And she did. After a minute or two, her eyes opened. She looked up at Sinclair with a confused expression, one that mingled deep regret with an even deeper thirst. He held the bottle steady as she suckled at its tip. Her eyes became more focused, and her breathing more regular. When he felt she had had enough—too much and she might regurgitate the lot—he laid her head back on the pillow, wedged the cork back in place, then hid the bottle beneath the pile of bedclothes.
“I have to see the captain,” he said. “I won’t be gone long.”
“No,” she said, barely audibly. “Stay.”
He squeezed her hand. Was it already warmer to his touch?
“Talk to me,” she said.
“And so I shall, so I shall…About coconut palms as tall as St. Paul’s…”
The tiniest hint of a smile creased her lips.
“And sand as white as Dover.” It was one of their private catch-phrases, drawn from a popular ditty, and they had often murmured it to each other in moments far less trying than this.
Sinclair took the stool away from the door, extinguished the lamp—what oil remained had to be conserved—and left it in the cabin. Only a pale shaft of light penetrated from the upper deck to the passageway, but it was enough to guide his way to the steps.
Cold as it was below, it was far worse above, where the wind, like a bellows, sucked the very breath from the lungs and filled them instead with a chilling blast. The captain, Addison, stood at the wheel, wrapped in several layers of clothing, the last of which was a torn sail; in Sinclair’s eyes, he was nothing but a privateer, who had extorted three times what the fare should have been for his and Eleanor’s passages. The man could sense desperation and had no scruples about exploiting it.
“Ah, Lieutenant Copley,” he declared. “I was hoping you might pass the time with me.”
Sinclair knew it was more than that. He looked around him, at the rolling, gray sea, strewn with great slabs of ice, and the night sky that, at such a southern latitude, gave off a kind of unchanging pewter gleam. Two crewmen stood watch, one on either side of the deck, looking for especially jagged or insurmountable bergs; another clung to his perch, high above, in the crow’s nest. The ship’s progress was slow and precarious, and the mutable winds made the frosted sails—those that could still be unfurled—flap and luff with the rumble of thunder.
“How is your wife faring?”
Sinclair came closer, his boots sliding on the slippery deck.
“The good doctor,” Addison continued, “tells me she remains unwell.” His tricorner hat was tied to his head with a frayed crimson sash running under the chin.
Sinclair knew that if there was one thing on which he and the captain could agree, it was on the utter unreliability of the ship’s physician. Every man aboard, in fact, was of a suspect nature, but it was only on just such a boat that Sinclair could have booked immediate and unquestioned passage.
“She is better,” Sinclair replied, “and resting.”
Captain Addison nodded thoughtfully, as if he cared, and gazed at the overcast, starless sky. “The winds remain against us,” he said. “If we don’t change course soon, we shall find ourselves at the pole itself. Never seen such winds, in all my time.”
Sinclair read into the remark precisely what the captain doubtlessly intended—a reminder that the foul weather was attributed to the presence of these mysterious passengers on board. Women were considered bad luck to begin with, but the fact that Eleanor was ailing—that she appeared as white as a ghost—only made matters worse. Initially, Sinclair had done all that he could to enter into the life of the ship, to make himself a steady and agreeable guest, but between his duties to Eleanor and the conditions imposed by his own secret infirmity, there was simply no way that he could carry it off. Even the two crewmen on deck—their names, if he was not mistaken, were Jones and Jeffries—glanced at him from under their woolen caps and the rags knotted around their faces with unconcealed malevolence.
“Tell me again, Lieutenant,” Captain Addison said, “what was your business in Lisbon?”
It was in Portugal that Sinclair had booked passage.
“Diplomatic matters,” Sinclair replied, “of a sensitive nature. Nothing that I may disclose even now.”
The wind picked up, whipping the ragged sail around the captain’s legs as he stood with both hands gripping the wheel. In the strange penumbral glow of the night sky, he looked to Sinclair like an image from some daguerreotype, washed of all color, reduced to shadows and shades of gray.
“And was it there your wife fell ill?”
The plague, Sinclair was aware, had visited the city only a few years before.
“My wife is ill with no contagion, I can assure you of that. It is an internal disorder, which we will see to when we reach Christchurch.”