How humiliating to accept that he was right.
Emma drew a steadying breath.
“I am going into service,” she explained.
“Ah.” Mary nodded. “Well, plenty of opportunities where we’re going, eh? Pretty puss like you.”
Emma’s smile froze. She knew her looks attracted attention. Her hair was too red to escape notice, Paul had told her. Her mouth was too wide, her bosom too generous to seem completely respectable. But…
Plenty of opportunities? Bitterness assailed her. Dear God, she had left work she loved and the only people she cared for to travel three thousand miles across the Atlantic as an indentured servant.
She did not see opportunities. Only exile.
Emma gave herself a mental shake. Better to scrub floors than earn her living on her back as Paul had offered. She had made her choice, driven as it was by panic, pride, and desperation. She could not afford the luxury of regret.
“You are very kind,” she said. Surely the woman meant her remarks kindly.
The woman clucked. “And nobody, no sweethearts, to see you off?”
“No,” Emma said firmly. “No one.”
Her throat ached. No one at all.
The brown river rushed between the ship and the shore. The deck shuddered and surged underfoot. She watched—she felt—everything she had known sliding away to starboard. The great clock tower, the Custom House’s dome, the spires of St. Nicholas’s and St. Peter’s, all the familiar landmarks disappearing forever because Paul had been a villain and she, a trusting fool.
Emma swallowed the lump in her throat. She would not give in to tears. She would not. She had wasted tears enough.
She caught herself straining for one last glimpse of the school, as if she could see beyond the bustling dock and busy streets to pick out one tiled rooftop among hundreds of other tiled rooftops in the city. Ridiculous. And yet…There was the promenade where she walked sometimes at the head of her girls, a line of bobbing baby ducks in blue wool uniforms.
The wind kicked up. Among the squawking, darting kittiwakes, a gannet soared, its wide wings flashing in the sunlight. The gray ocean rolled over the brown waters of the river, the waves adorned with foam like dirty lace.
An aching sense of loss weighted her chest.
A solitary seal heaved its head above the choppy water, braving the harbor traffic all around. Emma caught her breath. The massive dark body wore a thick band of scars like a necklace. The seal stood a moment against the wash, regarding the ship with dark, clear eyes, almost as if it marked Emma’s passage. Emma stared back, wondering at the seal’s boldness. Oddly comforted by its presence. As a girl walking along the cliffs of North Devon, she used to watch the seals hauled out on the rocky shore. But she had never seen one here before.
Just as suddenly, the great, sleek body disappeared. Disappointed, Emma squinted a long time at the moving water, willing the seal to surface.
When she looked again toward shore, the city and all the remnants of her past life had slipped away.
The wind blew from the west, retarding the ship’s passage. The engines labored through long, heavy swells. After five days at sea, the ship was barely midway through the voyage, and most passengers had lost their stomach for adventure…and everything else.
The stench belowdecks was terrible.
Emma braced fourteen-year-old Alice Gardner in her bunk as the girl retched violently into a bucket. The child had been separated from her family and quartered aft with eleven other single women under the watchful eye of Matron. It should have reminded Emma comfortingly of school, but with so many seasick and bedridden, the area between decks felt more like one giant infirmary.
At least Emma had some experience nursing pupils. Alice was the same age as many of her students. Emma wiped the girl’s face with a damp handkerchief, murmuring some soothing nonsense. She was grateful for something to do, for the opportunity to feel needed. She could not teach. That did not mean she could not be useful.
Matron—jealous, perhaps, of her own authority or suspicious of the color of Emma’s hair—had initially spurned her offers of help. But the surgeon’s time was taken up almost entirely with the twenty-six first-class passengers, and as conditions deteriorated in steerage, Matron relied more and more on Emma to help her with the younger girls.
After several days, Emma struggled simply to keep her eyes open. She moved through a viscous fog of exhaustion. Her arms and legs felt weighted. Her stomach felt like lead.
The cabin pitched and tossed.
Alice shrieked and wept.
Up and down, up and down, the creaking ship rode the crests in time with the angry sea.
Up and—
A crack like thunder exploded from the hold, slapping Emma from her stupor. The ship shuddered, suspended, and then plunged.
The bucket slopped. Her stomach lurched. She grabbed the rail to avoid being tumbled to the floor.
Nineteen-year-old Cora Poole, in the bunk above, began to cry. “We’re going to die. We’re all going to die.”
“I wish I was dead,” another girl groaned.
Foreboding tightened Emma’s chest. The roar of the engines still shook the air and vibrated the walls all around. But something was different. Something was…wrong. The ship lolled and rolled, no longer fighting the waves.
Emma clung to the bunk with sweaty palms, her heart tripping in her chest. She was almost as close to hysterics as her charges.
As if bursting into tears ever did anyone any good.
“That’s quite enough,” Emma said in her schoolmistress tone. If her voice trembled slightly, no one appeared to notice. “No one is going to die.”
She hoped.
She mustered her charges, struggling for balance in the narrow, pitching cabin, bundling and buttoning them into cloaks and jackets and boots in case it became necessary to go—
Dear God. Emma closed her eyes a moment, fighting panic. Where could they go? They were in the middle of the ocean.
A new sound—a deep, rhythmic rattle—rumbled from the bowels of the ship, almost drowning the crash of the waves.
Matron appeared, her face as gray as a sheet.
Emma stood, her knuckles white on the bunk rail. “What is it?” she asked quietly. “What has happened?”
“The shaft is broken. We’ve lost the propeller.”
Without the propeller, the ship was unmanageable. Helpless in this sea. Emma felt her knees fold like string and fought another wild surge of panic.
“But that sound—” She forced the words through numb, stiff lips. “The engines…”
“The pumps,” Matron said. “Captain is pumping water from the hold.”
Their eyes held a moment in silent communication. They were taking on water, then. Emma’s heart plummeted.
“What can be done?” she asked.
Matron shrugged. “Wait for another ship.”
Emma’s throat constricted. Another ship? But that meant…That must mean…
Dear God.
They were sinking.
Hours passed. The ship bounced and rolled like a log in a river. Emma staggered through the single women’s quarters, wiping faces, holding hands and buckets. As long as she kept busy, she did not have to think about the ship’s fate.
Or her own.
No one ate or slept. Emma coaxed the girls to take sips of fetid water. She could not even brew a cup of tea in the tiny galley without setting fire to the ship or herself. The incessant clanking of the pumps pounded in her head, penetrating the babble from the main steerage compartment. Children screamed. Men grumbled. Women moaned and prayed.
Emma thought the noise would drive her mad.
Until it was replaced by something worse.
Silence.
Emma hurried in search of Matron and met her own fears reflected in the other woman’s eyes.
“The leak in the hold has put the fire out.” Matron’s broad, country voice was sharp and raw. “There is no steam
to drive the pumps. We’re done.”
The word tolled like a church bell at a funeral: Done, done, done…
Emma’s mouth went dry. She wet her lips. “Has the captain—”
“Captain gave orders to abandon ship.”
Emma braced on the rolling bow, light-headed with terror, struggling to keep her huddled girls together and upright. The wind lashed her skirts and tore at her bonnet. Her wet boots sucked at her ankles. Waves buffeted the ship’s sides, washing over the stern. Spray shot halfway to the masts and fell like cold, hard rain.
Abandon ship?
Abandon hope, more like.
The lifeboats tossed on the towering waves, insubstantial as the paper boats with their cargos of pebbles and sticks that schoolboys sailed from the riverbank. Fragile. Perilous.
The heavy seas rendered the ship’s ladders useless. The boats could not come near without crashing into the ship’s sides. So the passengers had to be loaded in baskets, swung over the angry water and lowered by rope thirty feet to the rising, falling boats. Women first, in groups of three or four, and their children after them.
Emma held her breath as Mary Jenkins stretched out her arms for her youngest son and pulled him into the rocking basket. Her husband’s pale face ran with spray or tears. His fists clenched at his sides.
“Careful, Mary!” he shouted.
The ship rolled, the stern wallowing in the water. The girls shivered and wept. Emma hugged fourteen-year-old Alice tight. Giving comfort. Taking courage.
“We’re lost,” one of the waiting men groaned. “All is lost.”
All. The word struck Emma’s heart. Keepsakes and clothing, the little package of books wrapped in oilskin to protect them for the journey, the few belongings she had salvaged from her former existence, everything she possessed to launch her new life, all gone, all lost forever.
“Lord, Lord, I don’t want to die,” Alice sobbed.
Emma got a grip on herself. “Well, of c-course not.” Her teeth chattered. “Everything will be all right. Our turn is coming.”
“One more,” a sailor shouted from below.
The officer on the bow, a boy not much older than Alice, beckoned to Emma. “You, miss.”
Alice clutched her. “Don’t leave me.”
Emma did not think. “No. No, I won’t.” She pried the girl’s fingers from her cloak. “Here, sweetheart, you go first.”
“But—”
Emma thrust her at the young officer. “Go!”
Alice stumbled forward, toward the waiting ropes.
Emma watched, her heart in her throat, as the basket bearing Alice was lowered jerkily by bowline along the side of the ship.
Was she…? Emma strained over the rail to see the girl caught and pulled safely into the boat.
Emma inhaled in relief and satisfaction, straightening her back. The ship lurched. Off balance, she teetered and clutched at the rail. Her wet boots skidded on the slippery deck. No. Oh, no.
A cold wave rose and crashed over her, smashed over her, sluiced over her, ripping the rail from her grasp and sweeping her feet from under her.
Voices shouted. Hands grabbed. Too late.
She heard a rushing in her head, a roaring in her ears. The wave dragged her from the ship, and she toppled down, down into the cold, hard sea.
The shock knocked the air from her lungs and jarred her to the bone. A raging chaos engulfed her. She was numb. Blind. Cold. Her mind froze. She could not breathe. Water pulled at her skirts, dragged at her boots, spun her this way, tugged her that. Her petticoats floated and clung, trapping her like a fish in a net.
The boat. She needed to reach the boat. She was rolling, tumbling, sinking in the surge.
She was drowning.
The realization stabbed her like a knife. Like the lack of air.
She struggled, kicking with her sodden boots, flailing with her feeble arms. Something smooth and heavy glided against her legs, a shadow moving under her in the clear, cold dark. Horror clawed her.
Shark.
It circled higher, brushed by her, pushed more insistently. Terrified, she struck out, as if she could push the monster away, and touched fur, slick and flowing against her hands. She tightened her grip reflexively, dug her fingers into soft, thick pelt. Muscle rolled, flexed, and surged. Her arms jerked. Her shoulders strained as it pulled her through the freezing dark, towing her with fluid power. Up and up, the heavy, sleek body moving under her own, lifting her, supporting her, carrying her toward…
Light.
Her head broke the surface of the water. Her hair plastered her face like seaweed. She gasped, choked, inhaled.
The cold, briny air seared her throat and burned her lungs.
She retched and would have gone under again.
But her rescuer was there, big as a horse or a mattress, bumping and rubbing against her, bearing her weight. She clung instinctively to its bulk, felt its breath hot in her face, felt its…whiskers?
She blinked salt from her eyes, struggling to focus. Roman nose, round, dark eyes, thickset, powerful body—
A seal.
Wonder bloomed in her chest. She had been saved by a giant seal. With a band of scars around its neck. Its breath flowed over her again, warm and salty sweet, drugging as wine. Her senses swam.
No, she thought. She must swim. The boat. She had to reach—
The world whirled away from her, flowed away from her in streams of green and gray. Her vision was shot with gold like the sea on a sunny day. The ocean rushed in her ears, its melody rising in her blood, humming in her head, muffling the frantic beat of her heart.
Her lips moved soundlessly. No, she tried to say. Really…
Darkness.
Quiet.
Nothing.
TWO
Her bed was wide and soft. Emma drifted, floating with fatigue, buoyed by a dream. She didn’t want to wake up. She was warm and dry and—
Naked.
Her stretching foot paused. Gooseflesh tingled her arms. Emma had not slept naked since…She never slept naked. The school was too cold. Her musty mattress at the boardinghouse had been infested with vermin. Even on board ship, she had—
The ship.
Memory flooded back in a rush: the ship, the broken propeller shaft, the sea. She had fallen into the sea. Emma remembered the weight of her boots, her petticoats dragging her down…
She inhaled sharply and opened her eyes.
Dear God.
She bolted upright in bed, grabbing for the covers.
A man loomed by her bed, a big man with a broad, bare, hairy chest. No shirt. No shoes. Not even stockings. Emma’s heart pounded. She had never seen so much solid muscle, so much male skin in her life. Even Paul when they had—when he had—
But thinking of Paul brought a fresh surge of panic.
Her fists clenched on the covers. “Who are you? Where am I? Where are my clothes?”
The half-naked man stood quiet and unmoving, regarding her with dark, fathomless eyes. Dry-mouthed with fear, Emma fought to shake off the remnants of her dream. Did he understand? Perhaps he didn’t speak English. He didn’t look English.
She gulped. He barely looked civilized. His mane of thick, unruly hair was caught in a leather thong and tied in a stubby ponytail at his nape. His face was strong and raw, its lean planes broken by a brawler’s nose. Silver glinted in the hollow of his throat.
A chain. He wore a chain. Like a dog, Emma thought.
Or a Viking.
She licked her lips nervously. She felt dazed. Almost drugged, as if she’d drunk too much wine or taken laudanum for a toothache. She didn’t know where to look. All that skin…Her gaze dropped to his feet, broad, bare, masculine feet with a sprinkling of dark hair.
Her stomach clenched. Quivered.
There was something strange and almost unbearably intimate about those naked feet standing so close to her bed, the long pale arches, the jutting anklebones, the firm, muscled calves. His toes.
&nbs
p; Emma frowned, convinced her mind was playing tricks on her. Something about his toes…
“They were wet.” The deep, burred voice broke her distraction.
She jumped, her gaze flying back to the harsh-planed face of the man beside her bed. “What?”
“Your clothes,” he explained. In English, thank goodness. “They were wet. You were cold.”
Her skin prickled. Her chest felt tight. “I—”
“You could not wear them,” he said patiently.
“No,” she agreed faintly.
Oh, no. She fought another sudden wash of panic. She was not going to overreact to the notion of a man—this man—touching her, undressing her.
Memory engulfed her like a wave.
“Don’t overreact, darling,” Paul had said as he buttoned up his breeches. “I thought you wanted it. You were certainly asking for it.”
Her throat froze. She could not move.
The man frowned and leaned closer. “Are you all right?”
Emma gasped and raised her hand to hold him off. Don’t touch me, don’t touch me, don’t…
“Don’t,” she managed to squeeze past her throat.
He stopped instantly, his dark eyes watchful. “It’s all right. You are safe now.”
Safe. Saved.
She trembled in relief and reaction. What on earth had happened? She was dreaming. Drowning. She had fallen into the sea. And then…And then…
“What about the others?” she forced herself to ask. “Alice. Mrs. Jenkins.”
“I do not know them.”
Panic welled. “The other women on the ship. There was a girl, Alice Gardner, traveling with me in steerage. She was only fourteen.”
Sudden understanding widened his eyes. “The girl who took your place in the lifeboat.”
How did he know?
“Have you seen her?” Emma asked eagerly. “Is she here?”
Shifter Page 28
