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Updated: July 16, 2025
And many was the time I had hung over the side of the rocking boat and sought in the depths for the tops of the great rock-pillars which once held up the bridge that joined Brecqhou to Herm and Jethou. But now the fishing and vraicking were stopped, for Torode liked visitors as little as did Jean Le Marchant.
Then they swirled through a tumbling race, where the waters came up writhing and boiling from strife with hidden rocks below, past the dark chasm between Brecqhou and the mainland of Sark, through which the race roared with the voice of many waters and so into a quiet haven where hard-worked boats lay resting from their labours.
For, if I was single-handed against their six oars, their boat was heavier, and carried four armed men in addition to the oarsmen. But I saw that Brecqhou would be impossible to us, and moreover must prove but a cul-de-sac if we got there, for at best there were but two sick men there, and they could give us no help.
And I kissed her again, and said, "Helier will tell you all about it, Aunt Jeanne," and ran off across the knoll, past Vieux Port, to Belfontaine. I looked across at Brecqhou as I came in sight of the western waters, and said to myself, "In an hour I will be over there to see Carette," and my heart leaped with joy. Away up towards Rondellerie I thought I saw my grandfather in the fields.
We sat there in the heather till all the glories faded save our own, till Guernsey and Herm and Jethou sank into the night till Brecqhou was only a shadow, and the Gouliot stream only a sound; and then we went down the scented lanes close-linked, as were our hearts. Jean Le Marchant was sitting in the kitchen with Aunt Jeanne.
But the small boy knew every rock on the shore of Brecqhou, and the more deadly ones that lay in the tideway outside, just below the surface, and whuffed and growled at him as he passed. His course shaped itself like that of bird or fish, without apparent observation.
So, then, I was in Herm, not four miles away from Brecqhou, and though, for any benefit the knowledge was to me, I might as well have been in America itself, it still warmed my heart to think that Carette was there, and almost within sight but for that wretched wall of rock. If fiery longing could melt solid rock, that barrier had disappeared in the twinkling of an eye.
"Brecqhou," said the ancient mariner, as they swung past a long green island with beetling cliffs, and yawning caverns, and comet-like rushes of white foam among the chaos of rocks below.
Failing to end us, Torode had swung round Le Tas and run for Brecqhou, where Carette, alone with her two sick men, would be completely at his mercy. He would carry her off, gather his gear on Herm, and be away before Peter Port could lift a hand to stop him. If I held his life in my hand, he held in his what was dearer far than life to me.
She was her father's daughter, and Philip Carré was one of the most intelligent and deep-thinking men I have ever met. Her nearest neighbour and chief friend was Jeanne Falla of Beaumanoir, widow of Peter Le Marchant, whose brother John lived on Brecqhou and made a certain reputation there both for himself and the island.
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