Quintspinner

by Dianne Greenlay

  “Are you alright?” Tess whispered into her sister’s ear. “How have you been treated?”

  Even as the words left her mouth, Tess’s hands slid down to her sister’s shoulders and froze over top of a thickened weal on Cassie’s right shoulder. Tess pulled her hand away and stared.

  “Oh my God, Cass,” she whispered hoarsely. “What has he done to you?”

  Under the inquiring touch of Tess’s fingertips, an angry raised mound of fresh and tender scar tissue stood out. Clearly it was a miniature form of the powder horn depicted on the pirates’ flag.

  “He–he branded you?” Tess gasped.

  A brand. Carlos’s brand.

  Burned deeply into the soft flesh of Cassie’s shoulder, it marked Cassie forever as his own.

  Tess swallowed hard as sudden waves of nausea threatened to expel a rush of bitter bile. Anger deeper than any she had ever known cascaded over her in a hot rush.

  “That bastard!” she seethed. Looking into Cassie’s tear filled eyes, and seeing the intense anguish there, she clasped her sister hard to her chest once more. “He will pay for whatever he has done to you!”

  “No-o-o,” Cassie moaned. “He will kill you if you try anything.” Her eyes pleaded with Tess. “Save yourself if you can.” She laid her own hand gently over her branded tissue. Her voice was barely a whisper.

  “I am doomed.”

  Tess watched from the railing of the main deck of the Mary Jane.

  “Aye, ‘twill take at least a day fer each side, it will,” Mr. Lancaster explained. “First they’ll take her guns ashore, but before they can do that, they’ll be building earth mounds fer them.” To transport the heavy cannons to shore and then mount them on the hastily built mounds seemed like a lot of extra trouble to Tess.

  “That’s in case we’re discovered an’ put under attack,” Mr. Lancaster explained. “Can’t be takin’ a chance of being attacked an’ no guns now, can they? Course they can’t.” Hope brightened Tess’s face.

  “If another ship came along now we could be rescued!” she exclaimed.

  “Be careful what ya’ wish fer,” the carpenter shook his head. “Any incomin’ craft would see only two pirate ships, now that her flag’s been replaced.” He pointed up to the mast where a makeshift flag nearly identical to the Bloodhorn’s fluttered. “Watch now,” he suggested, pointing to the beached Bloodhorn.

  The ship listed hard as the sailors winched her over onto her side. “Now they’ll set to scraping barnacles off her bottom and her sides up to the water line,” the carpenter continued. “An’ next they’ll be patchin’ up any holes an’ gouges before they smear her whole body with a thick new layer of pitch an’ tallow. Helps to repel them water chiggers. The same work done to the other side, an’ she’ll be good as new.”

  Mr. Lancaster just can’t help himself, Tess noted. He’s a sailor through and through and he’s fascinated by ships more than anything else in the world. Even one commanded by buccaneers. The thought of the pirates brought her attention back to their own ship. She stared at Cassie’s silhouette at the bow of the Mary Jane.

  At least, Carlos is feeding her. Unlike the chained sailor who was being starved to death. Tess had not seen that sailor among the rest of the captives who had been transported over to the Mary Jane. Perhaps the wretched man has already died and has been mercifully released from his misery. It was lucky for William that he was not the one who ended up having to play the flute for the demented captain. She shuddered at the thought of Cassie having to return to the Bloodhorn.

  Two precious days, maybe three, were all that they were going to have together. Tess cherished each minute she spent with Cassie, becoming highly resentful whenever she was required to leave her sister’s side to tend to the onslaught of sailors’ fresh wounds, boils, and fevers.

  At Tess’s insistence, Cassie accompanied her to the sick bay, but she sat motionless on the medicine trunk while Tess worked, moving only to stand when Tess required an item from the chest. Cassie’s former dislike of medical procedures seemed to have disintegrated into total disinterest. She sat, staring at a point in the air, occasionally glancing at Tess and peering into the chest with only minimal interest when it was opened.

  In fact, during the entire careening time, Cassie remained silent and mostly unresponsive, no matter how hard Tess tried to cheer her. It was as though the weight of a heavy veil of sadness pinned her down and made even the simple act of conversation too much to bear. Only when Mrs. Hanley gathered Cassie into her arms, and rocked her gently back and forth as though she were a small child to be taken care of, humming a soft lullaby as she did so, did Cassie seem to relax, and the look of fear melted from her face. At such times, Mrs. Hanley combed her fingers gently through Cassie’s tangled locks, smoothing and detangling the long wavy strands, and finally braiding them into a long thick plait secured at its end with a strip of slightly tattered red ribbon.

  For Tess, the careening days passed by with the speed of an oncoming storm. All too soon, the captives were loaded back into the jolly boat and rowed back across to the newly righted Bloodhorn. Cassie had been among the first of the two boatloads to have been transported back. She and Tess and her grandmother had clung desperately to her one last time on the Mary Jane’s deck, eventually requiring the strength of two sailors to wrench them apart.

  “Cassie!” Mrs. Hanley’s and Tess’s sobs blended together, their voices each a high pitched wail, as their throats constricted with despair. Just as she had on the way over, Cassie now sat on the return trip, with her spine stiff and her face set forward. For her to have looked back would have been unbearable. Aboard the Mary Jane, Tess and her grandmother watched, sinking into grief-stricken silence, their souls having been emptied of tears. Neither one had words of consolation to offer to the other.

  As Cassie was roughly hauled up and over the Bloodhorn’s railing, she abruptly twisted out of the pirate’s grasp and turned back towards the Mary Jane, suddenly raising both outstretched arms and hands towards the Mary Jane. Instinctively, Tess raised her own, opening and closing her fist as she had seen William and John Robert do.

  Ooh-ah.

  The nonsense syllables filled Tess’s head and she mentally tried to project their intended message of love across the watery gap to Cassie. The fist gesture had shifted the tourmaline band and as it began its slow spin around her finger, Tess was filled with a cold sense of dread and new understanding.

  Cassie’s wave to them had not only been one of love. It had been a final goodbye.

  Tess turned towards her grandmother, her head pounding, and grabbed the older woman’s arm. “Something’s horribly wrong! I feel it! With Cassie, I mean. She’s in danger! I just know it! She’s been gripped with a horrible melancholy and she’s–”

  “She’s with child, I believe,” Mrs. Hanley announced quietly, her voice still thick with emotion. Her eyes were swollen and red-rimmed, the outward signs of the heartbreak that she too, felt with Cassie’s departure.

  “What?” The pronouncement jolted Tess with its content but even more shocking was the sudden comprehension that it offered. Cassie’s figure had not been the result of adequate nourishment but rather it was the outline of the swollen breasts and early bloating of a pregnancy!

  Bolting from the spot, Tess flew down the ladder to the deck below and sprinted as quickly as the cramped space would allow, into the sick bay area. After her parents’ deaths, she had had her father’s medicine chest moved from under their bed to this more convenient placement. Throwing back its lid, Tess scanned through the contents.

  Her father’s trunk. The sturdy case contained not only the tools of his trade–scalpels, needles, scissors, syringes and catheters–but also a relatively extensive pharmacopeia. Within it lay leather bags and pouches of many common herbs as well as a supply of the more rare, potent, and even lethal plants. Back in London, the various leaves, stems, flowers and roots had been dried and ground up, flaked or powdered, to maximize their stored
volume within the limited storage scenario of a long ocean voyage. The resulting collections were concentrated many times beyond their normal efficacy.

  Not content with her visual inventory, Tess dropped to her knees and scrabbled through the trunk’s contents.

  “Oh dear God!” she cried aloud, frantically tossing the sacks and satchels aside as she began her mental inventory.

  Laudanum. There had been several bags of powdered opium which, when reconstituted with alcohol, became the laudanum tincture. Its use covered everything from cough suppression to fever relief, from menstrual cramps to depression to chest pain. Tess wasn’t sure if any was missing.

  Thoroughwort. Also called Boneset. She had used this on the emaciated sailor to successfully rid him of his parasitical worms.

  Agrimony. It was useful in wound healing, and effective in shrinking warts and some tumors of the skin, while moderately useful to staunch internal bleeding.

  Bittervetch. If chewed, it would relieve the desire for food or drink, a useful thing in dire times of starvation.

  Soapwort. Her father would have used this for old venereal complaints when the mercury had failed.

  One by one she identified the botanies, praying that she was wrong in her review, yet continuing to search until the trunk had been completely emptied, not wanting to believe her findings and hoping that she had overlooked its missing contents.

  She had not.

  Dazed by her discovery, she was vaguely aware that her name was being called. Breathing deeply and attempting to control her mounting panic, she spun the tourmaline ring. She squeezed her eyes shut in an effort to block out the caller and focus inward on what her ring was trying to tell her.

  “Tess-s-s!” The voice cracked but was insistent, breaking up her concentration. There were heavy uneven footsteps on the ladder now. Tess whirled around in annoyance as the intruder’s shadow blanketed over her, then stood still in shock at the sight confronting her.

  There, at the bottom of the ladder, with his eyes boring into her stood Edward. Tess immediately regretted having given up on his drugged gruel. He had appeared to be so weakened that it had no longer seemed necessary. Too late, she realized that Edward was a man of great determination. He had roused himself from the cot in his cabin and had somehow managed to find her here on the lower deck.

  So! His movement has come back. More importantly, she wondered how much speech, if any, had returned.

  A rush of garbled syllables from Edward’s mouth confirmed that his recovery had not been a full one. Her name seemed to be the only word he could enunciate clearly. It was with some degree of satisfaction that Tess realized that for now at least, Edward was locked in a lonely prison of sorts–not unlike the one John Robert had endured all these months until he and William had been able to work out their system of hand signals.

  “What do you want?” she inquired.

  There was another string of unintelligible sounds.

  “You are making no sense at all,” Tess said pointedly. Pushing past him, she added, “If you’ll excuse me, I have important matters to attend to–” Edward’s hand shot out and grabbed her arm. She was astonished by the strength of his grip. He brought her hand up to his face and tilted his head.

  The rings! His rings!

  The three rings nestled around her fingers as comfortably as though she had worn them forever. Quite often she even forgot that she was wearing them at all.

  Edward had not. He tugged now at the ruby ring, even as she reflexively closed her fingers into a fist. She needn’t have worried; just as they had once before, the reunited rings resisted any attempt to be removed individually. Tess could feel the strange invisible pull–the magnetic draw–that they had for one another. So too, could Edward, as he threw her hand down in apparent frustration.

  “You see?” Tess hissed. “Nothing wants to be with you–not even a ring.” Edward’s gaze flickered, his eyes full of uncertainty. Tess was not sure if he understood everything that was being said to him, but if he did, she thought he must be wondering as she was, if without speech, the ring would ever be of any use to him personally.

  She was not anxious to find out.

  Carlos found women quite disturbing.

  In his experience, they were often shrill–incapable of silence in the face of danger–and of no use at all for the demands of brute strength that his world of sailing and fighting demanded. And as for their hidden inner charms, well, Carlos had often noticed that, pleasant as the destination was, an intimate coupling with a woman was more likely to be a source of disease for a man than would be a brief encounter with a cabin boy or powder monkey.

  And the women always expected something in return-money, love, presents ….

  However, he was greatly intrigued by his newest captive. Cassie’s toffee colored skin and thick tresses were attractive, true enough, and Carlos had intended to use her a time or two for his own pleasure–her soft inviting curves would be a welcome change from the hard buttocks of his sailors–before selling her for a handsome profit to a plantation overseer.

  It had been a long time since he had lain with Evangelina–just over a year, he estimated–and although his wife was always accommodating, he found his couplings with her to be barely satisfying. Nor were the slave women he had plundered from other shipsstarved and filthy things by the time they reached his part of the world–any more useful to him.

  The healer woman’s servant was different. She was curvaceous and attractive, and had all of her teeth. She differed from the other women in another way, as Carlos had found out the first time he had tried to mount her.

  This one fought.

  He had stripped his tunic and breeches off and was swishing one last rinsing mouthful of wine around in his mouth when she had attacked. Grabbing anything within her reach, she had swung at him, clubbing him ferociously about his head and shoulders. Initially caught off guard, Carlos had thrown his hands up to his face in a reflexive defense of her fury, warding off the heavy candlestick blows with his forearms. She had been, however, no match for his strength and determination, and he had quickly disarmed her, pinning her beneath him. He had marveled that she continued to struggle even so–and had been further amazed at how exciting he had found this to be. He had not thought it possible to become any further aroused until he made one more discovery.

  Cassie was untouched. A virgin.

  Carlos could hardly believe it. She would not be infecting him with any women’s foul smelling diseases or chancers, and lying under him, still she fought and silently struggled. Carlos was delighted.

  He had never enjoyed himself more.

  From then on, he had kept Cassie exclusively as his own, and his Bloodhorn brand would mark her as such to all.

  Keeping her constantly tethered to the foot of his cot, Carlos had expected Cassie to become resigned to her circumstances, but each time he had advanced on her she had met him with renewed feral resistance, attacking him like a cornered jaguar, biting him and clawing at him with her nails.

  Her resistance was thrilling. It made sex freshly exhilarating and at the end of each day, he hungered intensely for his new plaything awaiting him in his cabin.

  And so, the day after her return to the Bloodhorn, when Cassie’s eyes had suddenly rolled back into her head and she had begun to convulse underneath him, it had been with much distress verging on hidden terror that he had sent for immediate help from Tess.

  It had not escaped Carlos’s notice that one new recruit–the navigator called Smith–had shown a barely concealed admiration for Cassie, and so, expecting that the intensity of the young sailor’s interest in her would speed him along, Carlos had chosen Smith to captain a return boat over to the Mary Jane. His assessment had been correct, for Smith had frantically urged his three fellow mates onward, setting a wicked pace by rowing like a frenzied madman himself.

  Directly upon arriving on the Bloodhorn, Tess was quickly ushered into Carlos’s quarters where she found Cassie on the floor,
only semi-conscious and still lying on her back where Carlos had left her. His only concession to Cassie’s predicament had been to pull the thin linen tunic that she wore back down over her body.

  Tess noted that Cassie’s fingertips were pale and waxy looking, but her fingernails were blood-stained–apparently she had fought him fiercely even during this last time. Small flecks of foamy blood-streaked saliva clung to the corners of Cassie’s mouth and a pool of vomit collared her head. Tess knelt low and sniffed, her nostrils twitching with the acrid scent of bile. How she wished she had William’s ability to smell! He seemed able to pick out even the faintest differences in scents. Closing her eyes, she focused on the odor.

  There! A small whiff of mint. And ever so faintly, a sweetness. Her worst suspicions confirmed, and without requiring further proof, Tess set about rousing Cassie as best she could.

  The odors had offered proof that Cassie had ingested dried Pennyroyal, a powerful abortificant. Its distinctive minty smell was still present both on her breath and in her spewed stomach contents. Tess was guessing that the sweet odor was Blue Cohosh, often used in combination with the first herb to induce deliveries. She had brewed the two into teas on several occasions back in London for her father, whenever a fetus had obviously died before a pregnancy had come to term, and it had been necessary to have it expelled from its poor mother’s womb. Unofficially, as well, such a mixture had often been sought after by many others, wishing to terminate the evidence of illicit affairs.

  Her father had been very explicit in his teachings to her. The teas could be flavored with the addition of peppermint or cinnamon to make the concoction more palatable without diluting its strength. Either herb, if taken in a concentrated oil form however, was known to be commonly fatal, inducing splitting headache and extreme nausea, before convulsions and massive hemorrhaging set in. There was no way to know for sure, the effective strength of the dried contents.