Novels2Search

Chapter 15: Jack the Pickpocket

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image [https://i.imgur.com/DqimdvY.jpg]

a clap of thunder – Any strong alcoholic drink.

JACK PICKPOCKETED THE drunken officer and kept walking. She had seen him staggering, all alone with no one to help him, stepping down an unlit alley. She’d approached quickly from the opposite direction and waited for the right moment to bump the fellow. She meant to utter an apology to play it off, but the redcoat never even looked back at her, he seemed focused on something else. Jack breathed a sigh of relief as she tucked the small purse into her jerkin, cut through an alley to slip away from Lime Street, and emerged into the Meat Market. Smells of fresh meat and blood. Wet hands, dirty brows. Fish all cut up, scales weighing the meat. Folk passing a handful of reales or shillings or doubloons or whatever currency the customer had. Port Royal took it all, just better know the rate of exchange.

Jack followed the dogs. Packs of them roaming. Sniffing and begging. Like her. People in the Meat Market treated her the same. A stray, no home, better to keep away or might get bitten, savvy? Some days it was an advantage, some days it wasn’t.

Jack Weekes was small, and few people ever noticed her. Parentless, she was one of many forgotten children in Port Royal. The boys always found work at the docks, the girls did favours for some of the men in the warehouses. Jack was not interested in any of that. Her mother had died of some sickness and her father had sailed away on the Capricorn and, presumably, sank along with the rest of them. Her true name was Jacqueline and she kept her hair shorn to appear more like a boy. Her mum told her it was best. Fortunately for her, at twelve years old her breasts still had not come in yet and wearing boy’s clothes completed the disguise.

When she got to the Meat Market she found a place behind Mr. Cowert’s stall and looked around to make sure no one was watching, then dropped her trousers and squatted in her usual place. When she was done pissing she cinched her trousers back and took out the purse to count its contents. The dogs sniffed the bag.

Jack was disappointed. Usually officers did not carry much coins on them, because Port Royal was thick with pickpockets, but she’d expected a redcoat to at least carry more than a dozen Spanish reales and a couple of shillings on his person. “What the bloody fuck?” she said. “Why even have a purse at all, bloody bugger, if this is all yeh bloody carry? Why not just keeps it in your pocket? Bloody fuckin’ nonce!” Still, it might be enough.

She thumbed her nose in the direction the officer had gone, then jumped when the door behind her shot open.

“Jackie boy!” said Mr. Cowert. The fat man stepped out into the alley, wiping his hands on his blood-covered apron. “What in the world you doing back here? It’s dark out, I’m closin’ up shop.”

“I came for it,” she said.

“Eh. You did, did you?”

“Aye. Do yeh still haves it?”

Mr. Cowert laughed and scratched at his round pate. He’d had to shave his head due to lice. “Aye, I still got it, me. Do you have the—”

Jack held out the coins. “I told yeh I’d finds the rest.”

Mr. Cowert sighed. “Yeh did.” He scooped the coins out of her hands, tossed back one of the reales and pocketed the rest. “This is enough. C’mon, let’s get you that piece. Though I don’t know what exactly you intend to do with it.”

“That’s my business, codger,” she mumbled, stepping into the rear of the stall. The smell of raw meat filled the air, and Mr. Cowert guided her through the front of the stall, where he slept away his nights and awoke every morning to open shop again. Cowert was a butcher, a highly sought-after profession on the island. People from all over brought him their best meats. So much fish was served on the islands, a good slice of beef or pork was a treat, usually expensive enough that only officers or the visiting envoys of nobility could afford it.

Jack had learned something about removing entrails in here. It had been her first job, which she obtained a week after her mum shook off with the angels. She had also learned that Mr. Cowert was once an apprentice blacksmith and keymaker. The man was highly talented, and in the last year Cowert had taught her a lot. As a widower, he did not have much else to spend his time on besides butchering, so Jack had sort of become a project of his. Jack suspected Cowert knew she wasn’t a boy, but neither of them mentioned it.

“Here,” he said, reaching into a small chest-of-drawers in the corner where he and his wife used to sleep. “Reckon you’ve earned it.” He withdrew the flintlock pistol, along with a small pouch filled with gunpower and another pouch filled with shot. Jack had already paid for much of it with what money her mother had given her, and Cowert had been saving it for her. He held it above her head, just out of reach. “Just for practice, right? And hunting?”

“Right,” she said. But her father had already taught her to use one before he had left for good, and what Jack really needed was a means to defend herself once she set out to sea—a plan long in the dreaming.

The pistol was heavy in her hands, but not totally foreign.

“Just small vermin, forest critters. You bring ’em to me, and I’ll cut ’em up for free. We’ll have us some fine meals, Jackie boy. Mrs. Petter says she’s got good potatoes, her. We’ll share it all. Cook it up with them carrots there.”

Jack reached out and grabbed Mr. Cowert’s callused hand and shook it. “Hutia stew again, old man?”

He touched his nose. “It’s all in the seasoning, lad.”

She smiled at him and started back out.

“Wait,” he said, and reached into another drawer. He withdrew a small leather satchel and a new pair of breeches and a white tunic, all washed and clean. “Change out your clothes from time to time. Yeh stink, lad. No lie. To high heaven. Wash up at the well or at Matty’s Motel once a week, and have her wash them clothes and just tell her to settle up with me.”

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Jack smiled back at him. “Thanks, Mr. Cowert. But what’s the satchel fer?”

“To keep the pistol in, so’s nobody steals it. Wear it around you at all times and people’ll think you’re a page for the Admiralty Office or something. They won’t touch yeh.”

She nodded. “Thank yeh, sir.”

“Where you off to, now? We could play some cards if you’re not in a hurry.”

“Thanks, but I think I’m due fer a clap o’ thunder.” She held up the shilling and winked at him. “Fer the satchel.” Her father had always taught her to settle up.

With that she turned and left the stall. Not far behind, she heard a shot go off. People were startled all around the Meat Market. Jack stopped and looked around at the other stalls and saw one man fall, clutching his belly. The man that shot him was a blond-bearded man who sort of staggered away drunkenly. The body was left there in the mud and Jack watched as others looted the corpse before she could even think to.

She turned and cut through an alley, her feet splashing through mud and horse dung all the way to Queen Street. The dogs followed her.

____

It was Jack’s father that taught her to pickpocket. She didn’t think he’d meant for her to be a thief, it had only been a game between them. When the Capricorn was in harbour and he was getting shore leave, her father had squeezed as much time out of the day as he could to spend with Jacqueline and her mother. Fanorona was their favourite strategy game, but simple sleight-of-hand had been their preferred tricks to play.

At first the game was only played around their home, which was a house built in a tree just outside Port Royal, not far out in the jungle. When they went out to check their rolling-snare traps to see what they’d caught, her father would pickpocket the knife or the bait from Jack’s pocket. Inside the house, they would sometimes team up to distract her mother, and with his tar-stained fingertips would he surreptitiously put objects into her pockets.

“That’s called putpocketing, girl,” he’d said with a wink. “Won a few games o’ cards with that one. Jes put a few cards in another player’s pocket, then call him out, and all o’ the other players thinks him a cheat.”

Jack had played around with her friends George and Mory, both of them aged up to fifteen years now, sailed off on the HMS Hannibal and serving as loblolly boys. Proper privateers, them. But they had been easy marks for slipping a timepiece in or out of their pockets. Jack’s father had been a wily one, always full of mirth and jokes, pinching his wife’s bottom at nights when he thought Jack was asleep. During the days he took Jack with him to shop for materials in Port Royal’s marketplace, and there he had taught her what he called “the approach.”

“After yeh find yourself a mark, yeh simply intersects with them, not from head-on but from the side,” he said, holding her hand as they perused the stalls. “If’n they don’t make a move to gets outta yer way, that’s a good sign. Means their thoughts be occupied elsewheres.” Her father’s speech became stranger the longer he was out at sea, Mother had even commented on it. She said it was because sailors usually had poor schooling and being around one another only reinforced foolishness.

“Yeh can’t jes yank it outta their pockets,” he’d said, guiding her over to a chair outside a coffee-house and nodding towards potential marks. “Jes like at home when we plays the game, yeh have to look for the loose folds in the clothing, the soft spots. Tight clothin’ makes it harder. Then yeh slip two fingers in—the thumb and forefinger—and lightly prise the pocket open, only a smidge, jes to make it loose enough to slip the other fingers in. Not the whole hand. Never slip your whole hand in.” He’d held up fingers, and kissed each fingertip. “It’s all in the fingertips. A light touch, girl, that’s all yeh needs.”

That was all she needed, indeed. Jack had once thought of becoming a sailor on a merchanter, just like her father, but the revelation that only pirates ever allowed women to serve aboard ships had put paid to all dreams of sailing.

It was plenty dark out—perfect time for pickpocketing. The next mark she found was on her way outside of the harbour city. It was a short, squat woman carrying a handbag, and she was walking parallel to Jack. Jack picked up her pace, carefully maneuvering in front of the woman, then slowing down to let the woman pass her. The timing had to be just right. Jack pretended to adjust the satchel Mr. Cowert had given her, and slowed down her pace even more. As she heard the woman approaching, Jack let her left hand hang beside her. She turned as if just remembering she’d forgotten something, meaning to go back the other way, and bumped into the woman.

“Oh! So sorry, mum—” Jack slipped thumb and forefinger into the handbag.

“Not at all, young man,” the woman chuckled.

“I guess I didn’t see where I was a-going—it’s so dark out—” She prised the top open and slipped her fingertips inside and snatched the first thing she felt and palmed it. Her father had taught her to palm a purse quickly and squeeze tight so that its contents didn’t jingle.

“It’s quite all right,” the woman said, and walked around her. “Quite all right. Good evening to you.”

“And to you, mum.” Jack doffed her hand to briefly tip it towards her, and waited until she was outside the city to count her coins.

The house her father had built was like many others in the jungle, it was high in a tree, with a crude wraparound porch that required a rope ladder to reach. After the many tidal waves had slammed Port Royal over the decades, lots of people had begun building their houses either on stilts or up in trees. Jack had not been alive for the last one, but her parents had told her it was a devastating thing to witness. The sea surging inland, water rising almost to the treetops. She couldn’t even imagine it. Mum said sometimes hundreds would drown. She had asked her father, “Then why did anyone want to build Port Royal where it’s at?”

“No one knew tidal waves were such a threat at the time,” he’d said. “The Spanish built this place up first, and it became a huge port, very important fer trade. By the time the waves started hittin’, it was too late, Port Royal was already settled, established as the main trade city in the West Indies.”

Once up in the treehouse, Jack reeled up the rope ladder and stood for a moment at the porch railing. From here, one received a commanding view of the harbour. Soft moonlight rippled on the water. Sweeping her gaze west to east, she saw the main docks, the marketplace and main streets, and the Turtle Crawles, where an overflow of merchants and “disreputables” (how her mother had referred to pirates) usually anchored.

Jack entered the treehouse and sat on the floor, which had been made of slightly damaged planks taken from the ships her father had sailed on. It always made her feel closer to him when she sat and ran her fingers on the floor, along the bearskin rug he’d been gifted by Captain Fennitch for bravery.

She took the pistol out of the satchel and laid it on floor next to her, and wondered what she actually intended to do with it. Part of her already knew. Something had been building in her heart and mind for over a year now, perhaps even before Mum was sick. A knowledge that soon, perhaps very soon, she would have to leave. To where, she did not know, but already she was afraid that some change was coming—her breasts would eventually come and her figure would become more womanly and there would be no more hiding.

She had no real skills, none that were valued in Port Royal. Mum had told her those kinds of women became whores.

She had to leave.

But she needed a plan.

Jack looked at the purse she’d just pickpocketed from the woman and wondered, not for the first time, if Father hadn’t been prepping her, as well. Had he known that eventually she would need such a skill? Why show her how to shoot? Why teach her the skills of a pickpocket? And why had Mother allowed it?

Her stomach growled.

She took an apple out of her satchel and took a bite, then pulled a blanket over herself and laid down, chewing, thinking. It’s like they knew. But why make me a thief? I learned how to read, and I learned some maths. Didn’t they think I was smart enough for anything else?

She took another bite, chewed slowly, and eventually went to sleep wondering what in the hell she was going to do tomorrow. And the next day. And the next.