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Holmes

Friday, April 27, 1821

I n the very early hours of the morning, Holmes woke from a restless slumber to the sound of something scratching nearby. He thought it might be the men making more brig repairs. Yesterday, he’d overheard them announcing the arrival of a few tenders with fresh stores of sailcloth and wood. This had been followed by hours of hammering, thumping.

Eventually, they’d begun moving, though Holmes had no sense of their speed, nor their heading.

A few men had retrieved Nico’s shrouded body, too. Holmes wept when they took him away. He hoped that Nico’s body would, somehow, make it back to his family.

Now he shifted in his tiny cell, his shoulder aching terribly, as the scratching went on. He’d heard footsteps for days now, the back-and-forth clamor of men walking the berthing deck. And yet, this noise sounded so terribly close. Directly above him, in fact.

His prison cell consisted of four iron-barred walls; the ceiling and floor were merely planks, which separated him from the bilges below him and the berthing deck above him.

He looked upward, curious about the noise.

Suddenly, he jumped.

In a narrow gap between the wooden planks above him were eyes . He thought it an animal at first, but their voyages were too short for livestock; they hadn’t any need for pigs or chickens, as they were in port often enough to keep their food stores well-stocked.

The eyes blinked. They were very dark, almost black, and the eyelashes thick and long.

Holmes wrapped his arms around himself, feeling exposed. He contemplated his precise location on the ship; he must be directly beneath the second mate’s cabin—the same cabin where the officers were keeping something of unspeakable value.

Matteo. According to Quinto, Matteo had been in the second mate’s cabin a few days ago, looking through maps. Was it the older Mazza brother looking down upon him now? Spying, maybe?

“What do you want?” Holmes asked, louder than he intended.

“Hush,” came the soft reply. “You fool. He’ll return for you if he hears you talking to me.”

Holmes’s mouth fell open. It was a woman’s voice.

She peered directly at Holmes through the gap. Given her gaze between the planks, Holmes thought she must be lying facedown on her belly. He clamped his hand over his mouth in surprise: while he was accustomed to chafed skin and noxious bilges and the ceaseless swaying of a vessel, he was not accustomed to this—women on his ships.

He studied her eyes more closely. “Who are you?” he whispered. The second mate’s cabin had been locked, except when Matteo had been inside. Was this woman imprisoned, too, then, in the cabin? He wondered if she’d lifted a rug, or moved a piece of furniture, to peer down at him.

“Who are you ?”

He hesitated a moment, then: “Holmes Foster.”

“You’re not from here,” she replied in magnificent Italian. Her dialect sounded familiar.

He shook his head. “Massachusetts.”

“And what did you do to get yourself locked up?”

Holmes might have thought her one of Quinto’s prying accomplices, if not for the fact that Holmes had all but admitted to the crime already. “I took a knife to the rigging,” he said, “and tarred the spare sailcloth. I hoped to sabotage the voyage. Perhaps I’ve done so. I’ve delayed it, at the very least.”

“Hmm.” Her eyes narrowed, and she shifted on her belly. “Did Quinto or the captain do something to anger you?”

He wouldn’t dare tell the truth—would not so much as breathe Mari’s name. He kept silent.

“Ah, so he’s a man of secrets,” the woman said, giving a small laugh. “Well, I cannot say I am surprised. It is a Mazza vessel. I fancy every man here has a motive different than what he’s stated aloud.”

Whoever this woman was, she wasn’t new to this brig, nor the dealings of these men. He tried again. “Who are you?”

“I do not trust you enough to tell you,” she said.

Holmes picked at a hangnail, feeling himself grow frustrated with her. “We were told the second mate was thrown out of his cabin. They wouldn’t tell us why, but they installed a padlock bigger than any I’ve ever seen.” He narrowed his eyes, tried a new tactic. “What do you have up there with you? Black-market goods?”

“Nothing worth anything,” she said.

“ Who , then?”

“No one now.”

“Someone was with you earlier?”

“They have been in and out for weeks, yes.”

Holmes considered who she might mean. “Quinto,” he ventured, “or the captain, or Matteo?”

“All three,” she said, “though, mostly Matteo.”

He felt certain, then, that she was a prostitute. It wasn’t uncommon to bring them aboard. But still, the secrecy around her—and the padlock, too—didn’t make sense.

The woman’s eyes disappeared, and Holmes heard footsteps as she shuffled away. It seemed she had free reign of her cabin.

She must have left a lantern on the floor, for a faint light seeped through the planks into Holmes’s cell. It was more light than he’d seen in days. He opened his diary, feeling the urge to write or draw. He hoped he had not frustrated the woman, and he waited impatiently for her to return. He busied himself by half-heartedly sketching an illustration of the Aquila .

The woman did finally return, a few minutes later. “Here,” she said, dropping half a hazelnut through the planks.

Holmes popped it into his mouth as she continued to drop hazelnut pieces, one by one. His stomach ceased its growling for the first time in days.

“The other Mazza brother is dead,” he volunteered, hoping to keep her interest, earn her trust. It was maddening, her refusal to share her identity.

Her fingers hovered over the slit, a tiny nut perched between them. “What did you just say?”

“The other Mazza brother is dead.”

“Massimo,” she offered.

“Yes.”

“What happened to him?”

“Someone killed him,” Holmes said.

She gasped. “Serves him right. They are evil men.”

Holmes paused. She wouldn’t have called them evil men if Matteo were within earshot. Perhaps Matteo was now in the officers’ quarters.

How uninformed he felt, secreted away in the bowels of this brig.

“Yet here you are, hiding—or imprisoned—in the second mate’s cabin,” he said. If he could not get her to tell him who she was, he could at least try to understand her purpose here.

“Imprisoned,” she muttered.

“Are you someone’s mistress, then?”

“Absolutely not,” she hissed. “I would not touch one of these men—not the officers, not the brothers—if my very life was at stake.”

A flash of silver caught his eye. The woman was trying to squeeze a narrow container—a snuffbox—between the gaps, but it would not fit. Instead, she pried open the container and dropped a few pinches of tobacco through the crack.

Holmes held out his hand, letting it fall into his palm. But then, he frowned. A silver snuffbox had been reported missing earlier in the voyage. “Did you steal this?”

“I did,” she admitted, the hint of a smile in her voice.

“How,” he asked, “if you are locked in?”

“The louver at the bottom of the cabin door,” she said. “I slide the privacy cover off, take out the wooden pegs, and remove the louver. It is just wide enough for me to slip through.”

So she is the thief among us , Holmes thought, eyeing his prison cell for some ingenious exit, as she had. He could find none.

“How have you not been caught?” he asked. “You must be sneaking out very late. And even still, you’re lucky you haven’t run into anyone on the night watch.”

“Lucky, indeed,” she said. “Though, don’t forget, I have a closet full of men’s clothing at my disposal. In the middle of the night, I’m not nearly as conspicuous as you might think.”

Holmes popped another nut into his mouth.

“What is that book, anyway?” the woman said, nodding at Holmes’s journal.

“Many of us sailors keep a log,” he said.

“That is far from a record of headings and weather observations, though. A diary, then?”

“I suppose,” he relented. “Sometimes, I tear out pages and write letters.” He gave a shrug. “No way to send any letters now, though.”

“I could send a letter for you,” she said. “There is enough of a gap between these wooden planks for you to slip me a piece of paper.”

“I appreciate the offer.” He leaned back against the iron bars and sighed. There was nothing else to send. He could only hope that Mari had already received his warning and left Positano. “There is only one person I would write to, and she is—” Holmes paused. “Well, I don’t know where she is. I hope she is not in Positano any longer.” He felt no hesitation about sharing this with a stranger. He was lonely—terribly so—and scared, too. Even the most hardened of seamen longed for friends.

“Positano?” the woman repeated, her voice rising. “A sister?” she asked. “A friend?”

“Not a sister. But not really a friend, either.” He thought of his time in the olive grove with Mari, the glances and stories exchanged between them. The ways they’d touched each other, too.

“A lover, then.”

He paused. “A lover, yes.” Though, even this felt terribly inadequate.

“Tell me about her,” the woman said.

Without thinking, Holmes said the first thing that came to mind, perhaps because he was surrounded by it himself. “She hates the sea. She lives in a villa overlooking the ocean, but she keeps the curtains drawn over her bedroom window. She would rather sit in the dark.”

Or go to the mountains , he mused. He’d vowed to take her. It was a promise he wouldn’t be able to keep.

“What does she look like?” the woman asked.

“Her hair is very red.” And there is a tiny mole on her left palm, he didn’t add, and my thumb fits perfectly in the little dip behind her earlobe.

“There are not many women in Positano with red hair…” He heard a shift in the woman’s voice, something like surprise or hesitation.

“Nor in Italy at all,” Holmes agreed.

“I used to know many women with red hair,” the woman said. “But they all adored the sea.”

“Well—” Holmes stopped Mari’s name from slipping from his tongue “—she once told me she used to adore the sea, too.”

“What changed her mind?”

“Her mother drowned,” he said, “and her younger sister, too. She feels she has lost everything to the ocean.”

“When did her mother drown?”

Holmes frowned, thinking on the math. “Twelve years ago.”

“And what about her—” the woman’s voice caught “—her sister?”

That was easier to remember. Mari spoke of her every time they met. “Two years ago.”

The woman fell silent, her breathing so quiet he thought she might have fallen asleep. But then, as the moments passed, Holmes heard her weeping. He waited patiently, giving her space to purge whatever burdened her so.

Finally, she said a name he recognized. “Sofia.”

Mari’s little sister. Holmes sat up very straight. “You know of Sofia?”

“Yes,” she said. “Sofia and Mari, they are my daughters. I am…Imelda. I am Mari’s mother.”