The Devil and the Dark Water

54

Arent staggered into the compartment under the half deck, blood dripping off his fingers. A solitary candle burnt on a cask, discharging thick, foul smoke into the air.

Isabel’s laughter came from the shadows at the rear of the compartment. She was sitting on a stool, talking with Dorothea. They stopped the moment they saw him, their eyes widening in alarm.

‘Did you win?’ asked Dorothea.

‘He won,’ said Sara, opening the box of healing sundries she’d left there earlier, revealing a collection of rags and unguents, corked vials and bags of powder. From beneath them, she took out a hooked needle and a length of catgut.

Dragging the candle a little closer, Sara inspected the wound.

‘You’ll need to take your shirt off,’ she said to Arent. ‘The material’s in the way.’

He did as she asked, uncovering a patchwork of scars and burns, stab wounds and musket holes badly healed.

Isabel murmured a prayer. ‘God made you pay a high price to get here,’ she said devoutly.

‘God didn’t put a sword in my hand,’ he disagreed.

Sara’s hand was already slippery with blood and she had to ask Isabel to thread the catgut for her. ‘Is healing people something you can teach me?’ asked Isabel, frowning at the eye of the needle as she tried to engineer the catgut through it.

‘If you’ve the feel for it, I’d be happy to,’ said Sara, taking the needle from her. ‘Is there an unopened jug of wine anywhere?’

‘I can find one, my lady,’ said Isabel.

‘It’s Sara,’ she said. ‘If there’s none about, ask the steward. Use my name.’

Isabel departed.

Gripping the thread in her teeth, Sara slipped the point of the needle through the edges of Arent’s ragged skin, then looped it and started again. The sting was almost enough to make him wish for the days when he would have let the injury alone, then lain down for a week or two and hoped not to die.

That was what he’d been taught by the army’s stinking old barber-surgeon, who’d told him the bad humours had to be allowed to seep out. Once they were expunged, the body would do its own work, he’d said.

Sammy hadn’t liked that. First time he’d seen Arent injured, he’d stitched him up like a torn jacket. Arent had tried to argue, telling him about the humours and the surgeon’s advice, but Sammy didn’t take it kindly. He’d even pricked him a couple of extra times with the needle to emphasise his disquiet.

He was surprised to find Sara knew the technique also.

‘Where did you learn to do this?’ he asked, watching Sara work.

‘My mother,’ she said distractedly. ‘My grandfather was a healer of some renown. He taught her and she taught me.’

‘Could your father do this?’

She shook her head. ‘He was a merchant.’ Her voice frosted over. ‘My mother used her gifts to save his life after he became ill passing through her village, and he fell in love with her. She was only three guilders away from being a peasant, but my noble father didn’t care. They married and lived happily ever after, except for all the friends he lost because he’d snubbed their well-born daughters.’

She finished another loop.

‘Love nearly destroyed my family,’ she said drily. ‘On the bright side, they had five daughters, so my father had lots of chances to make up for his mistake.’

Sara worked quietly after that, shushing Arent when he tried to talk.

When Isabel returned with the wine, Sara used it to wash the wound, offering the jug to Arent so he could dull the pain.

He hardly touched it.

Having Sara kneeling in front of him like this, even under these circumstances, was proving tricky. Pain was the only thing keeping everything where it ought to be.

Isaack Larme stomped into the compartment, throwing a bag of coins at Arent’s feet. ‘Your winnings,’ he said. Then, leering at Sara, ‘But I reckon you’ve done well enough out of this already.’

‘I’m a noblewoman with rank, wealth and a very sharp dagger,’ said Sara, squinting at her stitches. ‘So a little respect, if you please.’

‘Apologies, my lady,’ said Larme, lowering his gaze.

‘You set those boys in the crowd on me,’ said Arent levelly. ‘I caught the nod.’

‘Would have been more if I could spare them,’ said Larme, unabashed.

‘Why?’

‘Wyck keeps control of the lads for me, which means I need him more than I need you. You went looking for a fight. I tried to warn you off, but you wouldn’t have it.’ He cleared his throat uncomfortably. ‘That’s why I’m here. I want to know what your plans are for me.’

‘Plans?’ said Arent, confused.

‘I don’t intend on spending the rest of this voyage waiting for you to jam a blade in my back. Do what you’re going to do.’ The dwarf puffed his chest out, as if expecting Arent to stab him right there.

Sara rolled her eyes and went back to work.

‘I’m not going to kill you, Larme,’ said Arent wearily. ‘If you piled my dead up, you could spit in God’s face from the top. I’m done adding to the sum. That lad you sent after me didn’t have to die, so I didn’t kill him. Same goes for Wyck, same goes for you. Answer my questions and we’ll end this day as friends.’

Larme studied him, obviously trying to find the ambush hidden beneath all of his benevolence. It was the same look Eggert had given Arent the day he’d apologised for holding a blade to his neck. Charity was evidently so rare aboard the Saardam, nobody recognised it any more.

‘You wouldn’t survive an hour as a sailor,’ said Larme eventually.

‘Nicest thing anybody’s ever said to me,’ said Arent, inviting him to take the stool opposite.

Larme appeared doubtful, but was swayed by the wine Arent pushed towards him.

‘What was in the smuggler’s compartment in the cargo hold?’ asked Arent with a grimace, as Sara completed another loop. ‘You emptied it before we got there.’

‘A piece of The Folly.’ He caught their shocked expressions, then added quickly, ‘I didn’t steal it, mind. I was searching for Bosey’s robes like the captain ordered. Figured he might have hid them in one of the compartments, but I found that instead.’

‘Not the entire thing?’

‘No, more’s the pity.’ He sounded like a man who’d been too often on the wrong side of fortune’s flipped coin. ‘A piece would have fetched a good price, but if I’d been able to sell the whole thing I could have bought a ship of my own.’

‘Could have?’ asked Arent. ‘What happened to it?’

Larme eyed him suspiciously. ‘Why?’

‘I’m out of patience for the self-interest on this ship,’ sighed Sara. ‘If you don’t answer our questions fully, I’m going to tell my husband you stole The Folly and watch him cut you into quarters.’

‘All right, all right,’ he said hastily. ‘I destroyed it, after you two almost caught me. Smashed it to bits, then tipped them out of the porthole in the cable locker. I thought it was too dangerous to keep.’

Arent shared a glance with Sara. She tilted her head, suggesting it was probably true.

‘How did you know it was a piece of The Folly?’ she asked

‘Governor General tested it on the Saardam. Not that I was allowed to use it. Captain Crauwels does all the navigating. Rest of us just sail in the direction he points.’

‘Sander Kers was murdered and stuffed into one of your compartments,’ said Arent bluntly. ‘What do you know about that?’

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘I’ve no reason to hurt anybody.’

‘Except Bosey,’ said Sara. ‘You ordered Johannes Wyck to cut out his tongue, didn’t you?’

The jug of wine stopped halfway to Larme’s lips. Sara wasn’t even looking at him. She was still stitching Arent’s wound.

‘That’s how you work, isn’t it?’ she said, her tongue pressing against her top lip in concentration. ‘Wyck does nasty things to people when you think they need doing, and you put an arm around whatever’s left of them. That trick with the knife in the crowd showed that. What was Bosey saying that you wanted kept quiet?’

Larme leant forward, lowering his voice. ‘The Saardam’s my home. Only one I’ve ever had where I wasn’t kicked for sport. It’s my job to keep her safe and Bosey put her in danger.’

‘How?’

‘He was recruiting my lads. Twisting them around.’

‘How?’ insisted Sara.

‘He had coin, too much for a simple sailor. He was buying them, getting them to do strange jobs for him onboard.’

‘Your talent for vagueness is both admirable and irritating,’ said Sara.

‘I don’t know what the jobs were specifically, but we caught him and a few of the others in parts of the ship they shouldn’t have been in after we docked in Batavia. They were searching for something, I reckon. Tapping the walls and kicking the floorboards. Whatever it was, it was big, judging by the tools they were carrying. I even caught them measuring the aft of the ship, but I couldn’t get a word out of them as to why.’

‘What happened to these other sailors?’ asked Arent eagerly. ‘Could we talk to them?’

‘They vanished,’ said Larme sorrowfully. ‘Marched off the ship one morning like they’d heard the devil’s whistle. They never came back. That was Bosey’s doing, I’m telling you. Never met a man with fewer principles when coin was flashed before him. He killed those boys, I know he did. That’s why I ordered Wyck to cut his tongue out. I didn’t want any more of my lads disappearing with that bastard’s coin in their hand.’

‘I thought he was your friend,’ said Arent. ‘You built those smuggler’s compartments together, didn’t you?’

Larme whistled, impressed despite himself. ‘Aye, we built those holes together and made fair coin doing it, but that was as far as it went.’

Scratching his belly, Larme hopped off the stool.

He glanced at the arch leading out on to the waist, then sighed, as if losing the tug of war his conscience had been playing with him. ‘Be careful of your new friend Jacobi Drecht,’ he said.

‘Drecht, why?’

‘You ever hear of the Banda Islands?’

Arent shared a glance with Sara, remembering their breakfast discussion. His uncle had massacred everybody who lived there when they refused to honour a spice contract that would have left them starving.

‘What’s that got to do with Drecht?’

‘It was the Saardam they sent when the population revolted,’ said Larme. ‘Governor General was aboard; that’s how he knows the captain. He gave the order to slaughter everybody and he sent Jacobi Drecht and his musketeers to do it. Your friend butchered his way across those islands, then drank and sang the night away with his friends. Governor General gave him that sword for his loyalty, and he pledged more besides.’

‘More?’

‘A king’s fortune. More wealth than Drecht could ever spend, so long as he got him home safe. Turns out that’s how much it costs to convince somebody to slaughter children in their beds.’ Fury pulsed through him. ‘Old Tom’s welcome to the lot of them.’