4. Sailing, Once Again
Still angry-crying, I stumbled into my cabin, immediately wrapping myself in the lava lava and flinging myself into bed.
I couldn’t stop thinking about Mom and how devastated she would be. Anne had run away on her boat more times than I could count; we’d lost Da to the sea. I didn’t need to imagine what things would look like if both of her daughters vanished the same way, and right now, my confidence in Anne getting us back was exceptionally low. For a number of reasons.
It took a while for me to notice the bloody, messy condition my room was in. Bloody handprints. My sister had been in my room since our return from Tavern Rock. During her haunting, Anne had bled all over the walls, taken my built-in dresser apart, and left papers strewn all over the fucking place. Beautiful. I knelt to take a closer look. I had never noticed that this innocuous piece of furniture had a false front, bottom, sections - false everythings. Within the dresser several books were visible; on top, copies of the family journal. As a bonus, some of those were also smeared with blood. “Anne’s secrets have secrets,” I murmured to myself. Something about quoting our mother as I leafed through the journal pages that my sister alleged I had written (would write?) was extremely trippy.
So the matriarch had the same ‘G’ I did. And a few other letters... and the question marks. I shoved the papers off the dresser to join the ones on the floor. How was handwriting supposed to be proof of anything? I didn’t want to think about it. I didn’t want to think about anything.
The bed beckoned me. Stepping over the papers, I sank into it heavily. Less than twenty four hours had passed since I’d last slept here, but that had been a lifetime ago. Now, my brain raced through the most horrifying scenarios. What if those pirates had friends? Friends who were following us even now, eager to exact revenge? It wasn’t like we were in any condition to fight off a crew. Maybe they’d fire a cannon at us and take us out before we even knew what was happening. ...Were boat cannons a thing now? Catapults? Trebuchets?
“Okay,” I murmured to myself. “You need to sleep.” I had a tried and true procedure. I scarfed down the pot brownie, took a few generous swigs of gin, then climbed into bed with Por el Amor de Rosa, and read until I passed out.
The big white house on the corner was an annual wonder of non-traditional Christmas decor. You would never see a jolly, bearded Santa in a sleigh here. This year, they had gone for an ocean theme. Turquoise seahorses hauling treasure chests of pearls and gold; a mermaid family gathered around a tall, tree-shaped piece of pink coral, decorated with sand dollars and starfish; and best of all, a choir of sixteen shimmering squid, led by an octopus wearing a grand tiara and a tutu.
It was beautiful.
“You were right, Izzy,” my mom said, turning from the passenger’s seat to look at me. “It was worth coming out tonight.”
Behind the wheel, my dad nodded, and I smiled to myself. I had managed to convince them to do this tonight, before Dad’s trip, so we could see it together, as a family. I was still thinking about how great it was when I fell asleep in the car.
Crash.
I felt very heavy.
“‘...Poor Alice! It was as much as she could do, lying down on one side, to look through into the garden with one eye; but to get through was more hopeless than ever: she sat down and began to cry again.’”
Anne. It was Anne...
Anne was there, and reading to me. I was too heavy to say anything, or even open my eyes.
“‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” said Alice, “a great girl like you,” (she might well say this), “to go on crying in this way! Stop this moment, I tell you!” But she went on all the same, shedding gallons of tears, until there was a large pool all round her, about four inches deep and reaching half down the hall-’”
“Diane,” her mother Vivienne interrupted, her voice a quiet, yet unyielding whisper. “Move onto another passage, please?”
The door opened, and a man’s low voice drifted in. “Mrs. St. Germaine? The social worker has some forms for you...”
“Of course.” The door closed again.
Why was everyone so quiet?
“It’s okay, Izzy,” Anne said into my ear. “I’m not going to skip any of it.”
I was so heavy.
“...she found herself at last in the beautiful garden, among the bright flower-beds and the cool fountains...’”
My eyes! I could finally open them. The lights were so bright, they made my eyes water. Maybe I could talk. I would try, even though my head was spinning.
She paused. “Izzy? You’re awake again! You’re not supposed to try to talk.” Everything was heavy again. I closed my eyes. “I’m here, Izzy.”
Something inside pulled, and I groaned involuntarily.
“Izzy?”
My eyes shot open, and I cried out. Anne held my hand and screamed for help.
I greeted an afternoon sun hungover and pissed off. “No,” I declared aloud, then rolled over, back into oblivion.
My sleep was fitful, and plagued with horrifically imaginative nightmares. There was Marco having tea with Mom in my garden, both of them layered in silks, surrounded by jewels, zinnias, and English lavender. There was Rat’s pale and bloodless corpse, swimming along beside the Try Your Luck and cursing me as a witch through the open wound in his throat.
And there was Anne. In my dreams, my sister wielded her sword with devastating precision, slicing her way through all manner of unknown monsters. At the end of the fight, she beamed at the chopped up corpses before picking up a severed tentacle and wrapping it around herself like a beauty queen’s sash, blood and gore dripping down the ball gown she was suddenly wearing. Her sword transformed into a giant match, which she struck along the floor with a delighted laugh. She turned into a violently beautiful fire goddess, and the wooden tavern went up in flames as she whirled about, laughing maniacally at the fire marshall as he wrote a ticket, tsking that the tavern was not up to code.
I woke up drenched in sweat, ensconced in books, and clutching the bottle of gin. Dr. Chabliss would not have approved.
How long had I been cloistered away in my cabin?
Too long, my growling stomach opined.
I stumbled to the small galley and breathed in deeply, taking in the mingled scents of the herbs and other plants. It was good to be back in my element. Even if I did feel like shit.
The kitchen looked exactly as I’d left it - and it slowly dawned on me that Anne hadn’t used the space to cook. So, had she been eating? Taking her medicine? Changing her bandages? My sister had never been the poster child for self-care. I drank a huge glass of water while making a mental list.
Food was first. A thick, hearty beef stew and brown bread would be just the thing, I decided, and washed my hands. The ship smelled especially wonderful when I baked, and cooking would give me time to think. Yes, I resolved, pulling out ingredients. We both needed to eat. I would feed Anne a peace offering, check her injuries, and we would figure out our next steps. Together, like we always had.
I sat the pot of stew on the table and marched up to Anne at the helm. “Here,” I said. I held out the steaming bowl, a thick piece of bread balanced on its rim. “I’ve had a lot of time to think and I need you to just listen, okay?” She blinked, but said nothing, which I took as a sign to barrel on. With a deep breath, I launched into my list of grievances. “I don't even have words for how angry and upset I am. You tricked me into joining you under the falsest of pretenses. Kidnapping your very own sister? I mean, really?” I was getting worked up all over again, and I took a moment to breathe. “This is a super fucked up situation, but after everything we’ve been through together... I’m trying to give you the benefit of the doubt. I’m really, really hoping you’ve got some sort of reasonable explanation, and I’m going to give you another chance to do so...”
I trailed off. Anne's eyes were fixed on the bowl of stew in my hand, all but glazed over. She hadn’t heard a single word I’d said.
“Anne? Hello?” She only stared at the bowl, nodding at it with an oddly wistful expression. “Anne!” I snapped my fingers in front of her, trying to get her attention. “Hello? Answer me and eat the damn stew already!” I put the spoon in her hand.
She blinked at me. “Did you make soup?”
“Stew,” I frowned. Obviously. Couldn’t she see how thick and hearty it was? Like anyone would use huge chunks of beef and potato like this and call it a soup. “And who the hell else would have made it?” Anne put the spoon into her mouth and immediately burst into tears. “...Are you okay?” I asked, thoroughly taken aback.
Anne slurped up several spoonfuls before looking up at me disorientedly. “What?”
I studied her for a long moment. “You are not okay.” She had already polished off her first serving and was staring at the empty bowl longingly, so I refilled it. She kept crying while she ate. I sighed and turned to the wheel, checking the compass. That was when I realized that the compass was all there was. No sat nav. No GPS. No wonder Anne was so out of it. I was clearly rather out of it myself, since it hadn’t even occurred to me that she’d been up here manually sailing for however long I’d been below decks.
Between a lifetime of knowing my sister and the evidence in front of me, it was pretty clear she’d been doing this without taking breaks.
“Where are we going again?” I asked, taking the helm and pushing down the pangs of guilt. Anne had made this bed, and it wasn’t my fault if she didn’t like the corners.
Anne was gulping down the stew like someone was going to snatch it away from her. “Bermuda.”
Right. I raised an eyebrow at the decisiveness of her answer. “Why Bermuda?”
“To sell the guns. And the gunpowder.”
My mouth dropped open in shock and I turned to stare at her. “What?!?”
Anne nodded, then took another big spoonful. “We are going to sell it all in Bermuda.” She gestured around at the vast quantities of boxes, casks, and sacks. “I can’t have us navigating the portal on a ship full of explosives. Good soup. Thanks.”
“It’s stew,” I corrected her absently, still trying to piece together the new information I’d gotten. Yeah, Izzy, this boat is a bomb just waiting to happen, but that’s no big deal. Thanks for lunch.
She paused long enough to say, “that’s what I said,” and I sighed. “So listen, this soup is great. But you shouldn’t be cooking,” Anne said over a mouthful.
Sure. We’d live on cereal and energy bars. That was totally sustainable. Besides, how could I take her seriously when she was positively inhaling the very food she was maligning?
In addition to not eating, Anne also hadn’t been sleeping or taking care of her bandages; also, the sling was nowhere to be seen. She looked like boiled shit, to put it nicely. Why the hell hadn’t she heaved to long enough to take breaks, like a sane person? You would think she had a death wish or something. “Why don’t you take a break? You look like you need sleep. And...more.” Yes, I was still pissed off, but I wasn’t a nautical expert, and I needed to take care of the one I had. And not only because I needed her to take me home. Suddenly aware of the critical way I was looking her over, Anne attempted to right her appearance, trying to dust off the days of blood and other bits from her clothing. It only showed off how exhausted and bedraggled she was.
“No. It’s okay. I’ll be fine,” Anne insisted. “The soup helped a lot. You don’t need to do this.”
I was unconvinced. “When was the last time you slept? Like, really slept?” Anne grunted in response. I looked around at the deck, noticing the bits of wrappers and other telltale pieces of trash. “Have you been living on junk food this entire time? You look like you’re on death’s doorstep,” I informed her. She only chuckled. “Why the hell didn’t you just heave to for a while so you could do what you needed?”
Anne stared at me blankly, shaking her head. “I’m getting us where we need to go. I’ll sleep when I’m dead.” She laughed again, sounding increasingly like someone auditioning for a spot at a high security loony bin.
My field of fucks about her feelings was totally barren and thrice salted over. “God, just move,” I said, elbowing her away from the wheel. I couldn’t get home alone and I was sure as fuck not interested in getting stuck here because my sister was too pigheaded to take care of herself. As if she was trying to make my point, she sat down on the bench and promptly passed out.
Fucking fantastic. After making sure she was ‘only’ unconscious, I set the wheel, lowered the sails, and then set about redoing all of Anne’s banadaging, during which I realized she had a fever. I could have cooked steak on her back and the wound on her shoulder was red, swollen, and oozy. Shit. I’d been sure the pills would stave off an infection. “How can it not be working?” I yelled at the afternoon sky. ...Because she wasn’t taking them, dummy. The bottle of antibiotics hadn’t been touched since I’d last been up here.
“Fuck!” I screamed into the vast expanse, then took a few deep breaths and got to work. I cleaned the wound the best I could, added a generous amount of antibiotic ointment to the new dressings along with a strong dose of hope, and then went to stand watch at the helm.
A little under an hour later, she roused, sitting up and looking around. I gestured at the refilled bowl of stew and she dove into it, mumbling what I assume were words of gratitude. I didn’t want to hear it. “We need to talk.”
“Okay?” She blinked at me.
“Bermuda.” I wanted answers and I wanted them now.
“Bahama,” Anne began, and I scowled. “Come on pretty mama,” she said, putting a hint of a tune into it.
I was ready to throttle her. “Don’t you dare start singing,” I warned.
“Key Largo, Montego, baby why don’t we go --”
“Anne! I need to know what to expect there.” I couldn’t exactly download a guide for visitors.
My sister shrugged her uninjured shoulder. “It’ll be fine. You’ll stay in the boat - for real this time – and chill until I finish the deals –” Anne stopped abruptly for a moment. “Then if you want we can do a little sightseeing for an hour before getting back underway. We’ll be out of there quick. Like a week.”
A week‽ Record scratch. She moved to take up the ladle but I was faster (powered by rage) and smacked the back of her hand with it. “No.” I shook my head, wondering if the fever was cooking her brain. The paltry offered hour of sightseeing smacked of an indulgent parent attempting to wheedle compliance from a troublesome toddler. “I don’t want to stay on this boat. I’ll find a hotel.” Or something. Whatever they were called nowadays. Anne had lured me here with promises of a summer of fun and adventure, and now she wanted me to act out an ethnic version of Rapunzel-at-sea? Fuck no. I was getting out of this tower, damn it. I said as much.
Anne frowned, starting on some long winded lecture about how unreasonable I was being. Apparently, the world was full of rapists, slavemongers, ruffians, and cutthroats who would all be after my person from the moment my feet touched ground. So, naturally, she’d brought me here to frolic for our summer of sisterly bonding.
“Well I guess you had better figure it out,” I snarled. “Because I am absolutely not staying on this boat.”
That turned into yet another diatribe, during which neither of us were moved. At last, we reached something of an agreement. More of a compromise, really, in the sense of it being something that everyone was bitter about but could at least agree upon: I would be granted shore leave, but I would have a guard. We were both scowling like gargoyles by the end of it but at least something was settled.
“And one more thing,” I said.
Anne’s scowl deepened and she mumbled something I couldn’t quite make out. “What now?” She spoke up, glaring at me.
“I want you to take me home,” I said. I had come up with a whole flowery speech earlier in the kitchen, but I now refer you to my previously stated barren field.
“Bermuda --”
I cut her off at once. “After Bermuda. Promise you’ll take me home.”
“Izzy, it’s--”
“What, Anne?” I was not in the mood to negotiate with my kidnapper.
“The portal is not like a door you can just walk back through. It’s powerful. It has agendas of its own. Even I can’t always get where I want to go.”
“It sounds like you’re prepping one doozy of an excuse,” I snapped. She could have at least bothered to come up with a plausible lie. After all, she’d had an appointment in 1649 and made it. Add that to the background information I’d absorbed - primarily the fact that she’d been here often enough to acquire a reputation - and that she’d already assured me that she could get us home. Was I really supposed to believe this?
“It’s not an excuse!” Anne yelled, springing to her feet. She swayed briefly, a decidedly sickly pallor to her coloring, then collapsed back into a seated position. “This was never supposed to be forever. It was just a small summer trip,” she rambled. “Your life is so busy and I just wanted to get a chance to have one more trip together before you went and moved on without me.” Her face contorted in pain; I held my breath to see if she was going to pass out again. “But fine. Screw it,” Anne continued. “You’re miserable. I’m shot up. Let’s get this shit off the boat and then get you the hell out of here.”
She made it sound like this fucking predicament was somehow my fault. “Great. I couldn’t agree more. Now promise me,” I demanded. Not that my sister’s promises seemed to be worth much these days. “I mean, this isn’t like, ‘I’ll try to get you home before curfew but you know how traffic is on Fridays’.” It had been over a decade and I was still bitter about that one.
My sister mumbled something else before speaking up loudly enough for me to hear. “What do you want? A pinky swear?”
I didn’t care one fucking bit for her tone. “I want you to swear in such a way that you can’t wriggle out or loophole your way away from this. Give me a definite promise. Give me a concrete promise. Swear on pain of your precious boat sinking to the bottom of the ocean that you, Anne, my sister, will get me home.”
Her face contorted as if I had asked her to sacrifice a particularly adorable kindergartener. “Never,” Anne replied immediately, caressing the nearby rail. I scowled. “But maybe there’s something I can do.” Then I had to watch while Anne once again lurched down the stairs. Was she... limping?
“I don’t suppose you’d let me help you!” I called after her unsteady form.
“Just hold on!” She barked back.
“Unbelievable,” I mumbled to the waves. Excuse the fuck out of me for not wanting you to fall down the steps and fucking die. I hovered by the stairs, anxiously straining my ears for sounds of distress until she reappeared.
“I’m going to make you a vow,” Anne declared, setting down several items. Looking between the three of them was like playing an unwinnable game of Which One Doesn’t Belong. There was a flask in a wrap of amber leather, a gleaming silver knife, and an old school milk glass Disneyland mug with gold lettering. I traced my fingers over the Anne on the side.
Anne was intensely focused as she poured a small amount from the flask into the mug; I felt a shiver. It had nothing to do with the wind and everything to do with the feeling that Anne was setting up to perform some kind of ritual.
I watched what happened next like it was on a screen. Anne took the knife and drew a long, thin slit from her pinky down to her forearm, and then duplicated the same mark on my arm, grasping me tightly. I watched the tiny, ruby-colored rivulets run down our arms, wondering why I didn’t feel anything.
Anne wrapped us in the traditional intertwined pinky swear, then pressed the new incisions against each other. She was solemn when she spoke again. “You will get back home where you will live out your days fat, happy, and rich.”
Why did this require a blood oath? I swallowed, feeling slightly dizzy as the rivulets of blood ran down our arms. And why ‘fat’, exactly? Anne dipped a finger into the mug then rubbed it along the cut she had made on my arm. I blinked in shock as healed skin followed her finger, still staring as she did the same thing to herself. She held up the chalice and said what sounded like, “Suck it, Ponce,” before gulping down half of the liquid and handing it over for me to drink as well. What the hell was in that glass, anyway, I wondered, accepting it nonetheless.
“Upon your precious.” I held up the mug and swallowed down the few drops of liquid.
Strangely, it didn’t taste like anything.
Anne chose that moment to take me up on my offer of a break. After confirming our heading and reminding me not to let the ship sink, she retreated to her cabin, leaving me alone with my jumbled thoughts. I set the wheel and turned to my stew, eating mechanically as I reviewed the events of the past few minutes. By the time my spoon clattered into the empty bowl, the only thing I was sure of was that Anne had again left me with more questions - and nothing that even came close to an explanation. She owed me an explanation. And a big, fat, genuine apology.
I also discovered that ‘fasting’ sans alcohol for days did not make one’s digestive system particularly receptive to consuming large helpings of stew out of nowhere. I spent what felt like ages leaning over the railing, convinced that I was going to unexpectedly share my meal with the sea creatures below. The dolphins and others bounced out of the waves to greet me while my digestive system waffled. Once it finally passed, I sank down in the captain’s chair, leaning back with a sigh.
It was the first time in days I’d paid any attention to the sky. I’d always loved how it looked in the middle of the ocean. Here and now, the view was even more profound. As the sky darkened and the stars began to emerge, I was fairly breathless at how striking it all was. Even on the clearest nights at home we never got views like this.
A black hole sucking down a spaceship, I’d said. Who would take someone to see that? But what if you wanted to take them to see the stars?
Although the journal had been a big part of my childhood, I’d never given the idea of real time travel any credence. Now that I was here, I found myself wondering how different things might have been if Anne had been upfront in the first place instead of this ‘surprise, happy birthday’ routine she’d pulled.
Then again... I would have probably smiled and nodded at her while discreetly texting Mom to get some white coats to the house, and pronto. A person could almost understand why someone might choose to go this route.
Almost.
Still, we had been raised to understand the importance of little things like ‘common decency’ and ‘honesty’ and ‘bodily autonomy’ and ‘respect’. The Anne I knew and loved understood things like that. This version of my sister was a complete stranger.
I shook it off. Regardless of how I’d gotten here, here I was. I had spent hundreds of hours reading romance novels that spanned several centuries, this one among them. “Lady Isabelle,” I announced to the waves. My sister/kidnapper/travel agent had provided me with a fitting wardrobe to boot. I was going to make the most of it. After all, this was the sort of thing deathbed confessions were made from. Did you know, when I was young, I took a lovely trip to the seventeenth century, I would say to my grandchildren, and their parents would smile indulgently at my assumed dementia while I detailed my adventures. Isn’t your grandmother a wonderful storyteller, my children would say.
Time travel. A thrill went through me. I was a time traveler! At least, I thought I was. I wasn’t sure you were allowed to claim the title if it was something you had experienced passively.
One week, Anne had said. Assuming my sister didn’t succumb to her wounds before reaching our destination, it was a quick stop in Bermuda and then we were heading home.
My arm itched. Right where Anne had performed her admittedly very impressive magic trick. I rubbed it, moving under the light for a closer look. It didn’t hurt. Despite being only hours old, it looked days healed.
Anne had used it on her wounds. It was the only thing that made sense - in as much as magical healing waters could. At least now I knew I hadn’t been imagining things.
“You are definitely not on your mental A game if you’re just putting that together,” I mocked myself aloud. And yet - she had a fever. Well...even if you did have some special liquid salve, everyone still needed to eat and sleep. Regularly. At home Anne acted like she could survive on chips and queso and diet soda, yet the second I put a slice of a juicy roast or something in front of her she’d practically swoon. And here she was, reluctant to take antibiotics she clearly needed and refusing to visit a kitchen that was only steps away.
I really didn’t get my sister sometimes. At least I felt like I was starting to make sense of some of the other wonders around me. We’d time traveled, but the sun still rose and set as normal. My sister had magic healing water (!) but she wasn’t impervious to infections and she still needed to take care of herself. Those were reasonable parameters. I could handle that. Hell, I was excited there were parameters at all.
Huh. There was that balance I had been looking for. Surprise, surprise.
When Anne came up a few hours later, I shook the bottle of pills in her direction before stashing them back into the kit. “I’ll be back up to change your bandages, give you your next dose of meds, and bring you food.” She nodded unconvincingly at me and I made an obscene gesture in response in farewell as I turned to the stairs. This was absurd. When the hell had Anne become such a goddamn masochist, I wondered. Maybe that special water was making her overly confident to the point of complacency. I wasn’t ready to ask questions about magic yet. Magic that my sister was strangely comfortable with.
Despite the realization that my sister was a time traveler who carried magic water, I felt unanticipatedly rejuvenated as I made my way back down; to be expected after resting and sleeping for however long I had, I suppose. The food had helped too, once my stomach stopped with its dramatics.
Even better, I now had a quest.
Any smart traveler did prep work before a big trip, especially for new and unfamiliar locations; now I found myself in Egypt and I hadn’t learned even a lick of Arabic. I definitely didn’t want to be an ugly American time traveler. I mean, how fucking embarrassing, right?
Luckily, I had a genuine first person historical account in the form of the journal. Preparing for a trip was simple, and far easier on my mind than attempting to wade through the complexities of time travel, the ethics of killing in self-defense, or the impossibilities of vanishing cuts. Not to mention thinking about how awkward the holidays were going to be this year.
In my current frame of mind, the sight of my cabin hit me anew. While I’d cleaned up all the blood, I hadn’t done much with the scattered journal pages or any of the other messes Anne had left. I knelt on the square of floor between the bed and dresser and began sorting through the disarray, making a pile of Anne’s stash of books on one side and gathering the papers into a neat stack on the other.
At the top of one of the pages was a to-do list, heavily smudged - Anne baptizing it in her blood hadn’t made it any more legible.
Write to Catherine about -----
Pumpkin stew??
Payments - Glassmaker, performance troupe
Community garden!
It is a truly unnerving feeling to see what is undeniably your handwriting on pages you couldn’t possibly have written. Suddenly the idea of using this document for research seemed extremely ill-advised. I slid the papers aside and turned to the books. Getting them to fit back into the dresser seemed tricky. And why the hell did she need to hide books, anyway? The top book was a tome titled Killer Kings, Petulant Priests, and Amorous Ambassadors. Curious, I flipped it open to a random page. It was all about the Habsburg monarchy: 1282-1918.
“It’s a history book,” I marveled, and looked over the others. Anne had secreted away a small, carefully curated collection of useful tomes with a wide range of topics, including The Stars: A Map of the World’s Constellations, an Atlas, and the most recent editions of the US Army Survival Manual and Physicians Desk Reference. I set aside Por el Amor de Rosa, (a Spanish lesbian romance novel set in medieval Spain) and got to work on my research.
The ability to compartmentalize was the difference between freaking out and looking at this as a fun project that would combine my love of theatre with the chance to see and do things I’d only been able to experience via the page. Reading had always been an escape for me, much like cooking. Or at least, cooking before Felix and Oasis.
I had a massive panic attack the next time I tried to cook, sure that the cooktop had broken - only to discover that my treacherous sister had unplugged it. Grrr. It wasn’t enough that I was stuck here - she had to ruin what little happiness I could find, too?
Anne waved me off each time I came to relieve her, only accepting my trays of coffee, food, coffee, antibiotics, water, and more coffee in lieu of rest, claiming that the ocean floor here was too treacherous for her to sleep. At this rate Anne would be made wholly of coffee by the time we reached land.
If we survived the trip at all.
Despite my methodical management of her wound care and medication, Anne was still very feverish, and I was worried. The lack of sleep couldn’t possibly be making things better, and yet she continued to refuse rest. There were times when my sister seemed so out of it that I wondered if we would even make it to Bermuda. Of course, my suggestions that she drop anchor and rest, if even for only a few hours, were dismissed without any real consideration.
I threw myself into reading.
During my research, I learned that Anne hadn’t been bullshitting about the ocean floor here. Crashing your ship in Bermuda - known as the Somers Isles to the locals - due to the abundant, mostly hidden reefs was practically the trendiest thing one could do. I vaguely remembered a perky tour guide at the Bermuda Naval Museum mentioning the recurring issue during my previous trip to the island.
My previous trip to the island. Odd to think that that date was now hundreds of years in the future. So was my date of birth, for that matter...
Breathe, Isabelle. I took a deep breath and then a deep toke, thinking through my priorities. And now I was Lady Isabelle; Anne had named and titled me fresh off the boat. She had stressed that I was to maintain my image of wealth and nobility as a shield, and outfitted me accordingly.
It was familiar, in a way. Mom had always been a firm believer in dressing for one’s station, and she had put her money where her mouth was, covering any and all grooming and appearance related expenses for Anne and me. I studied myself in the mirror critically, taking in my skin, hair, and nails, idly wondering how my pastel manicure would be taken by the locals. Shortly before setting sail I had made the rounds, getting myself meticulously waxed, exfoliated, moisturized, manicured, pedicured, and deep conditioned, doing my best to be prepared for a summer at sea with limited spa-like accommodations.
Lavish clothes, a pretty fascinator on coiffed hair, jewelry and a haughtily raised eyebrow - was that all it took to affirm me to the world as Lady Isabelle?
...Was it asinine to think that things here would be much like they were at home?
I focused on reading up on nobility. Anne had all but forbidden me from interacting with the locals, but I wanted to be prepared. I was the sort of person who studied for things. She had decided to clap me with a guard, after all, and who knew what sorts of might come up in conversation?
It didn’t take much research to learn that I was far behind. As a well-bred woman, there were a great number of things that I was expected to be proficient in: needlepoint, music, dozens of dances that I had never even heard of, and so on. Sure, I could sew - with a sewing machine!
I reviewed the short list again, dismayed. I could dine with the president confidently, but would my excellent future table manners translate into this period? The only other skills on the list that I had seemed to fall under the optional categories: education, and equestrianship. And what was I supposed to do about being left-handed? That could be a big problem in these times. I sighed heavily, letting the thick book fall on the bed beside me. Maybe Lady Isabelle should be shy and quiet. Then I wouldn’t have to worry about having potentially precarious conversations with locals.
There was also that small matter of being a woman of color. The status of the ‘bartenders’ at Tavern Rock, along with Anne’s insistence that I portray a titled woman of wealth was not lost on me. I was very aware of the fates that might befall a person like myself in these times - it hardly required a deep retention of history. Lucky for me.
So fine, I’d study things like precedence and dust off my curtseying and other things from cotillion class. “Bermuda, 1649,” I said, returning to Etiquette Through the Centuries. “Here I come.”
