Marked Men: part 2 of 2
Second part of fic written for
potcfest prompt #61: What was the mark Jack left on Beckett?
Takes place before the movies and after Tall Ship Tales, which you don't need to read first.
Title: Marked Men (2/2)
Author: p0wdermonkey
Pairing/characters: Jack/Beckett
Rating: NC-17 for sexual weirdness, medical stuff, Beckett, and philosophy.
Summary: Ridiculously long and detailed build up to the actual prompt.
Disclaimer: I don’t own Jack Sparrow, Cutler Beckett, or Hobbes’ Leviathan.
Warnings: Suggestions of dubious consent, offstage. Beckett, Hobbes. Though if you’re looking for Beckett/Hobbes noncon, you’ll be disappointed. Try Google.
Author's notes: are at the end, for those who make it that far.
Beta:
viva_gloria
Marked Men: Part One
Marked Men 2/2
British-run Pondicherry was remarkably similar to its French-run predecessor, with two considerable improvements: the former gouverneur and his friend, capitaine Leclerc, languished in the very prison where they’d been so keen to confine Jack (admittedly in a better class of cell); while their erstwhile thief, deserter, sodomite, etc., etc. enjoyed the privileges of a law-abiding citizen.
This was a delightfully novel experience for Jack. He resolved to savour it to the full, embarking upon what he would later describe (while suppressing many of the details) as “my brush with respectability”. He entered the employ of the British East India Company as Local Assistant to Junior Factor Beckett (in a bad humour since his anticipated promotion had been held up by paperwork, but still fabulously powerful by Jack's measure of these things.)
As Local Assistant, Jack became a part of Beckett’s household, with a room of his own in the official residence, a fine new wardrobe, regular hot baths, clean sheets, scented oils, erotic prints, and a steady supply of meals involving delightfully unnecessary arrays of courses, crystal, and silver implements. His admiration for Beckett’s cook grew in step with his skinny frame. The fever receded (either from cinchona bark tea, soft living, or both) and he felt better than he had in years. Best of all was the realisation that he’d fallen in with a man who controlled a huge, heavily armed, merchant fleet, and seemed willing to reward Jack’s services with a position of responsibility aboard one of his ships.
In fact, Jack was altogether more smitten with Beckett’s sophisticated elegance, urbane (and occasionally shocking) conversation, sensual luxury, and well-stocked library, than he cared to admit, even at the time. (Not to mention his cabinets of cunningly crafted devices for increasing, varying, or prolonging stimulation.) Beckett once hinted that the nights in his four-poster featherbed detracted somewhat from Jack's newfound respectability, but Jack brushed the suggestion aside: their liaison was conducted with great discretion and careful attention to concealment. To Jack’s way of thinking, that was as respectable as it got.
It seemed a fitting embodiment of the reversal in Jack’s fortunes that Beckett (or, in the privacy of his bedchamber, Cutler) generally preferred Jack to do the fucking. Jack was puzzled at first by certain eccentricities, such as Cutler’s dislike of ejaculation, but he adapted with his usual flexibility, learning just when and where to apply pressure so the fastidious Factor could convulse in rapture with little or no discharge of vital fluid. (Apparently, this was a life-extending practice Cutler had discovered from ancient Chinese texts while representing the Company in Canton.) Jack even experimented with the technique himself, but never took to it, somewhat to the disappointment of his mentor.
“It’s such a pity, Jack. A true master of bodily weather requires an equally accomplished partner. However, you’ve been exceptionally helpful thus far, so we’ll simply have to hope your inclinations will refine themselves with time, and exposure to one more advanced.”
“Best not to rush these things,” Jack concurred with feeling. But he volunteered to make a regular study of the Chinese texts, many of which were accompanied by informative illustrations.
While awaiting illumination, Jack could console himself with other achievements, specifically his dramatic, um, rise from criminal on the run to paramour of one of British colonial power’s most elegant representatives. Jack’s estimation of his own powers of persuasion-always considerable-soared high as a topgallant at the private knowledge that said representative would summon him almost nightly to his bed and beg him to fill his soft, white, perfumed, British orifices with savage, outlawed lust.
Very occasionally-and these were secretly Jack’s favourite nights-something inside Cutler seemed to snap. On these nights, a tokenly resisting Jack would find himself flipped onto his back and nailed to the mattress with all the power of a British gun battery suppressing an uprising.
After spending inside Jack with an explosion of pent-up humours, Cutler would collapse beside him, eyes vacant and lost, in marked contrast to his usual post-coital manner (which reminded Jack of a ship’s cat curled by the galley stove). Jack soon learned that the best course of action was to slip quietly to his own bed before he was ordered there.
Between clandestine encounters, Jack’s time was devoted to exploring Pondicherry, finding pretexts to visit Company ships in port (imagining himself in command of especially fine ones), and assisting Beckett with his philosophickal inquiries, public and private. He spent most of his retainer on a French chirurgeon who (much to Beckett’s approval) wired solid silver teeth into his mouth to replace those claimed by scurvy in the South Seas. At home, he could spend happy hours alone with the contents of Beckett’s library, which, being out of bounds to the servants, was also the venue for fascinating private conversations. These could run far into the night, often adjourning to Beckett’s bedchamber to submit some especially complex Chinese (or Indian, or Greek) illustration to practical investigation.
In the course of one such discussion (during its bedchamber phase) Jack asked Beckett about his unusual first name.
“Ah!” Beckett winced slightly. “I was wondering when you’d ask. People always do, you know. Family joke.” He paused. Jack kept silent, but licked Cutler's ear encouragingly. “My mother had some quaint idea that she’d married beneath her, when she had, in point of fact, wed a very considerable fortune with nothing of her own to trade for it. She wished to call me Cuthbert after one of her exalted ancestors, but my father found it more amusing to name me for the silverware trade that made him wealthy. I imagine he enjoyed watching her present me to my maternal relatives.”
“So your mum was some kind of impoverished heiress?” Jack was somewhat at sea regarding the social and personal ramifications of the story, but he was pretty sure it wouldn’t have made for a happy home life. “Bet she’s proud now you’ve done so well for yourself.”
“I doubt she’d consider employment in the East India Company a worthy occupation. The question remains academic, however, since all her fine breeding didn’t prevent her taking a lover and drowning with him in a boating accident while I was an infant.”
“Fuck!” said Jack, and wisely shut his mouth (having first removed it from Cutler's ear).
“I’ve no truck with outmoded notions of gentility myself,” Beckett continued. “A man’s worth is determined by his own efforts. In any case, the defining characteristics of an individual come from his father: the mother is merely the receptacle that provides base form. My father taught me how to make money and use it to acquire power. He supported my choice to join the Company, but he’ll judge it on its results.”
“Have you thought about changing your name?” asked Jack, who hadn’t always been Sparrow (or, for that matter, Jack).
“Frequently!” Beckett chuckled. “But that would leave a shameful secret for my enemies to uncover. I prefer to wear it proudly; to let them know I’m not so easily hurt.”
It might have been the courage of Beckett’s decision, or its tactical cunning, but something about it brought a lump to Jack's throat-also to regions lower down, which put an end to that topic of conversation.
During the library phase of their discussions, Jack was mainly required to listen with interest as Beckett expounded some intriguingly peculiar ideas. Occasionally, he’d be called on to supplement Beckett’s information with accounts of pagan practices he’d encountered, read about, or-where absolutely necessary-invented.
Beckett, it seemed, loved two things in this world: social order and personal power. (There was, mercifully, no question of his loving Jack, who was merely a pleasurable interlude along the path to greater things.) Beckett painted a picture of England riven with conspiracies and seething with religious enthusiasms, where unlettered preachers proclaimed universal equality and the evil of property. (Jack’s opinion of his hypothetical homeland rose by several notches.)
Beckett’s remedy for social ferment (to Jack’s surprise, and despite Beckett’s regular church attendance) was rational materialism. Guided by Beckett, Jack spent several days with an expensive, leather-bound volume, intriguingly titled Leviathan, in which a man called Hobbes set out that all men (and presumably women, though he never actually said) were indeed equal, but that their inborn competitiveness and greed would cause their lives in an untrammelled state of nature to be solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short. To escape this fate, personal freedom must be ceded to a sovereign authority.
Jack had his doubts about the social contract, as Hobbes termed this trade of liberty for security. But Beckett insisted it was the only rational option, so Jack (who, by this point, was generally enjoying a fuzzy post-coital glow enhanced by fine French brandy) tended to go along with him. Even when his wits remained sharp, he bit his tongue and told himself he wanted a ship more than he wanted an argument. (He was honest enough to admit that this behaviour rather proved Hobbes’ point.)
“Of course,” Beckett drawled on the night following his long-awaited promotion, pouring them both another brandy, “Hobbes leaves certain inferences to be drawn only by those worthy to do so.”
“Such as ourselves?” asked Jack, wondering whether enough brandy had been consumed for the plural to go unchallenged.
“Precisely! Those who submit to a sovereign authority only with a view to becoming its future embodiments.”
Privately, Jack was disappointed that Beckett, with all his learning, polish, and shocking brilliance, was content to keep things as they were (with the one minor difference that he’d be the one at the top of the tree). But he agreed-quite sincerely as it happened-that issuing orders must be preferable to obeying them.
“Once we free ourselves of religious claptrap,” Beckett continued, pulling off his wig and releasing his startlingly bestial black hair for Jack to massage, “it becomes evident that power flows along two sets of conduits, both of which can be manipulated to advantage. Hobbes perfectly understood the first, which is trade and conquest, but he scarcely touched upon the second, which is generation.”
“Tantric Mysteries!” Jack ran the ball of his thumb along Beckett’s bristly jaw line. He felt he was really getting the hang of this now.
His guess unleashed a torrent of elucidation. In the absence of a divine creator, Beckett’s (and Hobbes’) beloved Mechanickal Philosophy was powerless to explain the appearance of new life. Whence did a foetus arise? How could flies and worms spontaneously form in non-living matter? Why should these processes occur at all, and why should they sometimes go awry to engender monstrosities, or creatures lacking the breath of life?
Jack (all the while kneading tension out of Beckett’s neck and shoulders) learned of an instrument called a microscope that revealed the presence of tiny eggs, from which worms and flies emerged. This discovery had led to the conjecture that the first females of every species must have contained within them all future females and their eggs. (Jack refrained from asking where the first females came from because he sensed Beckett was building towards something vital. Something that might earn Jack a ship.)
“But, of course, females merely provide the substance that will receive shape and desire from the masculine vital essence. I have looked upon a bull’s seminal fluid-masculine seed-through a microscope. It was seething with animalcules, swimming creatures, like minute tadpoles, each one ready to command base female matter to form a living being!”
Jack found he needed a moment to adjust to the notion of tiny fish seething in his secretions-or anyone else’s. Beckett misread his silence.
“You’re wondering how the engendering of offspring channels power, and I confess, this is the point at which my understanding fails. But clearly, the generative force-which we can now see resides in animalcules-is enormously powerful in ordering the world. Out of tedious moral superstition, our society has suppressed such knowledge, but others have penetrated the mystery: all over the world, ancient cults worshipped the generative principle, and wise men sought to tame it. The priests who built my Coromandel temples knew much, and recorded their knowledge in stone. When I decipher the carvings, I shall attain knowledge and power never yet in the hands of a white man. I shall command not only technology and trade, but the very force of life. My authority shall be second to none. What do you think?”
Jack thought he’d better get himself a ship before his protector was confined in a lunatic asylum. Also that he’d like to see animalcules for himself: this seemed the safer option to voice.
“What a splendid idea!” Beckett leapt to his feet, almost cracking his skull into Jack’s chin. “I’m afraid I lack a microscope, but human animalcules must be more complex, and therefore larger, than the bovine kind. It’s possible we’ll be able to make them out with a magnifying glass and sufficient illumination.”
Despite a week of sterling efforts by all involved, the animalcules, even stained with ink, spread between two sheets of fine glass, held up to the Indian sun, and viewed through a powerful lens, remained elusive. Nothing, it seemed could persuade them to reveal themselves without a microscope, not even when Beckett reluctantly provided a sample of his own (on the plainly ludicrous supposition that they must be larger than Jack’s).
“What,” asked Jack (who sometimes just couldn’t resist) “makes you think yours are bigger?”
“I’d have thought it was obvious. I possess more masculine force, and therefore require larger, more vigorous carriers for my essence. All the more so since you increase my reserves of masculine force each time you infuse me with animalcules. Force that I, in turn, conserve by retaining my seed during congress, something for which you apparently lack sufficient moral fibre.”
“You’ve been stealing my animalcules!”
Jack was surprised to find himself genuinely upset, not by accusations of moral weakness (for these were mother’s milk to Jack Sparrow), nor even by the misappropriation of his animalcules (which, if they existed, he was happy to distribute with gay abandon), but by the perfidious sleight of hand that had made him once again the sexual underdog. Not shafter, after all, but shaftee once again. As per usual, remarked his cynical self, with Beckett-like smugness.
“Now, Jack,” soothed Beckett, “it’s nothing personal. The nature of force is to seek its own likeness: to pass from those with less to those with more. I have more power than you to shape the world to my design, so the engendering essence naturally flows from you towards me, where it can have the fullest effect.”
“Nothing personal!” Jack-suddenly bursting with all the suppressed outrage of months of discretion-wanted to throw respectability to the winds and tell smug Cutler bloody Beckett exactly who'd shaped the world to make a stateless, nameless pirate brat flow naturally down from the jungle to a life of luxury in Factor bloody Beckett’s official bloody residence and command of a fine Company ship. But the ship wasn’t his yet, so he swallowed his bile along with the revelations.
Beckett shook his head and chuckled, oozing offensive doses of pity.
“You stole them,” repeated Jack, increasingly aware that it was a stupid-sounding accusation, “just like you stole my titty domes, and my granny’s spells…”
Bugger.
Beckett froze in mid sneer. “Your grandmother’s spells? You said you had them from an old Indian moor…”
Jack considered claiming that said Indian moor simply liked him to call her granny, that being her tribe’s term for teacher. But he could see the game was up and, frankly, it was high time he reclaimed a modicum of dignity. So he held Beckett’s appalled gaze until Beckett looked away first, flustered and fumbling.
“I should have seen it sooner… I thought… I thought you’d been in the sun… You hinted at Spanish connections… This changes everything…”
“Why?” demanded Jack. “My dad was as English as you.” (Irish, in point of fact, which looked the same, but-for reasons Jack had never entirely fathomed-tended to go down rather less well.) “What happened to women being merely passive receptacles?”
“Active or passive,” hissed Beckett, “there’s a, a… taint. I want you gone this instant. Take what you must, but be sure I never set eyes on you again.”
“I want a ship.” Jack could practically feel respectability shattering and crashing in ruins around him. It was a good feeling. “Or I’ll go to the Senior Merchant and tell him you’ve been paying company money to bugger me black and blue. Or, in point of fact, blue, seein’ as I was black before you started.”
“Oh, do try to be reasonable, Jack!” Beckett had regained at least the semblance of composure. (Jack couldn’t help, yet again, being somewhat impressed.) “I was hardly likely to give you a ship when you were English! It was a charade, a ploy to make you suppose you’d still have a future when I tired of you. And I shall deny any allegations you’re foolish enough to make.”
“Isn’t the Senior Merchant coming to dinner next week?” enquired Jack sweetly. “I might get disgracefully drunk and invite him to join us for a threesome.”
“There’s a ship sailing tomorrow for Mombassa.” Beckett took up a quill from his desk, sharpened it carefully. “You’ll be conveyed there with the respect due to a representative of the Company. The next ship, however, will bear news that you are nothing but a thieving impostor, whose word cannot be trusted on any matter. I’m rather afraid it may warrant your summary execution.” He smiled. “So you’ll be well advised not to linger in Mombassa, and to procure a new identity for yourself. I imagine it won’t be the first. Or the last.”
Jack knew the best deal he was likely to get when he saw it. Resolutely suppressing his admiration for Beckett's tactical brilliance, he pocketed the letter, along with a selection of valuables, books, and charts from the treasure trove that was Beckett’s library.
“May as well furnish some evidence for those charges of theft, savvy?”
Beckett shrugged, but Jack was fiercely glad to see fury in the way his neck swelled and the pulsing of that little vein on his temple.
“Don’t imagine you’ll walk away scot free, Sparrow. Whether they catch you or not, you’ll find acquaintance with me has left its mark. I can easily find another catamite to do my bidding but I fear, now your eyes have been opened, you'll find your peers sorely lacking in sophistication, and your horizons sadly limited. Before long, you'll come to regret your illicit venture into a world where you don't belong.”
“Ah!” countered Jack, on his way to the door. “But don’t forget my animalcules are swimming around inside you, busily forming base matter to their own designs.”
He didn’t think he could improve on that, so he shut the door behind him and hurried to the dock.
The voyage to Mombassa provided ample opportunity to reflect on the truth of Beckett’s words. Jack suspected he’d never entirely shake off a hankering for silk sheets, lace sleeves, elegant dining, and candlelit chamber music. He’d also learned a great deal-not all of it welcome-about England and his likely reception there. Finally, he’d acquired a lingering respect for the ideas of Hobbes, and a lifelong aversion to cologne.
A series of dramatic adventures (and several tedious misunderstandings) took Jack from Mombassa to Zanzibar. Armed with Beckett's charts (the last of his plunder from the library), Jack claimed a place as navigator on a ship called the Black Pearl. He knew she was a pirate; more importantly, he knew he was one too.
It wasn't as soft as Company life in Pondicherry, but the interludes of luxury were all the sweeter for that, and the company far pleasanter than Beckett's predictions. Jack was determined never again to enter into a social contract: as far as he was concerned, poore, nasty, and brutish were in the eye of the beholder, and a short life was better than a dull one. “A merry life and a short one shall be my motto,” Bart Roberts had said, and Jack, when he heard it, was in full agreement. (Though merry and long would, obviously, have been his first choice.)
Along with more nautical matters, Jack's time on the Pearl taught him to recognise the marks that sporadically appeared on his body, and what they meant. He and the pox developed an understanding: he didn’t bother it, and it didn’t bother him. It had worked so far.
He was second mate by the time his captain unwisely agreed to transport a cargo of slaves for a certain Senior Merchant Beckett of the East India Company. Large quantities of cash-and probably other forms of pressure-had been brought to bear, and all Jack's objections fell on deaf ears. Predictably, he found a way to release said cargo (with a little help from a friend), which-equally predictably-brought the wrath of the Company down on the pirates. Less predictably (to Jack, anyway), this ended in the loss of the lovely Pearl, with the deaths of the captain and far too many men.
Jack shouldn't have survived it himself-hadn't been entirely sure he wanted to-but, in the end, he'd seized the chance to bargain with the devil for what he'd lost. Perhaps he'd thought he could cheat; perhaps Beckett had marked him more than he'd known: either way, it was a trade he couldn't resist.
He was chained in an unusually well-appointed gaol cell in Fort St George when he laid eyes on Beckett again, specifically on a spot peeking over the top of his neckband. The poorly concealed blemish awoke long-forgotten memories of a morning in Pondicherry, assuring Cutler that the red mark on his member was nothing but the bite of a local insect.
“Had scores of ’em myself, in the jungle,” Jack’d promised with complete sincerity and-as it turned out-equally complete inaccuracy. “Unpleasant, but utterly harmless. Clears up after a few weeks with no consequences whatsoever.”
Back in the cell, Jack grinned wickedly. “Gorgeous cravat, Cutler, but not tied quite high enough. I see those pesky animalcules of mine are still making their mark.”
A brief twitch of Beckett’s lips was the only outward sign of near loss of control, but was a sign they both know Jack couldn’t miss.
“My mark on you will be considerably more permanent, Sparrow. And sooner lethal. In the unlikely event of your cheating the executioner tomorrow-and I assure you 'unlikely' is something of an understatement-this will reveal you for what you truly are. You'll never pass yourself off in respectable company again.”
Before Jack could point out that he'd had enough of respectable company to last him several lifetimes, Beckett took a red-hot branding iron from the fire, held it a moment beside Jack's face, then pressed it, hissing and steaming, to his forearm.
It hurt like all Hell, but Jack didn’t care: his bargain was struck; his ship was coming; he had thirteen years, which wasn’t long, but might be long enough to attend Cutler’s funeral.
He threw back his head and laughed like a harpy.
Notes
Far too much background reading went into this one. Highlights include:
Brian Easlea, Witch-hunting, Magic, and the New Philosophy
Hobbes' Leviathan at Project Gutenberg
“In an honest service there is thin commons, low wages, and hard labour. In this, plenty and satiety, pleasure and ease, liberty and power; and who would not balance creditor on this side, when all the hazard that is run for it, at worst is only a sour look or two at choking? No, a merry life and a short one shall be my motto.” Bart Roberts.
potcfest prompt #61: What was the mark Jack left on Beckett?
Takes place before the movies and after Tall Ship Tales, which you don't need to read first.
Title: Marked Men (2/2)
Author: p0wdermonkey
Pairing/characters: Jack/Beckett
Rating: NC-17 for sexual weirdness, medical stuff, Beckett, and philosophy.
Summary: Ridiculously long and detailed build up to the actual prompt.
Disclaimer: I don’t own Jack Sparrow, Cutler Beckett, or Hobbes’ Leviathan.
Warnings: Suggestions of dubious consent, offstage. Beckett, Hobbes. Though if you’re looking for Beckett/Hobbes noncon, you’ll be disappointed. Try Google.
Author's notes: are at the end, for those who make it that far.
Beta:
viva_gloria
Marked Men: Part One
Marked Men 2/2
British-run Pondicherry was remarkably similar to its French-run predecessor, with two considerable improvements: the former gouverneur and his friend, capitaine Leclerc, languished in the very prison where they’d been so keen to confine Jack (admittedly in a better class of cell); while their erstwhile thief, deserter, sodomite, etc., etc. enjoyed the privileges of a law-abiding citizen.
This was a delightfully novel experience for Jack. He resolved to savour it to the full, embarking upon what he would later describe (while suppressing many of the details) as “my brush with respectability”. He entered the employ of the British East India Company as Local Assistant to Junior Factor Beckett (in a bad humour since his anticipated promotion had been held up by paperwork, but still fabulously powerful by Jack's measure of these things.)
As Local Assistant, Jack became a part of Beckett’s household, with a room of his own in the official residence, a fine new wardrobe, regular hot baths, clean sheets, scented oils, erotic prints, and a steady supply of meals involving delightfully unnecessary arrays of courses, crystal, and silver implements. His admiration for Beckett’s cook grew in step with his skinny frame. The fever receded (either from cinchona bark tea, soft living, or both) and he felt better than he had in years. Best of all was the realisation that he’d fallen in with a man who controlled a huge, heavily armed, merchant fleet, and seemed willing to reward Jack’s services with a position of responsibility aboard one of his ships.
In fact, Jack was altogether more smitten with Beckett’s sophisticated elegance, urbane (and occasionally shocking) conversation, sensual luxury, and well-stocked library, than he cared to admit, even at the time. (Not to mention his cabinets of cunningly crafted devices for increasing, varying, or prolonging stimulation.) Beckett once hinted that the nights in his four-poster featherbed detracted somewhat from Jack's newfound respectability, but Jack brushed the suggestion aside: their liaison was conducted with great discretion and careful attention to concealment. To Jack’s way of thinking, that was as respectable as it got.
It seemed a fitting embodiment of the reversal in Jack’s fortunes that Beckett (or, in the privacy of his bedchamber, Cutler) generally preferred Jack to do the fucking. Jack was puzzled at first by certain eccentricities, such as Cutler’s dislike of ejaculation, but he adapted with his usual flexibility, learning just when and where to apply pressure so the fastidious Factor could convulse in rapture with little or no discharge of vital fluid. (Apparently, this was a life-extending practice Cutler had discovered from ancient Chinese texts while representing the Company in Canton.) Jack even experimented with the technique himself, but never took to it, somewhat to the disappointment of his mentor.
“It’s such a pity, Jack. A true master of bodily weather requires an equally accomplished partner. However, you’ve been exceptionally helpful thus far, so we’ll simply have to hope your inclinations will refine themselves with time, and exposure to one more advanced.”
“Best not to rush these things,” Jack concurred with feeling. But he volunteered to make a regular study of the Chinese texts, many of which were accompanied by informative illustrations.
While awaiting illumination, Jack could console himself with other achievements, specifically his dramatic, um, rise from criminal on the run to paramour of one of British colonial power’s most elegant representatives. Jack’s estimation of his own powers of persuasion-always considerable-soared high as a topgallant at the private knowledge that said representative would summon him almost nightly to his bed and beg him to fill his soft, white, perfumed, British orifices with savage, outlawed lust.
Very occasionally-and these were secretly Jack’s favourite nights-something inside Cutler seemed to snap. On these nights, a tokenly resisting Jack would find himself flipped onto his back and nailed to the mattress with all the power of a British gun battery suppressing an uprising.
After spending inside Jack with an explosion of pent-up humours, Cutler would collapse beside him, eyes vacant and lost, in marked contrast to his usual post-coital manner (which reminded Jack of a ship’s cat curled by the galley stove). Jack soon learned that the best course of action was to slip quietly to his own bed before he was ordered there.
Between clandestine encounters, Jack’s time was devoted to exploring Pondicherry, finding pretexts to visit Company ships in port (imagining himself in command of especially fine ones), and assisting Beckett with his philosophickal inquiries, public and private. He spent most of his retainer on a French chirurgeon who (much to Beckett’s approval) wired solid silver teeth into his mouth to replace those claimed by scurvy in the South Seas. At home, he could spend happy hours alone with the contents of Beckett’s library, which, being out of bounds to the servants, was also the venue for fascinating private conversations. These could run far into the night, often adjourning to Beckett’s bedchamber to submit some especially complex Chinese (or Indian, or Greek) illustration to practical investigation.
In the course of one such discussion (during its bedchamber phase) Jack asked Beckett about his unusual first name.
“Ah!” Beckett winced slightly. “I was wondering when you’d ask. People always do, you know. Family joke.” He paused. Jack kept silent, but licked Cutler's ear encouragingly. “My mother had some quaint idea that she’d married beneath her, when she had, in point of fact, wed a very considerable fortune with nothing of her own to trade for it. She wished to call me Cuthbert after one of her exalted ancestors, but my father found it more amusing to name me for the silverware trade that made him wealthy. I imagine he enjoyed watching her present me to my maternal relatives.”
“So your mum was some kind of impoverished heiress?” Jack was somewhat at sea regarding the social and personal ramifications of the story, but he was pretty sure it wouldn’t have made for a happy home life. “Bet she’s proud now you’ve done so well for yourself.”
“I doubt she’d consider employment in the East India Company a worthy occupation. The question remains academic, however, since all her fine breeding didn’t prevent her taking a lover and drowning with him in a boating accident while I was an infant.”
“Fuck!” said Jack, and wisely shut his mouth (having first removed it from Cutler's ear).
“I’ve no truck with outmoded notions of gentility myself,” Beckett continued. “A man’s worth is determined by his own efforts. In any case, the defining characteristics of an individual come from his father: the mother is merely the receptacle that provides base form. My father taught me how to make money and use it to acquire power. He supported my choice to join the Company, but he’ll judge it on its results.”
“Have you thought about changing your name?” asked Jack, who hadn’t always been Sparrow (or, for that matter, Jack).
“Frequently!” Beckett chuckled. “But that would leave a shameful secret for my enemies to uncover. I prefer to wear it proudly; to let them know I’m not so easily hurt.”
It might have been the courage of Beckett’s decision, or its tactical cunning, but something about it brought a lump to Jack's throat-also to regions lower down, which put an end to that topic of conversation.
During the library phase of their discussions, Jack was mainly required to listen with interest as Beckett expounded some intriguingly peculiar ideas. Occasionally, he’d be called on to supplement Beckett’s information with accounts of pagan practices he’d encountered, read about, or-where absolutely necessary-invented.
Beckett, it seemed, loved two things in this world: social order and personal power. (There was, mercifully, no question of his loving Jack, who was merely a pleasurable interlude along the path to greater things.) Beckett painted a picture of England riven with conspiracies and seething with religious enthusiasms, where unlettered preachers proclaimed universal equality and the evil of property. (Jack’s opinion of his hypothetical homeland rose by several notches.)
Beckett’s remedy for social ferment (to Jack’s surprise, and despite Beckett’s regular church attendance) was rational materialism. Guided by Beckett, Jack spent several days with an expensive, leather-bound volume, intriguingly titled Leviathan, in which a man called Hobbes set out that all men (and presumably women, though he never actually said) were indeed equal, but that their inborn competitiveness and greed would cause their lives in an untrammelled state of nature to be solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short. To escape this fate, personal freedom must be ceded to a sovereign authority.
Jack had his doubts about the social contract, as Hobbes termed this trade of liberty for security. But Beckett insisted it was the only rational option, so Jack (who, by this point, was generally enjoying a fuzzy post-coital glow enhanced by fine French brandy) tended to go along with him. Even when his wits remained sharp, he bit his tongue and told himself he wanted a ship more than he wanted an argument. (He was honest enough to admit that this behaviour rather proved Hobbes’ point.)
“Of course,” Beckett drawled on the night following his long-awaited promotion, pouring them both another brandy, “Hobbes leaves certain inferences to be drawn only by those worthy to do so.”
“Such as ourselves?” asked Jack, wondering whether enough brandy had been consumed for the plural to go unchallenged.
“Precisely! Those who submit to a sovereign authority only with a view to becoming its future embodiments.”
Privately, Jack was disappointed that Beckett, with all his learning, polish, and shocking brilliance, was content to keep things as they were (with the one minor difference that he’d be the one at the top of the tree). But he agreed-quite sincerely as it happened-that issuing orders must be preferable to obeying them.
“Once we free ourselves of religious claptrap,” Beckett continued, pulling off his wig and releasing his startlingly bestial black hair for Jack to massage, “it becomes evident that power flows along two sets of conduits, both of which can be manipulated to advantage. Hobbes perfectly understood the first, which is trade and conquest, but he scarcely touched upon the second, which is generation.”
“Tantric Mysteries!” Jack ran the ball of his thumb along Beckett’s bristly jaw line. He felt he was really getting the hang of this now.
His guess unleashed a torrent of elucidation. In the absence of a divine creator, Beckett’s (and Hobbes’) beloved Mechanickal Philosophy was powerless to explain the appearance of new life. Whence did a foetus arise? How could flies and worms spontaneously form in non-living matter? Why should these processes occur at all, and why should they sometimes go awry to engender monstrosities, or creatures lacking the breath of life?
Jack (all the while kneading tension out of Beckett’s neck and shoulders) learned of an instrument called a microscope that revealed the presence of tiny eggs, from which worms and flies emerged. This discovery had led to the conjecture that the first females of every species must have contained within them all future females and their eggs. (Jack refrained from asking where the first females came from because he sensed Beckett was building towards something vital. Something that might earn Jack a ship.)
“But, of course, females merely provide the substance that will receive shape and desire from the masculine vital essence. I have looked upon a bull’s seminal fluid-masculine seed-through a microscope. It was seething with animalcules, swimming creatures, like minute tadpoles, each one ready to command base female matter to form a living being!”
Jack found he needed a moment to adjust to the notion of tiny fish seething in his secretions-or anyone else’s. Beckett misread his silence.
“You’re wondering how the engendering of offspring channels power, and I confess, this is the point at which my understanding fails. But clearly, the generative force-which we can now see resides in animalcules-is enormously powerful in ordering the world. Out of tedious moral superstition, our society has suppressed such knowledge, but others have penetrated the mystery: all over the world, ancient cults worshipped the generative principle, and wise men sought to tame it. The priests who built my Coromandel temples knew much, and recorded their knowledge in stone. When I decipher the carvings, I shall attain knowledge and power never yet in the hands of a white man. I shall command not only technology and trade, but the very force of life. My authority shall be second to none. What do you think?”
Jack thought he’d better get himself a ship before his protector was confined in a lunatic asylum. Also that he’d like to see animalcules for himself: this seemed the safer option to voice.
“What a splendid idea!” Beckett leapt to his feet, almost cracking his skull into Jack’s chin. “I’m afraid I lack a microscope, but human animalcules must be more complex, and therefore larger, than the bovine kind. It’s possible we’ll be able to make them out with a magnifying glass and sufficient illumination.”
Despite a week of sterling efforts by all involved, the animalcules, even stained with ink, spread between two sheets of fine glass, held up to the Indian sun, and viewed through a powerful lens, remained elusive. Nothing, it seemed could persuade them to reveal themselves without a microscope, not even when Beckett reluctantly provided a sample of his own (on the plainly ludicrous supposition that they must be larger than Jack’s).
“What,” asked Jack (who sometimes just couldn’t resist) “makes you think yours are bigger?”
“I’d have thought it was obvious. I possess more masculine force, and therefore require larger, more vigorous carriers for my essence. All the more so since you increase my reserves of masculine force each time you infuse me with animalcules. Force that I, in turn, conserve by retaining my seed during congress, something for which you apparently lack sufficient moral fibre.”
“You’ve been stealing my animalcules!”
Jack was surprised to find himself genuinely upset, not by accusations of moral weakness (for these were mother’s milk to Jack Sparrow), nor even by the misappropriation of his animalcules (which, if they existed, he was happy to distribute with gay abandon), but by the perfidious sleight of hand that had made him once again the sexual underdog. Not shafter, after all, but shaftee once again. As per usual, remarked his cynical self, with Beckett-like smugness.
“Now, Jack,” soothed Beckett, “it’s nothing personal. The nature of force is to seek its own likeness: to pass from those with less to those with more. I have more power than you to shape the world to my design, so the engendering essence naturally flows from you towards me, where it can have the fullest effect.”
“Nothing personal!” Jack-suddenly bursting with all the suppressed outrage of months of discretion-wanted to throw respectability to the winds and tell smug Cutler bloody Beckett exactly who'd shaped the world to make a stateless, nameless pirate brat flow naturally down from the jungle to a life of luxury in Factor bloody Beckett’s official bloody residence and command of a fine Company ship. But the ship wasn’t his yet, so he swallowed his bile along with the revelations.
Beckett shook his head and chuckled, oozing offensive doses of pity.
“You stole them,” repeated Jack, increasingly aware that it was a stupid-sounding accusation, “just like you stole my titty domes, and my granny’s spells…”
Bugger.
Beckett froze in mid sneer. “Your grandmother’s spells? You said you had them from an old Indian moor…”
Jack considered claiming that said Indian moor simply liked him to call her granny, that being her tribe’s term for teacher. But he could see the game was up and, frankly, it was high time he reclaimed a modicum of dignity. So he held Beckett’s appalled gaze until Beckett looked away first, flustered and fumbling.
“I should have seen it sooner… I thought… I thought you’d been in the sun… You hinted at Spanish connections… This changes everything…”
“Why?” demanded Jack. “My dad was as English as you.” (Irish, in point of fact, which looked the same, but-for reasons Jack had never entirely fathomed-tended to go down rather less well.) “What happened to women being merely passive receptacles?”
“Active or passive,” hissed Beckett, “there’s a, a… taint. I want you gone this instant. Take what you must, but be sure I never set eyes on you again.”
“I want a ship.” Jack could practically feel respectability shattering and crashing in ruins around him. It was a good feeling. “Or I’ll go to the Senior Merchant and tell him you’ve been paying company money to bugger me black and blue. Or, in point of fact, blue, seein’ as I was black before you started.”
“Oh, do try to be reasonable, Jack!” Beckett had regained at least the semblance of composure. (Jack couldn’t help, yet again, being somewhat impressed.) “I was hardly likely to give you a ship when you were English! It was a charade, a ploy to make you suppose you’d still have a future when I tired of you. And I shall deny any allegations you’re foolish enough to make.”
“Isn’t the Senior Merchant coming to dinner next week?” enquired Jack sweetly. “I might get disgracefully drunk and invite him to join us for a threesome.”
“There’s a ship sailing tomorrow for Mombassa.” Beckett took up a quill from his desk, sharpened it carefully. “You’ll be conveyed there with the respect due to a representative of the Company. The next ship, however, will bear news that you are nothing but a thieving impostor, whose word cannot be trusted on any matter. I’m rather afraid it may warrant your summary execution.” He smiled. “So you’ll be well advised not to linger in Mombassa, and to procure a new identity for yourself. I imagine it won’t be the first. Or the last.”
Jack knew the best deal he was likely to get when he saw it. Resolutely suppressing his admiration for Beckett's tactical brilliance, he pocketed the letter, along with a selection of valuables, books, and charts from the treasure trove that was Beckett’s library.
“May as well furnish some evidence for those charges of theft, savvy?”
Beckett shrugged, but Jack was fiercely glad to see fury in the way his neck swelled and the pulsing of that little vein on his temple.
“Don’t imagine you’ll walk away scot free, Sparrow. Whether they catch you or not, you’ll find acquaintance with me has left its mark. I can easily find another catamite to do my bidding but I fear, now your eyes have been opened, you'll find your peers sorely lacking in sophistication, and your horizons sadly limited. Before long, you'll come to regret your illicit venture into a world where you don't belong.”
“Ah!” countered Jack, on his way to the door. “But don’t forget my animalcules are swimming around inside you, busily forming base matter to their own designs.”
He didn’t think he could improve on that, so he shut the door behind him and hurried to the dock.
The voyage to Mombassa provided ample opportunity to reflect on the truth of Beckett’s words. Jack suspected he’d never entirely shake off a hankering for silk sheets, lace sleeves, elegant dining, and candlelit chamber music. He’d also learned a great deal-not all of it welcome-about England and his likely reception there. Finally, he’d acquired a lingering respect for the ideas of Hobbes, and a lifelong aversion to cologne.
A series of dramatic adventures (and several tedious misunderstandings) took Jack from Mombassa to Zanzibar. Armed with Beckett's charts (the last of his plunder from the library), Jack claimed a place as navigator on a ship called the Black Pearl. He knew she was a pirate; more importantly, he knew he was one too.
It wasn't as soft as Company life in Pondicherry, but the interludes of luxury were all the sweeter for that, and the company far pleasanter than Beckett's predictions. Jack was determined never again to enter into a social contract: as far as he was concerned, poore, nasty, and brutish were in the eye of the beholder, and a short life was better than a dull one. “A merry life and a short one shall be my motto,” Bart Roberts had said, and Jack, when he heard it, was in full agreement. (Though merry and long would, obviously, have been his first choice.)
Along with more nautical matters, Jack's time on the Pearl taught him to recognise the marks that sporadically appeared on his body, and what they meant. He and the pox developed an understanding: he didn’t bother it, and it didn’t bother him. It had worked so far.
He was second mate by the time his captain unwisely agreed to transport a cargo of slaves for a certain Senior Merchant Beckett of the East India Company. Large quantities of cash-and probably other forms of pressure-had been brought to bear, and all Jack's objections fell on deaf ears. Predictably, he found a way to release said cargo (with a little help from a friend), which-equally predictably-brought the wrath of the Company down on the pirates. Less predictably (to Jack, anyway), this ended in the loss of the lovely Pearl, with the deaths of the captain and far too many men.
Jack shouldn't have survived it himself-hadn't been entirely sure he wanted to-but, in the end, he'd seized the chance to bargain with the devil for what he'd lost. Perhaps he'd thought he could cheat; perhaps Beckett had marked him more than he'd known: either way, it was a trade he couldn't resist.
He was chained in an unusually well-appointed gaol cell in Fort St George when he laid eyes on Beckett again, specifically on a spot peeking over the top of his neckband. The poorly concealed blemish awoke long-forgotten memories of a morning in Pondicherry, assuring Cutler that the red mark on his member was nothing but the bite of a local insect.
“Had scores of ’em myself, in the jungle,” Jack’d promised with complete sincerity and-as it turned out-equally complete inaccuracy. “Unpleasant, but utterly harmless. Clears up after a few weeks with no consequences whatsoever.”
Back in the cell, Jack grinned wickedly. “Gorgeous cravat, Cutler, but not tied quite high enough. I see those pesky animalcules of mine are still making their mark.”
A brief twitch of Beckett’s lips was the only outward sign of near loss of control, but was a sign they both know Jack couldn’t miss.
“My mark on you will be considerably more permanent, Sparrow. And sooner lethal. In the unlikely event of your cheating the executioner tomorrow-and I assure you 'unlikely' is something of an understatement-this will reveal you for what you truly are. You'll never pass yourself off in respectable company again.”
Before Jack could point out that he'd had enough of respectable company to last him several lifetimes, Beckett took a red-hot branding iron from the fire, held it a moment beside Jack's face, then pressed it, hissing and steaming, to his forearm.
It hurt like all Hell, but Jack didn’t care: his bargain was struck; his ship was coming; he had thirteen years, which wasn’t long, but might be long enough to attend Cutler’s funeral.
He threw back his head and laughed like a harpy.
Notes
Far too much background reading went into this one. Highlights include:
Brian Easlea, Witch-hunting, Magic, and the New Philosophy
Hobbes' Leviathan at Project Gutenberg
“In an honest service there is thin commons, low wages, and hard labour. In this, plenty and satiety, pleasure and ease, liberty and power; and who would not balance creditor on this side, when all the hazard that is run for it, at worst is only a sour look or two at choking? No, a merry life and a short one shall be my motto.” Bart Roberts.