Chapter 7: Deep Green
Tuesday Midday and Evening.
Louisa and Martin walked down to the harbour together. Tom and Harvey were sorting through the dive equipment on the boat deck. The men went below to change into their wet suits and Louisa went to use the ladies' toilet at the Golden Lion. When she emerged in the formfitting suit she ignored a few wolf whistles from the men hanging out at the slipway, and clambered aboard the Louisa.
Tom and Harvey were below readying things for getting underway so it was just her and Martin out on deck, trying not to be too obvious about eyeing each other. Louisa felt a flutter in her chest at the sight of that strangely familiar physique in the black neoprene suit, nicely outlining his large, strongly built frame. She smiled to think of that time, back when she and her Martin were still awkwardly getting to know one another in Portwenn, when she remarked about seeing him out of his ever-present suit and in a wetsuit.
"So where are you lot off to?" a fisherman shouted from the dock, as Tom and Harvey came on deck. Louisa recognized him from the rechristening ceremony. "Funny you being off from fishing so long to fix up your boat and then going off to dive instead of work the first day," the man said.
"Yeah, you and the doc taking up pearl diving then?" said another man.
"Never you mind. Can't I have a bit of fun with my friends before getting back to the daily grind?" Harvey retorted.
"So where are we headed?" Louisa asked, as the boat motored out of the harbour.
Harvey and Tom spread out a modern map and showed their route. "Near as we can figure," Harvey said, "we head out round Polzeath Point, past this bit here, that's Doyden Rock, then out beyond St. Keyne's Rock is the likely spot. It's still well within the Celtic Sea, away from where the continental shelf drops off into the Atlantic proper, so lucky for us it's no more than 20 meters deep there, about 60 feet."
"And we think that's where the Esmeralda went down," Tom chimed in.
"If that's the spot, then the remains of the wreck likely got shifted slightly to the southeast by prevailing currents, so that's where we'll look," Harvey said. "We don't want to just look for a worm-eaten hull, odds are the wooden timbers will have broken down so much over the centuries there won't be much remaining. We've each got a metal detector, so look for rusted iron cannons that would indicate where a ship went down or the hinges of a chest that might have held coins, that sort of thing."
"And just be aware of anything black or shiny," Tom added. "Black means tarnished silver, shiny means gold. That never tarnishes."
Louisa and Martin glanced at each other, both clearly excited at the prospect of an adventure.
They reached the designated spot, weighed anchor, and got their breathing gear ready. As agreed, the three men dove first, leaving Louisa to man the boat. She waited eagerly for them to return after the designated 45 minutes. Louisa was not as familiar with boats as Tom was, but she had spent a bit of time aboard them with friends when she was younger and was never bothered by seasickness. She passed the time checking her mobile for messages from Mrs. Peters, reading a magazine she had brought, and mostly just watching the sea birds and fine wisps of cirrus clouds.
She couldn't help thinking about the two Martins. Her Martin, the one who was waiting for her back home in Portwenn, would be so disapproving of this project. This other Martin, in contrast, embraced it as a new experience. The one kept his feet squarely on dry land and the other maybe had his head in the clouds. Was that such a bad thing to let one's mind wander among life's possibilities? For herself, it might just be possible she could have a Martin that she was both physically and emotionally attracted to, but who was free of the barriers Martin Ellingham put up to the world and, too often, to her as well. She felt guilty entertaining such thoughts but she couldn't dismiss them either.
It was a relief when the men finally surfaced for a break and to don fresh air tanks. Then it was Tom's turn to stay on board and hers to plunge into the deep.
Louisa dropped into dark water, leaving the guilty thoughts behind. She drifted down, down, like she had jumped into the Portwenn Aquarium, but there were no glass walls, no boundaries at all, just fish - speckled, thick-lipped wrasse; sleek, fork-tailed mackerel; long, pointed sand eels; dark-spotted, top spined John Dories; silvery whiting and silver-lined pollock - many types of fish she knew from the aquarium and the fish market, but here she was in their realm and they were coming face to face with her as if to inquire why she had come to visit.
She reached the sandy, rocky bottom and swam off in the direction she had been assigned to investigate, as near as she could tell. The bottom sloped downward slightly and she moved along it to find herself among a small city of natural reefs and pinnacles, adorned with fantastic shapes of jewel anemones in ruby and sapphire shades and fan-like branches of hydrozoa, the bottom inhabited by flat bodied dab fish, spiney gurnards, and dozing dogfish sharks. Everywhere was alive, a sunken world where dim sunlight shafted down and was not blue as she expected but a deep, supernatural midnight green, and she could well believe she might meet an emerald-hued mermaid dwelling here.
She searched the bottom, moving her waterproof torch and metal detector about, always looking out for rusted iron and especially, as Tom had said, anything "black or shiny" but there was nothing that did not belong to the living ocean wherever she roamed. She moved toward the anchor line and followed it upward, pausing halfway to decompress. Dark shapes approached, for a moment she thought they were her dive companions but they were huge, at least twice as long as she was, and there were four of them, moving closer with gaping cavernous mouths. She knew they were basking sharks, alarming to see but harmless. Their little group parted and passed on either side of her in the green darkness, intent on their mission to filter the water of any plankton or little fish they could find.
When she surfaced the water and the sky above were pale blue and grey. She rested a while aboard the boat, then took a fresh tank and went back. By the end of the afternoon, she and her three companions had come up empty, so they headed back, exhausted but talking a mile a minute about everything they had seen.
Louisa picked up James Henry from Mrs. Peters, who assured her he had been a perfect angel, and returned to Chough Cottage. Tom told her he was heading for the pub and would be home in good time. She sat up for a while with the TV on but only half watching, till she got tired of waiting.
Upstairs, lying in bed she could feel the motion of the waves again, until she was gliding through the green translucency, dark hair streaming behind her, and she dropped the torch and metal detector, pulled off her mask and mouthpiece and slipped the air cylinder off her back, breathing easily in the water, her wetsuit turned to scales, her legs were a fish tail, and the sunken world plied by blunt-nosed fish was her familiar place, her home, and she swam up to the surface, and looked into the face of a pale blue-grey-eyed prince who peered over the side of a boat, low to the water. Her cool lips reached toward his warm, full ones and they met in a kiss.
To be continued…
