Читать книгу The Little Jane Silver 2-Book Bundle - Adira Rotstein - Страница 6

Dinner Conversation

“This year,” announced Little Jane to her parents, whilst they tucked into their customary Tuesday night dinner of hog’s face and green lichen, “this year I want to go on a boarding party.”

Bonnie Mary Bright and Long John Silver looked up at their daughter as if she had just informed them she wanted to be emperor of China.

“You must be joking,” said her father.

“Too dangerous,” proclaimed her mother conclusively. “Absolutely too dangerous. Do you know what happens to sailors who try to board ships without the proper preparation?”

Little Jane did not know or really care, but she had the feeling she was going to find out anyway.

“Well? Do you?”

“They turn into pumpkins?”

“Don’t be saucy now, young lady!”

“This ain’t a game, love,” warned Bonnie Mary. “I’ve seen many an experienced man struck down boarding a ship.”

“That’s right,” interjected Long John. “Why, when I were a young lad, I disobeyed a direct order not to participate in the raiding of a French frigate. Little then did I know the captain kept a pet Australian alligator onboard—”

“Jim,” warned Bonnie Mary, who could always tell when her husband was about to go off topic. But Long John continued, quickly warming to the tale.

“I had but set me leg over the rail when ... SNAP! Gone was me new boot, and foot with it! Worse still, the gator what took ’em followed me around for months after, still lookin’ for another taste! Eventually, I had to—”

“Hogwash,” snorted Little Jane. “Ain’t none of that true.”

“What?” exclaimed Long John, truly stunned. Little Jane had never questioned the veracity of any tale of his before, no matter how outlandish. Perhaps he was losing his touch.

“You heard me. Not true!”

“Are you calling your father a liar at his own supper table, Little Jane?” (Unlike most parents who might thoughtlessly utter such a statement, Long John really was within his rights to call it his supper table, as he’d carved the table himself and was really quite proud of his workmanship).

“She do have a point, Jim,” mused Bonnie Mary.

“When I were your age I would’ve never dared call me father a liar!” snapped Long John.

“It ain’t true,” Little Jane repeated, “’cause Changez said you said your foot was took off by King George III when his sword slipped while knighting you for saving his life. And I know there’s no such thing as Australian alligators anyways, ’cause they only have crocodiles in Australia, and it even says so on page fifty-seven of the animal book you bought me in Boston!”

“Point taken,” said Long John with a weary smile and a twinkle in his eye. “But where does it say a man can’t improve a little on history?”

Little Jane gritted her teeth in frustration.

“Come now, you mustn’t take it so seriously,” said Bonnie Mary gently. “You’ll get your chance to be on a boarding party one day — just not yet, love.”

This settled the affair, according to Little Jane’s parents, and they moved on to talk of other things.

“Did Jonesy tell you?” Long John asked.

“Tell me what?” asked Bonnie Mary.

“That new magistrate, Villienne, paid a visit to the Spyglass today.”

“I thought we’d have got him packed off by now,” muttered Bonnie Mary in consternation. “We’re slipping, Jim. He still trying to collect those blasted taxes? How go the plans for running him off?”

“Not good, I’m afraid,” said Long John, not sounding too sorrowful about it. “But you know, I think we may be goin’ about this the wrong way, Mary.”

“And how’s that?”

“Weeeell,” began Long John, “Villienne ain’t such a bad fellow. A bit of a nutter, perhaps, but ain’t no harm in him. I come to thinking, Mary, maybe we should stop trying to drive him off. I talk to him right, he might come around to working with us, ’stead of against.”

“Don’t be naive, Jim. He’s an Englishman. Remember, I lived with them and I’m telling you, an Englishman ain’t happy till he’s got everyone else under his thumb.”

“Now, that ain’t fair,” began Long John judiciously. “Me father were an Englishman. And yer mother, too.”

“Well, even if she were, she weren’t his sort.” Bonnie Mary frowned. “All them magistrates is the same — they just hang about where they ain’t wanted, sticking their noses in our business, tellin’ us ‘savages’ what we ought to do, and taking our hard-earned gold without a thing back in return. What were he up to today, may I ask?”

“Didn’t rightly explain himself,” admitted Long John, “but he was carryin’ a mighty big bag of lichen.”

“Now, y’see! That’s just plain off, ” said Bonnie Mary with a frown. “It is! What does a toff like that want with a bunch of plants, I’d like to know.”

Little Jane wondered the same thing as she pushed her own lump of salted green lichen around on her plate. Why would anyone in their right mind purposely seek out the most unappetizing foodstuff on the island, instead of sensibly fleeing the noxious green lichen in terror and disgust? But then, she thought, as the salty green substance made its way down her gullet, perhaps Villienne really was as strange as everyone in Smuggler’s Bay said he was.

It behooves us now to speak briefly about the Honourable Almost-Doctor Alistair Florence Virgil Villienne, the island’s sole legal judge, doctor, tax collector, and representative of the king. Mr. Villienne could only command so many positions at once by dint of the island’s small population and tiny size. In fact, Smuggler’s Bay was so small that a man could stroll round the perimeter of the island in a single day and still have time for dinner and a rousing game of charades.

Almost-Doctor Alistair Florence Virgil Villienne never set out to be the sole representative of the British Empire on an obscure Caribbean island. Actually, if anyone on the island had bothered to ask him, he might have explained that his great ambition in life was to be a famous poet, or barring that, a scientist.

Of the most popular poet and heartthrob of the age, Lord Byron, it was said, “He is mad, bad, and dangerous to know.” Of the completely unknown poet and aspiring explosives chemist Almost-Doctor Alistair Florence Virgil Villienne, it was said, “Who? Villi … what now?” — if anything was said at all.

Despite this, Long John, in his lifelong mission to know something about everyone who inhabited his island, had discovered a few things about the new British magistrate’s life prior to his arrival in Smuggler’s Bay that he found quite fascinating. Then again, there was usually something in everybody’s life that the garrulous captain found fascinating. It was part of the reason he enjoyed talking to people so much. And as luck would have it, of all the people who enjoyed good talk in Smuggler’s Bay, Villienne, long starved for intelligent conversation, proved to be nearly as unstoppable a talker as Long John himself.

Villienne quickly explained to the attentive pirate that he had been born to an old land-owning family in England’s Lake District. Unfortunately, this old land-owning family no longer actually owned any land thanks to one uncle’s poor decision to sell the family estate in order to corner the market in Belgian cuckoo clocks. Sadly, as anyone familiar with the great Belgian cuckoo clock bubble of ’73 is surely aware, such speculations swiftly met with disaster.

Thus, the youthful Villienne was, unlike most young men of his rank, forced to deal with the bothersome matter of selecting a respectable profession to earn his bread. With his budding interest in natural science, his parents thought he might do well as a physician, and sent him off to medical school in Edinburgh. Unfortunately, a medical career did not take, and young Villienne soon found himself in a London flat shared with three other young men and a mouldy wheel of cheese they named Harolde. Alistair Florence Virgil Villienne proceeded to earn money by tutoring indifferent young scholars. All his remaining time he spent busily writing reams of verse and stories that no one wanted to read.

Although this manner of existence might have horrified many a poor man of noble name, it did not trouble Villienne: nourishment, shelter, ink, and paper being all he thought he required.

But to craft a child from ink and paper is no easy task, and to send one’s paper children out into the wide world is more difficult still. Week after week he would kiss them on their inky little heads with all the love and hope in his desperate poet’s soul. And week after week he would discover that his poems had been put to use as a client’s birdcage lining or water-closet paper. It began to try even his most patient of spirits.

Slowly, he came to realize that he could not live a life shut up in his room simply churning out verse. He was starting to repeat the same words over and over. Worse yet, he was growing increasingly obsessed with finding a word to rhyme with orange.

His parents suggested the diplomatic service and Villienne realized that a journey to foreign lands might be exactly what he needed to rekindle his imagination. He dreamed of splendid new people and landscapes to write about, things no poet before had ever put to pen. Success was sure to be his! He could already hear the ink-stained masses crying out for more.

Exactly where Villienne’s plan went awry he could not precisely say. Perhaps, he lamented, he lacked the proper Romantic temperament for such adventure. Then again, maybe it was the adventure itself that was lacking. Smuggler’s Bay was a nice enough island, to be sure, but one could hardly describe people who named their favourite native cuisine as fish and chips as exotic.

The magistrate’s mansion was a residence in the traditional Spanish style. To Villienne, who had spent the past few years living in one-third of a poorly ventilated apartment above a seedy Earl’s Court chip house, using Harolde the cheese wheel as both window insulation and the occasional meal supplement, it was a palace.

In London, Villienne had slept in the same blanket for four years without once washing it. Now he had servants whose sole employment was to keep him in fresh linens and frown critically over his ink-splattered shirt sleeves, chemical-stained hands, and threadbare clothes. It was all rather disconcerting. He spent his first few weeks as magistrate cowering in his mansion, worrying someone would realize what a fraud he was and escort him away.

Dovecoat, the old magistrate, dead thirteen years by then, had been popular among the citizens of Smuggler’s Bay. A rotund gentleman and regular patron of the Spyglass, Dovecoat could always be counted on to supply good English sweets to all the island children and to forget to collect the taxes.

Now there was a man, the islanders said, who, despite his vices, knew enough to leave all important matters concerning what was best for Smuggler’s Bay in the capable hands of its true leaders — the captains of the Pieces of Eight.

Shortly after the beloved Dovecoat’s death, the people of Smuggler’s Bay were promised a new magistrate by the British government. Unfortunately, the matter took a little longer than expected, what with the wars going on in Europe utilizing all available ships. By the time some bigwig in London remembered pokey little Smuggler’s Bay and a ship was cleared to drop off the first of the many new magistrates, the islanders had grown perfectly happy with governing themselves, making their own rules and ignoring taxes.

Of all the people who should have most minded the imposition of Villienne as magistrate, Long John, the unofficial president of the island, should have been foremost. Yet Long John actually felt a certain fondness for Villienne. He wondered if he was the only one who noticed how much the poor man looked the little boy lost.

Sometimes, from his perch up on the porch of the Spyglass, Long John watched Villienne wandering the streets of town as if searching for some recognizable London landmark, a man nearly as skinny as his own shadow, with straw-coloured hair and a furtive pink face, cautiously trying to suggest an improvement here, a possible adjustment there. He seemed genuinely shamed by the stony silence that invariably met his hopeful suggestions that the people pay one or two taxes, if they maybe felt like it, not today, say, but perhaps tomorrow, or maybe next week. Idly, Long John wondered how much longer Villienne would soldier on. He couldn’t help but pity a fellow who appeared so out of his natural element.

Of course, pity was the last thing a man in Villienne’s position wanted. Obedience? Yes. Respect? Certainly. Fear? Acceptable. But this demented politeness depressed him. At least if the people were angry with me, Villienne reasoned, it would mean my existence was of some consequence to their lives. But the rogues at the Spyglass just ignored him, which was ever so much worse.

Sometimes he fantasized about kicking all the pirates out and repopulating the island afresh with some solid, law-abiding stock, Puritans perhaps, or some other group with an inordinate fondness for monochromatic clothing and silly hats.

Realistically, though, he couldn’t banish the pirates. He had no army at his disposal — only his disapproving servants and Dovecoat’s former mistress and her two daughters. Besides, in one way or another, every job on Smuggler’s Bay was connected to piracy. To make war on the buccaneers would be to incite revolt and destroy the tiny island’s even tinier economy.

And as much as he hated to admit it, he’d miss the stories at the Spyglass.

So things stayed as they were. The islanders grumbled to Long John and Bonnie Mary about Villienne, and Villienne complained to his superiors in his letters, but nothing much changed.

That night, Little Jane sat through another of her parents’ meandering discussions concerning the Villienne question, until her patience finally wore thin. “Stuff this Villienne person! What about letting me in on a boarding party!”

“That’s the final straw!” said Bonnie Mary. “Go to bed!”

Resentfully, Little Jane skulked away from the dinner table. But she did not retire to bed. Instead, she doubled back and headed to the small room off the kitchen that housed Ishiro, the ship’s cook. Other than Jonesy, Little Jane, and her parents, Ishiro was the only one with a permanent room at the inn. Jonesy called the room “Ishiro’s Cave,” and it did look something like one. Its dimensions were odd — a tiny square of a floor, only slightly bigger than Ishiro’s bedroll, high walls, and a ceiling on level with the ceiling of the Silvers’ own second-floor bedroom.

Little Jane understood why Ishiro liked this place. Sitting on the bedroll, she felt like she was in a cozy cocoon. On all sides of her, in towering stacks, were Ishiro’s drawing books, paintings, and boxes of exotic objects. Souvenirs of nearly six decades of travel and adventure rose all the way up from the floor to the ceiling.

Within those carefully stacked volumes, Ishiro had captured a portrait of every sailor who’d ever crewed on the Pieces of Eight, as well as the Newton, the Jeong Se-min, the Golden Fleece, and the Flying Squid.

Pages fragile with age told of a youth spent in the fishing villages of Korea and Japan and the bustling ports of Hong Kong. Others showed Jane’s parents as young newlyweds and Little Jane herself as a drooling toddler.

As far as she knew, there was no order to a book’s placement in the stacks. Even within the sketchbooks themselves, drawings were not strictly chronological. Taking care not to topple the stack, Little Jane extracted one and began paging through it.

“Ahoy there, Little Jane,” Ishiro said as he entered the room. “What have you found today?”

Little Jane held up a sketchbook for his inspection. “Aaah,” he said, and thumbed through the pages for her. People with black silken hair and dark eyes gazed back at her across the ages, while ships with curiously shaped sails plowed the waves of inky seas.

“How do you make it all look so real?” Little Jane marvelled.

“Observation,” said Ishiro, in his lightly accented English.

“What?”

“Study and practice, of course, but always I observe,” he replied. “I look closely at what I am drawing. I look at how others draw, too. And then … then I am learning.”

“Oh.” That didn’t sound particularly difficult. Little Jane wondered if there was some other trick to it that Ishiro was keeping to himself.

Suddenly, he stopped flipping through the drawings, his gaze arrested by a particular picture near the middle of the book.

Little Jane got up, thinking it impolite to sit and watch his private reverie —although not, as you may have noticed, to enter his room without knocking or touch his personal possessions.

“Where are you going?” asked Ishiro.

“Sorry, you just looked like you were wanting a bit of a think to yourself.”

“No, it’s all right. Here, take it,” he said, handing her the book. “I am thinking you may find this one interesting.”

“Thank you,” she said and bowed to him politely, as he had taught her one did in Korea.

The wind and rain rattling on the tin roof of the Spyglass hid the sound of her movements as she made her way back up to room she shared with her parents.

As she ascended the narrow stairwell, sketchbook in hand, she pondered what Ishiro had said.

Observation … that was the key. It was that simple.

Upstairs in the bedroom she cleared her parents’ desk of all the assorted maps, compasses, and star charts. This task accomplished, Little Jane rummaged through her own belongings until she unearthed a small volume with the title “Exercise Book” printed untidily on the cover. Inside were her spelling exercises and a few illegible sums written in smudged ink. One by one she tore all the marked up pages out. At last, with nothing left but unmarked pages, she sat down to write.

Pausing for a moment to collect her thoughts, she concocted a plan of action. She vowed to herself that when the sunny season came around again, she would scrutinize every action of her parents and the other crewmembers with the keenest observation ever attempted and thus decipher the secret of what it took to become a truly superior pirate. It was only a matter of time before the elusive secret of perfect piracy would be hers!

Feeling suitably impressed with herself, she dipped her pen into the inkwell and with a bold hand gave an inspiring title to her prospective endeavours: “How To Be a Good Pirate.”

Then she signed her name, Little Jane Silver, feeling most pleased with her penmanship. Only later did she realize she had left the “Little” in by force of habit.

Less than a week later, with this book firmly in hand, Little Jane went off to sea with her parents aboard the Pieces of Eight, secure in her confidence that she would soon be counted among the best of the crew.