“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.