Steel

TOUCHÉ

This was the best summer job she could possibly have. Almost as good as sailing on a pirate ship for a little while.

Twelve girls, ages ten to twelve, lined up in front of her on the concrete basketball court in the main activities area of Camp Mountain Oak. They had their lead toes pointed, their other feet back, their knees loose, their backs straight, their arms bent as if holding épées. Jill went to each of them and adjusted their positions.

She was teaching them how to fence.

She was at the camp primarily as a counselor, but the camp wanted someone who could also teach fencing, and that was how Jill had gotten the job.

After a half hour of exercises, of advancing and retreating across the basketball court, drilling the movements into their brains and bodies so that they’d never forget, until the girls complained that their legs hurt and their arms were sore—“That’s how you know you’re doing it right,” Jill told them—she gathered them around in a shady spot by the main building and brought out her prize.

She’d been allowed to keep the rapier. Her parents made some phone calls to museums and found a specialist who could clean the sword. It had taken weeks of desalinization treatments to remove the corrosion, careful grinding and scrubbing to clean the metal, and a protective acrylic coating to prevent further damage. It would never have the gleam that it had when it was new, and would never again hold a razor’s edge. But that was all right. Jill only ever planned on using it to tell stories.

Jill retrieved the sword, wrapped in a thick black cloth, from her locker, and revealed it in front of the girls.

Laid out on the fabric, the sword shone like a treasure. As she hoped, the girls crowded forward to get a better look, oohing and aahing.

“Is it real?” one of them asked.

“Yes,” Jill said. “It’s from the early eighteenth century.”

“Is it a pirate sword?” another asked.

“It is, it really is. It belonged to a pirate named Edmund Blane. He was defeated in battle by another pirate, Marjory Cooper. The sword fell overboard and stayed lost in the ocean for three hundred years.”

“Marjory Cooper—a girl?” one of them asked.

Jill grinned. She loved this part. “Yes. One of the fiercest pirate queens that ever sailed.”

Some of them looked like they didn’t believe her. Didn’t believe that there were such a thing as pirate queens at all, or that women ever dressed up as men and joined armies, or did anything big and amazing and adventurous. So she pulled out her books and pictures. She’d found pictures of Mary Read and Anne Bonny that didn’t look very much like they had in person, but were good enough.

In all the reading she’d done, she hadn’t found anything at all about Marjory Cooper and Edmund Blane, or the Diana and the Heart’s Revenge. They’d faded from history—if they’d ever been real at all.

But Jill had a scar on her left arm, three inches across her bicep, from the wound that Emory had stitched. Back at the house after the boat tour, she’d taken a shower and noticed the welt of pink, healing skin. Her mother saw it the next day and demanded to know where it had come from. Jill told her she must have gotten cut when she fell off the boat.

It was all she could do not to tell the girls about sailing aboard the Diana with Marjory Cooper. But she could tell them about a love of fencing, and of pirate honor.

She let each of the girls hold the sword. It was too heavy for most of them, and it wavered in their grips. Even so, with the rapier in their hands, they all stood a little taller.

CHAPTER HEADINGS GLOSSARY

En garde: “On guard.” The opening stance in rapier combat.

Retreat: Backward movement in rapier combat.

Disengage: An attack in which one’s blade moves from one line to another under the action of an opponent’s blade.

Foible: The last third of a rapier blade; the thinnest, weakest part of the blade.

Flèche: “Arrow.” An attack made while leaping into a run.