Free Curse of the Blue Tattoo: Being an Account of the Misadventures of Jacky Faber, Midshipman and Fine Lady by L. A. Meyer

those when I'm daydreamin' about Jaimy. Don't seem like sins to me, though. Just love, is all. Oh, well, at least we get Sunday afternoons off, too. Pretty soft, I thinks, remembering the one-in-three watch schedule we had on the
Dolphin,
night and day, day in and day out. Still rather be there, though. And then on Wednesday mornings we put our
dirty drawers and shifts, all our underclothes, in those net bags that I wondered about when I first got here and we leave them at the foot of our beds for the serving girls to pick up and wash. Pretty sinfully soft, that, too. Wednesday being wash day, the beds are stripped and we will have fresh sheets that evening. Don't I feel a little guilty, though.
    "Ain't it grand, Amy, so warm and nice and all."
    "Best enjoy it, for the fall will be short. Indian summer will come and go and winter will come around, count on it," says Amy, ever the happy one. She already looks better, I'm thmkin', even with her hair wet and hangin' down all straight.
    "So you have Red Indians here?" I say, thrilled with the thought of seein' one all decked out with tommyhawk and war paint and feathers. "Where are they?"
    "Mostly out to the west now." She pauses, and then goes on. "Surely you know the British gave them guns and money to kill our poor settlers during the Revolution. They paid them by the scalp. There were the most awful massacres. On both sides, Indians and us."
    Hmmm,
I thinks, prolly best to skip this line of conversation. I can't believe my country would do such a thing, but then I can't believe that the child that was me was tossed out into the streets of London with no help nor mercy nor Christian kindness. I get up and stretch and say, "Let's go and look through the churchyard."
    We go through a break in the low stone wall that surrounds the church and its graveyard.
    "Do you think it is wise?" says Amy, all doubtful. The church looms high above us.
    "Why not? We have nothing to fear from the dead, as we ain't done nothin' to harm em," I says. "It's the livin' you
got to fear." I lean down to peer at the carving on a stone. "What do those skulls with those wings stickin' out of em mean?"
    "Those are old stones from a hundred years ago. The carvings are called 'Death Angels' and they are supposed to depict the person that died." Amy wraps her arms about herself and shivers. "You can see that each one is different."
    "And what does that 'Memento Mori' mean?" I've got some Latin, but not much.
    "It means 'Remember Death.'"
    "Which means?"
    "It means you can have all your parties and songs and dances and you can pursue all your schemes and endeavors and ambitions and fancies and pride
but...
"—and here Amy tosses her head and looks almost defiant—"
but remember Death is coming and you'd better be ready at any time.
That is what it means. Can we go now?"
    "Ah," I say, and walk on. I stoop down and read another stone. "Oh, Amy, look. How sad. It is the grave of a girl not much older than us." The inscription under the Death Angel reads:
Here lyes ye body of

Constance Howard, Beloved Daughter

Who Departed This Life on May 2nd, 1679

in her seventeenth year
Death is a Debt to Nature...
    The gray and weathered stone is at a tilt and the rest of the verse is hidden by the high grass and I can't make it out,
and so I kneel down and pull at the grass clumps and dirt till the words are revealed and I read them out loud:
Death is a Debt to Nature Due

Which I have Paid

And So Must You
    Well, that rocks me back on my heels. Talk about a message from the beyond!
    I think for a moment and then I stand up and pull out my pennywhistle from my sleeve and I puts it to my lips and I play.
    When I'm done, Amy says, "That was very nice. What is the name of it?"
    "It's my own little tune, 'The Ship's Boy's Lament' I call it. I made it up as a lament for a mate of mine what died. Now it serves as a lament for a poor girl what didn't get to be no older than seventeen."
    We stand there for a while and