Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 26 (3 page)

“I feel it,” he moaned in his sleep, his face a sheet of fever, and then, “Oh yes, my Captain, willingly.”

In response, hooting broke out on deck. Feet and hands, battering across, down, everyone a powder monkey as sailors rushed towards the store room. The Cruel Ship groaned in satisfaction, a sound that shook the timbers, and Apple clapped a hand over Settle’s mouth as the sailors burst in.

“Graduation day!”

“A wee ketch, winking there in our stream.”

“Oh, he’s the genuine tar now—so let’s welcome the bugger to tar nation!”

A jug of Ship’s sweat was upended in the Doctor’s mouth and he started babbling low-tide Latin. All dressed in their christening finery, stitched roughly from flags and petticoats, his new mates dragged him from the store, wrenching his wrists until they remembered to un-iron him. Terrified, Settle and Apple wrapped themselves in each other’s comfort while the crew celebrated on despite the dawn, taking their accounts over the side in singsongs of retching, letting sails flap for a few hours. They made up a new saint’s day, and no one came for the captives that morning.

The first news they had of Wendell was the day after, when Apple reported from topside. “Never so changed a man,” he muttered, shaking his head for the sense of it. He refused to say further, but Settle found some distinction in the Wessex jabber of the three brothers. They talked of backgammon and jelly-roll for the Captain. They did not talk of him as a compatriot.

“I would rather drown than give myself to this abominable boat,” Settle promised.

Apple bit his lip. He so wanted to be the man in saying the thing that would anchor her. “There could be a way.”

“Anything, dearest Apple. I cannot live with the thought of my ship joining these savages.”

“Do you remember what Long Preston told us? About hiding our ships?”

And she did, the words tumbling forth like boxes bursting from a locked cupboard door. A ship carries your destiny—but we can be ships for each other’s destiny as well, the Minister had instructed them over dinner on the Dream. You all have someone who can carry you into your future. A true desire. If you find yours, then your ship can harbour in secret in their dreams.

Her true desire? “Apple?” she said—nearly a sob. And then when she was sure he was asleep, she whispered into his dreams, over and over, You will not leave me.

Settle was rousted by more banging in the pit of the night. “Apple!” she cried out, thinking his ship had arrived at last, but Apple was looking at her, wide-eyed, still hers. The Judge clattered with his keys and burst the door. His eyes were shining too. “Get yourself ready for our visitor,” he said, “Treasure!”

No time for the tale. The sailor who daily supervised Apple and the Wessex boys said to the Judge, “Soft hands.”

“Today will scab them.” The Judge asked the captives, “Ever used a harpoon before?”

They shook their heads.

“Keep feet clear of the lines. Butter, don’t jam the wind-up. And aim at the beastie.” He pointed at the other sailor. “Not Ralfie here—the beastie in the water.”

A monster! Settle’s mouth was parched with excitement. Stories of sea creatures had swaddled her childhood in Spithampton like a second mother, nurturing her in the horror and lure of a developing imagination. The prospect of such a wonder made Settle forget the certainty of danger—but she was not to join the other captives at the guns. The Judge took her through the maelstrom of belowdecks. Crew were strapping knives to legs and arms, reworking lucky tattoos with pens, braiding shell blessings into their locks, asking for forgiveness before their altars in the hull. Everyone’s face was covered in a mask of sweat and hunger, so that there were beasties everywhere Settle looked.

Then, as if Jahweh had flicked His hand over the universe, the hubbub stopped dead. The Captain was speaking. Despite the distance and yards of timber and noise between them, it was easy to hear him, as if the Ship arranged the acoustics specially. At the sound of his voice, Settle’s skin prickled with excitement and she finally comprehended who was bride and who was groom. She experienced a myriad of twinges too small and confusing to manifest a true feeling.

“Look at her beauty!” he told his crew. “It dumbs every ship that sees her. It sets every heart against us in jealousy.”

He did not mean the monster—he was talking about the figurehead, though what glamour he invested in that block of wood was hidden from Settle. “Her beauty is too much for the mortal plane. Her wedding day is coming, my boys. Let’s make her too beautiful for Heaven and Hellfire as well!”

Settle was put to work with the monkeys. She was stationed just below the quarter deck in the weapons store, where the harpoons were racked like vicious sets of teeth. The Judge removed one and dipped its tip in a bowl of aniseed-smelling blue liquid that he daintily topped up from a bottle in his shirt pocket.

“Where’s that from?” Settle asked of the liquid.

The Judge did not turn from his ginger task. “Did it come from the bilge?” she pressed him.

“For most of the Ship, the inquiring disposition is a virtue in a tar,” the Judge finally said, “but not all.”

Settle thought about the secrets of the dark belly below them, but there was no time to gather wool. Her task was monkey business—to bear the poison-tips through the Ship and pass them onto monkeys at the stairwell. She understood it was safer for the harpoons to be transported under the decks than in the mess of action up above, but it was fastidious work in a storm. The Ship tacked and rolled with the ferocity of pursuit and Settle dosey-doed around crew duffle, weapon firm in both hands. Halfway along the emptied quarters, there was an almighty crash. A great thing must be throwing itself against the sides, Settle thought, and she nearly lost her grip on the spear. Shouts above her: sight of the Monster. Her heart lurched with excitement.

When she passed the harpoons to the monkeys, she yearned to follow them onto the stage above, but the boys snarled Faster! Faster! and she had to run back to the Judge, careful to avoid getting skewered by another monkey with a harpoon. She tried to imagine what was going on overhead.

Settle picked out the story from her imagining. Sailors manned the harpoon guns, cranking them up, scouring the boiling sea as the Ship turned to give them the decisive shot. The Monster wheeled mirror close. It only gave the sailors a quick moment to fire, but they did not linger. Harpoons sizzled the air, ropes whipping out behind them.

Enraged, the Monster threw itself against the Ship. Its fury was a weird crying of the wind, a ululation of many voices, as if it was hunting as a family. But its sound could not measure against the curses of the figurehead, berating the crew: For my wedding day, my bonny, bonny bastards!

Settle heard the weapons strike packed flesh in satisfying chunks. The thumping of the hull gradually flattened. The Ship’s rolling smoothed. Then, at last, a raggedy cheer from the sailors. Settle cheered too, the Judge slapped her back and the Captain bellowed: He’s ours, boys! Now strip him for our beauty!

“Treasure for our beauty!” the Judge answered, and grabbing Settle, skipped through the Ship, gathering monkeys, ignoring the discarded harpoons rolling across the floor, and came up on deck into a crowd lumping around the fore topmast. Crew were unrolling the nets over starboard, unscrewing the harpoon guns so that there was room for heaving. In the red foam below, swimmers made certain the Monster was snarled, then the sailors took each of the ropes and tug-of-warred until the carcass lipped the edge. “Oh, how he sparkles!” the figurehead cried out, and with one final heave, the Ship tipped and the mass slithered onto the deck.

Settle squeezed between gaps among the sailors. All she could see was a vast jelly across the boards. The crew jigged their feet to avoid tentacles still flapping. The Monster’s skin sparked like tiny fireworks and Settle had to shield her eyes. Squinting men moved in with hooked sticks and shepherded the body towards the edge of the hold. Poured, the Monster slurped through the hatch, leaving a trail of clear slime, trapped minnows and tiny shells on the deck.

The Judge took her over to the edge, gripped her head so she looked down with the other sailors. In a circle of sunlight, a great, lifeless eye looked back up and for a moment, the eye was Long Preston, the passengers and crew of the Dream, her Spithampton life, all the dead ones looking back at Settle. But then Settle saw. The eye was lidded with shine. Folds and bubbles of bejewelled skin, amethysts and opals embedded in the flesh, hard bone of pollen crystal poking through the cuts and slashes of the behemoth’s body. A golden ooze flowed across the hold floor, thickening in the sunlight, becoming a dazzling crust.

Yes—treasure. The Judge handed her a cutting knife.

All at once, sailors and monkeys were jumping into the hold as lanterns were hooked along the hatch edge. All fell into frenzy as they untaped their knives, stabbed and gouged the flesh, scooping out jewels, filling their pouches as fast as they could. The slough of their days disappeared and Settle felt the collective shudder, the relief that the crew had found a new thing in the world, but she also sensed the deeper rumble, the ship’s hunger that could never be satisfied.

Settle’s eyes drank. She wanted the treasure. She leaned into the hole, but the Judge held her back. “The share for the Captain, the best for his lady, the rest for the crew,” he told her. “But nothing for prentices. When ye’re shipped, ye can draw.”

Settle’s heart thinned—but she was not simply to be a witness. The Judge pushed her in the back and she fell into the circle, only just missing a sailor hacking at a stalk sheathed in silver filigree. The air stank of fish and determination.

Settle stepped over tentacles. She stared down into the faces of small dolls. Mermaids tipped the monster’s tentacles, beautiful women who must have made that sound she had heard during the pursuit. Some were still wriggling, softly cursing the feet that trampled them. Their distress made Settle want to cradle them. Their tiny necklaces of sweet stones made her finger her knife.

“He’s a fine ugly bastard,” the Judge said of the creature. “Though we’ve seen bastards of his like before. All their likes. A man can’t stop hoping that the next one will be wondrous.”

The Judge showed her the creature’s huge maw: a burrow of pink flesh, veined with emerald. “But treasure is the measure. And the best is always deep inside. Needs the slightest hand to find the most precious.”

The monkeys eyed her suspiciously. “But I’m not crew,” Settle said.

The Judge was unexpectedly tender. “P’haps if ye see the beauty, p’haps if it ships ye—then p’haps ye could be crew.”

Settle crawled into the mouth, pushing the lantern ahead of her. The tight passage was slick. I am being unborn, she thought, retching at the faint smell of undigested meat. All around her, the cave was fairy-tale with booty.

Diamonds! The gullet was lined with them, some as large as peach stones. What should she gather? She started cutting, picking the jewels out like potatoes from the ground, stuffing them into the pouch the Judge had given her.

A different kind of shimmer caught her eye. A line of pearls around the muscle of something like a tongue. Pearls like a giant’s teardrops. Her eyes and heart goggled with amazement. She fetched out the six beauties, rubbed each and stared into their twinkles. Perspective see-sawed. Settle was looking into the dew one moment, the next she was gazing out to the black night sky. The dizziness nearly made her drop one of the pearls. She tore a snatch of the muslin about her chest and formed a small purse. She scooped the treasure and shoved the purse down her trousers.

When Settle crawled back out, the Judge retrieved the pouch of diamonds and she said nothing of the pearls. The Captain was summoning them back. Reluctantly, the sailors put away their knives and shimmied up the ropes. Up top, the sailors lined up to give their share to the Captain on the foc’stle, holding their handfuls for him to select the choicest. He squinted at each one hopefully, but always in disappointment, dripping them all into a pile at his feet. Whatever he was looking for was not there.

While he held his court, a barber attended to what sprouts there were of his beard. “Is the Captain always so concerned about his appearance after a fight?” Settle asked.

The Judge shook his head. “The Captain is concerned about something else,” he said, pointing at the dead sailors, victims of the Monster, now heaped along the side. She studied the barber: he was not cutting at all, but dabbing in a flurry of pinpricks. A tattoo beat. Settle understood—the faces of each of the dead, memorialized on the Captain’s face. A gazette sprawled down his chin, deep into his chest. How many were recorded there? Faces on faces, more dead than living skin.

And suddenly, how Settle wanted to pay her respects to her predecessors. Her head filled with thoughts of going up to the Captain, breaking into the line of sailors so she could press her lips to this face then that face, kissing strangers all the way down the Captain’s neck until he would reach down, grab her hair and pull her lips up to his—

“Where is the Ship share, fartleberries!” the figurehead bansheed. “Is this how you respect the bride?”

The sailors hurried along to the bowstrip. One by one, they slipped jewels in hastily-made string nets and rings around the figurehead’s stiff fingers and lacquered neck, fitted armbands and fashioned garters, until by the end of the line sailors had to balance rubies in the dips between her breasts. The Captain was last, feeding diamonds into his lover’s mouth, until she was brimful, sealing her with a gentle kiss on the cold wood. The Ship’s sigh blew across the water, a breath that rustled between the cracks in the timbers and shivered down the sails. Settle was weird with jealousy.

“And does our beauty not astound?” the Captain addressed his crew. “Whatever else can we need for the wedding?”

“A roast!” the former Doctor Wendell shouted out to widespread laughter.

“Then what do we say to the juice of a spitted whale?” the Captain answered and the crew roared with the joy of a yuletide carol.

But Settle could not look away from the figurehead. She could not dam the hatred pouring out of her, converging on her nemesis as if a stare would carry away the demonic dell in its flood. Finery was wasted on her. Settle could accomplish so much more, displaying not just the gaudy decoration but the grandeur of spirit proper for such a fine treasure.

Yet there was more to the crew’s gifts. There before Settle’s eyes, the stone and mineral draping the figurehead underwent a breathless transformation. The treasure sank into her—as if the wood had gone from skin to sand, the gifts fading into the painted surface like snowflakes fallen too soon.

The last to go were the diamonds. The figurehead belched, the flying jib snapping with the force of it. “Our beauty is terrifying,” she blessed them all. “Even the water bows before our beauty. Oh, we will fly now. We will find the undiscovered land. We will see creatures never before sighted. And we will hunt a wedding roast fit for Queen Meg herself!”

When the sailors’ cheers died down, the Ship’s voice darkened. “But it seems that not all here respect beauty. Some of ye haven’t made tokens. I can smell it. One of ye has kept the greatest prize from me. A treasure beyond yer pintpot wits. A dowry bestowed by the sea itself.”

The hidden purse pulled Settle with the weight of the whole ocean rather than a handful of pearls.

“Beauty does not forgive,” the Ship hissed.

Who would dare take the sea’s own wedding gift to the Ship? Everyone eyed one another with suspicion, the Captain scrutinized any who came across his sight and all studied the apprentices like criminals waiting for the sentence not the verdict. The Wessex brothers could not endure. Within a day of the hunt, two shipped and joined the crew. Left alone, the third broke free of his work duty, jumped overboard and sank his body with pocketfuls of jewels prised from the chapel walls of the hull.