John really was within his rights to call it his supper table, as he’d carved the table himself and was really quite proud of his workmanship).
“She do have a point, Jim,” mused Bonnie Mary.
“When I were your age I would’ve never dared call me father a liar!” snapped Long John.
“It ain’t true,” Little Jane repeated, “’cause Changez said you said your foot was took off by King George III when his sword slipped while knighting you for saving his life. And I know there’s no such thing as Australian alligators anyways, ’cause they only have crocodiles in Australia, and it even says so on page fifty-seven of the animal book you bought me in Boston!”
“Point taken,” said Long John with a weary smile and a twinkle in his eye. “But where does it say a man can’t improve a little on history?”
Little Jane gritted her teeth in frustration.
“Come now, you mustn’t take it so seriously,” said Bonnie Mary gently. “You’ll get your chance to be on a boarding party one day — just not yet, love.”
This settled the affair, according to Little Jane’s parents, and they moved on to talk of other things.
“Did Jonesy tell you?” Long John asked.
“Tell me what?” asked Bonnie Mary.
“That new magistrate, Villienne, paid a visit to the Spyglass today.”
“I thought we’d have got him packed off by now,” muttered Bonnie Mary in consternation. “We’re slipping, Jim. He still trying to collect those blasted taxes? How go the plans for running him off?”
“Not good, I’m afraid,” said Long John, not sounding too sorrowful about it. “But you know, I think we may be goin’ about this the wrong way, Mary.”
“And how’s that?”
“Weeeell,” began Long John, “Villienne ain’t such a bad fellow. A bit of a nutter, perhaps, but ain’t no harm in him. I come to thinking, Mary, maybe we should stop trying to drive him off. I talk to him right, he might come around to working with us, ’stead of against.”
“Don’t be naive, Jim. He’s an Englishman. Remember, I lived with them and I’m telling you, an Englishman ain’t happy till he’s got everyone else under his thumb.”
“Now, that ain’t fair,” began Long John judiciously. “Me father were an Englishman. And yer mother, too.”
“Well, even if she were, she weren’t his sort.” Bonnie Mary frowned. “All them magistrates is the same — they just hang about where they ain’t wanted, sticking their noses in our business, tellin’ us ‘savages’ what we ought to do, and taking our hard-earned gold without a thing back in return. What were he up to today, may I ask?”
“Didn’t rightly explain himself,” admitted Long John, “but he was carryin’ a mighty big bag of lichen.”
“Now, y’see! That’s just plain off, ” said Bonnie Mary with a frown. “It is! What does a toff like that want with a bunch of plants, I’d like to know.”
Little Jane wondered the same thing as she pushed her own lump of salted green lichen around on her plate. Why would anyone in their right mind purposely seek out the most unappetizing foodstuff on the island, instead of sensibly fleeing the noxious green lichen in terror and disgust? But then, she thought, as the salty green substance made its way down her gullet, perhaps Villienne really was as strange as everyone in Smuggler’s Bay said he was.
It behooves us now to speak briefly about the Honourable Almost-Doctor Alistair Florence Virgil Villienne, the island’s sole legal judge, doctor, tax collector, and representative of the king. Mr. Villienne could only command so many positions at once by dint of the island’s small population and tiny size. In fact, Smuggler’s Bay was so small that a man could stroll round the perimeter of the island in a single day and still have time for dinner and a rousing game of charades.
Almost-Doctor Alistair Florence Virgil Villienne never set out to be the sole representative of the British Empire on an obscure Caribbean island. Actually, if anyone on the island had bothered to ask him, he might have explained that his great ambition in life was to be a famous poet, or barring that, a scientist.
Of the most popular poet and heartthrob of the age, Lord Byron, it was said, “He is mad, bad, and dangerous to know.” Of the completely unknown poet and aspiring explosives chemist Almost-Doctor Alistair Florence Virgil Villienne, it was said, “Who? Villi … what now?” — if anything was said at all.
Despite this, Long John, in his lifelong mission to know something about everyone who inhabited his island, had discovered a few things about the new British magistrate’s life prior to his arrival in Smuggler’s Bay that he found quite fascinating. Then again, there was usually something in everybody’s life that the garrulous captain found fascinating. It was part of the reason he enjoyed talking to people so much. And as luck would have it, of all the people who enjoyed good talk in Smuggler’s Bay, Villienne, long starved for intelligent conversation, proved to be nearly as unstoppable a talker as Long John himself.
Villienne quickly explained to the attentive pirate that he had been born to an old land-owning family in England’s Lake District. Unfortunately, this old land-owning family no longer actually owned any land thanks to one uncle’s poor decision to sell the family estate in order to corner the market in Belgian cuckoo clocks. Sadly, as anyone familiar with the great Belgian cuckoo clock bubble of ’73 is surely aware, such speculations swiftly met with disaster.
Thus, the youthful Villienne was, unlike most young men of his rank, forced to deal with the bothersome matter of selecting a respectable profession to earn his bread. With his budding interest in natural science, his parents thought he might do well as a physician, and sent him off to medical school in Edinburgh. Unfortunately, a medical career did not take, and young Villienne soon found himself in a London flat shared with three other young men and a mouldy wheel of cheese they named Harolde. Alistair Florence Virgil Villienne proceeded to earn money by tutoring indifferent young scholars. All his remaining time he spent busily writing reams of verse and stories that no one wanted to read.
Although this manner of existence might have horrified many a poor man of noble name, it did not trouble Villienne: nourishment, shelter, ink, and paper being all he thought he required.
But to craft a child from ink and paper is no easy task, and to send one’s paper children out into the wide world is more difficult still. Week after week he would kiss them on their inky little heads with all the love and hope in his desperate poet’s soul. And week after week he would discover that his poems had been put to use as a client’s birdcage lining or water-closet paper. It began to try even his most patient of spirits.
Slowly, he came to realize that he could not live a life shut up in his room simply churning out verse. He was starting to repeat the same words over and over. Worse yet, he was growing increasingly obsessed with finding a word to rhyme with orange.
His parents suggested the diplomatic service and Villienne realized that a journey to foreign lands might be exactly what he needed to rekindle his imagination. He dreamed of splendid new people and landscapes to write about, things no poet before had ever put to pen. Success was sure to be his! He could already hear the ink-stained
