—
Midshipman Withers takes her onto the gun deck, where he introduces her to the mizzen topmen not currently on watch. There are six of them squashed together in the space between the stored hammocks and the guns. The hatches of the gunports are open. In the light falling through them, the men regard her warily until Withers mentions her father served with Lord Nelson at Trafalgar and the atmosphere somersaults. They vow they’ll teach her the trade as her father would surely have wanted. She may be a ship’s boy now, but she can be a topman like them in a year if she works hard.
“You’re not afraid of heights, are you?” says a man with the same kind of inked drawings on his arms as Dick Pascoe.
They ask her what ship her father was on. “TheNeptune,” she whispers, looking down at her feet.
“You should get a pair of shoes made,” says the inked man. “Terry Burks, the gunner’s mate, makes a great pair if you’re willing to pay for it.”
A bright-haired man called Red Will, who’s whittling a piece of wood into a mermaid, says he has a cousin who was at Trafalgar. Soon he’s regaling the berth with stories.
“Captain Hamer is a good one,” Red Will says after a lengthy eposabout the Battle of Copenhagen. “He’s a proper fighting captain, always after a prize. The only reason he hasn’t hoisted his blue yet is because they don’t know him well enough at the Admiralty.”
“He’d rather go after a Frenchie twice the size of our ship than toast king and country at some ball in London,” says the man with the inked drawings. “I ask you, which does more for winning the war?”
Red Will says, “This business with the smugglers may tip the balance. The Revenue Service has lost control of the situation. If our captain puts a stop to it, the Admiralty will reward him, I tell you.”
“That’ll be good for all of us,” says a man with a plait as long as Isabel’s was before Harriet cut it. “Though if he gets a first rate, we’ll be on blockade.”
“And if peace breaks out, God forbid, we’ll be cutting bricks ashore,” says the inked man.
“Let’s hope for neither,” Red Will grunts above his wooden mermaid.
Isabel only half listens to their conversation. She must find a way to slip away. But how? Her hands play with Richard’s cap as she thinks, but then the man with the long plait says, “Tell us more about your father at Trafalgar,” and she looks up to find all of them gazing at her. Quietly, she says she prefers not to speak of him.
The man says, “Aww, come, give us a tale.”
But Red Will shoves him, saying, “Leave the mouse alone, Paddy. It’s no good losing one’s da.”
They call her Mouse after that, because she’s quiet as one. She’s glad, for it allows her to think instead of talk. She needs to find Jack. He’ll be locked up in the ship’s prison, the brig, she thinks—wherever that is. Somewhere on the lower deck or in the hold, maybe.
Slowly, her clothes dry.Jack’s clothes,she thinks. She’s beginning to feel as if they are hers. The men’s voices murmur around her; the sea sighs below the gunports. Perhaps when these men go on watch, she’ll be able to get away. But what if they notice? If they sound the alarm, if they start searching for her, she’ll lose her one chance to save Jack. Her heart, mind, and everything in her strains for him.
Suddenly, theHornetshudders. A grinding noise reverberates through the hull. On the top deck, men’s voices sound. They’re singing. It’s impossible to make out the words, but there’s a rhythm to it, underscored by a clanging, as if a thousand hammers are banging into the ship.
“That’s them turning the capstan and raising the anchor. Means we’re off,” says Red Will. “We’re only going up the river, but it’s your first sailing, Mouse. Wouldn’t you rather be on deck?”
“Could I?” she says, fighting down a shiver at the thought that they’re sailing to the place of Jack’s execution. This is good, she tells herself. This may be her chance.
“Want me to show you the way up?” Red Will says, looking up from his mermaid. The knife catches the light and reflects it in his face, brightening his ruddy complexion.
“I can find it,” she says. “But thank you.”
She slips away, taking her new name, Mouse, and making it her own: she must be quiet, small, unseen, like a mouse, like a ghost. This is a ghost ship and she’s a ghost moving through it to find her ghostly lover. Her entire plan depends on her finding where Jack is being held prisoner without being discovered. Jack’s life depends on it. And possibly her own.
She steals down the length of the lower deck, then climbs to the deck below, past the surgeon’s room and sick bay, into the main hold. The smell of wood and sea mixes with the stink of bilge water. The light is so dim she has to wait for her eyes to adjust. The hold is empty but for a loud creaking running from fore to aft. Most of the hands are on deck as the ship sails down the river. The only man she encounters coming out of one of the storerooms ignores her. She keeps her head down, her shoulders slumped.
Long minutes pass, ten of them, twenty, maybe more. She has lost all sense of time. It’s awfully dark down in the hold; dark and hollow, the way she felt when Tom Holder told her they were going to hang Jack. They won’t hang him now. She only has to find him. She’s so close.
She presses on, taking care not to step in the bilge water pushing upfrom below the ship’s hull. The smell of it settles in her throat; she can taste it. She wants to call,Jack, where are you?She imagines him answering, guiding her as he did when he taught her navigation on theRapideand he positioned her hands as she worked the sextant.
Two more doors open onto storerooms. They’re filled with bags of grain and kegs of something. She moves on past them. She’s taking too long. Perhaps she should call out. She’s about to do so when she hears a sound farther down in the bow of the ship. Voices. Low ones, talking quietly, but the great cavern of the hold carries them over the creaking noise, and quiet as a mouse, she approaches the door.
She cannot hear what the voices are saying. She wants to rush at the door and wrench it open, but she doesn’t know who’s behind it, nor if anybody is guarding what looks like another storeroom. Stomach roiling with nerves, she crouches in the dark behind a massive coil of rope. She watches the door and the hold around it until she is certain: nobody guards the room. There’s no one to stop her.
She takes the three steps that separate her from the door so quickly she stumbles over a length of rope. A loud thud: her shoulder aches where it has slammed into the wood. The door doesn’t give way. She holds her breath. Every sound down here carries, but nobody comes. Behind the door, the voices have gone silent. Then someone says loudly, “Give us our dinner, will you, Morley!”
There’s an iron ring for a doorhandle. She turns it and she can hear the latch within lift, but the door remains shut. She digs in her shoulder, pushes.
