The Wanton Rose

The clerk set it down in four words. I read them over his shoulder and did not think to argue. *Master, one. Souls, two.* He had a good hand, that clerk. I have outlived him, and the room, and the harbour, and the man who paid him, and I can still see the page. I have had a long time to decide what belongs in its place. Of the three people in that room, the one with the ship was not obviously the one to bet on. I did not know it. Nor did the clerk. Nor did the other two correct us. Titania, Baxter, Breegarra. I set them down in that order in my own book, because the clerk had not set them down at all. I was there for my own reasons. I had cargo I wanted off that island, and away from a man who was coming for it, and I was too old for the water even then. What the cargo was, I am not going to say. I have had forty years to decide, and I have decided. It is the one thing here I will keep. So I found them a run, and a gap in the ring, and told myself I was doing business. Captain Breegarra had the fast ship and the papers to go with it. The papers were a commission signed for a Crown whose fleet Teach had broken to kindling the month before. I knew they were worthless. She did not say more, and neither did I. The clerk probably knew, but that was procedural habit. And an excuse. I offered Breegarra men. Eleven, aboard by morning, and I made it sound like generosity. It was not. Eleven of my men on her deck is eleven pairs of eyes on my cargo. She said no. I asked why. She said a blockade is not carried, it is slipped, and every man aboard is another man to be seen, and fed, and got off again at the other end. She said it the way you would hand somebody a glass of water. I put it down to pride. It has taken me a long while to realize it was human arithmetic. The big man at the window had not spoken yet. His name was Baxter, and there is a word that goes after it which nobody in that room used. I have heard three accounts of it and believe none of them. I had looked him over on my way in and decided he was hired for his hands. Breegarra laid out the run and Baxter heard her to the end. She meant to go through in the dark with no lights, which is what anyone would do, and what I would have done. Baxter said, "They sleep in watches. Every man on that line has spent six weeks looking into the dark for exactly what you have just described, and they are very good at it." She said, "And in daylight?" He said, "At dusk. Lamps lit, papers out, slow. Like a woman with nothing to hide and somewhere dull to be." He did not ask leave to say it. He said it across her own ship's table in front of a stranger, which on a bad ship is a hanging matter, and he said it in the voice of a man giving the weather. He was not hired for his hands. He was the reason the run was possible, and he had stood there the whole time I was working out what to offer the captain. She thought about it for as long as it takes to fill a cup. Then she said, "We will do it your way," and turned the chart round so he could mark it. She did not thank him, and did not apologise, and did not make a performance of being large about it. She stopped being right, in front of me, and got on. Titania had been at the door when I came in, arms folded, and in an hour had not spoken. In the second hour she went down into the town. In less than an hour more she came back up with the surgeon. I asked about him much later, because I ask about people. Galen Skelton had been put out of the Navy for objecting to the flogging of men, twice taken prisoner and twice got out, and he was twenty years younger than his face. Skelton heard the terms and the money and said no. He had a man in a room above a rope-walk with a gut wound that had turned. The man could not be moved, and Skelton would not leave him. I had begun thinking where else a surgeon might be got when Titania said, "Bring him." Breegarra said a man in that condition dies if you move him. Galen backed the claim up. He would not survive the carry, and he said it to the captain. Titania said, "There is no math to this thing. The man does not survive it aboard, in a bed, with a doctor beside him, or he does not survive it here on his own. But he dies staying here for certain. Teach is four days out and this island has three days in it." She had been down in the town, and nobody had asked her what she saw there. Then she said the thing that ended it: "We are taking him. I will carry him. The rest of you can stand there." She had her coat off the hook before she finished saying it, which I took at the time for rudeness. Galen looked at her for a while. Then he said, "Above the rope-walk, third door." Then he asked for pen and ink to sign as Breegarra's surgeon. I had been in that room since noon, and it had not once come to me that Titania might be the one to speak to. I had her down as the kind one, which in my trade is a way of saying the one who will not last. It is the only judgement I made in that room that I am still ashamed of, and I have made a great many. Breegarra paid Galen a day's wage he had not worked, which I noticed, because I notice money, and thought a careless way to run a ship. Then she opened the ship's book and entered the man above the rope-walk in it, by name, in the column for persons carried. Somebody had thought to ask him his name. It was not me. It took time, but that simple thing brought me towards an understanding of why she stood on the captain's side of the table. They sailed the next evening at dusk with their lamps lit. I had that from a man who watched them go. I did not go down to the water, and I have stood on that quay a hundred times since without being able to say why.

I was not there. What I have of that morning came to me later and in pieces, and some of it I had to put together myself, so take it as a man telling what he was told. She came up on a beach on the north side of an island that had no name that anyone in Tortuga used. The sea had put her above the tide line, which is more than the sea usually troubles to do. When she woke the sun was already off the water and into her face, and her mouth was full of sand and salt, and she was lying on her right side with one arm under her. Her shirt had a hole in it, front and back, and the cloth around the hole was stiff and dark. Under the cloth there was nothing. No wound, no scar, no tenderness when she pressed it. The shot had gone through her and gone on, and the only record of it left in the world was in the linen. She told me she sat there a while working her fingers over that one place, front and back, front and back, as though the thing she was after had only slid somewhere she had not yet looked. The marks began over her heart, where the shot had gone in, and ran out along her arm to the ends of her fingers. She described them as lines with a light in them, and the light was cold — cold the way a window is cold, not the way water is. When she touched them it hurt, and it went on hurting for some minutes after she had taken her hand away, and she did not touch them again that day. The medallion was still on her, which I have always thought strange, because the sea takes everything else. Her father had put it round her neck and told her never to be without it. It came out of the water with the stone split across and something brown worked into the setting that did not come out with rubbing, and she rubbed at it for a long time with the ball of her thumb, sitting on the sand in wet clothes. Then she got up and walked. She had it in her head to find the end of the beach, and there was no end to it. The sand went round, and the trees went round with it, and in time she came on two lines of footprints going away from her that were her own, and stood over them. She counted who had gone off that deck into the water. There were more than two. It was two she was standing there counting — a boy with rope in his hands and the ledger in his head, and a woman who would not be told what could not be carried — and by that evening she had them both down as drowned. There was nothing on that island to tell her otherwise. She was wrong. She went on being wrong a long while, and of all the counts I knew her keep, that is the only one she had short.