Aftermath of Singapore

Summary: after many adventures, the pirate sloop Horizon has finally made it to Singapore. But a British man-of-war is scouring the same waters for pirates, and as fortune would have it, it carries a young lieutenant who was on a ship that the Horizon attacked outside Cape Town. Too focused on revenge, something goes wrong when he tries to take over the pirate ship, and the powder magazine blows up, killing most on board. The few survivors who find each other are: Tom Vereker, the Navy lieutenant; Igenlode, a clerk who has joined the pirates unbeknownst to his nephew Tom; Dutch, the pirate captain; and Willem, a surgeon's mate who has been pressed into the service of the pirates.

They get a room in a tavern together, not knowing that the Navy, in the person of Lieutenant Porthwaite, is determined to get some results out of the failed operation.

Igenlode has a headache. And a backache, and a neck-ache, and a shoulder-ache, and a hip-ache, and altogether discomfort in every part of the body that can be affected by sleeping on the floor, not to mention the ill-effects of ardent spirits on a still-unaccustomed constitution. The clerk vaguely remembers a few convivial toasts in the tavern the night before -- a couple of drinks, perhaps, no more. Given how much everyone else had been imbibing, not to mention Dutch's repeated determination to seek refuge in an alcoholic stupor (better not to think of Dutch), it seems unfair to be the one waking up now with a thick head and a foul mouth...

Faces float through Igenlode's memory, merry and flushed with wine. Some of them had been floating in the water, last night. Igenlode makes a little sound and turns over again on the hard boards, trying to blot the image out. Unfair, to be the one waking when so many would never wake again.

But the oblivion of sleep is not forthcoming. The bare floor holds no comfort for any but an exhausted body, or one with the suppleness of youth. Igenlode sits up, groaning, and regrets for a moment the impulse of distaste that had rejected the shared bed. Dutch is not here (what a surprise...) and there had been room for three to crowd together, if barely for all four of them. But after years of privacy and sleeping alone, the prospect of reverting to the intimacy of childhood holds even less appeal than the thankless embrace of the floor. Even in the crowded shadows of the fo'c'sle there is no need to tangle limbs with one who sprawls as Willem does now, ginger hair scattered around his shoulders like rusty straw, or to fling an arm across a neighbour's sleeping form in an unthinking quest for warmth.

Better the bruises, Igenlode thinks, shrinking mentally from the image of a night spent in such proximity, better the bruises -- and knows that neither Willem nor Dutch would even understand such qualms, let alone sympathise.

Willem lies with arms flung wide in the slackness of total exhaustion, spread across more than half the bed. Beside the young man's sprawling limbs Tom seems very small and straight, lying almost to attention beneath the covers like a little tin soldier, as he had done for so many years in his narrow bed at home. Igenlode remembers glancing through the doorway, watching Johanna's solicitude with amused detachment as she tucked in her small son, smoothed the sheets across regimented arms and legs as if swaddling him anew, and dropped a good-night kiss upon his brow. He had always lain just so quiet and still, like a Crusader upon his monument.

Like a dead man on his tomb. That image echoes all too aptly, and Igenlode's heart contracts suddenly at the possibility. Tom's breast, beneath the ugly bulge that is the splinted arm, isn't moving. His lips are parted slightly, head fallen to one side --

His eyes are open. Have opened slowly, focussing on Igenlode's face with a puzzled intent that gives the lie to the momentary waxy illusion. Tom takes a breath and frowns a little, seeming for an instant even younger.

"It is you... 'Geyni?"

* * *

"Igenlode." Trying to teach Tom, a very small Tom not yet breeched, the difficult name. Johanna looking on, smiling. Egwin, still years away from the unsuspected fever that would carry him off, watching the little group by the fire with magisterial paternity.

"Igenlode." Patiently. "Mama. Igenlode..."

The small face splits in a sudden wide-toothed grin. "Mama. Geyni. Geyni-lo..."

A laugh from Johanna. "Your 'Geyni -- that's right, sweetheart, your big 'Geyni has come to play with you."

Igenlode makes a helpless gesture, at a loss in the face of the unknown quantity that is a nephew. "Igenlode, Tom. I-gen-lode."

"Geyni-lo," Tom tries again, hopeful. Then his face hardens into determination. "Geyni. Geyni play!"

And Igenlode capitulates, as always, tentative under Johanna's maternal eyes, conjuring castles from bricks that crumble to Tom's gleeful assault, and pictures in the ashes of the hearth soon scrubbed out by small and energetic fingers. But 'Geyni' persists, a childhood name through the years; until Egwin dies and Tom announces stiffly, through the lump in his throat, that he is the man of the house now and no longer a child.

* * *

"It is you," Tom says softly now, so many miles and years away from that moment that Igenlode's own throat swells in sudden emotion. "Yesterday... I thought I was dreaming--"

"No dream." Igenlode manages a few stumbling steps before sinking down at the bedside, head and arms buried against Tom's thin body to hide a rush of tears. "No dream. I'm here. I'm here..."

Tom touches the unaccustomed rough hair, gently, almost as if Igenlode may vanish at a breath. "I thought you were dead, 'Geyni." His own voice thickens as Igenlode's arms tighten around him. "I thought you were dead, and I was dead --"

Igenlode looks up into the boy's face almost in accusation and releases him abruptly. "I thought you were safe -- five thousand miles away. When I found you floating there last night..."

"I was posted here." Tom stiffens proudly. "Posted to the old Bellingham as lieutenant after the action with Hecate."

A tremor through the young body. "They all died, you see. Captain Hunter, and McPhair, and Ralph Tennant. The pirates attacked us under pretext of surrender, and they all died. I fought Hecate as long as I could --"

"I know." Igenlode, sick at heart, doesn't want to hear this. The words rush out in haste to forestall it. "I know, Tom. I was there --"

The rattle of musket-balls from Hecate's marines, and sudden, searing pain. Tom's hand, perhaps, on the trigger. The scar is still purple in glimpses by the half-light between decks, a little knotted beneath seeking fingers. But it made no difference. The boy had not known...

Too late, Igenlode hears the silence now hanging between them.

"You -- were there?"

* * *

Time to lie. Time to spin words desperately -- but there is no point. Tom is no fool. Sooner or later now he will be putting it all together in any case. The questions can't be stifled forever. He will have to know.

"It was that other ship... that took me out of Cape Town. The ship in the bay here. The... the pirate ship, Tom."

And Tom says nothing at all.

His hand, when Igenlode reaches for it, a painful moment later, doesn't respond. "Tom--"

"So none of it was a dream." Bitter words. "Last night -- you, and him, and that creature --"

"That creature saved your life!" Indignation wipes out Igenlode's own quarrel with Dutch, and Tom's lip curls.

"That unnatural creature -- that shameless flaunting slut -- killed my officers and my ship!"

Dutch, drunken and hostile, flinging the accusation- Igenlode uses it without thinking. "And you killed hers!"

It's true. The boy's face shows it, stung to the quick.

"How can you defend her? How could you sail with her -- run amok out of your life, your home, your own blood-kin, on the petticoat-tails of a brazen bitch who apes the worst of the better sex, and brings her own into disrepute? A foul-mouthed gutter-drab not fit to be my mother's serving-maid, and she has you moon-crazy --"

Which is wrong in so many ways that Igenlode doesn't even know where to begin. More ways than Tom can possibly know.

Not fit to be Johanna's serving-maid? Sweet, silly Johanna with her soft arms and her pretty gowns and her helpless appeal to masculine chivalry -- loving, womanly sister to her very core... with whom Igenlode has scarcely a thought in common.

"Tom, you don't understand. All my life -- I've dreamed --"

Dreamed of escape. Of a brighter world between the pages of old romances, of miracles and monsters and strange seas given shape of late by Tom's own stories, but above all, at heart... of escape.

"It's different for you," Igenlode bursts out. "You're young -- you're a boy -- you can't know what it's like, to be trapped by your world in the same narrow life --"

To work for a man like Klaasz year after year as nothing more than a cog in the machine, to rise through the ranks to a senior position -- to push the pallid pen-pushers -- and to know this was all there was, as far as you could go, as much as there ever would be.

"I went with her -- I begged her to take me -- and she laughed and protected me and was kind. I couldn't have survived in this world without her. She showed me freedom -- she showed me friendship -- she gave me wings to fly, Tom!"

And for a moment, Tom almost believes. Igenlode can see it waver in his eyes.

But the boy gathers the counterpane with his good arm about his knees, like a king enthroned and adjusting his mantle, and sits very upright. The coldly righteous tone is all too familiar. In Egwin and Johanna's world -- in the Cape Town world -- there are only two kinds of female: decent women and trollops. And Dutch's mode of living scarcely qualifies her among the ranks of the former.

"She's a pirate. She chose to be a pirate, rather than work a life of honest toil." Flat on her back with her legs open, probably. Tom doesn't bother to give that a mention. "She kills men for money -- to steal what little they have. You know that, don't you? Those coarse hands of hers are stained with blood, with high living and brutish debauch at the cost of other men's suf- at the cost of the suffering of others. She and her kind make a mockery of society, of the law, of human decency. They take what they can at the edge of a cutlass blade or the point of a pistol, and give nothing back save what is wrung out of them at the end of a rope. They kill for nothing -- for a fancied insult, a moment's resistance, for the sheer drunkenness of bloodshed to terrify the rest. You know they do! You know what manner of men these are --"

Deep inside, Igenlode has always known it. Always known that to stay with the pirates too long will be to witness brutality to which a blind eye can no longer be turned. Dutch does not hide what she is. To her, the merchants of the world are so many tethered lambs, waiting for the jaws of the tiger. And the tigress does not count innocence or guilt before she springs.

"Why?" Tom is saying more softly. "Oh Geyni, why? Why did you do it?"

I told you why, Tom. I gave you the real reason. Now all I can do is to tell you the stories we tell ourselves in the face of the world to hide the truth...

"I had to get away." Igenlode swallows, remembering that day, pulses racing faster even now. "I couldn't stay in Cape Town -- not after Klaasz --"

Tom cries out. "You should have waited for me! I scotched those rumours, cleared your good name -- everyone who knows you could have told them it's ridiculous, you'd never hurt a fly, you wouldn't have thought of raising a finger to a great man like Klaasz. Everyone at home knows now what really happened -- you should have waited for me, I'd have taken care of you --"

And Igenlode sees him as he is for the first time. No longer the pain-wracked child; no longer even the boy he'd been when he last left home. A young officer, proud in the possession of a King's commission, confident enough to face down the Klaasz family, Tom sees himself in truth now as the man of the family: the strong protector of the foolish or weak or merely female. He reveres his elders, as any dutiful son must. But he makes his own judgements -- if needs be, his own mistakes.

"'What really happened'..?" Igenlode is still numb from the sudden revelation. "But those 'rumours' were true, Tom -- I was guilty as they said!"

Tom's eyes -- stunned, and yet with a dawning horror -- are almost too much to bear.

"Klaasz was a brute. A bombast and a bully. He owned me -- he thought he owned us all, body and soul, for the long hours it took to earn his wage. And he had the woman -- the pirate captain -- trapped and helpless, and he was playing with her. One woman, with her hands bound, and his hot eyes and his hands on her, ripping the rings from her ears while he drank her in, taking his pleasure without a thought to those he had humiliated, those who hated him..." Half-choking even now, the little clerk breaks off. "I struck him down, and I set her free, and... and she killed him."

An aching silence.

"It's not true." Tom's voice trembles a little, but he is adamant.

"Tom, you don't understand! It's --"

Tom is shaking his head, eyes very steady. "Listen to me. It's not true. He died in the raid, that's all, as y- as so many others died. The rest is a rumour; an ugly rumour that's gone. I gave my word on it." His gaze is almost preternaturally clear. "Are you going to make me a liar?"

Igenlode's hands twist slowly, one over the other. A far-back door that has once seemed closed is drifting open again; and the Horizon is gone, and Dutch has made her feelings clear enough. "You mean... I could go back?"

"You're coming back." Tom draws his feet up, swings them over the edge of the bed, and begins reaching for half-dry clothing, wincing as an incautious movement jars injured ribs. He is very pale, but determined. "If we can make it back to the Bellingham by this afternoon, I think I can get you a travel warrant --"

"You're... you're going to the ship?"

Tom frowns. "Of course I'm going to my ship. Where else would I go? They'll probably have written me off for dead already -- I have to get word aboard as soon as I can."

"But last night..." Igenlode knows enough of the Navy now to guess at the Captain's possible reaction. "Tom, they'll court-martial you for it if they can! You said yourself they think you dead -- you don't have to do it --" Clutching at the stiff uniform sleeve as the boy tries to pull on his coat, only to be struck across the face as Tom's eyes blaze.

"Damn you, it's my duty! What do you think I am -- a mutineer, a deserter?" Realisation hits him. "Is that what you hoped? Is that what you saw for me -- a snug billet aboard your slut-of-a-captain's scurvy pirate crew, all family together as we draggled through the gutter in company with the scum of the seas?"

Tears stand bright in Igenlode's eyes as they stare at each other, the mark of the blow burning.

"What makes you think the rest of us like the woman any better than you do?" a voice says bitterly from behind them.

The bed creaks as Willem reaches up to pull his hair back into its tarred-string pigtail, pausing to scratch a freckled shoulder with a deliberate curl of the lip. He is tilting his head from side to side in irritation, as if his ears are giving him trouble; but from the look on his face, he has evidently heard the gist of almost everything that has just been said.

Tom takes a breath, glaring at the lanky young Dutchman. But before he can say a word, the door opens.

It might be more precise to say that it spills open, Igenlode thinks, gazing as if mesmerised. A figure lolls in the doorway, filthy and unfocused, barely decent in her tattered rags, and the clerk shrinks back in revulsion as it lurches forward, grabbing for the bedpost with one hand and almost falling. Some poxy street trull, come to hawk her raddled charms -- some reeking old hag sent up to empty the chamberpots and dabble her fingers in any baggage she can find --

"Soldiers," Dutch slurs with an effort, squinting blearily at Tom's uniform. She waves an arm behind her, swaying vaguely in a haze of alcohol whose fumes threaten to pickle the whole room. "Uniforms. Down below..."

And then, despite the desperate urgency in her voice, she folds up, staggering, and slumps face-down across the end of the bed.

"Well, that's convenient," remarks Willem casually. After a quick glance down on Dutch, he walks to a corner of the room and comes back with the cuffs that held him only hours ago. A satisfied smirk is on his face as he roughly rolls Dutch on her back. After everything she's done to him, he'll be glad to put her in chains. When Tom realizes what is going on, he suppresses the urge to push Willem aside and chain Dutch himself. He's not certain he could, with one arm in a splint, and since Willem seems to be his closest ally at the moment, he doesn't want to antagonise him. And so Tom merely looks on, and nods approvingly.

Igenlode watches in horror, then casts a worried glance at the door, where no soldiers are as yet to be seen. He has to do something. He has to save Dutch now, like she saved him. But there's nothing he can do. Even if he could get Dutch away from Tom and Willem, which in her current state is practically impossible in itself, then what? He would never be able to get past the soldiers.

"You can't do this." His protest sounds weak, at best. "She'll be hanged."

Tom keeps his eyes on Willem and Dutch, refusing to look at the clerk. This is not the Igenlode he knew, just some criminal who looks like him. "She should be hanged. She's a pirate."

"But... All she's done for me... Tom, please..."

The hand Igenlode gently places on his nephew's good arm, an attempt to restore the bond they once had, a lifetime ago, is immediately shaken off. "Don't touch me." At the moment, Igenlode is as disgusting to Tom as Dutch is. Possibly even more so, the trust Tom had in him betrayed. "You can do two things, 'Geyni. You can come back with me, and return to a respectable life in Cape Town. You were forced by the pirates. No one can hold that against you. After all, you never joined in their cruelties." Tom swallows, hoping that much, at least, is true. Fortunately, Igenlode doesn't deny his innocence. Tom continues, his voice cold as ice: "Or you can stay dead."

Silence. If Igenlode had trouble deciding what to do with his life before, it's even more difficult now. It would be no good staying in a place like Singapore, especially since he has work nor money. But going back to Cape Town would be like admitting to Tom that he was wrong to leave in the first place. It would be denying Dutch's kindness, denying the short but exciting life he led on the seas, denying the only time he ever really lived.

"I can't believe you." Tom's voice trembles with anger. It really shouldn't be such a difficult choice to make. "The only chance you have to be human again, and you'd throw it away out of misplaced loyalty to that..." He gestures to Dutch, chained now, with Willem sitting next to her, waiting for things to take their course. "... that thing?"

"You don't know her," says Igenlode softly, but he really isn't sure what to do. He doesn't want to return to Cape Town, but it seems the only real option he has. Looking at the dirty, smelly, unconscious figure on the bed, a small part of him can't help but agree with Tom that that is really no way to lead your life, no matter how friendly the person may be.

"I don't want to know her! Besides, if you're really so worried that I'll get court-martialled, you would want me to arrest her. That way I'll have something to show for my actions, and Captain Petterbridge may be lenient."

Willem, poking a finger in his irritated ear, suddenly seems to remember something. He reaches into Dutch's pocket and takes out the keys to the cuffs, grinning in self-satisfaction. Igenlode stares at his feet.

Tom shakes his head. "I gave you your options, 'Geyni. You better decide soon."

* * *

Her head... Dutch groans. Oh God, it hurts. Pain... everywhere. Completely sober for the first time since she left the tavern to check out what has happening aboard the Horizon, all the cuts, burns and bruises she's sustained since then are only now fully felt. She tries to lie still, hoping that will lessen the pain. While that doesn't really help, the slight rocking motion of the floor is very calming. A ship. Home.

A ship? She opens her eyes and follows the ceiling until bars appear in her view. Slowly the image sinks in, and panic overcomes her. No! They'll kill her! She tries to get up, but her body is a wreck, and her arms refuse to move. When she looks down and sees the cuffs, she closes her eyes and takes a deep breath. No worries. You have the key, remember? But, as she might have guessed, the key is gone.

A brief second wave of panic, and then nothing. All fear magically vanishes, as a morbid acceptance sets in. She will die. So be it. She's won a few, and now it's her time to lose. Somewhere deep inside her a small voice objects. You're kidding! You're not going to just give up your life to the bloody Navy! But she is too tired now to fight, and her head hurts so much that she'd gladly cut it off herself to be rid of it. She has taken so many blows these past months, and now it's enough.

A look around in the dim light reveals no one else locked away in the cells. Makes sense. She doesn't remember much, but she's pretty sure she saw Igenlode, warned him. But one way or another, Igenlode had managed to avoid being locked up. He escaped capture, and let her be captured. Maybe he simply left her. Maybe he was more like his nephew than she thought. Maybe he gave the soldiers her to save Willem. Dutch briefly closes her eyes again, trying desperately to think rationally in spite of the pain. No, not Igenlode. He would never... But he clearly did. She should have seen this coming, all of this. Every thing she had disappeared one at a time, beginning with Luiz. Or maybe the real start was even Binns' mutiny. Things had only gone a bit quicker lately. Now even Igenlode wasn't on her side anymore. All she had left in the world, gone. So now it was time to die.

Another protest from her voice of survival, growing ever weaker, is quickly muffled. What's the point? Why would she try desperately to survive, when there is nothing to live for? Exhausted from the pain and emotions, her eyes flutter shut again as her mind drifts away into darkness.

Willem sits in the cavernous crowded fug of the English warship's lower gun-deck, alone amid the heaving mass of the watch below, and stares at the marine sentry opposite, whose coat is the one spot of order and colour in the jostling world around him. The man's pipeclayed cross-belt gleams white in the twilight of the 'tween decks, the polish of his boots contrasts with the sturdy bare feet clambering across benches or jutting from hammocks all around, and the starched stock around his neck is so stiff as to force his chin up into a position of constant attention. With nothing to do but attend to his single duty -- that of standing guard -- his expression is positively bovine in its vacancy. Willem, with all the sailor's contempt for soldiers, even ship-trained ones, wonders if the marines ever think at all, or if they are recruited for their ability to follow orders without a blink.

Back on the voyage of the Vrouw Anna, before all this started, his one ambition had been to earn enough to fund even one-sixteenth of a share in the V.O.C., the East India Company that had been the foundation of so many fortunes. As if in repayment, he has more than enough money in his possession to fund that investment now -- and yet, forcibly impressed as he has been as a common sailor on board a foreign vessel, home and prosperity remain as far out of his reach as ever.

At least his actions in helping to capture that unspeakable pirate woman mean that he no longer has to face the prospect of standing trial for piracy himself. Young Vereker still insists on his presence at the trial -- hence, combined with the Navy's chronic shortage of men, his unwilling presence on board this ship -- but his innocence or guilt will not be in question. He is to be a prime witness against the accused. He will take great pleasure in ensuring that the noose of his words draws closer and closer around the pirate's neck.

That prospect, at the moment, is about the only thing that can still give him pleasure. Willem sits isolated in the crowd, the jabbering English voices dulled against the rushing silence that fills his ears.

He still cannot hear properly. Sounds are muffled and distant, regaining their clarity so slowly over the passing days that it is almost unbearable. It takes all the resolution he can muster to resist the temptation to box his own ears and try to smash through the thick veils that separate him from the outside world. But such blows can only retard the healing. He knows that... but a deaf sailor is no good at all, and even as it is he is constantly one step behind the rest, trying to make out the import of shouted orders from the nature of the general response -- and suffering for his lagging pace at the tip of a rope's end.

Injustice is part and parcel of life at sea, and there was a time when like the others he would have shrugged it off. A time, treacherous memory reminds him, before he'd known a ship where, for all her casual violence, there was no knotted rope-lash, no cat-o'nine-tails, no men bound to the grating and flogged to the bone. Pirate discipline -- such as it was -- was swift and deadly and a mockery of justice, with caricatured trials and offenders howled down by their own crew. But along with the rule of law, they had left behind also the abuses of constant petty harassment.

Even to catch himself at such thoughts was tantamount to sedition. Ashamed and furious, Willem had thrown himself into the work of the ship, trying to expunge any trace of pirate taint that might somehow have clung to him. His horror was all the greater on the next day, when, happening to enter the sickbay, he recognised the two wounded men there unmistakably as two former members of the Horizon's crew: flaxen-haired Fisheye and the half-caste Malay Penang Pete.

Worse was the fact that nobody -- from the bored orderly, picking his fingernails, to the surgeon himself in his snuff-coloured coat, or even his own messmates or the rest of the lowerdeck crew when he tried to warn them -- seemed to pay the slightest attention to his increasingly agitated protests over the men's identity. And taking his concerns in desperation to the lieutenant on watch, a choleric powdered individual with the abominable name of Porthwaite, brought him nothing but a reprimand for speaking out of turn and a stony face turned to the whole matter.

Since then it's as if there has been a conspiracy of silence directed against him. The men have him down as a tattle-tale and toad-eater, the officers treat him as a trouble-maker, and the two pirates in the sickbay continue to hover obliviously between recovery and a threat to cheat the gallows. The only difference is that no-one is talking to Willem.

When Igenlode -- soberly dressed once more in a lawyerly, if threadbare, coat and waistcoat, somewhat taken in at the waist and elbows -- taps him on the shoulder hesitantly and begins to beg a favour, for all his hatred of Dutch the young sailor shrugs and agrees almost instantly. The Marine, after all, strikes him as easily fooled. And circumstances have considerably frayed his sense of scruple in such matters.

* * *

Dutch wraps her arms around herself, trying to pretend the reassurance of the touch comes from someone else. She is cold; the clothes she had been wearing on the blazing deck of the Horizon are little better than rags, and she huddles into the warm broadcloth of a dirty old coat thrust upon her by one of the ship's officers "for the sake of decency". She remembers his indifferent eyes stripping her and finding her wanting, and warms herself a little by the answering spark of hate. Even the open leering of the sailors who brought her food had been better.

But with the exception of those unappetising meals and that one disparaging visit from on high, she has been left alone, to the company of her own thoughts and a multitude of ghosts, many of them taunting and vindictive. Sometimes it seems that every man whose death she has ever encompassed, for fair reason or foul, has danced across the paths of memory to mock her downfall. Pale faces -- brown faces -- black faces with shrieking red mouths -- blood-streaked faces, waxen drowned or congested from the rope, but all accusing her when she closes her eyes: "You abandoned me... you condemned me... you struck me down, and laughed... you held the burning iron to my temples to make me talk... you slit my belly... you knifed me from below... you had me bound across the mouth of my own guns..."

"Leave me alone!" Dutch shouts suddenly, the sound of her own voice strange after so many hours, and tries to get shackled hands across her ears. She isn't afraid to die, she tells herself. This is just some kind of dirty trick her mind is playing on her.

It wouldn't be so bad if she weren't all by herself. She hugs herself again, trying to picture friendly arms laced around her; remembers instead the rhythmic warmth of Luiz' shoulders against her own as they rowed in to that accursed head-hunters' island, and hears the catch in her breath. What she wouldn't give for just one person to talk to; one person to cheer up and chivvy along, for whose sake she could speak airily of argument and acquittal to keep up appearances, even though she knew full well there was no hope for any of them... one person who looked up to her and followed her lead, for whom she had to set an example --

A sound, very close by. She leaps up out of her huddle onto her feet, staring wildly all around. Then her jaw drops.

"Go boil the stinking midden of your louse-pit in the spume of your darling nephew's drooping --" She cuts herself off with an effort. Her rant is obviously going way over her visitor's unworldly little head -- now once again neatly bewigged, she notices bitterly. She gathers together every drop of honey-laced contempt she can muster. "Just get out!"

Igenlode flinches but doesn't move, enduring her glare. "I -- I brought you some cheese..."

It is salty, dried-out ship's cheese, years in the barrel and too many days out of it, but the savour of it even from here brings a humiliating rumble to her stomach. She swallows down a sudden rush of water in her mouth, setting her teeth in silence.

"I--" Igenlode doesn't seem to know what to say. "I -- Tom--"

"Oh, don't bother to apologise," Dutch interrupts, forgetting in her indignation her resolve not to say a word. "I suppose you sold me off to buy dear little Tom out of trouble. Or was it sweet Willem?"

The accusation seems to hit Igenlode like a slap in the face; but to her surprise, it is the last words that cause the clerk to stiffen into response. "It was Willem who helped me get down here, actually. Though since you're not hungry I don't suppose you'd care about that."

Igenlode deliberately breaks off a morsel of cheese and starts eating it, and the sight is too much for Dutch's self-control. Throwing the rest of her pride to the winds, she makes a grab for the remaining hunk, gets her hands around the rind, and snatches it back through the bars before starting to wolf it down. For a moment she almost chokes on the rich taste.

"Don't -- oh, please don't -- you mustn't try to eat so fast, you'll make yourself sick --"

The little clerk sounds really distressed, and Dutch shoots a sidelong glance in that direction, still stuffing cheese. "What do you care?" Her mouth is full, but the tone could cut through molten pitch.

"I begged Tom to let you go, but he wouldn't listen!" Igenlode's hands are twisting over and over each other, drained knuckles pale in the dusk of the single lantern. "I tried to get to see you before, but I couldn't, I truly couldn't. I'm practically a prisoner up there myself. Oh, they don't say anything, but they watch -- they all watch me, and there's a boy who's supposed to be a cabin servant and scarcely lets me out of his eye--"

"So, are they going to hang you too then?" Dutch reads the answer in the flinch that follows, and lets her lip lift in contempt. "Somehow I don't get the impression we've got too many troubles in common, my fine friend."

She takes another mouthful of cheese -- she has almost devoured the hunk already -- and tries to ignore the look on Igenlode's face. For some reason it's easier when she's actually lashing out. "So, how many of them did you kill when they came for me? Or did you just stand there, waggle your quill, and threaten to write on them?"

"There wasn't any fighting." There is an unexpected edge in Igenlode's voice that is suspiciously brittle. "And you know why not. Because you were stinking drunk, that's why -- too cup-shotten to lift a finger in your own defence, too sodden and shameless to waken when they dumped you in the scuppers and tipped two buckets of sea-water over you to swill off the reek, with six hundred men smirking and staring. Another tale for the grand annals of piracy: how Captain Dutch was taken in the East Indies without a single blade unsheathed, face-down and snoring in a filthy stupor. They'll put it on the hand-bills at your execution, and good luck to them --"

But the tears, spilling over, give the words the lie, and Dutch's own bitterness ebbs away. Unarmed and helpless in a fight, Igenlode had had no more chance at resistance than she had. And if trusting to nephew Tom's gratitude had been a mistake -- well, it made no odds now.

"They catch up with us all in the end, love," she says wearily. "'A short life and a merry one' -- eh? I've trod the sands of the Seven Seas -- I've had gold at my fingertips, and the deck of my own ship beneath my feet, and that's more freedom than many of us taste in three-score years and ten. I don't plan to snivel and plead for my life to please the court -- I don't regret any of it, and I always knew I'd pay for it before the last, by shot or splinter or rope."

She moves to the bars and takes Igenlode's hand between her own two shackled ones, remembering something in the moment that she does so. Somehow, that sudden shock of memory must have transmitted itself through her touch.

Igenlode's averted face comes up, wet in the lantern-light, to meet her eyes. "What is it? Have you thought of something?" The fingers tighten between her own. "What is it?"

"There's something you can do for me," Dutch says softly, a beach on Madagascar bittersweet before her eyes, "here on this ship."

"Anything." No pause. "What is it?"

Dutch takes a breath, glancing round as if a jailer might somehow be hiding in the shadows. "A pistol. And a single charge of shot."

"But--" Incomprehension, as she'd half-known it would be. Igenlode takes a step back as if to pull free, looking around at the bars, at the massive timbers of the ship, at the iron shackles at her wrist, and she sighs.

"You asked me to promise you something once, love, on Madagascar. Remember? If ever your own neck was in line for the rope..."

This time Igenlode does jerk away, shivering, as understanding bites. "No! I can't -- you can't ask that of me --"

She can't help smiling, picturing Igenlode's trembling hand on the trigger. "I wouldn't trust you to do it, love. All I'm asking is the same mercy I'd give any marooned man -- a chance to choose my own way out..."

But Igenlode's eyes are black with horror at the thought, and the clerk is staring down at both hands, trembling. A moment later, with something like a stifled sob, the little figure has bolted into the darkness, leaving her alone.

Dutch stands staring blindly for a moment; then she sinks back down into her low huddle, arms wound tightly around her knees, rocking herself backwards and forwards. She'd always known Igenlode had no real stomach for their life. But somehow, this betrayal at the last cuts into a rawer place of trust between them than all the rest.

Igenlode walks away as fast as he can. Away from Dutch and her horrible suggestion. How could she ask him to do such a thing? It's wrong. Terribly wrong. And yet he was dead serious when he asked her the same favour...

A strange kind of guilt is added to the turmoil of his emotions. He tries to ignore them all, to forget the conversation ever happened, and pretend Dutch is still passed out. Anger. That's it. He should concentrate on the anger he felt when she was drunk, and make it replace all other feelings. But it doesn't work. The harder he tries to focus on anger, the sadder he becomes, feeling responsible somehow, even if there was nothing he could have done.

Suddenly he becomes aware of Willem's raised voice at a distance, and spots him further down the corridor, keeping Igenlode's 'cabin boy' busy as planned. Willem throws him a dark look over the boy's shoulder, hinting that he should really be more careful. The boy, wondering what he's looking at, almost turns around, but Willem stops him and continues talking into him.

A look around, and Igenlode realizes that he's right outside his cabin. Which had been his goal, of course, but he can't for the life of him remember how he got there. Lord knows who may have seen him. Fear pushes worries about Dutch to the back of his mind, and he goes to open the door as quietly as he can and sneak back inside. But just as he puts his hand on the doorknob, a hand lands on his shoulder, and Igenlode turns around with a frightened shriek.

Tom raises an eyebrow. Where some people are concerned, a guilty conscience is just too easy to spot. "Where did you go?"

He motions the cabin boy, who at Igenlode's scream has finally escaped Willem, to enter the cabin while they stay outside, giving him a look that promises punishment when Tom can speak to him freely.

Igenlode desperately tries to come up with an excuse. "I..." But nothing follows.

Glaring at Willem, who decides to disappear before getting himself deeper in trouble than he may already be, it doesn't take much for Tom to guess. He shifts his eyes to Igenlode. "You went to her, didn't you?"

Igenlode opens his mouth to defend himself, but thinks the better of it. He's a terrible liar, and admitting won't help matters either.

"I see."

The patronizing tone annoys Igenlode, and he decides he may as well be frank. "There's no reason why I shouldn't be allowed to see her."

"Yes, there is! Me!" Tom is whispering despite his anger, hoping no one can overhear. "If you go and socialize with that strumpet of your own free will, you will be hanged! You don't seem to care much about that," -- a low blow, of course he does -- "but my reputation and career will die with you."

"Do you ever think about anyone but yourself?!" Igenlode blurts it out without thinking, and regrets it instantly when he sees the expression on Tom's face change. Reproach makes way for to pure misery, as the young lieutenant is forcibly reminded of all the persons he has ever cared for, many of whom are now dead. He quickly manages to recover somewhat, but his voice is still a bit shaky when he attempts to justify himself, which he feels he must. If not to Igenlode, then to himself.

"What would you have me do? I can't..." He gulps and before starting over. "If I keep my mind on others... others that have died, or..." A sincerely disappointed look at Igenlode. "... are otherwise lost..."

The clerk takes a deep breath, trying not to be offended. He refuses to explain his choice again, and he shouldn't have to. "You can't decide how everyone must run his life. Some day you will understand..."

But Tom immediately stiffens. "I can decide how everyone must run his life. It's my job to keep everything right."

"This is not right, Tom! She will die! She even wants to -" Igenlode stops himself just in time.

Still busy digesting the insult, it takes a few seconds before Tom realizes whom the conversation has once again turned to. "She wants to what?"

No reply, but he wasn't expecting one.

"I suggest you stay in your cabin for some time." As he says it, he opens the door, and Igenlode, insulted by the gesture and the barely disguised imprisonment he's once again subjected to, goes inside, slamming the door shut.

The doorknob is pulled from Tom's hand. He stands there, arm still half-extended toward the door, wondering how someone he thought he knew could have changed so much. Then the subject of their argument enters his thoughts again, and he decides to pay the pirate woman a visit.

* * *

Tom is almost shocked when he sees Dutch sitting in a corner of the cell, with her arms around her pulled-up legs, staring straight ahead. For a moment, he wonders if she's dead. But then her arms move to reinforce their grip on the slipping legs, and he breaths a quiet sigh of relief before getting directly to his point.

"What did he do here?"

There is no response, nor even the slightest sign that she's heard him.

"Answer me! Why was Igenlode here?"

Not so much as a flicker in Dutch's dull gaze. It's almost as if she has already shut herself off from the living world in anticipation of what's coming to her.

Furious -- he doesn't really expect any useful answer out of her, but he's determined to force her at least to acknowledge him -- Tom approaches close to the bars and reaches to grab her shoulder, preparing to unleash his best quarterdeck bellow in her ear. There is a movement too swift to follow. And then the young lieutenant finds himself pinned, struggling, up against the side of the cell, with an arm like an iron bar crushed against his throat and the prison-stench of her in his nostrils.

He kicks out wildly in belated panic, and feels the strength leave him as the pressure tightens and dots start to swim in front of his eyes. Her other hand is straining against its twisted chain to grope across his body in the parody of a caress, sliding into his coat and feeling downwards.

Half-strangled in that merciless grip, Tom hangs limply against the bars as her fingers search his belt. With the lack of resistance, her hold slackens a little and he draws a gasping breath, dizzy with the rush of returning blood. The touch of the woman's hand nauseates him, but he sets his teeth and masters himself.

"It won't do you any good." His voice, to his pride, betrays not even the trace of a quiver. "You'll get nothing by this assault. You won't find the key to those locks on my person; and if you're hoping for a weapon, you'll come by none from me. A King's officer has no need to walk around like a pirate--" he spits out this last word -- "armed to the teeth on board his own ship."

Judging by the thin stream of obscenities at his ear, Dutch has just verified this for herself. Tom takes advantage of her momentary distraction to grab hold of her arm and force his way free. In that first instant's humiliating struggle he begins to doubt his own strength; but for all her experience in choke-holds, the last few days have left Dutch exhausted and weakened. And she is, after all, he reminds himself sharply, only a woman.

A final wrench against a set of very unfeminine muscles leaves him staggering a few steps back, safely beyond the prisoner's reach, and nursing the injured arm still strapped against his body. The wicked jarring of their brief tussle has sent needles of fire through a fracture barely beginning to knit, and he is in no mood to appreciate the prisoner's audacity.

"I could have you stripped and flogged for this, you --"

"That you could," Dutch agrees equably, leaning against the corner of the cell to regain her breath. There are two high spots of colour in the fading pallor of her cheeks and she is breathing hard, but there is a sparkle in her eyes that had earlier seemed all but ebbed out. "That you could, son. And wouldn't it just be worth it to hear you explain how you came to be down here on your lonesome, and so careless as to let a chained woman get a hold on you through the bars?"

Tom flushes scarlet beneath that crinkled gaze. "I wonder to hear you vaunt your sex -- after the life of depravity in which you have indulged!"

A shameless chuckle. "Not half as depraved as your fevered imagination would make it, boy." She sounds, if anything, regretful. "The reason being, that sort of thing aboard ship tends to cramp a captain's style, d'you see? But if a fine lad like you, now, was to take a stroll ashore in Tortuga, I'll wager he might engage --"

Tom has just enough control left over his temper to recognise that she is deliberately baiting him to fury, and to clench his fingers against the desire to draw blood with a blow across that insinuating mouth. But that doesn't mean, as she goes on to speculate in elaborate and specific detail about his last shore leave, that he has to put up with this sort of thing.

"I think you forget which of us holds authority on board this ship and which of us is voyaging towards the gallows!" he raps out at last, all too conscious that his cheeks are flaming like those of any schoolboy.

Somewhat to his surprise, Dutch takes the hint and breaks off her salacious catalogue, raising an eyebrow. "You're not captain yet, son," she points out, disposing the chain comfortably and folding her arms. "And it'll take more than that for you to come the high horse over me. I've seen you white as a sheet and crying for your mother, remember? Tends to take the lustre off a --"

If his face was flaming before, it is incandescent now. But the words, as he has been unhappily aware these few days past, have to be said. "Believe me, I am fully recognizant of the debt I owe you for your behaviour toward me -"

He fumbles for the correct phrase, the stiff sentiments half-choking him, and sees both Dutch's eyebrows fly upward in lazy mockery. "So the little stuffed-shirt on a stick has a trace of human feeling after all -- who'd have thought it?"

"-behaviour toward me when I was in danger of drowning," Tom jerks out again, between gritted teeth, and then, his immediate emotions getting the better of him, adds with a strong sense of ill-feeling: "but that does not in itself counteract, by means of one impulse of charity, the consequences of a life spent in wickedness and crime, and you can hardly expect it to do so!"

Dutch is looking a little bemused, and for the first time he gets a sense that his words have actually made an impression. "Well," she says wryly after a moment, "I can't say I haven't heard more fervently-expressed gratitude in my time... but that was heartfelt, at least."

She is standing easily now, balanced on toe and heel with her old arrogant, almost feline poise, and mockery lies beneath the lids of her long eyes, apparently as unconscious of her draggled and ridiculous garb as if she were secure upon her own quarterdeck in gaudy silks and pilfered finery -- Tom can't help an unexpected laugh as that thought crosses his mind. "It would seem to me I've paid back some portion of that debt already," he points out drily, indicating the change that has come over her, and gets a surprised laugh of acknowledgement out of her in her turn.

"Touché... it seems Igenlode's not the only one with intelligence in your family after all."

"Intelligence? After all the stupid --"

"Intelligence," Dutch retorts, "and courage."

This time he really can't help laughing, with Igenlode's flinch and cry at being surprised from behind still fresh in his memory. "Why, if I had to come up with a more timid, helpless --"

Somehow, he doesn't care much for the trace of pity -- for him! -- that has begun to show in Dutch's expression. "You know," she breaks in, completely ignoring his remaining opinion, "I don't believe you've ever really troubled to know our little friend at all. You haven't the faintest idea there might be anything beneath that shrinking, clerkly demeanour, have you? You're still staggered by the thought that Igenlode might dare to defy you, let alone stand up to someone as 'desperate' as I am..."

Stung by the assumption -- and still more by the claim to greater intimacy than family itself -- Tom matches her with contempt of his own. "Possibly." The biting tone is admirably judged. "But then the two of us can look forward to another thirty years to further our acquaintance... which is rather more time than you're ever likely to enjoy."

This time, the barb goes home. He feels a sudden surge of satisfaction as the reminder cuts cruelly through her poise, reducing her once more to her proper station: that of a filthy, ragged prisoner who dares to bandy words with those above her.

"And now," Tom demands, certain of himself for the first time, "suppose you tell me what plan the two of you were cooking up down here? What ingenious scheme of escape you and this dear friend of yours whom you claim to know so well were discussing to pervert the course of justice?"

Dutch looks at him with eyes that for a moment hold that unnerving tinge of pity. "If it makes you any happier to know it," the pirate says quietly, setting one hand to her temple in a gesture that is all too intelligible, "Igenlode refused me even that mercy. So you can keep your loyalties clear and separate, Tom Vereker, just the way you like them. Because it's plain enough none of your family will lift a finger to get me out of here... one way or the other."

She sits down abruptly on the low stool within her cell as if the bitterness has drained her strength, and looks up at him where he stands frozen, staring at her in the shadows of the hold. "Igenlode and I don't have much in common, son, for all our liking, and I reckon we never will. But you -- you remind me so much of myself at your age... cocksure and confident and certain I was in the right..."

Tom knows he has to stop her before she can go any further, before she can weave some accursed parallel of culpability into his life and take away everything he thought he knew. But his tongue seems trapped against the roof of his mouth, and her voice is going on regardless, as if speaking to herself and not to him.

"My mother, she was London-born, she died in the Great Plague. My father had a cookshop down in Ha'penny Lane, between the stews and the river, and he brought me up to fetch and carry for him, and puzzle out my letters as all the son he had. It was a greasy living, but it was a fair sum to live on, and a fair inheritance for a fine bold lass, and I thought myself well set-up -- whenever the future crossed my mind at all." She coughs, as if caught up back in the drifting smoke and river-stench of far London Town.

"But my father up and died of the Spanish pox when I was but fifteen, and who should turn up but a pinch-faced uncle in cassock and gown from St Mary's up the hill, with a fine disdain for the things of this world and a morbid fear of the evils of Eve. Poxy father, poxy child -- oh, he never said it where he thought I could hear, but he watched me like a hawk and kept me mewed up within-doors, with trade at the shop going to rack and ruin all the while for want of a smile and willing hand." A scowl at remembered injustice. "And it ended when the hired man he'd put in let the kitchen take fire one day, with half the street pulled down at our expense before the blaze was halted. There was my inheritance gone and all the little money we'd had, and nothing left for my uncle but a dowry-less girl on his hands as a burden in the house."

A shrug. "So he shipped me off to the Barbadoes with other maids sent out 'to improve the stock', like fine red-poll cattle amid a scrawny herd. And to tell the truth I was nothing loth to go -- for a drearier household than Nuncle Jacob's you never did see, and I had ever the taste for roving. So I went, and was wedded like the rest within the three-month, to a great brave brawling brute of a Welshman who could have cupped my waist in his two hands, with a pelt of black curls on him like the lambs of his own mountainside."

There is a queer little rueful smile on her face now as she remembers. "Well! we rubbed along together for the most part of a year, with many a spark, for he was a man hot in liquor and I had a temper of my own. It was kissing and fighting up hill and down dale, with never a penny to spare between us but went to the ale-house, and never a blow but that he was sorry for it the morning after. And then he took his fist to me once too often, and me with a knife in my hand..." She touches the tip of her tongue to her upper lip in a curious childish gesture, as if recalling the spitfire young bride she had once been.

"They say Old Nick himself looks after an ignorant man with a knife. Well, my devil was surely guiding me that day, for I couldn't do a better job of sticking a man now if I tried. He went down like a felled ox on the beaten floor, and there was I with his blood on my kirtle and half the neighbourhood to swear they'd heard our quarrel." A husband summarily acquired is dismissed from mind, with little ado. "I had no such great love for him that I craved to be dangled post-haste at his heels into the hereafter, by way of the neck; so I thought to leave the island that night, trading all we had of value for a passage on board ship."

Another shrug. "But by some chance our ship fell in with a pirate -- a Dutchman, as I learned, by the name of de Graff. Our captain, being concerned for my safety at the sea-rovers' hands, had me clad in boy's clothing when it was certain the ship would fall; but they offered us no violence, save for asking if any on board would care to ship with them, for a free life and a merry one. And it came to me at that moment that I might as well be hanged for a ship as a lamb, as you might say... and being already beyond the law, I had little enough to lose. So I gave my word to de Graff and served my apprenticeship to the sea there on board, man and boy -- and woman too, once they found me out. The which," she appends in professional disgust, "was not nearly so soon as it should have been!"

She spreads her hands as if to signal that the story is almost done. "And from the Dutch ship I came to my own command as 'Dutch', and shifted my flag thereafter from vessel to vessel as I came upon one that seemed better for the purpose --" she shoots him a mocking glance -- "the purpose of pursuit and death upon the high seas, yes -- until I took the Aurora in hard fight, and renamed her more to my liking, with a good English handle and none of Nuncle Jacob's clerkish Latin."

A glare. "And the end of that story you know as well as I do, Master Tom, and if I chose to tell all I know it might go hard for you in your turn."

"I've already made my report," Tom says coldly, stiffening at the hint of blackmail. "I've admitted full culpability for certain events. If you attempt to embroider more into it than it will bear, I think you'll find the captain will believe my word -- and those who were with me -- over yours."

Dutch snorts, indelicately. "Then I'd have paid something to see his face when he read that report, son... A mistake's a terrible thing." Her mouth twists. "It can haunt your life. Why, I might be a buxom Barbados matron now, with a string of children and a ripe old age waiting with a sleepy giant beside me -- for my Rhys was not a bad man, save when the drink was in him. And I ever had a weakness for black curls --"

She bites herself off short, lips pinched very tight together, and Tom frowns, instantly suspicious of the passing thought. But whatever it is, she does not choose to divulge.

"On balance," she says drily instead, looking up, "I fancy I'd sooner have had the gold of the Indies, the beauty and peril of the seas, the thrill of the chase and the fierce pleasure of the fight. I've had brethren aboard ship that were as much care and company as children could ever be, and endured pains enough to dim the pride of any birth-pangs. I've had the life I'd have chosen, and as merry as I could make it. As for the 'short' --" a final shrug -- "that's for you to ensure." And she cups her chained hands behind her own neck, encircling her throat in the grim jest of a noose.

As Tom stares at her, there is a creak as the whole ship heels beneath their feet, and a distant shudder like the crash of a door. "What was that?" he blurts out, unthinking.

An instant later, of course, he realises; but it's too late. Dutch is already grinning, the mocking eyebrow flying aloft.

"Why, I do believe it's gunfire, Lieutenant. Though one of your tender years might be excused --"

Tom ignores her, straining to hear more. Only a single gun fired -- not a broadside --

"Not that I want to lose your company, see, but won't they be looking for you up on deck?" Dutch suggests cheerfully. "Now when a man's off-watch, his time's his own -- but I'll warrant they're calling all hands at this moment, and I've a fancy your absence might raise some remark --"

"Remark be hanged!" Tom snaps, knowing that he should have thought of it at once himself, and flustered out of a careful turn of phrase. He knows, the moment the unfortunate expression escapes him, that Dutch isn't going to let such an opportunity pass. But the clatter of his footsteps as he strides hurriedly off, barely restraining himself from breaking into a run, drowns out whatever rejoinder she may have made. All he can hear, as he climbs upwards through the decks, is the faint sound of her laughter behind him.

When Tom finally reaches the deck, there is a crowd of men standing along the starboard rail, and he pushes them aside to see what the Bellingham shot at. Not far away a cutter is striking its colours. French, Tom notes, raising his nose in disgust. What claim has a country that eats snails to civilization?

"Mr. Vereker!"

The stern voice of Captain Petterbridge, coming from the quarter-deck, causes Tom to turn around a bit too fast, his guilty conscience telling him that someone has seen him visit Dutch and now he will be reprimanded for it. The captain gestures calmly for him to come join the other officers, an order which is immediately followed by the young lieutenant. Feeling his face reddening, he takes a deep breath, assuring himself that everything is all right.

"How nice of you to join us," mocks Lieutenant Porthwaite.

Tom glares at him --- guilty conscience or not, he can't stand the man --- before turning to the captain. "I was below, Sir," he says by way of explanation, taking comfort in the truth of his statement.

"Just so..." mumbles Petterbridge distractedly, lowering his spyglass, but keeping his eyes on the cutter. "What would the French want with a boat like that in these waters?"

"They may be pirates sailing under false colours, Sir," suggests someone in the back.

Tom shakes his head. "Pirates wouldn't use French colours here. If they wanted to stay safe from an approaching man-of-war, it's more likely that they would use a British or Dutch flag."

Porthwaite doesn't bother to hide his contempt. "Pirates aren't exactly known for their intelligence, Mr. Vereker."

"If fewer people would underestimate pirates, Mr. Porthwaite," counters Tom, "they wouldn't be half as big a problem as they are now."

The insult to his own intelligence does not sit well with Porthwaite, and he doesn't intend to let it go by. "It would appear that you have an awfully high opinion of pirates, Mr. Vereker. But then, your family does seem to have a special bond with them."

Tom clenches his fists, realizing that after all his effort, it's still not over. Years from now there will still be people talking behind his back about what really happened between someone in his family and the pirate, and he can picture all too clearly how those stories will evolve from the terrible truth to fiction that is even worse. But he won't let them do it. Not to himself, and not to Igenlode. He will hit Porthwaite. He will hit him in the middle of his face, breaking his ugly nose to make it even uglier. Tom can already see him lying flat on the deck, blood streaming from between hands that are covering his nose in a belated attempt to protect it.

Fortunately for all involved, Captain Petterbridge intervenes before the confrontation becomes physical. "Gentlemen, that's enough! Any quarrels that you may have, you can settle ashore. I will not allow this on my ship."

Both lieutenants apologize to the captain, while continuing to glare at each other.

"Now, Mr. Porthwaite, you will go and take over the cutter."

"Yes, Sir. Thank you, Sir," replies Porthwaite, shooting a dark look at Tom before doing as he is told.

The gig is smartly lowered away, and Tom watches the older lieutenant's back receding as his party is rowed over to the little ship. The young officer strains his eyes to make out the other vessel's name, but the letters are blurred and obscure, almost as if they have been clumsily daubed out. Every instinct is shrieking at him that somehow this craft is not what she appears to be.

But she's a little beauty, for all that. There is no doubt of it, even as she lies with her canvas all in a tumble -- that single warning shot, passing overhead, must have chanced to bring down her mainsail, or she would surely have tried to flee for it up to windward, lying far closer to the wind's eye than any ponderous square-rigger -- and with her long spars nodding in the swell. Her hull is curved and slender as a young girl's waist, and mast and bowsprit rake far out over the waves, enabling her to set a cloud of canvas. With her six big sweeps and her single mainsail she bears the same rig as any small boat; as the Bellingham's own cutter, now snugly in her chocks aboard the man-of-war with mast and oars both stowed. But the craft now lying submissively beneath the guns of the big seventy-four is no ship's boat, but a sea-going vessel in her own right of some sixty tons' burthen with gun-muzzles at her side, and her sails and rigging are of a size to match, towering over the narrow hull with a grace that promises an ardent turn of speed in the lightest of airs. With her single soaring mast and mainsail, and the topsail and jibs that crowd about her spars, she is the lightest, swiftest little ship Tom has ever seen upon the high seas, less a merchantman than what the Dutch would call a jaght.

But -- Tom scowls: maybe he really is obsessed, maybe he does see pirates everywhere? -- while he may be wrong, he can't help but see how perfectly adapted such a craft would be to preying upon the coastal trade. And he can't think of any legitimate reason for her to be lurking out here at all, let alone under the French flag.

His good hand clenches and unclenches at his side with painful intensity as he watches the gig lose way and come round neatly at the other ship's side, with Porthwaite poised on the thwart, ready to leap up into the chains -- the cutter is so sleek and low to the water that the lieutenant has barely a scramble to grasp the shrouds and swing himself aboard. Unconsciously, Tom is holding his breath in unacknowledged dread of the moment when a horde of pirates, armed to the teeth, will burst up through the hatches to overwhelm and massacre the boat's crew right under the Bellingham's impotent guns.

But the little boarding party spreads out across the deck unopposed. Porthwaite stoops for a moment by the fallen gaff to examine what seems to be a wounded crewman, then motions to his men to check below before cupping his hands to his mouth to hail the Bellingham.

"No resistance -- she seems deserted, sir --"

Splashes: a dozen or more on the far side of the ship, heads swimming strongly for the shore. Porthwaite, clearly cursing, fires twice, but as far as Tom can see to no effect. With a pistol barely accurate beyond ten yards, it's scarcely surprising.

"Well, they don't swim like Frenchies, anyhow." The voice belongs to Granby, the elderly second lieutenant whose years of disappointed promotion have left him with an acid tongue, and Tom, as his junior, chuckles dutifully. But with most of the gig's crew below-decks, vital moments have been lost. The unfortunate Porthwaite is practically dancing with frustration as he attempts to get the men tumbling back into the boat and rowing in pursuit under the eyes of the whole ship's company. Finally the gig is under way and rapidly gaining on the nearest swimmer; but the cutter's former crew have scattered in all directions towards the coast, and once the first prisoner is hauled, yelling and struggling, over the gunwale, the rest are little more than momentary dots amid the waves. The lieutenant, standing on the stern thwart and shading his eyes, gestures the boat in the direction of one of them, but before the oarsmen can more than start to close the distance the bobbing black head is evidently lost from sight.

At Tom's elbow, plump little Billings, Porthwaite's immediate junior as lieutenant and outranked by every other officer on the quarterdeck save Tom himself, has hitherto been staring jealously after the boat-party as if he considered that the errand should have been his own. Now he nudges his neighbour with an elbow. "Sooner him than me -- eh, Vereker?"

"I wouldn't have made such a bungle of it," Tom retorts, also under his breath. "It's obvious a cutter doesn't sail herself -- the first thing to do was secure her crew --"

"Mr Billings. Mr Vereker." The captain's eye, inexorable as fate, descends upon his two junior lieutenants. "Perhaps you would care to share your insights with the rest of us?"

Billings shifts, caught in the act of disparaging a senior officer. "I-"

"We were commending Mr Porthwaite's zeal, sir," Tom volunteers, made bold by terror, and, to his amazement, glimpses a faint, wintry smile brush Sir Edward's thin lips.

"I shall refrain from advising you to imitate it," the captain murmurs, watching the gig limp back toward her prize with her tail metaphorically between her legs, and for a moment Tom could swear he sees one eyelid descend in the merest indication of a wink.

Both giddy and a little shocked -- it is, after all, the captain's duty to uphold the proper hierarchy of respect on board ship -- Tom risks a sidelong glance at Billings to see if he is imagining things. But the stocky youth is staring straight ahead of him with a perfectly non-committal expression, and it is impossible to detect whether he saw anything or not.

The gig is pulling back over to the Bellingham now, having collected the injured man from the cutter's deck, with a couple of men left on board to clear up the mess of gaff and topping-lifts that is the tangle of her mainsail. The captain himself hails down.

"Well, Mr Porthwaite?"

"Nothing aboard to show who she is or where she came from, sir. No ship's papers, no muster roll, no log or records of any kind. Her name's been painted out, but it's not much of a job -- we might be able to strip it back to the old lettering..."

"And the flag?"

"She's got a locker of all sorts, sir, and in a fine state -- fished off old wrecks by the looks of it. There's no telling if these black fellows even know one Christian country from another, and there's no getting a word out of these two. They claim --" Porthwaite sounds both indignant and deeply dubious -- "they claim not to speak the King's English."

Petterbridge looks down into the rapidly-approaching boat, where the two prisoners are huddled together on the bottom-boards. "Pass the word for the surgeon," he orders, turning abruptly. "I don't want that man dying on us before we find out what they were up to."

He frowns, rubbing at the crease between his brows with one hand. "Now, who on board has an acquaintance with the native lingoes..?" His eyes sweep the deck and come to rest, inevitably, on Tom.

* * *

He had been half afraid, half-hoping that he would be expected to sit in on the interview with Igenlode and Lieutenant Porthwaite. But once he had taken the captain down to Igenlode's narrow cabin to explain what was wanted -- although in addressing a civilian, the order was nominally phrased as a request -- Sir Edward had despatched him back to the quarterdeck to take over the watch from Granby, the second lieutenant, who was busy putting together a repair party to restore the prize to a shipworthy condition.

The hands were excited, and it was hard to keep them to their everyday duties when so much was going on. Even Tom catches himself stealing glimpses over the narrow stretch of water, where men are swarming over the damaged rigging, and once acquires a reprimand when the first lieutenant appears unexpectedly at the foot of the companionway and notices him at it.

But the end of the watch comes, with all the sudden darkness of the tropics, and he no longer has an excuse to idle on deck wondering what the captain will decide to do. He hands over to Billings and goes below to a solitary wardroom dinner, trying not to strain too obviously after the rumble of voices through the cabin walls. He could have picked out Igenlode's patient tones a mile off, repeating the same unintelligible phrases again and again. Other, rapid voices swell around it in irritation or disbelief, and once he is sure he hears the captain himself rap out a single question. But he cannot make out a single word of what is being said.

Sleep is elusive, and as a result the morning watch proves a strain. By the time he has come off watch, breakfasted, and made a gesture towards shaving, he is distinctly heavy-eyed and disinclined for interest even in their graceful neighbour, whose riding-lights are just beginning to ebb with the coming dawn.

But Captain Petterbridge bounds on deck as cheerfully as if he has just enjoyed a fine dinner of roast game followed by a sound night's sleep in a goose-feather bed at his own north-country estate. "Well, they're Malay pirates all right," are the first words that escape him, instantly engaging all within hearing. "We don't know where they got hold of that cutter, and they won't say -- or can't be made to understand -- but they took two trading junks with her not two days back, and sent half their men aboard to help sail them across to the sheltered headland where they lie up. They've described some primitive fortifications, but nothing that can stand up to the guns of a ship like Bellingham. There's a whole colony of them, busy breeding like flies by all I could make out, and they've been raiding up and down these coasts in half a dozen small craft more or less with impunity. Well, the locals may not have the metal to smash them, but we do."

He looks around the deck as if searching for something and catches sight of Tom, frozen by the taff-rail. "I'm sending the cutter back to rendezvous with the rest of the squadron and transport dispatches while we deal with this pirate nest. I can spare a prize crew of a couple of dozen or so -- that's enough to work her under reduced canvas, but not enough for a full set of gun-crews, I'm afraid. They seem to have scuttled all their powder and shot, but we can ship over a cask from the stores and some of the four-pound balls from the gun in the launch."

The young lieutenant feels pinned to the rail as the focus of all this attention. He opens his mouth in an attempt to protest ignorance; licks dry lips and tries again. "Sir, I-"

"Why am I telling you all this?" The captain's eyes crinkle slightly. "Because I'm sending you to command her, young Vereker, along with the two Malays to whip into shape, and the pirate on her way back for trial -- we'll set a spare chain-bolt into the hold and I'll see you have a proper set of chains made up for her, fit for a bear-baiting, so you can be at ease on that score. I'll expect you back on station when your arm's healed, if you're not appointed to another ship meanwhile."

He coughs. "This cutter of ours will need a new name if she's to be taken into the service -- as first commander, would you care to do the honours?"

The names of every vessel he has ever heard of rush through Tom's mind all at once in a tangle, grandiose or foreign or prosaic, none of them seeming quite right for the little ship riding quietly beside her big consort: Puddicome, Armiger, Barradall, Royal Charles --

"No?" the captain says. "Hmm... very well, then, we'll call her the... Julietta. Yes, Julietta will do very well."

Some niece or other, Tom remembers vaguely -- or was it an aunt? Privately, he nurses the conviction that the unknown Julietta Petterbridge cannot possibly live up to the grace and dash of her namesake. But he is almost overwhelmed by this chance that has come to him so unexpectedly. "Sir, I-"

"No need to thank me, boy." A hidden smile is tugging at Petterbridge's mouth. "You're less use to me here than the others, with a broken arm, and you know it. I'll expect you to shift your dunnage aboard her before the afternoon watch. Take her swiftly -- keep her well -- don't lose the dispatches, as you value your commission --" he raises his voice -- "and do try to steer clear of pirates this time, Mr Vereker!"

He gets a laugh across the quarterdeck; but Tom, pink about the ears with pleasure, doesn't care. The Julietta is his: under-manned, underarmed, and far from port as she is, she is beautiful, and for one precious voyage she is all his own.

Now that her spirits are somewhat higher, Dutch refuses to let herself be ruled by her darkest fears. She'll have to keep busy. Unfortunately, there isn't much to do in the dark, lonely cell. There isn't much, period. The stool is there. And the chain between her wrists. There is only one option: to try to get the chain off. It won't do any good, of course. She still won't be able to escape. But if it doesn't do any good, it doesn't do much damage either. At least it keeps her mind occupied with things other than her impending death. The manacles, however, won't open even the slightest bit, nor move further down her wrists when she tries to pull them off --- a predictable disappointment. Dutch keeps trying, but there is only so much time one can spend doing the same thing without obtaining any results. The stool, the chain... Her thoughts drift again to suicide, but a swift death seems impossible to accomplish with only those means.

Desperate, Dutch scours her mind for anything to think about that won't induce feelings of guilt, pain or mortal fear, and finds only the single gunshot that dragged away her latest diversion that was remotely enjoyable: Tom. As she leans back against the side of the cell, she can't suppress a small grin. He was much too easy a victim for her little verbal games, but for a few moments, he certainly provided her with a nice distraction from... She shakes her head, forcefully banning those thoughts yet again. The gunshot. She should think about the gunshot. There had been only one. A warning shot, no doubt. She is almost sure that she heard pistol shots as well, though everything seemed too short to be an actual fight. Not a single gun had been fired in return. A small vessel, or perhaps a larger target with simply no will to fight. Closing her eyes, Dutch catalogues the options and pictures them. Swift, shapely vessels. Large, bulky ones carrying valuable goods. Gold and silks from India. Spices on their way back west. In her mind she lists the items she might find on board one of those imaginary ships, calculates what she could get for them, and fantasizes about how she could spend the profit. An involuntary lick over dry lips. She could really use a drink. A decent meal wouldn't hurt either. Since Igenlode's clandestine visit was discovered, it's not likely that he'll be coming by again anytime soon with more prisoner-delicacies. And even if he could escape his spies again, she's not sure he could face her after her request.

Just as Dutch's stomach starts making hungry noises, reminded of the rich cheese Igenlode brought, two soldiers arrive to bring her food.

"Stay there," says the first and aims a pistol from a safe distance, as the other unlocks the cell door, shoves a bowl inside, spilling some of the contents, and quickly closes and locks the door again.

"Excellent service as always, gentlemen." Dutch picks up the bowl with little enthusiasm and looks at the watery substance within. "Do pass my compliments on to the chef."

The soldiers ignore her sarcasm and walk away, but Dutch calls hem back.

"Lads! One question, if I may?"

The bigger of the soldiers, curious, turns around, and the smaller one reluctantly follows his example.

"The gunfire --- what did they shoot at?"

"A vessel," replies the first soldier patronizingly, evoking a girlish giggle from the other.

Dutch rolls her eyes. "You don't say? What kind of vessel?"

"What's it to you?" asks the smaller soldier, apparently trying to be as tough as his colleague.

"Call it professional interest," replies Dutch with a smile.

"Well, let's say, milady," says the first soldier, using Dutch's earlier sarcastic remarks against her, "that your carriage just arrived to take you to your hanging."

Chuckling and nudging each other before adopting a more proper attitude again, the soldiers exit, leaving Dutch not much wiser.

She bites her lip. 'Your carriage just arrived...'

With a sick lurch in her stomach she acknowledges the fact that somehow she'd always assumed she'd have more time; a voyage all the way back to England, for the dubious honour of having her tarred body dangled in chains over the tidal Thames at Execution Dock, or back to Port Royal where they knew her all too well, or even back to the Cape under the shadow of Table Mountain. But if they'd simply taken her to the nearest port where they could empanel sufficient captains to hold a trial, or worse, chosen to hand her over to the Dutch or the Portuguese here in the Indies -- both of whom had every bit as much reason to wish to see her hanged as the British, and rather less compunction about a show of justice beforehand -- then the weeks or months of travel she'd been anticipating might be cut short right here. When they came (as they surely would come) to take her up on deck, it might be the last she'd ever see of the endless ocean before stone walls enclosed her and the last tall tree awaited.

She'd thought she was ready. Resolved that if she had to go, she'd go light-foot and mocking to the last -- no preacher for her, no unctuous prison-cell repentance or recantation on the gallows in the hopes of buying back heavenly favour. She'd make a good show for the crowd; and she'd been counting on a big turnout. Most of them would come to any hanging, of course, just for the spectacle, but some would be there because they'd heard of her... because they wanted to catch a glimpse. The attendance at the hanging was the only gauge of notoriety a pirate ever got, and if she was going to be swinging high over them all she wanted the view at least to be worth it.

She'd thought she had enough bravado to carry it through. The cold griping in the pit of her belly threatens to betray her.

There is distant hammering up above, and the clinking of metal. She tries to guess what they can be working on; can somehow think of nothing but a scaffold, the image of the gallows-tree presenting itself with every echoing blow. It's stupid. She knows it's stupid -- if they wanted to hang her on board here and now, they wouldn't bother erecting a post, they'd simply drop a noose over the yardarm, haul away on the tail-end, and leave her kicking. She remembers the jest she'd helped the Sultan play -- it seems a thousand years back -- on that canting rogue Makepeace Fry, as the Horizon and her motley fleet overhauled Fry's Belle-Marie. Somehow, she can't appreciate the humour of it any more.

The hammering stops.

"Well, I got Fry, anyway," she says out loud into the shadows of the hold, straining her ears despite herself for the sound of boots on the companion that will herald her escort. "I got Captain Fry -- now if I were young Tom I'd be getting a medal for that instead of a hemp cravat..."

And so, as she would have wanted, she is laughing when they come for her, dragging her faster up the steep ladder than her cramped limbs can manage. She tries to keep her head up and walk proudly; but the sudden transition out into the sunlight of the deck is too much after the darkness of the past days, and despite herself she flinches, raising a laugh. Derision washes her like scalding water, and she slips, coming down hard on a ringbolt and splitting her lip.

So it is with a bloody rag pressed to her face -- "Blast your eyes, keep it off the deck!" -- that she sets eyes on the Julietta for the first time; and then, ferried across, sees the chains laid out in the shallow hold and the brawny arms of the ship's cooper, waiting with a grin, and begins at last, to her humiliation, to understand.

* * *

"Get up. Get your things packed. You're leaving." Willem irrupts into the narrow cabin with a force that appears to Igenlode, taken aback, to fill it entirely.

"What is it? What -- what's happening?"

"You want to go home, don't you?" A moment's painful silence, which, to do him justice, seems to catch Willem unawares. He shrugs it off. "Well, like it or not, you're being shipped out. Sent back where you came from. Taken along with Tom -- and I'm in the prize crew, for my sins. A couple of dozen men to work a big cutter, day in, day out, on watch and watch all the way from here to the Cape --"

"Prize crew? But --" Igenlode frowns -- "they can't do that. You're not in the Navy..."

Willem snorts under his breath. "Try telling that to the bo's'n next time he's after me with a rope's end," he mutters in what he obviously thinks to be an undertone.

He raises his voice to what has become its normal over-loud pitch. "Young Tom -- Mister Vereker to the likes of me -- specifically asked for me among his crew. I'm his star witness, see? Without me, he has to wait months before someone from the Vrouw Anna can be reached again to testify to the attack -- with what I can tell the court, we'll have your rum-soaked captain turned off from the ladder with no need for further proof."

He grins, the gallows-humour not without a certain genuine feeling. "Look at it as a mercy if you like -- you wouldn't want her to linger. Not healthy places, gaols. Not the life for a sea-bird like her."

The image conjured up is all too vivid before Igenlode's mind, of Dutch caged and beating her wings against the stone, and the clerk swallows, mechanically folding a scant handful of borrowed possessions into a blanket. "Do I -- am I supposed to --"

"You're not to be a witness at all." Willem's mouth twists. "Young Vereker wants your name kept out of it altogether -- doesn't want any scandal spreading, is my guess."

Igenlode's face is burning at the imputation, at the stupidity and unfairness of it. If they only knew --

"So she gets no witnesses in her defence at all? How much is Tom paying you to make sure of that?"

For a moment Willem's own face flames scarlet beneath his carroty hair, and the clerk cringes before the storm overhead, the little flicker of defiance extinguished; then the young sailor slams his fist down instead on the narrow cabinet that, along with the chair and cot, forms the sole furnishing of the room. "Never say that again. Never. I'm going to bring her to justice no matter what it takes -- no matter if I starve -- and I won't take a penny of silver for it. Wherever she goes, I'm following after, until I can be sure her last breath has choked away -- and right now, she's crouching in that little cutter chained by the waist and throat like a wild animal."

"Chained?"

It is almost a cry, and Willem makes a sound of contempt, thrusting past to pick up the blanket-wrapped bundle and turning to leave. "What else can you do with an untrustworthy vixen of a prisoner in a ship that size? Have a man standing guard over her day and night? This way, she won't be making any trouble before her time's up -- or before she's sent off to British waters for hanging there."

He pushes out of the cabin, trailing a helpless Igenlode behind. The thought of being present in the town while, somewhere, Dutch is being strangled by inches before a baying crowd has seemed a sickening and unendurable ordeal; but, somehow, the thought of watching her being carried away to a strange shore and not knowing when it happens at all is even worse.

Igenlode and Willem are among the last to go aboard the Julietta, along with the two Malay pirates, one of which is clearly still not at his best, with his arm bandaged and his face paler than that of his companion. Igenlode feels he should probably explain to them what is happening, but he can't concentrate enough to form proper sentences, or even find the right words. 'Hanging', he thinks bitterly, is not a word often needed in trading. And so the Malays remain slightly hunched, unsure of their fate, with soldiers watching closely, prepared to shoot them at the merest suggestion of an escape attempt.

Seemingly unaware of the many disgruntled faces among the Julietta's crew, Tom is already visibly enjoying his command. For all his experience in His Majesty's Navy, he still looks like a boy playing captain, being just a little too enthusiastic. Igenlode approaches him with some reserve, trying to figure out the best and least offensive way to bring up Dutch. But before he can say anything, Tom notices him, and greets him in a cheerful but authoritative tone.

"Would you have the goodness to pass my orders on to the Malays, if you please?"

Only just able to stop himself from rolling his eyes at the formal address, Igenlode sighs softly and does his best to explain to the Malays, who cheer up somewhat now that it seems they won't be killed, what they are to do. Dutch will have to wait.

Shortly thereafter, the Bellingham's gig is rowed back, and the Julietta sails away, her first commander staring out proudly over the ocean.

* * *

Never has Dutch felt so utterly humiliated. Never. What everyone thinks of her, the comments, the laughing -- that all doesn't matter. She knew what these people thought of her before she ever met them, and decided that their narrow-mindedness is their problem, not hers. Besides, in all honesty: had the tables been turned, she'd have had a good laugh herself. But this --- being chained by the neck like a dog, unable to even stand up -- this finally gives them all what they want. Her pride, arguably all she has left, slowly fades away with every minute in the chains. Oddly, she is very much aware of the process, and tries to slow it down as much as she can. Under these circumstances, she figures, anything she says can only make her seem more weak and desperate, not in the least to herself. Better not to speak, and try to retain composure. And so not a word has come from her mouth since she left the Bellingham. It's probably for the best. Her split lip, still throbbing painfully, has stopped bleeding, but any movement might cause it to burst open again. Even during the most embarrassing moment, when she overhears Igenlode, full of good intentions, try to convince Tom that there is no need for her to be chained up like that, the both of them arguing right above her as if she isn't there --- what makes the clerk think he has to stand up for her anyway?! --- she remains silent.

Eventually, tired and with an aching back from trying to work out the least uncomfortable position, Dutch decides she may as well lie down and try to sleep. But hours later she is still awake, worries keeping her mind too busy to enable rest. When exhaustion finally overcomes thought, it only takes her into a half-waking, trance-like state, filled with fleeting images of past events, some pleasant and some not. A faint smile passes over her face when she sees Luiz, still very much alive, his dark eyes glistening. She feels a hand brush against hers, and takes hold of it. This simple contact is enough to melt away all her concerns, and Dutch slowly begins to sink into a deep sleep. But the hand is very real, and its owner, after some initial confusion, continues with his business.

There is a muffled curse from further down the hold. "Got to be here somewhere... What d'you think you're playing at with that lantern? Give us a glim over here!"

The slide of the dark-lantern scrapes slightly, the cautious sound magnified in the close quarters of the Julietta's hold, and a sliver of light reveals deep shadows and heavy timbers all around. It swings across onto the face of the speaker, who throws up an arm across his eyes with another oath. "Keep it down, you daft ha'porth -- let's have a peep behind those casks, then..."

The lantern-bearer dutifully directs his beam as instructed, and his companion, pawing through boxes and barrels, can be seen to scowl. "Ship's bread: biscuit. More biscuit. That'll fill a man's belly right enough, but it don't put no fire in it... Maybe he's got the stuff stowed away in that little pocket-handkercher of a cabin-"

A suppressed exclamation, as the wavering lantern throws bars of dark shadow across the stores, and he drops what he is doing to turn furiously, hands on hips. "I said, what d'you think you're playing at? Come over here, you thatch-brained oaf -- I'll have a decent light or know the reason why..."

"It be the prisoner, see." The other voice is lower and apologetic.

Another scowl. "The bint's asleep, ain't she?"

"Aye, that she be -- a-sleeping like a baby, pore soul..."

"An' a-stinking like one, I'll warrant. If it ain't the stench o' her black heart. Now you get that light over here this minute --"

"But she do have me by the hand," the other man protests. "Latched onto me, see, in her sleep -- and if she wake and find us here..."

"Set up a yell? I don't think so." He looks over at Dutch, curled in her rags, who has now begun to snore lightly. She is filthy from her long days of imprisonment, and her split lip is bruised and bloody. "Wouldn't touch her with a barge-pole, meself... but if you wants to slap a hand across her trap before you loose her grip, feel free. I ain't stopping yer. And maybe she knows where the rum's stowed, at that. I've heard as on pirate ships they swills down liquor o'nights like water -- though it's precious little o' that we get, neither..."

He continues to grumble his way forward through the hold, clambering over stacked provisions, while his fellow-conspirator awkwardly attempts to free himself from Dutch's limpet-like grasp without raising the alarm. The pirate is smiling slightly in her sleep, and despite her battered and noisome appearance there is something strangely innocent about the curled grip that has fastened around his own.

One by one the fingers are prised loose without any sign of her waking, and, after a moment's puzzled hesitation, the erstwhile victim lays the hand that had entrapped him gently back against her breast. "Reckon the best friend for you now'd be a quick knife atween the ribs, my maid, some dark night afore ever you do wake to know it..." he says quietly, looking down at her.

But if his voice had held a certain slow pity, his companion's holds none.

"Right, and just you try explaining that one away to strutting young Captain Cockerel up there." He jerks his head towards the deck above and snorts, derisively. "Leave her be -- and for pity's sake bring that light! I've a thirst on me would dry out an ox."

* * *

But the nocturnal foray is doomed to disappointment, for it transpires with daylight that among the many other casualties of Julietta's hasty provisioning was included the rum. There had been no drop of liquor on board when they had taken her, and no keg had been transferred across from the Bellingham for the benefit of her crew. There will be no forenoon issue of spirits, either today or for the many days to come.

Tom, too carried away by the joy of his first command to pay attention to the mood of the men, had not given the matter a moment's thought. As the news begins to spread, there is very nearly -- but not quite -- a mutiny.

"But these are loyal men," Igenlode says helplessly, watching the young lieutenant try to harangue his command back to some sense of reason. "Sailors from the Bellingham, under discipline and their Admiral's regulations --"

"They know their rights and they'll stick to them. There's nothing so hidebound as a seaman with a grievance." Willem, like the two Malays, is watching from a distance, seemingly indifferent to the outcome. But as Tom's representations gain the upper hand over his sullen crew, the Dutchman eases away from the bulwarks and the belaying-pins close at hand.

"There's no rum to be had, and that's the end of it. But if Mr Vereker --" he leans on the name with a twist of mock-deference -- "thinks this is a pleasure-trip his captain's given him, he'd better learn different... and learn fast."

Igenlode has stiffened defensively; but Willem is right. With a discontented crew and an over-eager young commander, as the days roll past it proves not to be a happy voyage.

On such a small ship there are few places to retreat. Igenlode spends a lot of time atop the cross-trees in the lookout's post, trying to keep out of the way -- or, increasingly, spends it down in the foetid hold with Dutch.

"I want your parole." Tom's voice had been uncomfortable, but resolute. "'Geyni, I want your word of honour that you won't help her escape, or... or anything. If you hold to that promise, then you can see her as often as you like."

Igenlode knows that the unexpected offer had been prompted largely by realisation of the impossibility of mounting a permanent guard, and now suspects, given the current mood of the crew, that Tom is more concerned to use Igenlode's own presence to ensure the continued safety of his prisoner. But the promise and its acceptance go some way to restoring the trust between them, all the same.

It is an easy enough undertaking to keep. Dutch, after an initial ungracious reception -- "What makes you think sitting here staring at me is such a favour?" -- seems to have accepted the motive behind Igenlode's visits and even to be secretly glad of the company. But she is growing increasingly morose, spending most of her time sitting on the bottom-boards without speaking, or else curled up in a heap, staring upwards through the opened hatch -- another privilege gained privately for her sake from Tom -- at the sunlit canvas of the mainsail, or the birds, the clouds and the sky.

Igenlode talks to her constantly, not knowing what else to do; telling her everything that goes on, recalling past adventures, venturing childhood anecdotes, or even reciting favourite stanzas of Latin history and verse, taking comfort from the familiar patterning of the words. But it is often hard to tell if she is even listening or not.

Two weeks out from Java, everything changes.

* * *

"A sail! A sail in distress! A sail!"

The words from up on deck have a startling effect. Dutch has seemed sunk into herself despite the day's heat, almost lost in apathy. Now she sits up abruptly, cursing as the collar jars her galled throat.

Igenlode's attention is caught, less by the lookout's report -- these are busy waters, and the Julietta had sighted dozens of other ships in the first few days of her voyage -- than by Dutch's welcome return of interest. "Shall I go on deck and see?"

Dutch looks startled for a moment, as if she had forgotten the clerk's very existence, and then nods.

Up on deck -- Igenlode, a little shamefaced, takes deep breaths, grateful for the relief of even the tiny breeze that is currently ghosting the cutter along -- the signs of distress are obvious. A small merchant ship, all but becalmed with sails hanging idle, is displaying a thick column of smoke pouring from her stern. Men can be seen gesticulating on her deck, and her boats have been lowered away.

Tom, who has been snatching a nap in a hammock chair rather than endure the stifling air in his cabin, is hastily buttoning his uniform coat and giving orders. The cutter swings round under her towering mainsail to run down towards the other ship, firing a signal gun to attract their attention. A couple of sailors thrust Igenlode out of the way to close the main hatch in spite of the heat -- understandable, when taking the risk of approaching a fire.

But there is no sign of flames on the merchantman's poop, despite the billowing haze. In fact, Igenlode gets the impression that a brazier or something similar is being used to produce the signal -- whatever is wrong on board, clearly this is the quickest way to summon help. There is no plague flag flying, but the distant boats now rowing towards the Julietta seem to contain a number of bandaged and ominously prone figures.

The temptations of curiosity are enormous; but the hollow sound of the closing hatch cover can't help but recall Dutch to mind, chained as she is in frustrated ignorance down in the hold. Igenlode takes one reluctant last look at the approaching scene and ducks back down the companionway to report as promised.

Dutch bites her lip, listening with intensity. Even as Igenlode describes the strange actions of the other ship, distant voices can be heard as the boats come within hailing range of the little cutter.

"Bandaged, you said?" she interrupts, a queer fey look in her eyes, and her voice quivers a little, as if from excitement or fear. "And lying down?"

Puzzled, Igenlode confirms the detail. Overhead, Tom's voice is rapping out stentorian questions. To judge by his tone, he doesn't seem to be getting satisfactory answers.

"Wait and I'll go and find out what's happening..."

"No!" Dutch reaches out, careless of the jangling chain, to grab Igenlode by the arm. "Don't go on deck. Stay here -- stay out of it --"

And as the clerk stares at her, unresisting, there comes a bump against the side and a sudden crescendo of yells overhead, with the rattle of small-arms fire. A furious shout from Tom, cut off abruptly -- Dutch's grasp tightens as Igenlode instinctively tries to pull away. There is a brief clash of steel that ends with the ringing sound of a dropped blade.

"You knew..." Igenlode whispers, watching Dutch's tense features in the dark between them with something akin to horror. "You knew... you planned..."

"I guessed." Her grip compels obedience. Despite the chains, Igenlode is no longer certain which of them is the prisoner.

A brief grin, teeth showing in the dim light. She is still listening intently. "Let's say I recognised my own style, love... but if not me, then who?"

"I think we're about to find that out." Igenlode's own hand has tightened unconsciously over Dutch's fingers as the sound of heavy feet on the companionway comes closer. Half a dozen men at least, shouting to each other, back and forth --

A flood of dazzling light, as the hatch-cover is lifted almost in the same moment. The leader of their captors, heavily slung about with weapons, face seamed with a recent scar, broad-bellied, balding and dripping with sweat, halts for a moment, blinking. He pulls off a patterned neckerchief and mops his face in a gesture that is all too familiar, then stares at the tableau in front of him.

"Captain?" he says in disbelief.

Only Igenlode is close enough to hear Dutch let out a long, shaky breath.

"Why, it's the merrymaid man himself," she says, beginning to grin widely. "That ugly mug of yours hasn't improved of late, Jones -- but I'll tell you this: I'm uncommonly glad to see you!"

"But, Captain... How'd you end up here?"

"Oh, I was on my way back to Cape Town to be hanged."

Igenlode is astonished by the perfect nonchalance with which Dutch makes the statement. Only minutes ago there was nothing left of her, but now she's as annoyingly self-confident as she's ever been, as if all her recent misfortune didn't really happen. Such an attitude must be necessary to live your life the way pirates do, but he wonders how they manage. If indeed they do manage. A studying look at Dutch reveals not a trace of her previous depression. She even uses the chain around her neck to illustrate the hanging she was supposed to get, eliciting a slow grin from Jones, before she continues talking.

"I'll tell you all about it later. Now, if you can just get these blasted things off me?" She jingles the chains to emphasize her point.

Jones immediately steps back from the hatch and disappears from sight, shouting things that can't be understood among the other noise on deck. Minutes later, a wrinkled, muscular old man, presumably the merchantman's cooper, enters the hold, and, without a word or even a look at Igenlode or Dutch, starts working on the chains. Jones comes in soon after.

"We figured you were dead," he announces, wiping the sweat off his face yet again.

"'We'?"

"Aye, ol' Hank and me. We were taken aboard that ship, the both of us. We'd jumped out the gunports right before the Horizon blew up."

Dutch briefly flinches at the memory -- or does Igenlode imagine it? Jones certainly hasn't noticed anything, continuing his story as if it were one of his beloved tales of mermaids.

"Except that merchantman's captain and her officers weren't nice folk. All the work they wanted us to do... too much for any man. So me and Hank talked to the rest of the crew and convinced them there were better ways." He grins, apparently very proud of his achievement.

"A mutiny?" Igenlode's civilized tone suddenly sounds oddly out of place, and the subconscious undertone of contempt stands out all the more.

"They had it coming. It's no fair to make men work so hard while the officers did nothing but stand around watching. And then they ate and drank the best, while we only just got enough to keep going."

Jones' face seems to have gotten slightly redder, and though Dutch, stretching her newly released neck, doubts he is truly offended, she decides it's best to play it safe.

"Calm now, Jones. I'm sure he didn't mean anything by it."

Then the cooper manages to free her waist as well and she takes a deep breath, enjoying the freedom of movement of her stomach. "Thanks, mate. Much appreciated."

Now that Dutch is loose from her chains, they all go on deck. But the trip proves more difficult than she would have liked. After weeks without being able to stand, her legs are ridiculously weak, trembling under her weight and occasionally buckling. Fortunately the massive Jones doesn't mind her grabbing his arm for support. As they walk into the light like that, one of the pirates can't resist commenting on the strange sight.

"Found yourself a girlfriend, eh, Captain?"

There is a wave of laughter over the deck, but Jones doesn't find it very amusing. "Shut it! This is the captain, and you will treat her as such."

Whether it is dumb loyalty, or if he knows that he doesn't have the brains to be captain himself, Dutch can't say. Either way, the remark warms her heart.

"I won't have no woman be the captain of me!" comes a voice from the back, with another seconding him.

Dutch rolls her eyes. "We'll vote on it later, lads, do it all nice and proper. For now I advice you to keep such thoughts to yourselves. I may be a bit unsteady from being chained up, but I've killed more men than you've known in your life, and you'll do good to remember it."

Walking on, to a hammock chair she's spotted, she stops abruptly and turns around, blocking Igenlode's path. He'd been slowly following behind, taking in the slaughter the pirates had wreaked upon the Julietta's crew. When Dutch is suddenly in his way, he glances up at her with a look that is somewhere between puzzlement and annoyance.

"You don't want to see this, love," she says softly.

But this only incites his curiosity, and he quickly takes a step to the side so he can look behind her.

Somehow, after all his nephew had survived, Igenlode hadn't taken into account the possibility that he might have died now.

Tom lies sprawled on the deck, his face a welter of blood from the blow that had struck him down. His head is thrown back -- impossibly far back. Beneath his dropped jaw there is a second white grin among the scarlet, where someone has cut his throat to the bone.

Igenlode's stomach turns suddenly to water, seeing again a bloodsoaked beach and the coppery scent of murder on the sand. Only this time it's not laughing young Luiz -- it's not even Dutch. It's Igenlode's own flesh and blood; the last of the family, Johanna's beloved offspring and her sole support... and the nearest thing to a son the timid clerk has known, or is ever likely to know.

A man is stooping over the body, as he has over others, stripping everything of wealth from the dead. Tom's head lolls nervelessly as his coat is stripped free, and its pockets and even the bullion on its sleeves plundered. His shoe-buckles have already gone.

The looter comes to the ring on the boy's little finger, a plain signet band from Egwin's own mother worn since he was a child, and begins tugging at it. But the band that had been too big for young Tom's broadest finger is now tight on his hand, the gold jamming against the joint, and with an oath the pirate takes out his jack-knife to hack it free.

"No!" Igenlode pushes past Dutch unthinking, horror finally overcoming the grip of shock. "You can't --"

The severed finger comes loose, its ring tinkling unheeded to the deck, as the jack-knife flashes up to meet the new threat. A burning slash slices down Igenlode's wrist as the clerk tries to tear the knife's owner away from his work; and then the clerk's small body is grabbed and flung crashing into the scuppers, an angry assailant glaring down. It's Dutch.

"Are you trying to get yourself killed?" she says flatly.

Igenlode stares up at her, blood dripping between the fingers that clutch the injured arm. "But he --"

"Either you're with us or against us." The note of warning in that penetrates even the haze of betrayal in Igenlode's heart, as does the glance she throws behind her. This isn't Dutch's ship. Any defence of Tom threatens her own skin. That's all she cares about. The knowledge is a bitter one.

She comes closer, lowering her voice. "They're pirates, love. This is what pirates do."

One part of Igenlode knows that Dutch is right, knows that nothing done to Tom can hurt him, now. The other part sees only that she too is a pirate, that she has done the same or worse in her time; that no amount of friendship can for ever hide the truth.

Tom was right. For all their fine feathers and talk of freedom, pirates are greedy, vicious and vile, no better than the footpads in the street. To befriend a pirate is to blind yourself wilfully to their life, to stain yourself by omission with the blood of their crimes even if you never meant to hurt another soul.

Piracy is like a foul contagion, spreading, ruining lives. Because Jones had lived -- genial, slow-witted Jones, with his weakness for tall tales and rum -- the officers and captain of this merchant vessel had died. If the Horizon had foundered cleanly in that storm, none of those aboard her would be here now... and there would be no blood on the deck of the Julietta, no blood smeared across Igenlode's own palms. Had Tom felt, then, this ashen comprehension on that morning when he had learned the truth?

This putrid sore, Tom had called them. This canker in the side of humanity. An infection that could not be allowed to breed. Pirates belonged dead, he'd insisted. Pirates belonged dead...

"What about those men?" Igenlode says loudly, deliberately ignoring Dutch's look of alarm and hushing gesture. One of the Malays is seated only a few feet away in the scuppers with his back against the bulwarks, staring straight in front of him with legs splayed out. His eyes are open, but the back of his head is missing. "Those were pirates too, just doing what pirates do -- keeping their heads down once they'd been caught, and looking after their own skins! But I don't notice a lot of brotherhood of the trade where they were concerned..."

"Two reasons for that," a slow voice says, coming forward. Hank, the Long Islander, still wears the remnants of the bandages that had served as a ruse to take the Julietta, and together with the engrained marks of an ancient powder burn on his face they give him the look of a fugitive from a lazar-house. But he seems to regard Igenlode's protests with more amusement than anything else. "The first being, I guess I didn't notice a lot of friendship in the way they welcomed us aboard. Seems they weren't disposed to look on us as brethren neither."

He scratches his beard, grinning. "And the second being that the last time I saw this little honey --" he runs a caressing hand along the cutter's polished rail -- "those devils were swarming all over her and I barely got clear with my life."

"You know her?" Igenlode is incredulous.

"Sure I know her. The Mary Adams, she is, and the finest little raider you ever saw -- 'til we put in for water and they jumped us off Penang point from that junk-heap of a ship of theirs." He looks around at the dead seamen, lying scattered around the deck as they had fallen. "So I guess the law finally caught up with them, huh? Now ain't that what you'd call ironic."

Dutch, who hasn't really had the chance of a good look at the ship until now, has been admiring the cutter's lines and her potential. She lets out a low whistle. "So this is the famous Mary Adams you used to yarn about? Maybe half those tales were true after all..."

A pirate ship.

For a moment Igenlode almost throws up. Tom's pride and joy had been a pirate ship -- it was so, so obvious now. That was why so small a ship had come to the Indies; that was why she carried all those false flags; that was why she is so fast and handy, when the Royal Navy has no such vessels on its books. No wonder she'd had no papers aboard to show where she came from. The Malay pirates might not have cared, but her previous owners had had no need of bills of lading, registration or tonnage.

Hank is leaning against the lee rail, talking animatedly and illustrating his story with gestures. He takes a step or two forward, catches his foot against something, and kicks the body out of the way without even glancing down. The dead man flops over. His eyes are half rolled-up, white and staring. A cutlass-slash has opened his cheek, and teeth grin obscenely through the bloody gash.

Igenlode doubles over, chokes, and runs. Down below, to a tiny cabin where every corner still bears the imprint of Tom.

* * *

Someone rattles at the door, later. Igenlode hasn't bothered to lock it -- the panels wouldn't stand up to more than a single blow.

It seems like too much trouble to say "Come in". Besides, the pirates are hardly going to wait for permission on this ship before going anywhere they like. Seated at the table, Igenlode doesn't even bother to glance round. It's probably Jones, come to take possession of the captain's quarters -- or Dutch, if she can dupe this crew into accepting her command.

Whoever it is isn't content with rummaging around at the front of the cabin, where the valuables are -- Tom's sextant, his books and spare clothes, any money that wasn't on him when he... when he fell. The intruder comes all the way round to stand on the far side of the table, and leans forward, forcing Igenlode to look up.

"I'm sorry," Dutch says, and she looks it.

"Don't tell me you're not glad it came out this way," Igenlode says bitterly. "Don't ask me to believe you'd rather be chained up in your own filth --" she's taken the time to clean up and change before rushing off to make her condolences, the clerk notices -- "waiting to be hanged. Don't try to pretend you ever cared two florins for Tom's fate, or for that of any man who tried to bring you to book."

"I spent time and pains enough keeping his head above water for your benefit," Dutch says drily, sitting down on the only other available space -- the narrow cot where Tom had slept. It swings slightly under her weight. "I don't like to see my efforts thrown away. Is that convincing enough, my fine friend?"

"And the rest of them were just in the way, I suppose." Igenlode can still see the Malay's splay-legged stare, like that of some grotesque doll; the grinning skull revealed beneath the cutlass-carved lips in the other seaman's cheek. "We're all just in your way, once we get between your kind and something you want. All that men's lives mean to you is cash for a few hours' oblivion in a stupor of rum, or a new set of pilfered plumage when you fancy showing yourselves ashore to boast of your conquests..."

Tears, swallowed desperately down.

"Tom was right." By some miracle, the condemnation comes out in a cold, steady voice. "I lost my humanity the day I willingly chose to sail with you."

Dutch has evidently schooled herself to show no reaction -- or else, Igenlode realises suddenly, she simply is as callous as she'd showed herself on deck. She'd grieved enough at the loss of her ship... or had she?

She sighs. "I warned you, love. A pirate life is no place for you."

One hand catches hold of Igenlode's injured arm, where the sleeve is now stained with drying blood, and drags back the ruined coat to inspect the damage. "Here." She retrieves a bottle of rum from the floor where she'd dropped it, sets her teeth to the cork and pulls it free, and despite her prisoner's struggles takes a swig herself before splashing the liquor over the open cut.

It hurts. A lot. Dutch ignores all Igenlode's protests, washing and cleaning the wound before knotting it up with one of Tom's white scarves.

"Right." She finally releases her grip and props both elbows on the table, absently helping herself to the remnants of the rum. "Now what are we going to do with you, love?"

"Why don't you just kill me now like the rest and be done with it?" Igenlode retorts, almost hoping she takes the taunt at face value. Anything would be better than living with those faces on your conscience -- living with the knowledge that you'd hoped Dutch would escape, without thinking of the consequences...

But Dutch just sighs again. "Don't be daft. Killing in a fight's one thing -- cold blood's another. You've nothing to fear from anyone here on board unless you play up like a hare-brained fool or start some wild talk... and if you want to get marooned, that's the right way to go about it." She runs her fingers through her hair, which has re-grown into a wild mop.

"Young Tom's plan was for you to go back to the Cape," she says at last. "He put a lot of effort into clearing your name, by your account. Be a shame to waste that."

So she had been listening after all during those endless days in the hold, Igenlode realises with a jolt, going scarlet at the thought of some of the more unguarded things said to apparently oblivious ears. And she thought she could just sail into the Bay and turn the clock back to make everything right?

"I'm sure I'll find it a pleasure to face Johanna." Sarcasm comes almost naturally now. "We can take tea together every Sunday while I tell her how my friends killed her son and then so kindly dropped me off back home, without a hard word said. And then when Sir Edward Petterbridge comes asking after his men and the Julietta, I can explain to him how I come to be safely there ashore without any sign of my nephew or his ship!"

Cape Town would have been unendurable -- then -- with Dutch's body swinging in the breeze. Daily life now with this on one's conscience, back in the old routine with Johanna's growing worries for Tom, the long months when his letters could have been lost before the certainty creeps in, the lies and the endless evasions and the impossibility of ever explaining it all to anyone who could understand... Igenlode is breathing hard. "I can't. Dutch --" it is the first time any name has been used between them in all these long months, and it hangs in the air like the sound of a gasp -- "I can't. I can't go back..."

"You're not one of us," Dutch says, reasonably enough. "You can't stay here, and I wouldn't want to see you hurt --"

A sob of breath, that starts off as a painful laugh and escapes as something else. Igenlode's voice wavers and breaks. "It's a bit late for that --"

Once started, the tears won't stop. Desolation -- self-pity -- loneliness -- the impossibility of going on -- genuine grief? Igenlode no longer cares. Head down on the table, the little clerk cries with great retching heaves of the breast, careless to the fact that every sound can be heard up on deck, oblivious to Dutch's gaze, storing up humiliation for the future with abandon. Nothing matters.

Dutch gets up, quietly -- though she could have made a song and dance of it for anything Igenlode would have noticed by now. If she is uncomfortable at the spectacle, the clerk is in no position to know it.

She moves towards the door, then turns back. Kneeling down beside the chair, she sets one arm across Igenlode's sobbing shoulders, feeling the wetness of tears against her cheek. "I'm sorry, love," she says at last, very softly. "I didn't want it to work out this way. Don't forget me... Igenlode."

But it is not until long afterwards that the little clerk even remembers those last few words, let alone begins to suspect their meaning.

* * *

"I need your help."

The words break into a mercifully forgotten dream, and Igenlode stirs in the dark, feeling the hardness of planks beneath cheek and shoulder. Every muscle aches. "Wha--?"

A hard hand clamps down to stifle any sound, and Igenlode jolts into the full wakefulness of panic, clawing at the fingers that threaten to cut off all breath as well as any cry for help. The flash of a lantern, showing a momentary glimpse of a face. Lank gingery hair, tied back. Igenlode blinks suddenly, remembering now the body that had been missing, up on deck. Willem...

The young sailor's grasp slackens as he sees recognition dawn in the other's eyes, and he nods. "Yes, it's me." Barely a whisper. "Listen, I need your help --"

Igenlode can barely believe it. "But what--? How did you--?"

"I was down in the magazine," Willem snaps. "It was all over before I could even get on deck. They took us completely by surprise with that cowardly ruse of theirs--" He cuts himself off. "Never mind. They didn't know how many were in the crew, and it was easy enough to keep out of sight. But I can't keep it up for long. I've got to get away -- tonight."

"Away?" Igenlode is still stupid with sleep. "But we're out at sea..."

"In a boat, of course!" Willem shakes the clerk's shoulder, hard. "Wake up. Listen to me. It was hard enough for me to get in here -- we may only have a few minutes' grace. There's a ship's boat towing behind that so-called merchant vessel with a few supplies and a breaker of water left in her; with what I've managed to gather up, there should be enough for a week or two's sail, enough to get her back into the Straits for a chance of being picked up. But I can't make it alone."

There is the sudden cold pressure of a knife beneath Igenlode's jaw, drawn hastily back as the clerk's head turns in astonishment. "You're coming with me -- like it or not."

"Of course I'll come! Do you think I want to stay here?" Igenlode protests, staring at him in the dark. "What do you take me for?"

"A romantic fool with a head full of pirates and a friend who's in league with the lot." The words sting, punctuated with a jab of the knife. "I'm not taking any chances on your giving the warning -- understand?"

"I wouldn't give a warning if I saw the Bellingham looming astern."

It is an avowal that carries enough bitterness to convince, and after a moment Willem makes a sound of acknowledgement, sliding the blade back into its sheath. "Right. Can you swim?"

"No," Igenlode admits, and Willem sighs, thrusting a wet rope into his companion's surprised arms.

"We need to climb out of the stern windows -- the way I got in. Hold onto this and I'll let you down. There's a tub on the end; cling onto that and you can float. Don't overset it, no matter what you do. I've gleaned everything useful I can lay hands on --" he snorts -- "and it's amazing what gets left around once discipline goes to pot. Someone's going to be short of a compass and spyglass come morning, not to mention a brace of pistols and a couple of charts..."

He seems to have thought it out carefully. Igenlode is somewhat ashamed to admit to a lift of the spirits at the prospect of escape and adventure that a few hours ago would have seemed impossible. "Where are we headed?"

"Batavia -- if possible. I can tell my story there; get a ship." There is a soft jingle of coin. "You can find a place with the Company, or one of the houses thereabouts. Or with one of the local rajahs, if you'd rather... I dare say you could live like a prince, if you make yourself useful enough. There's plenty of honest work. Trade. Ships. Politics."

Willem is guiding them both over to the the edge of the cabin, where the squares of the stern windows show as a paler shade of darkness against the night. One of them, Igenlode discovers by touch, is ajar.

Compared to the glass of the Belle-Marie's great cabin, let alone a brief glimpse of the Bellingham's, the openings in the cutter's stern are tiny. But there is room enough for Willem to squeeze his shoulders through, let alone for the smaller Igenlode, and a few minutes later -- after some heavy breathing and two or three splashes that have them both holding their breath for signs of disturbance among the pirates aboard -- they are in the water.

Willem strikes out again for the stern of the other ship, just visible against a break in the clouds, with a series of sturdy kicks that make up for the fact that he is towing both the dead weight of his companion and all their supplies. "Here." Igenlode struggles over the gunwale, boosted from behind, and lies breathless in the bottom of the boat while Willem hauls himself after. There is, inevitably, a good deal of noise.

Willem curses and begins fumbling with the mast and sail in the dark, trying to step the foot in the hole in the thwart. "Get the rowlocks fitted. We'll have to pull out -- I can't risk a light until we're hidden by the swell..."

Igenlode fumbles with the dangling metal pins, setting the curved half-moon ends upright in their sockets in the gunwale, feels for the looms of a pair of oars on the bottom-boards and gets the leather into place within the rowlocks' curve. The boat is heavy to pull for only one pair of oars, particularly when trying not to splash, and the little clerk is soon dripping with sweat. Somewhere in the bows, Willem is still struggling with the mast.

Then the clouds overhead drift apart. The moon's crescent brightens slowly against the sky until the whole sea is bathed in betraying silver, with their boat crawling black across its face. There is a glint of movement back on the merchant ship's stern.

In a moment of absolute calm, Igenlode recognises the unmistakable female outline against the rail. There is no point freezing in the hopes of passing unnoticed; no point trying to cover the pale gleam of their faces. She can't possibly help but see them, at this distance.

One arm is extended, and the moonlight catches the long glitter of metal as it sweeps to point directly at the boat. Igenlode doesn't move. Doesn't even bother to warn Willem. A musket-ball will be a clean enough end... and even if she misses, the sound alone of the shot will be enough to rouse both ships to their pursuit. It was a good try, Igenlode thinks, smiling. They very nearly made it. A valiant attempt at escape.

Dutch remains stock-still, her gaze trained on them, for the space of a heartbeat. Then her hand moves.

But there is no dull clap of gunpowder. The spyglass in her grasp closes with a tiny, audible snap that carries over the water between them, and she leans casually back on the taffrail, watching in silence as the mast finally wavers into place and the little lug-sail rises jerkily under Willem's efforts.

Willem scrambles aft for the tiller, turns -- and finally sees her. He reaches instinctively down for a pistol with a hiss of breath, levelling the barrel up at the distant watcher, only for Igenlode to catch at his arm.

"No! Don't be a fool -- you'll have them all down on us in a moment --"

"But --"

Willem breaks off. Dutch has raised one hand in what is self-evidently a gesture of farewell. She waves, once, and then stands there watching them as the sail carries them slowly out of sight. Soon the ship's stern is visible only on the crest of every wave; then only her masts.

Igenlode stands up on the thwart suddenly, despite Willem's curses, waving the end of the white scarf in desperate goodbye, and catches a momentary glimpse of something that might have been a flash of movement in return -- then, as the boat lurches wildly, submits quietly to Willem's indignation and curls up on the bottom-boards, out of harm's way. Sleep comes surprisingly quickly. The last thing Igenlode remembers, before the dawn and the sight of Willem's sleepy face rousing his companion to take over the watch, is the sight of a single star nodding overhead as they steer towards the east.

* * *

It is ten days later, when tilting the water-breaker to raise the remaining flow, that Igenlode finds the papers. A few scraps have been jammed under the base of the keg as if to hold it steady, by whoever had provisioned this boat and put the barrel there; but they have been wrapped in a scrap of tarpaulin to keep them dry, and fastened with a twist of bright thread that looks as if it might once have been silk.

The handwriting is unmistakable. Neat, well-tutored, despite the Bellingham's poor pens -- the clerk's own fair italic script.

Igenlode frowns, shuffling through the leaves: fragments of memories, scraps of verse, attempts at a journal... all written in those lonely hours on board Bellingham, thrown together and brought aboard the cutter with the rest. As an attempt at leaching the pain of the Horizon's loss, they'd been about as effective as a corn-plaster. But how--?

One page has been doubled back on itself as if to form a clasp. Letters stagger across it as if written hurriedly, and with little skill. It is a script that is almost as familiar as Igenlode's own, laboriously inscribed on page after page of the Horizon's ledgers with more determination than talent. "I kept the Madagascar Poem in Memory of the Shipp," it runs simply. There is no signature save the single letter 'D'.

The clerk stares down at the scraps of writing, so carefully preserved; at the convenient water-breaker, and the boat. At Willem, half-dozing in the shade of the sail, and the compass open on the thwart. Remembers a figure in the moonlight.

"Ahoy there!"

The sound of a single gun, flat in the distance. Igenlode scrambles up, all else forgotten, and leans out dangerously, trying to see under the sail.

The Dutch voice comes again, carrying faintly over the water. "Ahoy! Boat there! Are you in distress?"

Willem, rubbing his eyes, reaches out and kicks the tiller sharply, bringing the boat swinging round, sail flapping, and forcing Igenlode to duck. A tall ship looms up to windward, her high stern bright with gilding, and her sails grey from thousands of miles of sea. Figures line her bulwarks, pointing and gesturing, and the flower-colours of women's dresses flutter from her decks.

"An East-Indiaman; we're saved," Willem says quietly, bowing his head a moment as if in prayer. In the next instant he has snatched off his shirt and is waving it wildly in the air, signalling for help.

Igenlode watches as the Dutch ship heaves-to and lowers her boats, the oars dancing lightly over the water. Curious faces are turned towards them, earning an audible rebuke, and there seems to be an impromptu race going on to see who will rescue the castaways first. It is hard to resist a smile. The little clerk doesn't even pretend to try.

The two of them share a broad grin of purest relief. "We're saved!" Igenlode proclaims, jumping up impulsively to wave in turn and getting a laugh from Willem.

"Steady..."

But after all they have been through, the voyage is not to end in shipwreck. Willing hands reach out to support Igenlode's windmilling figure as the boats come alongside, and the threat of a ducking is averted. A few minutes later, as the long pull back to the Indiaman begins, there is nothing left aboard the little craft towing in their wake save the tumbled canvas of her sail and an all but empty water-breaker. Willem, animated in the midst of his countrymen, is talking nineteen to the dozen, illustrating his adventures with expansive gestures and the thrust of a stabbing, emphatic fist.

Igenlode, seated in the stern, is the only one to look back. One hand moves quietly to touch the breast of a tattered coat, where the little tarpaulin packet now lies.