strictest of confidence. He never interfered with another man’s livelihood where it didn’t intersect his own interests, so there were no questions asked when five men from London boarded the ship at Plymouth port with passage for Boston.
First on deck from the transport wherry was a man named Brudloe, certainly the group’s leader, and as densely muscled as a pit cur. He grinned tightly at everything, an unpleasant lifting of the lips, expressing mirth that stopped well below eyes that were pinched and distrustful. His gaze shifted restlessly at all times, as though assessing every portal and expecting trouble.
Next on board climbed a tall man with a pallid face and a set of slightly stooped shoulders. There was something menacing hiding behind his soft chin and pale skin that made the Rat suck in his breath. Once Baker caught his eye and slowly winked at him, and it was like watching a great northern shark closing its inner lid before feeding.
After Baker came a man as large as a Lebanon cedar. He clumped noisily onto the deck, already unsteady on his feet though they hadn’t left port, carrying a boy who was only slightly older than the Rat. This older boy looked dead drunk, or drugged, and was quickly conveyed belowdecks.
The last man to climb over the railing was a fop, wearing a shirt with more flounces than a woman’s and a velvet coat. He was called Thornton, and he answered every hail and every instruction with a silent sneer. Whether at rest or in motion, Thornton had a grace and a barely suppressed energy that might have, with enough experience, made him a superior seaman on the bucking deck of a sailing vessel.
Once the ship was under way, the four older men would often come up to the deck to desperately gulp at the air. But the boy, never; he was always left belowdecks.
The Rat frequently grinned to himself, thinking how quickly the London men’s swagger left them once the ship headed past the Isles of Scilly and the headwaters of the Channel. He often stood in the webbing of the bowsprit and watched impassively the four landies hanging over the sides, their eyes bulging, expecting to see their shoes coming up through their mouths. He himself clung effortlessly to the ropes like a monkey, impervious to their curses and threatening gestures, laughing silently at their distress, and waving extravagantly to the forlorn outcroppings of the Isles to show the Londoners that there would be no more sightings of land for many weeks.
The Rat had heard the captive boy crying from the Londoners’ section of the hold. There were no barriers or separate cabins in the hold, but the four men had hung a blanket for privacy, and when the boy went on sobbing for too long, the Rat could hear first the thud of a swinging boot to the ribs, and then the groan before the captive was kicked into silence again.
The Rat knew, of course, about impressment. The seas would dry up before the practice of kidnapping a man off the docks onto a ship would come to an end. But those who were captured were usually grown men, most of them seasoned on at least one trip on a ship; otherwise they would prove useless, especially on such a small craft, where every sailor had more than one duty to perform. This captive, he was sure, had never before been on a ship and couldn’t have been taken for ransom, as he was ragged beyond simple poor. He had the ground-in dirt of a river urchin, a lifetime spent in the sucking muck of the Thames up to his knees, grubbing for barnacles or bait or a ha’penny accidently dropped into the reeking tidal wash.
One day he heard an odd, repetitive moaning, like chanting, coming from the captive, and he realized the boy had been mindlessly singing to himself. The boy’s voice had a high-pitched quavering sound, like a wounded bird, or like a man stuttering out his prayers as he’s swaying, storm-ridden, on the yardarms, his fear giving desperate music to the pleading.
The Rat crept beyond the blanket when all the Londoners had gone topside, and crawled to where the boy lay bound with his hands behind his back, his knees drawn defensively up to his belly. He sat awhile looking at the older boy sleeping fitfully, noting the bruised, tender-looking swelling over one eye. As though feeling the Rat’s presence, the boy opened his eyes, which were not brown as the Rat had surmised but the blue of an island shoal. The boy’s brows knitted together, pleadingly, and he opened his mouth to speak. But the Rat heard the ponderous, slapping footfalls of the men returning, and he darted away into the shadows. From behind stacked barrels of powder he watched the men’s shadows thrown up by lantern light against the curved ribs of the hold.
The Londoners talked amongst themselves of plans and schemes, their voices getting louder the more rum they drank. They bragged of their fights and the prodigious pay for their robberies and murders, conversing at length of the man in the new England they were sent to capture or kill, or die trying.
Baker, the soft-spoken man with the eyes of the dead, talked of the plague ten years back and of the numberless bodies stacked in the pit at Houndsditch. Frequenting the Pye Tavern hard by the burying grounds, Baker would place winning bets on the exact number of dead piled onto the passing carts, like guessing the number of beans in a bottle.
But as the days went on, the ship heaving and creaking through stiff westerly winds, the men grew silent. The group lay on the floor to sleep, to be battered and rolled about, instead of hoisting a proper hammock. Eventually the men left off even dicing and playing cards, spending more and more time topside, leaving their captive alone, seeking through drink to numb their misery only to wake to a rebellious stomach and a throbbing head. In a way, the Rat thought the most pitiable was the oversize Cornwall, who drank the most but could not eat, spending his entire day amidships, his meaty hands grasping at the ropes for balance until he was chased away by the seamen seeking to trim the sails.
As the Rat worked on deck cleaning the chains, or with tar and oakum patching cracks in the deck, he would watch the captain watching the men, the captain’s expression carefully neutral. At one point, Thornton, his fine shirt soiled, the neck lace limp with seawater, approached the captain for a discourse. Without offering the Londoner so much as a “by your leave,” Koogin abruptly turned away, retreating to his quarters.
AT THE STEERSMAN’S strike of eight bells, the end of the middle watch, the Rat woke and lay in his hammock, which swung in a deep pendulum, following the yaw of the ship. He could hear the seaman next to him wake and deftly roll from his own hammock. There was a rustling of a shirt quickly tugged on and then retreating footfalls as the seaman crossed to the ladder to the open deck. Soon, the man he replaced at watch swung himself into the empty hammock and within the space of ten breaths was snoring gently.
It would be another half hour before the Rat had to begin his duties with Cook, and he took his time thinking of the boy, and how it would be to have a true companion. One who could serve as the Rat’s voice, whispering or howling his way through the oft-mapped lines of latitudes and stellar declinations like a singing fish through an invisible net. In all the years spent in the company of seamen, he had never had a shipmate even close to his own age.
The Rat would gladly, if only given the opportunity, share with the boy all his own hard-won knowledge of the ship, not just the trimming of sails or the climbing of the yards, but the listening for the gunshot sounds of a breaching right whale, or the sighting at night, midsummer, of the green glowing ribbons dancing in currents of water so deep they could never be plumbed.
He remembered with a growing anxiety the previous night, when he had overheard the four landsmen arguing over where and when to throw their captive overboard. He had been standing just behind Thornton, coiling a rope, when Brudloe caught sight of him and landed a quick kick to his side, sending him sprawling against the deck. The Londoner glared down at him, the white channel of scars in stark contrast to his weather-burned face, and all motion ceased for the briefest of moments, the seamen poised and wooden in their rigging.
The ship’s boatswain, directing the halyards, roughly brushed passed Brudloe, hauling the scrambling Rat back up to his feet. He bent down and whispered hoarsely, “Maggoty pie.” The Rat grinned widely behind his hand and nodded. He was to change out that very morning a fresh fish for an old one on top of the flour barrel. A dead fish, with its rotting flesh, was used to bring the maggots up out of the flour. He would later take the worm-ridden, stinking carcass and roll it into Brudloe’s blanket.
The Rat wasn’t certain if the captain knew of the plans for the bound boy, but he had felt a growing tension in the captain’s demeanor, like a rogue wind pulling a sail tight against its rigging.
After his morning duties with Cook, he stood on the open deck and happened to see the captain leaning down towards him from the halfdeck, a deep furrow between his brows. His eyes flicked ahead to the cresting waves, peaking at fifteen feet or more, and then back again. “Boy,” the captain called to him. He motioned for the astonished Rat to come up the ladder and stand beside him. The wind whipped stingingly at them on the raised deck, and the two swayed in unison for a moment in silence, each hunching into his own shoulders for greater
