by Sara Donati
“Hello, luvy. Come closer and give us a kiss.”
“Connor,” snapped Stoker. “Take her below.”
She puckered up her toothless mouth. “Ooh, that’s not very friendly. All these lovely big marines. Look at the doodle sack on that one, will ye? A yard like an iron pike.”
“Connor!” Stoker barked.
“Go with them, Quint,” said Fane. “We want no surprises.”
Connor did as he was bid with the marine at his back while Fane examined the rest of the crew.
He lifted his short sword so that his sleeve pulled up. A scar crossed the back of his hand and snaked up underneath his cuff. With a little flourish he pointed at a man Hawkeye knew only as Penny Whistle.
“You, there. Have you ever served on board a ship of the Royal Navy?”
Penny scowled. “I’m Massachusetts born and raised. What would I be doin’ on a friggin’ Tory shitebucket?”
It was calculated to make Fane angry, but the man wasn’t so easily riled. He smiled with half of his mouth, the one side drawn down by a curving scar.
“An opportunity missed, then, eh? Captain Stoker, who else is on board?”
Mac shrugged. “I run a tight ship. This is my whole crew.”
“All Americans, I’m sure you’ll claim.”
“Every man of them,” Stoker said calmly, the Irish heavy on his tongue. “There was a war fought, if you’ll remember.”
“Ah, yes,” said Fane thoughtfully. “That little squabble.” He turned and met Hawkeye’s gaze. Something flickered there, some curiosity. He jabbed the sword twice, toward Robbie and then Hawkeye.
“These two.”
There was a moment’s silence, and then Stoker began to sputter like wet gunpowder.
“Those two! Those two? Are you mad, man?” He thrust a shoulder forward toward Fane. The marines brought up their weapons, and he pulled back.
“You shoot me ship half to pieces for two men?”
“I can take them all, if you prefer.” Fane’s tone was icy. “And burn your ship, for good measure.”
Stoker’s expression shifted from outrage to suspicion. “Why those two? They’re no sailors and they’re older than sin, the both of them.”
Fane was studying Robbie. “Not sailors? I suppose that one there is the King of Siam.”
Stoker swung around to Hawkeye.
“Say something! Tell the man you’re American.”
“I ain’t American.”
“Of all the—Of course you’re American. Sure and you were born and raised on the New-York frontier!”
Hawkeye met Stoker’s eye. “That don’t make me American if I don’t want it to. I was raised Mahican, and Mahican I’ll be until I die.”
Stoker drew in his breath with a hiss. “You’re damned easygoing for a man about to be pressed onto a Tory frigate.”
There’s good reason for that, Hawkeye might have said. He made himself look away from the deck of the Leopard, where a familiar figure had appeared at the rail with a long glass in his hand. A man of no more than medium build. Not a sailor, or an officer.
Hawkeye said, “I been taken prisoner more than once in my lifetime, and by worse scoundrels than these. Rab here was held by the Mingo for a whole year.”
Robbie grunted, his brow furled down low. He hadn’t seen the man studying them from the Leopard’s quarterdeck and he didn’t follow Hawkeye’s purpose, but they had hunted and fought together for fifty years; Robbie could tell well enough when Dan’l Bonner had a scheme.
“We lived this far to tell the tale, I expect we’ll survive a Tory frigate,” Hawkeye finished.
“Captain.” Giselle had been hovering at the back of the crowd of sailors, but now she pushed forward and spoke up in her best drawing-room voice. “I will join you, as well. I have no business on this ship.”
Hawkeye forgotten, Stoker’s head snapped toward her. “You greedy bitch!” He lunged; the marine next to Giselle lifted the butt of his musket in a lazy swing and tapped him above the eye. Groaning, Stoker went down on his knees, pressing a fist to his bloody forehead.
“Captain Stoker, contain yourself,” said Fane. “I shan’t be taking your … lady on the Leopard.”
“Sir,” Giselle said, and pressed her lips hard together. “You would deny my request for assistance without knowing my name, or my father’s?”
Fane shrugged. “You came on board of your own accord, did you not, madam?”
“I did. And now I would leave.”
“But not on the Leopard,” said Fane firmly.
Giselle gave the man an injured look. “Captain, perhaps you know my father, Lord Bainbridge. He is lieutenant governor of Lower Canada.”
Fane bit back a smile. “Captain Stoker, I am impressed. The King of Siam, an Indian chief, and now the daughter of the lieutenant governor … Ayres! We’re away. Fetch Quint, and take these two men into custody.”
At the rail, Fane came up behind Hawkeye. “Your son and his family are not on board?” he asked quietly.
Hawkeye shook his head.
Fane grunted, clearly not surprised but displeased all the same.
“Rob MacLachlan!” shouted Giselle from the quarterdeck. “You and I have unfinished business!”
But Robbie went down the rope ladder to the longboat without even looking in her direction.
“Captain Stoker,” said Fane, touching the rim of his tricorn. “Until we meet again.”
“Aye,” said Stoker with a bloody frown. “Sure and that day will come sooner than you think.”
The marines pulled the longboat through rough waters toward the Leopard. Hawkeye sat shoulder to shoulder with Robbie; Fane was out of earshot at the other end of the boat.
On the Jackdaw the crew had already set about repairs, half of them heaving the spare mast into place while the others were at work on the rigging. There was no damage to the hull, and Hawkeye didn’t doubt that they would be under sail again before morning.
Below them, turning gently on their wake, Micah’s body floated amid the jetsam. Only Giselle stood at the rail to watch them go, her fists clenched like stones.
Hawkeye said, “I should have seen it long ago. She’s got Iona’s eyes.”
The wind whipped the words from him, but Robbie had understood. He wiped the sea spray from his face.
“I gave ma word that I wad nivver speak o’ it.”
Hawkeye tried to remember Wee Iona as he had last seen her in the shadows of the pig farmer’s barn on the outskirts of Montréal, but another picture came to mind. A young Highland Scotswoman he had first met after the battle of Québec; she had put aside the veil to live among the roughest sort of men. It made too much sense to be doubted.
“I suppose Pink George must be her father, or he wouldn’t have taken her in. But why would Iona give her up to him?”
Robbie hunched his shoulders. “It’s a complicated tale, Dan’l. One I canna tell in guid faith.”
Hawkeye put the question out between them, because he could do nothing else.
“And the boy? Is it true?”
Robbie ran a hand over his face. “Aye,” he said hoarsely. “It’s aye true. But Dan’l, ye mun believe me when I tell ye, I didna ken aboot the lad until I broucht Moncrieff tae Montréal just after the New Year. I couldna think how tae tell ye.”
A flock of tiny seabirds settled around the longboat. The men called them little peters, the souls of lost sailors who danced along the tops of the waves; bound to the sea in death as they had been in life. Beneath the water long sleek forms wove silver streams, moving faster than any horse. Headed somewhere else. Hawkeye took a deep breath, salt and storm, the endless sea. One grandchild unclaimed; the others equally out of reach, headed for an unknown shore. He wished that he had Cora beside him, for her quiet counsel and the simple sound of her voice.
“Dan’l, do ye think we shall ever see hame agin?”
They were close enough to the Leopard now to make out the voices of the men peering over th
e rail at them. More officers and curious sailors, the gun crews still standing alert at their cannons; sharpshooters up in the rigging. And someone else.
“Look, Rab, here’s an old friend,” Hawkeye said by way of answer.
Robbie raised his head. “Christ Jesus,” he said softly. “Young Will Spencer. For the love o’ Mary, what is he doin’ on the Leopard?”
“Come to Elizabeth’s rescue, looks like,” said Hawkeye. “Now we’ll just have to track her down.”
21
Almost two years out of home port, the Isis was overflowing with the evidence of her industry and enterprise. The hold was as big as a longhouse but still it was filled to bursting with kegs of cinnamon and mace, cardamom and saffron; endless bales of India silk, cashmere and cotton and a hundred seroons of indigo. On the last leg of the journey up the eastern seaboard to Halifax, the Isis had taken on what seemed to Hannah to be more Virginia tobacco than the whole Hodenosaunee nation had ever produced, or needed. And still, the sailors told stories of the real treasures kept in a locked room on the lower deck. None of them had ever been inside, but Hannah went there with Hakim Ibrahim early one morning when Charlie’s brother Mungo lay dying.
It was not the blow to his head, but a mysterious ache in his lower belly that was dragging him away against his will. The pain had come and gone for a week and for that whole time the Hakim had kept Mungo in a darkened room where he was forbidden any activity at all. He had been given only boiled water and a tea made of flaxseed and steeped wild yam. Curiosity and Elizabeth took turns sitting with Mungo to keep the cold compresses on his belly fresh, and for a time it seemed to Hannah that he would get well.
Then, on the very day that the Isis first came within sight of Scotland, he began vomiting again, and the pain settled in for good. Curiosity called it an angry belly, for its heat and hardness and the fullness of misery it brought with it. The Hakim called it the vermiform appendix and showed them drawings of a little finger of gut that was spilling poison into the blood. Mungo wrestled with the pain, and did not care what name they gave it.
After a particularly difficult night, Charlie came to the Hakim, his eyes red with weeping, but his voice steady. “Can we no’ give him laudanum to ease his passing?”
Hannah held her breath. She knew well enough that Hakim Ibrahim had no more laudanum. He had used the last of it when a sailor called Jonathan Pike had mangled his hand in a winch.
Hakim Ibrahim pressed Charlie’s bony shoulder. “I will do what I can for him.”
So he took Hannah with him to the locked storage room and opened the door with a key that hung on a cord around his neck. A sticky-sweet, warmish smell met them. He reached up to hang the lantern from the hook in the ceiling, and the room came into focus.
In the middle of it all sat a throne. It was carved of some dark wood Hannah did not recognize and so tall that the curved back touched the timbers overhead. The whole of it glinted with inlay work of pearl and silver and gold that told a hunting story. Men with eyes like the doctor’s held long lances. A tiger ran through tall grass, its tail winding.
“You may sit in it,” said the Hakim, and so Hannah climbed up.
It was very uncomfortable, but she stayed to study the room so she could tell the story. Forests of ivory tusks longer than a man sprouted in dark corners. A whole army of statues of all sizes crowded together, wrapped and padded with sacking so that only faces peeked out: some of polished white stone, others so old that noses and ears had been softened away to almost nothing. Animals, dragons, warrior women with furious hard faces. Piles of furs such as she had never seen before spilled out of trunks: some striped, some spotted, some deep black and others glossy brown. Spread out over a humped chest Hannah recognized the pelt of a lion by its mane, and because the paws and tail and head were still attached. The mouth was propped open with an ivory box, so that the lantern light played on the heavy yellow teeth. Dusty glass eyes stared into the shadows where wooden spice casks lined the walls.
Hakim Ibrahim opened one, and the sweet smell rose into the room in a fresh wave. Hannah went to stand beside him. There was another chair here and a little table, its rumpled cloth sprinkled with tobacco. On it were a flint box with a pierced tin lid, a few pewter plates, a half-bottle of port, a carved ivory case, a scale, and a worn hornpipe, the stem almost bitten through. Hannah wondered how often the captain sat here alone, smoking.
The Hakim took a cake from the open cask and put it on a clean plate. It was flattish, a deep dark brown, with small bits of leaf stuck to it.
“Laudanum would be easier,” he said. “But raw opium will serve too, if he can keep it down.”
He opened the ivory case. Inside, a row of metal weights nestled in green velvet, the smallest no larger than Hannah’s thumbnail, and cast in the shape of a spider. She saw a deer, a fish, a turtle, a horse, a cow, a tiger. The largest, the size of a hen’s egg, was fashioned in the shape of an elephant with a trunk curled upward.
The Hakim took the turtle weight and placed it on the scale. The knife flashed bright as he cut into the brown cake. When he had three pieces of opium, each equal to the weight of the little turtle, he quickly put the cake back in the cask and replaced the lid.
He said, “I will miss your assistance in the surgery. You have been a very good student.”
Hannah was so surprised that she could say nothing in return, but only bobbed her head.
“I need not encourage you to continue to study. But I will caution you to be alert in Scotland. Your natural curiosity is a powerful thing, but it may put you in danger.”
“My father will protect me.”
Beneath the red turban the Hakim’s brow creased thoughtfully. “Your father is a brave man of excellent understanding. But he is coming to a strange land, and he will need all the assistance you can give him. There are men in Scotland—” He paused, and then went on. “There are bad men in Scotland who would do you harm.”
“There are bad men everywhere,” said Hannah. The images came to mind without her bidding: Mr. MacKay and his ruined face; a man hung from a dead oak with his hands hacked off; the old Tory with his notched ears and moccasins of skin, hissing at her in her own language. And Liam as he had first come to them, beaten by his only brother until his bones had broken inside him. She had not thought of Liam in days, and a sudden swell of homesickness came over her. But when she opened her mouth to say this, to talk about home, something else came out.
Hannah said, “Are there many men like Mr. MacKay in Scotland?”
“And what kind of man is Mr. MacKay?” the Hakim asked. He was looking at her thoughtfully, and he waited while Hannah gathered her thoughts.
“The kind who thrives on the pain of others,” she said finally. Thinking of Margreit MacKay, worn so thin by grief that she lost all connection to the world.
“There are men like Mr. MacKay everywhere,” said the Hakim. “But there are also men like your father, and women like Mrs. Freeman and your stepmother. Like the woman you will be one day.”
He was trying to comfort her, but the truth was simple. She said, “I am afraid of Scotland.”
Hakim Ibrahim picked up the plate of opium, covered it with a cloth, and they went back to the surgery, where Mungo waited.
Dearest Many-Doves,
I write this letter in the trust that we will encounter a packet bound for Boston or New-York in the next day or so. By my calculations it is now the second week of June. God grant that it may reach you by September. I would wish for nothing more than to deliver it to you myself, but I fear it will be many months before we are safely home again.
From Runs-from-Bears you will have learned that the children were taken from us in Québec. Let me reassure you first that we were reunited with them within days, and that they suffered no permanent harm. Nathaniel, Squirrel, Daniel, Lily, Curiosity, and I are together now on the Isis, and we remain all in good health. It is a matter of great concern to us that we cannot give you word of Hawkeye and Robbi
e, but they follow us on the Jackdaw, and we have not seen that ship in more than a week.
This evening we came within sight of the Isle of Man; I expect we shall be in Scotland tomorrow morning. We are unsure of what is to happen next, except that we shall soon see the Earl of Carryck, who has caused us to come so far against our will. I pray that the earl proves a more reasonable and honest man than his emissaries Mr. Moncrieff and Captain Pickering have been. Nathaniel still hopes that an opportunity will present itself to turn about immediately and sail for home, but how that might be achieved is unclear.
Daniel and Lily thrive, as does Squirrel, who has been kept busy by studying with the ship’s surgeon. Nathaniel rarely sleeps, now that we are within sight of land; Curiosity seems to do little else. We think of you every day and pray that you are all in good health, and that Blue-Jay continues to thrive. Nathaniel bids me tell you all that he has seen the Panther in the Sky, and it was running toward home. A good omen.
Please share this letter with my father and those friends who inquire after us.
Elizabeth Middleton Bonner
10th day of June in the Year 1794
Aboard the Isis
My dearest husband Galileo Freeman,
This ship will come to rest soon. I ask the Lord what he has got on his mind for us in a country as homely and wet as this Scotland I see outside the window, but he don’t talk much to me these days.
Think of this when you worry about me: Nathaniel Bonner is the same good man he has always been, and if there is a way in this world to get me home to you he will find it. Otherwise I go to my reward thanking the Lord for the good husband he sent my way all those years ago, and for the fine children he put into my care.
Your loving wife
Curiosity Freeman
writ by her own poor hand this 11th day of June, 1794
on board the Isis
My grandmother Falling-Day,
Elizabeth says I might write to you in our own tongue but there is not enough time for us to puzzle out the sounds on paper. These letters must go to the packet Marianne. She is bound for New-York on the evening tide. A courier will bring them up the Great River to Paradise and Runs-from-Bears or Otter will carry them to Lake in the Clouds. Many-Doves will read these words out loud before the fire, and you will all be together when you hear them.