Across the table from me, Captain Morgan Corbye impaled the steaming
haggis with a skean dhu and allowed the scent of spice to fill the
close confines of her cabin. Intensely proud of her Scottish heritage,
Capt. Corbye had charged the ship's cook with delivering her St.
Patrick's Day feast, and had poor John Peeke presented corned beef and
cabbage, he would have been lashed severely. That your historian might
have been asked to share in the meal was too distant a possibility to
consider. I had already noted that there was but a single plate on the
oaken boards. I only hoped that I could keep my stomach from growling
while the Captain dined leisurely.
Between bites, the Captain gave into reminiscence and, in a moment of
deep reverie, she spoke of her mother's love for the Isle of Skye.
"'Twas frae there that me grandfer come," she said, and
added under her breath, "Wrong side o' th' blanket, that
one." When I assured her that most of us have bastards somewhere
in our history, she gave a coarse laugh and intentionally misconstrued
my meaning, saying, "Aye, an' there be a bloody lot o' them in
th' Corbyes, 'tis no denyin'."
Peeke interrupted us then by placing a large bowl of neeps (turnips)
in the center of the spread. Captain Corbye had gone so far
a-woolgathering that she passed over the opportunity to reprimand him
for the late serving. As if from the instinct of some half-remembered
social convention, she pushed the vegetable across to me with the
point of her knife. The moment gave me pause to wonder: who might
Morgan Corbye have become had she not turned to piracy those years ago
when she enlisted with Edgar Service?
No comments:
Post a Comment