Kings of the Sea

by Van Every Frost, Joan

  Roger. She had forgotten all about him. If he was alive, she rather thought that like her he would have stayed in Halifax, his future without Christian as dim as was hers. She started in on the hotels, beginning with her own, and came to the fifth one before a clerk told her that the gentleman had registered the night of the day after the wreck but hadn’t, according to the maids, slept in his room then or since. The manager had been contemplating notifying the authorities in case the gentleman had encountered foul play.

  Katharine thanked him and assured him she would let him know if she had news of the missing guest. She thought she might know where he was to be found. If Christian was dead, Roger was sure to be on a drunken binge. Christian had said he didn’t do well when he drank, which might even mean that he was already in the hands of the police.

  Roger’s hotel was within a block of a train station, and there were numerous saloons in the vicinity. Since she couldn’t enter them herself, she had to be content with doling out small change to loiterers outside to do the questioning for her. She let on that she was his wife. She kept widening the circle she searched around the hotel. Surely he wouldn’t have gone too far away. Finally at a place quaintly called the Broken Wheel the loiterer came out followed by the bartender still in his apron.

  “Be ye the one asking aboot the Irishman?” he said to her.

  “I am.”

  “Well, I’ve got ’im, more’s the pity, and I wish to Gawd I didn’t.” He wiped his hands nervously on his apron. “He drank for two days straight and then went berserk. My bouncer had to hit him over the head with a two-by-four, and I think he may have hit him too hard. Anyways, he’s in the room above the bar. I’d take it kindly if you could bring him to and get him out of here.”

  He led her up some back steps and then up an ill-smelling narrow stairway to an upper floor, where they were met by a tired-looking woman in a red satin wrapper.

  “He’s still out,” she told the bartender. “This his doxy? You looks too high-class for the likes of him.”

  Katharine smiled benignly at her and followed the bar-keep into a tiny room. Splayed out on the rumpled dirty sheets was indeed Roger. She called his name and shook him, but he went on snoring.

  “Has a doctor looked at him?” she asked.

  “Only the one what looks at the girls once a week. He says he’ll come to eventually, but he may not have anything left up here.” He tapped his own head. “Ask me, I don’t think he had all that much to begin with.”

  She thought of what a heavy blow on the head might have done to that already damaged brain and winced. “I’ll sit with him then. Bring me some clean sheets and something to eat.” At the look on the man’s face she added, “I’ll pay for it all, don’t worry.” He scuttled off.

  She got some warm water from the woman in the red wrapper and cleaned Roger up and changed his bed. It reminded her of the years when she had done the same thing for her father. It seemed centuries ago in another life. She wondered what her father would say about this, her spending the night in what was obviously a house of ill repute tending a naked man who wasn’t her husband. She smiled grimly.

  The following morning she was washing Roger’s face when his eyes opened. He looked up at her frowning, either not recognizing her or else trying to think what she was doing here.

  “It’s Kate, Roger. I’ve come to take care of you.”

  He looked bewildered. “But you’re dead.” His face cleared. “Then I’m dead,” he said triumphantly. “Why does my head hurt?”

  “No, Roger, you aren’t dead. Where’s Christian? Is he dead? Is that why you think you may be?”

  “Christian.” He frowned again. “Oh God, Christian … he sent me away, Kate, as if I were a servant.” His eyes surprisingly filled with tears that ran unchecked down his bearded face. “He doesn’t want me anymore, he said so. He —”

  “There, there,” she soothed him. “Of course he wants you. He probably just wanted you to be safe.” She thought he was saying that Christian had tried to persuade Roger not to come in the boat with him.

  “No, no,” he said impatiently. “We were already safe. He passed out on the cliff and I took a horse away from somebody and I walked him halfway to Halifax. There was a signpost that said a village was nearer, and I took him there.” He frowned again. “But he told me not to tell anybody.” He brightened. “He never meant you, though. You were the only one he ever brought home …”

  “Is he there now?” she dared ask, her heart threatening to break her ribs with its pounding.

  “Dunno. He sent me packing, and here I am. Said some terrible things to me, he did.”

  “How badly was he hurt?”

  “He had a great cut up one eye, and one of his arms was flayed to the bone.”

  “Did you take him to a doctor?”

  “He didn’t want to go, but I made him. The doctor sewed up his head, and then I was told to go. Said he didn’t want anyone knowing where he was, not even me.”

  After seeing to it that Roger was moved to where he would have adequate care, she hired a horse and trap and went to the village where Roger had taken him, hoping she could pick up his track there. He was in truth gone all right, but from the doctor’s description he couldn’t have gone far. He had bought a horse and tack and some clothes and disappeared at night. She was told that to the east there was another village some ten miles away that was popular with Halifax sportsmen for the fishing. There wouldn’t be anyone there now, however, because of the black flies.

  By the time she arrived in King’s Grove, a tiny hamlet that belied its elegant name, her neck and the backs of her hands were bitten to a fare-thee-well by the fierce black insects. Thank God, she thought, that the fishing she would be doing would be indoors. At the inn, predictably called the King’s Arms, she marched in arrogantly.

  “I understand my husband is here,” she announced rather than asked. “Husky man with a cut on his face. I’ve come to take him home, if he’s fit.”

  “Mr. Ames is in number three upstairs. Fair looks to have been in a fight, he does,” the man at the desk said.

  “When I told the constable the name Oliver Ames, he said no one was looking for him that he knew of.”

  “No one except me,” she corrected him primly. “Mr. Ames was involved in an, er, unfortunate encounter with an unexpected husband, and I’m here to see to it that he doesn’t get involved in a similar occurrence soon again. If you know what I mean. My valise is in the trap.” She waved imperiously at the door.

  “Yes ma’am,” the man at the desk said with alacrity, obviously fascinated by this unlooked-for slice of life to which he had been made party.

  She took the key he offered and sailed up the stairs, in reality now more than a little disturbed by the welcome she was likely to receive from a man who didn’t want anyone to know where he was. Aware that the garrulous room clerk was staring up after her, she didn’t dare to knock on the door. Taking a deep breath, she thrust the key into the primitive lock, turned it, and opened the door.

  In a stone fireplace a fire snapped briskly, and the oil lamp that served as a room light cast a warm glow that gleamed on the ornate brass head and footboards of the large rumpled double bed. Even though Christian was standing stripped to the waist with the light behind him, she could see that his arm was tied in a bandage black in places with dried blood, that there was a large scabbed and bruised area spread over his ribs and down along his side, and that an ugly stitched wound slanted down his forehead and across the end of one eyebrow. She couldn’t read his expression, which gave nothing away, not even surprise.

  “What in the bloody hell are you doing here?” he asked in an icy voice.

  She steeled herself. “I might ask you the same thing.” Her tone was every bit as icy as his. She closed the door behind her firmly.

  His face did register surprise then. He walked stiffly back to the bed and sat down with a wince. He poured a generous splash of brandy into a glass without offeri
ng her any and took a gulp, shuddering. “What makes you think it’s any business of yours?” His voice was hostile.

  “May I remind you that unfortunately not only I but any number of others are dependent upon you in one way or another? For a variety of reasons we threw our lots in with yours, and your cowardly desertion of us does you no credit. I had to fish Roger out of a sporting house where he’d gotten drunk and had his head cracked — he’s lucky he’s not dead. I’ve spent the pocket money provided by the Blue Hand agents to the Circe’s survivors looking for Roger and then for you, and I am now penniless in a strange city with even less hope of finding employment than I had in Boston. You’ve left Poulson and Aaron Fine to clean up your mess after you as well. Of course, they think you’re dead, which means that your father thinks so too. You who know so well what a father feels whose son is lost at sea might have thought of that.”

  He watched her face for a long moment in silence. “So they all think I’m dead, do they?” he asked surprisingly. “If I’d known that, I’d have skipped off to some distant paradise like the Spice Islands.” He shook his head. “I know what they do think, though — that the fault is all mine.”

  “Something like that,” she replied evenly. “You are also counted as being a coward for having used the boat to escape the wreck.”

  “The bastards! Who did they think it was climbed that bloody cliff and rigged the lines? And who the hell did they think it was had to take a pistol off one of the locals to threaten them into hauling on the lines? If I hadn’t passed out, I’d have been there to the end.”

  “Judge, you’ve got to go back to Halifax. You can’t let everyone go on saying — well, the things they’re thinking.

  “Will that return the Circe to me? Will that bring the dead back from the depths of the sea? Will it? Will that put the Circe into New York before the Iberia? Will that bring me the money for another ship? Why should I suffer their rotten slanders at all, tell me that?”

  “Because they’re all wrong, that’s why. If you can prove them wrong, it won’t bring back the Circe, but it might make a difference as far as financing another ship is concerned. Surely Clarice and her mother won’t desert you once they know the circumstances.”

  He looked straight at her and smiled wryly. “I’m afraid I put a stop to that before we ever sailed. Didn’t you wonder when Clarice failed to sail on the Circe?”

  “What do you mean, you put a stop to Clarice?” She hesitated. “Oh no! You mean to say you broke the engagement?”

  He shrugged and winced. “I decided I couldn’t live with a brainless woman, no matter how decorative and rich.”

  “So you turned to Arabella Fotheringay after all. But Aaron Fine told me she’s marrying him. In fact, he gave me some cock-and-bull story that it was you who turned her down.”

  “That wasn’t exactly the way it happened. You see, I always tried to make Arabella into someone else. Aaron knew exactly who she was and wanted her for herself. He even calls her Miriam. He is the heritage she rejected and always felt secretly guilty for rejecting. She and I finally agreed that we could never do well together. She wants a glittering, formal social life built around a large house and a doting husband, and I want a simple home life that will leave me free to work.”

  “I can’t say I blame her for not going along with you. What you’re really saying is that you’re married to your work, am I right? No woman wants to play second fiddle to a smelly iron ship.”

  “Did I ever tell you that my grandmother helped my grandfather with his shipyard, and that my mother kept accounts for my father? What a man does is what makes him a man. The only way a woman can share in that is to share in his work. I don’t know if a woman like that exists anymore. What do you think?”

  Somehow they had gotten on shaky ground. She knew very well what she thought, but she wasn’t for the likes of him. She suddenly felt very tired. “What does it matter what I think? What matters is what you are going to do.”

  “What would you have me do?”

  “Face them, all of them, and show every one of them how vicious and unfair they’ve been.”

  “What good would that serve, may I ask?”

  “Better than sitting here moping and feeling sorry for yourself,” she snapped. “Clarice isn’t the only one in the world with money.”

  “No,” he said, considering, “she isn’t, is she? The best of the lot, though, except for Arabella. I know them all, and most are not only brainless but not very decorative, either.”

  “Stop it, Judge! You refused to marry Clarice really because you couldn’t go through with it, and you know it. The role of gigolo doesn’t suit you at all — you’re not nearly devious enough. I’ll be right back.” She wanted to break up this discussion before it went too far.

  She went downstairs to order a meal sent up and some warm water and clean cloths. When she returned, he was still sitting on the bed.

  “I suppose Sam sent you,” he said.

  Like a blow the realization hit her that he didn’t know any of what had happened on the Circe after he had gone ashore. “No, Judge. Sam — Sam died in the shipwreck.”

  He closed his eyes. “And Thomas?”

  “Thomas too.”

  He had gone white. “How many died?” he asked at last.

  “They think now around five hundred.”

  He opened his eyes then and looked at her. “Roger told me it was bad, but I didn’t know how bad. I killed them all, didn’t I? I seem destined to kill and kill and never die myself …”

  “That’s not true. It wasn’t you who put Circe on the rocks.”

  “Who then?”

  “Sam.”

  “You’re mad! I don’t believe it. He’d have had every reason not to. Why, he’d even invested in her.”

  “Had he, Judge? Hard money?”

  “Well, he promised it. I put his bit in myself.”

  “He admitted what happened to Thomas and me when he was dying. He had gambling debts, and apparently they paid him plenty to delay the Circe however he could. He didn’t mean to sink her, but it was his doing nonetheless. He always played the role of dandy about town, you know, and that comes high, what with gambling at White’s and all the rest.”

  “You and Thomas rescued him?”

  “No. He was shot before the ship went under. The seamen were armed and insisting on being rescued before the rest. Sam made the mistake of getting between. The captain was shot by a passenger, whatever the inquiry says.”

  “How did you get off?”

  “Thomas knocked me out.” She pointed to the now yellowish-green bruise on her jaw. “I was the last across on the lines, and even I got a ducking.”

  There was a knock on the door, and Katharine opened it to three boys, obviously brothers, who carried in the dinner, a bottle of wine, and a basin of warm water. She gave each a coin and closed the door after them.

  “Aren’t you afraid you’ll be, er, compromised coming into my room like this?”

  She laughed. “I told them I was your wife. Do you want me to change the dressing on your arm before or after dinner?”

  “The dinner may get cold, but better before. It’s been a long time since I ate, and I don’t want to lose it.”

  In the end it took her the better part of half an hour, pulling gently and soaking the blood-encrusted bandage with warm water as she went. When she had finished, Christian was white and sweating. Something — shells or barnacles on a rock — had ripped two parallel furrows the length of his arm, and the outside of his forearm had a great crust of dried blood which had embedded itself in the bandage.

  “Didn’t the doctor tell you to have the dressings changed every day?”

  He shrugged. “What difference? I tried the first day, but I couldn’t manage it one-handed.”

  “The difference was the pain you just went through,” she said dryly. “You’re fortunate it didn’t infect — ocean cuts usually do.”

  “That damned slasher like to b
urned my arm off with disinfectant,” he grumbled.

  “Why didn’t you go back to him?”

  “Because I told him I was leaving. I didn’t want anyone tracking me through him.”

  She laughed. “You idiot, do you really think that everyone in this village doesn’t know you’re here? You are a city boy, aren’t you?”

  “Maybe so, but no one’s bothered me.”

  “That’s only because no one knows for sure you’re alive yet. It won’t be long before rumors of the wounded stranger reach Halifax, and then they’ll come and drag you back. I think you should face them all before that. If you would be a king, you must act like one.”

  “A king?”

  “What else are you rulers of shipping empires? You have your armies and your wars — yes, and your turncoats, too. As if it isn’t enough to battle the great seas of the world, you must battle each other as well. And as in all wars, it isn’t those who make the war who fall in battle.” She put before him a wedge of cooling shepherd’s pie and a tankard of wine.

  He toyed for a few minutes with the food on his plate, then shoved it aside impatiently. “I never saw her actually break up, but in my mind’s eye I see it all nonetheless. Most of the dead were steerage, weren’t they?”

  She shook her head, refusing to discuss it with him now. “If you don’t eat, I’ll have to feed you. You’ve got to be strong, Judge, or they’ll pull you to pieces.”

  She could still hear, would hear until the end of her life, that thin high wailing sound rising and drifting back against the wind as hundreds upon hundreds of living souls perished, dragged down into the cold depths by their impossibly heavy clothing.

  Reluctantly Christian placed a forkful of meat pie in his mouth and washed it down with wine. Then another, and another, until he had cleaned his plate. He sighed. “I didn’t think I’d ever eat again, but life goes on, doesn’t it? No matter how great the tragedy, we go on feeding our stomachs and catering to our bodily needs. By rights I should pine away and expire of sorrow, and a blood-red rose should spring from my grave. Instead I’m bolting down shepherd’s pie and swilling spirits like any day laborer without a worry in the world. So much for the poets.”