He was right, of course; they would. But summoning God and the Devil, and purporting to outwit both…I could only think it placed the doctor in a position of terrible power.

‘Well, now,’ he sighed, indicating the chest again. ‘Can’t leave this up here. May I propose we go below?’ The frankness of his gaze was shocking to me. Not a hint of the modesty, nor the uncertainty, a man might ordinarily feel.

‘Had you forgotten? You’re on watch, doctor…’

‘What difference is there between watching the bow from up here and the stern from my cabin windows?’ He laid a finger lightly across my jaw, then bent to pick up the Adige chest.

‘You think of everything, don’t you?’

‘Yes. Yes, I believe I do.’ He twirled youthfully on one heel, balancing the wooden box. ‘It is all ours, Eliza,’ he laughed.

I did not understand. ‘What’s ours?’

By now I stood facing him and I saw the arched eyebrow. ‘Everything. Anything.’

He did not lead me then. There was no need.

I made my decision, and went willingly.

THE BOWSPRIT ACHILLES

THE BOWSPRIT ACHILLES

At dawn, the doctor slept peacefully beside me, his shoulder and arm protruding from under the blanket. A body I had taken and turned to my own pleasure. I exulted at the sight of him. The mysteries of him, the things that caused me fear, I had reduced them all to mere flesh wanting satisfaction. His secrets were vanquished along with his lust: now he was just a man.

Should I have felt different? Changed? The world felt a little different around me, perhaps; its colours neither more vivid nor less, but altered somehow. Its relative position shifted by no more than a degree.

The chatter in my head inclined to mockery and caustic asides. Must we blush like a bride? But I would push those thoughts away, indulgent of my new-formed self, and dwell for long moments on sensations I’d never felt, sounds I had neither uttered nor heard until those stifled, ardent whimpers filled the dark. The mockery would rise again: Deflowered in my autumn! Ruined! and I would cast it out with the memory of his hands, his weight, the wholly surprising flight from thought…

And so on.

Barely any of the conversation in my head involved the doctor who was, I congratulated myself, merely the agent of my pleasure: payment overdue for a lifetime immersed in the needs of others. It was a debt, I thought, not yet entirely settled.

~

In the days that followed, life arranged itself to a rhythm.