For all his high-flown talk, Jack had not the faintest intention of trusting to Count Orgonez’ dubious mercies, of course. ‘All rogues together’ was an appeal that might have tickled the captious humour of a Harry Morgan, but was unlikely to soften the haughty Don one iota. The fact that he had indeed delivered a trap and victim precisely according to his — carefully imprecise — assurances was not going to weigh in the slightest in his favour.
Captain Jack Sparrow’s acquaintance with the endearing device known as the remores had, to date, been of a largely theoretical nature. But he had encountered an ancient, rusty pair in the cellars of an abandoned fort of the Spanish Main — complete with ragged wristbones still suspended above a forgotten corpse, a spectacle not entirely auspicious — and had met with another set during a long, drunken night in Tortuga, when the filibuster captain ‘Nez-de-Suif’ had dumped the plunder of a dozen ports out onto the tavern’s scarred table in a single expansive (and expensive) gesture. The Frenchman had clamped one set of jewelled hooks tight around his big bosun’s wrists — old Gratte-Cervelle being in on the joke — and challenged any of those present to get them off again; and Jack had been one of the assembled crowd who had roared with increased laughter every time one of their number made the attempt, only to find himself imprisoned by the alternate set of cuffs in his turn.
The principle was simple enough — releasing either side of the device would automatically trigger the other as the catch pivoted — and not that difficult to circumvent, for those both sober and forewarned. It was a sadistic little jest, but not an especially secure one; designed above all to raise a laugh at the expense of two prisoners thrust into a cell together. Jack, sounding out Orgonez and improvising as he went, had discovered the Count’s interest and possession of the device, and instantly proposed its employment. He had gauged his host’s humour to a nicety.
Suspending the initial victim’s arms above his head both helped ensure the proper positioning of a potential rescuer’s wrists, and decreased the likelihood of his being able to trigger the reversal himself. Jack had, however, decided that the latter feat should be entirely possible for a man with a good idea of what he was doing, even working blind. Indeed, he could be said to have gambled his entire future on just that assumption.
As it happened, he had been quite correct. Ten minutes and a well-concealed lockpick later, the open jaws of the remores clamped smoothly shut on empty air, and Captain Jack Sparrow stepped clear with a distinct air of satisfaction, surveying the possibilities. A certain emerald brooch found its way instantly into the breast of his coat; but he saw no reason, left alone in what amounted to a treasure-house, to limit himself to a single jewel, now that he found himself with a free hand — as it were...
He kept a weather eye out for trouble, naturally. But the first he heard was the sound of the lifting latch; and it was a moment — a moment too long — before he realised that it came from the wrong side of the room.
The shadows behind the pillar were thick and dark, swaying slowly to the candle’s stately dance. But the outline of the little door was blacker still, widening as the rough planks swung apart. And the Count’s courtly velvet was midnight-soft, save for the white at wrists and throat, and the glitter of the great gem at his breast.
“You play me a pretty comedy, Sparrow. A touching jest.” Purest Castilian, cool and liquid with hauteur. Jack, frozen mid-reach with a string of pearls burning his fingers, essayed innocent incomprehension; had it flicked aside with a sound of disdain.
“Oh, we understand each other very well, Captain, I think. And the time has come to converse on the terms of Spain, and not on yours.”
The barest whisper of leather, as the Count’s slender blade came free of its sheath. His other hand, steady at his side, never wavered in its aim. The pistol barrel was chased with silver and delicately patterned, a rich man’s toy: but the unmoving muzzle was deadly as sin.
Jack reckoned up the odds, and found them unappealing. He offered up an ingratiating smile. “Spain — a great country. Always admired your empire...”
The Count brushed him off with a gesture of his rapier-point.
“So. It seems one cannot even trust you to be dishonest. What then is to be done?”
The question, Jack sincerely hoped, was purely rhetorical. But Orgonez was contemplating him with a distinct degree of speculation.
“Sleep on it?” Jack tried, cocking an eye in the direction of the little door. He volunteered his wrists hopefully. “Hang me fast on the wall, maybe, ’til morning? Nothing like getting up bright and early for giving a man ideas. Why, one time my first mate—”
The Count’s nostrils had narrowed in contempt: “Silence, buffoon” — and Jack, unabashed, grinned. Contempt... now contempt was always good. A man was never so safe as when he was being underestimated.
But the Spaniard was regarding him with an icy eye. “You take me for a fool, perhaps, like that little gutter-girl; like your friend the English lord, who believes you give your life for his. Captain Sparrow does not set his hand in the noose unless he can slip free; and Orgonez would be a fool indeed, who watched you play your comedy in this room, and thought to bind you fast a second time.”
He stepped sideways, sharply, and tugged on a bell-rope with the hand that bore the sword: once, twice, thrice. Jack, straining for the distant peal, could not hear it; but a moment later it was answered by voices, and the sound of armoured men. Another minute, and the odds would be going up yet again. Orgonez, standing motionless in the candlelight, was tranquil and poised as a figure on an altar-piece.
“I withdrew my men, as we agreed. I watched and waited to see your game play out; to see how, and when, you would play me false. And you did not disappoint. But the farce is ended, Sparrow. I could have ended it at any moment, when your antics began to pall: I choose to end it now. For you begin to bore me — and that, señor, I do not permit.”
He raised a hand; signalled to the man who had just appeared in the doorway, others crowding behind. Orgonez’ household had looked impressive in livery and gloves. Armed and towering, they would have given any invader second thoughts.
“Disarm him... search him... and take him.”
“Now hold hard a minute —”
Jack flung up both hands in outrage — without, naturally, releasing his instinctive clutch on the pearls with which he’d been caught; some things went without saying — labouring under a considerable sense of injustice. The Count had just let Lily walk free... but more than that, he’d accused Jack of being boring. There was supposed to be gloating; there were supposed to be gruesome threats; but Captain Jack Sparrow had never been so insulted in his life.
And besides, he had no intention of allowing the odds to swing any further.
The genuine injury in his tone was enough to halt his captors’ advance in a moment of confusion, as their leader, lantern held aloft in one vast palm and a cutlass-blade in the other, glanced across at the Count for further confirmation. The candle guttered in the breath from the open door, and light chased across Jack’s hands, still frozen in theatrical pose, and sent a pearly glimmer dancing back from the necklet dripping between his fingers.
As if mesmerised, Jack brought his other hand across to grip the string, holding it out as if to avert evil at arm’s-length. When the Count, behind him, nodded, he saw the change in the faces before him in the instant before they closed in. His grip tightened.
It went clean against the grain to do it. But one of the things that had kept Captain Jack Sparrow alive and out of the noose, when others kicked their last, was a healthy — if undoubtedly skewed — sense of priorities.
Forearms flexed, and jerked apart in a sudden snap that burst the slender thread; and pearls in their dozens flew forward in a costly, unstable shower, rolling treacherous on the floor beneath oncoming feet.
Jack had leapt back in the same instant, as the lantern rocked wildly before an oath and a crash. Oil spilled, hot and acrid with a flicker of flame, and then went out. Candle-shadows shot suddenly high, reeling; and from somewhere in the corner of his eye there came a tongue of fire and a shattering report. A tug at his sleeve and a cry from the door, as Orgonez’ bullet missed its mark and struck home.
Now, that was no way to win loyalty in your men, slave or free. Still shaking his head in sad disapproval, Jack swept his own blade from its sheath, darted a blow at the candle — and lost his footing in the lunge as a stray pearl found its way beneath his heel in turn.
The flame streamed beneath the steel, ebbed and then sprang up, dizzying in the dark; Jack rolled aside, jerking furiously at the sword-tip that had buried itself in the woodwork beyond. And Orgonez was down on him almost before he had regained his feet, rapier against sword, quicksilver thrust against blow and parry...
It was a matter of only seconds before it dawned on Jack that he was fighting not for his liberty but for his very life; mere seconds more before he knew he was totally over-matched. Captain Jack Sparrow was the equal of some and better than most who made their living by the sword in his line of trade. He was good — every bit as good as he needed to be. But the Count fought with deadly accuracy, speed and grace, and he wasn’t just good; he was a great swordsman. And — not to put too fine a point on it — he was lethal.
On the heaving deck of a ship, Jack might have had the ghost of an advantage; as it was, only the crazy dance of the candle-light allied to his own agility kept that relentless blade from moment to moment at bay. Behind him all the time he was aware of the sullen, angry mass of servants, blocking the door and ready at any moment to intervene. One giant, more foolhardy or eager for favour than the rest, had already stepped forward with a blow that aimed to split Jack open from guts to gizzard; but the fight had surged back, and it was Orgonez who beat aside the stroke.
The Count snapped out a single, biting phrase and thrust high to the throat, barely breaking the rhythm of his attack. The point flickered back almost too fast to see, leaving a rent horribly red against the man’s dark skin; and the colossus fell, unheeded, to gasp out his life amid the pearl-strewn litter of the floor. Driven backwards behind a splintered table, Jack found himself sparing a moment’s pity for the poor sod who’d just tried to kill him.
But he had little enough time or attention to spare. He’d heard of men whose past flashed before their eyes; right now, all that was passing before his own was his future. In a hundred different forms, admittedly... but most of them skewered, and all of them distinctly short.
In which case — Jack parried aside a thrust, snatched up a handful of heavy silver in passing, and barely dodged the rapier’s return — in which case, there was only one thing to be done, and that was to change the rules. He let his next parry take him to the pillar. Curled a bulky amulet between finger and thumb, and threw, accurately. Not at the Count, but at the candle.
The darkness was not absolute, but it was enough.
Jack heard the hiss of his opponent’s breath and knew himself to be silhouetted against the trace of light from the concealed door beyond. He twisted aside from the zephyr of a blow more sensed than felt, and struck out, blindly, at its origin. The sword-edge bit home.
Then he was plunging towards that saving glimmer, hearing heavy bodies crashing behind him and the brief, clenched curse of the wounded man. By the sound of it, the Count was about to get trampled on. Despite heaving lungs and scrapes that stung with sweat, Jack couldn’t repress a grin.
There was a lamp burning in what proved — no surprise — to be the Count’s bedchamber. A breath ahead of his pursuers, Jack swayed, pivoted on his heel, and found the door and the stout bolts he’d been counting on. If he were Orgonez (his nose wrinkled up at the very idea) he wouldn’t have fancied an unsecured passage into his chamber either.
He slid home the panelling that concealed the entrance, stepped back, and watched with interest as the wall shook to the renewed assaults on it from the far side. There was another door, a grand one, leading into a suite of rooms beyond, for the moment deserted. Jack eyed the contents, wondering just how long it would take for some bright spark in the household to cotton on to the notion of coming round the other way, and came to a regretful conclusion: not long enough.
He closed that door in turn, wedged a heavy dresser across it, and surveyed the costly panes of the window. Now if — just for the sake of argument — he’d been Orgonez, would he have had a view from his bedchamber out across the servants’ quarters, or across a nice secluded garden? Not much of a question, that.
Captain Jack Sparrow stripped the sheets from the bed in time-honoured fashion, knotted one end to the nearest bed-post, flung wide the casement, and lowered himself cautiously over the sill. Straddled halfway across he paused, considering, laid one finger along his cheek, and then swung himself back.
The doors would hold a while longer yet. His eyes strayed to the rich furnishings. And he’d a mind to a few... personal... souvenirs for his trouble.
There was a limit to what one could carry. The tattered figure who finally emerged down onto the foreshore clinked at every step; but his luck had held. Behind him the island still lay hushed in its night-time torpor, and beyond the stockade the lights blazing in the mass of buildings were hidden from view. Clearly his improvised barricade had yet to give way.
Jack’s rapid (and somewhat encumbered) exit had been hindered by nothing worse than his old nemesis, the unseen thornbush — and while the latter had taken its toll, the lack of pursuit had allowed him to take his time in disentanglement. It was not, after all, as if he had been worried about catching the Florence. He had other fish to fry.
Beginning the long trudge across the sands to the water’s edge, he halted a moment, head cocked in bird-like alertness in the dark. Eighty yards away, faint phosphorescence rimmed the ripples of the bay, in a quiet, almost unheard lapping against the beach, pale beneath the moon. Dry leaves rustled somewhere behind him, prickling softly all along the ridge in a cat’s-paw of wind as the night airs stirred. From the dimly-seen hull of the Spanish ship, a distant bulk beyond the point, there came the familiar groan of the anchor chain shifting slightly to the swell. Carried across the water he caught the monotonous trace of a loose rope tapping against a block.
But further out — where the plump-bellied little brig had lain moored at moonrise, when he left — there was nothing either to see or to hear. Jack let fall the beaten-silver cup dangling from his left hand, shaded his eyes with fanned fingers, more out of habit than anything else, and scanned the waters. If his ears had not deceived him—
Then it came again, borne by some fluke of the breeze: the creak of spars, and a word of command. Topsails showed black for a moment against the glimmer of reflected moonlight. Lily had reached her in safety, then; and young Johnny had done as he was bid.
Not for the last time, either, with Lily in the offing, Jack reflected with an inward grin. There would be sparks to come, if he was not mistaken. But he liked the cut of the boy’s jib; there was a calm steel there that would stand the pair of them in good stead when the youngster had learned a little more, and rubbed a little of that green off. The girl who had been Deptford Lil could have done worse for herself by a long way, to his reckoning.
He watched Florence slip out of the wide bay, a shadow in the night, with scarcely a twinge of regret. The ship had been of Johnny Fortescue’s choosing (here he conveniently forgot his own hand in the matter), of Johnny Fortescue’s purchase: Johnny, who had wished her upon him, was more than welcome to her. She might suit for merchant purposes, but she would never have served for Jack’s preferred profession. And it was not, after all, like watching the receding sails of the Black Pearl...
Still, the twinge was there, denied but undeniable. Jack Sparrow, who could leave a girl at every port without a backward glance, had a certain sentimentality for a ship that had done her best. He shrugged it off, stooped to retrieve his booty, and set off on the churning slog through the sand to the firmer strands of the tideline, the dark hump of the longboat — a moment’s panic lest Lily had found that — and the greater prize: Orgonez’ swift-sailing warship, the Concepcion.
He was doing the boy a favour, after all. Jack began to whistle softly through his teeth, feeling freedom settle around him like a cloak. With the Spanish ship out of the way, pursuit (his own rôle in provoking that conveniently forgotten) would be an impossibility. Plus, he’d staged that pretty picture of sacrifice to please him — a misspent life redeemed in one selfless gesture for the benefit of others. If he knew the gentry, that should be bringing a well-earned tear to young Johnny’s eye and warming the cockles of his heart right about now. With a cheerful conviction of virtue and a mind already speculating the possibilities of the Concepcion’s anchor chain, Jack waded on through the night.
Apparently, he didn’t know the gentry.
Black Grindley’s signal was to have been the first phrase of “The Coster’s Daughter”, whistled thrice. Jack sent the opening notes of the bawdy little ditty out into the moon-shadowed darkness as he neared the longboat — but surely, surely it had moved? his instincts shot onto the alert — and saw the shapes rise up all around him: not the handful he’d been expecting, but six, a dozen, a score, concealed by the long hummocks of the beach and the shape of the boat itself. Breath hissed through his teeth.
He was moving almost before he had time to think, sword free and in his hand, burdens cast with split-second accuracy into the face of his nearest opponent, along with a spray of sand. The big cup struck home with an incongruous kitchenware clattering, and a strangely familiar oath. Jack had been turning swiftly to set the stout planking of the longboat at his back, ready to spit the first looming figure in his way; but something about the sound gave him pause.
The man spat, shook his head violently, and gave him a disgusted look. “Bilge an’ ashes, Captain, what manner o’ welcome is that?”
Jack let out a long breath and rolled his eyes in eloquent retort. “Would it be your head that’s stuffed with wadding, mate, or just your ears? I said, bring those as won’t be missed awhile: even Blind Charlotte at the Mudhouse Tap couldn’t help but take heed of this many gone astray...”
Grindley scratched in his black beard, looking — as far as was, for him, possible — a little shamefaced. “Aye, well, he said you’d likely need more, see. Said a handful could maybe take the Dago ship, with her crew ashore, but you’d never make it free of these waters without men to man the yards. And being as he seemed to know the whole —”
“He?” It was hard to wrong-foot Captain Jack Sparrow; but just for the moment he had the sensation that a wave had come up unexpectedly beneath his boots. “He — that would be young Fortescue you have in mind? John Fortescue the younger, with a head of courtier’s curls and a plum on his tongue?”
But he read confirmation in the other man’s nod even before he could speak.
So much for the popinjay, he told himself drily; so much for slipping off quietly for the boy’s own good. The boy had wits and he used them. Some people were simply wasted on the aristocracy.
But it wasn’t until a week later, ensconced snugly in the great cabin of the Concepcion as she breasted the Mona Passage, with his boots on the polished table and a line of fingerbowls set up between them filled with rum — just for variety — that he had cause to think of Johnny Fortescue again. And it wasn’t on account of a ship, or even a girl, but the weight of the emerald brooch, snagged and forgotten in the sleeve of a grimy shirt cast aside over the seat of a chair, and swinging to the time of the waves’ steady roll with an oddly ponderous rhythm.
He’d watched the telltale sway of the cloth with an idle fascination through the course of three draughts of rum, wondering vaguely as to its cause, before he could be troubled to swing his legs down and reach across to find out. The hard shape of the pendant brooch fell into his grasp as the filigree, entangled, slipped loose, and Jack — who had completely forgotten its existence — surveyed the jewel with interest and appreciation, holding it up to wake green fire from the lamp.
A fine piece of work, to be sure. Not that he had any longer a pressing need for its value, but a man never knew.
His fingers brushed across a fine tracery of engraving on the pendant’s reverse, unmistakable lettering in its curves, and a dimly-remembered resolution to investigate (or, if he were to be honest, simple curiosity) prompted him to turn it over. Some name, the boy had said: some name Lily hadn’t known, when she claimed it for hers. A fluke of memory and a frown, and he had it.
‘Marie-Thérèse’ — and his old aunt in Marseilles. He began to chuckle, remembering that afternoon and the odd little looks he’d had from the boy, befuddled beneath the bright blaze of words Jack had lavished on him. Then stopped short, looking closer.
The brooch did not read ‘Marie-Thérèse’ .
Jack rubbed muzzy eyes, took another drink of rum to clear his head, and tried again.
The lettering was simple and clear, as antique in its fashion as the emerald’s setting, but impossible to misread. There was an outlined crest — a hound’s curving leap against a single fret — and one brief word: ‘Cécile’.
Captain Jack Sparrow thought back over that so-innocent interview, the bait trailed with such total lack of guile... and began to laugh. This time, it was at his own expense. He’d been had.
So the boy had known all along, with that little dry turn of phrase; set out to find a thief to catch a thief, and caught... well, caught Jack out, for one. With the emerald twirling once more between nimble fingers, it was a point he was cheerfully willing to concede.
He reached for the bottle, splashed himself a fresh set of libations, and knocked them back one after another in silent toast: to a lordling he’d liked, to a girl with a quick mind and quicker hands, to a certain mynah (if no-one had yet wrung its neck) — to a whipping or a wedding. Or perhaps to both.
With a swift ship under him and the wide seas ahead and the burn of good rum in his belly, he leaned back, tossed the brooch in the air, caught it, and propped his feet on the table, contemplating the future with content. It had Barbossa in it. And the Pearl, that was for certain.
He had no idea how he was going to get the Black Pearl back. But just at this moment he was quite sure he’d find a way.
* * *
END