Ned

I wrapped my arms around my aching stomach and fought to keep a groan in. I couldn’t let my awful seasickness give away my position in the hold. Not when I’d managed to stay hidden this long.

I wasn’t sure how long it had been, exactly. It turned out Bailey, the sailor who had smuggled me aboard as a stowaway in the first place, was the ship’s Quartermaster. Those stores that were so carefully counted were, in fact, counted by Bailey. But he had kept his promise and brought me food on a regular basis. Perhaps even more significantly, though, he had brought me water when I’d been struck with the seasickness—and a pail to vomit in.

I was more disgusting than I had ever been, and worse, I was convinced I was going to die.

For days, I had been certain I was going to die in the dark, trapped in a dank, stinking hole. When I had finally accepted my fate and closed my eyes, intending to never open them again, the storm that had slammed the boat for days on end finally abated.

I huddled against the crates, hiding in the dark, counting down the seconds until...I wasn’t sure what. Until we reached Australia, maybe. Or until my life ended. Either seemed fine at that moment.

But soon, Bailey came down into the hold with a bowl of broth, a cloth, and a bucket of water, and said, “You might as well make your way topside. Half the sailors on board know that you’re here, and the other half think we might have a ghost. Were as echoed all through our quarters.”

He spooned up some of the broth and held it to my mouth. I took it gently.

“Does the captain know I’m here?”

Bailey shrugged. “I haven’t asked him, but I would guess that he does.” He fed me another spoon of the broth, then set the bowl down next to me. “I’m going to leave the hatch open. Finish this, get cleaned up, then make your way up top. Don’t tell anyone I’m the one who let you on board, though. I’ll deny it, and I won’t help you anymore if you do.”

“Will the captain toss me overboard?”

“Probably not. The work isn’t as bad as I made you think. Besides, it’ll help you build your strength back up.”

Bailey was right, too.

Captain Jones pretended to be angry that I had stowed away, but he had lost a couple of sailors who had never returned from shore leave, so I think he was glad enough to have the help. Less glad when he saw my hands, surmising correctly that I hadn’t done much in the way of physical labor in the course of my life.

But he remedied that quickly enough. My first job was scrubbing out the hold I’d befouled during my bout of seasickness. And after that, he put me to work cleaning every imaginable corner of the ship, scrubbing it down, then sloughing it off with seawater. I worked until my hands were wrinkled and rough and bleeding.

At night, Bailey taught me to tie sailors’ knots and George taught me to stitch. I spent my evenings mending ropes and sails.

It wasn’t long before I was considering staying aboard even after we made port in Australia.

After all, within weeks, I knew more about sailing than I did about farming, and that was my most likely employment in Australia.

I was almost ready to approach Captain Jones about it, having discussed it with George and Bailey and a few other of the old-timer sailors. I still didn’t know if I had it in me to stay aboard a ship for the long haul—I hadn’t suffered through another storm like the last one, so I didn’t know if I’d be able to get past the seasickness. But I was willing to try, and according to George, never giving up was the primary attribute of any “landlubber wanting to turn true seaman.”

Since the captain had little choice other than to either take me on as a sailor or make me walk the plank, he agreed to let me stay on board as a crew member on a trial basis. If I had realized how easy it really was to get taken on board a sailing ship, I might have attempted to come aboard legitimately—if not for the fact that I wanted no record of my leaving London. I couldn’t let my father know where I had gone. The great Earl would track me down and drag me back home to marry me off to a woman I didn’t love.

Sometimes I wondered what had happened at home, how my father had reacted to my absence the day he had planned to make my engagement to Miss Lansing public.

But mostly, I simply enjoyed my new life as a sailor.

With one exception. The first time I had to climb up to the crow’s nest.

It was where we took turns doing duty as lookout. It wasn’t so much keeping watch up in the crow’s nest—a tiny basket attached to the highest mast on board the ship—but the climb getting there terrified me.

Many of the sailors on board The Felicity had grown up on the sea. Their fathers and grandfathers were sailors. Even if they hadn’t spent their childhood on board ships, many of them had spent them in ports, where they’d had the run of the ships docked there and were used to the heights required when climbing among the sails.

The first time I climbed up to the crow’s nest, I was certain I was going to die.

Climbing the rope ladder made my head spin. Everything swung and swayed around me. The wind blew against the sails and the ropes, swinging me high above the deck below, out over the ocean.

The world spun around me, and the line between the sea and the sky blurred until there was nothing around me except blue for as far as I could see in any direction. I felt as if, were I to let go, I would fall up, up, up into the ocean or down into the sky. I would drown in air, fly in water—and it would all be the same.

In that instant, my fear disappeared.

I would not survive this world. None of us do. But I was free, and that freedom was joyous.

I could soar.

At that moment I came back to myself and scrambled into the crow’s nest. It had seemed so terrifying and high from the deck below, but now? Now it was just another spot in the giant world, neither high nor low.

And from that day forward, I swung among the ropes and sails with ease, laughing and joking and never fearing to look down.

I might have been born the youngest son among the London aristocracy—but now I was a sailor.