Surely I have seen a little ghost
More of the story, kiddos. Let me know if you like it!
Dangerous Sholes
Chapter Eight: (Enter The Pirates)
That evening, the crew pitched up tents and blankets on the shore, and slept on land. Some preferred the steady rocking of the ship, and returned to sleep in their hammocks below deck, but for many of them it was a peaceful and wonderful new experience. The captain granted everyone extra rations of rum. Esperanza gave hers to Barret, as she always gave away her ration to someone, having resolved long ago not to drink, which was not uncommon for women on ships.
She may have first made this resolution when she was ten years old, when one of the men deeply in his liquor tried to get her to lay with him, forgetting the fact that she was so young, but remembering abruptly when she broke his nose. It may have been at age fourteen, when another sea man she knew became roaring drunk and stumbled over the railing of the ship into the ocean, and he would have died if his more sober mates had not thrown in ropes to pull him back in. It may simply be due to the vileness of liquor to begin with.
“Cap says we may stay for two weeks or more,” one of the men says to a group of them sitting around a fire. “We need to do some repairing, from what happened with them pirates an’ all, and we’ll take our supplies and what, then put out again.”
“Does he mean to hunt down the buccaneers?” another asks.
The man grins. “We’re talking about Captain Lucky Jack Aubrey, mate. What do you think he’s gonna do?”
Everyone nods. Captain Aubrey has demonstrated time and again his unbending strength and determination, even to the point of arrogance -- but as it’s been said, an arrogant captain is fine, as long as he’s an arrogant captain who knows what he’s doing.
Some of the men glance at Esperanza, who is sitting in the sand, looking into the fire. Worried looks pass between them; if the captain means to pursue the pirates, things will get rough for sure. One of the many good arguments against having a woman aboard a ship (besides the obvious “wicked bad luck”) is this: strong men can watch one another die in battle, but they become significantly less strong when women are dying alongside them. This is something no man should have to see.
Barret Bonden has another reason to worry. He has told no one of the possibility of Esperanza leaving the ship forever, but he has thought of it often, and the thought has never made him comfortable. To him, one of two things will happen: Esperanza will stay in Tierra del Fuego, and Barret will never see her again, or Esperanza will be killed or captured by the pirates, and Barret will never see her again. He wants to shove her into an empty tent and hold her close and tell her all manner of half-crazy passionate things that he can barely form in his mind, that may end up being just random words, but random words that would mean what he cannot say intelligibly. His heart is pounding. This is not normal for him.
He happily accepts more of the drink, hoping that the warm fuzz of rum will burn away all of these thoughts that he is not, not meant to be having.
“You’ll, em, be in the cabin, then, Allie? Wif th’ doctor, when we meet up wif them pirates?” one of the beefier men asks, jabbing at the fire with a stick and trying to sound casual.
Esperanza pulls thoughtfully at her bottom lip, not looking up from the fire. “I don’t know,” she says, and means it on more levels than one. She’s no longer certain of whether or not she will be on the ship at all when that times comes.
“Well you know...” the man says, sounding as though he doesn’t want to say what he’s about to say. “Them pirates... they’ll be pretty rough blokes and that... and we was thinkin’, maybe you wanna keep outta sight, if they get on the ship, like...”
“I’m going to bed,” says Esperanza, getting up from the sand and brushing off her hands and she turns and walks in the direction of her blanket, which she’d set up previously near the doctor’s tent.
“Well done,” says Barret to the men, and he sets his bottle down in the sand and gets up to go after her, a mumbling chorus of chagrined “sorry”s following after him.
The orange glow that comes from the lanterns inside the tent fuzzes out to the beach around it, illuminating Esperanza’s blankets with honey-colored light. She is laying on her side, away from the beach and the sailors and the water, facing the glow of the tent. Before Barret can say anything to her, she has heard his approach, and knows whether by sound or instinct that it’s him.
“I spent the last four years of my life before going out to sea on this island,” she says, not looking away from the canvas of the tent. “I was raised by an innkeeper in Cape Horn, and I hated it. But I wasn’t born here, I was born in Argentina, in Ushuaia, which is very close to Chile.”
Barret stands for a moment, then lowers himself to sit on the ground beside her.
“In Argentina, they used to say, ‘Mexicans descended from the Aztecs. Peruvians descended from the Incas. But we descended from boats’.”
Barret smiles. He likes that, though he can’t figure exactly what it means. The idea of being so close to the sea that its vessels could be considered ancestors is comforting. He imagines that is what Esperanza is getting at.
“Are you gonna be all right?” he asks.
She is quiet a moment. “I really don’t want to leave the ship, Barret.”
Barret thinks of saying a dozen different things. He thinks of telling her that, while she would be greatly missed, she would be in far less danger ashore, with no sea wars, no marauders, and with a town full of people to look after her. But he knows she would never go for that.
“I don’t want you to either,” he says. “But take care. The men don’t mean to make you feel helpless, but they know that you would be a target, and they want to look out for you.”
“I can look out for myself,” she says. “What will be enough to prove this?”
“I know it, Allie,” he says. “I do. But you have to allow others to want to... to care for you...”
Esperanza turns her head toward Barret and glares.
“Don’t you dare worry about me.”
She turns back around and lays down, closing her eyes. Though he knows this means he should go, he longs to talk to her more, to stroke her hair or her back, to say or do something that will give her some comfort, but in the end he gets up and says, “I’m sorry, Esperanza.” before walking away.
The next day most of the crew is busy running the boats back and forth to the ship with the supplies, or working on the repairs. The damage isn’t too bad, but some boards and some masts need to be fixed, as well as few of the sails, and some of the boards to the hull of the ship. Barret spends a lot of time doing his own tweaking and inspecting, as he’s found the steering a little difficult to manage the last few days since the attack, and as the steering is Mr. Bonden’s entire purpose aboard the Surprise, he doesn’t want anything to interrupt that. He looks after the helm like a baby daughter, not comfortable until he’s figured out the problem and solved it. He works the majority of the day until he’s smoothed everything out, then he returns to shore.
By the time dark comes he hasn’t seen Esperanza all day. He’d expected to pass her by on the boats, or as she helped the men load the supplies, or at least to catch a glimpse of her shape and her long dark hair on the beach, working on repairing the sails or something else that needed to get done. Not seeing her worries Barret; he hasn’t gone a day without at least seeing a bit of her in a very long time. While the men are eating, he approaches the doctor, who is poking about in one of his specimen cases.
“Have you seen Esperanza today, sir?” Barret asks.
“I have, yes, she was with me, collecting plants from around the island,” says the doctor, holding up a twig that he appears to be very interested in, though Barret cannot see why. “And if you’ll come with me, you can see a brilliant specimen of coryanthes macarantha which I think you’ll find quite interesting for its peculiarly shaped sepals---”
“How did she look?” Barret presses.
“Oh terrific, yes, as I was saying, the sepals are---”
“No, sir, Esperanza, how did Esperanza look?”
“Oh. Well lovely, as always, she... well, let me see, she had her hair pinned up for our field research and, ah, well she wore... dash it, I’m so bad with such things...”
“Her mood, I meant, doctor, how did she look to be feeling?” Barret asks, at the point of being exasperated with anyone of the medical or scientific profession.
“Hm. Pensive, I should think,” the doctor closes up the case he had been inspecting and leans in to speak to Barret in a quieter, kinder tone. “She’s got a lot on her mind, as you know...”
Barret nods, longing to find her and say something, anything, even if it’s all gibberish.
“Now as I was saying about the coryanthes macarantha, it’s a very interesting species of orchid, you see, it creates a nectar that quite literally intoxicates the bees that wish to pollinate it, and makes the insect thoroughly drunk so that---”
“Thanks doctor, I’ll see you later!” says Barret, sprinting off after a flash of dark hair.
“It’s a truly inspired pollination process!” Doctor Maturin calls after him, watches him for a moment, then shakes his head, disappearing back into his tent and his beloved plants.
“How long were you and your husband married?” Barret asks as he and Esperanza dip their feet in the cool water of the beach.
“Almost two years,” she says. “It doesn’t sound like very long, in terms of marriage, but at the time it felt like twenty years. We grew so very attached to each other.”
“Two years...” Barret tries to do the math. “How old were you then?”
“Nineteen.”
“And you lost him four years ago, that would make you... twenty-five?”
“Twenty-four right now,” she shrugs, liking the watery bell-sounds of her feet moving in the clear water. It is night time, and fires are being lit all over the camp, and the orange lights of the flame dance over the water.
“Twenty-four... well...” Barret shakes his head, never having assigned a certain age to Esperanza. To him she is timeless, and it seems strange to put a number to her, especially with her being, in his estimation, so young.
“Why, how old are you?” she asks, looking over at Barret. Though his face is wind-burnt and marked with scars and experience, his appearance is still very young, very boyish, and he acts with a cheerfulness and energy that helps to keep that image alive.
Bonden chuckles. “Older than that.”
“Come on, how old?” she smiles, studying him. “You can’t be over thirty...”
He sneaks a glance at her, smirking. “Thirty-five.”
“Oh, that’s nothing,” she says, nudging his shoulder. “You look great.”
Barret can’t help grinning, savoring those words, holding them and running them over and again through his mind. He spends the rest of the evening in a daydream.
By midday, most of the repairs have been finished on the Surprise. The sails are back up on the mainmast, and the slight rudder damage that Barret had been so concerned with, lest it ruin his precious steering, has been repaired. All that is left now is the tedious work of reconstructing the minor damage, the broken railings and the less worrisome holes in the outer shell. The captain has sent up most of his supplies, and there is little work left. Jack Aubrey was never the sort of man to waste time, and he reasons that the more they get done now, the more time they can have with their rum and Spanish women later.
Mr. Calloway, one of the younger midshipmen, is passing by a copse of trees on his way to give the captain the weather report, when he sees a form peeking through the brush. He starts, and the face behind the leaves starts as well, drawing back. Mr. Calloway knows at once that it is not a member of his sailing crew, and fears the threat of the pirates. He draws his cutlass but before he can approach, he hears the sound of rapid footsteps in the sand, sprinting away from him. Sheathing his cutlass (which, being twelve years old, he hasn’t had much experience in using to begin with), he runs across the camp to find the captain and make his report.
Before the crew can pack up their camp and return to the boat to make a stand, if need be, the pirates have flooded into the camp like a colony of ants, swinging their cutlasses, knocking over barrels of apples or boxes of supplies, plenty of threatening but no killing, as were the orders from their captain, unless it becomes absolutely necessary. The group of sailors nearest to Esperanza at the time draws closer to her, much to her exasperation. Sixteen years on the sea and they think she can’t handle a damn pirate. Barret, from across the camp, panics at the thought of not being with her, and he runs to find her, only to be stopped by a group of the marauders once she is within sight.
“Lucky me,” says one of the pirates standing in front of Esperanza, leering at her. “I get to deal with the Spaniard bitch.”
The men around her all tense, hands going to their hips, but as the pirate has the tip of his sword pointed at Esperanza, none of them dare go for their pistols.
A ripple goes through the crowd of men all along the beach. The pirates all seem to be looking in one direction, where another group of their company is strolling up toward them. In the middle of the group is a man dressed in the familiar attire of a pirate captain, the old fashioned hat and coat probably stolen off of his last victim, worn to both mock the hierarchy of naval power, and to promote their own rank. It is both a jeer and a commendation, the overdramatic and somewhat eastern flair to the dress of a pirate. Esperanza looks at the captain, his dark hair and sharp nose ringing a bell inside her.
“Jon!” she cries out.
The captain turns to the voice and his face betrays first shock, then joy. He runs to Esperanza, calling to his men to lower their weapons, for God’s sake. Both the pirates and the British sailors stare in bewilderment as Jon Shole, Captain of the buccaneers, embraces Esperanza.
“Allie!” he cries, holding her tightly. “Allie, my wife! Somehow I always knew I would find you again!”
Dangerous Sholes
Chapter Eight: (Enter The Pirates)
That evening, the crew pitched up tents and blankets on the shore, and slept on land. Some preferred the steady rocking of the ship, and returned to sleep in their hammocks below deck, but for many of them it was a peaceful and wonderful new experience. The captain granted everyone extra rations of rum. Esperanza gave hers to Barret, as she always gave away her ration to someone, having resolved long ago not to drink, which was not uncommon for women on ships.
She may have first made this resolution when she was ten years old, when one of the men deeply in his liquor tried to get her to lay with him, forgetting the fact that she was so young, but remembering abruptly when she broke his nose. It may have been at age fourteen, when another sea man she knew became roaring drunk and stumbled over the railing of the ship into the ocean, and he would have died if his more sober mates had not thrown in ropes to pull him back in. It may simply be due to the vileness of liquor to begin with.
“Cap says we may stay for two weeks or more,” one of the men says to a group of them sitting around a fire. “We need to do some repairing, from what happened with them pirates an’ all, and we’ll take our supplies and what, then put out again.”
“Does he mean to hunt down the buccaneers?” another asks.
The man grins. “We’re talking about Captain Lucky Jack Aubrey, mate. What do you think he’s gonna do?”
Everyone nods. Captain Aubrey has demonstrated time and again his unbending strength and determination, even to the point of arrogance -- but as it’s been said, an arrogant captain is fine, as long as he’s an arrogant captain who knows what he’s doing.
Some of the men glance at Esperanza, who is sitting in the sand, looking into the fire. Worried looks pass between them; if the captain means to pursue the pirates, things will get rough for sure. One of the many good arguments against having a woman aboard a ship (besides the obvious “wicked bad luck”) is this: strong men can watch one another die in battle, but they become significantly less strong when women are dying alongside them. This is something no man should have to see.
Barret Bonden has another reason to worry. He has told no one of the possibility of Esperanza leaving the ship forever, but he has thought of it often, and the thought has never made him comfortable. To him, one of two things will happen: Esperanza will stay in Tierra del Fuego, and Barret will never see her again, or Esperanza will be killed or captured by the pirates, and Barret will never see her again. He wants to shove her into an empty tent and hold her close and tell her all manner of half-crazy passionate things that he can barely form in his mind, that may end up being just random words, but random words that would mean what he cannot say intelligibly. His heart is pounding. This is not normal for him.
He happily accepts more of the drink, hoping that the warm fuzz of rum will burn away all of these thoughts that he is not, not meant to be having.
“You’ll, em, be in the cabin, then, Allie? Wif th’ doctor, when we meet up wif them pirates?” one of the beefier men asks, jabbing at the fire with a stick and trying to sound casual.
Esperanza pulls thoughtfully at her bottom lip, not looking up from the fire. “I don’t know,” she says, and means it on more levels than one. She’s no longer certain of whether or not she will be on the ship at all when that times comes.
“Well you know...” the man says, sounding as though he doesn’t want to say what he’s about to say. “Them pirates... they’ll be pretty rough blokes and that... and we was thinkin’, maybe you wanna keep outta sight, if they get on the ship, like...”
“I’m going to bed,” says Esperanza, getting up from the sand and brushing off her hands and she turns and walks in the direction of her blanket, which she’d set up previously near the doctor’s tent.
“Well done,” says Barret to the men, and he sets his bottle down in the sand and gets up to go after her, a mumbling chorus of chagrined “sorry”s following after him.
The orange glow that comes from the lanterns inside the tent fuzzes out to the beach around it, illuminating Esperanza’s blankets with honey-colored light. She is laying on her side, away from the beach and the sailors and the water, facing the glow of the tent. Before Barret can say anything to her, she has heard his approach, and knows whether by sound or instinct that it’s him.
“I spent the last four years of my life before going out to sea on this island,” she says, not looking away from the canvas of the tent. “I was raised by an innkeeper in Cape Horn, and I hated it. But I wasn’t born here, I was born in Argentina, in Ushuaia, which is very close to Chile.”
Barret stands for a moment, then lowers himself to sit on the ground beside her.
“In Argentina, they used to say, ‘Mexicans descended from the Aztecs. Peruvians descended from the Incas. But we descended from boats’.”
Barret smiles. He likes that, though he can’t figure exactly what it means. The idea of being so close to the sea that its vessels could be considered ancestors is comforting. He imagines that is what Esperanza is getting at.
“Are you gonna be all right?” he asks.
She is quiet a moment. “I really don’t want to leave the ship, Barret.”
Barret thinks of saying a dozen different things. He thinks of telling her that, while she would be greatly missed, she would be in far less danger ashore, with no sea wars, no marauders, and with a town full of people to look after her. But he knows she would never go for that.
“I don’t want you to either,” he says. “But take care. The men don’t mean to make you feel helpless, but they know that you would be a target, and they want to look out for you.”
“I can look out for myself,” she says. “What will be enough to prove this?”
“I know it, Allie,” he says. “I do. But you have to allow others to want to... to care for you...”
Esperanza turns her head toward Barret and glares.
“Don’t you dare worry about me.”
She turns back around and lays down, closing her eyes. Though he knows this means he should go, he longs to talk to her more, to stroke her hair or her back, to say or do something that will give her some comfort, but in the end he gets up and says, “I’m sorry, Esperanza.” before walking away.
The next day most of the crew is busy running the boats back and forth to the ship with the supplies, or working on the repairs. The damage isn’t too bad, but some boards and some masts need to be fixed, as well as few of the sails, and some of the boards to the hull of the ship. Barret spends a lot of time doing his own tweaking and inspecting, as he’s found the steering a little difficult to manage the last few days since the attack, and as the steering is Mr. Bonden’s entire purpose aboard the Surprise, he doesn’t want anything to interrupt that. He looks after the helm like a baby daughter, not comfortable until he’s figured out the problem and solved it. He works the majority of the day until he’s smoothed everything out, then he returns to shore.
By the time dark comes he hasn’t seen Esperanza all day. He’d expected to pass her by on the boats, or as she helped the men load the supplies, or at least to catch a glimpse of her shape and her long dark hair on the beach, working on repairing the sails or something else that needed to get done. Not seeing her worries Barret; he hasn’t gone a day without at least seeing a bit of her in a very long time. While the men are eating, he approaches the doctor, who is poking about in one of his specimen cases.
“Have you seen Esperanza today, sir?” Barret asks.
“I have, yes, she was with me, collecting plants from around the island,” says the doctor, holding up a twig that he appears to be very interested in, though Barret cannot see why. “And if you’ll come with me, you can see a brilliant specimen of coryanthes macarantha which I think you’ll find quite interesting for its peculiarly shaped sepals---”
“How did she look?” Barret presses.
“Oh terrific, yes, as I was saying, the sepals are---”
“No, sir, Esperanza, how did Esperanza look?”
“Oh. Well lovely, as always, she... well, let me see, she had her hair pinned up for our field research and, ah, well she wore... dash it, I’m so bad with such things...”
“Her mood, I meant, doctor, how did she look to be feeling?” Barret asks, at the point of being exasperated with anyone of the medical or scientific profession.
“Hm. Pensive, I should think,” the doctor closes up the case he had been inspecting and leans in to speak to Barret in a quieter, kinder tone. “She’s got a lot on her mind, as you know...”
Barret nods, longing to find her and say something, anything, even if it’s all gibberish.
“Now as I was saying about the coryanthes macarantha, it’s a very interesting species of orchid, you see, it creates a nectar that quite literally intoxicates the bees that wish to pollinate it, and makes the insect thoroughly drunk so that---”
“Thanks doctor, I’ll see you later!” says Barret, sprinting off after a flash of dark hair.
“It’s a truly inspired pollination process!” Doctor Maturin calls after him, watches him for a moment, then shakes his head, disappearing back into his tent and his beloved plants.
“How long were you and your husband married?” Barret asks as he and Esperanza dip their feet in the cool water of the beach.
“Almost two years,” she says. “It doesn’t sound like very long, in terms of marriage, but at the time it felt like twenty years. We grew so very attached to each other.”
“Two years...” Barret tries to do the math. “How old were you then?”
“Nineteen.”
“And you lost him four years ago, that would make you... twenty-five?”
“Twenty-four right now,” she shrugs, liking the watery bell-sounds of her feet moving in the clear water. It is night time, and fires are being lit all over the camp, and the orange lights of the flame dance over the water.
“Twenty-four... well...” Barret shakes his head, never having assigned a certain age to Esperanza. To him she is timeless, and it seems strange to put a number to her, especially with her being, in his estimation, so young.
“Why, how old are you?” she asks, looking over at Barret. Though his face is wind-burnt and marked with scars and experience, his appearance is still very young, very boyish, and he acts with a cheerfulness and energy that helps to keep that image alive.
Bonden chuckles. “Older than that.”
“Come on, how old?” she smiles, studying him. “You can’t be over thirty...”
He sneaks a glance at her, smirking. “Thirty-five.”
“Oh, that’s nothing,” she says, nudging his shoulder. “You look great.”
Barret can’t help grinning, savoring those words, holding them and running them over and again through his mind. He spends the rest of the evening in a daydream.
By midday, most of the repairs have been finished on the Surprise. The sails are back up on the mainmast, and the slight rudder damage that Barret had been so concerned with, lest it ruin his precious steering, has been repaired. All that is left now is the tedious work of reconstructing the minor damage, the broken railings and the less worrisome holes in the outer shell. The captain has sent up most of his supplies, and there is little work left. Jack Aubrey was never the sort of man to waste time, and he reasons that the more they get done now, the more time they can have with their rum and Spanish women later.
Mr. Calloway, one of the younger midshipmen, is passing by a copse of trees on his way to give the captain the weather report, when he sees a form peeking through the brush. He starts, and the face behind the leaves starts as well, drawing back. Mr. Calloway knows at once that it is not a member of his sailing crew, and fears the threat of the pirates. He draws his cutlass but before he can approach, he hears the sound of rapid footsteps in the sand, sprinting away from him. Sheathing his cutlass (which, being twelve years old, he hasn’t had much experience in using to begin with), he runs across the camp to find the captain and make his report.
Before the crew can pack up their camp and return to the boat to make a stand, if need be, the pirates have flooded into the camp like a colony of ants, swinging their cutlasses, knocking over barrels of apples or boxes of supplies, plenty of threatening but no killing, as were the orders from their captain, unless it becomes absolutely necessary. The group of sailors nearest to Esperanza at the time draws closer to her, much to her exasperation. Sixteen years on the sea and they think she can’t handle a damn pirate. Barret, from across the camp, panics at the thought of not being with her, and he runs to find her, only to be stopped by a group of the marauders once she is within sight.
“Lucky me,” says one of the pirates standing in front of Esperanza, leering at her. “I get to deal with the Spaniard bitch.”
The men around her all tense, hands going to their hips, but as the pirate has the tip of his sword pointed at Esperanza, none of them dare go for their pistols.
A ripple goes through the crowd of men all along the beach. The pirates all seem to be looking in one direction, where another group of their company is strolling up toward them. In the middle of the group is a man dressed in the familiar attire of a pirate captain, the old fashioned hat and coat probably stolen off of his last victim, worn to both mock the hierarchy of naval power, and to promote their own rank. It is both a jeer and a commendation, the overdramatic and somewhat eastern flair to the dress of a pirate. Esperanza looks at the captain, his dark hair and sharp nose ringing a bell inside her.
“Jon!” she cries out.
The captain turns to the voice and his face betrays first shock, then joy. He runs to Esperanza, calling to his men to lower their weapons, for God’s sake. Both the pirates and the British sailors stare in bewilderment as Jon Shole, Captain of the buccaneers, embraces Esperanza.
“Allie!” he cries, holding her tightly. “Allie, my wife! Somehow I always knew I would find you again!”