Summary
Moonlit palmettos shiver as Margaret Martyn—Peg—twirls through a candlelit ballroom, her silk hem snagging on the splinters of colonial expectation; her heart is a clandestine sonnet stitched to Terry, a penniless versifier whose pockets jingle only with metaphors. Sir Wyndham, iron-wigged patriarch of Carolina’s dying aristocracy, trades her youth for Elliott’s fossilized name, and so the engagement feast becomes a danse macabre of goblets and whispers. Peg, half-feral with revulsion, murmurs a jest to the chandelier—“Let the pirates have me!”—and the ceiling splits open like fate’s rotten fruit. Through the breach surge Captain Bones’s salt-crusted renegades, cutlasses flashing like shark fins; they devour the banquet, guzzle the Madeira, and whisk Peg aboard their black-sailed leviathan. In the reeking below-deck twilight Flatnose Tim—whose visage resembles a battered figurehead—hones his hunger for her extinction. Peg answers with theatrical demise: she collapses, breath quenched, limbs waxen, a corpse worthy of Keatsian elegy. The brigands ferry her to a limestone cavern veined with doubloons, intending to inter her among their looted saints. Yet she rises, sheet-white, voice echoing like a ship’s bell in fog, and the superstitious curs scatter, crossing themselves before the apparition they swear is Davy Jones’s bride. Tim unmasks the ruse; chains clap again around her wrists. On the horizon, Terry—no longer rhyming waif but corsair-poet—commands the sloop Aurora, cannons singing Rimbaud. He boards, duels Tim across a deck slick with tar and starlight, wins Peg with blood-stained stanzas. Back on shore Sir Wyndham, contrite beneath salt-stained banners, bestows his blessing; the lovers return to the cave, where torchlight kisses heaps of Aztec gold and the skulls of forgotten conquistadors grin their approval.
Synopsis
Although Margaret "Peg" Martyn of the Carolina territory loves Terry, a poor poet, her father, Sir Wyndham Martyn, wishes her to marry the ancient Arthur Elliott. At the engagement party, Peg's wish that "the pirates might get her" comes true when Captain Bones and his men ransack Martyn's estate and carry Peg off to their ship. The most vicious mate of the crew, Flatnose Tim, wants to kill Peg, so to save herself, she feigns death. The pirates are about to bury her in their secret treasure cave when she fools them into believing that she is a ghost. After Tim discovers her deception, however, she is taken back to the ship, where Terry, now commanding his own ship and crew, rescues her. Impressed with Terry's bravery, Sir Martyn finally blesses the poet's marriage to his daughter, after which the couple returns to the cave to retrieve the pirate treasure.
