Captain England (Post 10)

Mental note: Do not fall asleep in a corset. I awoke to find the strips of whalebone digging into the flesh of my abdomen and my breasts aching from being flattened.

I sat up suddenly, my head spinning. Where was I? As my eyes focused, I remembered. As with every time I had awakened in 1718, I still wondered if I was dreaming, still experienced that plummeting feeling in my gut every time I realized that this was, in fact, not a dream.

I was in 1718.

I stumbled through the house, looking for England. On the table, I found a pitcher of water, pieces of fruit and a hunk of cheese on a plate, and a note tucked carefully under a pewter cup of ale:

Loading the ship. Infection abound, stay in the house.
Edward

Infection? Great. Just great. All I needed right now was to get sick. Immediately, I washed my hands and face, creating as much lather as possible with the bit of lye soap I’d been given. I peeled and ate an orange while I opened the shutters of a window to let in some fresh air. The stench that wafted in was beyond anything I had ever smelled before, and I found myself slamming the window shut in a hurry. Only once had I smelled anything so bad, and that was when a raccoon had died in the wall of my house. Was anyone surprised that “infection abound” when the air smelled like rotting flesh?

I sat down and put my head in my hands. A green fly buzzed through the room, settling on the cheese. What was I going to do? I needed to speak to England, ask him what his plans were. What with the pirates losing Nassau, he was going to Africa, that much was clear. But what was I going to do? On the one hand, I didn’t want to be separated from England. He was, as he had so aptly put it, my protection. I wouldn’t survive a second on my own in this place.

On the other hand, I had to stay here. What if the sea around Nassau, around the Bahamas, was the key to my returning home? The idea had come to me in a dream: I had been thinking about my last moments in 2009, the storm, Bryan shouting something about the compass not working… Was there some link to the Bermuda Triangle? I remember watching a special on TV once about time warps and the Bermuda Triangle. What channel had that been on? Not the Sci-Fi Channel, I hoped. Jake had made fun of me for watching it, but I’d been procrastinating at the time and anything, including pro wrestling, was better than working.

How else could I explain what had happened to me?

A time warp. Micro-wormholes or something. Jesus, what a horrible nightmare. If this was, in fact, the way I’d gotten here, then leaving the Bahamas was a bad idea, right? But then, what would I do? Set myself adrift on a boat and wait for something to happen? Hope to stumble on another time portal? I felt my eyes fill with tears. There was no reasonable way out of this. I had to focus on simply surviving at this point. And the key to my survival in this strange and volatile world was Edward England.

But while I clearly needed him, he most certainly did not need me; if anything, I weighed on him, a woman who claimed to be from the future, a woman who knew nothing about anything and wouldn’t stop passing out or throwing up. I couldn’t think of a bigger pain in the ass for the average person, let alone a pirate. A man who was defying king and country and losing his home base had put his own needs aside to help me, to take care of me. Maybe he’d felt something for me, maybe he’d thought I was cute. Maybe I reminded him of his mother. Who knew? But at some point, he was going to have to ditch the extra baggage. The last thing an outlaw needed was a weak, confused woman holding him back.

I had to convince England that he needed me. The question was, how?

I pulled out the cropped picture of Sophie that I kept tucked in a secret pocket in the front of my corset. I remember hearing somewhere that this pocket was used to hide small fragrant sacks of perfume (you know, to mask the stench of their unwashed bodies). I used it to keep Sophie close to my heart. As I examined the worn photograph, wishing that radiant smile had been for me and not Jake, my stomach rumbled.

I grimaced, tucking the photo away. I knew the time would come when I would have to… relieve myself, but I’d tried my best to hold it in. Using a “piss-pot” that I had later dumped out into the street had been repulsive enough; but having to actually go to the privy, which was little more than a hole over a cesspit? I shuddered. If the alternative was a stomach ache, then so be it. But what I was feeling was more than just a tummy ache from “holding it in” – it was, without a doubt, caused by eating and drinking in 1718.

Using the privy, at this point, was no longer an option. It was a necessity.

I rummaged though my backpack, desperate to find something I could use as toilet paper. I settled on a few pages out of Sky’s romance, and almost smiled at the irony. I would use my reading material to wipe my ass afterward.

After emerging from the nightmare that was the privy, I scrubbed my hands with soap until they were raw. I felt queasy, gutted. It was that damn water, I was certain. Any water I drank would have to be boiled, plain and simple. It would be good for England to learn about water sanitation, in any case. He and his pirates had to learn simple hygiene, for God’s sake, if they wanted to live long enough to…

That was it. That was how I would convince England to keep me around.

My grandfather had been a missionary doctor in Haiti, and had tried to teach me a thing or two despite my unwillingness to learn. Hopefully some of it had stuck. In any case, I knew as much as any educated person of the twenty-first century – washing hands with soap and water, boiling the drinking water, using alcohol as an antiseptic and citrus fruit for scurvy… Those things alone should be enough for most of these guys to start worshiping me. Or, in the unfavorable alternative, to burn me at the stake.

I began to look around the house, near the hearth, at which hung a big kettle. I found a tinder box easily enough, but was puzzled by its contents. A ring of steel, a piece of flint, and some pieces of charcloth for tinder. Jesus. When the hell were modern matches invented? Oh, what I would have put in my backpack on the fateful morning of that booze cruise, if only I had known…

England returned later that afternoon to find me sitting before the hearth, my head buried in my arms, my knees drawn to my chest. “Lass, what are ye about?” he asked, squatting down next to me.

I looked up at him, knowing I had dark circles around my eyes. “I’ve been trying to light a fucking fire. I can’t do it.”

He wiped his brow and took the firesteel and flint from my hands. In under five minutes, he had a fire going under the kettle. He smiled at me. “Are ye cooking, then?”

I shook my head. “No. I’m boiling water.” I leveled a look at him. “We need to have a chat, Eddie.”