“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.
