A marvellous quality

'It's beautiful! Look Celes ... uh, miss Burroughs, that is ... it has a marvellous quality, you must touch it!' I am at the lad's side attempting to prize the ring from his finger. The colour of the stone is astonishing close up and, when I touch it, I'm filled with such warmth and overwhelming optimism, I can't help smiling, despite the ring being stuck fast on his finger.

'I won't,' she answers.

I look up at her with a bemused grin. 'Won't? Why ever not?'

'Well he's clearly unstable, anyone can see that ... ' she pauses and raises an extraordinary eyebrow. 'Why are you looking at me like that?'

'Unstable?' I'm feeling sleepy and everything in the room has a blurred edge. Miss Burroughs is a floating white cloud. So soft. Celeste! What a name!

'Yes ... UNSTABLE. That's what I said ... good grief you have a strange expression. What is the matter?'

'Huh?'

'Are you ill?'

'You know you're quite lovely Celes ... that is, I mean to say, Miss B. You're like a fluffy white cloud. You're ... you're like an angel! An angel with wings and a huge fuzzy halo that ... uh, did you feel that?' The walls begin to tilt and the floorboards begin to groan ... 'You know I think I might sit down a while.'

'You're behaving like a lunatic!'

Although, if I'm entirely honest, I don't really like you all that much.’ I slide onto the floorboards beside the lad. 'I think you're a little self-important and you behaave as thouu ...' Clunk! My head hits the floor and the world fades from blue to black.

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.

Pirates

'There's more!'

My hand, entirely of its own volition, reaches out and grasps her tiny wrist. Her bones are bird-like under my skin. She turns, casts her eyes down on my white-knuckled hand, then raises them, slow and deliberate (which frankly makes me wonder if she practices such melodrama in her cabin mirror) and fixes me a gaze of such astonishing green-eyed severity, I am struck dumb.

'Let ... go ... my ... wrist.' The enunciation of each single syllable word is precise and particular and each word lands like an artillery explosion on my eardrum. My hand falls away as though it were butter and her wrist was hot lead.

'Miss Burroughs, I ...' I want to say something apologetic and seemly about the impropriety of this clandestine meeting, something to immediately win back a modicum of favour, and yet I am also encouraged to say something mysterious and bold, something which will excite her emotions and, yes, perhaps even illicit more such reactions. I'm in a quandary. I want her to see me as her equal and, at the same time, I want her to ... I want her to ...

'You what? What is it? What is it you want to say?' Her hair clasp has come undone and a fiery tendril of hair flames about her face.

'Pirates!' the word explodes out of me, with a wild emphasis on the plosive 'P'.

She narrows her eyes, but I have her. She pauses in her haste to reach the staircase. 'Pirates?'

Ah, the desired response. Intrigue.

Breathe

'This is why you've brought me down here?' She holds a perfumed silk kerchief to her delicate, upturned nose. The emphasis on the word this is not subtle. This, I assume, is intended to leave the object of our attention, No Name, with no doubt as to the yawning gulf that exists between his station in life and hers. I am appalled by her derision and, at the same time, I am utterly complicit.

We are side by side. Cheek by jowl. Hip to thigh. I stand beside my nemesis and my queen, out of control and breathless. Why is there no air in this fetid place? I'm acutely aware of a tightness in my throat, a rank permeating smell, the awful gloom. We're in the riveted iron guts of a grotesque factory expelling effluent through chimney stacks high above. We are in the bowels of a beast. We're sunk in the stomach of a whale. Jonah squats before us.

I listen for her breathing and, for an exquisite moment, it is the only sound. An intake and an exhale, as sonorous as rolling surf on a sandy shore. I consider the foul air. I imagine it passing into her lungs and out again, into the hold and then, that same air, no longer foul, is drawn into my mouth, into my lungs. I hold my breath as long as I can endure and then expel, producing from my tight lips an unexpected whistle. For no purpose I can reasonably fathom, I'm blushing. Blushing!

I feel her eyes on me, like burning coals, and I bluster and twitch, thankful for the gloom at last. 'Um, well you see, I wanted you to meet him. He's rather an interesting sort, if you come to think of it.'

'Whatever do you mean?'

'Well, if you consider what he's done.'

She looks at me as though I'm a vile prawn-like creature crawling through the slime on the banks of the Thames. 'Oh ... and what is it he has done?'

'Well ...' I feel the sentence slipping on my tongue. 'Well he's managed to run away. He's left it all behind. All for what? For this? This boat, this sea, this prison.' I'm surprised by the fervour in my voice.

She snorts into her silk. 'In my experience, those that run have a reason to run.'

'You mean they are not wanted where they are?'

She gives me an icy stare. 'I mean to say, they are usually, inevitably, villainous ... they have blood on their hands.'