Read Online Sylvanus Now by Donna Morrissey - Free Book Online

one lives, and the king no mightier than self, she tried to make her feet turn in the right directions for the dancer who was now swinging her around dizzily, her eyes burning from smoke, and her head aching from the tiresomeness of repeated thought.
    Small wonder, then, the force with which her heart pounded when the Sunday before her first day at the new fish plant, she opened her door to the dark-faced young man standing on her stoop, wearing a finely cut suit, and with no funeral, wedding, or christening taking place for miles around.

CHAPTER SIX
    THE EMISSARY
    T RULY AN EMISSARY , she thought, an apostle sent by God to bridge that gap between Ragged Rock and the world overseas. And given that she believed him divine, her first impression was the strength registered in the thick of his lips, his skin, the gleam of his tar-black hair, and beneath that darkened ridge of his brows, the never-ending darkness of his eyes sinking into hers. She held out her hand as if to touch him, and he immediately grasped it with his, leaving merely the tips of her fingers showing, and they a ghostly white against the hairy blackness of his. And, oh, the warmth of his skin! Below the clasped hands she took in the sharp edge of his finely pressed trousers, and—and her heart sank along with her gaze onto a pair of well-worn rubber boots peeking out from the length of his well-pressed pant legs.
    Lord, what was this?
    Pulling back her hand, she stood, noting his fingers curling in the way of all fishermen who hand-lined day after day, and his legs bowed at the knees from fighting for balance in a rocky boat, and his shoulders starting to hunch from reining in jiggers and anchors. She sighed, her hand to her hip. A creature honed by the wind and sea was what he was, fitted only for that which took him from his door to his boat. As though following her thoughts, his eyes dropped and his shoulders hunched a little further; yet his voice, though low, was steady as he raised his eyes back to hers, and in the most sombre of tones, invited her for a boat ride to Cooney Arm.
    “Cooney Arm,” she repeated, drawing down her mouth as though speaking the name of some dirty relative. She’d been up and down the shore a few times, a dance here, picnic there, but Cooney Arm with its handful of blood relatives, the scattered sheep, and the odd rhubarb patch was never a place she cared to visit. “Isn’t that where Bear Falls is?” she asked, dawdling for time. “Winter nights, when it’s still, we can hear it,” she added as he merely nodded. “I don’t like boats. Just a second.” A whine from one of the toddlers had mushroomed into a scream. Shutting the door, she turned back into the kitchen. Ivy was dragging the eldest toddler into his room for a nap, the other was sitting on the floor, turning red from holding his breath, and the boys, Johnnie and Alf (or the buggers, as she preferred calling them) were on their knees, barrelling across the kitchen.
    “What’d ye do to him?” she cried, darting to the toddler and whacking his back, her hands sticking to a gob of molasses on his nightshirt. “Bloody hell, ye little bastards—they done something to him,” she yelled as her mother hurried into the kitchen, the newest addition but a ripple amongst the folds of cloth pushed up over a swollen breast.
    “There,” and Adelaide sighed with relief as the youngster caught his breath. “Janie—Janie, you going to wash him?” she sang out over another scream.
    Janie hopped down from the washstand where she’d been kneeling and snapped, “I already washed him once!”
    “Then wash him agin—and this time change his clothes,” she snapped back. Ignoring her sister’s sharp rebuttal and the youngster’s screaming and the newest member’s starting up a wail as Florry fled the room, berating Johnnie and Eli, Adelaide lifted her sweater off the back of a chair and, without word of farewell, walked out the door.
    His voice was clear and soft