The Jolly Roger

A Day In The Life Of Warrick Roberts

*Three Months Later*

The rain fell in a steady pitter-pat on the roof of Portsmouth's Old Catholic Church, where many town's folk had gathered to mourn the passing of Gerald Roberts, a small time accountant and generous friend, who had left behind six children and a worrywart that sometimes took the shape of a social climbing wife.

Her name was Silva and she was the daughter of a wealthy banker. She was a short, portly woman, but still held a level a beauty most of the rail thin twenty something's in town didn't have. Her hair was sunshine colored, her eyes were hot chocolate. Her sobs were fog horn loud. She wept elephant sized tears into a black handkerchief that she had pulled from breast pocket of her finely tailored black dress. She wore no veil, as she had decided veils were no longer fashionable, and her children looked on in shame as the town's people stood witness to her runny and ruined makeup.

Of the afore mentioned children, Cynthia was the youngest at four, with natural bobby pin curls and large blue eyes. She was crying a steady stream of tears, not for the loss of her father (since she was much too young to understand that sort of thing) but for the fact that she had been dressed head to toe in black. A color that she claimed "Drained the happiness right out of her body."

The next in line was a boy of eight, named Edgar. He was as plain as those named Edgar rightly should be, with straw-colored and grey eyes that were mischievous enough to make him adorable. Unlike Cynthia, he found himself to be rather dashing in his black suit even if it was a hand-me-down, and he kept straightening his tie again and again until his older sister, Betsy, smacked his hands down with a tear-filled glare and like anyone one after such a look, stared at his feet in shame.

Two of the six children were twins, Betsy and George, and they were nothing like most twins in the sense that they seemed to hate each other in every way and very much like twins in the sense that they looked like each other in every way. They were thirteen and incredibly tall and spindly limbed, like a pair of daddy longlegs spiders after a spiteful child had pulled most of their legs off. They were quiet, scheming creatures, with calculating black eyes and hair as black and slick as motor oil. They stood still and silent; frowning heavily. Their pale skin struck contrast with their black dress clothes; causing them to look almost as dead as their unfortunate father.

Behind the twins stood Veronica, a girl of lantern reel starlet beauty and no small amount of intelligence. She was seventeen and the second eldest child of the Roberts family. She had a head of full blonde curls that made the majority of the girls her age in the room push out their chests in an effort of compensation. A contest they were sure to lose as Veronica had a fairly ample chest to balance her voluminous hair as well. Her eyes were a soft blue, like her father's had been, and though they poured forth tears in an extraordinary fashion, she saved herself from embarrassment by not sobbing, although her mother sobbed loudly enough to cover over any noise Veronica could have made.

To the right of Veronica, with an arm draped across her slender shoulders, was the eldest of the children, Warrick. At twenty and one he was hardly a child and was now, in fact, the man of the house; a title that was weighing heavily on his chest as he half-listened to his uncle James deliver a somewhat depressed but mostly drunken eulogy. Being Irish, it was something Uncle Jimmy could get away with, and at the moment Warrick realized he maybe could have gotten away with it too, if he had ever had the fortitude to drink.

Warrick Roberts was a tall boy (err...Man) with long, but proportionate limbs. He had black, feathery hair that almost always looked tousled and a pair of peculiar purple eyes; the color of slightly wilted lilacs. He considered himself shade too pale to be handsome, though most people in Portsmouth were a bit pale, even though many of the men worked as fishermen or sailors.