Any Port In a Storm
Author's Notes : Sorry for the delay on this chapter, but I've honestly been too busy to sit down and work on this one for awhile. I do believe, however, that it shall prove to be well worth the wait; this is, personally, my favorite chapter so far, and the piece that's been the most enjoyable to write this month. There's something tranquil, here - something slow and sensual that I don't quite want to leave behind. I've grown to cherish this sideplot just as much as Jack. I hope you all come to do so, as well.
Please; read slowly, and savor.
* * *
Chapter VIII : In the Golden Irish Dawn
[ colloquial title : Part I : but waves in a storm ]
morning has broken
like the first morning
blackbird has spoken
like the first bird
praise for the singing
praise for the morning
praise for the springing
fresh from the world
- cat stevens -
******
"Who was Grace...?"
... She was a Goddess, that's who she was; a red haired Goddess from the North, with skin like pale cream silk and a tongue like boiled leather against a bruised hide. She was a true Irish beauty, red haired and blue eyed, with the soul of a man and all the sweet, sensual wisdom of a woman. She was a child of the Tribes - one of those ancient blooded creatures, who's ancestors had known Mysteries now lost to mankind. She was a writer, and a sailor, and a formidable player of cards. She was a woman who could read three languages yet spoke with the tongue of a sailor; a woman who owned fine jewels from Spain, yet wore a rawhide bracelet... a woman who preferred freedom to propriety, a woman who loved life more than money.
She was the one I had loved, and lost.
Sometimes William Turner is simply too gentle for his own good. I love him, of course I do - I love him more than I thought myself capable of loving anyone or anything -- because of this I find myself worrying for him almost constantly. Sometimes it's all too easy to forget all that he's seen and felt and experienced in his few short years; his face screams of innocence, and his eyes are so blessedly earnest that it seems not only a shame, but a sin, to taint them with harsh wisdom any further.
I didn't want to tell him about Grace. I wanted to make him laugh some more, because he was beautiful when he laughed, and because I didn't want him to worry anymore. A year and a half ago, I I'd left him behind me for his own good. My own pain hurts him far too much for me to bear, at times; when I bleed he bleeds, and he suffers for my mistakes twice as hard as I do, simply because he loves me.
But when a man kisses the blood from your lips in your hour of greatest pain, you owe it to him to answer a seemingly simple question -- seemingly, unfortunately, being the operative.
"She was a lot of things," I said.
"Was she beautiful?" he asked; and I smiled, because yes, she'd been beautiful, and no, she had not cared. Her looks meant nothing to her. She let her silky red hair tangle in the wind and did not brush it for days on end.
"She was beautiful," I told him, "as only wild things can be beautiful. She walked barefoot through the sand and mud and streets of Donegal and turned her dainty feet black with earth. She wore no paint, but let the chilled Irish air paint her cheeks rose instead. She was a rogue child of the northern wilderness; born in Killybegs to a fishing family who'd not only expected male children, but needed them to carry on the family business. Grace was the eldest of six daughters, and every bit the fisherman her father was. She did the work of a man with a woman's delicate fingers, kept the soul of a man behind a woman's delicate features ... but yes, she was beautiful. More beautiful than one could ever imagine."
"You loved her," whispered Will.
"I loved her. Oh yes, I loved her. But sometimes, Will, love simply isn't enough."
"What happened to her, Jack," he asked me. "What happened to you? And what happened here, last night?"
And the ghost of Grace McClannathan whispered "we are waves" in my ear.
I closed my eyes, took a breath, and so began the tale.
***
The first thing I met was The Whip, not The Woman.
I cheated her at cards, and she broke my nose in a single blow. Only a foolish girl or a wizened wench takes a seat at a tavern card table among the men, and I'd thought her a foolish girl in every sense of the words. Foolish, to frequent a coastal tavern like The Killybegs Black Dog. Foolish, to wear the garb of a man with a body like that. Foolish, to flaunt her youth and her beauty amongst the company of aged scoundrels and whelps. Foolish for wasting her ace on the fourth throw. A pretty little thing, and worth a pretty penny from the looks of it.
I couldn't have been more wrong about her.
She tended the bar of The Black Dog, in the months she spent ashore. She owned no dresses save for the fine gowns her great grandmother had passed down to her, and she never wore them. Instead she wore the clothes of her male peers and compatriots and thought nothing of it; and rough-tanned leather breeches were sinful on her hips and thighs, though she left her loose linen shirts unbuttoned at the top and her tight-cinched bright sashes wound enticingly round the curve of her little waist, every man who frequented The Black Dog either knew better than to open their mouths, or learned the very hard way. Grace McClannathan had not earned her nickname, "The Whip," for nothing. And she'd had the high joker all along.
She didn't get to throw it, though. I made my move before she had the chance to -- cheated her the way I had cheated thousands of hardened cardsmen and gotten away with it clean; held my ace of hearts and threw off, saving it for her king.
"Aye, ye think yer fingers right swift, then, lad."
And then she broke my nose clean, with one tiny fist -- rising from her seat too quickly for me to see and sending me clear over backwards with one blow. When I managed to open my eyes, she was standing over me. She held up the ace of hearts from my deck with two fingers, then slid it into her pocket with a little smile.
"That'll be my book, there."
She looked perfect -- a Siren with snarled, untamed hair and a Mona Lisa smile. The hand that she offered me was tiny, graceful, like the hand of a china doll covered in dirt. Her little nails were perfect ovals. Her grip was like iron, as she helped me to my feet.
I loved her from that moment on.
We gambled and drank the Black Dog dry, that night, of all it's rum and it's gold; we made far better friends than enemies at the card table, and when dawn came we were both very rich and very drunk, and spent of our pleasures on the deck of her fishing boat, the 'Sweet Jane'. In the tavern she had been a man -- but in love, she was a woman, a goddess; the epitome of all that is soft and sensual and uniquely feminine. She kissed as a woman, touched as a woman, yielded as a woman in the wild Irish moonlight.
I remember her lying there, with her hair spread about her -- a lions mane of burnished reds and coppers, spread in silken waves over the worn, faded wooden deck. The warm, golden fingers of First Light had just crept over the horizon to caress her porcelain curves ... to drip like honey over the countor of her hip and thigh, to dip into her navel and curve beneath her breast, to cup her jaw and set her delicate features alight. Red and gold, red and gold. Her hair became the dawn, and the dawn became her hair. Even her eyelashes were on fire. Lithe and lurid and abandoned to reflection, she lay sprawled and shameless on her back, with one arm cradled beneath head and her face turned out to the sea and the newborn sunlight. Silence, save for all of the good, comforting creaks and groans of the little boat, and the soft lap of the breakers against her hull, and far off, somewhere, the cry of a few hungry birds.
She did not mind me watching her. She let me look at her, as she looked at the sea; let me smooth her lurid locks against the roughened planks with my fingertips, let me watch the sun rise in her eyes. Grace had no fatal drop of inhibition in her, no fear of closeness or tenderness or silence as most women seem to harbor. She wore nothing but her rawhide bracelet and the golden Irish dawn -- and in those moments, I do believe that I knew sheer bliss for the first time in my life. Time stood still on the deck of the 'Sweet Jane'; she was mine, and I was hers, and for one sweet sunrise I wanted nothing, needed nothing, save for exactly what I had.
"I want time to stop right here," I told her.
"And leave behind your bonny galleon for the likes of a poor fishing schooner and her penniless captain? You lie like a rug, Captain Sparrow. Think of all the grand adventures you would miss."
Softness in her words, and in her hair against my cheek. She stretched against the deck like a large, lazy feline, her laugh warm and sweet and slow in the back of her throat. I kissed the origin of it -- pressed my lips to the hollow of her throat, then her jugular, then the underside of her jaw; following the laughter to her lips with my own. She rolled her head back and let me kiss her, sighing into me with a deep, languid breath.
I propped myself up on my elbow and looked down at her.
"Come with me, Grace,"
"Stay with me, Jack," she replied with a coy little smile, and reached up to brush my hair from my face. "And that'll be the way of it, dearie. 'Come'. 'Stay'. Oh, we could break each other, you and I. We could wound each other as no other forces on earth have the power to wound." She turned her face to the sea, again, and as though reading from the horizon she said;
"We're nothing but sheer will, you and I. We're nothing but waves in a storm -- momentum and force and velocity, whipped along by the winds. You've seen waves collide as many a time as I; the crash of water pounding against water -- roiling, foaming, explosive. For one split second the waves are not waves but one grand peak of water before they break, and roll back."
Quite suddenly she rose up, rolled atop me in one fluid, easy motion. Dawn was burning on the horizon beyond her, and her hair burned with it; a tangled, sunstruck mantle of copper and gold cascading over her shoulders and breasts to lick at my own ribs. She braced her arms on either side of me, let her weight rest in her shoulders, looked straight into my eyes and said;
"We are waves, Jack. Don't ask me to come. I won't ask you to stay. Let the tides take ye where they will -- come ye back to Killybegs, and I'll welcome ye with open arms."
And then she kissed me; leaned in close and kissed me, pressing her lithe body flush against mine as day broke in full over Donegal Bay, and the Sweet Jane, and the puzzle of our tangled limbs.
I stayed a full fortnight aboard the Sweet Jane, caring nothing for the passing of time. There were more sunrises, and sunsets, and moonlit moments of passion and perfect understanding; but it's that very first morning that remains burned into my memory -- when time stood still in the golden Irish dawn, and it seemed as though I had forever before I would have to leave her.
But leave her I did. I don't know why. Maybe if I had given it all away and stayed with her ... maybe if I had stayed, things would have been different. Maybe they would have been perfect. I'll never be able to say for sure. I only know that Barbossa still haunted me, even in her arms. I only know that my crew grew weary of the same old food and drink, and the same old tavern wenches, and the days of doing nothing beneath a bleak Irish sky that grew progressively colder by the day. The sea called to me. There was gold to be taken and rum to be tasted, horizons to be chased and leagues to be searched for the Pearl and her cursed crew.
And so it was that I pulled anchor one bitter cold morning, on the brink of winter; held her one last time and promised to return before the snow fell twice more. I took the finest ivory bead from my hair, and tied it into hers. On the frozen docks of Killybegs we shared our final kiss -- a kiss that lasted forever, yet ended far too quickly -- and for one moment, I nearly changed my mind. I nearly gathered her into my arms and turned my back on my ship, and my crew, and my life. I nearly stayed.
It was the call of my first mate that shattered that moment. The gray Irish morning rushed back to me on the cold gust of wind that carried his voice, and time moved again, and suddenly the choice was gone from me. I had to go. We both knew it.
"I'll come back to you," I told her.
She smiled softly through her hair, that Mona Lisa smile, and pressed a butterfly kiss to my fingers before she let go of them. Tears in her eyes, or maybe just the sting of the Donegal wind. My first mate called again. I could not look her a moment longer without giving way to tears myself.
I'd nearly made it to the gangplank when her voice stopped me; my name, spoken with the soft, familiar lilt of her Irish brogue. I turned around.
And from her pocket, she drew a single, battered playing card -- the card she had taken from me in the Black Dog that first, fateful evening. The ace of hearts.
"That's your book, there," I told her. "Keep it."
She lifted her chin a bit into the wind, kissed the card, and held it up between two slender fingers before sliding it back into her pocket. And then she turned, and walked back up the pier without a backward glance.
I never saw her again.
I put Killybegs out of my mind. I took to the southern seas and never looked back. I laid claim to anything that lay beyond the bow of my ship, be it vessel or port. I pursued each and every lead on the Black Pearl to their inevitable dead ends. I lived as though Grace McClannathan had been a dream - and slowly but surely, she became just that in my mind; a phantom goddess, frozen in my memories in those moments when I had loved her best. I put Ireland behind me, and kept my eyes on the horizon.
My crew, however, had not so soon forgotten my brief bout of insanity, the way they saw it -- for what but sheer madness could persuade Captain Jack Sparrow to waste his time on such on unlucrative misadventure as what they had begrudgingly endured in Killybegs? The idea that I had loved her never once crossed their minds. Indeed, it was my first who posed the question to me before we had even left the Irish sea;
"Blimey, Captain, why didn't you just bring the wench along? She's a right bonny little thing--"
"Trim up the topsail, Davey."
"-- you could have at least shared the goods --"
And as smoothly as Grace had broken my nose, I broke David Spencer's, with one clean, well placed blow.
- to be continued -
******
A/N II : The tale is but half told, I understand -- but I didn't want to keep you waiting forever. Expect the next chapter within the week.
Author's Notes : Sorry for the delay on this chapter, but I've honestly been too busy to sit down and work on this one for awhile. I do believe, however, that it shall prove to be well worth the wait; this is, personally, my favorite chapter so far, and the piece that's been the most enjoyable to write this month. There's something tranquil, here - something slow and sensual that I don't quite want to leave behind. I've grown to cherish this sideplot just as much as Jack. I hope you all come to do so, as well.
Please; read slowly, and savor.
* * *
Chapter VIII : In the Golden Irish Dawn
[ colloquial title : Part I : but waves in a storm ]
morning has broken
like the first morning
blackbird has spoken
like the first bird
praise for the singing
praise for the morning
praise for the springing
fresh from the world
- cat stevens -
******
"Who was Grace...?"
... She was a Goddess, that's who she was; a red haired Goddess from the North, with skin like pale cream silk and a tongue like boiled leather against a bruised hide. She was a true Irish beauty, red haired and blue eyed, with the soul of a man and all the sweet, sensual wisdom of a woman. She was a child of the Tribes - one of those ancient blooded creatures, who's ancestors had known Mysteries now lost to mankind. She was a writer, and a sailor, and a formidable player of cards. She was a woman who could read three languages yet spoke with the tongue of a sailor; a woman who owned fine jewels from Spain, yet wore a rawhide bracelet... a woman who preferred freedom to propriety, a woman who loved life more than money.
She was the one I had loved, and lost.
Sometimes William Turner is simply too gentle for his own good. I love him, of course I do - I love him more than I thought myself capable of loving anyone or anything -- because of this I find myself worrying for him almost constantly. Sometimes it's all too easy to forget all that he's seen and felt and experienced in his few short years; his face screams of innocence, and his eyes are so blessedly earnest that it seems not only a shame, but a sin, to taint them with harsh wisdom any further.
I didn't want to tell him about Grace. I wanted to make him laugh some more, because he was beautiful when he laughed, and because I didn't want him to worry anymore. A year and a half ago, I I'd left him behind me for his own good. My own pain hurts him far too much for me to bear, at times; when I bleed he bleeds, and he suffers for my mistakes twice as hard as I do, simply because he loves me.
But when a man kisses the blood from your lips in your hour of greatest pain, you owe it to him to answer a seemingly simple question -- seemingly, unfortunately, being the operative.
"She was a lot of things," I said.
"Was she beautiful?" he asked; and I smiled, because yes, she'd been beautiful, and no, she had not cared. Her looks meant nothing to her. She let her silky red hair tangle in the wind and did not brush it for days on end.
"She was beautiful," I told him, "as only wild things can be beautiful. She walked barefoot through the sand and mud and streets of Donegal and turned her dainty feet black with earth. She wore no paint, but let the chilled Irish air paint her cheeks rose instead. She was a rogue child of the northern wilderness; born in Killybegs to a fishing family who'd not only expected male children, but needed them to carry on the family business. Grace was the eldest of six daughters, and every bit the fisherman her father was. She did the work of a man with a woman's delicate fingers, kept the soul of a man behind a woman's delicate features ... but yes, she was beautiful. More beautiful than one could ever imagine."
"You loved her," whispered Will.
"I loved her. Oh yes, I loved her. But sometimes, Will, love simply isn't enough."
"What happened to her, Jack," he asked me. "What happened to you? And what happened here, last night?"
And the ghost of Grace McClannathan whispered "we are waves" in my ear.
I closed my eyes, took a breath, and so began the tale.
***
The first thing I met was The Whip, not The Woman.
I cheated her at cards, and she broke my nose in a single blow. Only a foolish girl or a wizened wench takes a seat at a tavern card table among the men, and I'd thought her a foolish girl in every sense of the words. Foolish, to frequent a coastal tavern like The Killybegs Black Dog. Foolish, to wear the garb of a man with a body like that. Foolish, to flaunt her youth and her beauty amongst the company of aged scoundrels and whelps. Foolish for wasting her ace on the fourth throw. A pretty little thing, and worth a pretty penny from the looks of it.
I couldn't have been more wrong about her.
She tended the bar of The Black Dog, in the months she spent ashore. She owned no dresses save for the fine gowns her great grandmother had passed down to her, and she never wore them. Instead she wore the clothes of her male peers and compatriots and thought nothing of it; and rough-tanned leather breeches were sinful on her hips and thighs, though she left her loose linen shirts unbuttoned at the top and her tight-cinched bright sashes wound enticingly round the curve of her little waist, every man who frequented The Black Dog either knew better than to open their mouths, or learned the very hard way. Grace McClannathan had not earned her nickname, "The Whip," for nothing. And she'd had the high joker all along.
She didn't get to throw it, though. I made my move before she had the chance to -- cheated her the way I had cheated thousands of hardened cardsmen and gotten away with it clean; held my ace of hearts and threw off, saving it for her king.
"Aye, ye think yer fingers right swift, then, lad."
And then she broke my nose clean, with one tiny fist -- rising from her seat too quickly for me to see and sending me clear over backwards with one blow. When I managed to open my eyes, she was standing over me. She held up the ace of hearts from my deck with two fingers, then slid it into her pocket with a little smile.
"That'll be my book, there."
She looked perfect -- a Siren with snarled, untamed hair and a Mona Lisa smile. The hand that she offered me was tiny, graceful, like the hand of a china doll covered in dirt. Her little nails were perfect ovals. Her grip was like iron, as she helped me to my feet.
I loved her from that moment on.
We gambled and drank the Black Dog dry, that night, of all it's rum and it's gold; we made far better friends than enemies at the card table, and when dawn came we were both very rich and very drunk, and spent of our pleasures on the deck of her fishing boat, the 'Sweet Jane'. In the tavern she had been a man -- but in love, she was a woman, a goddess; the epitome of all that is soft and sensual and uniquely feminine. She kissed as a woman, touched as a woman, yielded as a woman in the wild Irish moonlight.
I remember her lying there, with her hair spread about her -- a lions mane of burnished reds and coppers, spread in silken waves over the worn, faded wooden deck. The warm, golden fingers of First Light had just crept over the horizon to caress her porcelain curves ... to drip like honey over the countor of her hip and thigh, to dip into her navel and curve beneath her breast, to cup her jaw and set her delicate features alight. Red and gold, red and gold. Her hair became the dawn, and the dawn became her hair. Even her eyelashes were on fire. Lithe and lurid and abandoned to reflection, she lay sprawled and shameless on her back, with one arm cradled beneath head and her face turned out to the sea and the newborn sunlight. Silence, save for all of the good, comforting creaks and groans of the little boat, and the soft lap of the breakers against her hull, and far off, somewhere, the cry of a few hungry birds.
She did not mind me watching her. She let me look at her, as she looked at the sea; let me smooth her lurid locks against the roughened planks with my fingertips, let me watch the sun rise in her eyes. Grace had no fatal drop of inhibition in her, no fear of closeness or tenderness or silence as most women seem to harbor. She wore nothing but her rawhide bracelet and the golden Irish dawn -- and in those moments, I do believe that I knew sheer bliss for the first time in my life. Time stood still on the deck of the 'Sweet Jane'; she was mine, and I was hers, and for one sweet sunrise I wanted nothing, needed nothing, save for exactly what I had.
"I want time to stop right here," I told her.
"And leave behind your bonny galleon for the likes of a poor fishing schooner and her penniless captain? You lie like a rug, Captain Sparrow. Think of all the grand adventures you would miss."
Softness in her words, and in her hair against my cheek. She stretched against the deck like a large, lazy feline, her laugh warm and sweet and slow in the back of her throat. I kissed the origin of it -- pressed my lips to the hollow of her throat, then her jugular, then the underside of her jaw; following the laughter to her lips with my own. She rolled her head back and let me kiss her, sighing into me with a deep, languid breath.
I propped myself up on my elbow and looked down at her.
"Come with me, Grace,"
"Stay with me, Jack," she replied with a coy little smile, and reached up to brush my hair from my face. "And that'll be the way of it, dearie. 'Come'. 'Stay'. Oh, we could break each other, you and I. We could wound each other as no other forces on earth have the power to wound." She turned her face to the sea, again, and as though reading from the horizon she said;
"We're nothing but sheer will, you and I. We're nothing but waves in a storm -- momentum and force and velocity, whipped along by the winds. You've seen waves collide as many a time as I; the crash of water pounding against water -- roiling, foaming, explosive. For one split second the waves are not waves but one grand peak of water before they break, and roll back."
Quite suddenly she rose up, rolled atop me in one fluid, easy motion. Dawn was burning on the horizon beyond her, and her hair burned with it; a tangled, sunstruck mantle of copper and gold cascading over her shoulders and breasts to lick at my own ribs. She braced her arms on either side of me, let her weight rest in her shoulders, looked straight into my eyes and said;
"We are waves, Jack. Don't ask me to come. I won't ask you to stay. Let the tides take ye where they will -- come ye back to Killybegs, and I'll welcome ye with open arms."
And then she kissed me; leaned in close and kissed me, pressing her lithe body flush against mine as day broke in full over Donegal Bay, and the Sweet Jane, and the puzzle of our tangled limbs.
I stayed a full fortnight aboard the Sweet Jane, caring nothing for the passing of time. There were more sunrises, and sunsets, and moonlit moments of passion and perfect understanding; but it's that very first morning that remains burned into my memory -- when time stood still in the golden Irish dawn, and it seemed as though I had forever before I would have to leave her.
But leave her I did. I don't know why. Maybe if I had given it all away and stayed with her ... maybe if I had stayed, things would have been different. Maybe they would have been perfect. I'll never be able to say for sure. I only know that Barbossa still haunted me, even in her arms. I only know that my crew grew weary of the same old food and drink, and the same old tavern wenches, and the days of doing nothing beneath a bleak Irish sky that grew progressively colder by the day. The sea called to me. There was gold to be taken and rum to be tasted, horizons to be chased and leagues to be searched for the Pearl and her cursed crew.
And so it was that I pulled anchor one bitter cold morning, on the brink of winter; held her one last time and promised to return before the snow fell twice more. I took the finest ivory bead from my hair, and tied it into hers. On the frozen docks of Killybegs we shared our final kiss -- a kiss that lasted forever, yet ended far too quickly -- and for one moment, I nearly changed my mind. I nearly gathered her into my arms and turned my back on my ship, and my crew, and my life. I nearly stayed.
It was the call of my first mate that shattered that moment. The gray Irish morning rushed back to me on the cold gust of wind that carried his voice, and time moved again, and suddenly the choice was gone from me. I had to go. We both knew it.
"I'll come back to you," I told her.
She smiled softly through her hair, that Mona Lisa smile, and pressed a butterfly kiss to my fingers before she let go of them. Tears in her eyes, or maybe just the sting of the Donegal wind. My first mate called again. I could not look her a moment longer without giving way to tears myself.
I'd nearly made it to the gangplank when her voice stopped me; my name, spoken with the soft, familiar lilt of her Irish brogue. I turned around.
And from her pocket, she drew a single, battered playing card -- the card she had taken from me in the Black Dog that first, fateful evening. The ace of hearts.
"That's your book, there," I told her. "Keep it."
She lifted her chin a bit into the wind, kissed the card, and held it up between two slender fingers before sliding it back into her pocket. And then she turned, and walked back up the pier without a backward glance.
I never saw her again.
I put Killybegs out of my mind. I took to the southern seas and never looked back. I laid claim to anything that lay beyond the bow of my ship, be it vessel or port. I pursued each and every lead on the Black Pearl to their inevitable dead ends. I lived as though Grace McClannathan had been a dream - and slowly but surely, she became just that in my mind; a phantom goddess, frozen in my memories in those moments when I had loved her best. I put Ireland behind me, and kept my eyes on the horizon.
My crew, however, had not so soon forgotten my brief bout of insanity, the way they saw it -- for what but sheer madness could persuade Captain Jack Sparrow to waste his time on such on unlucrative misadventure as what they had begrudgingly endured in Killybegs? The idea that I had loved her never once crossed their minds. Indeed, it was my first who posed the question to me before we had even left the Irish sea;
"Blimey, Captain, why didn't you just bring the wench along? She's a right bonny little thing--"
"Trim up the topsail, Davey."
"-- you could have at least shared the goods --"
And as smoothly as Grace had broken my nose, I broke David Spencer's, with one clean, well placed blow.
- to be continued -
******
A/N II : The tale is but half told, I understand -- but I didn't want to keep you waiting forever. Expect the next chapter within the week.