Redlegs by Chris Dolan

house his wife and children – more of them than she had realised – were huddling on the bedstead, keeping their feet curled around them, above the waterline. The gardener sat Elspeth down on a high shelf that ran along one side of the house. To make more space for her he cleared, with one lunge of his massive arm, all the cooking utensils and gardening tools and knick-knacks , letting them fall into the water and float or sink along with the rest of the debris. He repositioned her and then turned away as though he had just put an old doll of his daughter’s out of reach.George tried to clamber up beside her, but fell back down with a little cry of pain. Henry came to his aid, and the two men spoke. She could not understand what they said. Not because she couldn’t hear them – the hut was as quiet as the grave, the sky still inhaling – but her brain could not organise the sounds into any meaning. Even words, her old allies, failed her. Henry helped George up and sat him beside her, then bounced the shelf up and down to demonstrate its strength, proud that his workmanship was of value in calamitous circumstances.
    “You be safe up here. That mantel take any weight and you a li’l elfy ting, Mistress.”
    Everything Henry did he did merely in the way of duty. His face betrayed no real emotion. He had gone out to round them up as a shepherd might gather in his landlord’s sheep. The hard fact struck Elspeth like a falling stone. All of them – the smiling maids and servants, the skivvies at the theatres – they all giggled or nodded, assented to everything, because duty demanded it. His chores done, Henry turned back to his family, pulled two of the older children in towards him on the tabletop. His wife and younger daughters remained sitting on the bedstead, placid and staring into space, glancing at their visitors, clumped together in the soaked, muddied bedclothes.
    The last thing Elspeth could remember was the sound of the wind getting its second terrifying breath, and thinking she would never sleep again. She laid her head on George’s shoulder; he raised his hand to stroke her but could not reach out far enough. He gave another cry of pain. She lowered her head onto his lap and he stroked her hair with his other hand. Then, miraculously, sleep came after all. She drifted into the safety and calm of inner darkness, George whispering in the distance, “Be over soon. Rest now.”
     
    Now it was calm, the light peeking in the windows fresh and clear, sparkling like a rock pool in the early morning. She had regained partial wakefulness often enough during the night to know that the storm had built to at least one more riotous climax. She had dreamt that she was back on the Alba, the wind and rain pitching Henry’s hut more than the Atlantic ocean had ever shaken her cabin. Shewould have chosen the terrors of the high seas any day to the reality of this morn – calm and untroubled as it deceitfully was.
    The air was distilled and sweet; the world weightless, her body like a feather. The birds sang and the sea in the distance swished calm and regular. The echoes of last night’s howling wind and crashing trees and stone and bricks now murmured only softly in her ears. George’s judgement had proved correct – the chattel-house still stood steady. The water level had risen and pots and pans and loose articles had been tossed around. But the cast of human characters remained unchanged. Everyone was where they were when she had fallen asleep, all open-eyed, like a chorus required to hold their positions. Statues of loss and confusion. Henry and the two youths on the table, his wife and smaller children on the bed. The gardener woke a little after Elspeth and gently lifted the two boys he had been supporting, setting them down on the crowded bed with hardly a motion on their part. His legs, as he swung round to alight from the table, sank into the flood up to his thighs. He slushed through the water and the