Humphries loved the sea, but the sun had proven too brutal to his pale skin, and so he had found his niche as the Captain’s steward. Nicknamed “Mole,” it was difficult to say whether the appellation was prompted by the fact that he rarely came up from below, or by his remarkably small round eyes—disquietingly pinkish—and bucked teeth.
She ate out of obligation. To do otherwise would be an insult to Chambers’ hospitality. Eating her fill wasn’t an issue; for the best part of five years, food had been a sparse commodity, any ort to be portioned out to last for days. Such entrenched behavior was difficult to break. The food was much better than anticipated. Mr. Grogan, the cook, prided his creativity, but there was still a limit as to what could be done with the basics of cheese, dried fruit and peas, pickled and salted beef, and pork or fish, with the occasional augmentation of fresh turtle. Her lack of appetite added its own layer of monotony.
“We have rats that eat more,” Chambers had observed early on. “Don’t be expecting a reduction in your fare, just because you’ve ate so little.”
The jibe was made good-naturedly enough, but his point was made.
Grogan gave her a suffering look as he came around the table. An Irishman with an elf-like face on a hogshead body, he walked the pitching decks with mind-boggling ease in spite of his peg leg. One hand was perpetually occupied with a handkerchief with which to mop his red face.
As was the case most mornings, Grogan stood pugnaciously at Chambers’ elbow, overseeing the meal. The moment she sat, he gestured impatiently to Fitzgibbons for the tarred leather tankard before her to be filled. A Lowland Scot, Fitzgibbons was a gangling lad with a face full of spots and sooty smudges of hair on his lip.
“You’re late,” Grogan sniffed.
“I beg your leave,” she murmured over her ale.
Grogan was a strong advocate of the benefits of small ale for one’s digestion first thing of a morning. The drink was palatable enough, but she longed for the bracing effects of a good cup of coffee.
With the hatches bonneted against the weather, the lamps were lit in spite of it being daytime. As they pendulumed over the table, the dinnerware performed a nautical ballet back and forth. The table’s lip prevented the plates from shooting off. The men’s hands followed what they sought with a second-natured ease. Grumbling under her breath, Cate snatched at a bowl as it passed. Mr. Ivy, at her elbow, ducked his head to hide a smirk.
“Nor’easter,” he said into his drink. “Storm blowin’ up on the Banks.”
She knew of only one “Banks:” the Great Banks, rich fishing waters off the coast of Newfoundland.
“Isn’t that leagues away?” she asked.
He nodded approvingly at her token bit of sea-going knowledge, the unspoken implication being perhaps her lubberiness wasn’t a total lost cause.
“Coupla hundred, aye, but ’tis nothing to stop a wave out here,” he added, gesturing with his tankard toward the unseen beyond.
She had been aware of the conversation taking a sudden shift when she entered. It was a common occurrence. Cursing or coarseness didn’t bother her—her five brothers and her husband had all possessed a very colorful turn of the tongue—but the men assumed it did. Once she was seated and quiet, they would soon come to forget she was there, and the dialogue would return to its natural state. Such conversation always took the same path: speculation on how far they had traveled, when to expect to make land, and past voyages, ultimately working around to storms, best and worst captains, mysteries of the deep, and inevitably, pirates.
Pirates.
The word conjured images of something between sinister mythological creatures of the sea and marauding thieves. In London, she had heard of hangings at Tyburn, their piked heads and tarred, rotting bodies left in public display of the fate that awaited anyone who chose a similar lowly path. There had been literary attempts to idealize them, but their corruption and savagery were difficult to whitewash. Unwholesome dregs of society that, unfit to live among the civilized, had chosen to live as drunken scavengers. Violence, mayhem, and gore seemed the pirate trinity. Life having already served up far too much of that for her tastes, she felt little tolerance or sympathy toward them.
Cate toyed with the dried apple slices and claret-soaked currents on her plate, trying not to focus on its motion. The metered passes had a mesmerizing effect. Blinking from one