The Jezebel (Taskill Witches 3)

Roderick sighed, inwardly fuming at the turn of events.

After his restless night he awoke to rough seas, and he’d come above deck to find a grim day overhead, with no break in the clouds and the ship pitching and tossing as if it were trapped on a knife edge between winds from the east and the west.

As soon as he appeared on deck, one of the men went below and shortly afterward a crowd of them emerged. Even as they came toward him they were mumbling amongst themselves about what they’d seen of Adam and his injury. Roderick found that the men’s thoughts and opinions about their passenger had grown only more dark and determined overnight. He knew what had brought it about—too much discussion fueled by too much rum. When they had a good subject to argue about, his men could spend the whole night doing so. But he would not have any of it. Maisie was not the black-hearted Jezebel they were currently describing.

“Rest assured that I, as captain of this ship, have quizzed our passenger,” he told them. “The young lady has a way with nursing the afflicted. I discovered no proof of malefaction.” If that did not quell them, he had a secondary plan that would.

They were not content to let it lie. Brady led them once again, detailing the latest discovery, while others added their own commentary.

“It was not nursing. Healed he was, Captain, his fingers perfectly straightened again!”

“It was as if there had been no injury at all,” someone else added.

“The injury cannot have been as bad as it first seemed,” Roderick stated firmly.

“It was,” Brady argued, “you saw it yourself. His hand was all twisted up and the skin broken and his knuckles raw.”

“I saw it, too, and the lad was crying out in pain,” another man added.

“Not damaged at all now. Wrong is what it is.” Brady shook his head. “She wrapped his hand in some strange potions, and there were whispered chants, words that have no known meaning to good God-fearing folk. What does that tell you?”

“It tells me nothing, because no one has been harmed. No one has been thwarted in their duties and our ship is safe.” Roderick kept his voice level, maintaining command and reassuring his men, even though his loyalties were divided.

Brady was the ringleader, and that was not good. “I took it upon myself to unbind his hand, to reveal what she had done,” he said.

He should be Roderick’s closest man, and yet he stood with the rest of the crew instead. The atmosphere was mutinous. Roderick saw the irony of the situation, for Brady was a man who kept a woman himself. Surely he knew the female sex was different to men, and that was not necessarily a bad thing? Apparently not.

“There were strange potions indeed,” Brady continued, “ancient leaves with a putrid aroma. But that was nothing compared to the evil doings she created with this potion. There was nary a mark on him. No grazing, no swelling. It was as if it had never happened. The devil has her enslaved, and she spins magic to bring him more souls.”

Roderick scowled at them. “I have seen several of you men here beg for a healer when you were sick or injured, and yet you accuse this woman of evil when she has done nowt to deserve it.”

“We have never had one aboard our ship, one who could turn on us and destroy our vessel, our livelihood.”

“She has blinded you to her true nature, Captain Cameron, blinded you with her magic and her feminine wiles.” It was Brady who made that assertion, and it sent Roderick dangerously close to reaching for his cutlass. Amidst the stream of objections the men had raised, Brady insinuated that she had ensorcelled him into bringing her aboard.

“Do you think the same of your Yvonne?”

Brady smiled, slow and sure, and Roderick saw the trap he had fallen into.

“No,” the man responded, “but then my Yvonne is no witch.”

“Witch!” someone repeated.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if she’d been found out, and that is why she was so eager to leave London,” Brady added.

Could it be true?

“See her off the Libertas and spare us from the devil’s woman, please, Captain,” another added.

Several of them had a murderous look in their eyes, and Roderick knew that was not easily going to be changed. He’d tried to straighten their thoughts the night before. That hadn’t worked. If he didn’t take charge of the situation soon, they would turn on him, as well. Several of them were looking at him suspiciously, as if he’d lost his mind, as if he’d lost his soul because the Jezebel pleasured him in bed.

What angered him most of all was that they put questions in his own mind. Some of what they claimed fitted. He struggled to recall what it was that she’d said when she’d begged for safe passage. Her liberty was at stake, that was it. Why so? Were there witch hunters after her? Roderick scrubbed his jaw in his hand while he shooed those treacherous thoughts away.

Now there was only one thing he could do, and that was to take charge of the situation and lock her up for her own safety. It would be damnably hard, but he would also have to be canny and put on a good show for the men in order for them to rest easy.

* * *

For the first time, Maisie didn’t want to go above deck that morning. Instead, she sat on the bunk and tried to focus on the path ahead, how she would travel from Dundee to the Highlands once they made land. But she couldn’t think upon it, because trouble was afoot. Above deck the mood had turned dark amongst the men, she sensed. That darkness sank down through the aged beams and boards, permeating the captain’s cabin and reaching out to drag her spirit down.