“I am sorry not to have included you in the secret of our nuptials,” she continued, addressing Richardson and Stross, confident now that her captain would follow her lead in this. “And I apologize for breaking the news to your officers in such a precipitate manner,” she said to the captain. “I was forced to reveal the truth to Capitaine Lefevre so that I could be housed with you.”
“I quite understand, mi—my dear,” the captain replied. He stepped up to her and, quite chastely, kissed her upon the cheek. Though she would have preferred a more demonstrative expression of affection, she reminded herself that it was entirely appropriate under the circumstances. “In fact, I am glad that the secret is finally out. May I inform the people?” He meant Diana’s crew.
“Of course, my dear.”
“Congratulations, sir!” said Richardson, putting out his hand for the captain. “I wish you great joy of it.” Stross, a Scotsman, was naturally more reserved but likewise offered his congratulations, and both wished Arabella happiness.
“As for myself,” the captain said to Arabella, “I must apologize for my appearance. The heat and dampness of Venus are, as you have no doubt discerned, quite at odds with proper English dress, and I have reverted to the clothing of my youth in India. However, now that you are here, we will all certainly resume the attire expected of an officer and a gentleman.” He cast an eye to his first mate and sailing-master. They nodded their assent, looking rather shamefaced.
“No apologies are required, sir,” she said, dropping a curtsey. “I am very happy to see you, no matter how you are dressed.” But the gauntness and ragged clothing of all three of them were worrisome, and reminded her of the sorry state of her own dress … and her own considerable weariness, which had retreated momentarily in the face of the emotions of reunion but now came flooding back in force.
“I have forgotten myself,” Captain Singh said after a long moment, breaking the uncomfortable silence. “I should invite you in to dress for dinner.” He turned to his officers. “We can divide the room with a cloth, for privacy.”
“Of course, sir,” said Richardson, touching his forehead. “I will have one of the men find one and bring it up. Failing that, I am certain that Gugnawunna will be more than happy to sell us something.” From his tone of voice, he expected the cost to be exorbitant.
But rather than thanking the men for their kindness, Arabella merely stood trembling and distraught. For she had no other clothing in which to dress, and that realization drove home the very great distance between herself and every thing she owned, knew, or cared for. All except her beloved captain.
And yet he, too, was more distant than she would like.
* * *
Arabella awoke with a start. All was dark, but the sounds and smells, not to mention the rough pillow beneath her cheek, were terribly unfamiliar. Alarmed, she sat bolt upright.
She found herself in a small and rather rudely-built bedchamber, dimly illuminated by a lambent greenish light from a single window. The walls were of rough timber chinked with mud, the bed and close-stool similarly rustic in construction, and the room was divided in two by a cloth hung from the ceiling. From the other side of that cloth came the snores of at least two people. The air was still and damp and, despite the apparent lateness of the hour, terribly hot.
Another snore, this one from much closer, drew her attention to the shadows beneath the window.
There, in a hard wooden chair, slept Captain Singh.
The sight brought the events of the last days flooding back. The capture of Touchstone, the long march across country, the reunion with her fiancé—no, her husband, she reminded herself, she must never relax that pretense even within her own mind—and then the way she had, shamefully, allowed herself to fall into a near-stupor from exhaustion as her captain and his officers had found her something to eat and laid her in this hard, narrow bed. After that she remembered nothing.
Arabella took a breath, held it, released it with a silent sigh. She had reached Venus, she told herself; she was alive, she was with her captain, all would be well.
Yet he seemed so terribly wan and thin, and his warm brown skin in the greenish light seemed chalky, gray, and unhealthy. All her brave plans and expectations to aid in his escape had collapsed; her way forward from here was uncertain at best.
She shook her head, trying to drive all such unprofitable thoughts away into the chirping, creaking darkness, and lay herself back down to sleep. But sleep would not come; indeed, she seemed more awake than ever.
What time, she wondered, would show on Captain Fox’s watch now? It had been four in the morning the last time she had checked, though the Sun of Venus had stood at mid-afternoon. Now, deep in Venus’s night, the time to which her body was accustomed must be late morning or early afternoon. Small wonder that she could not sleep. She would eventually, she supposed, become reconciled to Venus time, but for now she found herself wide awake.
The thought of Fox’s watch naturally brought to mind Fox himself. He might at this moment be as sleepless as she, in his own quarters, wherever those might be.
As quietly as she could she slipped from the bed. She was wearing her chemise, she found, and her stays had been loosened but not removed. She padded barefoot across the floor and peered out the window.
The wan, greenish light, she saw, came from a lantern on a pole which stood in the street. Yet that lantern with its strange illumination was fueled neither by oil nor gas, but rather—she peered intently at it—a living thing! She had seen glow-worms once in England, and this seemed similar … though much larger, as long as her forearm. Its glowing after-parts pulsed gently and regularly with its breathing, and its mouth-parts seemed fastened to a bottle at the top of the pole, like a Martian tukurush supping from a kekhel-blossom. This bottle, she theorized, kept the worm supplied with nourishment.
The street illuminated by this peculiar living lantern lay vacant except for a pair of Venusians in French uniform, who marched along in lock-step with fixed bayonets. All else was quiet, and no candle gleamed in any of the windows that overlooked the street. Behind one of those dark windows, perhaps, lay Fox, wakeful or not.
The man could be annoying, with his glib self-assurance, his untidiness, and his ever-present smirk. But he was intelligent, energetic, and certainly did not lack for bravery; of all the men she had met in her voyages, he seemed the one most likely to be able to effect an escape from a Venusian prison-camp.
Other than Captain Singh, of course, she reminded herself. Though this exhausted, emaciated man did not much resemble the proud captain to whom she had proposed marriage so many months and miles ago.
Arabella gazed upon his sleeping face, with its sunken eyes and drawn cheeks. She longed to kiss his forehead and wake him and have him tell her that all would be well, but he plainly needed his sleep.
She slipped back beneath the sheet—even a single sheet was nearly too much in this heat, but propriety seemed to demand it—and lay staring into the darkness for an unknown time before, finally, returning to her uneasy dreams.
* * *
The next time she awoke the room was empty of people and filled with sunlight. The cloth had been taken down, and the other bed, as narrow as hers, had been made up with naval precision; from without came the clatter of knives and forks, and she realized she was famished.
Her dress had been draped gently over the footboard of her bed. She picked it up and saw that, though it had been cleaned somewhat, the mud of the last day’s long march had permanently soiled the hem. But despite that, and despite the revulsion she felt at the thought of putting even one more layer of clothing upon her person in this dreadful heat and damp, it was now the only dress she owned, and so she put it on.
Following the sound of cutlery and conversation, she descended the rough-hewn and creaking stairs to a parlor where her captain sat at a small table with Stross and Richardson, taking breakfast. Several other tables, likewise occupied, crowded the small space; she recognized so
me of the men occupying them as officers from Diana, though others were unfamiliar to her. Gugnawunna and two other Venusians bustled about with steaming plates.
The captain, noting her presence, at once stood and bowed. He had put off his uncivilized clothing and now stood shaved and uniformed as a captain of the Honorable Mars Company should. Though his uniform coat was plainly quite worn and patched, he cut quite a dashing figure, and her heart thrilled at the sight of him. Richardson and Stross had likewise tidied themselves up.
All the other men in the room stood and bowed as well, and she dropped a curtsey in response. The captain introduced her to the other diners—the shock of being referred to as “Mrs. Singh” was somewhat diminished, but still very much present—and she seated herself at an empty chair at his table.
“I am pleased you are able to join us for breakfast,” he said. The table was laid á la Français, with all the courses set out at once: a pie which smelled of fish; a plate of peas or something similar; soft white bread in the French style; wine, of course; and coffee. She gratefully accepted a cup of coffee, hoping its stimulating qualities would overcome the haze which still overlaid her brain from her long wakeful night. “We thought it best to allow you to sleep.”
“I blame the French,” she replied, buttering her bread. The butter was off, she realized, but she was so famished she ate it anyway. “They were so impolite as to capture us before we had an opportunity to synchronize ship’s time with our destination.”
“They can be terribly inconsiderate,” the captain said, and for a moment his eyes had the same eager brightness she had once known. But that spark faded quickly, replaced by an expression of weary care. “Unfortunately, we cannot dawdle over our breakfast. We must all report for appel, or roll-call, at eight o’clock, after which I have secured an appointment with Lefevre to discuss the officers’ gambling debts.”
“Gambling?” Of all the difficulties she had expected to confront in a Venusian prison-camp, that was not one.
“Sadly, yes. Unlike the rank and file, officers are not required to labor on the iron plantation, and find themselves with nothing but time on their hands. Many of them have taken up that vice, to their great detriment, and several have gone so far in arrears that the senior officers have had to get up a subscription for them, to prevent them being sent down to the plantation to work off their debts. I intend to ask Lefevre to close the gaming-house.” He sighed. “Although I believe he is personally profiting from the proceedings, I hope that an appeal to his honor as a gentleman may bear fruit.”
The expression on Stross’s face showed how little hope he himself held out of that, but one of the other phrases in the captain’s explanation had caught Arabella’s ear. “You said ‘iron plantation.’ When the French commander told us where we were going”—she did not mention that it was her intercession that had caused the Touchstones to be sent here—“he said ‘plantation de fer,’ and I was certain I had misheard. Surely iron does not grow on trees, even on Venus?”
“Iron ore does not, Mrs. Singh,” said Stross, “but refining iron—turning the raw ore from the mine into bars of pure iron, ready to be made into cannon-balls or nails or what have you—requires tons and tons of charcoal. And that does grow on trees.”
The making of charcoal was a grueling process with which Arabella was far too familiar. On her voyage from Earth to Mars, Diana had lost her coal stores in an attack by a French corsair and had been forced to stop at an asteroid and make charcoal to replace it.
Richardson wiped his mouth with a napkin. “The plantation is an invention of a Mr. Fulton, from America. It requires an iron mine, a limestone quarry, a forest, and a river in close proximity to each other, which explains why the town of Marieville was built in this particular spot, so far from even what the froggies consider civilization.”
“Diana’s people,” the captain said with considerable vexation, “must spend fourteen hours each twenty-eight-hour day, six days a week, cutting down the forest and burning it to charcoal for the blast furnaces.”
Arabella was stunned. “Surely the rules of war prohibit compelling prisoners of war to labor in aid of their captors?”
The captain’s face, already choleric, grew still darker. “Lefevre claims that the laws of Venus—to be precise, the laws of French-controlled Venus—permit this barbaric behavior. My arguments to the contrary have fallen on deaf ears.” Again he sighed. “But it could be worse. The people of other ships labor in the dark of the mines—the death toll is appalling—or in the infernal heat of the furnace-house. At least I have been able to keep them from that.”
As the captain spoke, Arabella’s outrage at the situation rose and rose. But before she could express it, a church-bell rang without, and all the diners immediately leapt to their feet. “Eight o’clock,” commented Richardson, “seems to come earlier every day.”
“We must all report to the square,” the captain said, drawing out Arabella’s chair, “for roll-call. Twice a day, at eight in the morning and four in the afternoon. And we must report back to our lodgings by ten each night.”
“Keep in mind,” Stross said as they proceeded to the door, “that on Venus, with her twenty-eight-hour day, noon and midnight are fourteen o’clock.”
* * *
The officers yawned and chatted desultorily among themselves as they made their way through the muddy streets toward the square. And then, as they rounded a corner, Arabella saw Fox, Liddon, and several others of Touchstone’s officers in a small group ahead of them. She immediately hallooed, quite improperly, and waved them over.
“Captain Fox,” she said, “may I present Captain Singh, of the Honorable Mars Company airship Diana. Captain Singh, this is Captain Fox of the privateer Touchstone out of Sor Khoresh.”
The two men shook hands. “Very pleased to make your acquaintance, sir,” said Fox with sincerity. “I have heard so much about you.”
“I would wish the circumstances were better, sir,” was all Captain Singh said in reply, and at this Arabella was taken aback. She had thought he might offer thanks to Fox for bearing Arabella safely across the airy wastes from Mars to Venus—exhausted though she had been the previous night, she had provided a brief summary of the voyage—or at least to express the fellow-feeling of one captured captain to another. The captain had always been a reserved man, but this response, though polite enough, struck her as very nearly cold.
Nonetheless, Fox did not seem to take it badly, and the two captains proceeded to introduce their officers to each other … a rather lengthy process, at the end of which they were compelled to make haste so as not to be late for roll-call.
Once there—Lefevre, from where he stood at the top of the square, plainly noticed the distinctive Captain Singh arriving at the last minute, and muttered something to a secretary standing behind him—they lined up in the third rank, even as those in the front were already calling out their names.
There were perhaps sixty men present, and though they were all officers they were a ragged and shabby lot; Fox and the other Touchstones, worn though they were from the previous day’s march, were by far the most presentable. She hated to think what the ordinary airmen—working fourteen hours a day at the backbreaking, filthy tasks of cutting wood, making charcoal, and mining iron—must look like.
Arabella was distracted from her observations by Richardson, standing in line on the far side of the captain, calling out his name, followed by cries of “Stross” and then “Singh.” Arabella, last in line, automatically called out “Ashby” before, rather embarrassed, correcting it to “Singh.”
The roll-call having concluded, Lefevre stepped up and said, “Permit me to extend an official welcome to the men, and ladies”—he nodded to Arabella—“of Touchstone who have recently joined us. Welcome to Marieville, and I trust you slept well. You will find that, so long as you obey all of our rules and regulations, your life here will actually be quite pleasant, with a broad range of entertainments available to occupy your t
ime.”
“All of which,” the captain muttered to Arabella without moving his lips, “line Lefevre’s pockets, either directly or indirectly.”
“However,” Lefevre continued, “if you do not choose to respect the laws and customs of our little municipality, we will have no alternative but to restrict your access to these entertainments, restrain your liberties, and—if absolutely necessary—even to punish you.” He shook his head, eyes downcast, in a theatrical show of distress at even the contemplation of such an action. “But I am certain that, as officers and gentlemen, you will not compel us to do so.” Here he fixed Captain Singh with a particular glare, in reply to which the captain returned only a steady gaze. “Are there any questions? None? Good.” He had not given even the pretense of pausing. “You are dismissed.”
As the men shuffled wearily out of the square, Captain Singh spoke with Richardson, Stross, and Diana’s other officers. Arabella cast a glance at Fox as he departed, but he was engaged with the men of Touchstone and did not return it.
“I must meet with Lefevre now,” Captain Singh said, “to see if the gaming-house may be closed. Mr. Richardson, pray continue in your efforts to obtain fresh straw for the men’s beds. Mr. Stross, the repairs to the leak in the roof of the north barracks have proven inadequate, and require further attention.” He continued in this vein until each of his officers had been given their assignment for the day.
“And as for myself?” Arabella asked.
The captain seemed nonplussed at the request. “If you do not wish to remain at the auberge … I suppose you may accompany me to the manoir.”
She was not entirely satisfied with this response, but with the officers looking on she chose to say only “Well then, I shall accompany you.”
“Very well,” was his only reply.
The officers saluted and departed, leaving Arabella and Captain Singh together in awkward silence. “Mrs. Singh?” he said, breaking the moment by offering his arm.
She took it, and together they proceeded in silence out of the square.
Arabella and the Battle of Venus Page 16