Shores of Darkness by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781788635073
Publisher: Canelo
Published: 2019-04-26T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

She’d considered it.

On the night she’d been taken, she was dragged shouting and struggling to the captain’s cabin, pushed inside and the door closed on her. The quarters were beautifully proportioned if she’d been in a state to appreciate them. There was a wall of leaded panes opposite her through which came the smell of sea. Behind a huge table with an ornate flange running round its top, a man was studying a chart. He raised his head and she stopped shouting instantly.

‘You call yourself Mlle La Fée?’ When she nodded, he said in English, ‘You and your friends are enemies of King James.’ He reminded her of the Pretender. Very neat, very cold. And of somebody else, she couldn’t think who.

‘We ain’t,’ she said, ‘We been serving his very own mother, Queen Mary Beatrice. What you up to?’

He’d got up from the desk then, walked round it and hit her across the face. ‘I’ll not have that name uttered from a mouth like yours,’ he said. ‘You’ve been spying on her. You and your paramours.’

She didn’t try to deny or protest, there would be no point. She could see he didn’t want to believe her anything other than an enemy. Anyway, she was too afraid. She’d remembered who he reminded her of. The man who’d raped her at Effie Sly’s had eyes like this one.

‘You’re a whore.’ He was very close to her and she felt the huff of his breath on her cheek as he said, ‘A harlot. I shall have your men put in a sack and thrown overboard. I shall have you stripped and lashed until the blood runs.’

The ferocious prayer that Bratchet sent up in that moment was answered by the unlikeliest guardian angel of any, but a guardian angel nevertheless. Clear as a voice from heaven, she heard the words of Floss, the Puddle Court prostitute, talking about her most dangerous clients. ‘You don’t want to show ’em you’re frightened,’ Floss had said, and now said again into Bratchet’s mind. ‘Show ’em you’re scared and they’ll do you where Maggie wore her beads.’

‘A waste,’ she whispered. She took a deep breath to control her breathing, and tried again. ‘Waste that is. Able-bodied fellows like them. Always useful. And me. Able-bodied too.’ She had trouble getting out the last word. ‘Useful.’

What appalled her then and after was that they understood each other as if he’d been buying and she’d been selling at the same stall for all their lives. ‘We’ll see,’ he said, ‘Later.’

During the laborious business of getting under way, she tried to find some corner where she wouldn’t be stepped on and watched him as he strode the quarterdeck, rapping out orders to his officers. The ship dwarfed her; it seemed to have been designed for giants. Hawsers were thick as sewer pipes, cables the width of barrels, blocks as big as footstools. The anchor stock came up like a whale flipper rising from the sea, sails that rose and shook out were frightening in their immensity.

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