Missed last week, but got another short story up at Noble Cobra Magazine. This one’s a quick pulp tale that I’ve had lying about for a little while, featuring another one of Lady Emma Worthing’s adventures (some of you might remember her: that story will probably end up in the magazine as well, once I make a few updates).

The old fisherman looked at his visitor with interest that even a face hardened and weathered by a lifetime of the sea could not disguise.

He dwelt in an old shack made of driftwood and rusting metal siding set up beside the water. His small boat, pulled up on shore, was as patched and stained as his trousers. Everything in his single room was damp, rusted, and corroded with salt.

In such a place as this, his visitor seemed like a being from another world.

She was a young woman, tall, graceful, and well formed. Her hair, elegantly styled beneath her wide sun hat, was a deep midnight black that was almost blue, and her large eyes sparkled like opals with a lively intelligence and interest in all around her.

It was this interested, open quality more than her evident beauty that so many found captivating about her. For Lady Emma Worthing had that elusive thing: personality.

In her simple, perfectly fitted white sundress, belted above the waist by a pale blue sash, she looked entirely too clean and too elegant to be seen anywhere near so dingy and dirty a place as this hovel. As she greeted him and took her seat at his small table, the fisherman merely stared at her with a kind of bewildered confusion, as though he doubted whether she were real. He had a half-finished can of beer in one hand, which he seemed to have forgotten about. But if Emma felt herself to be out of place, she did not show it, and when she graciously thanked the old man for sparing the time to see her, no one could doubt she meant it.

“I will come straight to the point,” she said in perfect Spanish. “For some time I have been looking for the wreck of a ship – the Corbeau – that is believed to have been torpedoed in these waters during the Second World War. I have inquired around the island, and every time I mention it, I am told ‘go see Senor Escovar the fisherman. He can tell you about it if anyone can.’ And so, here I am to ask whether, at any time in your work, you have come across a wreck that might once have looked like this.”

She handed him a black-and-white photo of a large, ocean-going cargo ship from four decades past. Escovar’s eyes went reluctantly from his beautiful guest to the photo. Slowly, he nodded.

“You have?” she said eagerly. “Can you say where, or perhaps show me on a map?”

“Why must you know?” he asked in a slow, creaking voice.

“There is something on that ship that I would very much like to find,” she said. “An historical artifact that was being shipped away from France. Most people presume that the thing was lost for good, but I believe it may have survived the sinking and, if so, I mean to find it.”

“You are going out there? In the sea?”

“Yes,” she said. “That is, if I can find the wreck.”

Slowly, he shook his head.

“You should not do that, senorita.”

“Whyever not?”

Another pause. Then:

“It wasn’t a torpedo that sunk her.”

“Come again?” she said, a little startled.

“I’ve seen her. On the bottom of the sea. By a big reef.”

He glanced at his can of beer as though only just remembering he had it. He drained the last of it in one draught, then crushed the tin can in his fist.

“Looked like that,” he said, chucking the can aside.

Emma frowned at the crushed bit of tin on the floor.

“You mean, she was cracked in half like that?”

“Aye, that’s it,” he said. “Tanwo’s what did it.”

“What is Tanwo?”

But he merely shook his head.

“You go out there, he’ll eat you up. As sure as I’m sitting here.”

Read the whole thing here.