Page 53 of Trouble

The crew of HMSUnicorn– a name that had caused Oliver to choke on his own soup, and keep choking as a strapping officer with very large arms patted him forcefully on the back – had bedded down as best they could in the ground floor rooms overnight, and it had thrown the entire house into acute disarray. Captain Edwards had slept in Grace’s room with both of his children, not due to lack of beds but as a precaution against around a hundred strange men in the house, and Meera had insisted that Akia and Emily share a room for the same reason.

‘You can sleep closest to the door,’ Akia had said as she tied her headscarf, ‘so that when they come to ravish and kill us, you can be my human buffer while I climb out of the window.’

Emily didn’t really believe that anybody was going to burst through the door in the night, but she hadn’t slept well regardless. The only reason she had been able to drift off at all had been that the sound of Akia’s gentle breathing in the dark beside her had reminded her so much of Amy. She had awoken far too early and thought herself at home for a moment, before she opened her eyes and remembered.

It seemed that none of their guests had slept either. The house was a wreck of its own this morning, with sailors wandering aimlessly through the halls. Absolutely everything wasgritty, and reeked of the sea and wet boots and various bodily odours.

‘I hope they never leave,’ Grace said, as they sat in the schoolroom. The door was firmly closed, but it didn’t matter; at least ten men were smoking at the front of the house at all times, blazing their way through all of the captain’s rarely touched tobacco, so Grace always had people to spy on. ‘It’s so exciting! Perhaps one of them will glance up and see me sitting at the window, and the light will catch me just right, and he will decide to marry me.’

‘Ugh,’ said Aster. ‘That’s vile, Grace.’

Aster had been in an unspecified amount of trouble for rushing away into the sea when she should have been carefully tucked up inside the house, but it seemed that Captain Edwards had been too busy to dole out punishment; he had also not yet reprimanded Emily for losing track of her in the first place, and she was starting to think that it might actually never come. Perhaps he had finally realised what everybody else in the house was already well apprised of – that no force on earth could keep Aster anywhere she did not want to be for very long.

‘If any of them make the vaguest of advances in your direction,’ Emily said, ‘they’ll be killed three times over by the time they reach you.’

‘Three?’ said Aster, absent-mindedly flicking a scrap of paper in Emily’s direction.

‘Your father, Joe, Akia. Oh, and Meera, too, if she wasn’t buried under her task list.’

‘Five, then,’ said Aster. ‘I’m faster than Father. But there won’t be any man left to re-murder when I’m through.’

‘I am fourteen years old,’ said Grace. ‘I am almost a woman, and I cannot put off thoughts of marriage for too much longer.’

‘Yes you can,’ said Aster and Emily, at the exact same time and with identical tones of finality.

Aster glanced sideways at her, looking mildly disgusted; Emily just blinked calmly back at her until she rolled her eyes and looked away.

‘Just because I am sometimes ill,’ Grace said, going pink, ‘doesn’t mean I am not a real person, or that I cannot have any romantic feelings, or—’

‘No,’ said Aster. ‘It’s not that. Sorry, Gracie. And I mean .?.?. of course you can do all those things. Just not yet. You’re still a baby.’

‘You are only two years my senior, and nobody thinks you’re a baby!’ said Grace indignantly.

‘Yes,’ said Aster. ‘But that’s just because I’m horrible.’

She flashed her sister a grin, and Emily tried not to smile to herself as she reached for a book.

There was something horrifyingly endearing about how determined Aster was to tell all the world that she was terrible, now that Emily had seen enough of her softer side to know that this was not entirely true. Terrible people did not dote on their sisters, try to keep them safe from harm, jump into boats and head out into the volatile ocean to try to save the lives of men they had never met.

‘Come on,’ said Emily. ‘No more talk of marriage, lest I vomit. Let’s read some poetry.’

She did not add that the poetry was just as likely to induce her to lose her breakfast.

They made their way line by line through a really rather horrible poem by Nash Nicholson; by the end of it Aster was asleep by the fire, and Grace seemed to have given up on romance completely.

‘Akia is going to come and eat luncheon with you,’ Emily said on her way out of the door. ‘Donotleave this room.’

From her chair by the fire, Aster gave a sleepy mock salute without opening her eyes.

Now that the sailors were not reeling from their brush with death, their behaviour was deteriorating. Emily felt all eyes on her as she walked down the stairs; every single one of the men in the entrance hall looked up as she descended and then tracked her progress across the room, like bedraggled beagles eyeing a fox. Their conversations quietened, as if they needed all of their concentration to engage in uncomfortable staring, and only started up again once she had walked past them.

She told herself that they were not talking about her, but very distinctly heard the wordgovernesstossed about, before an outbreak of unkind laughter.

Just yesterday she had been working herself to the bone for their survival; today, she wished to toss them all back in the sea and wave merrily to them as they sank to the murky bottom.

In the kitchen, Joe handed Emily two bowls of dubious stew.

‘One’s for the boss,’ he said.