Jersey Legends by Erren Michaels

Author:Erren Michaels [Michaels, Erren]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780750967259
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2015-10-07T00:00:00+00:00

THE WATER HORSE

The errant breeze lifted and whipped Anne-Marie’s dark curls, blowing them about her face as she walked alone beside the sea. Waves crashed against the stony shore and glittered in the pale moonlight. She tasted sea-spray on her lips and turned her face to the ocean, losing herself in the rhythm of the waves as she thought of William.

Before William had left for the war, he and Anne-Marie would walk here together around the curve of Bonne Nuit Bay, talking of how they would be married and the home that they would make together. They spoke of planting an orchard so that William could make and sell cider. Anne-Marie would bake apple pies and churn black butter to sell in the village of St John.

The night before he had departed William had placed a ring of silver upon her finger, for he could not afford gold, and begged her to wait for him. Now when Anne-Marie could not sleep for worrying that William might be killed in the fighting, she would walk along the bay in the darkness. Sometimes she would simply stand looking out across the ocean in the faint hope that she might see his ship, homeward bound upon the horizon.

Some of the other girls with husbands or sweethearts away to war would sometimes skim stones on the water. For each time the stone skipped across the surface, they said, they would count it as another month to wait for the return of their lovers from battle. Anne-Marie had often watched in amusement as girls she knew to be experts in skipping stones threw lazy, half-hearted casts, which only touched the water once or twice before sinking beneath. While she was not superstitious or fanciful herself, on this particular evening Anne-Marie began idly skipping pebbles across the flat water between the rising waves as she thought of William so far away.

‘How long until you return to me, my William?’ she whispered. She flicked her wrist and sent a stone skimming, but it disappeared beneath the surface without a ripple. Anne-Marie blinked and pushed her wind-swept hair back from her forehead. Before she could bend to pick up another pebble, a pale hand clutching the stone which she had cast broke the surface of the water. Then a man, the image of William, rose dripping from beneath the waves, water pouring from his dark hair and over his bare shoulders. Anne-Marie stifled a cry of alarm. Was this her William? Or was it his ghost, come to tell her of his death?

She stepped closer into the shallows, heedless of the cold water lapping at her ankles and soaking into her dress. Every detail of William’s dripping features was exactly as she remembered. His eyes though … William’s eyes were the bright blue of a summer sky. The eyes of this man were as black as the depths of the ocean.

‘William?’ she whispered, her voice quavering with uncertainty as she stepped into the waves, ‘Will, is that you?

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