by Seven Jane
“Aye, it was Dunn,” I confirmed, not able to bring myself to speak of him so familiarly as Jones or Birch would. “He told me so only a few days ago, when we sailed on the frozen sea on the other side of the ocean, though why he kept such a thing a secret for so long I could not guess.” The Captain Jones lifted a well-defined grey eyebrow but did not say anything, waiting, perhaps, as I summoned my courage to ask the single most important question I had ever asked. After a few moments, I did. “Is it true? Am I … well, am I a Jones?” The word was heavy, as if it were so much more than a name, and it was.
He gave a small smile that looked half-apologetic and half-proud. “Aye, love. It is true, that you are.”
We looked at each other for a few moments, letting unsaid words pass between a father and daughter who were barely more than strangers. There were so many things I wanted to say—so many things that I had planned to say if ever I found this moment—and now that it was here, nothing came. There were too many, and not enough, and none of them felt quite right.
“Don’t hold it against the old sea lion, love,” Davy Jones said, returning to our mutual friend Mister Dunn who had kept my father’s secret and mine for all those innumerable years. “After all, it wasn’t his secret to tell. I would have told you myself as soon as I had the occasion, but I expect he had a reason to tell you before we had the chance to meet.”
I didn’t know what to say to that so I said nothing. Instead, I pursed my lips together and tugged the brim of my hat over my eyes, shielding both the sun and Jones’ permeating gaze. I was glad to have known my true name that night on the frozen sea, even if it had come from Dunn and under such circumstances. The knowing alone had given me strength, and courage, and had renewed my spirit at a time when it had been nearly broken. Without that name, I might not have made it through the storm, much less made it here, and here on these unfamiliar tides I was unsure what the consequences might be now that I had led us all to a place that would not let us leave.
When Davy Jones spoke again his voice was softer, kinder—the same patient tone that one might reserve for coaxing a frightened animal out of hiding, though I was not an animal, nor was I scared. I was sad, really. In fact, I was overwhelmed with a deep, guttural, longing type of sadness about what I had known and not known, and the price others might have paid on my behalf—on Erik Winters’ and Brandon Dunn’s and mine. Had we condemned them all in our quest to reclaim the pieces of our hearts that had been stolen from us?
“What’s your given name, love?” he asked now, halting my own inner monologue. “What do they call you back on Isla Perla? I never had a chance to know it.”
“Merrin,” I said, swallowing down the pain that rose with it. “Formerly, Merrin Smith it would seem.”
His smile was warm and there was a glint in his eye, like I’d said something that sparked his interest. “Lovely name, that is. Merrin.” He closed his eyes and repeated it, “Merrin. Suits you, it does. Do you know what it means?”
Shrugging, I averted my eyes. “It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just a name. I don’t even know who gave it to me.” It was an orphan’s name, I almost said, but didn’t. It was a petulant comment, I knew, and an unfair one. It was also untrue. Mrs. Emery had given me that name, and although I had my quarrels with the strict mistress of the island’s brothel, she had been the only mother I’d ever known. Still, it broke my heart a little that my own father did not know my name, even thought that was perhaps unfair as well. After all, I had only just learned his.
Jones made a tsk-ing sound and swept his hand graciously in the air before him, again demonstrating that eerie, noble-like quality that marked him as more than a simple pirate, even one who held the title of captain. “Aye, love, but names hold power, whether you know it or not. It is still there, underneath, waiting all the while like a great sunken thing, waiting to be found. That’s a lesson you’ve learned more than most. It was the power of a name that brought you and the rest of your crew here,” he swept his arms open in front of him, “that brought you back to me at last in a place where no man has yet sailed.”
“It was, and I have,” I agreed, thinking again on the strength the name Jones had given me, and the strength it had not. Still, there was a deep bitterness seeded within me, and I could not help the sharp edges that crept into my voice. My next words were high and harsh, each one a small, poison-tipped arrow that flew from the bowstring of my lips. “But I’ve also learned that to not have a name is to rob someone of their power, to steal from them a part of their very core, and that is a lesson I’ve known even longer—every day for ever year for the past many years that I’ve lived without one, wasting my life away alone, and as nothing more than a nameless orphan kept as a kitchen maid in a filthy island brothel. I was left behind like a piece of unwanted cargo.” I stomped my boot on the deck as if it were punctuation, and then as if propelled by the energy of my own anger I took one step forward, and then another, and another, until I was so close to my father that I stood in the place where his shadow should have been but wasn’t—so close that if I had wanted to I could have wrapped my arms around him. I could have held my body close against his, embracing the only blood relative I had ever known, and I wanted to. I was desperate to. But I did not. Suddenly, I realized I was angry—angry that I had been abandoned, that I had never known my own name, my parents, and that they had never known me; angry that I still had more questions than answers, perhaps more even than when I had started. I was standing in the presence of a man who was more myth than real, of a legend who’d somehow become my father, and I wasn’t even sure he was human or what sort of implications that might hold for me or what it might mean for the men who had become my brothers on this journey. As something more, perhaps, as my thoughts brushed as they always did past Tom Birch. I blinked the image of him, unconscious on the cot, out of my mind.
A spark of something that might have been remorse moved across his face, and then Davy Jones, my father, sighed another deep, full-throated, sad sigh. “No, love, you were not unwanted. Never unwanted. I never wanted to send you off to Isla Perla, but I had no other choice to keep you safe. I was going to come back for you, but then I was trapped here.” He motioned at the water. “Trapped in this damned place for more years that I can count by a being too bitter to ever let me go.”
I ignored him. “And now here I stand, and you wish to talk to me about the power of names like it’s some buried treasure.”
He sighed. “No, not treasure. Names hold power, that’s true enough, but power isn’t always a good thing. Aye, I fear I’ve cursed you to the same fate as I, and for that I am truly sorry, love.”
“What fate is that?”
He turned and looked back toward … into the deep greenish-blue water over the edge of the ship. It was still and smooth, like polished sea glass, but it was not clear. The color was thick and impenetrable, warning of dangers that lurked within its depths. “The same as that’s reserved for all who sail under the name of Jones. The curse of the sea herself.”
His words were heavy with a nameless agony. For as long as I had heard stories of the sea, I had heard men refer to it as a pronoun. Such was the manner of sailors who cherished nothing as they did their waters and their ships and their gold. For these men, she was their deepest love, and they spoke of her with the same affection as another man might speak of a woman. But Captain Davy Jones spoke of her as if she were indeed a woman flesh and blood.
“And what is that curse?” I asked.
With a last yearning look at the water, my father returned to the chair, settling himself once more with his grey hat on his lap. He gestured to me, inviting me closer, and this time I went to him, lowering myself to rest against an overturned crate near where he sat. Up close I could see each of the lines in his skin; they appeared soft in contrast to the scale-like texture that glistened in patches at his throat and elbows. Without the glare of the sun he appeared more solid than I had initially thought. I resisted the urge to tou
ch him, to verify that he was real. I could see now that he had once been a very handsome man, strong-boned with an expressive face, but time and age had hardened him and turned those features stiff and hardly recognizable. I could see my own countenance in his—the same eyes, yes, as well as the same cheekbones, the same curve of lip and thin nose.
He smiled at me as I rested beside him, and it was my smile I saw reflected in his face. “Once, long ago,” he began, and his eyes went soft, glazed over by memory, “I fell in love with the sea. And I don’t mean the shining blue waters of the ocean, nay, but the sea herself made flesh. The very spirit of the sea. She was beautiful and terrible, and I loved her for it, and she loved me, dreadful pirate that I was … that I am. Loved me so much she forsook the water for a life with a mortal man. But other gods cursed her for leaving her home and obligations to the tide behind, and it weren’t no matter—being away from it made a hole in her heart that after a time turned her cruel and unforgiving. And while I was off sailing the seas, taking and bending it to my will, I became so consumed with the quest to free her from her own bitterness that I lost sight of the woman I loved, until she forgot me altogether.” He paused for a moment, lost in a thought too painful to speak.
“I underestimated her, the woman and the sea. I made a terrible mistake. And in the end I was foolish enough that I traded my soul to sail the seas forever, thinking it might redeem me in her eyes, might grant me grace. But the sea is a wild and unpredictable thing, and she does not suffer herself to be forgiving of the errors of men. And so now I am bound to it, this place that is both the sea and farthest from it, condemned to haunt these waters until the very sea herself sets me free. I had hoped that the daughters Jones would be spared. I did my best to keep you both safe, but it would seem my sins are enough to have cursed us all. It would seem that she be willing to forget she ever loved any of us.”
“Daughters Jones?” I repeated, forgetting all the rest, emphasis on the plural.
“Aye,” he said. “For we three be here now, locked together in this cursed place, the Captain Jones and his two daughters, Merrin,” he placed a hand upon my shoulder, “and Evangeline.”
XVII
I could not speak. I could not breathe. My entire body was numb with shock and disbelief as I took in my father’s words, hearing them but not quite grasping their meaning as they reverberated against one another in my mind. Every time I received an answer to one question, a hundred more took its place, the mysterious coil that made up the truth of my existence ever tightening as things I thought I had known came unglued and contradictory, spinning and retracting like a giant, unbound top. I had always felt a connection between Mistress Dahl and myself, this of course, was indisputable. For as long as I could recall it had been an unrelenting bond, impossible to articulate but undeniably strong, though I could not say that it ever had felt familial, but more of a sort of reverence for a woman I had idolized as a goddess. I wondered now if she had been as ignorant to this knowledge as I had been, or if she had known all along, and whether she had felt the same unyielding pull to me as I had to her. I saw her again as she was in my earliest memory, golden hair reflecting the sunlight as she smiled at me across the sand-covered gravel of Isla Perla.
My sister.
How different so many things might have been, if only I had been privy to this secret. How I might have left the brothel and gone to her, how together we might have changed our fate so that neither of us would have ventured out into such strange and unknown waters. It was no matter now. I had left Isla Perla to find Evangeline, and now I had more of a reason for it than I had before—as much of a reason as Erik Winters himself. We sailed to find a woman we loved, and I had discovered so much more along the way than I had ever expected.
My father’s hand was still on my shoulder and he squeezed it gently, reassuringly. He did not speak again, although I wished he would. There was so much more still that I needed and wanted to know, even if I did not have the words to ask.
This was just as well as the white flame of Mister Dunn’s wild hair announced his sudden arrival on the upper deck, and then the rest of his wiry form appeared quickly below it as he scrambled up the steps. His movements were marked with agitation, and he made no effort to excuse his interruption. I knew at once that something had changed while I had been in private concert with Captain Davy Jones and away from the rest of the crew on the lower decks. Whatever it was had not been for the better, that much was plain to see from the look on the quartermaster’s face. The smirk had been replaced with a pained expression that twisted at his features. His eyes, shiny before with anticipation, had darkened into impermeable darkness and his skin was been relieved of its flush so that it was nearly as grey as my father’s.
“Jones,” he said, addressing both of us at once with a scratchy voice that was not his usual tone. I pushed myself up off the crate so abruptly that it scattered away behind me. My father was instantly beside me, one hand on the hilt of his weapon and the other rested protectively against the small of my back. “Both of ye be needed in the captain’s cabin, an’ quick. Tom Birch has taken a turn for the worst, and it ain’t be lookin’ like he has much time left.” His black eyes fixed on my father and there was a hint of knowledge in them that I was not party to. He was a man of sharp questions, and sharp solutions. “We act now or we lose the boy, Captain.”
The curtains in the Captain’s office were closed against the bright sun, blanketing the room in shadow except for the little flickers of light that came from the soft glow of a dozen or so candles stationed around the cot where Tom Birch lay. Winters had been sitting on a low stool beside the bed at Tom’s side, and he rose when we entered the cabin, his icy eyes moving from Dunn’s to my father’s to mine in turn with a look that demanded in no uncertain terms that something be done about the boatswain’s state. Then, he withdrew wordlessly to the other side of the room, walking solidly, heavily, across the floor. When he reached his desk he crossed his arms gruffly atop his chest and returned his cold eyes to Tom’s body, staring so intently that if it had been possible for him to will the man awake he would have woken instantly.
In the time since I’d been away, someone—presumably the doctor, Mr. Clarke—had covered Tom’s body in layers of heavy blankets so thick that all that was left to see of the man was the top of his sand-colored head where it rested on a bundle of soft cloth fashioned into a pillow at the edge of the cot. Even with his eyes closed, the unnatural stiffness of death had already begun to overtake his features so that a terse expression set across his face unlike one I’d ever seen on the boatswain in life. His color was a ghostly white and the pink of his lips had faded to a sickly, mawkish blue. The doctor was still bumbling about the bed in an unproductive, useless sort of way the same as he had been when I awoke, and was occupied currently with the business of tucking and retucking bits of stray fabric as if it had any purpose whatsoever. He was sweaty and distracted, and when his piggish little eyes finally lifted to see who had entered the room and he saw the great Captain Davy Jones, flanked on either side by Dunn and myself, his jaw came unhinged, the little pink hole hanging open amidst the company of several chins. He stared stupidly at us, his eyes stuck on my father like an animal bound for slaughter, and he attempted once or twice to say something, causing his jowls to waggle loosely in the space below his chins, but the only sound that resulted from his efforts was a hitch-pitched whining.
“Get out,” Winters growled savagely from the other side of the room, and this was all the permission the little man needed to instantly abandon his charge and scurry out, ducking alongside the narrow opening of the thin cabin door as he stuffed himself through it.
The doctor gone, I crossed the room in three quick steps and fell to Tom’s side, touching the backs of my hands to the skin of his face as I took my place on the stool where Captain Winters had previously kept watch. The flesh of his cheek was cool and clammy to the touch, like his body had been left to lie beneath a pool of cold water
though it was dry and did not even have a sheen of sweat to cool it. It felt like chilled wax and I recoiled when I touched it, but only for a second. I studied the stack of blankets for movement but they were piled so high and dense that I could not tell if they rose with his breath in the dim light of the room, and I shoved them away so that they fell heavily to the floor. I pressed my palms into Tom’s still chest and then my finger against his throat, but as I ran my hands across his body I could not find a pulse beating with life in his neck, nor could I feel the thump of his heart pounding within his chest. I leaned my head to his, and waited to feel an exhale that never came, and when I touched my lips to his I felt no breath and no life lingering with him. The stone on my hand flared with a peculiar, white light and then dimmed again, flaming hot and then cold where it sat on my finger.
“He’s dead,” I cried, the grief swelling within me, choking me, winding my heart so viciously within my chest that I could feel it tear as it ripped in two. “Tom Birch is dead.”
XVIII
I let out a sob and burrowed my head in the fabric of Tom’s shirt, gripping the thin cloth tightly in each of my fists as my breath came in great racking heaves against the unnatural stillness of his chest. With each inhale I could feel his body growing colder; I could sense the indescribable substance of soul lifting and quietly vacating his form, leaving behind nothing more than the husk of a body that was no longer required. The protocol of grief was as unfamiliar to me as were the behaviors of love, but there was a sharp stabbing pain in my chest that I could only assume was the shattering of my heart. No tears came, but I wouldn’t have cared if they did. There was no space for dignity when your heart was broken, and the fragments of what had been mine were being wrenched from my body with each anguished gasp, scraping and tearing at my throat as the noise of them filled the room.
