Aric drifted down slowly. He guessed the cliff he’d just stepped from was a bit more than half the height of the one at Portreath Beach, where he’d watched the children fly their kite. The wind had grown stronger, but that didn’t bother him in the least. As he neared the beach, ocean spray began to spatter him, and he raised a sphere of energy to protect his clothes.
Ralph’s Cupboard had offered little of value, most of it very recent: pstic bottles, a soft cap, an old red-and-white buoy with less than four inches of rope still attached. It took him only moments to decide it was a dry well—even though the sea continued to roar in before boiling back out again. Nothing would ever find purchase in that cave, the bottom of which was much deeper than he’d realized.
The entrance to Hell’s Mouth, guarded by jagged rocks on both sides, churned with boiling surf—a maelstrom of noise and motion. Aric’s glowing bubble had to submerge almost halfway to avoid damaging the cove’s structure. He drew the field in tight as he could until he found a small patch of dry nd—a patch that, long ago, an old sea chest had also found. A storm tide must have cast it here once, and it had remained undisturbed ever since.
The cave was dark, so Aric generated his own light. With the illumination came a flood of details. The chamber was scattered with debris, but his attention went straight to the sea chest, which had resisted the elements as best it could before finally yielding to time.
Inside, he found the remains of a man’s clothing—now just rags—but the buttons had endured: an equal number of bone and brass, remarkably preserved. A pocket knife y beside them. The bone handle was cracked, but the three brass pins still held. The bde was corroded—possibly fused shut—but still a treasure. Perhaps something Edith’s father would cherish.
A green bottle y nestled nearby, iridescent with age and salt air, the cork long since crumbled. It looked hand-blown, and light shimmered through the thick, sea-gss surface. A stiffened pouch of oiled leather held a briarwood pipe—its stem slightly warped, but whole. Aric lifted the smooth bowl to his nose and was surprised to catch a faint whiff of tobacco. With it he found a rusted three part tool—shaped like a sailor’s cross—meant for cleaning the bowl and tamping the tobacco. Rusted but still serviceable.
There was also a sleeve of oilskin containing a fragments of charts—still readable.
George will love these, he thought, pcing it alongside the other finds on a shelf at shoulder height in the rock wall.
But when Aric discovered the bundle wrapped in yered oiled cloth, he knew he had truly found treasure. The knot was stiff, and he took great care in untying it. Inside was a hand-carved box, made from driftwood. The lid fit tightly to the body, sealed with a line of wax running the perimeter—someone had taken great pains to protect what was inside.
His heart skipped when he opened the box and inspected the contents, his emotions moving him close to tears as his mind painted a picture of a man and a woman, both gone now a century and more. In that moment he realized that this discovery belonged not to him, but to all of them. He repced everything just as he had found it and tied the oil cloth knot loosely. He took each item one by one from the shelf and pced it in the sack he’d borrowed, pulled the string tight and slung it over his shoulder. But the box he held gently in his hands as he exited the cave and drifted up and up until his feet once again found the cliff path. He had to resist the urge to fly quickly back to the cottage. He knew it would be some time before everyone returned from the pub, and he wanted all of them to be there when he dispyed his discovery.
Everything was id out on the dining room table, the white tablecloth lending contrast to the items that had sat for over a century undisturbed in the dark cove.
George continued to shake his head as he gently picked up the pipe. “Can’t believe you found a way in, and then out alive again, in one piece. And dry as a bone at that.”
Aric shrugged. “I found a way down there.”
George knew that no path existed from the cliff path to the cove, but he held his tongue. The five men had returned to the cottage still glowing from their outing (and the ale). Even Carlos—who found the rules of cricket byzantine to say the least—was in high spirits.
“We’re in here!” Mavis called to them from where she sat at the table, calling them in without alerting them to what they would find.
“I”m sorry,” Edith had said simply when Aric had returned, the pull cord for the sack draped from shoulder to hip, the wrapped box still in his hands. They stood alone in the kitchen for a moment, inches apart, as she looked up at him and he looked down at her.
“Me too,” he replied, even though she was sure he had nothing to feel sorry for. It was just one more pebble added to the weight of responsibility he carried—that he felt he was required to carry—because of his powers. Healing—the word, the act—meant something different, looked like different things—to different people.
“My happiness isn’t your responsibility,” she said as she stepped close and pced her hand on his chest. His shirt was still cold to her touch, the smell of salt air hung on him like cologne, “it’s mine.”
“Your happiness is important to me,” Aric had answered, “I would never do anything intentionally to jeopardize it.”
When Delphine had come back out of her room Edith had surprised her with a hug, and an apology. The Parisian model/scientist hadn’t been oblivious to Edith’s mood at dinner, but the act had surprised her nonetheless.
“J’aimerais que tu aies une raison d’être jaloux,” she’d said reflexively, which required her to transte for her friend. I wish you had a reason to be jealous
It was a clumsy attempt to convey what she felt, but Edith had gotten the message loud and clear.
I wish it was different, but it isn’t.
An hour ter everyone sat or stood around the rge table and marveled at what Aric had found and—for George and Mavis at least—the fact that he’d been able to find it at all.
“Ain’t no way down to that cave from the path,” George whispered to his wife as everyone else looked at the collection of buttons, “not unless he sprouted wings.”
“He’s young, and fit,” Mavis said as she gnced at Aric again, admiring what she saw. “Maybe he climbed down.”
George silently shook his head.
“I’d like you to have these,” Aric said to George as he indicated the chart fragments and the sleeve that held them for so long.
“I can’t,” George started before his throat tightened, “I can’t accept these, d. These are valuable. These have history.”
“The fact that you think that means that you should have them. Besides, I’d never have know that cove existed if you hadn’t shown us. Please accept them.”
Everyone could see George struggling against his emotions. He left the delicate charts on the table, fttened out and held down by several pieces of cutlery. He picked up the oiled sleeve and caressed it in his hands and simply nodded before wiping his nose.
They had all watched Mavis sit with her sewing box one evening, repairing some article of George’s clothing, and had comment on her skill, and the collection of buttons that the box held. So none of them—except for Mavis—was surprised by Aric’s next words.
“Mavie, would you honor me by accepting these buttons? Adding them to your collection?”
Her shock at the offer was clear as her mouth opened only to be concealed as her hands rose to her face. She didn’t decline outright, but her doubts were obvious.
“You don’t want to give those to someone else?”
You don’t want to give them to Edith? was what she meant.
“No. I want to give them to you.”
Mavis’ tight smile and beaming face accompanied her silent vigorous nod.
“So, are you ever going to unwrap that little bundle?” Carol asked.
“In a minute,” Aric said as he picked up the rusted knife and handed it to Edith.
“You’re giving her a corroded pocket knife?” Hank asked as Edith looked quizzically at the item in her hand.
“No, I’m giving Edith’s father a rusted pocket knife. I think he’ll like it. And if anyone can bring it back to life it’s him.”
Edith’s smile became broad as she turned the item over in her hands. She gave it a final gnce before kissing the man she loved. “He’ll love it.”
Aric picked up the briarwood pipe and held it out to Ed Martell. “Speaking of collections, would you like to add this to your collection?”
Anyone who visited Ed’s home had seen an old photo of a very young torpedoman—Leading Seaman Edward William Martell—grinning broadly with a pipe clenched between his teeth as he stood with his mates on the forecastle of the HMS Tireless. Beside it was a second photo: a sole sailor, caught mid-ugh, his cap tilted at a jaunty—and quite non regution—angle. Even a passing gnce revealed the resembnce between the two men. This was Henry Martell, five years Ed’s senior, his features a clear echo of his younger brother’s.
Beneath the framed photos, along with a torpedo spanner, sat a rack holding four pipes of various shapes and sizes. Ed had given up the habit shortly after the war ended, but he kept the pipes as mementos of the men in the photo—one of whom never returned to his wife and young son.
“I don’t know, Dr. Martell—might have to make room in your pipe rack for that,” Alex joked, as Ed took the instrument from Aric and held it as if it were made of gss.
“This won’t be going anywhere near the pipe rack—too fine for that,” Ed said, his voice thick with feeling. “I’ll see it’s kept proper, where none of you hooligans can get your mitts on it.”
Only the gss bottle and the wrapped parcel remained, but Aric felt he’d waited long enough. His hands untied the loose knot he had himself pced there only a few hours earlier before folding the yers of oiled cloth back to reveal the box made from driftwood and rubbed with linseed oil. At the very center of the rectangur lid someone had carved the letters E A in beautiful script. Aric allowed everyone a moment to admire and comment on the handmade box. The lid came away more easily from the body than when Aric had first found it. Inside the felt-lined container, the contents sat just as he had first discovered them. He took them out, gently, one by one, and id them on the table.
The first item Aric removed from the box, the topmost item, for which it seemed the interior length of the box had been sized, was a comb of exquisite design.
“That’s whale bone,” George said as he described what they all saw—a comb roughly eight inches in total length. Nine tines capped with a carved figure at the top, which was ornamented with some sort of jewel.
“Is that a bird?” Carol asked, squinting at the curling shape of the handle. “Or something else?”
“That shell’s pāua,” George said as he pced his face closer to the comb. “Grows in the waters around New Zeand.”
“C’est magnifique,” Delphine said shaking her head with wonder.
Mavis’ face lit up again. “It’s a whale! That’s what the handle is meant to be. The shell is meant to be her eye looking at you.”
“Her?” George asked.
“I think she’s right,” Edith said. “It is supposed to be a whale.”
George’s hand came up to his chin as he nodded. “It’s Māori, but it could have been traded halfway around the globe and back again.”
The second item was a decorative writing card folded in half, holding a pressed flower. Inside the card was a short note:
I plucked this on a moonlit night in Galle, when all my thoughts were of you.
“Això és preciós,” Carlos said—this is beautiful—before his eyes found Carol.
“Where’s Galle?” Hank asked.
“Sri Lanka now,” George answered. “But when this bloke was there it would have still been called Ceylon.”
“What type of flower is that?” Aric asked.
“Frangipani,” George said. “In South Asia, they give it as a remembrance. A keepsake.”
Resting beneath the writing card was the third item, a handwritten letter.
Dearest Eleanor,
It seems an age has passed since st I beheld your eyes—grey as the sea after a storm, and twice as deep. At times I question whether our brief time together was aught but a waking dream, and yet, your likeness, kept close to my breast these many months, reassures me that what we shared was no mere illusion.
The photograph does you no justice, of course—it captures neither the quicksilver of your gaze nor the warmth that so often pyed about your lips. These details I must summon myself, though they come unbidden, etched as they are upon my heart.
Until such time as Providence sees fit to reunite us, know that you are ever present in my thoughts.
Ever yours,
Edward
Accompanying the letter was a photo of a young woman in te Victorian dress. A ruffled bodice with long sleeves and high colr gave the seated woman a refined look as she smiled at the camera, her hand resting on an open book. It was the face of someone who loved to read, and to give and receive letters, Edith thought. The sepia tone photo was very well preserved thanks to the oiled wood and wax seal.
“Well, we know at least that this photo was not taken much before the mid nineteenth century,” Ed said. Any visitor to his home got the grand tour of his darkroom and his collection of books on photography. “My guess, this is an albumin print. 1880 to 1900.”
He handled the photo gently, using a clean napkin to hold it by its edges before turning it over, where an inscription in faded brown script could still be read:
Dearest Edward—Until we are reunited, never to be parted again, let your heart be consoled by this likeness of me, as mine is daily by yours. With all my love, Eleanor.
“So she gave him this picture before he left, and he gave her one,” Carol said.
“He’d have been at sea a year or two,” Ed said.
“Never to be parted again,” Mavis said, her hand rising to her throat, eyes growing damp. “I wonder what she did when he never came back?”
George put his arm around his wife and silently shook his head.
“Too many men never came back,” Ed said, his voice low.
He was thinking of the ones he’d known—his shipmate Danny, lost when a sub they’d been chasing surfaced and fired its deck gun, killing Danny and everyone else manning the portside middeck Oerlikons. His brother Henry, who died at Dunkirk when the HMS Wakeful was torpedoed by a German U-boat. And both uncles—Billy Martell, a stoker killed at Jutnd, and Arthur Coates, a torpedoman lost with HMS G9 in a tragic friendly-fire incident during the Great War. His parents had never fully recovered from those losses, just as he’d never recovered from losing Henry.
“Indeed,” Aric said as he read the letter again before he began to pce the items back into the box so that they y much as they had for the st century or more. He wrapped the oilskins and tied the knot before offering the found treasure to Edith.
“I’d like you to have this.”
Aric wasn’t surprised to find Delphine on the cliff path looking out over the beach she’d flown over not too many hours previously. The wind was gusting, and her hair moved as if it had a life of its own. She’d neglected to button her coat, choosing instead to use her hands to wrap it tightly in front of her. He scuffed his feet as he approached, giving her an advanced warning that she hadn’t needed of his arrival. She’d become attuned to him—not as acutely as Edith had, but enough to sense him as he came closer, the old green bottle held firmly in his right hand.
“I didn’t forget you,” he said after he stopped next to her. He gnced at her, but she kept her eyes ahead as the sound of the surf and the bite of salt air filled their ears and noses. “But nothing I found in the cove said Delphine to me, and I wanted to give you something special.”
“I know you didn’t forget me,” she said evenly, without emotion. She was simply stating a fact. “And you already gave me something special. I flew. We flew. Together. The experience of a lifetime. Every second of it is imprinted on my mind. On every nerve in my body. I’ll never forget it. I don’t have the words to thank you properly.”
She leaned her head over and rested it on his shoulder, her hands still keeping the front of her coat closed against the breeze.
"“I brought you this,” he said, holding up the bottle. “It’s meant to hold something—to preserve it. I thought about asking George to craft a miniature kite, or maybe… imprinting a memory of us flying. I could do that. Let you feel it again whenever you touched it.”
He looked down at the sea. “But then I realized—it’s not my memory that matters. It’s yours. So maybe we can agree this bottle holds your memories of our time here—and it’ll preserve it, as long as we keep them alive.”
“I’ll keep them alive as long as I live,” Delphine said as she rubbed her cheek on his shoulder, her eyes taking in the iridescent gss. She was quiet for a moment before she spoke again.
“You know what I want to say.”
Aric leaned his head over until his own cheek rested on the crown of her head. “I do, because it’s what I want to say too. But saying it out loud won’t make either of us happier, or change anything.”
“Je sais. Mais j’aurais aimé vous entendre le dire à haute voix.”
His grasp of French—something he owed entirely to her—had come to him during the incident in the b. Her words needed no transtion.
I know. But I would have liked to hear you say it out loud.
Aric took the bottle and pced the opening to his lips. He whispered three words into it before handing it to Delphine. He’d been as quiet as possible, but she’d still been able to hear what he said. She had to force the words past the lump in her throat.
“Now this bottle will remind me of two things.”
