by Sally Watson
He got no further, for Jade had caught him in a rapturous hug that nearly deposited both of them in the box.
“Bon,” he said at last, when they had both recovered their dignity and self-possession and were extremely matter-of-fact just as a precaution. “We say au revoir now, and you shall go home and let the poor Miss Turner out of her room and take your punishment and presently sail away. But if you stay too long, ma petite, I think I shall then go traveling myself, perhaps to Jamaica, for this place will very much bore me when you are not here to make trouble. Va-t-en! Go away, quickly!”
CHAPTER FOUR
The Pearl
The Pearl clawed her way southward under reefed topsails, a stiff westerly wind singing in the rigging and laying the little merchant ship over like a toy boat in a pond. She climbed the long rollers diagonally: first the starboard bow rose and tilted, pointing its bowsprit at the sky. Up and up, until with a twisting lurch at the crest she began rolling massively over the other way, pitching dizzily as the wave passed under the stern, the bow nosing down and over until Jade—delightedly clinging to the fo’c’sle rail—stared almost straight down into the foaming sea. The lovely thing was that it was never done. One corkscrew complete, another swell started it all over again.
“Cor, you shouldn’t be up here, Mistress Lennox!” It was Tom Deane, nicest of all the crew, staring at her with wondering eyes. “The quarterdeck’s for officers and passengers.” He waved a tanned hand at the raised and railed deck at the stern, “Fo’c’sle’s for us common sailors.”
Jade turned and looked at him pertly, liking the cleft chin, peaked eyebrows, fair hair streaked and bleached to pale gilt by the sun, and smooth-muscled arms—and especially his air of astonished admiration. Jade had never before been admired by a young man. The boys in Williamsburg had a number of emotions toward her, but esteem was not one of them. This was a novel sensation— and pleasant.
“I like it here in front,” she told him simply. “I mean, in the bow. On the fo’c’sle.” She frowned slightly over all these new nautical terms, in which port was left and starboard right, and abaft behind and abeam to the side. . . . “Tell me if I’ve got it right,” she commanded Tom. “That part of the deck down there—I mean between the fo’c’sle and quarterdeck—is the waist; and there’s the foremast in front and the mainmast amidships and the mizzenmast in the stern; and those crossbars up there that the sails hang on are the yards; and the ropes that hold it all up are the rigging; and those nets you climb up are the shrouds; only the ropes going across—the ones you stand on—are the ratlines . . . and . . . Oh yes, the helm is the steering bit, and the hatches are the openings to the hold, where we stow cargo. What else?”
Tom laughed and twinkled down at her from his very blue eyes. “What about motions and directions?” he suggested, swaying easily to the slanted deck.
Jade moved away from the rail a bit, to prove she could balance as well as anyone. “Rolling’s from side to side like a cradle, and pitching’s front and back like a bounding dolphin, and the quarter is between abeam and astern, and we’ve got the wind on our starboard beam now, and windward is toward the wind and lee is away from it, and you must never spit to windward or get blown onto a lee shore.” She smirked at him, openly pleased with herself. “Now teach me the sails.”
The Pearl swooped again, over a particularly large roller. Jade, giggling, had to grab the rail to keep from falling right across the deck, and even Tom staggered slightly. Spray lashed over them. “You sure you wouldn’t be more comfortable on the quarterdeck?” Tom repeated, concerned.
Jade cast a wickedly amused eye astern, where her father was altogether failing to enjoy the heaving of the ship. In fact, he was invisible in his cabin, with Joshua attending him. Jade strongly suspected that he was doing some heaving of his own, and she felt a most unfilial sense of triumph. Mere inferior female, was she? She giggled at Tom Deane.
“There’s only one place I’d rather be than here,” she told him with truth, and lifted her face to stare longingly aloft, where the great pyramids of sails reached up, up, sweeping wide circles against the blue sky, and where the nimble shape of a sailor climbed the shrouds toward the topgallant masthead. How she longed to put on her breeches and follow!
“You wouldn’t!” said Tom, staring at her.
“I would! Why wouldn’t I? Don’t you like it up there?”
“Yes, well enough I suppose.” He looked faintly surprised at the notion. “Unless the ship’s too lively, of course, or a blizzard’s blowing. Only—one doesn’t expect a girl— But then, I dare say any girl who actually enjoys this sort of thing, when any respectable landlubber loses his dinner and wishes he’d stayed home—” He chuckled.
Jade chortled back and gave another unsympathetic glance at the quarterdeck. “I just wish we’d have a storm,” she declared, trying to imagine waves like mountains coming at them.
“Oh, do you, now?” It was the harsh, satiric voice of one Rory MacDonald, the second mate. He towered above her, balanced easily to the lurching of the ship, sneering down at her with those unpleasantly ringed and slanted blue eyes of his, so different from Tom’s mild and friendly ones. “Daft female! You’d change your mind quickly enough,” he went on with obvious relish at the idea. “I can see you now, green and tossing your biscuits and bawling for land!”
Jade turned to face him, her back firmly against the rail as the Pearl shoved her bow into the air once more and hung there quivering before the downward heave and corkscrew. It would be most embarrassing to lose her balance in front of this arrogant and ill-tempered boor, whose face looked as if it had been carved in a hurry with a blunt knife. And she felt herself rather at a disadvantage, anyway, because he had been through storms at sea and she hadn’t. She surveyed his crooked and oversized nose, the thatch of black hair and eyebrows, with an air of lofty disdain while she considered how best to counterattack. Defense wouldn’t do here; she knew that instinctively. All very well for fencing, but in argument it merely weakened one’s position immeasurably, besides being undignified. No, she needed a scathing, crushing retort, something that would instantly puncture his arrogance. . . .
“Your hair needs cutting,” she said.
It was not one of her better efforts. He looked disgusted and Jade couldn’t honestly blame him. Even Tom seemed uncomfortable—but this was probably because he would have liked to come to Jade’s defense, and didn’t dare. To oppose one’s superior at sea was mutiny, punishable by hanging from the yardarm should the captain choose— and Captain Narramore was a very severe disciplinarian. Not that Jade would have wanted Tom to fight her battles, of course, but this was no comfort to Tom. He stood looking at her miserably, while Jade tried to recover her lost ground by arranging her face into an expression something between hauteur and tolerant amusement.
MacDonald looked at her—infuriatingly—as if she were a bellicose mouse. “No use sticking your chin out at me,” he told her. “For one thing it’s the wrong shape, and for another, it makes you look ridiculous. All those airs for a scrawny, impudent wee wretch of a lass who needs spanking even more than most—and I never yet knew a female worth talking to except my grandmother. . . . She was a witch,” he added reflectively.
“That,” said Jade scaldingly, “explains a great deal! And nobody asked you to come up here and make a nuisance of yourself talking to me, so why don’t you go away and make us both happy?”
That was better! His swarthy, angular face flickered with surprise and annoyance. “Go sound the well, Deane,” he commanded Tom, who turned reluctantly and left. “As for you, miss, get back to the quarterdeck where you belong.”
“Shan’t!” said Jade, still seething.
MacDonald looked very much as if he’d like to knock her right over the rail and into the sea—now surging just below as the ship’s bow leaned into the trough between swells. Balancing herself against the dizzy tilt, Jade laughed in his face, loving the thrill of danger. For a long moment he stared,
brooding and menacing; then he spat over the lee rail, turned with a contemptuous swing of wide shoulders, leaped down to the waist, and made his arrogant way aft to the helm.
Jade turned her back on him and her attention to the sea just a fraction too late to be really effective. She couldn’t feel that she had really won this encounter, and she was almost as deeply annoyed with herself as with the second mate. How she’d love to continue the argument with that small hard footstool from the parlor back home! With very little effort, she felt, she could hate that Rory MacDonald even more than William Howe.
“You all right, Missy Lanie?” Joshua’s massive figure loomed worriedly. No knowing what devilment his young mistress might get into while he was busy tending his master’s illness. From the first day out, she’d tended to stare at the shrouds and rigging with a longing and speculative eye that stood Joshua’s hair on end. And Minnie, the dull-witted bond slave supposed to act as lady’s maid, was hopelessly prostrate in the tiny cubbyhole allotted her, and no help at all.
“You all right?” he repeated, falling against the rail as the Pearl started downhill, and clinging there with his eyes fixed suspiciously on her face. “You look like you’re fixing to throw someone overboard. You don’t want to get in any more trouble yet, do you, Missy Lanie?” he pleaded, with the air of a man who would love to egg her on, but thought it much more comfortable for them both if he didn’t.
Jade’s grin took on that familiar tilt, self-mocking. “Don’t worry, Joshua, I’ll be good until it’s too late for Father to take you back to Williamsburg with him.” Joshua looked relieved. “All the same, I would love to throw someone overboard! And cut off his horrid beak of a nose first.”
Joshua followed her glance and identified the nose in question without difficulty, since it was aimed disrespectfully in Jade’s direction. Joshua didn’t at all care for its owner. A rough, common young man with fierce eyes and tongue and a blazing contempt for both slaves and females.
“Don’t you have anything to do with him, Missy Lanie,” Joshua advised strongly.
But Jade had already dropped him out of her mind and turned back to her new love, the sea. Her uptilted nose sniffed the salty air with rapture, her vagrant dimples were showing. The sea! Who’d live on land when there was the sea, lonely and ever-changing; menace, mystery, and challenge? Why couldn’t girls be sailors? It wasn’t fair! She chalked up another bitter score in her account against society.
And she sighed. The future lurking over that southern horizon, depressed with the memory of vague, fluttery Aunt Louisa and an Uncle Augustus who ruled her with benevolent pomposity and who could train—or was it tame?—any horse, slave, or female. Well, he wouldn’t tame Jade! But the process of proving this to him promised to be a long and unpleasant one, and she wondered with a sense of panic how long she could go on fighting the whole world. What if it broke her at last, so that she wasn’t Jade any more, but only an empty shell named Melanie? She shivered in the hot sun, lonely as the sea itself, but much more vulnerable.
A patch of yellow sargasso weed tossed past. A school of dolphin scalloped up to the ship and, smiling, began to play games with it. Joshua laughed down at them, one brown eye fixed uneasily on his small mistress. But Jade couldn’t talk about this to Joshua, who’d been defeated before he was born. And Monsieur Maupin was far away, and Grandfather and Grandmother dead, and there wasn’t anyone else. She squared her shoulders, and turned to Joshua.
“There’s Father out on deck,” she observed, glancing toward the stern. “I dare say we ought to go see how he feels.” And with a lilt of something very near to malice in voice and step, she led the way down to the waist and aft to the quarterdeck.
Father stood listening to Captain Narramore, a lean man with an aristocratic-looking face, a choleric temper, and the strong conviction that if he wasn’t actually God, he was the nearest thing to it that mortal man would ever see. For that matter, on his ship he was God, and an Old Testament one, at that. Passengers and crew alike were expected to listen with reverence to every word he uttered. And Mr. Lennox was at once too polite and too weakened from his recent indisposition to put up any struggle at all.
“—usually run the Middle Passage,” the captain was saying as Jade mounted the steps and returned her father’s somewhat wan smile with one of pointed wellbeing. Captain Narramore spared a nod of godly affability and went on with his monologue. “Liverpool to West Africa with cotton goods, then to the West Indies, and back to Liverpool with sugar, coffee, fruit, cocoa, ginger, indigo—the lot. I just did this little extra run to the mainland and back to Jamaica—”
He interrupted himself before Jade could ask what the Middle Passage might be, and whirled around to glare at the helm with the air of Jehovah about to hurl thunderbolts. “Port that helm, MacDonald! Can’t you feel the wind shifting, you blazing landlubber?”
MacDonald, already in the act of helping the novice helmsman port it, glanced at the captain over his own right shoulder. His voice became dark syrup with just a drop of corrosive acid. “Aye aye, sir.”
Captain Narramore stared, scowled, couldn’t quite put his finger on it. “Young Beelzebub,” he muttered uncertainly. “If he ever gets out of line with me, I’ll have him flogged.”
Jade privately thought that a splendid idea, but unlikely. MacDonald—who shot her a knowing and sardonic glance even as she looked at him—was far too clever to provide an excuse. All the same, his tail did want cropping, the arrogant fellow! She smiled suddenly, lifted her voice to carry, fluting, over to the helm.
“He looks the sort of fellow,” she observed brightly, “who’d have a witch for a grandmother.”
The fellow shot her a look of pure poison, and Captain Narramore (the sort of man who’d instantly burn any such grandmother at the stake) nodded darkly. “Shouldn’t be surprised.” He looked at MacDonald with suspicion. “If he hadn’t such a good sea eye—”
He was interrupted by a shout from above. “Deck there! Sail off the starboard bow. Looks Spanish.”
Militant preparation at once swept the ship. Sailors ran up and down the rigging, nine-pounder brass guns were run out, and the course veered to port. It was clear even to Jade’s novice eyes that the Pearl’s best defense was her speed rather than her little pop-guns—and also that this strange sail on the horizon had the weather gauge on them. Her heart beating with pleasurable excitement, she pranced like a child around the quarterdeck, and finally waylaid Tom Deane on his way to the mizzen shrouds.
“What’s all the fuss about? Would a Spanish ship really attack us? Aren’t we at peace?”
Tom shrugged, the cleft appearing in his tanned cheeks, and his teeth white. “On paper and in Europe,” he agreed. “Surely you know that, Mistress Lennox! Out here, Spain still thinks she has Divine Right to the whole western hemisphere; and whenever she likes the odds, her ships act more like pirates than the pirates do. Much more,” he added, rubbing his sun-bleached head ruefully. “At least most pirates are English, and they say—” He changed his mind about finishing that thought. “But you mustn’t worry, Mistress; you’ll be safe any road,” he added belatedly and with far more good will than conviction.
Jade at once bristled. “Stop treating me like a halfwitted butterfly! If you think I think anybody’s going to tell his bullets and cannon balls to be sure to stay away from the passengers—”
“Get aloft, there, Deane!” Tom at once fled up the shrouds, and the second mate came over and glared down at Jade, contemptuous. “And you stop flirting with the crew, you silly minx!”
Jade, for once speechless, felt herself turning scarlet, and he observed this with clear satisfaction.
“Deck there!” bawled the masthead. “Dutch flag. Veering to parallel course.”
There was a general impression of relief and things returned to normal with a slightly sheepish air of having been just practicing, anyway. Rory MacDonald grinned offensively at Jade.
“You are a half-witted butterfly, you know.
Do you really pretend that you don’t expect special treatment because you’re a young lady? Liar!” And he strode away in the most cowardly fashion before Jade could rally her wits for a riposte. She had never in her life been so taken-aback. No one, not even William, had ever accused her of being a whiner, a liar, or a flirt—or even, for that matter, a lady! The injustice of it seared. How she longed to make him take it back, admit he was wrong—preferably at rapier-point! It wasn’t fair! Why should women be denied the right to demand satisfaction in a duel? Men’s rules!
Loathing the entire breed, she gazed with embittered eyes on her father, who chose that moment to pay serious attention to his daughter for the first time since succumbing to the motion of the ship. His own gaze could not possibly have been mistaken for approval.
“Melanie!” he realized, staring with startled discovery upon her sunburned face. “Where’s your face-mask? Your sun shade? What will your aunt say? Your complexion is ruined!”
Jade smiled, unrepentant.
CHAPTER FIVE
“Dear Little Melanie!”
Jamaica, as even the unpoetic Jade was ready to admit, was an emerald set in blue enamel. And Port Royal, atip a long spit of land guarding the bay, was still a pretty place, despite the earthquake that had all but destroyed it a generation ago.
“The coming town will be Kingstown across on the north side of the bay,” volunteered the first mate as they started to round the point. “Tops’l sheets! Tops’l clew lines! Helm a lee!” he added in a bellow not at all meant for Jade. She didn’t mind. She stared with quick interest at the activity aloft, at the ships all turned to the tide in the mirror of the harbor, and, right at the point on the starboard, the massive and lofty tower of Fort St. Jago de la Vega, with a narrow mole running around its outer wall. She might have paid more attention had she guessed she was destined to know it much better; but as she didn’t her eyes turned quickly to the blaze of green beyond, and a number of trees bearing highly unlikely scarlet or purple blossoms. A wave of warm fragrance was suddenly blotted out by another smell: an overpowering fetid stench that caused Mr. Lennox’s eyebrows to rise inquiringly and his daughter to turn a startled face. The first mate had vanished, and it was the ubiquitous MacDonald who slanted a disrespectful eyebrow.