Read Online Cast Off by Eve Yohalem - Free Book Online

forgetting his hat in his haste to be gone.
    â€œI shall breakfast here this morning,” Clockert said to Krause. “Bread and cheese, please. And coffee. Black.”
    â€œRight away, sir.” Krause lumbered out of the cabin.
    Clockert returned to his paperwork, his back to me. He wrote with an elbow on the desk and a hand threaded through his hair. I stared at Louis’s hat and weighed all the likely outcomes of my reckless decision to stow away. If I was very lucky, I’d sneak off the ship in Batavia and find work with a Dutch family. Or what was far more likely: I’d be found out and my future would be determined by the captain. Was he a merciful man? A generous one? Surely he was practical, as any captain who runs a “tight ship” would be.
    A stowaway girl discovered on a ship has few options; the stowaway daughter of Sacharias De Winter, merchant banker and former commissioner of the Amsterdam Bank of Exchange, has even fewer.
    But a no-name stowaway boy . . .
    I squatted down and snaked my arm through the space under the storeroom door, my fingers creeping along the floor toward Louis Cheval’s hat. A stray lock of hair fell across my face. Tonight I’d ask Bram to help me cut it short. My hand inched closer—
    â€œHalt, vermin! Who dares invade my office?”

12
    â€œYou sure Clockert didn’t smoke you, Miss Petra?”
    Petra looked a lot less green after a couple of days at sea and a belly full of ginger. We was down in the hold, and I was showing her how to pick oakum. Oakum’s made from old ropes. You take an end and split the hairs apart with a marlin spike ’til it looks like a fuzzy nest, and then you can use bits of the nest to caulk the cracks and holes that all ships are full of. I figured with Petra picking her share down here, I’d double my daily ration.
    â€œI’m perfectly certain he didn’t see me,” she said. “The surgeon was yelling at a rat—and no wonder it was there, given the state of the sick bay. He threw his shoe at it.”
    â€œHe hit it?”
    â€œHe missed. The rat’s probably somewhere down here now with the rest of his very large family.”
    â€œYou’ll be glad of those rats if we get stuck with no wind and food running low,” I said.
    â€œYou don’t mean—”
    â€œAye. They’re not too bad so long as you cook ’em enough.”
    Petra gnawed off another chunk of ginger.
    â€œWhy’d you do it, anyway? Why risk getting smoked for a hat?”
    â€œFor that very reason: Because there’s always a risk—no matter how careful we are—that I’ll be caught. And if that happens, I think I’ll be safer as a boy. I’ve worked it all out. I’ll cut my hair and wear Louis’s hat, and perhaps you could help me find a shirt and trousers, or I could sew them myself with some of these ridiculous skirts that make it all but impossible to climb over Clockert’s storeroom wall—”
    Petra’s skirts did look fairly volumable, but her scheme was barmy.
    â€œThink of it, Bram. With a pigtail and sailor’s clothes, who’d know the difference?”
    â€œEveryone, that’s who. Trousers and tail or no, you’d never pass. Nobody’d believe it for half a minute. And once they smoked you for a girl, they’d know you had help with your cover-up. Then that’d lead straight to me and we’d both be sunk.”
    Petra made one of those airy noises with her nose that girls make. “You’re right, of course. No female could get by on a ship for more than two bells without some cove such as yourself helping her. If I get found out looking like this, you’re sure to go down with me. However . . . at least if I’m dressed as a boy, there’s a chance the crew will believe I am one, and a chance they’ll believe I stowed away on my own.”
    I gave Petra a good look-over.