Hello everybody! This is the intro to my upcoming story Billy Scarlet. It’s the story of a girl was sent out on an adventure. Not knowing what that adventure was, Billy and her companions set out to sea to discover their true purpose, but they never expected to discover they weren’t exactly who they thought they were.
Introduction:
Of all the people that fate could have chosen for this story it chose me, the bastard child of a pirate and a governor’s daughter.
You see, my father was a pirate named Billy Scarlet. His rightful surname is unknown, I guess. He took on the name Scarlet for one reason and one reason only. Sometimes I think that the reason he did it was to mess up my life, but no, he took on the name Scarlet long before I was born. He’s called Scarlet because that is the color of his eyes, and I was scarred by that in two ways. For starters I got the name, which meant that everyone knew he was my father, but worst of all, I got the eyes. I was told that my mother couldn’t keep me after she saw me. I betrayed everything she had worked so hard to hide. If I had’ve gotten blue eyes like her then she would have kept me, but when all was said and done I was too much of a giveaway to who my father was and heaven forbid she get disgraced for it all.
Before she gave me away to a church on an island in the Barbados that took on orphans, she gave me a name. That name was Sabilla or well, Billy Scarlet, then she left me to deal. The head mistress of the church, Mistress Lora, told me that my mother said that she hoped that we would meet again someday. Personally, I never cared to see someone who birthed me, but didn’t care enough about me to raise me.
At the church there were about thirty other kids. The people that worked at the church tried to teach all of us things like manners and how to be ladies and gentlemen. Most of the kids did pretty good, but there were some exceptions. Among them were me, a boy named Davy Mitchems and a girl named Clara Honeycut.
None of us could stay out of trouble. We could never keep our minds on what we were doing. No matter what we did or how hard we tried, we always had our heads in the clouds, as Mistress Lora would say.
It wasn’t our fault really. There were enough distractions to feed our imaginations was all. You see, the church was in a harbor and there were men coming off of warships all the time, and they would tell us stories of their adventures and their lives at sea. After hearing the stories all we could do was sit and daydream about living as sailors.
All the three of us could think about was a life at sea. Though, it wasn’t normal for women to be on board a ship. However, me and Clara wanted to see what life on a ship was like, and we were always getting in trouble for it. As a matter of fact, the way that the three of us became friends was we met in the room that the church ladies would put us in if we got in trouble. They said that young ladies had no business thinking about living on ship full of men. It was improper for women to live among men in such a way. Women were supposed to be mothers and keepers of the house, not sailors. It was not at all how ladies should act and we needed to get it out of our heads, as we were told daily by Mistress Lora. We tried for a while to act like proper young ladies, but that didn’t work for us at all, so it was off to the room with us, more often than not.
I spent about half of my childhood in that room and the other half I spent doing things to get put into that room. I couldn’t believe that they kept putting me in there, because such a punishment never stopped me from getting in trouble. It’s not that I meant to get in trouble, it was just that I would sit and stare into the harbor while I was supposed to be in class or doing chores and I was never alone at doing this. Either Clara or Davy would be with me every time, but a lot of the time it was all three of us.
The room was nothing but a dark little closet. There was one window and one door and nothing else but a few long forgotten spider webs that hung limply from the ceiling. The window gave us a good view of the harbor which kind of defeated the purpose of putting us in the room in the first place. Mistress Lora put us in the room to keep us from thinking up crazy ideas about going to sea, but all we could do in the room was stare down into the harbor below.
Me, Clara and Davy spent at least two hours a day, four to six days a week in that room. But I didn’t mind being in the room with them because they were two of the three people that would look me in the eye for more than a few seconds. The fact that I was so different never bothered them in the slightest way. Even when we first started getting to know each other it didn’t startle them at all, like it did with just about everybody else, but we had been very young and it seems that children accept things better when they are younger than they do as they grow up.
The third person that never seemed to be bothered by my eyes, was an old man that worked for the church, named Garth McHale. He was a Scottish man and he was like a father to me. As a matter of fact he was the closest thing to a father that the three of us ever had. He was an older man who was slick bald and he had a crescent shaped scar on his left cheek. I had asked him about the scar once and he told me that it was a long story that even he could not fully explain and all he could tell me was the he had not been hurt when he got it. This confused me, but I pushed no further.
As I said before, I didn’t mind spending time with any of them, but there was one person that I couldn’t spend more than ten seconds with without getting into a fight with. Whether it was a fist fight or a word fight, we would go at each other every time we were around each other. This person was a girl named Lartha Caine. She seemed to have been put onto this earth to make my life miserable, but then again she probably thought the same thing about me. I know that mistress Lora did. She actually told me that once. I have learned to take insults without being bothered. That was just something that I had to do to survive. One thing that I learned was that in such an age, if one was the child of a pirate, they had to grow up tough, otherwise growing up was not an option.
Now I suppose that I’ll let the story begin. I would say that I’ll begin telling the story, but for a story such as this it will have to begin itself. It’s not something that can be told in such a way as other stories, because no one ever told it. The story told itself long before this beginning. You’ll see what I mean if you care to continue.
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