Beautiful Wild - Anna Godbersen Page 0,77

their gaze intent upon the ship that was making a wide turn in the open ocean. It had drawn a circle around their island and was slowly but surely coming their way, the gray smog of the smokestacks drifting over the pinkening sky.

Vida’s shoulders rose and fell. She was trembling all over with the scarcely to be believed possibility that they might be rescued. That they might be found. Within her rib cage was such a war of hope and despair. She didn’t like the trailing gray smoke, and yet she feared the huge ship would dissipate into thin air. Her sun-brown legs went rigid. She braced for what was coming. The wind off the ocean lifted her hair, which had been chopped below the ears, and was now a strange amalgamation of strands, curls, knots, and little braids. It was not until the dinghy was coming into the cove, the silhouette of a man standing at the prow while the oars lifted and plunged into the waves, that she considered what a feral creature she must seem.

Like the others, she advanced toward the water with her gaze fixed on the seascape.

As soon as she began to wonder if it was him, she knew it was. Then she knew it more so. Then the golden certainty circled her head, firm as a tight-fitting crown. When the dinghy reached the shallow waters, he leapt out and came striding through the water, his dark pants soaked above the knee, the salt spray gleaming on his face. That same sculptured face she had seen in newspaper illustrations, in ballrooms, that she had imagined in her wedding photo. It was that same sand-colored hair rising above his forehead like a wind-shaped bluff, those blue eyes like a crystal glass of water held against a noon sky.

Fitz was here.

He was alive.

That it was really him was hard to believe. Yet she saw that it was true. The wet sand filled the space between her toes, the skin at the back of her knees itched, she felt crazy, like her head was a balloon that might go flying off into the upper atmosphere if her body let go of its string.

What should I do was a thought she heard, as though it had been asked by a passing stranger. There was nothing to do, nothing obvious, and in a moment she began to cry and laugh at the same time. All she had feared and hoped and dreaded since the night the ship sank rose up, overwhelmed her. Meanwhile Fitzhugh, the real and very alive Fitzhugh, strode through the clear azure waves, sank to his knees at the place where the waves broke and receded, and grasped her hands.

“You’re alive,” she managed to get out through the stream of hot tears that drenched her cheeks, the laughter that she couldn’t manage to get under control.

“I gave you a scare,” he observed.

“You’re alive,” she repeated witlessly.

“I’m sorry. You must have thought the worst. But Vida, Miss Vida Hazzard, I’m here now. I will never let you out of my sight again. I promise. I’m here, and I’m going to take you home and make you my wife.”

Beyond him she could see the people in the dinghy bobbing on the water. There were four men sitting at their oars, they were the ones who would row them back to the big ship out in the open ocean. Vida gasped and gasped. Her face was wet with tears, but suddenly she couldn’t cry any more. She managed to take a breath, to put a stop to her strange laughing.

“Can I bring you there?” he asked, indicating the ship. “Your mother and father are eager to see you.”

For a moment she had no sense of the world. It was so hard to believe. Maybe she was afraid to believe. Yet it must be true what he said. They were all right, everything was all right, her mother and father had survived. Fitzhugh stood and faced her and she couldn’t help herself, she needed someone to hold on to, to steady her shaking. She threw her arms around his neck, pressed her body against his chest for support, and whispered, “Thank you, oh thank you, oh thank you so much,” into his ear.

Part Four

The Fate of the Princess

by Dame Edna Sackville

A concatenation of private rail cars has been traveling cross-country rather more slowly than is usual—they have had to cut their speed considerably before entering a town, on account of the