"How about that?" he said triumphantly.
"Not bad, old man, not bad."
The older gentleman scoffed, taken aback. "I oughta have you switched for that. Make your move. Not bad, he says."
Alexandre turned to Anne, looking at her for a moment as though what he'd showed her were enough. Anne stared at the two men for a moment longer, pondering the problem.
She spun on her heel and walked back into the general store. After she and William had exited, he had gone back to some busywork about the store. Upon hearing them enter again, he gave the same hello and wave in that practiced way the others in the hamlet had all done.
"I'm rather hungry, and I'd like to purchase some of the dried meat you have."
"Why, certainly," Jules replied.
He walked around the perimeter of the store to the left side with all the food and pulled down a glass jar filled with the dried and spiced meat within. He placed the jar down on the glass cabinet in front of him and took off the top. The long strips of what appeared to be beef wafted a gentle fragrance of pepper, cloves, and the unmistakable iron-like smell of dried blood towards Anne.
"How much?" Anne asked.
Jules scrunched his face in thought as he has done a few moments before, then pulled out his ledger from behind the counter. He rifled through the pages, his finger skimming down the lines of the ledger as he searched for his product. "Hmm, let's see… For one strip of dried beef, it would be… doo-doo-doo… Zero pieces of eight."
Anne had been fixated on the ledger and almost didn't hear what Jules had said. She was sure she had heard him wrong and looked up from the ledger, her brow cocked, and head turned slightly to hear better. "Pardon?"
Jules briefly glanced down at the ledger again, then repeated, "Zero pieces of eight."
Anne couldn't help but pause for a few seconds, incredulous, shocked, disturbed, or some combination of the three halting her natural ability to react quickly. "I'll take two," she finally said.
Jules held out his hand, waiting for the 'payment.' Anne mimicked the act of reaching into her cloak for some coins and dropped the imaginary pieces into Jules' outstretched hand. He accepted the mock coins and then tilted the jar towards Anne, allowing her to take some of the beef.
Anne, channelling the Frenchman and wishing to test things a bit further, reached inside and took all the strips of dried beef out of the jar in one bundle, leaving the container empty. "Oh! It seems you're all out."
Jules looked back into the jar, not noticing, or perhaps unable to notice, that Anne had taken well more than two pieces. "Oh my, terribly sorry about that, miss. I'm sure I have some more in the back, just give me a moment." Jules put the jar down and walked to the back of his store through an open doorway.
Anne turned around to Alexandre and William. "Something's not right with these people," she said, her fist clenched in a death grip on the dried strips of meat.
Alexandre smirked. "Astute observation."
Anne's anger flared, but she tempered the rage with a clench of her jaw. "Do you know what's wrong with them?" Anne gestured with the strips of beef, and after she realized she was still holding the batch, she handed some to William, some to Alexandre—despite him clearly not wanting any—and placed the rest on the counter.
Alexandre's brow raised. "My dear princesse, you of all people should know better." He crossed his arms in front of him, his face uncharacteristically serious. "Knowing a thing means you have an intimate awareness of the surrounding circumstances of a thing. This is no simple illness defined by a large rouge spot on an appendage. I have many theories, but not enough facts to say with any certainty what ails these people. They could be infected with un parasite, they could be acting, as unlikely as it may be, or they could be beings from the sky with no concept of our culture beyond a set of pre-described functions and phrases."
Anne's anger turned to a sour exasperation. Alexandre may be exhausting and withheld information at times, but he was proud and revelled in lording his superior intellect over others. If he didn't know a thing, and he said as much, then he didn't know it.
There was something they were missing, a crucial piece of information that would tie it all together. Anne took a bite from the beef and stared at the worn floorboards of the general store as she thought over the matter. She went deep, digging to every nugget of information Victoria, Christina, and, most importantly, Herbert had given about Silver Eyes over the years, searching for something that Alexandre didn't know that could turn one of his hypotheses into the most likely scenario.
"Three things come to mind that may narrow our focus," Anne said before looking up at Alexandre again. "One is the golden bell. It would be no coincidence were it to be the same metal as Edward's cutlass"—Anne touched the cutlass for emphasis—"and the same as Benjamin Hornigold's horn and his own cutlass. When he blew that horn the night we tried to kill him, it was as though the people around him went into a trance. Not all in the tavern, but most." Anne paused a moment, and after Alexandre nodded, she continued. "The second and third are things Herbert has said about Silver Eyes that you may not know."
"Yes, that could be valuable information," Alexandre agreed.
"He's said before that his crew never loses their morale, and when I questioned him about this further, he meant that in the most literal sense. They don't stop fighting, even if they lose their men, even if
