Next I turned my eyes to the sailors.
Some were appallingly young, hauling buckets of offal to dump over the side, wrestling with mops too big for their narrow builds, coiling rope into neat piles, sewing up tears in the sails; some were grizzled, grey hair frizzy, shadows or full beards on their faces, unwashed and uncaring, scarred and hard. In between were men in striped shirts of every age, but all them the same weathered brown of a world with no fear of melanoma driving them into wearing broad brimmed hats.
No faint pinkish sunburns here. No anachronistic glasses or contact lenses, as far as I could tell. No hearing aids. No conspicuously modern tattoos or the bulge of a cellular phone in a pocket, or a plastic earring. No outfit that seemed like it could have been reconstituted from a thrift shop sale, or build then worn down in a costume shop.
They were each and every one of them impeccably in character. They reeked of salt and sweat and men.
Damnation.
I wanted, needed, my theory to be right.
Below decks, I thought. Haven't been there yet. There has to be modern amenities – showers, toilets, a real kitchen. Cameras. Cameras need batteries, lights, constant mechanical attention. Repair gear. A green room, a director's chair, a playback screen.
I watched a cabin boy go below and followed a few steps behind. He startled to see me descending the ladder after him.
"Miss?" he said, more a question than an address. His face said 'WTF?' but his lips remained in a stubbornly courteous smile.
"I wanted to see... the chickens," I said, pointing suddenly to a cage against the curving wall of the hull.
But no, the chickens were not what I wanted either, especially not when they looked like this. There were only a few, and their pen looked fresh, if not thoroughly swept. I crossed the floor, not waiting for the boy's response, eyes on the joints for power cables taped against the boards, but saw nothing.
He followed behind, hovering behind my shoulder. I could practically feel his anxiety. "Miss, it's not fit down here, miss. For a woman like yourself, I mean."
"Like myself?" I asked, turning my gaze away from the straggly beasts. They would make poor eating at best, I thought, and couldn't possibly be healthy enough to be laying edible eggs, if any at all. Perhaps they had started their journey plumper, in the raucous company of their fellows.
They knew it too. I saw it in their eyes.
The haunting feeling of being the last one left.
The cabin boy cleared his throat politely and said, quietly, "Soft hands, nice teeth, expertly sewn, ah, breeches... you're a gentlewoman, yes, Miss?"
I looked down at those hands. One was balled up in white bandages and splints, the other was just balled up. I jammed that hand into my pocket, hiding the injured one behind my back.
He was waiting for my answer, polite but anxious that I should be out of here. That we both should.
I turned away, repeated my careful step by step circling of the vessel, eyes roving, good hand skimming the wall. "No," I said, stopping to bite my lip, to look here, to peer there, to take deep calming breaths. No digital screen glow, no led light flashing in the shadows. It had to be somewhere. "Or, maybe yes. My father owns land. I don't know. Does that count? That's what 'gentleman' really meant, right? Landowner?"
I heard the cabin boy move away, clamber back up the steep ladder, no doubt to tattle to the Captain. I had to move quick now, through a door in a wall that separated the coop from what appeared to be the storage for cooking implements and ingredients. Great big barrels labelled "water" and "brandy" and "salt" and "tack." Nothing here, nothing hidden behind the barrels, nothing in the triangle of empty space in the corner, nothing modern in the cauldron that sat cold and congealing. Through the next door, around the stacks of cannonballs, behind the gunpowder, the careful and regimental rows of muskets and bayonets.
Desperation rushed me through the next door at the far end of the room, to a sort of wedge shaped room with holes cut into the floor. Through them I could see the water rushing past. I could guess the use for this room by the ripe outhouse smell.
Turning on the balls of my feet, running now, back past the chickens too listless to be startled by my fly-by, into a room that looked like a surgery but, oh, god, so wrong. Everything was wood and stained steel and there were no bright lights, no bottles of antiseptic, no latex gloves. I dashed opened every drawer, flicked up the locking hooks and flung back the doors of the cabinets, ravished the chest. Tinctures, bottles, books with cramped, spidery writing. No mirrors. No hepa masks. Nothing with computer-generated font labeling the bottles.
Through the last door, into nose of the ship, a small cramped cabin with a small cramped bed and a small cramped man startled away from his desk and his wavering candle light. I had not caught him out of character – he was in his historical costume, writing with a quill, eyes wide and startled behind small spectacles.
"Miss Franklin?" he asked, standing but stooping to avoid the ceiling. "Is there anything I can provide?"
The driving, pulsing need to find my way behind the wizard's curtains stuttered to a startled stop. "You know my name?"
"Of course, Miss Franklin." He wiped inky fingers on his black breeches. "I am the ship's surgeon, Doctor Brown. Do you require...?"
"Painkiller," I blurted. "Willow bark tea. Opium. Oh, god, an answer." Yes, that was it. "An answer, please!"
"Miss Franklin..." he spread spidery fingers, helpless in the face of my cryptic desperation.
I didn't wait for what he said, heard the shouting above deck, Captain Goodenough's distinctive, feedback loop voice over the high hysterics of a boy: "She shouldn't be down here, and you know damn well that I told you to particularly keep everyone away of the storage crates in the lower aft."
"I know sir, it's my hide sir, I know, but she--"
"No!" I shouted, not sure what I was denying exactly; maybe Goodenough's approach and his inevitable calling off of my search, maybe that I couldn't find what I wanted, maybe that I hurt and scared and yet I felt nothing, and I could not make it stop.
I turned again on my heel, bracing my injured hand against my chest, and bolted for the middle of the room, for the hole there, for the ladder. I flew down it, feet barely touching the rungs. I hit the bottom of the boat hard with both feet, teeth clicking painfully.
"Keep her out of there!" I heard Captain Goodenough roar, but just barely.
The ocean was loud here, sloshing, in my ears again, pressing against my lungs. I couldn't breathe. I put my hands over my ears.
"No," I said, again, I cried it, gasping. "No!"
I couldn't breathe.
I rushed through the hanging rows of hammocks and the squat cots, elbowing men out of their deserved naps after a night of sentinel duty, around the perimeter again until I found it.
I stopped, feet suddenly anchored to the boards, heart leaping up into my mouth.
"Oh," I said, reaching out with my good hand. Air filled my chest like a rush of ice. There was a stack of about five small cargo crates, painted black with just a small "L" chalked into a corner. And in front of that...
The pile was laid on a piece of sheet metal, too smooth and strange to have come from this time, this place; of plastic pill bottles, filled with air so they couldn't sink, of cushions and a few still-inflated life jackets, of cell phones and still-damp clothing, hats and carry-on luggage and the little dolly with a plastic head that had kept it above the waves when it's owner had no chance, no chance.
"No!" I said again. "It's wrong, it's all wrong. It shouldn't be here. I shouldn't be here."
I picked up the cell phone and chucked it out of an open porthole. The splash was lost in the rush of the waves, so close to the window, but the spray of salt met my nose sharply. I threw the doll, what metal I could handle, gathered up the life jackets and pulled the air plugs and shoved them out into the sea. Gone, gone. To drown like the rest of them in time.
"Miss Franklin!" someone barked, and it was was familiar but my head and my hand throbbed, my throat was closed, my eyes burning, and I couldn't comprehend what he was shouting. I picked up the pill bottles, drugs that can't exist, shouldn't yet, and was too into the cathartic rhythm of my whole scale decimation to check to see which I had prayed for earlier: which were heavy painkillers, which were antibiotics. I did not want to read the names on the labels. I just opened the caps and committed the rainbow of medicines to the deep.
"Stop!" someone yelled into my ear, and then there were hands again, those same strong, square hands, on my arms, sliding around my middle, across my collarbone to hold me secure and firm against a hard chest, a soft jacket.
"Shhh," the voice said, soothing and grave. "Shh, shh."
I struggled for a moment, but hitting my right hand against his thigh did nothing but make my fingers protest in sharp agony. It felt as if every molecule of air vanished from my body. My eyes and throat burned.
I sagged, locked into his embrace, dangling. I felt the tears, hot on my cheeks, dripping down my neck, soaking into my hair and the collar of my tee shirt. I felt, finally,
I felt.
"It's wrong," I said again, one last hitching protest.
"I know, it is powerfully unfair," he said. The hand on my middle slid away, up my arm, to pet my hair, push it back behind my ears, calming, steady.
"Captain?" I warbled, not even sure what I was asking for.
"I'm here," he said. He bent his legs and I could not help but go too, sitting on the floor, his knees against the small of my back, hot. I needed him there, suddenly; the support, the strength. The kindness. I reached down with my good hand and gripped the top of his foot, fingers digging into the beat-up leather.
Murmurs around us, men's voices low and rushed. Then something against my lips, a hot cup, the scent of a bitter tea.
"It's the willowbark, Miss," the cramped little Doctor said, and he was crouching just inside of my peripheral vision. His face was white, strained. "It will soothe you."
I heard the words hysterical and woman and brain fever.
Nobody here had ever heard of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
I let go of Goodenough reluctantly, and lifted my left hand, shaking, and took the tea. I spilled half down my jacket front, across the back of Captain Goodenough's hand. He didn't jerk back. I lifted the rest to my mouth, sucked on it until there was nothing but dregs. A powerful exhaustion gripped me, though I knew the tea could not have begun to work so fast. It was just the aftermath of spent adrenaline. My arms shook, all my joints gone to water.
The Doctor caught the cup before I could let it fall. It was fine china, I saw. Probably his only fine possession on board, and he had let me drink from it.
I was glad it did not break.
"There now," the Captain said. He pulled back tentatively.
"I'm sorry," I said and even my voice sounded tired and wet. The ocean pounded against the walls, against my ears. I tried to cover them again, but the Doctor grabbed my wrists before I could. "The sound," I whined.
"Above decks, then," the Doctor said. "Into the sunlight."
The climb up into the daylight was slow, each action forgotten as soon as it was performed. Suddenly I was on a bench and everyone was as studiously not looking at me as much as they had been surreptitiously gawking before. My right hand was lifted, unbound, tutted over. I didn't want to look but I had too. The fingers were gnarled, hooking already into the useless form of dead muscle and poorly healed bone, despite the sticks meant to keep them straight. Useless.
A sudden fear seized my throat.
I might never write again. Never with that hand.
"I'll have to learn to be ambidextrous," I said, and that terrifying nervous laughter bubbled out of me again before I could manage to cover my mouth.
"More tea," the Doctor said. Already my hand was just a slightly lessened haze of pain, and I welcomed the second cup. A blanket was thrown over my shoulders, despite the blazing noon sun overhead. I shook. Was I cold? I didn't know.
Oh. Shock again. Shame. Feeling had been good, while it lasted.
My hands still shook and it was Captain Goodenough, his doe eyes concerned and glittering, that helped me steady the tea cup towards my mouth. I drank.
"Not too much damage," the Doctor said. "The hysterics are understandable. She's been through the sinking of her ship, the loss of ... everyone."
I didn't like being discussed like furniture, aware and there, but assumed deaf. But I couldn't manage to say so.
"It's..." I said, then stopped. My eyelids felt heavy. Was there more than just willow bark in that tea? "Wrong? I can't find it. Anything. How can there be nothing?" I stopped, licked my lips. They tingled, numb.
Numb. Numb, yes, I liked that word. That was a good word. A very good word.
Numb, numb, numb. That was just fine.
"No," I corrected myself. "It's not wrong. It's October, 1805."
"It is," Captain Goodenough said.
"Nearly Hallowe'en."
The Captain and the Doctor exchanged a worried glance. Oh, yes, of course. Hallowe'en wasn't a thing yet. Not the way I knew it, at least.
Nearly Hallowe'en and I was on board a sailing ship from two centuries previous and I felt like a ghost, swathed in my grey blanket staring into the grey mist collecting in the sky overhead, an angry thunderhead. Was it pathetic pathos? Did it come because I was in misery?
It was my imagination, surely it was imagination, that I kept hearing the sound of that tearing metal in my ears. I was fairly certain I was going to be hearing it forever. It sounded so much like a human scream.
"Almost Hallowe'en," I said again. "Trick or treat. One fucking hell of a trick."
Captain Goodenough's hand was immediately under my elbow, scuttling me back into the cool darkness of his cabin, pushing me onto the bed, where I had already spent more time than I wanted.
"Who are you really?" I asked, squinting up into his face, reaching out to touch, to see if my hand would pass right through.
If he replied, I didn't hear it.
Sleep was insistent and I had no strength left to fight it off.
* * *
I woke to the sound of the night watch's hour call: Three in the morning. All was well.
At least, everything would be well if he'd stop shouting every hour on the hour and waking us all the fuck up.
I wasn't alone in the room, but I was alone in the bed. Captain Goodenough was strung up on a hammock, ends tied to the beams of the ceiling, hanging between me and the door. I had taken his bed, and he was clearly unwilling to let me venture out alone again, even as he slept.
The rain was a susurrus patter against the roof, along the deck, tapping like a patient lover against the thick swirled windowpanes. I sat up. The boat swayed under me, but it wasn't dizziness. The pang of want twisted my stomach for a moment; but this time I could pinpoint the object of my desire - dry, steady, unmoving land. Civilization. The familiar, comfortable things that I was accustomed to, my friends, my family, my apartment.
Soon, I hoped. Soon.
I pushed my feet into my chucks, now completely dry, and lowered myself carefully to the floor. Crawling was hard with only one hand, but I bit my lip to cut off the little groans and puffs of exertion. Laying myself flat, I squirmed under the hammock and opened the door quietly, pushing down on the handle to prevent the hinges from squeaking out an alarm.
Then I was out in the fresh air, pulling myself to my feet with the aid of the rail on the staircase that led up to the wheel. My feet tingled with pins and needles and my brain frizzled with half a plan, no real direction. I stumbled over to the side. It wasn't until my fingers were actually tangling themselves in the ropes that I realized what I meant to do.
I should have felt scared.
Instead I felt nothing. The numbness had come back, the flushed and ranging emotion quenched by the rain and the willowbark tea and grief.
I hoisted myself up onto the top of the rail, the curve of the wood pressing my sneakers against the arches of my feet. I swung out, arms locked behind me, fingers still gripping with white-knuckled tenacity to the rope. It burned along the pads of my fingers and I relished the pain, the hot sensation in the middle of a grey fog of non-feeling.
I looked down.
Below my toes, the water frothed, jumping, as if to lick the grime of what was left of the future off of my soles, out of the tiny valleys of the treads. The rain made the wood slippery.
I heard it again: the screaming child, the screaming metal, the chemical scream of fire.
"Stop it," I whispered, squeezing my eyes shut, but all I could see behind them was the red orange blaze, the dinner trays flying up to splatter against the ceiling, the sky falling away too fast through the window. Then I shouted it, screamed it from the bottom of my stomach, from my bowels, from the sour twisting place all the way down: "Stop it!"
The world went silent. I could not hear the rain. I could not hear the waves. I could only hear the reverberating echo of my voice, my command, rolling back at me from across the ocean, from across the horizon, from across a time that was no longer mine.
Then nothing. White noise stuffed into my ears like cotton.
And then a soft voice: "Miss Franklin."
There was no reproach in it, no warning, no fear. Just my name.
I turned without looking at him, head down, concentrating on the climb, bending down to crouch on the rail, placing one foot and then the other on the slick deck. My fingers finally uncurled. Let go. Backed away.
"Miss Franklin," he said again.
I didn't look up.
I walked over the cabin door, now hanging open, a black mouth. There was nothing there. I wanted nothing. I wanted to be nothing. I walked in, pushed past the limp, empty hammock, and fell face first onto the bed, pushing my nose and cheeks and eyebrows against the flat, lumpy pillow.
He came back in, shut the door, said not a word.
Sleep came again, and this time, there were no dreams.
There was nothing.
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