Marooned, 2
In Which Norrington Visits a Friend
by
Gloria Mundi
See Chapter 1 for full headers
Originally Posted: 1/02/05
The taste of his broken oath was a bitterness that underlay every morsel of food, every drink he took, every breath that kept him alive. He'd recently acquired a taste for rum: it was that or do without the temporary anaesthetic of strong drink, for most of the dockside taverns sold nothing but rum or ale. The rum almost cancelled the bitterness. Almost.
They knew he wasn't one of them, in the taverns. They recognised something of what he had been, despite everything he'd done to disguise himself. Day by day the ragged clothes, the sneer, the slouch became less of a disguise. This was what he was now: what was left of him.
It wasn't as though he were the only ex-Navy man scratching out a living here, half the world away from the land of his birth. Once or twice he'd seen a face he recognised from before the war. The first time had been in the Rose and Crown, but Norrington's leg had been bad, still, and by the time he'd reached the table where the other man—foremast jack, Joseph Lee, speech still burred with a Plymouth accent—had been sitting, there'd been no one there.
Groves was still here, bitterer than everything else put together. Norrington tried to visit him whenever he returned to Nassau, but it was becoming harder to face his former comrade's bleak silence. Today he had sat beside the Lieutenant's bed and talked in measured, optimistic tones of the latest news from the former colonies: twenty minutes of it, at the end of which Groves had silenced him with a look, and had said, "Why did you let me live?"
Of course there hadn't been an easy answer to that. In the end, Norrington had said, "Because I'd already seen too many good men die."
"They're the lucky ones," Groves had said, and then had turned his face to the wall and pretended to be asleep. Perhaps he really had drifted off again: the Mission had given him syrup of poppies for the pain in his phantom limbs, and Norrington knew all too well the sweet dreaming daze that the drug bestowed.
He wanted rum. The wounded leg had healed badly, and with agonising slowness. It heralded each slight variation in the weather with paroxysms and bright explosions of pain. There was a storm coming, and walking was so painful that anyone passing him must have thought him already three-quarters drunk. His uneven gait had worn almost through his left boot-sole already, and he could feel mud against his bare skin in a couple of places. But after all, his boots were the least of his worries.
If he'd kept his oath and his honour, he'd be dead and buried by now.
There was a girl at the Ship who reminded him, by candlelight, of Elizabeth. He'd gone to her once or twice, when the leg was bad, for distraction. Somehow, over the winter, it had become a habit. She thought him peculiar because he paid her extra. He still had a little money, and Elizabeth herself had given him some of her jewellery to sell. She'd been red-eyed when she visited him in the little hospital in the Mission, and when he'd told her his plans she'd started to cry again.
He owed his life—many of them did—to Elizabeth's efforts, and her father's, in those last few terrible days, before the Nereid had come to carry them all back to England. He wondered, sometimes, what had become of her and Will, and the Governor, and the rest of them. Sometimes he remembered the wedding: three years ago, but it seemed like another world, the epitome of everything that was lost: music and dancing, food, wine, civility. Elizabeth in that dress, the radiance on Will's face, the pride on Governor Swann's.
There were, of course, no letters any more.
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Chapter 3