She looked up, half a minute later, to find him watching her levelly from across the table, hands clasped lightly behind his back.

"Moral courage is not something I have been given to expect in a woman." The words were as cool and measured as ever, but his lips had tightened a little. "I believe this is the second time today I have been privileged to see it."

'Allus foller yer heart, lass. Foller yer heart.' Bessie's words, forgotten all too often in the years since. Bessie, who had opened her arms to a small boy smuggled into the kitchens by an even smaller Elizabeth, fascinated by the castaway's apparently bottomless appetite. Who had slipped the two of them fragments of marchpane, to be savoured in shared sticky sweetness under the table. Who had turned an indulgent eye, later, to raids on the larder on a certain young apprentice's behalf.

Follow your heart... and the compass of her heart had held its steady bearing to its haven in Will Turner, on the course that had bound them both all but unknowing since childhood. It had been Will. It would always have been Will.

The strained lines of the other man's mouth had relaxed a fraction, into what might have been a smile. "Marriage becomes you well -- and you may tell Will Turner that with my good wishes."

His eyes met hers for a moment, as if seeking some response; but when none was forthcoming he took up his hat, inclined slightly in acknowledgment, and turned to leave. His hand was on the latch of the door before Elizabeth had fully understood the implications of his last words, with a jolt of pity and not a little indignation. Did he really think that she would do that?

"Whatever has passed between us in confidence is not for any other man's ears -- and if you believed otherwise of me, I wonder that you ever saw fit to give me hearing at all!"

"Indeed?" He had flushed a little at the imputation, brows raised. Now he swung back towards her. "Since our interview has been made the undoubted subject of remark among all your neighbours, I must ask in that case how you were intending to explain to Turner my presence here."

Elizabeth had jumped to her feet.

"Will isn't obsessed by your rules of propriety!" She flung the words at him like daggers, each one striking home. Too angry to think about what she was saying, she stormed towards him. "For your information, he happens to love me!"

In the sudden abyss of silence that followed, she read in his eyes, too close, the words that would never be spoken between them.

Vivid, unsought awareness of the flesh and bone behind the familiar puppet-figure in the uniform. Unthinking, Elizabeth recoiled, appalled at herself; saw, too late, the white pain that flashed across his face. "I--"

"I don't recall asking for your pity." Absolute ice.

You never asked me for anything. The words brought a searing bitterness to her own throat, but she choked them back. Not fair, to suggest that. If he had serenaded her nightly -- if he had found the words to woo her with a practised fluency that outmatched anything a blacksmith's boy could do -- still the woman she was now knew that it would have made no difference.

Instinctively, she reached out a hand. "I did ill to accept your offer of marriage -- but it would have been a worse wrong to have gone through with it. I am not the wife you hoped for; I never was..."

Her hand was taken; lifted punctiliously to his lips in a brush of courtesy, and retained a moment longer in his grasp. But his eyes had softened into a hint of wry amusement at their joint expense.

She felt her fingers released. "Any woman who can say that surely gives herself the lie, Mistress Elizabeth."

Back on the safe ground of Society compliments, she managed a mischievous glance. "Why, if in truth it's loyalty and plain speaking you seek, than I believe Bessie whom you admired so much has a daughter of an age with myself... and no doubt a fine woman."

There was an instant, as his brows drew together, when she wondered if she had overstepped the mark; then a rare, genuine smile. "Should she take after her mother in all respects, then she is apt to prove so fine a woman as to make two of me -- and I confess I doubt Port Royal could support the shock of a second such scandalous alliance within a year. I fear that's one shrine at which I am condemned to worship from afar."

His gaze met hers in brief shared irony, and on impulse, surprising even herself, she reached up to touch his cheek. "God-speed, James. And... be happy."

For a few seconds, she was not sure which of them was more taken aback; then he laid one hand gently along the line of her jaw, turning her face up towards his, and bent to take the brief, formal kiss of farewell, the warm graze of a bird's wing across her mouth. "Duty outruns happiness, Elizabeth. But I wish you God-speed."

He stooped to pass the parlour door, and a moment later was gone. Elizabeth sank back onto the settle, gathering without thinking the skirts of Will's mud-stained cloak, still flung across the far end. The familiar cloth was rough against her fingers. She closed her eyes, missing Will intensely.

But he would be home by sunset... and meanwhile there was old Mother Strangways to oversee with the supper, and the hundred and one small tasks of a household that boasted no Bessie, nor anyone like her. She sighed, wondering unworthily if she could beg Bessie's services if Father turned her away; then chided herself for the wish.

She would tell Will of Bessie and the spoons, and of Father trotting off like an antiquated Rupert of the Rhine at the head of his men, and give Norrington's insight its due. Did Will remember the warmth of those stolen childhood hours as clearly as she? Elizabeth smiled at the thought, cradling the cloak against her shoulder where the beloved head would lie. The tiny events of her day always took on a new savour when she recounted them to him. She shared everything with Will... almost.

The image of James Norrington's shuttered face presented itself, and she turned her head away restlessly, the curve ebbing from her lips. She could pass it off as a fine joke between the two of them, if she pleased. Will would be only too ready to laugh at his stiff-necked rival's expense.

But for Elizabeth Turner, the very idea of such a betrayal was unthinkable. Not because she loved the man -- a pang of memory -- but because she could not.