Steel (20 page)

And how did she explain it all? How did she tell them what had happened to her? They’d never believe it, any more than Cooper’s crew would believe where she’d come from. They’d think she was crazy. They’d check her for a head injury. And maybe they’d be right to think she was crazy. Surely it couldn’t have happened.

But she remembered it so clearly. All of it. The smell of the
Diana
, the sails rippling overhead, the noise of cannon fire, battling with Edmund Blane, kissing Henry—

She could never tell them about it.

“It was on the bottom,” Jill said, still catching her breath. “I saw it and just reached for it.”

She held the sword in both hands, so they all could see. Her mother and father were at her sides, and her siblings pressed closed. The rest of the tourists on the cruise gathered around wonderingly, and the grizzled tour guide studied the artifact admiringly.

“That’s amazing,” someone said. “How long do you think it’s been down there?”

“Look how rusted it is.”

“Where do you think it came from?”

“It’s from a pirate ship, I bet,” her brother said.

Jill glanced at her brother and hid a smile.

“I suppose we ought to take it to a museum,” her mother said.

Reflexively, Jill took a tighter grip on the sword. She could see it, this piece of history sitting in a display case in a museum somewhere, right where it belonged, next to a placard explaining its date and place of origin and what it said about the seafaring world of the eighteenth-century Bahamas, locked away from people and no one watching over it once the museum closed—and Blane somehow finding a way to steal it back. She told Captain Cooper she’d keep it safe. A museum, with its guards and alarms, ought to be safe. But Jill didn’t want to let it go.

“Do we have to?” Jill said, trying to explain. “I mean, this is like my own history. I’m a fencer. The weapons I use, my épées—they evolved from this, the kind of fighting I do came from this. It’s like I was meant to find it. You know? Like I fell overboard just to find this.” She turned hopefully to the tour guide. If anyone would know what should legally happen to the sword, it was him.

After a moment of thought, he smiled at her. “Law of salvage, kid. As far as I’m concerned, it’s yours. But let’s get it in a cooler, it needs to stay in water until we can get it to someone who can do some restoration on it.” He emptied out the long cooler of its ice and sodas—cold sodas. Jill almost lunged for one. But there’d be time for that soon enough. After filling the cooler with ocean water, Jill set the sword inside. It barely fit diagonally.

“Mom, Dad, it’s okay if I keep this, right?”

They both had their hands on her shoulders, unwilling to let go, as if reassuring themselves that she was safe. Her mother ran a hand over her wet hair. Jill didn’t mind.

“I suppose any museums we could show it to have a lot better-looking rapiers than this,” her father said. “It’s pretty rusted over.”

“That doesn’t matter,” Jill said.

She started shivering, because she was still wet through, and a cool wind was blowing over the water. The kind of wind that would catch sails and drive a well-rigged schooner across the sea. One of the crew found a blanket for her, and she sat huddled in the cabin to dry off and get warm. Her parents still kept to her side. And Jill still couldn’t stop smiling.

“You seem awfully happy for having almost drowned,” Mom said.

Jill had to agree.

T
his was the best summer job she could possibly have. Almost as good as sailing on a pirate ship for a little while.

Twelve girls, ages ten to twelve, lined up in front of her on the concrete basketball court in the main activities area of Camp Mountain Oak. They had their lead toes pointed, their other feet back, their knees loose, their backs straight, their arms bent as if holding épées. Jill went to each of them and adjusted their positions.

She was teaching them how to fence.

She was at the camp primarily as a counselor, but the camp wanted someone who could also teach fencing, and that was how Jill had gotten the job.

After a half hour of exercises, of advancing and retreating across the basketball court, drilling the movements into their brains and bodies so that they’d never forget, until the girls complained that their legs hurt and their arms were sore—“That’s how you know you’re doing it right,” Jill told them—she gathered them around in a shady spot by the main building and brought out her prize.

She’d been allowed to keep the rapier. Her parents made some phone calls to museums and found a specialist who could clean the sword. It had taken weeks of desalinization treatments to remove the corrosion, careful grinding and scrubbing to clean the metal, and a protective acrylic coating to prevent further damage. It would never have the gleam that it had when it was new, and would never again hold a razor’s edge. But that was all right. Jill only ever planned on using it to tell stories.

Jill retrieved the sword, wrapped in a thick black cloth, from her locker, and revealed it in front of the girls.

Laid out on the fabric, the sword shone like a treasure. As she hoped, the girls crowded forward to get a better look, oohing and aahing.

“Is it real?” one of them asked.

“Yes,” Jill said. “It’s from the early eighteenth century.”

“Is it a pirate sword?” another asked.

“It is, it really is. It belonged to a pirate named Edmund Blane. He was defeated in battle by another pirate, Marjory Cooper. The sword fell overboard and stayed lost in the ocean for three hundred years.”

“Marjory Cooper—a girl?” one of them asked.

Jill grinned. She loved this part. “Yes. One of the fiercest pirate queens that ever sailed.”

Some of them looked like they didn’t believe her. Didn’t believe that there were such a thing as pirate queens at all, or that women ever dressed up as men and joined armies, or did anything big and amazing and adventurous. So she pulled out her books and pictures. She’d found pictures of Mary Read and Anne Bonny that didn’t look very much like they had in person, but were good enough.

In all the reading she’d done, she hadn’t found anything at all about Marjory Cooper and Edmund Blane, or the
Diana
and the
Heart’s Revenge
. They’d faded from history—if they’d ever been real at all.

But Jill had a scar on her left arm, three inches across her bicep, from the wound that Emory had stitched. Back at the house after the boat tour, she’d taken a shower and noticed the welt of pink, healing skin. Her mother saw it the next day and demanded to know where it had come from. Jill told her she must have gotten cut when she fell off the boat.

It was all she could do not to tell the girls about sailing aboard the
Diana
with Marjory Cooper. But she could tell them about a love of fencing, and of pirate honor.

She let each of the girls hold the sword. It was too heavy for most of them, and it wavered in their grips. Even so, with the rapier in their hands, they all stood a little taller.

M
y pirates aren’t movie pirates. I did a lot of research on the real pirates of the Caribbean in the early 1700s, and got a lot of ideas from that research. But my pirates aren’t quite real historical pirates, either. We have lots of evidence that some women dressed as men and sailed with pirates (Anne Bonny and Mary Read are the best-known real-world examples), but no evidence that any of them were ever captains of pirate ships, at least in the Caribbean during the so-called golden age of piracy. (We do know of women pirate captains in other places, like Ireland and Southeast Asia.) And while pirates did capture slave ships traveling the route between the western coast of Africa and the Caribbean, they were more likely to sell the slaves themselves than they were to set them free, as the captain and crew of the
Diana
do. On the other hand, we also have evidence of former slaves like Abe serving on pirate crews. Grandy Nanny was a real person, one of Jamaica’s national heroes, but she was active a bit later than I have her here. And while Blackbeard, Calico Jack, Stede Bonnet, Sam Bellamy, and all the pirates I name were alive at the same time, they were probably never all having a drink together in Nassau at the same time. But I couldn’t resist.

We know about most of the famous pirates because they were captured or killed, witnesses interviewed, and their stories recorded in great detail for the court cases. There were hundreds of less famous pirates whom we know nothing about, simply because they were never caught. They either accepted pardons and settled into law-abiding lives, or they sailed into the sunset with their booty and retired. While we don’t know of any women pirate captains in the Caribbean, I’d like to believe that’s simply because if there was someone much like Captain Marjory Cooper, perhaps she was never caught.

Thanks go to Zrinka Znidarcic for answering questions about sword restoration. To Walter Jon Williams for the extensive notes on all things regarding sailing in the eighteenth century. All my errors on that topic are mine alone. To Gary Copeland and the coaches and students of Northern Colorado Fencers, whose successes in national and international competition gave me the idea for Jill in the first place. And to my fellow Defenders of the White Scarf of the Outlands, for the camaraderie and the love of rapier combat.

En garde:
“On guard.” The opening stance in rapier combat.

Retreat:
Backward movement in rapier combat.

Disengage:
An attack in which one’s blade moves from one line to another under the action of an opponent’s blade.

Foible:
The last third of a rapier blade; the thinnest, weakest part of the blade.

Flèche:
“Arrow.” An attack made while leaping into a run.

Remise:
The same attack continued immediately after being parried.

Redoublement:
An attack continued on the opposite line immediately after being parried.

Allez:
“Go.” A call for rapier combatants to begin fighting.

Attack:
An offensive movement in rapier combat.

Recover:
Returning to an
en garde
stance after an action.

Coupé:
An attack in which one’s blade moves from one line to another over the action of an opponent’s blade.

Beat:
A quick, sharp strike against an opponent’s blade.

Passé:
An action in which blades cross but no touches are made.

Stop thrust:
A direct attack with an extended arm against an advancing opponent.

Forte:
The lowest third of a rapier blade; the strongest part of the blade.

Touché:
“Touch.” When the point of the rapier touches the opponent.

Jacket art © 2011 by Larry Rostant

Jacket design by Amy Ryan