CHAPTER 29
THE HOLD
POV: MAE
The ship’s engine is a heartbeat under my feet.
Slow. Heavy. Somewhere far below the steel floor, something huge is turning over and over in the dark, warming up. The whole room shivers with it. The bolts in the wall hum. The glass of water on the little metal table beside me trembles, making rings.
I’m in a cabin.
It’s small and square and painted a sick institutional green that’s peeling at the corners. A bunk bolted to one wall. A table bolted to the floor. A single porthole, round, with a brass rim, black with night.
They took the hood off when they put me in here. They tied my hands in front of me with the same plastic ties as the fish locker. They didn’t take my shoes. They didn’t take the veil.
It’s still in my hair. Pinned at the crown. I pinned it back on in the Bishop’s oratory while Ronan held his gun on the door, and when they dragged me down the back stairs, it held.
Three long pins. Black enamel heads. Steel shafts four inches long. Rosa found them for me in a box in Grace Draven’s dressing table and said, For the lace, ma’am. It’s heavy. It needs a proper pin.
I haven’t touched them.
I look out the porthole.
At first there’s only black. Then my eyes adjust, and I see the wharf. Concrete, gray with snow. The ghost shapes of cranes against a sky the color of wet ash. And on the concrete, directly below me, lit by a sodium lamp, a number painted in faded, chipped yellow, as tall as a man.
11.
I stare at it.
On Christmas Eve. On your arm. And he can watch.
It’s Christmas now. It must be. It’s after midnight. Somewhere across the city, in the cathedral, they’re singing the Gloria.
I’m on berth eleven.
I’m not on anybody’s arm.
***
The door opens at what I think is one o’clock.
Conor Kavanagh comes in.
I’ve never seen him. Ronan described him, and it’s close. Big and red-bearded, going gray at the chin, a gut like a barrel under a black wool coat. What Ronan didn’t describe is his eyes.
They’re red-rimmed and swollen. He’s been crying. He’s been drinking, too. I can smell it from the bunk. But mostly he’s been crying, for days, the way my father cried at my mother’s funeral, the way men cry who aren’t used to it and don’t know how to stop.
He shuts the door behind him and leans against it and looks at me.
“So you’re her,” he says.
I don’t answer.
“My boy’s dead because of you.” His voice is thick.
Slow. “My Liam. He was thirty. He had a little girl. She’s four.
She keeps asking where Daddy is, and her mother tells her he’s with the angels, and she asks when he’s coming back from the angels.
” He wipes his nose on the back of his hand. “What do I tell her?”
“Tell her he hit a woman who was tied to a chair.”
He goes very still.
I keep my voice level. “Tell her he hit me with his left hand, because he couldn’t close his right. Tell her I bit him. Tell her that’s why.”
For a second, I think he’ll come across the cabin and kill me with his hands.
He doesn’t. He laughs instead. Wet and ugly. He pushes off the door and walks to the little table and sits down across from me on the metal stool, heavily, so it creaks.
“Conrad said you had a mouth.”
“Conrad talks too much.”
“Aye. He does.” He leans his elbows on the table. His breath is whiskey and cigarettes. “You know where this ship’s going?”
“No.”
“Halifax. Then Rotterdam. Then a lot of places with a lot of men who’ve never heard of Ronan Draven and don’t give a damn.
” He looks at me. At the veil. At my face.
“Your husband paid a hundred and eighty grand for you. I’m going to get my money back.
Twice. Maybe three times. By the time you’ve been passed around the North Atlantic, you won’t remember your own name. ”
I don’t look away.
“But first,” Conor says softly, “I’m going to give you something to remember my boy by.”
He takes a knife out of his coat.
It’s a fishing knife. The kind for gutting. Long, thin, curved at the tip. He lays it on the table between us and turns it slowly with one finger so the blade catches the light from the bulb.
“Your face,” he says. “Just a line. Here.” He draws his finger through the air an inch from my cheek.
From the corner of my mouth to my jaw. On the left side.
“So every man who ever buys you sees it and wonders who did that. And somewhere in Boston, your husband will look in the mirror every morning and see the same line, and think of you.”
My stomach turns over once, slow and cold.
I don’t let it reach my face.
***
The door opens again.
Conrad Draven comes in.
He’s still in his camel overcoat. The cane is in his hand. There’s blood on the silver hound’s head.
Ronan’s blood.
I look at it and something happens inside me that I have never felt before in my life. Not at the bridge. Not at the Crypt. Not in the Bishop’s study. It’s hot and white and very, very quiet.
Conrad looks at the knife on the table. At Conor. At me.
“What’s this?”
“This is between me and her,” Conor says.
“That wasn’t the arrangement.”
“The arrangement was my boy was alive.”
Conrad’s mouth tightens. He steps into the cabin and shuts the door. There’s barely room for three of us. His cane taps the steel floor.
“The arrangement,” he says, “was that she goes to Halifax quietly and my son gets over it. Nobody said anything about her face.”
“I’m saying it now.”
“If you cut her,” Conrad says, “he won’t get over it. He’ll come after you. He’ll come after me. He’ll never stop.”
“Let him.”
I look from one of them to the other.
I kept the books for a convent for two years. I know what it looks like when two columns don’t agree.
“Mr. Draven,” I say.
They both turn.
I look at Conrad. Only at Conrad.
“What did he pay you?” I ask.
Conrad’s eyes narrow. “I beg your pardon?”
“For me. What’s Conor giving you? Berth eleven? Peace in Southie? What’s the number?”
“That’s none of your—”
“Because I’ve been counting,” I say. “Since the dining room. I watched your son bleed money all week. Conor’s shipments stopped.
Conor’s trucks stopped. Conor’s bars stopped.
Conor’s been losing forty, fifty thousand a day since Monday.
He’s desperate. That’s why he needs berth eleven.
” I tip my head at the porthole. At the yellow number on the concrete.
“Once he has it, he has the terminal. Once he has the terminal, he doesn’t need you. And he’s just lost his son to yours.”
Conor’s face has gone dark.
Conrad’s hasn’t changed. But his cane has stopped tapping.
“You think he’s going to let you keep your peace?” I ask Conrad. “After tonight? You think the man who’s crying for his son is going to shake your hand at the club next month and forget whose son did it?”
“Shut your mouth,” Conor says.
“And your son,” I say to Conrad, softer. “You think he’s going to come back. The way he did after the piano.”
Conrad’s face flickers.
“He came back after the piano,” I say, “because she was still upstairs. Your wife. He came back every day for twenty-one years because Grace was in that house and he couldn’t leave her with you.”
The engine hums under us. The glass of water trembles.
“She’s dead, Mr. Draven,” I say. “There’s nobody left upstairs. There’s nothing for him to come back to but me.”
Conrad looks at me.
For one long second, something moves in his pale gray eyes that I think might be the truth.
Then Conor’s hand slams down on the table.
“Enough.”
He picks up the knife.
“Conor—” Conrad says.
“Get out, old man.”
“If you cut her, he’ll—”
“Get out.”
Conrad doesn’t move. He stands with his back against the door, one hand on his cane, and doesn’t move, and doesn’t leave.
He doesn’t help me, either.
***
Conor comes around the table.
He grabs my jaw with his left hand. Big. Rough. His thumb digs into my cheek. He turns my face to the light, the left side up, the way the doctor did in the marble bathroom.
“Hold still, sweetheart,” he says. “It’s only a little line.”
Sweetheart.
The man on the bridge called me sweetheart.
My hands are tied in front of me. At the wrists. Not behind the chair this time. In front. My fingers are free.
I lift them.
Slowly, like a girl reaching up to fix her hair.
Conor doesn’t even look. He’s looking at my face, at the spot on my cheek where he’s going to put the knife, and he’s breathing whiskey on me, and his eyes are wet.
My fingertips touch the veil.
The first pin. Black enamel. Four inches of steel.
I pull it out.
The lace slips on the left side. Conor’s eyes flick up to it.
Too late.
I drive the pin down into the back of his left hand where it grips my jaw. Between the bones. All the way through the meat of it, until I feel the steel scrape and then catch in the metal edge of the bunk behind my head.
He screams.
It’s a huge sound in the tiny cabin. It fills the steel box, and it goes on. His hand is pinned to my cheek, to the bunk, and he can’t pull it away without tearing it open, and the knife in his other hand wavers.
I let go of the pin.
I reach for the knife.
He’s bigger and stronger, but he’s screaming, and he’s drunk, and he’s never once in his life been the one who didn’t see it coming. My tied hands close around his wrist, and I twist the way you twist the lid off a jar that’s stuck, and the fishing knife comes loose in my fingers.
I get my feet under me. I put my back to the wall.
Conor tears his hand off the pin. It comes away with a sound I’ll hear for the rest of my life. Blood everywhere. He staggers back into the table and falls across it, holding his wrist, howling.
I stand in the corner of the cabin with the fishing knife in both tied hands, point out, the veil hanging half off my head.
Conrad hasn’t moved.
He’s still standing against the door. He’s looking at me. At the knife. At the blood on my face that isn’t mine.
His mouth has fallen a little open.
“Well,” he says, very quietly. “Grace would have liked you.”
I don’t answer him.
Because under my feet, under the heartbeat of the ship’s engine, there’s another sound.
Smaller. Faster. Coming across the water from somewhere out in the dark. Not one engine. Several. High and whining, like hornets.
Boats.
Conor hears it. He lifts his head off the table, white-faced, clutching his hand.
Conrad hears it. He turns and looks at the black porthole.
I don’t look. I don’t need to.
I know that sound. I’ve heard it in my bones since the night the headlights flashed at my window.
I tighten my grip on the knife.
He’s coming.
And when he comes through that door, he’s going to find me holding the knife.