The Secret Journeys of Jack London, Book Two: The Sea Wolves Read online

  For a time? Jack thought that once they chucked him below, Finn would be lucky to survive till morning.

  “You’ll do his job,” Ghost went on. “I’m less inclined to kill those who are useful to me. Go and acquaint yourself with what’s in our stores. It’ll be morning soon and we’ll want a bit of breakfast. And then, for lunch, we’ll be having a special treat.”

  Jack shuddered at the way Ghost said that, and the captain bared sharp teeth in a grin that seemed more hunger than smile.

  “What’s that?” Jack asked.

  Ghost gave him a sidelong appraisal, as though reaffirming his decision. Then he grunted and strode forward, leaving Jack standing on the aft deck without an answer.

  The first thing Jack did was clean the galley. In the months since the previous cook had been “lost,” Finn had made little attempt to fight the accumulating grease and filth. Every surface bore a layer of grime that required scraping and then washing, and Jack set to work long before dawn. By the time the sun had risen over the eastward waves, he was prepared to cook, although the best he could offer was a meal of cinnamon-spiced oatmeal, some eggs, and rashers of fatty bacon. He had inventoried the food available and wanted to conserve the vegetables and meat that were still relatively fresh for dinners.

  From a quick conversation with Louis he had learned that there were chickens in the hold to provide eggs, and eventually they, too, would be eaten. What meat and vegetables they had fresh were in the galley already, having been acquired at their last landfall, only two days before. There was reportedly plenty of salted beef and pork, plus dried beans and baskets of sea biscuits, also in the hold. But Jack wasn’t allowed down there to check.

  Even so, he reasoned that though their heading was to the southwest, toward Japan, Ghost must not intend traveling that far or he would have put in greater stores of food. They were a small crew, but Jack did not think they had near enough provisions to make the ocean crossing, particularly given the threat of scurvy without much produce. There were few enough vegetables, and half a bushel of apples comprised a meager store of fruit. He reasoned that it must have been kept only for the officers, but he would not serve it without asking the captain first.

  In a bucket in a corner, Jack discovered the pelican that had been shot on the deck the previous night. This, then, was the treat the men were to receive for lunch today—fried pelican. He might have turned it into a stew, but the captain’s orders were to preserve the flavor of the bird. Jack would fry potatoes and onions in the pan with a liberal dash of spices, and it would make for an excellent lunch. But he himself would not partake of the meal, fixing something apart from the crew’s special treat. He could not eat the creature whose portentous arrival last night had saved his life. He wished that he had the gift of life, so that with the touch of a hand he might restore it, but such a thing was not to be. Instead, the bird would end up in the bellies of the monsters who crewed the Larsen.

  Ghost’s remark about lunch had seemed ominous in the darkness before dawn, but now it only confused Jack. Could the captain have had an inkling that the pelican had some significance for Jack? Surely not. Which meant that despite his grim expression, Ghost had spoken in jest. He seemed an unlikely jokester, but Jack could not read the comment any other way. It brought into sharp relief the observations he had been accumulating about the rough men who were now his crewmates, and their captain.

  Ghost had been hewn from different stuff than his crew. They were ignorant brutes, and though he might be the most savage of them all, and certainly seemed the most dangerous, he brimmed with intelligence. Jack could see the mind working behind Ghost’s eyes, the dark and voracious intellect, yet the captain had no manners and no fundamental morality, and Jack could only think the man must be self-educated. It would make escaping from this devil ship far more problematic.

  “How ye farin’, Cooky?” came a voice, and then the Irishman, Kelly, came into the galley.

  Jack tried not to flinch at the nickname. “Cooky” was worse even than “young Jack.” I have a name, he thought. But he held his tongue. He wanted to live long enough to get off this godforsaken craft.

  “Tell the men their breakfast is ready,” he said. “They can eat in shifts at the table there. Since no one’s popped up and announced themselves as the cabin boy, I take it I’ve gotta feed the captain and Mr. Johansen myself.”

  “Nothing slips by ye, eh, Cooky?” Kelly jibed.

  He walked through the mess and went up the steps to the deck, shouting profanities at his fellow sailors as a way of summoning them to the table. The man seemed amiable enough for one of the brutish pirates, but still Jack chafed at the invisible bonds of his shipboard captivity. He ran through the faces of the crew in his head. Aside from Ghost and Johansen, there were Kelly and Louis, Vukovich and Finn, and the huge, ugly man he thought of as Ogre. Of the five remaining men, he knew the dark, rangy-looking man was Maurilio and the giant African, his skin black as pitch, was called Tree. The fat man was Demetrius, but he had forgotten to ask Louis the names of the silent, bearded Scandinavian twins.

  Any one of them seemed willing to kill him. Which made the question of accommodations a troubling one. How could he sleep among them, knowing they might murder him as he dreamed?

  Simple, Jack, he thought. They don’t need to wait until you’re asleep. And none of them is brave enough to kill you unless their captain orders it. These points were true, but the former troubled him considerably. As he prepared breakfast, he had been wondering about the strength and agility of Ghost and his crew. Finn could have torn him apart if he’d gotten the upper hand, and such strength was beyond the power of ordinary men. So if the men aboard the Larsen were not ordinary, which Jack’s own experiences made easy to believe, then what were they?

  “Something smells good! How the hell can that be?” Ogre rumbled as he came into the mess beyond the galley.

  Other men gathered behind him, and Jack took that as his cue. He had no desire to spend time among them, and he knew that Ghost would not be pleased at the thought of his men eating while he waited to be fed.

  Jack picked up a huge tray bearing a tureen of oatmeal and plates of biscuits and bacon. At the last moment he had scrambled a few eggs for the captain and his first mate, and he brought those along as he made his way through the cabin to the captain’s quarters.

  Jack used the toe of his new boot to knock.

  “Come!” Ghost called from within.

  It was a tricky matter to balance the tray and unlatch the door as the ship swayed beneath him, but Jack managed it and shouldered the door open. Only once he was a step across the threshold did he realize that he had been mistaken—this was not the captain’s quarters after all, but some sort of chart room. On the walls were various ocean maps, but they were hung alongside what seemed to be charts of the heavens themselves, maps of the stars, perhaps to navigate by.

  Three people sat around the table. Ghost was there, bent over an enormous, weathered map. Johansen sat to his left, which was to be expected. What startled Jack enough to freeze him in midstep was the person to the captain’s right, who peered even more intently at the maps and charts spread across the table. Delicate and lovely, with a tumble of dark hair veiling part of her face, the woman seemed to be stroking her fingers across the table as though sightless and in search of something she’d lost.

  Then she blinked as though awakening and glanced up at him, her copper eyes alight with intelligence, her coffee skin gleaming in the sunlight streaming through the porthole. And she gave him a smile so sad that it cracked his heart in two.

  “Good morning,” she said, her French accent adding exotic emphasis to the words. “You must be Jack.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  WRAPPED IN BEAUTY’S GAZE

  He served breakfast to the crew, accepted their jibes and barbed comments, barely kept his feet when Tree tripped him, avoided catching their eyes, collected their plates, and mopped up their mess, and all the while he was thin
king about that beautiful woman and what she might mean.

  Sweating as he cleaned the galley after breakfast, Jack had entertained the idea that he might have imagined her. But he could never have dreamed up those eyes, and such underlying sadness. Then he had scoured his mind for any memory of her having been on the Umatilla but drew a blank. It was a waste of time; if she had been on the ship and he had seen her, he would have remembered her instantly. She had that sort of face. And just as with that mad forest spirit Lesya, if he never laid eyes on her again, he would still remember her forever.

  Was she Ghost’s woman? Sailors—even pirates—usually considered a woman on shipboard to be bad luck, but if she was the captain’s wife or mistress, that would explain it.

  “Cooky, that was almost edible,” Louis said.

  Jack jumped—he hadn’t heard anyone approaching along the short corridor to the galley. Wrapped in beauty’s gaze, he thought, but then he realized that this might be an opportunity. Louis seemed to be a talker, and Jack was an experienced conversationalist.

  “I just threw it together,” Jack said. “Give me the proper ingredients, and I’ll make something truly edible.”

  “I believe that,” Louis said, a hint of laughter in his voice. His French accent held none of the beauty of that woman’s. It was a mocking, knowing lilt.

  “The crew enjoyed it,” Jack said. He dropped the wire brush he was using to clean the scarred wooden surfaces and turned to face Louis. The thin man leaned against the galley bulkhead, eyes flicking this way and that, and as Jack turned, his face broke into a feral smile. His golden tooth seemed to glow with an echo of moonlight.

  “Of course,” Louis said. “Finn feeds us dog waste, and you gave us something…” He shrugged, both hands out as if balancing his thoughts.

  “Better?” Jack suggested.

  “Something to tide us over.” The grin remained.

  “Who’s the woman?” Jack asked. He tried to sound uninterested, turning back to scrubbing down the surfaces. Louis chuckled behind him.

  “Ah, you’ve met Ghost’s guest. Well, Monsieur Cooky, once met, never forgotten. Did she cast her spell over you? Possess your eyes? Does she haunt your memory?”

  “She’s just a woman,” Jack muttered, but all those things were true. He could not recall what Johansen had been doing in that chart room, could not even remember how Ghost had been sitting or the expression on his face. But the woman’s words repeated to him again and again, chanted into his ear by a songbird on his shoulder. Good morning. You must be Jack.

  “That’s much like saying Ghost is just a man,” Louis whispered.

  He isn’t? Jack almost said, but he bit his tongue. He had no wish to betray his doubts. So he turned to Louis again and tried a different tack.

  “Is she his wife?”

  Louis frowned. “Wouldn’t put it that way. But she’s precious to him, all right.”

  Jack couldn’t forestall the flash of jealousy that went through him. It was absurd—he couldn’t even claim the woman’s acquaintance—but the sight of her had made his breath catch in his throat the same way it had the first time he’d seen a snowbird in the wild during the winter he’d spent trapped in a Yukon River cabin on the verge of starvation.

  “You know her,” he said.

  “Me? Oui.” Louis’s smile faltered for a moment, and his gaze went far away.

  “And does she know you?”

  Louis laughed, then glanced over his shoulder, perhaps checking to see if anyone else could hear their conversation.

  “Only so far.”

  “Only so far?” Jack repeated. What the hell did that mean? You must be Jack, the woman had said, and the sadness in that voice was undisguised.

  “I am the one who found her,” Louis said. “I knew of her, and I told Ghost. Of course I did. He’s my captain! Word of her was widespread in New Orleans, and for every ten people who did not believe, there was one like me.” He laughed. “And for every thousand of those who did believe … again, there was one like me. So perhaps, Monsieur Cooky, I was destined to cross paths with Sabine.”

  “Sabine,” Jack said, and the name felt sensuous in his mouth.

  Louis sat on the food preparation surface. He touched one of the stove’s still-hot coals, winced slightly, and examined his burned hand. He wants to tell me this, Jack thought, and though cautious of Louis’s motives, he saw no harm in listening.

  When it came to Sabine, he wanted to know everything.

  “Before I signed on with the Larsen, I spent some time in New Orleans. I move around. It isn’t in my nature to be still. I heard many stories there—demons and conjurers and magical forces imprinting themselves on the city like…” He drew back his sleeve and displayed a riot of tattoos, beautifully wrought and yet faded as if bleached by the sun. “Any city attracts such stories, New Orleans more than most. But the story of Sabine remained with me more than all those others because I saw her, once, in a high window, and I never forgot.”

  Louis seemed transported, eyes seeing something far away, and Jack dared not breathe lest he break the moment. Then the sailor blinked, looked back at Jack, and grinned again. Yet it was so clearly a mask, hiding parts of his story that he did not wish to share.

  “How did she come to be on the Larsen?” Jack asked.

  “San Francisco,” Louis said. “I was there seeking Ghost and his ship. I knew of him by reputation, and I needed to get away from…” He waved something away, his gold-glinting grin splitting his face again. “And Sabine was there to visit someone very old, very important.”

  “A relative?” Jack asked.

  “Someone with knowledge,” Louis said. “The old woman died before Sabine reached her home. But I saw her there, and I knew what she would mean to Ghost and to the fortunes of this ship. With my natural charm, it was only a matter of time before I talked her into joining our crew.”

  “She’s here willingly,” Jack said, though he doubted that. Her eyes suggested otherwise, and the sadness in her voice. She might be with Ghost, but she had a lonely air about her that had touched him.

  But Louis laughed.

  “Of course, Cooky. We’re all here willingly. Are we not?”

  “No,” Jack said. It was a risk, a small voice of defiance. But Louis did not react, and Jack sensed that he was enjoying his tale. “How can she bring the ship good fortune?” he asked.

  “She’s a seer,” Louis said. “A boon to the ship, and I found her. Me.” The pride was almost childlike, and Jack nodded in false admiration. “The ship you were on … the day it left port in Alaska, Sabine told us where it would be, and what it carried, and that there was”—he tapped his golden tooth with one long nail—“on board.”

  “She knew that?” Jack asked, and he remembered Sabine’s elegant fingers playing over those charts and maps as if searching for home.

  “She knows where things will be,” Louis said. “Ships, people, gold. She reads the sea. Ghost calls it finding order in chaos, or”—he waved a hand—“some other strangeness.”

  “And she’s with Ghost?” Jack asked.

  Louis blinked, and then smiled again. “Well, not exactly with—”

  “Telling your tales again, Louis?” Ghost’s voice was unmistakable, and for a second Jack saw a flicker of abject fear crossing Louis’s face. But then he took a deep breath, masking himself again with that gold-glinting grin, and slipped from the galley counter.

  “Just complimenting Cooky here,” Louis said.

  Ghost stood in the door, an imposing presence. “Time to get back to work.”

  Louis nodded, but Ghost remained blocking the doorway. He was staring at Jack, his gaze so strange that Jack had to glance away. It was like being examined by a shark. Totally inhuman, and yet with an intelligence that could not be escaped.

  Not even by turning away.

  “Nobody has any conscience about adding to the improbabilities of a marvelous tale.”

  Jack held his breath, then began scrubbi
ng again.

  “You’ve read Hawthorne, young Jack?”

  “Some,” Jack said. He was trying to gauge Ghost’s purpose with him, because he knew it went beyond cooking. And while he was striving to figure out what Ghost sought from this interaction, he was hesitant to commit completely to any reply, even to the most innocuous question. He might deny any knowledge of Hawthorne, and perhaps that would be wrong. Or he could admit to Ghost that he had read some of Hawthorne’s novels and many of his short stories, respected his complexity, questioned the moral purity of his vision … but perhaps that would also be a mistake. He had no idea what might set off the captain’s explosive temper.

  “Good,” Ghost said. “I should like to discuss him with you someday.”

  Jack heard the captain move aside and Louis scamper away, and then Ghost’s gentle, confident footfalls also led away from the galley toward his stateroom at the stern. Jack let out his held breath and took in another lungful, surprised at the tension within him. Someday, Ghost had said, promising a future that Jack feared.

  And yet his most pressing concern for the future was not Ghost’s savage volatility but the question of how soon he might see Sabine again, and if there would ever be an opportunity for them to converse. If she was Ghost’s woman, simply gazing too long at her might get Jack killed. But he knew he had to look upon her again. And if she was not Ghost’s woman, that only prompted more questions. Where did she sleep on board this ship of rough men? How did she endure their constant presence?

  He wondered, also, about the claims Louis had made about her strange gifts. Jack would have doubted him, or presumed the tale augmented with fantasies, but he had seen the way Sabine gazed upon those maps, Ghost and Johansen watching her with anticipation. In addition to whatever covetous affection Ghost might have for her—whether she reciprocated or not—she provided a service to them. That alone might be enough to explain why she had been untouched by the captain’s brutality.