"I need to know what happens to new arrivals when they're first brought aboard the ship," Lady Simms was saying in a clinical, no-nonsense tone, raising her voice to be heard above the noise.

  He walked ahead, not bothering to turn around. "They're given a bath."

  "Warm water or cold?"

  "Whatever comes out of the damned harbor. They're prisoners, they don't deserve any better."

  He heard her enraged intake of breath, and the fact that he'd gotten to her filled him with gratification and pleasure. Good. But her footsteps had stopped, and when he turned he saw her extract a small notebook and pencil from her reticule and begin to scribble madly.

  "Bath . . . cold water . . . must make note of this to —"

  "Come along," he snapped nastily. "I haven't got all bloody day."

  She shot him a look that could've melted iron, refusing to move, her brow knit and her pencil moving over the page, the wind ruffling the feathers of her hat, rippling the fine silk of her skirts.

  He seized her elbow and yanked her forward. "I said come along, damn it!"

  "Take your hands off me, you scoundrel!" She jerked free of him and held her elbow protectively close to her body, her eyes spitting sparks. "I want to know what clothes they're issued, what they're fed, if they're allowed visitors —"

  "They're issued clothes by the Transport Office, and they're fed as well as the seamen aboard any navy ship. They have nothing to complain about, damn it, so come along before I lose what little blasted patience I have left." He saw two marines anxiously watching him move toward the ladder. It was not safe for him to go below unescorted, and far less safe for the lady. He jerked his head and they immediately fell into place behind her, tense, watchful, their weapons at the ready and their eyes alert for possible trouble.

  The hatch to the stinking, noisy lower deck awaited him like a hangman's noose. Heat rose from it like a furnace. Already, Damon could hear the prisoners down there, yelling and shouting, already he could see their dim shapes clustering around the base of the ladder, pale faces turned upward — waiting for him like demons in the pit of hell. He had a flashback of Oxford, his tormentors leaning out of the windows above his head, laughing, mocking, taunting him as he fled, sobbing, across the lawn. He did not want to go down there. God help him, he didn't. He clenched his fists, steeling himself. They're just prisoners, for God's sake, they mean nothing, nothing! He was keenly aware of her, still behind him, she who was about to witness his further humiliation, she who would probably laugh right along with them, and he felt his pulse beginning to throb in time to his headache. He turned and stared coldly at her, hoping to put her off. She was wrinkling her nose and frowning as she peered down into the hatch, but she did not go for her handkerchief.

  He had to give her credit. She must be made of strong stuff indeed. "I see that the heat and stench alone are affecting you. You'd be wise to abandon this idea, now."

  "On the contrary, my lord. We have barely scratched the surface of this problem. After you."

  Needles of hatred stabbed through him and in that moment Damon never loathed anyone as much as he did Lady Gwyneth Evans Simms. But he would not let her triumph, would not let her see his fury, and so nodded, allowing his expression to set in its familiar mask of cold dispassion. Then, silently vowing revenge for what she was putting him through, he descended through the hatch, going down first.

  Gwyneth's first sight of the lower deck was something that would remain with her for the rest of her life. As she crept down the ladder into a hot, acrid darkness, illuminated by nothing but mean stabs of daylight sifting through narrow, iron-grated scuttles, all noise suddenly stopped. In the murky, malodorous gloom she saw hundreds of gaunt faces staring at her, frozen with curiosity, interest, awe. She felt the overwhelming despair, misery, and anguish that infected every inch of this horrific place as keenly as though it were the plague. Already the heat was intense, making her gown cling to her skin; the overpowering stench caused her eyes to water and the bile to rise in her throat. As she stepped down onto a deck that was slick with grime, she saw the marquess standing stiffly by the companionway, where the only headroom was to be had, making a big pretense out of studying his watch. His features were rigid, his eyes shuttered.

  "Seen enough?" he asked sharply, looking up.

  She could only stand there, crouched beneath the low overhead deck as she stared about her, too shocked to answer, even to record in her notebook what her nightmares could not have begun to imagine.

  Men, some half naked, some wearing nothing more than the grime that covered them, reposed on benches or stood idly about, caught in the act of playing dice, conversing, making ship's models out of bits of wood. They stared at her. Lice crawled in their hair. Flies drank from the sweat trails that cut rivers down their filthy faces. Scabs dotted their skeletal legs, their bony arms, the patches of skin that showed through the remnants of their clothing. Some of them had hard, feral eyes and starved smiles; others looked at her with sad gazes devoid of hope. Still others just stared, corpse-like, right through her, their minds already dead and waiting for their bodies to follow. Hammocks — some stowed, some hung, some lying in the damp filth of the deck — were everywhere, and the deck overhead was, at five feet, so low that nobody could stand up, the result being that those prisoners who were on their feet were round-backed and hulking, adding to their frightening, monstrous effect all the more.

  And then the noise started.

  "Aaah, look at the fancy Englishwoman! Come to stare at us like animals in the zoo, come to gawk! Bah, you go, leave us! Go now, no humiliate!"

  Movement, violent shoving. "No, let her stay! We never get to see pretty ladies. Let her stay!"

  "Hey Capitaine, you got yourself une belle femme? You share her with hungry Frenchmen, no?"

  "Come here to my hammock, ma coeur! Let me show how a real man can pleasure you!"

  The insults and abuse grew deafening, fists flew, and a wave of threat and hostility began to push the crowd forward. Gwyneth looked nervously at Lord Morninghall. He shoved his watch into his pocket, his eyes blazing, and turned to one of the marines who stood on the ladder just behind them. "Shut these wretches up!" he snapped, seizing Gwyneth's arm and hauling her quickly toward the next hatch.

  But not fast enough. She saw two men eating a dead rat, another grinning madly as he exposed himself to her, another urinating against the hull and watching, fascinated, as the urine streamed down the blackened wood. Filthy hands reached for her, and she gasped when someone snatched the hat from her head with a shout of triumph, pulling her hair, pulling tears of pain to her eyes, flinging the hat out into the masses like a trophy. She pressed close to Morninghall, suddenly terrified of becoming separated from him.

  "English pig! How dare you bring your woman aboard to flaunt her in our faces!" An American voice, that one.

  And more French: "You wait, ze Black Wolf will rescue us! Ze Black Wolf will make you a laughingstock, aristo!"

  The clamor grew louder, and behind her she could hear the marines yelling angrily for order. Morninghall had released her arm and was just going down the ladder now, his shoulders set and rigid, his hair gleaming in the dim lantern light.

  "Why aren't these men better dressed than they are?" Gwyneth asked, yelling down to him over the din. She grasped the coaming and yanked her hand away in disgust at the grime that soiled her glove. "I thought you said the Transport Office issues them clothing —"

  "They do. These men, madam, are the very lowest of the low, the Raffalés," he responded, without bothering to turn around. "You will find the officers, the gentlemen, and the Americans in a more acceptable state of clothing, breeding and manner."

  "Surely, being of a low social class should not mean they have to go about freezing and half-naked!" she cried, over the noise.

  He looked up at her over his shoulder. "If they are freezing and half-naked, it's their own damned fault. They gamble away their clothing, their hammocks, even their food, going hungry during the day then slinking around like rats at night and devouring the crumbs left on the deck. What do you want me to do about it, forbid the gaming? Christ, I'd have a damned mutiny on my hands."

  Gwyneth's jaw snapped shut, for she had no answer to that. She felt suffocated. She continued down the hatch, terrified of losing Morninghall, each step bringing her into hotter air, louder noise, more terrible smells. It was all she could do not to draw her handkerchief and press it to her nose. She took tiny breaths, each one an anguish in itself.

  She reached the bottom of the ladder and found herself on another deck. Sweat was now trickling down her brow and the curve of her spine, and the air was unbreathable. Instinctively, she reached for her handkerchief; then, coughing, she crumpled it in her fist. If these poor people could endure such air — for months, sometimes years, on end — she, who had to suffer it for only a brief time, would not make them feel even more wretched, more humiliated, by refusing to share their plight. Determined to ignore her discomfort, she peered through the gloom, the shifting wall of unwashed, skeletal bodies, and saw a small group of prisoners sitting on a little bench, one of them, finer dressed than the others, holding a book.

  "What are they doing?" Gwyneth asked.

  "Damned if I know," the marquess retorted, giving her a look that dared her to challenge him.

  Her temper began to boil. She clenched her teeth in frustration. Behind her, one of the marines was just coming down the hatch. "The gentleman's an officer," he offered, hearing her question. "He's teaching the others English."

  The gentleman in question looked up and inclined his head at Gwyneth, the pitiful attempt at gallantry tearing at her heart.

  "Don't look so upset, ma'm. These men, they make their own beds, just as His Lordship says. The Raffalés, they don't care about anything. They gamble away the clothes right off of their backs, the food right out of their stomachs. But the rest, they all have their own little trades and professions, teaching dancing, fencing, drawing and painting, and the like to the others — for a small fee, of course. They make ship models out of the beef bones or the bread, sell it to the masses, hold little auctions and such. I know it looks like hell here, ma'm, but the prisoners, they adapt. Why, the Americans even elect their own officers to govern them, just as they do in their own government; make their own laws, define crimes, and mete out punishments. Cleanest of the lot, though, those Yanks, real fussy about their persons . . ."

  His words blended into a soup of incomprehensible excuses as Gwyneth, feeling faint, fanned herself with her notebook. "Then why is the stench so bad down here? Are the latrines never emptied? Are the decks never washed? Are these men never allowed to bathe?"

  Lord Morninghall was waiting, watching. Flickering lantern light painted his face in tongues of orange, making it appear diabolic, savage even. "Those things, and others, are supposed to come about," he muttered darkly, almost to himself. "But it would appear that the very people one assigns to oversee such tasks find more interesting things to do."

  The marine flushed, visibly distressed. Seeing that Gwyneth had noted his captain's cryptic words and was now studying him keenly, he gave a lame smile, trying to defuse the tension-filled moment. "We don't like to wash the decks too much, ma'm, especially not in the cooler months. More damp, it just brings on sickness and such —"

  "What about bathing?"

  "Well, er, yes, some of 'em bathe . . . sometimes . . ."

  "Aren't they given soap?"

  "Soap isn't something the authorities issue, ma'm. I mean, this isn't a fancy manor house or anythin' . . ."

  "So I see," she murmured coldly. She entered this too in her notebook, but as she bent her head, the sweat ran down her brow and into her eyes, and the smell pushed its way into her nose, the back of her throat, even her head. She had a sudden, very real fear she was going to faint.

  She saw Morninghall regarding her, coolly disdainful yet meditative, as though he knew her plight and was reveling in it. She shot him a look of pure loathing and took a few hesitant steps away from the ladder.

  Down here, the air was so heavy that the few lanterns that penetrated the gloom did so with the same effect of a ship's light in a heavy fog, making it appear fuzzy, hazy, dim. Gwyneth, gagging, could only take in desperate, pinched gasps of it. Each tiny breath brought her near to retching. Her eyes watered. Her nose burned, her stomach began to roil, and the heat, emanating from hundreds of sweating, unwashed bodies crammed into such a small space, pressed against her senses, her clothes. A fly buzzed around her eyes and she batted at it, only to have it come back; she batted at it again, harder this time, feeling hysteria and a mad urge to flee this hell of hells beginning to overpower her. She tried to stand up, bumping her head on the low deck overhead, and as she instantly recoiled, near to sobbing, she saw a dead rat underneath a bench, and more flies crawling across it, some of them rising to move lazily through the humid, unmoving air.

  And still, those devils' eyes of Morninghall's, watching her.

  The fly came back, and with a little cry she swatted at it, backing up to where the marquess waited.

  "Seen enough?" he asked harshly.

  She shot him a look of pure disgust that he could let things be so bad down here, and saw the shame, the embarrassment, in his gaze before he turned his face away, his jaw hard.

  "No, my lord," she replied, her voice trembling with anger and determination. "I feel as though I'm going to be ill, my head is dizzy, and I am near to swooning for lack of air — but no, I'm not ready to leave. I would ask, however, that since this wretchedness does not appear to be affecting you as it is me that you be gentlemanly enough to stay close to me, perhaps take my arm, in case I become unsteady on my feet and finally succumb to that which I see and smell around me."

  Damon stared at her, momentarily disarmed and struck dumb. The woman was as pale as a sheet, perspiring, swaying dizzily — yet she was not about to abandon her quest. She had nothing to gain personally from doing this, yet she was still able to put aside her own physical discomfort for the common good of something greater than herself, able to overcome her disgust and fear and find compassion for these filthy men who had taunted and insulted her. It was total selflessness, and in contrast he felt small, mean, unworthy. Something hurt inside of him, as though a crack had split his heart, and a wave of admiration for this plucky little woman's spirit and courage swept through him. He reached out, as she had humbly asked him to do, and steadied her elbow. "Very well, then. If you wish to see more than you might as well see the Black Hole as well."

  She choked on another breath. "The Black Hole?"

  The marine piped up. "Where the prisoners are punished, madam. We keep 'em down there for ten days at a stretch when they're behaving particularly bad."

  Her face went gray. "Yes, yes, of course. Just lead the way."

  With Morninghall's hand firmly supporting her elbow, Gwyneth thrust herself toward yet another hatch, this one so dark and forbidding that it yawned out of the gloom like an empty grave at midnight. Morninghall went down first. Slowly, his shoulders, his head, disappeared into that black rectangle.

  The marines waited behind her. Lightheaded, nauseous, and growing more and more distressed, Gwyneth followed the marquess.

  Down into the hold they went, into darkness and stenches that made the upper decks smell like a rose garden in comparison. There were no prisoners here and it might've been faintly cooler, but the stink — of bodily wastes that had filtered down from the decks above, of dead and decaying vermin, stagnant water, ammonia, reeking mold and rotting wood — was enough to steal the last of Gwyneth's already meager breath. She paused, unable to breathe, to see, in the darkness. Behind her, the guard lit a tiny lantern which sputtered and went out in the airless gloom. Cursing and dashing the rivulets of sweat from his brow, he got it lit once more.

  Morninghall was standing a little distance away, feet braced on a huge rib that curved out of the keel, hands clasped behind his back as he stared sightlessly into the gloom. He looked as though he were in pain. "Show her the Hole," he ordered, hoarsely.

  Her head swimming, her teeth clenched to hold back a rising and horrible urge to vomit, Gwyneth picked her way over the ship's great ribs in the wake of the guard. For a moment she heard no sound behind her; then there were splashes as Morninghall caught up, quickly closing the distance between them. Moisture seeped through her shoes as she sloshed through the oily, stinking water. She had to hold her skirts up to keep them from dragging through filth and decay, and her pearls, slimy now with perspiration, felt as though they were choking her. She slipped and Morninghall caught her elbow. As he pulled her up, she saw shapes rearing out of the gloom, rodents scurrying near her feet and along the beams high overhead. Sweat was running freely down her brow, her temples, the curve of her upper lip, and she was fast losing the ability to breathe.

  Dizzily, she heard Morninghall's deep voice somewhere near her ear. "You all right?"

  She nodded gamely. "Yes. Thank you. Show me this thing, please."

  Morninghall nodded to the marine, who, breathing through a filthy handkerchief pressed to his face, thrust the lantern toward a structure built into the curve of the hull.

  "The Black Hole."

  Leaning heavily against Morninghall's arm, her vision reeling and her hair wilting against her dripping brow, Gwyneth stared through the gloom. There it was, a box six feet by six feet, looming out of the darkness like a coffin.

  Clutching her notebook, eyes watering, she stumbled toward it, this unspeakable prison tucked down here in this grave of a ship, abandoned, forgotten, forlorn. She saw tiny holes no bigger than her little finger for ventilation in its side; she felt the utter misery, terror, and despair oozing from it before she even got to the thing and placed a shaky hand against its door, leaning against it lest she faint.