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Author: Guede Mazaka
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Slight Horatio/Archie.
Feedback: Typos, character discussions, etc.
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Notes: Crossover with Horatio Hornblower. Pretend the first four HH movies happened, only adapted to the time of PotC. Inspired by “The Fireplace,” by Henry S. Whitehead.
Summary: On their way to their new post, Norrington’s new lieutenants hear a little about Port Royal’s legendary side.
***
“Well, since the pirates haven’t gotten us, I suppose the heat will,” Archie panted. He tugged at the voluminous octopus of linen and lace that the Navy forced upon its officers and thought longingly of the waters over the ship’s side. One detail that hadn’t been exaggerated was the cool, crystalline blue of the Caribbean sea, and on a day like this, it looked like heaven. Pity they were so close to meeting their new commodore, or else he would’ve begged the captain leave to swim.
Horatio h’mmed absently, far too distracted by the sight of the port heaving into view. If he tipped any further over the railing, he’d be having a swim no matter ritual and rank. But he himself was a sight when the wind ruffled his curls and he forgot himself enough to stare wonderingly, so Archie was rather loathe to interrupt. “Amazing. I’ve never seen sand so white.”
“Bleached by the bones of young sailors, and there’s never a place that has more of those than here,” muttered a sailor. A quick look up at the rigging did no good, for there were too many within hearing distance to have said that, and of course they all looked as if they were too busy attending to their duties.
“Quiet. Watch the ropes, and ready yourselves for orders. You lot know how tricky it is to make port.” Captain Groves came striding up the deck to scowl at the men, who murmured and fidgeted but generally gave the impression of acquiescence. He finally stopped beside Horatio to peer at the ocean. “Don’t let the clarity fool you, gentlemen. The sandbars shift with the slightest breeze.”
Archie nibbled on his nail—a habit of his that he’d never quite been able to break. Simpson had been fond of it, else he’d surely have broken Archie of it. “Does that mean the naval charts aren’t to be trusted, sir?”
He sounded over-sharp; Horatio caught himself on a line and glanced over his shoulder at Archie. So did Captain Groves, but before he could speak, Horatio was taking him by the arm. “Sir, I can make out something on that cliff-top. Ruins…? It’d be perfect siting for a shore battery.”
“Oh. That’s one of Port Royal’s most famous landmarks: Dead Man’s Inn. Or it was. You’ve a keen eye, Lieutenant Hornblower. It’s been abandoned nearly as long as I’ve been here,” Groves said. His eye darted once back towards Archie, but better men than him had succumbed to a Horatio wide-eyed and eager for knowledge. As Archie breathed a sigh of relief, Groves warmed up to his tale. “It is a prime spot for siting guns, but even now you’d have to import men from England if you’d want to build there. The locals absolutely refuse to go near it after dark.”
* * *
The cook of the place was employed on the Dauntless for some time, so this is his tale, unadorned by myself. No doubt he exercised less restraint, but it’s the commonly-accepted version.
About twenty years ago, a man named Healy came here and built an inn that he named The Merry Widow. Back then Port Royal was somewhat…less respectable. Pirates and merchants tended to be indistinguishable, and it was widely said that all nation’s flags looked alike in the dark and only gold showed when night fell, though of course we were defending in turns against the depredations of the French and the Spanish. At any rate, Healy hadn’t much patriotic feeling and opened his doors to anyone whose bags hung heavily enough. He was a canny man and picked a site he knew would be popular both for the commanding view and for…if you squint now as we’re coming round, you can see a small inlet. A stream runs down from near the ruins to the shore. The little harbor it forms is hardly large enough for a pinnace, but I’m sure lowlifes such as smugglers required little more.
He dabbled in some trade, but Healy was smart enough to know that the best game was the safe one. So he provided warm rooms, hearty food and the occasional female entertainment, and in return for his blind eyes, coin after coin slid under the table to his hand. I imagine if you dug around the cliff-top, you’d find the skeletons of quite a few men, but not a one of them could ever be laid at Healy’s doorstep in the eyes of the law.
According to the cook, one storming night a stranger blew in to the inn, and despite the kind of colorful traffic the place was used to receiving, the cook distinctly remembered this guest. He was of medium height, compact-built, and he swaggered the way all pirates do but he kept to himself and spoke little; perhaps that was why he was memorable in such a company of braggarts and criminals. His hair and eyes were brown and he had a beard, and his face was not ill to look upon but not particularly outstanding either. The name he scrawled in the register—oh, you’d be surprised the kind of education you can find among pirates, Lieutenant Kennedy—was William Turner. As far as anyone remembers, he was one of a hundred British men that had come seeking fortune and fallen to shady ways in order to make ends meet.
He had some business in the town in the morning, so he ordered himself a room and a good dinner. The room, says the cook, is important. The Merry Widow was one of the largest buildings back then, and it had an upstairs and a downstairs. There were five or six smallish rooms on the ground floor that were let at the cheapest rates, since they were near the tavern-room and naturally Healy wasn’t one to stop the ale flowing very early in the night. Upstairs were three larger rooms and then the innkeeper’s quarters. I’m told that there might also have been a secret room floating about where smugglers and slavers sometimes hid whenever one of the Naval officers made an infrequent inspection, but that’s irrelevant to the story, for William Turner had the third room on the second floor.
Apparently there was something a bit queer about that room before Turner ever arrived, for the innkeeper always filled it last. And he seemed to have made a habit of putting guests with which he’d had a falling-out in there. Nothing was ever said directly, but there were rumors of an unhealthy gust of wind that whistled through the windows, and of difficulty with keeping candles lit. The maid who kept up the inn’s housekeeping disliked attending to that room and often complained of hearing strange things, and of irregular stains beneath the bed. But she liked her pay, and so she put up with it. The cook said she propped the door open till she was done.
William Turner retired early and rose even earlier, stumbling downstairs to the kitchen at the crack of dawn. Healy paid well but worked his servants hard and so the cook was already there beginning on breakfast when Turner burst in and demanded a drink.
This surprised the cook, for Turner had noticeably abstained from imbibing the night before, but he’d seen the most unlikely men be taken by nightmares and shaken hard. That was what he thought was the matter, and so he set out a glass and sat Turner down. But Turner shook him off. While the cook fried biscuits and soaked the salt from strips of pork, Turner hunched over his glass and stared out the window, face white as the flour dusting the counter.
He made the cook nervous and soon the man couldn’t help asking Turner: “Are you all right?”
“To hell with you, and to hell with your damned inn,” was Turner’s less than gracious reply. Then he downed his whiskey as if it were his last drink on earth. He thumped down the glass and exhaled. “Sorry, mate. It’s not your fault. But—tell me something. Anyone strange ever have my room before me? Or anything ever happen in it?”
Strange was commonplace in that sort of establishment, but after a moment, the cook mentioned that he thought he could remember someone. He dug out the guestbook and showed Turner a flourishing signature: Jack Sparrow.
“The man was a pirate and bold as brass about letting everyone know it. He shipped in here two months back with a pack of four friends, flush as a peacock from a good looting. Stole the governor’s own hat the day he got in and lost it at dice right here that very night. He was a brazen one, with more gold in his own teeth than most men see in their lives, and a flaming red coat that looked like hellfire, and black stuff slashed about his eyes like he was some Oriental whore. He did have a look of a woman about him, but when he walked across the room everyone stared no matter who they were. Maybe he was half-devil; he had odd hands, that’s for sure. His fingers…see, the ring ones were longer than the second fingers, and nearly as long as the middle fingers.”
“He knew Healy from a while back, I think, but I don’t know for sure. I’ve only been here four months. Anyhow, he and his friends gambled two nights away waiting for a boat to come in below the cliff, and when it came—they might’ve put the devil to shame with their celebrating here.”
“There was one man with him, name of Barbossa—tall man, streaks of grey in his hair and yellow eyes like a snake’s. He gave me the shakes and I kept clear of him, but he and Jack seemed thick as thieves. They were even sharing a room—your room. And that night when even Healy had had enough, they invited the others up to it to finish their gaming.”
“The next day, all the pirates but Jack Sparrow left, nearly crawling ‘neath the weight of their aching heads. Healy asked after Jack, but Barbossa clapped him on the shoulder and smiled and said he’d slipped out early, but Barbossa would cover his bill. Which was all Healy cared about, so he asked no more.”
When the cook had finished his story, Turner sat back, looking less pale. “Ah. Thanks,” was all he said. He had another drink, and then he turned to the cook again. “You like Healy much?”
The cook didn’t, but like the maid, he liked his pay. “There’s many that don’t. They say he lets evil things happen to even his friends.”
“Well, maybe they’ve gotten themselves a voice. We’ll see,” Turner muttered.
After the sun had risen further, Turner settled his bill and made his way down to the town. He left on a Nassau-bound boat the same day, and the cook more or less forgot about him.
Turner must have done well for himself, for when next he showed up at The Merry Widow, he was sporting considerably nicer clothes and was relaxed enough to mention in passing a sweetheart he was planning to marry. That was six months after, with Healy prospering more and more in the meantime and as far as the cook knows, no attempt at retaliating against him.
There’d been several successful ventures in the area and so that night the inn was full of guests seeking to sell their ill-gotten goods in Port Royal. Healy and Turner had no quarrel, but the only room left save for Healy’s own room was the third one on the second floor. The cook claims that Turner flinched upon hearing the news, but in the end, the man took it. He also says that Turner mumbled a bit about broken promises, but treated Healy courteously and more or less pretended that he and the cook had never spoken.
Nothing out of the ordinary happened that night. Of course, nowadays the local tale-tellers have embroidered the story with shrieks at the moon and that sort of thing, but if you talk to anyone who’s lived here a while, they’ll tell you those parts only got to be bruited around long after.
In the morning, the inn emptied out pretty promptly except for the third room on the upper floor, the one William Turner had engaged. The maid first knocked, then kicked at the door, for she wanted to get her cleaning done, but there was no answer. So she got Healy who tried the lock with his key, but apparently the door was barricaded somehow from the inside as well and wouldn’t budge. He and the cook finally had to put their shoulders to the door.
When it gave way, the cook nearly fell on top of William Turner. The man was dead—had been dead for hours, for he was stiff and cold. His body was what was blocking the door, and around his neck were the hideous bruises of two hands, as if he’d been strangled in a rage.
Healy tried to keep it quiet but a new governor had just arrived and he was bent on setting Port Royal straight. The case was a perfect opening and he sent marines to rip up that room. Beneath the bed, between floorboards and ceiling planks, they found a half-rotted corpse that had gold in its teeth and scarlet tatters swathing it, and a crushed skull. When Healy couldn’t explain it to their satisfaction, they hung him and that was the end of the inn.
But the most interesting detail, if you can believe it, is that the handprints around William Turner’s neck were curiously unique, with the ring fingers longer than the index ones, and nearly as long as the middle fingers.
* * *
“And do you believe it?” asked Horatio incredulously. He propped a leg up on the rail and grabbed onto Archie’s shoulder, giving it a quick squeeze. Then he let go, as if he’d only needed to steady himself.
It wasn’t needed, for Archie had long since recovered himself, but it was appreciated. “Really, a ghost story?”
“I hear you two have made a bit of a name for yourselves in Europe. But that is there, and this is the Caribbean.” Captain Groves looked out over the water, so blue and calm, and folded his hands behind his back. “It’s not the same.”
“The heat, Horatio,” Archie muttered. “Gotten to him.”
There was no way Groves could have overheard, but the way he looked at Archie made Archie think he’d best be more circumspect around the man in the future. “I’ve changed the names, as we’ve since found that Healy had surprising connections in London. No doubt you’ll be able to find out the original ones from the old wives on the wharves.” He caught the flash of surprised understanding in Horatio’s face. “Yes, that was Governor Swann who ordered the investigation, with Commodore—then Captain—Norrington carrying it out. I was a Midshipman then. Helped with the burial, and while I can’t vouch for all of the tale, I can tell you those markings on the throat were real enough.”
The stiff wind netted some of the cold sea-spray and blew it into Archie’s face so he couldn’t help shivering. Beside him, Horatio was studying the cliff-top ruins with a more somber mien.
“Good day, gentlemen. And good luck with your appointment.” Captain Groves nodded to them and they hastily returned the salute.
“You don’t believe him, do you?” Archie said after a moment. He stared at the wind-bleached wood posts jutting at odd angles from the cliff. “Some man sees a ghost of a murdered pirate…promises to avenge him, forgets and then gets killed by the ghost for being faithless? Honestly, Horatio.”
“No, it’s too implausible.” But Horatio was hesitant. “I think.”
And to be honest, so was Archie.
***