Chapter Three

in which sam investigates

I read [history] a little as a duty, but it tells me nothing that does not vex or weary me [. . .] the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all.—Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

I straightened with less grace than my yoga instructor would have liked, and tried not to look too guilty. The cabin was visibly rifled, so it wasn’t very effective.

Captain Goodenough was holding a wooden tray, with the kind of forced smile that made it clear that he was going to pretend I hadn’t just ransacked the place. He set the tray down on top of the messy pile of papers on his desk. Wordlessly, I accepted a cup of tea still swirling with a generous daub of milk, and a hard cookie.

“I do apologize,” the captain said, resuming his seat behind the desk. I perched on the edge of the bed. “Ship’s biscuit is a poor breakfast for a guest, but we are a few days at slow limp from port, and our rations are otherwise depleted.”

“No, it’s fine,” I said quickly. “I’m actually not that hungry.”

Following his lead, I dipped the cookie into the tea to soften it before taking a bite.

It tasted like rancid flour.

Also, I hated milky tea.

My opinion of my first mouthful must have been extremely clear on my face, because the captain matched it with his own grimace and apologized again.

I sipped the tea anyway, because I could guess what a commodity fresh dairy must be after a voyage.

“If you are feeling more the thing, the weather has cleared,” the captain offered, trying to make it seem like he wasn’t judging my every bite. “It might be an opportune time for, ah, a promenade? Shall I leave you to dress? We can convene on the quarterdeck. That is”—he pointed above our heads—“up the stairs, by the wheel. I shall wait for you there.”

“Works for me.”

With a bemused head tilt at my turn of phrase, the captain bowed himself out, leaving me alone with the mess I’d made. Feeling like an idiot, I tidied up as best I could.

Though it was warming up in the aftermath of the storm, my button-down was too thin, and my jean jacket still too damp at the seams to be comfortable. I shrugged into one of the knit sweaters I’d found in a chest reeking of mothballs at the end of the bed.

Feeling guilty and revolted and extremely parched, I gulped the now-cold tea in one bolt. Terrible, but my tongue felt looser and my headache throbbed a bit lower. The cut on my tongue stung and my bruised ribs complained.

I wanted aspirin, morphine, codeine, something . Did they have painkillers in the nineteenth century? There was a ship’s surgeon, surely there had to be something he could give me.

A sudden thought occurred to me, sharpish and bright.

What if this was some reality show? What if they were filming a movie, or these were very in-character reenactors? What if this was real , but not reality ?

The thought had me out the door before it finished zinging across my brain. As promised, when I craned my head back to peer up at the quarterdeck, the captain was standing by the wheel, murmuring to another officer. The timbre of his voice resonated in my marrow: ’Tis the year 1805. Hand to God.

Instead of joining him, I went over to the rail and settled my palm against the smooth, worn lacquer. I put one foot in front of the other, heel just touching toe, and then switched. Forward I went, hand still on the rail, eyes on the water, on the joinings, on the crow’s nest, in the rigging. Plastic, that was what I wanted to see: a cable, a black mesh cover, a wireless aerial, a battery pack with a flashing bulb. Microphones. Hidden cameras.

The men were doing “sailorly” things, and either ignored me or were so discreet in their regard that I didn’t feel their eyes on me. I supposed I looked a sight: strange shoes, canvas-encased legs, and a knit sweater slightly too big for me swirling around my hips as I walked, the shoulder seams almost to my elbows, the cuffs rolled up in an ungainly tube of fabric. They stepped back as I passed, watching my measured steps, then returned to their work once I was out of the way. No one said a thing, indulging the wild creature among them.

I paused when I reached the rear to peer over the rail. The ship cut into the water, peeling out a white wake, no propellors visible.

Back there, I thought. Somewhere back there, but it’s gone now, the breadcrumb path. This isn’t what I’m looking for.

Any other time I would have felt a fool. But right then I yearned. It filled my belly with fire. Good for distracting me from the thirst I had no intention of quenching. I circled around the other side of the deck, step by step by step, eyes roving until I was back where I’d started.

Nothing.

Below decks. There must be modern amenities: showers, toilets. Cameras need batteries and repair gear. Shows need a director’s chair, a playback screen.

A cabin boy went below, and I followed.

“Miss?” he said, more a question than an address when he found me descending after him. His face said WTF? despite a stubbornly courteous smile.

“I wanted to see . . . the chickens.” I pointed to a cage against the curving wall of the hull.

But no, the chickens were not what I wanted, especially not when they looked like this. There were only a few in the fresh-swept pen. I crossed the floor, not waiting for the boy’s response, eyes on the corners for power cables taped against the boards.

He followed, hovering behind my shoulder, vibrating anxiety. “S’not fit down here fer a woman like yourself.”

“Like myself?” I asked, turning to the straggly birds. “There’s no one like myself here. That’s the problem.”

The chickens would make poor eating at best, 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. But they were quiet and sad.

I saw it in their eyes: the haunting truth of being the last ones left.

“But you’re a gentlewoman, yeh?”

He was waiting for my answer, polite but eager that I should be out of here. That we both should. I turned away, repeated my careful step by step circling of the vessel, my hand skimming the wall, looking for secret passages or electrical outlets.

“No,” I answered. I stopped, bit my lip, took calming breaths. No digital screen glowed in the shadows, no lights winked. “Or maybe yes. My father is a landowner. Does that count?”

Fun fact, my father’s memory said, the word gentleman originally meant “man of noble birth and means,” and was often used for the otherwise untitled younger sons of minor gentry.

I mourned Dad suddenly and fiercely, like a fist around my rib cage. I raised my eyes to the ceiling to keep from crying right then and there.

Focus. Find the truth. Find the way out.

The boy clambered back up the steep ladder, no doubt to tattle. I had to move quickly now. First, through a door in a wall that separated the coop from what appeared to be the storage for cooking implements and ingredients. There were great barrels labeled sweet water, brandy, salt, and tack . Nothing behind the barrels, nothing modern in the cauldron that sat cold and congealing. Through the next door, and I peered around stacks of cannonballs, behind gunpowder and regimented rows of muskets and bayonets.

Desperation rushed me through the next door, to a wedge-shaped room at the back of the ship. There were holes cut into the floor. Under them the water rushed past, just a few feet below. I guessed the use for this room by the ripe outhouse smell.

Turning. Running now. Back past the chickens too listless to be startled as I flew by, into a room that looked like a surgery, but wrong. Everything was wood and porcelain. There were no bright lights, no stainless steel, no latex gloves. I dashed open drawers, flicked up the locking hooks and flung back cabinet doors, rifled the chest. Tinctures, bottles, books with cramped, spidery writing. No surgical masks. Nothing with computer-generated font on the labels.

Through the last door, into the nose of the vessel, a small cramped cabin with a small cramped bed, where a small cramped man startled away from a desk in the wavering candlelight. I had not caught him out of character—he was in his historical costume, writing with a quill, eyes wide and startled behind tiny spectacles.

“Miss Franklin?” he asked, stooped to avoid the low ceiling. “Is there anything I can provide?”

The driving, pulsing need to find my way behind the wizard’s curtain stuttered to a shocked stop. “You know my name?”

“Of course, Miss Franklin.” He wiped inky fingers on his black breeches. “I am the ship’s surgeon, Dr. Begam. Do you require . . . ?”

“Painkiller,” I blurted. “Oh god, an answer .”

“Miss Franklin,” he hedged, helpless in the face of my confusing desperation.

He was interrupted by shouting above deck, Captain Goodenough’s distinctive voice over the fluting hysterics of the boy: “She shouldn’t be down here, and you know damn well that I told you to particularly keep everyone away from the lower aft.”

“I know, sir, it’s my hide, sir, 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 was scared and yet I felt nothing , and I could not make it stop .

Please, please, let it make sense.

I bolted for the middle of the ship, for the hole there, for the ladder. I flew down it, feet barely touching the rungs. I hit the bottom of the boat hard, teeth clacking painfully.

“Stop her!” Captain Goodenough roared.

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 gasped. “No!”

I couldn’t breathe .

I wriggled through hanging rows of hammocks and squat cots, elbowing sailors out of sleep. No anachronistic glasses or contact lenses. 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 constructed and then weathered down in a costume shop.

Another door, unlocked, but only because there was someone working inside, sorting piles of detritus. The sailor froze. So did I.

“Oh.” I stumbled forward, fingers splayed as if magnetized. Air filled my chest like a rush of ice. There was a stack of small cargo crates, painted black with just a small l chalked in a corner. I ignored those. Not important. Because in front of that . . .

The pile teetered on a piece of sheet metal. On top of it: plastic pill bottles, cushions and a few still-inflated life jackets, cell phones and clothing, hats and carry-on luggage, and the little dolly with a plastic head that had kept it above the waves while the child it used to comfort had no chance.

“No!” I said again. “We shouldn’t be here.”

There was a window. Sea level, half-painted shut, but I wrenched on the handle, shoved, shoved until the wood splintered and it thwacked open. The sailor tried to grab me. I elbowed him in the gut. First, the doll. I closed its bobble eyes then chucked it out of the porthole. The splash was lost in the rush of the waves, but salt hit my nose sharply. Then a life jacket. I pulled the air plugs and shoved it out and into the sea. Gone, gone. To drown like the rest of them.

“Miss Franklin!” someone barked, and it was familiar, but my head throbbed. My eyes burned, and I couldn’t comprehend the words that followed. I picked up the pill bottles, drugs that couldn’t exist, shouldn’t yet, and was too into the cathartic rhythm of my wholescale decimation to check to see if any were the kind of painkillers I had begged for moments earlier.

But I did not want to read the names of the dead patients 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, strong, square hands, sliding around my middle, across my collarbone to hold me secure and firm against a hard chest.

“Shhh,” the voice said, soothing and grave. “Shh, shh.”

I sagged, locked into his embrace, dangling. Tears dripped down my neck, soaking into my hair and my collar. I felt, finally.

I felt .

And it was awful .

“It’s wrong,” I sobbed, one last hitching protest. “Please. I don’t understand.”

“It is powerfully unfair,” he said. The hand on my middle slid away, up my arm, to pet my hair, 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, strong and supportive. Kind. I gripped the top of his foot, fingers digging into the beat-up leather of his boot. Grounding.

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 willow bark,” the cramped little doctor said, crouching just inside my peripheral vision. His expression was strained. “For the pain. It will soothe you.”

Around us, the sailors murmured hysterical and brain fever .

Nobody here had heard of post-traumatic stress disorder.

I let go of the captain reluctantly and took the tea. My hands shook so badly that I spilled half down the sweater, across his hand. He didn’t jerk away. I lifted the rest to my mouth, sucked on it until there was nothing but dregs. A powerful exhaustion gripped me. The tea couldn’t have worked so fast. It was just the aftermath of spent adrenaline. My limbs trembled, my joints gone to jelly.

The doctor caught the cup before I could let it fall. It was fine china, I saw. Maybe his only fine possession on board, and he had let me drink from it.

I was glad it didn’t break.

“There now,” the captain said. He pulled back tentatively.

The ocean pounded against the walls, against my ears.

“The sound,” I whined, and even my voice sounded wrecked.

“Above decks, then,” the doctor said.

The climb into the daylight was a numb haze, each action forgotten as soon as it was performed. Suddenly, I was seated on a barrel. The crew was as studiously not looking at me as much as they had been surreptitiously gawking before.

“I asked to live, but I didn’t mean this,” I said huskily, but knew better than to expect an answer from the universe. “Why this ?”

That terrifying nervous laughter bubbled out of me before I could cover my mouth.

“More tea,” the doctor replied.

My hands still shook and it was the captain, his doe-like eyes glittering with concern, who helped me steady the teacup toward my mouth. I drank. 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 something had been nice while it lasted.

“The hysterics are understandable,” the doctor said. He sounded a thousand miles away. “She’s been through the sinking of her ship, and a great loss.”

I didn’t like being discussed like I couldn’t hear, like I was just so much furniture.

“It’s . . .” My eyelids were getting heavy. Had there been more than just painkillers in that tea? “Wrong? I can’t find it. Anything. How can there be nothing?”

I licked my lips. They tingled, numb. Numb. Numb, yes, I liked that word. A very good word. Numb, numb, numb.

That was just fine.

“No,” I corrected myself. “It’s not fine. It’s October 1805.”

“It is,” the captain 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.

I was on board a sailing ship from two centuries previous and I was the ghost. I was swathed in a gray blanket staring into the gray mist collecting in the sky overhead, condensing into an angry cloud.

“Who are you really?” I asked, squinting up at the captain, reaching out to touch, to see if my hand would pass through his solidity.

It didn’t.

“I am Fenton Goodenough,” he answered softly. He took my hand between his, warm and reassuring. Alive. “You are Samantha Franklin.”

“Am I?” I asked. “What would I have to do, to go back? To be Sammie again? Can you tell me?”

A crackle of thunder drowned out his reply. It was in my imagination, surely, that in it I heard tearing-metal-burning-air-screaming.

“Almost Hallowe’en,” I said again. “Trick or treat. Helluva trick.”