Back in her yard Saint watched the empty hive, and through deep wades of moonlight walked along the foot of their land, the trees like guardians that wavered only in a single spot she had found with Patch that same evening two years before.
She stayed close behind as he forged them a path with a wooden cutlass.
“I carved our initials in the oak tree by the graveyard,” he said.
“Defacing nature for me, be still my beating heart,” she said, biting her lip to keep back her smile.
“I like that when we’re gone, it’ll be there. It’ll last.”
“Do you want to come to my birthday dinner tonight?” she said, and did not dare breathe for a long time.
He stopped dead, dropped to one knee, and tilled the leaves with a pale hand. “Wolf scat.”
She wrinkled her nose and made a mental note to spray him with Lysol on their return.
“Ready the pistol,” he announced.
Saint pulled the replica one-shot flintlock pistol from her satchel and cocked it, thrilled that she had been entrusted with such a prize.
“Does it fire?” she said.
“Doesn’t need to. You stare down the barrel of that and you spill your pockets and your secrets. Or you take off running. If you see one it’s best to aim for the eye,” he said.
“Savage. Especially coming from you.”
They moved on.
She cleared her throat. “Are you coming to this birthday dinner or not? Because I have lots of boys who might like—”
“Will there be cake?” he said, not looking back over his shoulder. She followed the shape of him, his bony shoulders and the narrow V of his waist. His trousers stopped an inch shy of ankle. He smelled strongly of cologne, a kind she did not know, a kind he had found in a box of his father’s things that perhaps might have been better buried with the man, if only to ward off scavengers.
“What kind of party doesn’t have cake?”
“Yes, but what kind of cake?”
“I mean…it carries a skull and crossbones…that’s all they had left in the store.” Her cheeks flamed a little at the lie. She had spent near a week working from the Wilton Yearbook of Cake Decorating, had her grandmother pick up mint wafers, shoestring licorice, and two packs of chocolate fudge frosting so she could fashion the ship.
He turned slowly, his smile so wide she fought hard not to match it. “You have a pirate cake?”
“Indeed.”
“I’ll be there. And I’ll bring a little offering. A gentleman corsair does not show with an empty hand.”
Later that evening he would turn up with half a bottle of apricot schnapps, which he would make a show of pouring like wine for her grandmother, who could do little but shake her head at the whole sorry affair.
They met with nettle so dense their arms were streaked when they finally made it through onto Tooms’s land, which pitched and fell in unruly pits.
In the distance lay a lone house, and above crowned a darkening sky that soon broke and hammered rain onto the land. Saint made to head for the trees, but Patch sat down on mats of grassland and then lay back.
“When the sky opens you got a better chance of seeing heaven,” he said.
She lay beside him.
Their heads side by side, their feet the north and south of a compass.
“Will things be different now that I’m a year older?” she said.
“Your tits might finally arrive.”
She nodded at that.
“Not that you need them or nothing.”
“Excuse me?”
“You’re smart, right? Already you know that you’re smart. But also, in the right light, you look a little like Evelyn Cromer. She was the most beautiful pirate that ever sailed. Of course, she wore her hair in a braid, and slaughtered—”
“You think I’m beautiful?”
He nodded. “Entirely and absolutely.”
The rain eased to gentle fall, and she turned from him and smiled, ran her tongue over her crooked front tooth and wondered if one day it would straighten by itself.
“Why is your name Saint?”
Her breath caught a little. “My grandparents named me.”
“Because your mother died before she could.”
She nodded.
“But the name…”
“They said I was every good thing, Patch. Can you believe that?”
He turned his head to look at her. “Sure, I can. Entirely and absolutely.”