As she kicked harder, she was dimly aware of some form of shadow that seemed to linger over Richard’s boat.
Death?
She gave herself a mental shake; she couldn’t think that way. She had to use her entire concentration to get her friend to the shore. She didn’t even dare look back at the Yankee ship. Richard had been thrown severely about his wounded ship, and if she didn’t get him to land, nothing else about the night would really matter.
An explosion suddenly burst through the night and Tara realized that a powder keg had exploded.
The resulting mass of waves wrenched Richard from her arms. Skyrocketing flames illuminated the water, and she couldn’t see Richard anymore.
Even with her exceptional sight and strength, it seemed like an eternity in agony, diving and searching, diving and searching.
While the blazing fire on the ship illuminated the surface of the water, creating an almost beautiful array of golden splendor on the now-gentling waves, beneath the glowing sheen the water remained stygian in the night. She could barely see, and while she knew about where Richard had gone in, she couldn’t pinpoint the precise location, and she might not have found him at all had he not bobbed to the surface.
Facedown.
“Richard!” she shouted, swimming to him, turning him over in the water. His eyes were closed; his form was limp.
“Richard!” she cried again, and then squeezed his torso with gentle pressure, fighting the waves around them. To her relief, he coughed and choked, and water spewed from his mouth. A wave lapped around them, covering his face, and he coughed again, trying to fight the water that seemed so ready to claim him.
“Easy, easy, just float, I’ve got you!” Tara assured him.
“The ship … the men,” Richard said, and choked as icy salt water moved over his mouth again.
“Shhh … Stop talking.” She wondered if he’d been struck in the head…. But he was breathing; he was alive and breathing and she was going to make sure nothing changed that.
“The men …” he repeated.
“Stop. We’ve been through this.” She was terribly afraid that her friend didn’t want to live, that guilt over his men would infect his thoughts and keep him from assisting her rescue attempt. “Richard! Shut up! The war has taken many lives—I won’t let it take yours.”
Richard wasn’t a small man, and the water felt bitterly cold, and it wasn’t easy managing the weight and length of his lean and muscled body—especially when he wasn’t cooperating.
“Fire,” he said, as if he hadn’t heard her, glazed eyes reflecting the burst of fire in the sky.
She was tempted to knock him out again. He was the dearest friend she’d ever had, or would have, and she would not lose him.
“Quiet!” she whispered softly. She hooked her arm around his body, trying to get him to relax and let her use the power of her right arm and legs against the water. “Lay back, Richard, and let me take you. Please. Please …” Just when she thought she couldn’t wrestle with him for one minute more, he mercifully passed out once again. She felt the fight leave his muscles.
Finally, she was able to begin a hard crawl toward the shore.
The water was deep; the ship had floundered in the channel between isles, where a coral shelf rested just to the Atlantic side. They couldn’t be in more than thirty feet of water, and yet, now the length of her body burned with the exertion of her muscles and her lips continued to quiver from the cold.
She had never felt so strained, nor so exhausted, in her life.
Just when she thought that the agony in her arms and legs would cripple her, she felt ground at the tips of her feet. She realized that she could stand, having reached the gnarled toes of the island. She slipped off the submerged root, dragging Richard with her. Doggedly, she found a foothold again, paused, breathed and waited. She looked back to the Yankee ship, on fire now.
At last, she managed to drag him up on a spit of sand between the gnarled and twisted “legs” of a spiderlike clump of mangroves. She lay there next to him, panting, and feeling as if her muscles burned with the same fire that still illuminated the night sky. She breathed in the acrid and smoky air.
Turning then to Richard, she felt for his pulse—faint, but steady—and warmth jumped in her heart. She allowed herself to fall back for another moment, just breathing and gathering her strength. She was drenched, and her skirts were heavy with water. She felt the winter’s nip that lay around her, even here.
She thanked God that they hadn’t gone in farther north, where temperatures would have been far more wicked.
She rested, and then, even as she breathed more easily, she bolted up. Looking out over the dying remnants of the Peace, she could see that the Union ship floundered, too.
She had grounded herself; she wasn’t injured and limping, but she was caught on the reef, and there was no escape for her. The Union boat would have a number of longboats, easy to send into the inlets, saving the lives of the men aboard.
Richard was alive, she knew that, and she believed in her heart that he would survive. But he wasn’t coming around, and they had to leave their present position; they were like sitting ducks at a county fair.
She dragged herself to her feet. Half of the heaviness of the weight she had borne, she realized, had been that of her skirts. She wrenched off the cumbersome petticoat that had nicely provided warmth—before becoming saturated with seawater. Rolling the cotton and lace into a ball, she stuffed it into a gap in the tree roots, shoving up a pile of seaweed and sand to hide the telltale sign that this was where survivors had come ashore.
Something in the water caught her eye, some form of movement. It might have just been a shadow created on the water by the rise and fall of flames that still tore from the desiccating ship. Soon, the Peace would be down to charred, skeletal remains, and she would sink to the seabed. At the moment, enough of the hull remained above the surface to allow the flames to continue to lap at the sky, shooting upward with dying sparks now and then.
A shadow on the water … The Unionists would be coming … coming after a blockade runner.
She reached down, dragging Richard’s body up. He was far bigger than she was, but she managed to get him over her shoulder. Taking a last glance back at the flame-riddled night, she started to move through the mangroves that rimmed the edge of the isle.
THE FIRE ON THE BLOCKADE runner was just beginning to subside, but Finn could still hear the lick of the flames as they consumed tinder, and the split of wood as it disintegrated in the conflagration. Soon, however, the sea would claim the fire, and the night would be lit by only the stars.
He couldn’t wait for the longboats; he surveyed his surroundings from the mangrove roots he stood upon.
This side of the islet—new to time and history, created by the tenacious roots and the silt and debris caught with those roots—was really nothing more than a tangle of gnarled tree, slick ponds and beds of seaweed. But looking toward the east, he could see that there was a spit of sand. He began crawling over the roots, heedless when he stepped knee-deep in a cache of water. Tiny crabs scurried around his intrusion, and he could hear the squish of his boots. When he cleared the heaviest thicket, he paused, leaning on a tree, to empty the water from his boots.
Shortly after he resumed moving through the thinning foliage, he heard a grunting sound. He paused. Alligators roamed the freshwater areas of the upper Keys, and even crocodiles made a home in the brackish waters off the southern coast. But Finn wasn’t hearing the odd, piglike grunt of a gator. He was hearing the snuffling grunt made by wild pigs. There was hope that water was to be found on the island, and if pigs were surviving here, then man could, too. Good