The stone heart

Her eyes are emerald green, luminous in the blue-tinged murk. Her hair, no doubt from noble descent, fiery red. Her cheekbones curved and taught beneath a smooth aristocratic-ivory skin. Her plucked eyebrows arch in perfect synchronicity as she presses silk to her sensuous lips with delicate manicured hands. It is not possible not to feel, in her company, anything other than utter unworthiness. I am a dung beetle at the foot of an English rose.

'Go on,' she says, unconvinced.

'Well, the poor lad insists we travel through perilous waters. He maintains a ship is set course to intercept us - captained by an unscrupulous pirate and manned by a crew, not a gentleman amongst them (I add this to set myself apart, both from them ... and the lad) of such viciousness they will think nothing of murdering women and children in their sleep!'

'Oh do be serious,' she declares with an emphatic stomp of her tiny foot. 'This is nonsense. Will you do nothing but incite? The boy is a stowaway and a saboteur. That is all. You are a mistaken fool to fall in league with him.'

'He was shanghaied by them. Abducted from his homeland and taken against his will to the seas, where he was made to work the galley and scrub the deck. Until he escaped and fled when they were at port. He's tried to get home ever since, but it is too late, he says ... he saw their black flag not days before and we will soon be set upon!'

'Oh the lies!' I will not listen to another word. I shall inform my father that you intend to collude with the stowaway, and ... and anyway it's an absurd story, why on earth would such a notoriously villainous pirate, as you describe, do battle for a worthless deckhand?'

'Because of this!' I reach forward and hold up the grubby right hand of the lad, who allows me to do so with little resistance. A ruby red garnet stone set in a silver dagger ring, shines like a lit torch from his filthy middle finger.

'The stone heart,' says the lad in his small voice and his heavy accent.