A Riddle in Ruby (4 page)

Your spine is tin, and your fire is false. They will never master the heart of a true Frenchman.

—Halvard de Anjou,
Bastionado

R
uby turned the weathered page, and for the thirty-first time, the brave Leftenant Capliche shot the dastardly Duc de Nantes in the foot, and for the thirty-first time the villain fell over the edge of the lighthouse, to drop for the thirty-first time into the icy waters and hungry rocks below. France was saved from the chemystral hordes. Well, until five years later.

The
Thrift'
s
second mate, Pol the Gizzard, had told
her the true story on a late watch one night. The Duc had actually escaped into the mists. Five years later he and some of his tinker friends had used chemystry to smash the entire royal palace right into the ground, flat as a two-penny coin, all in the name of liberty. Anyone who practiced alchemy and tinkercraft (and fortune-smellers and weed doctors and anyone else the mob wanted to be rid of) were hunted and driven from France by the church and those few nobles who escaped flattening. Many refugees, including Pol's parents, found their way to Philadelphi, where they were taken in by William Penn and the colonial government.

It was still a good book.

But Ruby snapped it shut and almost threw it across the tiny cubby. She was thoroughly, painfully, unimaginably bored. She should be climbing yardarms, cutting turnips in the galley, throwing turnips at Skillet from the forecastle. She was doing none of those things. Instead, she was hiding from a rich boy and his noxious servant.

She grabbed the dog-eared copy of
Bastionado
and
curled up with a huff against the wall once again, to open her only book in the wide-open world to page 1. “Julien Capliche woke to see his father's farm ablaze in the valley. The alchemysts had returned. He pelted down the slope, but he knew . . .”

She was not reading. She was reciting. She knew it by heart. Ruby scrunched up her eyes and rapped her head against the wall, keeping time with the clack of wooden spoons creeping in from the galley. The smuggler's cabinet built into the hold of the old Portuguese corvette was little more than a windowless box with a hidden door, but it was her refuge, her place. Now, though, it had turned into a cell for true, and she was driving herself mad with dreams of fresh sea air and the sun.

The narrow slot in the back wall of the hidey-hole snapped open. The back of Gwath's breeches shuttered into view, followed by his calloused foot and his toes, which grasped a folded slip of paper between them. The cook often served the entire crew with his back to the galley wall, all the while speaking in images to Ruby, drawing and folding up the notes with his feet.

She opened the paper in the dim blue glow of the tinker's lamp she had nicked their last stay in Charles Towne. She rolled her eyes. A brilliant caricature of her father and his ridiculous hat stared off the edge of the paper, looking deep into the distance through an oversize chemystral monocle. He was looking for her, and not casually. It was too late to go back to her cabin. She tore up the paper and ate it, just to make sure, and then quickly stowed the lamp and her book in the compartment under the false floor. The
Thrift
had more secret nooks and crannies within crannies than a weed doctor's traveling cabinet.

She opened the view slot on the wall opposite the galley. No one was on the other side. She pressed her fingers to the proper spots, and a knee-level panel opened silently. Slipping into the hold, she closed the door behind her and barely had enough time to place herself in glum style under a sunbeam on a pile of sailcloth before her father's immaculate boots dropped into view through the hole leading to the deck.

Captain Wayland Teach was a big man, and he levered himself to the floor of the hold like a careful pumpkin.
Ruby looked up from the needlepoint she had rescued in the nick of time from the front pocket of her dress. Her father lifted up the eyepatch he wore over his left eye, which was just as good as his right.

“Arr. There ya be, me lassie,” he growled, fully Brownbeard style. She hated it.

“Arrrrrrrr,” he rolled at her, raising his bushy eyebrows. “I looked for ya in your cabin, and you wasn't harbored there, so I set sail down here, and here ya arrrrre, as fresh a young lady as ever I set me eyes on.”

“How can I help you, Father?” she asked, picking at the needlepoint.

“We have passengers. I thought mayhap ye might wish to make pleasant conversation and to provide cultured diversion for our guests.”

She was fair certain that real pirates didn't say “mayhap.” “Are not the daring stories of Blackbeard's brother food enough for any man?” she asked brightly.

He plucked at the worn lace cuff peeking from the ragged leather overcoat he wore on even the hottest days of summer. He was angry. “Aye, but ye cannot season
every night's beef with gunpowder and deadly storms,” he rumbled. “A young lady's company can brighten the cabin of the meanest scalawag.”

The
Thrift
was a small ship, and there was little privacy anywhere. They might be overheard by their two passengers, and Ruby took advantage of that fact not for the first time.

“I fear I have a touch of seasickness, and I may not be fit company.”

“Arr, well, mayhap the night breeze will bring you some relief.” He leaned in, looming, and stared at her hard.

“Do your job, Ruby,” he growled, no trace of pirate in his voice. “This young prig is bored out of his skull, and my yarns fell on tin ears last night. Dinner was a disaster, and after was worse. Skillet and Mawk did ‘I'll Kill You for That Whiskey,' but he loathed it, and Remy Flatfoot could not even get him to crack a smile.”

“Really?”

“He slipped on a bucket, some pudding, his own feet. They even brought out one of the goats. Nothing.”

“What is that to me?” she whispered right back. “They'll be in Philadelphi in three more days, and we'll have our money. Why do you want me to—”

“This is important,” he pleaded. “There were no goods to be had in Boston and no goods in two ports before that. Our purse is light, and we need this lad to enjoy his stay with us so he will recommend us up the ladder. Please, girl.”

“What ladder?”

“He is close with the Tinkers, and from England as well. If we can tap into those markets—”

“Then we shall have more fire, ice, and noxious gas on the
Thrift
? Or even better, stuffy lords and ladies full of their own noxious gases? No, thank you.”

“It puts bread in our bellies and keeps us afloat. They pay far more for a ferry with a jolly pirate crew than just a ferry. They want to take their passage with a hint of mystery and adventure and add on the best grub in the colonies.”

“Father, they laugh at you. We are no pirates, and this is beneath you.”

He looked at her sidewise. “It keeps us safe.”

She gritted her teeth. “But what is the point of harmless thievery? Safe pirating?”

His face was bleak under the thistle of his beard. “When you pass Gwath's test, you can do as you like. But for now you are my daughter, Aruba Teach, and you will do as I say.”

“I cannot.”

“Why?”

She could not tell him of the failed carriage robbery. Not now. The whole ship was in danger because of her. If only there had been some way to deny them passage. If the boy did not see her, he could not recognize her, and if he could not recognize her, then they would not be taken by the constables at the next port. She could do no more than frown and shrug.

He crooked his mouth. “We are who we say we are, girl. A man is the stories he tells himself. And so is a woman. You need to find a way to make this right.”

She nodded.

His face split into the huge, false grin she hated so much, the grin for money.

Brownbeard's pirate drawl returned. “So glad you're feelin' better, my lass! See you tonight!” He flashed his blacked-out tooth at her and clambered back up the stairs into the afternoon light.

Curled on the sailcloth, Ruby ripped the needlepoint out, piece by piece, imagining each was a hair in her father's scraggly, desperate beard.

Ruby tried to lose herself in her pudding. At the top edge of her vision, the Hand, wrapped in an immaculate gray glove, lifted her father's best wineglass from the threadbare tablecloth. She spooned the perfectly sweet pudding into her mouth. Even in moments as raw as these, Gwath's Passenger Pudding was not a concoction to pass over lightly.

Dinner was almost over, and Ruby had managed the entire evening without once meeting the boy's eyes.

“Has she lived long on your ship, Captain?” the Voice asked.

“Why, yes, ever since she was born.” She could see her father smile in her mind. “Haven't you, Aruba?” She
nodded, looking for deeper holes in the pudding. The cut under her eye burned.

“She is not usually this reserved.” She could hear the demand in his voice. He drummed his fingers on the carved plank lying across his bed, which was also his seat in the tiny cabin.

Silence. She took another bite.

The
Thrift
listed to starboard. The boy in the corner clutched at his belly, which grumbled loudly.

The Voice chuckled, and the embroidered waistcoat twisted toward the servant. “You have a complex relationship with the seas, do you not, Cram?”

“Not really, sir.” Even the boy's voice sounded ratty. “It's fair simple. I was reared to live on the land. My mam raised us on sawdust and cobblestone soup. Begging your pardon, sir.”

“Not at all, Cram. I like a bit of straight talk from my man. I appreciate your crew as well, Captain. They are quite the jolly brotherhood.”

“We aim to please, my lord. If I may ask, Lord Boyle, how did you come upon our vessel? We are used
to entertaining men and women of quality, but I did not think our reputation had spread to the Continent.”

“Nothing so exciting, I am afraid. I have urgent business in Philadelphi, and yours was the first ship sailing.”

“I see,” the captain said.

“Captain Teach, if you do not mind my question, I would inquire after the presence of a young girl on your vessel. It seems a singular practice.”

“He is my father, sir. All I have in the world.” She couldn't help herself. She chewed fiercely and forced her eyes to follow the line of a small tear in the tablecloth.

“I meant no offense, Miss Aruba,” the Voice replied, “and I would cast no aspersions on your noble father. However, hired men are not family, and this is a rascally crew, if I do not mistake my eyes.”

Her father laughed his Brownbeard laugh. “My men owe me a blood debt, young sir. Loyal to the core, they are, and think of Aruba as sister or niece, I daresay.”

“But aren't there traditions among sailors that warn against this type of thing? Hexes and curses and what
have you? This wine is excellent.” He was certainly full of himself.

“Thankee, sir. It should be. It was waylaid on its path to a Castilian viceroy in Cartagena!” he rumbled.

Thankee?

“Indeed? Cram, please make sure to check my valuables in the cargo hold. We don't want anything waylaid.”

Ruby caught the faintest whiff of sarcasm in the boy's voice. She dug her fingers into the edge of the folding seat where she was sitting, fighting to keep her eyes on the pudding.

“Waylaid? Oh, no, Lord Athen, those days are long behind us,” her father reassured. “This crew battled its fair share in the teeth of the warring sea, but that was years ago. Now we carry travelers, not sixteen-pounders.”

She wanted to scream. How easily he lied. She shoveled another spoonful into her mouth. She had spent thirteen years on this ship, and Wayland Teach had been repeating this tired old spiel for at least as long. He only seemed a pirate. They were smugglers, no more. Sneak into port
with a hold of tobacco or rum. Do their business. Move along to the next port with the next shipment.

“And what of your famous brother, Captain? What is it like to be the brother of Blackbeard the Pirate?”

Teach puffed up, ready to launch into his favorite lie, the one with the walrus and the powder keg. The hooks that held the makeshift table into the wall groaned as he planted his hands, leaning across it. “Well, sir,” he said.

“It is a hard thing, sir, to be brother to a legend.” It rumbled out of Ruby from somewhere deep. “To be Blackbeard's brother is to fly ahead of a firestorm with an iron anchor cutting into the sea floor below ye! Nowhere to turn, demons and krakens to port, the crown and all the iron angels of the Royal Society to starboard! Why, there was one time—”

“Ruby.”

“Paw, I must tell the story of the walrus! This beastie, you see, had tusks the size of birch trees, and—”

“Aruba.” Sometimes the captain's voice could sear.

The door to the cabin burst open. Skillet's slight frame blocked very little of the wind and rain that rushed past
him. Hunched under an oilskin slicker, Gwath appeared a moment later.