Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 26 Read Online Free PDF Page B

boat—used for shore hops—lashed to the side. She unshrouded and unbound it with little disturbance. Its sails could be unfurled quickly. She deemed that a goodly distance could be made before the alarm was raised and the Ship turned. In a bleary night, Settle might even be able to slip their sight. Would the Captain be bothered for a half-scrap, maybe-bait, an apprentice that dropped overboard?
    Settle rolled the pearls against her skin and she knew, more absolutely than anything since she first knew in Spithampton that the sea was big enough to want to swallow her but her will was big enough to make it choke with trying: the Captain and the Ship would never let her go. They would hunt her just as they hunted the monsters, not simply for profit or safety, but because their desire would insist on nothing less.
    And neither would hers.
    She could not leave this way, a thief chased by the dawn cockerel.
    The ocean below was the ocean in her dream. Thinking that oiled her to act. She crept along the starboard rim, up the foc’stle stairs, peeking above the deckline to see the Captain, just as she expected to see him—not cozy in his quarters, but out in the open. His coat was careless and empty bottles rolled in the cage of his chair legs. One of the crew had had the courage to put a blanket nearby, but not to drape him. The Captain snored with the intensity of heavy carousing pitched straight into heavy sleep.
    The Judge’s bundle was generous and as much as she might hope to take on the fly, but Settle had gathered some extras on her way. The small wood knife had a blade she could nudge up with a fingernail and a curved sharpness that was long enough for what she had to do. Settle stole up to the Captain, feeling the lazy heat blazing off the fevered body.
    Hundreds of faces glowered at her from below the Captain’s thin beard, hundreds more wanted to shout out warnings all down his neck, but the tattooed dead could only ripple with the Captain’s yawns. She had never seen him this close before. The fine porcelain lines cracking his face were telltale of years of obsession, but the skin had been hardened with ink and salt and wind. Still, it would yield to her knife.
    One stroke and she would be free of the fear. A single cut and the temptation would be gone.
    She held up the blade, outlined the bloody smile in her mind. But something about the Captain stayed her. This had not been expected—this recognition. For a moment, she felt panic that the Captain was lost family, but it was not features that caught her. Something in the way Settle herself had looked at a mirror on the Dream when she had first donned the sailor cap.
    The look of a woman with a secret.
    The shock nearly made her drop the knife.
    The Cruel Ship’s Captain was just like—
    She tried to raise the knife again.
    I can’t stop myself, she thought.
    Finally, she kissed the Captain on the lips.
    The Captain woke and looked straight into her eyes. “Oh,” she whispered in recognition. “I know ye. It’s yer ship that’s been haunting my dreams.”
    Aye, she wanted to tell her, just as ye’ve been haunting my heart.
    But at that moment, the Ship screamed.
    “Satan’s midden! I smell the cat on ye! Cheat on your beauty? I’ll cut the eggs out of ye! I’ll tar the shit inside ye! I’ll burn yer atoms to smoke and yer smoke to void and yer void to damnation!”
    The Captain yanked Settle to her feet. The knife clattered away. What have I done? she thought as she was dragged by the Captain across the foc’stle deck.
    Some of the crew were already on deck—in a minute, they all would be. “Bring me that dungbie dell,” the figurehead commanded. The Captain yanked hard on Settle’s hair and pulled her towards the bowsprit’s root.
    “Facing!” the Ship demanded. “I want to smell the piss as I tell her what happens to any cockroach who dares dally with my Captain.”
    With a lock grip, the Captain held Settle by her neck. She wanted to