Chapter 11 #3
Rolling smoothly to his hip and swinging into a sitting position, Raven wondered what in the world would be better.
His experience with women was extensive for his age, but it was limited to a class of females that he could pull on his knee, and slip his hand into their bodice, and they would giggle and coo, and he’d take them to a bare pallet stuffed with a donkey’s breakfast. Then he’d be the one to giggle and coo.
And there was nothing on God’s earth better than that.
Still. The sun would set rosier if he could bring a smile to that sad, lovely face. That night, before sunset, he had.
He had brought tea for her, hot in a mug, and worked on the oakum until she had asked him shyly and warily what he was doing.
“This? Why, it’s oakum.” His fluid brown eyes filled with astonished compassion at so vast and touching an innocence. “A weak old rope shedded. It’s used to caulk the ship’s seams and such. Swells when it’s wet. Valentine sets me to it when I’m on his black list.”
“For pushing that man into the water?” asked Merry.
“No.” Again the astonishment. Then, grinning, “For wasting eggs.”
Within minutes he had coaxed her into helping him.
Her finished pile grew ludicrously slowly.
His was mountainous beside it. But he gaily praised her effort and to Merry’s horror brought his particular friends from the crew to admire it.
Mon, there had never been such oakum. The gulls would be carryin’ it away for nesting.
Such a good job, she was doing, did it matter that the Joke would have chewed the old oakum and sunk to Davy Jones before Merry had made enough to fill a single knothole?
Merry was not used to teasing, or strangers, or for that matter, men, and these, surely, deserved no more than the frigid turn of her shoulder. Their morals were low, their manners rough, their trade despicable. It was bad enough to have commerce with Cat, on whom she was dependent.
It took them the full third of an hour filled with a splendidly vivacious assault on her defenses to drag a smile from her, and once they’d had that triumph, she knew she might as well give up.
After the tentative bond she had made with Cat, friendship with Raven was like being force-fed beer bubbles.
Life had toughened Raven’s treacle-sweet disposition, but the harsh discipline of twelve tender years at sea had neither stemmed his floodtide effervescence nor lessened a natural love for the human race, who, in his case, had done precious little to deserve it.
Picking oakum was just the beginning. The next morning he had her up at daybreak to see a school of jellyfish, the shiny, throbbing bodies abob in blue water as far as the lens of a telescope would encompass.
After that Merry found herself settled near the scuttlebutt, the cask where the crew could draw water and gossip, while Raven taught her knots: a bowline knot, a common bend, a rolling hitch, a clove hitch; and the fancy ones: Matthew Walker knots and Turk’s heads.
With Dennis trying to climb in her lap Merry learned to name each sail, in order; and what could be told about a ship from the shape of her hull and her running rigging. There were ropes to be coiled, rigging to be inspected and repaired, leads to be taken.
The Black Joke was quite a place for a young woman whose eighteen protected years had allowed small outlet for a powerful natural curiosity.
There were some questions that brought her silences and evasions, but to ask about the sea or the ships that sailed there was to have an answer instantly; to admire a skill was to have it demonstrated as more and more the pirates came to accept the novelty of her presence.
She was as alien to them as they were to her.
Few of them had heard a woman speak with the intriguing aristocratic accent that Morgan and Devon used.
The gentility of her manners was a thing experienced only at the theater in low satires of the upper classes, and her face and figure were like those of plaster saints bought for a sixpence and given to one’s godmother on fair day.
The ship was a tight-knit if not loving community, and one learned swiftly here to be tolerant and live without privacy.
It was a democracy that elected Rand Morgan as captain unanimously and Thomas Valentine as quartermaster by a comfortable majority.
Their leadership brought with it a meticulously enforced routine, the minimum of bloodshed, and fat purses.
A dirty ship meant disease, bad rigging death in a storm, sloppy sailing capture and hanging, and the men on the Black Joke wanted to live and get rich.
Major decisions were put to the vote of the crew, and while Tom Valentine could punish lesser offenses at his discretion, any serious crime went to a trial.
It was not a bad life for men born paupers, and if their hearts of steel didn’t exactly melt to molasses at a glance from Merry, even Valentine had to admit they softened.
The days grew slowly warmer as they rode south, and it became harder to wear the jacket that she must to preserve her modesty in the thin gown of green silk that she was rapidly coming to hate.
Cat discovered her one midday slumped dizzily against a barrel and carried her below, applied wet towels to her red face, and with powerful doubts about its efficacy, brought her some of his own clothes and talked her into putting them on.
It was not easy, and he might not have succeeded if she hadn’t been halfway into a case of heatstroke.
The move into boy’s clothes, initially mortifying to Merry, was a delight to the crew.
When she came on deck dressed in Cat’s loose-bottomed denim trousers and a short jacket, they greeted the change with shouts of good-natured laughter and honored the new outfit by teaching her to run aloft (climb the rigging), to shoot the sun (take a meridian altitude), and to arm the lead (prepare to take a sounding).
For a lark Raven showed her how to throw a knife; they laughed when she held the knife as though it were a goat’s stomach, and laughed as well when, at her first try, the knife went end over end into the sea; all laughed, that is, except the owner of the knife, who said “Hey!” forlornly.
Her pride at stake, Merry’s second try had buried the knife cleanly if inaccurately in the mast, and the pirates with great hilarity had thrown themselves to their calloused knees, pleading for their lives.
On the poop deck Tom Valentine was heard by those standing closest to mutter something under his breath about Tom Cox’s traverse, “two turns around the longboats and a pull at the scuttlebutt,” which is a polite name for killing time.
Cat, watching also, had buried his forehead into the arch of his palm and wondered how he was going to explain it all to Devon.