Little Jane Silver

by Adira Rotstein

  Then Long John was crossing the length of the deck toward the boatswain. He did not rush at Ned, but moved deliberately, the way one might approach a wild animal; he held the elegant mother-of-pearl-handled duelling pistol casually in his hand; the sword on his hip jingling ever so slightly in its scabbard to the rhythm of his uneven gait.

  Step-scrape. Step-scraape. Step-scraaaape. Step-scraaaaape. He stopped with half the deck still between them.

  He would go no farther, Little Jane knew, for this was the perfect distance for a pistol duel; Close enough to make your every shot go home, but still too far to let them lay a hand on you. Just as he’d told her to write down in her book.

  Stark, unreasoning terror gripped her heart, but her father’s eyes — blue as the heart of a flame — now looked as if nothing could be more certain than his victory.

  From her post at the bow, Bonnie Mary squinted down at the boatswain, a vicious sneer roiling across her scarred face. With a sickening thok-click she cocked her own flintlock rifle. A big gun for a little woman, as Mendoza had said. She would finish Ned off if her husband failed.

  “You’d like to have a go at me, eh?” Long John asked Ned Ronk lightly, as one would inquire after the weather. “Fifty paces at the next island we sees? Or shall we take it now? While the sun’s still out then?”

  And like the snuffing of a candle, Ned’s rebellious momentum was gone. “No, sir,” he replied with submissively downcast eyes.

  Bonnie Mary nodded, taking over where Long John left off, turning curtly to the rest of the men. “Get back ta work, ye seadogs! We got thirty-two more cannon to clean and that sun ain’t getting any higher! Hop along Lockeed, that cannon ain’t gonna grease itself!” she bellowed, giving the gunner’s mate a boot in the rear end for good measure.

  To Little Jane’s amazement, her mother roared out these orders as if nothing untoward had just transpired. Weaving in and out between the men, barking further directions, she seemed as calm and unflappable as ever. But upon looking down, Little Jane noticed, protruding from the sleeve of her mother’s jacket, the nasty gleam of a knife and remembered Mendoza’s words to her about her mother’s speed with a blade.

  Little Jane looked away with a shiver, only to notice an awful splash of red on the deck. Her stomach lurched as she took in the sight of her hands.

  “Rufus!” shouted someone in the distance, as Little Jane hit the deck in a semi-faint. “Hey, Rufus, get the mop!”

  Hours later, Little Jane sat alone in the cabin she shared with her parents.

  Her disposition had ventured into solidly lousy terrain. How she would have preferred a physical flogging to the verbal interrogation she’d had to endure that afternoon. How many times could she be asked exactly what happened with the cannon? And was she sure she’d tied the knot off right? How could one be absolutely sure? She’d done such knots so many times before that she no longer thought consciously when she made them.

  She sighed and let the gloom take her for a while.

  She was nearly asleep when she heard a familiar, uneven step in the companionway outside the room.

  “Papa!” she called out to him, worried he might think she was sleeping. Long John ducked his head through the door.

  “What’re you still doing up?” He pulled up a stool beside Little Jane’s box hammock bed and sat down.

  She tensed, anticipating the harsh words she knew she so richly deserved, but he merely gazed at her intently, as if to reassure himself she really was all right.

  Little Jane never looked at her father much straight on. Neither one of her parents ever tended to sit still long enough for that. But now, for the first time, she noticed that his eyes, which she always assumed were just simply blue, were actually as changeable as the sea in colour, first green, then blue, then a pale gold like the eyes of a cat.

  He took one of her hands and carefully felt the bandages, making sure they were applied properly.

  She gasped as he prodded a particularly tender part on the heel of her palm.

  “Hurts the blazes, don’t it,” Long John said philosophically.

  “Aye.”

  “Well, ye ain’t the first sailor to get rope burn and ye won’t be the last. Ya know, when I were a lad, got it into me head to rig a climbin’ rope off the ceiling of the Spyglass and cut me hands up something awful!”

  “Thunders is lost for good, ain’t he?” asked Little Jane before Long John could break into another story.

  “Aye. But what of it? It be just a cannon.”

  “Not just a cannon. A crack twenty-four-pounder.”

  “There be plenty more twenty-four-pounders in this world where Thunders come from. Ain’t but one o’ you, Little Janey,” he said, his voice cracking on her name. “Me and yer mum, we broke the mould for you.”

  Long John looked away and suddenly Little Jane felt odd inside, as she realized her father was trying not to cry. There was quiet in the cabin as Long John paused to master himself. A room with him in it was never silent, and it was his silence more than anything else that disturbed Little Jane the most.

  “You shoulda just let ’em flog me!” she blurted out.

  He shifted back to her and spoke again. “Naw, couldn’t let that happen, love. According to our charter it’s the bo’sun what does the flogging, excepting of course when it’s him that’s needing the punishing. You know that.”

  It frustrated her how everyone was always expecting her to “know” things no one had ever precisely told her. In practice, there was so little flogging done on the Pieces of Eight, she had remained unaware of the rules regarding it.

  “I wouldn’t want Ned to — well, let’s just say he got a heavy hand with these things. He don’t mess about,” Long John said with a shrug. “The threat alone’s enough to keep most of the crew in check.”

  Little Jane shivered at the thought of Ned Ronk with the cat o’nine tails in his meaty fist. She desperately wanted to tell her Papa about all she’d learned about him. The words nearly leapt out of her mouth then and there, but the image of that clasp-knife, the blade glinting cruelly in the sun, crammed them all back down again. Forgetting her injury, in her frustration she smacked the side of the box hammock with her hand.

  “OW!” As the pain subsided, it dawned on her that Ned wasn’t the only one she had to worry about now.

  “How’ll I ever face ’em all up on deck again?” she moaned. “They hate me! They all do!”

  Long John chuckled. “Honestly! I don’t know where you get these crazy notions. Some o’ these folks knowed ye when ye weren’t more than a twinkle in yer bonnie mother’s eye. Now I ain’t discounting your worries, but wounds heal and men forget quick, much faster than you do, you’ll see.” He kissed the tops of her dark braids.

  She nuzzled her head up against his broad chest like a kitten, yet somehow failed to get her customary feeling of comfort from this action. Instead, all she felt was immense frustration. How could someone understand both so much and so little at the same time?

  “Now then, what’s this?” Long John picked Ishiro’s sketchbook out from between her bedcovers. Little Jane forgot she had brought it into bed with her to look at the night before.

  “Oh, just something Ishiro gave me.”

  Long John flipped through a couple of pages filled with depictions of sailing life — jack tars hauling line, mending nets, scrambling up the rigging … but then he stopped, his gaze arrested by a particular image. Little Jane bent toward her father to see what had so captured his attention.

  In the drawing were three lads. Two were tousle-haired boys (cook’s apprentices, most likely, she thought), sitting skinning potatoes in a galley kitchen, an enormous checkered cloth spread across their laps and over their crossed legs to catch the peels as they fell. Their mouths were open as if talking, their faces animated. They looked very alike and Little Jane would have thought them twins if the one had not been so fair and the other so dark. There was a third, a handsome older boy who sat beside the
pair, tamping a plug of tobacco into his pipe, the corners of his mouth turned up in a smile, exposing two missing front teeth.

  It was odd to think that the people in the drawing were probably adults now, Little Jane mused. Or perhaps they had never existed to begin with and were simply creations of Ishiro’s imagination. Yet somehow, she thought not. The missing front teeth of the older boy with the pipe, the crinkles around the smiling eyes of the fair-haired boy as he peeled potatoes, the sidelong glance of the dark eyed boy with the long eyelashes, even the distinct pattern on the potato-peel-filled cloth lying across their laps, seemed details too real to be mere fiction.

  “Who were they?” she asked her father.

  “Friends o’ mine,” mumbled Long John, his words uncharacteristically wistful and indistinct. “We was shipmates.”

  “Really?”

  “It was a long time ago. Before the loss of the Fleece and the Newton even.”

  Little Jane nodded solemnly. She couldn’t remember when she had first learned of the two lost ships, but the stories had always been there, embroidering the edges of her existence. One couldn’t serve long aboard the Pieces without hearing at least a little about the Newton and the Golden Fleece, the Pieces’ sister ships from long ago.

  Yet for all that, Little Jane had as yet to form a coherent picture of how the great disaster had occurred. Conversations had a tendency of cutting themselves short when talk began of the Newton and the Fleece. Too painful to sustain for very long. She supposed now was as good a time to ask as any. Somehow, looking at her father just then, she felt that for once in his life he might actually give her a straight answer.

  “What happened to the Fleece and the Newton, Papa?”

  “You know, darling.”

  “I forget. Papa, please.”

  Truth be told, Long John wasn’t sure he had a coherent picture himself of what exactly had happened that horrible day and he had actually been there. He’d turned it over so many times in his head, trying to figure out just where he’d gone wrong, but no matter how many different scenarios he danced like puppets across his mental stage, he still couldn’t figure it. Each choice he came up with still demanded a sacrifice of one kind or another. He had chosen with his heart. His sweet Bonnie Mary lived as a result, but others had not been as fortunate.

  “Tell me,” coaxed Little Jane.

  And with a sigh, he did.

  Chapter 9

  The Story of the Newton

  and the Golden Fleece

  “Back then, most of us sailed the seas as privateers for Britain as she fought first the thirteen colonies of America, and then Napoleon Bonaparte, from France. A privateer could make a fortune in that heady atmosphere, and toward the end of them Napoleon Wars, Captain Tom Bright had all of three ships under his command — the Newton, the Golden Fleece, and his powerful flagship, the Pieces of Eight. The Newton, she were a beautiful Norwegian cat, with one hundred men to crew ’er, the Pieces a sturdy custom frigate with all the trimmings and 180 men, and the Golden Fleece a speedy barque provencale, lateen-rigged with sixty men strong.”

  “And were you her captain?” asked Little Jane.

  “Oh, no,” laughed Long John. “Me and yer mum was just first officers then to Captain Bright aboard the Pieces. Fetzcaro Madsea and Ishiro Soo-Yun ran the other ships.”

  “Ishiro? A captain?”

  “Aye. Why? You think he were just a cook all his life? His first officers were Jang Kyung-Jae, Alberto Hanif, and Bill Chadwick, Bright’s own hand-picked men. Great sailors all — strong of body and mind, cunning in tactics, ferocious in battle — and all gone to the depths at Anguilla over a cargo of sugar what never was there. It’s enough to boggle the mind, even now.”

  Little Jane knew this much already. Anguilla was the only island in the Caribbean they never ventured to in their smuggling runs.

  “Old Captain Thomas Bright,” continued Long John, “he had it on a reliable source a supply ship from St. Maarten be stopping at Anguilla before heading off to France to deliver valuable goods and munitions to the French army.

  “We had them letters of marque from the king giving us permission to attack French vessels and take their goods. We was legal for a while. See, all the English cared about was stopping the loot from falling into the hands of Boney’s army. What us privateers wished to do with it, well, that were our own business so long as they got their cut o’ the take.

  “Now out about ten miles by Anguilla was this little island. L’Isle de Feaundy, just a big old piece of rock with a few trees and a fancy name, not more’n a hundred feet square. But the currents round Anguilla would always take you by that place, long as ye sailed up from the south. So we hid the Pieces and the Newton behind the north side of the island. We hid and we waited.

  “The captain sent the Golden Fleece out on reconnaissance flying no colours, disguising her as a fishing vessel. She were to sail round and then come warn us when the French ship was spotted to tell us what her bearing was. The Fleece were a small ship, but fast on the water. We thought even if the French figured out her little ruse, the Fleece could outrun them easy.”

  “And did she?”

  Long John smiled ruefully.

  “He were fed a load of hogwash, poor Captain Bright were. The story of the supply ship from St. Maarten were planted all over the ports. It were a ruse ya see, a scheme by the French to lure us English privateers into a trap. And we fell for it, hook, line, and sinker.”

  Little Jane began to regret she’d encouraged her father to discuss the subject. As he spoke, his ordinarily jolly countenance took on a gravity few ever saw. He looked suddenly … old. To Little Jane, her parents were like the weathered timbers of the Pieces of Eight itself: ageless and durable. Yet suddenly, here he was, every year telling upon his sunburnt face.

  “The Fleece were destroyed and never made it back to warn the Pieces or the Newton. Sixty men gone down with her. The French sent one man o’ war up from the south all heavy with cannon. We turns to fight and, despite the surprise, the tide of battle seemed to be turning in our favour until another man o’ war snuck down from the north and attacks the Newton. We was so busy fightin’ the first ship what had come in from the south we didn’t notice the second till it were too late. She were a monster, she was, bristling with cannons and sharp-shooters and the like. And our poor men right near exhausted by then.

  “Both French ships took the Newton, and we made like we was to flee, leaving them to concentrate on ’er. Then we tacked with a quick wind and turned about. They was surprised when we had at them then, all seventy guns spewing grapeshot, exploding shells, ball-and-chain and what have you, raking the deck of both French ships and the Newton all at once.” He looked down into his lap, unable to meet her eyes. “We was fighting for our lives, we was. French ship from the north we shot full of holes and she turned tail and run. French ship from the south we blasted and burnt to kingdom come.”

  “So you won, then?”

  “We beat them, aye. But we ain’t won to my mind. We all lost — far, far too much.” He gave a sorrowful shake of his thinning grey curls.

  “So many good men gone down to the depths. The Pieces herself barely survived. It ain’t never settled right on me what was done to the Newton, though Ishiro Soo-Yun himself once told me it were the only way. But the Newton were crabmeat after that and most of the men gone. We only managed to pluck a handful from the bloodbath of that boat, and then most of them was wounded. And not killed by the French even, but gunned down by us, their own mates, in the crossfire!

  “It were me and yer mum was at the helm, ya know, captains of the Pieces at the tail end of the battle. Aye, it’s true. Old Captain Bright, your grandpapa, he were gut shot when the Pieces came back for her second round with the French ships. And he weren’t the only one. Lots more injured and like to die if we didn’t nip into port right quick. No time to go back looking for the remains of the Fleece. We set a course for the nearest British isle, using what tore-up s
ails and lashed-together masts we could muster.”

  “But what about Mama? I thought she were wounded in the attack?”

  “No. It weren’t then.”

  Little Jane raised an eyebrow. She’d never heard this part of the story.

  “The two of us sailed through the attack of the French ships just capital. Afterward, I ain’t thought much when yer mum went off with the rescue party to pick up them remaining boys what was left on the Newton. She wanted to go find Ishiro, if she could. Who’d a guessed there was one surviving French soldier left what had boarded the ship before the worst of our attack? The blackguard was hiding behind a cannon and sees her stroll up on deck and jumps her with a saber. It were him what struck her down. They brought her back to me—” His voice wavered. “She were alive, but she weren’t waking. It were a whole two days afore she woke up.”

  Long John’s speech was full-on trembling now, but he pressed on with the tale, seeming unable to stop. Overcome with emotion as he was, he still could not bear to let a story go unfinished.

  “Ishiro and thirty others was all what made it out of the wreck of the Newton and twelve died of their wounds in the weeks after. From the Pieces, we had fifty wounded and twenty-five what died later on. The Fleece went down with all souls, including her captain. He was a good man as ever I served by.

  “Ishiro came out of it the best a’ any of us, with no more’n a broke nose, but he ain’t never commanded another ship since that day.”

  “Why? It weren’t his fault, surely?”

  “I dunno. I think he just didn’t want the responsibility no more. I thought he were joking then, but he just turns to me and he says, ‘I won’t have a single man’s blood on me hands again. I ain’t havin’ it on me conscience — men dying on my command.’ Course he don’t seem to have much trouble with butchering up them fish for dinner, but he wouldn’t budge an inch on taking back his post as captain no matter how much I talked him up. And I prides meself on being something of a convincing man! Stubborn as a mule he is, and that’s a fact. Leastways, he’s me mate and he got his reasons. Not to mention, he’s a good cook. But it should’ve been him what is the Pieces’s captain, to tell it plain, not me and yer mum. We was only the second-stringers.”