An Echo in the Bone, Page 39

  The cutter’s captain appeared to find this funny. He took off his hat and bowed—to me.

  “Allow me, mum,” he said. “Captain Worth Stebbings, your most humble.” He straightened up, clapping on his hat, and nodded to his lieutenant. “Go through the holds like a dose of salts. And you—” He tapped Roberts on the chest with a forefinger. “Get all your men on deck, front and center, cully. All of them, mind. If I have to drag them up here, I won’t be best pleased, I warn you.”

  Tremendous bangings and rumblings from below ensued, with seamen popping up periodically to relay news of their findings to Captain Stebbings, who lounged by the rail, watching as the men of the Teal were rounded up and herded together on deck—Ian and Jamie among them.

  “Here, now!” Captain Roberts was game, I’d give him that. “Mr. Fraser and his nephew aren’t crew; they’re paying passengers! You’ve no call to molest free men, about their lawful business. And no right to press my crew, either!”

  “They’re British subjects,” Stebbings informed him briefly. “I’ve every right. Or do you all claim to be Americans?” He leered briefly at that; if the ship could be considered a rebel vessel, he could simply take the whole thing as a prize, crew and all.

  A mutter at this ran through the men on deck, and I saw more than one of the hands’ eyes dart to the belaying pins along the rail. Stebbings saw it, too, and called over the rail for four more men to be brought aboard—with arms.

  Sixteen minus six minus four is six, I thought, and edged a little closer to the rail to peer into the cutter rocking in the swell a little way below and tethered by a line to the Teal. If the sixteen doesn’t include Captain Stebbings. If it does…

  One man was at the helm, this being not a wheel but a sort of sticklike arrangement poking up through the deck. Two more were manning a gun, a long brass thing on the bow, pointed at the Teal’s side. Where were the others? Two on deck. The others perhaps below.

  Captain Roberts was still haranguing Stebbings behind me, but the cutter’s crew were bumping barrels and bundles over the deck, calling for a rope to lower away to the cutter. I looked back to find Stebbings walking along the row of crewmen, indicating his choices to four burly men who followed him. These jerked his choices out of line and set about tying them together, a line running from ankle to ankle. Three men had already been chosen, John Smith among them, looking white-faced and tense. My heart jumped at sight of him, then nearly stopped altogether as Stebbings came to Ian, who looked down at him impassively.

  “Likely, likely,” Stebbings said with approval. “A cross-grained son of a bitch, by the looks of you, but we’ll soon knock sense into you. Take him!”

  I saw the muscles swell in Ian’s forearms as his fists clenched, but the pressgang was armed, two with pistols drawn, and he stepped forward, though with an evil look that would have given a wiser man pause. I had already observed that Captain Stebbings was not a wise man.

  Stebbings took two more, then paused at Jamie, looking him up and down. Jamie’s face was carefully blank. And slightly green; the wind was still up, and with no forward way on the ship, she was rising and falling heavily, with a lurch that would have disconcerted a much better sailor than he was.

  “Nice big ’un, sir,” said one of the press-gang, with approval.

  “Trifle elderly,” Stebbings said dubiously. “And I don’t much like the look on his face.”

  “I dinna care much for the look of yours,” Jamie said pleasantly. He straightened, squaring his shoulders, and looked down his long, straight nose at Stebbings. “If I didna ken ye for an arrant coward by your actions, sir, I should know ye for a fig-licker and a fopdoodle by your foolish wee face.”

  Stebbings’s maligned face went blank with astonishment, then darkened with rage. One or two of the press-gang grinned behind his back, though hastily erasing these expressions as he whirled round.

  “Take him,” he growled to the press-gang, shouldering his way toward the booty collected by the rail. “And see that you drop him a few times on the way.”

  I was frozen in shock. Clearly Jamie couldn’t let them press Ian and take him away, but surely he couldn’t mean to abandon me in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, either.

  Not even with his dirk thrust into the pocket tied beneath my skirt, and my own knife in its sheath around my thigh.

  Captain Roberts had watched this little performance openmouthed, though whether with respect or astonishment, I couldn’t tell. He was a short man, rather tubby, and clearly not constructed for physical confrontation, but he set his jaw and stamped up to Stebbings, seizing him by the sleeve.

  The crew ushered their captives over the rail.

  There wasn’t time to think of anything better.

  I seized the rail and more or less rolled over it, skirts flying. I hung by my hands for a terrifying instant, feeling my fingers slide across the wet wood, groping with my toes for the rope ladder the cutter’s crew had thrown over the rail. A roll of the ship threw me hard against the side, I lost my grip, plunged several feet, and caught the ladder, just above the cutter’s deck.

  The rope had burned through my right hand, and it felt as though I’d lost all the skin off my palm, but there was no time to trouble about that now. Any minute, one of the cutter’s crew would see me, and—

  Timing my jump to the next heave of the cutter’s deck, I let go and landed like a bag of rocks. A sharp pain shot up the inside of my right knee, but I staggered to my feet, lurching to and fro with the roll of the deck, and lunged toward the companionway.

  “Here! You! What you doing?” One of the gunners had seen me and was gaping at me, clearly unable to decide whether to come down and deal with me or stay with his gun. His partner looked over his shoulder at me and bellowed at the first man to stay put, it wasn’t but monkey business of some sort, he said. “Stay put, God damn your eyes!”

  I ignored them, my heart pounding so hard I could scarcely breathe. What now? What next? Jamie and Ian had disappeared.

  “Jamie!” I shouted, as loudly as I could. “I’m here!” And then ran toward the line that held the cutter to the Teal, jerking up my skirt as I ran. I did this only because my skirts had twisted in my undignified descent, and I couldn’t find the slit to reach through in order to get at the knife in its sheath on my thigh, but the action itself seemed to disconcert the helmsman, who had turned at my shout.

  He gawped like a goldfish, but had sufficient presence of mind as to keep his hand on the tiller. I got my own hands on the line and dug my knife into the knot, using it to pry the tight coils loose.

  Roberts and his crew, bless them, were making a terrible racket on the Teal above, quite drowning out the shouts of the helm and gunners. One of these, with a desperate glance toward the deck of the Teal above, finally made up his mind and came toward me, jumping down from the bow.

  What wouldn’t I give for a pistol just now? I thought grimly. But a knife was what I had, and I jerked it out of the half-loosened knot and drove it into the man’s chest as hard as I could. His eyes went round, and I felt the knife strike bone and twist in my hand, skipping through the flesh. He shrieked and fell backward, landing on deck in a thump and nearly—but not quite—taking my knife with him.

  “Sorry,” I gasped, and, panting, resumed work on the knot, the fractious rope now smeared with blood. There were noises coming from the companionway now. Jamie and Ian might not be armed, but my guess was that that wouldn’t matter a lot, in close quarters.

  The rope slid reluctantly free. I jerked the last coil loose and it fell, slapping against the Teal’s side. At once, the current began to carry the boats apart, the smaller cutter sliding past the big sloop. We weren’t moving quickly at all, but the optical illusion of speed made me stagger, gripping at the rail for balance.

  The wounded gunner had got onto his feet and was advancing on me, staggering but furious. He was bleeding, but not heavily, and was by no means disabled. I stepped quickly sideways and glancing at the compa
nionway, was relieved beyond measure to see Jamie coming out of it.

  He reached me in three strides.

  “Quick, my dirk!”

  I stared blankly at him for a moment, but then remembered, and with no more than minimum fumbling, managed to get at my pocket. I jerked at the hilt of the dirk, but it was tangled in the fabric. Jamie seized it, ripped it free—tearing both the pocket and the waistband of my skirt in the process—whirled, and charged back into the bowels of the ship. Leaving me facing a wounded gunner, an unwounded gunner now making his way cautiously down from his station, and the helmsman, who was yelling hysterically for someone to do something to some sort of sail.

  I swallowed and took a good hold on the knife.

  “Stand back,” I said, in as loud and commanding a voice as I could manage. Given my shortness of breath, the wind, and the prevailing noise, I doubt they heard me. On the other hand, I doubted that it would have made a difference if they had. I yanked my sagging skirt up with one hand, crouched, and lifted the knife in a determined manner, meant to indicate that I knew what to do with it. I did.

  Waves of heat were going over my skin and I felt perspiration prickle my scalp, drying at once in the cold wind. The panic had gone, though; my mind felt very clear and very remote.

  You aren’t going to touch me was the only thing in my mind. The man I had wounded was cautious, hanging back. The other gunner saw nothing but a woman and didn’t bother to arm himself, simply reaching for me with angry contempt. I saw the knife move upward, fast, and arc as though moving by itself, the shimmer of it dulled with blood as I slashed him across the forehead.

  Blood poured down over his face, blinding him, and he gave a strangled yell of hurt and astonishment and backed away, both hands pressed to his face.

  I hesitated for a moment, not quite sure what to do next, the blood still pounding through my temples. The ship was drifting, rising and falling on the waves; I felt the gold-laden hem of my skirt scrape across the boards, and jerked the torn waistband up again, feeling irritated.

  Then I saw a belaying pin stuck into its hole in the railing, a line wrapped round it. I walked over and, poking the knife down the bodkin of my stays for lack of any better place to put it, took hold of the pin with both hands and jerked it free. Holding it like a short baseball bat, I shifted back on one heel and brought it down with as much force as I could on the head of the man whose face I’d slashed. The wooden pin bounced off his skull with a hollow ringing noise, and he staggered away, caroming off the mast.

  The helmsman at this point had had enough. Leaving his helm to mind itself, he scrambled up out of his station and made for me like an angry monkey, all reaching limbs and bared teeth. I tried to hit him with the pin, but I’d lost my grip when I struck the gunner, and it slipped out of my hand, rolling away down the heaving deck as the helmsman flung himself on me.

  He was small and thin, but his weight bore me back and we lurched together toward the rail; my back struck it and all my breath rushed out in a whoosh, the impact a solid bar of shock across my kidneys. This transformed within seconds to live agony, and I writhed under him, sliding downward. He came with me, grappling for my throat with a single-minded purpose. I flailed at him, my arms, my hands striking windmill-like at his head, the bones of his skull bruising me.

  The wind was roaring in my ears; I heard nothing but breathless cursing, harsh gasps that might be mine or his, and then he knocked my hands away and grabbed me by the neck, one-handed, his thumb digging hard up under my jaw.

  It hurt and I tried to knee him, but my legs were swaddled in my skirt and pinned beneath his weight. My vision went dark, with little bursts of gold light going off in the blackness, tiny fireworks heralding my death. Someone was making little mewling noises, and I realized dimly that it must be me. The grip on my neck tightened, and the flashing lights faded into black.

  I WOKE WITH A confused sense of being simultaneously terrified and rocked in a cradle. My throat hurt, and when I tried to swallow, the resultant pain made me choke.

  “Ye’re all right, Sassenach.” Jamie’s soft voice came out of the surrounding gloom—where was I?—and his hand squeezed my forearm, reassuring.

  “I’ll… take your… word for it,” I croaked, the effort making my eyes water. I coughed. It hurt, but seemed to help a little. “What… ?”

  “Have a bit of water, a nighean.” A big hand cradled my head, lifting it a bit, and the mouth of a canteen pressed against my lip. Swallowing the water hurt, too, but I didn’t care; my lips and throat were parched, and tasted of salt.

  My eyes were beginning to accustom themselves to the darkness. I could see Jamie’s form, hunched under a low ceiling, and the shape of rafters—no, timbers—overhead. A strong smell of tar and bilges. Ship. Of course, we were in a ship. But which ship?

  “Where… ?” I whispered, waving a hand.

  “I havena got the slightest idea,” he said, sounding rather irritable. “The Teal’s people are managing the sails—I hope—and Ian’s holding a pistol on one o’ the naval folk to make him steer, but for all I ken, the man’s taking us straight out to sea.”

  “I meant… what… ship.” Though his remarks had made that clear enough; we must be on the naval cutter.

  “They said the name of it’s the Pitt.”

  “How very appropriate.” I looked glassily around the murky surroundings, and my sense of reality suffered another jolt as I saw a huge mottled bundle of some kind, apparently hanging in the dim air a few feet beyond Jamie. I sat up abruptly—or tried to, only at this point realizing that I was in a hammock.

  Jamie seized me by the waist with a cry of alarm, in time to save me pitching out on my head, and as I steadied, clutching him, I realized that the thing I had taken as an enormous cocoon was in fact a man, lying in another hammock suspended from the rafters, but trussed up in it like a spider’s dinner and gagged. His face pressed against the mesh, glaring at me.

  “Jesus H. Roosevelt…,” I croaked, and lay back, breathing heavily.

  “D’ye want to rest a bit, Sassenach, or shall I set ye on your feet?” Jamie asked, clearly edgy. “I dinna want to leave Ian on his own too long.”

  “No,” I said, struggling upright once more. “Help me out, please.” The room—cabin, whatever it was—spun round me, as well as heaving up and down, and I was obliged to cling to Jamie with my eyes closed for a moment, until my internal gyroscope took hold.

  “Captain Roberts?” I asked. “The Teal?”

  “God knows,” Jamie said tersely. “We ran for it as quick as I could set the men to sailing this thing. For all I ken, they’re on our tail, but I couldna see anything when I looked astern.”

  I was beginning to feel steadier, though the blood still throbbed painfully in my throat and temples with each heartbeat, and I could feel the tender patches of bruising on my elbows and shoulders, and a vivid band across my back, where I’d fallen against the rail.

  “We’ve shut most of the crew up in the hold,” Jamie said, with a nod at the man in the hammock, “save this fellow. I didna ken whether ye might want to look at him first. In the medical way, I mean,” he added, seeing my momentary incomprehension. “Though I dinna think he’s hurt badly.”

  I approached the fellow in the hammock and saw that it was the helmsman who had tried to throttle me. There was a large lump visible on his forehead, and he had the beginnings of a monstrous black eye, but from what I could see, leaning close in the dim light, his pupils were the same size and—allowing for the rag stuffed into his mouth—his breath was coming regularly. Probably not badly hurt, then. I stood for a moment staring at him. It was difficult to tell—the only light belowdecks came from a prism embedded in the deck above—but I thought that perhaps what I had taken for a glare was really just a look of desperation.

  “Do you need to have a pee?” I inquired politely.

  The man and Jamie made nearly identical noises, though in the first case it was a groan of need, and in Jamie’
s, of exasperation.

  “For God’s sake!” he said, grabbing my arm as I started to reach for the man. “I’ll deal with him. Go upstairs.” It was apparent from his much-tried tone that he had just about reached the last-straw stage, and there was no point in arguing with him. I left, making my ginger way up the companionway ladder to the accompaniment of a lot of Gaelic muttering that I didn’t try to translate.

  The belting wind above was enough to make me sway alarmingly as it caught my skirts, but I seized a line and held on, letting the fresh air clear my head before I felt steady enough to go aft. There I found Ian, as advertised, sitting on a barrel, a loaded pistol held negligently atop one knee, evidently engaged in amiable discourse with the sailor at the helm.

  “Auntie Claire! All right, are ye?” he asked, jumping up and gesturing me toward his barrel.

  “Fine,” I said, taking it. I didn’t think I had torn anything in my knee, but it felt a little wobbly. “Claire Fraser,” I said, nodding politely to the gentleman at the helm, who was black and bore facial tattoos of an elaborate sort, though from the neck down he was dressed in ordinary sailor’s slops.

  “Guinea Dick,” he said, with a broad grin that displayed—no doubt about it—filed teeth. “Youah sahvint, Mum!”

  I regarded him openmouthed for a moment, but then regained some semblance of self-possession and smiled at him.

  “I see His Majesty takes his seamen where he can get them,” I murmured to Ian.

  “He does for a fact. Mr. Dick here was pressed out of a Guinea pirate, who took him from a slave ship, who in turn took him from a barracoon on the Guinea coast. I’m no so sure whether he thinks His Majesty’s accommodations are an improvement—but he says he’s got nay particular reservation about going along of us.”

  “Is your trust upon him?” I asked, in halting Gaelic.

  Ian gave me a mildly scandalized look.

  “Of course not,” he replied in the same language. “And you will oblige me by not going too close to him, wife of my mother’s brother. He says to me that he does not eat human flesh, but this is no surety that he is safe.”

  “Right,” I said, returning to English. “What happened to—”

  Before I could complete my question, a loud thump on deck made me turn, to see John Smith—he of the five gold earrings—who had dropped out of the rigging. He, too, smiled when he saw me, though his face was strained.

  “Well enough so far,” he said to Ian, and touched his forelock to me. “You all right, ma’am?”

  “Yes.” I looked aft, but saw nothing save tumbling waves. The same in all the other directions, as well. “Er… do you happen to know where we’re going, Mr. Smith?”

  He looked a trifle surprised at that.

  “Why, no, ma’am. The captain hasn’t said.”

  “The cap—”

  “That would be Uncle Jamie,” Ian said, sounding amused. “Puking his guts out below, is he?”

  “Not when last seen.” I began to have an uneasy feeling at the base of my spine. “Do you mean to tell me that no one aboard this ship has any idea where—or even which way—we’re heading?”

  An eloquent silence greeted this question.

  I coughed.

  “The, um, gunner. Not the one with the slashed forehead—the other one. Where is he, do you know?”

  Ian turned and looked at the water.

  “Oh,” I said. There was a large splotch of blood on the deck where the man had fallen when I stabbed him. “Oh,” I said again.

  “Och, which reminds me, Auntie. I found this lyin’ on the deck.” Ian took my knife from his belt and handed it to me. It had been cleaned, I saw.

  “Thank you.” I slipped it back through the slit of my petticoats and found the scabbard, still fastened round my thigh, though someone had removed my torn skirt and pocket. With thought for the gold in the hem, I hoped it was Jamie. I felt rather peculiar, as though my bones were filled with air. I coughed and swallowed again, massaging my bruised throat, then returned to my earlier point.

  “So no one knows which way we’re heading?”

  John Smith smiled a little.

  “Well, we’re not a-heading out to sea, ma’am, if that’s what you were fearing.”

  “I was, actually. How do you know?”

  All three of them smiled at that.

  “Him sun over dere,” Mr. Dick said, shrugging a shoulder at the object in question. He nodded in the same direction. “So him land over dere, too.”

  “Ah.” Well, that was comforting, to be sure. And in fact, since “him sun” was over there—that is, sinking rapidly in the west—that meant we were in fact headed north.

  Jamie joined the party at this point, looking pale.

  “Captain Fraser,” Smith said respectfully.

  “Mister Smith.”

  “Orders, Cap’n?”

  Jamie stared at him bleakly.

  “I’ll be pleased if we don’t sink. Can ye manage that?”

  Mr. Smith didn’t bother hiding his grin.

  “If we don’t hit another ship or a whale, sir, I think we’ll stay afloat.”

  “Good. Kindly don’t.” Jamie wiped the back of his hand across his mouth and straightened up. “Is there a port we might reach within the next day or so? The helmsman says there’s food and water enough for three days, but the less of it we need, the happier I’ll be.”

  Smith turned to squint toward the invisible land, the setting sun glinting off his earrings.

  “Well, we’re past Norfolk,” he said, thoughtful. “The next big regular port would be New York.”

  Jamie gave him a jaundiced look.

  “Is the British navy not anchored in New York?”

  Mr. Smith coughed.

  “I b’lieve they were, last I heard. ’Course, they might have moved.”