The Following Sea (The Pirate Wolf series) Page 5

  "Please, Captain." Her voice wavered again as it came across the gap between the two ships. "I understand your dilemma. It was one of the reasons I did not search for food to keep myself alive. I hoped that if I ate nothing and slept in the open... the end would come swifter. I am afraid I am too much of a coward to throw myself overboard but I will accept the fate delivered by your guns."

  Gabriel blew out a breath that carried an oath with it. That was surely the last thing he had wanted to hear, for now it all but obligated him to find a way to save her.

  He turned to Douglas Podd, the barber and sailmaker who was the closest thing to a doctor they had on board.

  "Suggestions?"

  Podd scratched his chin. "I've heard tell o' people who've survived the pox. Some say how they don't catch it a second time. Might help to know if she had sum'mit like that when she were a weanling. Could explain why she were spared."

  "Assuming that to be the reason," Gabriel said, "how can we be sure she isn't carrying the disease on her skin or her clothes?"

  Stubs' jaw dropped. "Ye're not thinkin' of bringin' her on board?"

  "We're thinking a pistol shot would be quick and merciful," one of the men nearby growled.

  Dante glared from under an arched eyebrow and the crewman shrank back out of sight. He looked back at Podd. "She claims she's been a week with no signs of fever. What say you to that?"

  Podd pursed his lips and glanced around, weighing his answer carefully before he delivered it. "She 'd have to strip down to her bare arse and scrub herself head to toe with lye soap until the skin near comes off. Otherwise—" he hooked a thumb over his shoulder— "ye'd have a deal o' trouble keepin' the men from throwin’ her overboard. That's assumin’ they don't mutiny outright."

  Gabriel nodded grimly. "I'll talk to the crew."

  Podd scratched his graying hair. "I'm of a mind they might believe me over you, Cap’n. Mainly because I draw their teeth and set their bones an' they know I'd as soon drown a kitten as save it... something they can't say about you, especially when the kitten is a pretty female."

  Gabriel snorted, but had no time to be offended. "Go ahead then. Put it to them."

  "Aye. An' if they vote nay?"

  Gabriel pursed his lips. "If they do... then... I would have to agree: a pistol shot will be the most merciful."

  ~~

  While heated debates were taking place on board the Endurance, a jolly boat was rowed across to the Eliza Jane. Eva followed instructions and dropped a line over the side, pulling up a basket that contained food and water. She also pulled up a grappling hook bound to a long length of rope which she secured to a solid section of the gunwale.

  Despite unresolved fears, she was too hungry to ignore the sight and smell of biscuits and cheese. She sat in the midst of broken rails and torn rigging, eating and drinking, and watching the huge galleon while a crew of strangers on board decided her fate.

  She had all but given up hope of any manner of rescue. Eva knew full well the yellow flag would keep other ships away and she had resigned herself to a lonely, painfully slow death.

  Her first thought upon seeing the galleon was that the Spaniards would simply sink the Eliza Jane and bring about a quick end to her misery. She certainly had not expected to see Englishmen in command of the vessel and she had yet to decide if it made her feel better or worse that her own countrymen were deciding her fate.

  Not entirely certain what to think when the captain sent across food and drink, she nonetheless refused to let herself have any hope that it was anything more than a temporary reprieve. A charitable last supper, perhaps? A final kindness? The only prayer she did allow was that death would come swiftly when the barrage resumed to sink the plague ship.To that end, she drank the wine freely, inviting the numbness she hoped would come at the bottom of the bottle.

  "Hail Eliza Jane!"

  She stood, clutching the half-empty bottle. The man who had identified himself to be captain was standing on the high deck in the stern. He was hardly the handsome, dashing vision of the sea-faring adventurers she had read about in penny sheets. His face was mishapen and battered, his jaw heavily bearded. One eye was a bulbous, bruised mess of old scabbing. The other eye examined her like a hawk might inspect a mouse before deigning to eat it. His hair was dark and fell in greasy strings to his shoulders, which were admittedly broad and packed with muscle. Long legs were encased in black moleskin, the tall boots laced high to the knee.

  "We are sending over further supplies,” he said. “We need you to strip out of all your clothing and discard it, then scour yourself top to bottom with soap, after which, douse your skin and hair with the camphor oil. When you have done this thoroughly, we will tow you behind the Endurance in a jolly boat rigged with a canvas sail for shelter. Do you understand these instructions? A refusal or a deviation will remove any possibility of you leaving that ship alive."

  Eva swayed slightly and thought it must be the wine making her light-headed. Surely she had heard wrong. He could not possibly be saying she could leave this doomed hulk.

  "Repeat the instructions if you please," the captain ordered through cupped hands.

  "S-soap head to toe, then camphor."

  "My apologies, Madam, but we must keep you quarantined until there is no possible chance you are tainted by the fever. I would not risk it were you the Queen of England. Do you agree to the terms?"

  "Yes." She felt the first real flicker of hope shiver alive in her belly. "Yes, I do agree sir!"

  "Very well. We shall send across the necessaries."

  He turned to pass along orders to the man beside him and moments later a basket came sliding across on the line she had rigged earlier. In it was a brick-like bar of harsh lye soap used to scour the ship’s timbers, a jar of camphor oil, a scrub brush, and a striped wool blanket. At the bottom was a pair of sailor's canvas trousers and a large white shirt.

  The portion of deck where she had been staying was littered with smoking debris from the broadside but she managed to clear a small patch, lower a canvas bucket over the side and fill it with sea water.

  The larboard side of the Endurance was dotted with heads; the yards and rigging were filled with crewmen, all of them staring and silent. She could well imagine their reservations and their resentment. Even with such extreme precautions there was no guarantee she was free of whatever pestilence had killed the Eliza Jane.

  The captain’s orders had been specific. Strip out of all clothing and scrub her naked flesh. The hope that had kept her heart pounding now sent a flush of dismay into her cheeks.

  Did they all intend to just stand there and watch?

  Her gaze sought the captain but he appeared to be distracted, leaning over some charts and conversing with the helmsman.

  Eva set her jaw and looked for a way to suspend the blanket from the rigging to form a curtain. It was not a very large blanket and would not protect her from every pair of probing eyes, but it would have to do.

  Foregoing modesty for the sake of survival, she pulled the shapeless white sheath over her head and discarded it along with her cloak. Naked and shivering, she took up the scrub brush and started washing with the awful soap. It stung her skin and reddened it instantly. She doused her hair and worked the stinking lye into her scalp, rinsing and rinsing and rinsing again with tears of pain and mortification burning in her eyes along with the harsh fumes. There was no towelling to dry herself so she stood, arms crossed over her chest while the breeze tightened her skin and the residue of salt water caused even fiercer burning.

  She poured some of the camphor in her hands and began rubbing it over her body. It eased some of the stinging and tightness, briefly, but the odor was so strong it nearly brought the recently enjoyed contents of her belly up into her throat. She choked back sobs as she worked the oil through her damp hair and when every inch that she could reach was coated and slick, she donned the rough canvas breeches and shirt, then snatched the blanket and rolled herself into it, finally turning and
facing the Endurance again.

  The jolly boat that had ferried over the first basket of food was now rigged with a canvas sail stretched across the stern and tented in the middle. A long cable was being attached to a ring in the bow and men were lowering baskets filled with more supplies. It was a sturdy little boat, but bobbed in the shadow of the galleon like an apple in a barrel, and the thought of spending days on board, being dragged in the wake of the Spanish ship, made her belly threaten to rebel again.

  "You're alive," she told herself. "You're alive and that is all that matters. You have been around boats and ships all your life. You can do this, Evangeline Chandler. You can do this... for yourself... and for Father."

  For all she knew, it might even be safer than being taken on board the galleon itself. Surely they must be pirates, so there was no telling how they would have treated her if the circumstances were different. She might well have been condemned to a fate worse than dying with the Eliza Jane. She was reminded of Lawrence Ross's warning of how women captives were passed from man to man until they had been raped to death.

  To that end, she discreetly tucked a dagger into the folds of the blanket and bundled it under her arm as she made her way barefoot across the shattered deck to the gangway. The gate in the rail had been blown off its hinges and as she stepped to the edge, she saw the jolly boat had been tied off at the bottom.

  Hugging the blanket securely against her body, she turned and carefully descended the wooden steps that protruded from the hull. She could feel eyes watching her every move. In the reflection cast across the water, she saw the shadow of the captain where he stood on one of the enormous gun barrels, his hands on his hips, closely marking her progress.

  "When you are ready, cast off," he shouted. "Stay clear of the cable as it uncoils. If it catches your ankle and you fall overboard, no one will be jumping in to save you."

  The wine had fortified her enough to mutter a word or two about his level of compassion before her foot touched the rocking side of the jolly boat. As soon as she was safely aboard she untied the tether and shoved away from the hull of the ship.

  As the jolly boat drifted into the dark gap between the two ships, she looked up, squinting against the sunlight. "I thank you for your mercy, good sir, in rescuing me."

  "My name is Dante. Captain Gabriel Dante. And do not thank me just yet. As you can see it is my intention to keep you isolated until any danger of contagion is well past. We are still at odds to know why you, alone, were spared."

  Her eyes filled with tears despite her resolve. "I do not know the answer either, Captain Dante. As I said, we landed in Fox Town and some of the crew went ashore. Within the week, they were all dying or dead." Her voice fell off and she bit her lip into silence.

  Someone said something that made him tip his head back and nod. "I am reminded to ask: Do you know if you had any manner of similar fever when you were a child?"

  The question gave her pause as a painful memory surfaced of darkened rooms and black bunting draped over doors and windows.

  "When I was five, my mother and four siblings died as a result of some illness and I recall my father saying three fourths of the county perished that year."

  The captain nodded again as if this shed the light of possibility on an explanation. With his next breath he was giving orders to the short, half-bald man at his side who subsequently bellowed to send the crew scrambling up to the shrouds to set the sails.

  Eva sat in the stern and hugged her knees to her chest as the galleon started to glide forward. The cable attached to the jolly boat began to play out and as the Spanish ship picked up speed, it cut a path across the beam of the Eliza Jane and came up on the starboard side, running parallel again.

  Three full broadsides were all that were required to blast the Eliza Jane to oblivion. Eva sat huddled in the violently rocking jolly boat, her hands over her ears as the guns roared and belched fire. The first round levelled what was left of the masts and rigging, the second, fired at point blank range, pounded holes in the hull and blew wider openings in the gunports. Timbers burst and cracked. Windows in the stern gallery shattered and sprayed glittering shards across the surface of the sea.

  One of the shots punched through to the powder room and ignited the barrels. A loud explosion buckled the upper deck and sent a thunderous cloud of debris shooting a hundred feet into the air above the ship. A bright orange fireball boiled upward with the smoke and within minutes the deck was under a hail of burning splinters that fell back down to earth. The cinders landed on dry wood and as the Endurance sailed out of gun range, a dense plume of black smoke painted the sky above the raging fires that sent the Eliza Jane to her watery grave.

  ~~

  The rest of the day passed without incident. The sun climbed high in a clear blue sky and descended the same way, idyllic and beautiful—unless one was in a six foot by eight foot jolly boat being towed in the wake of a wooden leviathan.

  Eva lost the contents of her stomach half a dozen times, leaning over the side, cursing each wave that passed beneath the keel. She kept telling herself it was better than death and sooner or later her stomach would settle. But then the galleon would tack again to alter her course and the jolly boat would be bounced across the crests of the following sea and Eva would find herself hanging over the gunwale again.

  On board the Endurance, there was a natural curiosity that prompted the crewmen to climb the shrouds and peer down at the miserable occupant of the little boat. Some were not yet convinced she was not a siren or a water witch sent to place a curse on all their heads. They wanted to keep a sharp eye on her lest she suddenly sprouted a long, scaly fish tail and a head full of writhing snakes.

  Others had more practical reasons to worry, watch, and speculate. There remained the lingering question of why and how she had avoided taking the fever. Douglas Podd was amongst them and he wished his cohort, Nog Kelly, was aboard; the crusty old tar from the Iron Rose knew more about medicine and doctoring and would have known how to set the crew’s mind at ease.

  A third group simply went about their normal routines and all but forgot Eva was there. They smoked their pipes and repaired the sails or spliced new rigging lines, and ignored all the fretting and gossiping.

  Gabriel Dante found himself part of all three factions at one point or another. He openly mocked most superstitions, yet he was not one to deliberately cross the path of a black cat or stare a blind man in the eye. He knew the girl was human—quite a delicate, lovely human, in fact, for he had seen her naked limbs and pale white body as she scrubbed it down with the soap and camphor. Even so, he could not get the image out of his mind of her emerging like a ghostly specter from the rubble on board the Eliza Jane, her shapeless white form enveloped in smoke, her long blonde hair drifting wildly about her shoulders.

  He would be a fool if he did not have concerns about the plague infecting his own crew. The umbilical cable that stretched between the jolly boat and the ship was sixty feet long, but was that long enough? Stubs had suggested towing her to the nearest island and cutting her free, but that posed a whole other series of questions and doubts. If she was still carrying the fever, any island she stepped onto would potentially become infected. Even if she was clean, a young and beautiful woman stranded on an island would be helpless against natives or pirates or four-legged predators.

  With Eduardo working by his side, Gabriel forced the problem of what to do with the girl to the back of his mind. He started stripping the gaudy trimmings and tassels from the great-cabin and when the lad asked what he should do with the small mountain of gold trappings, Dante ordered him to simply toss them over the stern rail, forgetting that some might rain down upon the jolly boat. At one point, he went out onto the narrow balcony to relieve himself and had his breeches open before he realized there was a pair of rounded emerald eyes staring up at him.

  After that, he found himself periodically drawn to the gallery windows. He saw the girl emptying her belly several times and ordered
fewer tacking maneuvers, which reduced their speed slightly but allowed for longer stretches when the jolly boat could ride relatively smoothly in the center channel of the wake. Stubs offered up the expected objections but Dante ignored them.

  As the last streaks of the sunset faded to darkness, he was again at the gallery windows, his meal of steaming hot mutton stew cooling on his desk. He could just make out the blurred white bundle of blankets beneath the canvas canopy before the sea and sky turned black. He was about to turn away when he saw a flicker of sparks, then another as the girl attempted to strike flint and light the shielded lantern that had been provided with the rest of the supplies.

  ~~

  Eva used the edge of the dagger to send a small fountain of sparks over the tiny pile of dry tinder she had built on a metal pan. Three, four times she struck the blade on the flint before the bits of straw caught and she was able to coddle a flame long enough to light the wick of a candle and place it inside the horn-sided lantern. Immensely pleased with herself, she started to draw the sides of the tented canvas sail closed to hoard the light and meagre heat inside, but before she did so, she glanced up and saw the dark silhouette of a man standing at the gallery windows. That it was the brutishly ugly and battle-scarred captain, she had no doubt, for she had caught him watching her several times during the day.

  Shivering, she closed the edges of the canvas tight and curled up inside the nest of woollen blankets, and was eventually lulled into an exhausted sleep by the sound of the water rushing by an inch beneath the keel.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The sea began to turn choppy shortly before dawn. The previous day’s glorious blue sky was obscured by a fast-moving ceiling of gray and green-bellied clouds. Wind spun across the surface of the water, feathering the crests of the whitecaps, sending sprays of mist as high as the upper deck of the Endurance. The threat of the impending squall had Dante clearing the decks and ensuring the guns were securely lashed. As the heavy ship began to roll and dip with the taller waves, the crew began to grumble that it was a sign. A sure sign they had made the wrong choice in rescuing the witch-girl from the death ship.