by Seven Jane
Dunn loosed another deep sigh. “Just means that we best be movin’ through quick as we can is all.”
“And then what?” I was afraid to ask, and desperate to know. I was convinced there was more to this than Dunn was telling me. “They just go back to the way they were?”
“Aye, something like that. So long as we make it through, they’ll be fine.”
I nodded in acceptance. It wasn’t much in the way of comfort, but still the sickness swirling in my insides calmed, if only slightly. I had seen the expression on the captain’s face—that look of furious expectation—and found solace in the thought that if anyone could steer the ship through this frozen purgatory, it was Eric Winters. And with that I remembered that not all of the men were under the spell of this thin place. The captain, Dunn, and I seemed less affected—myself being the weakest of our trio while the other two men might as well have been immune—and Tom had spoken to me. He’d done more than speak to me, but Dunn had not mentioned his strange and intimate behaviors, and I thought better than to call attention to it.
“Why aren’t we—you, the captain, and me—we’re not …” I didn’t know how to put it into words and so I motioned uselessly in the space between the quartermaster and myself and then upward in the direction of the quarterdeck. “Frozen, I mean. And I was talking to Tom Birch, least I think it was Tom Birch …”
“Listen.” The sympathetic look fell off Dunn’s face as he leaned forward, his elbows planting firmly on the tops of his knees as a cloud of darkness passed through his eyes, dulling their shine to shark-like bleakness. He let the silence grow heavy until it became so dense that it even forced his lips into what resembled a thin red slice across the lower half of his face. “Most men, when in the presence of things that pass between, they freeze, they do. Shut up like oysters hidin’ their pearls. That’s all that is goin’ on out on the deck. When we come out of it, they probably won’t remember nothin’ ever happened at all. But some, well, some be different—more open, like. More sensitive to things that pass between one world and the other, you might say. They be pulled to the sea, and more agreeable to everythin’ that be a part of it. Rest of us, we already be claimed by it.”
I swallowed Dunn’s ominous words, although I didn’t grasp their meaning. “What does that have to do with me? And what does that mean, ‘claimed by it’?”
Dunn blew out a breath and seemed to search for the right words. After a while he gave up and hung his head in his hands, but when he lifted it again there was newfound resolve in his eyes. “I don’t know no other way of sayin’ it, so I expect it be abou’ time you find out who you really are, Merrin Jones.”
Surprise slammed into me, and the nausea I had levied inside of myself broke free. I turned my head to the side and vomited, and then the room turned black as the floor of the cabin rushed up to meet me.
“That’s a good lass,” Dunn’s voice was saying with uncharacteristic kindness when I came to. My hat lay on the floor beside me, far beyond reach, and my hair was spilled out in incriminating tangles on the floor. The wrinkled backs of the man’s hands were tender as they pushed my hair behind my ears and then pressed lightly against my face. “Didn’t mean to give you such a shock. Sorry abou’ that,” he said apologetically. He pushed the flask of sour liquid against my lips and again I tried to refuse it. “Have a swallow and you’ll feel good as new.”
Lass.
His word echoed horribly inside of my head as he pushed the flask firmly against my lips. The bitter fluid trickled across my tongue and I spat it out. It tasted like metallic saltwater. Lass. He knew—possibly had known all along. And he had called me by my name, or at least part of it.
“Lass,” I repeated in a mumble. My words were garbled and I felt half-drunk from the amount of whatever it was that I’d swallowed. My head ached miserably; it must have hit the floor when I fell off the chair. The room was spinning without me. “I’m no damned lass,” I said, trying to sound haughty and failing as I pulled myself upright. “Mind your tongue, you old drunk.”
My threat fell flat.
A quick flash of anger blinked across the old man’s face before he let out a sudden bark of laughter and clapped his knee, his beady black eyes glinting with unexpected merriment. I widened my eyes at him. “Aye, that be the damned truth,” Dunn exclaimed, and waved his flask in my direction. “And even less a lass than you might expect yourself, I’d be willing to bet!” He barked again, and it sounded distinctly unlike any man’s laughter I had ever heard—more like the sound an animal might make.
I’d barely so much as seen the man attempt a smile, and now he was laughing so hard that his great chest heaved with the force of it. I gawked at him, and let my mouth hang open under the weight of a thousand unanswered questions. I struggled to catalog the consequences of the current events. It was no use denying my sex; that much was done. Had the cunning old quartermaster known my secret this whole time? If so, why had he kept it? What other knowledge might he be in possession of? I felt foolish and scared, and could not fathom a reason as to why Dunn might have chosen this moment to disclose a truth I’d thought so smartly hidden. For weeks now I had taken great aims to disguise myself, carefully concealing my voice, my hair, my ever voluptuous form. On the few occasions I had dared to bathe I had performed the ritual quickly and under the cover of the dead of night. I slept fitfully light lest someone cross my bed at night, and avoided showing any flesh beyond my hands and arms, a strategy that had more than once almost ended me with heat and sunstroke. Even more troubling, though, than him knowing my sex was that he had named me. Perhaps a shrewd and discerning person could have cobbled together the first with months of careful study, but how had he learned my name?
I had lived in perpetual fear of being discovered, and yet I had been known all along. The voice I had heard on the deck echoed in my thoughts. Get her below, it had bellowed, stark as sunlight in a sky of darkness. It had not been Mister Dunn’s voice, but nor had it sounded like the captain’s, though I couldn’t really be sure. Perhaps I hadn’t heard anything at all. Everything felt murky and ambiguous, as if I’d been trapped in a long dream. For all I knew, those words might have come from the sea itself so loudly had their call be in my ears.
Once I’d recovered enough to find my voice, I asked, “How long have you known?”
This was an easy one for Mister Dunn, and another source of surprise for me. “Oh, e’er since you was a wee little lass.” He winked after another sip of the vile fluid, and then laughed again at his own cleverness, so hard this time that he put his hand over his stomach to quell the ripples that passed through him. He smoothed his other hand, flask still pinned to his palm by his thumb, over the wave of his white hair. It flattened and then buoyed back into place. He clicked his tongue thoughtfully. “’Fact, I was was the one who be takin’ you over to Miss Emery’s house for keepin’ when you first arrived in Isla Perla.”
My oldest memory flashed into my mind, this time slightly different than it had replayed before. I saw, again, Evangeline’s golden hair in the Caribbean sunlight as she waved at me from the door of her tavern. The man beside her was still eclipsed in shadow, but for the first time the memory loosened, and as it gave way I noticed that there was someone else at my side, fingers entwined with mine. In this edited version of my memory I saw myself looking upward at the man whose hand was wrapped around mine, and then I saw them staring down at me—eyes that were black and round and kind, and as unmistakably those that belonged Brandon Dunn as was the coif of hair that rose above his head, still white even then. There was something else, too—another new addition I hadn’t noticed before. It was unclear, but I imagined I saw, gripping Dunn’s other hand, a boy child with seawater green eyes and a mess of dishwater blond hair. And then another memory, this one newer, broke through as if it simply insisted upon itself: Dunn speaking to Claudette and Mrs. Emery in the shadows the day we set out to sea. I had thought it odd then, but now it all seemed so obvious. He had known, a
nd so had they.
A second wave of shock washed over me, this time erasing all of my pending questions and leaving blank, cavernous headspace where they had been. I started half a dozen attempts at questions, each one failing and dying silently on my lips while Mister Dunn stared back at me wearing an expression of patient amusement and sipping from that damned flask. There was an odd gleam to his eye, one that suggested he’d been waiting to have this conversation for a long time. Finally, my tongue wrapped around a thought. “You’ve known—” I nearly shouted. My vision swam from the effort and I gasped for air. Unconsciousness threatened again. “You’ve known who I am all this time, and still you’ve said nothing? Done nothing? Why?”
“Aye. Well, that’s not entirely true,” he scoffed, apparently offended. His voice was raised with agitation. “Let you sail, didn’t I? Kep’ you safe, didn’t I? I ain’t allowed no harm to come to Jones’ daughter.”
It felt like a bullet had ripped through me—again. I forgot everything else—the frozen sea, the cryptic comments, the surprise that he’d known my identity this whole time. None of it mattered suddenly; he’d given me the first hint to a parentage that I had ever had. He’d called me Jones, not Smith, the surname assigned to orphans like myself. “You knew my father?”
His face settled back into its normal frown as a dark thought passed through him, and then he squinted his eyes, snatched the flask from my hand, and took a final swig. He tossed it, empty, to the floor, and passed his palm over his head again. “Aye, I knew ’im. Captain Jones,” he stressed the title, and there was reverence in his voice. “He weren’t always what he be now. He was a good man, he was, ’for his greed got the best of him—greed and fury from the sea and women, too. Now he be cursed to sail the seas with ne’er making port. He’s out there somewhere, sailin’ between this world and the next. Sold his soul to sail, he did, but not in the way the stories say, not tha’ it matters. Some things can’t be undone.”
“Captain Jones?” I repeated, racking my memory. I had heard the name before, and the story that went with it. There was only one man called Jones who had sailed the seas to Mister Dunn’s description, and he was as much as a legend as the others the old man loved to tell, though the tragedy of Captain Davy Jones was one that had passed through the lips of every sailor I’d ever met. “You can’t mean Davy Jones?” I couldn’t help the skepticism that had found its way into my voice.
“Aye,” Dunn confirmed without the slightest hint of irony. “Captain Davy Jones. Knew ’im a long time ago, I did.”
I shook my head, trying to recall the lore that I’d read on the doomed pirate captain from Winters’ books. The story went that Davy Jones had found himself in trouble at sea after taking on the greatest treasure ever found. He had hailed to the sky, calling out to whatever god that answered with a pledge that he would sail the ocean forever if they would spare him his death. Something dark had taken control of the ship, and as a price for granting his request, had sentenced Jones to an eternity spent on the sea—one without life or love or land. “Davy Jones is not but a legend,” I argued. “Traded his soul to the devil so that he could sail the ocean forever on a ghost ship crewed by the silent spirits of dead men. He’s no more real than—”
“Than what, girl?” the old man countered. His eyes glinted devilishly in the flickering light of the candle. “Than a magical island that be disappearin’ and reappearin’, trapped in a place that only exists e’ry few years? Than sailin’ on a sea between two worlds with men frozen over?”
He had a point.
“These legends might have faded into naught more ’an old stories, lass,” he continued. “But they be startin’ somewhere in truth, and the versions you heard sometimes be twisted. I think it’s time ye stop worryin’ on old pirates’ tales, and start thinkin’ ’bout what your part be in all this, Merrin Jones. On my honor, you be the daughter of Captain Davy Jones and another I don’t dare be namin’ while we be a-sail on these dark waters, and it ain’t be no accident that you be joinin’ this crew.”
Before I could speak again the wind rapped loudly against the cabin door once more, only this time it wasn’t the wind. With a loud crash the door of the captain’s quarters flung inward, squealing on its hinges as a bolt of lightning ripped across the sky and illuminated the darkness on the other side. Winters was standing in the doorway, wild-eyed and covered in a layer of frost. He looked fierce, like some sort of spectral spirit, his eyes still possessed with strange blue fire. His long tresses had become so frozen that their ends were tipped with icicles that made a clinking, metallic sound when the wind blew through them. His gaze slid from Dunn to me on the floor, at my exposed locks and the dazed expression on my face, and it was impossible to see him as anything less than another actor in the legends of the mighty sea.
“Captain,” Dunn greeted him with a sigh of relief. He clapped his palms against the knobs of his knees and made to stand. “Seemed it be abou’ time to be tellin’ Mister Rivers who she really is.”
“It’ll have to wait,” the captain growled. “We’re here.” The same anticipatory snarl he’d worn on the helm crawled across his face as the ship pitched violently forward, sending books and golden trinkets and Dunn’s empty flask flying about the room. I watched as the candle that sat on the floor between Dunn and me fell over, broke in half, and rolled between Winters’ booted feet, disappearing out of the open cabin door behind him. The ship rocked again and I searched for something to hold on to, but found nothing on the floor other than Dunn’s weathered hand. I gripped it tightly as a roaring noise shook the ship, sending the debris of empty rum bottles and broken candlesticks scuttling across the floor beside me.
XI
I had no time to digest the revelations that had just taken place, much less unravel them. For now, whether they held any truth or not, whether I was the daughter of some ill-fated pirate captain or just the bastard of some drunken sailor, Dunn and his legends would have to wait. None of it would matter anyway if I died at sea—something that as I looked out toward the writhing mass of wind and water outside I decided to be distinctly possible.
Whilst we had been discussing the fantastical roots of my genealogy, the ocean had come alive again outside of the captain’s cabin. The previously tranquil sea was now furious and black, boiling in angry waves that rose in jagged cliffs and crashed down in white-tipped fangs that bit savagely into the hull of the ship. The ghostly sheen on the water was gone, but the unyielding cold was not. Even with my blanket still wrapped around me, the frigid air beat forcefully against my body like the breath of an angry ocean god, freezing the blood flowing in my veins until it chilled so deep it slowed even the marrow of my bones. Darkness had consumed the sky again, with only a sparse spattering of stars left to decorate the black canvas, and most of them were dulled and hidden behind thick nighttime clouds that warned of a storm brewing over the water.
Even though the air remained just as devastatingly cold, the strange trance that had wasted the men into icy statues had thawed. As the waves rushed and pounded upon the ship so, too, again did the crew, roused from their frozen stasis to combat a suddenly violent sea. Spurred into action, they worked with the same single-mindedness of a colonized whole, moving frantically above and below the decks with the precision and speed of the citizens of an ant bed that had just been kicked over. It was not the first time this analogy had come to mind. The Riptide’s men moved in a synchronized accord that required no command or direction, laboring quickly and agilely and without so much as a shiver, the linens and sail scraps they had clutched against themselves just moment’s ago now cast away in forgotten heaps on the deck. Even in my mounting dread of being sucked into the sea it was impossible to ignore the beautiful choreography of their movements—brawny men moving about on nimble feet made confident from years of sailing, leaning from side to side as the deck rocked ferociously beneath them. I observed how in quick, practiced actions they handled the sails; there was much heaving on ropes and the
guns and cannons were secured to anything that didn’t move. The most practiced of all, Tom Birch, simultaneously shouted orders while he tied knots and adjusted sails, moving from task to task without the slightest amount of hesitation although his eyes still had a dazed look about them, as if he’d been caught off unaware by the storm.
Otherwise, if the men had noticed anything amiss they did not show it. Their mannerisms gave away no knowledge that they had just been possessed by the ghosts that lingered between sea and air—just as Mister Dunn had predicted.
It took more effort and afforded less dignity than I was proud of, but eventually I managed to crawl my way on all fours to the doorway of the cabin and join Mister Dunn and Captain Winters. I was pulling myself up on wobbling legs beside the feet of the two men in my company when a sudden thrash of water collided against the starboard side of the ship. Salty sea spray rose over the edges of the hull and drenched everything in its path, some of it finding its way into my eyes and mouth so that for a split second I was blinded by the smell and taste of the ocean. Then, just when I could see again, another crash of water came, this time so roughly that it sent the ship rocking. Her bow and stern seesawed as they took turns pointing toward the sky. The motion nearly sent me flying backward into the cabin, but I grabbed hold of a length of rigging just as my legs flew out from beneath me, and I more or less remained upright.
Through all of this the captain and Mister Dunn stood on anchored feet while both watched the activity on the decks with oddly placid expressions. The older man lifted his nose skyward and inhaled deeply, a wry smile creeping through the staunch set of his jaw. “Aye,” he agreed to no one in particular, his throaty voice barely audible over the crashing sounds of the water and the rumbling thunder overhead. Another flash of lightning tore across the sky, and he eyed it approvingly, as if he’d been waiting for it. For now, all talk of sea-ghosts and legends was forgotten, and Dunn and Winters observed the impending storm as if it were any other day at sea. “We be here all right, Erik. Just a few more minutes and then it be time. Best make ready.”