Tailored for a Pirate

As official biographer of pirate captain Morgan Corbye, my passage on the Winged Adventure is not without price. My duties are various and many, for every soul aboard the handsome barque must pull their share of the load. I cannot claim to be a seaman, although I have endured watches in the crow's nest on lookout, the pitching and rolling of the ship more than my stomach could reasonably abide, and I have gone down on my prayer-bones to holystone the decks with the meanest of the lads. I have sat out hours on a coil of rope, arms burning under the sun, fingers engaged in fraying a baggy-wrinkle, that peculiar device which keeps the rigging from chafing. It was my skill at the latter which brought the Captain to ask if I was adept at sewing. Thus it fell out that I became ship's tailor, and though mending of the sails is delegated to more expert hands, I have learned to use a sailmaker's palm to drive a needle through the canvas, repairing breeches and outerwear at need.

That said, among the booty garnered in a recent raid, the Captain discovered several bolts of white muslin, and one evening in her cabin, draped the fabric about her body as I looked on in astonishment. One does not equate Morgan Corbye with the dressmaker's salon. Her posturing was that of the bride-to-be as she brought the soft folds against her breast. "I be thinkin' I wants a smock o' this," she said, "wi' fancywork." Taking up the several yards she had reeled off, she wrapped them untidily around the remainder and threw it without warning into my arms. "Ye're off spud duty fer a fortnight. Get crackin'."

Having taken her measure that same night, the "fancywork" is nearing completion and my respite from potato peeling will be at its end when the garment is assembled. The Captain is keeping close watch on my progress to ensure that I do not prolong this pleasant duty unnecessarily.

The Captain's Regret

In the privacy of her cabin, Captain Morgan Corbye permitted the consternation she had masked from the crew to cloud her face as she dashed rum into a flagon and sat down to table to consider where her plans had gone awry. An outline which had seemed to point toward a simple and successful raid had turned into a narrow escape, leaving one deckhand seriously injured and others with various minor wounds. Although as pirates to whom danger to life and limb was something to be considered as a matter of course, the Winged Adventure's crew had suffered their share of personal injuries, it was the first time that Captain Corbye felt she had a traitor in their midst. There had been but one opportunity for a breach of ship's confidence, and that was when a small party of men had gone ashore for provisions, among them one apprentice to the trade. With a solitary unproven man in the midst of a crew of twenty who had ever stood by her, little space was left in the Captain's mind for judgment against any but Orum Longstreet. "Aye, an' I 'ad me suspicions when I brung that slick-tongued liar on board. Curse me for lettin' too much slack in th' lines o' me wits an' lettin' th' sod win me trust wi' a tale o' 'is grandfer 'avin' been a pirate. Press-ganged, more like."

Your historian had been ordered below that I should not witness with my own eyes the punishment of Mr. Longstreet, but it is to be remembered that for all her consideration to those unfortunates who suffer for one reason or another under government oppression, Morgan Corbye is first and foremost a pirate. Although she metes out her disciplines rarely, when the need is felt for firmness, she turns to the task with determination. After the bo'sun had extracted full confession under twenty of his best, the captain relieved him of the cat and laid a final three stripes on Longstreet's raddled back. Three days later, he was marooned with scant provisions and a pistol with a single shot, and by the Articles, his personal goods were distributed among the remaining crew, the lion's share afforded to the deckhand languishing in sick bay with a sword cut which would cost him the use of his left arm. Of Orum Longstreet, your chronicler knows nothing more.

A Feast Fit For A Pirate

 

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?

The Harbourmaster's Error

The Harbourmaster gave Capt. Corbye a rude shove which sent her tumbling into the Winged Adventure's jollyboat and out of sight of the gathering crowd who had witnessed his escort of the saucy pirate from the pub. Their line of travel had been far from straight and between lurches port and starboard, the voice of authority could be heard informing the good captain that certain fees had not been paid, nor would her presence in the village be excused for any amount of gold and particularly not in her present state of inebriation. Coming partly to her knees, Corbye groped for her tricorn, not seeing where it had come to rest on the dock as it flew from her head during her fall. "I'll no' be departin' wi'out me bloody 'at!" she objected vehemently, only to have the Harbourmaster offer a kick toward her hand which missed and left a muddy imprint on the tricorn's upturned brim, noticeable when it came to rest on the thwart. Had he seen the spark kindle in her eye at that moment, the official would have found no comfort in his sudden disillusionment. Morgan Corbye was not drunk as he supposed, though to all events and purposes she seemed to be quite intoxicated as she fumbled to free the boat's painter from the cleat.

To say that Captain Corbye and Harbourmaster Beale were on less than friendly terms would be to put it mildly. Long had the captain known that the exorbitant tithes on incoming and outgoing goods were but in part governmental greed, and that only marginally more than half the docking levy ever reached the village coffers. Though Morgan Corbye was a pirate of the high seas, the worse villain was Beale, dry-shod landlubber he, with his permits and taxes and penalties slipped in substantial part into his own pockets. The very inn from which Captain Corbye had been ushered with such incivility was in fact foundering under Harbourmaster Beale's own avaricious and self-serving piracies.

A few days earlier, Captain Corbye had learned that a shipment of rum had been brought into port, a shipment on which Beale intended to capitalize. Initiating a surcharge of twenty percent above the official liquor tax, the government agent placed the goods marginally beyond the innkeeper's financial reach; thus the desperate proprietor, his cellar nearly empty, sought a loan from one of the village's more wealthy inhabitants. Harbourmaster Beale's wife's brother, no less mercenary than the Harbourmaster, set extortionate terms in regard to interest, terms which the innkeeper found so unreasonable that he was forced to turn down the contract and return to his place of business to make shift as best he could. When the pirate captain subsequently offered good gold for an evening's libations, the barman was compelled to inform her that no rum was to be had until Beale's greed was satisfied. Ever the champion of the downtrodden, Morgan Corbye listened raptly to his tale, her mind racing. In the next few hours, her plans to settle old scores with Harbourmaster Beale had been formed.

Thus it came about that upon the next evening while feigning insobriety, she allowed herself to be pushed and shoved and verbally abused as the bait she knew Beale could not resist. At the same time, her crew was hard at work to offload cases of liquor further down the docks, delivering them to the back door of the pub, untaxed save for an honorarium of bottles with which to supply the Winged Adventure's galley. Beale, however, had committed another insult against her in the kick he delivered to her hat, an offense which could not be let stand unavenged. Returning with her crew that same night, the pirate assisted the proprietor with relabelling his fresh stores as ale, and a crudely penned note was found upon the stoop of the local constabulary the following morning, informing representatives of civil law in the matter of the Harbourmaster's black-market trade in liquor. With an outbuilding on his property filled with empty rum cases, the evidence against Beale was singularly damning. Their tongues firmly in cheek, Captain Corbye and her crew pledged his good health in a toast of excellent rum as the Winged Adventure sailed out of port.

Hello, Lads!

 

"Hello, lads!" Thus it was that Morgan Corbye addressed the captain and first mate, having obtained with all due stealth the interior of the captain's own cabin where, with the crew taking leave ashore, the two men sat in private council. She had boarded the vessel under cover of darkness, her approach to the ship made on a makeshift raft of barrel staves lashed together in such quantity as would bear only her slight weight. The Winged Adventure and her crew stood ready for her signal, hidden in a narrow estuary the larger ship could not navigate, tucked away amid a screen of verdure which masked the river mouth. The element of surprise was ever Captain Corbye's trump card and she played it well on this occasion, passing a small oil-filled bomb from hand to hand in the manner of a jongleur, casual in spite of the rapidly shortening fuse. "And where will ye be 'avin' this, now?"

Her reputation preceded her, but that did not stop the mate's foolish flinch toward his pistol. He found his sleeve pinioned with a black-bladed dagger before the motion could be completed and wisely took note that its counterpart had sprung to Capt. Corbye's free hand. The pirate relieved him of the pistol and applied it forcibly to his head and, in the very next instant, had her second knife in the small of his captain's back, urging him onto the deck as the fuse of the bomb sputtered dangerously close to ignition. Upon arriving topside, she threw the grenade overboard and watched it explode just before it touched the water. As always, her timing was impeccable. The watch of the Winged Adventure called all hands to stations at the signal and soon the barque hove to alongside. A score of men swarmed aboard to pry up hatches, removing to the graceful ship cases of tinned meat, fruit and flour, supplies sorely needed by those who spend their lives upon the sea.

Yet Morgan Corbye was not done with the captain and his mate who by that time had regained a semblance of consciousness. She ordered them to strip and bound them, naked, to the spars where indeed their crew found them on the following day, the Winged Adventure long since beyond the horizon. "'Tis not fer th' wealth I be a pirate," says she of her modest commerce. "'Tis fer th' freedom o' bein' me own self, an' that be th' truth o' it."

Yo-Ho-Ho For The Jolly Old Fellow!

When your historian received a summons in the unmistakable handwriting of Capt. Morgan Corbye inviting, nay, demanding that I join her for seasonal libations aboard the Winged Adventure, I thought it best to forward to her a small overture by means of a messenger, our last encounter having left me somewhat in her disfavour. When the boy arrived at my apartments following the delivery with his ears, nose and digits intact, I felt it safe to assume that at least for the nonce, the good Captain had forgiven my transgressions. Not wishing to commit another social faux pas, I had decided (and wisely) to forgo presenting Captain Corbye with a better grade of rum; her preferences in that regard are carved in stone and no man dares offer anything but her usual. I sent along eggnog instead, a beverage for which the Captain has a great fondness (when liberally laced with the aforementioned rum), and one which does not keep well at sea. That I should suspect an ulterior motive never crossed my mind, demonstrating how easily we are lulled into false perceptions.

The Captain met me at the railing, handed me down to the deck with the gracious demeanor of a high-society dame and escorted me to her somewhat inelegantly appointed cabin where a single lantern illuminated the upturned trunk which sufficed as her table. It was then I saw the error in my assumptions, for on the table was the Swear Box. I had last seen it in the hands of our timid village parson.

Now it must be told that Captain Corbye has at her command a wealth of invective the likes of which is not often found even at sea. Her bold language was how she became acquainted with the Swear Box. The clergy had been making the rounds of the pubs whilst several legitimate vessels were in the harbour and the ships' crews taking liberty on shore, for sailors will swear and it was the cleric's purpose to fine them, funds thus raised to benefit the sea-widows of the town. Most sailors obliged him with prodigious and purposeful donations; benevolence is in their nature. Capt. Corbye, on the other hand, refused to pay up a cent for a particularly descriptive oath she had vented upon the innkeeper and all his antecedents. That was the last I had seen of the Swear Box, and now it was resting beside my gift of eggnog and the Captain's diminishing store of rum. I knew that I would be expected to respond in kind to each curse Morgan Corbye uttered, but only I would pay the fines she set. Oh, the parson would get his Swear Box back, no doubt about that, and the widows would eat well over the holidays, but my purse would be a great deal lighter before this night was through. Morgan Corbye had found a means to aid the needy in true piratical style.

Portents

The old gypsy cringed when the curtains of her sitting room were drawn back abruptly and a handful of silver coins were tossed on the wool shawl covering her divining table. The voice was one she remembered all too well, and though the payment was shabby compared to the contributions from her regular clients, she did not argue when she was addressed harshly. "'Tis naught but mumbo-jumbo, ye thievin' witch, though ye put mese'f in th' right quarter fer a tidy bit o' commerce last we met. I be thinkin' ye knows summat wot most ain't privy to, wot wi' cossettin' th' Guv'nor's purty new wife like she were a pet poodle. I thinks them ears o' yourn ain't quite so deaf as ye makes 'em out t' be, an' I'm wantin' t' know wot's afoot. Get on wi' yer hocus-pocus, ye canny ol' charlatan, an' be givin' me th' information 'owever ye wants t' dress it." Morgan Corbye sat down on the stool opposite the fortune-teller with a loud clatter of armaments. From her belt she drew her infamous black-bladed dagger and banged the hilt on the table. "Get on wi' it, I says!"

The gypsy woman drew the Queen of Pentacles from her Tarot deck and said, "Significator, a dark-haired, dark-eyed woman of power." She then passed the deck to Capt. Corbye who shuffled and riffled it until the old woman feared the cards would be damaged. Then the pirate cut the cards into three extravagantly unequal piles and placed them face down, barely within the gypsy's reach. In the manner of hundreds who had gone before her, the fortune-teller dealt the cards into an ancient Celtic pattern, speaking a formula as she did so.

"The Ten of Rods covers you." She paused for effect, as if she thought her divination skills might be able to read a reaction from the pirate. She was awarded a glare which left no doubt that she was to continue and quickly, or be at peril for her life. "The Tower reversed crosses you." Of all her patrons, Morgan Corbye was the one who most frequently had that particular card turn up in that particular position. The gypsy suspected her of having marked the deck. "The Seven of Cups crowns you. The Four of Cups is beneath you. The Six of Swords is behind you." This latter card was reversed, another frequent occurrence when Capt. Corbye sat opposite. So far, there had been no surprises. The gypsy could have told this portion of the Captain's fortune without any cards at all, but now she had to venture onto shaky and dangerous ground. "The Nine of Rods is before you." This was a momentary reprieve. Now she knew that Morgan Corbye's inner strength was not in question. Surely it would carry the day in the remaining cards.

The diviner laid out the final column from bottom to top: Four of Swords, Seven of Rods reversed, the Empress reversed and the Five of Cups. She paused to read the portents for only a moment, but was yanked from her meditation by the Captain's abrupt, "Well?" and the bright sound of silver against silver as a cairngorm brooch was slapped down among the paltry coins. The stone alone was worth half a year's visits from the Governor's wife, and the silver setting would stock the old woman's larder with a plentiful store of dried beef and flour, should she happen to survive her interpretation of the cards. Drawing a deep breath and marshalling all her skills, she read the augury.

"You come to me uncertain, emboldened by some success and yet finding too much opposition in your ventures for your liking. You want to know if you are in a bad patch, if the circumstances which go against you are out of your control. You want to know if you have the strength to endure what is being handed to you. I will tell you what I see.

"You desire change, Morgan Corbye. You are dissatisfied and bored. You want adventure. You have something behind you which is as yet unresolved, something you long to bend to shape by force of action. I tell you now that you have the strength to do this, and it is easily within your grasp. Take action, but be discreet and cautious with your time and resources. Do not expend them hastily or without careful consideration. Indecision is your enemy. It will lead you into the maze of anxiety and confusion which you already know and therefore fear. Do not let fear master you, and do not be distracted by small losses which shall pilot you to greater gains. Do these things, Captain Corbye, and you shall have fair sailing."

The knuckles of the hand gripping the haft of the black dagger whitened, but the point did not move as Capt. Corbye picked up the cairngorm with her other hand. The gypsy's eyes widened at the uncouth retraction of a proffered stipend. The pirate's expression hardened as she brought the dagger to bear on the point of the diviner's nose. "Ye bloody fraud!" she burst out, and gave the gut-shuddering croak which served her as a laugh. "I paid ye fer a dark an' dangerous man in me life, an' all ye've got t' offer is a bit o' me own 'istory recited? Dry up!" With a final gesture, she knocked the table to one side, scattering the cards, dealt and deck alike. Had she looked back, she would have seen the Knight of Swords upright beside her Queen.