George doesn’t use the captain’s cabin—he prefers the hammocks belowdecks with the other men—so the bed is undressed. I can see fleas jumping from the bare straw mattress. Monty collapses onto it, hauling his injured leg after him with a whine of pain.
“Get George,” he says, and I do as I’m told. By the time I return with him, Monty is barely conscious. His skin looks gray, the seawater replaced by an oily sheen of sweat.
George swears as he rips back the leg of Monty’s breeches to get a better appraisal of the wound. It’s already swollen, the skin along his shin and knee shredded and that spear of white bone pearly against the blood. I have to look away so I won’t vomit.
“Linens in the cupboard behind you,” George instructs me, then “Hold him still,” after I toss him a set.
I press my weight into Monty’s shoulders as George rips the sheet into strips and uses them to tie him down to the bunk so the storm won’t move him. Beneath my palms, Monty’s chest heaves. His neck arches suddenly and he lets out a sharp keen of pain that makes my toes curl. I fist my hands around the neck of his shirt as George ties off the last knot, then tosses me a second sheet. “Use that for the blood. Keep him as still as you can,” he instructs.
“Where are you going?” I ask, my voice pitching. I am not the man you want in a crisis. Surely George knows better than I do. Surely anyone does. “What about a surgeon?”
“We haven’t got one,” he says grimly, then turns for the door. “Stay with him; that’s all we can do for now. And,” he calls back over his shoulder, “keep him awake.”
As soon as George is gone, I wrap Monty’s leg as best I can without disrupting the broken bone, then empty the cabinets, searching for coats and blankets and towels and clean shirts to bundle around him to keep his leg from shifting overmuch when the ship rocks. His breath sounds louder than the storm, each inhale as sharp and raw-edged as a paper ripped in two.
I’m rolling a waistcoat into a tight coil when Monty’s hand closes around my wrist. I jump in surprise. “Adrian,” he says, my name punching its way between those ragged gasps. “I need you to do something for me.”
“Anything.”
He grits his teeth, a vein in his forehead jutting out. “I need you to take a letter. I don’t think I can hold a pen.”
“Now’s not really the time—”
“Please.” His grip tightens on my wrist. I can feel him shaking. We both are.
“All right,” I say weakly, and turn to the writing desk built into the wall. The ink bottle bolted in place is nearly dry and I have to spit into it a few times before it wets the nib of the pen. I manage to peel a sheet of parchment from the aged stack inside the desk, the corners all stuck together. “What . . .” I clear my throat and try again, though I’m still not certain he can hear me. “What do I write?”
His chest is heaving, every breath hard-won and snatched from the pain. “You’ll deliver this.”
“I don’t know if I—”
“Promise me.”
“I promise.” A drop of black ink falls from the tip of the pen onto the paper.
“Make it out to Percy. Take it to the office.”
“Monty, I can’t . . .”
“Dear Percy,” he says, his voice rising over mine. I scrawl the salutation, then wait for more. When none comes, I look over at him. His head has lolled sideways, eyes closed.
I think he must have lost consciousness, but then he opens one eye, and says weakly, “Did you write that down? That was very good.”
14
When the storm finally quiets and George returns, Monty is senseless—he spent all his strength on his dictation, then gave in to the pain and exhaustion. Trying to keep him awake, my single instruction, had become futile and almost cruel.
I’ve been clinging to the hope that George would know what to do to help Monty, but he seems as lost as I am.
“You’ve sailed before,” I keep saying. “Surely you’ve treated injuries like this.”
“There’s always been a surgeon,” George replies. “Ven knows a little bit of medicine—his mother was a doctor. Seb might—”
“How far are we from land?” I interrupt him. “There has to be somewhere we can dock.”
“We sustained too much damage in the storm,” George replies. “We’re hardly seaworthy—even if there was land nearby, the ship is too damaged to reach it.”
It takes me a moment to understand what he’s saying. Not only is Monty’s life in danger, but we are all of us adrift on a skeleton of a ship, dead in the water and at the mercy of the elements. “What do we do?” I ask.
George runs a hand over his face. “We’ve run up a flag for help, and we have a half dozen flares to set off. The best we can do is wait and hope any ship we attract will have a surgeon, and supplies for us to do the necessary repairs, or will take us to land. We’re still in Crown and Cleaver waters, but we’re close enough to Gibraltar that there may be English ships about. There’s a good chance someone will come.”
I’m not sure if it’s better or worse for us if it’s the Crown and Cleaver that picks us up. How fast does news of treachery spread throughout a fleet?
I look down at my hands. The stave George painted there is gone, washed away in the storm. “What do we do until help arrives?”
George shakes his head. “We do what we can.”
We set off three of the five flares over the course of the next day. The men repair the damage to the masts and sails, but it’s our rudder that took the hardest knock, and even I know that’s a rather critical piece for sailing. We drift in the ocean, scanning the horizon, waiting for help to arrive. I do little but sit with Monty—he’s feverish by dawn and struggles to stay awake. His spells of consciousness become less and less coherent. I’m not sure if the best thing to do is keep him cool or wrap him to stop him shivering. He cries for water, but our store was another casualty of the storm and we’ve nothing but beer and grog and the few bottles of rum George keeps secreted away.
The cabin is small, with nowhere to sit but the bed and a small stool at the writing desk, too low to the ground to be comfortable for my long limbs, so I mostly stay on the floor, my feet wedged against the bunk and my back to the wall.
It’s hard not to live in the memory of the storm and shuffle endlessly through what I should have done differently, starting with not believing in a bloody hallucination. I press my fists against my forehead, like I might knock the memory from me. I must have imagined it. I invented a ship amid the storm, but in the same way that, in the throes of panic, I can know a rational truth and yet not believe it at all, I know someone called me. The sea called my name and, had Monty not intervened, I might have answered.
I wanted to answer. I wanted to step over the rail and take her hand.
You are a lunatic.
I stare sightlessly at the wall, trying not to cry, trying to focus on my breath, the in and out struggling against my tight chest. There’s something wrong with me. Some black mold creeping through my veins, spreading fast and thick and infecting every part of me. It’s more than just my thoughts, more than just that constant thrum of worry—I hallucinated. I heard voices. I created a reality for myself separate from the world around me, and there is no explanation.