Sticking to the wall, she crept to the stairs, moving slowly to keep the floorboards from creaking. She checked one more time, but the two other people asleep in hammocks hadn’t stirred. Climbing without a sound, she waited at the edge of the hatch and looked out. A few more men, including Henry, stood watch on deck. Rather, they drank rum and sang songs, picking up the scatterings of tunes carrying over the water from the town. They were drunk. She could probably walk right past them and they wouldn’t notice.
Still, she remained careful and quiet.
They were on the starboard side of the ship, near the middle; so she crept to the port side, toward the bow, where the anchor was. Staying low, she kept to the shadows, easy to do in the sparse and scattered lantern light.
Using the anchor line, she climbed off the ship and into the water. The rope was thick and covered with slime; she had to practically hug it to make her way down, gritting her teeth and trying not to breathe too much. Then she swam, hoping there weren’t sharks.
She brought the rapier with her, though she hated getting it wet. But she didn’t dare go ashore unarmed. As long as she dried it off quickly, the water wouldn’t hurt it. But the length of steel weighed her down and made swimming more difficult. Especially since she was trying to be quiet. She dog-paddled, keeping her head above water, and tried not to splash.
She avoided the pier, since people would be watching there, and swam to the beach instead. Once onshore, at the edge of Nassau proper, she only had to worry about running into anyone from the Diana. Especially Captain Cooper.
She hid behind a stack of crates waiting to be loaded onto a merchant ship in the morning. A scrap of canvas she found wasn’t much good for drying anything off, but she was able to scrape most of the water off her rapier. The rest of her had to wait for the cool breeze coming in off the water. She started shivering; the sooner she got moving, the sooner she’d get warm. She couldn’t worry about the cold.
The real trouble was, she only had one idea about where to start looking for Edmund Blane, and that was back at the pirate tavern.
She tied her hair up with a scarf and stuck a soft cap over it. The rest of her clothing was plain, nondescript: the loose shirt and trousers that everyone working on a crew at sea seemed to wear. She didn’t think she could really pass as a boy. But she could hope that maybe people wouldn’t look too closely at her. Maybe no one from the tavern that afternoon would recognize her as the girl who was with Captain Cooper.
The town wasn’t large, the streets weren’t complicated, so she found her way back to the alley and the sprawling house with its painted sign. Instead of going in, though, she slipped into the shadow of a nearby building, crouching at its corner and watching for Cooper and her crew. Some of them were surely here, but she wanted information and was willing to take the risk. The tavern seemed even more loud and boisterous—she could hear shouting and singing from the street. Those people who’d spent all day drinking were still at it. The settings had reversed: This time, the outdoors were dark, lit only with sparse lanterns, while the inside blazed with light.
Jill crept around the building, looking for a back entrance, to avoid drawing too much attention. She discovered the back door by the smell of the latrine. The rough, square shed stood only a few yards away from the house, nestled among the trees, and reeked about as sourly as she’d have expected a latrine outside of a bar where people had been drinking all day to smell. After she’d been watching a moment, a man stumbled from the shed, to the back of the tavern, and through the door.
She sneaked to the doorway and ducked inside.
For a moment, she lingered at the door, searching the room for anyone she recognized, for any reason to duck back outside and flee. No one seemed to notice her, which was good. This time, there wasn’t just singing in the tavern, there was music played on fiddles and pipes, even dancing. And lots more women than she’d seen before, and with their bright dresses, low-cut bodices, curled hair, and made-up faces, it was pretty clear that they were working. Yet another reason for shore leave. Jill just wanted to stay out of the way.
Staying against the wall as much as she could with all the tables and chairs taking up spaces, and people using the walls to prop themselves up when they were on the edge of passing out, she moved through the first room and into the next, searching for someone who looked like they might be Edmund Blane. She imagined a towering villain with a scraggly beard and glaring eyes. And a broken sword at his hip. It was a haphazard way to search. But it was a start.
Then she saw someone she recognized, a woman sitting in the corner, smiling wryly, like she was also trying to keep out of the way but still enjoying the view. Mary Read.
Jill took a deep breath and approached. If she was too chicken to talk to the pirate, she should never have come here.
Read spotted her before Jill was ready to be spotted. She’d hoped to sneak up on her, come obliquely along the wall, maybe clear her throat to startle her, or tap her shoulder—though that might have gotten her punched, in hindsight. Instead, Read looked over, as if she spotted Jill from the corner of her eye. As if she’d been waiting.
“Hey now, what have we got here?” Read announced, drawing the attention of the ragged, drunken bunch of pirates around her. Jill glanced at them, daring them to laugh at her, which they did. She glared.
“You’re Marjory’s new little pet, ain’t you?” Read said. Her accent was thick, some brand of English Jill couldn’t identify. “Has she sent you on some errand then?”
“No,” Jill said. “She doesn’t know I’m here.”
Read raised a brow, as if surprised—maybe even impressed. Jill could hope. Read waved to a man, who handed over his mug of beer, and she passed it to Jill. Jill didn’t want to drink; she didn’t want to get muzzy headed. But she took it to be polite.
Here it went, then.
“I’m looking for Edmund Blane,” she said.
“You and everyone else,” Read said, looking away, taking a drink.
“I want to meet him.”
“Why would you want to do that? Do you know what he’s like?”
“No, not really. Just that Captain Cooper hates him. But he may be the only one who can help me.”
“And why do you need help? Other than the fact that you’re a wee lass who’s fallen in with pirates. And how did that happen?”
It would take too long to explain, and Read wouldn’t believe her anyway, so Jill just shook her head.
“Ah yes, that’s what I thought. Too complicated, it always is. Which ought to make it simple but it doesn’t.”
“How did you fall in with pirates?” Jill asked, wary, ready to run if the question made Read angry and she drew the short, stout cutlass at her belt, or one of the three pistols slung in a brace across her chest. Not that Jill was getting paranoid.
Read smiled into her beer. “It starts with putting on breeches and cutting your hair. Then you run away and join the army in secret. Then you think maybe you’ll try a normal life—get married, find a respectable trade. And then your husband dies on you, so you go back to what you know best. You sign on to a ship and get captured by pirates and decide you like that best of all. Pirates are more forgiving than fathers, ain’t they?”
Not her father, Jill thought with a pang, sure that he thought that she’d drowned long ago. Her parents and siblings surely thought her long gone. And there were all those times she’d been so wrapped up in the rest of her life she’d barely paid attention to them. She shouldn’t have argued about going to the beach.
Jill couldn’t tell if Read was drunk or not. She smelled of beer, but that may have been the rest of the room. The pirate studied her surroundings with a wary gaze, ready for action in a moment.