Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 26 (4 page)

Surely this should be enough to end the speculation, Settle hoped, but the figurehead still called through the night, “Beauty does not forgive!”

Why had she done it, she asked herself. Why keep the pearls? What was she thinking? Oh, Settle knew what she was thinking. She was thinking, Such prizes are not for empty spirits like the Ship. She was thinking about what colour of dress would show the pearls off best. But she could not bring herself to look into the pouch. Even in the privacy of the head, where she replaced the bloody bandages of her flow, she did not dare take them out, no matter how much she wanted to enjoy that dizziness again. The only place she trusted herself was in her dreams.

She should have been dreaming of her very own ship or the nightmare of being dragged as bait, but the open sea was undisturbed. The white masses swam menacingly below, but did not break the surface. Only here, under a clear night sky, could she take out the pearls, now strung on a silver wire. The Captain’s voice floated across the water, a groggy croon from the waking world, and in a moment’s instinct, without a further thought, Settle made her own offering to him.

She regarded the pearls and understood that there was something special about the jewels most prized by the Ship. She hurled them upwards and the necklace floated in the air with his voice, a circle suspended between water and space. The loop stretched. Downwards, and Settle followed the plunge into the sea, into a wave, a thimble of water, and saw the oceans cupped within each drop, filled with tiny monsters and bijou wonders. Upwards, and she climbed the rope into Heaven, up amongst the stars, through frozen and miraculous distances, then over the brow of the necklace back through cloud and down again into the water.

Settle woke, spitting. She shook with fever. She was warm as if touched in a certain way and she looked up, expecting the Captain.

“Apple,” she whispered, reaching for his warm body but finding only a cooling shadow.

He was already awake, lying against the bulkhead. His gaze was transfixed by some inner harpoon.

He and Settle had hardly spoken since the hunt. “Settle,” he said, “My ship is coming.”

He was trying so hard to be strong, but tears coursed his cheeks. “I promised you. I promised you.”

She touched his leg, shushed him.

“Settle, tell me about our wedding day.”

“My love will be dressed in silk the colour of an undiscovered ocean. I will be dressed in pearls.”

“I wanted to be strong like you. I wanted to be you.”

“And our families will sit down to a feast of roasted whale.”

“Settle, please—I do not want to leave.”

She gathered him to her, rocked him. “Then stay.”

Long Preston had told her: in the dreams of your heart’s desire, you can hide your ship. Hush, hush, she told Apple, and fiddled with the buttons on his trousers.

The fever got stronger and Settle swayed with the violent motion in her heart. But the strength was in her now. She rolled on top, kissing around his stubble, still so much a boy’s, and called him to a safe harbour.

It was a waking dream. The sea opened before her as she closed her eyes. After nervous fumbling, she commanded a rhythm, until finally, it glided into view: a smart schooner, two-masted, but with sails half-rolled, uncertain. Apple’s ship. She made the clouds stay apart and withheld the waves, and the schooner settled into sunlight and calm waters.

They slept. Only Settle woke the next morning.

When the Judge and Apple’s duty master came, they inspected the empty manacles and glowered. “He crews a galleon in Heaven now,” she told them.

They accepted this—where else could a prentice hide aboard the Ship? He would not have been the first to take a final midnight stroll on the upper deck.

But Settle waited for the Judge to leave her alone at her swabbing the next morning before she put down the bucket. She had to be sure that Apple was away. Quickly, she scooted the circumference of the hull, through the stores, the crew quarters, moving quickly, looking for signs of new infusions—but while she found recent sections in the bulkhead for the two Wessex boys, Apple had been spared.

What of the dead? The Ship took them as well. From the hatch that led to the belly, Settle heard the susurrus of the dead and other things. Father had taught her how to pick locks when he started forgetting keys in his drinking, so she easily threw open the hatch door. The darkness within made her suddenly vertiginous. She uncoiled the rope ladder hooked into place around the hole, took the lantern and descended into the bilge.

Water splashed below—a foot deep. The dead rose and fell like shouting in a fog, so many of them that Settle marvelled at how long the Ship must have been stitching and re-stitching the sea with its restlessness. But in all the voices, she did not recognize Apple. He was safe from the Ship now.

Settle held the lantern up—the light reflected off the ceiling two yards above her and illuminated the surface of an ocean filling the Ship’s belly. Pegged at regular intervals around the bulkhead were small bottles taped green and blue, catching drips like the sap from a tree. In the water, she saw small coloured lumps, a false seabed of pebbles carpeting the floor. Tiny jewels—smaller than those the Monster had sported, and Settle remembered the treasure the figurehead had swallowed. She thought of seeds.

Beneath the dead chorus, there was another sound. In the ocean’s middle, the water was bubbling, spitting upwards in small fountains. Settle waded towards it, feeling the stones under her boots. Standing above the disturbance, she lowered the light.

The ground slanted down, a pocket that exited into an underwater tunnel. Opening to the sea? Perhaps a valve the Ship periodically released—but it was not the sea that was thrashing.

The light glinted off a tiny whale. A white creature that swam in restless circles, trying to free itself of a placenta that it chewed with crystal teeth and rubbed with silver-threaded fins. As Settle watched, it finally broke loose, as all its predecessors would have done, and startled her with an upward leap of freedom, before plunging down the passageway.

The water’s churning fell back. The timbers around her groaned with familiarity. Settle recognized the sound from the childbirth rooms of Spithampton’s midwife.

The dead tried to distract her afterwards, but it was too late. The Ship’s secret was hers.

The Captain warned her to hold the secret as close to her as breath, but she scoffed him, sending him back to his termite queen with a puff of scorn. He came back contrite, presenting her riches and the world, but like the souvenirs of a discarded affair, Settle rejected them. She was tired of geegaws. She wanted something new. She told him, why did she need the whey when she had the curds, and brazenly pulled apart her shirt to show him the pearls, her breasts, her pluck. Sending him away set a part of her smouldering, a part that could not be put out, a heat that stayed with her but flared each time he came back and her heart combusted.

Outside of these dreams, that fire would not leave her, and Settle had no shame in stoking the flames whenever she passed the other sailors at their chapel rest. Hunting for the wedding roast, the Ship had fastened onto the whale’s spoor. The wedding day had been named and festivities had already started. The hull was coating itself in a fine golden fur that rippled in the sun. The crew tied bells to the masts to invite every breeze to the celebrations, delirious that something had broken the long slog of their days.

Down below, the Ship’s sweats supplied a potent grog. Waiting for their next shot of electricity from an adventure, the sailors licked the timbers and reeled to songs of wedding-night bawdiness. Hazily, they all tried to give Settle predator looks now, but she hastened them on with the wild fury in her own gaze. She was not afraid of anyone taking her ship now.

Even the Judge did not look at her anymore, but for that, Settle was grateful. These days he only regarded her with a clock’s face, sadly counting down the days.

One morning, as the Ship completed a slow turn, the Judge sucked in, rubbed the air between thumb and forefinger, and said, “Whale waters.”

“Yes—and I won’t be there to enjoy the feast, will I?”

They worked on in silence. She could see that the Judge was working on a response, but it took him to the following night.

He left a wrap of supplies—tack, a water flask and a pocket compass in a warm fearnought—just outside the open door. He had no lantern, so he spoke as darkness. “One soul can man the lubber boat,” the dark said. “Track west-north-west, four nights should bring ye to the darkie coast.”

Settle took the bundle but did not yet step across the threshold. “If you’re doing this because I could have been your—” She almost said daughter. “—child, then I’ll always remember you fondly as a parent.”

The shadows coughed, then in a low voice, “I thought ye might ship and crew. Ye have spirit sparks about, an eye for adventure. I thought ye would have shown us an escape from the world’s prison. But I’ve seen the way ye’ve mooned the Captain, and I’ve seen how impatient ye are with yer own noonday and how ye want to blaze her Majesty.”

The air stirred with sighs. “No, I never wanted to save ye. I wanted to save our beauty.”

After that, it was true darkness again. Settle was alone.

She buttoned on the fearnought and prowled through the sleeping quarters until she came out on deck. A prayer of night. Slow-sucking water, only a tease of wind. The moon was away, leaving just enough glow for her to pick a way across the ropes and between the wedding streamers as the two duty crew smoked crackers and played checkers.

Settle found the lubber boat—used for shore hops—lashed to the side. She unshrouded and unbound it with little disturbance. Its sails could be unfurled quickly. She deemed that a goodly distance could be made before the alarm was raised and the Ship turned. In a bleary night, Settle might even be able to slip their sight. Would the Captain be bothered for a half-scrap, maybe-bait, an apprentice that dropped overboard?

Settle rolled the pearls against her skin and she knew, more absolutely than anything since she first knew in Spithampton that the sea was big enough to want to swallow her but her will was big enough to make it choke with trying: the Captain and the Ship would never let her go. They would hunt her just as they hunted the monsters, not simply for profit or safety, but because their desire would insist on nothing less.

And neither would hers.

She could not leave this way, a thief chased by the dawn cockerel.

The ocean below was the ocean in her dream. Thinking that oiled her to act. She crept along the starboard rim, up the foc’stle stairs, peeking above the deckline to see the Captain, just as she expected to see him—not cozy in his quarters, but out in the open. His coat was careless and empty bottles rolled in the cage of his chair legs. One of the crew had had the courage to put a blanket nearby, but not to drape him. The Captain snored with the intensity of heavy carousing pitched straight into heavy sleep.

The Judge’s bundle was generous and as much as she might hope to take on the fly, but Settle had gathered some extras on her way. The small wood knife had a blade she could nudge up with a fingernail and a curved sharpness that was long enough for what she had to do. Settle stole up to the Captain, feeling the lazy heat blazing off the fevered body.

Hundreds of faces glowered at her from below the Captain’s thin beard, hundreds more wanted to shout out warnings all down his neck, but the tattooed dead could only ripple with the Captain’s yawns. She had never seen him this close before. The fine porcelain lines cracking his face were telltale of years of obsession, but the skin had been hardened with ink and salt and wind. Still, it would yield to her knife.

One stroke and she would be free of the fear. A single cut and the temptation would be gone.

She held up the blade, outlined the bloody smile in her mind. But something about the Captain stayed her. This had not been expected—this recognition. For a moment, she felt panic that the Captain was lost family, but it was not features that caught her. Something in the way Settle herself had looked at a mirror on the Dream when she had first donned the sailor cap.

The look of a woman with a secret.

The shock nearly made her drop the knife.

The Cruel Ship’s Captain was just like—

She tried to raise the knife again.

I can’t stop myself, she thought.

Finally, she kissed the Captain on the lips.

The Captain woke and looked straight into her eyes. “Oh,” she whispered in recognition. “I know ye. It’s yer ship that’s been haunting my dreams.”

Aye, she wanted to tell her, just as ye’ve been haunting my heart.

But at that moment, the Ship screamed.

“Satan’s midden! I smell the cat on ye! Cheat on your beauty? I’ll cut the eggs out of ye! I’ll tar the shit inside ye! I’ll burn yer atoms to smoke and yer smoke to void and yer void to damnation!”

The Captain yanked Settle to her feet. The knife clattered away. What have I done? she thought as she was dragged by the Captain across the foc’stle deck.

Some of the crew were already on deck—in a minute, they all would be. “Bring me that dungbie dell,” the figurehead commanded. The Captain yanked hard on Settle’s hair and pulled her towards the bowsprit’s root.

“Facing!” the Ship demanded. “I want to smell the piss as I tell her what happens to any cockroach who dares dally with my Captain.”

With a lock grip, the Captain held Settle by her neck. She wanted to caress that hand as she dangled out over the hull, her feet barely on the deck.

She stared straight into the figurehead’s visage. A dainty smile. Rouged skin and tumbling yellow hair, barely marked by storm—it had been cared for, lovingly repaired and repainted over the years.

“I remember ye,” the Ship purred. “Ye were one of those who didn’t respect beauty.”

“Oh, I respect beauty,” Settle said, then spat into the Ship’s eye, “when I see it.”

Settle’s spit was lost in the wind. The Ship’s flat eyes twinkled with reflections from the foam below. “Then look deep, for this is the last beauty ye’ll ever see. Ugly things are all ye’ll have to look at now.”

“Not just ugly things,” Settle said.

One hand released the edge of the staysail and reached into her shirt. Settle flicked the necklace over her head and held the pearls between her and the Ship.

The Ship quivered, a spasm that almost made the Captain let her go. “What dickery is this?” the Captain whispered.

The pearls caged the moment and allowed Settle to inspect it. The feelings of all three were transparent in their light.

The ache of the Captain, who had travelled the globe for so long she had exhausted everything that could fire her heart—

The weariness of the Ship, which had birthed her own monsters and treasure to chase because there were none left in a world she had exhausted so long before—