“Wish me luck!” Roger called, with a grin.
The clerk’s answering grin was tinged with something that might have been either admiration or wistfulness.
“Luck to ye, man!” he called, and waved in farewell. By the time the door swung shut, he was deep in conversation with the next customer, quill pen poised in readiness.
* * *
He found Captain Bonnet in the pub, as advertised, settled in a corner under a thick blue haze of smoke, to which the Captain’s own cigar was adding.
“Your name?”
“MacKenzie,” Roger said on sudden impulse. If Brianna could do it, so could he.
“MacKenzie. Any experience, Mr. MacKenzie?”
A bar of sunlight cut across the Captain’s face, making him squint. Bonnet drew back into the shadow of the settle, and the lines around his eyes relaxed, leaving Roger exposed to a gaze of uncomfortable penetration.
“It is myself has fished the herring now and then, in the Minch.”
It was no lie, at that; he’d had several teenage summers as hand on a herring boat captained by an acquaintance of the Reverend’s. The experience had left him with a useful layer of muscle, an ear for the singsong cadence of the Isles, and a fixed dislike of herring. But he knew the feel of a rope in his hands, at least.
“Ah, ye’re a good-sized lad. But a fisherman will not be the same as a sailor, sure.” The man’s soft Irish lilt left it open whether this was question, statement—or provocation.
“I shouldna have thought it an occupation requiring great skill.” For no reason he could name, Captain Bonnet raised the hairs on the back of his neck.
The green eyes sharpened.
“Perhaps more than ye think—but sure it’s nothing a willing man can’t learn. But what would it be, now, that makes a fellow of your sort crave the sea of a sudden?”
The eyes flickered in the tavern’s shadows, taking him in. Of your sort. What was it? Roger wondered. Not his speech—he had taken care to suppress any hint of the Oxford scholar, by taking on the “teuchter” cant of the Isles. Was he too well dressed for a would-be sailor? Or was it the singed collar and the burn mark on the breast of his coat?
“That will be none of your business, I am thinking,” he answered evenly. With a minor effort, he kept his hands relaxed at his sides.
The pale green eyes studied him dispassionately, unblinking. Like a leopard watching a passing wildebeest, Roger thought, wondering whether it would be worth the chase.
The heavy lids dropped; not worth it—for the moment.
“You’ll be aboard by sundown,” Bonnet said. “Five shillings the month, meat three days in the week, plum duff on Sundays. You’ll have a hammock, but find your own clothes. You will be free to leave the ship once the cargo is unloaded, not until that time. We are agreed, sir?”
“It is agreed,” Roger said, suddenly dry-mouthed. He would have given a lot for a pint, but not now, not here, under that pale green gaze.
“Ask for Mr. Dixon when yez come aboard. He’s paymaster.” Bonnet leaned back, took a small leather-bound book from his pocket and flipped it open. Audience concluded.
Roger turned smartly and went out, without a backward glance. There was a small cold spot at the base of his skull. If he looked back, he knew, he would see that lucent green gaze fixed unwaveringly over the edge of the unread book, taking note of every weakness.
The cold spot, he thought, was where the teeth would meet.
37
GLORIANA
Before shipping with the Gloriana, Roger had assumed himself to be in reasonably good condition. In fact, compared to most of the obviously malnourished and wizened specimens of humanity who constituted the rest of the crew, he considered himself well endowed, indeed. It took precisely fourteen hours—the length of one day’s work—to disabuse him of this notion.
Blisters he had bargained for, and sore muscles; heaving crates, lifting spars, and hauling ropes was familiar labor, though he hadn’t done it for some time.
What he had forgotten was the bone-deep fatigue that sprang as much from the constant chill of damp clothes as from the work. He welcomed the heavy labor in the cargo hold, because it warmed him temporarily, even though he knew the warmth would be succeeded by a fine, constant shiver as soon as he emerged on deck, where the wind could resume its icy probe of his sweat-soaked clothes.
Hands roughened and scraped by wet hemp were painful, but expected; by the end of his first day, his palms were black with tar, and the skin of his fingers cracked and bled at the joints, scraped raw. But the gnawing ache of hunger had been something of a surprise. He hadn’t thought it possible to be as hungry as he was.
The knobbled lump of humanity working beside him—one Duff by name—was similarly damp, but seemed unfazed by the condition. The long, pointed nose that quested, ferret-like, from the upturned collar of a ragged jacket was blue at the tip and dripped regularly as a stalactite, but the pale eyes were sharp and the mouth beneath grinned wide, displaying teeth the color of the water in the Firth.
“Take hairt, man. Grub in twa bells.” Duff gave him a companionable elbow in the ribs and disappeared nimbly down a hatchway, from whose cavernous recesses echoed blasphemous shouts and loud bangings.
Roger resumed his unloading of the cargo net, heartened indeed at the prospect of supper.
The after hold had already been half filled. The water casks were loaded; tier upon tier of wooden hogsheads, squatting in the shadowy gloom, each hundred-gallon cask weighing more than seven hundred pounds. But the forward hold still gaped empty, and a constant procession of loaders and quaymen streamed like ants across the dock, piling up such a heap of boxes and barrels, rolls and bundles, that it seemed inconceivable that the mass should ever be condensed sufficiently to fit within the ship.
* * *
It took two days to finish the loading: barrels of salt, bolts of cloth, huge crates of ironmongery that had to be lowered with rope slings because of their weight. It was here that Roger’s size proved of benefit. At the end of a rope belayed round the capstan, he leaned back against the weight of a crate suspended at the other end and, muscles popping with the strain, lowered it slowly enough that the two men below could catch and guide it into place in the increasingly crowded hold.
The passengers came aboard in the late afternoon, a straggling line of emigrants, burdened with bags, bundles, caged chickens, and children. These were the cargo of the steerage—a space created by erection of a bulk-head across the forward hold—and as profitable in their way as the harder goods aft.
“Bondsmen and redemptioners,” Duff had told him, looking over the incomers with a practiced eye. “Worth fifteen pund each on the hoof in the plantations, weans three or four. Bairns at the teat go free wi’ their mithers.”
The seaman coughed, a deep, rattling noise like an ancient motor starting up, and hawked a glob of phlegm, narrowly missing the side rail as he spat. He shook his head as he looked the shuffling line over.
“Happen some can pay their way, but no many in this lot. They’ll have had a job to come up wi’ twa pund a family for their feed on the voyage.”
“The Captain doesn’t feed them, then?”