As the dogs pulled the sled up the hill, their heads went down and their shoulders rose—these were powerful, well-trained beasts, and under other circumstances, he might have wished to compliment their owner. What Mr. Nolan had done with horses, someone had done with these dogs.
But when the sled approached the church, the dogs slowed down to navigate their way through a random collection of stones and worn wooden crosses, marking the gravesites of the camp’s dead. There was no order to the graves, and the words that had been chiseled on some of the tombstones were so effaced by the constant wind that they were virtually obliterated. An angel with no wings stood atop one, a weeping lady with a missing arm atop another. All faced the frozen sea.
At the wooden steps leading up to the chapel, Sinclair applied the brake once again. He stepped off the runners and moved to Eleanor’s side, but she was huddled down inside the sled and did not extend her hand to him.
“Let’s go in,” he said. “It seems the best shelter the camp affords.”
And it would be needed soon. Dark clouds were filling the sky, and the wind was rising fast. He had seen such storms spring out of nowhere and batter the ship they had traveled on, driving them ever southward.
But Eleanor did not move, and her face, pale to begin with, looked positively ghostly now.
“Sinclair, you know why I—”
“I know perfectly well,” he said, “and I don’t want to hear a word of it.”
“But there are so many other places,” she said. “I saw a dining hall, on our right side as we—”
“A dining hall with no doors and a hole in its roof the size of St. Paul’s.”
His mention of the cathedral inadvertently reminded them both of a popular ditty they had once recited to each other, in happier days…about coconut palms as tall as St. Paul’s, and sand as white as Dover. But Sinclair dismissed such thoughts from his mind and, putting a hand under her elbow, virtually lifted her out of the sled. “It’s superstition and nonsense.”
“It’s not,” she said. “You remember what happened…in Lisbon?”
It was not something he would soon forget. As they had stood before the altar in the Igreja de Santa Maria Maior—on what should have been a happy day for them—the hand of God himself had seemed to intercede. It was a lucky thing that Sinclair had been able to book passage on the brig Coventry for that very night.
“That was happenstance,” Sinclair said, “and nothing to do with us. Why, that city has been struck by earthquakes countless times before.”
He didn’t want to indulge such fantasy. There were things to do, plans to make. As the dogs settled down among the gravestones, tucking their heads in and curling their tails around their hindquarters, he held Eleanor by one arm, and with his other hand on the hilt of his sword, ascended the snowy stairs. The birds that had been following them had alighted, lining the roof and spire like gargoyles. Eleanor’s eyes went up and saw them, and when one cawed loudly, its beak extended and its wings flapping, she stopped in her tracks.
“It’s a bloody bird,” Sinclair said scornfully, dragging her up the remaining steps.
There was a pair of tall double doors at the top, though one was knocked off its hinges and simply frozen in place. The other one he was able to push, with considerable effort, until it opened enough to let them pass. A snowdrift had piled up just behind it, and once he had stepped over it, he took Eleanor’s hand and helped her inside.
Their footsteps echoed hollowly on the stone floor. Rows of wooden pews faced the front, with moldering hymnals lying on some of the seats. Sinclair picked one of them up, but the few words that were still legible were not in English. Some Scandinavian tongue, if he had to guess. He dropped it on the floor, and Eleanor, instinctively, picked it up and put it back on the pew. The walls and roof, which had several holes of their own, were made of timbers that the relentless elements had polished to a fine flat sheen, every whorl and groove in the wood revealed as plainly as a wine stain on a linen tablecloth. The altar was a simple trestle table, with a rough-hewn cross hung from the rafters behind it. Eleanor, wrapped in the bulky coat, held herself back, her eyes averted, but Sinclair strode boldly up the nave. Stopping in front of the altar, he spread his arms and declared, as if presenting himself to a country squire who had invited him to come for a shooting party, “Well, here I am!”
His voice echoed around the walls, joined only by the wind whistling through the narrow windows where the glass had long since fallen away.
“Are we welcome here,” he called out, tauntingly, “or are we not?”
A sudden gust blew the crest of the snowdrift up the aisle, the white flakes dusting the top of Eleanor’s shoes. She quickly stepped into a row of pews.
Sinclair turned around and with his arms still out, said, “Do you see? Not a word of protest.”