Chapter Six
SilasandIworkedside by side daily in both companionable silence and extended bouts of camaraderie. While he was not pretty to look at, he had the most indomitable spirit. He was always ready with a joke or story, and I learned several rather bawdy sea shanties from him that would have made the squire blush if he had heard them from my lips. But while he was friendly and amiable, and had many tips about cooking and wilderness survival and sailing, Silas spoke very little about himself. This puzzled me a great deal, as most men are wont to brag about themselves from time to time, and I had told him my story, about losing my mother and father, and then my Uncle Ned, and coming to live with Squire Harrington. So one afternoon, as we sat peeling apples, I screwed up my courage.
“You said you were in the Navy for over half your life. Did you like it, to stay that long?” I asked.
Silas stared past me through the hull at something only he could see. “Fought, sailed, traveled the worl’, them parts was all right. But I seen men blown to ‘oly hell, an’ I seen all kinds of things yeh ain’ ever s’pose ta see. Gives me nigh’mares, it has, from time t’ time. Fightin’ ain’ no life, Jamie Davis. Fightin’ and killin’ changes yeh, an’ I don’ ever wish to see tha’ happen to yeh.” He turned his dark brown eyes to me, looking frightfully solemn. “Yeh only ever kill if yeh have to. Leave the fightin’ to men like me. Killin’ takes a piece o’ yeh’re soul, and yeh’re too good for that, yeh hear me?”
He stared at me with such intensity that my lungs constricted in my chest. “I hear you,” I said.
Silas put his meaty hand on my shoulder and gave it an affectionate squeeze. “I tell yeh, Jamie. People will underestimate yeh, for all kin’s o’ reasons. Like if yeh’re young, or if yeh got darker skin, or if yeh ain’ educated same as them. But tha’s when yeh prove ‘em wrong, by God. Yeh’re a wee thing, but yeh’re tough.”
I laughed at that, for I had never been referred to as “tough” by anyone. “I’m not,” I said, shaking my head. “Not like you.”
“I ain’ say yeh’re like me,” Silas said, giving me one of his bright smiles that made his teeth gleam in the lantern light. “Thar’s diff’ren’ ways to be tough. Some folks got it in their hans. Some folks got it in their hearts. You gots it in yehr heart.”
I smirked softly at that. “I don’t suppose a tough heart will do any good if we encounter a pirate fleet.”
“No’un, I don’t suppose it would,” Silas said with a chuckle. He held up his hands like a pugilist. “Try an’ hit me.”
“I don’t want to hit you,” I said. Despite knowing that Silas had trained for many years, it still seemed rather unsportsmanly to swing at a man with only one leg.
“Yeh scared?” Silas chuckled, waving his fists around playfully. “I’m twice yeh’re size, lad, yeh ain’ gonna hurt me now.” He held up his right palm, tapping it with the remaining fingers of his left. “C’mon, hit righ’ here.”
I had never hit anything in my life, so I had no doubt I was about to make a great fool of myself. I balled up my fist and smacked it into Silas’s palm. My knuckles smarted, though Silas’s hand didn’t move an inch, and I shook my hand out while Silas grinned at me. “I tol’ yeh ta hit me.” I gave him a playful glower. “I’s jus’ teasin’ ya, lad, tha’ weren’ bad.”
“Your hand is like a brick wall,” I said, giving a suck to several of my knuckles.
Silas grinned and ruffled my hair. “Yeh’re not much fer a figh’, Jamie Davis. Bu’ yeh’s smart, an’ that means a lot nowadays.”
“Not smart enough not to hit you,” I pointed out with a wry grin, and Silas’s belly laugh echoed off the galley walls. “Why are you doing this, Silas?” I suddenly asked, a little surprised at my own temerity.
“Doin’ what?” Silas asked, looking at me sideways. I wondered for a moment if he might be unhappy with my question, but his scarred face had not changed expression.
“Working as a cook,” I said. “When you are so much smarter than that.”
Silas grinned. “You flatterin’ me, Jamie Davis?”
I rolled my eyes. “You said yourself, people will underestimate you. You could work in the royal office, or help train Navy sailors. Yet, here you are on a hired vessel, working in a galley. Why?”
Silas chuckled softly deep in his chest. “Tha’s a fair question,” he said thoughtfully. “I suppose it’s cause I wanted ta go to sea again, and a good berth as a cook seemed a fine way to do it. And,” he added with another rumble of laughter, “I likes to cook.”
“You do?” I asked in surprise.
Silas nodded. “I know yeh wouldn’t think it of me much to look a’ me, but I learned how to cook from me da’ when I was just a wee nipper. We din’ have much money now, but what we did have he stretched to make some of the most amazin’ meals yeh’d ever eat in your life. The things tha’ man could do with a piece o’ meat and a potato was like watchin’ the Lord turn water inta wine. He taught me to cook fer our fam’ly, and when I was old enough, I helped him at his fish cart.”
“He was a fisherman?” I asked curiously.
“No,” Silas said with a hearty smirk. “’E had a stand next to the fish market by the docks. People could buy their fresh seafood a’ the market and bring it to him, and ‘e’d cook it for them. If’n they didn’t have their own kitchen, like.”
I smiled at that idea, of selecting fresh fish or a bowl of mussels and having someone else cook them for me with a passion that I did not feel when it came to making food. “Then why did you join the Navy if you liked cooking so much?” I asked.
Silas’s scarred face fell just a little at that, his voice dropping lower inside of him. “Me da’ died when I was fifteen. Me mum was gonna have another baby, an’ I already ‘ad two sisters. I weren’t gonna be able to make enough money without me da’ around to support ‘em. So I joined the Navy. Had all the food and clothes I needed, so I could send my weekly pay home to ‘em while me mum an’ oldest sister did more o’ the neighborhood mendin’.”
I suddenly realized how fortunate I had been that the squire had taken me in, or I might also have ended up conscripted in the Navy like Silas had. Silas had been a boy, younger than me, when he was turned into a weapon. His passion for food and cooking had fallen by the wayside, and he had sacrificed that, as well as his body, for king and country, with nothing to show for it but his horrific scars and the nightmares that plagued him. “Do you regret it?”
“Regre’ what?” Silas asked.
“Going into the Navy.”
