Pirates (11 page)

The kitchen of the Crown and Lily was a crowded, steamy place, full of smells both pleasant and foul. Phoebe accepted a trencher of thick stew, too hungry to question its preparation, and sat on a bench near the slop bucket, eating purposefully. During the journey from Paradise Island, with her silent guide, she had subsisted on hard bread packed by Old Woman, accompanied by whatever fish, roots, coconuts, or berries her escort had been able to scare up along the way.

No one spoke to her, though she was subjected to a number of curious, speculative stares, just as she had been after
being consigned to the laundry room at Duncan’s house. Phoebe was not timid, though she avoided trouble when possible, and she returned the gazes of the other women unflinchingly. Any sign of fear or subservience, she suspected, would doom her to being bullied and ostracized.

She washed her hands after her meal was done, the injunction to rest apparently forgotten, and was given a spotted apron and sent summarily among the customers.

They made a colorful bunch, the clientele of the Crown and Lily—there were British soldiers, in buff breeches, Hessian boots, and the famous crimson coats, along with plain men in homespun or buckskin—craftsmen and apprentices and farmers and tradespeople. Some of the latter, Phoebe thought, as she hurried to serve pewter mugs spilling over with ale, were rebels. Others were Tories, of course. Who was who was anybody’s guess, though King George’s supporters did tend to be more vociferous in offering their opinions.

The brew had been flowing from the taps in the kegs behind the crude plank bar for some time when one of the redcoats, who’d been addressed as Major Lawrence, suddenly grasped Phoebe by the apron strings and pulled her onto his lap. She struggled, but he only laughed, his strong hands almost encompassing her waist and subduing her easily.

Even in her extremity, Phoebe did not fail to notice that some of the other men lining the long trestle table, all English, were uncomfortable with the turn matters had taken.

“Let the baggage go, Major,” said a cultured voice from somewhere down the line. “It’s plain she’s ailing—look at her hair. All but gone.”

The major, bleary with drink and an overabundance of testosterone, pushed the furious Phoebe to the bony ends of his knees and studied her. “I’d think her a bloody boy, if it weren’t that there are curves and swells in all the proper places.”

Phoebe squirmed, flushed and sputtering with indignation.

“Let her go,” repeated Phoebe’s champion, but he didn’t
stir himself to effect a physical rescue or even lean forward far enough that she could see his face and get some fleeting measure of his character.

“Mayhap the major fancies the lads,” observed some intrepid soul, punctuating the remark with a belch and a resounding fart. “Have a care, men, and keep your bums covered when
he’s
about.”

The major put Phoebe away from him with such haste and vigor that she nearly tumbled onto the filthy floor. In the next instant, Lawrence sprang to his feet, ruddy from the ale and the indignity of it all, and fumbling for his sword. “Who said that?” he demanded.

Phoebe might have laughed, if it hadn’t been for the gravity of the situation in general and the sword in particular. One man sat alone at the end of the bench, while the other members of the party were scrunched together at the other, wearing expressions of cheerful disgust.

Process of elimination, Phoebe thought, and no pun intended.

“Cheers,” said the digestive miscreant, raising his mug to the major. He was a small, sturdy person, with a bald head and a florid complexion, and one of the brass buttons sprang from his coat when he stood, clattering across the tabletop.

The major withdrew his hand from the hilt of his weapon and retreated a step, his long, aristocratic nose wrinkled. “God in heaven, Sergeant, you are a disgrace to the Crown,” he muttered. “I’d kill you where you stand, as a service to His Majesty, if it weren’t for the deuced legalities of the thing!”

The sergeant’s eyes twinkled as he groped for his button and dropped it into his pocket. “There is that,” agreed the bumbler in a merry tone. “The documents and such, I mean.” He donned a dusty tricorne, after fanning the air with it in a show of personal consideration, and winked at Phoebe as he turned to take his leave. “Farewell, good mistress,” he said.

Phoebe nodded in response and took herself well out of the major’s reach, just in case the party got rowdy again, but
things were not the same after the sergeant had gone. One by one, the bored soldiers pushed away their mugs, rose from the benches, and left the tavern. Their leader lingered, brooding, refilling his cup, with an unsteady hand, from the wooden pitcher in the center of the table.

“I’d suggest coffee,” Phoebe whispered to another servant, a young girl wearing a shapeless dress of butternut muslin, a mobcap, and a dirty apron, “but caffeine might be worse for his disposition than alcohol.”

Her colleague—Phoebe had heard her addressed as Molly, over the course of her illustrious half-day career at the Crown and Lily—looked utterly baffled, and nearly dropped the trencher of roasted meat she carried. But then she gave a wobbly smile, and Phoebe hoped she might have made a friend. Besides the sergeant, that is, who had saved her from the unwanted attentions of the major with remarkable finesse, all things considered. Now all she had to do was stay out of Lawrence’s path; he might be an officer, but he was no gentleman.

Molly served the meat to the ravenous craftsmen gathered at a corner table and gave the solitary Brit a wide berth when she returned to the bar with an empty pitcher.

The place had emptied out completely, and Phoebe was industriously scrubbing a table, as instructed by Mistress Bell, who prided herself, she claimed, on her worthy reputation, when the woman came to stand at her elbow.

“He’ll have a flogging for insulting Major Lawrence the way he did,” she said in low and matter-of-fact tones. “I hope you prove to be worth that kind of suffering.”

Phoebe thought she would be sick. Her knees went slack, and she sank onto a bench beside the trestle she’d been scouring. Terrible images of a man bound to a whipping post and savagely beaten filled her head. “The sergeant?” she asked weakly and rested her head on her folded arms with a groan when Mistress Bell nodded.

The tavern keeper laid a gentle hand on Phoebe’s shoulder, in rough sympathy.

“Was I hired to be a whore?” Phoebe asked, looking up at Mistress Bell’s weathered, careworn face. “Is that why
Lawrence felt free to manhandle me? Is all this happening because I was too witless to understand what I’d agreed to do here?”

The older woman shook her head, and the leathery skin over her cheekbones glowed with brief, faint color. “No, lass—you needn’t share any man’s bed unless you wish it so. I’ve told you that already. Lawrence is a coward and a rogue—and mark me, there are those like him in the Continental Army as well, He’ll not soon forgive you—much less one of his own sergeants—for showing him up for a fool.”

“Isn’t there something I can do—someone I can talk to?”

“If you don’t want to make matters worse for that poor blighter, you’ll stand back and let things fall ot as they will.”

“But a decent man is about to be whipped because of me—”

“And there’s naught to be done to stop it,” Mistress Bell interrupted. “Finish your scrubbling, miss and take yourself off to bed. Tomorrow will come almost as soon as you’ve closed your eyes.”

Despondently, missing Duncan and old Woman’s wise, reassuring advice, Phoebe completed her chore and, carrying the candle Mistress Bell had given her, climbed the steep, narrow steps to her room. There, after stripping to her petticoats, splashing her face with cool water from the pitcher on the washstand, and using a salted fingertip for a toothbrush, she collapsed onto her bed and cried.

Morning came all too quickly, just as the boss had predicted, and Phoebe washed, dressed, and hurried outside to use the stinking latrine behind the tavern. She scrubbed her hands again, in a basin beside the back door, using hard yellow soap that made no lather, and then went into the inn’s kitchen.

“He fair perished from the beating you got him, did Jessup Billington,” said a red-haired woman who would have been beautiful if not for the pockmarks fanned over one cheek.

“Hush yourself, Ellie Ryan. It’s not Phoebe’s fault that Major Lawrence is a pig,” Molly interceded, with a spirit surprising in someone who presented such a frail and mild appearance. “He’s the one that wants a proper hiding, if you ask me.”

Phoebe put out both hands in a bid for peace. She had never meant to get poor Billington into trouble, and she certainly didn’t want to be the cause of strife between Molly and the redhead. “Please don’t argue,” she said, squeezing her eyes shut against the terrible headache that suddenly pulsed in both temples. “It won’t do the sergeant any good, will it?”

Half an hour later, while serving a breakfast of sausage and ale to two merchants, Phoebe’s worst fears were confirmed. Sergeant Billington had indeed been tied to a post in the town square and soundly punished for insubordination. Lawrence had wielded the whip personally, one shopkeeper told the other, and there had been plenty of blood. They’d flung the poor bastard into a room in the back of the blacksmith’s place to recover as he might, and it had all come about because of some chit working in that very inn.

Who cared, they concluded in the end. Wasn’t he British, and hadn’t those rotters destroyed a lot of good men with their ruinous taxes and their war? Why, it was all an honest fellow could do to put food on the table, in these terrible times. There was precious little pity to spare for a lobsterback.

Phoebe, who felt sick again, might have been invisible for all the notice they paid her; she was only there to serve, like a footstool or a faithful dog. She suspected, too, that even if they
had
known she was the “chit” who’d earned a British soldier a whipping, they probably wouldn’t have given a rip.

She brought their ale and somehow kept from pouring it over their heads, and when Mistress Bell sent her out with a basket to buy eggs to be hard-boiled for the evening trade, she made her way to the blacksmith’s instead of the market. There was no one about—it was midday by then, and the tropical sun was hot—so she slipped inside, moving quickly past the forge and the horses nickering in their stalls, and
found the room where Jessup Billington lay. He’d been stripped to the waist for his beating, and the skin on his back was not only lacerated, but bruised as well, and hideously swollen. He lay on his belly, his trousers crimson with dried blood, and cursed when Phoebe touched him.

“I’m so sorry,” she said.

“Bugger that,” said Billington. “Get me some good stout whisky, lass, and be quick about it. The smithy keeps a flask on one of these shelves.”

Phoebe withheld the observation that water would be better for a man in his condition and went looking for the whisky. It was, given her involvement in the matter, the least she could do.

Billington raised himself onto one red-crusted elbow with a groan when she knelt to offer the flask, and the effort was agonizing to watch. He took a long, thirsty draught of liquor before sinking into the straw again. “I don’t know why you came, miss,” he said, “but I would beg you, as one Christian soul to another, to leave me be from now until Judgment Day.”

“I want to help you, if I can,” Phoebe said.

“You’ve helped me quite enough already,” Billington replied, groping for the flask, which Phoebe placed in his hand. “Do be so kind as to get out of here before Lawrence sees you and hangs me for a traitor and you for a spy.”

Phoebe rose to her feet. “Why would he do that?”

“Because he’s a spiteful snake,” Billington said, with excruciating patience, “and because I am indeed a traitor, and you might well be a spy. Give my sympathies to Rourke when he comes to collect you, the damn fool. And now, if you have a merciful bone in your body, get yourself gone.”

Phoebe felt herself turn pale. “What do you know of Duncan Rourke’s and my association?”

Billington laughed hoarsely. “Nothing I’m willing to confide in a devil-blessed bit of baggage like yourself,” he said. “Word gets round, and that’s all I’ll say.”

With that, he passed out, though whether from the pain or the whisky or both, Phoebe could not guess.

She found a pail of water on a bench near the forge and
lugged it back to the dark, dirty chamber where her rescuer lay. Tearing off a part of her one and only petticoat, she soaked the cloth and began, ever so gently, to bathe the mutilated flesh of Billington’s back. Every once in a while, she was seized by a bout of deep retching and had to stop the careful washing, but eventually the worst of the blood had been removed, revealing the true extent of the wounds. Phoebe closed her eyes for a long moment, preparing herself for what she had to do, then opened the flask and poured its contents over Billington’s raw flesh.

He shot screaming and cursing from his stupor, like a man set afire, and Phoebe scrambled out of his reach, certain he would have killed her if he could.

“Damn your black soul, wench!” he bellowed. “What witchery is this?”

Phoebe was crying, though she was barely conscious of the fact. “It wasn’t witchery, it was common sense,” she said. “You might have gotten an infection if I hadn’t done something to prevent it, and your precious whisky was the only antiseptic on hand.” She paused, lip quivering. “You might still die, but at least you have a chance to recover.”

“Get out,” Billington seethed, through his clenched teeth, “before I rise and find a pitchfork and run you through for the pure pleasure of it!”

Phoebe got out and returned to the Crown and Lily, where Mistress Bell was waiting to blister her ears with a lecture for tarrying too long and not bringing back the eggs, but she endured it without protest.

Phoebe had been gone more than ten days when word reached Duncan, via the usual complicated, clandestine route, that she was in Queen’s Town, a British-held settlement on the northernmost island, working in Sally Bell’s tavern. He was respectfully advised by his contact to fetch her before her good intentions got them all hanged, it being common knowledge that she hadn’t the sense God gave a pot handle.