by Sally Watson
“Oh, yes!” breathed Jade, brushing aside the fleeting thought that there might be one or two other desirable virtues besides courage.
“The Iroquois tribes are like that,” brooded Rory, clearly getting a great deal out of his system. “Brave and honorable and fair; much more than we are, for all we call them savages. They respect human dignity—women’s as well as men’s—and they keep their promises.” He looked murderously at the acrobatic dolphin. “That’s why we’ll wipe them all out in the end. We have no honor or scruples or humanity.”
His anger pierced Jade. She stared at his sharp profile, sick with the inevitability she caught in his words. He glowered into her green eyes, looking slightly astonished at himself, and fell back into his usual tough jeering manner. “Do I shock you?”
She shook her shaggy-growing head vigorously. “I think you’re talking with my mouth!” she marveled. “I hate even to think of going back: it’s like a November in my head.”
“Back!” he echoed, looking stunned. “You can’t go back, Mel— Mis—” He floundered over her name.
“My grandparents called me Jade,” she suggested. “And I think they must have been a little like your grandmother, only not witches.”
He grinned. “Jade. Suits you. Gran was called Kelpie; that’s a kind of Scottish water witch. You’ve got her kind of grit.”
Jade looked sideways at him, pleased. It was the first acceptable compliment a young man had ever paid her, the more acceptable because it was clearly his highest tribute. “I nearly didn’t,” she confessed with fierce honesty.
“Aye.” He nodded matter-of-factly. “Me too. But surely you’ll sign on with the pirates now? There’s no place for you back on shore. You’d hate it.”
She stared unseeing across the cobalt waves, Rory watching her with a not-unsympathetic blue eye. “Your family?” he guessed. “They’ll think the Pearl went down in the storm, you know. With the Plomleys and mate off to England, and the crew here, there’s no one to know different. They’ll be thinking you drowned.”
Jade winced, visualizing it.
“The point is,” Rory went on inexorably, “which is going to give them more grief in the long run: you sadly but safely dead, or you returned from the grave after their worst mourning is over, to drive them daft for the rest of your life? And don’t say you won’t, because I saw you doing it to your father the whole of the trip out. You can’t go back, Jade.”
It was true, of course, and quite unanswerable. Moreover, Rory’s use of her private name seemed to set a seal on the past and push it irrevocably behind her. Or had that happened earlier? Already her family seemed to her like people she had once met in passing, remote in time and space. She stared straight down at the surging wake, ashamed of the tear that hung on the end of her lashes and presently dropped off to join the other salt water below.
“Of course,” Rory added with elaborate unconcern, “if you do turn pirate, you’ll no doubt hang with the rest of us some day.”
This threat caused Jade to recover at once. With that strange perversity she couldn’t understand, she quickened to danger as Vinnie did to horses and Matt to the notion of travel. “Better hang than be bored to death,” she returned with spirit, thinking of the unbearable dreariness of being a lady in Williamsburg. “Will they take me?”
Rory grinned wolfishly. “Bartholomew Roberts wouldn’t. He has strict rules about females on his ship. But this crew’s got used to Anne being the best man of them all, for all she won’t be twenty until March; and they’ve sworn Domino in already. Aye, they’ll have you. Won’t you, Mark?” He turned to a short, beardless young man who had just swung down from the mizzen shrouds (which Jade eyed speculatively).
Surprisingly, Mark nodded at once. “Unless everyone from the Pearl is a liar, and Joshua’s a worse one. . . . I tried to talk Tom Deane out of it,” he added, looking puzzled at himself.
Tom Deane! Jade hadn’t thought of him once since that last glimpse of his distraught face. But how on earth had this Mark Read sensed so quickly that Tom lacked toughness? For it was true.
“You want to join, then?” Mark was asking.
There was really no choice. She could no more have deliberately chosen to go back than she could have deliberately jumped overboard. Even if the price was the gallows. Invisible chains fell off. Elation filled her, as the blue world of sea and sky became her world. Her laughter was a peal of joy.
“I’m already very good with the rapier,” she informed them with intolerable complacence. “Now I suppose I’d better start practicing the cutlass and pistol as well.”
Life as a pirate turned out to be surprising in several ways. To begin with, Jade had vaguely supposed pirates to be fierce, brutal, lawless, and bloodthirsty like the notorious late Blackbeard; wicked by the very look of them, spending their days and nights in looting, fighting, and other deeds of horrid violence. In fact, most of them were nothing of the sort, and the Queen Royal sailed day after peaceful day committing no piracy whatever because the empty seas showed them nothing to pirate.
And Jade felt more at home than she had ever felt anywhere. They didn’t seem wicked, these pirates—except for a few, like Barton, who liked brutality and killing, who had won a dozen duels and was always looking for another and rather had his eye on the inexperienced Tom Deane. Or there was Rafferty who liked stirring up trouble. Or Calico Jack Rackam who didn’t like anyone at all—including himself, said Rory shrewdly. Most of the others were victims of fate or men, refugees from terrible things like bond-slavery, injustice, poverty, and cruelty. And a rough, tough, uncouth, rum-guzzling lot they were, too, with even less reason than Jade to love society, for it had treated them far worse.
They were also, on the whole, kind, loyal, fun-loving, sentimental, musical, and nothing if not democratic. They made and enforced their own laws, elected their own captains, had their code of honor, and maintained justice much more successfully, they said smugly, than did the outside world. Moreover, if they became dissatisfied with a captain, they simply deposed him and elected another the next time they set foot ashore for fresh supplies of water and turtles.
“We voted Charlie Vane out that way a year ago,” explained little Sam Clarke, dwarf and self-styled clown. “Elected Jack instead. Figured he’d make a good figurehead (he hadn’t gone to pieces then) and Anne’d really run things.”
“You kill Vane?” asked Domino bloodthirstily.
Sam looked shocked. “Of course not! Gave him a boat and food; him and them as wanted to stick with him. He’s got another ship now; we see him now and then.”
“Well, why do you have to do it on land?” asked Jade, intrigued by this rather odd set of ethics. “Depose him, I mean.”
Sam looked even more shocked. “Well, we couldn’t do it at sea, could we? That’d be mutiny. Besides, it’s one of our rules.”
They were standing outside Anne’s cabin in the aftercastle, which was, in effect, the general lounge for the entire nothing-if-not-democratic crew (except, ironically, the captain himself, who was no longer welcome). Mark was at the helm; and one-eyed Cory Dickson, the star gunner, was up in the fo’c’sle teaching a fascinated Joshua the rudiments of the art. Amidships a trio of trumpet, fife, and drum played a rollicking hornpipe, and a dozen pairs of large horny bare feet flapped out the complicated steps. Domino, unable to bear it any longer, joined in with a dance of her own which she said was the same thing only better.
By now there were half a dozen pirates outside the cabin door, watching with great amusement. Domino and nimble-footed Toby Harris were each determinedly trying to outdance the other in what could equally well be contest or double dancing-lesson. Pierre fetched his flute and joined the orchestra. Other pirates dropped their delicate scrimshaw carving and joined in.
Jade began to laugh. “If they could only see us, those people who scream about pirates being awful, wicked, ferocious, murderous criminals!”
“Oh, we are,” Anne assured her blandly. “We’ve
our reputations to keep up, you know; and we pirates would have to kill people for principle alone, even if they didn’t fight us.”
Jade turned a sunburned nose over her own shoulder and squinted at Anne, trying to make out how much—if at all—she was joking. “Then you are murderous criminals?” she suggested, doubtfully.
Anne at once reversed her argument. “No more than the authorities who call us that!” she blazed. “Lawton’s a pompous, grasping, vindictive thief who steals under cover of the law, and Chidley is—was—twenty times worse. What’s more, that sort prey on the helpless and poor. We may be thieves, but at least we steal with no more protection than our own arms and courage, and we steal from the rich.”
Rory grinned cynically. “Just like Robin Hood,” he purred.
“If you like,” Anne retorted, her famous temper rising slightly. “We don’t harm the helpless, and we’ve little enough mercy on the rich and powerful—and ship’s officers who offend us . . .” She smiled grimly at Rory. “You didn’t count as an officer of the Pearl, considering the condition we found you in. That may have saved your life, my lad.”
It was a sobering thought. On the other hand, Anne might well be joking. Most ships, said Mark, surrendered without a fight. And Pierre’s description of pirate raids sounded far more like comic farce than serious business. Jade put it out of her mind and concentrated on the business of recovering her strength and preparing herself for the life of piracy . . . and learning to climb the rigging without letting anyone guess how terrifying it was the first few times. She’d never been so high in a tree. Moreover, trees didn’t hurl themselves wildly through the air the way a masthead did in a heavy swell.
“How do you like it?” Anne asked her as they clung to the foremast crosstrees, swinging dizzily above deck, sea, deck, sea— She looked with a grin at Jade’s rather sickly face.
Jade swallowed heavily and stuck out her chin. “Wonderful!” she said, only half lying. After which she went back up again and again until she was no longer scared at all—and was half sorry she wasn’t.
She was up on the fo’c’sle resting from rapier practice and savoring the galloping of the ship one morning when Calico Jack loomed beside her, his handsome face dissolute with drink and his breath reeking of it. Jade had scarcely seen him before, for it seemed that he had created a kind of private tavern for himself in the hold, and seldom left it. Anne was indeed captain in all but name—and Jade found herself wishing that Anne were here now, or Jack somewhere else. She looked at him with revulsion, having no use at all for anyone so lost to self-respect as to get drunk. Not from any moral scruples: she had none, in the ordinary sense. She merely considered that to get drunk—to lose control of one’s own behavior—was a disgusting sin against one’s own dignity and pride, almost more degrading and contemptible than cowardice. Her lip curled.
Jack squinted down at her, swaying. “Where’d a pretty li’l thing like you come from?” he asked, pleased. His puffed and bloodshot eyes were clearly trying to flash romantically. His finely penciled mustache needed trimming and his wavy black hair was uncombed. His waistcoat failed dismally to meet at what had once been a narrow waist. And he still fancied himself to be an irresistible swashbuckling fellow. Confidently, he reached for her.
Jade eluded him with ease, but her heart was thudding as she ducked neatly around the capstan. She felt that even a touch from that revolting creature would cause her to lose her breakfast at once.
“Wait a minute,” Calico Jack called, plaintively reasonable. “All I want’s a li’l kiss.”
Jade exploded into fury. How dare he! She turned, drew, flickered her rapier a menacing three inches from Jack’s dismayed nose. “Any kiss you get from me will be with this,” she announced trenchantly. The smile on her face might well have caused a hurricane to veer off and choose another course.
By this time a dozen pirates had seen what was happening and were gathering on the fo’c’sle, laughing but watchful, cheering both Jade and Jack on. Jade wasn’t in the least sure what to make of them, and she much preferred fighting her own battles in any case, so she continued to let her rapier point dance waspishly around Calico Jack’s unhappy face. To her increased contempt, he began to back away, wheedling and whining and blustering. A coward, then, as well as a drunk! Jade exchanged an expressive glance with Rory, who had draped himself very casually indeed against the rail some five feet away, amused and mocking and with his hand not far from his own sword. Jade was greatly pleased with him.
And at this point Anne arrived upon the scene and instantly took over the starring role. After just one quick glance, she rounded on Jack like an enraged Medea. “You ever lay one finger on Jade, or Domino either, and you’ll hang from your own yardarm,” she informed him pithily.
Jack roused himself to the fury of the weak and the drunk. “Who’s captain of this ship, you flaming doxy? Threaten me, will you? ’S mutiny! I’ll have you hanged, yourself . . . Or strung up by the thumbs! Seize her!” he ordered the crew.
No one moved. Anne laughed at him. “You may be captain, but not even the captain can break ship’s law, Jack Rackam! No woman on this ship will ever be touched against her will, by you or anyone else; you signed that yourself, in our ship’s articles. Do you remember what happened to Cordon?”
Jack apparently did. His bravado collapsed like a sail in a sudden calm, and he slunk back below to the consolation of his rum.
Anne turned to Jade. “No need to worry about that sort of thing on the Queen Royal.”
“I wasn’t,” said Jade briefly, sheathing her sword. Actually, she’d rather enjoyed it—after that first moment of revulsion, anyway. “Who’s Cordon?” she asked interestedly as Anne chuckled.
“Was,” Anne corrected her significantly. “He kept bothering me—so I challenged him to a duel and killed him. Come on back to my cabin, young Jade; Pierre wants to make you some clothes.” And she led the way aft, leaving Jade to ponder several small points as she followed.
Pierre, who enjoyed a close but quite unromantic friendship with Anne, was like Jezebel the monkey in a new banana tree. He had rich fabrics (looted from pirated ships, of course) spread over the cabin, while he reveled in the joy of two new women for whom to create clothes. Having concentrated his genius on the willing Domino while Jade recovered, he now turned to the intriguing problem of green eyes and tanned face and sun-bleached short hair.
“A petite jewel,” he told Anne happily. “Not magnificent like you and Domino, c’est vrai, but with great piquance. See how she is all green and brown and gold!” He stood back and pondered. “Oui. See how I have genius! I give to Anne black velvet breeches and white shirts, or cream and fawn and ivory and such subtle shades to set off her hair, and it is not my fault that she sometimes wears bright colors instead. To Domino I give the rich hues—crimson and purple and saffron and magenta, like jungle flowers, which she very much loves. But you—”
“Not pink or pale blue!” Jade warned him belligerently, stooping to stroke Morgan the cat—named for that famous privateer of sixty years ago. “I won’t wear—”
“Mais non! Never!” Pierre looked deeply wounded. “For you, all the colors of the sea: coral and salmon and shrimp, and the so-many shades of sea-green, and brown-gold of sargasso weed, and amber to match your hair. And you shall have a petticoat of—”
“Petticoat!” Jade literally squawked at him, causing Morgan to bolt under the bed as if the parrots were attacking him. “Oh no, I shan’t! I’ve had enough of petticoats; I’m never going to wear them again! Next you’ll be wanting to make me stays! I’m always going to dress in breeches from now on.”
Pierre looked crestfallen. “Mais for parties—for the evening—Chère Anne has some beautiful rich gowns that I have created for her, and Domino aussi. To wear in this so-splendid room?” He glanced around the so-splendid room, very grand indeed now that it was no longer a sickroom, and Jade was with Domino in the small aftercabin next to it. His dark eyes twinkled and wheedle
d, his mouth puckered in a distressed moue. “ Voyons, I have made velvet breeches and silken shirts to be the trademark of the so-famous Anne Bonney. If I make for you also the trademark of breeches and flame-colored shirt, will you let me to create just one gown for you? Or perhaps two?”
Jade relented: she couldn’t help it. “Well, I still think canvas breeches and cotton shirts are more practical,” she muttered, but more from principle than conviction. It might be rather nice to have one rich and sophisticated and totally unsuitable gown . . . and she would love a flame-colored silken shirt. She stood with astounding patience while Pierre measured and muttered, and then blinked when he shoved her abruptly down onto a low stool and flourished a pair of shears in her face much as she had flourished her rapier at Calico Jack.
“What are you doing?” she demanded.
“Something about your pauvre hairs!” he retorted. “For all these days I can hardly to keep my hands off! I ask myself was it chewed off by drunken mice or hacked by a near-sighted monkey with a machête?” And he glanced at the innocent Jezebel pointedly as she swung by her tail from the canopy of the bed. “Voilà, I trim and shape it properly, so it frame your pointed face just so,” he announced, and proceeded to do so at once, singing softly to himself a song of an artiste at work.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Pirate Raid
“Touché!” panted Anne, looking astonished. She lowered her rapier and stared at the grinning Jade. “You young devil, you are good!”
“I know,” said Jade coolly. “Well, I ought to be, after all that training. But now I wish I’d studied the cutlass and pistol, too,” she added, dissatisfied at being second-best in anything.
“You’ll shape up.” Anne took off the bright kerchief which most pirates wore around their heads as protection from the blazing sun. Morgan sauntered purring to the very center of the quarterdeck—just where they’d been practicing—and settled down for a nap. From the gangway came the twitter of Pierre’s flute. The wind hummed softly in the rigging. For the first time in her life, Jade wasn’t at war with her surroundings, and she hardly knew what to make of the laughter that kept bubbling up for no reason at all. It bubbled now.
