The Silver Swan Read Free Page A

but they didn’t come to visit you.’
    Mama stood beside me and put one hand on my shoulder. ‘There’s plenty of pudding,’ she said.
    â€˜Pudding!’ cried Ricardo. ‘Let’s eat.’
    I held my father’s gaze. ‘These boys would never hurt me.’
    His eyes flickered. Slowly, he lowered the sword.
    â€˜See, Papa,’ said Lucas. ‘All Lily’s tales are true.’ He ran across the floor and grabbed Papa’s hand. ‘Come and meet the pirates.’
    At last Papa smiled. He looked over Lucas’s head, straight at Jem.
    â€˜I believe we’ve already met.’

3.
Call to arms
    By the time the boys had demolished our pudding and downed a few glasses of wine, Lucas was sitting on Moggia’s knee, and Mama and Brasher were chatting like old friends. He’d served with her father, he said, on the frigate Amelia , many years before Mama was born — too many to remember, and yet he managed to describe every stitch in every one of Amelia ’s dozens of sails. A kind of soft contentment buzzed in my chest as I watched them all talking together.
    The boys filled our white dining room with colour and random noise. They all looked just the same to me. Jem sat precariously on a carved oak chair as if it was a hedgehog, too scared to move in case he broke something. His sword kept getting stuck in the chair legs. Ricardo and Francesco sprawled on the rug near the fireplace, where they argued and joked and threw splinters of kindling at each other. They weren’t used to furniture, either. Miller seemed comfortable enough, but then he’d had three glasses of wine and was pouring another glass for Max. Lucas flicked Moggia’s gold earringand made him laugh aloud.
    But there was a shadow — there was always the same dreadful shadow.
    â€˜Jem,’ I asked at last, ‘where’s Captain Diablo?’
    â€˜Who knows? Nowhere close by, anyhow.’
    â€˜We lost him.’ Miller chuckled. ‘He stuck a couple of his cut-throats on the Mermaid to keep an eye on us, but we threw them overboard in Naples.’
    â€˜You never did!’ I gasped.
    â€˜Aye,’ said Jem. ‘They were getting on my nerves.’
    â€˜You killed them?’
    â€˜Nah, more’s the pity,’ Miller said. ‘Just bonked them on the head and put them ashore.’
    Jem kept sneaking suspicious glances across the room at Papa, sizing him up — trying to figure out whether he was a pirate captain or an Ottoman renegade or a navy deserter. Or a spy. We’d never really known, in our days together on the Mermaid , yet the truth was even stranger than we’d imagined.
    â€˜You guessed he was my father, didn’t you?’ I asked Jem.
    He scratched his straggly beard. ‘I didn’t know what to think, really. It didn’t seem possible, but somehow I just felt it.’
    He slapped Miller on the chest. ‘Hey. Where’s that letter?’
    Miller scrabbled inside his vest and pulled out a crumpled piece of paper. ‘Damn me, I forgot all about it.’
    He passed it over to Papa. ‘I expect this is for you.’
    Papa looked as if he didn’t want to touch it. ‘Where did you get that?’
    â€˜Strange thing,’ said Jem. ‘We was hauled up by the Navy. Thought they’d give a bit of trouble, on account of some stuff we had aboard. But they let us off scot-free when they heard we was bound for Santa Lucia.’
    Papa kept staring at the paper.
    â€˜Is it from the Admiralty?’ I asked Jem.
    â€˜Couldn’t say,’ he replied. ‘Didn’t see any admirals. All I know is we was told to bring it here. The Navy fellow said we’d know what to do when we got here. I thought he was mad, but it looks like he knew better than me.’
    Papa slowly put his hand out to take the letter, and unfolded it. I watched his face as he read. I knew what it was: the call to arms.