The Companion (5 page)

He caught his expression and carefully shut down. “Then you are lucky.”

“What do you mean?” He couldn’t mean she was lucky her father had died.

“You said yourself there are more things in the desert than we can comprehend. That particular section of desert is dangerous.” He said it lightly, but he was hiding something.

“Oh.” She wanted to ask him more, but just then Captain Tindly stepped on deck.

“Look sharp, boy, for a signal from the sloop!” he bellowed. “Prepare to back tops’ls.”

Shouts and activity exploded. Beth turned to find her fellow passenger had disappeared.

The
Beltrane
was almost quiet now. Ian felt freer. Only a few hands were above decks, since she was “hove to,” as they said, for the night with sails furled, waiting for the rest of the convoy to arrive. Those sailors awake smoked or huddled over their mugs of grog. Ships were close quarters. Hardly a word was exchanged but what four people did not witness it. He could not afford shipboard curiosity.

He’d taken careful sips of the dread substance he now craved for four nights running before he boarded, hoping to forestall his need. It had been almost more than he could manage to take only a pint from each of his victims, for the hunger was bestial in its demands. The need rose about two weeks after he fed. He’d taken passage on a vessel that had several ports of call. He must do what must be done onshore, not in the narrow and too-public confines of the ship.

He leaned over the rail, one boot on the hammock netting, staring out to sea. His thoughts strayed to the strange girl who’d been so incensed when he had not believed her wild theory about the Sphinx. Such a bluestocking—no address, odd-looking. He was surprised she was English with her outlandish looks. He was not surprised she’d tried to assert that dominance females always craved. She’d been determined to prove his ignorance. He admitted grudgingly he might have given her provocation with his derision. She was direct; he’d give her that.

His mind contracted. There were even more direct ways of gaining dominance than that poor girl could comprehend
in her small world. He straightened and took in a breath of the salt air. He would not think of that or of
her
. He would think of the brown bird of a girl. He’d seen the carapace that covered her uncertainty about herself as she struck out at him over her precious theories. Whatever would she do in England? They valued everything she did not possess and nothing of what she did. He couldn’t help noticing how wistfully she gazed after Tripoli. She was right. She would be better off there. Impossible, of course, without husband, father, brother.

The sea was quiet. The wind had died. That boded ill for a quick journey west down the Med. It had been just such weather when his ship was taken off the Barbary Coast two years ago.

He wouldn’t think about that. He skipped over the roar of the guns blasting away at the fragile wooden sides of the ships at close range, the smoke, the smell of blood, the roar of the barbarous bastards as they came over the side. The damned Captain hadn’t even put up a good fight. He’d asked for quarter as soon as it got down to hand combat.

He stared at the scars around his wrists. He didn’t bother to pull down his cuffs—no one was about to see them. They were the beginning. And then he couldn’t skip over it anymore. Shame suffused him as he remembered the foul creatures stripping him of everything—boots, belt, coat, waistcoat, shirt, watch and fob, seal ring, even his stockings. Then had come the first of many bindings, cruel hemp around his wrists. Wearing only his breeches, he was thrown into the hold with the other able-bodied. A saber cut or two still qualified him as healthy.

The foul water in the belly of the ship was a foot deep. Those who could stand, did so. Those who couldn’t . . .

A rat swam by. He could not suppress a shudder
.

“You’ll thank God for the rats soon enough.” The voice came from about the point of Ian’s thigh. The man must be sitting in the water. They were almost touching in the pitch dark of the hold. “We’ll end eating them. These Barbary bastards won’t waste rations on slaves.”

“Slaves?”

“We’re for market sure, maybe Algiers.”

“I thought the Navy cleared the Med of pirates,” Ian protested, half-dazed by the quickness of the whole action and the throb of his wounds
.

“Mostly. But mostly don’t appear to be good enough.” The man coughed
.

“Hope they don’t try to convert us,” an old salt rasped. “I cain’t take torture at my age.”

Ian shrank inside. He’d heard of the hot irons and knives that compelled a man to renounce Christ. The damned infidels thought they were saving souls. The stench of tar and fetid water was overwhelming. He breathed through his mouth, but that only made his throat close
.

“I heard they cut your bollocks off,” a young voice trembled
.

“Sometimes. But the black ones, they cuts their balls and dicks clean off, too, so they dribble all over themselves. Bring ’em up from beyond the desert, in great long caravans. Arabs has always kept slaves. In droves, they keeps them.” The fount of information sputtered to a stop
.

“I read some firsthand accounts of Christian slaves.” Ian recognized the master, one of the few officers not slain or heaved overboard and therefore one of the few men who could read. “They’re employed as agents of business if they know the language, or to sail a rich man’s ships if they are sailors.”

Ian wished he’d learned more Arabic or knew how to sail a ship
.

He lost all feeling in his hands before he located a splinter of wood he could grate against his ropes. It took long hours to free them, and the pain of the returning blood almost made him regret his effort. He passed his splinter to the next man, and the old salt pried off another. Soon they all had their hands free. He realized he had a fever when he started shaking uncontrollably. The saber cut on his upper arm must be infected. The odor of death was added to the reek of tar and fetid water when a sailor named Young who had renounced Christ on the deck above died soon after he returned to their purgatory. The nightmare of the dark and the stink, the hunger, and fear made the ship’s boy set to shrieking until they knocked him senseless. They could hear the pumps working, yet the water rose until they were thigh deep and could not sit if they would. They slept fitfully, braced against the curve of the hull or leaning on another, in shifts. It was miserable to the point of unreality. Time lingered in a haze
.

A great thump against the ship’s side and muffled shouting, answered more faintly from afar, told them the ship had docked. It was not long before the hatch above opened, leaking a square of unbearable light. They did not have to understand the language to know that they were being bid up into the sun to a future more fearful even than their wretchedness in the hold
.

The ship’s boy was a gibbering idiot by now. The scurvy piratical lot cut him from the others and brought a club down upon his head once, twice, with a dull thud. No use for him. Ian squinted in horror against the stabbing light as they cast the lifeless body into the harbor. He hardly noticed the rope they used to fasten the remaining cargo together at the ankles until they were jerked down the gangplank. They stumbled into a town, thriving with the shout of commerce. Twenty-four survived out of the five-score sailors and passengers that set sail from Bristol. Famished, half-naked, they looked a poor bargain for whoever bought them
.

The slave market was even more frenetic than the bazaar at large. Groups of young men gleaming ebon in the sun, their male areas smooth enough to make the English shudder, crouched in the dust. Women, some with faces as covered as their bodies, huddled together. Others sprawled naked and displayed. Traders called out the virtues of their human wares. And through all, the merciless sun beat on their heads, burning their pale and waterlogged bodies. Everywhere, the scent of human sweat and fear mingled with that of aromatic spices, overripe fruit, and meat hanging days too long among the flies
.

Their keeper cut the gaggle into individual lots. Ian found himself pushed, stumbling, into a dusty ring surrounded by shouting and whirling colors. It was over so quickly he hardly had time to feel the shame. A stocky bearded man, gabbling at him, cast a rope about his neck. In the background a tall figure swathed totally in a hooded burnoose, his hands concealed in its sleeves, nodded. The burly man said something to him and then tugged on Ian’s rope, jerking him through the hooting crowd. The tall specter strode in their wake
.

Ian ripped his thoughts back to the cool Mediterranean breeze that soothed his hot cheeks in the darkness. He had been bought as a beast of burden for a caravan. Jenkins’s comforting accounts of slavery as a sailor or an agent of business were not for him. He probably had his beefy frame to thank for that. He looked an admirable brawny pack animal.

He must not dwell upon that time. The flash of a raised whip in the sun swept over him, the feel of skin rubbed bloody raw under the ropes that held his giant pack as he stumbled after the camels, equally laden, the unrelenting, torturous sun.

No. He breathed in the cool sea air. He wouldn’t think of what followed, either.

He would think of an England that boasted the finest medical minds, of Henry and his hopeful family and the Stanbridge of his youth, of frivolous activities you could fill your days with: rout parties and cockfights and turn-ups, Jackson’s and Tattersall’s and White’s. Thanks to the diamonds, he had enough money to enjoy London as he never had before.

His breathing calmed. He listened to the creak of wood, the squeal of rope, the slapping water at the hull. What use all this memory? For better or for worse he was beyond that time.

If only he could get beyond despair. The English doctor at Tripoli had been no help. Fool that he was, Ian had revealed all his symptoms. The doctor, horrified, ordered him from the room. Later Ian had received a note advising him to consult a doctor who specialized in hysteria. Ian was hurt and angry.
Hysteria
was a euphemism for conditions better confined in a madhouse. The doctor apparently took refuge in supposing Ian must be making up his symptoms. If only that were true . . .

After his visit with the doctor he tried a second time to end it. His naked body was blistered and cracked when a simple boy had dragged him out of the sun. The pain was so bad he’d made the boy gag him to muffle his groans. But he didn’t die. He healed in three days. He had thought for sure that the sun . . .

He
must
not despair. He might yet escape what he had become. There were better doctors in England. Who was the chap who studied blood? Blundell? He might serve. And if there was no way back? Ian shuddered with a revulsion that shook his soul.

If there was no way back, then he must somehow accede to his needs without sacrificing his immortal soul and becoming like
her
. He would concentrate on his future in the radiant normalcy of England. No one need know his shameful secret. The chaos of London was his best opportunity for obscurity and normal life. He would take a bit of what he needed from the seething tide of humanity in the great sinful city. He could avoid women, lose himself in trivial occupations. He could still carve out a normal existence, but for that one not-so-small aberration.

Above all, he could escape from Africa and all it held. He would never set foot on those shores again. Already he was beyond her reach. He blinked, eyes suddenly full, and despised his weakness. He could not afford weakness if he was to keep that which grew inside him in check.

As he passed beyond that dreadful time when he was counted among the livestock of the caravan and the far more devastating months that followed, he had perhaps passed out
of all human experience into some realm not quite tethered to the earth. That was his danger.

He must not let go. He must engage with the world lest the force that lurked inside him, strong and rejoicing, grow powerful enough to claim his soul.

Three

Beth wakened the next morning and realized that the ship was under way. She raised herself from her narrow cot to peer out her little window and saw several other ships of the convoy, their spread of sail magnificently white under the blue of the Mediterranean sky. She should want to leap up and be about. Often enough on other journeys the invigorating climate of the sea coupled with the promise of adventure had infused her with an energy that made her father wince. But neither the lure of Mrs. Pargutter’s company nor the prospect of England was enough to draw her out of her cot this morning.

The loss of her father weighed on her. Since his death, she had seemed . . . distant from herself and from the world. It was sometimes too much effort to engage with those around her, and indeed, since she was going back to a society that would not welcome her, estrangement might be the less painful policy. Lady Metherton’s drawing rooms had been a daunting precursor to a life Beth had no wish to master. Her refusal to attempt attaching any of a dozen eligible young men had driven her benefactor to distraction. They had all seemed so dull. . . .

With the rock of the swell under her, she lay back into her
bedding. Her thoughts turned again to the strange passenger, Mr. Rufford, even as they had for long hours in the night. He was the opposite of eligible: taciturn, gruff, the pain in his eyes keeping everyone at a distance. What was it about him that drew her? She could hardly deny that curiosity had turned almost instantly to fascination. It must have to do with the scars about his wrists. He had been a prisoner. But he was certainly a gentleman. Had he escaped from a transport on its way to Botany Bay? For what had he been imprisoned, and by whom? The British? The French? That country still schemed abroad even though the war was over. Was it one of the innumerable Pashas and Deys who set themselves against the Turkish Sultan in this most treacherous part of the world? And for what crime was he incarcerated, or for what purpose if not punishment of a crime?