Arent laughed and gave Sammy the sleeping draught from the pouch at his hip. ‘This is from Sara Wessel,’ he said. ‘It will help you sleep. Hopefully, it will make you more comfortable while I work out a way to free you.’
‘This is a wonderful gift,’ said Sammy, tearing out the cork to sniff the tincture. ‘Please, pass along my thanks. I saw her quality on the docks, but this is … I’ve never met a woman to match her.’
Arent agreed but said nothing, for fear of giving himself away. Instead, he handed Sammy a hunk of bread he’d stolen from the galley.
‘Know who’s trying to sink us yet?’ he asked.
‘That’s your job, Arent. I’ve been imprisoned in a dark room all day.’ He bit into the loaf, savouring the taste. Arent had tried some at dinner. It was hard as a moneylender’s heart, but Sammy looked as though he’d never had anything better.
‘Only difference between today and most other days is that you don’t have good wine and a pipe,’ countered Arent.
Finishing the bread, Sammy linked his arm into his friend’s. ‘I’ll concede the compliment in the insult,’ he said. ‘Shall we walk? My legs are stiff.’
As they had a hundred nights before, the bear and sparrow strolled together in amiable silence. They walked across the waist, past the two yawls strapped to the deck, and up the stairs to the quarterdeck. Shadows shifted around them, piles of rope revealing themselves to be sailors curled up on deck, while lurking bodies were exposed as buckets hanging from poles.
Step by step, Arent wasn’t sure whether he should be laughing at his own jitteriness, or swinging punches into the air, just to be safe. He didn’t relax until they arrived on the quarterdeck, where the first mate was tending the sniffling young carpenter beaten by Wyck. He was speaking to him in a comforting voice. Whatever Larme’s words, they seemed to be pouring some iron into the boy’s bones.
Another staircase brought them to the poop deck, where the animal pens were kept. Hearing their footsteps on the boards, the sows began grunting and sniffling at the wooden bars, believing they were about to be let out, while the chickens scratched at the wood.
Arent peered over the railing. The passenger cabins were directly below, candlelight spilling out of their portholes. Only Sara and Creesjie’s were dim, their deadlights closed in case the leper should return in the night.
‘What troubles you?’ asked Sammy, noticing his inspection.
‘Sara Wessel saw the leper at her porthole this evening,’ replied Arent.
‘The leper from the docks? The one you put your sword through?’
‘His real name was Bosey,’ explained Arent, delivering the information that Sara had uncovered about this man’s mysterious bargain with Old Tom, and how his tongue had been cut out by Johannes Wyck.
‘Tormented and returning to torment, eh?’ said Sammy, who was kneeling on the ground, running his fingertips across the rough planks, searching for any sign of the leper’s passing. ‘Do you think she imagined it?’
‘No,’ replied Arent.
‘Then she didn’t, which raises a rather particular question.’ Sammy paused his search. ‘Well, two actually.’ He considered it. ‘Three,’ he corrected himself.
‘Who’s pretending to be the dead man at her porthole?’ ventured Arent.
‘That’s one.’ Sammy leapt to his feet and peered intently at the dark water below. ‘It’s a sheer drop with no handholds, so how did he arrive there? And how did he get away once seen?’
‘Well, he didn’t come this way,’ said Arent. ‘I was up here in less than a minute after she screamed. He would have had to run by me to get away.’
‘Could he have hidden in the animal pens?’
‘I’d have seen him through the bars.’
Sammy ran his hand along the railing. ‘He would have needed ropes to lower himself down and he wouldn’t have had time to climb back up, then untie them.’
‘And if he’d dropped into the water, Sara would have heard a splash.’
Sammy walked towards the mizzenmast, which rose up between the poop and quarterdecks, then tugged on the rigging that disappeared over the side of the ship. The ropes were attached to a thick beam that jutted out of the Saardam’s hull.
‘That beam down there is the only place he could have stood, and it’s much too far away from the porthole.’ Abruptly Sammy licked the wood, but the disappointment on his face suggested it yielded no answers. ‘Tell me about this Old Tom.’
‘It’s some sort of devil, apparently.’
There was nobody quite like Sammy for a diminishing glare, and the one he threw at Arent could have stripped the bark off a tree.
‘I didn’t say I believed it,’ protested Arent, who’d known his entire life what was waiting for him in the dark. As a boy his father had caught him yawning during one of his sermons, beating him so severely it was feared he might never wake again. His mother had wept for three days, until his father gathered the servants, dragged her down the staircase and slapped her back and forth across the Great Hall, bellowing in righteous fury.
Her grief represented a lack of faith, he’d said. Arent had been delivered before God to apologise for his heresy in person. If his regret was sincere, he’d be returned. Should he die, then it must surely reveal his lack of devotion. Prayer, not tears, he’d argued, was the only tonic now.
Arent had been returned two days later. Devotion had nothing to do with it.
Most people woke up from something like that with a hole in their memory. They felt like they’d been asleep, they said.
Arent remembered everything.
He’d travelled into the afterlife, hollering for help and hearing nothing back. He knew there was no God waiting. No devil. No saints or sinners. There were only people and the stories they told themselves. He’d seen it himself. People gave the heavens a voice, so they had something to ask for: a better harvest, a healthy child or a milder winter. God was hope, and mankind needed hope the way it needed warmth, food and ale.
But with hope came disappointment.
The downtrodden yearned for stories to explain their misfortunes, though what they really wanted was somebody to blame for their misery. It was impossible to set fire to the blight that had ruined your crops, but a blight was easily summoned by a witch, at which point any poor woman would do.
Old Tom wasn’t a devil, thought Arent. He was an old man within kicking distance.
‘My uncle told me Old Tom devastated the Provinces thirty years ago, destroying villages and noble families,’ explained Arent. ‘Apparently, it offers people their heart’s desire in return for terrible favours. It left a strange sign wherever it went – an eye with a tail. That same mark was on the sail when we set off from Batavia, and it’s also on my wrist,’ he said candidly.
‘Your wrist?’ Sammy was taken aback. ‘Why would it be on your wrist?’
‘When I was a boy, I went hunting with my father,’ replied Arent. ‘Three days later I returned with this scar and he didn’t return at all, and I don’t know what happened.’
Sammy blinked at Arent in surprise. ‘So you got the scar around the same time this Old Tom was splashing its mark across the Provinces?’
‘I think I was the first person to carry it. Or one of them, my uncle wasn’t sure.’
‘Show me,’ demanded Sammy, pulling Arent over to a lantern on the mizzenmast. ‘And tell me everything you know about it.’
‘I don’t know anything, except that I drew this mark on a few doors in a nearby village out of spite,’ explained Arent, as Sammy inspected it. ‘I didn’t realise the harm it would do. An old beggar called Old Tom ended up being beaten to death by some scared villagers.’
‘Old Tom?’ repeated Sammy. ‘So this mark got free of you, then spread like a plague wearing your dead beggar’s name. Heaven’s sake, this isn’t just a demon. It’s your demon.’