My Name is Resolute Read Online Free PDF Page A

A man came to us and hoisted Patience to her feet, compelling me to follow, prodding others behind me. He pointed to the shallop, and when I paused at its edge, he lifted me up without so much as a by-your-leave, and dropped me into it. They made me sit in the reeking damp hull. Some other girl wearing rags far inferior to my gown, soiled though it was, sat upon me as if I were a cushion, perched upon my drawn-up knees. She looked down upon me and made a noise, wrinkling her nose. “Ach. Ye be ’ant so fine now, Mistress.”
    I recognized the accent more than the face. One of the red-haired Irish slaves bought out of the gallows, as Pa would say. Uncle Rafe always added that it proved more merciful to work them to death than to pile their corpses in the lochs. If I could have moved, I would have found that needle under my skirt and poked her right in her so high-and-mighty rump. I jerked my knees and hoped the bones gave her a poor chair.
    The tide began to rise. Four men rowed us nearer the ship. As we reached the reef’s edge, that hulk righted itself in the bay with a loud creak and a rush of wake that raised our smaller craft by two feet so that the rowers had to fight to keep from circling. I knew that once Pa came by, he would help us find Ma. Patience sat upon a seat at my back, and I said to her, “Can you see Ma from there?”
    A man holding a curved blade longer than his own arm shouted something at me. I shrank away from his cutlass and deeper into the muck, and wept. My gown had been blue. It would never be blue again. It had a nice silken flounce with a wee farthingale made just for me. My slippers were almost gone, wet through, and my stockings had fallen down. I wondered if Ma would be upset. Surely she would not find me at fault for the ruination of this gown. Surely she would come soon.
    When we reached the side of the galleon my mouth opened. I had never been so close to a ship this size. She looked to be a thousand tons. Maybe more. Rows of openings marked decks loaded with cannon. From far overhead, rope nets slid down her sides, looking for all the world like a gigantic version of Ma’s plaited silk hair coif.
    They untied our bindings and held us at knifepoint. As if we were rats in a harbor, all the maids in my boat climbed the rigging laid on the sides. I could have gone faster, but a woman above me could barely get up and she seemed not to have balance for the swaying of it. Her bare feet were callused, but they were not used to climbing. I felt the little casket banging against my legs and for a moment entertained the thought that a four-shilling piece in the hands of one of these pox-eaten devils might be all that it took to get us back on land. Of course, I did not have enough shillings for every man, so I kept climbing. On reaching the deck I chided myself for my haste. I have always felt a hurry to get things done. If I must take a medicine, I would gulp it, rather than sip it and prolong the misery. If I must climb a rope scaffold, I would as soon get it climbed.
    We had scaled the ship all that way to be led across the deck and down three sets of stairs into the pitch and dark of a hold where they herded us into compartments made of iron. One by one the doors clanged shut. The air smelled of sewage and cattle and rot. The gloom felt so cloying that the dim light of our jailer’s lantern did little to break it, and the thought that it shone full morning outside made it seem all the more mysterious.
    Patey stood beside me, as we could not have sat without stacking ourselves like so many chairs. When the last iron had been shut and locked, the men filed up the stairs and dropped the hatch over our heads. At that sound many of the women and girls around me began to cry; first whimpering, it turned to angry wailing. Patience joined them, crying aloud, holding my shoulders. “Patience,” I whispered, “do not cry. Call Ma. She’s full well got to be in one of the other cells.”
    I felt