43With this and subsequent chapters, please review. Constructive criticism will be greatly appreciated. Iron sharpens iron. If your suggestions are really good, you may even see them creeping into the story...
THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD
Volume One: The Ormer
Part One: Sweetest and Most Fertile Isle
Chapter One
The Coming Fire
~*o*~
Wednesday, August 16, 1939
Sunrise 4.58 a.m.
All was quiet and dim at first.
Then suddenly, day broke in a bright glitter of fish scale thrown over the tossing sea.
The same wind roiling the waters, was whipping Catherine Louisa's coppery mane and flopping her bonnet on her back, as she sat on the pierhead watching the morning sun ascending in searing waves of red and gold through the pink mists of French Normandy.
But the red and gold she could not see, for her eyes were fast shut, it being far too bright to keep them open for more than an instant. Nevertheless, she felt his heat as the great burning orb blazed like a phoenix as he rose, and she hoped with all her might that France would rise from the ashes the Nazis would leave in their wake.
Cathy did not live in France.
Her home was the tiny British island of Jersey.
Jersey lay fourteen miles west of Normandy in the Golfe dé Saint Mâlo carved from the Frankish shore by the washing tides of the English Channel.
The Island with her green hills surrounded by sparkling turquoise waters was the loveliest in all the world, but just beyond Normandy's distant white dunes there loomed a Darkness overshadowing the beauty of the place, veiling the sun with a cloud of deadly poison.
Newspaper headlines of far-off invasions had cast the first shadows, piling into a threatening storm bank on the international horizon. Then nearer to home they began to herald military takeovers by fascist dictator, Adolph Hitler, the head of the German National Socialist party.
Owing to his conquests, it had become impossible to look east across the Strait and not wonder with a knot in the stomach how long it would take for the Nazi war machine to burn through Normandy and blast its might at the Bailiwick of Jersey.
The Strait between Jersey and French Normandy was full of treachery, beset with hidden reefs and dangerous shallows, as was every nautical mile of the Golfe dé Saint Mâlo. Commencing with the huge rock submerged at flood tide, poised to smash an unwary fishing boat's bottom in the very harbour upon whose high pier Cathy kept watch, the Golfe was treacherous, for beyond the narrow harbour mouth vast stretches of water-shrouded rocks ranged in every direction, guilty of having made watery graves of many a ship.
If the tide were high and her draught shallow, a fishing boat might happen to glide over those stony pinnacles intact, but if she strayed too far, she would have a very good chance of foundering in the swift northerly current of the Alderney Race, stirring into a frenzy of crashing waves when the wind gusted itself south over the Golfe just as it had been doing that very morning.
If only the waters had been treacherous enough to foil Herr Hitler's evil schemes, Cathy would not have been preparing for the past fortnight to sail away on the Ormer to a place she hardly knew. And since it was just two days before she was to sail away, Cathy had not gone with her father and her elder brother, Harold, on the very last fishing trip before they left for good, for her help was needed in the cottage.
At least she had seen them off for the last time, after having walked with them in the grey quiet of morning to the harbour of Rozel Bay, where the Ormer was moored.
It was to be a short trip to pick up lobster-pots, but it was disappointing to be left behind, for she loved the challenge of dodging the snaps of sharp claws when measuring the catch and throwing the small ones back. On the other hand, she would not miss the pitiful longing glances of Robert Vardon, her father's young partner on the boat.
After the men had motored away, she set herself upon the pierhead long enough to see the sun rising through the curling mists, a flaming torch over Normandy, gilding a shimmering, glittering path on the unsettled waters of the Strait alive with the skreel of gulls.
As she sat, watching the rosy haze burn off, Cathy thought of all she must accomplish before the day was done…
First, she must milk Blossom, La Prîncêsse, her very own fawn-coloured heifer, due to drop her second calf come November. Cathy would be milking her for the last time in the little cowshed behind the cottage before leading her to her new home at Les Deux Tchênes, Papa and Manman Le Quesne's dairy farm. Then Cathy must help her mother with the cleaning and the baking, while boxing and bagging and throwing into trunks all the last-minute things still waiting to be packed up.
Everything must be made ready to load to-morrow into the hold and onto the deck of the Ormer, the forty-foot trawler, to share the space with the little rowing dinghy and the lobster-pots and lockers filled with various nets and rods as well as coiled fathoms of braided line and other tools of the fishing trade.
It made Cathy sad to think of it, but the day after to-morrow the family would say farewell to Rozel Bay and to everyone and everything they had held dear for the past dozen years and sail the Ormer to England to start a new life in a strange land.
"Me, I don't want to go! Don't make me do it, s'i' Vos pliaît!" she begged of the Deity on high.
Then out of the brilliant east, there came the flutter of fiery wings alighting nearby.
The gull cocked his grey head to fix her with a glinting eye, scolding with one sharp Squawk! from his yellow bill before taking flight once more.
"Oh las. That settles it," Cathy sagged, feeling empty and lost inside.
She must leave. And that would just have to be that.