Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 26

The Cruel Captain prowled the foc’stle deck, round and round the fore topmast like a chained holiday bear, frothing the air with spittle and glee. Bedizened like the devil’s dandy, he wore the articles of his faith: a purple frock coat off some frenchee admiral, a high guardsman hat with a dinner-plate shine and Good Queen Meg’s insignia kiss, the long silver-buckled boots of a Londinium salon king, all raggedy and sprayed with the violence of their getting. His face was hazed with hairy straggle and a filigree branding of the skin whose marks were lost through the distance. And his eyes—to Settle, his eyes were pits and suns, alternating in her vision between inescapable midwinters and June dazzlers. Before such an impudent gaze, she should have stepped back and swooned with the propriety of a woman of her station—had there been the room for such graces, had she been foolhardy enough to display a station, had they known she was a woman.

The Cruel Captain only wanted one thing. “Yer ships,” he slurred and growled, drunk and furious. “Ye’re all for Hell now and I want my fleet of the damned. Ye can join us on devil seas or ye can swim back to Heaven and suck the lamb’s cock for forgiveness.”

The Cruel Ship showered the company with her own foul gob. The oak-carved figurehead tried to twist off her bowsprit spine, a right arch doxy with her face painted ruby-lipped and deathmask, her hair, autumn leaves tumbling gold into winter, her exposed bosom, pink petals in early snow. Furious at her fixture to the boat’s forward cut, she mad-tommed the rest of the crew put together. And her eyes were as flat and lifeless as the engraved Jesus in a flotsam bible.

“Don’t sauce the geesers!” she screeched. “Don’t fedaddle with cooking and dinner manners and the like. Tear it out of them! Tear the ships from their geeser souls raw!”

The Cruel Captain joined his Ship on a high-pitched note of pure fury, the cry of wild things escaping from paradise together. Then he explained, “Right, now let’s see if ye’re the souls or the scraps.”

But they should all have been souls. That was why Settle had set out on The Righteous Dream in the first place: to become souled, to return home shipped. The Minister of her home in Spithampton, Long Preston, had organised the voyage on behalf of a Crown charity dedicated to those who had come into maturity without their ships revealing themselves—for youngsters like Apple and Settle, old enough for parents to begin to worry about them, and for those like Doctor Wendell who had hid unshipped all their lives for reasons too private to divulge. The open sea was said to call out ships. As of yesterday, four had already manifested themselves aboard the Dream. Settle remembered the celebrations as the newly-shipped swam out to the fresh vessels, taking the tills while Long Preston roused the passengers in hymns. But all such memories had been overwhelmed by the sight of the Cruel Ship as it had relentlessly borne down on them during the six-hour chase.

“Fiendishness!” bellowed Long Preston. “Cursed man—do you think you can seize a man’s ships like Jahweh at the Judgement?”

The Minister was the only survivor of the Dream who did not press back behind the other captives. When the Cruel Ship’s sailors had seized the women and thrown them overboard, without pause for the plainly pregnant lasses, Long Preston had fought like the old lion he was in the pulpit, but had been cast back into the kirk of his fellow passengers. Still, he stepped forward again, his white beard electrified in an invisible storm, an accusing finger so bony that it could have been skinned.

But the Cruel Captain laughed and he spat, and where the spit landed, the nearest crew-member, a scrawny duke of limbs, took up the laughter, “Yer Captain is yer Jahweh now,” he pronounced and with demon strength wrestled Long Preston over the edge of the boat.

The crew guffawed, raised their pistols and waited. Settle pressed deeper into the others. Applethwaite, who had pledged his protection, shielded her from sweeps of the Cruel Captain’s gaze. “Apple,” Settle began, but her lips were fossilized with fear. Her lips, but not her bowels, which pissed in a warm burst, or her legs, which vibrated uncontrollably. The boy’s breeches she had thrown on as the fighting raged on the Dream’s deck were dark enough to hide the stains, just as the scarf bound tight around her chest hid her budding womanhood. The boys and men around her—the sailors and passengers, now the Cruel Captain’s chattel—did not see through her mummer, or at least, could not see beyond their own terror.