Race to World's End (Rowan and Ella Book 3) (11 page)

9

“Look alive, ye.
What’s doing here?”

As Ella clawed
desperately at the man holding her by the throat, a short fat man thundered his
way down the narrow passageway.
 
Praying it was the captain or somebody in authority, Ella tried to speak
and was promptly slapped by the ape holding her.

“Hold yer clack,
wench! Stowaway, Cap’n!”

Ella felt close
to passing out, her breath allowed only in short gasps. She made her body go
limp to force the man holding her to either let her go or finish the job.

“You’ve killed
her, ye brigand!”

From very far
away, Ella heard the voices of her tormentors talking and shouting. She still
felt hands on her, but no longer on her throat. The movement of the ship began
to accelerate until she thought she would vomit with the motion, until she
realized it wasn’t the ship. She was being carried.

The bliss of
letting go quickly dissipated as she felt the hardness of the table they placed
her on—none too gently. She groaned and opened her eyes. She had no idea
how long she’d been out.

Still on the
boat. In a larger room, flooded with natural light, so a window somewhere. And
clanking and banging sounds that reverberated in her head like a street band on
crack.

She was cold.
“Where…?”

“Just hold fast. Ye
ain’t going anywhere lessen ye want the crew back in here.”

Ella turned her
head to see what looked like a textbook example of a homeless person watching
her as he polished the bottom of a large brass kettle. Disheveled, his clothes
mostly rags, the man was elderly, with rheumy eyes and wattles of wrinkles
cascading down his face like a bloodhound’s.

“Yer bleeding, lass,”
the man said, storing the large kettle on a shelf over his head.

Ella sat up
slowly and put her hand to her throat. It still felt raw and sore but the skin
wasn’t broken. She looked down and then she saw.

Her period had
started.

She glanced at
the old guy and then around the room, which was pretty obviously the ship’s
kitchen—that would make this guy “Cook.” Ella started to move off the
table when she noticed her shirt was unbuttoned and her breasts exposed. No
wonder she was cold.
 

“Had a bit of a
tweak while ye was out,” Cook said, nodding at Ella’s shirt.

Disgusting perv.

“But the crew’ll
not have at ye ‘til yer courses are done, ye may be sure.”

Ella buttoned up
and looked around the room until she spotted a row of butcher knives.

“And meanwhile ye
can’t be any help to me while yer unclean, tho ye can get off that table if yer
finished swooning.”

Ella got to her
feet, keeping one hand on the table to steady herself, her eyes on the knives
not two steps a way.

“Where are we?”
she asked, her voice an uncertain croak.

“That’s a quare
accent ye have there. Where ye from, lass?”

“Alpha Centauri,
dickweed. Where. Are. We?”

“Verra quare.
We’re one day out of Morocco, as it happens, heading to Nova Scotia. Whether or
not ye steal me knives ye’ll not get off this boat short of swimming with the
sharks. And it’s a long way to where we’re going. Might as well get friendly.”

What a disaster
.
Ella felt a wave of helplessness crash over her.
This can’t be happening. I can’t have buggered it up this bad so soon.

“Once yer courses
stop, Cap’n says ye can help me with the cookin’… when yer not relieving the
crew of their needs,” Cook said with a shrug. “Meanwhile, ye sleep in the
kitchen. And eat with the crew.” He threw a dirty rag at her. “Bind yourself
up. Yer leaking everywhere.”

That evening,
Ella was amazed that she sat among the sailors—two of whom had physically
threatened her and all of whom intended to repeatedly rape her—as if they
were all friends on a long adventure together. The men, although careful not to
touch her hand or any utensil that she did while she was “unclean,” nonetheless
spoke respectfully to her, even warmly, during the course of the meal.

“Who be this
giant yer so interested in?” Roger asked as he cut into the dry biscuit on his
plate. Ella saw a plate of what looked like salt pork and several fillets of
fresh fish.

“He’s…he’s my
brother,” Ella said. “He was lost off a ship in the Mediterranean Sea about a
month ago.”

“What ship?”

“Er…I don’t know
the name of it.”

“Lost how?” asked
the smallest cabin boy, Jeffy, who looked to be about nine years old to Ella.
He was blond and had a perennially worried look on his face. She was surprised
he joined into the conversation. From the looks some of the men gave him, she
guessed that little Jeffy had been the resident plaything until her arrival.

“I’m not sure,”
she said, amazed that these men were at all interested in her story and
possibly even in helping her. “Maybe fell overboard.”

“
Thrown
over most like,” Roger said. He
looked at Ella and shrugged apologetically. “Not saying he was, mind.”

“You said the pirate,
Sully, found a giant on an unchartered island recently.”

“Don’t she talk
quare? Almost like royalty. Ye ain’t royalty, are ye? Or maybe a duke’s
bastard?”

“I heard it from a
bloke who heard it direct from Cap’n Sully’s quartermaster. They had the
Dutchman—”

“Oy! I
saw
the Dutchman!”

“Ye never!”

“I did! Coming
back from Fifi’s, I saw the
Die Hard’s
master himself with Edward Toad. Between ‘em they had the poor devil, scared
out of his shorts, so he was.”

“How’d ye know it
was the Dutchman?”

“Who else would
it be? His hands was tied in front of him, wasn’t they?”

 
“Can we please get back to the
giant
?” Ella asked patiently.

“Right. Ansel
Hind off the
Die Hard
tells me
hisself they caught them a giant living on an island when they stopped to careen
their hull after the set-to with
Eendracht.”

Ella found
herself getting excited.
It had to be
Rowan
. It fit perfectly.

“Why did they
bring the Dutchman into Casablanca and not the giant?” she asked. “Did this Ansel
person tell you?”

“Not in words but
I got the idea the Dutchman was bartering, ye ken? He had a treasure to trade
for his life.”

Ella nodded.
Rowan had no treasure to bargain with.
“Did
you…did you happen to hear what they did with the giant?”

“Ye think might
be this giant is your brother? Because yer a wee thing, lass, and Ansel said
this fella was ten feet tall, so he did.”

“They won’t kill ‘im
unless he causes trouble, if that’s yer worry. Someone that big would be worth two
men for crewing a ship the size of
Die
Hard
.”

“How long do you
imagine
Die Hard
will stay in
Casablanca?”

“It lifted anchor
a few hours before we did.”

Ella felt her
heart sink. Had they really briefly been within a mile of each other?

“Any possibility
we’re going the same way?”

“No, luv. We’re
heading to Cape Breton Island.
Die Hard
winters in the Dry Tortugas.”

Ella felt herself
break out into a light sweat. “How far away is that from us?”

One of the
crewmembers—a man with only one arm—wrinkled up his nose. “Five
thousand?” he ventured.

Miles?
The floor under her feet seemed to move independent of the motion of the ocean
beneath it. “How long is that in days?”

“You mean months,”
Roger said, helping himself to another bowl of the spicy fish stew. “What think
ye?” he said to the one-armed man. “Five months, is it?”

“Aye. If the
weather’s fair.”

Ella burst into
tears. She felt the men sitting next to her edge away, although Roger
hesitantly patted her shoulder.

“Aw, lassie, avast,”
he said, fretfully. “Belay that. Come now. It’s not so bad.”

Ella tried to put
her thoughts into order.
Rowan was on a
ship heading to the Florida Keys, a trip that would take him—and me if I
follow him—five months? Was that possible? Can I really think of being
gone so long from Tater?

 
“Cor, if she’s that hard took with
Die Hard
, best not tell ‘er how long it’s
gonna take us to get to Nova Scotia.”

That night, Ella
wrapped up on a hard pad on the kitchen floor. She’d already seen three rats
and thought half the reason Cook wanted her in here at night was to guard the
larder from them. She lined up an arsenal of small pots and pans to throw at
them.

Five months.
Rowan was on a journey that wouldn’t reach its destination for five months.
Nearly half a year…unless something bad happened and the trip ended before
then.

She covered her
face with her hands.
How could this have
happened?
The plan had been to find him in Casablanca, or word of him, and to
go wherever he was and then the two of them would return home.

She glanced in
the direction of the lone porthole and leaned her head tiredly against the wall
of the galley. It was the end of the second day. Two days since the
Constantine
left port. She didn’t know
how fast the ship was moving, but she knew it was moving
away
from her hotel room in Casablanca and in the
wrong
direction from the Florida Keys. She
didn’t know much at this point, but one thing she did know was that one way or
the other she had to get off this ship before she ended up in the middle of the
North Atlantic Ocean servicing fifteen randy and extremely malodorous seamen.

 
That meant she had a timeline between
immediately and three days from now—which marked the time when her period
would be finished.

A dark shape
appeared on the shelf six feet from her head and she screamed and threw the
nearest pot at hand. She missed the rodent by a good foot. The clattering noise
prompted no shout or accompanying oath from people trying to sleep and it
occurred to Ella that she wasn’t sure where the crew slept. She stood up and
went to the porthole. It was night and all she could see was black. She couldn’t
even tell the sky from the water. She heard the waves crashing against the
sides of the ship but that was the only indication, aside from the rocking
motion, that they were at sea.

Does it matter that I’m alone at this end of the ship?
There’s no way off the boat and no moon even if I managed it.
Dejected, she slumped back down to her
pallet on the floor, another pot clutched in her hand, when her eye caught the
soft glow of the embers in the cook stove. She stared at the small fire through
the iron latticework of the stove’s door.

Did she dare?

She got to her
feet. What was she saying? How could she
not
dare? She was pretty much out of options. Looking around the kitchen, she saw a
pile of greasy hand towels next to the dishes. Grabbing them up, she went in
search of the kindling Cook used to keep the stove hot and dragged the whole
can across the wooden floor to the stove.

She had no real
idea how this was going to turn out—which was very different from her
crystal-clear picture of her future three days from now.

She opened the
door to the stove.

Thank God they
hadn’t thought to lock her in the kitchen, although she probably should have confirmed
that before she started catching things on fire. Assuming she was trapped on
the boat with no chance of escape—and the fact that they’d all been so
congenial at dinner—it probably hadn’t occurred to Cook that she still
hoped to get off the damn ship. The blaze in the kitchen was big enough to
attract notice, but so far nobody had come. She peered down the darkened passageway
outside the kitchen and then crept down it and vaulted up the half stairs to
the top deck. There she could see the first mate and three other men. It was a
clear night, if moonless, with steering and navigating seemingly pretty
straightforward at the moment.

While she frankly
didn’t care if the whole ship went up in flames, it seemed prudent to at least
appear
to sound the alarm lest she be
blamed for deliberately starting the blaze. Ella wasn’t sure what kind of maritime
justice there might be out here in 1825 for defenseless women but she wasn’t
eager to find out.

Pulling her
blouse open a little in order to remind the first mate that she was, indeed,
female, Ella stepped out of the shadows and called to him.

“Excuse me, sir?”
she said.

Instantly, all
three men whirled around to stare at her. The first mate—a skinny
Spaniard with bad skin—left the bridge and hurried over to where Ella
waited.