by Eli Brown
Only by diving headlong behind the windlass did I avoid being smeared onto the deck. The main anchor having been severed, the chains on the windlass were loose, and I swung several loops around the foot of the cannon before it could begin rolling again. I rushed then to the port forecastle gun. There, trying to remember all of the steps in order, I loaded the charge, then the ball, packed it home, pricked the charge and filled the vent with powder, and readied the flint. This may have taken two minutes, but with shaking hands and my heart in my throat, it felt like hours.
I opened the shutters easily, but pushing the cannon out took all my might. Finally, when the deck shifted with the sea, the gun rolled into place and I locked it home. I erred low, as I had been taught; for close range, it was better to hit the water than the air, for a ball would still skip into the target. Only a dozen yards separated the ships and I could clearly see the young, frightened soldier who operated the repeating gun on the bow of La Colette. The soldier quivered visibly, yet had not perceived my advantage. I wondered if he was perhaps the same soldier who had shattered my leg.
It was my moment—but with power enough to erase this young man, I hesitated. The blood rage that had fueled my murderous rampage across the ship had ebbed just enough for me to begin to feel the deep abyss of grief below it. Conrad, the invisible lords in the Barbarian House, the Patience, Feng and Asher, hundreds of men broken into kindling in a few short months. And now Mabbot: Could it be true—Mabbot too? Why not fire? Who was this thin whelp to me? Why not add one more body to the pile?
Perhaps I am not a pirate after all; I did not fire. Instead I rapped on the muzzle of my cannon with a marlin spike, ringing it like a bell to let him know I was there. He wheeled upon me and we faced off across the gap. With the cannon in place, he could see but a few inches of me. He was fully exposed to a twenty-pound cannonball while I was hidden by hull and steel. Seemingly relieved to be thus outmaneuvered, he released his gun and lifted his hands into the air. He was quickly stormed by my comrades and taken to join his colleagues in chains. As Mabbot had guessed, Laroche’s men were weak with scurvy and lack of sleep; a good many of them were eager to surrender.
It was a gruesome night with blood on my hands and many on both sides feeding the sharks. The sun was high in the sky before the fires were fully extinguished.
Worse, though, far worse, Mabbot was gone. Not ill, not asleep, not hidden in her cabin waiting to mock me with her knowing smile, but gone.
Despite the desperate dives by the swimmers, her body could not be found. Though they seemed willing to swim until they too drowned, Mr. Apples finally called them back to the ship, and at that, our crew broke into a feral howl. I lent my voice to that ghastly chorus, screaming until my voice broke.
My servitude is over, my mistress defeated. I am free to leave the ship, free to find my way to any port in the world, free to take up a life of my choosing. Yet I have barely the will to scratch these letters onto the page.
Tuesday, December 7
After much debate and emergency repairs, the crew has split in twain, and thus one pirate vessel has become two. Many chose to man La Colette, a bizarre craft with many deadly devices aboard. A terrible weapon it will be in their hands.
The smoke balloon was discovered folded tightly into a hold, and, last I saw, the men were teaching themselves to inflate it, tinkering with the wicker rudders. They have taken with them the prisoners whose fate is yet to be decided. Some argued for leaving them on Rat-belly Island with what is left of Conrad, who may yet provide one more unappetizing meal. Others called for immediate execution, while I added my voice to those calling for delivery to the nearest harbor. After all, Laroche was dead, and his crew were guilty of little but obedience.
Before going their separate ways, all of the men were awarded their share of the Trinity haul. I myself, had I been a proper pirate on contract, would have been awarded a share and a half due to my lost limb. As it was, I received a share, and that due only to the fairness of Mr. Apples.
Old Pete, the navigator, is gone without a trace. Lost, no doubt, in the battle. “It’s fitting, I guess,” Mr. Apples said. “Naught but Mabbot could understand him.”
Mr. Apples, myself, and a skeleton crew have chosen to stay on the Flying Rose. He has assumed the rank of captain with an iron fist, and while he tolerates the men to show their grief with drink and song after the watch, he has excused none from their duties. His own sorrow is barely visible under the mask of discipline that serves to keep the crew and ship from falling into chaos, but the clues are there: No one has seen him eat or sleep in days. When the men erected a shrine upon Mabbot’s stuffed chair, piling it with notes and gilded shells and tokens of their love, Mr. Apples broke his knitting needles in twain and laid them atop the heap.
After a day sitting still upon the water (I think Mr. Apples was secretly hoping, as I was, that Mabbot would crawl from the sea, crowned in glistening seaweed), we maintained course for the Americas, where it would be safe enough to set to port and recruit a full and proper crew. We’ve knocked the wasp’s nest to the ground, and all agree that the New World is a decent distance from which to watch China and England duel for control of the trade.
Mr. Apples has agreed to go two weeks out of his way to deliver Joshua and myself ashore in Martha’s Vineyard, Joshua’s home.
EPILOGUE
Tuesday, July 15, 1823
I wear, about my neck, Kerfuffle’s foot, and when not covered in flour, my hands inevitably find their way to worry its silken fur.
My share amounted to seven bolts of silk, nineteen ingots of silver, three hundred and fifty pounds of tea, and several cases of varied spices. With this wealth, Joshua and I have established our inn, the Rose, near the busy wharf on Martha’s Vineyard, setting the tables with our own stolen china.
This community’s hands are in the water, but its heart is nested on land. Following the sun, the fishermen return to their wives and sleep on beds that do not sway beneath them. Of a Sabbath, families picnic in the orchards, and the children feed the geese with bread fresh enough to make a pirate weep. A modest town, it has none of London’s bustle, the endless clopping of hooves on cobblestone, or the hawkers selling their baubles beside the filthy gutters—here there is nothing louder than the distant jangle of the gulls at the docks. There are no towering buildings and the market is humble, yet I have everything I need. What goods I cannot get here, like the indispensable miso, the whalers or rumrunners bring me from distant shores, and I haven’t set foot on a ship since my return.
Joshua is as excellent a host as he is a cook, leaving me at peace to invent new dishes and tinker endlessly upon an enormous custom-made fourteen-square-foot stove of steel bound magnificently with brass. Our menu last night: grilled miso-glazed cod with fava beans; goose liver and sumac quiche; haunch of lamb with poached pears and fennel root; and roasted pecan ice cream.
Of an evening, Joshua regales the guests with stories of his adventures upon the sea. His dramatic flourishes draw a crowd, but the best seat is always reserved for his mother, who without fail wraps herself in the shimmering green silk shawl he placed around her shoulders the night he returned. So painterly is he, evoking the rocking of the ships and slowing a cannonball for every eye to see as it passes, that even visitors to the island who don’t know the hand language are entertained by Joshua’s tales. If there are many of them, I sometimes volunteer to translate. We draw a spate of tourists from the mainland who stay in our beds above the tavern’s great room, where a fire always burns in the hearth to dry a sodden traveler. It has become a sign of high fashion to say one has eaten something unique at the Rose, such as Pilfered Blue cheese soup with fried plantains or anise-rum sorbet. We ship our Black Rabbit Ginger Ale to New York by the boatload.
Joshua spent his own share as only the young can, though at sixteen he considers himself a man. He has built his mother a two-story house and sails his handsome yawl to and from the mainland. Soon enough his culinary skill w
ill surpass mine.
He has married a lovely young woman. Their first child, to their delight, is also quite deaf. The beauty babbles with her hands. Joshua calls me her grandfather. I will do everything I can to live up to the honor.
Almost daily we read stories of trouble brewing on the Pearl River. Our little commotion was enough, it seems, to give particularly conservative officials in Canton control of trade there. China has not allowed Pendleton to reestablish the Barbarian House on its shores and, further, has placed ever more strict embargoes and taxes on tea, silk, and spices to discourage opium smuggling. I know that I cannot fully trust the papers, but if it is true that England is planning to blockade Canton, then war is inevitable. Mabbot would have been thrilled. Of course, Mr. Apples, if he is still on this side of the waves, will do his best to make things hard on Pendleton. (I admit I miss the brute. One of the old salts who eats breakfast here is the Michelangelo of scrimshaw, and I have commissioned a pair of whalebone knitting needles that wait on the hearth in case Mr. Apples ducks through our door someday.)
But that is all so very distant now. I may wonder sometimes, while watching the sunset, whose blood has stained the skies, but except for the ever-soaring price of tea, life here is little affected by those dramas.
This near the sea, one cannot escape the sailors’ tales: lies about giant squid and mermaids with their strangling locks. Once in a while I hear them talking about Mabbot, saying she is still out there, with a demon in her pocket and her red hair aflame. Some say she captains a phantom vessel that travels ten feet above the water, a vapor ship that cannonballs cannot touch. Many say they have personally seen her leading a pirate armada and that the sea is whipped into a bloody froth by her merciless assault against all that is “proper.” I know it isn’t true. At night, though, when my leg aches and my room becomes chilly, only dreams of Mabbot’s sly grin can keep me warm, and I cannot help but consider the quiet, calloused whaler who seemed to truly know her. Not a braggart, he told his story to Joshua and me late one night after everyone else had retired. Mabbot rescued him, he said, not three months before he came to our tavern. His vessel had run aground and capsized and a red-haired woman risked her own sleek schooner to come alongside and throw lines to his crew. At the bow, he said, was a withered old man staring at the waves.
Who does it hurt if, sometimes, I let myself believe it?
I gave Leighton a service upon a green hill under some oaks, burying him barrel and all. I paid one hundred mourners to attend and fed them all rabbit pie. I worried much over the epitaph and finally decided upon something simple, lest his body be disturbed by those who bear grudges against his family. The headstone reads, simply, BELOVED OF HANNAH. It may seem a humble elegy, but I would be honored, when the time comes, to have the same written upon my own stone.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I thank the following for their generous help with the book:
Melissa Michaud, Tonya Hersch, Anna Mantzaris, Sarah Steinberg, David Goldstone, Stephen Canright, Ben Steinberg, Julie’s Tea Garden, Iva Ikeda, Ella Mae Lentz, Jenny Cantrell, Nova Brown.
Special thanks to my tireless champion, Laurie Fox, and to the wonder-worker Courtney Hodell, who edits like books still matter.
A Note About the Author
Eli Brown lives on an experimental urban farm in Alameda, California. His first novel, The Great Days, won the Fabri Literary Prize.
ALSO BY ELI BROWN
The Great Days
