CHAPTER 16
CORDELIA SMELLED THE DOCKS AT WAPPING before she saw them: the tang of tarry ship’s rigging combined with the muddy reek of the Thames.
A girl selling cockles from a handcart swerved around her, sailors heaving heavy sacks stumped past. Mules brayed, complaining, as they hauled wagons loaded with barrels. Cordelia goggled at the sheer volume of goods being carried in and out of Wapping. It seemed everything that came into London came through the docks.
She wove through the crowds and out onto the quayside. Moored at the wharves were several huge ships. They were ocean-going vessels, their enormous bodies stirring like sleeping giants on the tidal swell of the river.
Sailors whistled instructions to each other as they winched crates from the decks to the dockside. Girls sang ditties to advertise their wares.
“Fresh briny winkles!”
“Sugarcane of Caribbee!”
“Baccy from the New World!”
“Excuse me!” Cordelia called up to a sailor, lounging on top of a bale of cotton the size of a carriage. “Which way to the sickbay?”
The sailor pointed, and Cordelia pushed through the crowd. The sickbay was nothing more than a ramshackle shed. Inside, she found coils of thick rope stacked by the door and masses of slimy rigging abandoned in tangled heaps.
“Hello?” she called.
The air was stale and stifling. A dirty old piece of canvas sail was draped over a railing to make a curtain. She reached out toward it—
“ARRR!”
Cordelia jumped. Something stirred in the shadows. She squinted into the darkness.
Asleep, splayed on a pile of rope, was an old seadog. He was a man, not a dog, but he was so grizzled and unkempt that Cordelia immediately felt he should be thought of as a seadog. She peered at him. He clutched a bottle to his chest and twitched in his sleep.
“RAR … arrr,” he growled, huddling down into his rope-nest.
She considered waking him, but thought it was probably best to let sleeping seadogs lie. She pulled aside the sail-curtain and there, in a bed made from shipping crates and old sacking, lay Jack Fortescue: the cabin boy from the Jolly Bonnet.
Cordelia had last seen him scrambling up the rigging to the crow’s nest. Now he lay, small and still, his sleeping face puckered in a distressed expression.
“Jack?” she whispered.
She crept to his bedside, glad she had brought something for him. From her basket she took out the slab of fruitcake she had stolen from the kitchen and unwrapped it.
“Jack?” she whispered again. “You awake?”
She held the fruitcake near his face, hoping the sweet smell would wake him up.
“Jack?”
She wafted it under his nose but he did not stir. She shook him gently. His body was heavy like a sack of flour. Her heart started to pound. The cabin boy was in a deep sleep—too deep.
“JACK!” she shouted, shaking him harder. “WAKE UP!”
She looked around desperately. Perched on a nearby barrel was a jug of water and a small, dark bottle that looked like medicine. She snatched up the jug and threw the contents on Jack’s face.
“WATER!” he wailed, lurching upright. “WATER!” His face was dripping wet and terrified, his mouth a black O gasping for breath.
“It’s all right, Jack! You’re all right!” Cordelia cried.
“TOO MUCH WATER!”
“I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” she said, sobbing. “I didn’t mean to—”
“Everywhere! It’s everywhere!” Jack scrabbled frantically, as though he was trying to fight a great wave bearing down on him.
“You’re safe!” Cordelia whispered. “You’re safe!”
She caught his arms and held them steady. His breath came in shuddering gasps. She looked into his frightened eyes and tried to smile in a reassuring way.
“You’re all right, Jack,” she murmured. “You’re safe, you’re on dry land. See? Here, I’ve brought you some fruitcake.”
He clung to her as if she was saving him from drowning. His ragged gasping calmed a little, but he was still delirious.
“Jack?”
He blinked woozily at her and collapsed back onto the sacking. “In the drink,” he muttered.
Cordelia nodded. The drink was what sailors sometimes called the sea.
“I know you were, but you survived,” she said soothingly.
He shuddered and closed his eyes.
“I know this isn’t an ideal time to talk about this,” she said, stroking his hand gently. “But it’s really important. It’s about my father, Captain Hatmaker.”
Jack’s eyes snapped open. “Hat—Hatmaker! Captain Hatmaker!”
“Yes!” Cordelia cried, hope and fear shooting through her belly. She was on her feet. “He’s alive, isn’t he?”
Jack was agitated, struggling to sit up. “Cor—Cor—” he stammered. “Dil-ly!”
“Yes! It’s me! Can you tell me where Father is?”
Jack reached a shaking hand into his shirt. He pulled something out, burbling words Cordelia could not fathom. He was clutching a leather tube. She reached for it, but he swung it wildly to the side. The medicine bottle fell to the floor and smashed. A dark, bitter smell burned Cordelia’s nostrils.
“Oh, no!”
Exhausted, Jack dropped the leather tube onto his lap.
“For you,” he murmured. “From him.”
And he was asleep.
From him. For her! Cordelia snatched up the leather tube. It was heavier than it looked, capped at one end, and still damp from the sea. Fingers trembling, she pulled off the cap and tipped the tube upside down.
A shiny brass instrument slid out onto the bed. It was her father’s treasured telescope! He carried it at his side whenever he was on board ship.
She picked it up. The hands that had last held this instrument were her father’s. But why had he sent it to her?
“It must be a message,” she whispered. “Or some kind of sign?” She paused, almost expecting it to speak its message to her.
Carefully, she put her eye to the spying end of it. The pile of ropes near the bed was so close she could see the individual strands in the coarse twist of hemp. She took her eye away and blinked.
It was, as far as Cordelia could tell, just a normal telescope. All her hope and fear and excitement were ebbing away, leaving her empty and confused.
She put it back to her eye and swung it around.
“YAARRR!”
Bared yellow teeth and one popping eye!
“AAH!” Cordelia jerked the telescope away from her face. It was the old seadog. He stood swaying beside the dirty sail, his single, bloodshot eye fixed on Cordelia.
“What’s this, missy?” he rasped.
Cordelia caught a whiff of stale rum. “I—I’m his sister,” she invented. “I’ve come to visit him.”
The seadog tilted his head woozily. “Arr.” He caught sight of the broken medicine bottle on the ground and kicked it. “Blast. He’ll be in a bate ’bout it.”
“Is he going to be all right?” Cordelia asked, tucking the telescope safely out of sight inside her jacket.
The seadog swiveled his eye toward her.
“The sea does strange things to folk,” he muttered, before turning and lurching back past the sail-curtain. She heard glugging, then rattling snores a moment later.
She gazed down at Jack’s sleeping face.
“You know the truth, I’m certain of it,” she said softly to him. “But it’s all swirled up inside your head at the moment.”
“Cordelia!”
She swung around.
“Miss Starebottom!”
It was her governess, looking very out of place in her prim gray dress among all the rotting ship’s equipment.
“What on earth are you doing here, child?” she cried. “When Master Bootmaker told me that you were likely on the way to Wapping, I barely believed him. Nevertheless, I hurried here as soon as I could!”
Miss Starebottom picked her way delicately through the slimy ropes, looking around in disgust.
“This is no place for a young lady, Miss Hatmaker!” she said, pinching her nose closed. She took a pretty bottle out of her purse and sprayed Cordelia liberally with lavender water.
“Am I—in—trouble?” Cordelia coughed as the sweet scent tickled her throat.
“Oh, yes, you are in a great deal of trouble,” Miss Starebottom confirmed. “But I am at least happy to have found you before something dreadful happened. Come along—I’m taking you home. I have a phaeton waiting.”
Cordelia hesitated. She had been so close to finding out the truth about her father. She looked from her governess to Jack.
“Can we bring him with us?” she asked. “He needs looking after.”
Miss Starebottom peered at the sleeping cabin boy.
“He looks rather grubby,” she said disapprovingly. “You can ask your aunt when we get home.”
“But he needs looking after now! He’s sick!” Cordelia insisted.
Miss Starebottom raised one eyebrow. Cordelia knew this warning sign—one eyebrow meant Danger ahead, while two eyebrows meant Too late.
“Please?” Cordelia begged, in spite of the eyebrow.
In answer, Miss Starebottom took Cordelia’s hand and pulled her toward the door. The seadog snorted awake as they passed, but the governess emptied her entire bottle of lavender water on him and he collapsed in a cacophony of coughs.
Miss Starebottom whisked Cordelia out of the shed and along the docks toward the phaeton. They were going at a very unladylike pace indeed, but Miss Starebottom did not appear to care.