The Devil and the Dark Water

by Stuart Turton

  White smoke billowed past them and up through the grates.

  Those who’d escaped were on their knees, coughing.

  Isaack Larme was helping the crew up at the other end of the ship, while Arent Hayes pulled the passengers from the crush. A sickly gleam of sweat still shone on his pallid skin, but it didn’t appear to have diminished his strength.

  “We need to get down there and put the fire out,” cried Crauwels over the din, eyeing the passengers spilling up the staircase like ants from a kicked-­over nest.

  “Ain’t fire,” yelled back Arent, tugging another passenger free. “Ain’t no flames, ain’t no heat. Don’t know what it is, but only danger down there is the panic.”

  Seeing a small child in the crowd, Arent reached through the press of bodies and scooped him into his arms, delivering him safely onto the deck. His mother leaped forward, clutching him tightly, weeping.

  “If it isn’t fire, what is it?” demanded Crauwels.

  “Was the leper,” coughed the constable, battling his way up the staircase.

  His eyes were raw with smoke, tears running freely. He was still weak from his flogging, but he’d resumed his duties in the gunpowder store. “I saw it in the smoke… It killed Wyck and…” He rushed to the railing, vomiting into the ocean.

  Arent immediately began pushing past people, heading down the steps.

  Seeing a path emerge, Crauwels followed him down. The smoke was already clearing, swirling tendrils snaking out the portholes.

  A few bodies lay on the ground. Some were unconscious, others groaning, clutching bloodied limbs.

  “These people need tending,” Crauwels yelled up the stairs.

  It didn’t take long to spot Johannes Wyck sprawled backward over a slab, his face contorted into the last expression it would ever have. He’d been gutted, like the animals in the pen.

  “Heaven on fire, what is Old Tom doing to my ship?” he said, his stomach turning.

  He’d seen plenty of dead bodies in the course of his career, but none that had been put to the sword with such relish.

  Arent was kneeling by the body, inspecting it thoroughly. He grunted in satisfaction, then got to his feet.

  “Have somebody bring Isabel down here,” ordered Arent.

  “Why?”

  “Because Wyck smells of paprika.”

  Crauwels couldn’t imagine a more confounding answer, but Arent obviously wasn’t in the mood to explain. He was already stalking across the deck to the far door.

  “Where are you going?” Crauwels called out after him.

  “To let Sammy out of his cell. This has gone on long enough. He’s needed.”

  71

  Sara arrived in the great cabin to find a solitary candle had been lit in the candelabra, its somber flame peeking over the edge of the table. Lia was a few steps behind her, racing down from the quarterdeck above. They’d heard Creesjie screaming, but it was sobbing they followed now, straight into the governor general’s cabin.

  Their eyes found the body.

  He was dressed in the nightshirt Sara had left him in earlier. Only now it was sodden with blood, a wooden-­handled dagger protruding from his chest.

  She felt nothing. Not even jubilation. There was something pitiful about it all, she realized. In death, without that aura of power cloaking him, he was exposed as a thin, frail, old man. All his wealth, all his influence, all his scheming and cruelty. They’d all been for nothing.

  Suddenly, she felt very tired.

  “Are you okay, dear heart?” Sara asked Lia, but her daughter’s face told the story well enough. It glowed with relief, with the knowledge that some terrible ordeal was finally at an end.

  This was his legacy, thought Sara. Not his power. Not Batavia. Not a seat among the Gentlemen 17 he would never occupy. His legacy was a family who were glad he was dead. For that, she almost found some pity for him.

  Aside from her husband’s body, everything else in the cabin was exactly as it had been. Two mugs of wine sat on the table, one empty and the other full. Between them was a jug and a flickering candle. And on the ground was a tatty flag, the mark of Old Tom smeared across the lion emblem of the Company.

  Her husband’s murder was the third unholy miracle, she realized.

  Seeing Sara, Creesjie flew into her arms, and for a moment, they simply held each other. Neither knew what to say. Commiserations didn’t need to be offered, and there was no hurt to soothe or tears to wipe away. Their breeding demanded a Christian reverence for the dead, while every memory of the man who’d been murdered demanded they dance and drink.

  For Sara, he was simply a victim of the creature terrorizing this ship, making him something to be studied rather than lamented.

  “Did you notice the dagger?” asked Creesjie, disgusted. “I’d wager that’s the dagger Old Tom promised to leave under his bunk if we accepted his bargain.”

  Sara stared at it. It was an ugly thing with a wooden handle, the sort of blade cutpurses used to steal a handful of coins. Her husband’s exalted station hadn’t even bought him a beautiful weapon to be murdered by.

  She wondered if that was the point. Old Tom had stripped him of every piece of dignity he had.

  “Do you think somebody accepted Old Tom’s offer?” asked Creesjie.

  “I don’t know. If there’s suddenly a king aboard in the next few days, I’d say yes.” She smiled tightly, then felt guilty. “Has anybody told Arent? They were close.”

  “He’s awake?” said Creesjie, squeezing her arm.

  “An hour ago,” confirmed Sara, smiling.

  “There’s a fire on the orlop deck,” said Lia. “I heard he was helping down there.”

  “Of course he is,” said Sara, a touch of pride in her voice. “Well, if he’s working down there, I suppose I shall start up here.”

  “How?” asked Creesjie.

  “In his cases, Pipps always says to look for things that aren’t there and should be or are there and shouldn’t be.”

  “Sounds like very unsatisfactory advice to me,” grumbled Creesjie. “How does he tell one from the other?”

  Sara shrugged. “He never explained that part.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you one thing,” said Creesjie insistently. “That candle was snuffed when we entered the cabin.”

  She was clearly thinking the same thing Sara was. Her husband didn’t sleep without a candle, because he was afraid of the dark. And more importantly, Sara had tainted his wine with her sleeping draught.

  She had watched him drink it.

  With that sleeping draught inside him, he wouldn’t have been able to wake up until the morning at the very earliest. Even if he’d had the inclination, there was no way he could have risen to snuff the candle, which meant his murderer must have done it.

  She turned to Drecht, who was hovering in the doorway, captain of a guard that had nobody to guard.

  “Was I the last person to see my husband alive?” she asked him.

  He was lost in thought and didn’t immediately respond.

  “Guard Captain!” said Sara, her tone of command snapping him out of his despair.

  “No, my lady,” he said smartly. “He called me in just as dinner was being served. He asked me to search the cabin for a dagger. He’d asked me to do it every night. He said Old Tom had threatened him.”

  “Did you?”

  “Of course.”

  “Did you find one?”

  “No.”

  The dagger protruding from her husband’s chest took on an accusatory air.

  “That wasn’t in this cabin when I left it,” he protested as everybody glanced at it. “And even if it had been, nobody came or went until Creesjie and I found the body. I was on watch all night. I didn’t doze. I didn’t wander.”

  “I remember hearing him call to you at di
nner,” muttered Creesjie thoughtfully. “He sounded peculiar, I thought.”

  “He’d been peculiar since visiting the passenger cabins,” agreed Drecht.

  “When was that?”

  “The night of Vos’s death.” He tugged his beard, summoning the memory. “He’d spent the afternoon poring over the passenger manifest and that other list of names beside it, rambling about losing control of demons. He must have seen something, because he said this wasn’t about the Folly, then leapt up. He went to confront somebody. He sounded afraid.”

  “Who was it?”

  “I didn’t see. I only heard what he said, and the way he said it. ‘You’ve been waiting for me, I believe.’ Those were his words. And he spoke…deferentially. Never heard him sound like that before.”

  “Then what happened?” asked Sara eagerly.

  Her blood was up. This is what Pipps must have felt like all the time, she thought. The thrill of discovery, and the sense of having an enemy just beyond reach. God help her, but this voyage was the most exhilarating thing that had ever happened to her.

  “He came out two hours later and asked me to take him back,” continued Drecht. “He didn’t say anything. Once he was inside his cabin, he started sobbing. After that, he didn’t come out again.”

  “Father was sobbing?” said Lia incredulously.

  Sara paced the cabin, trying to make sense of a husband she didn’t recognize. He was powerful, which meant he didn’t go to see people. He summoned those he needed. Whoever he’d discovered on the passenger manifest had made him deferent. But who could that be? Who would he march to the passenger cabins to see?

  Sara went over to the desk and inspected the lists but could see nothing that would have disturbed her husband. A quill was discarded next to them, a blot of ink dried on the wood.

  She felt a strange sense of déjà vu. Only three days ago, she’d done the same thing in Cornelius Vos’s cabin, though she couldn’t have explained why. There was nothing to be learned beyond what Arent had already observed. Everything had been tidied away, aside from the receipts of passage for the family, suggesting he’d been preoccupied with them before his death. Sara couldn’t tell why, though something about it bothered her. Vos was methodical. He wouldn’t have taken them out unless there was an irregularity.

  “Lia,” she said.

  “Yes, Mama.”

  “Would you examine the passenger manifest and list of people possessed by Old Tom for me? You’ve a keen eye and a quick mind. Perhaps you can see something I’ve missed.”

  Lia beamed and sat down at the desk.

  The second question was what had her husband discussed with the mysterious passenger? Whatever it was had made her husband weep. That suggested it had something to do with Arent, she thought. He was the only person her husband obviously loved.

  She glanced around the cabin once again, searching for the clue to make sense of everything. Her eyes were dragged back to the candle. The murderer must have snuffed it, but why? And how had they managed to get in without Drecht seeing? The guard captain could have been lying to them, but Larme had told them the guard captain had been offered a huge reward for escorting her husband back to Amsterdam safely. Besides, if Drecht had wanted to kill him, he’d had ample opportunities in the past. Why do it here and now, when it would be so obvious he was the killer?

  Her eyes prodded at the furnishings, searching for some other explanation. In “The Secret of the Midnight Scream,” Pipps had deduced that a trapdoor beneath the floorboards had concealed the killer, who’d hidden there until the investigation had concluded, then crept out when the coast was clear.

  Sara began stamping on the floorboards, earning strange looks from the others.

  They were solid.

  “Drecht?”

  “My lady?”

  “Climb on a chair and start hammering the ceiling, will you? My dress is too heavy.”

  Drecht raised a bushy blond eyebrow. “My lady, I understand you’re suffering an ordeal, but—­”

  “There may be a trapdoor,” she explained. “Somebody may have dropped down from above.”

  “But that’s your cabin, my lady.”

  “Yes, but I haven’t been in it this evening, because I was tending Arent.”

  As they pondered it, Lia made a small, startled sound, then laughed. “That’s very clever,” she said in amusement. Nobody listening would ever have believed her father lay murdered only a few paces from her. “I think I know who Father went to see,” she said.

  Sara and Creesjie clustered around her as she took the quill from her father’s pot, then underlined the name Viscountess Dalvhain in the passenger manifest and Emily de Haviland in the list of people possessed by Old Tom.

  “You see?” she said, though nobody did. “‘Dalvhain’ is ‘Haviland’ rearranged.”

  Without a word, Sara flew out of the cabin as quickly as her dress would allow and onto the quarterdeck. Left flatfooted by her abrupt exit, Drecht, Creesjie, and Lia followed her.

  Under the star-­bright sky, bodies were being hauled up from the crush in the orlop deck, children crying as adults despondently clung to loved ones.

  At Dalvhain’s cabin, she rapped insistently. No answer came.

  “Viscountess Dalvhain!” Still there was no answer.

  “Emily de Haviland?” she tried instead.

  Creesjie, Lia, and Drecht arrived at the end of the corridor, but she ignored them and tried the latch, the door creaking open. By the dim light spilling inside, it was immediately evident the cabin was empty. More than empty, it didn’t seem anybody had ever used it. There were no personal possessions she could see, no pictures on the walls or furs on the bunk. The only sign of habitation was the huge red rug covering the floor. She remembered the sailors trying to wedge it through the door that first morning, and it didn’t appear any smaller unrolled. Its edges climbed the walls.

  She crossed the cabin to the writing desk, searching for a candle.

  Something crunched unpleasantly underfoot.

  “Mama?” asked Lia from the doorway.

  Sara held up a hand in warning. Drecht gripped his sword ushering Lia and Creesjie behind him.

  Kneeling down, Sara touched something sinuous and curled. She took it into the corridor, where the light could tell her more. It was a single wood shaving. Exactly like the one the carpenter had created when he’d built her a shelf that first morning. Did this have something to do with the sound Dorothea had heard? Was Dalvhain building something in here?

  Or Emily de Haviland, as she had been known.

  “‘Laxagarr’ is Nornish for ‘trap,’” she muttered.

  “There’s an object on the writing desk,” said Drecht, squinting into the gloom. He sounded unnerved, and it was clear he had no intention of setting foot inside.

  From her own cabin, Sara quickly retrieved a candle on a tray, then returned to Emily de Haviland’s quarters.

  The daemonologica waited on her writing desk.

  She stopped dead.

  Isabel didn’t normally let it out of her sight. Did she have some relationship with Dalvhain she hadn’t mentioned? And even then, why would it be the only thing in an empty room? The anagram was clever, but Emily de Haviland had clearly meant for it to be unraveled, which meant she wanted somebody to come here and discover this book.

  Sara approached it cautiously, reaching out a hand and opening the cover.

  It wasn’t the daemonologica. Not inside.

  It had the same cover, the same vellum, even the same style of illustration and writing, but the contents were different. Instead of the reams of Latin script, there were drawings.

  Sara turned the first page.

  In dark ink, it showed a grand house burning, surrounded by an angry mob that was dragging people outside and slitting their throats. In one corner, the wi
tchfinder Pieter Fletcher watched impassively, while Old Tom giggled in his ear.

  She turned the page.

  Here was a more detailed drawing of Pieter Fletcher shackled to a wall, screaming. Old Tom was removing the organs from his chest and leaving them in a pile on the ground.

  Gagging, Sara turned the page.

  This was a picture of them boarding in Batavia. Sara, her husband, and Lia were on the quarterdeck, while Samuel Pipps and Arent were marched through the crowds by Drecht, stalked by Old Tom, who was riding a bat-­faced wolf.

  Her head spinning, she turned another page.

  Here was the Saardam at sea, surrounded by the fleet. Away in the distance was the Eighth Lantern, except it wasn’t a ship; it was Old Tom holding a lantern in one hand.

  On the fifth page, the leper slaughtered the Saardam’s cattle, while Old Tom danced among the bodies.

  On the sixth page, the leper stalked through the fog of the orlop deck, trailed by Old Tom.

  “What is it, dear heart?” asked Creesjie, coming up behind her.

  “It’s a diary of everything that’s happened,” said Sara in disgust, turning the page to reveal a drawing of her husband, dead in his bunk, with a dagger in his chest.

  “Mama!” gasped Lia, appearing beside her. “This is the scene exactly. How could Dalvhain have known what was going to happen?”

  Sara’s hand felt like stone, but she had to see what came next.

  The Saardam was aflame, passengers clinging to the gigantic body of Old Tom as he carried them to a nearby island. The devil was staring from the page at Sara with a knowing smile on its face. It knew she was reading the book.

  Opposite, on the final page, the mark of Old Tom floated on the ocean, the Saardam a tiny speck beneath it.

  Something nagged her. The mark was drawn strangely, the familiar lines broken up into rough circles of different sizes, almost like the ink had been allowed to drip off Emily’s quill onto the parchment.

  Sara’s breath caught in her throat.

  This wasn’t the mark of Old Tom, she realized with mounting horror. It was a drawing of an island the Saardam was sailing toward.