The Isle of Gold Page 3

  I was unsure whether it was a statement or a question, and I did not trust my voice to speak on either account, so I nodded and hoped it was sufficient. My pulse beat so strongly against my throat that it felt like there was a bird trapped in my neck, threatening to break free.

  Winters stared at me, saying nothing and everything at the same time, and I very nearly lost my nerve under the suffocating weight of his eyes. Luckily, Dunn broke the silence before I could take my last breath. He introduced me by way of another one of his disapproving gazes. “Lad’s name be Rivers,” he grumbled to the captain’s back. “Barely wet behin’ the ears and thinks himself ready to join the Riptide’s men.” He raised an eyebrow in my direction. “Best be sendin’ him on his way. We have preparations to ma—”

  I rediscovered my voice just in time to interrupt the quartermaster—an action that earned me another stern look of reprimand from the older man. “I d-do,” I spluttered, starting forward awkwardly. My damned hat slipped down too far over my eyes as I shuffled gracelessly to a sudden halt, and I tried not to look embarrassed as I pushed it back into place. I attempted to cover my discomfiture with additional tugging on the waistband of my pants, but my efforts were foiled by a startling, clinking sound of metal on my belt, and I couldn’t help but feel like a child dressed up in a pirate’s costume. “I do mean to join your crew.”

  Winters loosed a puff of smoke from his cigarette, and continued to hold me in his silent, icy stare. I could feel the coldness of it hardening around me, the razor sharp teeth of frostbite creeping up my toes despite the musky warmth of the crowded tavern. Frozen in place, I couldn’t help but wonder if the captain had been born with his name or if he’d earned it from some former enemy. Both would have been just as likely.

  “The crew won’t like it,” Dunn added. A faint note of caution had crept into his words though I wasn’t sure who it was aimed at. The men behind him, I noticed for the first time, had disappeared since their captain’s arrival, their previous shark-like intensity diminished to lesser fish in the company of this new danger.

  Winters remained unmoved as he passed his eyes over me in a final, lingering appraisal. His tongue flicked out in a swift movement—a quick flash of a red tip against the dark auburn of the stubble around his mouth—and the small nub of cigarette disappeared between his lips. “He’ll sail,” he decided, and then rose up from the table so swiftly that the smell of wood fire and gun smoke rushed into my nostrils. A last wisp of cigarette smoke escaped the corner of his lips. He paused momentarily, his taller height swathing me in shadow, and as I bravely raised my eyes to meet his, I was of the distinct impression that any choice I had had in sailing with the Riptide had now been replaced with an order. Whether I wished it or not, it was to be a pirate’s life for me.

  Without another word or a backward glance Winters moved briskly away, sliding through the throng of his drunken men to retreat behind a door at the other side of the tavern. Dunn and I watched in silence as the … our captain disappeared, and with a heavy sigh the quartermaster stood and extended his hand over the table to me. Without hesitation I took it, neither of us missing that my hand slid too smoothly into his, like silk into sandpaper. His mouth bunched into a disapproving look and his black eyes glittered with suspicion, but much to my relief he did not remark on it.

  “Well, Mister Rivers,” my new quartermaster grumbled in a tight voice, “welcome to the crew.”

  III

  I spent a difficult night striving to conceal myself amid the rough stonewalls and dim corners of the tavern, and doing my best to avoid the skeptical eyes of the Riptide’s men. Over the past several hours the announcement of my addition to the crew had spread throughout the tavern, prompting more sour looks and obscene hand gestures in my direction than I was entirely comfortable with. In my eagerness to join them, I had naively assumed that these hardened men would have little interest in me, and that I would slip unremarkably into their ranks without a second thought, and minimal, if any, disturbance in the usual course of such things. I had not, however, considered the possibility that they would be so opposed to my coming onboard, nor so openly hostile.

  Shrunken down as small as I could make myself in my ill-fitting pirate’s costume, I felt like a sheep running blindly into a pack of wild dogs, led by a wolf, and cursed myself for thinking that I was bold enough for such a mission. It had been easy enough to daydream about setting out to sea to find treasure, and answers, and the secret to Mistress Dahl’s disappearance when I had been safe in the brothel’s kitchens, surrounded by familiar faces and familiar frustrations. Now, I could only hear Claudette’s words echoing in my mind. “This compulsion will be the end of you.” I’d scoffed at how wrong she was. Never mind living long enough to return back to Isla Perla at the end of this journey, I’d be lucky enough to survive my first week at sea. If the captain didn’t throw me into the waters himself, it was quite possible that any member of the crew might take such a tempting task into their own hands.

  The only person in the tavern who had given me a moment’s kindness had ironically been Mister Brandon Dunn, who, despite his earlier trepidation, seemed now at least sympathetic toward me. After joining Captain Winters behind closed doors for the better part of the evening, he’d reemerged to deliver a scratchy woolen blanket, a fistful of bread, and a cup of warm, heady ale. “Never you mind the rest,” he’d counseled in his usual harsh manner. “Keep your head down an’ do your work, and they’ll eventually come around.” He’d stopped here to swear as an empty bottle, hurled by the man with the handkerchief across his eyes, shattered on the stone behind my head. “O’course, not all of them be takin’ too kindly to strangers,” Dunn had finished with a shrug. Still, this did little to comfort me, and I forced myself to ignore the lull of sleep so that I could keep one eye open on the men who were so unwilling to be my mates. Had any of them known my true identity or purpose, Dunn among them, I would bet my weight in Ogygian gold that I’d be swung from the mast before dawn.

  Though the men made it clear I was not welcome, they were too busy in their carousing to care enough to harass me, and so the dawn had seen me at the docks, where the Riptide made her berth, inhaling the scents of saltwater and tar that mingled in the morning air as I joined a group of men in a small boat to row to where the ship waited in the harbor. She had just this morning returned from the other side of the island, an isolated location designated as a neutral zone by the few crews who regularly used the empty beach as sheltered anchorage to maintain their ships. That part of the island was known as The Seawall, named for the wall-like barricade the emptied ships’ cargo formed on the beach between the jungle and the water. Here the Riptide’s men had worked in shifts over the past several weeks to prepare her to take back to the water. First they had lightened her, hoisting every crate and barrel aboard into longboats and then rowing them to land to be stacked along the shore. When she was finally empty, the second shift had inched her inland with the tide, and then, when she ran aground, used a system of ropes and pulleys to heave her down onto her sides for careening. There, once the Riptide had been anchored securely to the land by way of long, thick ropes knotted to palm trees, her hull was scraped clean of barnacles and seaweed. Holes and rotted wood were patched with tar and freed of shipworm, a clam that dug into the hull and bored holes until it was as brittle as honeycomb. The job took several weeks to complete. During these the men worked in groups that traded places, alternating between the beach where the ship’s boatswain—a willowy young fellow of friendly disposition who bore a striking resemblance to his name, Tom Birch—presided over the affair, and The Goodnight Mermaid, where they feasted on meat, beer, and brothel women. Their captain remained hidden away in his office, studying secret texts and charting their course, only visiting The Seawall once at the end of the process to give approval of his ship’s state himself before it was hauled up and pushed back into the water.

  At long last, the Riptide was now ready to again set sail, and even th
ough I was sleep-deprived, hungry, and still fretting over my own mortality, I couldn’t help but feel a tremble of excitement as the small boat bumped against her glorious sides. I stared up at her full height with awe as I waited my turn to scale the ladder embedded into her side and set my feet upon the deck, watching carefully as the men in front of me scrambled up so that I could mimic their motions as smoothly as if I’d done them myself a million times before.

  The Riptide was a large English galleon, and even by a pirate’s standards she was an exquisite ship, possessing two gun decks and three fully rigged masts that billowed fresh canvas sails of foggy grey, a mark of Winters’ command. She was an older ship, although expertly maintained, and rumored to have been seized originally in the Mediterranean before finding herself somewhat recently in the hands of Captain Winters on the other side of the world. Unlike many similarly decorated ships, the Riptide boasted the image of a goddess—fierce and ethereal and with a countenance eerily similar to that of Evangeline herself—as its figurehead rather than the large-breasted merfolk or busty angels which were more usual. The sides of the ship’s hull were lined with well-worn gun ports of carefully arranged canons, and its stern galley was wrapped in windowpanes with the name Riptide lettered in gold filigree underneath. Waving languidly in the air above its topmast was Winters’ flag—a skull atop a pair of golden bones, flanked by red claw marks and resting on a black cloth.

  I climbed the ladder and boarded the ship, then stood uneasily on the deck as I took in the flurry of movement around me. The men, an assortment of characters of every age and nation, worked with the speed and agility of an army of ants loading and storing barrels of food and supplies as they filled the ship’s stores for a long journey at sea. I tried not to catch the attention of any pirate swirling around me, still weary from last night’s murderous glares as I watched crate after crate come aboard—flour, rum, gunpowder, and other assorted items concealed in barrels and sacks. A portly man, who I guessed was the ship’s cook, supervised a pair of men as they lifted a spit carrying a giant roasted pig onto the deck, then stepped it below deck.

  The men did not seem to tolerate my presence on the edge of the main deck any more than they had the tavern, and not wanting to appear useless I quickly fetched a mop from the bannister and begin to busy my hands with polishing the planks around me. The men barked their sentiments as they shoved past me:

  “Out of the way, power monkey.”

  “Shove off, swab.”

  I pretended not to hear these.

  Then, “Oi,” an unfamiliar, affable sounding voice called in my direction. I kept my eyes locked on my mop and counted my breaths. The voice came closer. “Oi,” it said again, this time obviously to me. “What’s that you think you’re doing?”

  I looked up to find none other than Tom Birch standing with his hands crossed across his chest, his torso tanned and laced with thick, sinewy veins and flecked with small hairs that reflected the yellow mid-morning sunlight. I tried not to gape at him as I moved my eyes up his bare chest to his face, a long sweep that eventually reached deep, saltwater green eyes that glinted curiously at me. He was so tall that from my position below him his head almost entirely eclipsed the harsh, mid-morning sun, leaving the blotted light to cast a halo behind a crown of dishwater blond hair that had been clipped shorter than was common so that it stuck up in little tufts around his head. Thin sideburns ran the length of his face and curved around the ridges of his jaw and surrounded a pair of plump, soft-looking lips that were, at the moment, slightly parted as he waited expectantly for an answer. He wore a pair of plain woolen breeches topped by a wide leather belt, and a thick strap of frayed rigging rope hung around his neck. A small pail of oakum and pitch dangled loosely in his left hand; a brush thick with the black paste was stuck handle-deep within. From afar the boatswain had appeared lanky and unassuming, but up close he was much more arresting though he still had smooth skin that had not yet been hardened from salt spray. He was distractingly handsome, and by the looks of it, only a few years my senior, but now was not the time to enjoy such a view—the puzzled expression stamped on his face said clearly that I had committed a greenhorn’s error.

  “Well?” he inquired again, harder this time as he gestured agitatedly at the mop in my hands. The rope swung heavily from his neck, ticking like an impatient pendulum. I had nearly forgotten is question.

  “I-I was swabbing the deck, sir,” I answered, my voice squeaking a bit with surprise. I cleared my throat and lifted the mop as if it were explanation enough. I hadn’t the slightest clue what I was doing, but I was familiar with mopping—it had been a common chore in the brothel to mop up blood and other vile fluids from the floors several times every day. “Readying for the waves, sir.”

  The tall man cocked an eyebrow at me, and his upper lip stretch backward in annoyed bewilderment. For a moment, he just looked at me, stunned into silence by what I could only assume was my own stupidity. Then, he slumped forward, as if he thought he might have misheard whatever I’d said and a closer proximity would clear the confusion. I tried not to notice how inviting his lips looked, still parted, or that his teeth were brilliantly white. “Readying for the waves?” he echoed incredulously. His eyes dropped to the deck and he waved his open palm around in a sweeping gesture, the can of tar swinging in his hand. “What are you playing at? Can’t you see that it’s just been caulked?”

  Being unfamiliar with the nuances of nautical maintenance, I was foreign to the term caulking, but as I looked to where Tom Birch motioned at my feet I could plainly see that old rope had been pressed between the boards and sealed over with tar. I assumed this was what he referred to as having been caulked, though I didn’t dare confirm it with him and incriminate myself further. The sudsy saltwater from the mop bubbled around it pitifully in the light. I would have been less speechless had a mermaid suddenly appeared and flopped about on the boards, and I struggled to find a suitable response. No words filled my throat, and I braced for punishment. I had often heard that sailors did not take kindly to mishandling of their ships, particularly by young, already unwanted new recruits.

  After a painful moment during which he just stared blankly at me, a thought bloomed inside Birch’s eyes, making them somehow even greener and more lovely. A look of clarity smoothed his furrowed brow though his face retained some of its previous irritation, and he looked at me with new recognition. “You must be Rivers, then?” he guessed, visibly relieved that he was dealing with a novice and not a moron. Without waiting for verification, he thrust the pitch pail in my free hand and snatched the mop from the other. This last he tossed uselessly on the deck. A man with an impressively long beard made to yell at him, but upon seeing it was the boatswain who’d thrown the mop he let it go and kept waking, mumbling something under his breath. Mister Birch pulled a cloth from the band of his belt and wiped the sweat from his brow, then flipped the rag over his shoulder. “I’m Tom Birch, the boatswain.” He nodded at me in introduction but did not offer his hand, which was just as well as I was using both of mine to hold the pail, which was heavier than I had expected it to be. “Ol’ Bullet said to look after you.”

  I glanced from the tar in my hands to Tom, wondering what sort of manual misery “looking after” might mean, and then, noticing the much taller man eyeing me, I nervously managed one hand away from the pail to reposition the brim of my hat as low over my eyes as I could without blinding myself. It had only been one day and I was becoming rather practiced at seeing from underneath the brim of that bothersome hat. I tested the give of the brush in the pitch paste and found it to be sticky and stiff. If my lot on this ship was to be tarring planks, then so be it. Then again, had Tom Birch said to lick the deck I very well might have done that for him just as willingly.

  The boatswain was still watching me fiddle with the tar pail. “Bullet?” I asked, certain I’d never met anyone called Bullet.

  “Aye,” Tom said slowly, and I saw irritation overtake his eyes once more, this t
ime tinged with a hint of pity. The expression on his face showed that the man now evidently thought me daft—not exactly an improvement from stupid, but still it was better than suspicion. He pointed off the starboard side of the ship, and I followed his eyes down the length of his arm until my sight landed on Dunn, who was still several yards away on shore. “Bullet. Mister Brandon Dunn, obviously.”

  The moniker brought to mind a certain speed and gracefulness that didn’t seem to fit the man I’d met in the tavern last night. However, even across the water, he was easy enough to distinguish by his standing grey crest and tall, rail-like stature that did have a sleek, bullet-like quality about it. Standing half silhouetted beneath the groaning awning of a rickety shanty, I could see the tense set of his white-ringed jowls in his profile. He seemed to be arguing with someone who stood just out of sight; he was moving his hands in slow, deliberate gestures that suggested he was trying to explain—or perhaps convince—his listener of something. I watched curiously as he gradually appeared to relax, until he finally shrugged and rubbed his lips with the back of his hand in a manner I suspected was acquiescence. Either he’d won the argument, or he’d given up.

  Finally, he reached in front of him and laid his hand on an unseen shoulder. He bowed his head, and bobbed it lightly a few times in a listening manner. After a pause he withdrew his arm and turned away, his quick steps bringing him marching into the full sunlight as he made his way toward the small boat waiting on the water. As he neared the edge of the sand, I watched as he waded into the shallow depths and climbed into the vessel, and then returned my eyes to the awning as the person he’d been in intense conversation with stepped out of the shadow. I was stunned to see that the person with whom he’d been so engrossed was not one person but two, and a most unlikely pair at that—my sweet Claudette and Mrs. Emery.