The Nine Lives of Charlotte Taylor Read Online Free PDF

whisperingsoothing thoughts in his ear. “You’ll stay in the islands with me. I’ll need a good boy like you to help me. You’ll see, Tommy, this voyage will end and there will be a new beginning.”
    She stays there for hours, trying to will him to live. He sleeps a little, stirs as if in another nightmare and slips into suspended consciousness again. Then he wakens and begins to cough, to choke, she fears. She can feel his ribs against her arms as the cough tears through his emaciated body. The light around the ladder to the stalls turns to dusk, then dark. Pad finds her where she cradles Tommy; he brings them biscuits spread with molasses and strong tea. He warns her of the danger to herself, and suggests she leave the boy where he lies. The kittens, and Lucifer too, have found the heap of woman and boy and taken their places around them, burrowing into the warm, damp folds of Charlotte’s skirts. She wets Tommy’s lips with the tea, tries to dribble some liquid into his mouth. Pad returns with his own great coat. “I’ll tuck it under him. It might give some warmth to Tommy and protect you as well.” Charlotte knows Tommy needs more than a coat, more than her own ministration. “He needs decent food, a doctor.” Pad just shrugs—there is no one onboard except the incompetent Parsons.
    The ship sails into the night. A brisk wind means they’ll change hands on deck and take advantage of the blow. The only sound is the snapping of the sails, the voices of the men above her head. Charlotte naps, wakening when Tommy’s coughing wrenches through both of them. Then suddenly he sits up, looks straight at her and in his peculiar way of speaking says, “Yer fair of face, Miss Charlotte. Yer eyes take the colour of the sea. Yer scent is fragrant, like the cattle.”
    “Like the cattle!” she replies with mock horror, delighted to be teasing him. She thinks it must be a turning point, that theboy has gained his senses. But as quickly as he’d risen, he collapses again like a wicker basket suddenly disassembled. Then his eyes close and he becomes so still she finally realizes he has stopped breathing.
    “You poor small boy,” she croons to the little body in her arms. “You never managed to find the shore.” She’s never seen anyone die before, much less held a lifeless body. She rocks the bundle in her arms and tries to reckon what will happen next.
    A LOUD CLAMOUR of bells and the captain’s voice shouting words she can’t hear. Charlotte leaves Tommy’s body with Watkins, who had appeared with first light, and hurries onto the deck.
    “Get below!” he commands her. “Get below this instant!”
    She retreats in confusion. Several men jump through the hatch to the lower deck. Others push her toward it, then pass her down what seems like a moving platform of hands.
    “Hasten now!” calls a sailor at the bottom of the ladder and points her toward her bunk.
    “What’s happening?” Charlotte demands.
    “Pirates,” the sailor shouts as he runs toward the stern. Charlotte feels the frisson of fear. Had they come so far and suffered such discomforts to die now? She hurries to her lover.
    “Pad! There’s pirates!”
    He jumps to his feet, grabbing Charlotte and pushing her behind him.
    “You best get yourself down in the hold, mistress.” Hutchins lies on his filthy mattress, his face betraying no alarm. “You’ll be prize booty for ’em, that’s sure. They’d kill us all to have you. Not that I’d fight ’em. I’m too old for that. Get down in the hold, I say.”
    Charlotte turns to Pad. “There’s hardly strength enough left on this ship to take on boys, much less bandits.”
    Pad takes her hand and keeps her close while the other passengers huddle in silence. But she detests this, waiting like cattle in the hold for slaughter. She lets go of Pad’s hand and crosses through to the aft passageway. There is no one there and she wonders where she might best hide. Ten yards along, she sees