Ocean's Cage

by Carlton, Demelza

  "Perhaps Mrs McGregor would like a tour of the ship?" Captain Hughes suggested. "After all, you helped design it for the peculiar conditions it would encounter in and around Christmas Island."

  William laughed. "Mrs McGregor doesn't like tours of ships much and she doesn't need to know any more about this one. I'm sure she's already explored it quite thoroughly. More thoroughly than any tour you'd give her, Hughes."

  I remembered the tour of the Trevessa William had taken me on, and how I'd mistaken the coal-fed boilers for the ship being on fire. I forced myself to keep my eyes on my breakfast and not meet anyone else's. I wouldn't be that silly again.

  "Did she help with the design, then?" Captain Hughes asked eagerly. "The passenger cabins, perhaps? I've always had such compliments from female passengers about how well-designed they are. Is Mrs McGregor an experienced world traveller?"

  "No," I began, but my voice cracked at the end. I needed a drink. One of the servants saw my distress and came to my rescue with a pot of tea. I nodded gratefully and he poured. Before I could stop him, a liberal splash of milk landed on top.

  "My wife stowed away on your ship, Hughes. That's how she got to the island." William's tone turned ominous. "Not a single crewman saw her or thought to mention her to you, either. You should check your ship security if it's so easy for someone to sneak aboard that she managed it."

  I swallowed my tea with difficulty, trying not to choke on it. It wasn't Captain Hughes' fault he'd missed a siren on his ship. Hiding from humans came as second nature.

  "Yes, Mr McGregor," Captain Hughes said, eyeing me. "Though if Mrs McGregor would care to explain why she chose to stow away aboard my ship..."

  "It's not like you gave me much choice," I snapped. "Refusing me passage when I offered to pay for it. What else was I to do when...my...husband..." I trailed off, realising that the tale we'd told the Jacksons relied on my and William's marriage having taken place before the Islander left Fremantle. And I'd given Captain Hughes the name Merry had christened me with, not McGregor at all.

  Captain Hughes knew too much that contradicted all I'd told the people on the island.

  Could I kill him? That was common practice among my kind for humans who knew too much. Perhaps I could...

  No. Humans didn't kill each other and I was trying to be human.

  I reached for my tea and gulped more down. The taste hit my tongue and I almost retched. William's muddy brew, compounded with a copious quantity of milk. Oh no, not again.

  I closed my eyes, fighting to keep my breakfast down. The tea. The damn tea...

  "My God, your wife. It must be seasickness. Mrs McGregor, are you all right?"

  I pressed my lips together, knowing if I opened them I'd throw up on the table. There had to be another way to maintain his silence without killing him. Perhaps...

  "We need smelling salts. Mrs McGregor, do you have smelling salts on you?"

  I shook my head.

  "In your things? In your cabin?"

  I hesitated, then nodded. If I could get Captain Hughes alone, perhaps I could beg for his silence. If he swore he wouldn't speak to anyone about Fremantle or my unconventional trip aboard the Islander, then my story was safe. That was the human way, wasn't it?

  "I'll go. You keep an eye on my wife." William's tone held dire consequences for anyone who argued.

  I waited for him to get far enough out of earshot before I spoke. "Captain Hughes, I need to ask a favour from you. What my husband –"

  "I'm sorry, Mrs McGregor," he interrupted. "I'm sorry, but I can't go against your husband's orders. I've told you before, he's higher up than me in the company and if I don't do what he says, I could lose my job. I have a wife and children of my own, so I can't do that. You'll have to take it up with him yourself." He managed a sickly smile. "And if you know the man you married as well as I do, ma'am, you won't argue with him. He has a terrible temper and I'd hate to see a beautiful woman like yourself harmed by Grumpy McGregor."

  Could my heart sink any lower? I think it had settled into my left shoe. William had the man so scared that he didn't dare do any favours for me, no matter what they might be. He hadn't even wanted to consider it. But I didn't want to kill him. The ship needed its captain and he did seem like a capable man. Why wasn't there some middle ground between the ways of his people and mine? Killing him seemed so unnecessary.

  I felt a resurgence of nausea at the thought. Remembering how it had helped banish my seasickness on the Trevessa, I started to hum my mother's lullaby. The one that soothed and it certainly did, easing my nausea just enough to let me open my lips again.

  Perhaps I could sing to make him forget, weaving forgetfulness into the melody in the hope that it might be effective. If I could will my desires to other humans through a song, surely it would work on him. I kept the song quiet – barely within the reaches of human hearing – as I concentrated on how much I needed the captain to forget. To forget ever having met me in Fremantle, or William's revelations today.

  I didn't stop until I heard William's footsteps returning. "I don't know where they are, so I had to dig some out of the first aid kit." The sharp smell of ammonia reached my nose and I gave an inadvertent sob as it threatened my control over the contents of my stomach. "Right. That's it. I'm taking you back to your cabin."

  William's arms lifted me from my seat, holding me tight to his chest as he carried me out. I only hoped my song had done its work on the captain.

  Thirteen

  The moment the door closed, William's step lost its certainty. He set me down on the bed as if he thought I'd shatter, but his arms stayed around me. If anything, they tightened instead of letting go.

  "What's wrong, lass?" He looked and sounded as if he might cry.

  "I don't feel well. The tea. I smelled the tea and it made me ill." I couldn't explain it. I'd never been sick, not once, since I set foot on land. There'd been that first, rum-induced hangover on the Trevessa, but nothing since. I'd seen the men in the fish market fall ill when they ate bad food, drank water that had been sitting too long in the rainwater tank or their poor hygiene caught up with them, but never me.

  What in the world was messing with my body now?

  "We shouldn't have...I shouldn't have...was it what we did this morning?" He stepped back, his arms hanging helplessly at his sides. "Are you feeling sick because you..." He waved at his groin.

  I laughed softly. "I was much more ill last night before you were on the ship. Last night what set me off was tea." I eyed his pants. "In bed with you this morning, I felt much better. It's only when I drank tea that I felt unwell again."

  William sagged in relief. "I'll take care of you, lass, I swear. What do you want me to do?"

  I wanted him to stay with me and never leave me. But confining a man like William to the cabin for the whole trip would be cruel – even I didn't want to stay in bed all trip. Not when I could taste the spray from the ocean if I stood on deck.

  "Just having you here with me helps," I admitted. "I don't know what's wrong, so I don't know what else to do. Anne would know, or another nurse. A doctor. A..." I closed my mouth before I finished my last sentence. A healer would know, I would have said, and that meant I should know. Mother had trained as a healer under her mother, and she'd passed this knowledge on to me. How to keep our people alive, producing children, and leading them into the future. Fat lot of good that did me now. I didn't know what would make a mermaid vomit at the smell of tea so suddenly, when it hadn't affected me this way before.

  "I'm sorry I'm an engineer, then, lass. I can fix an engine or a ship or a railway, but the workings of your body are a mystery to me."

  Not all of them, I thought. He knew my body better than I did, coaxing it to levels of ecstasy I hadn't believed possible.

  "Would you like me to read to you?" he asked. When I stared, he went on, "It's what Mother made us do when one of the other children was sick. We each took it in turns to read aloud. My brothers usually brought in forbidden
stuff so they could blame it on me if they were caught with it. I didn't understand half of it sometimes, but one that I remember was Arabian Nights. Rob...or was it Tom? I can't even remember now. One of my older brothers, anyway. He was reading it to me and he'd barely gotten past the beginning about the king's wife, Scheherazade, when Mum came in, clouted him round the ear and told him off for reading a filthy book. For once, it wasn't. She sent Sarah in to read to me instead and I told her about the book and the woman who'd dared to save other women's lives with stories. Sarah...she knew where Mum kept the books she confiscated from my brothers, so she went right out and stole that book back. Mum was much too busy to remember, so Sarah read that book to me instead. All about Sinbad and Aladdin and magic and religions I'd never heard about...we dreamed of adventures we'd go on to see all the places in the book. Now we're all grown up...married, even, and she's at home, taking care of her husband and children. And there's me." He laughed humourlessly. "Living the adventurous life we said we would, among Sikhs and Muslims and Buddhists and who knows what on an island at the ends of the Earth."

  "And me," I added quietly. I was the who-knows-what, even if William didn't realise it.

  "You are my Bedr-el-Budur, or however you say it. The beautiful princess who I can't resist and don't deserve, but I will risk everything for anyway. And no matter how many times fate tries to take you from me, I will fight for you one more time." He chuckled at my blank look. "I still have the book, but I didn't think to bring it with me. I'll have to write to Sarah and ask her to send it. When it arrives, you're welcome to read it. Or I'll read it to you, if you like, lass, as Sarah did to me."

  "You mean if I'm still not well when we get home?" The words left my lips before I realised it. And I sounded frightened.

  "No matter what state your health is in," William soothed, lifting me into his embrace. "But with luck, this will pass and you'll be right as rain before we reach Singapore. So, what would you like me to read to you, lass?"

  I smiled wanly. "None of the books I brought. I've already read them several times and I'd only be listening to the sound of your voice. I'd prefer you tell me a true story. Tales of what you've done while we've been apart, like you used to tell me on the Trevessa when I couldn't understand you very well." And you told the water dragon in the Grotto, who was really me in my true form, I thought but didn't say.

  "I'll always wonder how much you did understand on the Trevessa," William said thoughtfully. "Sometimes, you'd look at me like you understood every word but you just lacked the ability to speak in response. Other times, it was like trying to talk to a coolie fresh off the boat from China. But you listened. Like you were drinking every word in and you wanted more, so I said...damn, I must have talked for hours. I'd have bored you silly if you'd understood." He stretched out on his bed, which one of the crew must have made while we were at breakfast. "All the while, I was wishing you'd tell me your story. How you came to be on that raft, who your husband was before you were cast adrift, the amazing childhood you must have had, growing up in a place just like this...while I was dreaming of a life out here, you were living it."

  "Cocos is not like Christmas Island," I objected. "The weather is the same, but the islands are flat and mostly sand, with only a little rock. There are crabs...oh so many crabs...but different ones to here." I sighed. I could tell William about Cocos island life, but it was not my life, for I'd grown up beneath the surface. Coral gardens that rivalled the coffee gardens at Christmas Island, with a kelp hammock swung between for sleep. Shallows where it was safe to birth and raise children, but deep water nearby for the bigger fish we preferred to eat. I shook myself. "My stories can wait for if you're sick in bed, William. Tell me...tell me a tale of what Grumpy McGregor saw when he first arrived at Christmas Island. And your first encounter with a robber crab."

  William turned red. "Oh, you don't want to know that, lass. It was quite embarrassing, really."

  I smiled. "All the more reason to tell it. Go on, William. It can't be worse than the time one stole your drawers outside the Grotto while we were making love."

  "I...well...perhaps I should start with how I got to Christmas Island. I left Singapore on the old Islander, the one that's now called the Moni, smuggled aboard by the first officer. He'd been told to replace some missing crew members and if I pretended to be one of them, he told me, he'd give me free passage to Christmas Island. I'd have to do my fair share of work on the ship, but seeing as all my things went down with the Trevessa, I figured it was a good deal. We'd been at sea for a couple of days and this big, cloudy mass rose out of the sea like some sort of nightmare. I shouted that we'd hit it and be smashed to kindling, but the other men just laughed and said they knew the secrets of navigating the place and we'd be docking there. Five days we drifted offshore, waiting for the swell to calm enough to steam into the cove, but when we did, I fairly leaped off the ship onto the jetty. In all the confusion of unloading, I wasn't missed at first, and I made some enquiries about the mine office and made my way up to meet the manager. It was McMicken then, not Jackson, though Jackson was keeping the accounts here already. McMicken all but hugged me, he was so thrilled to see me. He'd seen the papers and heard on the radio about the Trevessa and our trip across the ocean, and he'd been waiting patiently for me to arrive. The whole South Point expansion was waiting on me, you see – a second engineer, so one could take care of South Point, while the other managed the port and Settlement. And then he asked me how I'd enjoyed my cabin on the Islander, because he'd kept one reserved for me since I boarded the Trevessa in Liverpool. The first officer, who'd known my name and that I was to be an engineer at the island, had robbed me of my board and accommodation, worked me harder than a coolie, and not paid me a penny for it.

  "So I asked the manager to point me to my island accommodation, then strolled up to the jetty, where the Islander was still unloading. The first officer spotted me and called me some very uncomplimentary names, telling me to get back to work. I folded my arms and refused. The other men found this funny, but they kept unloading. I didn't know then how quickly the swell could roll in, and how every hand was needed, but no matter. The first officer strode up the pier toward me, threatening me with a beating and the loss of a month's pay if I didn't do what I was told."

  William grinned lazily, and I already guessed the ending. I'd seen him fight before.

  "That was all the invitation I needed. I beat him soundly, for he was a far inferior opponent, so when he fell unconscious to the deck, I left him where he lay. By that time, the captain had come out to find out what was going on, and I told him it was just a wager – the first officer and I had a bet on who would win a bout of fighting. The captain wasn't pleased, but I told him I was leaving the ship here anyway, so there'd be no further trouble. He asked how much the wager had been for, so he could pay his first officer's debt if the man didn't regain consciousness before the ship left port. I said the officer could settle his own debts – he'd know where to find me on the island. And he'd best not seek any further fights with me or any of my men on the island, or his widow would be left wanting."

  Widow? Oh, so that explained it.

  "First Officer Hughes made captain six years later, but he never forgot his lesson. And he's never put a foot wrong since. Wouldn't want to, either. He knows I'd kill him."

  Fourteen

  When morning tea time arrived, my belly ached more from laughing than from illness and William had almost talked himself hoarse, but I sensed he'd barely dipped beneath the surface of the sea of stories he had to tell. And I was fascinated by every one.

  "I'm as dry as phosphate dust, lass. Would you mind if I ordered some tea?"

  I hesitated. The smell of it in these close quarters was sure to set me off again.

  William seemed to guess my thoughts. "Do you think you could manage to sit out on deck in the open air? I'll have the crew set out some deck chairs at the stern, out of the wind."

  Sun, sea, breeze... "No. I want to s
it in the bow, where I might be able to taste the spray. And ask...ask if they have any Chinese jasmine tea, or Japanese green. Perhaps that won't unsettle me so much."

  He leaned over and kissed my lips lightly. "You stay here and rest while I take care of everything."

  I'd been resting for hours and the only thing wrong with me was my unfortunate inability to keep food down, so the moment the door closed behind him I levered myself off the bed and walked cautiously to the mirror. Ill or not, I was sure he still wanted me on my best behaviour, which meant an impeccable appearance. And a hat. I must have left my gloves in the captain's lounge earlier, so I didn't bother with those. They weren't much use on a ship, anyway – so unless William insisted, I resolved to keep my hands bare at least until we arrived in Singapore. That was two or three days away, William had said, and I hoped my illness would fade long before that. My eyes darted to the bed. We had a lot of lost time to make up for.

  The door opened behind me. "Are you sure you should be up? I'm happy to carry you all the way down to the deck chairs, lass."

  I snorted. "William, I might not be well, but as long as I have legs, I can walk." Thank water my illness hadn't made me lose control of my ability to shift from legs to tail, or William would've been in for a nasty surprise. And I'd have had to sink another ship...

  For a moment, he looked like he was going to argue. But I wasn't Captain Hughes and there was no way he'd use violence against me. Nor would I back down. He must have read all of this from my eyes, for the hardness he'd shown outside softened into concern. "You'll...promise me if you feel weak, you'll tell me. Or if you want to return to bed."

  Of course I wanted to return to bed with him, but an hour or two's sea air would help to clear my head. I smiled and nodded.

  William seized me and kissed me, sudden and sweet and oh so passionate. "I love you, lass."

  Before I could reply, he yanked open the door and ushered me out into the passage. Our linked arms were the only parts of our bodies that touched, but he held my heart, tightly twined with his. As the stern-faced man at my side led me down the stairs to the canopy at the bow and the pair of deck chairs placed beside a card table laid with all the accoutrements of a morning tea that would have met with Anne's approval, I knew it was only a façade.