Spring, year 1716
Eveline Adler is the daughter of a wealthy English merchant. Her family moved to the New World, while she stayed in London to finish her studies. After two years separated from her family, she decides to leave and join her loved on...
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I soon got used to life aboard ship. My father told me I'd get seasick, but he was wrong. On the contrary, I liked the way the boat slid and swayed on the surface of the water.
The Captain, a pirate with long hair and an aquiline nose, welcomed me into his crew with enthusiasm. I looked like a smart boy, he told me, a lad interested in learning the trade. And I really was. The art of navigation attracted me right from the start, so much so that I never missed an opportunity to have the helmsman explain to me how to use the currents and how to use the instruments on board. I learned how to manoeuvre the sails, how to orient myself at night by scanning the stars and constellations, how to plot routes, how to predict the weather by observing the sky, how to bargain prices and establish the value of a cargo, but above all, I learned how to control the wind. "You have to understand it, you have to feel it, you have to get in tune with it," the man instructed me. All this was like an oasis for me; I had found in the sea a shelter, an escape from the outside world and from the past. After a few months the Captain could no longer consider me as a mere cabin boy, for I had assimilated such notions as to be wasted in that role.
I spent two years on that ship. My father taught me the basics of fencing, how to throw punches and throw knives, but it was Jim, the coxswain, who showed me how to attack, where to hit, and how to throw a man twice my size to the ground.
As had happened with my mother and my brother, I also witnessed the death of my father. He died one day in March. It was cold; the sun was hid by great grey clouds. It was a British naval officer who ran my father through with his sword. I saw the whole scene out of the corner of my eye. My father had made a strangled sound, a lump of blood had spat from his mouth. He lived for a while. The agony persisted until he bled to death. Two other men died that same day, and we buried them all at sea. At the ceremony, the Captain invited me to say a few words, a eulogy, for my father, but I shook my head and pulled back. After all, what was there to say? His death did not destabilize me, nor did it make my life so different from what it had been until then. Probably, the resentment I felt towards him had made any kind of emotional bond between us impracticable.
