Free JoAnn Wendt by Beyond the Dawn

yesterday.
    While she clung stubbornly to her name, she no longer claimed to be a duchess. Almost a month in the bondslave hold had taught her that. Her fellow passengers had leaped upon her title as a pack of dogs leap after a rabbit.
    They tormented her. They taunted, jeered. The children had made up singing games, with her the butt of their joke. And she’d gathered the unwanted attention of men who tried to touch her breasts whenever she forced her way through the crowded hold to the vile slop bucket that served as the only privy, behind a curtain of tattered sail.
    But the women, excepting Mab Collins, were cruelest of all. Their jibes were tipped in the poison of jealousy. They jeered at her dainty ways, mocked her speech. They roared with laughter when she shrieked upon finding lice crawling in her own hair. During deck scrubbing, one of them always contrived to spill a bucket of cold seawater on her, soaking her to the skin.
    The meanness had gone unchecked until Obadiah Collins put an end to it. Exploding in righteous indignation, that gentle giant made it known he would tolerate no further baiting of Flavia. Each night she thanked God for Obadiah’s presence. No person, male or female, was foolish enough to risk the big man’s wrath.
    “Thy name iss—”
    Flavia jerked herself to alertness. The captain thumbed through his log, his irritation increasing with each page he was forced to search. At last he stabbed a long yellow fingernail at an entry.
    “Hah! Jane Brown!” he read victoriously. “Come Schilaack September the thirteen.” He glared up at her, his bearded mouth twisting in contempt. “Come Schilaack drunk.”
    Flavia’s mouth flew open in protest. Then she shut it tiredly. What was the use? The Collinses had told her she was “Jane Brown” from the first. They even remembered her solicitous “cousin” who’d brought her aboard. And she’d wakened in rude clothes reeking of rum.
    A dry hysterical sob forced its way up through her despair.
    “I am Flavia Rochambeau!” she cried out.
    But the captain wasn’t listening. He’d already dismissed her and was dealing with two brothers who argued hotly about the possessions of a third brother. The man had died of consumption just an hour before in a bunk near the one in which Flavia and the entire Collins family were crammed.
    She turned away, sickened for herself and sickened at the avarice exploding behind her. While the brothers railed, the captain thundered, cursing the untimely death. He could not collect passage if a bondman died before the ship passed the halfway point in the journey. Had the young man lingered, the captain could have tacked the indenture on to that of the young man’s widow.
    Sick, despairing, wishing hers was the body being passed out of the humanity-packed, fetid hold, she pushed her way through the throng. Her ears were deaf to the insults that trailed after her.
    “Ay there, Duchess. Crawl over to me hammock t’night ‘n’ I’ll give ye somethin’ from the duke!”
    “Blimey, Duchess! Where’s yer diamond and rooooby tiara? Lost it in the privy bucket, has ye?”
    “God! Ain’t so proud now ‘at she’s dirty as the rest o’ we!”
    There was a crevice, a little “hidey” place as the children called it, between the starboard railing and a dozen water barrels that were strapped between cabin wall and railing. Only a child or a slender adult could slip in. Flavia made for the haven and squeezed into it. Alone, she clutched the railing and rested her burning face on her hands.
    She felt defeated. Empty. The ship rolled under her. Whitecaps smashed at the hull, sending spits of foam flying. The spits sizzled on her hands for an instant, then melted away. She was too tired to think. Too tired to live.
    Am I dead to everyone who loved me? Does only my husband know I’m alive? Oh, why haven’t I the courage to end it! The sea beckons . . .
    But she had neither the courage to die nor the energy to live. And