Follow Me Down
“Cock-addling, prig sucking –! “Willow snarled, throwing curses every which way, and anything she could get her hands on. “Ugh!” She’d, sadly, run out of words to describe her predicament. Being cook aboard The Flying Sun was supposed to be an easy job, one she had happily taken on for in exchange for a discount off passage, straight to the islands of Jamaica. She was due to be in Port Royal for a wedding, one that could change her career if she brought her best, in which she’d be making the cake for an admiral’s wedding. A new admiral, fresh faced out of an academy somewhere, with ten years of experience on the sea, and due to be married to a lady with an impressive lineage to match his own.
Willow hissed however, shaky, clammy hands rubbing over the cotton of her skirts. They caught, fisting a tattered edge that she’d mended just the other day. The spare thread didn’t match the black at all, bright white against the worn fabric, but when you lived on so little… Well, appearances mattered very little in the grand scheme of things. She sat down on a crate, pressing her lips together, and choked on something closely resembling another cry of rage and a sob of pure frustration. Willow put her face in her hands, the frayed threads of the bandage wrapped around her left fingers chaffing her cheek, and ran them partially up into her hair.
Someone, somewhere aboard this bloody vessel, had stolen the plums. It had been a simple request, though layered in hateful barbs, and dripping with the venom of arrogance. Plum cake. Simple, relatively easy in her line of work, but there were subtle tricks – like with any baking – to making it irresistible. One of the tight, upper-class ladies on the higher decks had ordered it… for the captain. It was fairly obvious the older woman, a recent widow if the hushed whispers were to be believed, had her sights set on him. That meant she had to impress him before he found a younger woman, all but throwing herself at him, and wearing the tightest corsets Willow had ever seen. So, of course, she just had to order his favorite desert from the baker hitching a ride to Port Royal, a task she wouldn’t have undertaken if her own reputation and skill didn’t hang in the balance.
Willow was one of the few people allowed in the galley, she’d mentally compiled every ingredient before they’d left Spain, but now… They weren’t running low, quite the contrary, but they were now out of plums. When she knew for a fact they’d had at least three barrels at the start of the voyage. How in the flying hells they had somehow managed to run out within three weeks was beyond her – they’d been stowed properly, bugger it all she’d done it herself! They should have been good for at least –
Willow sniffled. She didn’t know exactly who to tell first… The duchess awaiting the fine dessert, or the captain. If she told the former she would probably be slapped, as she had once before already, though it was not the pain that bothered her. It was the feeling inferior, as if she had failed for merely breathing, for taking up space that she had no right to. Upon informing the latter, she’d be given a look, one that spoke of disappointment, as if he were her father, a man whose name she had never even been allowed to know. There would be little things underneath too, words unspoken: thief, incompetent, foolish woman. The last of which would be said together, she already knew.
Willow took a deep breath, staring into the gloom of the galley, illuminated only by stray slants of daylight that filtered from the deck above. “Heh…” More a huff, less a laugh, bitter and to herself, “I’d need a miracle… to get out of this mess.”
