Chapter 4

He took the stone steps to their house two at a time; his trembling hands twisted the brass knob to their front door and he didn't pause to shut it as it swung wide on its hinges.

"Mum!" he exclaimed into the darkened household, not taking care to keep his voice low, sliding at a break neck pace as his feet skidded across the open wood paneling. He crashed head long into her writing desk, sending her delicate oak chair clattering to the floor, announcing his presence to his mother with a greater finesse than his previous tactics.

"William Turner!" Elizabeth exclaimed, staggering out of her room, her lids drooping, heavy with the former weight of sleep as she drank in the sight of him. Instantly, he rushed to her and took hold of her wrist.

"What on earth are you doing out of bed at this hour?" As she drew closer to greater wakefulness her observant eyes widened at the sight of his disturbed person, drenched with sea water and covered with sand.

"Why, you're soaking wet!" Her solicitous hands slid off his coat and a hint of irritation crept into her tone. He knew the lecture well; it always began in the same manner, a postlude to every adventure he'd gone on in the quiet hours of the night.

"How many times have I told you…"

Will shook his head and pulled his coat out of her grasp impatiently. It was well known amongst his school friends that William had a mother who was uncommonly precocious; the type of mother from whom any nicking of sweets from the pantry was instantly noticed, but William was sorely surprised that she'd not observed his obvious panic.

"There's no time for lectures." He pulled his damp coat back over his shoulders with a defiant air. Elizabeth's dark brows drew downward with severe displeasure.

"Down at the beach, there's a man and he's dying. We have to save him!" He grabbed her wrist again and started to pull her toward the door. Elizabeth dug her heels into the ground and tugged her wrist away. He was babbling nonsensically, but his distress made it impossible for him to speak with any coherence.

"No! I will not believe your lies again, young man. You've justified your adventures to the beaches too many times with wild stories and I refuse to believe you. I want you to march up stairs and go straight to bed. Tomorrow we will discuss, perhaps with the aide of Captain Teague, why it is you do not go down to the beaches in the middle of the night. Alone." He was risking the swipe of the birch for his insubordination, but he would not fail a fellow pirate. If the man was found dead on the beach, it would be his head…or worse, his neck. He swallowed as he recalled the sting of the pirate's blade against his neck.

"Please, you must believe me. Come with me down to the beach and see for yourself. He'll die if you don't and it will be my fault." The desperation in her son's voice caught Elizabeth's attention, and she waxed visibly between stern authority and melting to her son's wishes. Whatever he'd seen had him so worked up that it'd be impossible to coax him into sleep. It was better to put his mind at ease and consequently, she'd also put hers at rest in the process. Though she'd convinced herself she had been alone on the beach the previous morning, she'd felt the unsettled tingle of her spine of an unfriendly pair of eyes. Perhaps her son's ravings were not as contrived as they had initially seemed. More than likely, it was one of the town drunks who'd meant to stumble home from the tavern but had staggered to sleep on the beach instead.

"I can't believe I'm about to follow yet another implausible falsehood…" Elizabeth sighed as she turned to put on decent attire; she was hastily intercepted by William who blocked her path on the stairs.

"No time! No time! Come on!" He pulled on the edge of her night gown, yanked her shawl off the coat rack and drug her unwilling feet in the direction of the beach.

"If you've made this all up, and I'm caught wandering the beach in my night gown by any one more dignified than a sea gull, there'll be no supper for you for a week."

The wind gnawed at her bare ankles with a chilling bite; sand whipped around them, shooting into their eyes and making passage down the cliffs nearly impossible in some places. William trudged ahead of her, braving all wind and sand in his dedication to his goal. His determination reminded her of his father; when they had a large undertaking, father and son devoted their whole soul to it without question. It was his loyalty to prove his words true that had put her ill-at-ease. What if her son was right and there was a man lying on the beach? He could be a vagabond lying in wait to overpower helpless females… . Elizabeth smiled at the incongruence of her thoughts. There were few who might deem her helpless; she had soul as pointed as the blade that lay hidden in her boot. If they were to be ambushed, she was prepared..

"There, he's lying behind the rock," Will informed her as the wind beat against the cliffs above them, causing them to howl. Elizabeth's skepticism dripped from her face; she'd yet to discover where he'd learned the habit of lying. Certainly, it was a trait not shared with his father; of late she'd also hardly indulged in front of him.

"Oh William," she sighed, looking down at what appeared to be a ratty sheet from the mast of a ship.

"These stories must stop…" To emphasize that she had gotten his guff, she took her booted foot and nudged the sheet with her toe. The sheet shivered and moaned; her foot collided with something solid and un-sheet like. Startled, Elizabeth leapt back, pulling William behind her to protect him.

"My word, you actually were telling the truth…" She breathed as she nervously pulled the knife from her boot. As she rose with it clutched in her hand, the wind picked up with a furious gust, blowing the protective sheet away from the groaning man. Sand stung her face; her night gown flattened against her thin legs and her hair wrapped around her neck like a scarf. She took a cautious step forward; the man lay flat on his stomach, his face obscured by his hair.

He had the hair and beard of a wild man; curls twisted about his face. Another step; the smell of his body was overpowering and rancid. Her nostrils were permeated by the fetid stench of rum combined with another odor she recognized but could not bring herself to name.

William approached the man from the opposite side and had knelt by his shoulder to roll him over.

"Stay back," Elizabeth commanded fiercely and with such power that William started at the harshness of the tone. He'd heard tell that she was an awe inspiring Captain, but he'd never thought the stories were true. Tonight, he became a believer. His body followed her command, startled by the quickness in which she moved.

"Hold this and do not drop it." Elizabeth pressed his father's knife into William's small trembling hands. His eyes were wide with fear and sensing his discomfiture, Elizabeth pressed a tender hand to his frozen cheek.

"If he moves, I want you to drop the knife and run as fast and as hard as you can. I'll be right behind you…," she whispered as the tenderness drifted from her features to be replaced by dread at words they both knew were not true. He would never run and leave her at the mercy of an attacker, nor would she be right behind him. His mother was far too courageous of a woman to ever run from a fight.

Turning slowly, she moved with cat-like agility to the man's resting form. The body quivered as though shivering from the cold and the absence of the sheet. With an ungentle hand, she gripped his shoulder and with Herculean strength she rolled him over onto his back.

The stench of dried blood nearly knocked her off her feet; dawn's early light revealed a sheet drenched in crimson. Elizabeth staggered backward, pressing the sleeve of her gown to her nose to prevent her stomach from retching. It was the sickening perfume of death—the man unleashed another pain filled groan. The pitiful sound softened Elizabeth's heart as she crouched next to his head.

"Sailor, can you hear me?" Elizabeth's voice rang high in the wind, a relic of the imperious tone she used to command servants as a child in London. He grumbled a response that sounded like a combination of a variety of languages, interspersed with English responses.

"Did he say tea party?" William asked with disbelief; his mother showed signs of visible relief. That wasn't all that the man's colorful ravings had revealed, but William seemed to have not absorb the new vocabulary.

"I can't understand him," Elizabeth huffed in determination as she scooted herself closer to the body. Leaning precariously over the trunk of the man's body, she pulled aside the singed fragments of his coat with her finger and thumb.

"He's been shot," she determined; in the weak light, she could see the aftermath of a ravenous infection. The wound was festering, overflowing with puss and crusted, dried blood that seeped with every labored rise and fall of his chest.

He mumbled something coherent, a weak cry that was almost a plea. Anxiously, Elizabeth shifted her attention from the severity of his wound to the words he hardly had the strength to speak.

"Perhaps if we…" Elizabeth used her fingers to trace away the wild strands of hair away from his face. The fingers paused, trembled as she took up a strand of hair, adorned with three familiar, colorful beads; trinkets of a life long banished to the recesses of memory.

"It's not possible…," she breathed, shaking her head as though to deny the possibility. Her throat suppressed a cry of anguish and panic as her hands made quick work of clearing away the remaining strands of matted hair.

"Jack Sparrow," Elizabeth gasped in wonder, believing him temporarily to be a mirage, except that his person had always been unmistakably solid.

"Captain…," he wheezed; his languid, pain-filled eyes rolled into the back of his head as his hands lifted, trembling with infirmity. He unleashed another groan as a fevered chill wracked his sunken frame. Elizabeth froze indecisively at the sounds of his suffering. She'd heard those cries before, from dying men in battle as they lay with their bodies scorched from cannon fire. The burden of leadership had fallen easily on her shoulders and spouting orders had been second nature to her—but moments like these left her a hapless wretch uncertain of what course to chart. It panicked her to think of him dying on a beach without a soul in the world to tend to his torment.

"Mum …," William called softly, calling her attention to the fresh blood that had sprung forth from an open sore around the wound. He looked to her with the beseeching eyes of a child.

"We will move him to our home, but you and I aren't strong enough to take him. Run as fast you can to wake Mr. and Mrs. Heung. Tell them that there is an injured man in need of assistance and that he'll need to be moved from the beach. Lead them back here—tell them to bring clean cloth and two bottles of rum!" Will took off running but stopped at the rock. Elizabeth feared that he would refuse to leave her alone in a protective streak that mimicked his father.

"Why two bottles?" he quizzed with a perplexed expression. Elizabeth fixed him with a warning stare and he set off running down the beach, as fast as his legs would take him. Two bottles, one and a half to numb Jack's pain and half to numb her petrified heart. She watched as Will became a distant spec on the expansive beach before she turned her attentions to Jack.

"Of all the foolhardy things to do; what business do you have in getting shot?" Elizabeth scolded him crossly, as she pushed his hands away to make a more thorough examination of the wound.

"Are we, by any chance, in the Locker?" Jack inquired politely, as though they were attending a ludicrous garden party and sipping steaming tea. Elizabeth struggled to follow the workings of his delirious mind, but chose to humor him in order to keep him from slipping into unconsciousness.

"No, of course not. Don't be absurd…," Elizabeth lengthened a tear in his billowing dingy white shirt and the disturbance of the wound caused him to seize her wrist with a hearty grip.

"Then I'm most assuredly in hell … . How fitting that you be here to join me…" He seemed so utterly bemused by his raving madness that Elizabeth could not be insulted by his insinuation that she might join him in the fiery pit.

"Do you remember who I am, Jack?" Elizabeth questioned, wondering whether or not in his ten year absence he'd forgotten her entirely. Even without the malaise of illness, she could see the toll the years had taken on his face. Though he was still youthful in appearance, she saw the lines of age and hard living littered around his eyes and mouth. Though she knew many had threatened to send Jack Sparrow to the depths, she had a difficult time imagining the manner of man who'd managed to best him. Jack eluded death with all the practiced skill of a cat.

For the first time in their conversation, his eyes focused on her face and he appeared to give it a great deal of study, his brows puckered with thought. She felt a shred of disappointment; his mind, the greatest part of the man, was slipping away and when it finally went there would be nothing left of him save for an empty shell.

All at once, his eyes lit with gentle recognition and he nearly sat straight up in his excitement. Elizabeth put her hands on his shoulders to hold him down so that he did not aggravate the wound any further. Her touch caused him to flinch, but he settled against the sheet, gazing at her with fevered eyes, his mouth opening and closing like fish frantically gaping for its final burst of fresh air. He mumbled an incoherent phrase; Elizabeth heard the crunching foot falls of boots against the crusty wet sand. Help had arrived at last! Jack's lids fluttered, though he fought them as he struggled to make one final word.

"Pirate…" His lips twisted into a strange relieved smile, as though he was grateful for the chance to utter the word before he slipped away into darkness.