that, they raised a hearty toast and drained their glasses.
The former preacher was pleased to discover the brandy at the Spyglass much to his liking. He absorbed nearly a whole bottle himself, and then called for another. Bonnie Mary rose to get one, but Long John stayed her hand.
“No,” he said chivalrously, “let me.” He stood and plodded off to the cellar, the still-wooden part of him thumping heavily on the scarred floorboards as he went.
The former preacher stared at Long John as he walked, wondering if he could pick out the places in the wood where the pirate had cut off his tree roots in order to set himself free.
“Your father is really a remarkable man,” he said to Little Jane with a shake of his head.
Little Jane nodded absently, still caught up in the swirling currents of her own imagination, so deftly stirred by her father’s story. It would be years before she stopped having nightmares about being turned into a Mexican swamp cypress or a knobbly European bladdernut tree.
The new magistrate left on a packet ship the next day with his sack of gold to build his new church in an exotic place called Trenton, New Jersey. With the last in a long line of new magistrates gone, Long John and Bonnie Mary returned to ruling the island from their little ramshackle inn as they pleased.
Peace reigned again on Smuggler’s Bay. Well, for the time being, at least.
Chapter 1
What’s in a Name?
Several years and a few new magistrates later, Little Jane was long past the point of believing her father had once metamorphisized into a tree. She was twelve now and fairly content with most things in her world. Fairly content with most things, that is, except her name.
From her earliest days, Little Jane Silver knew the power a mere name could command. Of her parents it was said that the stoutest hearts in King George’s navy trembled at the names Long John Silver and Bonnie Mary Bright; the ruddiest complexioned sailor’s cheek paled upon hearing the tales of their brazen acts of piracy; even the mightiest of warships sat uneasy in her moorings at the slightest rumour of the return of the Pieces of Eight.
But Little Jane? Feh! How she’d grown to detest that name! Well, the “Little” part of it, anyway.
For Jane Irene Amelia Silver, it felt like a curse, one she’d been trying to shake for years. She was certain she’d had precisely a million and one conversations with her parents over the matter, yet nothing changed.
“Why must everyone call me that?” Little Jane would start with her parents.
“Call you what?” her mother would reply, spitting her quid over the railing.
“Little Jane. Why does everybody have to call me little?”
“Well, you are the smallest one aboard,” her father would point out helpfully and Little Jane would make a very frustrated sound in the back of her throat and say, “I’m not little anymore. I’m nearly as tall as Ishiro! Can’t you command them to call me something else?”
“What? Like Turnip?” her father innocently inquired.
“Colin the Cornish Dachshund?” asked her mother with equal aplomb.
“You’re not taking this seriously at all!” Little Jane would snap at them.
“Hmmm … Did I ever tell you the story of what happened to the little village of Cheesestink-on-the-Thames when its mayor decided to change its name to Happy Cottage-on-the-Wold to attract more visitors?”
“NO!” Little Jane would shout before stomping off to their quarters.
Whenever she brought the subject up, even if her father did not by some miracle have another unlikely story about the bad luck of changing one’s name to tell her, there always seemed to be some work or disaster that needed immediate tending to. “I’m sorry, love, the parrot’s thrown up on me coat again,” her mother would say, or “what are you doing yammering around here when that spanker sail is loose and like to go overboard if no one tends to it,” or “Oh my! I think we’re being fired on by the Dutch Navy!” and any other manner of silly things which Little Jane saw as blatant excuses for them to avoid the subject.
Then some annoyingly precise person might point out that Little Jane wasn’t the only one onboard with a nickname. There was “Sharpeye” Sharpova and “Lobster” Duncan and, of course, Long John and Bonnie Mary themselves.
However, Little Jane knew for a fact that Lobster Duncan had been a real lobster fisherman before taking up piracy. Sharpeye Sharpova was the lookout, which explained his moniker. As for Long John and Bonnie Mary’s nicknames, they were misnomers anyway.
She knew the name “Long John” had really been her grandfather’s name to begin with. Her own father wasn’t particularly long or tall. He had taken the name because of the notorious enemy-scaring reputation that came with it. Her mother simply called him “Jim,” which Little Jane supposed was his real name.
As for Bonnie Mary, stopping a scimitar’s stroke with her face fifteen years ago had not endowed her with the sort of conventional good looks one saw among the fashionable ladies of London, but as a youth she had indeed been quite a “bonny” or beautiful young woman, and charmed many a dashing young sailor, Little Jane’s father included.
Little Jane, on the other hand, really was little: little in size, little in years, little in experience, but worst of all, little in the respect and estimation of the crew. She was twelve years old now, but still no one treated her like much of a real pirate. If only someone would give her a chance to prove herself, she thought, she’d show them what a true buccaneer she was! Too bad her parents were unreasonably disinclined to give her a taste of anything even remotely fun or dangerous. Whenever it even looked like they might come under attack, it was always “Down below, Little Jane, and don’t let the door hit you in the bum on the way in!”
Despite her frustration with their too-cautious nature, she knew enough about her parents to realize that they had a few solid reasons for their hesitation. Her mother Bonnie Mary had not been young when she’d had her only daughter. Such was the capricious nature of life at sea that Little Jane was the only one of all Bonnie Mary’s pregnancies to survive the womb. To her parents, Little Jane’s survival was considered a precious miracle. She was a precious gift to be treasured and protected. It was just her misfortune that in their line of work, there was such a lot to protect her from.
It is well-known that the environment an individual grows up in is what he or she will simply assume to be the norm until the rest of the world proves otherwise. Even if, for example, you were raised in a flying soup tureen by a gaggle of performing geese, it might take years for the realization to dawn that you might have been raised in a highly unusual fashion indeed. In fact, you would probably assume such a life was yawningly ordinary, at least until you were older and had tasted a little of world outside.
By the same token, knowing little of life outside the Pieces, it was quite some time before Little Jane came to realize how truly singular her upbringing had been.
In Little Jane’s world, work and play followed the passage of the seasons, with the temperate and unhurried nature of much of life in the Caribbean. Her family spent the warm, sunny months
