Jane nodded.

  “From St. Brieuc it is but a day’s ride up to Corlay,” said Francis.

  “Is it safe to go up on deck now?” she asked.

  “Aye,” said Jonsey. “There’s naught to fear now, lass.”

  She pulled her cloak about her and climbed up the companionway steps. As she emerged on deck Napper grinned at her. “You’re wiser than they are, Jane. It’s fresh up here.”

  “That song,” she said. “Will you sing it again?”

  “Which one?”

  “White Wings.”

  “Ah, you know it, do you?”

  She nodded.

  “Then do you sing it along wi’ me, lass. Two’s better than one. Come, sit you here beside me.”

  She shook her head. “I can’t, Napper,” she whispered. “My heart is too full of hurt. You sing it and I’ll listen.”

  She made her way forward past the creaking mast and sat down on the very net where, though she did not know it, her dead lover had once lain. Resting her aching head upon the gunwale she murmured: “Why did you not take me with you? Why? Why?” and the tears she had not thought she had left in her to shed, rose scalding in her eyes while the boy’s clear voice sang-

  “Oh, white wings, strong white wings,

  Ye’ll bear my heart across the sea,

  Ye’ll bear my heart across the mountains,

  To where my true love ‘waits for me.”

  In the second week of May a gale began to blow from the north. For three days and two nights it howled down the Sea of Dee through the Midland Gap to burst out screaming across the wide wastes of the Somersea. Low over the cowering Mendips the flayed clouds streamed unbroken while below them the rain squalls lashed like black whips and clawed handfuls of spume from the backs of the waves in Taunton Reach. They flew like tufts of fleece to lodge among the thorns and scrub oaks of Blackdown and skein the seaward forests on the North Dorset shore. By the evening of the third day the clouds began to break and, as night fell, stars could be seen pricking through the flying rents and tatters. Later the moon arose and the wind dropped abruptly. But the seas still ran high, raging blackly under the fitful moonshine and roaring among the groined caverns of Quantock Isle.

  At dawn, as the tide withdrew, the combers crept out from Tallon to scratch for gleanings among the high-piled wrack and sea-drift which littered the coves. In a rock-fanged gulley known as “the Jaws” they stumbled upon the naked, weed-shrouded corpse of a Kinsman. He had been dead for weeks and the splintered stump of a crossbow bolt protruding from between his ribs testified as to how he had met his end.

  As was their custom they dragged him down to the water’s edge and cast him back into the wayward currents. For what use is a drowned body to any man?

 

 

  Unknown, Richard Cowper

 

 

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