Taming the Wilde (4 page)

Seething with anger, I watched as he walked away without a second look towards me. There was not an ounce of kindness in his black heart, of that I was certain. His step was jaunty, his bearing proud as he passed through the silent crowd of prisoners. I knew they would not be silent for long, once the guards were gone I would be regaled with tales of my own rear end. If we sailed around the world a hundred times I would never hear the end of that blighted incident.

“Perhaps by the time we land I will have earned my sentence.” I mused under my breath. As a general rule I was slow to anger, but once affronted I never rested until those who had trespassed against me had paid for their sins. Master Roake had committed a heavy sin, one that would not easily be forgiven. I told him as much, though under my breath silently so he could not hear it. “You have made the wrong foe, Master Roake, you have picked on the wrong woman and you will know the error of your ways ere you set foot on shore again, I swear it on my father's grave.”

I will not say that setting sail was easy. Though we prisoners did little but sit and feel the motion as the ship moved through water we knew that every rock and roll of the vessel meant that we were moving farther away from the only home we had ever known. Melancholy took many of the prisoners and a soft sobbing could be heard throughout the prison deck as we were carried into our first night aboard the Valiant.

I could feel the touch of Roake's hand for many hours, a lingering sting that found new flame whenever I moved. The bunk in the cell was a little more comfortable than my prison accommodations had been, many times we had been so crowded as to have been forced to sleep on the floor. Lying on my back was not precisely painful, but it provided a memory I did not wish to have, so I tossed and turned with the ship from left to right until the morning came and we were roused with the dawn according to Roake's schedule.

I was not allowed out of my cell until we hit open water. It was feared that I might repeat my dive into the river's embrace, so for the first day's sail I was confined to quarters whilst the others took air under the watchful gaze of guards ready to avert any copycat attempts at escape. It was a miserable confinement to be sure, though not a lonely one for Lizzy made a point of loitering near the bars of my cage and speculating on the characters of all aboard the Valiant.

“That Morrow 'es a right 'un,” she said gleefully. “Keeps 'imself apart from us prisoners o'course, but I've seen the look in his eye, 'ed be up for it.”

Most men were 'up for it' as far as I could tell, but I did not sully her imaginings with that sort of talk. She was also keenly on the search for possible contenders for 'er Morrow' as she had taken to calling him. There were several other women she imagined to be showing obvious interest, one named Rose was of the most concern to Lizzy, for she was everything that Lizzy was not. Where Lizzy was robust and ruddy cheeked with a booming laugh and shameless personality, Rose was quiet, almost refined. She moved like a sparrow, delicate and easily startled. She was the type to elicit a protective response in a gentleman, but a predatory one in a man lacking in moral fiber.

I quite agreed with Lizzy's assertion that Rose would be one to catch the eye of the sailors. Her skin was fair and her hair dark, her eyes a pretty blue. Had she not secreted two of her employer's silver teaspoons in her skirts and subsequently sentenced to the same fate as the rest of us, she would have soon been married. The loss of her love was cast like a veil across her face, it should have made her seem morose and dull, but she was a woman who wore tragedy well and somehow her sadness only made her more appealing in aspect.

“Then there's you,” Lizzy said, giving me a sideways look. “But I'll warrant Roake has designs on you.”

“Don't be ridiculous.” I must confess I quite snapped the response. Another woman might be offended, but Lizzy laughed her raucous laugh. “You didn't see the way 'e looked at your rear,” she said, beaming away. “'E's a man in love.”

She had gone too far and I couldn't stand to hear another word. “Elizabeth Jones, I suggest you stop that sort of talk immediately, or you and I will have further words when I am allowed out of this damnable cage.”

“Settle yerself down there,” Lizzy
laughed. “Or I'll pop out for a bucket of finest Thames water to cool yer coals.”

I did settle myself and not just because Lizzy was capable of making good on her threat,
but because any disturbance below decks would almost certainly be blamed upon me. My status as scapegoat had been made clear at the outset, but it was not one I wanted to maintain.

Still, Lizzy's words had nettled me. Not because I thought Roake had feelings of any kind for me, but because I now saw what a thorough spectacle he had made of my person. He had not only caused me embarrassment, but he had associated himself with me in the minds of all those had seen what passed between us, perhaps even to the point of making me a pariah in the minds of the rest of the crew.

* * * * *

It was three days before I saw the man again. At that time we were assembled on a lower deck in a room that served as a schoolhouse. There rows of low tables and benches were provided for us to sit and learn our lessons. Two guards had shuffled us into our floating
schoolhouse, which was met with a mixture of curiosity and caution by most.

“Master Roake will be with ye all shortly, now settle down, for
‘e won’t be tolerating any talking when 'es teaching,” the guard warned us rather sportingly. The man departed then and shortly after Master Roake himself stepped into the room.

It wasn't until I laid eyes upon him that I realized I had not been prepared for the shock of seeing him again. In the interim I had fancied him a grotesque monster, but he was not a monster at all. He was tall and perhaps a little more slim than was the ideal, but the way he moved suggested strength, and I already knew the mighty power his limbs were capable of. I felt my face growing warm as I sat in the rear row of the school room, the sight of the man reminding me of what had passed between us in such clarity that I almost felt as if I was back in that cabin with him about to unleash his ire upon me.

He was dressed in a white shirt, black trousers and a long black overcoat that seemed perhaps a little too formal for the setting. But Roake was deeply interested in formality and propriety. He reminded me in some ways of old tutors employed in the years prior to and directly following my father's death. I had never taken to any of them, though I had taken to the materials they brought into my life, so we had existed in an uneasy truce. Unlike those tutors, who would have been horsewhipped had they dared lay a hand on me, Roake carried a great bristling birch rod which he placed conspicuously in a corner at the front of the room so we might all look upon it.

“Wilde, up the front.” I thought that he had not noticed me, but the first words out of his mouth were directed towards my person, a fact that did not go unnoticed by the others. I was compelled to move to the front row, every step an embarrassment as I moved toward him against my will. He glanced towards me as I took a seat at the furthest end of the row and that solitary look was enough to make my innards tremble.

To my relief, he said no more and a stack of primers was passed amongst us. I opened mine and glanced through it to find that it was the sort of book more suited to a nursery than a schoolroom. My first impulse was to feel superior, but that soon gave way to the realization that I could make far more hay out of not revealing my education. There was, after all, no real way for him to know that I could read. Plenty of women had pretty speech and not a brain in their heads.

“We will begin with an assessment of your abilities,” Roake declared, his dark eye roving over the assembled women. “Each of you will read a line from the fourth page. You will make your best effort to read, and each one of you shall make an attempt aloud. There is no shame in failing, but there is great shame in failing to try.”

As we all leafed through to the fourth page, skipping past the basic alphabet and the Lord's Prayer, I was impressed by his opening, which contained more compassion than I had given him credit for, but it did not change my mind. He elected to begin with me naturally enough. “Stand up, Wilde,” he said, “and begin with the first line.”

Our reading opened with a rather trite little tale about a cat and a kitten
that lived in a kitchen. Hardly relevant to the interests of women being shipped across the open ocean, but there were very few publications taking interest in the sort of matters of interest to our kind.

“
Th... e … c. a. t,” I drew out the sentence, pretending not to be able to read. I admit I felt a great satisfaction, perhaps even some smugness as I play acted my way through a sentence that even a small child should have been able to dispatch forwards and back. “I...s... o...n...” I trailed off, feigning confusion. “I do not know the rest,” I said, glancing up from the tome, but not up to Roake's gaze for I was sure he would see the deception in my eyes if I looked at that moment.

There were a few muffled noises of merriment from those I had both written and read letters for during our incarceration together, but by and large they let me have my play. There was not a single woman who denied that Roake's treatment of me was outrageous in the extreme and I fancied that they enjoyed seeing me take my revenge almost much as I enjoyed taking it.

“It seems you are missing the letter 'm' from your repertoire, for the second part of the sentence is the same as the first aside from that letter,” Roake said dryly. “The cat, in this instance, is on the mat.”

My heart rose in my throat as I realized that I had perhaps overplayed my pretense but to my great relief, he moved to the woman to my right, who acquitted herself very well in explaining that the rat was in the hat. By the end of the first lesson we had determined that about two thirds of our number were capable of reading three letter words with a modicum of accuracy.

To the remaining third, Roake distributed hornbooks, wooden boards with the alphabet, capital and lower case letters and the Lord's Prayer inscribed on paper and stuck to them. “One of you fortunate enough to have been well educated will be responsible for instructing your peers on the basics of reading,” he said, turning to the class. “I am certain that there are several of you capable of the task, are there any volunteers?”

There was no response at first and I did smirk quietly to myself, knowing full well that I would be more than capable of the task. Perhaps I would undertake it in private, but there was no way I would allow myself to be Roake's tool in any shape or form.

“Perhaps it will pique your interest to know that there are certain privileges associated with the position. A small salary and extra exercise time are both included, as well as greater leave to move throughout the ship – as long as the privilege is not abused.”

That bought a flurry of interest, both from those qualified and not. I almost
raised my hand myself, but seeing how neatly Roake was trapping me with the promise of rewards, I refrained. “Ah, there's a better response,” he said, smiling quite broadly in a way that made him near handsome. “I will make my determination presently. In the meantime, those of you who are capable will read on silently.”

I lowered my eyes to the primer where a very smug little cat gazed back at me. I could not stop thinking about how nice it would be to have a salary and more time out of the prison decks. But surely there was no way to suddenly become competent at reading... unless... “Oh!” I exclaimed aloud. “I see the problem, I am used to a different form of 'm', why, it all seems so simple now.”

“Indeed,” Roake said, turning towards me. “An indelicate 'm' is the source of your problems, is it?”

“I believe so,” I said, folding my hands in my lap. “Now that it has been made clear, I
think I might be in a position to read anything in this book at all.”

“Is that so?”

I should have paid more attention to his tone, which was soft to the point of caution, but I was thinking of the salary and other rewards. I did not think I could bear to sit below deck and rot whilst someone less qualified took the position.

“Yes,” I said, flipping to the back of the book and beginning to read a poem by Dr
. Watts.

“Hush my dear, lie still and slumber, Holy angels guard thy bed
. 
Heavenly blessings without number
Gently falling on thy head. 
Sleep, my babe, thy food and raiment, 
House and home thy friends provide, 
And without thy care or payment,
All thy wants are well supplied.”

There was much more of the verse, but I put the book down then and looked to see what
effect my performance had. I expected to see surprise, perhaps even a little admiration from Roake for I knew all too well that my reading voice was fair.

Instead I saw a dark and dangerous smirk on the man's face. “How strange that you should have developed such a talent for reading in the space of a few short minutes,” he noted.

“The good lord works in mysterious ways,” I replied. There was a hush in the room, but I heard Lizzy mutter the word 'fool' and I knew she was referring to my good self.

Roake's right brow rose slow and smooth as his dark eyes pierced mine. “You are lying to me, Miss Wilde, and that is a most unwise course of action.”

Though the situation seemed dire, I knew that there was no way for him to prove such an accusation, he could not see into my head and glean what processes were taking place there. “I am sorry you think that,” I said, folding my hands in my lap and casting my eyes towards them. I stayed like that, hoping Roake might move on, but as long moments passed I glanced up under my lashes to see that he was still standing over me, grim and stern as ever.