Chapter Eighteen
The knife is slotted in the hand of a young officer.
Judging by his uniform of a blue wool jacket with gilt brass buttons, cream shirt, and breeches, he’s a midshipman like George was.
The knife is like one George used to own, too: a dirk with a curved blade and, she expects, a mother-of-pearl inlaid hilt, though she cannot see it as the midshipman’s surprisingly beefy hand is wrapped tightly around it.
The young man’s hair is darker than George’s, but his eyes are similar, gray-green in color and wide set.
His age, she thinks, is the age George was when he died.
If things had been different, George could have been standing here pointing his dirk at an intruder.
The thought cuts. It’s the first such cut in some time—she has been too busy worrying about Jack.
And the thought is wrong, too, for George would’ve advanced through the ranks, especially after Trafalgar; he wouldn’t have been a midshipman any longer.
“State your purpose, coming aboard a vessel of His Majesty’s Navy in this manner,” the midshipman barks.
Water trickles onto the deck as she stares at her bare feet.
She wants to push the hair from her face but worries the motion may betray her.
She should have practiced in front of the looking glass.
Which of her gestures mark her as a woman; what habit might give her away?
Everything depends on her acting skills.
She cannot contemplate what will happen to Jack if she fails.
As the ship rolls, she again moves to keep her balance. Nine days on the Rapide have taught her well; she doesn’t stumble. The ship smells like the Rapide, too: wood scrubbed with sand and seawater, the smell of wet hemp and clothes in need of a wash.
“Well?” The midshipman snaps when she merely stands there, staring at her feet. She must remember to lower her voice. “State your purpose, lad!”
She says, “I wish to volunteer, sir.” Not too high, but too uncertain. She lifts her hand to her mouth, chews on the nail of her pinkie finger, then remembers Richard’s cap and pulls it off, holding it against her chest.
“You wish to—what? Speak up!”
“To volunteer, sir. To join the crew.”
Most of the crew has gathered around to watch. Some of them laugh and one calls out, “More fool you, boy!”
“Quiet!” the midshipman says, and a little more kindly, he says, “Look up when you speak to your superiors. You wish to volunteer to join His Majesty’s Navy?”
“Yes, sir.” She looks up at last and holds his gaze, everything inside her turned to liquid. Please believe me.
The midshipman is very young, just like George was.
He’s a boy compared to Jack. The thought comes to her, unbidden.
It’s unfair to George, who never got to grow fully into manhood.
And now she stands here deceiving George’s fellow officer in order to save a man who doesn’t look so very harshly upon the French and their Revolution, who smuggles contraband against the king’s laws.
Everything is turned upside down, yet her feeling forbids her to do anything but charge ahead with the deception, to try to find Jack, to get him out.
She says to the midshipman, “I should like to join His Majesty’s Navy sir, very much. ”
“And you couldn’t wait for the press gang, could you? You had to come aboard by swimming across?” As he speaks, the midshipman slides the dirk back into the leather sheath on his belt.
Letting her shoulders slump like Harriet told her, she says quietly, “I was hungry, sir. And I feared the officer in charge of the press gang might not want me.”
“What in God’s name made you think that? The press gang will take anyone!” shouts one of the men.
Another calls, “They’d take your nan if they could get her!”
The midshipman turns and barks, “Quiet there or I shall take your name!” To Isabel, he says, “What’s your name, lad?”
She had come up with something, hadn’t she? She stumbles around the corners of her mind, groping—“Jack,” she says, too softly.
“Jack what?”
“Jack…Dowling, sir. Of Helford, sir.”
“Well, Jack Dowling of Helford, if you are so hungry you couldn’t wait a day longer to make your application, I had best take you to see Lieutenant Knighton.”
“Lieutenant Knighton has gone ashore, sir,” says a doleful-looking man in a black-and-blue-striped shirt next to the midshipman.
“Right. So he has, Bryant. In that case, you’ll have to face the captain,” the midshipman says to Isabel.
With a snicker, he says, “Don’t look so worried—he’s not going to eat you.
You may be in luck. The captain might take you on sooner than Lieutenant Knighton, who can’t bear the sight of too many landlubbers among the ship’s company. How old are you?”
“Fifteen, sir.”
“Follow me.”
It’s only now, as she follows the midshipman down the gangway to the quarterdeck, that she feels a small thrill run through her.
It’s not enough to blot out the nerves, which have started to turn her legs to jelly, but it’s there.
She has made it this far. She’s aboard the ship.
Jack is somewhere nearby. It takes all her willpower to follow the midshipman and not run off in search of him.
Perhaps he can hear her footsteps on the deck this very moment…
The Hornet is at least five times bigger than Jack’s cutter.
A maze of rigging covers her masts, her upper deck gleams, and her quarterdeck is raised high above the main deck.
Another thrill, this time just to be on board such a ship, the thought of sailing on her roving through her mind.
She can see why George loved the navy—more than he loved her, perhaps.
“This way, lad.” The midshipman breaks in on her thoughts, going before her through a door next to the steps leading up to the quarterdeck.
The meat knife, deep in the pocket of Jack’s breeches, rubs against her hip with every step.
They enter a narrow corridor with doors on each side and another door in the bulkhead in front.
The air is stiff with polish; the wooden doors shine like burnished copper and there’s the scent of coffee wafting down the passage.
The midshipman stops in front of the bulkhead door and knocks.
At a gruff call from inside, he sticks his head through the door, saying, “I bring a volunteer, sir.”
“Can’t Lieutenant Knighton do it, Withers?”
“He’s gone ashore, sir.”
“I see. In that case, bring him in. I hope you’ve got a decent seamanlike creature for me.”
“I’m afraid not, sir,” says Withers, stepping aside while holding the door open for Isabel.
She steps into the captain’s cabin, which is of a gargantuan size compared to Jack’s cupboard aboard the Rapide.
There’s no sign of a hammock, only a fine polished oak dining table with a set of chairs around it, a music stand in one corner, and a large mahogany desk, from behind which Captain Hamer studies her, quill poised as if he’s about to write a sonnet.
He’s perhaps ten years older than Jack, with a strong jaw, a benevolent smile at odds with the piratical glint in his eyes, and dark hair streaked with gray tied back in the style popular in the navy some ten to twenty years ago.
A memory tugs at her mind—just such a cabin somewhere, with the stern windows looking out across a bay, glittering in the sun, with just such a desk and such a captain, too.
Was it her father’s ship? She visited one of Admiral Farnworth’s ships, HMS Leander, only once, when she was eight years old.
She doesn’t remember what its great cabin looked like; she only remembers the view of the tripping water out of the stern windows and the desire to go to sea.
And she remembers the galley, the chef’s great steaming pots, the furnace blazing, and the small corner in which she hid, not wanting to leave the ship.
She gradually becomes aware she’s staring at the captain and quickly lowers her eyes the way she thinks an impoverished boy of fifteen would.
“What’s this then, dripping all over my carpet?” Captain Hamer’s voice is deep and resonant. It stirs something inside her, another vague smear of a memory, but it flits away before it can take form.
“My name is Jack Dowling, sir,” she says. “I should like to join your ship’s company.”
“Look up when you speak to me, lad. Why do you look like a drowned cat?”
Withers says, “He swam across, sir.”
The captain is studying her far more closely than the midshipman did.
The tip of his quill rests just below his lower lip and his eyes are hooded as he gazes at her.
She has to fight the urge to look down again.
After a moment, the captain places the quill in the inkwell.
“Hm. You’re very keen. You’re aware we don’t usually lie at our leisure in a pretty little cove such as this?
We go to war, lad. If you join the ship’s company, you may fall in the next battle. ”
Like George did. She’s still holding Richard’s cap; her other hand goes to the medal, hidden under Jack’s shirt. She could not bear the thought of going without it. Lifting the black ribbon, she wraps her hand around Lord Nelson’s silver silhouette. “Yes, sir,” she says quietly.
“That prospect doesn’t faze you?”
She feigns embarrassment, says, “Not any more than dying of hunger, sir.”
The captain gives a nod. “So that’s why you’re so keen.” He narrows his eyes as if to see through the shirt, the skin and sinews covering what lies inside. “You’re hungry, is that it?”
“We’ve got too many mouths to feed at home. I was sent out to fend for myself, sir.”
“And you couldn’t go down the mines or go a-fishing? That’s what they do here, isn’t it?”
“Yes, sir. No, sir.” A breath, then, “I…I should like the adventure, sir.” Please believe me. Please, please, please. She must convince the captain. If they send her back to shore…no, she cannot think of it.