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speak her teeth had taken a pink color. “English?”
    “We are going home, now,” I said, and patted her hand. “Do not try to stand up. Everything will be all right, now.”
    A wrenching scream—a man’s voice—tore the air, and a great splashing with more shouting followed that sound. A deep-voiced man said, “Anyone else crave a taste of steel?” The rest of what happened I could narrate only with my ears. The sounds of hard-soled boots clamored overhead. Orders given. Ropes tossed. Saracen pirates were hung, some strangling for several minutes before they died swinging from the yards over the deck. Served them justice, I thought.
    Men swung axes at the heavy bars over our heads which held our prison hatch closed. A man stuck his head in and threw up on the ladder. Apparently we were sickening to an English privateer’s delicate sensibilities.
    In short order, more Englishmen came down the steps and again pumped seawater about our ankles. Eight fellows stood in the row between the cells and opened the gates. Six of them held swords drawn and two had pistols. We were marched up the stairway and made to stand on the deck. We were near land! My mind was already home again. There would be so much work to do, putting our house right once Patey and I got home. We might spend weeks living in a shade tent. What a bother that would be! Then I looked about. This ship was surrounded by three other vessels loaded with men all brandishing cutlasses and pistols. One of them flew a flag I had heard much about but had not seen before, black silk with a white human skull and crossed bones beneath it.
    They moved the men captives to another ship. I could see the heads of our desperate fellows, recognizable by their filth and wasted stance. Many women were so weak that they could not climb down the rigging again as we had come up. After two fell to the sea and drowned for they could not be pulled up with the weight of wet clothing, the sailors stopped sending captives over the side.
    These sailors were little different from the Saracens in their smell, but they were indeed different in their means of holding prisoners. The English pulled sails down to form tents on deck. They put up cots. They called a physician to see each person. They even procured odd bits of clothing, ragged coats, old trousers, a few gowns and shifts for the women. Imagine, women in trousers! They guarded us day and night with armed and fierce sailors rather than keeping us in animal pens in the hold. They sent ashore for crates of vegetables and they butchered a kid right there on the main deck and made stew. I helped Patience eat from a wooden bowl though they still afforded us not a spoon amongst the bunch.
    The men brought up some kind of plant that they pounded into a soapy pulp with a mallet. We washed with it in sea brine, clothes and all. At least we were not as wretched as before. I told Patience I would help her, but she would not let me. Said her clothing was her own affair. As I stood in line for my turn at the wash kettles, one of the women told me to pile all my clothes aside and she said, “You be wearing twice the frocks some has got. You don’ gan to wear dem all w’en dere’s dem goes naked. Put dem down.”
    “No. I shan’t,” I said. I stood as tall as I could make myself, rising up on tiptoe. “My ma made my clothes. You shan’t take these. They would not fit you, madam.”
    “Put dem down, Missy,” she said, and stood over my head, as if to frighten me.
    I put my fists against my waist and said, “Show me one person here my size who shall gain from my clothing!”
    “How now. Stop the squalling!” called one of the English. “Hark ye here. No one’s to pinch from another on this ship!” At that many of the men laughed. Then that man—a short but brawny fellow and clad in once fine clothes himself, though I doubted he had done more than purloin them from some real gentleman—walked toward the woman, passed her, and stood