Little Jane Silver

by Adira Rotstein

  Little Jane stared at her scratchy blue camlick blanket and thought about how some of the other sailors treated Ishiro, how they lorded it over him, loudly demanding their food on the double. She knew the crewmen would never dream of speaking to her mother or father that way. Then she thought about how much she didn’t know about Ishiro or about her own mother and father even. She wondered what more she had never bothered to ask and what everyone else always simply presumed she knew.

  “Finally, yer mum and me drag our sorry carcasses home to the Spyglass—” continued Long John.

  This part, Little Jane remembered. “Aye! Jonesy told me! He said the men fell to the left and right of her in admiration, so eager was they to prostrate themselves at her feet because she was a real true hero — a noble captain ready to sacrifice herself for the lives of her crew!”

  “That’s what Jonesy says, is it?” asked Long John wryly.

  “Well, uh, more or less,” answered Little Jane, unsure of what he was driving at.

  “Little Jane, the only man in history what ever fell before yer mama she didn’t cut down herself with a sword or pistol were me, and that’s only account of I got me peg leg stuck between a pair of paving stones. Don’t let him make us out to be better than we was, love, for Jonesy’s younger and he don’t remember the way I does. We was never heroes and them folks at Smuggler’s Bay didn’t exactly bow down to us either — in fact, they near killed us for what a mess we’d made of things — their dear ones brought back wounded or dead, with nothing for wages. Can’t say as I blame them. Smuggler’s Bay don’t have a big population to begin with. In case you ever wondered why there be so few children your own age back on the island — well, that there’s your answer.”

  Little Jane nodded. She had never even thought about it.

  “Not enough men and plenty of families set on leaving. They was bad times, those days. How I ever kept this misbegotten hide o’ mine out of the fire, I ain’t too sure.”

  “What was Mum like?” she asked. “Back in those days, I mean.”

  “Much the same as she be now,” he said with a smile, happy to be turning to an infinitely more pleasant topic. “Magnificent. Your mum, she’s got an adventurer’s heart with an explorer’s soul and a mind as bright as her name to match. And beautiful, Lord! She got herself a light on in there, Little Jane, and, you know, it glows.”

  Little Jane blinked. “What? Like a lamppost?”

  “Maybe,” said Long John. “I ain’t much of a poet, but I do love ’er. I have since I were young as you.”

  Little Jane thought about this, tried to visualize her parents as children, tried to imagine herself falling in love with someone, but could not picture it. Maybe it was just the strange heat of her bandaged hands distracting her. She unfolded them, placing them down flat on the surface of her thighs, trying to ease the hot ache in her palms.

  Her father sighed and patted her on the arm. “You do something what’s never been tried before, Little Jane, it ain’t right not to expect a few cock-ups. It just shows you’ve lived.” He kissed her on the forehead above the welt where the rope had struck her. “Wear it with pride, love, wear it with pride.”

  After her father left, Little Jane lay in bed, letting the hammock rock her back and forth to the motion of the waves. It didn’t bother her that her injuries would leave scars. A real pirate always bore plenty of marks from battle, brawling, and shipboard accidents. She just wished she could’ve got hers as a result of some brave action, rather than a stupid mistake. Instead of recalling a glorious battle or duel of honour whenever she looked at her scarred hands or forehead thereafter, she’d be reminded of the time she had humiliated herself and drawn the ire of nearly everyone onboard. She wished she could just hide under Ishiro’s drawing books at the Spyglass until all the other sailors forgot she had even been born.

  Thinking of the towering stacks of books back at the inn reminded her of the picture her father had been so drawn to. The sketchbook on her lap was still open to the drawing of the three boys in the galley. Idly, she wondered what had happened to them at Anguilla. Had they died with the others on the Newton or the Fleece? Had they survived to take pride in their battle scars attained through circumstances more honourable than hers? Or had they simply not gone to Anguilla at all?

  She’d ask him about that another day.

  At last, she drifted away into pleasant dreams where Ned Ronk and his clasp-knife held no sway, and the Newton and Golden Fleece sailed once more.

  Long John mulled things over as he stood on the gently rolling deck surveying the crew at work on the rigging. It was late for such adjustments, but all the excitement of the day had taken up valuable time. The glowing blue of twilight was slowly seeping down to the orange stroke of sky that surrounded the setting sun.

  Long John watched from the shadows now, paying close attention to which men Ned Ronk talked to, which seemed the friendliest to him.

  Somewhere in the back of his mind, Long John heard his father’s warning: “Be careful who ye wrong in life. Choose your enemies with care.” His father, Long John Silver the First, was one to know it, too. He had wronged some bad enemies in his day and lost much by it.

  The situation with Ned puzzled Long John. He thought himself a patient captain, a good captain, a just captain. He and Bonnie Mary had been fully within their rights as captains to whip the boatswain. There were plenty of captains at sea who would have hung a man for less cause than Ned Ronk had given him. The man certainly deserved it. Long John knew if one of his old captains had chastised him so, he would’ve accepted the rebuke and strived to prove himself through hard work and obedience until he was back in his senior officer’s good graces again. Yet Ned had gone in the opposite direction.

  Hadn’t Long John once thought of Ned Ronk as a friend instead of a just a simple ship’s boatswain? Hadn’t he advised Ned on how to tack a three-masted square-rigger into the wind in a gale and what kind of gift to get the girl he fancied on her birthday? Now he wondered if during all that time Ronk hadn’t really been secretly laughing at him, chuckling up his sleeve at his stupid, gullible captain sharing a hearty jest with his mates at old Silver’s expense. Picturing the scene in his mind, Long John felt his blood begin to boil. If Ronk wasn’t afraid of his captain’s wrath yet, Long John would show him what the full force of his anger felt like. His large hands clenched into tense, powerful fists with the strength of his emotion.

  But then he paused.

  The time ain’t right, Jim. Not yet. Better he should wait to unleash his fury at Ronk when the Pieces of Eight was in port again. At least then there would be less risk of a mu — He dare not even think the word mutiny.

  Chapter 10

  The Powder Room

  After a day below decks, boredom and hot weather drove Little Jane topside. She was apprehensive about what reception she’d receive from the crew, but the attitude of the other sailors toward her came as a pleasant surprise. It was as if whatever monster of fury had raised its head the preceding day had subsided with the change in the wind. Instead, she was overwhelmed with generous offers of rope burn remedies from the practical to the bizarre.

  Though returned to the good graces of her shipmates once more, Little Jane still felt unusually quiet and withdrawn. She observed. She waited. She tried not to scratch under the bandages on her hands when they itched. She read Admiral Hillingbottom’s book of fun-filled exercises. Though she couldn’t write at the moment, she saved all she read and saw in her mind, carefully repeating it to herself at night to make sure she retained all the important parts in her memory for her book.

  After a week and a half of painful cleansing and fat based salves the blisters on her palms deflated, shrunk, and scabbed over. The cut on her forehead had sealed on its own without stitches and was already beginning to fade.

  In a pair of thin cotton gloves she returned, stiff-fingered to fencing with weaponsmaster Mendoza, learning navigation with her parents, and helping Ishiro in the kitch
en.

  Jezebel Mendoza was surprised by Little Jane’s new seriousness of purpose, and the increasing accuracy of her strikes. Talking with Bonnie Mary, she praised Little Jane’s change in demeanour.

  For her part, Bonnie Mary was not so sure it was a positive change. She had liked Little Jane better the way she was before — loud, sweet, and light-hearted. This new seriousness, Bonnie Mary felt, did not quite suit her daughter. Bonnie Mary had known enough dour, quiet, serious people in her own youth to last a lifetime, and thought these qualities highly overrated.

  Bonnie Mary was born in Liverpool to a woman named Nancy Lee, a barmaid at the Happy Kreyfish Inn. Nan had been Captain Tom Bright’s girl once, but being a sailor, he never lingered anywhere for long. He was not even aware of Mary’s existence until years later, for one could not address a letter to a ship. The little Bonnie Mary remembered of her mother was good, though not the kind of good one heard about in church. Rather, the kind of good that laughed at her own jokes, hugged her daughter in the face of disapproving strangers, and never gave a toss whether a man was a loser or a lord, as long as he had a nice smile. Her mother wasn’t the least bit strict about anything and spent her money and her favours freely.

  Unfortunately, when Nan died, Mary was shuffled off to the northern village of Teviothead to live with her relatives. Her grandparents and aunts and uncles had never left their tiny town and remained scandalized by her mother’s defection to Liverpool, a city they called “scarlet with sin.” They were stern, pious people, who enjoyed long sermons, frugal living, and sewing ugly monochromatic dresses with high collars and too many buttons. To Bonnie Mary, it seemed like they lived by the principal that “If It Feels Good, It Must Be Bad.”

  When Mary’s relatives spoke of her sailor father at all, they called him “that horrid dark man your mother sinned with.” Confused, young Mary imagined the father she had never known as a frightening figure that hovered about in a billowing black sheet.

  What her mother’s family never once considered was that Tom Bright might actually return for his daughter, once he learned of her existence. If they had, they might have left her a little better prepared.

  Mary remembered sitting on the floor of her aunt and uncle’s little cottage, being introduced to her father for the first time, gobsmacked by his utter ordinariness. Why, he could’ve been any other seaman she’d seen at the pubs and docks in Liverpool back when her mother was still alive. There had been plenty of other sailors with skin the same coffee-brown colour as his and wiry black hair of the same texture, though none with quite so mischievous a gleam in his eye, nor a hat with quite so ostentatious a feather. When he smiled at her, she saw the gleam of several gold teeth, a secret acknowledgement of the kind of needless extravagance uniformly frowned upon in Teviothead, where vanity was strictly forbidden.

  To say he was not a bit like the awful man of her imagination was understatement. Nor was he a bit like the dour, gloomy relatives of her present reality, whom she now saw as out and out liars for deceiving her about her father’s character. In fact, Tom Bright reminded her of no one so much as her mother — a vivid, tropical parrot standing out against the grey English sky. He wore clothes like her mother did, too — everything brightly dyed (though she assumed that unlike her mother’s garments, his were not gifts from customers who couldn’t pay their tabs in regular coin), from his green striped waistcoat to a red sash fringed in gold and black boots so shiny she could see her face in them. She even smelled eel pudding on him somewhere, her mother’s very favourite! She remembered a phrase she’d once read, that “to look on him was to smile.”

  She smiled at him then, and with the clear instincts a child may lay claim to, she turned her back on the liars who’d made her tame her curls until they fit into a perfectly spherical bun, and set off for a new life with her father, one she hoped would involve the ingestion of plenty of eel puddings. He was the first to ever call her “Bonnie Mary” and she took the nickname to heart, for it pleased an innate sense of happy vanity in her that had far too long been denied.

  Whatever sorrows and heartaches Bonnie Mary had experienced over the years since that moment, and there had been many, it was true, she still did not count the price she’d paid too great. Had she the choice to make again, the only thing she conceded she might have done differently all those years ago, was to run from her relatives’ property, instead of walk.

  Most sailors’ worst nightmares are of storms and drowning, but not those of Bonnie Mary. The dreams she dreaded most were those that saw her back in that clapboard cottage, slowly going insane for lack of freedom and entertainment, clothed in scratchy, grey homespun dresses with an infinite number of tiny black buttons. In those nightmare visions of monotony and offensive costume design, she would sit forever in a straight-backed chair, bowed over a plain wooden table, one that had never known the gentle touch and lovingly carved embellishments of a certain talkative sailor. In that place her ears would never hear fall a single word of love or laughter, let alone the “devilish” music of her precious fiddle. Without the arms of her daughter or husband to warm her, she’d sit in the shivering cold, her eyes screwed tight to a needle pushing and pulling its pointless way in and out of some ridiculous homily concerning the benefits of knowing one’s proper place, unaware, in that mirthless place of cold and gloom, that her world could ever have been any different.

  She shuddered at the thought of it.

  It is not surprising, then, that when certain people close to her grew unnaturally serious, Bonnie Mary tended to get anxious. She could not help but notice that Long John seemed uncharacteristically sombre recently, and even the crew had taken to singing fewer sea shanties than was their custom. Listening to the old tunes they used to keep pace in their work, she wondered if she was the only one who could hear how lacklustre they sounded. The atmosphere felt ominous somehow, like that crackling in the mist just before the sky rips apart and a hurricane comes down. She felt it, as surely as she felt her sheathed knife against her thigh below her clothes. Like a hurricane, this odd tension in the air seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere all at once. And like a hurricane, too, in the end Captain Bonnie Mary Bright would be powerless to stop it.

  That evening Bonnie Mary mentioned her reservations to Long John.

  He chalked the crew’s low spirits up to boredom. Though they had not been at sea long, as maritime voyages went, if boredom was indeed the culprit of the crew’s widespread malaise, then they were in deep trouble.

  Of all the enemies a captain may face at sea, boredom is one of the most difficult to combat. Ask any ship’s captain and he’ll tell you straight off he’d much rather deal with scurvy. At least one can suck a lime for that.

  Bonnie Mary and Long John decided a little light weapons practice might provide some entertainment and improve crew morale. Swords were all good and well at close range, but for the long-range tactical response a musket on one’s shoulder was vastly preferable. With no ships in sight to attack at the moment, the crew had to be kept in fighting form through target practice, too, and so the floating buoys with their fluttering paper targets were put out.

  They bobbed about in the ocean now, still attached to the Pieces by their mooring ropes. Long John had a standing bet with the crew that anyone who bested him in shooting practice was to receive a ration of double biscuits and grog for a week. So far, only Bonnie Mary and Sharpeye Sharpova had ever done it, and that at very close margins indeed, but this never prevented the rest of the crew from trying.

  Long John, Changez, Lobster Duncan, and twelve others took their turns first. The paper targets were pulled in, the holes counted and new ones put out.

  Long John leaned back against the foremast to prepare for a nice relaxing smoke. He hoped he wouldn’t win by too much this time. He turned out his pockets before realizing he’d left his pipe in the cabin.

  “Little Jane—”

  “Yes, Papa — Sir!” said Little Jane, happy to be called upon for somet
hing.

  “Fetch me pipe, from the cabin.”

  “Aye-aye, sir,” she said and caught the key ring he threw to her.

  She put her small hand through the brass hoop of the key ring. Wearing the tangle of keys like a bracelet, she scampered off below decks.

  Little Jane went down to their cabin in the stern of the ship and unlocked the door. Her father’s pipe took some finding. Shots continued to go off overhead as she searched. She finally discovered the elusive object languishing in the corner by the rubbish bin where it must’ve landed after taking a tumble off the desk.

  Walking through the narrow passage midships Little Jane noticed she was not alone below decks. Just down the narrow hall she thought she spied Ned Ronk, going about some business, completely unaware of her presence. She watched as he locked the door to the powder room, the chamber where the guns and gunpowder were stored, before climbing up the ladder to the main deck.

  She could think of no good reason for the boatswain to be down there when he was supposed to be topside watching the shooting practice.

  What sinister purpose can he be up to? she wondered. As soon as her nemesis was safely out of the hold, Little Jane went to the powder room to see.

  The door was locked as always. She tried a few of the keys from the bunch her father gave her, and was unsurprised to see them fail. There must’ve been forty keys or more on that ring. Not to mention that the locks on the Pieces were often rusty. Even with the right key, Little Jane failed to open them more often than not.

  So Little Jane settled for peering through a knothole in the wood of the door. From this perspective she could make out some of the objects in the shadowy chamber.