The Patron of the Lost
Jocelyne had few scruples about lying. In the last ten years of assisting at the clinic with the sisters she lied right and left, patient to patient. To one she was another Sister of the Convent, untouchable. To the next she was someone's daughter, another's sister, yet another's future sweetheart. In the center of her head and heart she knew she was none of these things at all.
At fifteen she had been married away from the Atlantic coast of France, home, and taken to the Caribbean. By sixteen she had been left there to fend for herself. No, it was nothing like it could have been. Now, at eighteen, she had daily work at the convent ward under the watchful eyes of St. Anthony.
The haze of the morning had already burnt away when Jo walked out into the plot of medicinal herbs. The yarrow had suffered from a shift in winds in the fall, but the lavender and sage were thriving. She walked without thinking, bending down automatically to brush the overgrowth aside where it spilled over the path. She stopped by the threshold to the vegetable garden, just left of the carrots, and drew herself to her full height. The air thrust up the rock from the ocean and eddied over the garden. Jo peered at the bright horizon and filled her lungs with the heavy salt scent. She closed her eyes and pictured the face of the man in the second bed from the end and bore him as clearly as she could in her mind as she made a petition to St. Peter.
As she let her eyes drift back open she mumbled to herself: let him go peacefully.
Absorbed in the petition, the light, the air, and the plants as she was, Jo failed to notice the commotion at the convent until the door to the garden slammed open such that the hinges screamed. She whirled around to see a sister stride toward the garden followed by the oddest man Jocelyne had ever seen. From her distance she could only make out cuffed boots, a flamboyant coat torn through and restitched at the shoulder, and a battered tricorn hat battling a nest of bead-strewn hair for dominance of his head. As she walked back to the house she found to her embarrassment that her gaze lingered on the way his breeches formed around his legs, and the way those legs looked lean and strong. She tossed her head to throw the thought out and walked more quickly to the door.
Inside the sisters assigned her to more patients than they ever had before. She'd been given the run of a room often unused and in a far end of the convent. Each of the four men was bleeding from at least one wound, and all had bandaged forearms. The one woman was free of the other wounds, but shared the forearm wrappings. They seemed more shocked and pained than fevered, so Jo busied herself with tending wrappings and keeping them as near sleep as possible. She was sponging the beads of sweat off the forehead of a man with trimmed whiskers along his jowls when his eyes blinked open and seemed lucid. "Lass," he croaked, "tell ol' Jack he's mad."
Muted footfalls from worn boot soles met the man's request. Jo looked up into dark, dark eyes rimmed in kohl. "Now Mr. Gibbs," a hand waved into the injured man's field of view as the man swayed toward Jo and back again, "I'd advise against tellin' the lady tales without the tellin' of the full tale—to do so would be bad luck, much to be avoided by a man of your current condition—and I'd advise against tellin' the full tale just at this moment," the man swayed forward again, hands steepled as though considering an important point, "a moment so early in our acquaintance." Jo was peripherally aware she'd been staring, slack-jawed, at the man. He lurched forward again, his hand extended to her. Without really thinking, she gave him her hand. "Captain Jack Sparrow, at your service, luv."
If Jocelyne's face had shown shock before she was unsure what it was doing as he lowered his lips to her knuckles. Mr. Gibbs merely stared upward, apparently trying to focus his eyes on their joined hands above him. Jo retrieved her hand and with it, some of her wits. "Captain Sparrow, it is my pleasure. I am Jocelyne." Jo fought a wince as she heard her accented English stretch his name into "Spah-hrow" and press "it" into "eet." But what had he called her? "Mais, pardon me. You have called me 'love,' yes? What is this name?"
Jo fought another wince when the man's eyebrows twitched into the red bandanna around his head and back down again. The corners of his eyes creased with contained laughter. The injured man saved her further embarrassment. "Jack," Gibbs croaked, "Meant what I said. Ye're a madman, ye'are."
The man's pronouncement seemed to sober the Captain. Jo rinsed the cloth she'd been using on Gibbs' forehead and inspected his wrappings for blood before turning to the woman in the next bed. When Jo looked back away from her patients Sparrow was gone, leaving Jo to contemplate the fond tone with which Gibbs called him what Jo knew was not a nice name at all, and what on earth the Captain meant by calling her "love." For the second time that day Jo tossed her head to clear it and resolved to ask one of the Novices during the next meal. Satisfied with that reasoning Jo looked again at the still woman in the bed nearest the wall and decided to work some of the tangles from her long, thick hair.
For a week little changed in the sickroom other than Jo's increasing certainty that her patients were pirates. English pirates. Jo cared little for the disputes that led to the French and English staring down their cannons at one another but she knew this: it was unwise to be English in the port these days. Jo could not imagine it was wise at all that she was learning English in the very climate, or that she was caring for English pirates and learning that English from them. This rolling through her mind she told herself one morning it would not be overly superstitious to move the image of St. Anthony from her room to the pirates' sickroom. It seemed they could use the aid of the patron saint of the lost.
It had been a week and the pirates were awake more often than not during the day. Anamaria, especially, had become restless in her confinement. Jo secretly thought the tall woman was right in thinking she could go back to work. Her only remaining sign of injury was the bandage on her forearm. The sisters had early insisted on caring for those injuries themselves and Jo had not questioned their wisdom. She could not help her growing curiosity as the days passed, though, especially when the injury seemed to be all that barred the woman from freedom.
The negative side of Anamaria's recovery, and of Gibbs' as well, was their increasing prying into Jo's place at the convent. While she knew they—and all her patients in the past, for that matter—only asked her about herself out of boredom, she couldn't help but wish she could just go on thinking of nothing but the present day. Who wanted the past? No one. Certainly there was nothing back there worth thinking of. But Gibbs didn't think so.
"Well, little Jo. We've told ye the way Jack escaped being marooned. Now it's yer turn to tell a tale." The man grinned, his eyes crinkling.
"Aye! I've already heard all o' Gibbs' tales. Tell us." Anamaria's sat against the wall, her stern voice matching the determined look in her eye.
Jo's knitting needles stilled mid-stitch, and she hummed slightly as she peered at the ceiling. "I do not know any tales, Monsieur Gibbs. Only such talk as comes to a convent, eh? It is hardly of interest."
"Tosh." Anamaria sent a curt gesture into the air between them. "You tell us how you came here."
"S' a good idea, Jo. Tell us what brought you to the island," Tom, a thin youth with a young face, piped up from the far bed.
"All right, all right," Jo shook her head and held her palms up to them. "I surrender." She smiled at them. "It is not fair, the three of you and just me, no?"
"Ye're stallin'." Anamaria's voice was flat.
"Very well." The truth? Why not. She'd never see them again, once they were well. Jo took a breath. "When I came here, I was fifteen years. I had lived en France, near the sea. My mother, she married again when my father died. And he knew a man here, in the islands. He told my mother the man would care for me, so they sent me to marry him. I…I was a child then." Jo looked out the small window set deep in the wall near Anamaria's bed, and remembered. Her gorge rose in her throat. Enough of that.
"Well?" Anamaria's voice cut in.
"Now Anamaria, let the girl speak." Gibbs cut his eyes over at the striking woman. She glared back.
"Both of you stuff it. She's talkin'." Mason, the burly man next to Gibbs, cut in.
"I...ah…I married him just after I arrived at the port. I knew no one, and knew nothing of his reputation." Jo winced in spite of herself, and she could feel Anamaria and Gibbs watching her. "I knew no English, so I could not truly leave the port. I came to the sisters and asked for work. They taught me to care for the sick. So I am here with you."
"No, that's not all of it." Anamaria peered at her, her eyes not as hard as before. "You tell why you were trying to leave. He beat you. He did, didn't he?"
"No, no." Jo sucked in a breath. "Well. Yes. But that was nothing—I had a stepfather who did also, that was of no importance." She kept her eyes trained on the sea beyond the little window. "My stepfather had sold me to him."
"McLaggen." Jo whirled at the sound of a new voice. Leaning in the corner near the door was the captain. He had his steady eyes trained on her. She nodded. "He's a right bastard, that one."
"Oui, vraiment." The bitterness in her voice surprised her. "But it is no matter. I am here now, and even he no longer wants me."
"What does that mean?" Anamaria was impatient again. "You're still a woman."
"Oui, mais… Perhaps this is the tale you wanted." Jo smiled at Gibbs. "I did not leave quietly." Jo felt the scene come back together in her memory for a moment. "It had been a year. He was trying to appear respectable and gain access to higher company. I was part of that plan. Most nights he would insist I dress in silks, and he would take me to be seen: his new little wife from France, proof he was not a scoundrel. I did not know, most of the time, what he was saying. Still, I knew. I knew what he wanted to do. I saw his eyes on the women there. Even the girls, sometimes. I thought I could not let him get this, what he wanted, but I did not know how to stop him. I thought if I stopped going to the parties he would simply beat me until I would go again, et that would be that."
"What did you do?" Tom's eyes were wide like a child's.
"Well, I started to think: what ruins a man?" Jo smiled to herself at the memory of the lists she'd made by a lone candle in the early morning. "I knew I could not take his money, or hurt him, but I could shame him. I could bring him shame." Jo glanced at Anamaria and found her grinning back. "He would always ask me to sing en Français for the ladies and gentlemen. He thought it showed he was cultured. I thought of this. I thought: what if I started to sing tavern songs the next time he asked me to sing? He could not beat me in front of all the people. I could claim I did not know the words, and did not know they were low. I could say I just learned the song because he seemed to like it." Anamaria chuckled.
"So just sing 'em a tavern bawdy, then turn the innocent face on 'em, eh?" Gibbs let out a peal of laughter.
"I did. I talked to the servant he had working in the kitchen. I had her teach me the crudest English song she could think of. At a ball for the governor I started to sing it when he asked me. You should have seen them!" Jo hummed the song for a bit. As they recognized the one she'd chosen the pirates started chuckling, then guffawing. Even the captain let out a bark of laughter. After they calmed, Jo took a breath to start again.
"I did not think of the consequences much. I just sang my song. When he started to drag me from the house I thought, 'Oh, perhaps I will die of this,' but it was just a beating." Jo took her knitting needles back up from her lap and turned the rest of the nearly-forgotten stitch. "After several days of beatings each night I thought I would not live. I became afraid, and because I was afraid I knew I did not want to die there. Not like that, as some man's whore." She bit off the last word. Her eyes seemed focused at some point well beyond the room. Anamaria shifted on her bed. "The next night I hid a piece of glass in my hand when he came to me. He beat me. I took the glass and made a cut on my forehead, here." She lifted the sweep of her hair to show a thin scar that echoed the horizontal line of her hair. "I made it deep enough to bleed. Then I pretended to be dead. When he left I was not hurt too much to walk. That had been my hope."
"Tha's why you pretended to be dead," Tom breathed, "to get out walkin'."
"Oui. I walked to the convent and asked for the mercy of the church."
"You never went farther?" Anamaria's impatient edge was gone; in its place was something like curiosity. "Just here?"
"Just here," Jo echoed, "but it is far enough. He does not want me; he does not want to look for me. The patients here, they do not know who I am."
"Would you go, lass?" Gibbs' voice was openly curious.
"Ah. Where would I go? My English sounds so bad. My Spanish is good enough, but then to do what? Be a barmaid? Perhaps not." She shook her head. The captain threw his weight up out of the corner with an exaggerated show of keeping his balance with his arms. He swaggered across the floor towards her.
"I hate to interrupt this interrogation, luv, but there's need for a bit o' talkin' between me crew and meself." The captain locked eyes with her.
"I understand. I will go." Jo tucked her knitting beneath the chair and went to stand in the hall. Outside the closed door she could hear muted voices, but no words. As she stood there idle her mind returned to the bandaged arms, and to the captain. Secrets. Perhaps they thought she didn't know they were pirates? Surely they knew she knew. Gibbs had all but told her. Then what could be the meaning of the wounds on their arms? She scoffed at herself. Anamaria was right. She would not go farther. She wouldn't even ask them why their forearms were bandaged. She was timid.
In the next two days the captain rarely left the room, and Mason still was not upright. Something had crushed his kneecap—Jo hesitated to think of how such a thing might happen on a pirate ship—and he was far from walking comfortably even though the skin had started to close. When the captain was there Jo was not, for the most part. That simply meant more time to knit, she told herself.
It was on one such morning, with the captain inside, the English men came. One stopped a sister in the garden and demanded to be brought to the Abbess. Once the sister was gone Jo flew down the hall to the room, her heart in her throat. Knowing even as little as she did of the sea and piracy, Jo knew redcoats and pirates were not meant to be in the same building. She burst in the room, hair loose and skirts flying.
"What gale caught you?" Tom smiled at her.
"Please—there are English men here. In the convent. Redcoats." Jo dragged a hand through her hair and smoothed her skirt nervously. "The leader of them, he is talking to the Abbess now." Jo watched each pirate's face fall, then harden. The captain strode over to her with a much more stable gait than normal. He took her hands.
"Jocelyne, luv, I want you to do something for me." She nodded. "I want you to listen for anything you can hear from them. Can you do that?" She nodded again, and reached into the folds of her skirt. She handed him a small key.
"It is for the fenêtre—the window." She eyed the small casement. "If you must." Sparrow nodded. She left, careful to shut the door tight.
She had barely been gone a half an hour when a sister came to her and told her the redcoats would search the convent room-by-room for pirates. The sister scoffed at their insistence on such a thorough search, certain no pirates would seek harbor from the church. Jo could feel the blood leave her face.
When she told the captain her voice shook a little. He grinned at her, to her confusion, and tapped two fingers under her chin. "No need to worry yerself, luv," he grinned, "I'm Captain Jack Sparrow."
Jo merely stared. Then the door opened, and not even minutes later the unmistakable sound of a sword leaving the scabbard cut through the little room. Jo whirled. Her attention was trained so thoroughly on the two redcoats at the door that it took her some moments to notice the chest pressed against her back, and the blade lightly resting at her neck. Several thoughts flew through her head at once, but finally one fought to the front: What do I have to lose? Within moments she was screaming at the redcoats in rapid, impassioned French.
The two men goggled at her, and at Sparrow. Then they dropped their swords. Anamaria and Gibbs swiftly hauled them into the room and knocked them out with the hafts of their own swords. "That will have them coming," Anamaria said.
"Aye, but to the door," the captain said. "Gentlemen…and Anamaria, we will take the window." Gibbs and Tom held Mason between them as they walked to the window, through which Anamaria was already climbing. Jo turned to the captain.
"There is a gate at the base of the herb garden that leads to a staircase. From there you are nearly at the docks." Jack held his hands up to her in an attitude of prayer. She wrinkled her brows at him. Tom climbed out the window.
"I'm truly sorry about this, luv." Jack hardly gave her time to digest what he'd said before he hefted her head first out of the window. Anamaria looked as startled to see her on the ground outside as Jo felt. But there was little time. Jack and Gibbs managed to squeeze Mason through and get out themselves just as the scuffle of redcoats battering the locked door started. Jack took Jo by the wrist and pulled her into the garden. "Lead the way, luv." It was with a stab of irritation that Jo began the walk away from the home that had kept her safe during the long two years since her marriage. But it was also with a pang of anticipation.