All the Colors of Time (15 page)

“You can’t come,” I had told her as she struggled into her
oilskin sou’wester.

“Ah, but I will come,” she said, not even pausing to look at
me.

“It’s dangerous! Tell her, Doctor. Tell her how dangerous—”

He afforded me a grim smile and dashed out, bag in hand.

Mary continued to ignore me, fastening her hat securely over
her braids and making a beeline for the door. I stepped in front of her. She
put both hands on my chest and pushed. She was stronger than she looked.

I followed her up on deck, reaching the poop just in time to
see Dr. Mac (as the crew was pleased to call him) kneeling over the fallen
sailor. It was Tommy Rodgers, a boy of about seventeen. White-faced and
trembling, he clutched his right arm.

It was obviously broken—a jag of bone could be seen amid
cloth and blood.

I wanted to be sick, but a weak-kneed salt was an oxymoron
and I wouldn’t let Charley see me puke. The only one here with an excuse for
that sort of behavior was poor Tom.

The Doctor was at work over the wound, and his missus was at
work as well, keeping the boy’s mind off his pain and fear and his eyes on her
angelic face. They made a great team, did the MacCormacs. Dr. Mac set the
forearm before Tommy realized it. The boy let out another great shriek and
swooned.

He’ll dream of Mary,
I thought, and stood by, ready to help lift him below.

Charley, clutching a thick rope for support, looked on from
the mizzen stepping. “Is that it then, Dr. Mac?” he shouted. “Is the arm set?”

“Aye!” MacCormac shouted back, and nodded vigorously for
emphasis. He straightened, clutching his bag. “We’ve got to get him below!”

“The boys’ll take care of that. Never you mind. Piggott!
Carew! See to him!”

Those two able-bodies jumped to it and MacCormac and I
backed away—I toward the wheel, he toward the port rail. At that point,
everything seemed to happen at once; I glanced at the helmsman and saw a sudden
terror leap in his eyes; I heard Charley roar a warning and Mary MacCormac
scream. I spun back toward the bows. A blur of movement to my left drew me
instinctively right, toward where the Doctor stood like a post, waiting for a
huge, free-swinging block to dash his brains out.

I dove at his feet.

The block and its thick twist of hemp whizzed overhead as we
sprawled toward the rail. Mary came right after us, crying incoherently into
the gale. She was knocked from her feet by
Essex’
s
sudden starboard lurch and schooned along the deck on a wash of sea water, her
legs tangled in her long skirts. She was headed straight for the rail.

MacCormac shrieked and struggled sharply in my grasp. There
was nothing we could do, but Charley, in some superhuman effort, slid after her
and, as she was flung over the edge, caught her water-logged skirts and hauled
her back into his arms.

They stared at each other for a long, pregnant moment,
Charley gaping like a sea bass. Then, the young lady threw her arms around his
neck and squeezed him so hard I swear she wrung water out of him. Before he
could do more than open and close his mouth once, Mary MacCormac had
disentangled herself and scrambled to where her husband lay, soaked and
stunned.

The hug she gave Dr. Mac was even more prodigious than the
one she’d given Charley. That done, she reached down, rent her skirt from hem
to waist to disentangle her legs, then hauled her husband to his feet and
supported him down the steps to the main deck.

Dazed, I rose and followed, my gaze straying aloft,
wondering where in hell that block had come from.

oOo

“I do believe it was on the mizzen mast,” said Mary
sometime later when we were once again dry and sane and steeping in the
normalcy of hot tea.

We were in the Captain’s salon (Captain’s mess suited it
better at this juncture)—Black Charley, Dr. Mac, Mary, and I—seated around the
sturdy table, clutching our mugs as if they might fly away. There was no real
danger of that. The Sea had calmed significantly and
Essex
rolled rather than pitched.

“The spanker gaff was whipping about and so was the boom. It’s
no wonder that block came free.” Her sweet voice sounded so calm, so certain.

We men merely nodded.

“Well,” said MacCormac at last, “I daresay ‘thank yous’ are
in order all around. To you, Arthur, for saving my life and to you, Captain for
doing the same. If my dear Mary had gone overboard, I might just as well have
followed her.”

“You just about preceded her,” I said and shivered at the
memory of those two very close calls.

“Then I’d have followed
him,
”
said Mary firmly and covered her husband’s hand with her own.

I glanced at Charley. His eyes, narrow and over-bright in
his pale face, were locked on their entwined fingers.

“That,” I said, “would have been a horrible tragedy.” I got
Charley to meet my eyes and wasn’t sure I liked what I saw there.

“Well, no harm done,” said Mary. “Tommy will be fine, the
block hit no one, I did not—thanks to our brave Captain Charley—go overboard.
We are all as we should be—safe and sound.”

Charley shook his head. “I’m not brave, my dear. I was
scared as a schoolboy up there. If anything had happened to you . . .”

Now Mary’s hand moved to the Captain’s as he worried the
handle of his mug. “Nothing did and nothing will. You see, I have a guardian
angel.” Her eyes sparkled like playful tropical seas. “Always have had. And my
angel always makes certain there is someone or something about to preserve me
when I get in dire straits. That’s how Ian and I met, if you’ll recall. He’s one
of my angels, too.”

“Madam,” said Charley most soberly, “I pray you will always
consider me your angel.” He raised her hand to his lips and kissed it.

I glanced at Ian. His gray eyes were blandly neutral. If any
of this disturbed him, it didn’t show.

oOo

Captain Charley was unspeakably cheerful the next day. I
labored under the misapprehension that it was because we were to make port that
evening in the Canaries until he swatted me on the back and said, “You’re a
blackguard, Arthur—you with your fortune-telling. I think I half believed you ’til
last night.”

“Believed me?”

“That malarkey about me wedding some bit o’ muslin named
Maureen. It’s clear as can be, boy. It’s Mary I’ll wed or none at all.”

It was not a bitter pronouncement of unrequited love; the man
acted as if he was all but ready to go out and publish the bans.

“Charley,” I said, forgetting my station of servitude. “She’s
married already. Seemingly quite happily so.”

“Ah, but do you not see what’s happened? He was her guardian
angel, now I am. And what’s a guardian angel, if not a hero? He’s a mamby-pamby
little boy, needing young Arthur to save his unworthy skin, but I—I saved her.
What woman will not fall in love with the man who saves her life? It’s only a
matter of time.”

I shook my head. “Maureen,” I repeated. “I’m positive your
wife’s name will be Maureen.”

He pointed a finger at my nose. “You’re a cabin boy. No,
worse yet, a stowaway and a liar and probably a thief as well. Who in his right
mind would listen to the likes of you?”

No one, I thought. And especially not a man so enamored of a
Scottish sweet that his accent was beginning to sprout heather.

oOo

Santa Cruz de Tenerife. I had never seen it before. It
sparkled under its veil of storm detritus like a platter of jewels.
Essex
stood in under a full press of
sail in a stiff breeze and I wished I could be in two places at once so I could
stand on shore and see the great, white cloud come on.

I gave a moment’s thought to using the Grid to do just that,
but knew, if I did, that my Shift-Eye would have my tail feathers for the
unauthorized expense. So I stood in the bows and watched the billowing mass of
canvas above me. I must’ve looked like the biggest tourist this side of
Casablanca. I could hear the crew chuckling at me. I was getting ready to slink
off to a less obvious vantage point when Mr. Piggott sidled over.

“Aye, take a good long look, lad. She’s the Queen of Ships,
she is. Every time
Essex
puts on her
show, I fall for her all o’er again.” He winked at me. “I reckon that’s her way
of keepin’ her crew. Sure ain’t her master’s sweet temper.”

Essex’
s show was
over soon enough, her sails being furled as we entered the port—but it had
served to draw a crowd to the quay to see her in. She stood off at anchor, the
small cargo for this port o’ call going off in a lighter; a return cargo
arriving the same way. The passengers went ashore—the crew would have their
turn later—and I watched with interest as Black Charley conducted his private
business with a local merchant. Before they had shaken hands, the merchant had
made it worth Charley’s while to land some Indian goods here on the return
trip.

Our Captain was smiling contentedly, no doubt counting his
earnings, when Mr. Reardon put in an anxious appearance.

“I’ve just heard the most confounded news, sir,” he told the
Captain. “The French have taken the
Warren
Hastings.
”

oOo

Charley was miserable. And he was avoiding me. In two
seconds I had gone from amusing companion to unwelcome Sibyl. I rededicated
myself to my project (the reason I was here, after all) and used the
Warren Hastings
affair as a study in
historical veracity.

History, in case you hadn’t noticed, is rather like the old
schoolroom game of Telephone. An event takes place and all witnesses concoct
their version of it with or without comparing notes. They then disperse to
disseminate the information to one or more others who go on to retell the tale
to their own select group of listeners. Only eventually—unless one of the
original witnesses thought, “Gosh, I’d better grab a piece of slate and scratch
this down for posterity”—the tale is set to bark, slab or paper and passed down
further via copious copyings from one written source to another. There may even
be a plethora of originals.

Take the fall of the Roman Empire for example. Most
twentieth and twenty-first century histories making reference to that series of
events tend to lift material from Gibbon, who, unless he possessed a time
machine of his own, was not among the eyewitnesses. Until QuestLabs began
dabbling with the Temporal Spectrum, Gibbon was our eye on the Roman Empire,
yet a mere link in the great Telephone Tree of Time. No offense to that
illustrious gentleman, but, as in a game of Telephone, things inevitably get
lost (or at least amended) in the translation.

The text book version of the
Warren Hastings
capture was pretty detailed and made a great sea
story. A forty-four gun British East Indiaman with full complement goes up
against a French frigate. The frigate is seriously outgunned. Somehow the
frigate in question,
Piémontaise,
according to history, blows the rigging off the bigger ship, then tows her to
port at seven-and-a-half knots under three single-reefed topsails, foresail and
mizzen staysail. One helluva frigate.

What history fails to mention is that the
Piémontaise
was not alone. She was
accompanied by a ship-of-the-line—a battle wagon named
Bonaparte
—who handled most of the actual fighting. The
Piémontaise
then struggled to port at
about three knots, flying everything but the master’s bedsheets and damn near
springing her main mast in the process. Well, at least according to our Canary
Island contacts.

On the social scene, since I was denied Charley’s company, I
took up with the MacCormacs. Exposed to him more often, I found I liked Dr.
Mac. We had a lot in common. Not interests exactly—I mean, after all, we did
have what amounted to a monumental generation gap between us—but we shared
attitudes about things. And I have to admit seeing him with Mary, I had to
forgive him for being married to her. (As if it could make any possible
difference to me.)

“Doesn’t it bother you,” I asked him one day as we plied the
waters off Africa, “the way men react to your wife? I mean, she’s such a
striking woman, a fellow is hard put not to court her almost without meaning
to.”

“Aye, well,” he said, smiling ruefully, “it’s just like
that, you see. There’s not much either of us can do about it but adjust. It’s
not as if it’s anything she does. It’s just who she is. She’s as true as can
be. I’ve no lack of faith that she loves me as much as I love her. But the men,
now . . .” He chuckled and made a nervous gesture. “Sometimes I
look in Captain Dunbar’s eyes and I swear I . . . I can almost
hear him condemning me for daring to be married to her. Makes me feel downright
unworthy and well . . .” He ran his finger around the inside of
his shirt collar. “. . . a little uncomfortable. That’s a
powerful man, that,” he added.

It was true, I realized as I watched Black Charley watch
Mary MacCormac, that if she were my wife, I’d find the look in Charley’s eye
more than a little discomfiting. Oh, not when he looked at
her,
of course. If ever a woman was worthy of that worshipful gaze,
it was Mary Mac. But when the Captain’s eyes fell on her poor husband, even I
took a chill. There was jealousy in that look, and soul-rending sorrow, and
what I hoped to God was not murder. Charley Dunbar was a man who, though master
of his own ship and, he’d have said, his own fate, was to be denied something
he had begun to want very much indeed. And I, Sibyl, bearer of that bad news,
was now the object of his taciturn ire.

I tried reasoning with him. Usually during his stints at the
wheel when he couldn’t escape me. “Charley,” I’d say, and he’d glare at me out
of the tail of his eye. “Captain Dunbar, then—if Mary MacCormac’s your standard
of female excellence then surely this woman you’re to wed will be just as
excellent. Maybe even more so. Just think of it. To win you she’d have to
outshine the Doctor’s wife, wouldn’t she?”