Crossing Over - Anna Kendall [16]
“Aye, sir.” He sat. I had no doubt that he would wait there until the end of time, if necessary. I left him.
Behind thick bushes, I tried to make myself fly through the air, as Bat had done. I willed it, I jumped, I closed my eyes and tried to command myself. Nothing. Apparently it was not enough to merely be here; one had to also be dead.
I bit my tongue, enough pain for a return, and crossed over.
“He’s reviving,” a woman’s voice said. I lay on the floor of the cabin. Mistress Conyers’s face, weary and grieving and disgusted, sagged above me. “Guards, take him outside and set him free.”
“No, wait!” Beyond shame, I clutched the sodden hem of her velvet gown. “Listen to me! I—”
“Out!” Her voice rose to a shriek. She was not, I sensed, a woman giving to shrieking, but here and now . . . Her husband lay dead in the roiling sea, his ship wrecked on the rocks, her life in ruins. A soldier seized me, not gently.
I blurted, “Captain Conyers bought you roses in Yantaga! When you put into port to put the bosun ashore for theft . . . yellow roses, masses and masses of yellow roses!”
The soldier had me halfway out the door. Mistress Conyers said, “Wait.”
“Mistress—”
“Wait.” And to me: “What do you know of yellow roses at Yantaga?”
I knew what Bat had told me, no more. But her face had gone white, and so, of course, there was more. With women, there is always more. I stabbed wildly around in my mind for something to say, to give her, something that might preserve my life.
“The roses were a . . . an offering. Between you two. For something important.”
Her eyes filled with tears. To the soldier she said, “Leave us.”
“Mistress, it may not be safe to—”
“Leave us!” And there it was, the tone of authority I had tried for with Bat and could never, not in this land nor that other, achieve as she did. She was born to that voice. The soldier dropped me and stalked out the door.
“Who are you?” she said. “How do you know these things?”
We stared at each other across the dim space, lit by only one lantern and the gray light from the small window. The other survivor moaned in a corner. The cabin smelled of male sweat, of rodent droppings, of my fear. But I had no choice.
“My name is Roger Kilbourne. I know these things because your husband just told me, while I lay unconscious. Mistress, please believe me, please let me convince you. I can tell you more of your voyage on the Frances Ormund, much more . . . No, please hear me out! I am not lying or conniving or trying to play on your grief. I don’t know why I am this way, and I want nothing from you except my life. Please listen to me. I can . . .”
I had never said it aloud to anyone except Hartah and my aunt, and then only when I was a child, too young to know that some things are better left unsaid.
“I can travel to the land of the Dead.”
7
SHE BELIEVED ME. Hartah had always said that only country folk believed in my ability, never the city-bred nor those above us, and I had found that true. But Mistress Conyers was a rare creature, one of those few who look squarely at the evidence before them, who weigh it, who can accept even that which is distasteful or frightening if it also seems true. After I told her all I had learned from Bat, Mistress Conyers accepted that I could cross over. She also accepted that if I was not to be killed, she must take me away from the soldiers filled with lust for revenge over the Frances Ormund. She believed me, she took me with her, and then she disliked me intensely for both those things.
Witchcraft.
Child of ship wreckers.
We left late in the afternoon. The rain had stopped and the sea had gone from raging to grumbling. Those bodies that could be recovered lay under wet blankets in the backs of wagons, along with such cargo as could be fished from the waters. Mistress Conyers and I rode in a different wagon from the corpses, and I stuck close to her. Soldiers in rain-soaked blue glared at me with murder