“Don’t you wish you could do that?” I called to Montgomery over my shoulder. “It’s like they’re flying.”
There was no answer. I turned, but Montgomery had gone below. In his place was the castaway, awake, upright, watching me from across the deck. Surprise drenched me like a splash of cold water.
The sun blisters on his face had faded, though the gash on the side of his face was a constant reminder of the shipwreck. He’d cut the tangles out of his dark hair and it now fell just below his chin, unfashionable but at least clean. Only a whisper remained of that haunting apparition, and now he was merely flesh and blood and bone and bruises. He looked naturally lean, so his gauntness was even more pronounced, yet there was something undeniably strong about him.
He waved.
I hesitated, and waved back.
Ten
THE NEXT AFTERNOON I found a lidded bowl full of live worms and roaches outside my door with a note written in a gentleman’s handwriting. It wasn’t in Montgomery’s hand, and none of the sailors could write, so it took little reasoning to determine who it was from.
Monkeys adore insects, it said.
I went above deck, set the teeming bowl under the rigging, and removed the lid. One roach saw its chance to escape and crawled up the side, but I flicked it back in. I hid behind some crates, settling in to wait, but heard the sound of the ceramic bowl moving within only a minute. The monkey was so engrossed in the bowl that he didn’t even notice when I sneaked up behind him and slipped a collar around his neck. I let him finish eating before putting him in his new cage.
Monkey secure, I found the castaway sitting in the corner of the forecastle deck outside the boatswain’s hold, his back to me, leaning over an old backgammon board balanced on top of a barrel. He was studying the game’s red and black tokens by the fading sunlight. They were set all wrong. He didn’t seem aware of the sailors throwing him angry glances for taking up space on the deck.
I studied him as carefully as he studied the backgammon game. Despite the gash along his face, there was something undeniably attractive about him. Not handsome in a classic way like Montgomery, but more subtle, deeper, as if his true handsomeness lay in the story behind those bruises and that crumpled photograph. Something to be discovered, slowly, if one was clever enough to decipher it.
“They say you’re mad,” I said.
His arm jerked as he turned toward my voice. The backgammon game spilled to the floor, red and black tokens rolling across the deck. I fell to my knees to collect them, and he bent to help. He seemed reluctant to meet my eyes. Reserved. His fingers absently drifted to the gash under his eye. A muscle twitched in the side of his jaw. He was scarred from the shipwreck, of course, but there was something in his guarded movements that spoke of more, as though the scars might continue deep below the surface.
“I couldn’t remember much at first,” he said, daring a glance at me. This close, I saw that his brown eyes had flecks of gold that caught the fading sun. “But it’s coming back to me.” His hand dropped away from his face. A sailor passed, kicking one of the tokens down the deck and grumbling curses about cadging stowaways.
The castaway added, “I’m not mad.” For a moment his eyes shifted oddly to the left, as though half his mind was still trapped on that dinghy or had sunk with the ship. He had suffered so greatly, and the sailors seemed keen to make him suffer more.
“Mad enough to come above deck and get in the sailors’ way. You aren’t making yourself popular with them,” I said, and then lower, “You should be careful.” I handed him the tokens I’d collected and nodded at the board. “Would you like to play a round?”
The corner of his mouth twitched again, this time in a half smile. He straightened the backgammon board and stacked the tokens one by one.
I folded my legs and sat across from him. I tried not to stare at the bruises on his arms and face. His knuckles were scraped raw nearly to the bone, and I remembered that hand clutching the photograph, clutching to life. Hard to believe this was the same person.
“Do you remember what happened?” I asked. “The shipwreck?”
His eyes slid to me, only a flash, judging whether or not to trust me. He picked up the dice. “Yes.”
“And your name?” I asked.
“Edward Prince.” He said it slowly, as though he had little information about himself to share and had to ration it carefully.
“I’m Juliet Moreau.”
He nodded slowly. “I know.” And I remembered he’d asked Montgomery about me.
It was my turn to stare, wondering what he’d thought of me that first day, when he’d been lost in a whirlpool of delusion. He’d said something that none of us had heard. Now he stared at the tokens, just slices from an old mop or broom handle, with the dice waiting in his hand. The tokens were still set wrong, and I instinctively reached out to rearrange them before starting our game. It felt good to put something in order.
“How did you survive?” I asked.
My question caught him off guard, and his hand curled around the dice. He gave a cautious shrug. “The grace of God, I suppose.”
I watched his broken fist working the dice, the tic of his bruised jaw, the strength in his wiry shoulders. His words came too easy. He’d said what I wanted to hear, not what he was truly thinking.
“I don’t believe you,” I said. He tilted his head, surprised. “Twenty days at sea. No food. No water. No shade. The sole survivor of dozens of passengers. God didn’t save you. You saved yourself. I’d like to know how.”