A/N:
So thank you so much to everyone who reviewed. I was completely taken aback by the response. You guys rock. Many of you said you would like to see this continue, and to tell the truth, I've fallen in love with this story and I'm only one chapter in, so I've decided to continue.I hope I can do it justice. On another note, to my PotO readers, LFK will be updated soon. Thank you for your patience.
Now, where were we?
Chapter 2
"Forgive me Captain, but where is my brother?" Evelyn cast her eyes to the floor, not wanting to meet the icy glare of her fiancé.
Norrington gave an insincere smile. "Your brother, my Lady? Your brother is out roaming the seas with the East India Trading Company. They have," he paused, "business to attend to."
"Oh," she replied, and for a moment James thought that he saw relief on her face, but only for a moment. In an instant it was scrunched up again with the same look of anxious discomfort that had plaguing her since the start of their conversation. "If my brother is not here, Captain, then where am I to stay?"
James cocked an eyebrow. "Here, Lady Beckett. You will stay here until our wedding, after which you will accompany me aboard my ship, Regent. I have goods that need to be run to the Bahamas.
Evelyn blanched. "Aboard your ship?" Her voice was a nervous whisper. "With you? And a crew?" Her fingers began to kneed nervously at the lace of her dress. "But I was under the impression that men don't, that is to say, that wives aren't usually welcome aboard ships, Captain."
He shrugged. "Usually, you are correct, but I expect that I will be away from you most of the time at sea. You will be mistress of this house, but before that I will require you in my company." He walked over to the writing desk in the corner, shuffling threw some manifests that he would need to get in order before the Regent set sail.
"Why is that, Sir?"
James bit his lip, annoyed. Idiot girl. Must he spell it out for her?
"Offspring, Lady Beckett."
"But then—oh." Oh. She was tight lipped once more, her skin suddenly much too hot and much too cold. Something about the way he had said "offspring" had made her blood chill with the ill sense of foreboding. "I see."
"Indeed," he muttered, adjusting the numbers on the manifest, his back to her. "Indeed I'm sure you do."
For a few precious moments, silence surrounded them.
"Captain?"
It wasn't so much that she was asking another question, but the way in which her voice sounded as she asked it—young, naïve, afraid—that made Norrington want to smash his fist into the wall. Instead, he grated his teeth and gave a clipped "what?" The woman was twenty four for God's sake. Why couldn't she just understand what he wanted of her and leave him in peace!
"Captain, won't it come across as," she chose her words carefully, "bad form, if I stay in the home of my fiancé before we are married?"
At that, James turned, his eyes glued to the timid creature sitting in his bedroom, pale and pathetic when compared even with the memory of Elizabeth Swann.
"You will find, my Lady," he said, his voice dangerously low, "that the citizens of Port Royale have a decidedly cautious air around me. They will say nothing."
"But Captain—"
"Josiah!" He barked, and instantly a middle aged servant came into the room.
"Yes, Captain Norrington?"
"Escort Lady Beckett to her rooms. I am done with her for the evening."
As Josiah led Evelyn Beckett away, James could have almost swore that he saw a flicker of rage in her dark gray eyes.
Almost.
Lady Evelyn Beckett, youngest child of the now dead Lord William Beckett and only sister of Lord Cutler Beckett, had endured many a trying moment in her young life. She had never lacked for anything material, not being the daughter of a lord, but other areas had been greatly lacking. Her brother, like their father before him, was a cold, calculating man, though Evelyn gave him her unwavering loyalty. She had become used to their cool treatment, their easy dismal—but had hoped for more from Norrington. She suppressed the foreign pang of anger with steady reason.
Don't be ridiculous, Evie How else do you expect to be treated?
She had been at her townhouse in London when the letter had arrived, signed and sealed by her brother, commanding her to make the journey to Port Royale in the Caribbean. She had instantly packed her bags at his behest. There was a fiancé waiting for her, a James Norrington, the letter had said, a man that she knew nothing about.
But that didn't matter to Evelyn.
There was nothing left for her in London.
Not after all that had happened.
She had expected her fiancé to be an older man, perhaps a widower with children, what other man would marry a creature such as her? Twenty four and a spinster, with a reputation that was shaky at best. She had expected a man of authority, a man who would ignore her, perhaps. But the man that she had met here tonight, a younger man than she had expected, was a man whom authority ran through the very core. His eyes were ice, cold and hard and impenetrable. Evelyn could have dealt with a harsh man, perhaps even with a cruel one—
But this man was something much darker.
Something painful lurked in the depths of his bright green eyes.
A Commodore. He had once been a commodore in the British navy, but why he was no longer such had been kept from her by her brother.
"You will find, my Lady, that the citizens of Port Royale have a decidedly cautious air around me."
Evelyn Beckett was a woman kept in the dark.
"Here you go, Lady Beckett." A young maid turned down the comforter of the large, dark blue canopied bed, and Evelyn climbed in, grateful to be surrounded by the fresh linen of a bed that was anywhere but on a ship. She hated ships—or, at least the inside of them. She had been coped up on the one from England far too long to feel any other way.
"Good Lord," she said to the maid, "I couldn't imagine being a sailor, having to sleep in the hold of a ship for the majority of my life." She laughed, happy to have a young woman to speak with again. She had been too lonely for too lonely. "My nursemaids used to tell me tales of pirates to scare me into obedience, saying that they would drag me away with them to live on their ships." She fell easily into the memory, back long ago when her life had been so much simpler, when nothing had been expected of her beyond silence, and found the words spilling easily from her lips. "I was terrified of those stories, and yet I think a part of me loved them. Blackbeard, Captain Cook, Jack Sparrow."
The maid dropped the tray that she had been holding.
Evelyn bolted upright from the bed. "What? What's wrong, what did I say."
Forgive me, my Lady," the young girl begged, picking up the tray quickly, "but you must not say such things."
"What things?"
"Jack Sparrow."
The maid said the name in a hushed whisper, as if it were the worst of blasphemies.
Evelyn raised an eyebrow. "Why must I not?"
"Why the Commodore, of course, er Captain, as he is now." She narrowed her eyes at Evelyn. "Don't you know?"
Evelyn shook her head, enraptured.
"It was Jack Sparrow that brought the Commodore to his ruin, though he only chased after Sparrow because of what the Swann girl did."
Evelyn stood up, her white nightgown brushing her heels. "Captain Norrington, knew Jack Sparrow? Chased Jack Sparrow?" Disbelief shone in her eyes. "My God, that's—wait, the Swann girl? As in Elizabeth Swann?"
The maid nodded. "You know of her?"
"I know that she has been missing for quite some time. Even from the Caribbean, news travels. Or gossip travels I should say. A woman of the peerage doesn't go missing without a fare deal of London tongues wagging. The Swann's still have noble family in England."
The maid nodded. "Well you can imagine how it was here, and only months after she broke of her engagement to the Commodore, er, Captain."
"You will find, my Lady, the citizens of Port Royale have a decidedly cautious air around me."
Evelyn cocked her head, unsure of why she had a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach. "Captain Norrington was engaged to Miss Swann?"
