The Raconteur's Commonplace Book by Kate Milford

Author:Kate Milford [Kate Milford]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780358411222
Publisher: HMH Books
Published: 2021-02-24T00:00:00+00:00

ELEVEN

THE STORM BOTTLE

The Captain’s Tale

THE TROUBLES BEGAN, as they almost always do at sea, with an omen. There is always an omen. The difficulty is spotting it and determining its meaning in time to anticipate whatever it is it happens to be foretelling.

The children of the captain of the schooner called the Fate often argued over omens. It seemed to the captain’s young daughter, Melusine, that her still-younger brother, Lowe, had a very solid instinct for spotting them, but that he tended to get exactly wrong whether they were good or bad. Some of this might’ve been because Lowe and Melusine had different mothers and had been raised with different tales and traditions, and moreover Lowe hadn’t been at sea for quite so long as Lucy had. Still, everyone knows that corposants coming down a mast are bad luck. Everyone except for Lowe, who staunchly insisted that it was when they moved up the mast that you were in for it. And he couldn’t keep straight when you ought to whistle and when you shouldn’t under any circumstances so much as think of it. Whistling might be permissible if, for instance, you needed a wind and had already stuck a knife in the mast and the sailing master was safely out of earshot, but you ought never to whistle at almost any other time aboard ship, ever, or that same sailing master would find some particularly unpleasant and probably smelly bit of busywork to occupy the rest of your natural life.

Then came the matter of Lowe and the storm bottle, and this time, for once, they were in complete agreement. Breaking the storm bottle was bad luck for certain, if for no other reason than it had belonged to the captain’s steward and he would be furious, and he had the power to make certain Melusine and Lowe ate nothing but stewed millers for a month if that was the punishment he deemed fair. And if stew sounds nice enough, it might change your mind to know that millers is the polite way of referring to rats if you have to eat them, which is not an unheard-of thing aboard a ship after months at sea, or as proper punishment for a particularly grievous offense.

The steward, Garvett, had bought his storm bottle from a glassblower in Venice. It was a narrow vessel full of liquid and some pale fluffy stuff that got cloudy or snowy or formed crystals, apparently according to what weather was coming. He had taken a bit of ribbing from the rest of the crew, who had scoffed at the idea that any sailor worth his salt needed a flask of milky water to tell him what he ought to be able to deduce from the sky and the sea and the plenitude of other signs the Good Lord had given him for interpreting the world. But then one day the storm bottle predicted snow on a perfectly mild and pleasant day in latitudes where snow had no business falling.

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