Rubbing her head, she muttered, “What do you want?”
“I wanted to congratulate you on surviving your first battle,” he said.
Frowning, she looked away. That wasn’t a battle, it was a raid, a true pirate raid. Or a rescue mission? She’d only watched, dumbstruck. “I didn’t do anything.”
He shrugged. “You didn’t interfere. You didn’t make an ass of yourself. Sometimes that’s all you can ask for.”
That almost sounded like a compliment. “What happens next?”
“I’m guessing we’ll sail for Jamaica. There’s a place there we can let them off and they’ll be safe.” He nodded toward the middle of the ship and the group of former slaves. “Some pirates would sell ’em off in Havana, but not us. We may stop somewhere to provision first. However the captain chooses.”
None of those plans seemed to offer Jill a way home. But Captain Cooper wasn’t taking her into account—Jill had signed on as crew, hadn’t she? She was bound by the captain’s articles.
Henry lingered, not smiling this time, not taunting. Just quietly watching her, as if he knew she wanted to talk, which gave her the courage to ask, “Does this happen a lot? Have you done this before?”
“Done what, capture a ship? Of course, plenty of times.”
“But a slave ship,” she said.
He glanced upward, maybe seeing the same patterns she did. But then he’d probably lived on the ship for years. The view may have seemed ordinary to him. “We try. Because of Abe, you see. It’s where he came from. He’d stop every one of those ships sailing from Africa if he could. He’d give up his share of every other haul we make to stop the trade. He can’t. But we try.”
“What about you?” she said, the question sticking in her throat, because she had a sudden image of Henry, beaten and in chains, and she hated thinking of him like that, however much he might annoy her. It was the opposite of Henry as she saw him now—smiling, bright, fit, alive.
“What about me? Did I come from Africa on a ship like that?” he said, and shrugged. “My mum did, not that she ever talked about it. I was born here, on the islands. Jamaica, in fact.”
“And your father?”
He snorted. “Who knows? Some English sailor stopped in port, I reckon. I was bound to turn pirate, wasn’t I? A half-breed bastard like me.”
He grinned like it was a joke, but she turned away. She wanted to tell him what would happen with the slave trade, how many more decades of suffering were ahead of them, that it would never be made right. But she would sound crazy. Like she was apologizing for a stretch of history she had no control over. But she felt like she ought to apologize.
6
REMISE
Henry was right, and the captain announced that they’d be sailing for Jamaica next. There had been some debate, back and forth, between Captain Cooper and Abe. “We could go east,” Abe had said. “Take them home.”
Cooper had refused. “We don’t have provisions for such a voyage, and we can’t be sailing ’cross the Atlantic. Tell them that.”
So Abe did, explaining in the language they shared that they couldn’t go back home, that they’d be sailing west instead of east. The interpreter seemed to plead with Abe, who relayed the words to Captain Cooper.
“Abe, you know as well as I do we can’t take them home,” Cooper said. “And we’re still going after Blane.”
Captain Cooper put it to a vote among the crew—Africa or Jamaica? Only Abe voted for Africa, so they sailed to Jamaica.
Again, Jill watched Captain Cooper holding up the shard of rapier blade, watching it turn on its string, following its length with her gaze to stare out at a different part of the horizon than where they sailed to.
Jill still wondered what the broken rapier meant—how Cooper knew the shard would behave like this, and what the captain hoped to accomplish by following it. And how did Jill fit into that? Or had she been brought here by accident? It was all too strange.
After spending the night on deck, the former slaves went below to continue resting in semidarkness. They were still sick, and the surgeon, Emory, continued to move among them, checking for fevers, dispensing liquid concoctions. Jill hadn’t learned anything new about him. He glared at everyone and didn’t invite conversation.
The next day, the captain set her to scrubbing the decks again. The whole thing, all over again. When Jill came to the middle of the deck, where the Africans had first been when they came on board, where their irons had been cut off, she found blood. Drops, smears, and stains of it marring the planks. She scraped with the stone, pressing as hard as she could, ’til the muscles in her arms cramped, but she couldn’t get the wood clean. Choking up, her throat tightening with tears, she kept scrubbing. She’d clean it, make it shine, if she worked hard enough, scrubbed fast enough.
Startled, she nearly fell over when a hand touched her shoulder. Gasping, Jill saw Captain Cooper standing over her. The pirate’s hand rested on her shoulder, then pulled away.
“It’s all right, lass. Leave it,” she said, and walked away.
Slouching, Jill dropped the stone and watched her go.
Another two days passed.
Jill learned to sail. She learned that the Diana was a schooner, and while it might have seemed impressive, it was a speck next to a Spanish treasure galleon or an English ship of the line, or so the sailors told her. She learned about foremasts and mainmasts, yardarms and rigging, the bowsprit, larboard and starboard, fore and aft. She learned to tie knots and trim sails. At sea, ropes were called lines. She learned the commands that Cooper and Jenks shouted that made the crew scramble like they were a colony of ants, swarming to this sail or that rope—line—and making the changes that caused the ship to speed up, slow down, heave one way or another, plowing the waves in a different direction. Depending on whether the sails were furled or unfurled, and how, the ship behaved one way and not another. Even if Jill stayed on the ship for years, watching, she wouldn’t understand all the details. Many of the crew had, in fact, worked on ships since they were children.
She divided the crew into two camps: the ones who hassled her and the ones who didn’t. In the former camp were some of the men from that first day, the ones who harassed her as soon as she came on board—Jenks, John, Martin, and a hulking man the others called Mule, who did much of the heavy lifting. Some of the crew in the second camp ran interference for her: putting themselves between her and the others, butting in before teasing got serious with jokes and laughter of their own. Jill had started to trust some of them—Henry and Abe, and Bessie and Jane, two of the other women on board.
Shrouds were the lines that anchored the masts to the ship. Part of the constant sound of creaking and straining were the tall masts pulling and flexing against the lines. The masts were like the tall trees they’d been made from, always groaning and moving, however slightly, in the constant wind.
The ship had eight cannons on the main deck, locked down and silent for now. Slots in the side of the ship would open and the cannon would be shoved forward if the ship went into battle. Jill wasn’t sure she wanted to see a real battle—as opposed to the one-sided raid on the slave ship—but she was curious. She imagined seeing the whole rank of cannons firing would be exciting—as long as she was someplace far away, watching safely through a telescope.
“Have you been in many battles?” she asked Henry at supper, the usual stew of dried meat and potatoes, along with the usual serving of rum. She’d learned to drink it slowly, with plenty of water.
“Of course I have.”
“I mean real ones,” she said. “Not ones where you run up the black flag and scream and the other ship surrenders without firing a shot. I mean have you ever been shot at.”