If he lost this girl, he’d lose everything.
“Heave ho, heave ho,” he heard Hall order. “Almost there!”
Nicholas spread his hand out across her back to steady her as they came up level to the bulwark, and he turned to brace his feet against it. None of this made the least bit of sense to him—why had she run out? And this blood…was it even hers?
His shoulders were gripped by the solid force of half a dozen hands, and he and the girl were hauled onto the ship’s deck.
Nicholas rolled just in time to avoid landing on top of her. The back of his skull bounced against the coarse wood with a sharp crack, blacking out his vision for one terrible instant.
“The surgeon’s mate will look after her.” Captain Hall’s face swam in front of his.
“—is the lass dead?” someone asked.
Nicholas was trembling like a flag in a gale. He focused on the steady pattern of drawing in breaths and releasing them. Around him were the anxious, bedraggled faces of the sailors from both crews, all hovering about the girl with morbid interest. The men had forgotten their fighting with this spectacle, true, but his crew had also forgotten they were meant to be securing the other men in the ship’s hold.
A movement distracted him from that thought. His eyes shifted to where a small figure in a navy coat was kneeling beside the girl, hands pressed firmly on her belly. Plain, crisp clothes; dark hair perfectly pulled back and collected at the base of his skull in a queue; a face like a child’s—Nicholas mistrusted anyone who could stay so pristine on a ship, never mind in the midst of battle. It spoke of cowards.
“Easy, Nick,” Hall said, helping him sit up, “it’s only this ship’s surgeon’s mate.”
“Where’s Philips?” he demanded. “Or this ship’s surgeon?”
“Philips went below to tend to the men there. Their surgeon is no longer in possession of the lower half of his body. I believe he is presently indisposed with the business of dying.”
Nicholas shook his head, unwilling to accept that a child would be caring for her. “How long has he been out of strings? A year?”
Captain Hall raised a brow. “About as long as you, I’d wager.”
He didn’t like the liberty with which the surgeon’s mate was cutting her gown and stays open—
“Couldn’t be bothered to take off your shoes and stockings, I see,” the captain continued, storm-gray eyes flashing with amusement. “You took off like the devil’s hounds were on your heels.”
Nicholas glowered at Hall, well aware of his sagging wet stockings and the ruined leather. “I didn’t realize we are now in the habit of letting ladies drown.”
His words were forgotten when Nicholas caught a movement out of the corner of his eye. He turned in time to see the surgeon’s mate raise a fist and bring it down, hard, against her stomach.
“Sir!” Nicholas surged up off the deck, swaying on his feet. “You dare—?”
The girl coughed violently, her back twisting off the deck as she spat out the water in her lungs. Long, pale fingers curled against the deck and she took several panting breaths, eyes squeezed shut. Nicholas’s eyes narrowed at where the surgeon’s mate had placed a steadying hand on her bare shoulder.
No one spoke, not even Captain Hall, who seemed as startled as the rest of them to have her so suddenly returned to them from the land of the dead. Persephone, indeed.
“Ma’am,” Nicholas managed to scratch out, with a curt bow. “Good afternoon.”
Her eyelids fluttered as she collapsed onto her back again. Her hair, darker now that it was wet, clung to the curve of her skull. The sailors seemed to step in as one, leaning forward to peer down at her, and were rewarded with a wide-eyed gaze as pale blue as the sky above them.
“Um,” she said hoarsely. “Hi?”
THERE WASN’T A PART OF Etta that didn’t feel raw and battered; the aching inside her skull did nothing to dampen the rank smell of blood and body odor, and something else that almost smelled like fireworks.
Looking from face to face—the knit caps, a crooked and fraying wig, a few wet eyes discreetly wiped against shoulders—her mind began the work of piecing it all together as if she were sight-reading a new piece of music. The notes became measures, and the measures phrases, until finally the whole melody drifted through her.
She was not in the museum. So, obviously, the rescue workers must have carried her out into the street, away from that strange explosion of noise and light. Her skin, hair, and dress were drenched through and through, because—because of the building’s sprinklers, right?