Story total = 562 words
Post total = 562 words
Yes, some of this is familiar to those who read the previous two posts. I finally got the two tied together.
Kate Roberts stared at the stone thurst into the splintered wood. The salt water had already filled the hold ankle-deep. Empty casks eased free from their ropes and nets to bob. The latern light was too feeble from the stairwell. Had the Crimson Lady been struck a fatal blow?
There comes a regularity with being cursed. Course, Kate didn’t feel she was cursed. It mattered not that others added Storm-blown to her given name simply because every ship she had floundered and was lost in the storm. She never lost any crew, by God’s teeth, save for the fools who could not follow orders in a crisis. Those were hardly sailors one desired come what may. Due to that fortunuous circumstance of her life, she had never expected her ship to run aground, no matter how foggy the night.
She moved forward into the hold, lifting the lantern above her head.The second lantern was held by Jenkin Hopwood, the Quartermaster, at the foot of the stairs into the hold. Peadar Macartan, the ship’s Carpenter, sloshed along beside her until they reached the rift. Yet, here it had happened while following the torches of another ship that had vanished.
The waves pushed more seawater in, but it sprayed into the hold instead of pouring. She stopped and let Peadar move closer to the damage. The Crimson Lady’s hull creaked around them, but the wood wasn’t screaming its death keel. “I think we can repair the good lady. What say thou?”
“Aye, Captain.” Peadar pressed against the rock and inched closer to the wood. “T’is not a large hole, but we need to get her out of the water. She be needing a careening also, provided there be a harbor fit for it.” He straightened and wiped the water spray from his brown beard.
“And if the harbor is not fit, what then?” Jenkin braced himself against the wall of the stairs.
“I can patch her in the water if you can man the pumps. There do be a beach that has not vanished. You can hear the waves crashing on the shore.”
Kate frowned, not that either of the men saw her in the shadows of the hold. How loose were the crew’s collective tongues over the ship that they had followed into this bay? “Counsel, Master Carpenter and Quartermaster, let’s not make this crew even more uneasy over a little hole in the ship. Do you wish to start repairs tonight?”
Peadar shook his head. “By lantern light with the clumsy sots that must assist me? Nay, this job be best by daylight. We must wait till morn.”
“I would prefer to meet the dawn with me boots on the beach.” Jenkin leaned further into the hold from the stairs. “And making camp would give the men something to do besides listening to Bat’s rosary.”
“Adverse to that I am not.” Kate moved the lantern to show her smile. “Mayhaps if Bat had a beauteous voice, he would win more converts. Let’s tell our restless crew.”
Jenkin’s grizzled face twisted with a grin as he backed up the steps. Kate moved the lantern in front of her and let Peadar slosh ahead of her. The salty water even under the light was inky. She waded to the stairs and shook the water off her bare feet before climbing to the deck.
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