Chapter 9
For A Pirate, Who Knew He Was So Mushy?
I didn’t say another word about the ruby ring after Max and I went back up on the deck of the Elizabeth. I kept it in the pockets of my shorts and put my hand on it every few seconds because I was being a little paranoid that I was going to lose it. I definitely couldn’t do that.
Max sat beside me on the seat of the boat. I looked over at him every few minutes and it looked like he was thinking hard about something. Well, I knew what he was thinking about: the code in the ring. I was, too, I just liked watching him thinking about it.
Wow, I sounded like a creeper.
A few minutes later, Ronny was pulling the boat back up to its place at the dock and Dad and Brielle were gathering up all of our things. Max was still in his trance so I had to bump my shoulder against his just to get him out of it.
“Hey, we’re getting ready to get off,” I said to him quietly.
He looked at me for a moment, his eyes blank, before he looked like he comprehended what I had said. “Oh,” he said, shaking his head. “Sorry. I must have spaced out there for a moment."
I smiled slightly. "It's okay," I said.
"Sorry," he said. "I was just..."
I got a feeling that he was going to say that he was thinking about the ring. I quickly stood and pressed my finger to his lips, shutting him up.
"Don't say anything," I said quietly so that only he could hear me. "Ronny and Jeff might hear you."
Max looked me straight in the eyes as he nodded. Reaching up, he grabbed my hand in his, lacing our fingers together, and dragged me toward the doorway of the cabin. He leaned me against the wall and stepped in front of me, pretty much blocking me from going anywhere.
"I've got a question for you," he said.
I raised an eyebrow. "Okay," I said slowly.
"When are you going to tell your dad and Brielle about the ring? And when you do, are you going to show them the code on the inside?"
I rolled my eyes. I mean, really? Did he think I was just going to let the two of us be the only ones to know about the ring? Well, then only the two of us would be able to get to the next clue...if there was a next clue. We had to figure out the code first to be able to get anywhere. And for that, I knew I had to have the help of my dad and Brielle.
"Of course, I am," I said. "You might not know this, but Brielle is basically an expert in cryptography."
His eyes widened slightly. "Really?" he asked, and I nodded, grinning. He shook his head again, this time in amazement. "You Landon women are full of surprises, aren't you?"
I laughed. "Yep," I said.
Max laughed with me and reached up to push a damp curl behind my ear that had stuck to the side of my face. His thumb lingered there, brushing my cheek lightly.
There was the sound of someone clearing their throat from behind us and I hesitantly looked over Max's shoulder to see my dad standing there. I pushed Max away and stepped toward him.
"Hi, Daddy," I said a little too sweetly.
"Hey," he said, but he wasn't looking at me. His eyes were just slightly narrowed at Max. "Are you two ready? We're going to go back to the hotel before we go out for dinner."
I nodded as I leaned up to kiss his cheek. "Yep, we're ready," I said, looking back at Max. "Aren't we, Max?"
Max had to clear his throat for a second before he nodded. "Yes, we're ready," he said.
Dad watched him with his eyes still slightly narrowed. I'd never seen him act like this before, all protective of me. Maybe that's because Max was a guy...and I was a girl...and Dad could see something between us that really wasn't there. Well, on Max's end at least. Me, on the other hand...I didn't even want to talk about it.
"Well, come on," Dad said, nodding toward the walkway toward the back of the boat where we would be getting off onto the dock from. "Brielle and I already have our stuff on the dock. We did it while you two were...doing whatever you were doing over here."
"We weren't doing anything!" Max and I said at the same time. We looked at each other, both silently telling each other to keep our mouths shut.
Dad smirked - finally! another reaction other than narrowed eyes! - and rolled his eyes. "Sure," he said.
"Dad!" I said, looking at him with my eyes wide.
He started laughing then and kissed the top of my head. "Come on, you two. Let's go," he said.
Once we said our goodbyes to Ronny and Jeff, the four of us piled into our car and headed back toward the hotel. I kept my hand on my pocket where the ring was still hidden. I was trying to figure out a way that I could tell Dad and Brielle about it. Did I just casually bring it up at dinner? Or did I just come out in the open with it and show it to them?
I think I was going to go with the latter. At least it would be quick and easy.
And I would more than likely be yelled at for stealing from the site.
But that would change when I showed them the code engraved on the inside of the band.
Oh, yeah! Take that!
I was thinking about this as we walked into the hotel and got into the elevator to go to our floor. Discreetly, I pulled the ring from my pocket and held it tight in my fist. Max saw me as I did and raised an eyebrow. I gave him a look telling him to shut up and all he did was chuckle softly. Dad and Brielle apparently heard it and looked at us.
"What?" I asked innocently.
When we got to our floor, Max and I walked behind Dad and Brielle to our room. Once we were inside, all of us sort of just went our own separate ways. I went into my room where I dug the ring from my pocket and looked at it.
There was a knock on my door and I had to quickly find some place to put the ring.
"Just a minute!" I yelled as I rolled over my bed, trying to find.
"Oh, who cares if your half naked," Brielle said as she walked into my room, grinning. "It's not like I haven't seen it before."
I quickly put my hands behind my back, tightening my fist around the ring.
Brielle stopped once she shut my door behind her and looked at me with a raised eyebrow. "And just what do you have behind your back?" she asked.
My eyes widened just the slightest, but she still saw my reaction. "N-nothing," I said, shaking my head quickly back and forth. Oh, Lord, I was a goner. That totally gave her the evidence she needed to know that I was hiding something from her. She told me that when I stuttered and shook my head quickly that she always knew.
"Oh, really?" she asked, sauntering over toward me. I could see the sneaky little smile on her face. "So just what are you hiding behind your back?"
"Nothing," I said too quickly. Well, there was another hint for her. Answering too quick.
"Uh-huh, sure," she said, her grin widening as she got closer.
I tried to back away from her advance, but I bumped into the bed. She was still coming for me...
And that's when I made a run for it.
"Daddy, the mean lady's trying to get me!" I screamed as I ran from my room and down the short hallway toward the living room area of the hotel room. Brielle was laughing as she chased after me into her and Dad's room.
Dad was just getting out his laptop from its case when I ran into the room, screaming. I jumped on the bed, trying to get away from Brielle, but she just tackled me and held me down as she tried to open my tightly drawn fists to get what I was hiding.
"Let me see what you're hiding!" Brielle said, laughing.
"Never!" I yelled back. "Now get off before one of my fists flies and hits you in the face!"
Brielle laughed again. "Is that a threat, my dear?" she asked.
"Yep!"
She narrowed her eyes...and then started tickling me.
And when that happens, I'm a goner.
I was laughing so had that I didn't even realize that I'd dropped the ring onto the comforter of the bed. It wasn't until I saw my dad lean down and pick it up to look at it.
I gasped and sat up, pushing Brielle off of me. "Dad, wait!"
He looked down at the ring and then up at me. "What is this?" he asked, looking at me sternly.
"Um," I started. "I was going to tell you about that."
"And?" he asked.
Max came into the room then, probably because he heard all of my screaming. He looked at Brielle, me, and then my dad's furious face. "What's going on?" he asked.
"Yes, Callie," Dad said, looking back at me. "What exactly is going on? Where did you get this?"
"The jewelry box I found on the Queen Anne's Revenge," I said. "It was inside of it."
"This is stealing, Callie!" he said, furiously. "You can't just take an artifact from a historical site without permission!"
"But..."
"No," he said, shaking his head. "I'm not listening to another word. I'm calling Ronny and telling him..."
"Dad, stop!" I said as he reached for his phone on the bedside table.
"What?" he asked angrily. "I'm really disappointed in you..."
"Steven," Brielle said, looking at him. "Will you just let the girl talk?"
Dad looked at her for a good minute before he looked back at me. "Alright, go ahead," he said. "But you better make it good."
I grinned, knowing that I was going to make it better than good. "Look at the inside of the band," I said.
"What...?" he started, but then his eyes widened when he saw the engraving.
"Told you," I said smugly. "It's a code...and I'm pretty sure it's our first official clue."
In the next few days, we were all researching and trying to figure out just what the code was. Brielle figured out that it was a type of cipher called a Vigenère cipher. It used the letters in the alphabet and arranged them in a square with twenty-six lines. You started with the letter A and then went all the way to Z on the first line, then on the next you would start with B and go to A, and you would go on through the alphabet until your last line started with Z and ended with Y. Brielle said we had to have a key word to figure out the code, but that was a little harder than we thought it would be to find it.
All four of us had been reading articles online and books about Blackbeard nonstop, but we couldn't find anything about a ring or the initials E.S.
That was until I stumbled across a website and read over a part about Blackbeard life before he turned to piracy.
"During Edward Teach's early life in England, he had a secret affair with the Duchess Elizabeth Stafford, who was married to the Duke of Harrington. The duke was twice Elizabeth's age and it was a loveless marriage. Teach and the duchess met in secret until the duke discovered their affair. Teach fled the country in order to avoid getting arrested and sailed for the Caribbean in 1715, where he began his life of piracy.
"The Duke of Harrington died the year after Teach fled, leaving the duchess with everything. Elizabeth tried to find Teach, but was unable to locate him. It was said that he had kept a small metal jewelry box of hers with her initials engraved on the lid to remember her. There is also speculation that inside he kept a ruby ring that he had planned on giving to her..."
Gasping, I jumped up from my bed where I was laying with my laptop in my lap and rushed into the living room.
"I've got it!" I said.
Dad looked up from his own laptop. "What?" he asked, surprised.
"I know what the keyword is!" I said, and then read the little section of the article out loud. I looked up at them when I was finished. "The keyword is Elizabeth! It has the same amount of letters as the code does. It has to be it!"
Brielle got up and picked up her notebook where she was trying to figure out the code. She wrote the word 'Elizabeth' down, putting a space in between the Z and the A, and took a minute to decipher it. Before she was even finished, she was shaking her head.
"It doesn't make any sense," she said. "I don't think it's the right word."
All of us paused for a moment. I thought I would have it, but no.
"What about a nickname?" Max asked suddenly. "He could have called her Lizzy or Beth. And for the keyword, can't you have a word shorter than the code and have it just repeat so that it has the same letters?"
Brielle nodded, picking up her pencil again. We all watched and waited as she first tried the word 'Lizzy' and then 'Beth'. As she searched through the letters as she worked on Beth, she started smiling.
"It worked," she whispered once she was finished.
"It did?" I asked, rushing over to the table to look down at the paper. A smile lit up my face. "It did!"
Below where Brielle had arranged the letters engraved in the ring and the keyword underneath it was the words 'the garden'.
"So what does it mean?" Max asked from beside me. I hadn't even realized that he was there. "What garden?"
I picked up the ring where we had it laid on the table in a velvet box and looked at it. "Well, in the few paragraphs before, it said that Elizabeth lived in England and apparently her manor still stood today. They had gardens behind their homes, right? Maybe it literally means a garden."
"Where is the manor?" Dad asked.
"Just outside of London," I answered.
"Well, then," he said. "I guess we're going back to England."
***Finally uploaded! Sorry it's been so long!
So what did you guys think?!? And they're going back to England! That should be fun! ;D Haha!
Comment, Vote, and Like!!!1***