Chapter Eighteen #3
Suddenly, the Hornet shudders. A grinding noise reverberates through the hull. On the top deck, men’s voices sound. They’re singing. It’s impossible to make out the words, but there’s a rhythm to it, underscored by a clanging, as if a thousand hammers are banging into the ship.
“That’s them turning the capstan and raising the anchor. Means we’re off,” says Red Will. “We’re only going up the river, but it’s your first sailing, Mouse. Wouldn’t you rather be on deck?”
“Could I?” she says, fighting down a shiver at the thought that they’re sailing to the place of Jack’s execution. This is good, she tells herself. This may be her chance.
“Want me to show you the way up?” Red Will says, looking up from his mermaid. The knife catches the light and reflects it in his face, brightening his ruddy complexion.
“I can find it,” she says. “But thank you.”
She slips away, taking her new name, Mouse, and making it her own: she must be quiet, small, unseen, like a mouse, like a ghost. This is a ghost ship and she’s a ghost moving through it to find her ghostly lover.
Her entire plan depends on her finding where Jack is being held prisoner without being discovered.
Jack’s life depends on it. And possibly her own.
She steals down the length of the lower deck, then climbs to the deck below, past the surgeon’s room and sick bay, into the main hold.
The smell of wood and sea mixes with the stink of bilge water.
The light is so dim she has to wait for her eyes to adjust. The hold is empty but for a loud creaking running from fore to aft.
Most of the hands are on deck as the ship sails down the river.
The only man she encounters coming out of one of the storerooms ignores her.
She keeps her head down, her shoulders slumped.
Long minutes pass, ten of them, twenty, maybe more. She has lost all sense of time. It’s awfully dark down in the hold; dark and hollow, the way she felt when Tom Holder told her they were going to hang Jack. They won’t hang him now. She only has to find him. She’s so close.
She presses on, taking care not to step in the bilge water pushing up from below the ship’s hull.
The smell of it settles in her throat; she can taste it.
She wants to call, Jack, where are you? She imagines him answering, guiding her as he did when he taught her navigation on the Rapide and he positioned her hands as she worked the sextant.
Two more doors open onto storerooms. They’re filled with bags of grain and kegs of something.
She moves on past them. She’s taking too long.
Perhaps she should call out. She’s about to do so when she hears a sound farther down in the bow of the ship.
Voices. Low ones, talking quietly, but the great cavern of the hold carries them over the creaking noise, and quiet as a mouse, she approaches the door.
She cannot hear what the voices are saying.
She wants to rush at the door and wrench it open, but she doesn’t know who’s behind it, nor if anybody is guarding what looks like another storeroom.
Stomach roiling with nerves, she crouches in the dark behind a massive coil of rope.
She watches the door and the hold around it until she is certain: nobody guards the room. There’s no one to stop her.
She takes the three steps that separate her from the door so quickly she stumbles over a length of rope.
A loud thud: her shoulder aches where it has slammed into the wood.
The door doesn’t give way. She holds her breath.
Every sound down here carries, but nobody comes.
Behind the door, the voices have gone silent.
Then someone says loudly, “Give us our dinner, will you, Morley!”
There’s an iron ring for a doorhandle. She turns it and she can hear the latch within lift, but the door remains shut. She digs in her shoulder, pushes.
The voices behind the door are silent. They’re waiting. There’s a crack in the wood as wide as her finger. She puts her eye to it, but the room is so dark she cannot see anything. She puts her mouth to the crack, calling softly, “Jack?”
There’s a shuffling and a groan in a man’s voice—another man, she thinks, not Jack.
She calls again, louder, “Jack?” and now someone is coming to the other side of the door and the hold of the ship starts to spin.
She’s dizzy with hope and yearning, and then his voice is there, less than an inch away, behind the wooden planks of the door.
“Isabel?”
She thought she would never see him again. She thought he would die. She’s crying and laughing at the same time, she’s soaring—her heart is soaring. It’s like swimming, like an effortless floating, the ocean holding her up. “Jack, it’s me,” she says.
He’s laughing, too, saying, “I’m dreaming, aren’t I? Isabel.” Her name is like a sigh. “How? How have you managed it?”
Soaring, falling. “Jack, the things they said about me—about me and the sailor, they aren’t true.”
“Did you think I cared about that? All of London could’ve bedded you and I’d still desire you.”
Legs weak with relief, she leans against the door.
“I’ve come to get you out,” she says, and with those words, the reality of the situation dawns on her again.
Jack is here, but she has yet to get him out.
Grabbing the doorhandle with both hands, she twists and twists, the iron digging into her fingers.
Jack says, “Isabel, listen. It’s locked. You won’t be able to open it. And there’s a guard. He’s gone to get our supper, but he’ll be back any moment. You must leave at once.”
“What? No! I’ve come to get you out.”
“If he finds you here, if they learn you were there when I killed Sowerby and that you were on the ship when we carried contraband, they’ll put you on trial, too.
If they hurt you or worse…I couldn’t forgive myself.
Listen to me, please. I don’t know how you did it, coming here, but you must go, Isabel. ”
“Don’t be absurd. How many of you are in there?”
“Eight besides me, but—”
“Jack! I haven’t come all this way to—”
Jack cuts in. “Listen to me.” He speaks quickly.
“We haven’t got time. I love you. Do you hear me?
I love you; I love you. I should have put it in the note, but it’s better to tell you now.
It’s a miracle you’re here and I got to tell you.
It makes me trust that God exists. I’m ready now, or as ready as a man will ever be, I reckon. ”
“Stop, please! I beg you.”
Ignoring her plea, he continues. “I wish it wasn’t like this.
It’s going to hurt you. I never meant for you to have to go through that again.
I’m sorry, Isabel. I just need you to know I love you.
I’ll love you to the very end. I’m so grateful I got to tell you, but now you must go.
” A pause; she cannot speak. He says urgently, “Promise me you’ll go. ”
“Stop it! Stop saying those things.” The words burst out of her. “I’ll get the key. Jack, I’m not going…I won’t leave you here.” She’s weeping again. She swears and this makes him laugh softly against the door.
“Such language. I suppose you learned that on the Rapide,” he says. “Go. I’m prepared now. I only needed to tell you; it was the one thing keeping me. You will be all right.”
“I won’t be. Not without you.”
“You’re stronger than you think, Bucca’s daughter.”
The uselessness of her tears makes her swear again.
Her mind rushes on. Then she feels the meat knife between her hip and the door, and just like that, the plan is there, fully formed in her head.
She got confused seeing the prison unguarded, that’s all.
She always knew it may not be as easy as simply finding the brig.
Of course the door would be locked. It’s a prison, isn’t it, or a storeroom made into a prison—of course there’d be a guard.
Harriet was right to tell her to take a weapon. She’ll hide behind the coil of rope and use the knife to force the guard to open the door. Or she’ll hurt him and take his keys if she must. She hopes she can. It’s a hard, dark hope.
Words tumbling over each other, she says, “Jack, I’ve got a plan. I wasn’t thinking—there wasn’t anybody here, but I’ve got a plan. I’ll go, but I won’t be far. I’ll get you out. Trust me. You only have to—”
A sound behind her, something between a clang and a thud.
“Isabel!” Jack cries, and then she slams into the door a second time, this time with her right temple. Her head throbs as she turns to face a pistol.