下载掌阅APP，畅读海量书库
立即打开
“Hurry Papa, or we’ll miss the hanging,” a little girl said excitedly as she raced down a crowded cobblestoned street. “They’ve caught a real pirate! I want to see.”
She wasn’t the only one.
Beneath a dreary gray sky, a crowd of Londoners poured into the Old Bailey, which is what they called their courthouse. They came to see the trial—and probably the hanging—of an infamous pirate. The courtroom was filled to overflowing, and the crowd greeted the prisoner with boos and hisses as the jailer led him in, his wrists and ankles bound in manacles, a black hood covering his head.
The bailiff stood up and read the indictment. “Now appearing before the court, the notorious pirate, brigand, pillager, and highwayman, Captain Jack Sparrow!”
More boos and hisses rained down at the sound of his name. Jack Sparrow was a hated man, his reputation well-known throughout London. But while most of the people in the courtroom had heard stories of his evil deeds, apparently none of them had ever seen him. Because when the jailer pulled off the prisoner’s hood, no one realized that it was somebody else.
“I told you the name is Gibbs,” the man pleaded. “Joshamee Gibbs!”
Joshamee Gibbs was a pirate. And he often sailed as Jack Sparrow’s first mate. Somehow he had been mistaken for his boss, and now an angry mob was screaming for his blood. With no way to prove differently, a show of mercy from the court—which seemed unlikely to say the least—was his only hope of avoiding hanging.
“Hear ye, hear ye,” the bailiff continued. “Commencing now, the sessions of the peace. Presiding over these trials, the highly esteemed magistrate of South York. All rise for the Right Honorable Justice Smith!”
The crowd shouted as the judge sauntered into the room, wearing his black robe and a large, white powdered wig. He also held a lace handkerchief in front of his mouth, making it difficult for the people who jammed the courtroom to get a good look at his face.
He dropped the handkerchief just long enough for Joshamee to get a glimpse of the glint in his eye and the flash of gold in his mouth. Gibbs instantly recognized him. It was Jack Sparrow, apparently adding “impersonating a judge” to his long list of crimes and misdemeanors.
“Jack?” Gibbs said, disbelieving. The bailiff jabbed him in the gut with a billy club.
“Not necessarily,” said the judge, who was really Jack. “You were saying?”
“Jack ... Sparrow is not my name,” the prisoner claimed. “My name is Joshamee Gibbs.”
“Is that so?” Jack asked with a wry smile. “It says Jack Sparrow here.”
“I was making inquiries as to the whereabouts of Jack Sparrow,” Gibbs tried to explain. “Who I’d learned had come to London. And who I would be happy to identify to the court ifit would help my case.”
He shot his friend a look, and Jack quickly tried to change the subject.
Jack turned to the jury. “The prisoner claims to be innocent of being Jack Sparrow. How do you find?”
The foreman of the jury didn’t know what to say. They hadn’t even had a trial yet.
“Foreman!” Jack said forcefully. “Your finding? Guilty?”
“Guilty verdict means he’ll hang,” the foreman responded.
“Yes,” said Jack, bringing a round of cheers from the crowd.
The foreman scratched his head, unsure how to render a verdict without a trial. “Guilty?”
Another cheer from the gallery.
“That’s not fair,” pleaded Gibbs.
“Not favorable to you,” Jack corrected. “But fair is not the same as favorable. You have been found guilty and so are sentenced to hang.”
The people roared their approval and began to stomp their feet in anticipation of the hanging. Jack banged his gavel to silence them. He was a master of double-talk and was now about to use it against the assembled mob.
“What say you?” he asked the crowd. “You want me to set this prisoner free?”
A chorus of nos and calls to kill him rang through the courtroom. The judge was clearly mistaken. The crowd wanted this man to hang.
“I cannot in good conscience set this man free,” Jack said, continuing his double-talk. “Joshamee Gibbs, the crime of which you have been found guilty is of being innocent of being Jack Sparrow. I hereby sentence you to be imprisoned for the remainder of your miserable life.”
Slowly the people in the gallery began to realize that there would be no hanging.
Jack turned to the bailiff. “Arrange to transport this prisoner to the Tower of London.”
The mob began to boo and hiss, and some people threw old fruit and garbage. Jack pounded his gavel just as a shoe flew past his head.
“Stop,” he commanded. “Order, order, you hooligans. Restore order.”
More objects flew toward him, and Jack decided it was time to get out of the courthouse.
“Court is in recess!” he proclaimed with a healthy wallop of his gavel before throwing a shoe and some garbage back at the gallery. Then he rushed out the back just as a riot was beginning to erupt.
As he raced down the hallway, the pirate quickly transformed from stodgy Justice Smith back into swaggering Captain Jack. He ripped off the wig and robe and tossed them into a closet, where the actual judge sat bound and gagged .
By the time he stepped outside, Jack looked like his old familiar self—knee-high sea boots, a striped sash around his waist, and a red bandana on his head. All that was missing was his tricorn hat, which he plucked off the head of a horse that was hitched to a paddy wagon. It was the same paddy wagon he’d just commanded the bailiff to use to take Joshamee Gibbs to the Tower of London.
Jack winked at the driver, who flashed him a sly smile. The driver reached for the reins and in the process exposed the skull-and-bones tattoo on his arm. Everything was going exactly as planned.
Jack walked around to the rear of the wagon, where the guard took him for a prisoner and tossed him in the back alongside his old first mate.
“Crikey!” said Gibbs upon seeing his friend. “Now we’re both off to prison.”
Jack flashed his gold-filled smile. “Not to worry, I’ve paid off the driver,” he assured him. “In ten minutes we should be outside of London town, horses waiting. Tonight we make for the coast. Then it’s just a matter of finding a ship.”
Now Gibbs was the one smiling. The driver snapped the reins, and the horse started pulling the wagon across the cobblestoned street.
“What happened, Gibbs?” Jack asked as he offered his flask of whisky to his friend. “I thought you had another gig.”
“Aye, but I always listened like a thief for news of the Black Pearl ,” he said as he took a sip and handed the flask back to Jack. “No one’s seen hide nor hair ofit. And then I hear a rumor: Jack Sparrow’s in London.”
“Am not,” Jack said, wondering how the rumor got started.
“But that’s what I heard,” Joshamee replied. “Jack Sparrow’s in London with a ship and looking for a crew. Fact is, you’re signing men tonight at a pub called the Captain’s Daughter.”
“Am not!” Jack protested, getting more confused.
Gibbs nodded. “I thought it a bit odd. But then you’ve never been the most predictable of sorts.”
Jack mulled this over for a moment. “Truth is, Jack Sparrow arrived in town just this morning to rescue Joshamee Gibbs from one appointment with the gallows.”
Gibbs smiled. “Like I said, unpredictable.”
Jack did not like this one bit. “So there’s another Jack Sparrow out there, sullying my good name.”
“An impostor ,” Gibbs said.
“Aye,” Jack answered and then added, “an impostor with a ship.”
There was a glint in his eye that Gibbs knew well. It seemed that Jack Sparrow was once again a captain in need of a ship, and he was always willing to do almost anything to get one.
Jack put the cork back in his flask and slipped it into the inside pocket of his jacket. Gibbs noticed a rolled-up map tucked in there as well.
“What about you?” he asked Jack. “Last I heard you were bent to find the Fountain of Youth. Any luck?” For centuries, no destination had proven more tempting nor elusive than the mysterious Fountain.
Jack gave a wry smile as he pulled out his map and showed it to Gibbs. “Circumstances arose and forced a compelling insight regarding discretion and valor.”
“Meaning you gave up,” the first mate replied with a chuckle.
“So untrue,” he assured him. “I am just as bent as ever. I’ll taste those waters. Mark my words.”
Joshamee Gibbs slapped his friend on the shoulder. “There’s the Jack I know.”
Jack nodded confidently. “And I’ll not have it said there’s a point on the map Captain Sparrow never found.”
It was just like Jack to speak so confidently while locked in the back of a paddy wagon. He had it all planned out. Or at least he thought he did. Just then the wagon came to a sudden stop. Jack frowned. They couldn’t have made it outside of London so quickly.
“Short trip,” Jack said as he slipped the map back into his coat pocket.
The door to the wagon opened. Jack and Gibbs climbed out and found that they were now in the courtyard of St. James’s Palace, home of the king and certainly not where Jack had arranged to go.
They looked around and saw that the king’s royal guard had them surrounded, their rifles trained on them.
“All part of the plan?” Gibbs asked.
Before Jack could answer, the captain of the guard slammed him in the head with the stock of his gun. Jack crumpled into Gibbs’s arms before falling to the ground. Another guard shoved Gibbs back into the paddy wagon and slammed the door shut.
A woozy Jack looked up as the wagon pulled away. He was finally able to answer Gibbs’s question, but it was too late.
“No,” he said.