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Chapter 10: I've Got Plenty of Hands

The crew had finished their second rendition of the pirate song and then fallen into raucous conversation and ringing laughter. Still, Gwen found herself softly humming the tune- it was really quite catchy!- as she looked out toward the distant line where sea met sky. The sails above were filled with a steady wind already, and they were on their way.

She raised a hand to brush straying hair out of her face and turned to watch a couple of pirates heading below deck with the last of the barrels of supplies. Gwen had been led to believe, by the sober crewmen of the Graymere, most notably, that pirates were a bunch of dejected outcasts, starving to death on small boats, scrounging a life by stealing whatever they could and promptly frittering that away in taverns and brothels. The Black Pearl had certainly been the largest ship in Tortuga's shady docks, and it may hold true that she was the exception to the rule in other ways as well. But still, as far as Gwen could tell, while these pirates were every whit as selfish and lovers of the bottle as they were "supposed" to be, they were hardly dejected. And if they were outcasts, society had forgotten to tell them they were unwanted. And if any of them were starving to death, it was because he simply wasn't eating the food that was provided. The stores had just been replenished with fresh food items. She'd watched them load much of the stuff herself.

"Gwendolyn!" A hand gripped her shoulder, and she turned with it to face its owner. "I've been calling ye but ye didn't answer," Jack said.

She didn't think she'd heard him say her name at all before, except to introduce her to the Turners. Not that she could recall, anyway. He tended to just speak in her general direction, and she normally answered.

"I was just... thinking," she answered truthfully, "and lost myself. And I'm not particularly accustomed to hearing 'Gwendolyn.'" She caught a long brown curl as the wind swept it into her face and tucked it behind her ear.

"So it's 'Miss Webster,' then?" Jack asked, snidely affecting a nasal accent which he apparently thought sounded very much like a refined English gentleman.

"Well, I was going to say that I'm used to hearing it shortened to 'Gwen,' which is what I've been called for years."

"Ah," Jack said, the fact not lost on him that she seemed to be a bit less stringent, about titles and certain issues of propriety, than Elizabeth, the only other "lady" he really knew, had been just a couple of years ago. The lass hadn't mentioned a word about the one mistaken night she had fallen asleep on his bed a few days previously. He hadn't asked, and she hadn't said a word either.

"Well." Jack propelled her forward with a gentle hand at her back. "If you would be so kind, Miss Gwen," he said, still affecting his comical "genteel" accent. He steered her up the steps toward the helm. She went willingly, curious as to what he wanted of her.

"Now," he said seriously, stopping her before the wheel, "about the treasure."

"The... treasure?" she repeated. "I really don't know what you're-"

"Shh!" He glanced around to make sure no one was listening to their conversation too closely. He was still a bit paranoid about letting his crew know too much about his plans. He wasn't entirely sure where this adventure would lead, but he was hoping that his compass and its recent behavioral changes had something to do with a legendary treasure he'd been trying to track down in the past year. "What else do you know about Bill Jacobs?"

"I... may have heard a tale from my mother once, a very long time ago," Gwen said slowly, unable to follow what Jack was thinking. "She mentioned pirates a time or two when I was quite young. Just another adventure tale."

"Hmm," Jack said and frowned at her. He was familiar enough with the tale of Jacobs and his cursed treasure. But by the same token that he knew it well, she shouldn't know of it at all. Truth be told, Jacobs had been a small-scale pirate. He hadn't been terrible or successful enough for law-abiding sailors to think any more of his banner than it being just another black flag flying over a nameless vessel. Jack didn't think it was mere coincidence that the only pirate story this lass knew was an aggrandized version of a legend he'd never heard outside Tortuga.

But now was no time to interrogate her further about such things, he supposed. At least not here, where anyone might suddenly appear and overhear them. He drew out his compass and held it out toward Gwen.

She hesitated, pushing her blowing hair out of her eyes. Did he expect her to set the ship's course? She knew nothing about navigation or steering ships, let alone where exactly it was they were supposed to be going now.

"Your hand, lass," Jack finally said impatiently.

Obediently, Gwen held out her hand, palm up. He flipped open his compass and set it in her hand. She was surprised to see its tiny arrow pointed at her still before it swung about, at her touch, to its other favorite direction. She'd forgotten about the compass. And she had thought it was all a joke of some sort, anyway.

"Oh," she said, dumbstruck.

The captain's hand closed around her wrist, and he pulled her hand up so he could see the compass clearly. As he turned the wheel, altering the ship's course to match the compass, Gwen abandoned her facade completely and spoke up.

"How do you know what the compass is pointing at?" she asked.

"There's no way to know at all, luv," he said impishly but honestly. "But it's yer touch the poor thing wants, luv, so treat it nice," he said, releasing her hand and taking back his poor lonely compass.

She pushed hair out of her face again and frowned at his teasing. "You are a rascal," she said irritably, begin to get annoyed at the wind and his constant badgering both.

"I can fix that for ye," Jack said.

"And become a respectable man?" She had gathered her hair in one hand and was holding it at the back of her neck.

"Never. But I can get yer hair out of yer face."

She cast a dubious look at him. "No, thank you."

"Don't you trust me?" he asked, with a lilt which he seemed to think made him sound childishly innocent.

"No," she answered. "You're a scoundrel, a rascal, a villain, and a knave, and I don't trust you at all. Especially," she went on, pointedly eyeing his dreadlocks, "not with my hair."

His smile faltered noticeably at her teasing attack on his hair, though he chose to pretend he hadn't heard it.

"Ye forgot 'devil,' 'black sheep,' and a 'really bad egg,'" he said with a wink.

"Those as well, and countless other forms of dishonest men," she conceded, frowning as a breath of wind pulled another curl loose and into her eyes.

"If I'm all those at once, then I've got plenty of hands to plait yer hair for ye."

"Then why not use all of those hands to smooth your own mane?"

"Ladies first, dear lass," he said in an overly honeyed tone. He gestured broadly toward his cabin.

Her stock of bantering arguments being exhausted, Gwen shrugged carelessly as she made her decision and went, leading the way to his door. Truthfully, she was quite annoyed by the wind blowing her hair about and didn't particularly mind letting a man help her, odd though it was. She never could tame it herself, having been always reliant on maids to assist her.

Once inside his cabin, Jack pulled his desk chair across his rug to the center of the room. "Fair miss," he said, jabbing a finger down at the seat of the chair, the brusque motion and his jesting tone at odds with each other.

While she obediently took her seat, Jack cut a piece of twine from a ball of it that seemed to have appeared from thin air, with a knife of equally vaporous origins. Gwen allowed herself to relax, feeling safe behind the closed door, as the pirate drew his fingers through her tangled locks, smoothing it and beginning to braid it with a familiarity and ease born of a sailor's life braiding and knotting ropes. The gentle tugs and the feathery touch of his fingers reminded her, absurdly, of her mother...

"Mother?"

"Yes, dear?" Her mother drew the comb through Gwen's dark curls one last time. Setting the comb aside, she patted the top of her daughter's head.

Gwen climbed up into her mother's lap. "Will we always live here? You and me and Father in this house?"

"I don't know. Perhaps so. But one day you will probably get married and go to live with your husband."

"Have you always lived here, Mother, before you had me?"

"Of course not, child."

"But where did you live, then?"

"Well, I was born far across the ocean on an island in the Caribbean Sea."

"Were you really?" Little Gwen sounded awestruck.

Her mother nodded and continued. "Then, my mother alone brought me when I was a year old to England to raise me."

"What happened then?"

"I grew up, of course."

"What happened to Grandmother, though? Where is she now? Father told me not to ask, though," she admitted more quietly.

"She passed away some years ago. I was very lucky to meet your father very soon after that, and very lucky that he married me."

"I'm going to live in the Caribbean too, Mother, and have a daughter," Gwen said excitedly, hopping down from her lap.

Her mother fixed her with a very stern look, which then eased to one of mild shock. "I don't think you mean that, dear. There are pirates and such down there. And it's not a place for ladies."

"But my grandmother lived there," Gwen argued. After a moment, she changed subjects slightly, after the fashion that small children have of doing such. "Did she ever know any pirates?"

"She told me about a few," she said with an indulgent smile. "There was one named One-Eyed Jones." Her mother covered one of her eyes with her hand. "And Black Bill Jacobs, who hid all his treasure and was lost to sea. And Mad Kyle Keasling who drew his sword at anything that moved," she said with a playful snarling accent. She drew her daughter to her and held her tight, tickling her.

"No!" Gwen shrieked through peals of laughter. "Mother!"

Jack stepped back to admire his work. He found himself admiring Nature's work instead... the curve of Gwen's neck, the burgeoning confidence expressed in the smooth lines of her shoulders, the fair skin, the view of her breasts he could see from his vantage point standing over her...

Jack frowned and cleared his throat more for his own good than anything else, resetting his mind and veering away from those thoughts. Gwen jumped slightly. She'd been lost in thought, he knew. He focused his mind on his task again. Something was missing...

Cutting a two-foot strip with his knife from the long sash at his waist, he tied it around Gwen's head. "There ye are," he said triumphantly.

"What have you done to me?" Gwen asked quietly, waiting as he fished about for a reflective surface, trying to ignore the broad grin on his face. When he handed her an ornate hand-mirror, cracked at one edge, obviously stolen from some lady somewhere, she peered into it with a mixture of dismay and fascination.

"I look like a pirate," she observed flatly. Jack had taken advantage of her absent-mindedness. Her hair was braided into twelve or fourteen different thick plaits. With the bit of sash he'd tied over her forehead to keep the foremost plaits from her eyes, she looked every bit as exotic as many of the pirates that traipsed around the Black Pearl with strange hairstyles.

"Sexiest pirate I've ever seen," Jack said, ignoring the flustered look she gave him.