Free Secondhand Charm by Julie Berry Page A

he was, felt false to me. The woman kept her distance.
    “You folks want to see some animals?” a tall sailor said. “Oy! Bob! Bobby Natch!”
    A reply came from somewhere in the tall riggings.
    “Bring your crew,” the sailor yelled. “We’ve got some here ’at wants to see it.”
    The sailor called Bobby Natch, a much-wizened older man with very few teeth, appeared with a parrot on one shoulder, a three-legged cat at his feet, and a wicker basket. The parrot favored us with language I dare not repeat, and the cat hissed at the monkey, then climbed to the top of a long pole where he sat yowling at us. Many men found this amusing.
    Then Bobby Natch opened his basket. “Stand back, stand back, ladies and gents.”
    At first nothing happened. Then a shape appeared, small, triangular. It tilted, swayed, then slipped over the edge of the basket, drawing a thick, winding, swelling body behind it.
    “Snake!”
    Women shrieked. My dance partner made no bones of scurrying off the poop deck. All the while the snake kept pouring itself out of the basket, and Bobby Natch cackled with delight.
    “That’s a sand viper,” he said. “Three feet long. Annoy her, and it’s the last thing you’ll do.”
    “Why would you keep such a creature?” a woman cried.
    For the fun of scaring us, I imagined. “Rats,” said Bobby. “This lady kills three times the rats as old Puss. Rats bring disease. So my mates and me call her ‘the Doctor.’ ”
    Aidan nudged me. “Stand behind me, Evie,” he whispered. “My boots are thick.”
    “I’m all right,” I said, fingering my snakebite charm, and wondering if I believed in it. “Snakes don’t bother me.”
    “Now, now, folks,” Bobby said, “you don’t have nothing to fear from the Doctor. Leave her alone, she’ll leave you alone. Ain’t she purty?”
    She was beautiful. Her amber eyes reflected lantern light like two yellow moons. A symmetrical zigzag of dark scales traced down her muscular back. She coiled herself in a neat pile and surveyed everyone’s ankles.
    A chill wind blew across the ship, whipping the sails. Bobby Natch and the other sailor studied the sky. The stars in the west had been blotted out by clouds.
    “Chick-chick-eeet!”
    The monkey, perched on his master’s shoulder, chattered at the sand viper. She raised her head to search for the sound. Bobby Natch, wearing a leather glove, stooped to retrieve his snake, but the monkey leaped down and hissed at her. She swerved her neck back and forth menacingly.
    “Get that thing away if you want to keep it,” ordered Bobby, and the monkey trainer reached for the little pest.
    He saved his monkey, though he was a moment too late. The sand viper, striking like a spring-loaded arrow, hurtled across the deck and sank its teeth into the monkey tamer’s wrist.

Chapter 16

    Bobby Natch gripped the viper’s head at the jaws, pulled it off the man’s arm, and stuffed her back into her basket. He gave the man a mournful shake of his head, then scuttled off the poop deck and disappeared into the bowels of the ship.
    The two bites leered like narrow red eyes from the monkey tamer’s wrist. The wind whipped the sails, sending spray into our worried faces.
    I came forward and took his hand. “Get me strips of cloth,” I said to a sailor. “And a blanket for this man to lie down on.”
    “ ’Oo’s she think she is?” one sailor asked another.
    “Get her what she asks for,” Aidan said, as I coaxed the man to sit. “She knows things.”
    If only I did! From what I’d read in my father’s books, I knew the procedure would be to slit the bite wound across with a sharp blade, then suck as much blood out as you could.
    I might have only moments to spare before the venom took hold, but I couldn’t bring myself to cut the man further, nor to suck his blood into my mouth.
    It wouldn’t work anyway, I thought. How could it? But who was I to argue with Father’s books? Then again, even the books admitted that