A Pirate's Scheme
Sometimes in our life
We get to where we wonder if
The long road that we're on
Is heading in the same direction.
When it comes to you and me
We're right where I know we should be.
-I Told You So by Keith Urban-
Jack stayed up through the entire night, focused on nothing but his concern for Eva's well being, for the marriage and life she was willing to take as sacrifice for the success of the whole damned island. He couldn't believe what he was hearing when she'd said it, but after a while of sitting up and watching her sleep, of developing plans of failure non-stop in his brain, he understood why she had. Eva had fallen for this place and let Shipwreck become her new home, with his father and Elizabeth and little Jack and everyone else attached to it. She was fighting for the place and the people she loved; the one thing he had always had a hard time doing.
He was profoundly inspired by it though, for the first time in too many long years of his life. And it was as he lain watching the black trickle out of the sky and slowly turn blue, that he felt a pinch of something rough under the pillows and dug it out. It was a book, a gifted book nonetheless, and one that proved Eva had taken to his room at the Cove even before he'd returned.
He smiled over at her peaceful form and began flipping through the pages she had marked for certain emphasis. There were details about Grace O' Malley's crew, and ship, and the treasure she had accumulated. He'd never taken the time to read through it when the book had been in the shelves of his cabin onboard, but now he was drawn in. When he got to about halfway through the large book, he came across a page heavy with something holding its place. He opened it wide to see a folded, aged piece of parchment. His brow twisted as he unfolded it and found a well etched (and used for that matter) map.
"Bloody ell'…" he whispered as he traced over the details of it.
A prominent red dotted line was painted in a route from Africa all the way to the Northern coast of Ireland. And an X was plotted not on the mainland of the country, but on a small island marked beside it, settled in the midst of Galway Bay. In the low candlelight of the room, he could just make out the cursive name, Clare Island, and ran his index finger across it. His eyes darted from the map to Eva's silent, completely unconscious face, thinking and plotting very differently, and very fast. He returned to a moment in a study for a clue.
"Evangeline is a Greek name...means 'good message' Jacky."
"Marley's, old Irish…"
"Er' hair is dark, black almost…An' her eyes…they're blue; blue like an ocean I've ne'er seen before."
Certain words exchanged between him and Teague, all of nineteen months before, passed over his head in a flurry of short, hidden facts; things he should have seen a long time ago. It went on for another hour at least, as he rushed to consume information from the book and pinpoint details of his own accord and concern.
Before the sky was entirely blue and at least an hour ahead of the rising sun, Jack jumped from the bed and began to dress, never letting his eyes fall from the creature without a clue; his 'good, black haired, blue-eyed Irish message' wrapped up tight in his sheets.
Eva sat wound up in nothing but a blanket from the bed, looking over charts and plots that Jack had made since he'd been gone, of places and treasures and oceans yet to be fully mapped out. Her fingers trailed along, pointing out locations to her unconscious mind, things she wanted to see for herself. She kept at it too, until she heard a soft voice whisper in her ear, as if it floated on an imaginary cloud over her head.
"Pick a place, anywhere ye want t' go."
She smiled, because the voice sounded all too perfect to her, and because it could only belong to one man. Her hand left the charts as she slowly turned under the man's arms and brought her eyes up to meet the face she'd waited to see all through the night.
"I missed you so much while I was asleep, Jack."
When her eyes opened fully to catch the gaze of the man who spoke to her though, she gasped in horror. It wasn't Jack at all. It was Daniel Bryant and he quickly swept down over her, his mouth upon hers roughly and his body forcing hers to do things she didn't want. She tried to scream out, but it was as if her voice was made of nothing but blank wind and no sound came of it. She tried to get away, but his hold was too tight, like chains on her wrists, holding her back from everything free.
"Marry me…" he chanted as he worked his way across her bare form with dangerous thrusts, "Marry me, Evangeline…be my wife…"
Her heart pounded and she found herself wriggling against his fingers until she could hear her voice again and it sounded real and right.
"Stop, no! Jack, help me!"
Her eyes widened quickly, forced open by the heat of something different than Daniel's breath on her face, something warmer and peaceful; the sun.
She breathed in a deep, nightmarish panic as she looked around at her surroundings, the ones that weren't what she had fallen asleep to. Because of her state of shock from sleep, it took her twice as long to establish what the room was, with trunks and chests and low burning candles everywhere. Her hazy eyes caught sight of a large desk, her body lost in the massive bed, and then, the one thing she couldn't deny the truth of. Her nose took in the combined scent of burning rum and an ocean gust and she fell back against the mattress shouting.
"No…no…" She threw the pillow over her head and yelled into it with a private muffle. "No!"
Eva attempted to calm herself with the fluffy, feathered pillow still keeping her from fresh oxygen. She let thoughts race through her mind, trying to determine what she would find if she got up from the bed and looked out of the windows of the cabin. Would she find a port outside of Teague's house, a mere sign that Jack had somehow gotten her so drunk or so seduced that she hadn't notice him lure her to his ship for the rest of the night? Or would she find open water and countless miles of nothing but his cruel idea to whisk her away from something she was sure she had under perfect control?
"Please say we're docked…please...please say we're docked…"
She let the wishes reel in her mind as she very slowly dropped the pillow from her eyes and glanced across the room through the huge plated windows. She saw water, of course, but wasn't sure how much of it there was, so she eased herself down from the bed, wrapped in a sheet and walked towards it, still prying for a dock view. What she found though, as her bare feet came into contact with scattered maps on the floor and as her heart beat wildly with confusion, was trackless, unwarranted, oceanic triumph on the high noon South China Sea.
Eva's eyes grew fierce as she moved her glare from the windows to the doors of the cabin. She could see shadows of movement outside and drew her lip up in a soft growl as she began searching out clothes on the floor. None of them were hers from the looks of it, but they fit loose and comfortable and smelled like the man she was ready to send right back to the locker Lizzie had so granted him before.
Once dressed, she stormed barefoot across the room and pulled open the cabin doors to rush out into the twice brighter daylight. A few men perked to look up at her, some of them remembering her face and others interested in only what they had seen Jack carry aboard in a sheet hours before. Eva nodded to a few of them, but felt her anger confusing them, so she ignored the rest until she had come about enough to face up at the wheel past the glow of the sun. Holding her hands above her eyes as a shield, she saw only Gibbs and Mr. Cotton with his parrot.
Gibbs smiled down at her and pointed just over her head, but it was a mute point when she felt something warmer than the sun blow through her hair.
"Welcome back, Elijah Marley."
She rolled her eyes and forced a worse scowl as her hands drew into small fists at her side.
"See ye found some decent garments. Mine no doubt."
Eva spun around in a flash and raised her hand to strike Jack, to which he instantly caught it, expecting no less and ready for far worse at all times with women.
"Ah." He stopped her, holding her wrist soft overhead. "The time for revenge is o'er for now, love."
"You are impossibly maddening, do you know that?!"
Her screech flew over the ship as the men turned to watch the scene with mops and ropes in hand. Jack stayed peaceable with a wiry grin, despite her anger.
"Ye seemed t' take to my madness last night, Eva."
He lifted his brow seductively, but it made her even crazier with anger and she ripped her arm away from him, shouting.
"And one night is all your going to get from me, Jack!"
The men fell into a flurry of hushed laughter across the deck.
"You are the most selfish, aggravating, daft human being on the planet!"
"Are ye done yet?"
"Never."
Her eyes caught into a blue flame, the one he admired so much, and she stamped her foot with flailing arms, shouting out more of her made-up statements of hatred.
"You've ruined everything with your greed and filthy disposition to relieve yourself nightly…the Cove is going to suffer because you won't just let me marry a man that isn't you…I can't believe you bundled me away on this ship again… in the middle of the night and drunk…me, a woman upon your vessel, you foolish man…"
While she went on and on loudly, he lunged forward and quickly threw her over his shoulder, her head bobbing against his back with her hair falling wildly, as she kicked her legs together in front of him, all the way back into the cabin. The men laughed and cheered her on a little, until her final words and screaming were majorly muted by the slamming of the cabin door.
"…you've no doubt granted fair curse upon these men!"
It was the last they heard of her. A moment later the two of them were safe within the walls of his room, and Jack slowly dropped her down to her bare feet, raising his head to begin a command of her.
"Now listen Ev--"
But before he could get her name out, or anything else for that matter, a harsh, warm palm swept across his right cheek with a fierceness he should have expected. His jaw flew off to the side from her hand as she stood a whole foot shorter than him and an easy fifty pounds lighter, but holding her own. The slap was the most dominating he'd ever felt. And that was saying a lot from him.
"Don't you dare, Jack."
Her anger was apparent, in his ears, on his face, and he stood tall again above her, simply clinging to her gaze, knowing just by how her eyes were flickering that Eva was far from done.
"I can't believe you thought this was a good idea. I told you not to bother with me. Why didn't you listen?"
"Is it wrong for me t' ave' wanted to help ye?"
"Yes. I told you it wasn't your concern. And now you've made it your own."
"Eva I--"
For no real apparent reason, he felt her hand strike him without warning a second time. His face flung back for a moment as he winced away the short pain and breathed in much needed oxygen, then he moved back to her eyes, confused.
"Wot' was that one for?"
She threw her finger out at him in a point as he attempted to duck the movement.
"That was for bringing me aboard this ship without clothes…" she growled as he tried not to laugh.
"There's a whole trunk o' yer things in the corner."
Her finger remained pointed at his face while she glanced back for a moment to see the chest from her room at Teague's, one that housed most of the books and trinkets she had collected during her stay.
"Are there clothes in it?" She asked angrily.
"Lizzie packed it."
Her face fell back to him, suddenly somber. "Elizabeth knows I'm here?"
He nodded nervously, still ducking under her raised finger until she calmly lowered it and walked away. She fell to sadness that he'd never seen her in before, and she was suddenly like a child lost in the world for some reason, even though she must have known she was safe with him.
"I couldn't let ye marry into misery, not for th' benefit of an entire town. That's absurd."
"Is it really, Jack?" She asked solemnly over her shoulder as she slumped down to sit on the large trunk of her things. "Is it really absurd, when I know what's to eventually come of your plan?"
"Do you even know wot' my plan is?"
She looked up at him, her eyes growing heated again with concern.
"You're taking me captive again, from the looks of it. To keep me from Daniel."
"In a way…" he slowly walked toward her, then past as he fumbled near his charting table, scrambling under loose paper until he grabbed at her book. He tore the map from inside of it and walked back to Eva, dropping it in her lap. "…We're going after your treasure, Eva."
She looked at the parchment, shocked, and worrisome as a hundred different images flew through her mind. Of course, Jack couldn't see her eyes burning with devastating fury while her face was hidden toward the map.
"I brought ye along because you know all bout' it. We find th' grand thing, worth wot' must be five times th' gold Mr. Bryant's cotton can make for Shipwreck, an' you won't have t' worry about marrying him."
Her first crumbled the map, and he stepped back a little, worried.
"You idiot."
She murmured at him, rising too and reaching out for a bottle sitting in her side view on the table. Jack slowly inched away more with his hands drawn toward the doors.
"Easy, darling."
The bottle was firm in her grasp as she slowly walked him backwards.
"I can't believe you this time. This…" she shook the map at him, "…this is how you're planning to save me. And from what? Marriage…childbirth…London?"
"Unhappiness." He stated with flat reverberation of her words from the night before, and one more step back, reaching behind him for the doorknob.
"Well if only you had thought to ask me for finer details in the matter then, Jack."
She shook her head, still holding the bottle up at him.
"Meaning wot'?"
He pulled the door open slightly enough to sneak his leg through as she came closer.
"Daniel's father and he may be nothing more than cotton merchants, but his uncle…Lord Henry Compton…is an admiral in the British Royal Navy."
Jack felt his throat closing up as he slipped further out of the door with Eva's snapping speech.
"And his cousin, Paul Compton, operates a fleet of the East India Company, the same one that saw to William Turner's death. Don't you see, you've condemned us all!"
He ducked his head out the second she thrust the bottle toward him, hearing it crash into a million pieces with the slamming oak of the door. Jack rested against the outside of the door, trying to pull his jaw back into place again from where her palm had twice left it unhinged, and looked up to see a dozen men standing around with gawking mouths. From inside of the cabin, he heard Eva's body as she slumped down to the floor and began to cry, and he forced himself to ignore it and move away, shouting out orders.
"Back t' work ye filthy ninnies! Step to!"
He brushed them all off to duties again, turning to see the rum stain on the glass of the cabin doors, as it trickled down with the faint sound of her tears. It nearly killed him to stand there and listen, and so he urged his feet to follow his mind and move to the mental construction the helm would provide instead.
The day passed by with vigor, strong work and ferrying waves, until Jack felt himself tilt from the effects of the sun on his spirited head. He let Cotton take over for the rest of the night ahead, and made his way down the steps, turning in toward his cabin doors. He was afraid of what he would find, only because he never knew what quite to expect from Eva.
He wondered how long she had cried for, or if she'd cried herself to death. He wondered for a hasty moment at the door, whether she'd found a way to jump ship and head back for the Cove somehow, knowing it wasn't entirely beyond her realm of capability. He wondered last, if she had come even close to forgiving him yet, or if she had just grown angrier through the lonely afternoon.
Jack breathed in deep to sober himself up better and pushed open one of the doors, sliding inside. There were no broken windows of escape and the shattered glass from the bottle had been cleaned up. Yet before him on the floor in the center of the room, with two empty, unbroken bottles of rum rolling on their sides, and her twisted form in deep sleep, was his return captive.
"Ye ne'er fail t' make a sight of yerself, love."
He sighed with a short laugh and stepped in quietly to lift her up from the floor and carry her to the bed. She was light from releasing everything she drank in tears, and he draped her into the middle of the mattress, drawing the blankets up over her. She stirred a little, half conscious of what was happening, and then pried a single, blinded eye open up at him.
"I'm still mad at you." She murmured in tire.
He grinned proudly. "Oh, grand," and then turned away for his desk, when her voice stopped him again.
"But--" Jack glanced back as he pulled his coat off. "I'm glad to be back on the sea with you, Jack."
In later years, he might have claimed that that statement from her melted every bit of his blackness, but at the moment it was merely intriguing to him as he stepped back to the bed. Jack brushed her hair out of her eyes and leaned down to leave a soft kiss on her forehead, forcing her into a harsher peace.
"You need t' sleep th' rum off."
She looked at him with sparkling, strangely refreshed eyes and smiled before finally passing out again.
"Good girl."
He breathed a laugh against her nose and then went to his charting table. He watched her aimlessly for hours, plotting, drinking, and analyzing the way she turned and moaned during sleep. After a while, when he couldn't deny his own tire anymore or the need to be close to her, he crawled into bed too. Rolling to his back, he pulled her sleeping form across to cover his chest, resting her head on his heart. Jack held her as close to him as he could get her, studying Eva's breathing pattern for a long time before finally allowing himself to drift down too, wordlessly apologizing to her beforehand.
