Chapter 1: Captain Elizabeth Turner of the Eastern Sun
My Dearest Beloved,
The world seems a darker place with you away from me once again. How short the time seems that you are ever allowed to be with me. How am I ever to bear this as I should? I know very well that you have accepted a very noble and praise worthy task and that your solitude and loneliness can only match mine in its grandeur but how to keep it locked inside? I could not speak a word of it to you for fear of destroying you happiness at seeing your son for the first time but it is so over coming that I cannot keep it locked away in my heart. My words to you are all I have left but for a single day every ten years. I have a child by you and he grows to look like you with every passing day. He fills my life with joy but my nights I lay awake longing for the sea and you whispers.
You will likely never read this, and yet it eases my pain to write these words to you. I know that you are feeling the same as I, how could you not, our love is too strong to bear such a distance and yet you are too good and kind not take on your task to its fullest. It is my pride to know that your goodness and your heart are tied to mine and I can only hope that I can teach our son to live as you would live and to be as brave and as kind as you are, my darling.
Once again I fear that I am being called to sea. I hear it in the village and the words of the beggars and the thieves that follow us around. The women whisper their displeasure about me as I pass. It is as if I am the plagued here in this village. The women fear me as a whore and the men see me only as a pirate. They do not believe that you exist or that such a secret can be kept by the sea. I do not pretend that it is not a welcome call, anywhere from land brings me closer to you and my heart has always been as the tide is changing. I must be at sea. To hear it whisper of your greatness, to hear the legend that you have become and to allow my own legend to follow you into the great stories of pirate lore. I cannot pretend that I do not wish for our son to not be brought up in such a life. I find more good sorts of people that roam the sea. They are the people to teach a child how to be and how not to be. It will be at sea that he learns to be as strong, brave and good as you are and should my crew come for me, as I have heard they are, I will once again set sail as the pirate lord of Singapore and the King of the Pirate Court. One day I will find a way to free you or to be with you to its fullest. If ever there was hope for such a thing it is among the waves that carry our ships toward the same destination. I will find you and I will love you for all of the days that my heart should long for you.
There is a part of my soul that is afraid to unleash such a world on a boy so young but I cannot help that the sea is in his blood. He speaks of the sea and of the legends as though they were his own. He takes to the docks whether I have forbidden it or not. It is in his blood as it is in your and it is in mine. We cannot deny him the experience that will one day pull him away from us and out to sea. I feel that I must honor the pirates call in him and nurture his desire to be as you are. He will sail by my side and will learn of the ways of the code from my crew. He will be the next great pirate of the brethren court and a king in his own right.
It is time for me to return to the sea. I will protect your heart with my own and will keep it with me wherever the wind may take me. Soon I hope that our paths will cross again. My heart tells me that it must be so. Until that day, should I find a way, I would lock my heart with yours in this chest forever.
Yours forever in love and devotion; one heart and soul:
Captain Elizabeth Turner.
Elizabeth laid her quill down gently as a tear rolled down her cheek and landed on the leather bound log book she had been reluctant to write in since she had last been at sea. The pages of cargo stalks and seaman names had long been torn away from the binding and left only the water stained pages blank and smelling of the salt of the sea. The names and the accounts that once filled the pages of this book also filled her heart with sorrow as they were a terrible reminder of what she had lost and gained by her life of piracy. Now she looked to its pages for solace and comfort; a place to now make her yearning clear and a confessional to her despair.
She walked slowly to a dark corner of her well established dwelling and as she lit a single candle, to light the corner, soft thumping of a still beating heart could be heard. She pulled the key from among the fold of her corset; a place near her heart where she felt it belonged, and unlocked the heavy black chest. There within was the heart of her lover, the father of her child and the soul she had been bound to for all her living, and dreaming.
Throwing the leather book violently against the wall, causing the chest to slam shut, she fell to her knees in tears and sorrow. She gasped for breath and clenched her shivered arms so close to her body that she felt as though she may suffocate herself, she tried, in despair, to calm her sorrows and ready herself to greet the child of her love with the smile and the joy that he always brought to her.
"Mother, please don't cry so," a young lad, dressed only in a white linen shirt came from another corner of the room, "father would not want you to."
Reaching out and taking her son into her arms she rocked him gently as he whispered the familiar lines of a sea chant in her ear, "the wave they speak of a gallant man whose heart the sea she stole. And once the heart still beating sings the songs that love foretold."
"My love," she whispered amidst her tears and his song, "would it suit you to leave this place and be among the tides and the torrents of the seas?"
"You wish it?" he asked as he looked into his mother red, tear soaked eyes, "your tears tell me you do and your heart beats to the sound of the waves. I could never keep you on land as you must know I long to be at sea."
"Even if it was against your fathers wishes?" she asked.
"Father has wished me not to seek him among the great's men of the waves?" the boy asked.
"No," she answered, "he has never come out and said it directly but he has only seen you but once in the ten years of your life."
"Then it is not against his wishes if you were to take up your place as the Pirate Lord that you are," he whispered, "yo, ho, the seas be calling, to the tide take my heart and my mind. Yo, ho off to the sun rise bring the horizon as steady she goes."
"The sea is in your blood, as it was your fathers and his fathers before him," she said as the tear continued to roll down her cheeks.
"As it is in yours as well," he whispered, "how you have stayed ashore for these ten years I do not understand. Would it have been absolutely terrible that you should take me away from the water when I was but a babe and place me in the gentle rocking arms of your ship?"
"I did not think it right at the time," she said with a great sigh, "I know I am wrong. You belong at sea, as I do."
"What an adventure it should be if we could find a way to set father free," the boy said as he wrapped his arms around his mother's neck, "an entirely new legend to be written and to sing about."
"There is but one man that could find such a thing," Elizabeth whispered as she pointed to the sun rising in the window and the songs of the birds that filled the morning air, "can you tell of which bird that is singing for the sun on the eastern horizon?"
"It is the Sparrow," the boy said, "can it be that you should wish to seek the Sparrow of the sea?"
"That Captain will know of a way and will help us to find all that we seek," She whispered, "we shall set sail as soon as a suitable vessel can be found."
"Aye, Captain," the boy shouted, "I shall spend my day on the docks inquiring as to a ship for the pirate lord."
"That will not be necessary," Elizabeth whispered as she pulled from her pocked a piece of silver, "my crew knows to come for me. Can you not hear it?"
"Aye, I can," he smiled.
"There is much to be done before we can leave this despairing land," she said and stood from her place on the floor. She walked to the shelf where the chest that held her husbands heart sat and slowly opened it again. Taking the leather book from where it had fallen she placed it in the chest with the heart and so it was that her secrets words of longing were locked with her lovers heart.
