"Aye," he said, after some contemplation. "It is intolerable. The wicked crew of smugglers and what they've done to Yorke and Warren, the thought that Sally might be springing our enemies back to France, Wimbarton and that pretty little girl he has no right to, Slack Dickie and his power over us, poor Charlie in the Devil's Punchbowl. Lord, friend, how lovely it would be to be just rich!"
They were not rich, they were as poor as dirt, though not without their horses and their privilege. When they arrived, Slack Dickie exercised his power ruthlessly, and overrode all arguments and claims. At dawn next morning the Biter slipped downriver, with Gunning drunk and hardly capable at the con. Kaye's agents had reported juicy pickings in the offing, the remnants of a storm-tossed convoy from the East, crammed with fine sailors for the taking. Kershaw implied some pressure had been on from their lordships, for this lieutenant of the Press to do some pressing; there was a war on, after all. Slack Dickie, on the quarterdeck in the fine bright morning, his fat face and plum-pudding eyes a picture of unwonted keenness and efficiency, was off to make a killing.
Twenty-Four
When Deborah awoke, that same bright shining morn, he knew her time had come, with no escape. She was i a high room, more like an attic in the house than her prison of earlier, and from the open window she could hear only country silence birdsong, breeze, some cattle lowing. It made her think of her home, on the Cheshire edge of Stockport near the River Goyt of a summer Sunday, and she had a strong wrench of dread and misery that she would never see it, or any of her people, ever again. Well, she told herself, you left them without farewell or by-your-leave, so home-sickness is no one's fault but yours. Then she wept at her own hardheartedness for she missed her mother, terribly.
Two days before, after she had sprung at him, the master, her new lord and master Wimbarton, had withdrawn from her presence apparently unaffected by her attempt to rip his face. This was in the coach house a large, bare, bottom chamber, which Jeremiah had pushed her into after she'd been dropped down from the horse. Deb had been almost broken by the journey, bent across the backbone belly-downward, and when she'd hit the ground she'd had spots before her eyes and could not stand unaided. Fiske had cleared the others off with brisk brutality, slamming a door on her and Jeremiah and the master, then she'd been left swaying like a baited bull. Her stomach pained her, she had an urgent need to piss, but her heart was filled with only hatred and mistrust. She had a feeling this would be a little sport, to show her in what respect he held her, what she might expect if she did not co-operate. Wimbarton and Jeremiah watched, like farmers at a market, as she stood her ground. By Mary and the saints, she thought, I'd rather die than let him play with me.
Wimbarton, perhaps, had more shame than Dennett had done, God rot his soul. He did not pull his club out, but moved in on her like a thin and feeble wrestler, in anticipatory crouch. Jeremiah, far better able to give a maid this sort of paying out by the look of him, merely leaned back against the wall with a half-smile on his lips as Wimbarton approached. Deb, from her aching bladder to her aching limbs, was the breathing antithesis of submission, crouched also, but hers a feral crouch, a pre-explosive bunching led by glaring eyes. She had all her clothes on also, her skirts were long and full, winter ones borrowed from one of Mrs. Houghton's maids. If he should try for me, she thought, I'll make it half an hour till he finds the spot, by which time I'll have blinded him.
Wimbarton could read minds, perhaps. Anyway, he straightened up, and turned away from her, and said to Jeremiah, "Take that gown from off her, will you? I am too old for all this teasing, strip her to the buff." At which moment Deb sprang at him, claws out, and Jeremiah moved like lightning to smack her a heavy blow between the eyes, placed nicely so as not to crush her nose, and Deb sprawled out in the coach house dust and lay and pissed herself. Her skirts had risen up as she had skidded, so they knew what was happening, there was a puddle and the hot wet smell. Jeremiah had looked angry, but Wimbarton had laughed, which Deb found much more frightening. But it ended the attempt. Before he left her, he told his man to lay off her or else, and get the women to look after her.
"Next time I'll have you clean," he said. "Next time I'll have you civil."
Jeremiah, if he resented not getting at least a sight of shagging, amused himself with a feel or two, taken in good grace, when he could easily have hurt her badly and never have been blamed. But the urine put him off, for which Deb was grateful (she'd heard in Dr. Marigold's of men who would pay more for things like that), so pretty soon she ended up with Joan and Sue, whose job turned out to be to strip her down and scrub her, which they did as viciously as possible until they saw the scars and bruises her body bore already, when they seemed dampened, if not ashamed. When they decided they would talk, not sneer at her for her immoral life and strange outlandish accent, she decided she would answer, and confirmed that Dennett and their master, between the two of them, had done the injuries, and she would presumably get worse until she ran away again. At which they told her one man had had his leg broken by Fiske and Jeremiah for letting her escape and Dorothy, chief woman to Milady, had been whipped naked in the yard for getting her mistress past the guard to start with and causing all the mayhem. Deb was amused to hear them beg her to stay put in future, for fear of punishment they might have to suffer if she ran.
"But you will not," said Sue, a simple girl. "The place is like a fortress now, and we're locked in even washing you, and the place where you're to have your room is right up yonder in the roof, with no way down but one, and guards, and locks, and I don't know what all else. And Fiske and Jeremiah will shoot you like a rat, or cut you down like wheat. That surgeon man of yours got his payment in the throat, and Milady's dead and gone, an' all There's no compunction killing in this place, believe you me!"
There was no compunction either, it appeared, in Wimbarton's search for sex. Milady lord, the graces of that woman, who was just a slut from gutter land in their opinion! Milady had come as a replacement for an earlier, and Dorothy (much older than her girls) remembered other ones before. Milady, though, had ruled him with a rod of iron, and told them, and all and sundry, how he'd fell in love with her, and she was different. More impressive that would have been, they started, if the master had not Then giggled, and rolled their eyes. She could end up as a wife, Joan finished it unkindly, but most whores he'd had there ended up as whores.
"And such a ratty little bugger," crowed Sue. "Like a bloody scarecrow that couldn't lift a skirt. Well let me tell you, lover, he's got a prick on him you could stir a pudding with. I know, I've had some, and I'm bloody ugly, ain't I? So don't give yourself no fancy airs round here. You're nothing special, are you?"
But for all that they were friends, as women in these situations went, and Deb knew that she was close enough in spirit to them not to be as quickly hated as the one they called, so sneeringly, Milady or Mistress Corpse. She could not really see herself ending up a wife to Chester Wimbarton, or so-called wife or consort, because just at that moment she thought she'd rather die. He must know by this time also, that maids young enough to be his granddaughter had nothing to offer except quick poking and a smirk (or pained expression) hid behind a hand or handkerchief. If he'd moved so far beyond the law as to murder wives and passing mountebanks without the slightest fear, he must know similarly, that young maids could be bought in quick succession, used, and turned on to the road. As for that, she hoped it might be soon.