Read Online Anna's Crossing: An Amish Beginnings Novel by Suzanne Woods Fisher - Free Book Online Page B

that the sailor’s calloused hand belonged to the ship’s carpenter, not the beast who threw the bucket of salt water at her.
    “’Tis nothin’ but a case of the mal de mer, n’more. Comealong with me and the boy while I fetch you some ginger root to help.”
    From around the waist of the ship’s carpenter popped a mop of curly red hair. Felix.
    The carpenter held up a hand. “Before you start giving him a tongue lashin’, follow me.” He tilted his head toward the front of the ship. “Come along then.”
    As she followed him, she saw a sight at the bow of the ship that stopped her in her tracks. She stared at the sight with dropped jaw; so startled, she forgot she was seasick.
    The carpenter spun around to see what was keeping her, then grinned at her obvious embarrassment. A sailor stood on an open platform with holes cut in it, lashed to the bow of the ship. He was relieving himself directly into the channel, rinsing off with a bucket of salt water, for all the world to see. “That, m’ lassie, is known as a head.”
    The Charming Nancy twisted down the side of a wave, and Anna flew forward. The ship’s carpenter caught her shoulders before she struck the railing. Everything around Anna started to spin. Spinning. Spinning, spinning. Then darkening—
    “She’s gone all pasty colored,” she heard Felix cry out.
    Anna’s knees sagged. I must not faint. I must not faint. She grasped onto the forearms of the ship’s carpenter as her stomach flipped and churned. He put a hand firmly on her shoulder to guide her as they walked forward on the shifting deck.
    On any ordinary day, Anna would have been mortified to allow a stranger to help her, to touch her, but this was not an ordinary day. With Felix following closely behind, the carpenter helped her into a small rectangular room not much bigger than a closet. A short bald man was mixing bread dough ina large bowl and looked up in surprise at his visitors. A clay pipe stuck out of the corner of his mouth. He wore an apron covered with food and charcoal smudges and . . . was that blood? Anna’s stomach clenched again.
    “That’s Cook and this is the galley,” the carpenter said. “The ship’s kitchen.”
    “Galley,” Felix quietly repeated to himself. “Cook and galley.”
    The ship dipped and twisted. Anna took long, deep breaths, and tried to think about the green hills of Ixheim after a spring rain. “I think . . . I think I need to sit down.” Before she sagged in the ship carpenter’s hold or was sick down the front of his expensive shirt. “Please.” The single word nearly choked her.
    He helped her to a barrel along the wall. “Here you go.”
    Anna sat carefully upon the barrel’s lid and braced herself with both hands on the side. She took some deep breaths, willing her stomach to stop cramping. Slowly, she lifted her head and looked around the room, then her gaze landed on the ship’s carpenter. A black cat appeared and twined around his boots.
    “There you be, Queenie,” Cook said. “I haven’t seen you for days.”
    Absentmindedly, the carpenter said, “She’s been trapped under a tub, Decker said.”
    “Queenie?” Felix asked.
    “Aye, that’s her name. She’s the ship’s cat.”
    Anna looked up. “I thought cats were afraid of water.”
    “They are,” Cook said. “But every ship needs a cat.”
    “Why?”
    “To catch rats.” One side of his mouth lifted and the clay pipe bobbed as he spoke. “Prodigious rats.”
    Anna barely stifled a gag.
    The carpenter kept rummaging through cupboards. “Cook, have you ginger root? The lassie needs some t’settle her stomach. She’s as sick as a poisoned pup.”
    “Aye,” the cook said. He jutted his chin toward a basket and went back to punching and kneading the dough.
    “Judas Iscariot!” Felix shouted, pointing to the bowl of bread dough.
    Anna clapped her hand over Felix’s mouth, astounded by his outburst of profanity, then her eyes went wide with shock. The cook