A dull, muffled thump came from somewhere off to my right, where my trunk was stowed. I blinked, laced my fingers together, and kept my eyes on the rambling captain.
“… that you would stay below, please, for the avoiding of questions, and when Le Havre is reached if your baggage would stay below for the same reason, we would all be most happy.”
Mr. Babcock inclined his head, and again a soft thump, with three more in quick succession, came from my right. I felt Mary tense. The captain was still speaking, gesticulating wildly with his hat, and the translator leaned outside the door and brought two metal bowls back in with him. With a brevity that seemed to have nothing whatsoever to do with the captain’s unceasing speech, he said, “The captain says to give you these. For the …”
He paused, struggling for the correct word as the captain talked on and on. The soft thumping was continuous now, regular and rhythmic, though between the captain’s babbling and the thoughtful scratching of the second man’s head, neither seemed to notice. The translator finally gave up the linguistic fight, shrugged one shoulder, and said simply, “First the boat will be up, and then it will be down. Up and then down. Good night.”
He gave us a grin that was long and narrow, the bowls went to the floor with a clatter, and the captain bowed himself out, words still flowing as the slippery translator shut the door after them.
The interior of the little room was suddenly quiet. The three of us remained still, the lamp above our heads making the shadows sway. The thumping had stopped. I listened to the scurry of feet and the shouting of men on the deck above, to the silence outside our door, counting eight terrified heartbeats before in unspoken agreement we all three leapt forward and ran to my trunk, the key already in my hand. I turned the lock and threw back the lid, tossing the top layer of dresses out onto the dirty floor.
My uncle lay curled in a nest of cushions, still and with his face pale, wrapped tightly in the blanket from his bed. Only his wild, white hair and unkempt beard disturbed what would have otherwise been the look of a dreaming child. Nothing moved. The hammering in my chest seemed to pause, then beat with a speed that stole my breath.
“Well?” said Mr. Babcock.
I reached a hand into the trunk and found my uncle’s neck, feeling the skin with two fingers until I had located what I wanted: a pulse, very slow, but strong. Uncle Tully’s chest rose up suddenly in a long, deep breath.
“Sleeping,” I said weakly, and felt some of the collective tension release around me. I smoothed Uncle Tully’s hair, damp with the stuffiness of my trunk, and carefully adjusted his legs and the cushions, making sure the small air holes drilled into the leather-covered wood were unobscured.
Uncle Tully breathed deeply once more, and then all at once he yelled loudly, kicking out hard against the side of the trunk. The cocoon of his blanket loosened as he flailed, shouting out nonsense. I held his head, eyes darting to the door as Mary knelt quickly beside me, taking one of the little brown bottles Dr. Pruitt had given us out of her carpetbag and holding it to my uncle’s lips. He drank without ever opening his eyes, coughing and sputtering as he struggled, but after a long minute, a time when every sound pricked me with fear, the movement in the trunk quieted. Uncle Tully relaxed, his face going slack. I let go of his head and arranged the blankets, tucking him in tightly, as if he were in bed. Blood pounded in my ears.
“All well?” Mr. Babcock whispered, his ugly face creased.
“He should have had that dose nearly an hour ago,” I said, “but Dr. Pruitt did say to wait as long as we could, that the less we gave him the better. …” I rubbed a finger over my throbbing temple. I felt ill, though whether from guilt or relief I wasn’t sure. What would have happened if my uncle had shouted like that while those men were in the room? I doubted our captain’s “tactful,” tariff-free enterprise actually included sailing screaming men locked in trunks across the English Channel.
“Don’t worry, Miss,” Mary said. “It doesn’t seem to have been doing him any harm.”
My head nodded mechanically as I counted Uncle’s Tully’s breaths, watching them gradually slow. I trusted Dr. Pruitt. He was a good man, and I did not believe for a moment that he would give my uncle away. And he had assured me again and again that though experimental, he had used the contents of his little brown bottles many times with no ill effects. But this long, enforced sleep was so unnatural. I stroked my uncle’s hair, trying to ignore the tightening pain in my middle.
Mr. Babcock had dropped himself back onto a crate, once again mopping at his brow. “You put men in the cemetery, I assume?”
I nodded in response, laying the discarded dresses carefully back on top of my uncle before shutting the lid and locking the trunk. Mr. Babcock tsked softly. I could guess what he was thinking. How many days before Mr. Wickersham or one of his men stood on the edge of my uncle’s open grave, looking down into its contents? How many days before a dead man’s face became unrecognizable? None of them had ever actually seen my Uncle Tulman, not to my knowledge, but how soon could a decaying man in his forties be mistaken for one in his sixties? Before a head wound given by the stroke of a hammer would not be so readily noticed?
The boat pitched, and my stomach went with it. I barely heard Mary’s exclamation of “Lord!” before I vomited hard into the metal bowl she held out for me.
7
It was an action I repeated many times over the next few hours, catching only snatches of sleep, curled between crates on two moth-eaten blankets we had found in a corner. Mary, to my shame, was not the slightest bit indisposed, and neither was Mr. Babcock. I could not crawl far from my bowl. As the rising sun lit the sea, it was Mary, her nose against the little window, who got our first glimpse of France.
When the boat docked and the engine thrum I’d forgotten I was hearing sputtered and stopped, I pushed against the floor and experimented with being upright. Seagulls were crying, bells clanging, and I could hear scurrying footsteps above us. Mary was instantly at my side, snapping shut the pocket watch.
“Now don’t you worry, Miss. We’ve got to be staying right here until that captain has paid out the money Mr. Babcock was giving him. Then somebody will come and say we can be getting off. Mr. Tully’s had another dose, and I’ve gotten his water down him, too, so there’s no trouble there, and there’s to be wagons or some such at the docks that will take us to a place called Rouen, though I never heard of such a name as that, and Mr. Babcock, he says there will be something to eat on them as we go. …”
“Nothing to eat,” I whispered, “please, Mary.” Though the uppermost thought trickling through my mind was the amazing power of Mr. Babcock to make impossible things happen. The man should have been prime minister. That would have settled Mr. Wickersham. And possibly the emperor of France.
“… and there’s a train here, too, he says, though he don’t want us to be getting on it just yet, ’cause that’s too easy.” Mary began stuffing my wayward hair back into order. “And when you’re on the train, you can rest proper, Miss — though I won’t be resting ’cause having never been on a train, I ain’t planning to miss a thing — and then we’ll be in Paris in a snap, and we’ll hire a carriage to be taking us to the new house. But Mr. Babcock, he says not to be looking worried or in a hurry when we get out there. To just be easy, like ‘ladies on their way.’ That’s what he said to me, Miss, ‘ladies on their way.’ Ain’t that kind of him to say such a thing? My mum, she would have said —”
“Where is Mr. Babcock?” I interrupted.