Trade Wind by M. M. Kaye Page B

launch a boat. She must get up at once!
    It was at this point that Miss Hollis made the unpleasant discovery that the slightest movement was not only extremely painful but very nearly impossible. She appeared to have scraped an astonishing amount of skin off herself, and every inch of her body was stiff and bruised from the savage battering it had received as she had been dragged on board.
    It took a considerable effort of will to pull herself out of the berth and across the room, but she set her teeth and managed it at last, though the effort brought cold beads of sweat to her forehead and made her gasp with pain. There was a tin basin, and a can of fresh water—stale and tepid but still drinkable—among other necessary amenities in a dark little closet that adjoined the cabin, and Hero drank long and thirstily and was uncritical of the taste.
    There were none of her own garments in the cabin, but there was an assortment of male attire in a wall cupboard, and she pulled out a shirt at random and had barely managed to slip it on when the cabin door opened cautiously and a grizzled head peered round the comer:
    “Ah! So you’re up,” it announced in a tone of satisfaction. “I suspicioned you might be. Been in ‘arf a dozen times, I ‘ave, just to take a look. I reckoned you’d be wantin’ yer vittles soon’s yer woke.”
    The door opened wider to admit a spry little man with a broken nose in the middle of a face that was as brown and wrinkled as a walnut shell and entirely surrounded by grey whiskers. He sprang agilely on to the only chair, and turning up the wick in the bronze lamp said happily: “There now! That’s better, ain’t it? Now we can see wot we’re at.”
    Miss Hollis, adequately concealed by white cambric as far as the knee but painfully conscious of a lavish display of bare leg and ankle below it, retreated hurriedly back to the bunk; a proceeding which her elderly visitor regarded with a tolerant and entirely understanding eye:
    “You don’t ‘ave to worry, miss,” he assured her. “I’m a married man I am—five times over and two of ‘em legal. Yore safe with Batty Potter, for I seen too many wimmin to get a’sizzlin’ over ‘em at my time of life. Which is why the Captain ‘e says ter me, “You better do nursemaid. Batty,” ‘e says, “for by this-an-by-that, you’re the only respectable member of me ole crew!” Which was right ‘and some of ‘im when you come to think of it. So ‘ere I be, and werry much at your service, miss. What’ll it be? Some nice fried pancakes and a cuppa coffee?”
    Hero said cautiously: “That sounds very nice, Mr—er—Potter. But I would like my clothes first, please. As soon as they are dry.”
    “They’re dry all right,” nodded the only respectable member of the crew, “though a bit wore-out like. But I’m doing me best with them, an’ you shall ‘ave them back as soon as I can get ‘em to ‘ang together. ‘Ere’s your supper.”
    At any other time Hero would undoubtedly have rejected the meal as uneatable, since the pancakes turned out to be flat cakes of unleavened bread, imbued with curious Eastern spices and fried in clarified butter, while the coffee was black and very sweet and thick with grounds. But by now she was feeling far too hungry to be critical, and Mr Potter, removing the denuded tray, remarked approvingly that he liked to see a wench that could do justice to her vittles, and at this rate they would soon have her on her feet again.
    He had forgotten to turn down the lamp when he left, or perhaps it had simply not occurred to him to do so, and sitting propped up against her pillows Hero at last had time to take stock of her surroundings.
    She was occupying a cabin that was not in the least like any of those on the Norah Crayne , for it was neither as large as her own comfortable one nor as well equipped as the Fullbrights’, and there was no comparable display of polished mahogany, bright chintz or gleaming