When an old and valued servant gets herself in trouble, Elizabeth Turner encounters Norrington again. But six months of marriage turn out to cast a fresh light on earlier events — for both of them.
- "A really spot on depiction of Norrington... Beautifully written and observed."
- "Your Elizabeth is one I can actually like and respect... Your Norrington is heartbreaking, the poor man."
- "Lovely plot, pacing, language, and characterization."
- "...your characterisations are spot-on and absolutely perfect"
It was not customary for a blacksmith’s wife to be admitted by the front door. But then Mistress Elizabeth Turner, despite the shocking mésalliance that had made her the talk of the town, was still the Governor’s daughter, even if she made the short journey these days in a hired conveyance rather than her own carriage — still very much the Governor’s only and beloved daughter, and known to be the apple of her father’s eye.
Indeed, since this was no impromptu social call but an oft-anticipated weekly visit, Elizabeth was more than half expecting to find the Governor himself awaiting her in the entrance hall, hands outstretched and face wide with smiles. She was already moving past the footman who had admitted her, eager for her father’s greeting, when the emptiness of the hall became apparent and her own face fell.
Weatherby Swann was a busy man, after all, his daughter reminded herself firmly, summoning a smile for the footman who had known her since childhood, and allowing herself to be escorted across the wide space into the cool propriety of the drawing-room beyond like any morning caller. Left alone, she sat with newly-acquired poise, disposing her skirts around her, and listened to the distant sounds of the house with a little frown of concern gathering between her brows. She could not, in all conscience, expect things to be exactly as she had left them. Mrs Halcombe ran the household now, a woman carefully selected and instructed by Elizabeth herself but doubtless with her own methods of management, to which she was fully entitled. But even allowing for those tiny changes that were more apparent on every visit, Elizabeth thought there was something wrong today. The household was not its usual self.
“Elizabeth!” Her father blew into the room without ceremony in a cloud of relief, just as if it had only been ten minutes since they had last seen each other instead of over a week. “Thank God you’re here. That Halcombe woman is quite impossible—”
Elizabeth felt her heart fall, remembering the succession of luckless housekeepers they’d had during her childhood, until she had finally been judged old enough to take the running of Government House into her own hands. Her father was so very difficult to learn to please.
“Oh Father, what is it this time? What has she done?” The possibilities swam up before her in their multitudes: disrespectful, over-obsequious, too extravagant, too mean, dishonest, drunk, male followers brought into the house — Elizabeth blushed. Surely not that last. The woman was hatchet-faced, after all, and over fifty.
“What has she done?” The Governor’s wig was rumpled with indignation. “She hasn’t managed to do a thing, that’s what I’m objecting to. She can’t get a word of admission out of Bessie!”
“Bessie? Bessie the kitchen-maid?” She read the confirmation in her father’s face, and gasped. “Bessie in trouble? Surely there must be some mistake. What charge can there be against her?”
“A dozen silver spoons.” Weatherby Swann’s voice held no satisfaction at apprehending the culprit, only trouble. “Eight found among her possessions. Three missing. The last in her very hand, as she was caught in the act — I’m afraid there’s no doubt about it, Elizabeth. It seems she was seen at it before, but she’s been with us so long none of the others thought to question her—”
Bessie. Bessie, whom Elizabeth could have sworn was as honest as the day was long, who had upon a time been comfort and nursemaid and refuge all in one to her little motherless namesake, shielding Elizabeth from the wrath of the awe-inspiring cook who ruled over the warm, sweet-smelling domain below stairs when the child ventured down from the chill corridors of the big house. Bessie, whose husband Amos the ostler, with his slow country burr, had watched over the Governor’s small daughter in the stableyard, reassuring her father when he sought to keep the child mewed within-doors, allowing Elizabeth to pet the coach-horses as they stood in the stalls, and even boosting her up onto their warm broad backs, where she sat ensconced like a Queen of the East in her howdah. Bessie, quicker-tongued than Amos, scolding her charge in a constant, loving stream even as she slipped fragments of pastry from the baking into a kerchief or hanging pocket. Bessie, whose ample curves had served in lieu of her mother’s own bosom for so many of the tear-storms of childhood...
Her father had understood, Elizabeth thought now, looking at him with the new-found gratitude of maturity. Her mother’s death must have left as great an absence in his own life as it had in hers; but he had not sought to whip his daughter from keeping company with the servants nor constrained her to the society of her governess. He had recognised Bessie’s good heart even as the child had instinctively done, and he had tacitly permitted Elizabeth’s devotion, trusting to her good breeding to wean her from kitchen company as she grew older — as it had done, Elizabeth realised with a little pang of guilt. As she had grown older and more self-possessed, above all as her mother’s memory had faded, she had ceased to run for comfort to Bessie’s arms. ‘Miss Elizabeth’ had become Miss Swann, cool and withdrawn and, soon, mistress of the household, and Bessie had ebbed back out of her life, to be kitchen-maid once more. She could not remember now when they had last exchanged two words.
Bessie had understood, Elizabeth told herself. Bessie had always understood.
“Father, I can’t believe it.” Her voice was sharp with protest. “Bessie isn’t like that, you know she isn’t. She wouldn’t know what to do with silver spoons if she took them — she wouldn’t know where to sell them, or how to get an honest price, any more than I would myself.”
Less than I would, she thought with a sudden guilty jolt, remembering certain unsavoury vicissitudes of the past year. Will and I probably have more shady acquaintances between us now than poor Bessie has ever set eyes on.
“I’m very much afraid there’s someone else behind this, ” the Governor agreed with a sigh, pulling up his coat-tails and sitting down on a fine brocade-covered chair with an air of distraction. “She can’t have been disposing of the stuff herself — she even admits that. But she won’t tell us why she did it, and she won’t tell us where the silver is now. Confound it, I don’t want to press charges against a woman who’s been in the household since before we came, any more than you do — I’ve even told that Halcombe woman I’m prepared to forget the whole thing if she can just get out of Bessie where the rest of our dinner-ware has got to. But she’s quite useless. Can’t prise a word out of her.”
He tugged furiously at the curls of his wig, sending the whole edifice askew, and Elizabeth rose from her own seat, gently imprisoning his big hands between her own.
“What will become of her, Father, if she comes up before the law?”
“Not my decision — thank God.” But the Governor didn’t look particularly relieved. “A whipping at the cart’s tail is the least of it. Maybe a hanging. They can’t very well transport her overseas, since she’s already here.”
Elizabeth cried out. “A hanging? For three silver spoons? Father—”
“A culprit has to be found — and I can’t cover up for her, Elizabeth, too many people already know. If she can’t or won’t tell who put her up to it—”
“Let me talk to her. Please, Father.” She had dropped down to crouch beside his chair as she had when she was a child, dusty skirts forgotten, looking up at him pleadingly with her hands in his. “Please. Mrs Halcombe barely knows her — perhaps if she has the chance to confide in someone she can trust—”
Then, seeing the look of surprise in her father’s eyes, she blushed, feeling a little foolish. Of course, that must have been what he had come to ask of her in the first place.
“I know this isn’t your house any more, Elizabeth, but if it wouldn’t be too much trouble....” The Governor began what was obviously a prepared speech a little hesitantly, but Elizabeth was up and flying to kiss him on the instant.
“With a woman’s life at stake? What sort of daughter would I be even to think to refuse?”
But she could not help but be daunted when Bessie was brought into the drawing-room, eyes red with weeping and her plump face drawn beyond recognition. She seemed to have aged twenty years in the six months since Elizabeth’s last glimpse of her — rosy-cheeked in the crowd at the church door and wreathed in happy tears — and she refused to meet her former mistress’ eyes.
The housekeeper was hovering somewhat officiously, as if reluctant to see another woman succeed where she had failed.
“Leave us alone together, please,” Elizabeth said sharply, her order confirmed by a frown from the Governor when the other woman glanced up at him for support, and Mrs Halcombe sniffed and withdrew. “Father...”
“Are you sure?” Weatherby Swann looked at her in some concern, and his daughter sighed.
“I’m quite sure I don’t need protection from Bessie — and I’m sure she will speak more freely if she can be certain Mrs Halcombe isn’t listening at the door.” An indignant breath from outside went to prove her point, and despite himself her father’s mouth twitched in a sternly-repressed smile. “Do take her away, please, right up into your study—” it wasn’t only Mrs Halcombe’s listening ears she had in mind, she admitted to herself privately — “and let me have a nice comfortable talk with Bessie on our own.”
But even when the door had clicked firmly shut behind them, all her coaxing could draw no more than a few words from the other woman. Yes, she had taken the silver. Yes, she had taken the three missing spoons down into the town, and had intended the rest for the same destination. No, she would not, could not say why she had ever done such a thing, not even for Miss Elizabeth’s sake. No, she would not say who had the silverware now, not if she was to be chopped up into little pieces and fed to the sharks, not ever so. No — this in response to a question prompted by Elizabeth’s own increasingly uneasy conscience — she hadn’t ever seen a man like the one Miss described, not with gold teeth and beads in his hair and all. No, it wasn’t him who’d told her to do it. No, honest to God it was someone else —
And then, having inadvertently let slip this much in reassuring her former nurseling’s fears, she bit her lip with a little gasp and refused to say anything more at all.
“Please, Bessie—” No response.
“You know what they’ll do to you for stealing—” A nod, tears brimming.
“Then why — oh, why?” Elizabeth knelt down and flung her arms about Bessie’s warm bulk at last, burying her face against the familiar shoulder as she had done so long ago. “My father would have given you the money, if you’d only told him why you needed it — or I’d have found it somehow—”
Will’s finances were tight enough, and he wouldn’t touch a penny of her own dowry save for that portion of it that had gone to pay for their narrow little house down in the centre of town — if he was to give his only daughter away, her father had insisted she should at least have a roof of her own over her head — but she would have scrimped and saved sooner than see Bessie ruin her life for the want of a few golden guineas.
But Bessie, weeping openly now, shook her head in mute refusal, and Elizabeth, all but exasperated, and angry with herself for it, found herself on her feet again and pacing up and down the length of the room, the weight of her skirts swaying with the unladylike vigour of her strides.
The door opened, briskly, when she was at the far end, by the long shutters that shielded the elegant interior of the house from the sun. Voices in the hall; male and impatient. A tall figure in a captain’s uniform, thrusting past Peter, the footman, as the latter tried to protest.
“Governor, I—”
His eyes found Elizabeth, standing frozen by the window; took in the incongruous figure of Bessie huddled in upon herself amidst the luxuries of the drawing-room; returned to meet Elizabeth’s own gaze with a momentary hesitation that was all the acknowledgement he would ever give of the constraint that lay between them. James Norrington. Commodore of the Fleet. The man she’d given her word to marry... before wedding Will.
She had barely seen him in the six months since that ceremony. The instant’s unguarded look in his eyes told her all too clearly why.
Elizabeth looked down, flushing as much on his behalf as her own. It was not fair, to take a man by surprise like that. To catch a glimpse of what he had never intended for you to see.
The girl who’d listened to his stilted proposal on that insufferably hot day so many months ago had been a sheltered innocent, for all her dreaming; a child with no more notion of what it meant to wed a man than that it marked the next step on the road to adulthood, just as the fluffy little tigrish kittens that tumbled about the stableyard inevitably became staid tabby Puss within the year under Amos’ indulgent eye. The young woman who’d bargained away the offer of her hand to rescue her lover had known full well her power over men... but she had not known what it was to share a husband’s life. To reach out for reassurance in the night; to learn every line of his shoulders from behind as intimately as his laugh; to discover his little likes and dislikes and coax him to eat when he was tired, or to change his coat when he was wet; to feel the brush of his kiss on the nape of her neck as she pored over the accounts by lamplight, trying to balance their slender income, and to reach up in reproof, half-scolding, half-glad of the distraction, to return the embrace in full. To lie in his arms and know oneself one half of a whole, sheltered and sheltering against the whole world, come what might — to be his and know him to be hers, utterly, whatever sharp words had passed between them or were yet to come. To be a wife in truth... until, down the long, long years, death should them part.
She’d given her consent to Norrington. But she hadn’t had the faintest idea, then, of what it was he asked of her; of what that state of marriage would have implied. The knowledge, now, of the way his eyes had rested on her brought a sudden shock of understanding; and of unwanted, quickly-stifled pity.
“If I may ask the reason for this intrusion —?” Her voice was a cool echo of his customary tone, and she met his gaze again with a challenge that brought a faint colour back to his own frozen features.
He inclined himself briefly in her direction, acknowledging her presence.
“Your servant, Mistress... Turner.” That little stumble over the name, as if it was stiff in his mouth, was, she thought, unconscious, though it grated on her. “I was informed the Governor was to be found here — but clearly I was mistaken.”
“I didn’t know you were in port — I mean—” Mortified, she could have swallowed the stupid, gauche words as soon as they were out, as his brows rose.
“Eurydice docked some hours ago.” There was a warmth in his mention of the smart little sloop that had not been there for her own name, and despite herself Elizabeth remembered the excitement in town over the capture and the crowds of urchins who had swarmed to watch the Commodore’s new ship fitting-out. The chance to replenish his little fleet must have come as a great relief, she guessed. She wouldn’t know. She’d scarcely seen him, then or since.
“We came in on the morning tide,” Norrington was saying smoothly, the polite phrases evidently intended to mask her confusion, save face for them both, with the servants listening. Then the edge in his tone gave her sudden warning, in the moment before his next words cut through her like a bitter wind. “Of course, there was a time when you would have known that. A time when you took an interest in every ship that entered or left the harbour, Mistress Turner.”
And this time there was no doubt at all about what it cost him to admit that last word.
Elizabeth felt her cheeks flame as if she had been dipped in scarlet. Yes, there had been a time — so long ago now it seemed — when she had dreamed of adventure, of rich cargoes and grizzled mariners carried in on every tide, and imagined herself aboard every ship that left, standing gazing from the shore on some contrived errand into town or tracing them with her father’s spyglass from her bedroom window high above the bay. There had been a time — before pirates in all their grim reality came to Port Royal — when she had fantasised herself shipping along with some bold buccaneer as cabin-boy in jacket and breeches.
She hadn’t dreamed that young Captain Norrington might have been aware of the girlish eyes yearning after his ship, just as they’d followed every dashing vessel that ventured out onto the high seas. It hadn’t even crossed her mind — her cheeks burned painfully now — that he might once have read that gaze as intended for him.
“My father is in his study, sir.” Despite everything, her voice came out admirably steady, and she swallowed, gaining strength from the thrice-blessed windows at her back, against whose light her high colour must surely be invisible, even to those level, judging eyes. “If you will wait a moment—”
But it was at that instant that Bessie, whose sobs had been choked off by the sheer astonishment of the fine gentleman’s unexpected entry, spilled over once more into weeping, and Elizabeth came forward swiftly with a little gesture of despair, caught out of awareness of herself by the renewed crisis. “Forgive me... you catch us in a bad moment, as you see. My father is half distracted — a matter of theft, and the woman cannot be brought to utter a word in her own defence—”
“Indeed?” Norrington had halted as she tried to hasten him out of the door, his face sharpened into obvious interest — he must often encounter such cases on board ship, she realised. “She is shielding someone else, I take it?”
“I... suppose so.” Elizabeth had not fully articulated the thought to herself until now. She flushed again, feeling herself foolish in his eyes. “But you have business with my father — I had no intent to inflict domestic matters upon you that are none of your concern—”
Norrington had brushed her entreating hand from his sleeve as if removing a stray hair. “On the contrary, if it is a matter of law and order in the town it is very much my concern.” His voice was deceptively mild, the steel barely sheathed beneath. “Perhaps you could give me a few minutes alone with her, Mistress—”
“Elizabeth.” She could not bear to hear Will’s name jerked out again with such reluctance on those lips. “Please — Elizabeth.”
“Mistress Elizabeth.” A punctilious nod of acknowledgement. “If you would —?”
It was only at his gesture and faint, amused smile that she realised she had ranged herself defensively in front of Bessie as if to protect her from merciless naval assault. She dropped her eyes in confusion, but stood her ground. “If you mean to browbeat Bessie into some confession—”
A sigh of impatience, as unfeigned as his earlier amusement. “Mistress Elizabeth, I do assure you I am no ogre. Now if for once in your life you would kindly submit to the judgement of your elders, perhaps I might be able to extend some hope of reaching to the bottom of this. Your Bessie seems to me a sensible woman—”
It was a dismissal, in her father’s own house, and a stinging one at that. Elizabeth had opened her mouth to rejoin hotly when she caught sight of Bessie, who had been startled out of her tears and was staring with some awe up at the naval gentleman who had ventured such a decided judgment in her favour. Perhaps the Commodore might stand a better chance of handling her after all, Elizabeth told herself firmly, swallowing down the hot words that rose instinctively to her lips with an effort that threatened to scald her.
After all — much though it irked her to admit it — she herself had achieved nothing more than to reduce the woman she’d been trying to help to a state of tears even the Halcombe creature hadn’t managed. If James Norrington’s questioning could do anything for her, she owed it to Bessie at least to let him try.
She bit her lip and let herself out quietly, resisting the temptation to leave the door a fraction ajar. As she crossed the floor to the stairs that would lead her up to her father’s study, she heard the voices from the drawing-room begin: the man’s steady and uninflected, the woman’s responses fragmentary at first but gathering in strength. She could recognise the stubborn note in Bessie’s words, even from here. Elizabeth couldn’t resist a small, unworthy smile at the thought of Norrington’s calm strained by mounting frustration.
She hesitated a moment, halfway up the stairs, wondering if she ought to intervene; then folded her mouth firmly into a line of decision, abandoning the interview to its fate, and swept on up to her father’s door. The Governor deserved to be informed of this unheralded visitor, even if his subsequent arrival promised to be somewhat delayed... and she herself had come by arrangement to spend some much-missed hours with her father, and intended to do precisely that.
As it turned out, Fate clearly did not intend to allow Elizabeth Turner a prolonged tête-à-tête with her father the Governor that morning. It was barely half an hour later that a series of tumultuous knocks on the door heralded the irruption of Norrington into the study, clearly in a state of some haste.
“I have the whole story — and the address of the man who has the silver.” He had barely spared a moment in the usual courtesies. “Sir, I believe you are acquainted with the situation; when I tell you that the news of the wretched woman’s apprehension has undoubtedly spread by this time into the most unsavoury quarters of the town, you will understand the need to act with celerity.”
The name and address he gave meant nothing to Elizabeth, but brought Weatherby Swann to his feet in a condition of some indignation. “That usurious scoundrel! But how did a decent woman like our Bessie ever let herself get into his clutches? What has he got over her that could induce her to such an act?”
“It would seem her husband is a gambling man,” Norrington said drily, “though I was able to extract the admission from her only with the greatest of difficulty, and, I fear, with the pledge of your word that it would not cost the wretch his employment. A run of ill-luck had left him deeply in this creature’s debt; but Amos being too stubborn to consent to his creditor’s demands for payment at the cost of his employer’s trust, the villain conceived of putting pressure upon the woman Bessie in his stead. It was to him she was to deliver her gains — and I make no doubt that his hold over her would ere long have led to her forced compliance in the admission into this house of thieves with an eye to more than silver spoons. For the sake of her future safety as well as for yours, sir, I would advise immediate action before the rascals can disperse—”
“Outrageous!” The Governor’s feelings had finally got the better of him. For a moment, Elizabeth, forgotten in the corner, feared he might be struck down with an apoplexy. “Peter! Jessop! Have the horses put-to — send down to the fort — fetch my overcoat, man; no, not that one, the blue — where’s that rascal Amos?”
In the growing hubbub of the household, as the soldiers formed up outside in the drive and the carriage was brought round from the stables, and a constantly changing crowd of satellite servants rotated around her father’s figure as he made his way downstairs, sending first one then another off to fetch some forgotten article or deliver some newly-recalled order, they were almost at the hall door before the Governor remembered her presence. “Elizabeth, my dear, I do apologise. Your visit — such disturbance this morning—”
She smiled, and reached up to kiss him a perfunctory goodbye. “It’s quite all right, Father. Of course I understand. We can arrange for me to come again some other time — next week perhaps?”
The last words were called across the gravel in his wake as the Governor swung his bulk into the coach, setting it swooping on its springs, and she wasn’t sure he’d even heard her. But the next minute his head appeared at the window. “Ah, Norrington —” his eye sought out the one stationary figure amid the crowd of domestics — “you have business on the waterfront, I believe. Would you do me the honour of escorting my daughter safely back to her home? If you would be so kind — it would be a great weight off my mind. Until next week, Elizabeth — coachman, spring ’em!”
In a rattle of stones the equipage disappeared at a smart trot, with the half-company of soldiers swinging along at a quick march behind it. Elizabeth let out a breath she hadn’t even realised she was holding. “Well...”
It was like being back in childhood again, she recognised ruefully, back in the first hectic years of her father’s appointment, when constant last-minute business affairs and duties had seemed to snatch him out of her experience and away from the narrow circles of the world she had known. She glanced up at Norrington, standing beside her on the steps, who was gazing in the direction of the vanished carriage with an expression that suggested he, at least, considered he should have had a right to be included ‘in at the kill’. It was a forbidding cast of countenance. She almost thought better of her question; then frowned, determined not to be thrust back into irrelevance.
“Where is that place ‘Slitbelly Alley’?”
Norrington looked round with a start that betrayed that he had almost forgotten her presence. The renewed realisation was evidently not a welcome one. His nostrils narrowed. “A vile place with which I trust you are unacquainted. And to forestall your next question: Obadiah Crake is an equally unpleasant personage whom I have long suspected of trading with the worst class of pirates and rogues... and with whom I sincerely hope the whole of Port Royal will shortly be acquainted — at the end of a rope.”
He turned on his heel, clearly unwilling to discuss the matter any further. “And now, if you will be so good as to acquaint me with your direction, Mistress Elizabeth, I shall escort you to your door. ”
Elizabeth glared after his unresponsive back, stung by the allusion to Will’s past. “My father’s prejudices to the contrary, I assure you I have no need of an escort!”
Even to her own ears the words sounded childish. Already some yards distant, Norrington paused to look back at her, his weary tone suggesting that he had expected nothing less. “And I have no desire to accommodate my pace to female company. But since, unlike those of your tender sex, I am not in the position of being able to flout at my pleasure a direct order from my superiors, I suggest that you swallow your pride and endeavour to cooperate with your father’s instructions — unless you wish to experience the humiliation known as the frog-march.”
“Oh!” The syllable escaped her before she could bite it back, and she clamped her jaws together, determined not to descend into a public tirade. Instead, she set off after her unwilling escort, who had already lengthened his stride to an extent that forced her to resort to an undignified trot to catch up.
It was ridiculous of Father to insist on sending her back home every time in the carriage, when she had been running errands down into town since she was twelve years old — with her maids, naturally, but then she and Will could afford no lady’s-maid, and she could hardly bring old Mother Strangways up from peeling her roots in the kitchen to dance attendance in the servants’ hall while she spent the morning with her father, simply in order to trail home after her again. But it was even more ridiculous, Elizabeth thought indignantly, for Father to take the carriage and then subject her to this. He had to know perfectly well that she went about the town every day as Will Turner’s wife without any escort —
Norrington was deliberately walking too fast for her, she was certain of it. Well, she was not going to give him the satisfaction of complaining. She set her teeth and hurried forward to catch up.
To her unspoken relief, the crowded streets at the edge of town presently forced her companion to moderate his pace. They walked together in icy silence through the jostling lanes, save for a brief inquiring pause while he waited for her to supply Will’s present address. The quarter was a far from fashionable one. Norrington absorbed the news with a studied lack of reaction that to Elizabeth’s over-sensitive mind seemed to speak volumes.
They passed the public pillories and whipping-post in the marketplace — empty today, Elizabeth registered with unacknowledged thankfulness. “You had uncommon success in persuading Bessie, ” she observed into a silence that was becoming absurdly strained.
Norrington followed the direction of her gaze, and smiled somewhat grimly. “You had already appealed to her natural fears and affections, woman to woman, without result. It seemed apparent to me that she considered herself honour-bound by some compact not to speak; thus, the task was to convince her that she might in all loyalty do so — man to man, as it were.”
Elizabeth stared at him, taken aback. “But good heavens, a kitchen-maid can scarcely be considered in the light of your sailors or marines!”
“A woman may pledge her word with as much honour as a man, ” Norrington said drily over his shoulder, striding on. His profile hardened imperceptibly. “Or so at one time I had always believed. ”
Elizabeth stopped stock-still, feeling as if she had been struck across the face. He could not, in all courtesy, have intended that the way it sounded, she told herself, furious at her own reaction, as she hurried on. It was ridiculous to find oneself reading veiled humiliations into every word.
“You speak of her with great leniency,” she ventured instead as a peace-offering, as they turned into the end of her own street, “for one whom I would have expected you to condemn as a common felon.”
Norrington said nothing for a few long moments.
“Yes.” He spoke at last with some apparent care, each phrase judged to a nicety, weighted and deliberate. “But then I find I can respect a woman who enters into an ill-judged compact for the sake of another, despite the fact that she knows her actions to be wrong, fully intending to adhere at all costs to that sworn word: even when, Mistress Elizabeth—” and this time the biting hurt in his words allowed of no possible doubt — “it is no longer convenient to her own desires to do so!”
And before Elizabeth, her heart clenching, had time to think of a single word in response, he had turned on his heel and left her isolated on her own doorstep.
A gasp. “Listen to me, James Norrington!” Flung off-balance by the sudden, unwanted glimpse into the older man’s pain, Elizabeth clung to a saving fury of purpose. She was no longer an inexperienced girl to be lectured at and dismissed without a hearing. She was a woman grown, and he would hear what she had to say even if it meant shouting after him down the length of the marketplace. Heads were turning, up and down the street. She ignored them.
But he had halted, every line of his figure stiff with reluctance. Swung back, slowly, to meet her angry stare with a blazing ice of his own.
She would not be quelled, Elizabeth told herself, as he came the few paces back towards her, every step a condemnation. She would not.
Without a word, she reached out to the latch and swung open her front door, indicating the narrow passageway beyond with a cold gesture.
“Really, this is scarcely proper—” Norrington frowned, stopping short.
“I have something I mean to say to you.” Elizabeth kept her voice light and cool with an effort. “Either inside, or out here before all ears — the choice is yours.”
At that moment, if truth be told, she did not very much care. He must have read that warning in her eyes, for he jerked his head abruptly in token of assent, and stood back to allow her to precede him over the threshold.
Secure at last on her own ground, Elizabeth drew a deep breath, feeling strength seep into her all around from the memories of Will held within these walls. This was their home. Here, nothing could touch her.
The door to the dark little parlour was ajar. With a glance at her, Norrington stooped to enter, his hat clamped firmly beneath one arm, as she shed her own cape and bonnet and turned to close the street door firmly against prying ears.
The room was in some disorder, guttered candles still standing on the table from last night and Will’s old cloak flung across the back of the hard wooden settle where she had left it, meaning to sponge off the mud. Norrington was standing by the window, his face once again perfectly guarded. She could read nothing in it of what he must think, of herself or the way she lived.
There was a single wide chair by the fireplace. Elizabeth seated herself on the settle, disposing her skirts neatly around her, and motioned him to take his place opposite.
A shake of the head. “Thank you, I prefer to stand.” He set his hat down on the table, thrusting aside an empty trencher with some distaste, and crossed his arms, staring down at her with the air of one who would infinitely prefer to be elsewhere. “If circumstances lead you to take my words as personally applicable, Mistress Turner, subject to the confines of my duties I am entirely at your husband’s disposal should he wish me to offer him satisfaction. ”
“I can defend my own honour!” Elizabeth flashed out, before biting her tongue. But the last thing she wanted was a duel — of all the stupid, hide-bound, male ideas....
“Listen to me for once, James Norrington — for whatever you believe of me, you are wrong.” For a moment the next words seemed impossible to find; but she had set herself this task, and she meant to carry it through. He deserved this much frankness from her at least.
“When I gave my word to marry you, it was for the sake of another man; but it was not a bargain entered into lightly, or one I thought even then to disclaim as soon as you had played your part.” She swallowed. “I wronged us both when I accepted your hand, but it was a promise I meant to carry through, I swear to you, whatever it would cost.”
Marriage to him. The thought was suddenly very real to her, as it had never been back then. Alone in this room with him standing there — where Will had stood last night, laughing, as James would never laugh — she shivered involuntarily at the understanding of how close she had come without knowing what she offered. How it might have been for her, with the wrong man.
“I never meant to play you for a fool, James. I saw Will safe, and then I left his side to go back to you and the Dauntless, and sailed back into Port Royal as your affianced bride, to await the day of the wedding you’d planned. You’d paid your price in full—” the crudity of it brought a flush to her own cheeks, but no colour to the frozen face opposite — “and I was prepared to pay mine.”
“And then — Sparrow.”
There was a resigned inevitability in it, as if for an Act of God. Elizabeth nodded, watching her hands twisting in her lap. “If Will had not spoken — I would be yours now, a dutiful wife.”
“But given the choice, you would rather have died at his side than lived at mine.” The voice from the window was steady, but almost too low to hear. “You made that very plain, Elizabeth. I could not in all honour have done otherwise.”
Silence between them. Her hands wrenched together as if to wound, fingers writhing over each other. Even a married woman could not, did not say such things. If he had thought ill of her before, he must believe her utterly shameless now.
She did not hear him move. But her hands were caught and held apart with surprising gentleness until her struggles stilled; then laid quietly, one after the other, back in her lap.
She looked up, half a minute later, to find him watching her levelly from across the table, hands clasped lightly behind his back.
“Moral courage is not something I have been given to expect in a woman.” The words were as cool and measured as ever, but his lips had tightened a little. “I believe this is the second time today I have been privileged to see it.”
‘Allus foller yer heart, lass. Foller yer heart.’ Bessie’s words, forgotten all too often in the years since. Bessie, who had opened her arms to a small boy smuggled into the kitchens by an even smaller Elizabeth, fascinated by the castaway’s apparently bottomless appetite. Who had slipped the two of them fragments of marchpane, to be savoured in shared sticky sweetness under the table. Who had turned an indulgent eye, later, to raids on the larder on a certain young apprentice’s behalf.
Follow your heart... and the compass of her heart had held its steady bearing to its haven in Will Turner, on the course that had bound them both all but unknowing since childhood. It had been Will. It would always have been Will.
The strained lines of the other man’s mouth had relaxed a fraction, into what might have been a smile. “Marriage becomes you well — and you may tell Will Turner that with my good wishes. ”
His eyes met hers for a moment, as if seeking some response; but when none was forthcoming he took up his hat, inclined slightly in acknowledgment, and turned to leave. His hand was on the latch of the door before Elizabeth had fully understood the implications of his last words, with a jolt of pity and not a little indignation. Did he really think that she would do that?
“Whatever has passed between us in confidence is not for any other man’s ears — and if you believed otherwise of me, I wonder that you ever saw fit to give me hearing at all!”
“Indeed?” He had flushed a little at the imputation, brows raised. Now he swung back towards her. “Since our interview has been made the undoubted subject of remark among all your neighbours, I must ask in that case how you were intending to explain to Turner my presence here.”
Elizabeth had jumped to her feet.
“Will isn’t obsessed by your rules of propriety!” She flung the words at him like daggers, each one striking home. Too angry to think about what she was saying, she stormed towards him. “For your information, he happens to love me!”
In the sudden abyss of silence that followed, she read in his eyes, too close, the words that would never be spoken between them.
Vivid, unsought awareness of the flesh and bone behind the familiar puppet-figure in the uniform. Unthinking, Elizabeth recoiled, appalled at herself; saw, too late, the white pain that flashed across his face. “I—”
“I don’t recall asking for your pity.” Absolute ice.
You never asked me for anything. The words brought a searing bitterness to her own throat, but she choked them back. Not fair, to suggest that. If he had serenaded her nightly — if he had found the words to woo her with a practised fluency that outmatched anything a blacksmith’s boy could do — still the woman she was now knew that it would have made no difference.
Instinctively, she reached out a hand. “I did ill to accept your offer of marriage — but it would have been a worse wrong to have gone through with it. I am not the wife you hoped for; I never was... ”
Her hand was taken; lifted punctiliously to his lips in a brush of courtesy, and retained a moment longer in his grasp. But his eyes had softened into a hint of wry amusement at their joint expense.
She felt her fingers released. “Any woman who can say that surely gives herself the lie, Mistress Elizabeth.”
Back on the safe ground of Society compliments, she managed a mischievous glance. “Why, if in truth it’s loyalty and plain speaking you seek, than I believe Bessie whom you admired so much has a daughter of an age with myself... and no doubt a fine woman.”
There was an instant, as his brows drew together, when she wondered if she had overstepped the mark; then a rare, genuine smile. “Should she take after her mother in all respects, then she is apt to prove so fine a woman as to make two of me — and I confess I doubt Port Royal could support the shock of a second such scandalous alliance within a year. I fear that’s one shrine at which I am condemned to worship from afar.”
His gaze met hers in brief shared irony, and on impulse, surprising even herself, she reached up to touch his cheek. “God-speed, James. And... be happy.”
For a few seconds, she was not sure which of them was more taken aback; then he laid one hand gently along the line of her jaw, turning her face up towards his, and bent to take the brief, formal kiss of farewell, the warm graze of a bird’s wing across her mouth. “Duty outruns happiness, Elizabeth. But I wish you God-speed. ”
He stooped to pass the parlour door, and a moment later was gone. Elizabeth sank back onto the settle, gathering without thinking the skirts of Will’s mud-stained cloak, still flung across the far end. The familiar cloth was rough against her fingers. She closed her eyes, missing Will intensely.
But he would be home by sunset... and meanwhile there was old Mother Strangways to oversee with the supper, and the hundred and one small tasks of a household that boasted no Bessie, nor anyone like her. She sighed, wondering unworthily if she could beg Bessie’s services if Father turned her away; then chided herself for the wish.
She would tell Will of Bessie and the spoons, and of Father trotting off like an antiquated Rupert of the Rhine at the head of his men, and give Norrington’s insight its due. Did Will remember the warmth of those stolen childhood hours as clearly as she? Elizabeth smiled at the thought, cradling the cloak against her shoulder where the beloved head would lie. The tiny events of her day always took on a new savour when she recounted them to him. She shared everything with Will... almost.
The image of James Norrington’s shuttered face presented itself, and she turned her head away restlessly, the curve ebbing from her lips. She could pass it off as a fine joke between the two of them, if she pleased. Will would be only too ready to laugh at his stiff-necked rival’s expense.
But for Elizabeth Turner, the very idea of such a betrayal was unthinkable. Not because she loved the man — a pang of memory — but because she could not.