Devotion(114)

There was a low, eerie growl nearby.

I turned my head as Thea did, saw the same feral black cat staring at the woodpile. Her back arched, tail on end, tipped in white. She yowled again, and then, spitting, streaked off into the bush behind the cottage.

Thea’s eyes widened in surprise.

‘Hans’s cat,’ I whispered to myself, and then I heard Thea suddenly, sharply, inhale. The apron hem fell from her mouth, the kindling tumbled to the ground. She staggered backwards in a quiet, urgent scramble, one hand still tight around Johann.

I saw it then.

A sheened coil within the wood heap, a small brown head swaying.

Thea brought her struck hand to her heart, staring at the brown snake that was already sliding from the stacked kindling, was already winding into the landscape, absorbed into it.

Oh God, I thought. Oh God, what has happened?


The moment Thea returned to the cottage, the book smouldering on the coals burst into flame. The air inside, thick and poisonous, began to clear.

Thea was pale. Her hair was unwinding from her braids. She paced the room, taking her hand from Johann’s back to examine the strike marks on the flesh of her palm. Then, as if deciding, she set Johann back in his cradle and washed the wound in water from the jug on the table. Johann continued to cry, quivering fists above his head, as though he knew what had happened and was already railing against it.

I could do nothing but watch. Thea gingerly dabbed her hand dry with her apron and then wrapped it in the dress Christiana had brought as the fire roared with burning paper. The flames cast a weird glow against the cottage walls. The air was thickly gauzed with smoke.

Thea stumbled then, and I felt cold fear. I was back inside the ship, in the darkness, terrified at the cant of the floor, and the water coming to drown us. For a moment she was motionless. Then she stooped to pick up Johann again and it was as though the floor had tilted, as though the world had forsaken its axis and nothing was sure, nothing was steady. The ocean was here. It was hungry. She staggered sideways.

I could do nothing.

Thea left Johann in his cradle and, instead, tried to drag it to the side of the bed in the corner of the room, holding a hand to her head as though it pained her. She fell again. I saw dark water pooling on the floor. Leaving the cradle in the middle of the room, she stumbled to the bed alone.

I climbed in with her. I wanted her in my arms. I wanted to guard her from what was happening, the terrible waters rising.

Thea lay on her side, her injured hand tucked under her chin and her free arm dangling over the edge, fingers waving at Johann.

‘Shh,’ she was saying. ‘You are safe. You are loved.’

I placed my mouth over the bite on her hand and felt her pulse jump against my lip. Her wrist was warm and soft and there was the suggestion of vein and artery and tiny bones lying hidden beneath the skin, and I touched my tongue to the punctures and tasted something oddly sweet, a little sharp. I sucked at it in a wild hope that it would do something, that I might help her. There was no bitterness.

‘You are safe,’ Thea was still saying to Johann. Her voice had become strained. ‘You are loved.’ She said it again and again until Johann stopped crying. She said it until she could not form words, until it sounded as though she were talking underwater, as though she had moved beyond language, as though her tongue had lost its way. I could hear the roar of the sea taking back the bush, filling the valleys and the high country, taking the air from the room.

Thea’s breathing changed, then. I heard her heart fall out of time with every hymn I had ever composed to its syncopation. Her chest began to rise and fall, too fast. I was no longer certain she was taking in air. Her body shook.

I wanted so badly to pray, but my tongue had forgotten the taste of the Lord, and so I sang. As her eyes closed and her face became slack, as her breathing became strangled, I sang. I sang against the rushing of the tide. Her fingers trembled, but there was no intention in them, and then they were hanging, and she was still, and my song had become a cry. The ocean rose up around the bed and I asked the trees and the earth and the burning fire in the hearth to do something. It was not enough that they might move and turn as though nothing was happening; they must stop what was happening because I could not. I could not do a thing.

Oh God in your Kingdom, oh Thea. Thea. Open your eyes.

I was holding her. I was bearing it, bearing her. I was not letting go of her.

The waves rose and we were underwater, and, suddenly, there was a stillness and a silence.

I held her. She died as I held her.


Hans came home later that night. He came into the house holding a lamp aloft, braced against the dark, and in its light I could see the concern and fear on his face at Johann, screaming in his cradle, his swaddling unravelled and his face red and tight with tears, at the fire dead in the hearth. I had listened to the baby choke on his own cries for hours by then, but I couldn’t move. I was afraid to let go of Thea.

Hans set the lantern on the table and picked up Johann. I watched him take in the cold ashes, the absence of Thea’s usual candle casting a glow in her corner by the fire, by the seat he had made her. He rubbed Johann’s back, soothing him.

‘Thea?’ Hans’s voice seemed too loud for such a small space. I could hear the fear in it and guessed at his thoughts. She has run for help. She is trapped outside somewhere. Someone has taken her. A well. A fire. A fall. Then he turned to the bed and saw that she was in it.