Standish looked amused. “And Peter thought you weren’t clever,” he said. “Here. Hold out your hands.”
I did, as best I could. I extended them, though they hung like dead flowers from my wrists. Standish unchained them, and I let them drop back down against my thighs. They lay against my lap like two warm, limp bladders. I tried to move them from the shoulders, and all I managed was to flop ’em against my chest and belly disgustingly.
Standish watched silently for a few moments. Then the pins and needles started and, after those, the pain.
I didn’t scream. But I did say “aaahah!” loud enough for anyone to hear it two rooms over. And I did rock back and forth on the table, huddling my arms up to my chest and kind of shaking them.
It hurt worse than my burned face, and the rocking back and forth wasn’t doing my splitting head any favors. Standish reached out and put a hand on my shoulder, ever so gently. “There, there, Miss Memery,” he said. “The pain will pass.”
And, more or less, given time, it did.
He touched my cheek gently — but not so gently the burned skin didn’t smart something awful. I jerked away and hissed.
“Pity about your face,” he said. “You were lovely.”
And a lot of good it did me. His words still smarted, though I determined to do everything possible to keep him from noticing. I hoped he’d think my stung look was just pain. Christ knows I had plenty of it.
Besides, I never met more than one man in a hundred who was ever nice to a whore except out of pity or because he wanted something. Standish had the charm, sure, and I knew Priya said he was kind, by the standards of them as work for Bantle. But he wasn’t entirely enticing me to let my guard down.
“Where’s Priya?” I asked. I’d thought about keeping mum, not letting on that I cared. But who would I think I was fooling?
“I’m going to see her next. I’ll let her know you were asking after her.” He smiled. “I convinced Peter not to just kill both of you outright, you know. You owe me, Miss Memery.”
Ah, there it was. I could do something for him. “What do you want?”
“Right now, I want you to rest and get your strength up,” he said.
Well, that could sound as ominous as I wanted to make it.“I’ll send someone with food presently.”
That, however, couldn’t sound ominous. My stomach rumbled, and I winced. I didn’t want to admit to human weakness in front of any of Bantle’s men.
At least I managed not to say, Thank you.
* * *
Standish took the bucket with him, and pretty soon the room only smelled faintly of vomit. I guess the air circulation worked pretty good, if he was telling the truth and we was in a submersible boat. In any case, it weren’t pitching up and down with the waves the way a boat on the surface would.
The food came. The seaman who brought it was a white man, with high cheekbones and dark eyes. I tried talking to him, but he just shook his head and muttered, “No English,” with a heavy accent. I might could have tried to brain him with the bowl, but then where would I go? Besides, there was another one in the corridor outside.
It weren’t anything I’d eaten before — some kind of gritty tan grain, boiled, with turnips and mushrooms in it and a scrambled egg. I wondered if this were the sort of food Priya had grown up with. From her descriptions, I had expected more spices.
Unfamiliar or not, I ate it and didn’t fuss. I figured if they wanted me dead they wouldn’t waste poison when they could just drown me. And now that my belly had settled from the ether or the chloroform or whatever they’d used, I was ravenous.
I figured that since Standish hadn’t mentioned Merry Lee or Marshal Reeves that maybe meant they’d gotten away clean. Which meant they was looking for us. Which meant I had all the reason in the world to stay alive and stay strong.
After I ate, I slept on that narrow table again, wishing I was wearing girl clothes. I could have used my top layer of skirts as a blanket, if I had any. And to cover my eyes from the glare of that awful, hissing electric light.
I was awakened by a terrible lurching and a horrible series of thuds that reverberated through the whole hull. I clutched the edges of the table to keep from being pitched bodily to the floor.
Well, of course I thought of Mr. Verne again and his Nautilus. Which was more like a narwhal, when it come right down to it — the Nautilus had a screw on its nose, a sort of augur that it used to rip open the bellies of enemy ships so they would founder and sink.
Maybe this Nemo had built his ship to be like the Nautilus in addition to taking the captain’s name. Or maybe Mr. Verne has somehow heard about this Nemo and his submersible and put them into his book wholesale.
I hoped not.
I paced the room then, tried the door, tried to climb up to the ventilation shaft. I scrambled up, but it was too narrow for my shoulders. And I didn’t hear anything down it but the deep hum of machines.
So I laid my head back down on my arms, then, 100 percent certain that I no longer knew what to think, and I hoped like hell Merry and the Marshal would come for us quick.
* * *
Some time went by. Having no clock and no light but the electric arc, I’d be hard-pressed to say how much time, except I was getting that desperate for a toilet. And that thirsty, too, because bodies is perverse and a trial. My face had settled into a sharp kind of itching, and I spent most of my time trying not to pick and peel at it.
I discovered I could use the polished steel of the table as a sort of clumsy mirror, and when I poked my face in it I could tell that those soft white bulges along my jaw was blisters. I didn’t look forward to when they popped and peeled and left raw red behind ’em, so I tried not to poke at ’em too much. Anybody who’s ever had a blister can tell you how well that went.
In what might of been the morning, the man with the dark eyes and no English brought me a bucket, a cup of water, and another bowl of mush. He had the decency to turn his back while I used the bucket, too, though at that point I wouldn’t of thought much of dropping my trousers and peeing on his foot. If I could aim like a boy, I might of even tried it.
I drank the water and ate the mush, and he took the things away again. I commenced to my non-sleep pastime, which was pacing in circles around the table, twiddling my thumbs.
Thumb twiddling is harder than it looks, it turns out. Unless you go pretty slow, your thumbs have a tendency to brush together. But I got pretty good at it after what I figure was an hour or so.
Some more time later, Horaz Standish came back in.
His timing was good enough to make me wonder if there were spyholes in the walls, or those half-silvered mirrors you get in some whorehouses so people can spy on the clientele. Madame doesn’t hold with such chicanery, but I know there’s them that do.
I’d worn myself to a frazzle with the pacing, but every time I sat still for more than a moment the anxiousness started spinning around in me like an unhinged gyroscope until I felt like bits was going to start flinging off me in all directions. So even though I’d been watching the door like a mouse in front of a cathole, I still jumped half out of my skin when it opened.
He came in all mild, like before. But what I didn’t like was that he had two big seamen with him, dressed like they fell out of a burlesque about the Happy Sailor, white shirts and bulging arms and little blue neckerchiefs and all.
They didn’t look happy, though. Their hair was cropped off into brown-blond bristles. One had a cauliflower ear and a low forehead. The other was balding at the temples and had a flattened nose and was missing a couple of fingers. Neither one of ’em looked as if they was from India.