She tries. Elizabeth Turner, nee Swan, tries. Finds a little house to rent, takes in laundry because her hands are already rough, and the smell of lye reminds her of that tall governor’s house, where clothes came white and the silver gleamed. Sometimes she imagines what her father would say, if he could see how far his pirate king laundress of a daughter had fallen, and laughs.
The townsfolk say she spends too much time walking the shore, too much time staring out at the sea. Even for a sailor’s wife, they say.
Yes, Elizabeth Turner agrees. But she is trying.
When she pieces together that she’s pregnant, she stops trying. She goes down to that cove where she kissed Will goodbye and fills a small jar with sand and dirt. She uses the sharp edge of a cockle to cut her finger open, the left one where her wedding ring goes, and bleeds herself from the heart. She seals her jar with wax, kisses the lip. Makes herself a promise.
The next day, Elizabeth Turner is on a ship, where no one questions the urge to stare at the horizon. A week after that, Elizabeth Turner leads a mutiny and readjusts their course, due Shipwreck Island. (Well—with detours. Elizabeth has always wanted to see the Spanish Armada.)
(…on their knees.)
When she finally shows up, her ship weighted down by stolen goods and seven months pregnant, Jack spits out a mouthful of perfectly good rum in sheer surprise. Calls her “your Majesty” by not-really-accident, and watches her grin like a pirate.
On a length of cord around her neck is a jar of sand and dirt and blood. At the bottom of her trunk is a dead man’s heart, beating hale and even. In her belly, a child grows.
She gives birth one moonless night, when the sky is being torn apart by storms. There is saltwater sluicing through her cabin and saltwater on her lips, and the thunder screams with her. After an exhausting thirteen hours, her first mate puts her son in her arms. He is squalling like the sea.
Her crew calls him the princeling, in deference to his mother’s rank. She calls him after his absent father, who ferries the dead.
Elizabeth returns to Shipwreck Island for a while, because an infant has no place on a barque. A baby, she finds, is a useful thing—all she needed do was place the squirming Willy in Edward Teague’s arms, and the fearsome Keeper of the Code turned to mush. She cannot be a captain with a child in her arms, but with him in Teague’s she reads and re-reads the code until it is emblazoned on her eyelids. She cannot be a captain, but she will be a good king.
Pirates are an unruly bunch, and so it is many years’ worth of settling disputes, appointing and recognizing pirate lords, watching her son grow. The terrors of the high seas become almost gentlemanly in the court of this pirate king, knowing that swearing, drinking, lewdness, and other piratey behaviors are not tolerated in front of the princeling. And if she does not punish you herself, then Captain Jack Sparrow is a very protective godfather.
(The rumors follow her around of course—the King is wedded to Davy Jones, the King commands the kraken, the King destroyed an entire flotilla of the East India Company, the King is Calypso—Elizabeth likes to hear them sometimes. She doesn’t laugh enough.)
As Willy gets older, more independent, she goes out on more and more excursions—Shipwreck Island has to eat, after all, and she needs goods for selling and bribing with. Captain Turner is gaining a reputation beyond the courts, and men in uniforms of many colors go pale when they see her coming over the bow. She takes vicious pleasure in being able to swing a sword again, the blood that it draws, the death of those who threaten her people, their way of life.
It is to her eternal surprise that death brings her husband back to her.
The ghostly ship pulls along the Hannibal just as she is dislodging a cutlass from a man’s skull. She is about to call for her men to rally once more and turn aside these yellow-bellied vultures, when the man she had just killed rises up, insubstantial and ghostly.
All her crew has frozen in place, watching as the dead rise up from their broken bodies, as they are led away to the ghostly ship by the strange crewmen with lamplike eyes.
Elizabeth?
She whirls around, and everything in that moment goes still and silent. Will, she breathes.
Elizabeth? Will asks, betrayal in his eyes. Elizabeth can see his thoughts passing across his (still too-innocent) face, that he is doomed, he will wander and go mad like Davy Jones, how could she do this to him, how could she—However, when he reaches for her, he gets only a polite distance before being repelled by an invisible force. What…? he breathes, trying once more and being turned aside yet again.
Elizabeth grins. Well, husband, I’ve got a jar of dirt.
(They still meet on the shore, ten years after—there are rituals to be observed, after all. Elizabeth is sun-browned and breathless, having been late from meeting with the lord of the Caribbean, and now Willy has muck on his face that she had to scrub away, he’s getting so big, when did that happen—
Mama, Willy says, grabbing at her hand. Elizabeth turns. Sees the horizon. Sees Will.)
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