đïž Chapter 4: A Cabin Boy's Lot
My prison was a windowless storeroom adjacent to Harker's office, smelling of damp rope, old wood, and the faint, sweet tang of spilled molasses. A pallet of rough-spun wool laid over a pile of empty grain sacks was my bed; a chamber pot my only luxury. The door had a heavy bolt on the outside.
I was a secret, and secrets in the Green Cormorant were kept under lock and key.
Harker brought me food himselfâa greasy stew and hard biscuit that first evening. He said little, his mind clearly elsewhere, racing through plans I couldn't begin to fathom. "Stay quiet. Stay alive," was his only advice before bolting the door, plunging me into a darkness so complete I could feel it pressing against my eyelids.
The days bled into a strange, monotonous rhythm. I was a ghost in the walls of the tavern, listening to the muffled rise and fall of drunken revelry, the occasional burst of violence quickly silenced by Harker's booming voice or the thud of a cudgel. I learned the tavern's cadence: the quiet lull of the mornings, the boisterous swell of the evenings, the dead silence of the deep night, broken only by the scuttling of rats.
On the third day, the bolt slid back. It wasn't Harker with my meal, but the man they called Two-Finger Tim. He was shorter than I'd realized, with a face like a friendly bulldog, but his shoulders were as broad as a barrel and the absence of those two fingers on his right hand spoke of a story I didn't dare ask for.
"Right, pup. Josiah says you're to make yourself useful," he grunted, tossing a bundle of filthy rags at me. "The Captain's comin' for a meet. This place needs to smell less like a bilge rat's arsehole. Get scrubbin'."
It wasn't a request. And in a strange way, it was a relief. The mindless, physical labor of scrubbing years of grime from the tavern's floorboards was a welcome anesthetic for my guilt and fear. The work was brutal, my hands raw and bleeding by the end of the first hour, but it was real. It grounded me.
Tim watched me work, his gaze not unkind, merely assessing. "So you're Thorne's boy," he said after a long silence.
"I'm no one's boy," I replied, the words coming out with more bitterness than I intended.
He barked a short laugh. "Aye. That's the truth of it now, ain't it? Thorne's dead. Your da's⊠wherever he is. You're your own man, for what that's worth." He spat a stream of brown tobacco juice onto the floor I had just cleaned. "Which ain't much, down here."
Over the next few days, a fragile, wordless understanding formed between us. I became his shadow, tasked with the most menial chores: hauling kegs from the cellar, swabbing the vomit from the privy, polishing the endless stream of tankards. I was the cabin boy of this land-locked ship, and the Green Cormorant was every bit as treacherous as any vessel on the high seas.
It was through this work that I learned the true nature of the establishment. The Green Cormorant wasn't just a tavern; it was a nerve center. Menâweather-beaten, hard-eyed men with the roll of the sea in their gaitâwould come and have quiet, intense conversations with Harker in the back room. They spoke in a coded language of tides and winds, of "cargoes" that needed "special handling," and of ships with names like The Sea Witch and The Revenant.
I kept my head down, my ears open, and my mouth shut. I learned that "Billy Bones" was the name of the scarred man, and that the mere mention of it could silence a room faster than a drawn cutlass. I learned that Harker was not just a tavern keeper, but a man of significant and feared influence, a spider at the center of a web that stretched across the Bristol docks.
One evening, as I was hauling a crate of empty bottles, I overheard a snippet of conversation between Harker and a tall, gaunt man with a face like a hatchet.
"...the Serpent's Kiss is sound," the gaunt man said, his voice a low rasp. "But her master, Avery, is a cautious man. He knows the stories. He wants a percentage, not a wage. And he wants to see the chart."
Harker's reply was a low growl. "Avery will see what I damn well show him. He gets his percentage when the Kiss is provisioned and his crew is sworn to silence. No chart until we're leagues from shore."
The Serpent's Kiss. Thorne's final words. The ship. My heart leapt into my throat. This was no longer a fantasy; it was becoming a plan.
Later that night, after the last drunk had been thrown out and the doors bolted, Harker called me into his office. He sat behind his desk, the chart of the Ivory Isle spread out before him, held down by a pistol and a tankard of rum.
"You've been listening," he stated flatly.
I froze, my blood running cold. Denial was pointless.
"Yes, sir."
He studied me, his expression unreadable. "What do you know?"
I took a shaky breath. "I know you've found the ship. The Serpent's Kiss. I know her captain is a man named Avery who drives a hard bargain. And I know you don't trust him with the chart."
A slow, grim smile spread across Harker's face. "You're smarter than you look. That's good. Stupid boys die quickly where we're going." He leaned forward, his shadow swallowing the chart on the desk. "The Kiss sails on the next spring tide. Five days. Avery has his doubts, but he has his orders now. And you, Elias Thorne's boy, are going to be my eyes and ears on that ship."
"Me?" I gasped, the word barely a whisper.
"You. Avery and his men are loyal to coin, not to me. I need someone aboard who is tied to this," he tapped the chart, "by more than greed. Someone whose life depends on its success. You'll serve as my cabin boy, in truth. You'll run my messages, you'll listen to the crew's talk, and you'll report everything back to me. You saw the men who killed Thorne. You might just see or hear something that saves all our necks."
The reality of it crashed down on me. I was not just a passenger. I was a piece in Harker's game, a spy being sent into the lion's den. The fear was paralyzing, but beneath it, for the first time since I'd fled my home, a spark of purpose ignited. I was no longer just running from something. I was being sent toward something. Toward the Isle.
"I understand," I said, my voice stronger than I expected.
Harker nodded, a look of grim satisfaction on his face. "Good. Get some rest. Your sea-legs await." He rolled up the chart, the parchment crackling with promise and peril. "The waiting is over, boy. It's time to sail."