plan went awry he could not precisely say. Perhaps, he lamented, he lacked the proper Romantic temperament for such adventure. Then again, maybe it was the adventure itself that was lacking. Smuggler’s Bay was a nice enough island, to be sure, but one could hardly describe people who named their favourite native cuisine as fish and chips as exotic.
The magistrate’s mansion was a residence in the traditional Spanish style. To Villienne, who had spent the past few years living in one-third of a poorly ventilated apartment above a seedy Earl’s Court chip house, using Harolde the cheese wheel as both window insulation and the occasional meal supplement, it was a palace.
In London, Villienne had slept in the same blanket for four years without once washing it. Now he had servants whose sole employment was to keep him in fresh linens and frown critically over his ink-splattered shirt sleeves, chemical-stained hands, and threadbare clothes. It was all rather disconcerting. He spent his first few weeks as magistrate cowering in his mansion, worrying someone would realize what a fraud he was and escort him away.
Dovecoat, the old magistrate, dead thirteen years by then, had been popular among the citizens of Smuggler’s Bay. A rotund gentleman and regular patron of the Spyglass, Dovecoat could always be counted on to supply good English sweets to all the island children and to forget to collect the taxes.
Now there was a man, the islanders said, who, despite his vices, knew enough to leave all important matters concerning what was best for Smuggler’s Bay in the capable hands of its true leaders — the captains of the Pieces of Eight.
Shortly after the beloved Dovecoat’s death, the people of Smuggler’s Bay were promised a new magistrate by the British government. Unfortunately, the matter took a little longer than expected, what with the wars going on in Europe utilizing all available ships. By the time some bigwig in London remembered pokey little Smuggler’s Bay and a ship was cleared to drop off the first of the many new magistrates, the islanders had grown perfectly happy with governing themselves, making their own rules and ignoring taxes.
Of all the people who should have most minded the imposition of Villienne as magistrate, Long John, the unofficial president of the island, should have been foremost. Yet Long John actually felt a certain fondness for Villienne. He wondered if he was the only one who noticed how much the poor man looked the little boy lost.
Sometimes, from his perch up on the porch of the Spyglass, Long John watched Villienne wandering the streets of town as if searching for some recognizable London landmark, a man nearly as skinny as his own shadow, with straw-coloured hair and a furtive pink face, cautiously trying to suggest an improvement here, a possible adjustment there. He seemed genuinely shamed by the stony silence that invariably met his hopeful suggestions that the people pay one or two taxes, if they maybe felt like it, not today, say, but perhaps tomorrow, or maybe next week. Idly, Long John wondered how much longer Villienne would soldier on. He couldn’t help but pity a fellow who appeared so out of his natural element.
Of course, pity was the last thing a man in Villienne’s position wanted. Obedience? Yes. Respect? Certainly. Fear? Acceptable. But this demented politeness depressed him. At least if the people were angry with me, Villienne reasoned, it would mean my existence was of some consequence to their lives. But the rogues at the Spyglass just ignored him, which was ever so much worse.
Sometimes he fantasized about kicking all the pirates out and repopulating the island afresh with some solid, law-abiding stock, Puritans perhaps, or some other group with an inordinate fondness for monochromatic clothing and silly hats.
Realistically, though, he couldn’t banish the pirates. He had no army at his disposal — only his disapproving servants and Dovecoat’s former mistress and her two daughters. Besides, in one way or another, every job on Smuggler’s Bay was connected to piracy. To make war on the buccaneers would be to incite revolt and destroy the tiny island’s even tinier economy.
And as much as he hated to admit it, he’d miss the stories at the Spyglass.
So things stayed as they were. The islanders grumbled to Long John and Bonnie Mary about Villienne, and Villienne complained to his superiors in his letters, but nothing much changed.
That night, Little Jane sat through another of her parents’ meandering discussions concerning the Villienne question, until her patience finally wore thin. “Stuff this Villienne person! What about letting me in on a boarding party!”
“That’s the final straw!” said Bonnie Mary. “Go to bed!”
Resentfully, Little Jane skulked away from the dinner table. But she did not retire to bed. Instead, she doubled back and headed to the small room off the kitchen that housed Ishiro, the ship’s cook. Other than Jonesy, Little Jane, and her parents, Ishiro was the only one with a permanent room at the inn. Jonesy called the room “Ishiro’s Cave,” and it did look something like one. Its dimensions were odd — a tiny square of a floor, only slightly bigger than Ishiro’s bedroll, high walls, and a ceiling on level with the ceiling of the Silvers’ own second-floor bedroom.
Little Jane understood why Ishiro liked this place. Sitting on the bedroll, she felt like she was in a cozy cocoon. On all sides of her, in towering stacks, were Ishiro’s drawing books, paintings, and boxes of exotic objects. Souvenirs of nearly six decades of travel and adventure rose all the way up from the floor to the ceiling.
Within those carefully stacked volumes, Ishiro had captured a portrait of every sailor who’d ever crewed on the Pieces of Eight, as well as the Newton, the Jeong Se-min, the Golden Fleece, and the Flying Squid.
Pages fragile with age told of a youth spent in the fishing villages of Korea and Japan and the bustling ports of Hong Kong. Others showed Jane’s parents as young newlyweds and Little Jane herself as a drooling toddler.
As far as she knew, there was no order to a book’s placement in the stacks. Even within the sketchbooks themselves, drawings were not strictly chronological. Taking care not to topple the stack, Little Jane extracted one and began paging through it.
“Ahoy there, Little Jane,” Ishiro said as he entered the room. “What have you found today?”
Little Jane held up a sketchbook for his inspection. “Aaah,” he said, and thumbed through the pages for her. People with black silken hair and dark eyes gazed back at her across the ages, while ships with curiously shaped sails plowed the waves of inky seas.
“How do you make it all look so real?” Little Jane marvelled.
“Observation,” said Ishiro, in his lightly accented English.
“What?”
“Study and practice, of course, but always I observe,” he replied. “I look closely at what I am drawing. I look at how others draw, too. And then … then I am learning.”
“Oh.” That didn’t sound particularly difficult. Little Jane wondered if there was some other trick to it that Ishiro was keeping to himself.
Suddenly, he stopped flipping through the drawings, his gaze arrested by a particular picture near the middle of the book.
Little Jane got up, thinking it impolite to sit and watch his private reverie —although not, as you may have noticed, to enter his room without knocking or touch his personal possessions.
“Where are you going?” asked Ishiro.
“Sorry, you
