Relief, as the hatch closed – there was no one here. The sounds from above deck were muffled, shouts and cries and the muted crack of gunshots.
She tried not to let it feel like the doors to her father’s study closing, shutting her out after Tom was led inside.
Stewards, Tom had called them. They had called him Lion. That word was beating at her like blood. She remembered a younger Tom bending a copper farthing in half with his fingers, telling her, Violet, I’m strong, but you can’t tell anyone. His strength was a secret they kept between themselves, but now it made her ordinary brother seem as though he was like the Stewards, strange and otherworldly.
Lion.
She kept replaying the moment that Tom had killed the blonde Steward, red blood on the iron bar.
She had not believed Tom capable of killing anyone.
Her hands were shaking. It was stupid. Locked up tight in the hold, she was the safest person on the ship. She squeezed her hands into fists to stop it. That worked, a little.
She needed a weapon. She looked around herself.
The Sealgair’s hold was a cavernous space, with thick beams near the stairs, and crates, barrels and containers extending to the back of the ship. A long line of lamps hanging from hooks overhead disappeared into a darker area, like the black interior of a cave. There, she could see only distant shapes, half-draped canvas and huge wooden bins.
This was Simon’s cargo, part of a steady stream of goods that he brought back from his trading outposts. They said Simon was a collector, and that his trade funded the unusual objects that he brought back from around the globe. Tom had been rewarded with the brand for procuring one of them, something rare and hard to find. Violet could only guess what strange items lay inside these crates. An uneasy chill passed over her, as if she shouldn’t have come down here. As if there was something here that shouldn’t be disturbed.
She stepped off the last of the stairs. In this murky lamplight, it was hard to remember that it was sunny outside. Crates loomed on either side of her, anonymous shapes that flickered in the lamplight, appearing to shrink and grow. Despite the snatches of light, it was cold – cold as the river. The Sealgair was low in the water, weighed down by the cargo. Outside, rather than towering above the river, prow tall as a building, it lay near level with the pier, accessible by ladders. Down here, she was submerged.
Moving deeper into the hold, she found herself sloshing through water.
Water?
It was ankle deep, and cold, with the dank, repugnant smell of the river.
‘Who’s there?’ said a tense voice.
A splash as she turned, her heart racing at words in a place she had thought was empty.
A boy of about seventeen, in a torn shirt and ripped breeches, was chained up in the darkness of the hold.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE BOY WAS clearly a prisoner, chained to the heavy beam behind him, irons so thick they looked more like anchor chains than restraints. Under the tangled dark hair, his pale skin was bruised and mottled, old bruising and fresh, in a pattern of purples and yellows. He’d been beaten, more than once. The shoulder of his torn jacket was dark with blood, his shirt marked and stained, hanging open to show that the bruising covered his body.
She stared with cold, creeping horror. Why was there a boy her own age chained in the hold of this ship? In her mind’s eye, she saw again Tom pulling the iron bar out of that woman’s chest, red with blood.
‘What’s happening?’
The boy had trouble standing upright as he spoke, his weight on the wooden beam. He was breathing shallowly, as if even that was difficult, and trying to hide the effort, like a wounded creature trying not to show that it was in pain.
‘The ship’s under attack.’
‘By who?’
She didn’t answer that. She told herself that if Simon had a boy down here, he must have reason for it. He must be a prisoner or – or a petty thief, an urchin criminal, the paid flunky of one of Simon’s merchant rivals.
She told herself that the boy had brought this on himself. He must be dangerous.
The boy wore the tattered clothing of a dock labourer, but with high cheekbones and a certain intensity in his dark eyes, he didn’t quite look like one. His eyes were fringed by long dark lashes that might have been pretty in a less battered face.
‘You don’t have Simon’s brand,’ said the boy.
Violet flushed. ‘I could have.’ Fighting down the impulse to grip her own wrist where the brand would be. ‘If I wanted.’ She flushed harder, feeling like she had been tricked. She realised that as she was observing him, he had been observing her.