Kit by Marina Fiorato Read Free Book Online Page B

knock someone about, save it for the French,’ he said. ‘We do not fight each other.’ Kit paid little heed to the teasing or her rescue for she now had another nugget of information. They were to fight the French. None of it made any sense: France and Spain were at war, that much she knew. Richard had been taken by the English Army, and shipped to Genova. It sounded like a parlour game.
    She could not puzzle it out, so day by day she carried on doggedly with her exercises. She did not seriously think she would ever see combat; she was still convinced that as soon as she landed in Genova she would find Richard and somehow take him home. As far as she was concerned her exercises served purely to make her more male. She could already feel the changes in her body. Her soldier’s coat began to strain over her shoulders – she thought that once on land she must pick the seams. Her arms were harder, less rounded, and her grip stronger.
    Cleanliness was required aboard ship, and the soldiers bathed in freezing buckets of seawater on deck. Some stripped to the waist, and some hardy souls stripped entirely and poured the entire contents of the bucket over their gooseflesh. Luckily, there were many who elected to do what Kit must; to wash face and hands, and duck the head in the bucket. At such times Kit was to learn what a variety of shapes the male form could assume. Some were burly and muscled, some as skinny as she, some had run to fat. And their man’s parts differed likewise. She had only seen Richard without clothes, and at the sight of her first naked soldier looked modestly away; but thereafter she forced herself to look. She needed to know how men were constructed – such sights had to become familiar to her, even commonplace. But how could she become used to a part of a man that seemed different on every sighting? Some were plumbed with a skinny long pipe, some had shorter, fatter appendages, some were generously proportioned. And the size of the members seemed to bear no relation to the size of the man himself; it was most confusing. Kit was struck by how immodest the men were, and how close was the relationship between a man and his member. They handled themselves, they handled each other, they twitted each other about their pricks, they stood naked with no trace of modesty. In the space of a fortnight she heard a man’s appendage named as prick, cock, pouting stick, honey pipe, pretty rogue, and stiff and stout. She envied men this ease, remembering how, that last night in Dublin, she’d stood peeled and naked before the window. She had foreseen then, in that moment of premonition, that she would not be in that most natural and naked state for a long time.
    Her clothes became her shell. She never removed them – she lived in them all day and slept in them all night. They were spattered with seawater and vomit and piss from the storm, and spilled rations of food and grog from the calm. Even in tranquil waters she had not yet acquired the skill to eat and drink at sea without spills. She had soaked the jerkin and shirt with the acid sweat of fear. They had become hardened and greasy and fitted to her body now like a skin. The uncomfortable, heavy woollen felting had moulded to her, she was used to the twin buttons digging into her back as she lay in her hammock, the lacings and facings and buttons and ties that prodded and poked and pressed their impressions into their flesh had become part of her. She had some company in her clothes, as head lice fed daily on her scalp and their cousins feasted upon her delicate flesh. She begged some tar oil from the carpenter and washed her hair in it, but the lice soon came back.
    Her women’s courses were to be another problem. She had bled just after Richard had gone, and now she was bleeding again. But because there was no privacy she must suffer the cramps and the discomfort in secret. Regretfully she tore one of her good Holland shirts into rags and stuffed them into her