Prologue

1714

Tortuga

            The floors wanted scrubbing.  But then there was always something in need of a good scrubbing at Madame Torbeau’s.  Edmund slapped more dirty water onto the bare floorboards.  He had some rather serious doubts as to whether the water, which had already been used to clean a large pot of soiled linens, was helping the situation or making it worse.  However, he’d been told to scrub and, by God, he was going to do it.  He wasn’t in the mood for another lashing.  Edmund’s tolerance for abuse was limited to three beatings per day, and he’d already endured four.

            The first had come by way of morning reverie and, after nearly ten years, was a long standing tradition.  The stable hand had found that his charges awoke with more vigor if he walloped them a few times with his riding crop.  In actuality it was the most action the crop usually got since very few of the Madame’s customers arrived on horseback.  The terrain of the island wasn’t suited to them and, being so close to the port, most of the clientele came straight from the ships anyway.

            The second beating of the day had come from Mrs. Gibbons, the unofficial matron of Madame Torbeau’s servants.  She was a solid, though deceptively slim looking woman of indeterminable age.  Her hands, with their long, reddened fingers and large knuckles, looked strong and capable.  Mrs. Gibbons oversaw the daily work of the house and made sure that everyone was given just enough food to make it through their chores, and not a jot more.  She had caught Edmund sneaking a small loaf of bread out of the kitchens after breakfast and had beaten him around the head for it.  Since this had been the second time he’d been caught stealing inside of a week she’d gone a bit overboard with his punishment.  Edmund had been reduced to hiding in a cabinet under the stair for the better part of an hour, just waiting for the world to stop spinning.

            Mrs. Gibbons’s attack hadn’t exactly been unexpected.  Edmund tried to sneak a little bit of extra food every day and had for years.  The other boys never ratted him out.  At seventeen, Edmund was the oldest among them and that made him their defacto leader.  More importantly, they knew that if there was anything left over when he was finished they would be able to buy it off him.  Edmund always tried to cut a deal with whomever he thought needed it the most, even if they were offering the least amount of money.  He liked to think it cancelled out the theft on God’s moral scale.

            The third and forth beatings had come at the hands of the Madame herself.  Upon discovering Edmund hiding in a closet rather than working she had backhanded him across the face.  His aching head felt as though it might split in two as he toppled to the floor.  The Madame gave him two sharp kicks to the side as a means to roll him over.

            “Well, I recognize Molly’s work, right enough,” she said as she prodded the growing bruise around Edmund’s eye.  Grabbing him by his grubby collar, she hauled him bodily upright.  Though no longer in her prime she retained the strength of the hardy farm girl she’d been in her youth.  “Let’s go see what mischief you’ve been up to, my young rake,”

            The Madame, dragging Edmund behind her, bustled into the servants corridor and shoved open the kitchen door.  A moment of shocked silence followed by a sudden flurry of activity painted a picture of kitchen maids lounging idly by until the moment their mistress was near at hand.  The Madame scowled.  She tossed Edmund into the room ahead of her.

            “What’s the little wretch done now?” she demanded.

            Even the blustering anger of Mrs. Molly Gibbons guttered out like a candle when faced with the mistress’s displeasure.

            “Oh, nothing worth mentioning,” she evaded, turning towards a large pot set in the fireplace.  “Boys will be boys, eh?” Mrs. Gibbons slight Scottish brogue always became more apparent when she was nervous.

            The truth was that, if it weren’t for Mrs. Gibbons, the Madame would have had Edmund’s throat slit for his petty theft long ago.  But Molly Gibbons, who had lost her own three children to fever when they were just infants, had taken a special interest in the boy.  Despite appearances, she had always acted on his behalf.  By administering his punishments herself she had, in fact, been protecting him from the wrath of Madame Torbeau.

            “You mean to tell me you beat this boy black and blue for no reason?”  The Madame laughed incredulously.  “You must think I fell into the world yesterday, you expect me to believe that.”

            “It really weren’t anythin’ worth botherin’ you with, Mum.”

            “That the way of it?” she asked Edmund.  He shot a quick glance at Mrs. Gibbons.  She didn’t move or speak, but her expression spoke volumes.

            “Yes, Mum,” he answered quietly.

            The Madame looked from Edmund to Mrs. Gibbons knowingly.

            “So that’s how it is,” she said with quiet menace.  “Secrets, then?  I’ll show you how I deal with secrets in my house.”

            The Madame walked serenely towards the back of the room and the servants scattered before her.  Along the back wall of the kitchen the sundry utensils not currently in use were arranged neatly on shelves and pegs.  Beneath them hung the heavy honing steel, a foot long rod of metal used to sharpen the kitchen knives.  The Madame hefted the steel in her hand, seeming to test its weight, before removing it from its peg.  She turned and advanced on Edmund.

            On an average day Edmund prided himself on taking whatever abuse life heaped on him with as much dignity as possible.  But, as the Madame stepped towards him, Edmund cowered, dignity be damned.  He scrambled as far away from her as he could in the cramped kitchen.

            As the Madame raised her arm to deliver the first blow, Edmund instinctively raised his hands in surrender.  The heavy rod cracked against his wrist and he spun away from her, cradling the injured arm against his chest.  The second blow caught him on the shoulder with much more force.  He smacked face first into the rough, wooden wall and attempted to brace himself.  Edmund lost count as the blows began raining down on his back and upper thighs.  The weapon was rounded and could not draw blood, which was, he supposed, a blessing.  For several minutes he was conscious only of the thud of heavy metal striking flesh, his own barely controlled cries, and the occasional gasp from one of the women watching.  He wished he had something to bite down on. Grinding his teeth, he waited for it to end.

            After what seemed an eternity, the Madame tired.  Edmund slumped to the floor in a shuddering heap.  Snatching a handful of his hair, the Madame jerked him around to face her.

            “Remember, love, I don’t need to know what you done to kill you for it.”  She shoved him away and his head cracked against the wall.  “Now get back to work.”

            As the Madame swept towards the door, she paused.

            “No one touches him,” she ordered.  No one had dared oppose her.

            Now that night was beginning to fall the pain and nausea had subsided into a constant but bearable ache.  His wrist twinged with every move, but he did his best to ignore it.  Though Edmund knew he would most likely be sleeping on his stomach for the rest of the week, if not longer, he didn’t think there would be any permanent damage.  He was young and fit and he’d always bounced back before.  He saw no reason why this occasion should be any different.  He scrubbed the floors as vigorously as he would have any other night.

            “Edmund!”  The door man poked his head into the servant’s corridor where Edmund was working.  His ebony skin made him almost indiscernible in the flickering light cast by the hall’s two oil lamps.  His voice was round and deep and seemed to echo down the long hall.  “The Siren’s Song jus’ pulled inta port.  Madame wants Marry’s room aired afore the Captain gets ‘ere.  Get on it or she’ll tan your backside again.”

            Edmund sighed heavily.  There was always something in this damned place.  He shoved his buckets and scrub brush against the wall and got shakily to his feet.  Before going into the main room, he slipped off his shoes and tucked them into his belt.  The Madame had spent a great deal of money on a beautiful, ornate rug to put at the bottom of the stairs.  Edmund didn’t like thinking about what she would do to him if he tracked dirty water across it.

            The layout of Madame Torbeau’s was simple enough.  The bottom floor had once been two fairly large rooms with a single wall separating the front from the back.  The stairs to the second floor plunged ostentatiously into the middle of the front room as though they had once aspired to be a grand staircase, but hadn’t been able to scrape together enough coin.  When the Madame had purchased the building she had immediately refitted it to suite her needs.  Thin walls had been erected to form the kitchen, laundry, and storage rooms, all connected by the narrow servant’s corridor.  The upstairs had been chopped up in a similar fashion.  What had once been four spacious rooms now housed ten tiny bedrooms and the Madame’s master suite.

            Mary’s room was one of the few to boast a seaward facing window.  She had been granted such an honor due, in large part, to the good Captain’s favor.  Captain Williams could always be counted on to spend at least a week in port, spending his coin almost exclusively at Madame Torbeau’s.  The Madame kept careful track of his comings and goings while on the island.  She monitored Mary, as well, after his departure, desperately hoping the girl was with child.  Sadly, the fortuitous event had yet to happen.

            Edmund knocked quietly on Mary’s door before entering.  Spending the majority of his life in the confines of a whorehouse hadn’t left him with a great deal of respect for women’s privacy.  Mary was up and dressed, at least.  She stood in front of her hand sized mirror attempting to pin her hair up into something that might almost have been elegant.  She wasn’t much older than Edmund, which meant she was still young enough to care about appearances.  She didn’t even glance at Edmund as he entered the room, so he cleared his throat to get her attention.

            “The Siren’s Song is in port, Ma’am,” he said quietly

            Mary gasped.  The pin she had been holding flew out of her fingers and hit the wall with a small twang.

            “Sebastian!” she whispered rapturously and ran from the room, her half pinned hair streaming behind her.

            Edmund walked across the small room, limping only slightly, and threw open the window.  A cool breeze coming up off the water rushed into the room and whisked away the scent of the previous night’s whoring.  The fresh air was a relief after a day spent indoors.  Edmund breathed deep.  The sun was setting, shooting swaths of orange and pink across the sky, and he took a moment to appreciate its beauty.  Quietly, he began humming a tune that had been with him through the whole of his young life.  He supposed his mother must have sung it to him in his infancy as he could not accurately recall the first time he’d ever heard it.  The melody was slow and melancholy and Edmund loved it.

            The song told the tale of a young woman and her lover, who had gone to sea to make his fortune.  When he didn’t return, the lady cut off her hair, disguised her sex, and snuck aboard an outgoing ship.  On that ship she met a man who had known her love, and his fate.  The young man had been lost overboard during a storm.  Upon hearing the tale the poor woman climbed the main mast and leapt into the waiting waters below.  The song ended with the lovers being reunited in death’s cold embrace.

            Edmund had always felt a kind of kinship with the woman in the song.  He knew from experience that it had taken true desperation to make the choices she’d made.  He knew because, for the first seven years of his life, his name had actually been Sarah.