Storms! She loves storms – they are the best sea-change, they are the wind that finally makes you feel alive – she laughs as a wave almost swamps her, for all the other sailors scowl and tremble their way through the windbreakrain racket of the sea.
Get below he father shouts, but she is here, she is useful, pulling ropes, slip sliding across the deck, skin shinning up the rigging to undo a knotted sail. The wind grates across her face, the pelting rain takes chunks from her cheeks – yes, this is it, this is true freedom, at last this is what she wants!
Slate grey, Prussian blue, a kind of bruising purple – the wind whips up an artist's palette, blurred all over by the charcoal smudge of midnight rain. Whee! A crack of lightening shakes the sky, glows mercury for a moment, leaves a shock behind her eyes.
Now. Below, Meg.
She ignores him, she is needed. Then, his hand on her arm, his frantic eyes slowing the joyful pound of her heart.
Elizabeth Meg Smith, you get below deck now.
So Elizabeth Meg Smith hurkles her way below the deck, pouting, and goes to her cabin, where she sits in the dark. Soon, she begins to grin with the plummeting of the boat – up down up down –
As once upon a time a girl grinned at the fall and flip of her canoe, at the waterfall leap into blue – but that is enough, that is another time, and the people who lived then are dead –
In the morning the only casualty is the boat, and Meg's violin. She goes to fix it on the salt scrubbed deck, leaning against the side and watching a gull wheel in the parted clouds. In the distance, founts of light fall in slanting beams, cutting clear through the sea mist and filling the air with the colour of heaven.
He father is worried about the ship. They will have to land, he says, they will have to pitch anchor in the closest port, repair the ship, it could take mounths.
And the next he says with a kind of heavy sadness in his slate blue eyes, an expression so lost that Meg pulls herself to her feet and wraps her arms around him, listens to his heart, knows that it is breaking.
The closest place, if I am right, is Jamestown.