captains—”
“No good ever come of having a girl-child onboard, I always says, but no one ever listened—”
“An ol’ fashion floggin’ oughta teach ’er!”
“SHUT YER TRAPS!” bellowed Captain Bright, face scarlet with rage as she stomped onto the poop deck, brought up from her charting work below to investigate the source of the sudden commotion.
“He’s right, Cap’n,” said Ned Ronk evenly to Bonnie Mary. “She oughta be flogged. If it were any one of us, we’d have to learn our lesson. This ship’s supposed to be a floating republic! With all respect, Cap’n Bright, you and Cap’n Silver ain’t kings and queens here. We all signed the charter! Equal parts o’ everything!”
“I tied it right! I did!” Little Jane protested, but even to her the words sounded pathetically small against the tidal wave of angry voices.
“Flog ’er! Flog ’er!” The chant rippled through the crew assembled on the deck.
Little Jane listened, feeling strangely detached. The thing was, she understood. Although she had no desire to be flogged, she could see their point. You had to be able to trust everyone on your crew to do their job or you’d end up at the bottom of the ocean. A weak link in the chain could easily mean death, and there was enough to deal with at sea without your shipmates proving unreliable.
In the face of it all, her resolve began to weaken. She wondered whether she really had tied the knot off properly. It was possible it hadn’t been tight enough. She should have double checked. She should have asked. She should have—
The terrible thunder of her father’s voice cut through her thoughts.
“She’s under my command,” growled Captain Silver. “My responsibility. You all want te flog someone? Flog me!”
With a dramatic gesture, Long John tore his shirt off and flung it to the deck. His broad torso shone with sweat. The tattoo of a skull in flames grinned back at the protesters, a prediction of the dire fate that lay in store for any man fool enough to cross the captain.
Although Little Jane had not initially seen her father remove the elegant mother-of-pearl handled duelling pistol from his belt, she saw it in his hand now. He held it loosely, as one would hold some meaningless accessory, but his show of carelessness fooled no one.
The entire ship grew silent. Waiting.
Unruffled, Ned glared back from the other side of the deck.
Little Jane heard the slapping of the waves against the hull clearly in the silence.
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
