Collector of Lost Things by Jeremy Page

Author:Jeremy Page [Page, Jeremy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4804-4826-1
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2013-11-04T22:42:00+00:00

15

THAT WAS MY FIRST vision. The following morning I woke agitated from my dream, for I could not think of it as being anything other than a fantasy. It had been an outrageous and disturbing vision. A man, a stranger, had sat at the foot of my bed, watching me while I slept, and the details of him—the smell of his rough seal coat, the cracking sound it had made as he moved—felt more real than I could account for. Even at breakfast, I still felt his presence, and with it an awareness that the ship had a troubling new dimension to its empty cargo spaces and bare decks. Among the shadows that filled the hull, or against the grains of wood and coils of rope, at any time I might see him again.

Simao served me, polite and attentive as always, but I could tell he was aware of my anxious state. Bletchley, too, who emerged from his cabin with his customary loud yank of the latch, but then stood so awkwardly, staring at the fire, then at the back-rest of his chair, and finally at the companionway door, that I knew he must be remembering parts of the conversation he and I had shared the night before. Do you think you will get away with it? he had said, enigmatically. It still hung in the air as an unanswered question between us. I can tell it, in here, he had added, tapping his forehead as if he were privy to my inner thoughts. Your mind is burning from the inside. The man was in a very dangerous state, that much I knew. And it seemed the only possible conclusion that it had been his drink, with the strange but not unpleasant odour, that had conjured up the vision.

Bletchley was uninterested in having food. In fact, I had rarely seen him eat during the previous few days. Unshaven, roughly dressed, with one wing of his collar sticking upright, he stamped his boots into place over his stockings, issued a rough ‘good morning’ to clear his throat, and went up on deck. I was glad not to have to deal with him.

‘You are not well,’ Simao asked, with the tone of a statement.

‘I had a troubling night,’ I answered.

‘The sea runs many ways in this area,’ he said, weaving his fingers together as explanation. ‘The ship …’ He began to rock his hands.

‘Maybe that’s it,’ I said, happy with his normality, his constancy. Beyond him, I saw the companionway door swinging eerily on its hinges. I was again haunted by a presence of something I could not explain.

‘We are in sight of Greenland,’ Clara said to me as she stepped from her cabin arranging a bonnet on her head. It had an aigrette of grebe feathers, pinned to one side. I watched her fingers tying a small bow in the silk ribbon, fixing it under her chin. On her skin I noticed a dot of reflected shine from the apricot silk,

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