Long John told was ever the same twice.
In this fashion, Little Jane’s world continued to unfold with a certain amount of predictability until the winter of her twelfth year. It was at that point that a simple comment, uttered from the idle lips of a thoughtless fabric seller, changed the course of her life forever.
Chapter 2
The Comment
On the surface of it, “The Comment” was really a simple thing, but like a single pebble ripples an entire pool of still water, sometimes a comment made thoughtlessly in passing can have the most astonishing effect on a person’s perception of the world, altering it much more than the speaker ever meant it to.
The rainy season blew fiercely through Smuggler’s Bay that year, wild and torrential. Little Jane strutted about the docks on errands for her parents, pleased with herself and the mighty ship she belonged to.
At home in the Spyglass, all was warm and cozy. She lent Jonesy a hand when she could, waiting tables or cleaning up. There were many trinkets and pieces of bric-a-brac in the inn’s tavern room in need of dusting — souvenirs from distant lands, trophies of notorious provenance, and odd, elaborate crafts fashioned from bits of ship’s equipment by bored sailors during long months at sea. Each one had its own story and there was always something new to amuse her and attract her eye.
It was a rare rainless day in Smuggler’s Bay, the first market day of the season, when Jonesy took Little Jane to the village to restock their supplies. With the Piece’s crew entirely occupied with shipboard repairs, Little Jane was the only one who could make the trip.
The weekly market in Smuggler’s Bay was a colourful thing. Within an hour of sunrise, the sandy village square would be nearly full to bursting with craftspeople, musicians, and foreigners. Many of the stalls belonged to villagers Little Jane knew. They traded their fish, livestock, crops, spirits, and handicrafts to visiting sailors. Some foreign merchants were regulars to the market, too, and Little Jane recalled their wares from years before. There were always a few new stalls at the market for Little Jane to look forward to, some featuring peddlers of exotic goods from places so distant they were unfamiliar even to a well-travelled young salt like her.
As Little Jane bounced along in Jonesy’s rickety cart, she held the two copper coins her mother had given her tightly in her hand, dreaming of purchases yet to be made. Before long the smell of food was drawing the donkeys by the nose and Little Jane knew they had arrived.
Little Jane left Jonesy absorbed in some tedious haggling over a cask of wine and scampered off on her own to see what she could buy with her two precious coppers.
She strolled by a man selling keepsake boxes made from shells and past a group of girls peddling fish-bladder perfume. She chatted with the old parrot woman, danced with the drummers, had her palm read by the wizened tarot card master, and sampled some barbequed squid tentacles before discovering a new stall filled with bright fabrics, fluttering restlessly in the breeze. Little Jane wandered among the curtains of blowing cloth. Woven through the most expensive samples of the material were threads of silver and gold that gleamed like rays of pure sunshine. She held the shimmering material up against her cheek, entranced.
Suddenly, a large hand clamped onto her wrist and yanked her forward.
“Hey-yah! Watcher’ doing there?” growled its owner.
“Just looking at your wares,” said Little Jane, extricating herself from the man’s hard grasp. “I … I didn’t know you ain’t supposed to touch ’em.”
The fabric seller scoffed, showing just what he thought of that claim. “Well, you just skedaddle, girl! Likes of you kin’t afford ’em, anyhows. Can’t have no urchins about driving off legitimate business! Now, scat!”
“I beg your pardon?” Little Jane paused, confused, wondering if she’d heard correctly.
“I said, get outta here, ’fore I call the magistrate on ya for stealin’,” sneered the man.
Her honour inflamed now, Little Jane drew herself up to her full height. When she spoke, it was in imitation of how she had once heard her mother talk to a truculent American naval captain.
“Do you know to whom you speak, sir?” she demanded, blasting the impudent gentleman with such a show of contempt she wondered that he didn’t shrink into the very folds of the fabrics he sold.
The merchant remained unfazed. “A girl in pants,” he said, smirking. “And dirty, patched pants at that.”
“I,” said Little Jane, “am a crewmember of the Pieces of Eight. The most frightsome ship to sail the seven seas! The buccaneer scourge of the Royal Navy! The piratical colossus of the ocean tides! The Minotaur in the maze of the naval brigade! The jewel in the belly of the titan of—”
An odd sound made Little Jane stop in the middle of her speech. She listened, with growing confusion. She opened her mouth to speak again, but the sound continued.
Now, Little Jane had heard many unpleasant sounds in her life, but neither the crack of a beam of wood as it connected with the head of a hapless ship’s carpenter, nor the shriek of a purser’s mate when a parcel of gunpowder exploded in his hand, had so much power over her as the sound she now heard.
Can you guess, gentle reader, what the sound was?
It was laughter. The fabric seller was laughing and he was he was laughing at her.
In the face of his ridicule, Little Jane’s proud words crumbled into dust.
“You, a pirate?” the peddler sputtered, tears of mirth streaming down his face. “You’re nought but a child … and a girl-child at that!”
Little Jane faltered for a reply until she remembered what her mother had once told her: Always meet a cruel word with politeness. It is sure to bewilder people.
So she smiled with a composure she did not feel and said, “I assure you, sir, I am a crewmember of good standing.”
“Oh, yeah? Then what’s yer station?”
She was about to speak when she realized, to her shock, that she did not know the answer. Did she even have a station?
“Good God, you must be the cabin boy’s cabin boy!” The peddler laughed heartily. His assistant and the other peddlers at an adjacent table joined in.
“Why, if they hire any more like you, the Admiralty’s sure to pack up and go home!”
“That’s a good ’un, by gum, a good ’un!” commented a horse-seller’s apprentice, barely bigger than Jane.
Little Jane looked around at the laughing merchants incredulously. No one had ever said anything of the sort to her before. She felt tears prick the insides of her eyelids and with a further wave of humiliation realized she was going to cry.
Cry! Had she not seen her mother pull an enormous splinter of wood out of her own thigh with barely a grimace? Or her father sail a prizeship to port in a storm with but a company of two men? And did either one of them cry?
No! Of course not!
But
