“Don’t you think he’d be less inclined if it was asked as ransom for his nephew’s return? He’d withdraw them as soon as we’d left the harbor.”
“What if we offer it as a reward instead of a ransom?” I suggest, and Percy nods. “If you get us to Venice, we’ll write to our families and tell them how you rescued us. From pirates, even, if you really want to go for the drama. They’ll be so grateful they’ll offer you anything, and all you need ask for is letters of marque to sail as privateers under the protection of the English crown.”
Scipio runs a hand over his beard, looking at each of us in turn like he is searching for a definitive reason to either trust us or strap us to a cannon and fling us over the rail.
“You could get a ransom for us,” Felicity pipes up. “But they won’t issue letters of marque to our kidnappers. And that’s far more valuable.”
“I’m sure we could console ourselves with a good deal of money. And I’ll be much less moved to compassion if I find out this is all a con.”
“We’re not lying,” I say, though it sounds feeble.
“I’ll have to consult my crew—”
“Aren’t you the captain?” Felicity interrupts.
“We’re more of a democracy. Though if none of them protest, and if you—” He scratches a hand through his beard. “You really think you can get us letters issued?” he asks, and Percy nods. “Well, then we’ll take you to Venice. We can facilitate your return to your families from there.”
I’m about to extend a hand of accord to him, but Felicity has a few more terms. “You’re not to mistreat us on this voyage,” she says. “We’re not to be kept as captives.”
“Then, in return, you’ll stay out of my crew’s way, give them your respect, and cause no havoc,” Scipio counters. “Any whiff of ill intentions toward any of us from any of you and I’ll shackle you to the masthead. Do you agree to that?”
“Agreed,” we three chorus.
Scipio helps us unwrap from our imitation bindings, then leads the way up from the gun deck so we can make our proposals to the crew. Felicity follows close behind him, her surgical kit rewrapped and clutched close to her chest the way some girls might cling to a favorite doll. Percy and I bring up the rear.
As we climb the steps, Percy nudges me with his elbow. “You’re daft, you know.”
“Am I?”
“James Boswell. Rooking the navy. Making deals with pirates.”
“Well, they’re not pirates. And”—I poke him in return—“the deal was mostly your doing.”
“You’re still daft.”
“Are you complaining?”
“No,” he says, giving a quick tug on my sleeve that turns into his fingers pressed into my palm in a way that makes me weak in the knees. “I sort of love it.”
26
It will be weeks before we make port in Venice, weeks that I assume will be filled with hard labor and abuse from our captors, but instead consist of a strange calm and a stranger camaraderie.
We’re given hammocks on the lower deck alongside the crew (Scipio surrenders his captain’s cabin to Felicity for the sake of her modesty), and we take meals with them—meals being a loose term, as they mostly eat hardtack softened in coffee or warm rum. Ebrahim teaches us that the biscuits need a good soak so that the maggots burrowed into them drown and float to the top, which is a positively scrummy thing to consider every time you tuck in.
The crew keep their distance from us at first and we from them, though the ship is small and there is only so much space in which one can avoid the other. The standoff breaks when Percy and I, starved for entertainment, play a game of dice with a handful of the men, which feels at first like conspiring with the enemy and ends up being a better night than many we’ve had with the blades back in Cheshire. They don’t cheat half as much as Richard Peele and his lot.
They are not what I expected of pirates, nor really of tars at all. They’re not bloodthirsty, drunken rogues passing round-robins and black spots and ready to knock the man in charge on the back of the head with a belaying pin. Rather, they are a small, tight-knit crew, who trade jokes and stories and songs mostly in jack-tar lingo, and we become their strange, temporary crewmates, assigned small tasks with no irreparable consequences if bungled.
They all take to Percy right away—their greenhorn, who they all call King George, follows him around like a puppy, not saying much, just always staring with his enormous eyes at Percy, like he’s a rare orchid brought aboard.
“Is he truly a lord?” King George asks me one night, as he, Ebrahim, and I sit on the deck tying monkey’s fists.
“Who, Percy? Not a lord, no, but he’s from a highborn family.”
“And they raised him well?” Ebrahim asks. “Even though he’s colored?”
“I don’t think he was allowed to take supper with them when they had company, but, with some exceptions of that sort, they’ve been first-rate to him.”
Ebrahim tosses his monkey’s fist between his enormous hands, his mouth pulling down. “So it’s not the same at all, then, is it?”
It occurs to me suddenly, as I look down the deck to where Percy’s sitting with his fiddle and two of the men, who are singing a tune for him in hopes he can pick up the melody, that this must be the first time in his life he’s around men who look like him. Men who don’t assume he’s worth less than them just because of the color of his skin. Among the pirates, he has nothing to prove.
“Maybe I’m a lord,” King George says.
“Maybe, Georgie,” Ebrahim replies, with no conviction.
We round the tip of Italy—the heel of the boot, as Scipio calls it—and enter the narrow straits between the Neapolitan state and Corfu, where Archaic temples sit like bulwarks along the cliffs. The water shifts from turquoise to emerald as the light billows across it. Percy and I spend long stretches of these days standing together at the prow, marveling at the way the whole world around us seems to be made of raw cerulean pigment and playing a silent and absolutely maddening game of who can get his hand closest to the other’s without actually touching it.
We haven’t yet had a moment alone since the unfinished one in the hold of the xebec, though we both keep finding increasingly creative ways to touch each other without anyone noticing. I think I quite deserve some medal for the restraint I have thus far shown in regard to Percy now that I know he and I seem to be reading from the same book on the subject of our romantic sentiments, until Felicity mutters one night at supper, “Be a bit more obvious, won’t you?” Though, in fairness, I had just hooked my foot around Percy’s ankle and he had nearly choked on a mouthful of salt pork.