Electra looked at the girls and smiled. “Well, saving is a sport that is open to all, is it not? And the game is afoot, my loves. Rip the skirts away from yourselves so your movement is free, for if you ever hope to see freedom yourself, you will need to be quick and willing to swing a club! Are you willing to fight for your own liberty?”
A guttural group cry answered her. All but one of them rose up and ripped clothing from their bodies, wigs from their heads. This last creature, a youngster dressed as a boy, purple and green bruises covering half her swelling face, fell to her knees and began to pray. Electra fell to her own knees before the terrified girl. “What is your name, child?”
“Polly,” the child whispered.
“Polly, you will not be used as you were before—ever again,” Electra promised.
“Will I die?” the girl murmured.
“Perhaps. But you will never be used again.”
This promise, along with Electra’s own commanding presence, was enough to bring the tiny creature to her feet. She stepped forward and joined the group of former captives. Electra turned, raised her dagger, and cried out for them to follow. They flowed behind her in a stream that broke into waves when they reached the deck. Once there they separated, stripping weapons from the fallen and turning on the crew of the Terrible with an energy that matched the slave ship’s name. And Electra led them.
Into the bloody chaos they moved, and their presence stunned both the men of the Terrible and the Cat. The shock the girls and women generated worked entirely to their advantage—a man falling away in surprise is an easier man to kill than one who stands ready, and the women’s momentum had an almost manic force. Men who towered above them by more than a foot, who outweighed them by as much as fifty pounds, found themselves falling away before this awful assault. Within moments a concerted rush led by the first mate and a gunner from the Cat pressed the men of the Terrible toward the hatch, driving them beneath where once the women had been held prisoner. Electra herself locked the hatch.
Her eyes swept over the blood running through the scuppers and the bodies of those who had fallen. When her searching eyes at last found their object, he was giving orders to secure the prisoners and take the Terrible to London as a prize to be condemned by the Crown. As she approached her lover she saw him reach out to grasp a railing, begin to stagger, lose his balance. Blood streamed from a cut over his left eye. A pike thrust had opened a thigh. She reached him, ripped his shirt from his back, and tore it into strips, binding the thigh and head.
“You cannot be here,” he said, his voice full of wonder. “You are a spirit.”
“I am flesh and blood,” she answered him, taking his hand and pressing it against her. “Feel the beat of my heart and the warmth of my flesh. Know that both belong entirely to you.” Basil did not answer but continued to regard her with wonder. “Basil,” she said. “Your brother? Does he live?”
“You are safe, little witch. He no longer lives, though the memory of his last moments will be forever engraved on my body.” Basil touched first his temple and then his thigh. “Remembrances of him,” he said softly.
“The rest of his convoy?”
“Without him to lead and protect them with his connections, they will sink back into the dark places from whence they came.”
All around them Basil’s men were ordering the deck, pushing the dead over the side, fishing the broken mast and readying the Terrible to sail. Electra’s eyes were drawn to a body so small it looked like a bundle of clothes. She stood and approached it, knelt over it. Polly lay quietly, her expression as calm as if she were merely sleeping. Not a mark was visible on her body, and only when Electra touched her and the body fell to its side did she see the crushed back of the skull.
“No one will ever use you again, Polly,” she said softly. She drew a sailcloth gently over the corpse’s face. “I promise you.”
NEAVE
It’s Done
The police officially stopped looking for Lilly Terhune. There was no body so there could not be a murder charge. No address or telephone had ever been found for the husband, who officially remained un-interviewed. I don’t mean to upset you, ma’am, a young officer had offered at the end of his last meeting with us, but missing people tend to end up being missing people.
Charles Helbrun III had called me every day through the entire month to give me yet another chance to reconsider my error and agree to marry him. I thought he called more in shock and irritation than disappointment. I felt sorry to lose the things that had come with him: the way he looked so in charge of things that I could just lean into him and relax, the respect that radiated toward him wherever he went, the beautiful dining rooms and powerful people he moved among, the way he looked when something caught his interest. But I wasn’t sorry enough to marry him. I knew I didn’t desire him, because I now knew what desire was, and I wasn’t willing—not anymore—to choose what Charles Helbrun III had to give.
The conference success rippled outward. AP wires ran photos of salesgirls on trapezes. Be Your Best got profiled in five major city newspaper business pages. Within three months the sales force grew by 20 percent. I’d never been busier in my life. Meanwhile Lilly’s old office stayed just the way it was when she walked out the door for the last time expecting to come back soon. People stopped looking over my shoulder for her, stopped hesitating about coming to me for answers to what used to be her questions.
Oddly, the people I felt most comfortable with were Mr. Boppit and Dead Lilly. In her first weeks here in my world, Dead Lilly had left Boppit and me sometimes to go to Janey’s. That’s where Annie’s new life was, and Lilly needed to see it. No one in that household saw her stand by her sleeping child at night. No one could touch or smell or hear her as she leaned against a doorjamb in their kitchen at dinnertime.
“Lilly’ll be all right,” Boppit said to me. “She just needs to get the idea of Annie being there and being happy in her head.” Boppit was right. Eventually Lilly spent less time there, more with me and Bop.
“Maybe,” my dead sister said to me when she rejoined us after a visit to Annie, “maybe how this is all happening is what’s best. I was a C-plus mother. Janey’s an A. A-plus, maybe.” This was true, but even a dead person can have her feelings hurt, so I didn’t agree out loud.
In the last couple of days I’d noticed that Boppit and Dead Lilly were unusually restless. They couldn’t sleep, which kept me awake. If it was moonless, we’d wander onto the Rubber Duck’s deck for a while before returning to the cabin to toast bread. Bop and Dead Lilly would lean on the minuscule counters or sit on the tiny table, getting in my way and offering opinions while we buttered toast and looked into the black-mirror middle-of-the-night windowpanes. I loved the phosphory snap of a match as Dead Lilly started another cigarette. We’d make our way through pots of coffee and entire loaves of bread. We talked about love. They thought I’d done the right thing, turning Charles down.