DISCLAIMER: This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by Disney. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended. Hopefully, Disney's many experienced lawyers will not decide to come after me for this, as I posses only a Gateway computer, some black eyeliner, and a stack of library books on sailing ships and the navy.
Posted by: Elspeth (AKA Elspethdixon).
Author's Notes: To my eternal shame, I have only seen this movie once, so if you find any mistakes, inconsistencies, or inaccuracies in characterization, please tell me. Also, as per Teleute's suggestion, nautical terms and the like will now be glossed at the end of each chapter.
Ships: Will/Elizabeth, Jack/Elizabeth, eventual Jack/Will, eventual Norrington/OC
Warning: This story contains killing, stealing, lots of angst, an OC, and a non-evil Norrington. It also contains drinking, swearing, a male/male relationship, and an eventual threesome. Sadly, it probably will not contain any hot, steamy sex scenes.
Chapter Three: In Which Mary Rose Relates her Tragic Story, and Norrington is Greatly Moved.
They'd not been gone but about two weeks,
I'm sure it was not three,
when that fair maiden, she began to weep.
She wept most bitterly.
Why do you weep, my own true love?
Weep for your golden store?
Or do you weep for your house carpenter?
You're never gonna see him anymore.
When the green mass that was the island of Jamaica finally appeared on the horizon, Mary Rose very nearly wept with relief. The Golden Dolphin, undermanned and half crippled, had been limping slowly through the Caribbean waters for nearly three weeks, while the eyes of all aboard her constantly searched the surrounding sea for more pirates. Now the battered little brigantine was finally within sight of port, the sails on her foremast and jury-rigged mainmast filling with the wind that would bring her to shore. It was over. This Godforsaken voyage was finally over. She did not know what awaited her in Port Royal, or what she would do now that Robert was dead, but at least she would be safe.
It took a long time to bring the Dolphin into port, short-handed as she was, and by the time the ship was moored and the gangplank laid, Mary Rose was beyond ready to disembark. Two of the sailors were kind enough to carry her chest--which the pirates had left untouched, not being much interested in women's clothing--to the dock, and she was sitting upon it tiredly, wondering how she ought to go about contacting Robert's uncle with news of her arrival, when the naval officer approached.
He stood on the dock for a moment, surveying the wreckage of the Golden Dolphin with a hard, angry look on his face. Around him, the ship's surviving crew members went about the business of unloading what remnants of cargo they still had. Apparently electing not to interrupt their work, he turned to her.
"What happened here?" he asked, in a polite voice at odds with his angry bearing.
"We were attacked," Mary Rose said dully. Could the man not see that?
"By pirates, I presume." It was not a question.
"Yes." She provided an answer even though one did not seem to be required. "By, by pirates." She could hear her voice tremble slightly over the word, and tried desperately to get a hold on herself. She could not break down and cry here on the dock, in front of a total stranger. "They took everything, even my jewelry. Everything except my wedding ring." She blinked hard several times, forcing back tears. "And, and my husband… He tried to fight them, and one of them stabbed him with a sword."
The officer's expression shifted to something gentler, sympathy, or something like it, seeping into those sharp eyes. "My condolences, Mrs…" he left the sentence hanging, waiting for her to supply the proper name.
"Swann. Mary Rose Swann. My… Robert and I were coming here to start a sugar plantation. His uncle lives here."
"Governor Swann," the officer nodded. "I know him. If you will wait until I have spoken to the ship's captain, I can provide you with an escort to his residence."
"That would be most kind of you, sir," she said.
"Commodore," he corrected gently. "Commodore Norrington." He sighed, looking unhappy. "I hate to dredge up unpleasant memories, but can you remember anything specific about the pirate ship that attacked you? Anything at all?"
"The ship had white sails," she told him, shifting her gaze downward from his stern, square-jawed face to where her hands lay folded in her lap. "I know, all ships have white sails, but some of the sailors seemed to think that important. That they were white and not black. It had more than one mast. I can't remember exactly how many. I'm sorry."
"It's all right," he reassured her. "You've been very helpful," he added, though Mary Rose was fairly certain that she had not been helpful. The details of the pirate ship were hazy in her mind, consisting mainly of a lot of confused memories of smoke and canonfire. There were other memories, however, that were not hazy at all.
"Wait," she said, forestalling him before he could turn away. "I don't remember the ship but, the pirate, the one who, who… murdered Robert. I remember him." She looked back up into Commodore Norrington's face, remembering another face, almost more pretty than handsome, with wild hair and crazy, kohl-lined eyes. "He had black hair, with, with beads and things in it. And paint around his eyes. And he killed Robert." She blinked again, but in spite of her efforts, a few tears escaped. "I think he might have been their captain."
Commodore Norrington had stiffened when she mentioned the beaded hair, and now his eyes hardened again, blazing with a contained anger that Mary Rose was very glad not to find directed at her.
"Sparrow," he growled softly, his right hand closing seemingly without his knowledge around the hilt of his sword. "I might have guessed." His grip on the sword hilt tightened until his knuckles showed white, and he glanced down at his hand almost in surprise, releasing the weapon. "I assure you, Mistress Swann, I will do everything in my power to bring to justice the scum that murdered your husband. You have my word."
Slightly startled by the force of his statement, Mary Rose stared at him for a moment, before gathering her wits to phrase an answer. "Th-thank you, Commodore. I, I would appreciate that greatly." She was almost shocked at herself to realize that her words were completely true. Never before in her life had Mary Rose wished another person harm, but the thought of her husband's killer dangling at the end of this angry Commodore's rope was very satisfying indeed.
^_~
"I am the resurrection and the life, sayeth the Lord," Father Williams intoned solemnly. "He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live…"
Beside Elizabeth in the pew, her cousin's wife wept into a handkerchief, small, quiet sobs that somehow managed to sound genteel despite the obvious grief behind them.
Elizabeth's own eyes were dry. She felt as if she should be crying; after all Robert had been her cousin. Still, it was difficult to feel any real grief over the death of someone she hadn't seen in over ten years. Her only memories of Robert were hazy recollections of an adolescent boy, seemingly vastly taller than her, who had once mocked her for having freckles. His death simply didn't seem real, because "Cousin Robert" himself had not seemed quite real in her mind.
Mary Rose, however, was most definitely real, and so was her grief, and the sight of her trying manfully—womanfully?—to suppress her tears finally brought a few tears of sympathy to Elizabeth's own eyes. The poor woman had been through so much, crossing the ocean only to be stranded in a strange land without her husband. She had not even been able to bury him properly, there being time for only a quick prayer and a hastily murmured "we commit his body to the deep," before the Dolphin had had to sail on, hence the memorial service now.
Elizabeth and her father had not asked Mary Rose about Robert's death, accepting her brief declaration that he had been slain trying to fight off a pirate attack without pressing her for further details. Governor Swann had his own memories of Captain Barbossa's crew and their attacks on Port Royal and the navy vessel he and Norrington had sailed out to search for Elizabeth in. Elizabeth had similar memories, and could very well imagine the sorrow she would feel if she were to somehow lose Will. Neither wanted to exacerbate the recent widow's grief.
After all, Elizabeth told herself, when the periodic need to check her curiosity about the Golden Dolphin's attackers arose, God alone knew what the poor woman had suffered. Not all pirates were as comparatively civilized as Jack.
Thoughts of Jack led inevitably to thoughts of Will, and she wondered what her husband was doing at the moment. Was he already in Tortuga, fixing the Black Pearl's damaged cannon, or still sailing, heading out to sea on Jack's ship with the wind in his hair and the salt spray in his face?
Either way, she wanted to be with him. She would willingly have traded every stilted conversation with the memorial service's other attendees, all offering formal and nigh identical condolences to the Swanns and Mary Rose in particular, for five minutes with Jack and Will, the deck of the Pearl heaving beneath her feet or the sand of a beach sifting between her toes.
"I'm sure Mr. Turner will return to Port Royal directly," Mary Rose ventured, as the pair of them exited the church, Governor Swann following behind them.
"What?" Elizabeth turned to face her, halting momentarily in startlement.
"Your husband," Mary Rose repeated. "I'm sure he will return shortly." She offered up a tremulous smile for Elizabeth before turning to Commodore Norrington to accept his bow and proffered sympathies. "Thank you, sir. You are most kind."
Elizabeth felt a momentary stab of guilt. Will would indeed be back in a few weeks. Robert would never be back. She ought to be the one comforting Mary Rose, not the other way round.
"I am not so much sorrowful," she confessed, as the two women were handed up into the Governor's carriage by Norrington—who gave Elizabeth a lingering glance as he assisted her—"as I am jealous that he may go sailing around the colonies while I must stay ashore." She smiled ruefully. "Ships really are freedom." Then she recalled that, given her recent experiences, ships were probably the last thing Mary Rose wanted to talk about. "Do you do embroidery?" she asked, quashing the little voice in her head that wailed at the idea of practicing any more of the stuff. "I'm sure there are some spare frames at home, and I'd be happy to sit on the veranda and sew with you, or take tea."
"Some tea would be lovely," Mary Rose replied softly, staring down at her hands before looking back up at Elizabeth. "I am afraid I do not feel up to embroidery today."
Of course she doesn't, Elizabeth scolded herself. She's just spent all morning crying. She doesn't want to squint at a needle now.
"Of course you don't," Elizabeth assured her. "It was silly of me to suggest it."
She was trying to think of some further comment to make, something that would involve neither ships nor embroidery, when she noticed Mary Rose gazing intently at her, eyes fixed on her ears. Involuntarily, she raised a hand to her head to see if one of her earrings was missing. To her relief, both little pearls were still there.
"Those…" Mary Rose hesitated. "Those earrings. Where did you get them?" She looked pale suddenly, as if she had seen a ghost.
"These?" Elizabeth reached to touch one earring again, the memory of the last time she had worn them flashing unbidden to her mind. The recollection of hands in her hair and callused fingers gliding across her throat nearly made her blush. "They were a wedding gift from a friend. A joke of sorts; pearls to remember him by. He said I looked beautiful in them." Or had that been Will? Two sets of brown eyes gazed at her in memory, one tender and one laughing, both laden with different sorts of promise.
Mary Rose had gone, if anything, even paler, face so white beneath her ash blonde hair that she looked as if she were fading into the coach's champagne-colored cushions.
"Are you all right?" she asked, reaching to place one hand on the other woman's wrist.
Mary Rose pulled her wrist away slightly, the movement almost a flinch. "Yes. Yes, I'm fine. Who did you say gave you those earrings?"
With a sudden, cold feeling in the pit of her stomach, Elizabeth lowered her hand back to her side. "No one," she said, mouth opening in an instinctive attempt to conceal, to protect. "A friend of my husband's. Why?"
"Oh, it does not matter." Mary Rose turned away, directing her attention out the small window set in the coach's side. "It's merely that, for a moment, they looked almost familiar. I imagine your friend must have bought them in London."
"Yes," Elizabeth heard herself saying, "I think he might have." Which was untrue, of course. Jack had been round the Horn once, a voyage he said had cost him two teeth to scurvy and any desire to venture that particular route to the Pacific again, but he had never been to London, or to anywhere in England at all.
^_~
Brigantine: A two-masted merchant ship.
The Horn: Cape Horn, the southernmost tip of South America. In the days before the Panama Canal was dug, sailors had to sail around it to get from the East coast of the New World to the West coast. It was essentially the sailing voyage from Hell, which is why the Panama Canal was eventually built. You could also get to the Pacific by crossing the Atlantic, rounding the Cape (of Good Hope) and then crossing the Indian Ocean.
Interesting tidbit: Norrington is shown wearing a British Naval uniform in the movie, however, Britain didn't officially adopt any sort of uniform for her Navy until the 1740s, several decades after the movie's supposed to take place. I've decided to go along with this, inaccurate or not.
Next up: Chapter Four, In Which Much Drinking Occurs, but Nothing is Resolved.
The angst and woe will be abandoned briefly in favor of vaguely slashy humor as we catch up on what Jack and Will have been doing.