Chapter Text
The first time Oluwande sets foot in the Republic of Pirates he’s just shy of seventeen, green as can be with less than a year at sea under his belt and all but the last handful of weeks of that on a Navy vessel doing all the worst, most humiliating, grimy, rank-smelling, dangerous chores on three hours sleep a night, for as close to no wages as they thought they could get away with and all the abuse they could heap on him for having dared to presume he had any right to serve the Crown or the Crown would even want the likes of him.
It was impulse and instinct that drove him off the Norwich onto the Shadow, but he hasn’t regretted it for a second, and now here he is walking around in a fucking pirate city and Oluwande is not the kind of lad who grins as a rule but he’s got a quiet glow going that he can’t shut off and doesn’t want to.
Growing up in London, he’d never imagined he might miss city life if he ever got a chance to see the world, but turns out he was wrong. There’s something about alleyways and doors and market stalls full of things that glitter or chime or steam out fantastic smells and old folks leaning out of windows watching the young folks running their feet off that hits him like nothing else. In a city you can be almost invisible but never alone, and Oluwande loves it.
And this city? So small you’d barely call it a neighborhood in London, but it’s still fully alive and bustling and, unlike London, here he isn’t one of the only dark-skinned people in the crowd. He isn’t even the darkest-skinned person in the crowd.
London wasn’t hopelessly bad—heaven compared to being trapped on the Norwich, for sure—but his entire life he’s never not been aware of white Londoners being acutely aware of him everyplace he goes, never quite seeing his face as anything but a stranger’s though his family is London born four generations deep. Sometimes they’re polite and sometimes they’re dicks, but they never see him as one of them even though he is, the Great City as much his birthright as anyone else’s.
The first of his family, back in Shakespeare’s time and Shakespeare’s neighborhood, had done grand, smashing, built himself a little empire. Every generation after that, their world has got smaller and smaller. Plague and revolution and restoration and poxes and flux and plague again, each bad turn falling hardest on them and folks like them. And now here he is, gone because home is hardly home anymore and there’s nowhere else in England for someone like him to settle. Where could he go but away?
Here, though—this is a fine away to be. Everyone here is a stranger and no one seems to care, and he’s spotted a couple of folks who might be sailors of some kind but no officers and no colonists at all. Oluwande has never been in a crowd like this, and it makes him a little dizzy.
He’s got just two errands to run for Captain but other than that a full day to fuck around and do exactly as he likes before returning to the Shadow, and he can hardly believe his luck. Two errands? He’d do twenty, just to walk the length of this place and back again and feel so at home in his own skin.
First up is a bolt of sailcloth. Oluwande takes his time, walks up and down the marketplace stalls, listening to the merchants and mongers. He recognizes some of the calls—New mackerel, new mackerel, who will come and buy new mackerel, new mackerel? All chairs to mend, all chairs to mend, rush or cane-bottom, all chairs to mend--wonders how they got from home to here, reminds himself that he got from home to here so why is he surprised?
He fingers the bolts of cloth, pulls and flexes them to test the strength of the weave. He pops into a shop a time or three as the day wears on and the sun beats down. He dickers a little as Mum and Dad and Mamamama had taught him—For God’s sake, never say yes to a first offer, sonny! My great grandfather started off at your age and you’re none too young to learn to make a canny deal yourself—for the sheer pleasure of the song and dance of it.
He finally settles on a good sturdy bolt from a booth run by a smiling girl who looks to be just his own age. Her skin is lighter than his but her eyes are darker, and when she smiles her thank-you as he counts out the coins from his purse into her hand something about how that smile hits her eyes seems to say, “Look at us, playing at being grown-ups! Have we fooled ‘em all yet?”
Oluwande doubts that he himself has fooled anyone, but it’s impossible not to smile back at that smile, so he does. At his smile she throws in a pair of needles and a tiny yellow cotton sack, no bigger than a cherry, filled with sand. “When the needles dull, and they will, just run them through this a time or two and they’ll clean right back up,” she tells him. “No charge. You’ll need all of this—the finest cloth on earth’s no good without regular mending.”
“Thanks,” he says. “This is fantastic. Captain’ll be glad.”
“I don’t care a fig for your captain,” the girl says, and smiles again, but this time the smile is somehow slower, more luxuriant, like a cat stretching in the sun. “I’m giving it to you.”
Oluwande sees, a step behind as usual, what she means, and feels like a total fucking idiot. He bows, because clearly she expects something from him but he doesn’t know what, and busies himself wrapping the needles in his handkerchief so they won’t impale him from inside his purse. When he straightens up again, the girl is still looking at him, or maybe through him, her expression remote, like she’s heard his silence clearly and is already mentally walking away.
He realizes he has no idea where to go for his next errand, just a name to hunt down. “D’you know of a place called Spanish Jackie’s?”
She frowns. “Why d’you want to go to that place?”
“Captain told me to go, I’m going.”
The girl sighs, then leans out over the wooden counter and points. “Keep going down this way, turn left at the cooper, go down that alley until you hear the whores calling for custom. It’ll be on the right, down a few steps. There’s a little sign shaped like a coat of arms that says Spanish Jackie’z—Jackie’z with a z—and a big heavy door that’s usually open and there’s always someone passed out on the steps. If you get to the crazy-eyed fella selling fishnets, you’ve gone too far. And when you go in, be polite. She’s got a nose jar.”
Oluwande has no idea what a nose jar is, but the girl makes it sound like something so obvious that he can’t bring himself to ask her for an explanation. Instead, he just says, “Thanks. First time running errands for Captain, I really don’t want to screw it up.”
“Come back sometime and say hey,” she says, but not as if she expects him to actually do it. Which he doesn’t, so, fair cop.
Off he goes, bolt of sailcloth under one arm, on his way to the second errand. The girl’s directions are perfect—he spots a little jagged alleyway straggling off to the left just past the cooper, and he hasn’t gone a hundred yards before he hears the calls, high voices and low:
“Clean rooms by the hour, reasonable rates for services rendered!”
“Penny candies fresh and tart, come get a suck!”
“Farthing for a handie, penny a blowie, groat for a proper lie-down, guinea for a Spaniard, doubloon for a Frenchman, English feckers feck right off!”
Oluwande doesn’t look up, doesn’t meet anyone’s eyes or take any of the hands waggling out of various doorways grasping for him and the other passers-by; he just keeps scanning the wall to the right looking for a sign and an open door and a fallen-down drunk or two. Just as the girl said, he finds them a dozen yards in.
He expects it to be dark and dank even now at midday, windowless as it is, but there are a shocking lot of candles: on the tables, down the length of the long bar, blazing in tall churchy candelabras in the corners.
By their light he is able to make out what look like a dozen different places crammed under one low ceiling: There’s the most glossily polished bar he’s ever seen (along with the candles, several large glass jars of murky liquid and… things; he can’t tell what and doesn’t want to look more closely). Jostled up against the far wall sit a couple of cozy little booths. In the middle is a long table of planks that look like they’ve been salvaged from the most shambling wrecks at the shabbiest harbor at the world’s arse-end. And scattered throughout are upended barrels missing half their staves and clearly just waiting for someone fool enough to try to set a glass down on them so they can fling it in the fool’s face and shiver themselves to pieces. At the farthest end of the room he can just see a distinctly unlit passageway that ends at a decidedly closed door.
For a basement bar at midday down a side alley on a market day, it’s surprisingly busy. People are lined up at the bar, crowded around the plank table, crammed into one of the booths, huddled around the wobbly barrels. The crowd inside is as varied as the crowd outside, and blissfully just as free of anyone’s navy or gentry.
In contrast to every other inch of the place, the larger of the booths is occupied by a single person majestically alone, someone nearly as tall sitting as anyone else in the room standing, who can only be Spanish Jackie.
She wears the finest crimson velvet greatcoat he’s ever seen, over a shirt that seems to be constructed solely of ruffles upon ruffles. At her throat is pinned a black satin rosette adorned with what looks like the skull of a tiny bird. She is smoking a cigarillo, or at least holding it and letting the smoke curl around her face. Her edges are gorgeously, elaborately laid, precise little curling tendrils echoing the smoke. Her bearing is regal as a dowager duchess’s (a dowager duchess who seems likely to have a concealed weapon or three about her person) and she scans the room entirely without hurry or fear.
Oluwande knows at once that she’d spotted him the second he appeared in the doorway and that she’s just waiting to see what he does and how he does it and whether she needs to do anything about him. He may be unclear on how to respond when a pretty person smiles at him, but he knows exactly how to respond when the boss of a room gives him an unsmiling look that says, “Who exactly the fuck are you?” He walks right up, doffs his cap, and says, “Ma’am, Captain Welters just docked the Shadow for supplies, and he sent me to you to ask for three bottles of your best Haitian rum.”
Spanish Jackie continues to look at him, not quite bored but absolutely impassive. He stumbles on. “Captain was most particular, I had to get it here, from you.”
Her eyes flick from Oluwande to the bar and then back. “I’m Oluwande Boodhari.” He’s twisting his cap like the streetcorner orphans he used to see in Newgate, but he can’t stop himself.
At last she sighs, the cigarillo smoke swirling around her with the exhalation, and kicks at one of the benches of the booth. “Cap’ll get his rum. Sit down, kid.” He sits. “And put your cap back on. You look like a squirrel with a fuckin’ nut.”
“Yes ma’am.”
Which he’s terrified is a horrible mistake, but she only seems mildly amused, and leans in very much too close. “How old you think I am, kid?” Up close, her skin is perfect but her eyes are ageless, depthless. One wrong step and you could fall in and drift forever.
“How—how old?” Oluwande stutters. “Please don’t ask me, I’m rotten at guessing.”
“I’m twenty-five,” she says. “I’m not a fucking ma’am.” Even with her perfect skin she doesn’t look twenty-five, he thinks—but then, what does he know? He’s still sixteen, everyone over twenty looks either old or very very old as far as he can tell.
And like the chump he is, Oluwande says automatically, “No, ma’am, sorry.”
She rears back and for half a second he’s absolutely terrified, but then she claps him on the shoulder and grins. “Oluwande, you said? From the Shadow? Hello, Oluwande from the Shadow. I’m Spanish Jackie. I know you already know that; sometimes I just like the sound of my own name. Emilio!” She raises her voice and gestures to the man behind the bar. “Three bottles of the Haitian for our young friend to take back to Tommy. Pack ‘em in a sack of hay so they don’t get busted. And pour us out a couple shots.” She lowers her voice again, focuses back on Oluwande, intently. “How well you know Tommy? Known him long? Know why he sent you?”
“Hardly at all, really,” says Oluwande. “Maybe a month. And I guess he’s running low on rum?”
“How’d you end up on his ship?” asks Jackie.
“I was on an English warship, the Norwich, to start. Supposed to be a cabin boy to the officers, running their errands and doing their scutwork, and I hoped they might make me some sort of apprentice and let me work my way up. But what they really wanted was a slave—they wouldn’t call it that, they act like they’re better than the colonists, but they don’t say no to the money the colonists make off slaves, do they?
“Last month that captain sent me out on a skiff with two officers as their pack mule and their muscle while they met with the governor of Jamaica. He said I was a stout-looking lad and I’d scare off the savages. He wouldn’t trust me with a proper weapon but he gave me a couple of iron bolts to hold and showed me how to clench my fists around them for a good solid punch if someone came at us. But I was that sick of it all that when a couple fellas from the Shadow boarded us I punched the officers and left with the fellas. Broke one of ‘em’s noses, too. Felt good.”
The man from the bar appears at the booth, a fat burlap sack bristling with hay under one arm and a tray with two shot glasses of glossy amber liquid balanced on the palm of the other hand. In one swooping move he swings the sack to the floor beside Oluwande’s bench and glides the tray onto the table. “Rum for you and the kid, kitten,” he says. Jackie shoots him a stabbing glare. “Boss,” he corrects himself, and flinches. If she looks old to Oluwande, he looks very very old, a balding strip of jerky draped in ancient linens. “Boss,” the very very old man repeats, his voice cracking, and skitters back to the bar.
Jackie knocks back her shot. “What island are you from originally?”
“Kind of a big one—England. London, neighborhood called Southwark.”
“London? The London, no shit?”
“No shit,” he affirms. “My great-great-great granddad was a merchant—his family come from Mogadishu to the Low Countries trading silk and spices, but it got so crowded there that when he was old enough he struck out on his own. Landed in Southwark and done so well he married a London girl and set up permanent shop, silks and other fabrics. Took commissions for Shakespeare’s own Globe and all. Built up a good trade, made it thrive, and passed it down to his kids like any other rich merchant. Not that it lasted—what the City didn’t take, the plagues and the Puritans did. By the time I came along we were still free but that’s about all we had going for us, and no hope of better if we stayed. So here I am.”
“Still, free from birth is pretty goddamn great,” Jackie says. “Good on your ancestors for that.”
“Indeed,” Oluwande agrees, and lifts his glass. “To my great-great-great granddad, Master Reasonable Blackman. Sorry about Cromwell, sir.”
“Reasonable Blackman?”
“Had to call himself something that told everyone how safe he was, or he’d never have got on. I’ve only got the name Oluwande because we’re too poor now for anyone to care if we’re safe.”
“City boy and great-great-great grandson of freeborn Belgian Reasonable Blackman—no wonder Tommy sent you here. You need me, little baby chicken, or the Caribbean and the colonizers are going to eat you alive,” says Jackie. And with that, she pulls her bench up close to the table and close to him.
“Your captain sends folks to me when he thinks they got potential but they’re young and dumb and they need a crash course in not getting fuckin’ dead. He may look as white as a English admiral but he’s a cousin’s cousin so we help each other out. He looks out for family, and for Family. And if he sends someone to me I help ‘em out. And you, Oluwande, are in dire need of help, so shut your innocent ass up and listen.”
And he does, as she talks and talks, and the afternoon drifts on as Jackie explains to Oluwande exactly what is the what. At some point Emilio pours them two more shots, and a little later on a tall cheerful fellow somewhere between Oluwande and Jackie in age introduces himself as Marco, puts bowls of pudding and souse in front of them, and tries to slide in beside Jackie and sling one arm across her shoulders. “The fuck you doin’, man?” she hisses, and Marco hastily retreats.
Jackie goes on at length about where to avoid (mostly the American colonies). “Stay the fuck off the mainland. You being a freeborn Englishman ain’t gonna mean shit to them. They. Will. Not. Care. I know you think the Royal Navy treated you like shit, but trust me when I tell you it’s much worse on land. You show up anywhere in Virginia or the Carolinas, some asshole will set slave catchers on you, swear you must have escaped from somewhere, and you will be well and truly fucked. The Spanish and the French territories, maybe a little less insane than the English, but not much. Steer clear of all of it. You’re safe with Tommy, he won’t order you on land there, he understands how it is, but some other captain might. If they do, you gotta say fuck no and stick to it.
“All these islands? Bermuda, St. Kitt, Haiti, Jamaica, Tortuga nem? English and French and Spanish and Dutch motherfuckers been fighting over them and passing us and the tribes and the land back and forth and nothing’s ever settled and they never manage to dig in deep enough; we’ve teamed up and run away and burned it all down and shed their blood over and over and we’ll do it again. You can get by just fine out here on the islands if you stay on the move, or if you do like your great-great-great granddad or like Jackie and build yourself a little empire. But America is different. And crazy. Stay the fuck away.”
(Oluwande will of course fail to stay the fuck away, but not for many years and only for a very good reason which he can’t even imagine yet.)
She tells him where to go, all the little islands scattered throughout the Antilles, the ones that look too puny and insignificant for the colonizers to bother with. She pulls out a few maps (that majestic velvet coat is full of hidden pockets, and sure enough Oluwande spots the gleam of a knife as she pulls out one of the maps, but he doesn’t say anything; he’s already a little more savvy than when he walked in here), riffles through them, chooses one and spreads it out on the table between them. Then she pulls a completely different knife out of a different pocket and taps out the little islands, flyspecks on the map, tap tap tap.
“This one? Tribe that lives here is one white folks don’t want to fuck with because they’ve been fucked with one too many times and they’re done. But you? Me? We fine there. That little bitty thing down there just north of Bonaire? Only five square miles, but the best fried fish you will ever have in your life. Nice people, too. Not big talkers, but nice. Great place to just kick back. Waaay out here—ain’t even on any of the maps, but a few leagues east of St. Lucia there’s a little string of tiny islands. Five islands, five families. Long ways back they killed a plantation owner in Haiti, torched the land, and took off. These islands are the place to go if you want folks to not find you.” Her voice drops. “Unless folks are me. Try not to have any reason to want Spanish Jackie to not find you. Jackie knows these islands very well, and Jackie don’t like it when people try her.”
“I definitely won’t,” Oluwande says.
“Smart kid.” She sheaths the knife and folds up the map and they both vanish before he can blink. On to the next lesson. “Now, you broke one of them motherfuckers’ noses? Good start. Show me your technique; I want to see what you got.” She leans back, bawls down the darkened corridor. “JULIAN. GET OUT HERE, NOW.”
A lanky pale pink fellow with the scraggliest red beard and the most freckles Oluwande has ever seen on a single face emerges from the closed door, pauses to lock it behind him, and runs up to the booth to obligingly spar a little and take a punch or three, or four. Jackie corrects Oluwande’s stance, his swing, his follow-through, makes him do it again and again.
When Oluwande has clocked Julian a fifth time and he starts to look a little wobbly, Jackie sends him back down the passageway and pulls one of the busted barrels over. “This is a good height to practice gut punches. You gotta change it up a little. If you always swinging at someone’s face he gets to know it and you’ll be blocked every time, so mix it up and go low too.”
He jabs at the barrel a while, right, left, back again, with Jackie pointing out all his mistakes and making him do the same move over and over until, to his total shock, he slams an aching knuckle into just the right spot and punches out another stave. The barrel groans and lists crazily to one side. Jackie laughs, orders them both another shot, and tells him to remember how that last one felt and also he owes her another barrel. At first Oluwande laughs too, but Jackie gives him a cold sharp look and he can’t quite believe just how quickly he’s fumbling for the cord around his neck to pull out his purse.
More drinking, more talking. He’s shown her he can throw a punch so she assumes he can handle a knife. What else can he do? You survive by making yourself indispensable, and one or two fight moves won’t do it. He needs more. Can he sew? (A bit.) Tinker, mend, make? (He could be better, but he’s not hopeless.) And? (He drives a good bargain. Does figures in his head. Has an ear for languages—they speak a little of everything in London and he’s always been a word magpie; he’s got some Spanish, Portuguese, French, Scots Gaelic, a few words of Irish.) Anything else at all? (He can keep a secret. He knows when to shut his mouth.) That. That last one. That’s fantastic, that’s gold. A man who knows how to truly keep a secret is a motherfucking treasure.
By the time Oluwande is done laying out all his strengths, he’s mentally exhausted. He’s not used to thinking or talking about himself, much less bragging about himself. To be honest, it kind of stresses him out. Jackie seems to sense that he’s all talked out and lets him fall back into silence and just listen to her. And there’s a lot to listen to.
Spanish Jackie the person and Spanish Jackie’z the bar have a lot of history, especially considering that she says, again, that she’s twenty-five. She’s had this place forever, or possibly since her aunt who was also Spanish Jackie passed it on to her, or it might have been her mother or her grandmother, or some random woman she met once, but it may also have been just her all along. She says each of these things very insistently.
Jackie has also been sailing forever. She has her own ship, not docked here but someplace else, someplace secret. She has a fleet of plundered vessels somewhere, and has sunk or burned or sold for scrap a few dozen other folks’ ships because someone on board had fucked with her on the wrong day. She can’t bother keeping track of just how many anymore. Jackie’s always at sea.
Jackie’s always in Tortuga; she and a friend used to run the whole island but the Spanish got up their noses. She faked her own death to get away and those idiots never even guessed and they still don’t even when she goes back. She has to keep going back; it’s her responsibility and her duty, no matter what the Spanish or any of those assholes say.
Jackie’s always here; this here is her favorite place in the world, her little basement palace. She’s just kidding; not just the basement, she owns the building. But this place really is her beloved haven, and that’s why she has standards of behavior, strictly enforced:
- No idiots.
- No weepy drunks.
- No breaking shit.
- No cheating at cards, or at least no getting caught cheating.
- Absolutely no cheating Jackie or any of her husbands, even the squirrely ones. (Oluwande blinks at this entirely new idea but, again, holds his tongue—and when he really thinks about it, anyhow, it’s not like half the men on board don’t have someone in every port plus all their dealings with each other at sea; if they can do it, why shouldn’t a woman? And if everyone involved is agreeable, it must be much neater and tidier to keep them all in one place than scattered all over.)
- Put your nose where it don’t belong, lose it, and once it’s gone don’t think you can sneak by the nose jar to visit it because you’re also banned and you’ll lose something else every time you show what remains of your face here.
- Also no nose-picking, no spitting on the tables and no sniffing snuff. All that shit is gauche. Show some fucking class.
By the time twilight is coming on, Oluwande is a little tipsy and queasy and his head is spinning with all the things he’s been told. Every one of them contradicts all the others but somehow they all sound very true and very serious and he has no idea how he’s going to remember them. Jackie crams another bowl of pudding and souse into him to sober him up, gives him one of her maps, and makes him repeat the directions back to the dock several times because everything looks different at twilight and she doesn’t want to go to the trouble of filling him up with all this knowledge and then find out he wandered off in the wrong direction and got his damn throat cut two minutes after walking out the door.
When he’s just about ready to go, she says, “Anything else you need to know? Anything else you want? Jackie’s feeling beneficent this evening. It probably won’t hurt to ask. Probably.”
Something occurs to him, stirred up by all the talk and all the history. “Is there any way you could send a piece of mail? I’ve been avoiding all the… er, reputable places, because of the Navy officers and all. Seemed smarter that way. But I’d like to get a message home.”
“Jackie could do about any damn thing for you if she feels like it, and you want to mail a letter?”
“I want to tell my mum and dad I’m still alive. We were only just scraping by, and three of my sisters, the twins and the baby, died in a month last year so there was just the two of us left. After we spent all we had burying them my mum got in a bad way, just kept saying London was killing all her babies and we had to leave and she couldn’t rest easy until we were out. My sister went into the scullery in a great house in Norfolk, but I tried one thing and another and I couldn’t fit anywhere. Too dark for the great houses, too citified to work a farm, and I could have maybe started as a stable hand but, truthfully, horses fuckin’ terrify me. No place left but the sea, so off I went. Probably never see them again. I’d like to send them a note.”
“I could do that,” Jackie says. “But you know they might not be alive themselves. And they’ll never write back; you’re a vagabond. You’ll never have a place they can send it to.”
Oluwande looks at his hands. “Yeah, I know. But I got to know that I tried anyway. They’re my family.”
Jackie considers a moment, nods, and looks to the bar. “Emilio! Go get Quentin. Tell him to bring his writing kit.”
Emilio melts away into the shadows, and barely a second later another man appears at Jackie’s elbow, lank and long-haired and dressed in green and looking absolutely all business. In no time at all the table is covered with paper, blotters, bottles of ink, a chunk of sealing wax and a magnificent quill. Oluwande has no idea where it all came from. Quentin dips the quill, taps the tip, holds it up. “Will you write it, or would you rather dictate?”
“It won’t be long, if you can write it, thanks,” Oluwande says. “I just want to sign it. ‘Dear Mum and Dad, I am well and working on a…’ merchant ship, does that sound good? ‘…on a merchant ship in the West Indies. I’ve learnt to swim so I am fine. Give Idowu my love if you hear from her. Don’t worry about me.’ I think that should do it. Can I sign now?”
Quentin re-dips the quill and turns the sheet of paper to Oluwande, who scans it through to make sure it looks all right—he’s not great at writing much beyond his name, but he can read a bit—and signs. Quentin folds it once, twice, seals the folded side, writes down Oluwande’s parents’ names and their address on the other side. Jackie slips it into yet another of her pockets.
Oluwande watches it disappear, knowing it’ll likely never reach his home. But there’s a small bare chance that it might, that sometime weeks or months from now his parents could be touching the same piece of paper he’s just touched and put his name to. Just the thought makes something quiet and soft and much younger than the almost-seventeen rest of him pinch up with a hopeful little ache. He takes a moment to let the ache come and go, and then he smiles his usual quiet smile and says, “Thanks. That’s all I needed.”
“Then go ahead and get gone,” Jackie says crisply. “Little baby chicken like you ain’t ready to be out after dark.”
He’s almost at the door when she calls out one last bit of advice. “The next time you walk back in here, you better have a piercing or a scar or both. Get some holes in you, kid. Tells the world you lived through something and it didn’t take you down. All unmarked like you are, you look naked and not in a good way. Toughen yourself the fuck up.”
“I surely will. Anything else?”
“All I can think of for now,” she says. “Go on, shoo, before you start to get on Jackie’s nerves.”
And he does.