<em>The Deck </em><br/><br/>Colleen smiled ear to ear between dueling demands for her attention. So warm and inviting was this bath that at first the words did not seem to settle on her. When she realized what Jacqueline asked of her, she began to worry.<br/>"Captain said," Colleen protest. And what had the captain said? "Stay out of the crew's way, and don't disturb the patients."<br/>Grim the knife she'd used to prepare the fish wiped clean, and slipped into Colleen's tatters. When she sealed the galley, each of the doors around them in the aftercastle was identical, and Colleen rooted there in her anxiety, staring at Jacqueline.<br/><br/>"You oughtn't go down into the hold."<br/>It came with a gust of breath, a taboo, but without the authority to forbid anything.<br/><br/>"This is Captain's Cabin. This is Doctor's," Colleen informed them. Her hands were far more illustrative than her words, running along the woodgrain of the rearmost doors, savoring the attention as she unfurled with a stretch before the eyes on her. "Galley, and crew cabins, where the sailors go."<br/><br/>Colleen tried the door to Doctor Rehner's cabin to demonstrate that it was locked. Instead, she led the way out onto the deck, under the bright sun. Baykur's crew called back and forth along the rigging in that guttural language, and from the stairs to the hold arrived a sailor drenched up to the knees, pushing past Colleen, continuing on up to the sterncastle.<br/><br/>Hung in the sun to dry, all the clothes Aloisa and Corinne, Margaret, Michelle, Zoe and Sage had been wearing billowed and snapped in the sea breeze, providing a screen against idle notice. There was an opportunity to slip down those stairs, if one were discreet and swift. Colleen did not let her eyes off Danae and Jacqueline.<br/>"Down there is the hold. Alas, but for the rats. I would not wish the sight of it on you. We should not dawdle here, I don't wish to be whipped."<br/><br/><em>The Store Room </em><br/><br/>"Strange desires," Doctor Rehner reiterated. Michelle could not be coerced to lie still as a rich-smelling oil drizzled onto her burns and painted gingerly across the skin.<br/>"Madness confounds the natural course of our desires to be healthy, happy."<br/>The young woman's hands on her wrists did not stop Doctor Rehner from working firm into the poised genteel muscle of Michelle's flank and back. It amused Rehner to elicit halting gasps, to insistently dissolve decorous composure. All the while Michelle's eyes remained on Aloisa, lashes fitful as butterfly wings.<br/><br/>"Lunacy makes you forget what you need to be happy. It makes you want unnatural, destructive things," said Rehner. "What you suffer is not so uncommon. A little lust is healthy, but yours is lost its course. May as well you lust for a shoe as your fellow woman. All those who come to Doctor Heinfroth as such soon are cured. I do not think she will hold you, but you will want to talk."<br/><br/>If Doctor Rehner's intention was to soothe the lusts from Michelle, she went about it exactly the wrong way. Oiled hands diverted far beyond the red marks of burns that needed pampering, and bubbled from the airtight drag of Rehner's touch over small eager breasts, to bared throat. "In the meantime, I will help you, if you let me."<br/><br/>"You're hurting her," Zoe sputtered, a knot of tension in Corinne's arms.<br/>Rehner loomed over her patient, both a touch out of breath. "Nonsense," she said. "One of you able-bodied ladies, help me to wrap the bandage."<br/><br/><div class="spoiler_container"><div class="spoiler_header" onclick="hideSecond (this);" role="button">Aloisa's Insight</div><div class="spoiler_body">Doctor Rehner's actions spoke truer than her words. She seemed far more intrigued by observing this diagnosed madness, and allowing it to run its course, than curing it.</div></div>