Jack and Bill dodged the bullet. They both rolled down onto the dock, almost into the water. Pistols drawn, they raced towards Barbossa.
"Jack! Jack! He's heading towards the church!"
The tunnel vision emerging from out of Jack's brain prevented him from answering Bill's huffing exclamations. Before him, a white cathedral stood out from the square clay buildings. Willing his legs to lengthen their stride, Jack sprinted to the towering doors with knockers heavier than most doors by themselves.
Inside, he heard a scream, and then silence. The shadows from the pews provided ample places to hide…and here was old Jack standing out in the open, he thought. Scrambling backwards to slam his back against the wall, he tripped, but caught himself.
"Sir, sir," he heard from under the nearest pew. Peering underneath it, he found a young woman huddled. "He is behind the baptismal."
Straight ahead of him, down the aisle, he saw the baptismal, a wide wooden affair so elaborate it would be easy for a monstrous man with a large hat to hide behind it. He nodded to the woman and squatted down. Hands shaking, he pulled out his sword without a sound and pushed it to her. Her startled cherry eyes gathered the sword to her chest faster than her hands did. Crawling over to the side, he maneuvered past the rays of light shining through the stained-glass windows, making his way to the front of the church. Sensing a presence behind him, he twisted his neck to spy the woman following him.
"Stay back!" he hissed at her, almost dropping his pistol as he gestured for her to go back.
"No, he has a pistol!" she whispered back.
"Enough of this," Jack muttered to himself and aimed his pistol right at the edge of the baptismal. His shot lined up, he fired.
Another shot answered his.
"Give it up, Barbossa! You won't be touching my ship, save for maybe the brig!"
"I take what I please!" Barbossa's head poked out from behind the baptismal, lurching back at the sound of another shot firing from Jack's pistol.
The woman crawled under the pew, dragging Jack's sword with her. She stopped at the other side of the pew. Another move and she would be out in the aisle. Squinting, Jack thought for sure he could see her knuckles transform from red to white gripping the sword. She looked back at him and nodded her head, her thick black curls falling into her face.
Staring back at the baptismal, Jack saw what she meant—Barbossa clambering from his hiding spot to the large chair, if not throne, where the priest would sit when the choir…it had been too long since Jack had been to mass. Sorry, Mum, he thought, closing his eyes and then snapping them open again. Where the bloody hell was Bill?
Without warning, the woman sprang up, screaming and running towards Barbossa, the sword positioned tightly in both her hands. Jack fired without thinking, part of him knowing a pirate would shoot her without a second thought. His mind finally snapping back into the present, he saw Barbossa bend down to pick up his pistol, shot from out of his own hand.
"Stand back! Stand back!" the woman shrieked, her lip trembling. Her eyes darted to Jack for less than a second before locking back onto Barbossa. Barbossa held up his hands, palms out, and took a few steps backward, a resigned expression on his face. Arching his back, he then leapt forward.
"Don't do it, mate," Jack said, close enough now to point his pistol right into Barbossa's temple. "You'll be goin' back to England now, rotting away in a jail cell."
"Don't see how things could get much worse," Barbossa said, a quiet hate building up in his cheeks and his nostrils.
"Well, it might. See, there are no diamonds. Oh, and if you look at my ship that way again, I might just be tempted to use this tiny thing here and tell the East India Trading Company I found ye dead, courtesy of one of your mute acquaintances."
XXX
"I must say, Miss Valladares, you never thought a sword would match those dainty gloves of yours," Jack said, laughing at the sight of him escorting a well-born Spanish lady home.
"Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied; and vice sometimes by action dignified," Trinidad Valladares quoted, blushing. "I think you have bravery confused with simply surviving."
"Funny how those two often coincide." They stopped in front of a massive tan house with what looked like red bamboo chutes bundled together to form a roof. The lush trees and shrubs gracing the property overlapped a long courtyard, the lone sound apart from the chirps of the birds was the gushing of a fountain behind the house. The flag displayed over the veranda matched Trinidad's canary skirt. Jack pulled up his coat by the lapels, covering his tattered shirt and vest underneath it.
"You must come in now that it is dark," Trinidad said. "My uncle will be away, but there is plenty to eat and there are many rooms for you to stay the night."
"It's very kind, but I do have my ship to get back to and, well, I trust my first mate, but there is a violent pirate in the brig there, and, not that Bill is a right simpleton, but…" he trailed off, already up the
front steps to the veranda, watching Trinidad turn her key into the lock. "They wouldn't leave without me, but knowing the circumstances…"
"I insist you stay, Jack," she said. "Had no one followed that pirate inside, I might have died."
"Were you at Confession, by chance?" He liked the blush that came over her, already giving him his answer. At her nod, he said, "What would a sweet Spanish lady like yourself have done that warrants a Confession?"
"That is hardly for you to know." She threw her coat over a chair.
"It just doesn't seem to match the woman I was walking with who, after all she's endured, still gave everything in her purse to a bum…despite a certain captain's warnings against the action. Perhaps being too generous, too charitable, too much of a lady simply now qualifies as a sin…"
"I am quite generous, Captain Sparrow," she said without inflection. "But, as you've said, there is such a thing as being too generous. Now, promise me you will eat something and we will go back to calling you Jack. I quite like the name." She broke a loaf of bread from the box in a kitchen larger than Jack's own cabin and handed him a piece. He bit into it, trying to figure out what a refined woman meant by "too generous."
"That's better, isn't it, Jack?" she asked.
"Being called Jack is nice, I'll agree. So, if I may ask, how does one spend one's weekends when said person is not bandaging the sick or bundling up gift baskets?"
Trinidad sat at the harpsichord bench, her hands forming talons upon touching the yellowed keys. She struck one note, but hesitated, biting her lip. She motioned for Jack to sit in one of the chairs close to her. Her Crucifix toppled out of her neckline while she bent over the instrument. Gulping, she faced him. It was such a surreal moment, Jack thought, seeing Trinidad face him, stand up so smoothly, walk over to him, and plant her lips onto his. It was as brief a moment as her long lashes shutting and opening.
"My weekends are spent being too generous with myself, sir," she said. "Forgive me. I'll show you to your room now."
Even with only the moonlight and a candle flicker or two, there was enough light for anyone to see Trinidad Valladares' cheeks flush.
XXX
The warmth from nuzzling his face against a woman's neck and loose hair provided Jack a new sensation he found most pleasant. Her eyes had stayed open during most of the night, just listening to Jack at some points and then watch him listening to her for the rest. But now with them closed, he could turn more onto his side and curl into her, his arms tightening around her waist. Awake for what he hoped would not be a long time, he scanned her room—the creamy vanity, the beige and scarlet curtains, separating from the massive window due to a cool gust of wind.
"If I were to ask you what you were thinking, would it wake my servants?"
Jack turned back to her deep-set eyes, puffing only a fraction from being closed for so long.
"You didn't care if they heard anything before."
"That was when I was awake enough to prevent anything." She brushed her cheek up along his chest up to his neck, moving his hair out of the way. "What do you think Mr. Turner has decided to do about Barbossa?"
"He hasn't decided anything. Bill only makes a decision when he needs to, not that he doesn't have a mind of his own or that his decisions are poor, but he has his orders. Ah," he sighed. "You know the first time I did this, the wench robbed me."
"Really?"
"Yep. It's nice to be the poorer of the two for once, unless you have some urges I have yet to discover. 'If love be rough with you, be rough with love; prick love for pricking, and you beat love down,' eh?"
"Don't speak of love, Jack. You know what this is." Trinidad removed the sea of sheets around her and sat up, her breasts bare and her collarbone sporting a suggestive blotch, at which Jack could not resist gaping. "Admiring your work?" she asked, stretching her arms above her head. About to push off of the bed, Jack tugged on her hair and gathered her back into him. "At least my uncle will not be returning today. It would have been most amusing for him to chase you out of our house."
"Oh yes, amusing is the word I would use for it as well," Jack said. "So, you really wish me to not mention love?" He kissed her jaw. "There is a first time for everything, I suppose, but it does tend to make one rethink his ability to pleasure women as it were. Had you been, well, every other one I've been with, you'd be telling me you loved me to the point where I'd tire of it. We could pretend for a while, eh? No comparing you to a soft light from yonder window breaking and all of that?"
"If I'm to be pledged to a stranger, I would at least like to have my adventures while I still can," she snapped, clamping her eyes shut.
"What's that?"
"Nothing."
"No. You tell me." He twisted his upper body so he it hovered over hers. "I heard the word adventure and it can't end there. It just can't."
"Jack," she sighed. "I will be given away to a rich, ill-traveled nobleman and I will go from living in this house to living in one just like it. Perhaps the 'generosity' I bestow is my way of having adventures before that happens."
"Trini, look at me. You held a pirate at the point of a sword. I don't pretend to know what it must be like to be a lady, but no one deserves an ill-traveled nobleman, to be sure." Failing to cause a laugh emit from her, he tried again. "Come with me. Yes, you can come with me. You wouldn't have to do a thing. I don't expect a sailor out of ye, much less a girl what can even swim, but I'd teach you. And if you didn't want to do that, I'd drop ye off anywhere in the world, anywhere. Name the place."
"Run away and start a new life," she whispered, half to him, half to herself. "Doing what?"
"Whatever you would want. It's an exciting time to be alive, Trini, especially out on the sea, doing whatever you want to do. The Wench could use a mum, a girl what cared for her the way I care for her."
"Is that the kind of girl you want to settle down with?"
"I never said settle down. You're stalling so you don't have to answer."
"No, this intrigues me," Trinidad said. "We've already established you want a girl that can sail. What else? You wanted me to speak of love and now I am."
"No para discussion!" he mock-yelled, digging under the sheets for his shirt.
"You know what I think," she taunted. "I think a virgin for Captain Jack Sparrow. Have you ever been with a virgin?"
"My dear, the definition of a virgin would make the answer to that question a most unquestionable no."
"Captain Jack Sparrow breaking a virgin, what an image. Mind you, if you're gentle, she'll love you forever. It is a painful, scarring experience for a woman, and she would insist upon the fact she would have your eternal love and open affection from that time onward."
"Coming with me or not?" Jack pushed his leg through his trousers, tightening his belt before practically spinning in a circle in search of his boots. "I'm serious."
"So am I. Forget about me and find another young woman who has been untouched. There are plenty."
"I know you're afraid," Jack said, bending over her, his hands on her wrists. "But I'd take care of you until you were settled. It's a big world, Trini, bigger than you know it to be, new worlds all over the place. Someone would take care of you after me. You're unhappy here? Then come with me. It's a beautiful ship, most beautiful thing in the world. You deserve to ride in it."
"Jack," she said with a sharpness that had been entirely absent for all their conversation and other activities that previous night. "I did not ask you to rescue me. Here." She left the bed and pulled a lace scarf out of one of her vanity drawers. "If you are ever in Spain again, you will come see me, rich and respected with a passel of children."
"And happy?"
"Deliriously." She kissed him, guiding his hands up to her cheeks for them to cup, forcing his mouth open with her tongue. It was not until she broke away from him that he felt the silky lace wrapped around his wrist. "When you are in Spain again, you can bring that back to me. Now," she said, patting his shoulders, "You should be getting back to your ship."
XXX
Covering one of his eyes with his hand, Jack descended the steps to the brig, careful to not allow any drop of sweat to trickle onto his lace. If Trinidad was so certain she would be happy when he next saw her, then he would have to return her gift unsoiled and as pristine as it was when it lay in her drawer with any number of identical siblings. Going from the bright outdoors down into the dark hull, the covered eye adjusted easily to the transition.
"Well, Hector Barbossa, it appears you almost escaped the clutches of Captain Jack…" His foot caught on the last step, but he caught himself, his taunting tone replaced with a relieved smile. "Rum?" He crossed to the bars and clanged an empty bottle against them.
"Thinkin' yer quite clever, ain't ya?" Barbossa said, rolling his eyes. "I'll be out, and you'll be the one to do it."
Unable to deliver a crushing response, Jack loosed a hardy laugh.
"You laugh, but I know a budding pirate when I see one. Yer weak, though, soft, but with a little bit of tweaking, ye could maybe make yourself worthy of this vessel."
Jack turned and went back up the stairs. One of his sailors handed him a butter-colored envelope, causing all of Barbossa's taunts to evaporate out of his head. He knew it was from Trinidad before he even opened it, but strained his eyes to make out her curvy, elongated writing.
Jack,
This is where you can reach me should you long to keep in touch. I will not be going with you, as you may have determined, but I have written another letter to Lord Cutler Beckett detailing just how you apprehended Barbossa, making mention of the insignificant life you saved. One can only hope it does wonders for your career and your status and you will be able to come and go from Spain as you please, capturing more "privateers." Just do not forget me.
A/N: Trinidad is named after a wonderful character in James Michner's epic Texas. Her nickname is, of course, a homage to the best yellow Power Ranger ever. She and Jack quote lines from Romeo and Juliet in this chapter. I do not own POTC.
I want to encourage everyone to read "Nights in the Bayou" by Maidenfairhair. She has another take on Jack's past that is quite fascinating. She ships me and I ship her. Cheers!