I had forgotten how insufferably boring the upper-class were. It really was dire I have no idea how I managed to survive them for so long. They were all so nosy and bitchy. Of course it wasn't something I could really pick them up on; they were far too sly for that, I just had to suffer through it.

The first hour of dinner was spent listening to people congratulating us on our engagement, telling their own ridiculously boring wedding stories and asking us stupid questions our 'big day'. Luckily, George took care of all the questions and all I had to do was sit there and nod along and smile like an idiot. I could tell that these conversations were not really why they were all here. Beneath the pleasantness and pretend interest simmered the desire for gossip. We knew what gossip they were after and knew it was only a matter of time before someone brought it up. George obviously thought it was best that we be the first to mention it, so it didn't look like we were hiding anything (which we were), so he did his best to slip it in after a question from some old fat man I couldn't even remember the name of. I was sure he had been asleep for the last fifteen minutes. In response to his question about why it was taking us so long to finalise wedding plans (which I though was rude of him) he answered by saying, "Well, we had to give Isabel time to recover."

And that was it. That was all it took.

Everyone in the room became horribly interested in me. I was the new gossip given my recent 'kidnap' by pirates. George had drilled the story firmly into my head, down to the tiniest detail so all I had to do was sit there with a huge smile plastered over my face and tell it the way I'd been told to. I barely knew them and yet they had to know every detail of what had happened to me since I had last been in Port Royale. I tried to change the subject countless times, but it was all to no avail. They were desperate to hear every tiny little thing that happened to me, probably because their own lives weren't interesting enough. So I gave them what they wanted to hear. It was the best way to shut them up. Had I told them the truth they would have been so confused, so shocked that I would have been bombarded with awkward and insignificant questions. If they had heard about the Brethren Court, the Flying Dutchman and her Captains (both new and old), Calypso and the journey to the land of the dead they would have thought I was mad and I would most probably be disowned by the lot of them and locked away for a very long time. The truth was just that unbelievable.

Distancing myself from the actual events made it so much easier for me to talk about it. It didn't bring back any memories and I actually got some fun out of their reactions. Telling the truth and remembering would have been too hard. It was much better to live a lie than wallow in the painful truth.

It gave me some amusement that none of them seemed to be capable of saying the word 'pirate'. All the questions asked purposefully avoided the word. They said things like, "Were… they… as savage as they seem." And, "Was it horrible… you know… with them?"

I was in a pretty good mood by the end of the whole thing and starting to play it up a little. These people were so easily shocked and engrossed in the intricate web of lies I was spinning over them. It came as a shock when George informed me I had to leave. He didn't look best pleased. Not that that bothered me. I glanced at him, "Why?"

"Your dress fitting," he replied and my good mood crumbled back to that false smile and fake cheeriness.

"Then do excuse me," I nodded politely to our guests. "Thank you all for coming, it was lovely to see you."

***

I endured hours of pulling, tugging, pinning, sowing and altering that stupid dress before everyone else was happy with it. I couldn't have cared less about the bloody thing, but that opinion didn't really matter. There were three women attacking me with needles and various different sizes of pins. I tried to strike up a conversation with them, but they didn't speak any English. They muttered darkly to each other in some foreign language. It wasn't all that encouraging to be honest. They pulled in the corset to suffocating level of tight, but that was what I had been expecting so I was ready for it. A few months out of corsets had meant it was a bit of a shock to return to them. Even I had to admit that it was a lovely dress. When you are younger you dream about the perfect wedding and the perfect dress, but none of that matters if you're marrying the wrong man. When they had finished torturing me with sharp sewing-related objects one of the women stepped back and nodded to me saying something that sounded more cheerful than the rest of it had. I smiled back at her before she ushered her friends out of the room, still talking away in their language.

When they didn't come back I assumed they were finished with me. I walked the lonely way back up to my room. The house had mostly all gone to sleep at that point, so I met no-one on my way up. My door was open and my room lit only by one single candle. The window was open again.

Open wider than before.

The curtains were billowing around in the wind that was gushing through. My hands started shaking. I ran across and slammed it shut, jerked the curtains across and breathed deeply to calm myself down. I bit my lip to stop my eyes from watering. The door slammed behind me. I jumped at the sound and spun around. Someone stepped out from the shadows of my room and into the flickering candlelight.

"Hello, Belle," he said. It didn't make me angry to hear it. It made me feel a whole lot of things, but not anger. The overwhelming number of emotions drew a broken whisper from my lips.

"Jack…"