The Lass who Loved a Pirate

Chapter 1 Bloody Pirates

I could feel the ship move underneath me. The candle by my bed flickering with each movement of the waves. I had been feeling anxious since my first step aboard my uncle’s merchant vessel. A ship called The Maiden’s Virtue. My uncle was one Lord Stanley Cambell. A prominent merchant in Edinborough Scotland. He had just been knighted by the King himself. Uncle Stanley was well known in trading rich wines and silks from both France and Italy. He was escorting me on my return to Port Royal Jamaica to my father. Jamaica was a colony located in the Caribbean. The year was 1713, I had been residing in Scotland for the last ten years. My father who was a wealthy planter and merchant himself had married my mother Selene St. Pierre, the daughter of a fellow wealthy planter, somone with ties to the aristocracy of France. He had married her after his first wife, his one true love, had died in childbirth. His son had died a few days after his mother. I was sent to live with my Uncle Stanley and Aunt Delphine at the age of ten. Just after my tenth birthday Port Royal was ravaged by a yellow fever epidemic. The outbreak had claimed many lives, including the life of my own mother. Not knowing what to do with a grieving ten year old, my father sent me to Scotland. He wished me to be educated by a proper lady. And my Aunt Delphine was a proper lady. But I knew that he did not want to be reminded of my mother's failure, of not giving him a son. So he chose to send me almost 4000 miles away.

Aunt Delphine was a kind and virtuous woman. She had been sent to Scotland when she was just ten and four to marry my uncle. Though in their many years of marriage they could not produce any children. Therefore, when I arrived in Scotland, Aunt Delphine welcomed me with open arms. She finished what my mother had started. She helped me with my education in writing and reading. She taught me numbers and figures. She said that those tools would help me in running a proper household when I became a wife and mother. But she also taught me history, religion, and philosophy. Often reading to me at night. But now that I was 20 and at an age where most women were married and had children of their own. My father sent a letter to my Uncle Stanley. Telling him to bring me back to Jamaica to be married. And so I was being ripped away from another home. From another woman I considered a mother. Aunt Delphine was not happy that I was returning to Port Royal. She begged my Uncle Stanley to let me stay. To allow me to marry in Scotland. Where my chances at love and happiness were much higher than in Port Royal. I had made many friends in Edinborough, and had a life here. But that did not matter to my father. Who really had no affection for his only daughter, for his only child. The explanation being was that I was a daughter, and not a son.

After the letter, requesting my return to Port Royal. Another letter arrived. It was addressed to me. It was from my father, he had found a suitable husband for me. A suitable husband for his one and only daughter. He was a planter’s son named Thomas Finn. I had met him once as a child. Yet I could not recall what he looked like, or what he sounded like. Though it hardly mattered to my father. He was a part of the planter elite. Son of an Irish immigrant who made his fortune on slaves, sugar, and tobacco. And so now I was sailing back to Port Royal to become a planter’s wife. A prospect I was not too excited about. Many planter's wives were bitter old women. Their husbands taking pleasure in their mistresses rather than their wives. I closed my book, my mind too clouded with anxiety to continue reading. I placed it on the table by my bed and laid back. As I drifted off to sleep I felt the boat lurch. As if it has run into something. Or something had rammed into it. 

I bolted upright as the sound and smell of gunfire floated down through the boards. I could hear men screaming and cursing. I got out of bed quickly and raced to my trunk. I grabbed my cloak and tied it around my neck. I knelt down and rummaged through my trunk to find the dagger. Aunt Delphine had given me this dagger as a send off gift. She wanted me to protect myself against any man who would attempt to force himself on me. I knew she meant well, but no dagger would stop my betrothed from taking what was his. The moment we exchanged vows, I was legally my husband’s property. I heard my door creak open, I whirled around the dagger held tightly in my hands and saw my Uncle Stanley. He was hastily dressed, his hair not smoothed down like it normally was. His face was ashened, and his eyes were filled with fear. He had two pistols in his hands. I wondered if my uncle had ever shot a pistol before.