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!”
