The little girl was laughing, which Alfred supposed meant she wasn't seriously hurt or traumatized by her little adventure through the sails. Wherever they'd come from, though, one thing was clear, and that was that they could hardly stay there. They'd come too far now to turn around and head back to London just to offload a couple of stowaways (which must be what they were, since they hadn't pulled in anywhere else and they were decidedly not sea creatures, and they looked far too solid to be spectres or ghosts), but he didn't know where else they'd be able to go to get rid of them.

"Damn it," he muttered under his breath, then turned to his second-in-command. "Get the navigator and the quartermaster to my cabin," he said with a weary but authoritative tone. "Have someone take these two below, and keep an eye on them — I want them in sight at all times until we can get them off the ship." Merlin, what a bloody hassle. As if the crew didn't have enough to do already without posting a babysitting watch on two French brats. Not to mention the inconvenience of trying to find a port to dump them in — and coordinating things so that there was someone to dump them on, instead of just abandoning them in some dockyard town. Hopefully if he wrote to someone at the Ministry, they'd know who these two were, or be able to figure it out, because Alfred did not have time for this.

He'd have to write the Commodore onboard the Ophelia and explain that they would be delayed, too. Merlin, what a pain in the ass. Women onboard ships — even tiny women — were the worst kind of luck.