Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 26 (2 page)

Only her dear Apple could see her, just as he saw her heart a half-mooned night barely two days ago when they had pledged themselves. “Stay close, Settle sweet,” her barely-manned boy whispered as steadily as he could. “I will hold you up.”

The Cruel Ship’s crew penned them into a sheep ring. As the afternoon unsheathed and the smoke and flame of The Righteous Dream receded into the night, Settle stared at the bloated head of the Dream’s captain, spiked like a prize to one of the masts, until she found her own keel, a will to live.

The Cruel Captain wanted ships. He could not take the ships of those whose lives had already set sail, the sailors of the Dream whose ships had already been fathomed from childhood. He craved unshipped men—but how to tag the shipless passenger from the brined sailor? Both had foreseen the fate of those taken by the Cruel Ship and had time to jumble their rags as the Dream gurgled its last. Passenger and crew were a single tribe now.

The Cruel Captain bided. One by one, the captives lost to sleep, one by one, their bodies sagged and curled onto the deck. As sleep churned their dreaming, the Cruel Captain’s men scanned the dark fan of the ship’s wake. If it was a sailor, one of the shipped, it appeared, out there—a boat, faint in the muslin-light of the clouded sky. A schooner, or a fine frigate in miniature, or a rough sculler. The jack tars pointed and laughed, joking about the ship-shape and vigour of each, then dragged out the sleeping sailor and gave him to the sea. But if it was a passenger or one of the powder monkeys, the unshipped, the boats still docked in their dreams and the Cruel Ship’s backwash lay undisturbed. Their bodies were pulled from the mass, leg-ironed, but led away in safety.

Settle would not sleep. She was unshipped as yet, but all through the Dream’s journey, she had felt its immanence. What if tonight was the night, what if her ship chose to slip her lethe now? Her adolescence was cusped, her blood had started in flow over a year ago. Shipness came to most when the jibs of adulthood were set. Surely it must be soon.

She clasped her Apple and he provided her a trunk in his arm, the breeze through the leaves in his soft prayers. She would not drift. Passengers and sailors made pacts and fell asleep together to confuse the Cruel Captain’s men, but they were prodded awake in turn until a ghost ship faded and the ‘souls’ could be divined from the ‘scraps.’

Settle urged herself through the long night, the cold ache of the dawn, the slow blister towards noonday. She pinched Applethwaite awake, she caught Doctor Wendell when he fainted dead, and into the second night, as the crew heaved dark matter from the hold overboard and the water beneath boiled with frenzied gulls, Settle denied herself thoughts of home, holding back memories of Father’s chanteys and the coze of Spithampton’s familiar quays as those around her surrendered. But she was only a girl and her strength was a cup not a pint. She pitched, Apple’s hands and his urgent “Settle!” tried to hold her. And she dreamt—

—of open seas on a calm night. Not a ship, not a wink, and she sighed to herself, relieved, and she cringed, disappointed that it was still not yet. Nothing but horizon, though great things moved below the shallow ripples.

When she woke, a face, a boiled chestnut pierced at each ear with a wine cork and framed by hedgehog chops, leered at her. “Well, here’s a lucky little one,” he said. “A fine prentice—not lumber.”

Settle was slapped in irons and taken away, no longer branded captive but marked for crew.

Of the nineteen passengers of the Dream, only six others survived to indenture. Pale Dr. Wendell, in a constant twitter since the disaster, three deranged Wessex boys who were latterly pretending to be brothers despite being strangers all through the Dream’s voyage, a man whose wits refused to shine through a fixed expression—and her Apple. Taken aft, they were ironed to a length of rack in the grain storage, which they shared with rat skitter and the suck of the waterline beyond the hull. But they were given a sip of water, a hack of bread and a promise that one day they would have a bunk and a share of the revelry—as soon as they offered their ships to the Cruel Captain.

“Apple, if they discover—”

“They will not, my Settle.”

In private at last, he could smudge Settle’s cheeks with ship grime, button high her canvas shirt, check her roughly-chopped locks. He nestled close as the others slept. “I gave you my oath as we crossed the equator and I will keep it under southern stars, northern stars, any constellation you can imagine.”

But shortly after first light, they were separated. A party of sailors rattled their pistols against the rack and chains and ahoy-ed the prentices awake. “First day of schooling,” the oldest said. Settle recognised the tug of a man with judge’s whiskers from the ordeal on deck. “No red carpet in the Academy, but ye’re welcome all the same.”

Settle was taken by the Judge, her Apple, Dr Wendell and the Wessex brothers by the other sailors, while the dazed man was left behind. The Judge exchanged looks with another sailor, and they agreed with barely a nod. Settle never saw the unwitted man again.

The Judge guided her through the bowels of the Cruel Ship, jerking the chain to remind her of his meanness, but prattering easily about his arthritis and the cook’s little jokes with rat’s turds. Settle had to twist her ears to hear through the accents, both the Judge’s own gutter growl and the Ship’s creaks and belches. The boat had more belly than she would have sworn from the speed with which it ran down the Dream. Close to the deck, the crew slept in bunks ranked tighter than steerage in a colony ship. The stench was dizzying, speaking of decades, not just years of confinement, but Settle checked her refined instincts. Below the common layers of the Ship, Settle could see further circles descending into the hellish darknesses below, pulsing with unexplained sighs and moans.

The Judge took her along the ship’s hull, throbbing with the pressure of the sea above, and issued her with a mop and a bucket. “Give the old girl a Queen Meg ha’penny.” Settle was frightened to ask what he meant, but the Judge quickly added, “There’s a proper wash and shave.”

The skin of the hull was slick with a clear oil. It was not condensate, but an ooze that coated the tough bristles sprouting out of wood rashed by ancient termites. The lanternlight pearled the drops that clung to the tips.

Settle understood. She swabbed the surface, drained the excess from the mop into the bucket where it thickened into a murky yellow paste. Using shears, the Judge shaved the hull, cutting the hair close to the wood. Each tendril snapped like a firecracker.

They worked their way down one end of the Ship. After a few hours and what she hoped was a companionable silence, Settle asked as gruffly as she could muster, “What about food and drink?”

She held her breath at her daring, but in two days, all she had eaten was a few bites of stony bread. The Judge picked up two bristles from the floor, gave one to Settle and chewed the other like tobacco. “Best soften her in the gob first,” he said, “before washing her down.”

“With what?” Settle looked around for a flask.

The Judge tapped the bucket with his dirty bare foot. “But sip her first. If grog and crank fucked for a month, ye’d still never get juice with more blow.”

They harvested a bag of bristles and three buckets of brew while the Judge whistled skeleton jigs and execution songs. After they slopped the lot to the cook, the Judge gave Settle a tour of the forward head and a sponge to keep. Hidden at last, she relieved herself. She could remember who she was and let the tears at the loss of the Dream and horror at the Judge’s manners and dread at her plight surge on a spring tide of feeling. She gripped the splinters of the door frame, feeling the canter of the Cruel Ship, praying that she did not have to go back out, that she could stay here with the ship’s motion forever.

But the Captain’s voice snaked through the mass of boat to find her. Hunt that wind, ye darling wretches, hunt it and hump it and trap its roar. Take us off the charts. Find us something amazing in the dried-up shit fens of this world. And any slack and ye’ll be skinned and sugared in salt!

So Settle gripped her will and came forth and allowed herself to be taken back to the secure store.

That night, she and Applethwaite separated themselves from the others—the Wessex boys huddled in their own speak while Dr Wendell tried to ingratiate himself with the cook’s monkeys through the slats of the door. Apple had spent his day labouring to move the Dream’s seized cannon as the armourer determined which of the Cruel Ship’s guns were in need of replacement.

“Our supervisor had not been a sailor—he let slip that he was once a Rutland farmhand,” he explained. “A passenger like us. Unshipped.”

“I do not understand, Apple. What happened to him? What will happen to us?”

“These questions come too soon, my sweet Settle. All I can say is that the Captain is recruiting.”

“Then what is he recruiting for?”

But there was no one to tell them and they were tired to their marrows. She fell asleep listening for something that would tell her, but all she could hear was the figurehead wailing drunkenly, calling for the Captain to poke her in a flyer, cursing the winds for teasing and not mounting her, a dementia that faded as Settle returned again to the open sea of her dreams.

Her dreams disconcerted her. Still no whisper of her ship, only grand creatures close to the surface that refused to reveal themselves. Why were her reveries not of the Dream? That happy voyage—why not go back to the long afternoons of lazily-ravelled passenger bonhomie, evening lessons boomed by Long Preston over dinner, twilight choruses of sailors hailing the sun on her loop about the planet? The Dream’s survivors would not discuss it, nor even acknowledge each other—a blessing given Settle’s disguise, but one that emptied her of any comfort other than Apple’s embrace.

So she placed another life away in the Dream while she mopped and trimmed for the crew’s meals. A life where their passage was never crossed by the Cruel Ship, where they followed the equator until, one by one, all the passengers were found by their own ships. She dreamt of them all returning through the Londinium Flats, a flotilla of manifest destinies, and Father and Apple’s uncle and step-aunt waiting at the docks as she and her newly-beloved announced their news. And she dreamt further, hers and Apple’s ships joined on the sea—maybe as a fishery, perhaps as an inland cruiser, and sometimes, when her urges were more dashing, a smuggler or a spy for the Crown—

The dreams always faltered. Settle was unshipped and she could not imagine what her own boat would be like. As a life’s purpose cleared from the mist of childhood, ships were supposed to shake loose all a child’s fantasies and speculations and drop into the waters of the waking world. Ships bore fate. Queen Meg’s was a vast, dry-docked galley, once a fearsome fireship at war’s cutting edge, now a floating palace of burnished oak and gilt sails that shone as the jewel on the necklace of the Tham and had grown with the Empire’s reach across the seas. Father’s was a simple barge, dull but prized in Settle’s eyes for its lack of pretension, a tub designed for routine crossings of the pinch of Spit Bay and the routine fate Father had fashioned after the influenza took her mother. Neither hinted at the shape of Settle’s ship or her destiny—but nor had any other ship or destiny she could fathom.

Father had never pressed her to join the Dream—Settle had craved it for herself. I can feel my future surging inside me, like a wave trapped in a bottle, she had told the other passengers. I would command my ship to appear if only my voice could carry!

Applethwaite and Doctor Wendell had laughed at such violent sentiments coming from such soft lips, and indeed, Settle had even surprised herself. Her Apple had said, I would simply be happy to be part of another ship, and then taking her into the harbour of his gaze, an ark for two. While Doctor Wendell had coughed into his fancy kerchief and twittered, Oh yes! Another ship! A mighty vessel—to be part of someone else’s grand scheme, and never to be alone in one’s dreams—oh no!

Doctor Wendell meant grand schemes like the Dream, a composite like the other ships of the line—and like the Cruel Ship. But the Dream had been a voluntary union of ship and soul—unlike the Cruel Ship. This boat had swelled with the bones and boards of other vessels and lives, taking on its stock in a restless voyage that old dogs swore had been continuing since their grandfathers’ boyhoods. The Ship had exhausted every ocean, seizing whatever it could take, driven on by a desperation that stained the atmosphere as emphatically as the stewed air.

In the days that followed their capture, as they headed south into seas so warm the seaweed formed phantasmic continents, Settle studied how the Ship had been pieced from its far-flung jetsam. The hull was quilted from teak, birch, wood she could not name, from the hide-stretched line of a canoe, the polish and varnish of a princely schooner, the thick-tarred roughness of a city junk. Every section was staked out in private chapels, accretions of personal faith formed from enamel likenesses, locks of hair, a baby’s sucker, mementoes all tacked and roped by the crew and made royal by the liberal jewelling of precious stones the crew must have seized from other unfortunates. For all their hidden dreaming, they slept in a tangle of each other and moved like assemblies whenever the Cruel Captain barked. The Cruel Ship and its crew breathed and farted in the rhythm of a single organism.

But there were still parts of the vessel that were too intimate for any of them. Some evenings, the dark spaces in the Ship’s gut slushed with a wet moaning that could drown out the figurehead’s lewd cries or the Captain’s drunken songs.

When she asked him about the lower levels, the Judge reluctantly broke his whistling. “The Ship’s spun the globe time and time over and many have crewed with the Captain,” he said. “Not all left when their contracts were cleaned.”

So even the dead could not break the Cruel Ship’s hold. “But it’s not all ghosties,” he added. “She carries her own waters down there.”

Settle had a flash of the powerful things that flowed below her dreams and shivered. She startled when the moan grew louder, shifting in the ship’s strange echo chamber so that it came from above.

The Judge hiccupped with delight. “Not all blowing’s out the arse,” he said. “Her Majesty is getting impatient and she’s a mouthy old cow.”

He meant the figurehead, whose clamour was becoming more earnest by the day. “Aye—she’ll want her gifts before the wedding.”

“A wedding?” Settle asked. “Who is to be married?”

“Worry least about the bride and groom,” the Judge warned her, “and most about whether ye can get an invitation.”

The Judge licked the side of the hull, his eyes rolled white with the taste, and winked at Settle. “And if ye’ve an intention to join the Ship, time ye did before the wedding. We don’t carry lumber long.”

Oh, if it were only so simple a matter of intention. Joining the crew was not a decision—it was straightforward possession, seizure of the newly-shipped’s destiny. That was clear later that night when they witnessed Doctor Wendell discover his oars for the first time.