Read Online The Year of Broken Glass by Joe Denham - Free Book Online Page B

best friend, Ray Harving, and except to say that he got me through the raising of my two girls in more comfort than I’d have been without him, there wasn’t much there. Losing Yule had put the fire out in me, and I passed through that time in what I realize now to have been a suspended state of grief. My poor girls, I was gone into the sorrow that swelled up when Yule and the Misty went down.
    When Ray sank with his tuna boat just off the mouth of the Columbia River I awoke to my life as though out of ten long years in a coma. With my girls approaching their university years, and myself almost forty and penniless, I decided on one course of action: find a rich husband, a landlubber, or at the very least not a fisherman. Someone I could love and wouldn’t lose to the sea. Three times lucky. So I began sailing lessons at the Royal Victoria Yacht Club in Cadboro Bay, possibly not the best place to find a non-seafaring man, but certainly a place to find a wealthy one, which I did.
    Horace Maynard, the son of a land baron in England, was old, old money. I recall him actually saying to me around the time we first met that he’d come to Victoria to get a taste of the colonies, as if Canada’s ties to England were anything more than those of history and formality; as though the Empire of the world was still British and not American. Horace was an idiot, but a rich one and a loveable one in his well-bred, benevolent arrogance. He considered himself a philanthropist, and so I easily convinced him in the mid-90s to buy a very expensive waterfront acreage south of Tofino where we built the Glass Globe beach house, a small and outrageous-looking accommodation (thanks to Horace’s flair for innovative design). The idea was to offer it as a free residence for scientists and journalists, academics and artists, and whoever else was working for the betterment of the world’s oceans, which we did; and to rent it as a short-term bed-and-breakfast accommodation to the tourists through the summer months, the proceeds of which were to be donated to Greenpeace and Sea Shepherd and the like.
    Not long after the Glass Globe was built, Horace and I bought my mother’s old family estate in southern France from the family who’d owned it since my grandfather passed on. It was there we wintered most of our eleven years together; there we had a grand swimming pool built and housed in glass on the Mediterranean shore. And it was in that pool, filled with the fresh sea water we had pumped in to avoid the fish-killing chemicals used in conventional pools, that Horace had an aneurysm and drowned.
    So I’ve lived alone in what was once our modest summer residence at the Glass Globe for almost five years now. In that time I’ve had some exceptional company—I’ve shared a table with Sylvia Earle and Tim Flannery, David Suzuki and Robert Kennedy Jr.—but as I idle past the breakwater at Schooner Cove, all the while cursing Horace for insisting on the purchase of such a large, impractical boat, it’s one particular conversation with one particular guest that I can’t keep from flooding my thoughts.
    It’s been over a decade now since the Children of Mu, a little motley group of characters obsessed with the life and ideas of a man by the name of James Churchward, first descended upon the Glass Globe for a week-long convention. I have only a very peripheral knowledge of Churchward and his ideas, gleaned from the many lectures I received over dinners with Horace. He and the leader of this group, Monsieur Arnault Vericombe, were kindred spirits, and the friendship they immediately fell into inspired my husband to become enamoured with Churchward’s life and his theories of Mu.
    As a young soldier in the British Army, Churchward was sent to India during the famine of the 1880s. There he fell in with a rishi at a local temple and, in the off-hours of his army duty, he studied an ancient language