The Watery Part of the World by Michael Parker Page B

governor’s palace with fish in your pocket.”
    â€œAnd why not, if you’re the governor? Who’s going to tell you not to?”
    â€œA host of people. And you all serve them, not the other way round.”
    â€œYou sound like you’re well shy of that role,” he said.
    â€œIt’s true,” she said. She felt only a twinge of guilt in her words, for she felt at that point that she could tell Whaley anything.
    Yet as she rose to clean the dishes, she realized they had not said a word about Daniels’s visit. The marked shift in his mood, from his late-night drunken melancholy to this morning’s alacrity, made her suspicious.
    That night as they sat by the fire she said, “So are you going to take him up on his offer for materials to build my manor house?”
    He tensed. “I’ll not be beholding to that man for things I can pick up off the beach.”
    Before she could think, she pointed out how beholding they both were to that man.
    â€œYou don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Whaley. “You ought not to say anything when nothing is what you know.”
    â€œIf I know nothing, it’s because you tell me nothing.”
    â€œEverything that goes on in the world is not your affair. Your husband is not the governor here.”
    â€œFine,” she said. “If you can point me the way to his compound, I’ll go alone. I know it’s up past the big dunes, on the sound side. Certainly his lodgings will befit his station. I’m sure I’ll be able to recognize it.”
    â€œYou go up there alone, you might as well slit your wrists right here and now.” He withdrew the knife he kept sheathed at his waist, extended it to her.
    Theo ignored the knife he offered, looked him in the eye. “You’re not telling me something.”
    â€œWhat I already told you, you’ve not listened to.”
    She feigned anger, but she knew he was right. She hadn’t paid much attention to his threats because she was too obsessed with recovering her father’s papers. All she had to do was smuggle them off the island, get them in the right hands, and her father’s reputation would be restored, for how tender and noble he was in those missives, how courageous and devoted a statesman and citizen did his journals reveal him to be. All the accusations against him would be exposed as slander; his plan for Mexico and the western provinces would be understood as advantageous to the common American good, much less threatening than French and Spanish dominion. And even if she were never rescued from this island, even if she spent the rest of her days the ward of a deranged pirate, pummeled by relentless, sand-laced wind, she would join her father as empress of his sovereign land.
    That day the progging was fruitless; she brought home only items passed over by others: rotten timbers, strips of sail, rusted iron rings from busted-up barrels. Whaley looked at the things she dragged over the dunes and went back to plucking feathers from a tern, too busy to even pass judgment.
    That night, while he snored softly a few feet away, she realized she would likely be dead now were it not for Whaley. Therefore it seemed only logical to put her trust fully in the notion that Whaley had been sent to protect her. Not by God, whose mercy was too celestial to concern itself with the assignment of earthly sentinels, but by her father, whose Aristotlean idea of love—a singlesoul inhabiting two bodies—had gotten Theo through many a night before she had even arrived on this island.
    The next morning, as they sat drinking tea by the fire, breakfasting silently as was their habit, she said, “There’s nothing left to find on the beach. I’m going to his compound today.”
    â€œYou’d be better off walking into the ocean during a storm.”
    â€œI can swim.”
    â€œWe’ll see about that,” he said.
    She