Centuries of June by Keith Donohue

herself of the men. She sought out Mr. Carter and found him alone on the beach, Bible in hand, and the other two men gone, off tupping one another, she supposed. In a casual manner, she approached and begged him to walk with her upon the strand so that they might talk, for some heavy thing rested in the heart. The mastiff Crab gamboled in the surf ahead of them, barking at the crashing waves, and fetching a stick thrown on the waters. Carter clutched the book in his crossed hands behind his back and walked like a great heron, long-stalked, his gaze fixed upon the ground, as gentle as a vicar gone a-courting, and Jane struggled to keep pace, her thoughts awhirl in her head, her eyes darting to the man’s inscrutable face, to the dog playing in the sea, to the strange visions present in memory of her two seducers. Where to begin my prologue, she thought, how best to tell the tale? Thanking Carter for his confidence, she leapt ahead, rehearsing the dark secret, wondering how he might react to her unsexing; would he understand and treat her as Ravens had, or would he, too, fall upon her like a savage?
    As she parted her lips to speak, Jane heard the dog bark instead and then come bounding from the sea, wagging its stumpy tail in circles as if to tell them something as dogs are wont to do by primitive means. Crab raced back to the object of its consternation, speaking loudly and with great excitement, and there, wedged within a trio of large stones, what appeared to be a dead man, tho they could not see to tell at first. As Carter and Jane made their way, wild surmises flitted across her senses: perhaps one of them, fallen from a boat or wandering on some hilltop and tumbling down, had drown’d in the ocean, and she feared it might be Waters, hoped it would be Chard, but just as she speculated, both men appeared from the opposite direction, running on the same shore, alerted by the dog’s alarums, so that all four arrived at the same spot more or less at the same time, and of the four, Chard seemed to know at once what had stopped in the crevasse. He hallooed them all and danced a jig upon the sand. “Rich, rich, I’m rich. It is the amber grease spat up from a whale.”
    Big as a man and heavy, too, the white-gray lump of ambergris loosed itself with much effort from the mariners who dragged it from the water. Weighing about thirteen stone, the chunk looked like the torso of a giant, sans head or limbs, and caught as well among the rocks were several smaller pieces. Laughing and shouting the while, the men danced with one another, and Jane could not resist the temptation to taste a small pebble of the stuff, but it were most foul, and she spat out the speck in her hands.
    “Hah!” Carter said. “The whale can swallow Jonah, but Jonah cannot swallow the whale.”
    Offended by the tone of his quip, she popped the nugget into her mouth, chewed it twice, and swallowed. The men cheered her derring-do, and Carter clapped her on the back. “You must know, sirrah, that you have et more than a whale, but a small fortune.”
    With the sharp end of a stick, Chard drew some numbers in thesand. “If memory serves, the Virginia Company offered fourteen shillings fourpence for a troy ounce, and we must have enough for two thousand English sterling. Rich, rich, I tell you, rich. The king of the Bermudas—”
    “Aye, and so are we all,” said Carter. “The four kings.”
    Jane thought of her mother back in England making do with three shillings sixpence each week for herself and four daughters. They would live like queens.
    “All we need do,” said Waters, “is hie this stuff to England …”
    His words shimmered in the sunshine, the blue waves never more endless, the horizon never more distant, the ache for home never more acute. Jane thought of The Moon and the Seven Stars, her mother fending off the men who supped there, the smell of ale and mutton, her little sisters underfoot, the youngest surely walking and talking now;