LITMIR.BIZ

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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.

      Chapter 4

      “How to Be

      a Good Pirate”

      Bonnie Mary sat in the captains’ cabin staring at the star chart on the table in frustration. She’d tried every subtle trick in the book to get rid of the new magistrate, short of actually chasing him off with a loaded musket, but with no success. Without her husband’s silver tongue on her side, it was hopeless. The problem as she saw it was that Villienne seemed genuinely oblivious to almost everything she did. Threats went unnoticed, no matter how thinly veiled, and hints of bribery fell on ears more preoccupied with listening to the whales mating in the bay than to the clink of gold coins.

      Even her most recent scheme of posting handbills around the island luring all chemists in the area to gather in faraway Bermuda for a phony “International Conference on Sodium,” had failed. It was really quite exasperating. At long last they had been forced to sail, leaving the hapless magistrate still in possession of his position, much to her disappointment.

      While Bonnie Mary surveyed the ship’s star charts at her desk, Little Jane worked on “How to Be a Good Pirate.” Though she had intended to use the time to write up more observations, all she could think about that day was Ned Ronk, the ship’s boatswain. Quite by accident, she had acquired her first real enemy and now he threatened to derail all her best-laid plans.

      It was the boatswain’s job onboard to make sure the crew did what the captains asked of them. Thus positioned, Ned Ronk would have been the perfect person to teach Little Jane the elusive secret of superior piracy, but to her immense frustration, he would tell her nothing of the running of the ship, disregarding even her most basic inquiries. Then, when it became apparent that ignoring her would not stop her from asking him further questions, he barred her from the deck during all his shifts. Little Jane was furious.

      Ned Ronk had been with the Pieces of Eight for about four years. Under his rule the crew worked together like a well-oiled machine. Though his style may have been rougher than that of the previous boatswain, it was unquestionable that Ned Ronk got results. Crew discipline was at an all-time high, targets were being met, and the captains couldn’t be more pleased with the crew’s performance.

      For her part, however, Little Jane was not impressed. Even prior to her banishment from the deck, she had never liked the boatswain. The reasons for her contempt of him were difficult for her to articulate, but being small and unobtrusive, she saw things the captains did not. For instance, Ned Ronk would always smile and bow politely to the captains when they were present, but as soon as they were out of sight, he acted differently.

      Though Ned didn’t rely too heavily on the whip, he had other means at his disposal, equally cruel and cutting, for controlling the men. He delighted in tormenting anyone he considered beneath him, picking up on and exaggerating for the benefit of other crewmembers any imagined defect he noticed

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