He laughed again. “I sometimes have this irrational fear that one of her many admirers will try to eliminate me.”
“Nobody would be as stupid as that,” I said. “That would hurt her. She obviously adores you.”
“Yes, she does. Incredible, that. And you’re quite right. No one would hurt Mary. I haven’t to worry.”
I had to worry. There was no sign of my disclite and I was haunted by the suspicion that someone was watching me as I searched for it. I considered telling the Captain I’d lost an odd family heirloom and hope someone would come forward with it.
But I didn’t have to. Someone came forward anyway.
I was returning from one of my clandestine visits to the hold when a tall, very solid shadow blocked the companionway just outside my cabin door. It was Reardon.
“A word with you,” was all he said, then followed me into my cabin.
It seemed exceptionally crowded in the cubby suddenly. I offered him a seat on my bunk. He declined, so I sat there, waiting for him to speak.
“May I ask,” he said finally, “why you have told the Captain your name is Dunbar?”
“Because it is.”
“You said Foreman.”
“I lied . . . a little. Foreman is my mother’s family name. (Also a lie.) You see, I knew the Captain’s name was Dunbar and I didn’t want him to think . . . well, you understand.”
His brow puckered. “I suppose. Now may I ask what you find of such interest in our forward hold?”
I saw no reason to dodge. “I lost something. A very rare family heirloom.”
“Oh? What, then, a pocket watch? A ring?”
“A . . . belt clip. It’s a disc about so big—” I made a circle with thumb and forefinger. “It . . . well it’s luminescent.”
“Ah,” he said, nodding. “You mean, like this.” He held out his hand. The disclite sat in its palm.
“Yes! That’s it!” I reached for it. His fingers denied me access.
“Can you explain by what principle it works, Mr. Dunbar?”
I scratched my head. How many people could explain the principle behind any contemporary piece of technology, even one they used every day? Windmills were probably a mystery to all but the miller.
“Not really,” I said. “I believe my uncle said it had something to do with, um, phosphorous and the absorption of sunlight.”
“Your uncle?”
“An inventor,” I lied glibly and smiled. “He makes less money than Aunt would like, but enough to finance his projects.”
I gestured at the disc. “This one was supposed to help miners see what they were digging up.”
“I should say it works quite well—better than I would expect from a light-absorbing phosphorous. I find it rather astounding that your uncle makes such a modest living. Common wisdom has it that everything of value has already been invented—that all we may hope for is further refinement of what we already possess. Something like this . . .”—he flipped the little medallion in his hand— “would revolutionize the mining industry . . . and stun the patent office.”
He was not buying this. Next he would tell me he was raised on the moors and knew all about phosphor-producing plants.
“I was raised on the moors, Mr. Dunbar. And I’ve never seen such a light as this.” He thumbed the thing on and hit me in the face with a splash of yellow light.
I blinked. “My uncle has quite a few new tricks up his sleeve, I guess.”
“Someone does,” he said and pocketed the disc.
My eyes followed it. “That means a great deal to me,” I said. He could have no idea now much. If QuestLabs found out I had lost a techno-gadget like that in Regency England . . . “Please, sir, may I have it back?”
The Oliver Twist gambit failed miserably. “Don’t whimper, man,” he ordered me. “You are a sailor . . . at least for the time being.”
“But what will you do with it?” My eyes never left his pocket.
“I don’t know. Perhaps the Captain will find it of interest,” he said, and left me where I sat.
oOo
I was a passable cabin boy, according to Captain Charley. I was quick and thorough and showed good humor. Meaning I put up with his moods, his autocratic style and his hazing. We came to an understanding when I began to return his pranks with stunts of my own. Replacing his mustache wax with boot-blacking was my grand finale. I was not prompted to give an encore.
Charley also liked the way I handled the passengers. There were seven on this trip—two couples and, between them, three children. I entertained them, which meant Charley didn’t have to. Instead, he could spend supper gazing soulfully at the Doctor’s wife.
“She’s a powerful woman, isn’t she, Arthur?” he asked after supper one evening. We were seated in the bows on a couple of empty crates; he, smoking a pipe, I, attempting to whittle something. The night was exceptionally balmy and Essex ghosted under flying jib and reefed foretopsail.
I knew who he meant, of course, but pretended not to. “Who?”
“M—Mrs. MacCormac.” His tongue stumbled over the title, straining toward her first name.
“Mary?” I grinned, realizing that, I, a lowly cabin boy, had been allowed a privilege of which he but dreamed. “Yes, she is exceptional.”
He leaned toward me, elbows on knees, his pipe stem pointed at my nose. “Powerful, boy. She pulls a man. Pulls him like the Sea.” He raised his head and gazed over-sides at phosphor kittens playing pounce with dark troughs. He seemed bemused. “I’ve never known a woman like her, Arthur. So quiet and deep one moment, playful the next.”
He might have been describing the Sea and I said as much.
He nodded, looking sage, and drew on his pipe. “A man might be able to trade the Sea herself for a woman like that. She’s Ocean’s daughter—has her mother’s eyes. I sometimes feel as if she was sent.” There was a long moment of silence while he ruminated over his smoke. “She’s wasted on a man like MacCormac.”
Something in his tone made my teeth itch and my arm hairs stand at attention. I laughed wanly and whittled too big a chunk out of my wooden whale’s fluke. It would make a fine dolphin.
“Oh,” I said, “he’s not such a bad sort once you get to know him. He’s seaworthy, I’d say. Says he can’t take being landlocked. He loves her madly, of course. And she, him.”
My last observation sent the Captain’s pipe overboard. He swore and stalked off to his cabin, face black as a rain-filled thunderhead.
For some reason, after that, I began to watch Black Charley very carefully. My mother always said I was fey and right now my teeth and arm hairs were whispering of dark deeds yet undone. Charley, increasingly companionable, pushed the whisper to a five bell alarm.
“Arthur,” he said one morning as I cleared our breakfast dishes, “tell me the future.”
“Sir?” I clutched the plates tighter as the deck tilted sharply.
“I’m in the mood for some soothsaying. Tell me what the future holds.”
“The abolition of slavery,” I said, hoping it might shock him into forgetting what I knew he really wanted to hear.
He was thoughtful, but unsurprised. “Aye. Ungodly system, that. I’ve no doubt men of intelligence will soon put an end to it on English soil. But, say on. I want to know—”
“A Queen,” I said quickly, as if inspired.
“A what?”
“A Queen will end slavery in Britain. A Queen named Victoria.”
His eyes grew wide. “Indeed? Imagine that.”
“Women will vote in elections soon, too,” I continued. “And the first country to grant the right will be . . .” I closed my eyes as if concentrating. “New Zealand in . . . 1893.”
I opened my eyes to find him staring at me. “Well,” he said, after a moment, “if all women were like our dear Mary, then they should have the vote already.”
Damn, I thought.
“I’d in mind something a wee bit closer to home.” He smiled.
I made a sorrowful
face and looked away from him out the mullioned panes of his cabin windows.
“What?” He rocked forward in his chair. “What is it, boy? What have you seen?”
“The Prime Minister . . . the Prime Minister will die next year . . . in November.”
He blinked. “Pitt? Ah, well, he’s that old. He’ll be sore missed, of course . . . by some.”
I glared at him. “You don’t believe me! You don’t believe a word I’ve said. You’re making sport of me.”
He came to his feet as the ship, in the teeth of a fresh squall, pitched into a trough. He seemed not to notice it. I was nearly dashed off my feet—would have been, if he hadn’t grabbed my arms to steady me.
“Arthur, lad! I’m not sporting, believe me. I can’t say as I believe all you’ve told me, but then I can’t say I don’t. I find it fascinating’s all. And I credit it could happen as you say. But it’s not Pitt or slavery or some unheard of Queen I care about, you see. I want to hear about me. My life. Tell me, boy. Do you see me wed . . . to her?”
“No, sir,” I said, then bit the pill and told him what I did know. “You will marry, but your wife’s name will be Maureen. Maureen Llewellyn.”
He let go of me then, and the little fever-light in his eyes died. “Ah, it’s all superstition, anyway,” he said, and went up on deck.
oOo
The storm worsened. By midday the decks were awash and the passengers had completely disappeared. I could imagine them, cruelly, moaning in their berths, ready to repent of everything and meet the Reaper. I, of course, have never been seasick in my life, but this storm challenged even my constitution. The waves were twenty-footers and the rain drove horizontally across the slippery decking.
I was helping batten down a loose cannon when I heard a shriek that was not the wind. I turned from my lashing job, peering through the chaotic, colorless whirl toward the poop deck.
Beneath the wildly swinging spanker boom, my eyes locked on a tumble of activity. It took me a moment to realize that someone had fallen from the mizzen mast.
The cannon forgotten, I launched myself aft. The deck writhed under my feet like an angry whale. I’d just reached the steps below the poop deck when Captain Charley came sliding down them and virtually into my face.
He grabbed me, shouting, “The Doctor! Get the Doctor! We’ve a man down!”
I did as ordered, nearly falling into the aft companionway.
I brought back, not only the Doctor, but the Doctor’s wife as well. Mary MacCormac was determined to aid her husband and she was not, I discovered, a woman to be argued with.
“You can’t come,” I had told her as she struggled into her oilskin sou’wester.
“Ah, but I will come,” she said, not even pausing to look at me.
“It’s dangerous! Tell her, Doctor. Tell her how dangerous—”
He afforded me a grim smile and dashed out, bag in hand.
Mary continued to ignore me, fastening her hat securely over her braids and making a beeline for the door. I stepped in front of her. She put both hands on my chest and pushed. She was stronger than she looked.
I followed her up on deck, reaching the poop just in time to see Dr. Mac (as the crew was pleased to call him) kneeling over the fallen sailor. It was Tommy Rodgers, a boy of about seventeen. White-faced and trembling, he clutched his right arm.
It was obviously broken—a jag of bone could be seen amid cloth and blood.
I wanted to be sick, but a weak-kneed salt was an oxymoron and I wouldn’t let Charley see me puke. The only one here with an excuse for that sort of behavior was poor Tom.
The Doctor was at work over the wound, and his missus was at work as well, keeping the boy’s mind off his pain and fear and his eyes on her angelic face. They made a great team, did the MacCormacs. Dr. Mac set the forearm before Tommy realized it. The boy let out another great shriek and swooned.
He’ll dream of Mary, I thought, and stood by, ready to help lift him below.
Charley, clutching a thick rope for support, looked on from the mizzen stepping. “Is that it then, Dr. Mac?” he shouted. “Is the arm set?”
“Aye!” MacCormac shouted back, and nodded vigorously for emphasis. He straightened, clutching his bag. “We’ve got to get him below!”
“The boys’ll take care of that. Never you mind. Piggott! Carew! See to him!”
Those two able-bodies jumped to it and MacCormac and I backed away—I toward the wheel, he toward the port rail. At that point, everything seemed to happen at once; I glanced at the helmsman and saw a sudden terror leap in his eyes; I heard Charley roar a warning and Mary MacCormac scream. I spun back toward the bows. A blur of movement to my left drew me instinctively right, toward where the Doctor stood like a post, waiting for a huge, free-swinging block to dash his brains out.
I dove at his feet.
The block and its thick twist of hemp whizzed overhead as we sprawled toward the rail. Mary came right after us, crying incoherently into the gale. She was knocked from her feet by Essex’s sudden starboard lurch and schooned along the deck on a wash of sea water, her legs tangled in her long skirts. She was headed straight for the rail.
MacCormac shrieked and struggled sharply in my grasp. There was nothing we could do, but Charley, in some superhuman effort, slid after her and, as she was flung over the edge, caught her water-logged skirts and hauled her back into his arms.
They stared at each other for a long, pregnant moment, Charley gaping like a sea bass. Then, the young lady threw her arms around his neck and squeezed him so hard I swear she wrung water out of him. Before he could do more than open and close his mouth once, Mary MacCormac had disentangled herself and scrambled to where her husband lay, soaked and stunned.
The hug she gave Dr. Mac was even more prodigious than the one she’d given Charley. That done, she reached down, rent her skirt from hem to waist to disentangle her legs, then hauled her husband to his feet and supported him down the steps to the main deck.
Dazed, I rose and followed, my gaze straying aloft, wondering where in hell that block had come from.
oOo
“I do believe it was on the mizzen mast,” said Mary sometime later when we were once again dry and sane and steeping in the normalcy of hot tea.
We were in the Captain’s salon (Captain’s mess suited it better at this juncture)—Black Charley, Dr. Mac, Mary, and I—seated around the sturdy table, clutching our mugs as if they might fly away. There was no real danger of that. The Sea had calmed significantly and Essex rolled rather than pitched.
“The spanker gaff was whipping about and so was the boom. It’s no wonder that block came free.” Her sweet voice sounded so calm, so certain.
We men merely nodded.
“Well,” said MacCormac at last, “I daresay ‘thank yous’ are in order all around. To you, Arthur, for saving my life and to you, Captain for doing the same. If my dear Mary had gone overboard, I might just as well have followed her.”
“You just about preceded her,” I said and shivered at the memory of those two very close calls.
“Then I’d have followed him,” said Mary firmly and covered her husband’s hand with her own.
I glanced at Charley. His eyes, narrow and over-bright in his pale face, were locked on their entwined fingers.
“That,” I said, “would have been a horrible tragedy.” I got Charley to meet my eyes and wasn’t sure I liked what I saw there.
“Well, no harm done,” said Mary. “Tommy will be fine, the block hit no one, I did not—thanks to our brave Captain Charley—go overboard. We are all as we should be—safe and sound.”
Charley shook his head. “I’m not brave, my dear. I was scared as a schoolboy up there. If anything had happened to you . . .”
Now Mary’s hand moved to the Captain’s as he worried the handle of his mug. “Nothing did and nothing will. You see, I have a guardian angel.” Her eyes sparkled like playful tropical seas. “Always have had. And my angel always makes certain there
is someone or something about to preserve me when I get in dire straits. That’s how Ian and I met, if you’ll recall. He’s one of my angels, too.”
“Madam,” said Charley most soberly, “I pray you will always consider me your angel.” He raised her hand to his lips and kissed it.
I glanced at Ian. His gray eyes were blandly neutral. If any of this disturbed him, it didn’t show.
oOo
Captain Charley was unspeakably cheerful the next day. I labored under the misapprehension that it was because we were to make port that evening in the Canaries until he swatted me on the back and said, “You’re a blackguard, Arthur—you with your fortune-telling. I think I half believed you ’til last night.”
“Believed me?”
“That malarkey about me wedding some bit o’ muslin named Maureen. It’s clear as can be, boy. It’s Mary I’ll wed or none at all.”
It was not a bitter pronouncement of unrequited love; the man acted as if he was all but ready to go out and publish the bans.
“Charley,” I said, forgetting my station of servitude. “She’s married already. Seemingly quite happily so.”
“Ah, but do you not see what’s happened? He was her guardian angel, now I am. And what’s a guardian angel, if not a hero? He’s a mamby-pamby little boy, needing young Arthur to save his unworthy skin, but I—I saved her. What woman will not fall in love with the man who saves her life? It’s only a matter of time.”
I shook my head. “Maureen,” I repeated. “I’m positive your wife’s name will be Maureen.”
He pointed a finger at my nose. “You’re a cabin boy. No, worse yet, a stowaway and a liar and probably a thief as well. Who in his right mind would listen to the likes of you?”
No one, I thought. And especially not a man so enamored of a Scottish sweet that his accent was beginning to sprout heather.
oOo
Santa Cruz de Tenerife. I had never seen it before. It sparkled under its veil of storm detritus like a platter of jewels. Essex stood in under a full press of sail in a stiff breeze and I wished I could be in two places at once so I could stand on shore and see the great, white cloud come on.
I gave a moment’s thought to using the Grid to do just that, but knew, if I did, that my Shift-Eye would have my tail feathers for the unauthorized expense. So I stood in the bows and watched the billowing mass of canvas above me. I must’ve looked like the biggest tourist this side of Casablanca. I could hear the crew chuckling at me. I was getting ready to slink off to a less obvious vantage point when Mr. Piggott sidled over.
All the Colors of Time Page 11
