Excerpt from my novel FATE.

 

Edwina's Curse

                           “I’m telling it as it happened … not dressing it up, but maybe … I will allow myself to dance a bit with it.”
       In Captain Berek’s absence, Edwina’s condition worsened. She seldom ventured outdoors, and when she did, it was only as far as the garden gate or along the cliff path where the north wind came cold off the sea at Devil’s Leap. She spent long hours in her husband’s work shed, at the back of their stone house, reading his old logbooks, tracing her fingers over his handwriting as though she might feel his presence through the ink, mumbling to herself and asking…
 “Why … why … you damp fool … why?”
       She spoke not only to the man she married ... but to the seaman he was ... a man who carried the smell of the sea with him even when his feet touched dry land.
       But poor Edwina ... she had already laid her sorrow at God's feet-of-clay ... poor-poor Edwina Mace.
       Her half-brother Obed visited her when he could, though it pained him to see her slipping further into herself. He brought her the new English tea from its plantations in India … preserved fruit, or some sailcloth to mend, anything to keep her hands busy. But he could no longer reach her spirit, not as he once had … you remember I told you about them wanting to marry, but old men put their foot down … maybe they were wise old men now.
     Obed’s silent companionship, while drinking the new tea on the porch, seemed only to deepen her isolation, her grief for her lost infants, and the stillborn son ... the quiet punishment she inflicted upon herself by tying thorns to her tights, as if her own suffering could somehow repay a debt only she understood … but we need to ask the man-on-the-cross that.
       It can be said … Edwina Mace was losing her hold on reason, and Obed Mace felt guilty in passing it on to his friend Berek.
       On the morning The Minx set sail, Edwina Mace stood alone from the crowds on Fairhaven waterfront, away from the other wives and children. They did not want her near their children in cast that jinx of child-birth-death was spreading in the wind. Her black Galway shawl loose around her shoulders, her eyes wild with sleeplessness, her red hair undone and blowing in the salty air.
       As the wind filled the bark’s new sails, Obed Mace spent six weeks fitting her out with the fussiness of a dressmaker ... and she looked proud ... like the coming-of-age girl at her dance, turning before the mirror and fluffing out her dress with the same pride and innocence in what fate had decided.     
       Edwina raised her trembling hands to the heavens and cursed the voyage in a voice not her own, in a strange weaving of words twisted from Irish and French ... words that would make any Druid proud of the old craft.
       Her words carried over the sea like a prophecy.
       She whispered her curse softly at first, as though in prayer, and then it became louder...
 “Hear me scoundrels … hear me well … no man aboard will see Fairhaven again … that their sea will take back what it is owed in whale oil … pay heed … you too … you damp scoundrel.”
       The wind caught her venomous words and carried them out and across the shining hull of The Minx. Captain Berek felt a shiver going down his back and looked over his shoulder towards Fairhaven. By the time the ship had vanished beyond the headland, to chase whales and damnation alike, Edwina’s voice was gone … leaving only the squeaking gulls in answering her.

 

 

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