Megan Shepherd - The Madman’s Daughter

Monkey secured, I found the castaway sitting in the corner of the forecastle deck outside the boatswain’s hold, his back to me, leaning over an old backgammon board balanced on top of a barrel. He was studying the game’s red and black tokens by the fading sunlight. They were set all wrong. He didn’t seem aware of the sailors throwing him angry glances for taking up space on the deck.

I studied him as carefully as he studied the game. Despite the gash along his face, there was something undeniably attractive about him. Not handsome in a classic way like Montgomery, but more subtle, deeper, as if his true handsomeness lay in the story behind those bruises and that crumpled photograph. Something to be discovered, slowly, if one was clever enough to decipher it.

‘They say you’re mad,’ I said.

His arm jerked as he turned toward my voice. The backgammon game spilled to the floor, red and black tokens rolling across the deck. I fell to my knees to collect them, and he bent to help. He seemed reluctant to meet my eyes. Reserved. His fingers absently drifted to the gash under his eye. A muscle twitched in the side of his jaw. He was scarred from the shipwreck, of course, but there was something in his guarded movements that spoke of more, as though the scars might continue deep below the surface.

‘I couldn’t remember much at first,’ he said, daring a glance at me. This close, I saw that his brown eyes had flecks of gold that caught the fading sun. ‘But it’s coming back to me.’ His hand dropped away from his face. A sailor passed, kicking one of the tokens down the deck and grumbling curses about cadging stowaways.

The castaway added, ‘I’m not mad.’ For a moment his eyes shifted oddly to the left, as though half his mind was still trapped in that dinghy or had sunk with the ship. He had suffered so greatly, and the sailors seemed keen to make him suffer more.

‘Mad enough to come above deck and get in the sailors’ way. You aren’t making yourself popular with them,’ I said, and then lower, ‘You should be careful.’ I handed him the tokens I’d collected and nodded at the board. ‘Would you like to play a round?’

The corner of his mouth twitched again, this time in a half smile. He straightened the backgammon board and stacked the tokens one by one.

I folded my legs and sat across from him. I tried not to stare at the bruises on his arms and face. His knuckles were scraped raw nearly to the bone, and I remembered that hand clutching the photograph, clutching to life. Hard to believe this was the same person.

‘Do you remember what happened?’ I asked. ‘The shipwreck?’

His eyes slid to me, only a flash, judging whether or not to trust me. He picked up the dice. ‘Yes.’

‘And your name?’ I asked.

‘Edward Prince.’ He said it slowly, as though he had little information about himself to share and had to ration it carefully.

‘I’m Juliet Moreau.’

He nodded slowly. ‘Yes, I know.’ And I remembered he’d asked Montgomery about me.

It was my turn to stare, wondering what he’d thought of me that first day, when he’d been lost in a whirlpool of delusion. He’d said something that none of us had heard. Now he stared at the tokens, just slices from an old mop or broom handle, with the dice waiting in his hand. The tokens were still set wrong, and I instinctively reached out to re–arrange them before starting our game. It felt good to put something in order.

‘How did you survive?’ I asked.

My question caught him off guard, and his hand curled around the dice. He gave a cautious shrug. ‘The grace of God, I suppose.’

I watched his broken fist working the dice, the twitch of his bruised jaw, the strength in his wiry shoulders. His words came too easily. He’d said what he thought I wanted to hear, not what he was truly thinking.

‘I don’t believe you,’ I said. He tilted his head, surprised. ‘Twenty days at sea. No food. No water. No shade. The sole survivor of dozens of passengers. God didn’t save you. You saved yourself. I’d like to know how.’

He studied my placement of the tokens on the board, memorizing it, learning everything over again from scratch. ‘Montgomery’s first question was about the family I must have lost,’ he said. ‘The grief.’ He rolled the dice, a little too hard. His reaction told me I should have had more sympathy, like Montgomery.

I blinked, unsure of myself. I hadn’t meant to be cold. ‘I’m sorry. Your family … were they with you on the Viola ?’

‘No,’ he said, surprisingly flat. ‘I was traveling alone. My father’s a general on tour abroad now. The rest of my family is at Chesney Wold – our estate. Probably entertaining dull relatives and glad to be rid of me.’

His tone was so cavalier as he scratched his scar with a jagged nail and studied the board. Something felt a little too forced. There was almost a harsh, layered tone that spoke of pain and anger and made me suspect he wasn’t being entirely honest. ‘But you said—’

He shrugged. ‘I thought it strange you were more interested in the details of my survival than the dozens who died on that ship.’ He started to move his tokens, and I should have thought about how heartless I must have seemed, but instead all I could focus on was how badly he was playing backgammon.

He slid a token slowly around the points. ‘Montgomery told me you’re to be reunited with your father. A doctor of some sort,’ he said.

‘That’s right.’

He picked up the token, running his finger over the rough-hewn wood. ‘It’s odd, don’t you think, for a wealthy doctor to want to live in such a remote place? It makes one wonder.’

I caught the undercurrent in his voice, and it intrigued me. Whatever he was insinuating wasn’t good, and it was awfully bold to speak it aloud. Maybe there was more to him than a sea-mad castaway who’d never worked a day in his life.

I picked up the dice. ‘What do you mean?’

‘What would make a man give everything up to come out here?’

I shook the dice and spilled them out across the deck. ‘I could ask you the same thing, Mr Prince. What made you leave England if all your family is there?’

His jaw twitched again. ‘You’ve come to find your father. I’ve come to get away from mine.’ Once more, that subtle layer of anger laced his voice.

‘Why? What did he do?’ I moved my tokens like an afterthought.

He paused. ‘He didn’t do anything. I did.’ And then he shook the dice and threw them, abruptly, as if he’d said too much. A three and a six. He started moving the token in the wrong direction.

‘Captain Claggan isn’t exactly pleased I’m here,’ he added, and the change in subject caught me by surprise. ‘Did you know he came with that first mate of his, last night after Montgomery was asleep, and dragged me to the rail? He was going to throw me over until I told him I had relatives in Australia who would pay dearly for my safe return.’

My hand was frozen in midair. The game suddenly didn’t seem to matter anymore. ‘Did you tell Montgomery? He won’t let the captain get away with that.’ I shifted on the rough floorboards. ‘Just the same, it’s lucky about your relatives.’

He gave me a guarded look, though something like amusement peeked through. ‘I don’t know anyone in Australia. I just made that up. I sought passage on the first ship I could from London, regardless of its destination. The Viola just happened to be it.’

‘So what happens when you get to Australia and he finds out there are no wealthy relatives?’ Once we were gone, without Balthazar and bribery and guns, Edward Prince would be on his own.

His fingers drummed on the wooden board. The last ray of sun slipped below the horizon, casting half of his bruised face in shadows. ‘I don’t know.’