we ever got this far and then to disembark at some civilized port and find a ship to carry me home. I’d thought it was going to be so easy – a ship tossing about in stormy seas, slippery decks, dark nights and a fragile young girl – it was an accident waiting to happen, so what could possibly go wrong? Iceland wasn’t even worth wasting a stray thought on. And if I had been forced to think of Iceland at all, the image that would have occurred most naturally would have been that it was … well … icy … covered in snow, I guess. But somehow black was never the colour that came to mind when I heard the name.
Now I joined the others at the rail and stared as dumbfounded as they. Before us was a scene that might have been the gateway to purgatory itself. Towering columns and jagged shards of black rock rose from out of the cobalt-blue sea. Huge waves crashed against these pinnacles with such violence that spray was flung high into the air, so that it looked as if a pall of white smoke hung permanently above them. What I could see of the land itself was nothing more than a hunk of craggy black rock which jutted out into the sea, like a splintered jaw, without a single blade of grass or even a smudge of moss to soften it. The roaring waves hurled themselves into