Page 21 of Escaping Pirates (Legends of Neverland #4)

B lossom and Sugar kept Harlan out of their quarters while I scrubbed long past nightfall, until I was ready to drop from exhaustion.

He had already been locked securely back in the brig by the time I was escorted down and shoved into my own cell at nearly midnight.

I was black from head to toe and so filthy that I didn’t think I would ever get clean again.

“Once we get out of here, I’m going to take the longest bath in the history of bathing,” I told Harlan, sinking onto my bunk with a groan.

The quilt Tyrone had gifted to me would be just as black as I was soon.

But the prospect of our freedom was so tantalizingly close that it wouldn’t have mattered if I was spending the night in the freezing cold. Tomorrow was our day of liberation.

“I don’t know why I ever complained about bathing as a child,” Harlan said. “I used to avoid baths, but as an adult I crave them.”

“Me too,” I laughed, then looked to ensure the brig door was shut all the way and dropped my voice. “We should be near enough to Berkway to let a bottle out tonight. They said we’ll get there in the morning, and if we want to let it out under cover of darkness, it should be tonight.”

“I already have one written,” Harlan told me, extracting it from an inside pocket while I pawed the straw aside to unearth a bottle and handed it to him.

“We can drop it down the privy hole,” I suggested with a smile. He would think I had the same maturity as a ten-year-old boy.

Harlan chuckled. “I thought the same thing. Ready to try?”

I eagerly gave him a bottle, my exhaustion fading as excitement took over. Harlan shoved one of the notes into the bottle and pushed the cork into place.

“Want to do the honors?” he asked me, handing it back.

“Yes,” I answered. The privy hole wasn’t large enough to fit a person, but it could fit a narrow bottle. I angled the bottle and released it.

Movement from the ship caused the bottle to clatter against the sides of the shoot all the way down.

The faint splash of it hitting the water was instantly accompanied by an intense rattling for a full minute, followed by a shattering sound that broke my hope just as easily as the bottle.

The loss of one of our precious three bottles felt like kissing our chances of rescue goodbye.

“It must have been too fragile,” I lamented.

“No,” Harlan said with a sigh. “I think the ship sits low in the water so that the bottle was too buoyant to sink far enough in the chute to exit the hull. The chute is still half-submerged with water, so the bottle couldn’t sink and was jostled until it broke.

If only we’d partially filled it with lead shot first.”

“That would just make the bottle sink and no one would ever find it. But we still have two bottles left.” I inspected the porous cork. “Do you think any water can get in here?”

“Can you reach that lantern for me?” He nodded at the glass case hanging outside my cell door. “We can use melted wax to waterproof the next cork.”

“Good thinking,” I said. I grabbed the handle, but found it to be uncomfortably hot, so used my old blanket to wrap around my hand to unhook the lantern from where it dangled.

I set it on my quilt but kept my wrapped hand on the handle as Harlan rolled another letter. But instead of immediately sticking it into the bottle, he propped one of his boots up onto his opposite knee and tugged at the heel.

“What—” I began, but broke off as the boot’s heel swiveled away to reveal a hidden compartment.

Inside was a golden ring, which he took out and placed onto his middle finger.

After dripping wax onto the rolled paper, he used the ring to press down on the wax, waited a minute, then pulled it away to reveal a crest. He blew on it for a moment to help it finish cooling, then slipped it into the bottle, corked the opening, and dripped more hot wax over the cork to seal it.

He stamped the ring again on the cork’s top, then raised his eyes to meet mine.

I realized my mouth was open and intended to close it, but my shock was too great.

I recognized that crest as the one that belonged to Berkway’s royal family.

I’d seen it on a few of the missives sent to Papa, ordering shipments of goods.

“Are you all right?” Harlan asked.

I didn’t answer his question. Realization was crashing over me in tumultuous waves.

“Elena, what’s wrong?” Harlan gripped the iron bars between our cells. “Are you hurt?”

My arms hugged my sides in a poor attempt to keep myself grounded. “Are you Prince Jameson?” I breathed.

A yawning silence met my question, and that was answer enough.

“You are, aren’t you?” I pressed, swaying back and forth as the ship listed on the rolling waves.

He didn’t deny it. “Did you recognize the seal?” Harlan’s voice was quiet as he put the ring back into the heel of his boot.

“Yes. And when Blossom mentioned that Prince Ernst would become crown prince, you went strange. Then before, you said you call your brother Ernie.”

Harlan stayed quiet.

“I won’t tell,” I hastened to say. “But they said that Jameson is still there in Berkway. How…?”

“I have a body double,” he confessed quietly.

“In the event that anything happens to me, it’s meant to be a protection.

If word got out that Prince Jameson was lost at sea, and pirates have a hostage who fits a missing-person description, they would demand ransoms or the release of prisoners or could very easily kill me.

When I travel, I always assume the identity of a sailor and my double takes my place until I’m back.

Everyone in my family has one. Harlan is one of my middle names and is the one only my family calls me.

When I was captured, it was the easiest name to think of that would keep my identity hidden. ”

“But…but if you’re…” I sat down on my bed, head swimming. “I had no idea.”

“I know. I wanted to tell you, but?—”

“No, no, I understand; of course you can’t tell anyone.

But that means…” My voice died as I realized that I wasn’t just talking to a fellow prisoner.

I was talking to a prince. Royalty. I clamped my mouth shut.

I had flirted with him. He would have had princesses falling at his feet.

A simple merchant’s daughter who’d been reduced to scullery maid covered in cinders would be nothing. How silly I must have seemed to him.

“Elena?”

“Y-your Majesty, I?—”

The rest of my sentence was drowned out as Harlan burst out laughing. “Don’t start with that now! I’m a prisoner aboard a pirate ship. There are no titles here.”

I couldn’t share his merriment. “What if they find out?” I whispered. “What if they realize who you are? They’ll kill you.”

“I know.”

“I won’t ever tell,” I vowed. “I promise I’ll keep your secret safe.”

“With any luck, we won’t need to keep it safe much longer.”

I raised my eyebrow. “I thought people make their own luck.”

Harlan grinned “That’s true. Whether or not the navy shows up, we can swim to shore in the morning. Or swim to another ship. Or we’ll shout until someone comes once we’re in port. That will be our luck.”

“I hope you’re right,” I told him. “I’m ready to be off this ship.”

“Once this bottle reaches the right hands, my family will send the navy, I know it. I’m assuming that no one from my crew survived, or the navy would be out, searching every ship in the ocean for me. They think I’m dead.”

“Let’s let them know you’re still alive then. Can you reach that porthole?” I nodded toward the porthole in the cell beyond Harlan’s.

He grinned. “I think so. I don’t have much else to do when I’m locked down here during the day, and I thought we might need a backup, just in case the privy hole didn’t work.

” He waved a hand at the cell next to his.

“Watch.” Harlan scooped up something that looked like a stick the size of a bottle, but when I squinted, I saw that it was merely a bundle of straw knotted together and twisted to a shape similar to a bottle.

He stuck his arm through the bars into the empty cell, took a few trial swings, then released.

The bundle sailed straight out the window and vanished with splash so quiet it wouldn’t raise any alarms.

“Impressive,” I told him. “Do you think you can do that with the bottle?”

“I hope so. I’m not always successful,” he admitted, pointing to a small pile of twisted straw sticks heaped in front of the porthole.

“Do you feel confident enough to try?” Now that the time for action had come, my nerves had rushed into overdrive. Every creaking board from above and every barked order set my blood to pumping.

“No, but I’ll do it anyway.” Harlan did several more practice rounds with straw before he nodded, picked up the bottle, and blew out a long stream of air. Carefully, he swung his arm back and forth as he had done with the straw, then released.

To my horror, the bottle’s base hit the bottom of the porthole and fell back. I expected it to smash into a thousand tiny pieces, but it landed on the pile of trial straw and rolled to the middle of the cell. I clapped my hands over my mouth to avoid screaming, and Harlan growled his frustration.

Had anyone heard the bottle? Did they suspect? I waited, teeth on edge, to see if someone would come running .

“Did it crack?” I asked Harlan. He had dropped to his knees and reached through the bars up to his shoulder to reach the bottle but he was several inches short.

“I don’t think so,” he said with a grunt, still straining to retrieve the bottle. “But I can’t reach it.”

“Maybe once the ship tilts it will roll this way,” I suggested, watching anxiously as Harlan tried to crawl his fingers even farther, now less than a hand length but still too far away. “Or, here, try this.” I handed him my pillow.

He tried to use that, stretching out and trying to swing the pillow down in an arc to coax the bottle closer, but to no avail.