Hadn’t Long John once thought of Ned Ronk as a friend instead of a just a simple ship’s boatswain? Hadn’t he advised Ned on how to tack a three-masted square-rigger into the wind in a gale and what kind of gift to get the girl he fancied on her birthday? Now he wondered if during all that time Ronk hadn’t really been secretly laughing at him, chuckling up his sleeve at his stupid, gullible captain sharing a hearty jest with his mates at old Silver’s expense. Picturing the scene in his mind, Long John felt his blood begin to boil. If Ronk wasn’t afraid of his captain’s wrath yet, Long John would show him what the full force of his anger felt like. His large hands clenched into tense, powerful fists with the strength of his emotion.
But then he paused.
The time ain’t right, Jim. Not yet. Better he should wait to unleash his fury at Ronk when the Pieces of Eight was in port again. At least then there would be less risk of a mu — He dare not even think the word mutiny.
Chapter 10
The Powder Room
After a day below decks, boredom and hot weather drove Little Jane topside. She was apprehensive about what reception she’d receive from the crew, but the attitude of the other sailors toward her came as a pleasant surprise. It was as if whatever monster of fury had raised its head the preceding day had subsided with the change in the wind. Instead, she was overwhelmed with generous offers of rope burn remedies from the practical to the bizarre.
Though returned to the good graces of her shipmates once more, Little Jane still felt unusually quiet and withdrawn. She observed. She waited. She tried not to scratch under the bandages on her hands when they itched. She read Admiral Hillingbottom’s book of fun-filled exercises. Though she couldn’t write at the moment, she saved all she read and saw in her mind, carefully repeating it to herself at night to make sure she retained all the important parts in her memory for her book.
After a week and a half of painful cleansing and fat based salves the blisters on her palms deflated, shrunk, and scabbed over. The cut on her forehead had sealed on its own without stitches and was already beginning to fade.
In a pair of thin cotton gloves she returned, stiff-fingered to fencing with weaponsmaster Mendoza, learning navigation with her parents, and helping Ishiro in the kitchen.
Jezebel Mendoza was surprised by Little Jane’s new seriousness of purpose, and the increasing accuracy of her strikes. Talking with Bonnie Mary, she praised Little Jane’s change in demeanour.
For her part, Bonnie Mary was not so sure it was a positive change. She had liked Little Jane better the way she was before — loud, sweet, and light-hearted. This new seriousness, Bonnie Mary felt, did not quite suit her daughter. Bonnie Mary had known enough dour, quiet, serious people in her own youth to last a lifetime, and thought these qualities highly overrated.
Bonnie Mary was born in Liverpool to a woman named Nancy Lee, a barmaid at the Happy Kreyfish Inn. Nan had been Captain Tom Bright’s girl once, but being a sailor, he never lingered anywhere for long. He was not even aware of Mary’s existence until years later, for one could not address a letter to a ship. The little Bonnie Mary remembered of her mother was good, though not the kind of good one heard about in church. Rather, the kind of good that laughed at her own jokes, hugged her daughter in the face of disapproving strangers, and never gave a toss whether a man was a loser or a lord, as long as he had a nice smile. Her mother wasn’t the least bit strict about anything and spent her money and her favours freely.
Unfortunately, when Nan died, Mary was shuffled off to the northern village of Teviothead to live with her relatives. Her grandparents and aunts and uncles had never left their tiny town and remained scandalized by her mother’s defection to Liverpool, a city they called “scarlet with sin.” They were stern, pious people, who enjoyed long sermons, frugal living, and sewing ugly monochromatic dresses with high collars and too many buttons. To Bonnie Mary, it seemed like they lived by the principal that “If It Feels Good, It Must Be Bad.”
When Mary’s relatives spoke of her sailor father at all, they called him “that horrid dark man your mother sinned with.” Confused, young Mary imagined the father she had never known as a frightening figure that hovered about in a billowing black sheet.
What her mother’s family never once considered was that Tom Bright might actually return for his daughter, once he learned of her existence. If they had, they might have left her a little better prepared.
Mary remembered sitting on the floor of her aunt and uncle’s little cottage, being introduced to her father for the first time, gobsmacked by his utter ordinariness. Why, he could’ve been any other seaman she’d seen at the pubs and docks in Liverpool back when her mother was still alive. There had been plenty of other sailors with skin the same coffee-brown colour as his and wiry black hair of the same texture, though none with quite so mischievous a gleam in his eye, nor a hat with quite so ostentatious a feather. When he smiled at her, she saw the gleam of several gold teeth, a secret acknowledgement of the kind of needless extravagance uniformly frowned upon in Teviothead, where vanity was strictly forbidden.
To say he was not a bit like the awful man of her imagination was understatement. Nor was he a bit like the dour, gloomy relatives of her present reality, whom she now saw as out and out liars for deceiving her about her father’s character. In fact, Tom Bright reminded her of no one so much as her mother — a vivid, tropical parrot standing out against the grey English sky. He wore clothes like her mother did, too — everything brightly dyed (though she assumed that unlike her mother’s garments, his were not gifts from customers who couldn’t pay their tabs in regular coin), from his green striped waistcoat to a red sash fringed in gold and black boots so shiny she could see her face in them. She even smelled eel pudding on him somewhere, her mother’s very favourite! She remembered a phrase she’d once read, that “to look on him was to smile.”
She smiled at him then, and with the clear instincts a child may lay claim to, she turned her back on the liars who’d made her tame her curls until they fit into a perfectly spherical bun, and set off for a new life with her father, one she hoped would involve the ingestion of plenty of eel puddings. He was the first to ever call her “Bonnie Mary” and she took the nickname to heart, for it pleased an innate sense of happy vanity in her that had far too long been denied.
Whatever sorrows and heartaches Bonnie Mary had experienced over the years since that moment, and there had been many, it was true, she still did not count the price she’d paid too great. Had she the choice to make again, the only thing she conceded she might have done differently all those years ago, was to run from her relatives’ property, instead of walk.
Most sailors’ worst nightmares are of storms and drowning, but not those of Bonnie Mary. The dreams she dreaded most were those that saw her back in that clapboard cottage, slowly going insane for lack of freedom and entertainment, clothed in scratchy, grey homespun dresses with an infinite number of tiny black buttons. In those nightmare visions of monotony and offensive costume design, she would sit forever in a straight-backed chair, bowed over a plain wooden table, one that had never known the gentle touch and lovingly carved embellishments of a certain talkative sailor. In that place her ears would never hear fall a single word of love or laughter, let alone the “devilish” music of her precious fiddle. Without the arms of her daughter or husband to warm her, she’d sit in the shivering cold, her eyes screwed tight to a needle pushing and pulling its pointless way in and out of some ridiculous homily concerning the benefits of knowing one’s proper place, unaware, in that mirthless place of cold and gloom, that her world could ever have been any different.
She shuddered at the thought of it.
It is not surprising, then, that when certain people close to her grew unnaturally serious, Bonnie Mary tended to get anxious. She could not help but notice that Long John seemed uncharacteristically sombre recently, and even the crew had taken to singing fewer sea shanties than was their custom. Listening to the old tunes they used to keep pace in their work, she wondered if she was the only one who could hear how lacklustre they sounded. The atmosphere felt ominous somehow, like that