Cast Off (7 page)

“Still, it must be uncomfortable, a hundred men sharing such a small space for six months with no room to stand. No wonder they're a rough lot. Their lives at home must be unthinkable if they were willing to sign up for this journey.”

Bram's face darkened. “Sure it's uncomfortable, but when they get to the Indies they give the VOC three years labor and after that they're free to stay or go as they please. Don't seem so bad to me. 'Specially when you think about where most of 'em comes from, which is prison or the almshouse.”

Something I'd said had offended Bram. I changed the subject. “Have you been on many voyages?”

“Not so many,” Bram said, looking easier. “This is my second west-east crossing. The first was after my ma died and my pa came back to Batavia to get me. He's sailed with De Ridder ten years, first five as carpenter's mate and the last five as ship's carpenter. Took us nine months to sail from Java to Amsterdam 'cause we met some heavy weather and had to stop at the Cape overlong to refit. Then we hit the doldrums and we was becalmed for nearly two weeks, men dying of scurvy and fever right and left. That's when we lost our surgeon. Clockert's new. I hope he's got a better hand than Daneelszoon. That cove was slow with his knife, which is about the worst thing you can say about a ship's surgeon.”

“Do you mean he was a coward? Afraid to fight?”

“I mean it took him more than twenty minutes to get a leg off when what you want is ten. Or five. The
Rijnenburg
's got a surgeon who can do it in five.”

The octopus didn't like the thought of slow amputation. I threw up into the slop bucket.

“I'll go and get that ginger,” Bram said.

Hours later I was awakened by rough voices in the main part of the hold. I shot up from my bed and leaped behind a stack of crates. The octopus in my belly was gone, chased out by a woodpecker in my chest.

“Point of four.”

“Making?”

“Thirty.”

“Curse you, brother, for the bilking black devil you are.”

“And you too, you thon of a dog.”

It sounded like some men had sought out the privacy of the hold to gamble at piquet. I crept silently around boxes and barrels. A knothole in the wall between the cabins gave me a good view of them. Twins. Tall, scrawny, carbuncle-faced, no more than twenty years old. One was missing his front teeth, which explained the lisp. A barrel and two crates served as their card table and chairs, and they sat with muskets across their laps. Against the wall behind them, stacked floor-to-ceiling, were the treasure chests of the Dutch East India Company.

“You hear something?”

“Don't thtart your trickth, brother. Pay up!”

“No, I thought . . .”

He stood, a hound that had caught wind of a fox, and approached the wall I was hiding behind, the long narrow barrel of his musket pointed in front of him.

Like a poker.

The wind left my body. I was back in the front room, Father towering over me with the glowing fire iron. I could smell the olipodrigo and hear Tina shouting,
Go! Go!

Down in the hold, I staggered through the blackness, blindly feeling my way, until I reached the hatch to the sick bay. Without stopping to listen for voices, I shoved open the trapdoor.

I clapped my hand over my mouth and squeezed my eyes against tears. I could never go home. Father would kill me if I did. Perhaps not right away, but someday after he'd had more bad news and one drink too many.

But if I never went home, I'd never see Albertina again.

“If you're here merely to adorn my doorway, you're doing a poor job of it,” said a man's voice on the other side of the wall.

“Master?” said a small high voice barely louder than a whisper.

“Are you here for a medical problem?”

“Just . . . just
this,
sir.”

I crawled the rest of the way out of the hatch and pressed my eye to a crack between two boards. Clockert, if the sallow-faced man with stringy brown hair drooping over half his face was indeed Clockert, sat at his desk with his jacket off and his shirtsleeves rolled up, a quill in his hand. In the doorway stood a little boy with stooped bony shoulders, and hair, skin, and eyes the color of wheat. He'd unwrapped a bloody rag to show the surgeon his forearm, which had a flap of skin the size of a florin coin dangling from it. Blood flowed to the floor in a steady trickle.

“Hmph.” Clockert lifted the arm and held it up to the light. “Chisel? Splinter? Broken glass?”

“Goat, sir,” the boy whispered.

“A
goat
?”

“She didn't mean to do it, sir. The goose, 'e bit the goat, and the goat, she bit me. I take care of the animals, sir. It is my job. And also I am the drummer. I 'ave two jobs, sir.”

“Stop there, young man. I am quite sure I have no wish to know more about the ship's livestock. What's your name?”

“Louis Cheval, sir.”

“You're a Walloon?”

“No, sir! I am French.”

“And how old are you?”

“Nine.” The boy's face had blanched from dry wheat to skimmed milk, but the surgeon seemed not to notice.

“How did a French boy of nine end up on a Dutch ship?”

“My parents, they are dead, sir. I went to live with my uncle, who is Dutch. 'E sent me 'ere. May I . . . if you please?”

“Ah, yes, sit down.” Clockert stood and offered Louis his chair. The boy collapsed onto the seat and dropped his tassel-topped knit cap on the floor.

“Krause,” Clockert called over his shoulder, “I'm going to sew up this boy's arm. Prepare the ointment, please.” Clockert opened a drawer in his desk and rummaged through various bits of stuff until he found a needle and thread.

“Krause!”

A grunt, followed by shuffling footsteps. “Sorry, master.” A large, slovenly, red-nosed fellow, more boy than man, rubbed sleep from his eyes. If I wasn't mistaken, he was the drunk sailor Bram and I had seen sleeping in the crew's quarters.

“The ointment, if it's not too much trouble, my bovine colleague.”

“Yes, sir.”

Krause knelt beside the medical chest and began taking off stacks of books.

Clockert picked up Louis's arm and used a rag to wipe away the blood. “You're not squeamish, are you?” he asked the boy.

“Squeamish, sir?”

“You're not going to faint or vomit or scream
comme une petite fille
?”

“No, sir. I don't
think
so. At least I 'ope not.”

“Krause, give the boy some gin.”

“Right away, sir.” The surgeon's assistant poured gin into a cup and, when Clockert wasn't looking, took a long pull from the bottle himself.

Clockert took the cup and gave it to Louis to drink, which he did with gusto.

Brave Louis kneaded his jacket with his good hand but otherwise kept quiet while Clockert worked. I counted the stitches—nine. If I'd been wielding the needle I'd have done twelve and not tugged nearly so hard.

“Krause, the ointment.”

“I'm sorry, master, I don't remember—”

Krause sat in front of the open chest, looking like a lost boy in a big man's body. Saws, knives, and other metal contraption
s
fanned the inside of the lid in a holster, while the main box held tiered trays with dozens of glass bottles and jars.

“It's the same one I showed you yesterday for the sailmaker's split knee. However, I do realize that two ingredients is a great deal to remember.”

At home, Albertina and I used a tincture of—

“Myrtle and turpentine. Here, I'll do it myself.”

Clockert quickly found the bottles he wanted and measured the oils drop by drop in a small bowl. He applied the mixture to Louis's arm and wrapped it snuggly with linen.

“Now,
Monsieur
Cheval, do be careful of goats and geese—and pigs and ducks for good measure—and come see me tomorrow so I can have a look and change the dressing.”

“Thank you, sir.” Louis sprang from his seat and hurried out of the cabin, forgetting his hat in his haste to be gone.

“I shall breakfast here this morning,” Clockert said to Krause. “Bread and cheese, please. And coffee. Black.”

“Right away, sir.” Krause lumbered out of the cabin.

Clockert returned to his paperwork, his back to me. He wrote with an elbow on the desk and a hand threaded through his hair. I stared at Louis's hat and weighed all the likely outcomes of my reckless decision to stow away. If I was very lucky, I'd sneak off the ship in Batavia and find work with a Dutch family. Or what was far more likely: I'd be found out and my future would be determined by the captain. Was he a merciful man? A generous one? Surely he was practical, as any captain who runs a “tight ship” would be.

A stowaway girl discovered on a ship has few options; the stowaway daughter of Sacharias De Winter, merchant banker and former commissioner of the Amsterdam Bank of Exchange, has even fewer.

But a no-name stowaway boy . . .

I squatted down and snaked my arm through the space under the storeroom door, my fingers creeping along the floor toward Louis Cheval's hat. A stray lock of hair fell across my face. Tonight I'd ask Bram to help me cut it short. My hand inched closer—

“Halt, vermin! Who dares invade my office?”

“You sure Clockert didn't smoke you, Miss Petra?”

Petra looked a lot less green after a couple of days at sea and a belly full of ginger. We was down in the hold, and I was showing her how to pick oakum. Oakum's made from old ropes. You take an end and split the hairs apart with a marlin spike 'til it looks like a fuzzy nest, and then you can use bits of the nest to caulk the cracks and holes that all ships are full of. I figured with Petra picking her share down here, I'd double my daily ration.

“I'm perfectly certain he didn't see me,” she said. “The surgeon was yelling at a rat—and no wonder it was there, given the state of the sick bay. He threw his shoe at it.”

“He hit it?”

“He missed. The rat's probably somewhere down here now with the rest of his very large family.”

“You'll be glad of those rats if we get stuck with no wind and food running low,” I said.

“You don't mean—”

“Aye. They're not too bad so long as you cook 'em enough.”

Petra gnawed off another chunk of ginger.

“Why'd you do it, anyway? Why risk getting smoked for a hat?”

“For that very reason: Because there's always a risk—no matter how careful we are—that I'll be caught. And if that happens, I think I'll be safer as a boy. I've worked it all out. I'll cut my hair and wear Louis's hat, and perhaps you could help me find a shirt and trousers, or I could sew them myself with some of these ridiculous skirts that make it all but impossible to climb over Clockert's storeroom wall—”

Petra's skirts did look fairly volumable, but her scheme was barmy.

“Think of it, Bram. With a pigtail and sailor's clothes, who'd know the difference?”

“Everyone, that's who. Trousers and tail or no, you'd never pass. Nobody'd believe it for half a minute. And once they smoked you for a girl, they'd know you had help with your cover-up. Then that'd lead straight to me and we'd both be sunk.”

Petra made one of those airy noises with her nose that girls make. “You're right, of course. No female could get by on a ship for more than two bells without some
cove
such as yourself helping her. If I get found out looking like this, you're sure to go down with me. However . . . at least if I'm dressed as a boy, there's a chance the crew will believe I am one, and a chance they'll believe I stowed away on my own.”

I gave Petra a good look-over. She'd have to get some dirt on her face and start leaning back in her chair instead of sitting on the edge with a poker up her shirt. But maybe if she cut off her hair . . .

“Be a boy.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You say you can pass for one. Show me how you'll do it.”

“All right,” she said, squaring her shoulders.

“Wrong,” I said.

“What do you mean, ‘wrong'? I haven't said anything yet!”

“It's not what you're saying; it's what you're doing. Which is sitting. Which is all wrong.”

“Fine, then. Tell me how to do it properly.”

“Boys slouch.”

She slouched down so low, she almost slouched right off the crate.

“Not like you're dead. Like you're comfortable. Like this,” I said, pointing at myself.

Petra fixed herself. Mostly.

“Better,” I said. “Now say something.”

“Hoay there! How now, mate!”

“Is that a joke?”

“No, it's not a joke! It's what I hear a hundred times a day, sailors shouting at each other like the whole world's gone deaf.”

“That's because it's a cove on deck calling up to another cove on top of a mast. Try some regular parley. We're just two coves having a chat. And don't make your voice so deep. We're twelve, not twenty.”

Petra eyed me for a bit. Then she set her knees apart, hawked up a hunk of phlegm, and spit it over her shoulder.

“How now, mate? That boy enough for you?”

My mouth dropped open. I shut it.

“You know, Miss Petra, you just might do.”

“I'm so glad you think so, Mister Broen.”