A Tyranny of Petticoats (2 page)

Pop still thinks we chose poorly, joining the
Vanity
’s crew. “It’s a brig, pet. Moves slow, like an ox in molasses. We’ll never catch anything faster than a merchantman. We’ll never be able to
outrun
anything faster either.”

I’ve given up trying to convince Pop that sloops and schooners might be quick but they can’t bring as many guns to bear. Besides, the
Vanity
’s old man has an eye for ships loaded down with plunder and swears the wind tells him things. And if you’re bold enough to ask what things, he’ll merely wink and say, “Things about things, lad.”

Which is no answer at all, but when you’re the captain and your name is Half-Hanged Henry, it’s an answer you can give a bold sailor who’s a little too curvy amidships to be an actual boy.

We’re flying a Union Jack we stole from our last prize and lying in wait for the next behind a barrier island off the coast of Carolina. I’ll be on watch in another turn of the glass, but for now I’m up on the mainmast yard, my bare legs swinging, the salt-wind curling through my jacket and over my windburned face.

A flurry of seabirds circle the topgallant yard, then dip and glide down to the waterline. But when they gather just above the spray, I flinch hard and grip the mast.

Mother Carey’s chickens.

They’re not proper chickens, not the kind you’d eat. They’re little seabirds, black at the wing with a white stripe across their tails. There are four, and they dance eerily over the surface of the water without ever landing.

I wonder if I knew them. They were once men, and I’ve seen my share of floating corpses since I was a cabin boy. These birds are the souls of drowned sailors who’ve escaped the wife of Davy Jones and returned to warn seamen of storms. Even crews like us who use captured flags to lure prizes close.

I shinny up the mainmast till I reach the topmost yard and can go no higher without becoming a bird myself. The sky is clear and gray. Not blue, but no angry clouds mount. The air doesn’t smell like a storm, and the wind promises naught but a good chase once the prey comes in sight.

“Ha! Almost got that one!”

Hanging over the rail near the bowsprit are Johnny and Black Tom. They signed the articles in Port Royal, no older than me and full of showy false swagger that lasted a single turn of the glass. Pop took pity on them and now they’re our messmates, two sons closer to the big family he always wanted.

Black Tom flings a stone and it misses one of Mother Carey’s chickens by a handswidth.

I’m down the mainmast in a trice and I haul those two coves collar and scruff away from the rail. They go stumbling and fall into fighting stance before seeing it’s me. Then they straighten and eye me warily.

“What gives, Joe?” Black Tom has squinty pig-eyes and a constant white-boy sunburn. Johnny’s the one who’s blacker than me and Pop put together, with ritual scars like Pop remembers on his granddad.

“Don’t you make Mother Carey angry, harming those birds.” I stab a finger at the feathery shadows tiptoeing across the water below. “Or else she’ll call up a storm so she can serve our drowned guts to Davy Jones for tea.”

“You really believe that old yarn?” Johnny asks. “Them’s just birds. Souls go to heaven or they go to hell.”

Eight bells rings, four sets of two peals, short and pert.

These lads must stop. Killing even one of the little harbingers could bring us all to a bad end, and Pop’s grown attached to both Johnny and Black Tom, orphans like him, like he’s terrified I’ll end up. I want to smile at them, to use honey instead of vinegar, but Pop says nothing makes me look less like a boy than when I smile.

“I do.” I say it over my shoulder as I head toward the mainmast. “And you’ll do best to believe it too, ’cause if you let them, they’ll save your life.”

Still no sign of a storm. And we’ve been watching every bearing.

Just after three bells, we weigh anchor. The old man’s got wind of a massive treasure ship limping her way up the coast of Spanish Florida, blown off course and separated from her warship escort.

Prizes don’t get any more tempting than that, and Johnny and Black Tom lead the whooping and speculating.

I’m trimming the staysail when the old man strolls past.

“Joe, you’ll be in the boarding party, got that?”

“Ah . . . beg pardon, sir, but I’m a topman.”

Pop puts down a bucket and edges closer. I hate that I’m glad for it, but I am.

The old man squints at me. “A big strong lad like you? How old are you, Joe?”

I frown, reckoning, and Pop hisses, “Sixteen.”

“Sixteen, sir.”

“And you’ve never boarded a prize?”

“No, sir. I was a runner and a surgeon’s boy when I was little, then a powder monkey and now a topman.”

The old man scoffs cheerfully. “Nah, you’re wasted up in the rigging, moving sails. See Davis after your watch. He’ll give you a blade.”

“But I . . .”

I can splice a line and take a sounding and play a passable hornpipe. I can fight like a bag of wet cats, but I know I can’t kill. Just the thought turns my stomach.

But boys my age are well scarred like Johnny, like Black Tom. Boys of any age are full of piss and vinegar, and they’d be spoiling for a chance like this.

“What is it, sailor?” The old man isn’t smiling anymore.

I signed the articles. I took the ledger from the bosun and balanced it on my left forearm while inking a big shaky
J
beneath all the other names and marks. I could have handed it over to Pop, let him make a mark for us both and taken my half share like always.

My father puts a hand on my shoulder. His voice is quiet but steady when he says, “Nothing, sir. Right, Joe?”

“Yes, sir,” I mutter, and it’s to both of them, to the old man and Pop too.

The bosun sends me aloft and I’m glad for it, but now I see Mother Carey’s chickens everywhere and I shouldn’t be seeing any when there are still no storms off any bearing. All I can do is wonder what the little souls are trying to warn us of, since birds of this kind never just appear.

When eight bells ring out once more and I’m off watch, I head down to my rack below, snug among the guns. The canvas is still warm from when Pop slept in it earlier, and there’s a little packet of rock-hard ship’s bread waiting for me wrapped in his kerchief.

Pop hasn’t given me his rations since I was nine and laid up sick and sweating with cowpox.

The
Golden Vanity
runs on bells a lot tighter than most other ships Pop and I have sailed with, but Pop says the old man was in the Royal Navy before he turned pirate, and bells are what he knows.

Pop says it in that voice he uses when he’s hopeful for something but doesn’t want to be. He’s hopeful for one thing, mostly — to crew a vessel that takes a prize big enough that he can retire on an able seaman’s share.

Whenever he talks about it, I smile and nod like I’m eager to put on shoes and petticoats and sip tea in a drawing room, but I already know there’s no way I can follow him. I stopped being a girl that day on the Charleston dock when Pop signed the articles that first time, when he put his hand on my newly shaved head and told the old man of the
Veracruz
his
son
would make a fine cabin boy. Pop had no way to keep me unless I spit and swaggered and pissed through the curved metal funnel he made for me out of an old drinking cup.

So even if we do hit a once-in-a-lifetime treasure ship — maybe like the one we’re sneaking toward now — even if Pop does land enough silver and gold to buy that little farm or the tall Boston townhouse he’s always on about, now that I’m old enough to sign articles for myself, I have no desire at all to leave the sea.

But I can’t tell Pop that. Not after everything he’s done to keep me, starting with swinging me on his back that night he fled his future and mine — days beneath the sun and years beneath the lash.

I must have drifted to sleep, for I’m jolted almost out of my rack by an insistent thudding that sets the bulkheads trembling.

Black Tom’s at the head of the gun deck, pale beneath his sunburn, and he bangs on the bulkhead with a stick of kindling to the same wild clang as the ship’s bell.

They’re beating us to quarters.

We’ve come upon our prize.

I’m awake in an instant, and I’m clearing hammocks and sea chests from the guns before I remember the old man wants to see me out on deck, blade in hand and ready to board and subdue the enemy ship. I shouldn’t like how the dagger Davis gave me feels in my hand — sturdy, heavy, menacing — but I do.

As I step out on deck, Pop nods me near. He’s breathing in sharp little bursts as he grips his blade. Pop’s been in boarding parties before, but I’ve never seen this look about him.

If I didn’t know better, I’d say Pop was afraid.

“That’s not a treasure ship,” Pop says in a low voice. “She’s riding too high. Look at the waterline.”

I step to the rail and peer out. And pull in a sharp breath of my own. If the ship were loaded down with treasure, the deck would be only a fathom or so above the waves. Instead all the gunports are clear.

Two whole rows of them.

“She’s a warship, isn’t she?” I whisper.

Pop nods.

“And we’re trapped against the coastline, aren’t we?”

This time Pop doesn’t reply because questions I know the answers to I shouldn’t have to ask.

All she’s got to do is come broadside to us and fire. Two volleys and we’re sunk.

We’ve hauled down the Union Jack, since England and Spain are still at war the last anyone’s heard, but flying no flag at all will draw every captain’s eye.

His grapeshot as well.

The bosun’s whistle cuts the clamor, and we fall silent as the old man swings onto the quarterdeck and waves his arms for attention.

“She’s Spanish, all right,” the old man says, “but there’s not a single coin aboard her. We’ll never be able to outrun her, and we’re all dead men if we try to fight.”

A rumble moves through the crew. Unease and discontent and more than a little raw terror. The wind has led Half-Hanged Henry astray.

Pop steps closer so our shoulders are touching. Signing pirate articles means you’re always with a crew that’ll overwhelm an enemy, and any captain worth a damn never starts a fight he can’t easily win.

But that vessel is a forty-gun frigate, and there’s no way we’re sailing past without being sunk or boarded.

Pop and me and Johnny and others like us — we’re done for either way. Half-Hanged Henry and his lawless lot treat us like sailors so long as we act like it, and every seaman brown or white is the same to Davy Jones. But if we’re caught, we’re part of the plunder and hauled in chains to the auction block. We won’t get a show trial or even hang on the harborside gallows like the white pirates.

I can’t speak for Pop or Johnny or the others, but I’d rather be a guest at some underwater table with Davy and his missus. There’s no way I could crouch between rows of tobacco now that I’ve felt the foredeck swaying beneath my feet, tasted salt on my lips, and run before the wind in a little sloop under a sky blue enough to make me forget every storm I ever sailed through.

Mother Carey’s chickens usually warn of a storm she’s busy stirring. At least a storm would take both us and the Spanish warship down to the bottom, where Mother Carey herself would dice up our flesh onto dishes made of shells and use our bones to comb her long green hair.

“We cannot fight her.” The old man is pacing, toying with the spyglass. “If we cripple her, we might be able to run past.”

“Her mainsails are dropping!” shouts Black Tom from the rigging. “She’s coming about!”

The old man snaps the spyglass closed. “Can any man among you swim?”

Pop fidgets with his blade, and at his other elbow Johnny looks utterly greensick.

“C’mon, lads, speak up! There must be one of you who can sink that ship sneakylike, with auger and drill.”

No one says anything. Like as not because none of them can swim.

But I can.

There’s only so much a child can do in squalid ports with ten grogshops per man and not a church in sight. While Pop drank his ghosts to whispers, I whiled away long afternoons in quiet inlets, splashing and collecting shells — and paddling about the shallows and deeps till I could swim like a fish, even in a wind-whipped ocean current.

“There’ll be silver in it for you,” the old man says with an edge of terror I’ve never yet heard from any man who’s turned pirate. “My gold watch too.” He rakes a look over us, shouts, “My daughter’s hand in marriage! What the devil will it take?”

My father has saved my life nine times. He wanted no part of the
Vanity,
and I was the one who finally wore him down.

“I’ll do it.” I step before the old man. “I’ll sink that frigate if you’ll trade your shares for mine when we find and take the treasure galleon.”

Pop stiffens. That treasure ship is still out there, and a captain’s haul is always seven shares. Seven, when a single share from a prize like that would grant Pop’s hopes thrice over.

The old man shuts his mouth. Narrows his eyes. Looks to the warship. Then he says, “It’s yours, Joe. It’s yours if you sink that ship.”

Everything feels oddly quiet but for the creak of wood and the rattlesnap of damp canvas. I can hear every last one of my father’s indrawn breaths somewhere behind me.

The first mate takes off his belt and Johnny holds out a leather sheath, wide-eyed and solemn. I thread the sheath through the belt and cinch it tight under my jacket. When the bosun hands me an auger, I brandish it like a pistol with more piss and vinegar than I feel before tying it into the sheath.

Johnny laughs nervously, then paws my shoulder in an awkward sort of half-hug.

“Back to your labor,” the old man calls. “If they see us crowded at the rail, they’ll know something’s amiss.”

With both auger and dagger about my waist, I feel a full stone heavier. I can swim well, but I’ve never tried it weighted. I climb up to the rail and peer over. The water below is not a sparkling sky-blue lagoon where little waves lapped around my baby feet, where I dipped and surged with naught on my back but my smallclothes. It’s green-black and choppy, and at the bottom are the bones of sailors who did not have a care for its will.