A Riddle in Ruby (6 page)

As the crew sprang into action, Teach turned to his daughter.

Ruby interrupted before he could speak. “What is happening?” she demanded.

“Ruby, listen to me.”

“I won't until you tell me—

“There's no time, poppet.” He put a hand on her shoulder, pulling his beard on with the other. “An enemy may be upon us.”

“What did we do to make England angry?”

He ignored the question. “You need to go down to your hidey-hole that you think I don't know about and wall yourself in.”

Athen had taken the steps to the forecastle two at a time, and Teach handed him the letter.

“Captain, I fear they may be accompanied by members of the Reeve,” Athen said.

Teach looked to the heavens, as if for guidance.

“Who?” Ruby asked.

“Special agents of the crown, my dear. They are . . . formidable.” Teach turned to Athen. “You, sir, and your servant, please accompany my daughter. She is taking you to a safe place. Be silent as a tomb and open for no one, even for me. Only come out if you hear Skillet ring that the coast is clear.” He crushed her in a bear hug. She found herself clinging to him as well. “Bring your knives. You may have need of them.”

. . . a Glorious Revolution, indeed. Change one king for another king, and give me Charles or James, Mary or Lizzie. But mark me, this new king with his Tinker lords? They care no more for plain folk than for the dung on their carboshaeth shoe. My man and me? We're headed for Sweden.

—Overheard on Victory Night,1689,

outside the House of Progress (formerly the Palace of Whitehall)

R
uby, Athen, and Cram were sitting knees to nose, shoulder to shoulder in the tiny space. The lanky serving boy had taken off his hat and was hunched over into a ball, but the top of his skull still touched the boards above them. Ruby had taken the tinker's lamp out of the panel so that they could see. Athen clutched a small bag of flasks and vials he had saved from his trunks before the crew sent them over the side. He had put on a good show, but as
he watched them sink below the waves, he'd looked as if someone had just drowned his favorite pony. Gwath was crouching, staring in through the opening of the hole.

“Stay quiet,” Gwath said.

Ruby began to speak, but Lord Athen interrupted. “We will. Thank you for your help, sir.”

“You can thank me by helping to keep this one safe,” he responded, nodding at Ruby.

“I can take care of myself, Gwath,” she sputtered. “Besides, it will only be a few hours. You'll pull the wool over those jolly jacks' eyes, and then we'll be on our merry way.” She reached down and grabbed his hand. She didn't want to let go.

He smiled, pressed her hand, and then pulled his back out of the opening. “Keep an eye out for fair winds. And don't forget to check your pockets,” he said, and closed the hidden panel. It was pitch black.

Ruby turned the small wheel at the base of the lamp, and they were lit by low, molten blue.

“Tinker's lamp, hmm? Well, you are full of surprises, Aruba Teach,” Athen said in a low voice. He had eased
himself around so that his shoulders were against the back wall. The sword scabbard lay across his lap. He was at ease and attentive, as Ruby imagined a theater patron might look before the curtain on opening night. “You know, you could trade two of those little lights for the wages of half this flea-bitten crew? No fuel, lasts two lifetimes. From whence did you acquire that?”

“That is my business,” she said. “And they are not flea-bitten.”

“And this is the famous hidey-hole? I had imagined something more spacious.”

She had thought that it was her place, the refuge only she and Gwath had known about. Apparently her father had known about it, too.

Ruby sidestepped. “What about you? Awfully late in presenting that letter to my father, weren't you?”

“That was a different matter.”

“Different, how?”

“Milord, miss, please,” Cram hissed from behind Athen. “The cook said we needed to be quiet, and I do think that—”

A loud banging penetrated the wood and filled the little room.

“What is that?” Athen asked.

Ruby tried to control her breathing. “That's a hammer on a nail.” She put her hand on the door and felt the quick, steady vibrations pass through it. Bam. Bam. Bam.

“Oi!” she yelled. “Gwath? Big Shem? Little Shem? What are you doing?” She pushed, but the door wouldn't budge. They were walling it up. “Gwath!” Athen shushed her. The hammering went on, quicker now, and she pushed harder. “Oi! Stop!”

Athen grabbed her wrist and pulled her arm away from the hidden door. She tried to free herself, but he was stronger than her. She kicked at him hard, in the chest. He grunted and then pushed back, banging her shoulders against the bulkhead with both hands.

“Stop it!” he hissed. “They are doing this for us so we cannot be found!”

Hitting the wall had knocked the breath out of her. Athen was hunched over the bag and breathing heavily,
watching her in the half-light. She realized that her knife was in her hand.

“I am sorry,” he whispered, holding his hand up in surrender, “but we need to be silent. We need to assume the worst.”

The worst? What did that mean? Who was this? Who was following him?

Athen then reached behind him and grabbed the little barrel he had brought from the hold. He popped the lid, and the heavy, tarry smell of oakum filled the little room. Ruby was even more confused. The gooey, dark substance was caulk for the joints of the ship. Big and Little Shem would scour the deep places of the
Thrift
with it, filling in and spreading it into the cracks, so that the joints would keep watertight. But there was no chance of a leak here, and while the stuff didn't exactly stink, in such a small area the smell was powerful. Lord Athen gave Cram a wide little knife and held one out to Ruby. She looked a question at him but then sighed and took it. He tapped his nose and then grinned. He motioned for them to cover the walls and ceiling, and he went to work on the cracks
of the doorway. Cram tasted the knife, made a face, and got to work. She did the same.

The hammering continued for a few more minutes, then stopped abruptly.

When there were streaks of oakum all over the door, as well as the walls and ceiling, Athen motioned for them to stop. Ruby leaned her head back against the bulkhead, dizzy from the fumes. She rolled over and opened the slot to the galley to let some fresh air in. Athen immediately closed it and covered it with the tarry glue.

They waited.

Voices and activity buzzed like a hive of far-off bees. After a few minutes the bees subsided, but the
Thrift
jolted, and they braced themselves against the bulkheads. The impact was brief but felt like a giant had reached down and nudged their little ship to the side with a flick of its massive finger.

Athen leaned over and turned down the wheel of the tinker's lamp.

Darkness and oakum seeped into her head.

Shortly thereafter, after two more muffled thumps,
feet came onto the deck. Then there was talk. The sounds were far off, like termites, and Ruby wondered in the fumy darkness if she was a termite. At rest in a tiny corner of the
Thrift
, taking a break after a hard day of chewing before making her way down the beam roadways back to her termite family, who would be waiting at home with Gwath's Sawdust Pudding and her father's tales of termite pirates from the olden days.

Voices tugged her out of her oakum dream. She couldn't make out who was speaking but thought one voice might be her father's deep rumble. Muted conversation became sharp words. She pressed her ear to the stained wall to try to hear a little bit better but only got a sticky ear for the trouble. The argument deepened and quickened.

A pistol shot rang out.

She pulled her head back and reached out instinctively to grab Athen's gloved fingers. After the first shot, a wave of sound crashed down upon their heads: the clash of blades, the pop of muskets and pistols, the cries of men. There were other, deeper roars that sounded like metal
lions. Ruby stared up through the darkness, willing herself up through the deck so that she could see, so that she could help.

She had no idea how long it lasted, though she suspected it wasn't all that long, but the battle slowed and then stopped. The wall of sound faded away, replaced by a strange, tense quiet, punctuated by flurries of running, a musket, a yell, the clash of swords, back to silence.

Then something landed in the hold outside the boarded-up door. Something metal, like a sledgehammer dropped from a height onto the planks. There was a whirring, slower, and then more quickly, into a steady ticking, like the sound of a music box. But this was deeper. Tock, tock, tocktock, tocktock, tocktocktocktock. Athen let go of her hand in the dark and drew his sword. She reached into the scabbards Gwath had sewn into her dress and pulled out her two knives. They were fine ones, blister steel, that Skillet had given her special from his trip back to England, and they sometimes gave her courage. Not today.

The whirring and tocking had stabilized into a
rhythm, and then there was a metallic sound, like shaking out an iron sail. Ruby's hands hurt from gripping her knives. She found herself staring at the door, even in the pitch-darkness. On the other side, whatever was out there was moving around the hold. The underlying tocktocktock of clockwork gears was peppered with a rhythmic clacking that she knew her ancient ancestors would recognize as claws. There was another sound, like a harsh wind forced through a teakettle. The thing was sniffing. Smelling. Hunting.

Minutes went by as the creature searched the room. It stopped right outside the door. It sniffed more persistently, and it growled a jangling snarl. A man asked something in a low voice, but it was lost under the tocking of the thing's innards. A metal claw slowly rasped down the walled-up portal like a file, mere inches from her face.

Ruby bit her lip so hard it bled.

Them smelly little jangling demons, puttin' me right out of business, they are. They ain't purr, they ain't yowl proper, and they just gives me the woolies. 'Tain't even real cats!

—Maisie Fallows, ratcatcher

A
then put his hand on Ruby's shoulder. In the tense quiet of the hidey-hole, she thought that even the sound of his glove on her dress might call the attention of the beast outside. She couldn't chide him, or move, or even breathe. There would be fangs. Many fangs. And claws. And she had to stop imagining what it might look like, because the imagining was making her want to scream.

The ship had been seized, and some sort of monster
prowled outside the secret door. The monster's keeper, who had a rough voice with no good in it, was also in the hold, and the only thing standing between them and savaging and chomping was a few new boards, a flimsy secret panel, and a pail full of oakum. Clever on Athen's part. If not for that, they surely would have been already discovered.

Ruby cocked her head. It couldn't smell them because of the oakum. Which Athen had brought into the hidey-hole. So he knew this beast might be here!

If she dared move, she would have struck him. If she dared speak, she would have lit into him like a raging bosun. If she dared breathe, she would, well, she would breathe him to melting with the devil's breath of Gwath's Goat, and that would set him straight.

But she could do none of that.

So she sat.

It felt like a very long time.

All at once there was sound. A muffled voice called down into the hold. A jumble of scrambling, gears, clumping, and whuffling sounded as the searchers, one
metal and one not, climbed out of the hold and then were gone.

Silence. She dared not move. If she were searching a ship, she would play savvy and wait out the final stowaways, silently leashing her snuffling monster until some stupid innocent popped her head out of the hold like the youngest of chipmunks. Ruby would not have her little furry head popped off from lack of caution. Gwath and her father had taught her better.

Sometime later they were jolted about. Cram stifled a whimper. She reached across Athen and squeezed his shoulder. He started, and it sounded as if he had banged his head on the ceiling. She listened to the waves and took in the motion of the
Thrift.
They were moving, but slowly. Perhaps the business had been dealt with, and the Royal Navy had gone on its way, taking its ship, noise, guns, and monsters far away from here. But she didn't believe herself.

There was a soft breeze that smelled of mint. Athen's lips were right up on her ear.

“How do we get out?” he whispered, light as a june bug on a leaf.

She thought a moment. Then she leaned over and whispered, just as lightly into his ear, “I have no idea.”

It was quiet again for a good while.

She felt him lean away, and he whispered something to Cram that she couldn't hear. Then Cram whispered, in a voice more raspy foghorn than careful whisper, “Well, sir, she have to know how!”

The muffled thump that came after must have been Athen's glove over Cram's mouth.

And then no one came.

It had been hours at least since the last sounds of the monster and its master had dissolved. Now there was only the steady motion of the waves, the occasional creak of the
Thrift
's beams, and a faint growling that must have been Cram's stomach.

She scooted closer to the door panel. Athen held on to her arm for a moment, but she grabbed at his wrist once, firmly, and he relented. She suspected he wanted out as badly as she.

Ruby pushed hard on the panel. It didn't budge. She pushed again. It didn't even wiggle. She couldn't breathe.
She didn't know why, but she hit the panel, hard. It made a thump. Athen quickly pulled her back, but not before she had hit it even harder. She started beating her feet against the wall until Athen and Cram lay on her feet and hands. She eventually stopped struggling and lay there in the dark.

She might, she thought, be going a little mad.

She tried to calm herself by taking deep, quiet breaths. Athen risked a very low light from her tinker's lamp, which he gave her to hold.

In the half-light he rummaged around in his bag, and he pulled out a little wooden box and a vial. The vial glittered. He knelt in front of the door and took something out of the box. When he held it next to the vial, there was a small pop, then a sizzle, like pork in a frying pan, followed closely by a smell like fresh mushrooms. He eased the neck of the vial around the edges of the door, leaving green foam behind it. When he sat back on his knees, he was breathing heavily.

Ruby's only experience with chemystry up close was watching the weed doctors and fakers in city squares
trick people out of their coins. She had not seen much real chem done, but this sure looked like it.

After a few moments the smell of mushrooms became less intense, and she felt a breeze from somewhere. Athen pointed a question at her knife. She handed it to him, and he slid it into the foam across the top of the portal. He tipped the hilt up, and the whole thing tilted toward them like a puzzle piece.

Clever.

She uncurled her screaming legs and was first out of the hole, slipping past as the other two grabbed at her.

The cargo hold had been ransacked, but it didn't look as if anything had been taken. She ignored the boys as she scrambled silently up a stack of boxes and pulled herself like a monkey up over the lip of the hole in the deck.

If anyone had been on the deck, he would have seen her pop up quite like a chipmunk and squint into the sun, but there was no one. Not a single living person, and no dead bodies, either. A terrible picture flashed in her mind of her father with a ball of shot in his head or Gwath
skewered right through, but the main deck of the ship was empty of life. The foredeck, too.

A quick, silent search of the stern cabins rendered the same result. They were all gone. Skillet, Frog Jerky, Pol, Big Shem: There was no trace of them. But the ship was moving.

Her chest was tight as she ran back into the sun.

The two boys were just pulling themselves out of the hold as she sprinted up to the foredeck to look out into the water ahead. The Royal Navy ship was nowhere to be seen. From horizon to horizon there was only water and sky save one little boat right in front of the
Thrift
. A long gray rope was tied fast around the waist of the figurehead. Other lines of the same gray hawsers were knotted around supports to the left and right sides of the foredeck. It was springy at first touch but left a slick film on her fingers that felt nothing like rope. All the lines were fixed to the rear of the little boat below. The tug, for indeed, it was somehow towing the
Thrift
, was tiny. It was fit for no more than five crew, she guessed, and was powered by a tinker's wheel that ran the width of the stern.

She ducked down behind the rail. Athen crept up beside her. “That tiny water bug has no business pulling a ship that weighs ten times as much. It must be hauling some powerful tinkercraft,” he said.

“Who are these people?” she asked.

His eyes clouded.

“Where is my father?” Ruby pressed.

Athen said, “I do not know. I am deeply sorry if I brought this upon you.”

“You are deeply sorry? What do we do now? Who is on that boat?”

He looked away, then met her eyes. “I do not know. I wish I could tell you more, but I cannot.”

She wanted to scream. She wished that he had never come on this ship. She ran to her cabin and shut the door with her back against it. It smelled of salt and cedar, and she rubbed at her face to keep the tears from coming.

Her best friend was missing or dead. Her father was missing or dead.

She pulled off her work shift, covered in oakum, dust, and filth, and threw it on the floor. The cabin was
ransacked. She pulled on a pair of old breeches and a shirt and then curled up against the built-in cabinet of her bed. On the floor, next to her crumpled dress, was a folded-up piece of parchment.

Right before nailing them in, Gwath had said, “Check your pockets.”

Her pulse was racing.

She opened it.