Best Laid Plans
By Alekto
Disclaimer: I didn't own 'em last week, I didn't own 'em yesterday, I don't own 'em today... Anyone else noticing a trend?
Summary: Set after PotC. Will Turner decides to accompany Elizabeth to England when her father, Governor Swann is recalled to London. However, the sea crossing doesn't turn out to be quite as uneventful as they would have liked.
Rating: PG
A/N: As with "Storm Warning", this is written from Will's POV. For the nautical stuff I thoroughly recommend "Seamanship in the Sage of Sail" by John Harland. It's not an easy read, but it is terrifyingly comprehensive. Again this is unbetaed, so apologies for any errors that have slipped through.
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Best Laid Plans. Part 1 (of 2)
"Sail ho!"
Like the others on the Larne's quarterdeck I gazed upwards as the lookout's cry reached us.
"Where away?" came the answering bellow from close by, uttered by a voice trained over long years to be heard above the worst gale. As Elizabeth, her father and I had discovered over dinner the previous evening, Captain Nathaniel Locke, master of the Larne, rarely managed to talk with anything close to a regular speaking volume. His was a voice suited far more to the quarterdeck than the dining salon.
"Fine on the larboard quarter," returned the lookout from high above us. A few seconds passed, and he went on, "looks like a cutter, an' she's coming up fast on us."
From a box near the wheel Locke took out a glass, and leaning on the taffrail he studied the tiny white smudge on the horizon behind us that was apparently a ship. "Aye, she's a cutter alright," he allowed after studying her for awhile, "and running with every scrap of canvas crowded on that she'll carry."
"Why on earth for?" wondered a quiet, female voice. Elizabeth. I turned and smiled a greeting, while Locke and the others on the quarterdeck doffed their hats to her. It appeared that I'd been too occupied with our mysterious pursuer to have noticed the arrival of my beloved Elizabeth and her father, the pair far and away the most august of the Larne's several paying passengers.
"Couldn't say, miss," Locke answered.
"Might it be pirates, do you think Captain?" asked Governor Swann with barely concealed apprehension.
"I doubt it, sir," Locke replied thoughtfully before continuing in an attempt to allay his passenger's concern. "It would take more than a cutter to take on the Larne. There can't be more than a handful of pirate ships in all of the Caribbean of a size to threaten us. My Larne might not be the fastest or handiest of ships, but we carry eight six-pounders that would make kindling of anything but a ship of war."
While her father nodded in relief, Elizabeth and I exchanged glances. Neither of us could claim any great nautical expertise, but it seemed we both shared the same doubts that the small operating crew of a merchantman such as the Larne had anything like the numbers or training to make effective use of the guns that Locke was so proud of. The line of gunports so clearly visible on the Larne's main deck was surely more a bluff than anything, and I think both of us hoped it would not be called.
Certain that the cutter presented no threat and increasing curious as to her intentions, Locke ordered the ship hove to and waited for her to run down on us. Soon even without a glass I could see that Locke hadn't understated things when he said she was carrying full canvas. The cutter, at perhaps no more than fifty or sixty feet long was less than half the length of the much bulkier Larne,but her single mast and indeed, much of her deck was all but invisible underneath the sails she carried. I used some of my recently gained nautical experience to put names to them: a gaff rigged mainsail secured to a boom projecting far over the cutter's side, huge triangular staysail in front of the mast, and in front of that, attached to the jibboom the smaller triangular jib. Above it all was a bulging, square topsail. Still we could make out no flag or any other signal. The cutter's speed alternately buried her prow in the swell so deeply as for us to lose sight of the hull itself for some seconds before lifting it well clear, only to plunge back down into the next wave. My worry that she was a pirate seemed unfounded as, from what I could see of her decks and rigging, I could make out no more than four or five men busily engaged in sail handling rather than the heavily armed crowds that a pirate would have surely carried.
With her less than a hundred yards from us, and Locke beginning to worry that she would collide with his ship, I watched as her dark clad helmsman hauled the tiller over to bring her into the wind. The topsail was quickly clewed up, then the jib and massive staysail were backed and the cutter's way came off her, bringing her to a halt as neat as could be just to windward of us. Minutes later a small boat was swayed out and three men climbed down into it, two at the oars and a third sitting in the stern.
The two oarsmen made light work of the rough sea that tossed the little boat about like a child's toy during the short crossing, and as they neared, it occurred to me that the man in the stern looked disturbingly familiar. Alarmingly familiar, come to think of it.
"It can't be," I heard Elizabeth breathe in disbelief.
Then a slightly off-cockney drawl cut across the water between us. "Oi! You there! I'm coming aboard, right?"
"Dear God, it's Jack Sparrow!" muttered Locke in appalled realisation. "We're lost!"
"Captain Locke," began Elizabeth in that cuttingly superior voice she occasionally used, "it seems to me that pirates intent on taking a prize would seldom have the courtesy to ask for permission to come aboard!"
Locke looked at her, uncertain how to answer while Jack, it seemed, had taken the lack of gunfire as an invitation to come aboard and clambered over the side with Mr Gibbs and another whom I didn't recognise. The sailors and other passenger on the Larne formed a loose circle around their outlandishly clad visitors.
"Oi? You there?" I questioned with a grin, approaching Jack. "I thought 'ahoy' was the correct nautical term."
"Yeah, but seein' as 'ow you've got such a wonderful record of not usin' correct nautical terms, I thought I'd try somethin' different so's I wouldn't 'ave to take time to explain it to you. Again." He tilted his head slightly to one side and smirked at me, gold teeth glinting in the light.
I crossed my arms and tried to put on my best glower, but somehow, as in most of the recent meetings I'd had with Jack Sparrow, the grin I'd been hiding pushed its way through. "Jack, what are you doing here, and for that matter, where's the Pearl? You haven't lost her again, have you?"
"What? No, she's jus' getting' cleaned up some. Barbossa left 'er in a bit of a mess, y'see. See, 'im captainin' 'er with 'im bein' dead 'n' all... well, let's jus' say 'e didn't bother doin' a lot of the things that needed doin'."
I could see Jack's point. The Pearl might have sailed like a witch, but when I'd seen her while I'd been Barbossa's prisoner, I'd noticed how poor a state she appeared to be in, but at the time had put it all down to the curse. It seemed I was wrong. "So what's the story with the cutter?" I asked, more than a little wary of the answer I was sure I'd get.
"I borrowed it," he replied.
"Like you 'borrowed' AnaMaria's boat?"
He looked at me, a hurt expression on his face. "Not at all!" he averred. "I asked an' everythin'."
From behind Jack I saw Gibbs struggling to hide the snort of amusement it seemed Jack's words had evoked, turning it into a not entirely convincing cough.
"I asked, didn't I?" he protested, alternating his gaze between Gibbs and I. "I sat the man down, poured 'im a drink, an' asked 'im polite as ye like: 'Mind if I borrow that cutter of yours for a while?' An' 'e said to me: 'Sure, Cap'n Sparrow, you borrow 'er as long as you like.' Ain't that exactly what 'e said to me, Mr. Gibbs?"
"Aye, Cap'n, that 'e did," agreed Gibbs, then went on much more quietly, "an' given 'e 'ad a pistol pointed at 'is 'ead at the time, I don't reckon 'e would have said anythin' different."
Jack shrugged expansively as if the exact circumstances surrounding the offer were neither here nor there. "But I did ask," he repeated with the flourish of an argument-winning answer. I gave up. Sometimes there was no winning an argument with Jack Sparrow.
"So, anyway Jack. What are you doing here?"
"I've come to see you an' Elizabeth, an' to give ye a couple o' things. Weddin' presents, ye might say."
I felt the colour rising in my cheeks, and heard Governor Swann's discreetly embarrassed cough. Around us the crew and passengers of the Larne were looking on, like theatregoers watching a play far different from the one they'd intended seeing, but enthralled nonetheless. Jack looked at me, then to Elizabeth, then to Swann. "'Ave I said somethin' I oughtn't?" he asked with a frown of bemusement on his face.
"Er... well... It's like this, you see... I haven't exactly..." I stammered.
"And I hadn't quite..." put in Elizabeth.
"Yes. Quite!" Governor Swann rounded out, interrupting us both.
"Well, it's good to hear we're clear where we all stand, then," agreed Jack, nodding seriously.
I contented myself with a glare.
Any future comments were forestalled by a shout from above. "Deck there! Sail off the windward beam! She's a three-master for sure!"
I saw Locke reach for the glass only for it to be snatched from his hands by a suddenly much more purposeful Jack Sparrow. Any protest Locke might have made died unsaid with a single look at the expression on Jack's face. He met my gaze for a moment, paused as if wanting to say something, then the old familiar grin crossed his face. "Back in a sec'," he said before he turned, tucking the glass in his vest as he did, and climbed rapidly up the Larne's main mast to where the increasing confused lookout must have been waiting.
The rest of us left below exchanged glances, not knowing what to say. Then I looked at Gibbs, saw the beginnings of worry there, and knew that he at least had some idea of what was going on. "Mr. Gibbs," I started.
"Wait, lad," he said softly. "Just wait for Jack."
We didn't have to wait long. After a few minutes Jack slid down one of the mainmast's backstays and handed the glass back to Locke, then without a word to us headed up to the windward side of the quarterdeck to watch the approaching ship. Governor Swann led the rush to follow him. "Captain Sparrow," he began, "what is that ship?"
Jack finally looked at us. "Pirates!" he answered with a sardonic grin that quickly faded, and with it any hint of good humour leeched out of his face. "Pirates," he repeated. "Captain 'Black Bob' Crauford and the Blood Eagle."
At that the stunned quiet on the quarterdeck became bedlam. Jack Sparrow might take your gold, but everyone there knew that Black Bob Crauford would kill you, and enjoy doing it. Captain Locke was shaking his head in dismay, muttering to himself. "Larne can't outrun him, and if we fight we'd stand as much chance against his guns as a rowboat..."
"Captain Sparrow," asked Governor Swann, taking control, "can we not transfer the Larne's passengers and crew to your ship? She appears a more weatherly craft than the Larne, and in her surely we might stand a chance of outrunning Crauford's Blood Eagle."
Jack shook his head. "Take too long. She'll be on us in less'n an hour, an' with this sea I can't lay the Kathleen alongside to take everyone off in one go, which means they'd all 'ave to come over by boat. An' there ain't enough time for that." Then he went on in a much softer voice, pitched for our ears alone. "Mind you, I reckon if it's jus' the three of you to get across, we could get clean away, no problem at all."
My instinctive refusal of his scheme warred with my concern for Elizabeth's welfare should the Larne and her passengers fall into Crauford's hands. Elizabeth, however, was characteristically forthright in her opinions. "Captain Sparrow, that is an infamous suggestion!" she retorted sharply. "I refuse to leave these people to such a horrible fate."
"I agree, Captain Sparrow," the Governor added, courageously willing to stand by his principles despite his evident fear at the inevitable outcome.
Jack scowled at us and muttered something under his breath about the foolishness of "damned idiotic stiff-necked women..." then he looked again at the ever nearer Blood Eagle. "Right, if that's it, I'll best be off, then!" he announced abruptly and turned to go, leaving the rest of us standing somewhat stunned on the quarterdeck. Shaking off the shock at such callousness, I hurried after him.
At Jack's gesture, Gibbs and his cohort were already climbing back down into the Kathleen's launch and I caught up with Jack as he was about to join them. "You're honestly just going to run out on us?" I accused.
"Pirate!" he reminded with a smirk.
I looked at him. Pirate he may be, but I knew Jack had his own, albeit slight odd, set of principles however well he liked to hide them. And in that moment of awful clarity I knew he had no intention of running away.
"I'm going with you!" I blurted out.
"No you're bloody well not!" he argued.
"I'm going with you," I repeated firmly, and glared at him with all the stubbornness I could muster.
He looked at me for a few moments as if gauging my intent, then shrugged, nodded once, "alright then," he said, as if he might have been agreeing to nothing more adventurous than a jaunt around the bay. With a characteristic grin he followed me as I scrambled down into the boat, trying not to trip up on my sword which seemed intent on getting entangled between my legs as I climbed. We pulled away from the Larne's side and I didn't dare look back for fear of the disappointment I felt sure I would see in Elizabeth's face at my apparently craven action.
Soon I was climbing up the side of the Kathleen and it immediately struck me how very much smaller than the Larne she was, not to mention the fact that the Kathleen carried no guns.
Less than a minute after the boat had been swayed on board, I felt the cutter's movement change as the jib and staysail were sheeted home and the gaff mainsail hauled taut so the boom was nearly parallel to the line of the ship. I moved to help Jack who was having to lean heavily into the tiller to hold our course so close to the wind.
Directly in front of us the Blood Eagle loomed closer than ever.
"Don't worry, Will my lad," he grinned at me. "I have a plan!"
Jack Sparrow had a plan. I looked at him then back at the Blood Eagle.
Jack Sparrow had a plan.
God help us all.
TBC.