Page 19 of Her Perfect Pirate
“I can hear.”
“I thought perhaps you would want to dance.”
“I don’t.”
That was one way to end the conversation.Shifting on his feet, Chow tried to think what to ask next.He ended up saying, “I heard you were fierce on theWhimsy.Jack Davies won’t stop talking about how you singlehandedly protected the longboat from the slavers.”
“Jack Davies is exaggerating.”
“Still.”Chow dared nudge her boot with the toe of his.“You make a good pirate, Rebecca.”
A compliment he thought she would appreciate, since almost every day, she had asked him once or twice whether he thought the rest of the crew accepted her as one of them.
Her fingers curled around the goat’s rope.“Why did you feed them supper?”
It took Chow a moment to realize she meant the prisoners.“Everyone has a right to eat.”
“That was a proper meal we gave them.More than a slave would get on one of their ships.”
He felt strange towering over her while she launched her argument at the goat’s face instead of his.He lowered himself to squat over the wooden deck.“You would have us treat them by their standards instead of our own?”
“I would treat them as they deserve.They are slavers.There is no lower man than that.”
The judgment in her voice stole away the last remnants of Chow’s good cheer.He braced a hand against the floor.“You know how they get sailors to work a slave ship?”
“They don’t kidnap them, I know that,” she scoffed.
“But they do.”His voice cracked a little because that small sentence allowed distant memories to leak in.Memories from his life in London, when he had not yet turned into Sharkhead, when he had collected these stories as evidence of a broken world he never expected to be a part of.“Some of the sailors sign up based on promises of wealth, sure.But most of them aren’t there because they want to be.The stupid ones don’t ask where the ship is headed.Others run up a debt at a public house, and the house says either they can go to debtor’s prison or work the slave ship.And then there are those who intend to leave ship as soon as it makes it to their home port again, only to discover the captain has charged them for tobacco and rum and the only way they can avoid debt is to stay on the ship for another voyage.”
Rebecca, at last, was looking at him, her expression shadowed in the lantern light.“Are these the sob stories they use to plead for mercy?”
“Before I took to sea, I used to manage a boardinghouse for the East India Company.These are the stories I witnessed myself.”
“If I were forced to work on a slave ship, I would throw myself overboard before we even reached the coast of Africa.”
Her words were so heavy with derision that they stacked like weights upon his heart.“And if they caught you before you jumped, you would be flogged or chained to the deck.Andthenyou would be forced to help with the slaving.”
“We just sank three slave ships.We killed at least two hundred men.Now you’re telling me I should pity them?”
Chow couldn’t look at her anymore.“I’m saying that if they managed to survive that battle and make it into our brig, they deserve to eat a meal.That’s all.”
“Either they are our enemies and they don’t deserve anything, or they are our allies and they deserve everything.You can’t have it both ways.”
If she needed everything to be so certain, so clear, what would she say if she knew what he had done before joining theGhost?
She continued: “I slit a man’s throat today.Just like a butcher.He was my enemy.He chose to work on a slaver.That’s all I want to know.”
Her words were awful.Worse still, they invited some hope to lighten Chow’s heart.This argument was not about a moral right and a moral wrong, with him falling on the wrong side of the scale.It was about Rebecca facing that terrible feeling Chow knew so well.The one that made him feel so very unworthy.
He reached out, touching only her ankle.“You were brave on theWhimsy.You did exactly what you needed to do.”
“I shouldn’t have been there.”Her eyes pinned him in place.“I had no business being in the longboat.”
“But you came through safe and sound, and that’s all that matters.”
“No.”Sitting up, she yanked her ankle away from him.“The captain had no business sending me to that ship, and you had no business letting him.”
Surprised by her sharp anger, Chow replied, “He’s the captain.”
