Free The Lifeboat by Charlotte Rogan Page A

message—and I came to wonder if he had—it would have been as if we had never been married, for any proof of the event would have been lost with Henry in the sea. Of course, the London magistrate who married us must have a record of it, but he was far away, and his country was at war.
    Penelope and I remarked to each other that the world seemed to be getting bigger and more dangerous, with countries we had never heard of dragging the rest of us into their affairs. As I write this, though, I can see that a world that collapses in on itself until it is a mere wooden speck is dangerous, too; and in the lifeboat, I spent many hours wondering if there were an optimal size to the world—some equilibrium set of dimensions where things wouldn’t boil over and where I would be safe. As a child, I had thought my family’s purchase on the world secure, and then my father lost his money and shot a hole in his head. My mother took one look at the blood congealing on the polished floor before dropping her parcel of newly embroidered linens and going almost instantly mad. I had also thought the Empress Alexandra was safe. For one naïve moment, I had all that I needed—more than I needed; but that, too, had been only a pleasant illusion. I wondered if all a person could hope for was illusion and luck, for I was forced to conclude that the world was fundamentally and appallingly dangerous. It is a lesson I will never forget.

Day Five
     
    IT WASN’T UNTIL the deacon had said prayers over Mrs. Fleming and her body had been lowered into the water by Mr. Hardie and the Colonel that anyone noticed that only one of the lifeboats was still in sight. We had lost the other one during the night. I could tell people were dejected to have more bad news coming directly after Mrs. Fleming’s death, but Hardie was oddly jovial and announced to everyone that he was going to catch us a fish. He unsheathed the long knife he wore at his waist, leaned out over the side of the boat, and gazed into the water, the knife poised above his head. The clouds had lifted and the sun illuminated the ocean to a brilliant jewel-like translucence, and sure enough, barely an hour had passed before Hardie plunged his knife into the water and pulled a huge fish into the boat. It was about three feet long, rather flat in shape, and of a mottled brown color. It flipped about in the bottom of the boat until Hardie slit it from gills to anus, after which it flipped twice more and then lay still.
    “Supper,” said Hardie, holding the fish up to gleam in the sun.
    Isabelle asked, “Are we going to eat it raw?” and Hardie answered, “No, we’re going to sauté it in a garlic and butter sauce.” I found myself wondering how this was possible and believing for a moment that because Hardie had said it, it could be done. Even when he had passed out the pieces of dripping, uncooked fish, his hands still covered in reddish slime, the illusion held, and I was able to eat the raw flesh without retching, though Greta barely made it past Mrs. Grant to lean out over the side and vomit, and Mary Ann refused to eat it at all until I told her to imagine we were at her wedding banquet and were just starting the fish course.
    I ate my morsel of fish slowly, savoring it and knowing that it was as valuable for its moisture as for the protein our wasting bodies so sorely needed. The taste was slightly salty, which might have been because Mr. Hardie had rinsed the fish in the ocean after gutting it, but it was the texture that surprised me the most. It wasn’t flaky the way cooked fish is flaky, but firm and muscular—almost living. I had of course visited farms and seen where cows and pigs came from, and even in the city it was possible to buy a live chicken or to see one slaughtered, so I wasn’t naïve about the realities of turning livestock into food. But with the fish, I felt we had come very close to the thin membrane separating the living from the dead and that no matter what