White and Black Pearls 1 - Seven Pearls

Chapter Ten


“So that’s where the Pearl got her name,” Will muttered as he looked at his own ship. Jack was full of secrets and stories, a man of mystery, but it seemed that he had more of a private romantic side to himself than he let on. The comparisons between Jack and Celeste, and Davy and Calypso, were becoming eerily similar. And yet… in all the time Will had known Jack and spent with him, Jack had never seemed… forlorn. He’d never appeared to care one way or another about ways of the heart and he’d certainly never restricted himself from pursuits of the flesh with women.

Though, now that he considered, all of the women Jack had supposedly wooed always felt abandoned or betrayed, as though he’d never given his heart to any of them. There was the exception of Elizabeth and that brief period where he’d believed Jack and Elizabeth to be in love, but even then she had not been displaying the mannerisms of a woman who had earned a man’s heart, she’d been acting more like a widow who had lost her husband before she could get all the affection she’d expected from him.

Was Jack still involved with Celeste all that time, was he still involved with her now? Had it ended back then on the ship? He turned to his father then, not minding so much that the story fixed on Jack any more, now that he was learning things about this man that most wouldn’t be able to fathom. “So they gave up then, that night and morning on the ship where she asked him what they were going to do, they gave up on their relationship, and she simply continued to watch over him?”

Bootstrap shook his head. “I think she tried. There are no tales about her showing up to be with him between that last time I spoke of and when she called Davy Jones to raise him and the Pearl from the depths. Perhaps she still visited him, I don’t know. It would be something you’d have to ask Jack, though I doubt you’d get a straight answer out of him.”

“Has she been to him since?” Will asked as an afterthought, not particularly expecting an answer. He still hadn’t even gotten an answer about the stars that were falling above them at present and what they meant.

“Yes,” Bill said in a distant tone as he gazed off at the stars and his expression became guilt-ridden. “The day of the mutiny, barely a year after Jack had the Pearl in his possession… it wasn’t as simple as Barbossa and our crew sailing out to that desert island and tossing him overboard.” He took a heavy draught from the rum bottle, unable to face his son for this fragment of the tale. “He was beaten… he was bloodied. He was starved and kept awake for days until he went mad, and only then was he tossed overboard. As we sailed away from the island after ensuring Jack washed ashore, I saw her standing on the beaches near him. She wasn’t staring at him, though; she was staring at us. It spooked all of us for weeks, the way she was silent and still, staring at us from all that distance away. We were certain that we would be under her curse, though most of us didn’t yet know who she was… we just knew that she was on Jack’s side, whatever side that was. Even after we’d raided the Isla de Muerta, while all of us were frittering away the gold on women and wines, there wasn’t a one of us that would go anywhere near any woman with black hair and fair skin.” He looked at the near-empty bottle and tipped it upwards once more for another swig. “It didn’t help that the whole time we were sailing towards the Isla de Muerta, that was the first time the stars were falling from the skies as they are today. Terrified us all.”

Will’s eyes flashed. There, now, now they were getting to the parts where the story became more relevant to what was happening today.

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