He stepped into the narrow aisle between the bulkheads, blocking the seaman’s way.
“Here, what do you mean—” the man began, and then, raising his eyes to Jamie’s face, stopped, gasping. One eye was fixed on him in horrified recognition; the other showed only as a bluish-white crescent beneath the withered lid.
“God preserve us!” the seaman said. “What are you doing here?” The seaman’s face gleamed pale and jaundiced in the dim light.
“Ye ken me, do ye?” Jamie’s heart was hammering against his ribs, but he kept his voice level and low. “I have not the honor to know your own name, I think?”
“I should prefer to leave that particular circumstance unchanged, your honor, if you’ve no objection.” The one-eyed seaman began to edge backward, but was forestalled as Jamie gripped his arm, hard enough to elicit a small yelp.
“Not quite so fast, if ye please. Where is Mrs. Malcolm, the surgeon?”
It would have been difficult for the seaman to look more alarmed, but at this question, he managed it.
“I don’t know!” he said.
“You do,” Jamie said sharply. “And ye’ll tell me this minute, or I shall break your neck.”
“Well, now, I can’t be tellin’ you anything if you break my neck, can I?” the seaman pointed out, beginning to recover his nerve. He lifted his chin pugnaciously over his basket of manure. “Now, you leave go of me, or I’ll call—” The rest was lost in a squawk as a large hand fastened about his neck and began inexorably to squeeze. The basket fell to the deck, and balls of goat manure exploded out of it like shrapnel.
“Ak!” Harry Tompkins’s legs thrashed wildly, scattering goat dung in every direction. His face turned the color of a beetroot as he clawed ineffectually at Jamie’s arm. Judging the results clinically, Jamie let go as the man’s eye began to bulge. He wiped his hand on his breeches, disliking the greasy feel of the man’s sweat on his palm.
Tompkins lay on the deck in a sprawl of limbs, wheezing faintly.
“Ye’re quite right,” Jamie said. “On the other hand, if I break your arm, I expect you’ll still be able to speak to me, aye?” He bent, grasped the man by one skinny arm and jerked him to his feet, twisting the arm roughly behind his back.
“I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you!” The seaman wriggled madly, panicked. “Damn you, you’re as wicked cruel as she was!”
“Was? What do you mean, ‘was’？” Jamie’s heart squeezed tight in his chest, and he jerked the arm, more roughly than he had meant to do. Tompkins let out a screech of pain, and Jamie slackened the pressure slightly.
“Let go! I’ll tell you, but for pity’s sake, let go!” Jamie lessened his grasp, but didn’t let go.
“Tell me where my wife is!” he said, in a tone that had made stronger men than Harry Tompkins fall over their feet to obey.
“She’s lost!” the man blurted. “Gone overboard!”
“What!” He was so stunned that he let go his hold. Overboard. Gone overboard. Lost.
“When?” he demanded. “How? Damn you, tell me what happened!” He advanced on the seaman, fists clenched.
The seaman was backing away, rubbing his arm and panting, a look of furtive satisfaction in his one eye.
“Don’t worry, your honor,” he said, a queer, jeering tone in his voice. “You won’t be lonesome long. You’ll join her in hell in a few days—dancing from the yardarm over Kingston Harbor!”
Too late, Jamie heard the footfall on the boards behind him. He had no time even to turn his head before the blow fell.
* * *
He had been struck in the head frequently enough to know that the sensible thing was to lie still until the giddiness and the lights that pulsed behind your eyelids with each heartbeat stopped. Sit up too soon and the pain made you vomit.
The deck was rising and falling, rising and falling under him, in the horrible way of ships. He kept his eyes tight closed, concentrating on the knotted ache at the base of his skull in order not to think of his stomach.
Ship. He should be on a ship. Yes, but the surface under his cheek was wrong—hard wood, not the linen of his berth’s bedding. And the smell, the smell was wrong, it was—
He shot bolt upright, memory shooting through him with a vividness that made the pain in his head pale by comparison. The darkness moved queasily around him, blinking with colored lights, and his stomach heaved. He closed his eyes and swallowed hard, trying to gather his scattered wits about the single appalling thought that had lanced through his brain like a spit through mutton.
Claire. Lost. Drowned. Dead.
He leaned to the side and threw up. He retched and coughed, as though his body was trying forcibly to expel the thought. It didn’t work; when he finally stopped, leaning against the bulkhead in exhaustion, it was still with him. It hurt to breathe, and he clenched his fists on his thighs, trembling.
There was the sound of a door opening, and bright light struck him in the eyes with the force of a blow. He winced, closing his eyes against the glare of the lantern.
“Mr. Fraser,” a soft, well-bred voice said. “I am—truly sorry. I wish you to know that, at least.”
Through a cracked eyelid, he saw the drawn, harried face of young Leonard—the man who had taken Claire. The man wore a look of regret. Regret! Regret, for killing her.
Fury pulled him up against the weakness, and sent him lunging across the slanted deck in an instant. There was an outcry as he hit Leonard and bore him backward into the passage, and a good, juicy thunk! as the bugger’s head hit the boards. People were shouting, and shadows leapt crazily all round him as the lanterns swayed, but he paid no attention.
He smashed Leonard’s jaw with one great blow, his nose with the next. The weakness mattered nothing. He would spend all his strength and die here glad, but let him batter and maim now, feel the bones crack and the blood hot and slick on his fists. Blessed Michael, let him avenge her first!
There were hands on him, snatching and jerking, but they didn’t matter. They would kill him now, he thought dimly, and that didn’t matter, either. The body under him jerked and twitched between his legs, and lay still.
When the next blow came, he went willingly into the dark.
* * *
The light touch of fingers on his face awakened him. He reached drowsily up to take her hand, and his palm touched…
“Aaaah!”
With an instinctive revulsion, he was on his feet, clawing at his face. The big spider, nearly as frightened as he was, made off toward the shrubbery at high speed, long hairy legs no more than a blur.
There was an outburst of giggling behind him. He turned around, his heart pounding like a drum, and found six children, roosting in the branches of a big green tree, all grinning down at him with tobacco-stained teeth.
He bowed to them, feeling dizzy and rubber-legged, the start of fright that had got him up now dying in his blood.
“Mesdemoiselles, messieurs,” he said, croaking, and in the half-awake recesses of his brain wondered what had made him speak to them in French? Had he half-heard them speaking, as he lay asleep?
French they were, for they answered him in that language, strongly laced with a gutteral sort of creole accent that he had never heard before.