For it is, it is a glorious thing
A/N: I recently saw an extremely excellent production of The Pirates of Penzance at a college near me. Since it was a women's college, the entire cast was female except for Major General Stanley, the Sergeant of Police, and Samuel the pirate first mate/Lieutenant (who were male for, I believe, musical reasons). As with other all-female productions that theater department has done, most of the women playing male roles chose to play their parts gender-neutral rather than explicitly trying to be male. For the pirates in particular, this almost came across, conveniently, as a bunch of female pirates acting macho and manly as suited their pirate status - more in-universe crosscasting than outside-of-universe crosscasting.
The Pirate King was played by a tall, slim young woman with a blond streak in her straight-chopped dark hair and a red coat and pirate-captain hat, who looked so miserable when the policemen clapped a respectable bowler hat on her head that I had to write her a fanfiction.
Yes, because of the crosscasting, there is some implied lesbianism/bisexuality in this fanfiction. No, I will not rate the fanfic T solely for implied homosexual content. If you cannot handle being reminded that gay people exist, go read a different fic.
For I am a Pirate King!
(You are!)
Hurrah for the Pirate King!
And it is, it is a glorious thing
To be a Pirate King!
Settle down to a wife and family? Me? Have doing business as a businessman be my business, never setting foot on a ship again? Lead a respectable life? Me? Not bloody likely.
The problem is not, in itself, the fact that these supposedly intelligent law-and-order oh-so-British matchmakers apparently cannot see past their noses to the fact that I, and at least half of my crew, am in fact female. What's wrong with a girl being allowed to have a bit of fun, or a bit of marriage, with another girl? The problem, or the worst problem, is this awful hat.
It's little and black and made of felt. It has a round crown and a round brim. Whoever came up with it apparently had no sense of fashion whatsoever. It's awful. I wear it and I can feel my sense of dashingness (dashingity? Dashosity?) leaking out my boots. When I was still a pirate, I swore I would never in my life wear such a thing. Of course, my oath as a pirate is easily broken, but there, unfortunately, is the paradox. Frederic finds that one amusing. I do not.
If I had to wear the rest of this outrageous outfit, I would probably kill myself on the spot. Fortunately, I still have my coat and boots - you remember, the ones that my dashingness (dashosity? Dashingity?) is leaking out of. My darling Isabel does not think that it is proper for a respectable businessman to wear a pirate coat and boots all the time. She apparently does not understand that this is the whole point.
She has, I believe, hidden my old hat, the extremely dashing red tricorn one with the gold trim, in the closet. The Pirate King is not happy about this. Nobody ever used to hide my hat in the closet. Well, that could have been because we didn't have a closet, but they didn't hide it at any rate. At least not very often.
I will not put up with this. The hat is just too awful. I'll not end my days as a respectable gentleman, Isabel or no Isabel, Major General Stanley or no Major General Stanley. I refuse to be buried in a bowler hat.
Oh. She's coming down the garden path now. Isabel, that is. And sitting down on the stone bench next to me. "Hello, dearest Tara," she chirps. At least she doesn't take five entire minutes to say it, like Mabel would.
"Hello," I say, elbows on my knees, feet wide apart, facing away from her, in proper pirate fashion.
"Tomorrow is our wedding!" she says, as if I couldn't remember this on my own.
"I know." The doctor of divinity located in this vicinity is going to have a proper job on his hands. There are about twenty-four of us engaged to be married tomorrow, one way or another, what with Frederic and Mabel and my crew and the policemen and Major General Stanley's innumerable daughters and Major General Stanley and Ruth and Isabel and me. I think Samuel is going to end up getting married to one of the policemen just to even things out.
"Tara dearest," Isabel says, her fine brows wrinkling, "you do love me, don't you?"
"Of course, my dear." I actually do - I am engaged to her, after all. I am a pirate and she is a pretty maid of seventeen, the thing pretty much works magnetically.
"But," she says frowning, "you also love Kate and Edith and Kate and Daisy and Abigail and Ruth and Pappa and Samuel and the ship's boy Roderic, don't you?"
"Of course not! ...Not Roderic. Not General Stanley. Not Ruth." There is, however, I have to admit, something in what she says. I am a pirate. I am not required to be monogamous. Or, well, at the least I am not required to be blind.
"You're not helping, dear."
"Sorry." I sigh, and turn toward her. "Isabel, I have something I must tell you."
I take off the awful hat and turn it around in my hands, staring at it. Isabel should be looking at it too, but she's looking at my hair instead.
"Oh," she says, and her face falls.
I stare at her. "Isabel," I say matter-of-factly, "a tip which you may find useful in your life. The name 'Tara' is not, as a general and nonspecific rule, a male apellation. I rather thought you had realized this already."
"Well..." she says, perhaps a bit desperately, "I thought maybe it was just a pirately nickname your crude shipmates gave to you..."
"Nope."
She starts to cry, hiding her face in her hands. "Whatever are we going to do?" she sobs.
"Do? I don't intend to do anything about it." I hand her my handkerchief, which she takes gratefully. "What would you have me do about it?"
"Well," she says, dabbing at her eyes superdaintily, "I suppose we could get the gardener to trim it..."
I stare at her, and wait for a few beats of silence before asking, "Isabel, what are you talking about?"
"Your hairstyle is awful! It looks like you cut it yourself!"
I stare at her some more. There has clearly been a misunderstanding.
"I did. We are pirates, not hairdressers."
"It looks like you cut it in the dark!"
"I did. In the middle of a sea battle. With a dagger."
"It looks it!"
I sigh. "Does it really, now?"
"You'll have to cut it if you want to be a respectable Peer, you know."
All right, here we go. "I know. I don't want to be a respectable Peer," I say hurriedly.
"You don't?" she says, shocked.
"No, I don't. And I happen to like my hair the way it is, thank you very much," I add.
"But what do you mean?"
"I mean, my dear, that I am a pirate and I would like to stay a pirate. Respectability does not suit me. I ran away from it for a reason. Besides, this hat is awful. It violates every aesthetics nerve in my body."
Her lip is trembling. "Don't you love me, Tara?" she says plaintively.
I sigh. "Of course I do, my darling. It's just that... well..." This is something I have learned the hard way. Major General Stanley's daughters are all pretty maids of seventeen, and therefore magnetically attractive to us pirates, as I have said, but, though it goes against my piratical instincts to say it, they are not the only pretty maids of seventeen in the whole wide world.
"Isabel, how do you think life on a ship would suit you?"
"Oh, not at all," she says immediately. "I get unladylikely sick at the sight of all the waves going back and forth. It would be no fun at all."
"Oh, that's all right," I say. "You could stay in the hold."
She shrieks. "It was a joke," I say hurriedly. "But you see, we have so little in common, my dear. You are a refined maiden, and I am a rough pirate. I really am a rough pirate, dear, gentleman who has gone wrong though I may be."
"Many married couples have little in common with each other," she points out.
"Yes, but... oh, just bloody listen to me, Isabel! I don't want to be a Peer!"
She faints. I think I may have gone too far.
We undergo a brief period of my fanning her with her fan before she revives. "Don't leave me, Tara," she cries piteously, clinging to me. This is going to be worse than I thought.
"I won't, dear," I say, trying to peel her off. This is not the kind of thing I normally have to deal with. I pat her on the shoulder awkwardly. "We are getting married tomorrow, right?"
She sniffs and nods.
I take her hands. "I do love you, Isabel. It's not that." I think that trying to discuss this with her is not going to prove fruitful. Ah well, there are other methods of doing things. "Why don't you go in to dinner now, Isabel? I'll join you soon."
She goes off down the garden path again, and I wander in the other direction, hoping to come upon Ruth.
I am lucky. She's sitting on on a bench against the low stone wall which separates the garden from the lawns, looking out over the orchard of the estate, which looks golden in the afternoon light. She isn't looking around very much, which gives me an opportunity to climb over the wall, sneak up behind her, lean over the wall, and cover her eyes with my hands. She jumps. "Guess who," I whisper, making my voice deeper than usual.
She yanks a small pistol from her bodice, pointing it at straight my nose. I back away hurriedly.
"Ruth, we are supposed to be respectable now," I sigh. "Major Generals' wives do not hold people up at gunpoint."
She glowers at me, and then relaxes somewhat. "Really?" she says. "And how would you know, pray?"
"You have a point." I lean over the wall, so my face is upside down in front of hers. "But it still is probably not the best idea." I cock my head to one side. "Ruth, you were lying about us, weren't you?"
"When?" she asks, looking the tiniest bit shamefaced.
"I have been an orphan since before I was born, if I am a nobleman I've never heard of it. My crew is comprised of a motley collection of hooligans who I mostly picked up in taverns. They are not noblemen. Samuel as a nobleman I might be willing to believe, but Roderic? No. Just... no."
She grins at me, upside-down. "I thought it up on the spur of the moment. Not the same as telling a regular terrible story, right?"
I wink back at her. "Right. Just an innocent fiction."
I don't mind terrible stories all that much, to tell the truth, provided that they benefit me and not the other man. I had thought that Ruth would be all too willing to turn us in along with Frederic, but after he renounced her, or she betrayed him, or whatever happened there, she seems to have had a rather major change of heart. She has always had the ability to terrify, that woman. She could rule the seven seas if she ever put her mind to it.
I withdraw my face and lean my elbows against the wall. Ruth turns to look at me. "I thank you for getting us all out of that, Ruth, but I do not particularly want to be a Peer. I've had a taste of respectability before, and it is not something that suits me. Besides, I think this hat is going to kill me."
She rolls her eyes, then looks me up and down and nods, tight-lipped. "I can tell. About the respectability, not the hat. But what are you going to do about it?"
I vault over the wall and sit down next to her. "I don't know. I don't particularly want to run away from Isabel. I wondered if you had any ideas."
She sighs. "I never wanted to be mixed up with your lot at all, Pirate King. You couldn't just settle down with your young wife? You have unbounded domesticity, respectability, and a seat in Parliament! You've been given what every Englishman should theoretically long for!"
"But in my experience, they usually don't."
She throws her hands up in apparent exasperation. "Pirates. You lot are never satisfied."
But she certainly looks as if she is having a felonious thought. I raise my eyebrows expectantly.
She leans forward and hisses into my ear. "You could turn to highway robbery."
Why on earth this woman persists in maintaining she does not like illegality is beyond me. At this point it seems to be a bit hypocritical.
"But what about Isabel?"
"What about her?"
"You know what about her, Ruth."
She looks at me expectantly. I sigh. "She would not approve of me switching one illegal trade for another. Nobody would, actually, but Isabel would not want to be the wife of a highwayman."
"And?"
I stare at her for a bit, and make vague hand motions. I realize she has a point. Theoretically. The only woman who walks over me is Queen Victoria. Well, Queen Victoria and Mabel. And Ruth. Sometimes.
"She's young. She'll come around. And if she doesn't, you would not have to tell her... Do you mind leading a double life so terribly?"
I shake my head, and grin slowly. We high-five. In my opinion, Major General Stanley has quite a catch, though I would most definitely not want her for myself. She is quite enough as a friend.
"Think on it, Pirate King. I didn't say anything, remember." She winks at me.
I nod. "Thank you, Ruth."
I can hear footsteps coming nearer to us. I look around and sigh. "Ah, I told Isabel I'd go in for dinner soon, I suppose I had better..." But I don't move off the bench. I take off the hat again and stare at it.
"I don't suppose you have any use for an extremely unattractive bowler hat?" I ask Ruth. "What kind of hats do highwaymen wear, in any case?"
"You could get away with the plumed tricorn, let's say."
"Good. I'll do it."
She winks at me again, and takes the hat from me. "I'll keep this. I may have a use for it. Now go in and tell your engaged girl that you have not run away on her. And oh, Tara?"
I turn back toward her. "Yes?"
"Good luck. And... Samuel would come with you. So might I, sometime."
She turns away, and I saunter up the garden path toward the manor house, whistling my song. It is indeed a glorious thing to be a pirate king. Or a highway king, as fate may have it. I'll take what I can get.