Beautiful Wild - Anna Godbersen Page 0,30

her beautiful hair hung half-loose down her back, as though she had arranged it that way on purpose. Jealousy struck Vida like snake venom, and she almost turned away. Then she heard the sound—a moan like an animal dying. When she looked again she saw the scene below for what it really was.

Fitzhugh’s lovely sister-in-law, the girl he had been romantically attached to at some time in the not-so-distant past, was bent in a beautiful aubergine curve, her waving golden hair lifted by a gentle breeze, her head hung low, as she tried to protect the body splayed out on the beach. A dead body. Even at a distance Vida knew that body possessed no life. A body that wore a formal black tuxedo, and that belonged—or anyway, had belonged—to Fitzhugh’s brother. Again Camilla made that horrible sound, and Vida felt it, low in her stomach, and before she could help it a sense of sadness for this widow on the beach had invaded her heart.

Very slowly Camilla lifted her head. The wind pulled her hair back from her face, and Vida saw that the woman’s beauty had been undone by loss. Anguish had drawn its paw across her features. Her mouth and gaze were ripped open. Nobody had told Camilla to stay out of the sun—her face looked charred by the elements.

“Hello!” Vida tried, with the same verve she might have used on the top deck of the Princess. She lifted her arm and smiled wide, and then immediately thought better of it. She wrenched her arm back to her side. Camilla’s eyes were bloodred from crying—in those eyes was the whole story of their ordeal. A man was dead. Her man. The life they had lived together was an ocean and a country away and they could never go back there. The glittering world in which Vida had first encountered the grand Mrs. Carlton Farrar was gone—the ocean had swallowed their way of life whole.

Ten

The funeral was held at dusk on the high rocks that separated the cove from the wide, flat beach. The survivors of the wreck of the Princess gathered around and bent their heads as Fitzhugh Farrar spoke some words about his elder brother. Though Vida felt numb inside, she had no trouble looking sad. She wasn’t sure her face would ever be capable of anything but a sad expression again.

“Carlton Farrar taught me everything I know,” said Fitzhugh, hands clasped behind his back and head hung low.

Vida’s eyes darted between the two distinct rows of mourners. On one side were the fine people, of which she was one, mostly in tattered evening wear. On the other were the crew and other third-class passengers, whose appearance was slightly less ridiculous than the first-class passengers’, on account of being mostly dressed in dark fabric and adorned with a minimum of frippery. Not that she was going to be the one to call attention to a torn silk skirt’s ridiculousness. They were a morose group, and Fitzhugh’s solemn tone seemed to admonish her for thinking such things.

“He was a man who embodied righteousness, a man of rigorous intellect. He was a husband, a son, a steward of a great enterprise. He was the keeper of the family’s values, and a man of indubitable practicality. . . .”

Vida was stern with herself not to roll her eyes. This last bit was, as almost every member of the assembled now knew, untrue. The story of Carlton’s demise had spread rapidly throughout the long afternoon. How he had been among the first of the passengers of the Princess to evacuate, but upon realizing that the crew was abandoning ship, had insisted on returning to see that all was being done to preserve his family investment. And his wife, who had already been drinking tea in the captain’s quarters of the Artemis, had heard of his rash behavior, and insisted on going after him with two other members of the Princess’s crew. He had been ascending the side of the doomed ship when she began to sink, and he was feared lost in the following chaos. But Camilla commanded them in her husband’s name to remain close to the scene of the wreck, so they had managed to recover his body before they, too, were swept up in the storm. All night she had keened over him, and into the morning as he became rigid. And when they crashed into the rocks in the darkness she had insisted that the two