Conversation in Port Royal

So love will take between the hands a face

Robert Frost

Chapter 1

Ten days.

Ten days between the sentence and the hanging.

Ten days accorded by the law for an unlikely reprieve or an even more unlikely pardon.

They had elapsed more quickly than Jack Sparrow expected. Like a rope slipping out of his hands.

For ten afternoons Reverend Bertram had come and sat outside Sparrow’s cell in order to lecture him about his evil habits. For ten afternoons Jack had laid on the straw-littered floor of the small cell and resignedly endured the Reverend’s heroic efforts to convert him. The possibility that he took a nap, now and then, cannot honestly be excluded.

No blasphemy intended. But Reverend Bertram, with his short body precariously perched on a tar-barrel and his ill-shaved cheeks pressed against the iron bars of the cell, exhibited a likeness to Jack the Monkey that Jack the Captain found little conducive to spiritual enlightenment.

The Reverend’s predication, sadly, was not much more enjoyable than Jack the Monkey’s squeaks. The Navy he’d consorted with all his life long had transformed Bertram into a Gunner of God who fired broadsides of gloomy Biblical quotations and, in imitation of the Navy Captains with their bloody Articles, he seemed to believe that endlessly reading aloud a selection of deeply thoughtful passages, reverently copied from a bundle of penitential treatises he’d found mouldering in the cabinet of his predecessor, was the best way to force faith and repentance into a thick degenerate skull.

Jack, however, totally failed to see the blessed workings of Divine Providence in his having being singled out to die for the edification of Port Royal’s sinners. If the good Port Royal’s citizens loved so much to hear pirates talk about their sins, why did they just not organize regular visits to Tortuga ? The taverns, at night, were full of pirates just craving for an audience. And if you bought them rum enough, you could get all the repentances you could desire, and professions of faith in any type of Christian, Jewish, Mohammedan, and Oriental religion, including anthropophagic cults and worship of ancient Roman and Greek Gods. Why all this rage for forcing people to talk with a noose around their neck when you could just civilly offer them a bottle of something nice ?

It must also be said that the astonishing droning quality of Reverend Bertram’s weak voice did nothing to redeem the platitude of his arguments. Should Jack ever have a private conference with Our Lord Above, he would strongly suggest that the All-mighty should take particular care this minister of His did not happen to be nearby the Valley of Josaphat on the Resurrection day, or the reawakened dead, instead of surging from the graves, would just roll over and fall asleep again.

This tenth afternoon, however, Reverend Bertram had not let himself be deterred by Jack’s emphatic snoring. After tomorrow morning, there would be no other opportunity to save a soul that would figure like a trophy in the Reverend’s slim carnet of piratical conversions. Therefore, Revered Bertram had crossed himself with a tired sigh and sombrely declared that he would stay, and fast and pray all night long for the prisoner, because what was his food and sleep compared to the Lord’s rejoicing in having a lost sheep brought back to His flock ?

Panic-struck by such a horrifying prospect, Jack had suddenly woken up from his more or less feigned doze. He’d spryly bounced to his feet, grabbed the Reverend’s sweat-stained collar through the bars, and picked him up bodily from the barrel. Keeping him nose to nose and exhibiting his grimmest pirate scowl – the one usually reserved for the toughest East India Company captains – Jack had made it exceedingly clear that, should it be true that the smallest repentance would grant him Heaven, then he was feeling like adding the killing of a God’s minister to his list of sins, just to be sure he did not risk going to a place where you could get no rum.

As soon as Jack had let go his collar, the poor Reverend had run away in utter shock, totally deaf to Jack’s mocking invitation to come back and take his chance of becoming the first Caribbean martyr.

Again, no blasphemy intended. Jack was not a Christian according to strict theological criteria, but no one could ever refuse to believe in a divinity of some sort, after being on Isla de Muerta the night Hell had opened its door and Lucifer’s legions had walked on earth in the form of Hector Barbossa and his crew of Damned. Yet, Jack did not trust Gods of vengeance nor the absolutions of clergymen who did not know how to smile.

Ten days.

Ten days with nothing to do, in that blasted jail in Fort Charles, except dozing, killing lice, defending his food from the rats, and carefully avoiding thinking. It was not in Jack’s nature to sulk on what might have been but had not. He loved freedom above all and freedom, to him, meant first and foremost to look ahead. Always.

But this time, with the gallows looming in that direction, it was not a heartening sight.

To bide his time, Jack usually exchanged some banter with the sentinels or listened to their chattering. His favourites were Murtogg and Mullory, the pair of marines Jack had met at the Navy dock the day of his arrival in Port Royal. An uncommon pair of lobsters they were, spending their watches in endless disputation, like doctors of philosophy. Their ability to wrap themselves in a fog of nonsensical paradoxes was almost uncanny.

Murtogg and Mullroy always got posted together, probably because their Sergeant would fear for the sanity of any other Marine exposed to their fantastic confabulations. They also systematically got the worst shifts: nights, Sundays, celebrations, the hottest hours of the Jamaican afternoon. The pair was aware of something unfair at work in the compilation of the watch roster, yet, with true philosophical fortitude, they never complained. Sitting deep in conversation on their customary bench halfway down the corridor, equally insensible to heat and dampness, mosquitoes and rats, the smells of the prisoners and their endless rosary of curses and obscenities, they had come to embody for Sparrow the military virtues of the British Empire in a much more cogent way than the obsessive drills on the tune of Lilliburlero their Irish Sergeant was so enamoured of.

Although often sniggering at their conversation and mischievously contributing to entangle it beyond the realm of any human unravelling, Sparrow sincerely liked the pair. For their part, they treated Jack Sparrow with an awed respect that the pirate, in his quintessential vanity, could not avoid finding flattering.

Of course, Jack’s interest in the two Marines was not exempt from a sensible dose of self-interest. The value of knowing your enemy was a lesson Jack had been taught at a very early stage of his sea vagabond’s life. Information could be as useful as a loaded pistol. And the philosophical lobsters were an invaluable source of details about Commodore Norrington, the officer in command of Fort Charles and also the man most responsible for Jack’s current predicament.

Jack considered it a great disadvantage for the men in his profession that the Brethren did not regularly issue posters of dangerous naval officers exactly as the Government did for wanted criminals. Since his arrival in Jamaica, about eight odd years before, this Norrington fellow had achieved quite a reputation as a pirate hunter. Regrettably, Jack had left the Caribbean two years before Norrington’s advent, missing any opportunity to know of his stellar ascension in the over-crowded sky of British Naval Heroes. And how could a honestly dishonest pirate, just come back to Port Royal after ten years of hard thieving and plundering in the Eastern Seas, how could a trusting and sociable fellow like Captain Jack Sparrow imagine that even the wickedest city in the world had fallen under the moralizing broom of the Royal Navy and been swept clean of pirates by an officer who seemed to have that very broom stuck into his ass for quicker access ?

It was a galling thought for Jack that, were it not for the Royal Navy and its damned latest promoted Commodore, he could be now enjoying Barbossa’s treasure and the best Jamaican rum in the great Cabin of his beloved Black Pearl, instead of eating meager King’s soup and bread locked up in a dirty cell, waiting to be hanged at dawn, and in such a dramatic depression of spirits as to bitterly miss the company of a pair of British lobsters.

Because, of course, it never rains but it pours and, this evening of all evenings, for some unfathomable reason, Murtogg and Mullroy had been abruptly dismissed just after the beginning of their watch, and Jack had been left to his last dinner and his own resources. Which, as we said, were not many.

All the cells around were empty. The men of Barbossa’s crew had all been hanged two weeks ago in the most terrific mass hanging of pirates in the history of Jamaica.

They were so many that they had to be executed by divisions. For three days after the trials, Jack had seen batches of pirates leave shackled in pairs, moaning and shuffling their feet between a double row of scarlet coats armed to the teeth: a sorrowful, dismal procession led by a Navy officer carrying the Silver Oar, which symbolized the Admiralty Court’s Authority for all the crimes committed beyond the high water mark.

It had been a relief, for Jack, to be freed of that hateful company. The pirates had spent their days in a disgusting alternation of violent oaths and miserable cries. A batch of cowards, all of them. Cattle waiting for the butcher. Without Hector Barbossa to rally their black hearts, they were as lost as sheep.

Very black sheep, indeed. Difficult to find men with greater expertise in treason, falsehood, blasphemy, thievery, pillage, rape, torture, and other assorted kinds of violence. The curse apart, their whole life had been an inexorable march towards the noose. Were it not for having to share their lot, even Jack Sparrow would acknowledge they were now cutting a very fine sight, tarred and swaying in the wind at Deadman’s Cay, by the entrance of Port Royal’s harbour. Well, “fine sight” in figurative terms. After three days exposed as a banquet for gulls, crows, flies, and the occasional shark coming near the cost at high tide, it was rather doubtful whether Jack’s former comrades looked the better for it. But it was rather doubtful, too, in Jack’s opinion, if people like Koheler or Clubba had ever possessed human looks and habits. The rum had burned their brains along with their black guts and transformed them into beasts long before the Aztec gold completed the job of making them into devils.

As far as his own not so scrupulous person was concerned, however, Jack Sparrow was determined not to make a spectacle of himself, either tonight, in his cell, or tomorrow, on the gallows. He would not spend his last night like Bosu’n, swearing and hitting his bald head against the wall, screaming like a madman for a bottle of rum. Jack had always held spirits in the highest and warmest appreciation, but he was not a man to climb the scaffold as drunk as a fiddler. He was Captain Jack Sparrow ! Barbossa, Norrington, and the whole bloody Port Royal be fucked in Hell if tomorrow, on the gallows, he would show the slightest sign of fear.

Yet, tonight, a drop of killdevil would have greatly helped to gulp down his unsavoury dinner and keep memories at bay.

Unpleasant memories, most of them.

The trials of Barbossa’s crew had been the usual one-day business, with most of the time expended in going through the forms of the Court. Their case was a foregone conclusion. No real need for further evidence of their being pirates beyond their attempted assault against a King’s ship. They’d been all of them dead and buried the moment they’d put their dirty feet on HMS Dauntless’ immaculate deck. Wait a moment – they were already technically dead then. No, correction: undead. Sparrow stopped chewing a rather coriaceous piece of boiled beef (or was it a horse respectably dead of old age in Cronwell’s time ?) furrowed his brows in concentration. Would this mean that un-dead people could still die ? It had a logic. Sort of.

Well, whatever Barbossa’s men specific condition of un-deceasedness at the moment of their arrest, boarding a man-of-war in arms had been surely the quickest path towards a state of ultimate and irreversible defunctness. The Royal Navy did not usually take it well when you slaughtered some dozens of its finest seamen.

But even without the Dauntless’ onslaught, the chances of being acquitted, for anyone in the Black Pearl’s crew, would have been the same as having a knighthood conferred upon them: the citizens of Port Royal spontaneously queued up for hours in the street outside the Admiralty Court House, in order to give testimony against the scoundrels who had plundered their houses, looted their shops, burned their boats, slain and raped their relative, and destroyed in a single night of brutish, goulish violence, years of hard work in the most unhealthy island in the British domain.

Of course, no one mentioned curses, zombies, or any similar devilries. Starting from the Commodore down to the last of his cabin-boys, it was a smooth, impenetrable wall of omissions and silences. And if some ill-advised boor of Port Royal babbled about skeletons walking in the moonlight and dead pirates going down Queen Street carrying their heads under their arms like pumpkins on a market day, Judge, Counsel, and Jury just shrugged their shoulders and blamed the overindulgence in rum that still plagued that God-forsaken town.

In a significant break from the tradition of festive merriment with which such shows were usually attended by the townfolk, the hanging of Barbossa’s pirates took place in front of an eerily silent crowd. Men, women, children, all as still and dumb as hostile ghosts bearing in their eyes the looks of their lost loved ones. From Gallows Point, that silence of stone, punctuated only by the rolls of the drums and the cry of the seagulls, had reached Jack Sparrow in his cell and made him shiver.

Jack’s trial was a different kettle of fish. A tenth of his variegated past would have been enough to make a man hang a dozen times, but the Counsel showed a morbid pleasure in reconstructing his career as a gentleman of fortune. Jack did not expect the trial to go on for a month. It was an acknowledgment of popularity, in its way. The Court House was crowded to excess, with people squeezed into the gallery, climbing up columns, and squatting on every available window-sill and ledge of the wall. And they laughed, oh if they laughed and even cheered, as the Counsel called witness after witness and the extraordinary skein of Jack’s life was unravelled in all its succession of felonious, wilful, and piratical crimes against the Peace of our Sovereign Lord the King, his Crown, and Dignity.

But the thing Jack least expected was the unflappable smile on Commodore Norrington’s face when the Interceptor’s theft and following inglorious destruction was finally mentioned at the trial and HMS Dauntless’s First Lieutenant Mr Gillette called in front of the Court, to give his evidence as to the events of that fateful debacle.

To Jack’s dismay, Norrington himself had been spared the trouble of testifying, the Court declaring itself satisfied with his written report of the events. Braided and plumed like an ostrich, the Commodore had followed the trial sessions comfortably seated on a chair at Governor Swann’s right, along with other gentlemen and ladies of importance. Norrington’s easiness sorely nettled Jack. The Interceptor affair was not only an outstanding achievement in Jack’s career, but also an unparalleled example of naval mismanagement. There was no way the Commodore and his little officers could avoid being court-martialled once the truth was known. Yet, neither Norrington in his gilded armchair nor any other of the blue coats sitting in the more humble mahogany benches behind appeared in the least worried about their future.

A young lady with a pile of powdered boucles on her head, and a miniature man-of-war with full sails on top of the hairdo, let her fan fall. The Commodore picked it up and gave it back to the owner with a graceful, confident smile. Too graceful and too confident for an officer whose career was going to be buried under an avalanche of ridicule within the next ten minutes.

The lady thanked the young naval hero and made him notice something in the miniature vessel on her hair, which bore a suspicious likeness to the Dauntless. Norrington blushed (a very lovely blush, indeed) and played down the compliment with all the modest grace of an aristocratic upbringing. Governor Swann smiled in his turn and told some joke which had all his party to erupt in a peal of laughter. He too seemed totally unaffected by the prospect of being father-in-law to a future Navy laughing-stock.

Jack stared hard at the Governor’s party. It was about noon, and the spacious Court House was immersed in light and as hot as an oven, but the part where the quality sat was opportunely cooled by the star-shaped shadows of the palms growing outside the windows, and the scene had a definite theatre-quality.

A beautiful group it was, for sure: the ladies clad in silk fanning themselves; a few Army officers like scarlet spots among the civilian gentlemen in ivory, lavender, lemon, and mauve, who were perspiring with the utmost decorum under their white wigs; and, of course, the inevitable Navy officers outshining them all with their dazzling braids and full-dress swords.

But something was wrong. Especially with the sea officers. They were too jolly, too careless. Too much exchanging of pleasantries and snuff boxes. Jack was an expert in falsehood and knew one when he saw it. All those elegant, respected people were playing a part. A part in the farce which the good old Governor Swann and the handsome Commodore who flushed so gracefully had shrewdly concocted in order to save their own sorry arses and those of all the persons related to them. Which included Miss Swann’s reputation and, by extension, that of her childhood friend Will Turner.

For the first time, Jack realized the conspicuous absence of Will throughout all the proceedings so far and it was then that Jack smelled a rat. A big, foetid naval rat.

Mr Gillette made a dramatic entry from a lateral door, his back straighter than a rod and the most confident tilt of the world to his chin, although he limped like a lame duck and made ostensible use of a walking stick. His right ankle had been seriously strained during a nightmarish hand-to-hand combat with the gigantic African Bosu’n of the Black Pearl. Mr Gillette was said to have expressed his warmest satisfaction for Bosu’n dancing the hempen jig in payment for all the jigs he’d been deprived by the sprain.

The Lieutenant was ushered into the witness-box and sworn by the Court clerk with the usual solemnity. However, at the moment of putting his right hand on the Bible, he momentarily leant the walking stick against the railing of the box and, Sparrow noticed, stood without any apparent discomfort. The walking-stick, as far as Jack could see, was a dainty affair of ebony with a chased silver handle in the shape of a dolphin. A delicate article of fashion, more suitable for taking a walk across Vauxhall than to hold the weight of a six feet tall young man who seemed to vastly appreciate his meals. Jack wondered about the reason of that foppish display till Lt Gillette, after carefully disposing the tails of his coat on the witness chair, sat down, recovered the walking-stick, set its tip on the floor and started toying with its handle like a juggler. Jack, who was used to perform the same diverting trick with the quick swirls of his bare hands, could not repress a smile of appreciation at seeing it performed in a gentleman-like version.

When the Judge asked him to explain how two men alone had succeeded in stealing a ship of His Majesty, Mr Gillette exchanged an almost imperceptible look with Commodore Norrington, raised his chin to an even more defiant height, and started to spin the wildest yard Jack had ever heard. The Dauntless’ First Lieutenant revealed – and with so strong a note of truthfulness in his voice that even Jack was tempted to believe him – how William Turner had freed Jack Sparrow and sailed away on the Interceptor with the full knowledge and approval of the Commodore. Far from being an accomplice of Sparrow, William Turner had acted in full concert with the Navy, left in dramatic shortage of men after Barbossa’s raid, and accepted the risky task of playing the bait for the Black Pearl, while using Jack to find Barbossa’s hideout. Unfortunately, the pirates had attacked the Interceptor before the Dauntless, slowed down in her chase by a damaged rudder-chain, could come to help. Then – and very wisely – Mr Turner had chosen to blow the ship to pieces rather than leave her in the hands of Barbossa.

Mr Gillette lied, lied, and lied, with the most splendid brazen face in the world, while the walking-stick in his hand rolled like a fairy spinning top. An amount of lies and brazenness to appal even Captain Sparrow, who yet had a certain experience in the deception department.

The testimony, punctuated by emphatic nods of the Governor and a discreet cough, now and then, from Commodore Norrington, when his First Lieutenant’s story-teller’s talent led him to wander too much from the agreed path, left the Judge and Counsel too exhausted and astonished for further questions. It was noon, the air in the court-room was oppressively heated, wigs itched, human smells were getting stronger, and there was a batch of Dauntlesses still to examine.

When the Judge gave him permission to leave, Mr Gillette looked at Norrington and the right corner of his mouth pulled up in a barely concealed grin. Norrington appeared to look intently at his own Bath medal, but the curls of his magnificently powdered full-dress wig trembled slightly once, in approbation. Then Mr Gillette proudly stood up as though he were a mizzen mast flying the British war colours and hobbled victoriously away, to sit near his commanding officer.

Sparrow, who had a habit of collecting idle details like a child might pick up seashells, did not fail to notice that Norrington shifted his chair to let Mr Gillette have more room to ease his leg and that, later, Mr Gillette lent Norrington a handkerchief to dab the sweat trickling down his temples from under the wig.

An odd fellow, that Gillette. On the Navy dock, when the officer had put him in irons, Jack had been misled by his sullen zeal. He thought Gillette-fetch-the-irons was just the Commodore’s hound, dangerous and stubborn if unleashed, but fundamentally obtuse, and totally incapable of hunting on his own initiative. However, on their second meeting on the Dauntless (the one that, according to the official version of the story fed to the Court, had never happened), Jack realized Mr Gillette was, indeed, very dangerous, very stubborn and very prone to saturnine moods, but not at all obtuse. On the contrary, he had an exceedingly sharp edge. No polished Toledo blade, like the Commodore was. Yet, solid steel all the same. Of the type that wears soon of the swirls and flourishes of an elegant swordplay but can efficiently and neatly knock you down with a brutish flat blow on your head.

And when circumstances and prudence forbade Mr Gillette to draw out his sword, there was always his tongue to reckon with. Jack was too much accustomed to befuddle people rather than being befuddled in his turn, or he would acknowledge that Mr Gillette’s reaction when he and Will Turner had boarded the Dauntless under his freckled nose could be counted as the first time Captain Jack Sparrow had been left speechless by a blue coat.

Alone, unarmed, with a skeleton crew of a half dozen hands, Mr Gillette had obviously given priority to saving the lives of his rum-soused but difficult to replace seamen rather than to the very vague possibility of two bedraggled madmen succeeding in commandeering a first-rate that needed at least a hundred hands just to weigh anchors.

The confrontation with Mr Gillette had been a piece of Italian comedy. Jack would always remember – well, remember till tomorrow morning at Gallows Point, at least – the grin that appeared on Gillette’s moonish face when he’d recovered from the shock of finding himself with Sparrow’s pistol levelled at his nose. Did Sparrow and Turner really want a man-of-war in which to fuck each other senseless ? No need to quarrel. They were welcome to it. The Commodore’s cabin was just that way.

And a moment before nimbly climbing over the rail and jumping down in the jollyboat, that popped up and down like a cork, beside the huge flank of the Dauntless, Gillette had taken off his cocked hat and made a mockingly courtier-like leg to Jack.

“My compliments, Captain Sparrow, and good luck with your press-gang. You will need a particularly spirited one to man your new command.” After which, with a final laugh, he had jumped down into the jollyboat as light as a soap bubble, sat down on the thwart, and ordered the men to row away. “Come on ! Put your backs into it, my lads. We’ve a tremendously funny joke to tell the Commodore and we do not want to keep him waiting, do we ?”

And Jack, within himself, knew he would be still there, stuck in the bay, caged aboard that most useless Noah’s Ark, along with the similarly useless son of Bill Turner, had it not been for Norrington’s rashness in ordering the Interceptor to sail with barely a dozen hands aboard, and the naïve carelessness of the Interceptor’s acting Commander, a Lt. Groves, protégé of the Admiralty, just arrived from Portsmouth a week before. It had been Mr Groves’ first real action at sea and, in the excitement of leading the Interceptors in a boarding party against a notorious pirate, he entirely overlooked the need to leave someone on his own ship.

Jack smiled at his dirty and broken nails: his calculations on Mr Groves had proved fairly accurate. Young, inexperienced, a tad arrogant, his ideas about pirates all coming from Captain Johnson’s History of Piracy and Drury Lane melodramas: it was only to be expected that he would be unable to keep an eye on Norrington and his chivalrous but often oblivious heroic impetus.

Even the strongest chain has a weak link. You only have to find it. And, to this purpose, fraternization with the enemy is always the best strategy. In less than an hour, the pair of philosophic lobsters met at the Navy Dock had provided Jack with a perfect sketch of the Interceptor’s Acting Commander Groves. They also told Jack how the Interceptor crew, mostly formed by Irishmen, badly regretted the preferment of Mr Groves over Mr Gillette, who, till to a few weeks before, had been First Lieutenant of the Interceptor at the order of Captain Norrington. Clearly a decision taken by petticoats in some sitting-rooms of London, and carried forth in open disrespect of the Commodore’s expressed wishes and concerns.

Well, the Dauntless’ First Lieutenant was quite a different animal from Mr Groves, Jack mused, and one very unlikely to ever gain petticoat support.

Soon after being recaptured on Rum Island and brought back on the Dauntless, Jack had managed to attempt an escape, eluding the Marines like an eel and taking a dive into the sea from the larboard main chains. In Jack’s opinion, missing the chance would have been an insult to the Commodore’s delicacy in not putting him in irons. Moreover, the lobsters appointed to watch him had seemed much more interested in watching the Commodore who, in his turn, seemed wholly engrossed in making sweet faces to his fiancée, on the windward side of the main deck.

But Mr Gillette proved to have eyes even in his back, because, although apparently petrified on the quarterdeck stair, his eyes strangely riveted on the nuptial Commodore, he sensed Jack’s movement at once and, with his usual, detestable eagerness, shouted for the marksmen on the main tops to fire a warning volley over Jack’s swimming head.

Jack did not appreciate that Lt Gillette took the trouble to welcome him back aboard in person, commenting on the beneficial properties of sea baths with a poisonous irony that Jack found totally out of place, considered the joyous mood of nuptial happiness pervading the Dauntless.

Yes, Mr Gillette was a very dangerous person to deal with, when he did not like you. And he did not like Sparrow. That’s was a certainty written in the malevolent smirk with which Mr Gillette added to the irons the novelty of a pair of fetters, “just to make him steadier on deck, the Dauntless being such a teaser with all the rolls and pitches caused by the jury rudder-chain”.

Damned heavy and encumbering fetters, by the way. It did Jack no good that, when the Commodore ordered for the pirate to be brought into his quarters for a formal inquisition, the lobsters, always obliging, locked him up alone in the day Cabin. All the stern windows were temptingly open on the ocean, but Jack had only to weigh his chains to realize he would have to walk all the way to Tortuga on the bottom of the ocean, had he tried another plunge.

Looking around for any diversion that might occupy his time until the coming of the nuptial Commodore, Jack noticed the inkstand on the writing desk and, accidentally, of course – all fault of those irons and Mr Gillette’ s zeal! – toppled it on an official-looking document with the seal of the Admiralty on it.

Then, from his position behind the writing desk, Jack noticed a small cupboard between the rack of glasses and one with an impressive array of swords and pistols. The cupboard had been left open, revealing the Commodore’s best wig, neatly resting like a dove upon a wooden stand. Acting on inspiration, Jack carefully carried the inkstand between his chained hands and gently poured the remaining ink over the wig.

He was admiring his masterpiece when he heard the marines springing to attention outside. The sound of shoed feet followed, and, finally, voices on the other side of the thin partition that separated the day Cabin from the Commodore’s bedroom.

First it was the Commodore’s deep and clipped voice, apparently engaged in a passionate explanation involving the frequent mention of Miss Swann’s name. The Commodore’s peroration, however, was brusquely cut short by Mr Gillette’s voice, sullen and contrary like that of a peeved child.

“Please spare me further details, James. I do not want to know.”

Norrington’s again, flustered, surprisingly agitated. “But you have to, Drew. You must. I want you to know all about it. Don’t you remember? No secrets between us. Never. I gave you my word. This does not change anything.”

Gillette muttered something that Jack did not understood but that was uttered in a rapid, flustered flow of Irish brogue.

And then Norrington’s voice, soft and deep, laced with pure, indescribable pain. “You’re tearing my guts out, Drew.”

The Commodore was as white as his stock and more funereal than nuptial, when he finally entered the day Cabin. His mysterious conversation with Lt Gillette had probably made him forget all about his order to bring Sparrow there, because, at seeing the pirate sitting behind his own writing desk, dripping sea water all over his most expensive chart, he stopped on the threshold, with a startled expression on his lean face. A curious mixture of surprise, annoyance and tense weariness.

The weariness, in particular, intrigued Sparrow. Might it be that the infamous Scourge of the Caribbean, known in the Royal Navy as “Bonnie Prince James” and among the pirates by a far less flattering “Bloody Norrington”, had grown sick of chasing pirates ?

Norrington came near the desk, and gave Sparrow an icy look that took in the pirate’s dishevelled and wet appearance, the disfigured despatch on the writing desk, the soaked chart, and the ruined wig in the cupboard.

He blinked once, then narrowed his eyes and just tightened his mouth. Without a word, he drew up a chair and sat down across from Sparrow, lounging casually with one thin, silk-stockinged ankle resting on the opposite knee. He took a cane from the desk and left it dangling from his fine, long-fingered hand. Sparrow’s eyes followed the sweep of the cane in alarm.

“You can spare your worries for the gallows. I’m not in the habit of torturing prisoners.” Norrington said coldly, noticing the direction of Jack’s look. “Not to mention that the young gentlemen I use this with might object to its application to a dirty pirate’s backside.”

“I daresay they might. As thoroughly as I approve of educating the young, I would hate to lessen the effectiveness of your teaching.” Sparrow acknowledged good-humouredly, fingering a thick dreadlock out of his right eye. “By the way, I forgot to thank you for the rescue of my humble self from that wretched island. Unforgivable lack of manners.”

“Think nothing of it.” Norrington said with cold graciousness. “I’m sure Admiral Cornwallis, at Kingston, will be most obliged to you for accepting the Navy’s hospitality.”

Sparrow nodded a thank-you, flashing an engaging smile, but began to feel rather uncomfortable.

“So you claim to know where the den of those beasts is located.” Norrington said, arching one elegantly shaped eyebrow and making the cane sweep again. “Isla de Muerta. I heard the name mentioned before. Thought it was a sailor’s yarn, to be honest.”

“Like the Black Pearl ?” asked Sparrow with another flashing smile.

Norrington’s knuckles went white on the cane’s handle. He looked Jack over very disapprovingly. So thoroughly disapproving that Jack had a glimpse of what the Dauntless’ midshipmen felt in their stomach when the Commodore called them in his quarters for a good telling-off.

“I wonder why you are so ready to betray your former companions.” Norrington mused in his baritone drawl. “Oh yes, according to Miss Swann, you might harbour a justified grudge against the men who mutinied against you and marooned you on a desert island.” A sudden gleam came into his green eyes. The cane vibrated like a cat’s whiskers. “This is your version of the tale, at least. But allow me to have some doubts about your trustfulness.”

Norrington sat back, slightly narrowing his eyes, as he focused them on Sparrow. “How can I exclude the possibility that you’re playing false? It might be a plot to lure me and my men into an ambush and take my ship.”

He stared at Sparrow intently.

Sparrow, with a brazen smile, stared back.

“Pray, continue. You’ve the pleasantest of voices. Or are you asking for my professional opinion ?”

The graceful line of Norrington’s mouth tightened a bit more and the cane vibrated again, in such a minatory way as to make Jack fear the Commodore was reconsidering his policy about corporal punishment.

The tension was fortunately broken by the entrance of a sulky Mr Gillette, followed by a servant carrying a tray of tea things.

There was a silent and curious exchange of looks between Commodore and First Lieutenant. Then the pair withdrew together near the stern-window for an undertoned but intense conversation, during which the still sulking Mr Gillette rolled his eyes and grimaced a bit too much for a First lieutenant, and Mr Norrington pleaded a bit too much for an All-Mighty Captain of His Majesty’s Navy.

Then Norrington gestured to the servant, who spirited away and reappeared after a few seconds with another china cup and a key.

A definitely ill-humoured Mr Gillette unchained Jack while Norrington, silently, poured out the tea. The Commodore offered Jack a cup with the inbred civility of a high-born gentleman, accustomed from his cradle to be a proper host, whatever the circumstances and the character of the guest.

Jack looked dismayed at the brown water in the cup, and then at the two officers, comfortably sipping tea from theirs.

“Don’t tell me.” He finally said. “Miss Swann burnt your rum too !”

Norrington was so taken by surprise that he actually laughed and almost spurted his tea out. It quite transformed his face, and Sparrow wondered why he had not found scented envelopes with feminine handwriting in the pigeon-holes of Norrington’s desk.

Mr Gillette laughed aloud, too, and when he finished his cup, leaning nonchalantly against the arm of Norrington’s chair (too nonchalantly, too near to Norrington, too informally, Jack’s mind quickly registered), he stared at the pirate, a half smug smile lingering on his mouth.

“Whatever else you may be, Sparrow, at least you’re a diversion on this damned day.” he remarked.

Norrington got up, put his cup back on the tray, and went towards the stern windows. He was turning his back to Jack, and Jack thought this was the right moment to grab him by the neck and use him as a hostage.

He envisioned himself ordering Mr Gillette to have a longboat lowered at sea, provisioned with water and food, while he pressed a blade against the Commodore’s milky throat. Or rather his face, yes, far better – handsome men would rather get a cannon-ball in their bowels than a scratch on their cologne-scented cheeks. The swords and the pistols on the rack seemed to wink at Jack, soliciting him. Imagine Captain Sparrow landing at Tortuga with an authentic Royal Navy Commodore as his personal oarsman…

But, with diabolic precision, exactly a half quarter of a second before Jack could jump off the chair with one of his lightning-like contortions, Mr Gillette walked in front of him.

He just did that. Just walked in front of Jack’ chair and looked at him with a slight twitch of his nostrils. But he had a curious capacity of collecting a great strength and turning it towards the person whom he was looking at, like some threatening, formidable weight. And all of a sudden, Sparrow became conscious of how tall and muscular Lt Gillette was, how big and strong were his hands, how stout his neck and shoulders, just deceptively draped in the line of his cravat and the blue wool of his embroidered Navy frock.

But the gigantic bear looming before him proved to be a civilized, if not peaceful beast. He waited a moment – the time for Norrington to go back to his chair, unaware and unharmed in his wonderful, perfect bubble of unmitigated patrician elegance, then, very quietly, leaning with his hands on the padded armchairs, he stated “Now you are going to tell us all you know, Sparrow. Are you not ?”

And Sparrow had done it. He had told them all.

Well… almost all.

He had kept for himself a trifle or two.

Like the fact that the pirates were cursed and could not be killed. But, upon his honour as a blackguard, this was a detail he honestly – dishonestly – believed the lass, Elizabeth, would not fail to tell her fiancée. Were it only to increase the chances of freeing Master Turner.

Even to Jack, Elizabeth Swann’s callousness had been a disconcerting revelation. She’d seen the Commodore and his men go into the barges – go to an almost certain death – without a blink of her beautiful eyes. Jack could understand a lass attempting to eliminate an inconvenient fiancé. He loved and admired women with a character. But to immolate a man-of-war along with her whole complement of hands, lobsters, and officers on the altar of Bootstrap Bill’s son was to overdo it even according to Jack’s flexible criteria.

Had someone taken the effort to ask, Jack would have proudly declared that, as far as he was concerned, he was at peace with his own conscience. He had gone with Norrington, exposing himself and his precious hide. And he had attempted – he ! – to keep Norrington and his men on the Dauntless, out of the skeletal claws of Barbossa’s crew. And he had provided them with a believable rearrangement of the truth, something suitable to the unimaginative naval mentality. He had not gone – he ! - into hysterics with Mr Gillette, fishing out zombies and curses when it was too late. Too late for everyone.

But at the trial, not even Jack’s role in the final defeat of Barbossa had been enough to bring the Jury onto his side. Jack’s reputation backfired on him. From every corner of the Caribbean it was all a brushing up of old grudges and illegalities Jack didn’t even remember committing.

It was his sense of humour that proved his final undoing. If Jack had been a cold-blooded scoundrel like Barbossa, who just killed you and went away with the money, he would have left behind him a wake of awed silence. But Jack’s victims had not forgiven him his passion for making fun of his fellowmen, his keenly developed sense of the comic, as though leaving his victims stripped from head to foot but alive and with a funny story to tell would indemnify them for the monetary loss. The good bourgeoises of the Spanish Main did not like to become protagonists of merry tales.

In the end, the Counsel reduced even Jack’s epic duel with Hector Barbossa to a sordid settling of scores between rascals. When the evidence was read over and the Judge asked Jack if he had anything to offer in his defence, Jack was so nauseated that all he could do to be true to his fame was to declare that he would trust the fairness of the British Justice only the day he would see Miss Swann arraigned for the felonious, wilful, and of her Malice aforethought destruction of innocent rum.

Then, while the Judge furiously hammered his desk, to silence the uproar of laughing in the Hall, a very strange thing happened. The Commodore and the Governor’ wigs mingled for a hushed, hurried council, which resulted in the sudden summoning of Sir Weatherby’s secretary. It was the same man who, a few days before the trials started, had gone to Jack in his cell and offered him to turn King’s evidence against Barbossa’s crew. Jack had proudly spurned the offer: he might be many disreputable things, but not an informer. Of course he did not mention the little detail that, had he accepted to turn King’s evidence, a permanent residence in Fort Charles’ well guarded jail would have been the only effective strategy against the Brethren’s retaliation. No love lost for spies in Tortuga.

The Gorvernor’s Secretary went to the Judge’s bench and produced a sealed packet which proved to be the sworn evidence of William Turner as to Jack Sparrow’s loyal and commendation worthy behaviour during the time Will Turner had been kept prisoner by the pirates, aboard the Interceptor first and then at Isla de Muerta. The Judge paled, almost choked, with indignation and stared at the Commodore as if he had grown two heads. The Commodore just smirked, in the same, self-assured, arrogant, most disagreeable way he had smirked on the Docks when he had ordered Jack to be arrested.

That smirk on the face of a man who should have been more pleased at seeing Jack hang than if he had taken a French frigate explained it all. As the realization hit him, Jack beamed. He’d seen it right: the whole trial was a farce. Neither the Commodore nor the Governor really wanted ol’Jack dead. He’d witnessed too many of the embarrassing public failures and private miseries of both men. They dreaded what he could say on the gallows, where, before the execution, it was customary to allow the prisoner to speak to the crowd in total freedom. So, in a touching anticipation of that family harmony that would have reigned once Norrington married the Governor’s daughter, they’d joined forces and planned for Jack to be pardoned in extremis.

It soon became evident, however, that they’d forgotten to include the Judge in their calculation. The Judge appeared fidgety and discontented, as if this unexpected chance to show some leniency not only offended him in his most tender feelings of justice, but almost put him in some physical discomfort.

No, definitely they’d forgotten to warn him of this new trick.

Or there had been a mishap.

Jack recollected a rumour passed to him by the chattering lobsters, how the first Judge appointed for the trials had been forced to resign because of a bout of malaria, how they had had to wait for another Judge to come from Bermuda, and how Commodore Norrington had been disappointed.

What if the new Judge had not been in friendly terms enough with the Governor to be asked to abet him in the scheme ? What if, even worse, the new Judge had been bribed by someone who was no friend of the Governor at all?

The crowd in the House, the Counsel, the Jury, Jack himself stretched forth their heads towards the Judge, anxiously waiting for his reaction.

The Judge hem-med a lot, and, being now evening and quite dark in the House, bided his time by ordering for the Court to be lighted. When the lamps were brought in, there was a buzz in the audience. At some point during the reading of Turner’s evidence, a new spectator had unobtrusively taken place in a bench at the far end of the House, diametrically opposite to the Governor and his Navy friends.

The Judge, Swann, and Norrington knew him at first glance. The Judge almost collapsed in relief under the rat-coloured curls of his wig. Sir Weatherby’s triumphal smile sank into the lace of his cravat. Norrington bit his lower lip, and ostensibly stared at a point in the wall above the Judge’s head, his sudden paleness mysteriously mirrored at once by a flush spreading on the cheeks of Mr Gillette, who shrank in his chair as if to make himself as much as inconspicuous as possible.

Jack knew the man too, and his heart skipped a beat.

The newcomer stood up and addressed the Judge with a drawling, amused tone whose formal civility barely concealed the speaker’s sense of superiority, introducing himself as Lord Beckett, of the East India Company. He implored forgiveness for his arriving so late to court: unfortunately, the Indiaman packet he was waiting for from England had been delayed by a storm. All the same, however, he felt his duty to insist for the new evidence he carried to be admitted, vouching for its decisive importance in revealing the defendant’s character and intentions.

Lord Beckett was a short, slender man, wearing an exquisitely tailored dove-coloured suit and a snowy wig that gave a timeless, doll-like look to his young face. He had handsome, finely chiselled features whose natural paleness, enhanced by the gleaming white of the wig, did not require powder. His eyes were deep and dark and his wax-like hands moved slowly and gracefully, like those of a priest or a dancer.

The bastard had not changed a bit since the last time they had met, two years ago, in that fortress of the Company at Madras, Jack thought. The same algid veneer of politeness covering a core of ruthless commercial and political ambition. No one like a new minted British aristocrat for pursuing money and power with the fierceness of the wild beasts that prey in the darkest places of the world.

While Jack engaged in such moral considerations about human greediness, a second, rather substantial bundle of parchments was produced, this one containing evidence signed by several merchant captains of the East India Company and demonstrating how the prisoner, when in command of the Black Pearl, had repeatedly and piratically attacked the Company’s convoys, causing enormous losses to the East India Trade.

The Judge read on with growing satisfaction, his tone gaining excitement and almost dripping with glee, the list of all the preyed ships and stolen goods the prisoner was responsible for and how, after being captured off Madras and condemned to be branded and hanged for his heinous crimes, he had run away just after the first half of the sentence had been carried out and come to play havoc in the Caribbean.

That sealed Jack’s fate. A buffoon living on expedients and petty thieveries, now and then helping himself to some little sugar or tobacco cargo, could have still be tolerated by the West Indies settlers. But not a serious menace to the most holy British Trade, on which their own wealth and survival depended.

And so the Navy’s trick had been outdone. The Jury, after withdrawing for a ridiculous short time, found the prisoner guilty of all the indictments and the death sentence obviously followed.

Commodore Norrington, who at Port Royal represented the law for all crimes committed on the sea, had been imparted very specific orders. “He shall carry the prisoner to the place of the execution, to be hanged by the neck till he be dead, dead, dead …”

And this was what Norrington would do tomorrow, barring hurricanes, earthquakes, and epidemics, because Norrington was one of those men who do not leave things halfway.

Jack thought of the row of bodies hanging from the gibbets at Gallows’ Point and his stomach convulsed so much that he had to get up and run to the piss-bucket to vomit his dinner. Staring vacantly at the pieces of undefined vegetables and meat floating in the bucket, he persuaded himself that it was all for the better: it would have been unworthy of Captain Jack Sparrow to die with water and the dead horse of Cromwell in his bowels. The sight of the Admiralty arrow roughly scratched on the bucket’s side contributed to restore his good humour. People who felt the need to mark even their piss-buckets against thieves and had chosen a fouled anchor as their symbol did not deserve to be feared.

Jack cleaned his mouth against his sleeve and, as he had done for nine evenings before, climbed upon his bunk to have a sniff of the sea breeze from the window’s cell.

Ten days.

Ten days spent vicariously living the lives of the other people he could see through the bars of a square one foot high and from a loophole as small as a slot. Yet, through those two openings on the external world, Jack had come to see and learn many things about the life at Fort Charles. That the Marine Sergeant had a very bad temper and did not abide latecomers and Irishmen. That the sentinels on the Western rampart, at noon, withdrew to play at dice in the shadow of the beautiful arched bell tower. And that every evening, in Commodore Norrington’s rooms, there was music.

Flute and harpsichord. And all the Fort stopped to listen. Even the sentinels broke the ritual of their barked calls and suspended their monotonous stamping on the ramparts for all the time the music went on.

To Jack, accustomed to the dissonant lewd choirs of the Tortuga taverns and to the sad songs of the drunkards, those melodies rose like a vision in the silence of the night, broken only by the roll of the breakers against the cliff.

During the last ten days the piece had been always the same. An air that began slow and sweet, as if the flute were talking and the harpsichord gently nodded. Then the flute took flight alone, with a pure and lively flow of deliciously fresh notes, followed by the harpsichord joining again, and both the flute and the harpsichord went on together in a tumultuous rolling of notes, until to the moment when, on the flute holding back its last note, a conclusive majestic florilegium was spun by the harpsichord.

Jack had no idea what that music was, but he felt that it spoke of a perfection and a beauty the like of which was not to be found in real life, even less in the life of a gentleman of venture. And yet that perfection was not a dead, static one, but something changing like the colour of the sea or the sky. It was made of moments in time, rushes, variations, reprises, like transparent hands of dancers searching for each other in an endless minuet.

Every time the music stopped and time started to flow according to its normal rhythm, it seemed absurd to think that, in the meantime, men in the world had gone on suffering and dying, and that those same hands capable of creating that frail thread of beauty knew how to maim and kill.

One evening, during a break of the players, Jack had seen a figure coming near to the window and standing out against the golden rectangle of candlelight, as beautiful and solemn as the figure-head of an Admiral’s flagship. Someone as tall as the Commodore but with broader shoulders. Somewhere, in the room, the white patrician fingers of the Commodore were absentmindedly stroking the ivory keys of the harpsichord, and those pure, isolated sounds resembled a slow fall of raindrops. Who knew if, even when playing, Norrington kept on his face that singular graveness of his, as if of someone who never thought of ever aspiring to happiness ? And who knew how Mr Gillette’s face was when he played ?

A character who left a strangely durable impression, that Lt Gillette. He was tall and handsomely built, but his broad neck and shoulders conveyed an idea of brute force that Norrington, slender and poised like a majestic heron, entirely failed to impress on his adversary. When Gillette was among other people, his round face, his finely arched red eyebrows, his caustic tongue, and his light steps made him appear all carelessness. But his eyes did not.

Sparrow had noticed it during the melancholy voyage back of the Dauntless to Port Royal, after burying the dead at sea off Isla de Muerta. Elizabeth Swann’s protestations had wrought from the Commodore a permission for Jack to have liberty to walk about the ship, with just small irons put upon him, instead of being locked up in the brig. Yet Jack would have rather suffered the rats’ company in the bilge than have to meet the Commodore, who, from nuptial, had gone awfully mournful.

It was not only for the men killed in the fight that Norrington grieved. Something by far more private and fragile had gone to pieces in his life. In the aftermath of the battle, on the quarterdeck itself, there had been a most woeful argument between Miss Swann and Gillette. With the corpses still laying in bloody heaps on the decks, Elizabeth Swann, in the heat of defending Will Turner from the charge of stealing the Interceptor, had hurled against Mr Gillette the tremendous accusation of having caused his own men’s death with his disbelief.

Mr Gillette had flushed, as crimson as the blood staining his sword and breeches, and sharply answered that, as far as he was concerned, he’d rather be in a hammock with a cannon ball at his feet, like his comrades, than live with the knowledge of being a liar like her.

The Commodore, with an angry, rude tone it was very rare to hear him use, had silenced them both. He curtly invited Miss Swann to go and have a rest in her Father’s cabin, then, in an even rougher bark, he ordered Mr Gillette to immediately take himself to the Sick Bay and have his ankle dressed by the surgeon.

But the Dauntlesses, all seamen from the tips of their toes to the ends of their tarred pigtails – the only category of men on whose opinion Jack would ever rely – had already passed judgment. When Sparrow had come back aboard after the battle, certainly there had not been fireworks and cheers in his honour, but you could perceive a certain respect for the man who had ridden the earth of Hector Barbossa. The reappearance of Will Turner, his piratical ancestry notwithstanding, did not stir up too many grumbles either: the lad had had a reason to act as he had done, and he’d paid for it risking his own life.

Towards Miss Swann, however, they were relentless: she had put them all in danger without the slightest regret, and she would never be the worse for her carelessness, because she was the Governor’s daughter. She did not deserve mercy, because she never offered any and that was wrong – in man or woman alike. Moreover, the oldest sailors, who still remembered her as a child infatuated with pirates, recalled with a knowing air several instances of bad luck associated to her presence aboard the Dauntless on her first sea voyage from England to Jamaica. The whispered list included several casks of rotten tack, a whole set of spare topgallants ruined by mildew, Francis O’Shea the mad fiddler, fallen overboard during a storm, Mr Norrington himself – then just First Lieutenant – who’d almost been killed by the unaccountable explosion of a long nine during a gunnery practice, and the most pitiable case of the boatswain, Mr Gibbs, probably the first and only instance of an able and experienced petty officer discharged from the British Royal Navy because of drunkenness.

Jack Sparrow was not a little angry himself with Elizabeth Swann for choosing to fall from Fort Charles’ ramparts and get herself kidnapped by Hector Barbossa just the first day he was back in Port Royal after ten years. He’d be a free and disgustingly rich man, now, had it not been for Elizabeth Swann persuading him to go back to the Dauntless as Will Turner’s prisoner, with the promise of a pardon from her Father. A pardon that, she knew too well, would never, could never come.

Jack stroked the little tails in his beard while an indefinable smile made his way though his resentment. A ruthless tiger she was, whenever her Will was concerned. For him, she would have stolen the poor’s bread, killed, perjured, and even sold herself. But she was a lovely lass, too. The type of lass any man who was not a eunuch could not be angered with for long.

Even Jack had felt somewhat mollified when, the morning after the battle, Elizabeth Swann had appeared on the quarterdeck, escorted by her father. The loveliest sight of blue and white she was, dressed in a billowing gown and a short jacket the gunner’s wife had hastily patched up for her in the night, using the lightest canvas number 8, of the type used for royals, and the second best frock of Mr Fremantle, the youngest Dauntless’ midshipman, who due to his still childish and undeveloped size was the most suitable to provide clothes fitting Miss Swann’s ephebic frame. She might benefit from having some more flesh on her bones, but even so it was impossible to think her less than charming, her small face like the petal of a rose under the straw hat with the Dauntless’ name embroidered on the blue ribbons she’d borrowed from Norrington’s coxswain. But all her beauty and grace went lost on the tars.

It took her the best part of a minute to notice the unnatural silence that had fallen on the lower decks of the ship after the chorus of the officers’ greetings had ended. The whoosh of the winds in the sails, the wails of the ropes, and the washing of the waves against the huge hulk had suddenly become the only sounds to be heard in the whole ship. There was not a single human voice to be heard. Not a shuffle of feet. And whenever she looked, on the waist and forecastle, she could see nothing but accusing eyes fixed upon her. Mr Gillette, on the quarterdeck, a step behind Norrington and stiff as a broomstick, had a dark expression of satisfaction on his face.

Miss Swann’s reaction was more appalling and bizarre than ever: she ignored the men, pointedly snubbed Mr Gillette, went straight for the Commodore, and started a fantastic hollered monologue about their future matrimonial happiness. Monologue that, for whoever had eyes to see and ears to hear, was clearly aimed to excite the jealousy of Master Turner.

Jack stroked his beard a little more pensively and intently than before, any trace of amusement disappearing from his expression. A pity Will Turner was such an honest, rank-conscious, grateful fellow who could not abide the thought of stealing his only daughter from the man who’d provided for him when he was only a destitute orphan. Jack, who knew better, shook his head: women did not like such excesses of nicety. Especially the young ladies like Elizabeth Swann, who’d never experienced the dubious delights of poverty and rough living, but took it for granted that anyone in love with them should despise the wealth and propriety of their privileged life as much as they did.

Jack shook his head once more and went back to peering out across the bars of the cell window. But he could not stop thinking about Elizabeth Swann. She was amazing, in her way. After her public humiliation on the quarterdeck, with Will disappeared in the ship’s bowels and the Commodore morosely closed in his own cabin, out of reach of her coquetries, she had swallowed her arrogance and attempted a reconciliation with Mr Gillette. Mr Gillette bowed in a gentlemanlike way and kissed her hand, but the cold sneer on his face prevented any further attempt by Miss Swann to create a friendship. A woman always knows where she is utterly powerless, and Elizabeth Swann’s mortification at realizing her powerlessness on Gillette had impressed Jack. Why did she suddenly care so much for his support? Why did she think him so important an ally as to sacrifice her pride and obvious dislike?

But no answer to these questions, as well as to many others regarding the future Mrs Commodore, had come to Jack during his weeks of captivity in Fort Charles, and even less during the last ten days of mercy allowed to him by the British justice.

Ten days.

Ten days spent without even the distraction of plotting escape schemes just for the fancy of doing it. Norrington might be an impetuous man and a fool in love with the wrong woman, but he definitely followed word by word the Admiralty’s regulation for running a Fort on land. Moreover, lobsters were irritatingly on watch night and day, and the jail building was located at the very core of the military compound, just behind the officers’ living quarters that faced the central courtyard. While the grand parapets atop the Fort stone walls had a distinct Spanish flair, legacy of the catholic convent that Fort Charles had once been, the prison was no more than a brick box, leaning with quite a drunken angle on the top of its stone foundations, sunk into the sand during one of the latest earthquakes. A small barred window looking at the western rampart, where a gibbet perennially stood on platform, to remind the prisoners just where they were, admitted some air and light but was not intended to particularly improve the prisoner’s mood. About twenty feet away from the gibbet, steps led up to a platform that ran along the inside of the fort wall. On the top of the tower in the western corner, there was the flagstaff, with the British ensign that flapped heavily, the halyard beating against the pole. That halyard could be precious to solve the problem of climbing the Fort walls, all stonework ten feet high. But getting to it presented a series of awful difficulties. It would be easier to dig a tunnel to the sea in the stone below the cell’s floor than to attempt to break open Master Turner’s locks. And unless the French decided to invade Jamaica and start bombing Port Royal tonight, there was no hope the walls would nicely fall asunder for Jack. And even supposing Jack were so lucky as to find a way out of the jail, he would still have to pass under the very windows of Commodore Norrington.

Yet, without the backyard of the officers’ quarters offering him a view on their private life through the loophole of his cell, Jack would have felt buried alive.

The bell struck the hours according to the Navy custom, and the wind carried the strokes, one by one, from the ramparts to Jack Sparrow ’s cell. There was still light outside, but the sky behind the gibbet was red. Jack wondered why they always hanged people at dawn and never at nightfall. With the sun that strikes you on your side and the violet shadows that seem to lie for sleeping, it would be a gentler way to die.

But, no, Jack thought, one should never wish for a gentle death. It would be horrible to disappear without a sound, like footfalls on a shore after high tide. No, better to die with a clash and a bang. And even better to die with a laugh. A laugh to be remembered forever in the West Indies as the laugh that destroyed the career of a raising star in the crowded sky of British naval heroes.

Using a straw as a toothpick, Jack considered the best way to make use of the last speech that was his right on the gallows. He discarded at once the possibility of casting a shadow upon the Commodore and Elizabeth Swann’s first offspring. The reputation of the future Mrs Commodore was already blackened beyond redemption, and Jack had no intention of taking posthumous blame for Will Turner’s probable sins. The ties between Norrington and Governor Swann were a more interesting target, but Jack sincerely doubted he could add anything new to pamphlets that Swann’s political enemies had already put in circulation since the arrival of the new governor in Port Royal. So it was a necessity to invent something particularly scandalous about the Commodore’s personal habits. Jack remembered some very lewd and obscene engravings satirizing the Navy he had been shown in Madagascar and his grin became almost feral. Yes, that was the right thing. Hanging offence for hanging offence. The inspired verses of a Norringtoneid celebrating the daring feats of the Commodorial Prick and those, even more daring, of the Commodorial Arse started at once to compose by itself in Jack’s brain. It would be a memorable speech. From tomorrow onward, the new and improved Navy anthems sung aboard the Commodore’s flagship would be “Cocks of Oaks” and “Backside rules the Navy”.

Night was falling and the pulse of the day’s activities at the Fort was dropping. All at once there was the rattle of a carriage on the stone pavement of the main gate. By the great commotion of boot-tramping, bayonet clicking, and shouting of marines presenting arms, Jack reckoned that the Commodore had come back. He’d left very early, that morning, in a black coach led by a pair spirited grey horses, that had unexpectedly materialized in the backyard of the Officer quarters. From the loophole of his cell, Jack had been able to see that the Commodore, in addition to his usual dress uniform, wore a newly coiffed wig, a diamond pin in his cravat, rings on his fingers, and shining silver buckles on shining leather shoes, as if he were planning to impress some civilian more sensible to riches than naval rank. The black coach, indeed, with its big gilded wheels and green velvet-lined interior, was an impressive touch, thought Jack, who again regretted the absence of the chattering lobsters. Private coaches were a rarity among Navy Officers posted in colonial settlements, and the family crest enamelled on the doors also strongly spurred Jack’s curiosity.

Jack let the straw fall, slid back on his bunk, lay down and stared at the grey drapes of cobwebs festooning the ceiling. For a while he occupied himself chasing lice in his beard, then he began whistling his personal version of Rule Britannia, but the sound was too mournful, and he soon stopped, dismayed. A bed, when you have to lie on it alone, is a very dangerous field, were it only a pair of planks and a thin jail’s mattress: thoughts can go to the point of no return. Jack, who knew it well, had always been careful to have some bedfellow at his side, because sooner or later, at night, comes the hour when a man can be a coward if left alone to himself.

Typical of the season in Jamaica, there was an heavy shower of rain andm from the courtyard of the Fortm a smell arose of muddy earth, like a freshly dug grave. The association of ideas was not particularly agreeable to Sparrow. And even less so was the flashing vision of his remains buried face down below the tide high-mark after being exposed at Deadman’s Cay.

Then Jack heard the sound of keys opening the heavy gate at the end of the hallway. The jingling and jangling of the keys and the clanking of the bolt told him at once that the person was not accustomed to open that gate.

In a corner of the jail, buried deep under centuries of British, French, and Spanish dirt, Jack had found a splinter of mirror glass. Orienting it, face and chest pressed against the bars, Jack was able to see Commodore Norrington and Lt Gillette. They were standing in the orange pool a torch fuming just over their heads, in a sconce of the low archway that divided the wardroom from the cell corridor.

Commodore and Lieutenant were – as usual when they believed themselves to be alone – engaged in a heated exchange of whispers. Strange behaviour for Navy fellows accustomed to bellow their lungs out, mused Jack with a grin that grew larger and larger as shreds of their dialogue reached his ears.

“…I owe him this little mercy. It’s a matter of honour…”

“…You must have gone mad, James. Yes, you’ve gone as mad as a march hare …”

“… I hoped that at least you, Drew, would try to understand me….”

“ I will, as soon as you will call the marines back…”

“No. I do not want rumours about it…”

In the end, Lt Gillette relented. He looked keenly at Norrington then, with a tenseness of distrust in his shoulders, he turned his head towards the corridor besieged by darkness and, stressing the words in order for Sparrow to hear, he said aloud “Very well, Sir. I’ll wait for you in the wardroom. Should you need me, you only have to call, Sir. This corridor is better than a megaphone.”

In the stained silver of the fragment, Jack saw Gillette yield to the Commodore’s hand a covered basket that, until to that moment, had been wilfully kept out of Norrington’s reach. Jack had the fleeting impression that, when their fingers touched on the handle of the basket, Gillette’s head bowed and his lips brushed Norrington’s hand. But the movement was so quick and lasted so short a time that it could have been just a wicked illusion of shadows conjured up by the torch flame.

Jack Sparrow lacked time for further investigations. As Norrington’s rhythmical step came down the corridor, echoing in the empty cells, the pirate hurriedly hid the mirror splinter in his vest and ran back to sprawl in the straw on the floor, covering his face with his shabby leather hat and appearing, to anyone looking at him, like a righteous man who had peacefully snored away the whole afternoon without a care in the world.

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A very singular portrait of Lord Rodney
Actually he seems more of a Christmas Reindeer than a Naval Hero, but, you know, fame is fame, even with its drawbacks !

And now I’ve this insane vision of ladies of quality tearing at each other’s powdered wigs in a 18th century version of Harrods, fighting to be the first to buy the newest earthenware cups with a certain green-eyed Commodore on them !

Title: Canzonetta sull’Aria (A little Song on the Breeze)
Summary: in which a marriage is saved by Mozart’s music, the daughters of an Admiral, and the evening breeze.
Main characters: Norrington, Gillette
Rating: PG-13
Setting: post-COTBP, not DMC and AWE compliant. In the same universe as The Hours .
Acknowledgements: Beta by Galadhir. Inspired by this pic [NC-17] by Menegroth .
Disclaimer: Considered what Disney did of them, I suppose I can play with them for my private entertainement.

Canzonetta sull’Aria
(A Little Song on the Breeze)

To Galadhir, for her birthday, with my deepest admiration and affection.

“Che soave zeffiretto
Questa sera spirerà
Sotto i pini del boschetto
Ei già il resto capirà”

“How gentle the zephyr
Will be this evening
In the pine grove”
The rest he’ll understand”

Susanna and the Contess, duet “A little Song on the Breeze”, from “The Marriage of Figaro”,
libretto by L. Da Ponte (based on a stage comedy by P. Beaumarchais), music by W.A. Mozart, 1786.
[for opera lovers: a vid of the duet can be found here]

They’re very different, Andrew and James. Andrew seems to think that nothing really exists unless it is plainly uttered in words. James, on the contrary, feels an instinctive diffidence towards words, especially in the matters of the heart. What’s the use of saying aloud, with trite and hackneyed phrases, the things that every day and every night are better proved in the flesh and in action?

James has never been a brilliant talker. He’d rather lead a boarding party onto the quarterdeck of a French three-decker than sit and hold a conversation in a drawing-room. Even concocting the amorphous reports to their Lordships of the Admiralty has always been hard drudgery for James. To make him talk about himself, as Port Royal’s ladies sadly know, is an impossible challenge. The nearness of a petticoat is enough to make him shut like an oyster.

Not that his few male friends are often allowed a closer look.

A too deeply rooted modesty, along with a lack of self-confidence that not even his victories at sea and Andrew’s absolute worship can shake, make James carefully refrain from any manifestation of his inner feelings. When put in a corner, he defends himself with the utmost Spartan use of the English vocabulary and a dry sense of humour that young marriageable ladies tend to find upsetting and his fellow officers have learnt to be afraid of.

No, James Norrington does not trust words. Words can betray and, more often than not, they are just an elegant silk cloak unfolded to cover the filth of the soul.
The most beautiful words, often, are nothing more than hollow sounds.

Two nights ago, in the music-room of the Governor’s House, James listened for the first time to a performance of the Canzonetta sull’Aria from the Marriage of Figaro, sung by a pair of Italian singers. Sitting at his right, Governor Swann was beaming with delight, proud of presenting his guests with this continental novelty. But a mischievous smile almost unmasked the shrewd politician hidden beneath the father-like, benevolent features, when he explained to James how the play by Beaumarchais, on which the opera is based, will cause the French Crown more damage than capturing Guadalupe and Martinique could ever do. The new opera by Herr Mozart, however, is comparatively harmless and, in the Governor’s opinion, greatly benefited from the removal of any political reference. The success in Vienna, he informed James, has been so overwhelming that the Austrian Emperor has been forced to limit the number of encores to be sung in theatres, in order to avoid the opera running all night long.

“An intelligent man, that Joseph II”, said the Governor with a knowing smile. “Enlightened enough to understand where you have to draw the line. You would never believe he’s the brother of that beautiful but light headed Queen of France, whose scandalous extravagances never cease to shock St-James’s.” The last was followed by a barely repressed sigh, probably caused by the sight of his daughter just entering the music’s room, late as usual and on the arm of that improbable husband of hers who, dressed and wigged like a gentleman, seems even more improbable than ever.

Indeed, the unearthly beauty of the duet between Susanna and the Countess left James almost breathless. He forgot all about the Turners, the troubles of the French Sovereigns, Martinique and the Austrian Emperor, and just listened in rapture. The slow and melodious intertwining of the two female voices was like an endlessly unfolding arabesque of crystal. An arabesque soaring to the sky in a spire of immaterial, luminous grace.

But James was thoroughly disappointed when Sir Weatherby, who speaks some Italian – legacy of his Grand Tour – translated the lyrics of the duet for him. Once put into English, those soft syllables that seemed like kisses and caresses revealed themselves for what they truly are: a boring and meaningless repetition of ridiculously idyllic words. Words that James, should he ever do something as improbable as writing a billet-doux, would be ashamed to use with a lover.

This afternoon, James’ disappointment with Mozart’s music is currently reaching a dramatic climax while, sweating to death under the wool of his uniform in the stifling waiting room of Admiral Vickers, at Kingston, he’s forced to undergo the additional torture inflicted by the Misses Vickers’ daily music lesson. Somewhere in the inner part of the house, they are practising at the harpsichord and, in the process, they are abusing notes and rhythm of an arrangement of The Marriage of Figaro with a systematic, almost voluptuous determination to kill and destroy that has the taint of evilness.

Andrew, who is a terrific flute player and very sought after in all Port Royal’s music-rooms because of his beautiful baritone, fidgets on his chair, making grimaces as if he had a toothache from Hell.

“Joseph and Mary, they should be keelhauled for playing like that!” he mutters under his breath at a certain point, beating his foot on the parquet in an outburst of uncontrollable annoyance.

James frowns at this ungentleman-like behaviour.

“Shame on you, Drew ! You’re awfully unkind.” he hisses, kicking Andrew’s ankle with his own foot, all the outwards semblances of a virtuous reproach on his fine features. He leans towards Andrew and, in a barely audible whisper, dramatically says “Think of all those poor, innocent fish! The would be frightened to death at finding themselves face to face with Miss Vickers and Miss Frances!” James’ tone is the most serious ever, but a single inky eyebrow elegantly lifts towards the snowy wig, in a way that transforms his whole expression into a paradigm of refined irony.

The wretched ugliness of the poor Misses Vickers is as proverbial, in Jamaica, as their inability to find a husband, and paralleled only by an equal inability to extract minimally pleasant sounds from any musical instrument. But they have the loveliest voices. And when those voices rise together in the “Sull’Aria” duet, covering the unmelodious and halting accompaniment produced on the keyboard by one of the sisters, James is –against any expectation and belief – drawn again into that crystal-like land of beauty and limpid quiet he had a glimpse of in the Governor’s music-room.

Later, once they have satisfactorily attended to the service, Admiral Vickers invites Commodore Norrington and Lt. Gillette for a cup of tea with his family. As soon as they catch sight of him, Laura and Frances Vickers capture Andrew between their hoops, and sequester him on a settee. Thence, they proceed to extort from him, by every means fairly allowed to young ladies (which include lots of sugar in Andrew’s cup and an outrageous amount of cream and strawberry jam on his scones), a promise to sing with them, next month, at a musical celebration for the birthday of Princess Charlotte.

James, from whom Mrs Vickers has since long lost any hope to extract anything more than a non-committal remark about the Caribbean weather, let alone a marriage proposal for her daughters, is soon abandoned to his own resources. In order to evade a subtle attempt of Mrs Vickers’ mother to make him confess Whig sympathies, James takes shelter behind the potted ferns surrounding the harpsichord. He would rather die than admit he’s unnerved by Miss Frances’way of drawing her fan across her cheeks while talking to Andrew.

So, he starts leafing through the scores with an assumed air of competence. His knowledge of music is very amateurish, actually. His sister Georgiana taught him to strum a few English nursery rhymes on their mother’s spinet, and for most of his life at sea as a midshipman and a lieutenant, Hearts of Oak and Rule Britannia have been the only significant addition to this musical repertoire. Only later, during their first years together in the West Indies, has Andrew coaxed him into learning the keyboard part for a few of Bach’s flute sonatas.

It could be said that only the affection of a sister and the passionate fondness of his most intimate friend can think of James as a musical being. But when the score of the Canzonetta sull’Aria falls under his eyes, even James, who can hardly read the notes at first sight if there are more than three of them in the same measure, is impressed by the beauty with which the written music unwinds itself on the paper. It seems a mysterious and elegant garland of black flowers, curving and rounding and twisting, following an infinitely varying pattern.

But James is not a poet. He’s just a sailor. And the most beautiful thing on earth he knows, apart from Andrew’s heart, is the sea. So it happens that the flowery, graceful pattern of the notes makes him think of wind-ruffled deep sea waves and blue Atlantic rollers. Beneath the notes, written in the flourishing hand of a copyist, are the Italian words of the duet, and as the memory slowly recovers their meaning according to Governor Swann’s explanation, James experiences, all of a sudden, a wondrous revelation.

Because he understands in a flash that those words, so foolish in their meaning, are not words at all. They are the sprays of lacy foam, the sparkling glassy crests of that waving ocean of notes. Light and fleeting in themselves, it’s true. More ephemeral than love’s vows. Yet they have the sea below. The strong, majestic, powerful sea. The sea that, since the dawn of time, has covered the earth and supported the ships, carrying them in her white and blue arms whose rising makes the waves. The sea that James loves and trusts and respects beyond any other thing.

The sea in Port Royal Harbour, that night, is a sheet of quicksilver under the full moon that floods the Caribbean with light. The masts of the ships at anchor are a thick black forest and the sight of the Union Jack hanging from every mizzen mast fills James Norrington with serene pride. It’s a tiny bit his merit, too, if that night the merchant captains, the common seamen, the fishermen, and all the many and several traders that are attracted to Port Royal by its safe and flourishing trade, will have a peaceful night’s sleep.

The Commodore’s bargemen do not comment nor do they complain when the Commodore, after a short exchange of half words with Mr Gillette, declares it is too late to row back to Fort Charles, all the way around the peninsula, and orders the barge instead to come alongside the little quay near Mr Gillette’s town lodging, very conveniently situated in Thames Street, right on the harbour waterfront and halfway between Admiralty Court and the Governor’s House.

Seamen’s tongues can be as sharp as those of the sharpest London’s gentlewomen, but not a single word, not even a single look pass after the Commodore and Mr Gillette disappear under the archway. The men have just gained an unexpected night of shore leave, to spend in one of the many taverns and cheap brothels thriving in the backstreets of Thames Street. No need to look too closely at their Commodore’s preferences. If he likes his first lieutenant’s company better than he can ever like women, cards, and wine, it’s only his affair and it will not be the Dauntlesses who question his choices.

Lodging, if applied to the fourth floor of 25 Thames Street, is a misleading term, rather excessive in optimism. They’re only two rooms, so small, so low, and so disarmingly lacking in comfort and right angles that, at his first entering there, James seriously considered the possibility of the house having been built by some retired Navy carpenter. Sitting on the bed that, by itself, takes a half of the larger room, James can perfectly follow Andrew’s comings and goings in the other, much smaller one. Originally designed as a dressing-room, this second room is currently used as a kitchen and James frequently regrets its demotion. A dressing-room could have come handy considered they often stop at Thames Street to change into their civilian dress, before going incognito to some masquerade or opera night at Kingston (too compromising to be seen together at Port Royal). The bedroom, after they’ve finished powdering their hair as fashion requires, seems an English countryside in winter, and everything in it gets a floury iris-scented quality that becomes obnoxious in the long term.

But Andrew is adamant: in the interval after dancing or listening to music and before what he, with unusual chastity, just refers to as “being together”, he needs a dinner to strengthen himself. A dinner to be savoured in James’ company, without half of Port Royal knowing of it directly from the taverns’ boys and the other half learning the details from the usual gossips of the drawing-rooms. And dinner is what Andrew is preparing just now, manoeuvring with a sailor’s nimbleness in the Lilliputian space, too small for two persons to move in.

Dinner too, is a term that may mislead, when applied to food prepared by Andrew Gillette. The only stuff Andrew can actually cook is toasted cheese and grilled fish. But it already represents a phenomenal achievement, considered that James is endowed with an uncanny ability to char anything edible falling into his hands.

Conscious of this sad failure of his in the housekeeping department, James carefully abstains from entering the kitchen and usually confines himself to a silent wait in the bedroom, after putting clean bed sheets on the mattress. The bed, it should be mentioned, is not a true bed, but a great bench with stunningly rounded arms, taken as an unofficial prize from a French privateer. With its white and blue striped silk upholstery, all elegant scrolls and luxurious carvings, wrapped in a gauzy shower of mosquito nets hanging from the ceiling, it has all the appearances of a love-nest suitable for a boudoir. But James knows how penitential it can be, especially when shared in the aftermath.

It is a particularly sultry night. Andrew whistles Roast Beef of Old England while, barefooted and with only his shirt on, he keeps the slices of cheese and bread on the stove under strict scrutiny, now and then expertly testing them with a fork. At his every movement, the hems of his shirt flap against his white and brawny thighs.

The mountain breeze is late, this night, and Port Royal is atrociously suffering under a smoothing cape of heat. James feels rivulets of sweat trickling down his chest and realizes that, whatever the gnats’ predilection for his pale British skin, it will not do to further keep on his shirt and stockings.

Looking at Andrew, flushed and sweating as he bends on the stove, with his dampened auburn hair dangling annoyingly into his face, where it sticks to his eyes and lips in the less opportune moments, James thinks of the many and strange ways love can show itself and feels a new respect for all those women who, that night, are bending like Andrew over some kitchen fire, cooking hard earned food for their men.

“How much for dinner yet, Drew ?” he asks in a guilty fit of concern.

Andrew mistakes the tone and turns with a heated glare. “The time it takes, Sir. Sorry to disappoint you, but it’s in the nature of cheese not to care a straw if your Lordship is hungry or not,” is his gruff reply. He sticks the fork in a slice of bread with dangerous energy. “God, what a pain in the arse you can be, James. – he mutters peevishly – There are times I’m inclined to suspect that eating, drinking, sleeping, and fucking are the only activities your brain is capable of, when you do not have a quarterdeck to shout orders from like a slave master !”

James raises his eyebrows, open his mouth as if to answer but then, wisely, chooses to take a deep breath and stay silent. Andrew and the Jamaican climate do not get along very well, and James knows better than to discuss with Andrew when it’s too hot. In the Caribbean, alas, it happens frequently.

And this night the air is devilishly sultry. Not even stripping himself naked to the very ends of modesty is giving James the expected relief. All he achieved in discarding his shirt and stockings is that now the sweat, instead of drenching his clothes, runs down directly between skin and breeches and the gnats are ravenous on his calves. He kills a pair of them with a slap of his hand, accompanying the stroke with a curse worthy of a middie experimenting in creative obscenity. From the other room, Andrew grumbles something about divine chastisement for undeserving men. The slightest breath of air ripples the mosquito nettings and James hopefully raises his face, praying for the mountain breeze.

The breeze does not come but, after a great sizzling of red wine poured upon the toasting bread, directly onto the plate of the stove, Andrew does, and he comes with a significantly improved mood, a plate full of deliciously smelling food, and a bottle of Madeira miraculously kept cool in a wet cloth.

They share the Madeira in the same way as, for years, they have shared everything, including James’ alleged tyrannical streak, Andrew’s foul tempers, and the crumbs of food in the bed. The crumbs of toasted bread, James has learnt, are the worst. They sting like needles and have an appalling tendency to find their ways into the body’ most private crannies. They are even worst than the gnats and the flies torturing him. This evening they are so rabid and attack James with such a perverse wickedness that Andrew puts out all the candles and resolves to close the curtains of the netting, even if it means stifling to death in the still, hot night.

“Now – Andrew says with the satisfied face he has after obtaining from the crew a set of perfectly spiral braced sails. – Look at this ! The Holy Ghost itself could not get through here. I bet my arse these little infernal whoreson hellspawn will go to search their dinner elsewhere.”

He’s kneeling on the bed, with his thin linen shirt sticking to his shoulders and chest, the sleeves rolled up his arms, his strong neck standing out from the limp open collar like a sculptured marble column. He seems enormous in the pool of milky and blue moonlight filtering through the nettings. A luminous mass of flesh and blood and deep dark eyes vibrating with life. Manly flesh in whose scent powder and cologne blend with smoke, tobacco, sweat, and a light, secret lime flavour with a bittersweet tang that James associates with sex. Eyes in which the heart of a whole world throbs, the light of a whole world burns. A face as white as the inside of a shell, so handsome that the air around seems to shimmer.

James looks at Andrew, reddens to his ears and then he goes off all in a breath, with a crazy glibness worthy of Captain Sparrow at his best: “I know I do not say it often, Drew. Indeed, to be honest, I almost never say it, and I know I’m wrong, because even if you already know it, it would be only fair and good if I said it, considering it’s only the absolute truth, and I never stop repeating it to myself every day and every hour, every second of my life, and thanking God for making us find each other, because I…” But there, on the brink of that so promising I, James’ speech miserably stops like a tide exhausting its impulse.

Andrew crawls on his knees on the mattress, coming nearer to James. He leans towards him, smiling encouragingly.

“Because you ? you what, James ?”

“Because I-I… be-be-because I…” stammers James in a fit of that tormenting child stutter which does not impede him from properly and solemnly reading the Articles on Sundays and making his orders heard over the blast of a broadside, but that embarrassingly comes back every time he has to say something intimate.

Andrew knows the signs. He crawls a bit nearer, putting his hand on James’ shoulder with a gesture which is at the same time an invitation and a loving reassurance. He leans towards James, his face smiling, his eyes sparkling, waiting.

“Because you? come on, dear, tell me…”

Andrew is so near, now, that his breath caresses James’ cheeks. James is accustomed to the overwhelming physical and spiritual feeling of Andrew’s presence, but tonight, in the close of the alcove, in that night that seems liquid fire, it is suddenly too much. Too much life. Too much feelings. Too much Andrew.

A startled blink of his long eyelashes then, reacting on instinct, he backs towards the arm behind. As soon as he is out of Andrew’s aura, words come back to him in full force. “Because I really think your toasted cheese is the best I’ve ever eaten, Drew. Absolutely the best.”

It is Andrew’s turn to blink, his face a battlefield of expressions where perplexity, amusement, and a vaguely resigned discontent openly alternate like sun and clouds on a windy day. Then he cracks a blank smile and moves back, sitting on his heels. He looks at James as if the young commodore were a landlubber at his first, unsatisfactory excursion on the shrouds.

“Oh yes, my toasted cheese. Of course.”

James feels like an idiot. He’s furious with himself. But it is useless. There are things you cannot change, whatever the strength of your resolution. He is like that. Nothing, no one can change it.

And that is the moment when the veils of the netting shake, then fill like topgallants taking the winds and start fluttering everywhere in a fantastic whirlwind dance of white aerial ghosts. Suddenly, it is as if they were at sea. The air freshens and the Blue Mountain breeze on their sweaty skin is as sweet as a benediction.

Andrew gets up and slips out of the nettings with that light step that makes him such so delightful a sight to look at when he dances. James, from the bed, watches as he strips off his shirt and, naked as the day he was born, stands in front of the basin, looking with total unconcern at his flat abdomen and at the thick prick, dangling heavily between his legs. James swallows. He cannot take his eyes off Andrew. The unashamed, marvellous confidence his companion has with his own body never ceases to surprise and enthral James.

Andrew pours some water in the bowl, dips a sponge, throws back his head with a swift, sure movement, closes his eyes and then, with a sigh of almost primeval relish, he squeezes the water over his face and chest to get some refreshment. Droplets of light fall down his arms and shoulders, like tiny, glittering diamonds, outlining the play of the muscles. Rivulets of water glide their way down all along the strong back, the buttocks, the inner part of the thighs, the hairy groin, the perfectly shaped calves, covering Andrew with a wet, tattoo of crystal shine. A dark stain forms at his feet, expanding on the wooden floor.

The veils of the netting shroud the bed in an evanescent mist. Through that mist, Andrew appears to James as unreal and eerie as a fairy creature of those Irish tales Andrew patiently tells him the nights he cannot sleep. His body glows with a white, soft, pure radiance. The tousled curls of his rich auburn hair fall on his nape and cheeks with a silver glimmer. The beautiful and powerful curve of his buttocks forms with his long legs a line of unsettling beauty. A line that makes James think of a mermaid’s tail.

When, still naked and wet, Andrew walks towards the window, James abandons the mattress and follows him. The room is as ugly as it can be, but the view of the harbour is just magnificent and enough to fill a sailor’s heart with happiness.

With their elbows on the windowsill, James and Andrew look together at the sea, watching the waves cross the harbour and break against a row of lead coloured rocks, raising fountains and fireworks of silver spurts.

James leans comfortably against Andrew’s solid body and smiles, an unreflective, little, sweetest smile of contentment. Through his breeches, he can feel the moist warmth of Andrew’s skin against his side and it feels marvellously good.

He turns towards Andrew with that candid, vulnerable smile only a lucky few are allowed to know. “North East wind.” he whispers as if it were a precious secret he’s sharing. “Good wind for sailing.”

Andrew nods, still looking at the sea. “Yes, good wind.” He breathes deeply the breeze that tastes of flowers and fruit that have no name in English. Then, smiling in his turn, with matter of fact simplicity, he adds: “And yes, I love you too James.”

Should anyone wonder what the painting in my header is…

View of Port Royal, Jamaica, by Richard Paton, circa 1758

Description from the National Maritime Museum online collection

“An aerial view of Port Royal, Jamaica in 1758, showing merchantmen and other vessels in the approaches. In the early years of the 18th century Port Royal had been notorious as a den of iniquity for pirates and brigands of all kinds. In 1724 it was the scene of the execution of the famous pirate ‘Calico’ Jack Rackham at Gallows Point. Port Royal had been devastated by an earthquake in 1692, but was subsequently re-occupied and rebuilt as Britain’s principal naval and mercantile port in the Caribbean. As a wealthy sugar island, Jamaica was a valuable colony for Britain and was also heavily involved with the slave trade, making Port Royal a principal centre for this. By the middle of the 18th century a new doctrine of the liberalization of trade was emerging, in an effort to curb the excesses of monopoly trade claims. In peacetime, a system evolved that became known as the Freedom of the Seas. This promoted the belief that every ship should have the right to expect an unhindered passage to her destination, providing she was engaged in honest trade and prepared to obey the customs laws of the country in which she hoped to sell her cargo.

The artist has distorted the perspective to achieve his effect, with a predominance of sky occupying half the picture. Port Royal lies towards the left and the flat coastal plain is encircled by mountains. The port is visible inside the harbour. Morant Bay Fort, built in 1758, is to the left of centre, at the mouth of the harbour. Small islands are depicted scattered in the foreground amongst the ships. Three British war ships are shown under way off the harbour. The one on the left shows her stern and red ensign. Those on the right of centre, broadside, and on the far right, with the bow in view, fly Union Jacks at the bow and red ensigns. Other shipping is visible at anchor on the left in the distance.

The artist started his painting career as an assistant to a ship’s painter on Sir Charles Knowles’s ship, and he rose to become one of the principal painters of naval actions of the 18th century. “

ETA: it seems I’ve figured a way to use my LJ icons *G*

Just testing the system. And what better than the infamous Admiraly Rodney’s portrait for a proper naval start ?

This is me testing the “more” tag: curious to see if and how it works.