Jim Morgan and the Pirates of the Black Skull Read Free

I be if I’d let the old Count Cromier have ye, eh? Asides, twas good for old MacGuffy to have some company for a time, it was.”
    “You could still come with us,” Jim said. The day the message had come, Jim had offered MacGuffy to come live at Morgan Manor, to continue teaching him about the sea and sailing and the stars. But the old man had declined then and declined again now.
    “Nay, lad,” MacGuffy said, looking past Jim and out over the sea. “Truth be told, this lighthouse ain’t my home neither and it never were. The sea is my home, boy, the only home I’ll ever have. Remember this, young Morgan.” MacGuffy’s good eye never left the ocean. “Lands and titles’ll all pass on to others the very day a man dies – but his scars, his tales, and his great deeds in the storms o’ the sea belong to him forever. Aye, they do.”
    Jim regarded the old man for a long moment, still staring over the waves and perhaps daydreaming of some long forgotten adventure. Jim felt sorry for MacGuffy at times like this, for the old man had never had a place to which he belonged. But Jim knew for himself that he belonged at Morgan Manor. He was certain that he was meant to be the next Lord Morgan, like his father before him.
    But for the second time that day, Jim was more wrong than he could possibly know.

TWO

    ight fell over the grassy hill, where the lighthouse stood watch over the bay. Inside the tall white tower, Jim Morgan was climbing the stairs for bed. His room, if it could even be called such, was barely a closet with a hammock stretched between two walls. Small as the room was, it at least had a little window that faced the sea. On warm nights, Jim would leave it open and let the ocean breeze and the rhythm of rushing waves lull him to sleep. Those nights he would dream of the day he would go home – dream of tomorrow. So it was that evening, and Jim opened his window to lean out into the moonlight.
    From the floor below he heard the Ratts getting ready for bed. George was delivering his nightly sermon to his brothers. He railed on about how they would lose their pickpocketing skills if they gaveup taking some real practice. He also added that the nice thing about having lived in a cellar beneath a shoe factory had been that they were never forced to do laundry or scrub floors all afternoon, which had been their punishment for getting into MacGuffy’s underthings.
    After a long moment at the window, Jim retreated back into his room and sat on the edge of his hammock. From under his pillow he withdrew a small, wooden box, an ornate drawing of a trident and a pearl carved upon the lid. Jim pushed with his toes on the rough floorboards to swing slowly back and forth on the hammock. Then he opened the box.
    Beneath the lid was a delicate necklace, charmed with a silver shell, and also a folded piece of yellowed parchment. In all the world, the contents within the box were Jim’s most valued possessions. They were all that was left to him of his father, who had been poisoned by the treacherous Cromiers, and his mother, who had died when Jim was but a baby. He ran his fingers over the smooth rounds and perfect ridges of the shell charm. Then he withdrew the parchment and took it back to the window where he knelt down beside the sill.
    Jim unfolded the page slowly and carefully so as not to tear the paper, and found the letters of his father’s script faint and faded on the page. As he did each night before bed, Jim held the page out beneath the moonlight. Like a sharp breath on dying coals, blue light sparked to life through each and every pen stroke, the words waking as though only just written in their enchanted ink beneath his father’s quill. Jim read the letter, pretending to hear his father’s voice as he did.
    “Does the letter say the same thing every time?” Lacey’s voice said from the stairs. Jim turned to find her standing at the entry to his little room in her nightgown, the worn leather book of