Cinnamon and Gunpowder (30 page)

“Oh, shut up, Wedge, I wasn’t talking about Joshua. I was talking about you. You’re the dog.” Mabbot was laughing out loud now. “You stubborn cur. But you learn. And this
food
, Wedge. Kidnapping you was the best decision I’ve made in years.” She beamed.

I folded my arms and took to looking at the floor.

“Let us take a little stroll and watch the moon.”

“I don’t stroll as well as I used to,” I said.

“We don’t have far to go.”

Mabbot waited patiently as I navigated the ladder to the poop deck by placing my crutches up first, and then supporting myself with an iron grip on the top rung.

We stood between the Twa Corbies, watching the moon in silence for a long time, each of us lost in our own thoughts. The strangeness of my new life impressed itself upon me, this intimacy with notorious criminals, this chaotic tour of the globe. And this woman, for she was, despite her savagery and unnatural predilections, an undeniably lovely woman, a more fascinating character than I had ever known. Her arm, when the ship rolled, occasionally brushed against mine, and though I am sure she noticed it too, she made no effort to distance herself. When a crutch fell, she picked it up for me.

“I want to understand, Hannah,” I said softly. “Please don’t get upset … the opium—of all the injustices in the world—” I found myself stumbling over my own tongue, not wanting to ruin the rare moment of peace between us. “That is, as you have pointed out, the world ignores the opium trade, but for some reason you cannot.”

“Your papist ears are itching for a confession?” Mabbot chewed her thumbnail while she considered my face. “Do you recall my young days as a bed warmer? I had a friend in that brothel. She was older than I was, but she lacked a certain … numbness that the rest of us had, a knack for leaving the body while the men batted it around. She felt every grunt and hairy grip. I watched her face wasting away, every day more gaunt, and her red-rimmed eyes … So I stole a tin of opium from a coat pocket, easy enough while the gentleman snored, and told her to eat a little before. And it worked. It helped greatly.”

Moonlight fell on her brow, on her nose and lips.

I whispered, “Where is the confession?”

“That’s it. I made it easy for her, for
them
. I might as well have chained her to that bed. She didn’t cry anymore; she disappeared completely. When I ran away with Evangeline, this one stayed for the opium pipe.”

“A childhood mistake turns you into a pirate?”

“Do you really think, after all that you’ve seen, Wedge, that I’m out here atoning for my crimes? When I learned how Ramsey had used me, when I learned how the Pendleton Company really made their money, that girl rose up in me; she reaches for the sword with my hand.”

“It’s true, then, that Ramsey’s ghost sits at the heart of the story, having pitted you each against the other?”

“In his scheming to own the globe, he sowed the sea with privateers and assassins, leveraged the Royal Navy to his will, and even forced the Crown to allow him to raise private armies in Africa and India. The devil himself could not keep so many pawns in place.”

“And to think I made biscuits for the man.”

She shivered. “Let’s get back inside before the crew starts asking questions about this dress.”

Hopping in the undignified manner my new proportions demanded, I escorted her to her door, then made to leave, but she beckoned me back inside. I leaned upon my crutches while she dug in the chest at her bedside and produced a bizarre item, much like a wooden chalice, with a stem of polished teak and a rounded base. Its cup was full of moleskin and a knitted wool pad; the whole was adorned with a heavy leather strap and buckle.

“It was a collaborative effort,” Mabbot said. “We’ll have to fit it to match your stride.”

I could see their hands in it: Mr. Apples’s yarn thick and soft, the wood oiled to a handsome sheen by Kitzu, the leather worked to velvet suppleness. It was a gift of considerable forethought, even beauty, but how could I feel grateful? The thing revolted me. The seductive complacency I had felt just moments before dissipated in an instant. I felt that if I accepted this thing and wore it, then they would, piece by piece, take all of me and leave me a leather-and-wooden puppet. I feared, frankly, for my soul.

I said, “I wouldn’t need such an abomination if not for you!”

Without another word, I took my crutches and hobbled out, leaving her holding the artificial leg.

Tuesday, October 19

Today the surgeon and Kitzu came to fit my peg to my body, and though the process filled me with a number of unpleasant emotions, I cooperated. Mabbot has it in her head that I should wear it, and after all, it would be nice to walk rather than hop. After the measurements, Kitzu took it away, then brought it back a quarter inch shorter and left me with it.

Deeper and deeper through the South China Sea we go. Every day I feel some grim terminus approach. By her tenacity, one would guess the captain intends to drive us to the tattered edge of the map. She is her own planet moving on a stubborn mission against the sweep of order.

17

SABOTAGE

In which we visit a witch

Wednesday, October 20

I spend much of my time learning Joshua’s hand language, though there seems to be no end of it. It’s our arrangement: he learns to read, I learn to sign. If I am falling behind, it is only because he learns so quickly. He corrects me now without hesitation, jumping upon the slightest mistake and mocking my errors. He is frustrated with the way I move my face, particularly my eyebrows, and goes so far as to push at my features as if to mold them by hand.

Wednesday, Later

It is late, but I write by candlelight because I am too anxious to sleep. I saw Mr. Apples and Mabbot discussing anchoring tomorrow in the Phan Thiet port of Cochin China. This may be my last opportunity to escape, and I must take it. Again, I have packed myself some meager foods for a journey. When the party leaves tomorrow, I will wait for them to get some distance, free myself from my cell if need be, then make to the dock.

I stride with my strange new appendage the three steps to my hammock and back and forth like a caged tiger, until a spot has worn in the wood where my peg lands. The strap has to be very tight to keep it from slipping, but each day I can wear it for longer stretches.

Thursday, October 21

I was upended early this morning when Mr. Apples threw my door open and announced, “The cap’m wants you should join us.”

I could not tell him I had other plans, and so, soon enough, we were moving swiftly in a longboat toward a pier. There were six of us: Mr. Apples, the twins, a Cochin seaman, the captain, and myself. In the harbor were half a dozen fishing boats, little larger than canoes, occupied by figures in wide straw hats. I watched as one hauled a net full of shimmering fish out of the water. The green-furred hills bunched toward the mouth of a wide river. Close to the inlet were several ships with roofs instead of masts. They looked like illustrations of Noah’s ark.

“Hulks,” Mr. Apples told me. “Floatin’ warehouses. When a ship’s been patched too many times and is too weary for open sea, she gets pastured.”

“If the Fox is headed to Macau,” I asked Mabbot, “why stop here?”

“There is a man, an old friend of mine—well connected, a first-rate smuggler before the malaria slowed him. He’s the only person I trust to take me into Macau. He knows the countryside there. And with any luck his grandmother is still alive too.”

“His grandmother?”

“She knows things.”

As we walked down the dock, ruby-eyed herons judged us from their perches on the gouty trees above. Bai carried one of the pheasants we had captured on the island, still squawking in its sack.

A pair of unshaven French soldiers sat smoking in wicker chairs at the foot of the dock, their uniforms sagging open in the heat. As we neared, they stood and aimed their muskets halfheartedly. Mabbot’s stride didn’t slow until she was only a few feet from the taller soldier, who was obliged to take a step back to keep his gun trained on her.

“I’m Captain Hannah Mabbot. That’s my
Flying Rose
. Do you know me?”

No doubt the soldier had seen the scarlet flag of the
Rose
even as she anchored. Now he was taking in Mr. Apples’s barrel chest and the swords on the hips of the twins. A prod from his subordinate steeled his resolve, though, and he rattled his blunderbuss and growled, “
Je ne parle pas anglais
.”

Mabbot pulled a ditty bag from her belt and emptied it into her palm. She offered the half-dozen silver crowns to the man. “Do you know me now?”

He took the money with relief and returned to his post, where the other soldier bickered with him for his share of the toll.

Walking upon solid ground took some getting used to, as the path came up and met my peg in a jarring manner. The air was alive with the odor of ox dung and the paternal musk of the earth itself.

“Did you just end decades of enmity with thirty bob?” I asked. “France is poorer than I thought.”

“Mercenaries,” Mabbot spat. “Those men aren’t French any more than I’m English. If we don’t get near their hulks, they won’t give a fig about us. Besides, France knows my work. They should be paying me.”

The forested hills were riotous with birdcalls. I had been eager to get to land, but the jungle was uncomfortably close, and the stories I had read about cannibals and man-eating tigers seemed suddenly quite vivid. The insects alone were enough to make one pause: the flies converged on us as we left the shore, and every few paces a new beetle or spider crawled across our path, each more grotesque than the last.

At a bend in the river, we came to a derelict village consisting of dozens of stilt houses arranged in a rough circle around a boggy meadow. Most were abandoned; others looked to have been razed by bandits and bad weather. The slopes of the nearby hills were scored with fields, but there was no movement there. Weeds had choked the ditches, and feral dogs ran in the wastes. At the peak of the hill sat a church, quiet and dark, its cross jutting into the sky like the hand of a distant swimmer. Several huts had long since burned, their bamboo skeletons grim in the yellow light. Moreover, the Cochins here seemed to be ill. They lay at the doors of their huts looking gaunt and exhausted. A handful of children, their bellies swollen unnaturally, clustered about us begging. Mabbot tossed them sacks of hardtack and pickled herring—our lunch—and when they had bolted these and still were not appeased, Mabbot was obliged to smack at them with a reed to clear our way.

Why the captain wanted me on this day trip, I couldn’t fathom. She seems to anticipate my attempts to escape, though I hide this log very well in a sack of stale tea. I have even gone so far as to leave a decoy set of innocent musings out for a snooper to discover, yet I have never found evidence of the pages disturbed.

Two older boys ran up bearing a rusty musket and a sharpened stick. Just as Bai leaped to intercept them, they fell to their knees and held the weapons over their heads.