Bride of the Baja Read Free Page B

cause of cholera doesn't mean I don’t. Filth, that's what brings on the disease. Filth, swamplands, miasmas. Dirt. That's where cholera breeds, Mr. Malloy, in filth and dirt."
    "Aye aye, sir." Malloy felt the tic start at the corner of his mouth. He tightened his lips to a thin line but he couldn't stop the twitching.
    "We'll scrub the ship from stem to stern, Mr. Malloy. We'll hunt down and kill every rat in the hold and we'll kill every other vermin as well. See to it, Mr. Malloy. See to it now."
    "Aye aye, sir."
    "One other matter, Mr. Malloy."
    "Sir?"
    "I don't need your assistance in looking after the welfare of my daughter. Understood?"
    "Aye aye, sir."
    Malloy spun on his heel and climbed the companion-way. As soon as he reached the deck, he began shouting his orders. Damn him, he thought. Clenching his fists at his side, he directed his fury at the job at hand. I'll show him. Before I'm through, he vowed, Captain Bradford will be able to eat his dinner off the deck of the Yankee's hold.
    In his cabin Captain Bradford stared after his mate. He'd noted the twitch, of course, as he'd noted it before in times of stress. As he had many times, he asked himself whether Malloy was ready for command, whether he would ever be ready. He was a good mate, worked hard and knew the ways of the sea. And yet Captain Bradford, without knowing precisely why, didn't completely trust the man. The captain shrugged. He was probably finding flaws where none existed.
    Samuel Peters died shortly before noon on the following day. After his body was washed and toweled dry, it was sewn into a length of canvas sail to which lead weights had been attached. Alitha, head bowed, stood beside her father while he read the burial service. The seaman, she knew, was only a half-year older than she was. So young to die. She blinked back tears as, with the captain's final "Amen," the earthly remains of Samuel Peters were lifted on a canvas stretcher to the rail and committed to the waiting sea.
    Alitha walked to her cabin knowing that the dead man's belongings would now be brought to the mainmast so the bosun, as was the custom, could auction them off to the rest of the crew. Alitha had opened Peters’ sea chest and listed his effects so her father could make a record in the ship's journal: three shirts, two pairs of trousers, boots, a knife, a pocket watch and a Bible. The man who bought the dead man's clothing, she knew, would not wear them until his next voyage—to do otherwise was to tempt fate.
    Five more men died in the next three weeks, the disease striking with lightning suddenness and seemingly at random. Two healthy men would bunk down across from each other and in the morning one would wake to find the other dead. By the end of the fourth week, half the crew had become ill, and even those who recovered—only one in three did—were too weak to climb the shrouds.
    As day followed day with no break in the epidemic, Alitha noticed a change in her father. The captain, always a taciturn man, became even more uncommunicative. He stood for long hours on the poop deck staring at the rise and fall of the empty sea, always looking off the port side toward the islands thousands of miles beyond the horizon, the islands of the South Seas where he had sailed as a young man. On other days Nehemiah Bradford took to his cabin, and Alitha wouldn't see him for twelve hours or more at a time.
    Nothing favored the Flying Yankee except the weather. The ship sped north, the days blue-bright, the nights lit by a thousand stars. They crossed the equator, sailed along the west coast of Mexico, heading for their next port of call, Yerba Buena in San Francisco Bay. From Yerba Buena they would sail westward to the Sandwich Islands.
    Where Thomas Heath waited.
    Alitha, with most of her waking hours spent in the forecastle nursing the crewmen, rarely thought of Thomas now. When she did, her memory of him seemed faint, almost dreamlike, as though he belonged to another time,