The waves’ caps blurred into a dizzying blue mass. I felt myself swaying and gripped the rail. My corset was bound too tightly. Blood wasn’t flowing to my brain. I didn’t know how to process these feelings. Safety. Warmth. Affection—God, I wasn’t a little girl anymore—maybe it was more than just affection.
I pressed my fingers against my eyes and looked back at the waves. A strange sight: a dark mass against the sea. I blinked to clear my head.
A hundred feet away from us a battered dinghy bobbed, half sunk. I squeezed my eyes shut.
“Juliet, are you all right? Did you hear what I said?”
But when I opened my eyes again, I saw that the dinghy was real.
So was the hunched body inside.
Eight
“CAPTAIN! THERE’S A MAN adrift,” Montgomery yelled. I dug my fingers into the chipped rail. The dinghy was quickly taking on water, sinking lower and lower.
“Could he be alive?” I gasped.
“Doubtful. Must have been drifting for days. We’ve been at sea nine weeks and haven’t seen another ship.”
The captain shuffled over, cursing loudly, and shoved me aside as he peered over the rail. “Bloody devil,” he muttered, and signaled to the first mate. “Turn us alongside her!”
A red-nosed young deckhand helped Montgomery lower some line, hand over hand, so fast that watching made me dizzy. As the ship swung to aft, the sinking dinghy drew closer until it knocked against the hull. The waterlogged body lay curled in the bottom, a hideous display. The tatters of a coat, bleached and salt-stained, covered his upper half. Torn trousers ended midcalf over bare feet that were scarcely more than bones. What would we find under the clothes? A bloated corpse? Bleached bones scoured clean by salt and sand? I found myself leaning dangerously far over the rail.
“Larsen, you’re lightest,” Montgomery said. The deckhand swung a leg over the side and disappeared. I waited tensely with the group of sailors. Even the monkey watched. A cloud passed overhead, stealing our sunlight. A few fat raindrops fell on my face.
Suddenly, a rough hand took my wrist and pulled me away. Balthasar. He led me to the sheepdog’s cage, where we could watch from a distance, sheltering us from the coming rain with a canvas cloth.
“Thank you,” I muttered, hugging my arms, though I still wanted to be watching from up close.
“Montgomery says a lady must be protected.”
I looked at him askance. If Montgomery and Balthasar thought I’d never seen a gruesome image before, they were mistaken. I wasn’t that kind of lady. I started to say as much, but Balthasar seemed proud, as if he was protecting a proper young woman, so I kept my mouth shut.
A murmur spread through the men like spring rain, and I strained to hear. I caught only one word, but it was enough.
Alive.
I itched to move closer, but knew I should stay with Balthasar. Another sailor climbed over the side. The line jerked wildly, held fast by the second mate and his watch crew. At Montgomery’s signal, they pulled. Several feet of line came up. The sailors hoisted up Larsen along with the castaway. The unconscious body fell upon the deck, dripping with seawater. The crew swarmed closer.
Unable to resist, I tore away from Balthasar. He called after me not to look, but I felt compelled to, dragged forward by an invisible hand. I slipped quietly among the sailors, catching glimpses between their swarthy frames.
Montgomery rolled the body carefully to its back. It was a young man, a little older than me, unconscious and so battered and beaten by the sea that I couldn’t believe he had survived. His hand clutched a tattered photograph as though, in his last hours of consciousness, the image was all he’d had left to cling to.
I blinked, paralyzed by the image of that bruised hand holding a photograph. A coldness stole my breath. I had been drawn by morbid curiosity like a vulture to carnage. But this wasn’t some lifeless corpse—it was a person, with a heart and a hope. Alive.
I drifted among the sailors, keeping my distance, almost afraid that if I stepped closer my curiosity would once again take control of my limbs. I glimpsed a blood-soaked bandage wrapped around his leg. I imagined him alone and desperate in the dinghy, tending to his wound and wondering if he was going to die out there.
Montgomery’s lips silently counted the young man’s pulse. “Fetch some water!” he called.
A sailor shifted, giving me a clear look at the castaway’s face. I’d never been one to turn away from blood, but my heart twisted at the sight. A crusted and seeping gash ran down one side of his face, just below his eye. Sun blisters covered his cheeks and forehead. His salt-stained dark hair tangled like the seaweed that washed up at low tide in Brighton. His eyes were closed.
It struck me he was almost a ghost, straddling the fine line between the living and the dead. I wanted him to live, to see again whatever was so important in that photograph, as if it would make up for my morbid fascination.
The rain came harder now. A sailor pushed past me with a flask. Montgomery held it to the castaway’s lips, but he didn’t wake, so Montgomery poured the water over his face instead. A slight moan. A cough. And then the castaway jerked awake, blinking, rain streaking down his face. His wild eyes darted back and forth.
“We found you at sea,” Montgomery said. “Can you speak? What’s your name?”
But the castaway shook his head, muttering something I couldn’t make out, clutching the photograph so hard it crumpled. He grew more agitated with each breath, kicking and tearing at some invisible demon. The gash on his face reopened, and a line of dark blood rolled down his neck.