Little Jane Silver

by Adira Rotstein

  Your grandma, however, she weren’t no shrinking violet. She lets his windy little speech blow and buffet her around some, but stands resolute, sturdy as a cliff by shore. “He ain’t sickly,” she tells him stoutly, “and he ain’t deformed nor half-witted neither — no more so than anyone else in this house, Mr. Fancy John Silver. So why don’t you just take a look at him, before you goes on and says anything!”

  “Oh, you better believe I’ll take a look at ’im!” says your grandfather. So branded pirate and supposed murderer he were, wanted in thirteen countries ’round the world and captured by none, over he goes to the crib and looks at me.

  Well then, little me, I looks right back at him, cool as you please. Course, I were too young then to know to be afraid. Then he goes on and prods me small leg as if he had the right. And I goes and thinks to meself, “Now then, sir, you may be a right salty pirate and wanted in thirteen countries and all, but I don’t take kindly to be waked up from a nap without so much as a by-your-leave, not to mention being pinched for freshness like a ham at market. I thank you, sir, to keep your hands to yourself.” But because I were only a little thing then and couldn’t speak proper yet, I did the next best thing to show him what I felt: I peed on him.

  I’m not sure what your grandma thought the captain would do then. Wring my little neck I suppose, but he only just stared at me a moment, all covered in wee as he was. And she stares frightened at him as he is growing redder by the second, but me? I ain’t batting an eyelash.

  But then right suddenly, he starts out laughing. Mean as he were sometimes, you know, once you got your grandpa started in on a laugh, he just couldn’t stop. At long last, when he’d dried his hands and wiped the tears from his eyes, he turned and said to me, “Son, you is only the second bloke in history what’s ever got the drop on old Long John Silver, so I thinks it fitting to name you after the first.” And so he called me Jim, after that first bloke what got the drop on him, whoever he was.

  We was friends after that. After a few years passed and it seemed clear to him I be booking meself a permanent room at the Spyglass, he cut the handle off an old ship’s steering wheel to make me a wooden leg, so’s I might walk about and make meself useful to your grandma. I tried to be, I guess, though seems I only got into more trouble the wider I could range.

  Long John put down the pencil with a small smile as he recalled trailing his mother about the inn on a piece of ship’s steering wheel, tipping over a butter churn to get at the tasty goods inside. Thinking of this soon brought him back to memories of Little Jane when she was small.

  He felt the touch of her tiny hand in his as they strolled along the boardwalk of some foreign harbour. She would ask him an endless stream of questions as they went. So many inquiries; so much curiosity and hunger for knowledge in that piping treble voice of hers. He remembered the awe he had held her in then, for having given him the rare gift of seeing the world anew as she did, all the wonderful details he had edited out himself over the years, all that precious beauty unnoticed for so long thanks to the necessary streamlining of the adult mind.

  Even thinking of it now, all these years later, and in such a horrible place, was enough to light a little candle of warmth within him. Further Little Jane stories came back to him now, as his mind drifted with a smile upon the sea.

  Chapter 18

  Tale of a Tub

  When Little Jane was three years old she came upon the realization that green was the most aesthetically pleasing colour in the entire universe and decided from that point onward she would wear nothing but green. Her parents were utterly baffled. They could tame the billowing ocean waves, sail through hurricanes, and brave the wrath of numerous French naval convoys, but no matter what they tried, they could not bend the will of one small three-year-old girl, infatuated with the colour green. They shouted, they pleaded, they tried to bribe her with a small tortoise made of wood, but she refused to wear her clothes and woe betide the person who tried to force her to wear what she did not want to, for as a toddler, Little Jane was a confirmed biter.

  Finally, Captains Bright and Silver came to Ishiro for a bit of wisdom. “Don’t fret so. Once she gets up on deck and feels how cold the breeze is against her skin, she’ll jump into her clothes lickety-split, whether they be green or polka-dotted, you mark my words,” he said.

  So Captain Bright and Captain Silver picked up Little Jane and plopped her naked upon deck. One hundred and forty sailors stared down at her, but tiny Little Jane was neither ashamed nor concerned. She luxuriated in the pleasant warmth of the sun-drenched planks, enjoying the unusual sensation of the bare timbers against her naked bottom as she played with a highly amusing bit of rope.

  After about a week of such behaviour, they were finally forced to give in and rob a carefully chosen ship of fabric merchants.

  All of which goes a ways toward illustrating Little Jane’s capabilities in the realm of sheer stubbornness. And if there was ever a time to be insanely stubborn, Little Jane realized, now was certainly it.

  She had come to see the magistrate Villienne and by thunder she was going to see the magistrate, if she had to wait on his doorstep for a week! He had to come out sometime, and when he did … well, she’d be there. No diabolical twins in strangely starched pinafores would keep her away!

  This course of action decided, Little Jane sat down upon the front step to wait and pick the rotten cucumber peels out of her hair.

  Fifteen minutes turned into a half hour, a half hour turned into a full hour and still Villienne did not come. As the sun sank behind the hills, Little Jane sagged against the wall of the mansion. She was so tired, so very tired, that she leaned her head against a stone planting pot and fell asleep.

  Some time later, Villienne arrived home through the back door, missing Little Jane at the front door entirely. He wiped the mud off his shoes, ate his supper, changed into his lab coat, and went to work in his laboratory, never realizing that all that time there was someone desperately waiting to speak to him sleeping on his front veranda.

  The twins, who were the only ones in the mansion to know Little Jane had arrived, assumed she’d long since left and spent the night in their room arguing over who’d been the more instrumental in chasing her off.

  One advantage to Villienne’s life on Smuggler’s Bay versus his previous existence in London was his newfound freedom to engage in chemical experiments without worrying about blowing up anything important. It was to this end that he’d converted Governor Dovecoat’s old, unused greenhouse into a top-of-the-line laboratory.

  He’d always found chemistry a delight. It was the only medical art he truly relished in college, possibly because it didn’t involve dealing with copious amounts of blood, grave robbers, or leeches.

  His previous series of flats in London had been cramped and highly combustible, necessitating frequent changes of venue. In his new greenhouse, however, were scads of space in which to study the fascinating chemical properties of dozens of undocumented native plants. An added bonus was that if he needed further samples he could simply pick them up by tramping around the island instead of sending off to an expensive chemist’s shop for them.

  Several months ago he’d discovered a new species of green lichen growing on a rock behind the town’s chip house privy. Since then he’d managed to distill a chemical compound from the lichen which appeared to have some interesting properties, not the least of which was the tendency to explode in a very pleasing manner at high temperatures.

  Distilling compounds and analyzing new samples was long work and the day had been a particularly fruitful one for gathering new specimens. In anticipation of a particularly lengthy night of thrilling experimentation, Villienne took a pot of potent Jamaican coffee off with him to his lab to help keep his wits sharp.

  After chopping, mixing, burning, and testing for absorbency, he ran the entire mixture of a new lichen sample through a pipet until it liquefied once more. Then he tried to dissolve it in acid.

  Whi
le waiting for the concoction to vaporize, he worked on his new poem, “Ode on a Spot of Grease on an Urn,” hoping it would be more successful than his recently rejected effort, “The Ancient Marinara Sauce,” inspired by an old sailor’s tale he’d heard down at the Spyglass Inn.

  He had only just thought of a word to rhyme with “overwrought” when a movement outside the greenhouse caught his eye. Looking through the glass wall, he noticed a ghostly face pressed up against the pane. He was so shocked that he proceeded to cry out with ear-splitting terror.

  He was met with a similarly terrified scream in reply as Little Jane jumped away from the pane of glass and stumbled backward into a raspberry bush.

  Villienne leapt back from the wall, overturning his ink well, which dribbled into the chemical compound currently bubbling over the lab’s burner. Little Jane’s eyes opened wide as a small but extremely loud explosion briefly lit up the interior of the glass room with a burst of green smoke. Then everything in the greenhouse went dark.

  “Hello?” Little Jane called out. “Magistrate! Is that you? Are you all right?”

  She heard the sound of coughing. The door opened and the greenhouse belched forth a cloud of sulfuric stench along with a soot-covered man. The magistrate’s hair, Little Jane observed, was still its old pale yellow colour, only now it stood straight up from his head.

  Little Jane braced herself for the scolding of her life, preparing to run like the wind should any orders of execution issue forth from Villienne’s mouth, but the magistrate merely pulled off his protective goggles, blinked his watery blue eyes curiously at her, and shouted in her face, “Who the deuce are you!”

  “Jane Silver,” she mumbled in fright, wondering what punishment one usually received for attempted combustion of a servant of the British Empire.

  “Who?” trumpeted the magistrate. She now noticed his benign expression did not quite match the loudness of his voice, and realized, with belated guilt, that he must have gone temporarily deaf from the explosion.

  “The daughter of Captains Long John Silver and Bonnie Mary Bright, sir!” she roared back at him.

  “Oh, Little Jane,” he yelled at her. “Good Lord, but you look a sight! I nearly didn’t recognize you!”

  Not that you look much better, she thought.

  “What in the blazes are you doing here? Has there been a shipwreck?”

  “No. Yes. Well, yes and no, but that’s not important now. What’s important is that Ishiro needs a doctor!”

  “Who?” he shouted.

  “Ishiro! The cook!”

  “That Chinese fellow?”

  “He’s actually Korean!”

  “What?” screamed Villienne.

  “But I think he was born in Japan! It’s a bit confusing.”

  “Taipan?” asked the bewildered magistrate.

  She didn’t have the energy to explain it all right now at the top of her lungs, so instead she just shouted, “He’s down at the Spyglass and very sick. We were hoping you might come down and help him, sir!”

  “Of course, of course. But what of you, child? Are you ill?”

  “No, sir. I’m fine. Just tired.”

  “Hmm. Well, I can’t very well go calling like this.” He glanced down at his blackened clothing. “I dare say I’ll make the patient more ill than he already is. Why don’t you come inside with me and have a hot cup of tea while I dress?”

  He held out his hand and she took it.

  It was an odd sort of hand to her mind. Her mother, who knew about such things, having lived in England as a child, said a real English gentleman had hands of lily white so you could tell he’d never done a day’s physical labour in his life.

  Villienne’s hands were white alright, but also stained yellow, green, pink, black, and purple, and speckled with curious scars, different from the ones a body got from honest work such as hauling rope or hooking fish.

  She wondered what sort of sinister projects he really got up to in that greenhouse. Maybe he wasn’t a real gentleman at all, but an imposter! She shivered. It was certainly getting dark out. Not a good time to try to make a run for it. If she planned to return to the Spyglass at this time of night, she’d better be in possession of a decent lantern or risk stumbling off a cliff in the dark. She realized, belatedly, that Jonesy was probably beside himself with worry for her now. She hadn’t told him where she was going.

  “Ah, here we are,” sang out Villienne, blissfully unaware of Little Jane’s qualms. He opened the backdoor to the mansion and stood upon the doorstep.

  She waited politely, but he didn’t go through.

  He flapped an iodine stained hand toward the interior and smiled gently. “After you, milady.”

  The narrow hallway yawned dark and foreboding before her. “Uh, why don’t you go in first?”

  Villienne shrugged his shoulders in a scattering of green dust and stepped inside.

  They entered the mansion, interrupting the male servants of the household at a game of cards. The red-haired servant looked instantly familiar to Little Jane, but she held her tongue.

  “Oh, sorry to disturb you fellows,” said Villienne, as McCauley the groom tried to hide the cards and Redd, the butler, tried to squirrel away a bottle of the former governor’s prized ’77 Chablis under the table.

  Redd blushed the colour of his name as the magistrate picked up the wine bottle. “Capital work, Redd!” Villienne congratulated him. “I’ve been looking all over for this.”

  He held the bottle down for Little Jane to see. Only then did she notice two pale, round objects floating around at the bottom.

  “Nothing better for preserving dead tissue when formaldehyde is unavailable than a nicely aged white wine, wouldn’t you agree?”

  Little Jane felt slightly queasy. “Dead tissue, sir?”

  Redd and McCauley balked.

  “Scottish Puffin gonads,” answered Villienne cheerfully. “Totally forgot I still had them kicking around. I’ve been meaning to experiment on these for years, but other things just keep getting in the way.”

  Redd and McCauley began to look a little green around the gills.

  “Ah, well,” said Villienne briskly. “McCauley, see my horse is saddled and a lantern got. I must ride into the village to tend to a patient. Redd, make sure the young lady here is given some tea and biscuits. Oh, and I’ll call in Bertina and the girls to get a bath and bed ready. This poor child looks downright exhausted!” With that, Villienne went upstairs to search for his doctor’s bag and a pair of only mildly stained trousers.

  Little Jane was still trying to decipher the part about puffin gonads when she realized someone had just suggested she … take a bath.

  She turned to the two male servants, busy washing their mouths out with dish soap. She went up to the red-haired man.

  “Harley?” asked Little Jane.

  Redd/Harley glanced at her. “Well Jeee-osephat! Look what the cat dragged in!”

  “What are you doing here?” she asked him.

  Redd/Harley scuffed his shoe on the rug and looked down. “Well, ah, you know, after the little incident with the potatoes …”

  Wait! She did remember an incident where one of the crew was caught pinching potatoes from Ishiro’s larder, a New Yorker with red hair. The man was slated to be flogged, but jumped ship and was never seen or heard from again.

  “But that must’ve been two years ago!” exclaimed Little Jane.

  “Three and a half, actually,” corrected Harley.

  “We all thought you’d drowned, and here you’ve been hiding out on this very island, working as a servant all this time!” marvelled Little Jane.

  “No, I’ve only been here since just after Villienne came to the island,” corrected Harley. “Before that I was trying to make a go of it as a musician.”

  “Oh. How’d that go?”

  “It’s a hard business to break into and that’s the truth,” he answered ruefully, with a sigh for the mandolin he’d lost to a card shark somewhere on th
e road between Rosarito and San Gabriel Mission.

  “But why ever did you leave the Pieces? It was such a small offence. Surely, Ishiro and my folks would’ve let you off the hook.”

  “Aye, they would’ve, but that bosun Ronk would’ve flogged me rotten. Ain’t you ever seen Ned Ronk when he gets real mad?”

  “You have no idea!” exclaimed Little Jane. Before she knew it, she was telling him the story of Ned’s tragic sabotage of the Pieces of Eight. As she told the tale, Harley prepared the tea. The hot water almost never made it to the teacup as Harley grew increasingly incensed with Ned’s betrayal of his former shipmates, threatening to spill it all as his hands trembled with rage.

  By the time Little Jane got to the part about her and Ishiro leaping from the burning ship, tears were running down her face.

  It was at that moment that Bertina, the housekeeper, showed up, flanked by her two darling daughters.

  Bertina took one look at Little Jane and nearly had kittens.

  This child was without a doubt the filthiest creature she had ever seen. What colour it might be beneath the dirt, whether a boy or a girl — all were indecipherable to the naked eye.

  It was true. Little Jane’s hair hung down in matted clumps. Her clothes had been shredded and torn to rags in her escape from the Pieces and what she now wore were Wayne’s coarse boy’s garments, which were several sizes too small. Worst of all, she stank with an unholy combination of exploded lichen soot, sweat, fish, and salt water, with a whiff of octopus ink thrown in for good measure.

  Bertina looked down at the sparkling floor of her perfect kitchen with a growing sense of dread. Indeed, her previously pristine tiles were now marred by dirty, child-sized footprints. Had Bertina not been under strict directions to treat the child courteously, she would have beaten her soundly.