The Pirate's Witch Epilogue It had been a year since their capture, and a year since they had seen each other, and they knelt quietly in a circle with the pirates studying them. Deegan knew that they were anxiously waiting for his permission to speak freely with each other, and he deliberately drew out the moment... besides, Peter was telling him something Marsha had kept insisting since almost the day of the capture, and Deegan was trying to discover the truth. He finally asked Peter to have Marsha relay the story herself. Marsha nodded nervously and began, “When my friends agreed to the sailing trip, I put together a gift for each of them. I traced each of their families back several generations, and was excited when I learned that we all had ties to the islands. It was one of the reasons I choreographed the trip to the Caymans, and I was going to tell them my discovery when we were there for the celebration. We all have a relative who was sailing together back to France when the revolution was beginning in Haiti. When I came to Monique, I focused on the mysterious identity of the woman in the portrait hanging in her bedroom. It took me months to finally track down information, and I was led to a historical society on Haiti. They actually had what they said was one of the woman’s journals, but they made me send them a picture of the portrait before they would tell me anything else. I guess it satisfied them, because after sending them fifty bucks, they sent me a copy of the journal.” Marsha looked at Monique. “I was going to give it to you when we reached the Caymans.” “Anyway, the woman in the portrait was a girl named Clarette Daniella Fontaine. The journal began when she arrived back in France after narrowly escaping a pirate attack on her first attempt to return home, with six of her friends. She married a French soldier, and she reported she found the experience dull and unsatisfying. The man was killed in the war two years later, and he left her a small inheritance.” “She missed the islands, and after a terrible fight with her parents over securing another husband, she announced that no one she could possibly meet in France would be suitable. They disowned her and she sailed back to Haiti where she moved in with some of her uncle’s former slaves. I guess, for the times, it was quite a scandal.” “Clarette knew the workings of her uncle’s former successful holdings, and she helped her friends become wealthy. Although she chose to live frugally, she invested her money into businesses on Tortuga, ensuring the prosperity of the island, especially the outlying areas where pirates were rumored still to be hiding. In return for her generosity helping them re-build and stay free, she increased her wealth considerably. Her original investments are still in Haiti and Tortuga, but by her request they have been filtered through so many solicitors that now it’s difficult to track the source.” “Clarette wrote in her journal that she had been too young and too foolish to recognize the other, dangerous side of her soul when she had met the pirate. The result of the meeting was a daughter, and her parents forced her into the marriage by reminding her how lucky she had been that the French Captain had been so mesmerized by her beauty that he was willing to accept the scandal of the pirate’s offspring.” “After her husband died, Clarette never married again, and they only way she knew to make reparations to her lost lover was to care for the island he had called home. Her attempts to unravel the curse with the African women were unsuccessful, and they told her that her emotions were so intense when she had cursed him that it would take time for the strength to weaken its hold. The best they could do was cast a spell, that the two would be together again one day.”
