“Ambrose,” she muttered.
“What is that you say?”
Kate didn’t realize that she had said it out loud.
“I’m Kate.”
“I know. They speak of you as if you have already made them rich men. You must have angered your husband very much.”
“Not my husband, my enemy.”
“Your enemy is not another woman. You look too stupid to have enemies like that.”
“Thank you.” Kate hoped that it meant that she was not a scheming woman, now done in by a woman who schemed better.
Fiya’s smile was very weak, but it engulfed her whole face in a form of beauty that was a privilege to behold. Kate was taken aback for she had not seen such beauty since . . . her mother. She knew the term: Fiya was striking.
The woman said, “What is that poison you would give me?”
It was something to help the fever. Rose hips and white willow bark. Not the best tasting, but the best that she had left. Kate said, “Toad stool and henbane. Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble.”
There was a pause. “Fresh henbane or dried?”
Kate smiled then. She went to the door and called for hot water.
“Ah, dried then. I am not really ill,” Fiya said, sitting up with a bit of effort.
“And I’m not really a witch,” Kate said, feeling the woman’s forehead.
Fiya’s skin was fine-textured and the brownish color of coffee mixed with just a bit of cream. Her cheekbones were high, the hollows quite chiseled, and her eyes were the size and shape of large almonds. Fiya had the face found on the statuary of exotic countries where cultures had peaked centuries before.
Like the faces drawn in Kate’s mother’s journals—Egypt, Nubia, Assyria.
“I smell something tart and something quite bitter,” Fiya said. “What else do you have there?”
“You know of plants?” Kate said.
“Some, it is of interest to me. Poison is a woman’s weapon, they say.”
“Rose hips for many ailments. I always give rose hips for I know it’s good in general and really quite harmless. They are common and easy to find. Then there’s white willow bark for fever, pain, and swelling. It tastes rather bitter, but I will add the last of my honeycomb and that will help some. I suspect you are just tired. If you need something to help you sleep, I have skullcap and valerian.”
“You are not a frightened little lamb like the others.”
“Of course I am; I’m just not afraid of you.”
Fiya settled down into a languorous stretch. “They deserve what they get, they did not fight.”
Not like Fiya’s ship. It was the last vessel taken by the red corsair, the one from the Middle East. They fought hard, and it cost many lives on the Red Wind. Still, they lost everything. But because the Red Wind had lost so many, those that did not fight to the death were given a chance to join the red corsair instead of going down, tied to the rails of their own ship.
All joined, for those that would not have joined, it seemed, had already fought until the death.
“We were on half rations for many days,” Fiya said, “The crew was weak. The fault is my own. I was proud and Allah has made me pay.”
Kate didn’t want to ask, but she couldn’t help herself. “You were running away?”
“It is true. We left in a rush and were quite ill prepared. How did you know?”
“They fought hard to save you. There was no other woman on board save one, and she threw herself overboard rather than be taken.”
“Perhaps they wanted to save their ship,” Fiya said.
Kate mulled this over. “A man fights for many things, but one ship is much like another when it is not your possession.”
Fiya nodded. “I was running away with my lover. My father forbade our union, but we could not be apart, and so my father would have killed us both. It is a matter of honor, for I disobeyed and submitted myself to a man beneath my father’s station.”
“He died?” Kate said, “Your lover, I mean?”
“One of the first to surrender, and it seems that my father was correct in his assessment of the man. But he is dead now, my lover. And you?”
“I was betrayed,” Kate said. Then she wondered what happened to the lover.
Fiya seemed to understand that well enough. Kate handed her the cup of steaming brew. The woman’s face flinched at the smell, but she drank it all down in long, deep sips.
They heard the screaming then. Kate rose, but Fiya grabbed her wrist. The crewmen were attacking the Indian women. They could tell by the language of the prayers and calls for mercy.
“Leave them,” Fiya said. “In their frenzy, they will take you too. It is God’s will. Those women know it too, I can tell by their prayers.”
“You know their language?”
Fiya shrugged. “Enough.”
Kate slumped to the bunk and put her hands over her ears.
Fiya eased up and wobbled over to start rummaging in Kate’s trunk. She spoke off-hand, as if they were discussing something trivial. “There is no shame in saving your own life. Those women, their will to live may not be strong enough to carry them through this ordeal. It is a test of their gods.”
“I am not religious.”
Fiya found a treasure. “You have cocoa.”
“Yes, you’re right. Cocoa always helps.”
She kept rummaging, and Kate only watched. Outside, the screams had died down to painful moans. The men were laughing, possibly drinking. Kate could hear some of the other women crying in the cabins nearby. She made the cocoa with lukewarm water, honeycomb, and trembling hands.
The glass of the porthole suddenly lit up, filling the cabin with a bloody glow from the colored glass. Kate opened it up as far as she could, and the redness dimmed a bit. Outside, there was a brilliant and beautiful sunset, and the last rays of the sun flowed across her face. The warmth seemed thicker than just light, almost like the light ray was made of warm golden honey.
“So much beauty,” Kate whispered, “so much pain.”
She stayed like that until the rays went away. Behind her, Fiya attended everything. Kate was glad it was getting dark. It wasn’t much longer until she was asleep from exhaustion. But even then, she dreamed:
* * * * *
Spring, 1774,
Senlis Family Compound, New York colony
Her mother disappeared out the kitchen door, but when she screamed, Katie wanted very much to go after.
She crawled out of her hiding place, her legs faltered. She found herself too cowardly to actually go outside.
Instead, there on the floor, she looked out the windows that were no longer glass, but gaping empty holes in the wall. There were birds around now, and a butterfly settled for just a few seconds on the windowsill. It was a monarch, pretty, but common.
Katie liked them anyway, monarchs. In her mind, she sang a song about its colors being the same as a tiger. It wasn’t a pretty song, she decided, a tiger was a much prettier thing and deserved better. She stopped. There wasn’t any difference; no sound came out either way. It was only in her mind, the little song about the tiger-like butterfly. Or was that unreal as well?
She held her breath and reached out to touch it, but it was too far away. It gently drifted out of sight. She watched the place were the butterfly had been for a moment, and then released her breath out slowly.
Her mind said, “Goodbye, flutter-bye.”
She forced herself to stand up. She took a step back, the floor crunched. The pieces of window glass that had shattered across the floor now sparkled in the sunlight like little diamonds.
Katie knew diamonds; she liked them very much. She had seen some of her mother’s only a few months before. Her father had taken them away again, taken them to Boston to be with his mother for safekeeping. It occurred to Katie then that perhaps that’s what the French were after: stealing her mother’s jewels.
Too late, all that was left was glass.
Katie reach
ed to pick up one of the sparkling pieces.
It bit her.
Not as bad as a bee sting, she decided. Katie watched the small drop of blood form, and then put her finger in her mouth. It was salty, and something else. It reminded her of the smell of the oil that her father had used when he tended his guns. She did not like the taste; she had never liked the smell.
She wondered how diamonds would taste. Like ice maybe? What pretty colors they made, little rainbows. Or flowers instead. Maybe they tasted like flowers smelled?
Someone giggled. Maybe the flutter-bye.
Her mother had shown her other stones too—smoky golden and grass-like greens and reds like blood called rubies. Like flowers, only with no smell, and no soft, cool petals either.
So maybe not as nice as flowers, she decided then. And maybe she no longer liked the red so well.
“Yours someday,” her mother had said of the stones, lost in the telling of the history of her family. Katie loved the stories, and she wondered if there was any family left somewhere else. Faraway, though, they had to be. She knew all her family here.
Outside, it was all very quiet.
It had only been a moment, but Katie knew her mother was dead.
Why else would her mother have cried out like that? Why else would she have heard nothing more? It was just like before with the raiders. Katie also knew she did not want to see the crows pecking out her mother’s eyes.
She scooted back to her hiding place. She would wait there for her father. She hoped he didn’t blame her for breaking Mama’s jars.
But there in her hidey-hole, she could again hear her mother’s voice. It didn’t seem afraid anymore, and that offered a bit of comfort, because Mama was now an angel.
But then Mama’s voice said in relief, “My God, you scared me, Ambrose. I thought you were the raiders come back. You could have ended up hurt. Come up out of there, boy. Come in and make yourself useful.”
He followed her into the house—too close behind, for he almost ran into her when she stopped. He didn’t say anything, and Katie couldn’t see his face for her hiding place, only their legs and feet and his hands. She could also hear him breathing. She didn’t move, she couldn’t, and she didn’t know why.
“We have to get word to your father,” her mother said to Ambrose. “He can send word to the militia and the village elders as well. I think they were Huron, but I would not swear to it. Still, better to look both west and north, I think. They might be heading for Canada now.”
Ambrose stood in one spot, turning as her mother moved around the kitchen cleaning up here and there. It wasn’t doing much good, there was so much shattered here.
Her mother stopped and stood with her hands on her hips. She said, “Well, don’t just stand there, Ambrose.”
He stepped closer still. Katie could only see them from their waists down still, but his one hand was fumbling with his crotch. He grabbed her mother’s wrist with his other hand and twisted with a force that made her cry out.
“What are you doing?” her mother said, not alarmed, though not quite normal. “Sit down there and I will make you some tea. You must be in shock. We can wait for a bit to bury the rest of the bodies, but it must be done. I could only do a few yesterday, poor souls.”
He sat, but pulled her down to his lap. Katie could see his face now. He was smiling with his big yellow teeth, but his eyes were like nothing she had seen before. They were so big and black; they looked like holes in his head and not really eyes at all.
They looked like the gaping empty eyes of the dead men outside, the ones attacked by the crows.
Suddenly, he buried his face in her mother’s bosom.
Katie couldn’t make out his words, but her mother pushed herself up and away.
“Get a hold of yourself, lad,” her mother said. “We will make it through this well enough.”
But he grabbed her again, this time by the hair, and Katie’s mother cried out in pain. This time, Ambrose would not let go.
* * * * *
Her eyes flew open. Kate sat up. Her body was covered in sweat, and her face was wet with tears. It was Ambrose who raped her mother. Right there on the kitchen floor, but not before her mother fought hard, and used her fingernails, her teeth, even the broken glass.
Kate remembered it now, all of it. The scars on Ambrose’s neck were from her mother’s struggles. Kate put the heels of her hands to her eyes to blot out the scene, but it was there too clear in her mind:
Ambrose ran away when he finished his brutal deed, but not all the blood on the floor was his. Her mother’s legs were cut, and the back of her neck and shoulders, and even her head. But worse, a gush of crimson fluid surged from between her legs. Her mother tried to hold it back with her hands, but it soaked through her clutching fingers and onto the floor like a slow wave of dark molasses.
Katie crawled out of her hiding spot.
Her mother didn’t speak; her eyes were glazed in shock. Katie sang the song about the tiger and the butterfly, but her mother didn’t seem to hear it, and Katie wished it were better.
She rubbed the place where the new baby lived. Her mother started crying in sobs that racked her whole body. Then her mother turned onto her side and curled up as tight as she could go.
Katie touched her mother’s face, then rubbed at her arm because it seemed so cold.
Blood soaked into the floor mats now and seeped into the cracks between the plank floorboards that had been sanded smooth at her mother’s insistence. It oozed through the bits of diamond-bright glass, turning them into rubies like on Mama’s necklace that Katie’s father took away to Boston.
The sun reappeared from behind a cloud, and the rubies sparkled as if they were moving with life. Another butterfly fluttered above them, suspended just a moment, then it flickered away.
Katie crawled even closer and put her mother’s head in her lap. She brushed the hair from her mother’s face and looked into the eyes that looked so much like her own. She watched them for a long time, rocking her there until Mama was asleep.
But Mama didn’t sleep. And Mama never looked away either. Mama didn’t even blink. Katie vowed to stay there until she did.
Deep in her mind somewhere, someone was singing: “Dead, all dead, too much red . . .”
* * * * *
CHAPTER 33 - Escape
They had been sailing for many days. Kate figured the pirates must have been avoiding the trade lanes. She spent long hours discussing remedies and reason with Fiya, who had been educated in a prestigious school for young ladies in Switzerland. Fiya spoke of Bedouins, and Kate told what she knew of the native tribes in America. They spoke of families and customs and of her mother’s journals. Then Kate told Fiya of the American Revolution.
“All men are created equal,” Fiya said. “It will never work, such a concept. How can men say this and still hold slaves?”
“Slaves, aboriginals, women. None of us were included in the grand plans, it seems, but I have never claimed to understand the minds or hearts of men. My grandmother nursed the wounded in the war. She gathered food and clothes for the troops. I believe if pressed, she might have shot a Red Coat or two. Perhaps she did. Still, things are much the same for her as they ever were, though she’s now missing a son and grandson or two.”
“You understand men well enough,” Fiya said. “They like to possess things, and even more so that which another man covets first.”
Kate sighed and shook her head. “I understand what ails them, maybe, but I would never say I understand what is important to men. Not politics or religion, nor duty when it comes to that.”
“Peel away the layers and all men are the same. White, brown, painted or plain. Base needs often overcome better judgment. It has always been so. And for this, a man fears that which he wants most. It gives him a weakness that may be used against him. He knows this, and fears that others might learn it too.”
Kate thought for a moment. It seemed a simple concept. Everyone is afraid
of losing who or what they loved. She said, “That’s true of everyone, I think.”
Fiya smiled like a sly Nile queen then. “Perhaps, but why do you think the crew fears me so?”
Kate’s eyebrow went up, just the one. “Because you drank all their cocoa?”
“Because I killed a man. I had no fire in my blood at the time, and I have no remorse for it now. They know this. To want me and then betray me will end badly for them. Better to keep their distance and wonder what might have been.”
The coldness in Fiya’s eyes said that all this was true. Kate didn’t have to ask who had been killed with such cold calculation. She already knew that it was Fiya’s lover. When he surrendered, Kate figured, Fiya didn’t give him a chance to join the crew of the red corsair.
In a moment, Kate asked, “Do you miss him?”
“I hate him, still I miss him. I am weak, perhaps I deserve my fate.”
“I wouldn’t go that far. But it seems that our curse in life is not so easily to forget.”
Fiya said, “You have not forgotten your British captain.”
“How did you know—“
Fiya laughed. “You talk in your sleep. Do you miss him? Is he handsome? Does he yearn for you too?”
Kate felt herself flame red in the face, and it wasn’t the sunset this time. She studied Fiya for a moment, but the woman’s expression held only curiosity, there was no hint of ridicule or scorn. Kate said, “I miss him, though he doesn’t know it. I wrote him a note, but he did not get the message.”
“Perhaps he knows anyway,” Fiya said. “You would not love a stupid man.”
“You did.”
“He was not stupid, he was a coward. There is a difference. He regretted it more than I in the end.”
“That seems very cold, Fiya.”
Fiya shrugged and merely said the usual when there was nothing left to reason: “Insha’Allah.”
Everything shall be as God wills it.
The Wilde Flower Saga: A Contrary Wind (Historical Adventure Series) Page 33
