Unpleasant predicament

'Take it!'

'I do not want it.'

'You don't want it, or you won't have it?'

'Is there a difference?'

The difference, it's fair to say, eludes me at this precise moment. He's being clever. 'Well I don't mean to dampen your spirits, but it is yours and I don't want it.'

'It is not mine, it is his, and I do not want it either. It has brought nothing but trouble.' His tone is measured, but I'm certain his heart is filled with quiet rage.

'Well why take it in the first place?'

He doesn't respond, instead he binds his arms across his chest and stares grimly out to sea. His anger is understandable. I watch his straight defiant back, willing him to speak, but I know he'll say nothing further. This conversation contains all the words that have passed between us for hours.

'Look ... I'm sorry. I don't know why I said nothing. I have no idea. It's not like me. It's not the way I was brought up. My father would be ashamed if he knew and my mother ... I dare not think it. You'll be redeemed, you'll see, when we get to the Canaries they'll be there and ...' and I realise then, of course, the last thing he wants is redemption that way, because with it, comes inevitable recapture.

I consider the moment of betrayal. Captain Burroughs points at the lad with an accusatory finger and declares him a thief. I assume he's making reference to the ring, but of course he has no knowledge of the stone heart. No, he's referring to the bread. The rhy loaf I stole for the lad.

'Did you steal the bread, or was it brought for you? It is a simple question, Boy.'

There was nothing simple about the question. The lad stared at the wooden floorboards. And I ... I said nothing. Nothing at all. Not a word. I damned him with my silence.

And here we are now, in his unpleasant predicament. We three in a lifeboat tethered behind the Frontier, bucking unhappily in her wake. All three. I turn about to find Miss Burroughs in precisely the same position. A mirror image of the boy. Not speaking. Quite upright, as though seated at the edge of an abyss, staring at the stern of the Frontier, willing herself back on board.

And here I sit in the middle, with a ruby red stone weighing down my pocket, calling me to the sea.

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.