Catherine’s captain might very well have picked up new agents who were not mentioned in the communiqué at all. The thought was troubling. Absently, he listened to the oars in the water. Dip, pull, up, dip. Over and over again. The sound was hypnotic.
“You are thoughtful, Kyril.”
“I suppose I am. Has the Catherine docked, by the way? I forgot to ask you.”
Lukian shook his head. “Not yet. But our man got the harbormaster roaring drunk and extracted a little useful information. He said she is downriver, riding low in the water. Her progress is steady, though.”
“Her cargo must be heavy. Did you obtain a copy of the ship’s manifest and the bills of lading?”
“Yes. Stepan Wisotsky boarded her at Gravesend in the guise of a customs inspector and made them wait while he inspected and memorized both. He was only able to make a cursory inspection of the cargo but he penned fair copies of the paperwork when he disembarked. A messenger brought them to me.”
“Very good. Stepan has prodigious powers of recall.”
“Yes. He was a bookish cub, as I remember. He would never come out to play in the Archangel winters.”
Kyril laughed in a low voice. “I remember that. Stepan was no fool.”
“How pure the snow was there and how white. Blindingly white.” Lukian sighed. “London snow is grimy even when it falls. Full of soot and ashes.”
“Yes, yes, the city runs on coal,” Kyril mused. “Does the Catherine have any in her hold? It is a risky cargo and sometimes explodes.”
Lukian shook his head. “Mostly timber, according to Stepan.”
“That is what Mr. Briggs is shipping. Nothing out of order there.”
“Stepan thought he saw a container marked as khodzhite.”
Kyril raised an eyebrow. “Indeed. I am sure our client knows nothing about it. Khodzhite is valuable and very rare. And far more dangerous than coal.”
“The shipment is safe enough. The container was made of lead.”
“Did Stepan estimate how much of it there is?”
“A thousand pounds, he said.”
“Hmm. No wonder the ship is slow.”
Lukian interrupted him. “The Russian captains overload their ships, no matter how valuable the cargo or perilous the voyage. They would sacrifice their own mothers for a kopeck.”
Kyril nodded. “Indeed.” He remembered the captain on his voyage out to England two years ago. The tightfisted bastard had served his passengers spoiled meat and the sailors had to subsist on hardtack. Lukian, on a different ship leaving months later, had been far worse off, with a very devil at the helm.
“They treat their men brutally. Even an officer can be flogged.”
Kyril knew that Lukian bore the marks of the cat upon his powerful back, deep scars that would never fade. Posing as a naval attaché on his way to England, his cousin had protested an ill-advised shortcut through drifting floes—the Taruskins had made the voyage in generation after generation, and a few of them could read the changing sea as well as their native ice.
Lukian had told Kyril much later that the captain seemed to suspect his otherness from the beginning—or had been told to break him.
The agents of the Tsar had already been looking for the Pack and gathering intelligence as to their travels, and their confidential assignments for the British Society of Merchant-Adventurers. None of whose members had been on Lukian’s vessel to intervene for him.
For daring to question the captain’s judgment, Lukian had been shackled for three days, unable to move. The captain made his punishment an object lesson to the others. He had been stripped to the waist in freezing weather, tied facing the foremast and flogged until his skin burst and the blood poured from his torn flesh, an agony he had endured in silence.
He had been taunted for that, loudly mocked by the captain and the petty officer who had flogged him, but still he said nothing. Then salt water was thrown by the bucketful upon his open wounds to wash away the gore and shredded flesh—and make his agony worse. But Lukian could not be broken by mere men, however cruel they were. He revealed nothing, not one secret of the Pack, or who and what he really was.
He was taken down half-alive, brought belowdecks and left alone to die. He hadn’t. Before the sun came up the captain was found in his cabin with his throat savagely ripped open, his dead body draped with the corpse of the man who’d whipped Lukian. Both were naked.
And mutilated.
Their balls had been ripped from their groins, then stuffed, sac and all, into each other’s mouths—no, their fate was worse, the sailors whispered. Their mouths had been stuffed before they were killed. To keep them from screaming. Before they drowned in the blood gurgling down their throats from the stumps of their severed tongues.
Persuaded, the first mate turned the ship and went the long way, around the ice, arriving in London a few weeks late.
The dead men had been buried at sea, wrapped in red-splotched shrouds of canvas and tipped into the waves. No holy verse was read and no tears flowed. And no one was the wiser in England. The dreaded execution dock of Wapping, built out in the mud of the Thames, did not creak under the last steps of the killer and no one was left in a noose for the tide to wash over him three times. Lukian left the ship and simply disappeared into London, finding his way to the Pack’s lair near the Palace of St. James’s, where he had healed.
Kyril had a great deal of respect for his cousin’s temper. And his toughness.
“They are fools as well as brutes,” Kyril said at last. “But captains earn nothing if they are forced to wait out the winter in Archangel and this fellow made it through.”
“We are supposed to think so. I for one agree with Phineas Briggs.” Lukian pulled harder on the oars, battling the swift current in the middle of the river. “But the northern seas will soon be choked with ice. It is lucky that the Catherine did not sink.”
They turned their heads, hearing distant shouts in the dark. Sailors called to each other and a bosun’s whistle piped. Kyril’s ears pricked. He thought he heard the name of the vessel they sought, though he could not see the ship. “That may be her.”
His own excellent hearing was not quite enough. But sounds traveled over open water in an uncanny way. In a little while his guess was confirmed.
“Well?” Lukian asked.
Kyril listened intently. “Yes, it is the Catherine. Her crew took advantage of the incoming tide.”
“Perhaps they kedged her.”
“A tedious business. Letting go an anchor and dragging to it makes for slow going. And I do not hear the rattle of chains.”
Lukian exhaled. “Then they are relying upon a pilot or a tug.”
“They would have to. Sailing upriver on so dark a night is treacherous.”
