Chapter Text
April, 1912.
He’s been aboard Crown’s Jewel for a year and six days, which, if you spend your days between backbreaking and the deepest self-destroying boredom, it’s a long fucking time. He takes the last puff from his pipe under the starry vault that has enveloped him every night for months. They’re a few days away from the port of New York now.
The ocean today is a table, unlike yesterday. Yesterday a wave twenty feet high or more brushed them. He thought that if they’d left Nazarè a minute earlier, now they’d be fish food. What a pity to die a few days before docking. What a fucking luck to be alive.
He looks after the smoke coming out of his nostrils, until he sees foam a few meters from the bow. A black figure. A fish, perhaps. A branch. He hears a whistle so faint that he thinks he’s imagined it. A dolphine, maybe, but this is not the area. He thinks it could be anything, but not a man.
Fuck.
It is a man. It’s a man and he’s moving.
He runs fast to the deck cabins, where the others are playing poker drunk on Rum.
“Man overboard!” he screams at the top of his lungs. Man overboard, and he can’t fucking believe it. Can’t help but thinking that if they’d left Nazarè one fucking minute earlier…
They pick up the boy, dry him, but he’s frozen anyway. Tiny splinters of ice have nestled in his eyebrows, in his eyelashes, the hair in his nostrils. His face is swollen, all cracked by the freezing cold of the ocean. His fingers are purple like grapes in November. Crystalline eyes wide and red with salt and terror.
After a few hours he’s better. They feed him and he eats, they give him to drink and he drinks.
He ravens and vomits.
“It wrecked…” he stutters “it wrecked, they’re all dead” all dead he repeats. He talks about the screams. “They’re echoing in my head”. He says he saw his brothers as it took them away. He saw all of them go.
He talks about it. The death. How he watched it relentlessly pass over the others. Had the face of a woman.
“Hair has filigree, eyes as the deepest abysses”.
He talks to Alfie about her. Death’s name is Grace. Alfie thinks it’s a funny name for such a threat. But the boy isn’t laughing. He says she killed him, but he loves her anyway. It seems to Alfie that he hates her. He says a lot about this Grace. Nothing that makes sense. The boy doesn’t say she’s a bitch, but Alfie is convinced he thinks so. He, himself, certainly thinks so.
When he can stand on his legs, they bring him under deck. They put him on a bed and cover him with blanckets. He keeps calling for Grace. Says he can see her.
Ollie puts warm bendages on his wounded flesh, a rag on his forehead for the fever. He says he can hear her singing.
“It’s echoing in my head”.
They give him Rum and he sleeps.
When the door is closed, Alfie prays for the delirium to pass. Fills the pipe with tobacco. He smokes warmed by the candlellight. Thinks of the boy’s crystalline eyes and prays not to throw his dead body in the ocean the following day. Thinks how his eyes would look like without the crimosn of terror. Thinks of everything he said on his delirium. He doesn’t even know his name, but hopes he’ll heal.
He wonders where’s this Grace. What happened to her. Tries to picture filigree hair and abysses in her eyes. He doesn’t even know her. But he hopes she’s now fish food.