The Pirate Captain (24 page)

Hearing the thump of the
Terpsichore
’s guns and feeling the
Morganse
shudder when she took a hit, Cate was a reminded that this was no practice. She grasped the rim of the cask, her knuckles whitening, the rough oak gouging her fingertips, as she worried for Nathan. Chanting that he had been doing this for years, she tried not to count the incoming shots. To do so seemed to paint a target on his chest. The blessed man had swelled to twice his size at the prospect of a fight. Her presence dampening those spirits, he had wished her away. And so, she was left with doing what she had done for months aboard the
Constancy
: nothing. She would have far preferred being in the thick of it, rather than sitting in the moldering dark waiting to hear a scream, dreading what might await when she at last returned to the world of sun.

Cate braced as the ship veered, took an uncommon lee lurch, and then swept through her pivot. In the dark void of the hold, the maneuver had a dizzying effect. The grind and scrape of the planks working under the strain vibrated into her chest.

And then, almost as quickly as it had begun, it was over. Unlike the last time, there was no musket fire. The fight never grew that close.

By the time the first victorious cheer had erupted, Cate was already at the bottom of the steps. She reached the main deck in time to see the rail lined with men, their trousers down around their knees, slapping their bared arses toward the retreating
Terpsichore
. She found Nathan on the quarterdeck. Fixing his breeches, his somewhat guilty look dissolved into a brightener one at seeing her. He winked and nodded, and then set to heartily clapping his men on the back and giving them joy of their win.

The
Morganse
was bruised, but nowhere near as damaged as her engagement with the
Nightingale
. Her people were already putting her to rights: cutting away tangled rigging and pitching the useless debris overboard. Nathan’s cheerfulness as her backdrop, Cate bent to the task of tending the injured. Compared to the last time, they were minor and few. She set up her makeshift sick berth below with what she had: a table, a bucket of hot water, some bandages recently gathered and a jar of salve from Mr. Kirkland.

Mr. French was regaling Cate of how his gun,
Bloody Bess,
“Took the
Tersipchore
foretop, whilst
Lucifer
did for the bastard’s mizzen,” while she worked to extract a sliver longer than her finger from his thigh, when Pryce and young Jensen appeared bearing a box, which they presented to her. Similar to a portmanteau, it was leather-covered, with straps and a handle on top. The inside was filled with rudimentary weapons for the warfare against sickness and injury. Amid the jars, bottles, gauze bags, and folded waxed envelopes, sat a shining pair of scissors and tweezers, crafted by Petrov, the ship’s smith.

“We’ve scavenged every prize fer medicines and such, but the pickings have been blessedly thin,” Pryce told her, dolefully shaking his head over the box. “Not a one possessed more than vitriol, dead leeches, purges, squill pills, and a rare bit o’ poppy syrup. ’Course, ’tis no countin’ the things what we had no idea. Needed a Latin master for that. The Cap’n can cipher a bit o’ that Popish falderal, but bloody little sense could be made o’ it.”

Pryce's claim was born out by the Latin lettering on many of the labels. Rough translations had been scrawled next to it, most now smeared and water-spotted.

“We woulda taken the first chirurgeon we come upon, clapped ’im in irons, if come the need, but blessed few in these waters,” said Pryce.

“There was that one—” began Jensen.

“Ah, yes! I mind him. What was the cove’s name? Died of a fever afore we learnt if he was worth his salt.”

“Tach,” cried Jensen, shuddering. “All he could think was to bleed everyone.”

“Aye. And cursed ghoulish about it he was. ’Peared to me he just wuz a-wantin’ blood to lure his blessed sharks. The man appreciated his shark steaks the likes o’ which I ain’t never seed.”

And so, armed with her new line of defense, Cate set to work on the powder burns, splinters large and small, broken bones, busted guts, and bashed heads.

She was tying off the splint on Mr. Church’s arm, broken when he failed to outdistance a recoiling gun, when she became dimly aware of someone behind her, close enough to nudge her in the back. Living on a ship with over a hundred and twenty others, it was common to be jostled, and so thought nothing of it.

“Women are good but for two things and both are with their legs apart,” came from so near behind she could feel his breath hot on her back.

Her gut lurched. She knew the voice without looking: Bullock, the one who had accosted her when first arrived. She looked up into Church’s insolent grin. She tried to move, but found she was now trapped between Church’s legs with Bullock behind her. A quick glance revealed that Bullock had timed his comment well: no one was near, no one to hear, no one to witness.

Setting her jaw, Cate gave the binding a final jerk on the knot hard enough to elicit a pained yelp from Church. She jabbed an elbow into Bullock’s as she pushed herself clear, and then climbed to the main deck to their jeering chuckles.

Cate retreated to the safe shadows of the Great Cabin for the remainder of the day. Bullock’s comments had put her at ill ease. They were a stark reminder of how tenuous her status aboard was. It was only Nathan’s protection that kept her safe. If anything were to happen to him…

She shied from finishing that thought.

As much as Nathan denied it, she knew her presence caused problems. Bullock was one symptom. The two crewmen, Hughes and Cameron, revealing her involvement with the Stuart Uprising was another problem. The knowledge hadn’t gone without comment, if not incident. The Uprising was seen by many English as a direct threat to their King: England’s soil had been invaded, English lives lost. Any participants in such an insurrection were seen as traitors; animosity ran high throughout the realm, including on a pirate ship. She hadn’t been deaf to the crosswords and epithets uttered by some of the men.

Again, she wondered why Nathan kept her aboard, what he planned to do with her.

He had assured her she was not to be turned over for the reward, declaring, “Never in all me days have I been that desperate.”

She was being kept, but for what? Hostage or prisoner? Slave, mascot, or pet? Insurance seemed more fertile ground: a bargaining chip in reserve, with either the Royal Navy or the Royal West Indies Mercantile Company.

It was wholly confusing. For months on the
Constancy,
Cate had listened to railing against women aboard and the bad luck they apparently carried in their skirt folds. Surely pirates would be of the same mind, if not more so. That night, she made her case to Nathan. A shrug and a dismissive flap of the hand was her answer. Mr. Pryce had exhibited a proclivity for superstition, so she pressed her case with him. His mouth compressed as if a great mystery of the ancients had just been posed. “Aye, ye’ve a point there.”

A Company Council was called. The exact logic was lost to her somewhere in the debate. The final outcome, however, punctuated by a cheer, was from that point on she was to be addressed as “Mr. Cate.”

Lolling atop a cask looking on, Nathan raised a bottle in salute. “I’m good with it!”

The subject was closed.

The
Morganse
found a cove in which to hide and lick her wounds inflicted by the
Terpsichore
, and those which lingered from the
Nightingale
. It was an open but protected place, the ship’s masts merging with the ratcheted spine of the island curving around her.

All hands set to their duties with a gleeful eagerness. Battle had disrupted the Morgansers orderly world and they were anxious to set it back to rights. They set to knotting and splicing, conversation requiring a raised voice in order to be heard over the woodpeckerish rap of caulker’s mallets, and Chips and his mates, looking harried but happy. Wood and watering parties were sent ashore, as well hunting parties for fresh meat. Foragers were sent to gather fodder for Hermione and anything else that might be had. In the West Indies, apparently all one need do was put their arm out and food was to hand. After years of eking out an existence on scraps, such a state of plenty seemed edenic to Cate, if only she could see it.

“Let’s give ’ er a new set o’ boots and tops,” declared Nathan, and then jabbed an elbow at Cate’s side. “It’s cleaning. You’ll love it.”

It would seem the sea was of the opinion that the bottom of a ship was solely intended for weed, barnacles, shells, and any number of other things to grow, including the insidious
teredo
. The shipworm was described to her as nothing more than a mass of sawblade-like jaws set on devouring the ship from under their feet. Able to make holes the size of Cate’s thumb, the creature itself nearly as long as her arm, with such voraciousness that surely, if she bore an ear, she could hear them munching away.

Anything wooden and afloat in seawater required careening, the regularity rising with the temperature of the water in which she plied. It meant literally running the ship on shore and divesting her of everything, including guns and rigging. It was an arduous and monumental undertaking, rendering the ship as vulnerable as a beached whale for the best part of a month.

A good amount of the
Morganse
’s bottom was copper-sheathed, denying worms and barnacles access. Another portion was studded with copper nails, a massive expense, but one her captain willingly paid to keep her bottom sweet. A space between copper and waterline still existed, and so boot-topping it was, as Nathan had so colorfully ordered. It was an intermediary measure: shifting guns, rigging and cargo to roll the ship on her side—a parliamentary heel—baring the space below her waterline to be breamed.

“Only a strake or two,” Cate was told. The strakes, the planking seams in the ship’s hull, could be seen if she stretched far out over the rail. While out there, in the clear water underneath the ship, she could catch glimpses of the green skirt of weed wisping with the currents.

She was pulled back by her skirt, like a parent jerking a child from a precipice. Turning around, she came directly into Nathan standing there.

“Going somewhere, are we?” he asked in a low voice, with a mixture of suspicion and dare, but daring her to do what?

Startled, she could only sputter. He spun away, apparently losing patience in waiting for her to find an answer.

The workload required all hands. No parties made the pull ashore for the mere sake of fun. And so, once again, Cate was tempted by the nearness of land. She gazed longingly at the long gleam of white sand between the azure and emerald of water and trees, so near and yet so far.

With no skill at carpentry, useless at knotting or splicing, lacking the strength to move guns or do heavy lifting, and Millbridge barring her from helping to stow the cabin, Cate was sat down to make besom brushes: bundling and tying twigs onto the ends of branches. Dipped in tar, the brushes were set afire to heat the graving, the hull’s coating. The heat and fumes poisoning the worms, the fires softened the graving enough for the irons and scrapers to remove the weed, barnacles, and other filth.

Cate moved about, careful not to trip over the tackles rigged for the network of lines over the side from which the men dangled. “One or two strakes” put the decks at an acute angle. In truth, the incline was not much more than when the ship was heeled over sailing, but her motionlessness—baring the cove’s minor swell—made it seem far more precarious. Not unlike when on that same tack, the topsmen scampered about in the rigging with the agility of monkeys and the industriousness of squirrels.

There was a good deal of convivial shouting and swearing. It must possess an energizing effect on men, for it seemed they could rarely accomplish a task without. The deck grew hazy with curls of smoke rising from the sides, acrid with an odd mix of burning weed, sulfur, tar, and perhaps a tinge of cooking worm. The smoke wafted low across the water and ashore, hanging among the trees like tobacco smoke wreathing a man’s head. Bits of canvas were rigged at the ports and hatches to funnel air below where the noxious smoke tended to collect. Fire and ships were mortal enemies, a ship being barely more than a pile of aged wood saturated with tar and paint, and so lookouts stood at the ready, with hoses and filled buckets.

Both sides complete, the
Morganse
righted for good, Nathan yielded to Hodder, chafing to the point of near apoplexy over the ruin of his precious paintwork. The swarms of besom-brush-bearing ants were replaced by paint-brush-bearing ones, the sharp smell of fresh paint joining the heady fug of breaming.

Declaring “idle hands and all that,” and disinclined toward revealing the ship’s fixed whereabouts with the daily great gun practice, Nathan ordered small arms practice instead: knives, pikes, boarding axes, sabers, cutlasses and the like. A series of chalk circles were drawn on deck and the smell of the sweat of exercise mingled in the air as the pirates honed their hand-to-hand skills. Stripped to their breeks, their chests shone with sweat as they sparred and parried with uncommon intensity, the classrooms taking on an air of competition. Under the watchful eyes of their mates, the combatants were cheered on by a large audience lining the ratlines, yards, and yet-to-be-painted rails. Beatrice shouted a bawdy repartee from amid the men peering down from their roost.

Cate stood by with her blood box—so named by Nathan, since it appeared every time there was blood—for injury was frequent. She smiled faintly as she watched, thinking it wasn’t unlike when Brian’s men had trained in preparation for raids and clan wars or during the Uprising. There was, however, one difference: a blood-lust abandon.

“They look like they are trying to hack each other to pieces,” she said, wincing at the sight of a vicious swipe by Mr. Rowett, his snakeskin vest tossed aside.

“Pirate.” Nathan offered the single word as an all-encompassing explanation. He sat next to her atop a cask, watching with a sports-like avidness.