Free Cinnamon and Gunpowder by Eli Brown Page B

heading for Mabbot’s personal pinnace, which hung behind the ship, her little sails furled coyly. The elegant script on her stern read Deimos .
    We scrambled from the quarterdeck to the poop, and I was beginning to imagine what trouble sailing even that small boat would be for a pair so shackled when Jeroboam stopped in his tracks, stood straight at attention, and fell on his face. Though I tried, I could not hold him up, and, as he fell, he yanked me to my knees. His monocle broke with a pitiful sound. A short slender blade had pierced the back of his neck. Feng, who had thrown it, called for the captain, who emerged scowling.
    She nudged Jeroboam with her boot, then turned a wry smile on me. “And you, Mr. Wedgwood, are you unhappy with our hospitality too?”
    “No, ma’am,” I quavered.
    “Nothing you need?”
    “Nothing, thank you, Captain.”
    She returned the blade to Feng, who cleaned it on the hem of his pants.
    The weight of Jeroboam’s arm pulled on me, and I was obliged to kneel near him. A breeze carried his palm-leaf hat over the rail. It danced for a moment in the air before dropping.
    I was left alone. Occasionally a flurry of gunshots sounded from the prison above us, but they seemed distant and unrelated to me. The plan, whatever it had been, was horribly bungled. Things were far worse now, irredeemable. What folly to have put my hope in Jeroboam, whom I could no longer bring myself to look at. When I tried to stand and get some distance from the heap of him, his arm rose and tugged me back. He was my keeper now—even Feng left us unwatched.
    I had had my fill of murder and corpses. A revulsion crept into me bit by bit, until it was everything I could do to stay where I was and not run screaming, dragging the bloody thing behind me.
    Thus yoked with the dead, I witnessed the interrogation of the prison warden, who was brought at gunpoint to the deck. This man’s keys had been ripped from him, belt and all, and he was forced to hold his pants up with both hands. Mabbot asked Mr. Apples a question with her eyes to which he merely shook his head.
    A small heap of items, among them a tin cup, a prayer rug, and boots, were placed at Mabbot’s feet. “These were in the jailer’s chambers—he says they belonged to the Fox,” Bai said.
    Mabbot, her fury barely contained, demanded of the warden, “And where is the Brass Fox?”
    The man pressed his forehead to the wood and raised his folded hands in supplication. “Not here! He’s not here.”
    “I’m beginning to grasp that. Where is he?”
    “He escaped three weeks ago. We haven’t had him for three weeks.”
    “Three weeks? Are you sure? Damn Jeroboam! Wish I could kill him again.” She paced, fuming, then gripped the jailer by the hair. “Tell me why I shouldn’t shoot you for incompetence. Did he just swim away?”
    “He was delivered with a dozen other criminals.” The officer moaned. “At first we didn’t know who he was—he’d blacked his hair and given us a false name. When we discovered we had the Fox, we sent right off for instructions. Sometimes they want the notorious ones hanged in the public squares in London, it makes for a good show…” Here the man trailed off, remembering whom he was talking to.
    “Give his head a thump, Mr. Apples,” said Mabbot. “The contents are stuck.”
    The warden flinched and blurted the rest: “By the time we got instructions back, he’d flown.” He held his hands up to show they were empty, as if he could be palming the Fox like a card.
    “What were the instructions from London?”
    “Immediate execution after interrogation.”
    “Without trial or even a last meal.”
    “‘Immediate’ was the word. But we never got to do it. The Fox is not a natural man.” The prison keeper wept. “Locks are nothing to him, he moves through the walls themselves. He took a hostage, one of the guards. There was a ship waiting for him. He had help.”
    “What ship?”
    “A Dutch merchant, the