“A cap’n’s invitation is an order aboard that cap’n’s ship, ma’am. Now, don’t you fret. We’ll accustom you to our ways. I’ll leave this light, but you must remember that fire is the barkie’s worst enemy besides a Spanish man-o’-war and you must never leave it unattended.”
He withdrew, leaving her in the dim cubicle whose tiny light threw a hundred flickering shadows. She unpacked what she could, dressed in what she hoped would be appropriate for the captain’s table, and sat still, a bit uncertain, waiting to be summoned. She had pulled a new cotton doublet over her shift, sought out and located her rouge and kohl, but looked in vain for a mirror. There was none. How strange it was to prepare oneself for public judgment without the aid of that reflective surface. There were probably no mirrors at all on board. She was in a world where one’s reflection meant very little—a man’s world.
She heard the sounds usual to departure, but because she was new to them she could not read them. Still, foreign to her or not, they proceeded in the time-honored order: the cable being wound aboard, the anchor being catted and fished, the pinnace being run up to the davits, the halyards in their blocks. She waited on. The entirety of her cell tilted to one side and she braced herself against the walls of her little quarters, feeling the living wood around her vibrate against the pressures of sea and wind—they were moving. Still she waited uncertainly, sitting silently. She heard the turning of the glass called, heard the gunroom members surging through their shared mess and back to their posts, and then finally, finally, a banging on the door and Trotter’s voice, shrewish now and a bit anxious. “Ain’t you ready, miss? You mustn’t be late!”
When she swung open her door Trotter took her by the hand and pulled her through the ship’s narrow passages toward her appointment, lecturing on when various messes messed, and how to tell the time from the unvarying routines and noises on ship, and how lateness was never, never countenanced on a well-run ship like the Cat. They reached the doorway to the captain’s cabin and he pushed her forward, gently, over the doorway and into the beautiful space with its stern rising up from a steep counter in a wall of glass. Light glanced up off the waves in their wake and into the shining room. A table glowed with silver and crystal. Behind each seat stood a nodding, smiling, clean-shaven man dressed in his best coat in the stifling heat of the close room, waiting for her. Looking at them watch her approach she understood that these eyes would be her only mirror aboard the Cat. She took a deep breath, smiled as warmly as she could, and thanked them all for the kind invitation to their dinner. She was rewarded with unguarded admiration.
The captain seated her at his right and lifted his first glass to her. “To my special guest, Mademoiselle Gates. A glass of wine with you, my lady.”
She raised her glass to his and drank. On this ship, her value, her rights, her safety, all rested on the captain’s authority, and she saw that his authority was total. Had Le Cherche hosted this dinner with the particular purpose of establishing a protected status for her?
“A beautiful Sauterne, Captain,” she said when he filled her glass again.
“I had five cases brought aboard before we sailed. I served, in youth, in Her Majesty’s Royal Navy, and there I came to a deep appreciation of what private means can supply in addition to what the grateful nation provides a man during wartime.”
“Sailors are not well provided for?”
“They are if a pound of bread, pounded dry peas, a pound of salt beef that’s made its way around the Horn three times before it hits your tin plate, and a quart of beer satisfies you utterly. War is not about cuisine, however. Or glory,” he added.
“Not glory, sir?” she asked.
“One might stumble upon glory. But war is not glorious in and of itself. It is simply the great contest for resources.”
“Like a crown?” she said, her tone gentle but challenging.
“Incidentally perhaps,” the purser joined in. “But a crown is merely the key to what matters.”
“Which is what, sir?”
“Land. Silver. Wheat. Women.”
“Women?” Electra smiled thinly, remembering that she was a guest at this table and in this world, but finding it difficult to curb her own tongue. “Surely we are not something that would appear on a purser’s list, sir, like a case of Sauterne or a plot of land to be squabbled over—a mere possession.”
“I mean no offense, ma’am.” The purser blushed. “I was merely speaking.”
The captain broke in. “As to squabbles and mere possessions, I could ask you to remember Helen of Troy—a stolen possession who caused quite a squabble. But pardon me. We border on discussing politics, which is not a suitable topic for a captain’s table. Mr. Davies—I believe the bottle stands by you.”
The mood lightened with each bottle. Deep into the fifth course a somewhat drunken young lieutenant was holding forth with a story that threatened to become inappropriate before a mate kicked him under the table and he changed the course of the narrative, making it virtually incomprehensible. Electra glanced at Le Cherche, catching him in a moment when he thought he held no one’s attention. She expected to find an arrogant man among those he considered his inferiors. Instead she saw a man who sat at an enormous silent distance from those around him, a man with a face whose lines and battle scars showed suddenly in stark relief—a sad man. She turned quickly away, and when the little story had ground to an illogical conclusion Le Cherche clothed himself again in good cheer, calling for toasts all around and a good night. Hours later as she lay in her swinging hammock she heard his cello begin to speak through the thin cabin walls, unaccompanied, the loneliest sound she believed she’d ever heard in her life.
In the days that followed, Electra ventured enough into the life of the ship to come to know its routines, to know her gunroom fellows, and to be invited several times more to the captain’s table.
“So you are a letter of marque and you hunt the Spanish?” she asked on one evening when they were alone except for the bustling presence of Trotter, who waited upon them.
“We are and we do. But if you were of any value at all to my brother, we are now the hunted as well as the hunters.”
“I doubt this. Your brother might have gone to the relatively controllable expense of having local roads watched to stop me as I fled, but he would not set out upon the boundless ocean to find something as insignificant, in the end, as a woman.”
“Ah.” He smiled. “Remember Helen of Troy.”
“I recall your example of Helen of Troy, Captain—but I am no Helen of Troy, and your brother is no Menelaus.”
“You need not be a Menelaus to be made unreasonable under the influence of pride or of a woman. And your looks are not so unfortunate, Mademoiselle. There are all kinds of charms that can give a woman the power to bewitch a man. I have seen but little of you, yet even in that short time I can see that your arsenal has weapons beyond physical beauty.”