The truth was, he was simply not a one-woman kind of pirate—something that wasn’t all that unusual among men of his seafaring occupation. And he truly wasn’t a one-woman pirate if the woman in question happened to be a skeleton cockatoo. His world travels had revealed to him that there were many, many ab-com women. Before he had even met Persephone, he had been married three times. Scurvy had taken his first wife, Sofia, while he was haunting the islands of the Mediterranean, bouncing from the Islas Baleares to Corsica to Crete, and living a sailor’s life. Sofia stayed with him for as long as she could stand the claustro-phobic ship holds and the savage confrontations that were a part of Scurvy’s everyday pirate existence, until the day finally came when she left him for a watchmaker from Constantinople, whom she had married secretly, claiming that her marriage to Scurvy had never been legal, due to the fact that a barnacle and not a priest had performed the ceremony. For his second marriage, he had picked a tall, mysterious woman from Casablanca named Amal—a woman so mysterious that she never removed the veil that covered most of her face.
