firmly, its secrets hidden once more from his eyes. She stepped from the bath and Zelda draped a towel over her shoulders that hung to her ankles. Zelda loosened the coil of her mistress's hair and brushed it out, and then braided it into a thick golden rope. She stood behind Katinka and held a gown for her to slip her arms into the sleeves, but Katinka shook her head and gave a peremptory order. Zelda protested but Katinka insisted and the maid threw the gown over the stool and left the cabin in an obvious pet.
When she was gone Katinka let the towel drop to the deck and, naked once more, crossed to the door and slid the locking bolt into place. Then she turned back and passed out of Hal's sight.
He saw a fuzzy pink blur of movement in the clouded mirror but could not be sure what she was doing until, abruptly and shockingly, her lips were an inch from the opposite side of his peep-hole and she hissed viciously at him, 'You filthy little Pirate!' She spoke in Latin, and he recoiled as though she had flung a kettle of boiling water into his face.
Even in his confusion, though, the taunt had stung him to the quick, and he answered her, without thinking, 'I am not a pirate. My father carries Letters of Marque.'
'Don't you dare to contradict me.' Confusingly she was switching between Latin, Dutch and English. But her tone was sharp and stinging as a scourge.
Again he was stung into a reply. 'I did not mean to offend you.'
'When my noble husband finds out that you have been spying on me, he will go to your pirate father, and they will have you flogged on the tripod like those other men this morning.'
'I was not spying on you, -' 'Liar!' She would not let him finish. 'You dirty lying pirate.' For a moment she had run out of breath and insults. 'I only wanted to, -' Her fury was recharged. 'I know what you wanted. You wanted to look at my katjie, -' he knew that was the Dutch word for kitten ' and then you wanted to take your cock in your hand and pull it, -' 'NoV Hal almost shouted. How had she known his shameful secret? He felt sick and mortified.
'Quiet! Zelda will hear you,' she hissed again. 'If they catch you it will be the lash.'
'Please!' he whispered back. 'I meant no harm. Please forgive me.
I did not mean it.'
'Then show me. Prove your innocence. Show me your cock.'
'I can't. 'His voice quivered with shame.
'Stand up! Put it here next to the hole so I can see if you are lying.'
'No. Please don't make me do that.'
'Quickly or I -will scream for my husband to come.' Slowly he came to his feet. The peep-hole was at almost exactly the same level as his aching crotch.
'Now, show me. Open your breeches, her voice goaded him.
Slowly, consumed by shame and embarrassment he lifted the canvas skirt, and before it was fully raised his penis jumped out like the springy branch of a sapling. He knew she must be nauseated and speechless with disgust to see such a thing. After a minute of thick, charged silence that seemed the longest in his life, he began to lower his skirt over himself.
Instantly she stopped him in a voice that seemed to him to tremble with revulsion, so that he could hardly understand her distorted English words.
'No! Do not seek to cover your shame. This thing of yours condemns you. Do you still pretend you are guiltless?' 'No,'he admitted miserably.
'Then you must be punished,' she told him. 'I must tell your father.'
'Please don't do that,' he pleaded. 'He would kill me with his own hands.'
'Very well. I shall have to punish you myself. Bring your cock closer.'
Obediently he pushed his hips forward. 'Closer, so I can reach it. Closer.'
He felt the tip of his distended penis touch the rough wood that surrounded the peep-hole, and then shockingly cool soft fingers closed over the tip. He tried to pull away, but her grip tightened and her voice was sharp. 'Stay still!'
Katinka knelt at the bulkhead and threaded his glans through the opening, then eased it out into the lamp- light. It was so swollen that it could barely fit through the hole.
'No, do not pull away,' she told him, making her voice stern and angry, as she took a firmer grip upon him. Obediently he relaxed and gave himself over to the insistent pressure of her fingers, allowing her to draw his full length through the opening.
She gazed at it, fascinated. At his age she had not expected him to be so large. The engorged head was the glossy purple of a ripe plum. She drew the loose prepuce over it, like a monk's cowl, and then pulled back the skin again as far it would go. The head seemed to swell harder as though on the point of bursting, and she felt the shaft jump in her hands.
She repeated the movement, slowly forward and then back again, and heard him groan beyond the panel. It was strange but she had almost forgotten the boy. This mannikin she held in her hands had a life and existence of its own.
'This is your punishment, you dirty, shameless boy.'
She could hear his fingernails scratching at the wood, as her hand began to fly back and forth along the full length of him as though she were working the shuttle of a weaver's loom.
It happened sooner than she had expected. The hot glutinous spurting against her sensitive breasts was so powerful that it startled her, but she did not pull away.
After a time, she said, 'Do not think that I have forgiven you yet for what you have done to me. Your penitence has only just begun. Do you understand?'
'Yes.' His voice was ragged and hoarse.
'You must make a secret opening in this wall.' She tapped the bulkhead softly with her knuckle. 'Loosen this panel so that you can come through to me, and I can punish you more severely. Do you understandT 'Yes, he panted.
'You must conceal the opening. No one else must know.'
'It is my observation,' Sir Francis told Hal, 'that filth and sickness have a peculiar affinity, one for the other. I know not why this should be, but it is so.'
He was responding to his son's cautious enquiry as to why it was necessary to go through the onerous and odious business of fumigating the ship. With all the cargo out of her and most of the crew billeted ashore Sir Francis was determined to try to rid the hull of vermin. It seemed that every crack in the woodwork swarmed with lice, and the holds were overrun with rats. The galley was littered with the black pellets of their droppings, and Ned Tyler had reported finding some of the stinking bloated carcasses rotting in the water casks.
Since the day of their arrival in the lagoon a shore party had been burning cordwood and leaching the ashes to obtain the lye, and Sir Francis had sent Aboli into the forest to search for those special herbs that his tribe used to keep their huts clear of the loathsome vermin. Now a party of seamen waited on the foredeck, armed with buckets of the caustic substance.
'I want every crack and joint of the hull scrubbed out, but be careful,' Sir Francis warned them. 'The corrosive fluid will burn the skin from your hands-' He broke off abruptly. Every head on board turned towards the distant rocky heads, and every man upon the beach paused in what he was doing and cocked his head to listen.
The flat boom of a cannon shot echoed from the cliffs at the entrance to the lagoon and reverberated across the still waters of the wide bay.
'It's the alarm signal from the lookout on the heads, Captain,' shouted Ned Tyler, and pointed across the water to where a puff of white gunsmoke still hung over one of the emplacements that guarded the entrance. As they stared, a tiny black ball soared to the top of the makeshift flag-pole on the crest of the western headland then unfurled into a red swallow-tail. It was the general alarm signal, and could only mean that a strange sail was in sight.
'Beat to quarters, Master Daniel!' Sir Francis ordered crisply. 'Unlock the weapons chests and arm the crew. I am going across to the entrance. Four men to row the longboat and the rest take up their battle stations ashore.'
Although his face remained expressionless, inwardly he was furious that he should have allowed himself to be surprised like this, with the masts un stepped and all the cannon out of the hull. He turned to Ned Tyler. 'I want the prisoners taken ashore and placed under your strictest guard, well away from the beach. If they learn that there is a strange ship off the coast, it might give them the notion to try to attract attention.'
Oliver rushed up the companionway with Sir Francis's cloak over his arm. While he spread it over his master's shoulders, Sir Francis finished issuing his orders. Then he turned and strode to the entry port where the longboat lay alongside and Hal was waiting, where his father could not ignore him, fretting that he might not be ordered to join him.
'Very well, then,' Sir Francis snapped. 'Come with me. I might have need of those eyes of yours.' And Hal slid down the mooring line ahead, and cast off the moment his father stepped into the boat.
'Pull till you burst your guts!' Sir Francis told the men at the oars and the boat skittered across the lagoon. Sir Francis sprang over the side and waded ashore below the cliff with the water slopping over the tops of his high boots. Hal had to run to catch up with him on the elephant path.
They came out on the top, three hundred feet above the lagoon,
