The whole process had been a kind of Punch and Judy parody of the way Arabella’s father had always carved the Sunday joint for the family. “Why do you not look at the men as you cut their meat?” she asked Gosling after he’d turned around with his own plate.
“It’sh the fairesht way,” he said, chewing a mouthful of meat, then swallowed. “No one knows who’ll be getting each bit, so it’s all even-like. And we each take our turn as mess cook, t’ mix it up even more.”
Arabella took a bite. The meat was tough, grayish, and had an unfamiliar flavor.
“Good, innit?” said Taylor, the youngest, a lean fair-haired fellow with tattoos all over his arms.
“I have never tasted the like,” Arabella admitted neutrally. “What is it?”
“Horse, I think. And look a’ this! Greens! An’ fresh bread!” He tore off a hunk of bread with his teeth and chewed noisily. “Enjoy it while you can—once we leave port it’ll be naught but salt beef, salt pork, and ship’s biscuit.”
Arabella did her best to enjoy it.
“Ye’ve not touched yer grog,” Young said. “I’ll take it, if ye don’t want it.”
Every one laughed heartily at that, though Arabella had no idea why. To be polite, she grinned and took a sip from her cup.
The drink was not nearly as bad as she had feared—a little sour perhaps, a little bitter, but actually quite nice after a day spent running around in the sun. She was sure she would appreciate it even more once she really started working. She took a deep refreshing draught.
Then she noticed the sensation of warmth spreading down her throat and through her stomach.
At her expression the men all laughed again. “What is in this?” she asked.
“Four parts water, one part good Navy rum, and a bit of lime juice,” said Young. He raised his cup to her and drained it off.
Four to one … this stuff was nearly as strong as Madeira! And her father had only let her have a sip of that at Christmas! “Is there any thing else to drink?”
“You can have it with small beer instead of the water.”
“Oh.”
She would have to be careful. If she allowed herself to become at all tipsy, her secret would surely be undone.
*
After dinner, Arabella was sent to the kitchen, which was called the “galley,” to clean up—a greasy, smelly, backbreaking task. The cook, a one-legged man called Pemiter, took what she felt was entirely too much pleasure in having someone who ranked even lower than himself to order about, and by the time she was finished scrubbing the last wooden plate she was nearly dead with fatigue.
The sun had already set when she emerged from the galley, and the lights of London shimmered in the Thames. Carriages with their lanterns clopped across a bridge nearby.
She took a moment to regard the view before searching for her hammock. London! How she had wondered what that shining capital city might be like, reading a book by the fire before bedtime in the manor house at Woodthrush Woods. And now here she was, about to depart it, having seen practically nothing of it.
She wondered when, or if, she would see it again.
Then, suddenly, she remembered that, despite her best intentions, she had not sent word to her mother about her situation. A sharp pang of guilt ran through her at her preoccupied self-absorption.
Though the deck was nearly deserted, one elderly airman sat quietly nearby, smoking a pipe. “Excuse me, sir,” she said to him, “but might there be any way for me to mail a letter before we depart?”
The man glared from beneath his wild, gray brows, seemingly annoyed at her polite query, and she realized she had forgotten her station and slipped into an inappropriately elevated diction. She would have to take care not to do that again. “Last boat’s already gone,” he grunted, and turned away.
Her eyes threatened to spill over with tears, and she wiped them quickly with her rough sleeve. But now there was nothing to be done about it.
The lights of London suddenly seemed ten thousand miles away.
*
The hammock was right where she had left it, alone on the shelf. She gathered it up and returned belowdecks, which had again transformed itself in her absence. All lights had been extinguished, but as her eyes grew accustomed to the dark she perceived that the space was now filled with dozens of bundles—airmen in their hammocks—slung from the overhead beams. Many snored with great vigor; a few engaged in low, muttered conversation.
Ducking beneath the sleeping men, she made her way to the space she had been told was hers. And, indeed, though the room was too dark to read the numbers, she found a pair of unoccupied hooks in the right place, with nearly a foot and a half of space clear between the snoring bundles to either side. Standing on a barrel, she looped the ropes of her hammock over the hooks.