Page 20 of Dauntless

We watched TV for a while in companionable silence, and then Eddie stood up and began to check out the bookshelf.“Do you mind?”

“Help yourself.”

Eddie came back to the couch with one of the young adult novels Amy must have left.

“Not the book about Dauntless?”I asked with a smile.

Eddie grinned.“I’ve read it.”

Of course he had.

Eddie didn’t open the novel.Just ran his fingers down the spine.“What you said today.Do you really think the diary is a fake?”

“I’m not the historian,” I said.“But I didn’t want to get Short Clarry offside by saying it wasn’t.”

“Fair enough.”Eddie chewed his lip for a moment.“But are you curious?”

I considered that.

I was, in a way.But Mavis was right: nothing good could come out of disturbing the dead.So what if the diary was real?What if Harry Jessup had left Dauntless and made it all the way to Sumatra?What if he had survived long enough to write down what had happened on the island, and it turned out that George Hawthorne wasn’t a tyrant, and Josiah Nesmith wasn’t a hero for overthrowing him?What if the island’s history was even darker than I had ever been told?Would it change the way I looked at my neighbours?

Maybe it would.

We were fiercely proud of our origins.Such pride wouldn’t readily turn into indifference or mere academic curiosity if everything we thought we knew about our origins turned out to be a lie.It ran too deep for that.It would turn to shame, probably, or anger, and I didn’t quite know how to approach that.If what Eddie said about the island’s history was true, then I wasn’t sure I wanted to look it in the face.

“Maybe I’ll just wait to read all about it in your thesis,” I said at last.

Eddie smiled and pushed his glasses back up onto the bridge of his nose.His expression grew serious again.“Why did Short Clarry seem surprised when you said you were looking into things?”

I’d hoped he hadn’t picked up on that.I let out a slow breath.“There’s an...anexpectationthat comes with being me.With my name, I mean, and being a direct descendant of Josiah Nesmith.”

Eddie’s eyes were large behind his glasses.He nodded.“Like when we joked that you’re the king of the island?”

“I’m not the king of the island,” I said.“But I amsomething, and it’s not a joke.It’s hard to explain, but the other islanders listen to me because of who I am.The problem is, I’m not much of a talker at the best of times, so sometimes when they’re expecting my opinion on something, I’ve just got nothing to say.”

“You do okay with me,” he said.“Talking.”

“Yeah, I do okay with you.”

He smiled, cheeks flushing, and tapped his fingers against the cover of the book.

“So, tell me,” I said.“How does it feel to be a direct descendant of the tyrant of Dauntless Island?”

Eddie laughed and stretched his legs out.His feet, like mine, rested on the coffee table.He wriggled his toes in his striped socks.“Pretty cool, actually.Like, my parents weren’t really into history, but my granddad left me a bunch of books and old family stuff, and I got into it that way.I’ve got George Hawthorne’s christening cup at home.It’s this ugly silver thing.I keep pencils in it.”

I smiled and knocked our shoulders together.

Eddie set the book aside.“Anyway, I thought it was cool to be related to someone kind of famous, right?Or notorious, anyway.But when I looked into it, he didn’t actually seem to be that much of an arsehole.”He snorted.“Well, I mean, he was a nineteenth century white British naval captain, so there’s a certain amount of unavoidable arseholery inherent in that, but he didn’t seem worse than any of his contemporaries, you know?”

“Sure.”

“So I figured something wentreallywrong on theDauntless.”Eddie wrinkled his nose.“And I’m pretty sure that was down to Josiah Nesmith.”

“You think he didn’t have a reason to mutiny?”

“Henry Jessup didn’t think he did,” Eddie said.His expression grew serious.“I’m not here to shit on his memory, you know?It’s just there’s another side of the story, and I think it’s the truth, and I want to make sure it gets out there too.The truth doesn’t destroy a legend.”He shrugged.“Look at Ned Kelly.”

“It won’t matter to most people,” I said quietly.“But it matters here.”

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