Page 68 of Go, Rogue

Chapter

28

“There you are!” McNeil exclaims, charging into the boiler room only to meet the surprised faces of Catherine and Rogers. “I’ve been looking for you two. They’ve taken him!”

“Who?” Rogers asks, still pale and unsteady, one hand braced on the wall.

“Andrew,” Catherine says before McNeil can answer. The words scrape her throat raw. She can feel the weight of his absence—the shape of him missing from the air around her.

“Aye,” McNeil confirms. “And we’ve got a mess topside that needs all hands.” He glances at Rogers’s bloodied head. “If you’re up to it, that is.”

“I’ll be fine,” Rogers says, pushing off the wall. But after two steps, he sways and frowns. “Wait—who took Captain McGann? And where?”

McNeil hesitates, glancing at the cut above the first mate’s temple. “James, sir. The helmsman. Seized the captain and conveyed him aboard the black schooner.”

At Rogers’s bewildered look, Catherine says gently, “Give yourself a moment. You were struck rather hard. And you may have missed some important happenings. Cannons and pirates and the like, while you were knocked out.”

Rogers straightens with a wince. “Right. Well then. Did they take anyone—or anything—else?”

“Not that I could see,” McNeil says. “Bloody peculiar, too. Why take the captain but leave the crew and everything else behind?”

“Indeed.” Rogers agrees. “A mystery to solve, but we’ll be better served to head topside and begin repairs right away first.” He turns his eyes to Catherine and she can see they’ve regained their focus. “By your leave, of course, Mrs. McGann,” he adds.

She frowns but nods. They haven’t yet discussed the fact that he’s an agent of the Home Office, but finding Andrew and securing the ship are the most important matters at hand. She will have that conversation with him sooner or later, though. Sooner, she hopes.

“Let’s go,” she says, and the three leave the boiler room, only to be confronted with seawater rushing down the open ladder and into the hallway.

“Heavens!” Catherine exclaims. “It’s getting worse.”

“It is,” McNeil agrees, and they speed up their steps, rushing to the upper decks, where McNeil and Rogers waste no time surveying the damage and splitting the men into work crews.

Catherine aids McNeil and a small cadre of other men in cleaning the berthing and the galley, while Rogers directs the rest of the crew in restoring The Elphame to water-tight, running condition.

All day, they shore up cannonball holes and then fill any remaining cracks with tar and pitch. They drag cots, blankets, and hammocks from the berths to the main deck to dry in the sun, and they remove broken bits of furniture and crockery from the galley and mess.

It’s hot, hard work, but she’s glad of it to take her mind off the vision of McGann on his knees, arms bound and a bloody bandage wrapped around his thigh.

And she’s never met men like these before. McNeil, it turns out, is also a Scot, although one with a much less dramatic accent than either McGann or James. He’s from the south of the country, he explains to her as they haul broken bits of furniture up the ladders and out onto the deck to be used as spare lumber.

The south, McNeil says, is almost as different from the Highlands as Wales is from England in terms of language, culture, and history.

Catherine shakes her head; she’d no idea, and she’s been to Scotland. And if she didn’t know that about a place she’s visited—about the only place she’s ever visited—what doesn’t she know about all the places she hasn’t?

What, she wonders, is the world really like, filled with so many unfamiliar languages and cultures and histories?

The thought of how much she doesn’t know nearly bowls her over.

The rest of the crew, she learns, is made up of former Kentish farmers, with their own heavy dialects to parse. And she’s delighted to find out how much she enjoys working alongside them all day. Few were trained as career sailors. Most were tenants on Crawford’s family’s estate in Kent, struggling for years with the ever-increasing marshiness of the land that doesn’t lend itself to agriculture.

Crawford and McGann based their company out of Kent in part to give these men a chance at a new kind of life and then trained them to master their new trade.

She feels a kinship with them, all of them venturing together into unfamiliar waters. And just as she’d once been shaken by how close she’d come to living without desire, she’s shaken now by the thought of never having known these people at all. She might have spent her whole life merely watching the world drift by—flat, colorless, and distant—without ever touching it, let alone meeting the souls who inhabit it.

By heavens, how much she might have missed.

And even if all is not well in the world—Andrew missing, the Elphame damaged, her future uncertain—she knows she’ll never again give up the chance to be part of it.

An imperfect life fully lived, she decides, is better than a perfect one merely observed. And life, she reasons, can always be mended. No matter how much has gone awry.