by Sally Watson
“Nearly seventeen!” she said indignantly.
“Never mind.” Mark’s blue eyes were gleaming. “It’s still an idea. I can challenge him, and take him on with the cutlass, too.” He looked pleased.
Rory curled a lip disagreeably, determined to be obstructive. “And you think Tom will just sit back and let you?”
But Mark was sailing before the wind now. “We won’t ask him, of course. You’ll have to help. Get him to go ashore with you early, as soon as possible. Teach him a new stroke, practice with him, give him a bit of rum when the tavern opens. Not the big one where everyone goes; the little one over there on the bluff with the sign of the sick-looking cock over the door. In the meantime, I’ll challenge Barton. I’ll fight him right here on board if I can—but I doubt he’ll agree. He likes his duels on shore, with an admiring audience around, after plenty of rum. They’ll all go to the big tavern, I dare say, so I’ll meet you and Tom in the little one, and we’ll contrive some way to keep Tom out of the way until I finish with Barton. All right?” Jade and Rory looked at each other, at the confident and intrepid slight figure of Mark, and then at the hapless Tom on the fo’c’sle, still trying to appear calm and lighthearted, but making bad weather of it. “All right,” growled Rory with a disgruntled air that didn’t in the least hide his approval of Mark. And he and Jade made their way forward.
“Going to prick Barton’s bubble, are you, Tom?” called Rory cheerfully, and Jade tried to look like someone who hadn’t the least doubt of it.
But Tom’s smile was distinctly wan. “He’s more likely to prick mine, I’m afraid,” he said in a voice that wobbled as if his bravado was growing very thin. It was rather a poor show, really. Jade, who had put on a better one, herself, felt a swift flash of scorn. Then, as swiftly, came a memory of choking black fear, and her heart lurched in sympathy for poor Tom.
“Let’s go ashore now,” she said briskly. “Come on, Tom. We can practice a bit out of sight of the others. Warm you up, you know. Besides, I know a nice cutlass stroke Mark was showing me the other day, and I’ll teach you. Just in case you find it useful.”
Tom agreed quickly, with visible relief.
“Well, go change your clothes, water-witch,” Rory suggested. “You look like a bilge-rat in those baggy breeches, and rather a scruffy one, at that.”
Jade glanced down with a surprised grin at the loose sailcloth trousers reaching halfway between knee and ankle, and the equally loose cotton shirt that Pierre deplored, and the broad canvas waistband. Not really town wear, perhaps. She chuckled and hurried aft.
In the small aftercabin which she shared with Domino, she took out her black velvet breeches and coral silk blouse with long full sleeves. Gradually, as she started to change, her brow corrugated. All very well to prevent Tom being slaughtered like an affable and helpless lamb—but what about Mark? With his shining audacity, it was easy to forget that he was, after all, a slight man, smaller even than Anne or Domino. Barton must have a full sixinch advantage of reach on him. It took—as Monsieur Maupin had been at great pains to impress on Jade—enormous speed and skill to overcome such a disadvantage. And it occurred to Jade that she liked Mark very much indeed: even better than Tom, and it seemed a little hard that Mark should risk his life for a young man whom he didn’t even seem sure he liked. What an extraordinary thing, come to think of it! Surely that kind of reckless chivalry was unusual, to say the least, outside romantic tales, and Shakespeare, and ballads, and—
Jade’s train of thought suddenly fell flat over on its nose, and she paused with one arm halfway into the coral sleeve to backtrack and see what had tripped it up. Some important and relevant word? Romance . . . ballads . . . Shakespeare . . . Shakespeare! AS YOU LIKE IT! Rosalind! Jade’s eyes widened, narrowed, widened again. She took a deep breath, grinned crookedly, and finished putting on her blouse. Carefully she belted on her rapier, tucked a pistol into her belt as well (this being both high fashion and standard uniform in pirate circles), and went into Anne’s big cabin.
Anne and Mark were alone, talking quietly together at the far end of the room. Jade closed her door quietly, leaned against it, and proceeded to study Mark with quite new eyes. It was a most enlightening study. It explained a great deal. It explained, for instance, why a man surely old enough to have a beard, didn’t. It explained that odd warning look of Anne’s today, and the easy friendship between them, and Mark’s contradictory behavior toward the bewildered Tom. The only thing it didn’t explain was everyone’s incredible blindness, including her own. Jade drew a very slow, very deep breath, and smiled. Tight bandages around the chest, of course, to flatten any awkward curves. All the same, it was quite staggeringly improbable!
Her curious stillness caught Anne’s attention, and she looked at Jade narrowly. “Anything wrong?” she asked, snappish. Had she been telling Mark that Tom wasn’t worth it? Or was she annoyed (as Rory was) at not having thought of a counter-challenge first, herself? It was hard to tell.
They eyed each other, mutually inscrutable. Jade shook her tousled honey-colored head and smiled her small, slanted, secret smile. This wasn’t the time for her questions and comments.
“See you ashore,” was all she said.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The Duel
Mark found them sunk in the gloom of the tiny tavern trying to radiate cheerful confidence and not doing it at all well. Jade was in an anguish of apprehension for Mark, and Tom for himself, and the others were in varying degrees of dark brown depression. Mark brought a shimmer of light, and a friendly hand clapped on Tom’s shoulder.
“Hello. They’re all at the other place. Been limbering up, Tom? Did you show him that undercut, Jade? Let’s make sure you’ve got it. Finish up, Tom, and we’ll go down to the cellar here. There’s enough room, and Diego won’t mind. Will you, Diego?”
Diego, a brown slender man with black curls, didn’t flick an eyelid, but his hand curved over the coin Mark sent sliding toward him. It was clear that he didn’t mind. For two more like that, Mark could have owned the place. The cellar stretched into barrel-piled dimness.
“Need a light,” said Mark, picking up a barrel stave. “Should be flint and steel and a lamp just over there by you, Tom. See them?”
“No,” said Tom, groping. “Uh!” he added, as Mark hit him firmly over the head with the barrel stave. “Nnng,” he finished, collapsing neatly into Rory’s waiting arms.
“What you do?” demanded Domino, preparing to fight. Joshua restrained her, and Mark’s wide firm mouth flickered briefly into a smile.
“Take care of him!” he urged them. “If he comes round too soon, don’t let him out until you’re sure Barton and I have finished.”
Jade looked at Domino and Rory, bent over the sleeping figure, and decided that they could do very well without her.
“I’m going after Mark,” she announced, and did so, Joshua behind her.
On a spot where the ground rose from the beach near the large tavern, they looked down at the lone figure of Mark standing outside the door while a boy ran in with a message. And then the doors opened again, opened wide, and a stream of pirates poured out with the fuddled but happy expectancy of boys coming to see a dog-fight. Barton, massively at their head, paused at the sight of Mark, planted his treetrunk legs apart, wiped the rum from his mouth with the back of a hairy hand, and let out a bellow.
“Ready, are you? Let’s see if you are!” And with the simplicity of the natural killer, he drew his pistol and fired at Mark.
Jade gasped and clutched at Joshua—just as a second shot rang out, not two seconds after the first. Mark, it seemed, was not unprepared for Barton’s peculiar notions of how to start a cutlass duel. Acrid smoke swirled and blew away. Both figures stood unharmed, energetically drawing cutlasses.
The pirates cheered on general principles and formed a solid circle around them, betting wildly. A few booed Barton, but with some caution, as the odds were running heavily in his favor. Anne appeared from somewher
e, red hair blazing and face set and angry, forcing her way to the front of the ring. Jade and Joshua stayed where they were. Here they could see everything; down there little would be visible but the backs of dirty necks. And Jade found, at the cost of chewed knuckles, that the role of expert as audience is sheer torture. To be helpless to do anything—and yet to see everything: every feint, every opening, every hair-breath parry or missed riposte . . . She moaned.
The fight went on and on. Mark, defending, didn’t try to close against that long arm, but contented himself with riposting against the arm itself, over and over. The sunset faded with the disconcerting swiftness of the tropics, and the sea became a burning shield of silver in the brief colorless twilight. Mark was bleeding from half a dozen cuts in his shoulders and one perilously near the artery of his throat, and the sky darkened further, and the sea faded from silver to pewter.
But Barton was losing control of his right arm at last. His cutlass slowed and drooped as the muscles weakened, and his face curled in anger that had not yet turned to fear. And at last Mark began to attack effectively with hoarded strength, forcing Barton to defend himself at last. The slight figure took new authority, using his sword as a skilled tool instead of a battle-axe, adapting it brilliantly to a style of speed and subtlety that had never been intended for it, and that completely bewildered the larger man.
And then, at last, just when Barton was beginning to adapt himself to this unfair style, Mark changed with shattering speed to something different still. A whistling downward sweep, a circle unpausing, a swift horizontal arc—and Barton fell where he stood, like a tree.
A moment’s awed silence. “E’s dead,” announced Toby without regret, and Mark quietly crumpled upon the sand.
Anne reached him as he fell, and Jade was already halfway down the rise, crowding in as Anne tongue-lashed the clustering pirates back. “Give room!” she barked dangerously. “Stand back, you scurvy dogfish! Throw me your kerchiefs or anything else I can use for bandages, you calkheads, he’s bleeding badly! Stand back, I said— Oh, it’s you, Jade. All right, you can help.”
And Jade—no nurse at all—became a veritable miracle of efficiency as Anne’s aide, helping to staunch long gaping cuts. She didn’t bother to look up when the fringe of her attention glimpsed Tom, staggering from the lump on his head, escorted by the impenitent Rory and Domino.
“Somebody hit me on the head!” he bleated. “They said— What’s happening, anyway? They kept me in that accursed grog-cellar! What’s going on, I said? Where’d Mark go? I want to talk to him!” And then as his muzzy vision began to focus on the scene before him, he stood quite still and stopped bleating. “What’s happened?” he repeated sharply, this time directly at Anne.
And Anne looked up briefly, her expression just visible now in the dusk. Her eyes glittered almost cat-like. “Your duel’s been fought for you,” she told Tom, and the bright gaze swept the crew, mocking. “By Mary Read,” she added softly.
And in the dead silence her eyes met Jade’s unastonished ones, and the two girls bent once more over the third.
An air of stunned disbelief hung over the Queen Royal as she tugged quietly at her anchor. In the waist men shook their heads, blinking, and counted up again how long they’d known Mark—er—Mary. She’d been a pirate at least three or four years. . . . “Signed on wiv Sam Bellamy, ’er did, in ’16 or ’17”. . . . Ridiculous for no one to have suspected!
“Well, I thought it was funny he didn’t have no beard!”
This was greeted with hoots of derision and half a dozen more claims from men who had always thought there was something odd about Mark, and still more jeers.
In the salon, Anne’s huge four-poster had been turned once more into a hospital bed. Mary, bandaged in her own blood (“Best way to prevent mortification,” said Anne wisely, and Domino agreed), lay looking suddenly frail and white but a trifle smug for all that. Tom hovered beside the bed, shining with devotion and bewilderment.
“What a woman!” he kept murmuring. “I knew there was something wrong! . . . Well, I mean it stands to reason! I wouldn’t have started feeling this way about a man . . . . Thought I was losing my mind!”
Mary gave him a feeble but decided smirk. And Tom, quite carried away, promptly announced their intention of being married the minute they could find—or capture—a minister to do it.
Out on the fo’c’sle, Jade and Rory stood watching the quarter moon over the horizon, sending a long glittering trail of silver toward the ship. They said nothing at all.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Prison Ship
There was no church for pirates, nor any minister conveniently aboard any of the Queen Royal’s prizes. So Mary and Tom were married in a solemn shipboard wedding: an outlaw wedding: sacred and binding—and altogether illegal as far as church or state were concerned. This worried Tom, who was at heart a conventional young man. Jade blazed at him furiously.
“What are you fussing about, Tom? Do you think God only lives in churches? Or that He’s too stupid to understand why you haven’t got a vicar? Or that He cares more about parish records and things than He does for your heartfelt vows? Don’t be such a dolt!”
Tom looked sheepish. “To tell the truth, I wasn’t so worried about God as I was about—well—society. I’d hate people to call my Mary a wicked woman or anything.”
Anne laughed. “They do and they will. Along with me, and Domino, and even our righteous-minded pacifist Jade.”
Anne’s eyes sparked mockery at Jade, who simply shrugged, uncaring. She still sat and sulked aloft when they took a merchant ship, and she wasn’t to be taunted out of her convictions.
“Pooh, who cares what anybody says?” She tossed her head, as she had done, months ago, at Monsieur Maupin. “The thing is, they just can’t stand females who decline to be inferior, and they can’t think of anything bad enough to call us. I’ve heard them.”
“Aye,” said Rory, her ally in this. “But just you wait! Some day they’ll have to back down and change the laws to give equal rights and respect to women. You’ll be able to own property, and go to court if need be, and be defended by women lawyers and judged by women judges—”
“And there’ll be woman ship’s captains,” Jade burst in, carried away by the splendid vision, “and crew, too! And doctors and ambassadors and vicars and bishops and governors and generals and—”
“Black women generals and bishops and doctors,” Domino put in truculently.
Tom and Pierre and even Anne looked slightly shocked, being unable to imagine any such drastic changes in the world of reality. Surely this was going a bit too far? But Rory was nodding matter-of-factly. Why not? Ability was ability, wasn’t it?
“The hard thing is to get the education and training to prove your ability,” he frowned, as if it were all to start tomorrow. “And to do that, we have to change the laws so you can get them . . . I tell you what, if women and Blacks and Indians had the sense they were born with, they’d all be working together to free each other.” He glowered, incensed at the stupidity of people who let themselves be trampled.
Mary, radiant bride of two days, just laughed at them. “Why all this fuss? We’re outside society, free of it. We have equality here on the Queen Royal, and Anne’s captain, isn’t she?”
“Except in name,” Joshua pointed out unanswerably. “That’s the whole point, isn’t it?”
Anne shrugged. “What does that matter? So long as I have the power, who cares about labels?”
But the quartet of reformers stared at her unbending. It did matter, and they cared a great deal.
It was a leisurely occupation, piracy. Days and even weeks could drift by, smooth as the swells that slipped beneath the Queen Royal’s hull and out again in the perpetual summer of the Caribbean, without ever a sail breaking the circle of the horizon. Jade thought she had never been alive before. Within the loose fellowship of the pirates, she and Domino, Rory and Joshua became a foursome, caring about the same things,
more and more in harmony, until a look exchanged could be a whole conversation.
They took to seamanship avidly, for even Domino had soon got the best of her seasickness. Together they went aloft, learned to reef a sail, began learning to handle the helm and to read the quadrant. Rory, who was now intensively studying navigation, proceeded to organize a class of three—which probably taught him more than it did them, observed Joshua tolerantly from his comfortable place as average pupil. Domino was the shining light, and Jade, embarrassingly, the dunce.
To make up for it, she wheedled Toby into teaching her how to cripple a rudder, and worked ferociously at the cutlass to make speed and skill more than make up for size and strength—as Mary had done.
Only sometimes the four of them acknowledged a slight uneasy sense of having cheated. That wall of injustice was still there, back in the world from which they had escaped—and what were they doing about it? What, for that matter, could they do about it? There being no apparent answer to this, they did nothing. But whenever they took a ship that fought back, Jade became as squally as July, and either sulked in the rigging or went and picked a fight with Rory.
“We signed on as crew, didn’t we?” Rory pointed out implacably. “We knew what it involved. If we can’t keep our bargain, we should sign off and leave.”
“You hate it too,” she retorted. “Fighting ordinary seamen, I mean.”
Rory grinned at himself, sourly. “Aye. But not as much as I hated serving on a nice legal slaver. You can’t have everything. When I find something better than this, I’ll take it, and in the meantime I play fair with the pirates.”
Jade, silenced but unconverted, stomped off, to find Domino and challenge her to a race to the topmast and back. It was an unfair challenge, because Jade was smaller and nimbler, and because Domino could not feel really comfortable with the distracting swooping of the masts. “Now we go shoot pistols,” she suggested vengefully after Jade had won by a length. “After I beat you down,” she added, launching herself into the topsail shrouds.
