The Point of the Sword

By Debra Milligan

The Point of the Sword: The powerful love story of a man of experience, forced to deal with his conscience; and of the enraptured coming of age of a girl of independence.

This lush, intimate story is set in 1925, in the town of Ship Bottom on the barrier island of Long Beach Island, New Jersey. The windswept drama of love presents Andrew Derwent, formerly of the Royal Navy, who has moved from England to New Jersey to start a new life; and Sabine Marie-Thérèse Mercier, a painter. They meet, by chance, on the pure white sands of the beach. Their lives will never be the same.

The Point of the Sword is about true love finding the glorious movement of freedom. Within the charted course of the plot line, the reader can move sail with exhilaration toward the glorious movement of freedom to a vista of vibrant destiny. This destiny is the bright horizon that beckons these two people to voyage into the harbor of the arms of love.

Like the ethereal beauty of a luminous landscape, painted with soft brushstrokes on dark velvet, the moments of this love story touch the heart with aching tenderness. Passion and prose compose the durable pigments of this novel that depicts the arousal of desire intermixed with profound spiritual sensation.

The mystery of love and the mystery of life embrace as each person discovers not merely the other, but himself and herself, as if for the first time. In the caress of time, they become impressions of footprints upon the pure white sand. Only the vow of loyalty, one to another, will prevent those imprints from being washed away by an oncoming tide of treachery, the potential threat to any love. The steady march of time in this drama depicts, like a wave upon that pure white beach, the merging of two lives, the life of a young woman and the life of a sea captain. Those two lives find the splendour of harmony with each other and with the open sea.

The Point of the Sword presents the timeless themes of innocence educated by experience; the misdeeds of experience redeemed through innocence; heartache healed through the surrender to intimacy; the individual acting against destiny, but then meeting destiny through the power of love, true love, as boundless as the sea.

The virtue of fidelity to one’s heart overlays the drama like a cloak of daring dignity. Love, come what may, will sail the deepest ocean, braving every storm and sorrow, prevailing over any fear or portent.

Captain Derwent and Sabine Mercer invite you to chart a captivating course for an enthralling reading night with The Point of the Sword. The wild call of the sea and of love, along with the delights of a summer when love began — they await you.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Debra Milligan
• Release date: Oct 31, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370038565

Debra Milligan

Debra Milligan is a novelist, essayist, poet, and short story writer. She is fluent in French and has varied interests in the fine arts, architecture, history of all kinds, music, horses, hounds, the Golden Age of Hollywood, quilting, fashion, and gardening.

Book preview

The Point of The Sword

A Love Story

By

Debra Milligan

Copyright 2017 Debra Milligan

Smashwords Edition

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Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your very own copy.

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Table of Contents

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

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Dedication

For My Beloved

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Chapter One

The salt in the sea air told her that she must away from this place, far away to a land where he could not find her. And yet, she loved him too much to go, to flee him.

He’d become her life now. She’d scarcely wanted this life. Now she wanted to run away from him. He’d not pursued her. Indeed, he’d stood there, tall and strong and brave and beautiful as this lighthouse that he’d guarded for years. She’d come to him. And now she could never look away, turn away, go away. He’d become the captain of her heart, a heart that was now a frigate bound for war.

It had begun innocently enough, with a smile and a caress upon these white sands, the sands of time, sands that now felt like sable, soft as a lullaby in her soul’s memory. She knew, however, that her love for this man was wrong, as wrong as a love could be, for he was taken, not by any woman in the present, but by a woman of his past, a wife who had died, at sea. And she could not compete with this woman, a lass whose name remained unknown to her.

So strong, so fiercely potent was the weight of this lost love in the wardroom of his heart that she knew it was hopeless to even try to compete with a dead wife who’d been lost at sea.

You see, he’d blamed himself for her death and there was no way to convince him otherwise that her drowning had not been through his hand of neglect. Her ghost still stalked him on nights of summer, the season of her death, like white horses, pounding the whitecaps of the sea, the only body that this man truly loved, the body that his body had surrendered to, had loved more than any woman he’d ever let into his storm-tossed heart.

Oh, no, she did not hope to compete with that waterlogged corpse or with any woman, least of all the woman known as the Sea, that white-tipped cathedral to which his heart had belonged e’er since he was a wee boy.

He’d been afeard of the ocean. He’d trembled as a four-year-old lad in the upstairs, dormer room of the brown-shingled cottage of his childhood in Kent, England. Watching the waves from the white-trimmed window, he’d shuddered in front of the dingy plate glass and he’d cried out to the waves, to each wave, rushing closer, closer, ever closer to the house, to him. He could not become convinced that the waves would not come into that house and reach up into that room and overtake him and, then, take him.

He’d been an orphan, left in the care of his Aunt Adelaide. This woman of quiet blonde beauty had held this child, this boy birthed by an older sister who had died young, too young, through her own hand. Adelaide had softly assured this gently shaking boy that the water would not come into the house. The waves would not reach this humble Victorian cottage in Margate. The water would not gobble him up.

How could he think that she, his Aunt Adelaide, would stand there and watch the waves o’ertake him, her beloved nephew? Did he not see that she was there, with him? If there was truly danger, she would leave this house, and take him with her. Because there was no threat from those waves pounding the shoreline, she was there with him; and she would stay there with him, until the storm passed. She would not leave him if ever there was danger.

He’d smiled a small, quick smile and he’d nestled into the embrace of her arms. Gradually, he fell into a restful sleep in those small, strong arms. Silently, his tears stopped. Slowly, his aunt wiped the tears from his cheeks, even as the tears rolled down hers.

She loved this nephew more than anything in the world, a world that had known very little love or happiness. She’d taken this child into her house when he was just over two years old, aware that his need for his mother would never be fulfilled. A month earlier, his mother had killed herself in that ocean, and she was not coming back to him.

One day, Adelaide would tell him. One day, she vowed, he would know this tragic truth of his life. That day came, when he was ten, two years before the death of his father, who worked as a railway engineer in the railway station in Margate. The man was savagely killed by an oncoming train, a freak accident that no one tried to explain to this child, to anyone. Adelaide then became the sole protector of this boy. Her husband, a fisherman, loved the boy, not as his own, but with enough gentle discipline and stern guidance that granted this child the semblance of fatherly love.

When this surrogate father died at sea during a fishing expedition, the boy was on the cusp of becoming a man. The loss was bitter, and it likely played a large hand in the decision of this eighteen-year-old to join the Royal Navy.

Adelaide had loved her darkly handsome husband dearly but, through no fault of her own, she’d loved her only nephew more. He was, after all, blood kin. And she gave her heart, her all to him. Her love for her life’s mate had been strong and durable, but lacking in the flame of passion that might have produced a child. Thus it was that her maternal love so easily and naturally flowed to this little boy after the suicide of his mother.

The frightened, brown-eyed boy in that upstairs dormer room grew to a brave young man. When he left for the sea and the Royal Navy, Adelaide never quite got over the parting from her life of this adopted child. The sea, and the life at sea, claimed his heart and became his love, his lifeblood. Adelaide knew no longer how to live and she languished, alone, in that house.

She did not take her own life. Five years later, God took her Home, at the age of sixty-five. That seaside Victorian cottage, with its brown weathered shingles, and its weathered heartaches, and all of its worn belongings, they all belonged to her nephew. Those possessions were all that Adelaide had had to offer to this young naval officer, other than a lifetime of her love.

And because of that love, this man felt at home with the sea, in it, and on it, though not especially looking at it from the upstairs window of this cottage. Whenever he’d gazed out of that white-trimmed window, he did not see the ocean as much as feel it, like a tall ship sailing fiercely fine and free, steered by the stars at night, guided by God.

In 1915, five years after the tragic death of his wife, he’d sold that inherited Victorian house that looked out upon the sea, and he moved to America. He was forty years of age at that time. This sea captain was now fifty. He’d met unexpectedly, on the beach, during a walk in the afternoon, this young woman who wished only to end his heart-aches, sorrows of which she knew little consciously; but the pain was spoken by his eyes each time that he kissed her, each time that he reposed, with her, by his side, each time that he stared out into the darkness and reached for her, once again, to love and to be loved, once again.

She was scarcely twenty-five but she knew that she loved this man with the love of a lifetime that she’d yet to live. It was an intense love, born of her own silence, a love that wished to speak, to sing, to answer the questions in his softly mournful eyes. It was cruel, in a way, to love so deeply and yet so incompletely; but she yearned with all of her young heart to add her own song to the songs of the wind that were so fully the songs of his heart; and she’d heard and loved every one.

Yea, she wished only to be one of those songs. Perhaps her love could create a stopper knot amidst the sorrow, the figure-eight to figure in with all of the miseries from mistresses who took but never gave. She had humble but high hopes. Her heart was filled with love and she sought a noble repository for that love. He was that repository, a man bereft of hope. She hoped only to give to him hope from the surging sea that was the love of her young heart, a love that would, in time, become the love of her lifetime. This sonata then was the song that she wished to compose for him, to sing to him, to grant to him and to him alone.

They’d met by chance that early summer day, in late June, upon the beach where hearts so often come to play. And, yet, they were alone there that day, just they two, with the spume hitting their faces and the sunlit wind biting their skin. From the first look of the one upon the other, they knew, each knew, they could not walk away, one from the other. They’d stood upon the weather deck of this ocean shore, gazing into the eyes of the other’s need; and they vowed silently to not run away from that need, that vast ocean of daring and delight and dreams and desire.

And, yet, here she was, three sheets to the wind, not with strong spirits in her body, but strong spirits in her soul. Twas those strong spirits within her soul that frightened this girl during this hour of a long