The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle: Chapters 17–22

Even as I grasped the plan I felt a pang of embarrassment that compelled me to turn away.

“More’s the pity,” he said with a shake of his head and a lapse into silence.

I was taken aback. “Didn’t anyone tell you?”

“And if he told others,” Zachariah mused out loud, “then there’s not a soul aboard who could not know of it.” The moment he said it I knew he was right.

But Zachariah talked, a sudden and surprising torrent, dark tales about each member of the crew.

Though I sensed a trap in the question, I was loath to abandon my trust in the men just when I most needed them.

“Yes," I said sullenly, sensing he was getting the best of me.

“Thank you, Mr. Dillingham. I applaud your forthrightness. Now then, did anyone else see her with the knife. Mr. Ewing?"

“Teaching her to use a knife?” the captain repeated portentously.

I told him all that had happened. He remained silent, nodding now and again.
By the time I was done I was weeping copiously. Zachariah let me sob.

“Forgive me. This old black man humbly requests you tell him what’s beset your mind.”

Something in my voice must have alerted him. He scrutinized me shrewdly. “Miss Doyle, why are you calling me Mister Zachariah?”

“When—after the storm—he did nothing, I decided that was exactly what he thought: that I was an apparition. His leaving me here was proof enough. How else to explain it? And therefore I was safe.”

“What,” I asked ruefully, “can we do about any of this?”
“Charlotte, we must force him to confess.”

The enormity of the idea frightened me.

With great vividness I pictured myself relating my adventure, while they, grouped about, listened in rapt, adoring attention, astonished yet proud of me.

The news Keetch brought was crucial, that we were—by the captain’s reckoning—a few days’ sail from Providence.

Yet, inexplicably, I remained standing there, wasting precious time, listening to my old door bang and creak, trying to rid myself of the fear that lay like heavy ballast in the pit of my stomach: a notion that I had neglected to consider something about the voices I had heard that first night.

“Resume your place and station. Publicly renounce your ways, beg me for mercy before the crew, and I—you have my word—I will grant it. All will be restored to its proper balance...."

It sat high in a sky of darkest blue, amidst shadowy scudding clouds.

“She crept into my cabin and would have murdered me in my sleep if I'd not awakened and managed to wrest away this pistol. Not enough to have murdered Mr. Hollybrass! She would have murdered me..."

Besides, as Zachariah would acknowledge later, the fact that I was the daughter of an officer in the company that owned the Seahawk was no small factor in my formal elevation. It would preserve the niceties.

Indeed, twelve hours later, the mainland was sighted, a thin undulating ribbon of green-gray between sea and sky.

He'd discovered me up at the fore-peak, morosely watching the sea and the coast toward which we were drawing ever closer.

That question he didn’t answer right away. But when he did, he spoke in a less jovial tone. “I ran away from home,” he said.

When I realized that we were going to dock I went to my cabin and excitedly dressed myself in the clothes I had kept for the occasion: bonnet over my mangled hair.

I glanced at my trunk where I had secreted my sailor’s garb as a tattered memento.

As the ropes secured us, I looked upon the dock and—with a beating heart—saw my family among the waiting throng.

There were my father and mother, brother and sister, all searching up for me. They were as I remembered them, prim, overdressed despite the dreadful summer heat.

Tears from Barlow, a gruff hug from Fisk, kisses to my cheeks from Ewing—“You’re my mermaid now, lass,” he whispered—an offer (with a sly grin) of a splicing knife from Grimes—refused—a round of rum toasted by Foley, topped out with three “Huzzahs!” from all.

“And her gloves are so dirty,” Albert chimed in.
“Albert!” Papa reproved him.

“I would have thought you’d stay in your cabin,” she chided, “reading edifying tracts.”

“I would have thought you’d stay in your cabin,” she chided, “reading edifying tracts.”

“I would have thought you’d stay in your cabin,” she chided, “reading edifying tracts.”

“Well, yes, I’m sure,” my father offered. “But one must be careful about the words we choose, Charlotte. It’s well-known that sailors have an unhealthy tendency toward exaggeration. I look forward to reading a more sober account in your journal. You did keep it as you were bidden, did you not?”

My room was on the right side of the house on the second floor. Its windows faced the rear garden where a trellis of roses were in radiant bloom.

My mother was seated in a chair; my father was by her side, standing with his legs slightly apart, as if bracing himself.

“When I sent you to the Barrington School for Better Girls, I had been, I believed, reliably informed that it would provide you with an education consistent with your station in life, to say nothing of your expectations and ours for you. I was deceived. Somehow your teachers there filled your mind with the unfortunate capacity to invent the most outlandish, not to say unnatural tales.”

“What you have written is rubbish of the worst taste. Stuff for penny dreadfuls! Beneath contempt. Justice, Charlotte, is poorly served when you speak ill of your betters such as poor Captain Jaggery. More to the point, Charlotte, your spelling is an absolute disgrace. Never have I seen such abominations. And the grammar..."

From my mother I received little comfort but many tears. From my father, a vast quantity of books that he deemed suitable for my reclamation. Not a word, not a question, to console me.