Thank you for all the lovely reviews! I feel overjoyed :-)
Would you guys mind telling me in your next reviews whether you want the playlists to carry on? I've been writing the music in at an average pace of reading, in the hope that everything would sort of fall together. But if you're a quick reader and it isn't working out for you, let me know!
20.
"Here." Weatherby Swann stood in the doorway of a fair-sized tidy cabin, inviting Elizabeth to enter it, "My quarters. I shall bring something more appropriate for you to wear."
She took a seat on the lid of a large portmanteau, folding her hands in her lap, her dark honey eyes never leaving the floorboards. She looked as still as a sculpture.
After all, Weatherby thought, she must be traumatised.
Stuck on an island all alone with that pirate.
A dreadful thought occurred to him, and the look on her face seemed to confirm it. His breath began to catch in his chest.
He stepped into the cabin and knelt before his most precious possession, gazing up into her unblinking orbs with infinite paternal concern.
"Elizabeth." he said in a low, earnest, urgent voice, "How long have you been on that island?"
She looked at him as though she were surprised that he existed.
"Only a day. Why, father?"
"I need you to tell me. If he has done anything -" he appeared very uncomfortable at this point, and she wondered what on earth he was getting at, "If he has - taken advantage of you, if he forced you to do anything - if anybody has forced you, since you were taken from me -"
She stood up sharp as a bullet from a gun, and glared furiously down at him with suddenly raging black halos.
He rose too, regaining the advantage of height, and placed both hands on her shoulders.
"I would never allow anybody to take my virtue." she said, in that only-child's tone of her's, "And no, I have not been forced. You humiliate me, father."
Oblivious to her anger he enveloped her in his arms, overwhelmed with relief and tenderness. His daughter was pure still. And just as haughty and fiery-tempered as ever.
"I apologise, my dear. I am only concerned for your utmost wellbeing, you know that." he consoled, as she finally returned his embrace, and buried her face into his shoulder, "I thought I would never see you again. Elizabeth. I think I should have gone mad."
"I was always determined to come back to you, father." she assured him reciprocatively, "And I will come home with you. Once we have rescued the missing part of our family."
She said the last sentence dryly, and he remembered his harsh dismissal of the boy in his desperation to bring her home directly. He felt the keen sting of guilt under his daughter's judgement.
"You must not think of me too harshly. My only intention is to protect the last remnants of our real family."
With that, he discreetly wiped his eyes and broke away, smiling weakly at her, and then strode out of the cabin in search of some suitable garments to clothe her in.
In the comfort of solitude she sat heavily back down, and put her face in her hands.
She had fooled him - in a way. She had convinced him that she hadn't done, or wanted to do, anything inappropriate in her time away from home.
She knew she should revel in her escape from her father's piercing mind, but only felt an overpowering sense of guilt and internal conflict.
Jack, she thought softly.
She could hear muffled voices from the captain's quarters next door, and distinguished Sparrow's tones from all the others.
She could also hear James, chipping in with cutting questions and comments.
Jack's lingering, gruff, velvety words sounded as though they came from another plane, compared to every other voice in that room. He was infinitely above them all.
She allowed his purring intonations to wash over her through that wooden wall, feeling it snake along her shouders and relax them, letting it run down her spine in the form of a shiver.
Still wishing for what she couldn't have.
She tried to block out James' sharp, rapping tone, his constant interruption of Jack's sentences.
She was going to have to live with that voice now for the rest of her life.
She snorted, as she remembered his proposal on the battlements.
James would never raise his voice to her. He would never use that knife-edged inflection or those harsh, cold insults.
She would forever dwell upon the cushion of his softer lilt, living in the world of his tenderest notes and most tentative touches. He would treat her as a rare gem, a thing too rare to be handled. Not that he was the kind of man who cared for gems.
Jack cared for gems.
He picked them up and made them into rings and jewellery. He held them in his coarse brown hands with all the familiarity of a real owner.
He got bored of them and sold them on to pay for his alcohol and his gunpowder.
Jack's voice was made of gems, and golden coins, and fine silks.
She would give anything to wake up to that lusty, jewel-encrusted, unreliable voice in the fiery light of dawns to come.
Even now in her mind's eye she could feel his gaze upon her, his two round fragments of hardened black magma. Sable-coloured rocks just waiting to be crushed into diamonds.
There were diamonds hiding in there even now, that had gleamed at her once or twice, like a wink that she'd barely caught, and barely believed had really happened.
Why was it the good man who stood belittled in the wake of this selfish, outrageous scoundrel?
Perhaps following too many rules eventually stole away a fellow's attraction, just as age gradually stole a woman's.
Perhaps it was just that Jack was special.
To her, at least.
Everybody was special to somebody.
She shouldn't be hoping, even in the most secret compartment of her heart, that she was the girl whom Jack thought special.
Something told her that she was, and that his regard for her was stronger than she'd dared to think.
It made all the sense in the world when she considered it. The gravity between them, the way he had opened up to her so freely, how he had refrained from ravishing her even in the heat of the moment.
The only girl of class he had ever become involved with.
Just as he was the only pirate she had ever conspired with, but had dreamed of for endless years of her life.
Had he dreamed of meeting a woman like her too?
Did his inferiority somehow draw him, as a magpie in England was drawn to bright objects?
Did the thought of winning over her social standing and claiming her for his own drive him on, in this mess of altogether too brief relations?
She found her mind wandering, again and again, to that proposal on the battlements.
Something about it held so much meaning for her.
One minute, James was confessing his desire for her. You have become a fine woman, Elizabeth.
She had told him that she couldn't breathe, and like any man of his standing, in her world, in that place, he had taken the comment to be about himself.
The next moment she was lying supine and vulnerable on wooden boards, and a face of shocking contrast to James' was leaning over her. Her corset was lying flat underneath her.
He had interrupted James entirely.
She liked to think, now, that he had even given her a chance to delay her answer, because she hadn't wanted her answer to be yes.
It was hard to distinguish what she had felt about James before Jack had come along.
He had known exactly what she'd needed, and acted immediately.
Without any regard to appropriate behaviour, he had done the practical thing.
He'd given her air to breathe.
He was the real and unsung hero of the story.
Without any regard to appropriate behaviour, he had also given her a bottle of rum and danced on a beach with her. Given her the most ecstatic experience of her young life, but denied himself the same. Reduced her to tears with his enchanting talk of the sea, of the life that he led, with the glee of a child who played games all day long.
He had made her feel more alive and vigorous than she'd felt since pirate tales at bedtime with her mother. Now both literally and metaphorically, he had given her some air, in a world where her very breath felt restricted.
And she was turning him and everything he stood for down flat.
What kind of masochistic idiot was she?
The kind that cared too much for a title, and a father's shame.
If only she were a simple peasant girl and didn't have to care for her status...
Then Jack would never have given her a second glance.
It was topsy turvy and too twisted every way she tried to look at it.
It was just life. Life getting in the way of everything.
She abruptly heard the conversation next door come to a halt, and then footsteps within the captain's cabin. She looked up at the doorway just in time to see the small train of soldiers passing by, with James at their head, and Jack amongst them in manacles.
He didn't see her, but the sight of his tanned profile, his furrowed brow and downcast look, pierced her in a way she couldn't ignore.
She blinked away the silly tears as her father reappeared, edging around the group of men and looking distastefully at Jack.
He was carrying a navy uniform, respendent in scarlet and cream, and even a pair of black boots.
"There we are now, dear." he laid them in her hands and patted her shoulder briefly, "If you would care for a meal, I am eating quite soon with the Commodore. Perhaps you can tell us about your adventures before we catch up to this island of vagabonds, eh?"