Captain's Leisure

Day 341: Although not odd to the point of eliciting deep curiosity, it was uncommon enough to generate whispers among the crew when two weeks earlier, the Captain had ordered the first mate to take her ashore in the jollyboat to the windward side of a heavily forested island. Nary a man was chosen to accompany her; thus one green wit among us put forth the indelicate suggestion that she was going to see a lover. Upon overhearing the hand's inevitable and scurrilous elaboration upon such a subject, the first mate fell into a wild fury, taking up a belaying pin with which to enforce his order to "Shut yer gob, ye filth!" The blow never fell, for at that moment the young sailor (a lad in his early 20s) tripped on a coil of rope and went crashing backward into the hold, to break his neck in the fall. The sudden shadow of death sobered us all, but none so much as the mate who had only meant to chastise, yet he sternly reiterated his admonishment that there would be "none o' that talk" among the rank and file at risk of the lash. How he might explain to the Captain our crewmate's absence was a matter he would have to reconcile on his own.

Perhaps he invented a tale of desertion, though were he caught out in a lie by Captain Corbye, his remaining hours of existence might be counted on the fingers of one hand. Whatever account he devised to mollify her wrath, she was in good humour when he brought her back aboard eight days later. One might say it was an exceptionally good mood, for she dealt us out each a generous handful of coin though we had not participated in obtaining it. Since that time, we had been under sail in ragged weather, making toward Port Ryffe against a stiff wind. Upon putting in to the safety of the harbour, the Captain dismissed those of us the ship could spare, joining the crew at the pub in the confidence that her foe Harbormaster Beale had been called to court to answer charges of dereliction of duty as a direct result of our previous visit to his fair town.

The Captain passed over to the publican a leathern bag, the contents of which rendered him wide-eyed and immediately subservient and obliging. In short order, ale or beer was in the hands of every jolly sailor, and at no lightening of our purses. The Captain drew up a weathered trunk as a seat, and equipped herself with a tankard of ale for although the chill of evening had shouldered through the door with the impertinence of an uninvited guest, no fire had been laid. The massed humanity within the cramped confines would soon raise the temperature. We fell to serious drinking, the patchwork of our conversations overlaid with occasional roistering song.

As the Captain took a fourth beverage to her lips, her countenance was lit with a smile unsettling in its benignity. For a fraction of a moment, I saw her in freshly laundered and mended clothing, not as the master of a crew of blackguards and rogues, but as a woman of advancing years taking her leisure at the pub like any common matron of similar age. No artifice glinted in her deep eyes, neither of scheme nor of malice, the eroded tracks of prolonged wind and salt exposure softened somehow by a light not wholly external. Unsettling, I say, for it gave to Morgan Corbye a vulnerability heretofore unseen by this biographer. If known to her crew, none had dared speak it aloud, nor would, knowing it to be illusion. In the public-house dimness of the Nine-Tailed Cat, the Captain's harsh voice lifted in the recitation of "Leave 'Er, Johnny," crackling off-key above the keen of the wheezing bellows of a mysteriously-acquired concertina. My observations drawn perforce to the instrument and the hands which clumsily drew forth from it a mere approximation of the shanty's tune, I saw it: the sapphire ring which but a year ago her sister Kat had plundered at the cost of a long period of unconsciousness. How had this repossession happened, unbeknownst to any of the crew?

One did not ask questions of Morgan Corbye, but as the evening wore on and she slipped further toward the brink of the ale's sweet oblivion, she laid aside the instrument and came to sit at my side on a low stool. Her disfocused eyes raised to meet mine by the accident of her physical position and, for all that I am a tall man and she of diminutive stature, for a moment I was caught in an illusion of superiority. In syllables smeared by strong ale, she spoke.

"Och, bloody 'ell, lad. I be gettin' auld." I knew she was speaking from her cups, yet was at a loss for a means to stem the tide I feared was surging inland. I had at times been her confidant, but only in regard to plots and plans, nothing of a personal nature. To be cast in such a role was not a burden I wanted to bear, yet she seemed determined to steer into the rocks. "Dinna look at me so," she said. "I'll be a'ter outlivin' ye by a decade, sprout. I only means t' say tha'...well, bloody 'ell! Leave me t' tell th' tale an' see if ye're no' in agreement."

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The theft of the sapphire ring by her sister was an affront Morgan Corbye could not ignore. Over the past year, she had engaged every available eye and ear on the mainland to the purpose of tracking Kat's movements until such time as her twin went to ground. Like the Captain, Kat had gone ashore unaccompanied on a certain wooded island, there to take a short respite from the hard labours of piracy in a lair she felt secure. Had it not been for the keen eye of one young fisherman, her plan might have succeeded but, duty-bound as he was to the chime of silver against silver, this ragtag urchin carried word to another of his gang who took it directly to his uncle who was in Capt. Corbye's employ. In possession of this knowledge, our Captain engaged the mate to convey her immediately to the same island, for time was of the utmost essence and the overland journey promised a hard challenge. When a few days later, Morgan Corbye caught first sight of her twin, she (Morgan) was bloodied and bruised by the cruelest of inanimate enemies; rocks, brambles and branches had torn her skin and hair as she passed through those lands where no other would venture. Her jubilation at seeing her twin nearly made her cry aloud when Nature's savagery had not, yet she took to cover and waited, the pangs of hunger cramping her belly unnoticed in her fierce concentration.

Expecting the tale to continue with a description of a fight and conquest, I leant back against the wall in anticipation. The Captain's next words struck like a thunderbolt.

"An' there she sits, 'erse'f roostin' on a rock like a shag, a-starin' out t' th' empty sea," she continued, "an' I slips up be'ind 'er quiet-like...though I think she's gone a bit deef, that one...an' I runs me pig-sticker str'ight atween 'er ribs an' gives it a good twist, an' by gawd, she falls orf th' rock, dead as dead. Me sister, me ain flesh, dead at me feet." She paused as if collecting herself, and had I not known it for a trick of the light, I might have said that a tear crept into the corner of her eye. Were it there, it would not have been for the death of her enemy but for the loss of purpose to her life, and thus I understood the reference to age with which she had opened her discourse. I recalled her threat to take the sapphire as well as her sister's hand which wore it, and silently wondered yet again why such a minor token was worth the enmity. As if she knew the course of my thoughts, she said, "I cuidna do it, laddie. I cuidna take th' finger wot bore ol' Service's sapphire. It were bloody 'ard t' pry orf 'er, bu' I couldna sp'il me sister's carcase. I'd kilt 'er, lad. I cuidna do th' bloody thing!"

Service's sapphire? It had been Edgar Service who had inducted a twelve-year old stowaway into piracy those many years ago. Now her mood came into stark relief. What I had taken for a guileless mien was that wistful smile which so often disguises pensive melancholy, and that which I had read for vulnerability was in fact far more dangerous to the spirit and soul of a pirate. In the flickering lights of the pub, I saw that there lay in Morgan Corbye a seed, a mere grain but with the potential to sprout into a pernicious weed, a seed of conscience. However, never before had Morgan Corbye been more wrong. At that moment aboard the Grey Raven, her sister's compassionless surgeon was cleansing a deep knife wound with turpentine and sealing it with hot tar with complete disregard for the whiskeyed moans of his patient. Although her recuperation would be long and fraught with pain, Kat Corbye lived.

Peril At Port Ryffe

Day 342: We had been at sea the summer long, provisioning ourselves from what beneficent Chance placed in our path, knew no dearth of any stuff save the dried mangoes which were a favourite with the Captain, and only put into land for maintenance and some well-contained recreation. Yet for all our idyll, Capt. Corbye took often to her cabin, there to be found frequently in a brooding, dark mood and poring over her charts. When the zephyrs of late August filled our sails, we set a course upon her rigid instruction and likewise held back from any raids, instead performing a series of short hops from port to port along the coast. An undercurrent of confusion circulated among the men for it seemed that the Captain had a plan but had not made us privy to it, and acting the roles of respectable citizens for a month's duration taxed us sorely though we strove to follow her orders expecting her intentions to be revealed. That we paid our bills and kept a clean slate on shore did not go unnoticed by the townspeople, and tongues began to wag until some were saying that we had renounced our pirating ways, all the while wondering by what means we had obtained our seeming fortunes.

The tide of gossip among the citizenry rippled outward and came to wash against the hull of the Grey Raven where she lay in a hidden harbour, her captain also in a sullen mood and for much the same reasons as those which affected Morgan Corbye. Two years had flown since last the sisters Corbye had met, and that Morgan was described to be revelling in plenty set like a fishbone crosswise in the throat of Katherine. Kat surveyed her charts with the keenest eye to the tides and an instinct for winds. Indeed as she suspected, her sister's course implied that the Winged Adventure was making for Port Ryffe.

To say that there existed an animosity between the sisters would be to do an injustice to a resentment and conflict so venomous that it stopped just short of deadly, and that because Morgan plainly took greater glee in humiliating Kat than could have been exacted by killing her outright. Kat, on the other side, felt no such sophisticated constraints and was prevented from demonstrating her passion by somewhat lesser skills with sword and knife. Yet despite having been bested in every encounter with her rival, she was not to be deterred from planning further assaults upon her twin, as always hoping to catch her in an unguarded moment. She had drawn blood on several occasions, in sufficient flow that it emboldened her and perhaps inspired a tendency toward ill-considered action as it did now. The Grey Raven took a heading toward Port Ryffe, her captain blithely unaware that she was being led into a trap.

*     *     *     *     *

Shortly before our arrival in Port Ryffe, Morgan Corbye called together the crew of the Winged Adventure and let it be known that they had served without foreknowledge as instruments in her plan. Her justification for secrecy soon smoothed over any resentment we might have felt at not having been taken into her trust; our belief in the rumour we had helped to start was crucial to its success. Capt. Corbye had dipped heavily into the ship's coffers in confidence only with Robin Penn, our one-legged bursar and her most trusted confidant, funding our on-shore revels in a manner which lent us the temporary appearance of having come by a vast windfall. We had in fact done well over the summer, though the mass of our wealth was but an illusion, chum tossed in our wake to draw a certain shark to the gaff. Should the Captain's plan succeed (and we had no cause to think that it would do otherwise), we would be reimbursed from the chests of the Grey Raven, our autumnal carousals paid in full or more.

We dropped anchor at the limb of a small estuary where low tide gave but inches to spare for the Winged Adventure's keel, and a handful of men set out in a jollyboat to put in upon a steep and rocky shore. Atop the bank, this land rolled back into a tangle of trees and thorny vines which without the service of cutlass and machete was nigh impenetrable by any creature larger than a rabbit. Upon the orders of the Captain, we made a foray into the interior at a heading of SSW to twice the length of a rope brought for the purpose of taking a measure. There, we scouted out a large rock on which we took a compass bearing and paced off its distance from our previous mark. From point to point we progressed until we had charted a route to an indistinct but identifiable feature where with no caution to conceal the evidence of our presence (again under the Captain's direction), we dug a pit and buried a small wooden hamper laden with a jumble of precious metals. "Bait," explained the Captain, "needs must suit th' fish."

At the moment of our emergence from the forested zone, filthy and with shovels over our shoulders, Kat Corbye had climbed into the rigging of the Grey Raven some distance off and with spyglass determined that we had been up to some mischief she felt compelled to investigate at the first opportunity. To that end, we provided her with the occasion by sailing 'round a promontory to the east, there to tuck into a cove where we were fairly well concealed. Canny as a fox, she did not at once make her approach. In fact, we kept our station for three days, taking watches both day and night from cover on the shingle. She stayed well off, the ship's lanterns mere points of light in the darkness and her masts naught but a faint fringe on the horizon by day. At five bells o' the forenoon of the fourth day, she made her move and sailed boldly forth, presuming us to be again on the move to our next port of call.

For three nights and days, Morgan Corbye and the bo'sun (himself a fine swordsman) had kept themselves out of sight on land whilst the Winged Adventure was hove to, and little did the Captain's twin know that when she anchored the Grey Raven well into the deeper portion of the cove, our sleek barque was turning tide and wind to advantage. Kat Corbye went ashore in the company of but two other sailors, leaving her crew in a vulnerable position which we were quick to exploit. We fell upon them swiftly from astern, making off with what loot our boats would hold and leaving the ketch's crew trussed and stacked like cordwood in the ship's filthy hold.

Upon making landfall, Kat sent her two men ahead following our well-trodden line and when neither reported any evidence that some of our crew might have stayed behind, she cast caution aside and went herself at an expeditious pace into a small grove of trees where she found a stone, flat-faced and canted at an angle at the roots of one and disturbed ground at its base. "'Tis 'ere they've left summat," she said, "an' frae 'ere 'tis we wot will take it. Dig, ye dogs, an' quick about it!" The sailors fell to the work and shortly brought Morgan Corbye's hamper to the light. Its weight required the two to carry it together from the woodland to the shore where Kat ordered it laid among the rocks and then in an unconsidered move sent her meagre retinue again into the brush to hunt after rabbits, a suggestion inspired by their discovery of a trap which we had deliberately left behind. It was not long before the pair was laid out between logs and quite oblivious to the world, sent into dreamless slumber by our bo'sun and his Captain.

Kat at that moment was tucking a particularly attractive sapphire-set piece into the security of her bosom, for her dispatch of the sailors had not been entirely well-intentioned. That the crew needed meat and other provisions was fact and a few rabbits would have been a welcome supplement, but fairness with her crew was not a trait Kat Corbye shared with her sister Morgan and whenever possible, she made arrangements to skim the cream from Fortune's cup unobserved by other eyes. Given wholly to greed, the passage of time was naught to her as like Midas, she fingered the contents of the hamper, selecting the most portable goods to go into her personal keeping, and thus allowed Morgan to come upon her with stealth from behind. Her first awareness of her sister's presence was of a sword point pressing firmly upon her spine between the bones of her shoulders and her second, the sudden release from its prickling pain. In the next instant, the flat of the blade caught her on the side of the head and sent her sprawling, her unconscious form disposed upon the rocks in a graceless pose from the force of the blow.

The fracas had not gone unnoticed by the Winged Adventure's crew, back aboard their own ship with such stores as they had brought from the Grey Raven, and four men had set out in our second jollyboat to come to the Captain's side. Morgan Corbye was not yet done with her sister; she had ordered buckets of offal and fish guts brought to land, there to be dumped in quantity over Kat where she lay. "Leave 'er t' th' gulls," she said, "an' may they get a bellyache o' peckin' at 'er."

Thus we sailed from the encounter, Morgan Corbye again victorious and relishing the ignominies she had committed upon the hapless Kat, our stores and coffers replenished beyond the degree of their former depletion, and no loss of life or limb on either side of the feud. Yet all was not as cheerful as it might have been within our pirate's Elysium when at nine days out, our Captain took inventory of the contents of the wooden hamper which had proved her sister's undoing. Louder than the lapping of the waves of the season's first storm and the wind snapping in our sails, the curses emanating from her cabin struck all hands with foreboding.  "Me ring! Me bloody sapphire ring! I'll be 'avin' 'er 'ead on a pike, th' cesspot! A pox on ye, Kat Corbye! Ye've gone an' pinched me bloody sapphire! I'll be 'avin' it back, ye rot-gilled bottom feeder! Aye, an' th' 'and wot wears it! We shall meet, o sister mine,  an' on me sworn oath, ye'll regret when ye was borned."