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The rocking eases Tabitha to sleep, her aching body cocooned in a rope and canvas hammock in a small cabin next to the captain’s below the aft deck. She can hear the murmur of her father’s voice next door, the sigh of boards above her, the bullying of gulls through the small window cut high in the cabin wall. She presses her ear into the canvas of her bed. Through the fabric, she can hear bells.

Frith sets John to the dog watch, just two hours. In the meantime, the sailor will clean deck with his brethren. John asks the route, and the captain unrolls a map on the table. John stands to the side and looks not at the map but at Frith’s face. Frith pulls at the skin below his eyes, digs his thumbs into the flesh behind his ears. He sways. John cannot tell if the captain is still aware of his presence. His eyes do not seem to be moving across the paper but are rather fixed in the depths of the painted ocean.

“We sail straight for the island?” John asks. His voice is too loud.

Frith drops one hand flat on the map, covering the routes, and looks through John. “How old is the girl?”

“Just ten,” John says. “Not old enough to tempt your men. You’ll tell them.” He has been on ships where anything in skirts was a lure. Weeks go by at sea, and morals fade. But surely no man would risk the fever.

Frith nods. “I’ve one who’s five. Fanny.”

“The ship’s after her, then?”

“The name is not my devising.” Frith worries the edge of the map between his fingers. “Rum’s the game. We head south first. The hold is too empty yet for going home.”

When John returns to the cabin, Tab is sitting in the hammock like a trapped crab, her legs crooked at the knees. She is heaving, retching.

On deck, John leans behind a mop, working at the filth that has grown since yesterday morning. Beaufort harbor had broken up like a reflection and now is gone, the horizon having swallowed his home. They have slipped through the shoals, and now the greenish water has turned dark and gray, the bottom invisibly deep. The men aboard are strangers to him. As a younger man, he had been the darer, the rope swinger, the one who leaned over the rails into the spray. But after ten years on the shore, his hands have grown papery from handling coin and cloth. They turn raw around the wooden handle of the mop.

He has kidnapped his daughter and brought her on a black ship, away from God and medicine, with no hopes but a distant island, the reaching of which will probably require the death of seasoned men. Though the war has ended, these are the men still fighting. There are no reasons to bring a child on a sloop except selfishness and a wild response to loss. If he had a vision of her as her mother, soaking up the open sea, he has his own willful blindness to blame. Tab is a child; she is sick. He cannot re-create what has already happened. He can imagine Helen as a young woman encouraging this girl’s adventure, laughing at John’s subterfuge, but as a mother? John never knew her as a mother. She may well have acquired the fierce protectiveness that John is now violating. He has betrayed the woman she would have become.

He wrings out the mop over the side of the ship. He will disembark at Charleston, after the sea air has done its work, and they’ll travel back home slowly, by stage, and when she’s older, Tab will remember this as something lost and golden, the dreamy heart of a happy childhood. When she is asked how it was to become a woman motherless, she will say, “But I had my father,” and will think of seacaps and the swamped roads running between rice fields, the egrets delicately stepping. A slow circle from her home out into water and back through the Carolinas.

Did he board the Fanny and Betsy for her, then, to wrest her from a biblical death, a sanctioned passing into God’s hungry arms, or had his yearning for landlessness overcome him like a tide? He remembers Asa, after Tabitha’s birth, dragging his wife’s body away.

The speech of birds fades as her window darkens, and all Tab can hear is the insistent watery press of waves on cedar. She has woken from a nap into the dimming and so cannot place which sill of day she’s crossing. The smell of sweat and salted meat reminds her she’s not at home, not in anybody’s home, but on a barge of plunder. If her knees didn’t ache so, she would smile at the thought of it.

A man squeezes in through the door, and, unable to lift or turn in her hammock, she assumes it’s her father.

“Ship doctor, miss,” and a hairy brown hand reaches into the hammock and fumbles for her wrist. She pulls her arms tight to her side. “Here now,” he says, and wrenches an arm out into the open. He holds his fingers on her wrist, and by the candle in his other hand, Tab sees a great round hairy face, bursting with bristles from eyebrow to ear, nose to chin.

“Blackbeard,” she whispers. Mrs. Foushee had shown them a picture of the man.

“Yellow fever, they say. Is that what’s troubling?” He leans an elbow on the side of the hammock so it rocks outward, nearly tipping her. “Now let me tell you what all I know about the fever. It comes hot and cold, does it, with the welts up your arms and down. Nights, the vapors leave you to go dancing with the devil, I’ve seen them myself, I have, and in the mornings they come settling back, all wearied out, and that’s when the welts turn blue. In ladies the feet take to tapping, and that’s the devil’s work too, to pound it out of you.” He looks at her kindly, at her eyes, which are still staring. “Have your feet been tapping?”

She shakes her head.

“So the cure, you ask me. Most will say bleeding, and that may work, but I’d first give it a good broth to ease the lungs and a little mustard paste to draw the welts back down.”

Tab whispers again.

“What’s that, my miss?”

“I haven’t any welts.”

“Oh, that’s just time’ll do it. Not to worry, your ladyship. Rest up, and I’ll be sending the broth in with your father.” He lifts his leaning body from her hammock and sends it swaying again. “Cheer up, miss. I’ve cured half the men I haven’t killed.”

When John returns to the cabin, his hands blistered and his lower back pinched, Tab is awake and silent in the dark. Below her hammock spreads a small puddle of vomit. He places one hand on her forehead and closes his eyes.

“This is not dying, is it?” she asks.

He pulls away from her, lights a candle, finds an old cloth among the piles of oddments in the cabin, and wipes up the traces of her sickness. “There is no sun you’ll not see. How’s that for a promise?”

He fetches her broth from the mess table and spoons it from the tin bowl into her mouth, which is a lurid pink.

“What will we see on the islands?” she asks.

John begins again his list of wonders: elephants, he promises, and cinnamon. The landscapes she hasn’t seen are the ones that buoy her.

The room is close and warm, lit by the candle that wavers on a shelf. Shadows are larger than objects. A curl of Tab’s hair springing free of her sweated face makes a snaking sea monster on the wall. In their quiet, they can hear the clanking of mugs from the mess, the bursts of profane humor, the endless wash of the ocean.

“Did you tell Grandfather?”

John considers. He’d left the letter next to Helen’s miniature in the parlor, where Asa would notice it. The older man always sought out the little painting on his visits, holding it when he could. He had a possessiveness in him that encompassed his house, his land, his women. And whatever didn’t belong to him belonged to God. Asa would be happy to have the girl in heaven, might consider it safer than Beaufort, but John has no such faith. He could not leave his daughter’s body with a man who would not mind it, whose vision of God implied the reclamation of his flock. John believes in flesh. His love survives no transubstantiation.

A seaman has found his fiddle and is setting a simple meter for a few drunken dancers. Soon John is due at his post on the bow, watching the stars again and searching for motion in darkness. Before he’d met Helen, in amongst stints of pirating, he had spent a year on a whaler and learned the smallest undulations of the sea, the telltale kick of spray from idle waves, an underwater hum. Here he must look for nothing but other masts. He leaves Tab’s unfinished broth on a shelf and eats his own tack and lime. Her eyes have closed, and he rests his fingers on her cheek once more. Her face has slipped into a fevered sheath. Her shift is damp. The loose curl still stands away from her forehead, trembling in the thin breeze that sneaks in through the cabin window. He kisses her and leaves her, without what the faithful would call hope.

On deck he meets Blue Francis, the ship’s surgeon, who asks after his daughter. John thanks him for looking in on her. The doctor smiles and shakes his shaggy head. “If women be the sailors’ bane, then I think the young of them be treasures. Little ones are the lights that ease our blackness, a’n’t they?”

From the mast, John sees nothing. The waves near the ship are yellow-tipped from the candles burning, the ones farther out are silver. He knows there are bodies beneath him. Below the lip of ocean swim schools of mackerel and drum, below them the whales, dipping to find their feed, and below them all the unnameables, the serpents, the kraken, the giant conger. What he has learned of the Bible are the bits Asa recited to him and the pieces that the sailors tell, the story of Job’s Leviathan, who maketh the sea like a pot of ointment, who maketh a path to shine after him; one would think the deep to be hoary. John sees the monster’s frost spread across the water, the unknown of it, the lurking danger universal.

When he was young, John thought the night gave cover to those who would steal him from his bed, who would select him as a prize from the sprawl of cousins he slept among. At night, the shadows pooled and left no inch uncovered. Only when he took to sea did he find the light again, collected as it was in concentrated smears on the sky and water, capping and puncturing the dark. He had taught Tabitha to see this. He had taken her to the marshes in the evenings so she could amend her sight, could watch the sun fade and reconstitute. Now she seems afraid of nothing.

After a burst of laughter from the sailors’ bunks, a loud report issues from the stern. The quartermaster is knocking about. These men seem far beyond John’s scope. Though once as rowdy and unconcerned as the petty officers, he now finds himself circling around a single set of images—child, God, woman, home—his duty never easing.

The sea air that opens lungs is the same that chafes the skin to scales. There is no version of this play in which he has done right. He has chosen rashly, and the fading stars remind him of the home to which they all will go, whether he professes faith or not. There Helen, if she waits anywhere, is waiting for her daughter.

A loud stirring of sailors and buckets and hauled rope wakes Tab. The sun already washes in through the window over the shelves and barrels and John’s empty corner berth. She feels weak, but also hungry. Her muscles that had clenched into resistance have eased again, and she is moved, emotionally, by the desire to stand. In attempting to untangle herself from the tight hold of the hammock, she tumbles to the floor, catching herself with pudding arms. There is no vomit here from the night before. She sits on the planks until her vision clears, then stands like a calf. The ship’s rocking is unfamiliar to her feet, and she grasps the rope of her bed to steady herself. There is no mirror in the cabin, but, trading hands on the rope to keep her balance, she takes down her hair and smooths it back into its wrinkled ribbon. Her legs sway. The breaking of the fever has made her giddy. She loses hope for her appearance, but there are none here but unkempt seamen; if she wishes to join their company, a little dirt will not prevent her. She pushes the cabin door open and slides down a short passageway past the captain’s room and up three steps into a glory of sunlight and ocean. She is a captive, the slave of notorious buccaneers, the masthead for a ship of villains. Her lungs take in the salt and spray of liberty.

The decks are alive with men and movement, sails snapping and lines pulled and tied, figures climbing masts, the sea bouncing the ship on an endless, landless plane beneath a rounded sky. This is what a proper town should look like, an upturned anthill of activity. She steps into the motion and weaves slowly among the men at their business. Seagulls churn in their wake. Every wave seems to break over a fish’s back. Tab is light-headed but certain that she can now do anything with her body. What had kept her father so long from these ragged perfect men? From their house in Beaufort, all they could see was sand and marsh and a still and silent sea. Here, on the Fanny and Betsy, even the ocean is a riot.

She balances against the mizzen-mast. Over the crack of the wind-taut sails, the men are singing. She laces her fingers into the rigging. A whistle draws her attention skyward, and she spies a sailor perched on a spar between the main sails and the topsails, his legs dangling like a child’s. He waves down at Tab, and she rises on her toes in her enthusiasm to respond.

A seaman wrapping lines by the starboard shrouds calls out, “Johnny, your miss is loose and about!”

Her father comes loping from the bow, swings her by the waist, and sets her three feet from the mast, where, without the wood to clutch, she falters. He grabs her arm to steady her.

“What business have you on your feet, Tab?” John feels her forehead.

“I feel a hundred times improved,” she says, and clings to his coat. “Have you seen the ship? Have you been everywhere?”

“I’ll carry you back to the cabin and have the doctor look in. You need rest still.” John wraps his arm around her back. “It’ll be here when you’re all well. I’m the one must answer for your health.”

Back in the dark cabin, bunched in her hammock, Tab lets Blue Francis poke at her ribs and glance behind her ears. “Seems the welts have whiled themselves away.”

“Never had welts,” Tab says.

“Little ladies don’t care for the welts. They leave spots on the face, don’t they, and then it’s a hard road catching the gentlemen, don’t I know. Though I married a lady with the spots and a prettier one would be hard to picture, excepting yourself. Shame to leave her behind, haven’t seen her in a dog’s year, but I imagine she’s fixed things up fine by now and keeps a pot on the fire against my return. In a year or so, whenever we make Barbados again.”

Tab struggles to sit up. “Is she a negro, doctor?”

“Can’t find any signs on you left, and your little heartbeat is running along smartly. I didn’t even have to use the mustard paste, which we don’t have aboard anyhow, but could probably purchase in Charleston for such a one as you. Frith’ll give me a few pence here and then for oddments. Better captain I’ve never known, the way he lets us do. I was once a surgeon on a navy ship, full frigate, and men of the queen’s own wouldn’t give you a bottle of the bark, they wouldn’t. They say men under the black flag is nothing but scoundrels, but here I can treat a little miss as right as you please. And now you’re fit and fine. Fetch me if aught else should happen, if your toe finds a splinter, or you start seeing merfolk from the decks.”

“This is the happiest ship on the ocean, isn’t it?” she says.

The doctor squints at her from the lit doorway. “If you call it happy where men die.”

She is silent as he leaves.

She has not thought of battles, of raids, of disease, of thirst and starvation. Of cannonballs landing with cracks on the boards of the main deck, lodging with deep thuds in the hull. The sharks waiting to sup on sailors when the ship goes down. She had yellow fever and now is better. Her mother went aboard a ship like this and was a queen. Only the land can kill people. Only the solidness and the long stillness and the heavy quiet can bring them to their knees and press them down until they die for lack of breath. The doctor shouldn’t worry about her, but about his land-bound lady, who is likely dying in childbed even as the sun shines on this salt water.

From her bed, she can see only the sky through the small window. A single tern cuts past, crying. She will leave her room again and ask her father about her birthday gift, just after a brief study of sleep. The walk from cabin to mast to cabin has left her legs pleasantly lame. She makes space in her open hands for the toy ship from New Bern, the wooden infant of this grand vessel.

She wakes in the afternoon feeling stronger yet. On deck she searches out the cook and finds him sleeping behind an iron cauldron where a stew is simmering. The smell is rich and just short of rancid. She takes her bowl and biscuit into the sun again and finds a space between two barrels to fold herself, safely distant from the lines. Two dozen men seem to be playing a game with coils of rope, vast sheets of linen, and the open ocean. The sloop is making progress, but Tab cannot tell in what direction they’re moving, or whether circles are being transcribed in place of a forward route. Whenever she looks at the sun, it’s a step to one side of noon.

Even with the wind, the air is warmer here than on the Beaufort shore. She tucks a bent nail into her dress pocket. Once in Bermuda, she’ll find not only shells and crab husks but also the beached carcasses of sea monsters with tusks of ivory. She will help her father build a house there, and everything she does will be an echo of her mother, so John will be content again. This is the life he was meant for, the life Tab had kept him from. Women, with their death, with their birthings, are not fit sailors. But Tab fixes a bargain, neither to die nor to beget life, and she asks the God of her grandfather to witness. Asa had always told her that if she was good, God would be her final home, and though he described it dully, he said her mother was waiting there. Tab is not sure whether she is good, but she knows that in her old home her father was restless, unhappy, wearied. Nothing grew on that shore but Mrs. Foushee and the church, and the ghost of a mother who would always every day be newly dead.

In her corner between the barrels, Tab tells God she will be good, that she will seek adventure and so redeem her mother’s absence, and in that moment with the sun on her face like a warm hand, she chooses to believe in his promise of everlasting life. To seal the compact, Tab sings one of Asa’s hymns. She sees John by the foremast siphoning powder into small kegs, and though she cannot see him smiling, she knows that he is joyous here, and free.

John labors with new gaiety. His daughter has sprung to life, a fever victim become a child again. He knows that yellow fever always has this pause, this reprieve that leads loved ones to hope, and that afterward the patients are either well or dead. But seeing her body in motion, her legs fumbling across the swaying deck, he swallows hope and lets it burn inside him. He pulled his daughter from the godly quicksand of Beaufort and now, in the clear and open air, he has saved her. He has done for the child what he could not do for the mother. A peace settles on him as he packs the powder kegs and carries them below to the gun deck. This ship is a haven, and even amongst two dozen of the roughest men he has no fear for his daughter. She is less a woman than a thin angel, the specter of her departed mother.

As an unpaid seaman on board a black-flagged sloop with no purpose but idle raids, John has few duties. He scrubs the weather deck, coils lines, sometimes climbs the shrouds to tie the mainsail, though never the topsails, which are another man’s province. He tidies the berths below the forecastle deck, where the rest of the sailors sleep, and lends aid to the cook, who has no mate. They apportion the dried meat and barley, the malt and the limes; they ration the rum. John has hardly spoken to Frith since they embarked, though only a thin wall of boards separates their cabins on the quarterdeck.

He takes on some tasks only to keep his hands busy, so that he’s not caught dancing with his daughter from foremast to mizzen-mast. After the powder kegs are safe below, he tends to the loose seams between the planks on deck, finding cotton and oakum in the stores and caulking the gaps with fibers and tar. This is a job done sitting down, and requires nothing but pressing hands and a little brush. He should be doing this when the ship is docked and dry and the wood has shrunk, but his fingers need a duty. Here, crouched near the bowsprit, he can look back on the expanse of the Fanny and Betsy and observe the small colony of men and the ten-year-old girl, who is sneaking between laboring groups and bending down to catch at what John assumes must be treasure. The sight of her, and her curious hands, brings back John’s wife. She was the first to know which objects mattered.

Years ago, he and Helen and the smallest version of Tab were on just such a ship. His wife’s belly was growing into a little drum. He asked what sort of mother she would be, and she asked what sort of father, and they laughed, having no guides. The ship was heading north again for home, laden with stolen goods, but that day, in the blue and gold of summer, they were docked at Antigua. The sailors were in town, some spending coins on women, others spending them on trinkets for the women they left behind: carved coconuts, painted bowls, bones. They would sail the next morning, the captain believing that one could outrun the diseases that thrived in the Indies.

In the cabin they shared, not six feet wide and with one hammock hung above the other, the afternoon glowed on the walls. Helen had pulled him here when the men filed off the ship. He asked didn’t she want to see Antigua, and she had kissed him, and he said no, he didn’t either. This cabin was Helen’s refuge when the ship engaged with trade boats on the ocean; even though they were rarely in danger, she was still shy of criminality.

“Come see,” she said, her hand tight around his arm.

Her open face reminded him of childhood. There was a song the boys would tease the girls with. “Be kind, my love, be kind,” he said, “and you shall ever find—”

“That a long, long absence can’t alter my mind.” She smiled.

They both were children once; and here she was, with child.

She made him sit cross-legged on the floor. Her dark hair had glints of bronze. She took a box with a metal clasp from the shelf and sat before him, the bare soles of her feet pressed together, her stomach a little ball beneath her skirts. He reached to touch her.

She held up her hand. “I wanted to show you,” she said.

Helen pulled from the box a series of strange objects—strange not because they were uncommon but because they had found their way into a box, gathered by a single hand. She first held out the button, taken from his coat when she was mending it, and then the glass rubbed smooth from Grenada. A musket ball. Three inches of frayed rope from when the lines were trimmed. He laughed at the pit of a plum.

“You kissed me with the fruit still in your mouth,” she said. He had not remembered.

These were her treasures, the bits of life she collected to remind herself of life, the tokens of experience. Her story of land and sea. He had wondered what she needed them for, what eventuality she was predicting.

She lined them up on the wooden floor, in order of size. He held his arms open, and she crawled into him, the two—or three—of them in a tight knot. He kissed her ears and said there was no need for memory, that’s how much he loved her. She tucked her head into his neck.

A sailor stopped by with fresh baked fish from shore, and they squeezed into one hammock and ate the fish with their fingers, and he put his head on her stomach and listened, and she watched the row of treasures march from the brass bell down to the tiny broken pearl, and the light slipped down the window and faded into the ocean, and the boisterous noise of men on land accompanied their sleep.

He is careful now not to forget things.

He tamps another line of oakum into a seam. This world is blue and brown and white. The sky and water with their indeterminate shades of paleness and depth reflect only each other. This is the purity that existed for him and Helen, and here it is again, just waiting to be taken up.

At dusk, he finds Tabitha spidered onto the web of ratlines and pries her off, a laughing bundle. They gather with the others at the mess table and John helps the cook serve another stew and heels of bread. When the meal is doled out, he sits Tab down and with his body shields her from most of the men’s wildness. Other than the ship surgeon, they’ve developed no particular fondness for the girl and find her little different from an indentured boy too young for whiskers, and of even less use. Their language is not tempered in her presence.

Blue Francis bangs his mug on the table twice. “If it’s ghosts you’re after,” he says in a hoarse voice, and the others roll their eyes and blow through their lips, adjusting themselves for a long tale, bound to be false. “Listen, listen,” he says. The curve of his back rises higher than his shoulders, and he leans into the table with his arms spread out on the grease-spotted wood.

John interrupts him. “Nothing bloody, Frank. You forget the young ones.” He keeps one hand on his daughter’s back while he sops up the rest of his stew.

The doctor winks at Tab and turns back to his audience. “It were on the Bonny Jane some score years ago, in the—”

“When you were just an old man,” someone calls out.

“That’s right, just me and your wench,” he says.

John tries to nudge Tab out of her seat, but she begs to stay.

“It were a slaving ship and we were nearing Charleston for the trade with more than half the bodies still well and good.”

“The others?” Tab whispers, and John tosses his head to one side to signal “overboard.”

“They made their moanings, of course, so the whole ship sounded like a bull with its neck cut, but we’d been used to such for weeks and paid it no mind. The last night before port, Captain sent Little Tom up the topgallant to watch for lights and Little Tom quivering in his boots, just as shivered as a boy can get. Had never seen a black before and thought they were singing for his soul.” Blue Francis peers over at Tab, whose head cranes out from behind John. “Just about your age, miss. Now Tom was used to ghosts, for wasn’t a ship didn’t have a dead sailor wandering around it, his neck cracked from falling from sail to spar, or his hair all floating up from the water drowned him. So when I heard him start the screeching and saw him clambering down the yards like a man chased, I thought he’d seen something solid. He ran straight for the captain’s cabin, saying it’s raining blacks, his hands swatting all about his head. I looked up and don’t see nothing, so I followed him, shouting that there weren’t any such things, but he’s shrieking and batting his hands around and now the rest of the men woke up and come out to see. Little Tom busts through the captain’s door, and the devil damn me if the captain didn’t rise up from his bed with his pistol in hand and shoot him clean through.” He pauses for effect. Some of the sailors pick at their teeth. “I held his head in my hands as his life slipped out of him and he said, ‘Blue Francis, they was blacks raining down on me, they was falling from heaven right on me, clawing and moaning and calling my name,’ and before I could tell him they was just ghosts, he dropped his head down and died right there.”

“So the negroes go to heaven and the rest of us damned to hell?” a seaman calls out, and there is a clanking of tin mugs and bowls. As Tab twines her arms around her father’s chest to stop her own heart from beating fast, one man begins a beat on the table while two more stand and stomp about. The company sings words Tab’s never heard, and John carries her back to their berth, across the new-caulked deck, under the white stars.

Held in her hammock again, Tab asks her father why some bodies would go to heaven and others to hell. She knows of these places from Asa, but why would sailors be damned instead of slaves, and why were haints always wicked?

“It was just a story,” he says.

“Ghosts aren’t true, are they?”

John smooths her hair back, which is growing knotted without its brush. “When folk die, it’s just their bodies. There’s something inside that stays alive always.”

“Our souls,” Tab says.

“Souls, spirits, ghosts. Memories. I always remember your mother.”

“And she’s in heaven, don’t you think?”

“Some call it that,” John says. “She’s wherever there’s goodness, I imagine.”

Tab closes her eyes and speaks in a whisper. “I don’t see her.” When John takes his hand away, she tries to make the miniature come to life, her mother’s small head with green points for eyes, a ribbon round her neck. She moves the head around her mind, placing it in different rooms, on the shore, on deck. It never moves, or smiles.

“You’re what’s left of her,” John says, and she opens her eyes. “If you wonder where she is. I sometimes think she’s all in you.”

“Do pirates always sing such bad songs?”

He laughs. “No.”

Tab catches his hand between hers and smiles up at her father. He leans down and kisses her forehead, which is cool and dry, and he hums quietly as she lets her muscles ease into sleep.

In the morning, Tab wakes in a writhing green room. The cabin is trembling. No, her eyes are trembling. She sits and fills her lap with bile, then crawls out of the hammock and lands in a heap on the floor. Her nose is wet and she wipes it against the boards, leaving a trail of red. Something is running fast in her chest. Her heart runs so fast it leaves a cool breeze fluttering through her limbs. There is no heaviness left in her body, only a froth of pain. Through the window, she sees a rain of black bodies, mouths open, her mother pale among them.