The Watery Part of the World - Michael Parker [13]
“I didn’t say I want to see him again.”
“You’re not talking sense. How long since you ate?’
It had been days. Two at least. The stomach cramps were so steady she knew the quarter hour by them. Whaley hoisted the door above his head and took off through the dunes. She understood to follow.
Inside his lean-to he pointed to a spot by the fireplace, tossed her a blanket, and set about heating up something in a black pot. While he worked she looked around the place, took note of the civilized touches—a shelf of leather-bound books, a music box, an oil painting of a mountain glen that reminded her of the wedding trip she took to Niagara Falls with Joseph.
“I suppose you subsist by robbing ships as well?” she asked him.
Whaley’s laugh, low and deep in his chest, was without glee.
“Not a smart line of questioning fired at a man about to provide you with a meal.”
“I’m growing accustomed to the men of this island contradicting themselves. Robbing and murdering, then taking me in, feeding me, offering me a corner of their homes.”
“They only tolerate you because he’s scared of you.”
“Because of who I am?”
This time his laughter was filled with mirth, or mockery. “Who you are? He don’t give a damn who you are. The more you carry on about your famous daddy, the more mad he thinks you are. If he really thought you were the daughter of that bastard, he’d of thrown you over same’s he did your maid.”
She thought of defending her father but realized, too late, how completely she’d exposed herself to Whaley. If her survival depended on hiding who she was, she was certainly found out now.
“All of what you see there I progged off the beach,” he said. He ladled steaming stew into a bowl and brought it to her along with a hard and slightly molded piece of bread. She dipped the bread in the broth and devoured it, speared a potato and ate without chewing.
“You worry that I’ll tell them you’re not so crazy,” he said.
She looked up at him, terrified suddenly that her every thought was obvious, transparent.
“Never mind that,” he said. “He spared my life as well. I got here same way you did. Against my will.”
“He boarded your ship?”
“Something like that.”
Whaley studied her in the flickering light. She looked him in the eye, something she hadn’t done to anyone since she’d arrived on the island. She needed to look the part. That meant no eye contact, appropriate body language—hunched back, drooped shoulders, a shuffling, sideways gait. Once a lady came to Richmond Hill to teach her how to walk, how to eat, how to converse. Her father paid the woman, though he swore he didn’t—she found the account in his ledger. He said the woman came because she felt sorry for Theo, having lost her mother, who was supposed to teach her these things. But charity made Theo feel worse. She was relieved when she’d discovered the woman’s name in the ledger. Thereafter she approached the lessons with a little more energy and interest. And now the lessons were truly paying off, for everything she had been taught she simply reversed.
“Well, it doesn’t look like he’s got you under guard either,” she said, conscious of how liberating it was to be so rudely intrusive, now that she had so little to lose.
“They say he knows every pony on this island, every milk cow, every chicken. All these people are his spies. You think they volunteered to board you? Poor as they are? This island ain’t good for growing nothing. Daniels supplies them with stock and the grain to feed it. He pays off the governor too. Not that the government’s got dominion on these islands.”
If there were no rule, no government, surely she had been forgotten. To distract herself from this thought, she asked another intrusive question.
“What was your trade before you were captured?”
“I was at sea.”
“Ah,” she said, looking above her. “I might have guessed carpentry, given the excellence of this structure.”
“You make do with what the water washes up over here.”
“I don’t suppose the rest of them