He would go no farther, Little Jane knew, for this was the perfect distance for a pistol duel; Close enough to make your every shot go home, but still too far to let them lay a hand on you. Just as he’d told her to write down in her book.
Stark, unreasoning terror gripped her heart, but her father’s eyes — blue as the heart of a flame — now looked as if nothing could be more certain than his victory.
From her post at the bow, Bonnie Mary squinted down at the boatswain, a vicious sneer roiling across her scarred face. With a sickening thok-click she cocked her own flintlock rifle. A big gun for a little woman, as Mendoza had said. She would finish Ned off if her husband failed.
“You’d like to have a go at me, eh?” Long John asked Ned Ronk lightly, as one would inquire after the weather. “Fifty paces at the next island we sees? Or shall we take it now? While the sun’s still out then?”
And like the snuffing of a candle, Ned’s rebellious momentum was gone. “No, sir,” he replied with submissively downcast eyes.
Bonnie Mary nodded, taking over where Long John left off, turning curtly to the rest of the men. “Get back ta work, ye seadogs! We got thirty-two more cannon to clean and that sun ain’t getting any higher! Hop along Lockeed, that cannon ain’t gonna grease itself!” she bellowed, giving the gunner’s mate a boot in the rear end for good measure.
To Little Jane’s amazement, her mother roared out these orders as if nothing untoward had just transpired. Weaving in and out between the men, barking further directions, she seemed as calm and unflappable as ever. But upon looking down, Little Jane noticed, protruding from the sleeve of her mother’s jacket, the nasty gleam of a knife and remembered Mendoza’s words to her about her mother’s speed with a blade.
Little Jane looked away with a shiver, only to notice an awful splash of red on the deck. Her stomach lurched as she took in the sight of her hands.
“Rufus!” shouted someone in the distance, as Little Jane hit the deck in a semi-faint. “Hey, Rufus, get the mop!”
Hours later, Little Jane sat alone in the cabin she shared with her parents.
Her disposition had ventured into solidly lousy terrain. How she would have preferred a physical flogging to the verbal interrogation she’d had to endure that afternoon. How many times could she be asked exactly what happened with the cannon? And was she sure she’d tied the knot off right? How could one be absolutely sure? She’d done such knots so many times before that she no longer thought consciously when she made them.
She sighed and let the gloom take her for a while.
She was nearly asleep when she heard a familiar, uneven step in the companionway outside the room.
“Papa!” she called out to him, worried he might think she was sleeping. Long John ducked his head through the door.
“What’re you still doing up?” He pulled up a stool beside Little Jane’s box hammock bed and sat down.
She tensed, anticipating the harsh words she knew she so richly deserved, but he merely gazed at her intently, as if to reassure himself she really was all right.
Little Jane never looked at her father much straight on. Neither one of her parents ever tended to sit still long enough for that. But now, for the first time, she noticed that his eyes, which she always assumed were just simply blue, were actually as changeable as the sea in colour, first green, then blue, then a pale gold like the eyes of a cat.
He took one of her hands and carefully felt the bandages, making sure they were applied properly.
She gasped as he prodded a particularly tender part on the heel of her palm.
“Hurts the blazes, don’t it,” Long John said philosophically.
“Aye.”
“Well, ye ain’t the first sailor to get rope burn and ye won’t be the last. Ya know, when I were a lad, got it into me head to rig a climbin’ rope off the ceiling of the Spyglass and cut me hands up something awful!”
“Thunders is lost for good, ain’t he?” asked Little Jane before Long John could break into another story.
“Aye. But what of it? It be just a cannon.”
“Not just a cannon. A crack twenty-four-pounder.”
“There be plenty more twenty-four-pounders in this world where Thunders come from. Ain’t but one o’ you, Little Janey,” he said, his voice cracking on her name. “Me and yer mum, we broke the mould for you.”
Long John looked away and suddenly Little Jane felt odd inside, as she realized her father was trying not to cry. There was quiet in the cabin as Long John paused to master himself. A room with him in it was never silent, and it was his silence more than anything else that disturbed Little Jane the most.
“You shoulda just let ’em flog me!” she blurted out.
He shifted back to her and spoke again. “Naw, couldn’t let that happen, love. According to our charter it’s the bo’sun what does the flogging, excepting of course when it’s him that’s needing the punishing. You know that.”
It frustrated her how everyone was always expecting her to “know” things no one had ever precisely told her. In practice, there was so little flogging done on the Pieces of Eight, she had remained unaware of the rules regarding it.
“I wouldn’t want Ned to — well, let’s just say he got a heavy hand with these things. He don’t mess about,” Long John said with a shrug. “The threat alone’s enough to keep most of the crew in check.”
Little Jane shivered at the thought of Ned Ronk with the cat o’nine tails in his meaty fist. She desperately wanted to tell her Papa about all she’d learned about him. The words nearly leapt out of her mouth then and there, but the image of that clasp-knife, the blade glinting cruelly in the sun, crammed them all back down again. Forgetting her injury, in her frustration she smacked the side of the box hammock with her hand.
“OW!” As the pain subsided, it dawned on her that Ned wasn’t the only one she had to worry about now.
“How’ll I ever face ’em all up on deck again?” she moaned. “They hate me! They all do!”
Long John chuckled. “Honestly! I don’t know where you get these crazy notions. Some o’ these folks knowed ye when ye weren’t more than a twinkle in yer bonnie mother’s eye. Now I ain’t discounting your worries, but wounds heal and men forget quick, much faster than you do, you’ll see.” He kissed the tops of her dark braids.
She nuzzled her head up against his broad chest like a kitten, yet somehow failed to get her customary feeling of comfort from this action. Instead, all she felt was immense frustration. How could someone understand both so much and so little at the same time?
“Now then, what’s this?” Long John picked Ishiro’s sketchbook out from between her bedcovers. Little Jane forgot she had brought it into bed with her to look at the night before.
“Oh, just something Ishiro gave me.”
Long John flipped through a couple of pages filled with depictions of sailing life — jack tars hauling line, mending nets, scrambling up the rigging … but then he stopped, his gaze arrested by a particular image. Little Jane bent toward her father to see what had so captured his attention.
In the drawing were three lads. Two were tousle-haired boys (cook’s apprentices, most likely, she thought), sitting skinning potatoes in a galley kitchen, an enormous checkered cloth spread across their laps and over their crossed legs to catch the peels as they fell. Their mouths were open as if talking, their faces animated. They looked very alike and Little Jane would