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.