Cast Off (6 page)

I rubbed my arms against the chill. The air was still, cool, and heavy with damp. The hold was dark and always would be because there were no portholes. It reeked of bilge. Cloves and dried lavender would help, but of course I had none. I spun a slow circle, holding out the candle. The light showed a mountain range of crates and casks and caught the glassy eyes of rats scurrying into corners.

Much as I envied them, I hated rats. When I was small and I slept in a trundle next to Albertina's bed, they'd run across my blanket at night. I learned to sleep with the covers over my head, which was suffocating, even in winter. When I grew bigger and Tina and I shared a four-poster, I made her double knot the bed curtains.

Relief and fear dueled in my heart, with excitement and dread standing by as seconds. These would be my living quarters for the next six months. If I was lucky.

And yet, I could well understand the boy Bram's thinking. Dark, roomy, plenty of hidey-holes, and when I
needed air
or food, I could go up the hatch and use Master Clockert's crates to climb over his storeroom wall.

Cautiously, I explored my new home. My section of the hold was at the back end of the ship. Midship was where the everyday stores were kept. The ceiling was lower there, and barrels of water and salted meats took up a good portion of the space. The cargo was lashed together or packed in box-frames to keep it from shifting. A wall between my area and the main, everyday area would keep loose things from rolling too far.

These explorations took no more than a quarter hour. Idleness being my mind's worst enemy, I put together a makeshift sleeping platform out of two trunks, and a table from a barrel of grain. A crate of knives worked as a chair, and I used my sleeve for a duster. I lacked only a proper scrub brush and some damp sand.

When I emptied the sack, I found the supper Bram had packed for me. My fingertips began to tremble—

I tore into the stale bread. Bram had pilfered cheese too, and a stone bottle of beer, which I gulped down in one long swig. Albertina would have been appalled.

My meal finished, the pail stowed, the blanket spread, there was nothing more for me to do but sleep, and so I lay down on my new bed and wrapped myself in the blanket, which, it turned out, was very dirty but very warm.

But sleep was impossible. My mind bolted from thought to thought like a kitchen mouse with a cat after it. How would I fill the empty hours? How would I bear the loneliness? What would become of me? And, worst of all,
what had Father done to Albertina after he failed to spend all his wrath on me?
He might have beaten her or dismissed her from her position. A good job wasn't easy to find, especially without a reference from her employer. Albertina had put her own life at risk when she saved mine.

The ship rocked slowly at its mooring. I could hear the slap of the water against its hull and the creaking of its ribs. I missed the weight of nasty old Henry Hudson the cat on my feet. I pulled off my slippers and set them upside down on the end of my bed as Albertina did with hers. To ward off witches, she said.

For better or worse, tomorrow I'd be at sea.

I woke some hours later to the sound of bells. The candle had burned out and not a speck of light leaked through the ship's tightly caulked timbers. It could have been midnight or noon for all I knew. I stared into absolute darkness and wondered when Bram would return and hoped it would be soon. Then I remembered I'd sworn never to bother him again.

I'd nothing to eat. For the first time in my life, I'd nothing to do—even as a small child I'd helped my
mother and
Tina with the housework. I lay on my trunk bed and listened to rats skipping among the loads of cargo and sailors clomping on the floors above my head. Also a strange sweeping sound I couldn't put a name to.

I sat up.

I lay back down.

“Greetings, fellow rats,” I whispered into the dark. “Please allow me to introduce myself. I am Petra De Winter, and, like you, I'm a stowaway on this ship bound for the East Indies, where, not incidentally, I've recently learned I'm forbidden by law to disembark. I've no idea how to solve that problem, and so I shall put it out of my mind until I resolve my more immediate concerns.
Namely that
I'm so hungry I could eat one of you vermin uncooked and in a single swallow if I could only catch you. I would steal food from the galley—as I'm sure you do on a daily basis—but judging by the thunder of sailors' feet and all the shouting and singing going on, it seems that now would not be an opportune moment.”

I covered my face with my hands. “God's teeth, I'm talking to rats.”

The ship's bells followed a pattern. First one bell, then, perhaps half an hour later, two bells, then three, and so on until eight. After that, they began again with one. I didn't know what the bells signified, but counting them helped pass the time.

Alas, counting bells was no help for seasickness. My stomach was no match for the sour smell of bilge and the lurch of the ship now that we were under way. I'd been on boats countless times, of course—Amsterdam is a city built on water—but I'd never felt the roll of a one-hundred-
fifty-foot
-long East Indiaman at sea. My nausea slithered from the pit of my stomach up my throat to squeeze my head, octopus-like, with slimy sucking tentacles. I curled up on my trunk bed and begged my body to purge itself, but the sickness neither increased nor decreased. And so I lay, sweating and counting bells, and listening to the strange sweep and shuffle somewhere above my head.

Shortly after the second round of eight, Bram came back.

“You still here, Miss Petra?” he whispered into the dark.

“I am.” I pushed myself up and willed my back to stay straight. Moaning was also out of the question.

Bram carried a lantern with him and used the candle inside to light mine. “I brought you a tinderbox for when your light goes out. Some more rations too.”

“Thank you.”

He set another hunk of bread and some cheese on the table. Also a bottle of beer and more candles.

“Did you go up the hatch today?” he asked.

“I didn't dare,” I said. “I heard voices in the surgeon's cabin.” But I needed to go up soon to empty the slop bucket through the surgeon's porthole. The smell was nearly as bad as the bilge water.

“That's no matter,” Bram said. “If you take care, you should be able to stay there as long as you like. Clockert almost never unlocks the storeroom, and Krause, his mate, don't have a key. Also, I oiled the hinges on the hatch for you last night. When things settle down a bit you should be able to get some food from the galley. You'll need to, 'cause you can't get into the bread room from here. You got to go down the hatch in the gunroom to get into it.”

“Where is the bread room?”

“Why, it's right there on the other side of that wall,” he said, pointing to the rear of the cabin. “The bread room's got tin over all the walls to keep out rats and bugs and such. It's where we stow stuff like bread, biscuits, flour, and cheese. And also gunpowder, which is why the only way in is through the gunroom one deck up.”

“You keep gunpowder with bread?”

“Can you think of a drier place?”

I couldn't.

“I'll try going up tomorrow, then. Or, er, later today? Can you tell me, Bram, what time it is? Is it day or night? I think I've worked out the bells, but I don't know the hour.”

Bram said it was afternoon and he gave me an explanation of the bells that included mentions of dogs and watches and lubbers. He must have read bewilderment on my face, because he stopped his lecture and said, “Give it a few days and you'll figure it out.”

“I'll make sure I do,” I promised.

“We're under way. Can you tell?”

“I thought I noticed a change in pace,” I squeaked.

“We're making five knots with a good steady wind. Fair skies and Barometer Piet says his hand is feeling fine.”

I hadn't the slightest idea what any of that meant, but Bram seemed happy about it, so I said, “How wonderful.”

“You ready to get working?”

“Absolutely,” I lied. I was ready for a mercury purge.

He eyed me shrewdly. “Seasick, are you?”

“Only a bit.”

“Time will take care of it. And ginger. I'll see if I can get some from Happy Jan the cook. He's got a big root of it in the galley for all the newbies who never been to sea before. Not that we have a lot of 'em, since De Ridder's got his sailors who follow him from ship to ship. I can't say about the soldiers, though. We got about a hundred on board this trip, out of maybe three hundred men total, and usually most of 'em is new to the sea.”

There it was again.
Sweep, shuffle-shuffle-shuffle-shuffle
. “What's that noise?”

“Noise?”

“That sweeping, shuffling sound. I've been hearing it all day.”
Sweep, shuffle-shuffle-shuffle-shuffle.

Bram cocked his head and listened for a moment. “Only it's the soldiers moving around their quarters. They're right over your head if you're in the main part of the hold. They got their own deck there where they stay most of the time, 'cept maybe once or twice a day when they come up for air.”

“Is that why the ceiling is lower in the main hold? To make a place for the soldiers?”

“Aye.”

“But their deck can't be more than four feet high! A grown person can't even stand there!” Which must be why they shuffle around on their knees.

“Why, no, they can't. But that's no matter. What do they need to stand for? The soldiers don't do any ship's work—not unless we get into a battle, in which case they come out and help fight, whatever good that does, since most of 'em is next to useless. No, unless there's a battle, they mostly sleep and play cards all day.”

“But why don't they work?”

“They're soldiers, not sailors, here as passengers to Ba-tavia, where they got jobs waiting for 'em guarding the colony.”