#me? debating whether to write a book about marcellus separate from black sails?

[unwilling-ships-surgeon]

marcellus notes

is 24 in 1705

is 34 in 1715

born in 1681

mother’s family expulsed from portugal in 1496

both sides of family expulsed from poland in 1648 by cossack uprising, remaining family wiped out in the rebellion and the deluge

mother’s family in izmir by 1650

father’s family in london by 1656

father’s family victim of repeated attacks in 1656-1658 during the debates on the readmission of the jews

grandfather arrested in 1673 on charge of rioting when attending services in duke’s place

father left for ottoman izmir in 1679

born in on synagogue street in izmir in 1681, 5 years after the messianic business

father’s parents and brothers killed in london in 1687 by EITC traders who had been trying to collect protection payments from a different jewish family, 3 years after the EITC declared all jews alien infidels and perpetual enemies of the crown

father moved the family back to deal with their affairs, only to find their belongings given to their murderers

moved in with relatives of their izmiri neighbors, sephardi New Christians

at age 8 in 1689 he dresses in boy’s clothes for the first time and runs away, moving in with an english ashkenazi surgeon who allows him to be his apprentice when he says he’s orphaned. he’s assumed dead.

the ashkenazi surgeon was an actor during the era of jacobean and elizabethan plays, so marcellus learns english out of the plays, including shakespeare. he previously spoke only “vulgar” (low-class) turkish, “yahudice” (ladino), and lithuanian yiddish.

aside from yiddish, which the surgeon speaks the ukranian form of and not often, he stops using the other two languages, except for turkish, which he writes his journals in. the surgeon chides him constantly, and drills him on pronunciation and grammar, drilling him on latin and greek as well as masculine mannerisms. marcellus, who has picked the name marcellus for himself from the plays he’s read, spends all the time he’s not in lessons as the accidental doctor to a troupe of young boys who he smuggles food, clothes, and medicine out to constantly. the surgeon doesn’t notice, until he does.

at age 12 he gets his period for the first time, and the surgeon, realizing that he’s trans, kicks him out of his house. the boys take him in, and one or two who are trans like him teach him how to take care of himself.

at 14 he does his first top surgery, after one of the boys bullies, bothers, and bribes him into trying it. the books he stole from the surgeon and has been stealing ever since teach him roughly how to do it, and he remembers the precedent from a pamphlet on muslim medicine he had read when he was young and that had always stayed with him bc trans. he manages it, and word spreads fast.

within two years they’ve created a space for him to work, and he not only does mastectomies, he’s the doctor to come to when gay-bashings happen, and when the space above him learns that he’s a jew, and not only that but a turkish jew, the New Christians let him use their back rooms as a halfway house. in return he has two of his friends help out around their house, one of them eventually joining their employ

he becomes a doctor of some note, people in the aristocracy who want things clandestinely cared for start coming to him, and when he tries to use this to kill a lord who’d poisoned a community member while he’d been his lover that’s how he ends up impressed into naval service as a “barber surgeon” of some repute, unable to contest it because, under the vagrancy laws, there was no protection for jews from this and the lord wanted him gone, not dead. he’s 19 when impressed, and is released from service by a superior when he’s found fucking one of the men, and discovered to be trans. the other man is executed for buggery, and marcellus is marooned because the superior believes it’s bad luck to have a woman on a ship. it takes marcellus eight months, but he makes it back to london, finds that the community has kept the doors open while he’s been gone, but that the apprentice he’d had while he was there had been killed on the pillory for sodomy, she’d been a molly and had been stoned to death. he closes the surgery, although not the halfway house, for three days over rosh hashana while he grieves and resets everything, and tries to find out who from the navy that he’d known is still in london, and then he reopens the surgery, and is flooded with people who need top surgery, people who want to try transfeminine bottom surgery, illnesses, gaybashings, treatments of people imprisoned or coming down from the pillory, and he doubles down, and in the process falls in love several times, staying close friends with several after the romance fades. he treats sti’s, and in a few memorable circumstances where community members don’t want to go to rabbis, acts as a mohel. he holds services in his surgery once, but never again after it’s too much and there’s an antisemitic occurrence. things continue for a while, and three years later, and he continues to accumulate languages (namely arabic, spanish, and cornish) and when marcellus is 24, he gets contacted by an earl to tend to his son, who’s been institutionalized in bedlam for being a high-profile sodomite and possible catholic sympathizer.

marcellus handles that illness, and the next, and when the son is disappeared and said to have died of an illness marcellus knows he didn’t have, marcellus goes to the earl's home to press him, because he cared for the earl’s son and because he’s never again likely going to be able to spit in an earl’s face. he tells no one he’s doing this, leaving only brief instructions to his two apprentices (he has since written instructions for how to train people to replace him in case something were to happen to himself or anyone else), and he never even gets the satisfaction of spitting in the earl’s face. the second he sets foot in his house he becomes aware just how massively and all-encompassingly able to crush him the lord is, and when he doubles down and confronts him about his son, the earl tells him little more than that it’s none of his concern, but when marcellus starts laying out the evidence he has, the earl starts listening, furious, then tells marcellus he has until dawn to get out of city or else he and everyone else in the “hebraic den of iniquity” would be burned to the ground. he stands his ground, saying that he’ll find the earl’s son, then, if he does leave, and the earl has him arrested, and nearly re-impressed into naval service. marcellus is lucky enough that one of the men arresting him knows him, so he’s able to escape, but when he sees one of the earl’s spies as he enters his surgery, he can only grab his bag for travelling on doctor business, the backpack he keeps if he needs to run, because by the jewish measure it’s already dawn (it’s an hour before sunrise), and he makes eye contact with the spy as he leaves, goes to the docks, and gets onto a spanish ship saying he’s a barber surgeon of some repute and he’s looking for passage to the west indes, because he’s a doctor who can speak spanish, they take him, and that’s the last time he sets foot in london.

it’s his first transatlantic voyage, and he nearly gets outed as gay or trans multiple times. he does get outed as a jew when his spanish slips into ladino and is called el judio for the rest of the crossing, finding salt pork in his bed multiple times. he journals extensively, gets someone to teach him to use a knife well, picks the surname orestes for himself, changing it from hippocrates, which he had used while impressed, and starts writing his journals in ladino, writing poetry and gay shit in turkish and arabic.

he spends two years in spanish florida in a small shack where he sells medicines to spanish naval men, and tries to get books on native plants, which don’t exist. he moves to st augustine after a hurricane destroys the city he lives in, and ends up doing a lot of first aid for communities of formerly enslaved people, many of whom had escaped from british colonies and converted to catholicism so they wouldn’t be returned. he has to overcome the impulse to speak turkish, since the last time he lived in a place with a significant black population it was in ottoman turkey. he learns a lot as he apprentices to local midwives, both about ways to care for wounds and promote healing and handle fever and about how being enslaved in the british colonies is not too dissimilar from being a New Christian when it comes to how hidden stories are told. it is the first time in his life he is not surrounded by young people, and learns, truly learns how to have humility towards his elders. he picks fights with members of the british navy, and when scotland is annexed in 1707 he gets drunk on behalf of a scottish friend he had once loved, goes looking for trade, and gets arrested for sodomy and pilloried by the very christian spaniards he’s been working for for years. the two women he apprentices under send their son to collect him, and for the first time in his life he awakes from unconsciousness feeling less damaged than he felt before it. in exchange, because he doesn’t know how to accept that he can be cared for by someone who doesn’t want to fuck him, he starts giving lessons in speaking and writing in spanish and english when the two midwives, who, after two years marcellus is beginning to understand are as good as wed, can spare him. their son is an avid polyglot, already speaking french, spanish, english, and ibo at age 11, and marcellus becomes fiercely proud of him, creating space for him to apprentice in his language lessons, never so overtly that he would be offended by the implication he need learn to do anything, but enough that when marcellus needs to step away to help his mothers as they begin to age, he steps into the stewardship of the language school effortlessly. marcellus doesn’t realize that he’s been reading the books that marcellus has laying around until he confronts marcellus with a book of his own poetry, written in turkish, and asks him what the script is. it takes everything marcellus has not to panic over being confronted with it, but he tells him that it’s arabic script, but also that it’s personal. he asks marcellus if he uses a language no one understands to write like he does, and that’s how marcellus learns that the kid has been a prolific poet and songwriter for years. he finds ways to gift the kid blank paper and writing implements as often as he can after that, and when, at 13, the kid realizes he likes men, marcellus is the third one to know, after his mothers. marcellus and he have a more candid conversation about the importance of code and hidden languages then, but as the young man is now fully independently head of a language school independent enough to have its own building, it’s mostly just marcellus, dead-serious, assuring him that if ever he needs marcellus, marcellus will be there. one year the midwives give him as close to a gift of hrt as would be possible at the time. because they treated him after his pillorying, they know he’s trans, and when they encounter a merchant trying to offload what’s essentially testosterone pills that they had gotten from a trader who’d gotten them from china, they buy it from him because he’s essentially selling it for the price of the crate, and they gift it to him. and he starts taking them, and when several other people find out that this exists, he gladly lets himself be the test subject on whom its effects are seen. within a month his voice begins to drop, then his cycle stops, and by the time the handful of other people begin to take their daily supplements, marcellus is finding that for the first time in his life he can grow a beard. the kid can grow a better one than he can, but it’s there and marcellus is almost entirely rendered awestruck. he thanks the midwives so much, and now that his transness is known to the community, he starts doing gender confirmation work again. that lasts barely a year before the spaniards find out what he’s doing. no longer the beautific, unaging marcellus the jew, he is once again a tangible, arrestable thing, and he finds himself imprisoned three times in a year. the family that he’s lived with now for almost five years is threatened, and it’s with the deepest fury towards spanish florida that he prepares once again to leave. it’s been almost two years since the enormous box of tiny pills became the largest thing in his room, and his life, but as he thanks how the beard he can now grow makes him unrecognizeable, he laments so utterly, and so suddenly, that once again he has to leave. the older of the midwives, whose hands have curled into themselves in the years he’s known her and whose tenderness has been unmatched in anyone he’s ever known, sits with him and talks long into the night about where he could go, about how they might have him stay, a hundred stories and examples of how the gods she still remembers would handle the threat of merely a few dozen men, until he can make his breathing less ragged and reach out and take her hand and force the words to thank her out of his mouth, and her wife, who also stayed up but to watch for trouble, can tell him that the sun is rising and he can fail to tell her all the ways that he’s loved them both more than anyone he’s ever known, and their son and his lover arrive to walk him down to the docks and marcellus realizes that he’ll never have what he had in the building in london but that the kid is building something that’s almost the same here, and he walks with them with his vastly diminished medical kit and what little he has to his name, the box full of pills still in his room for those who need it more than he does, and they help him stow away on a ship that none of them know where is headed, and he whisper-shouts to them that he left the books of poetry for them, that they can smudge them out and write over them, and the kid says to him in yiddish “we’ll keep them for you” and he lays down in the hull of the ship and sobs lowly and silently, alone, where no one can hear him over the roar of the sea.

it’s a ship south, and within two days he’s discovered. stealthiness had come back to him like it had never left, but he’s a bit taller than he was, and it’s an english ship, with all its regimentation and accounting, that he’s on, so he’s discovered quickly. he’s not recognized, thankfully, but his equiptment is assumed to be stolen. a bag that he’s owned longer than anything else he’s ever had is tossed aside one its contents are empty, and marcellus watches as it slips into the sea, equally numb and outraged. they beat him when he won’t talk, and lock him in away when he chooses to speak to them in french. days pass, and he isn’t fed or given anything to drink, and he tries not to think but there’s nothing else to do and he realizes and feels how deeply he misses london, how much he has loved those he’s lived with, and how much longer than he’d ever dreamed he would he has lived. he realizes, on his third day without water, how desperately he wants to live. it hits him like a shock of cold water, a realization he’s been waiting for for too long. he begs for water in english, only to realize the nearest crewmember speaks spanish, and he begs in that language too. amused by his linguistic prowess, he’s given something to drink, which he barely tastes with how fast it’s gone, and brought to the captain. he’s on his fifth language demonstration when the sails and flag are spotted. he’s completely ignored until the ship is boarded. so he runs, and grabs a bag of something, and empties it, and goes to the ship’s surgery, which has been vacated as cannonfire rips through the ship, and marcellus finds everything that is his, and then begins grabbing everything that he can think he could have a use for. there is garbage enough, but as he stuffs a spare shirt into the bag along with the bandages, he realizes that the cannonfire has stopped, and he finds something to tie off the bag by the time they find him. and when they ask, he says he’s the ship’s surgeon. they pull him onto the main deck, and when the crew calls him ’the polyglot’ and tells them he’s a stowaway, the pirate, who seems to be the quartermaster, gives him a second glance and marcellus says, very simply, ‘i want to live, and leave here. i am a surgeon, just not a ship’s one.’ the quartermaster looks at him, and asks, ‘what’s a surgeon doing as a stowaway? can’t surgeons afford their passage?’ marcellus takes a chance on honesty. ’not known sodomites. there’s very little we can afford.’ the pirate quirks a half-grin, and says to him, ‘we’ll find a use for you. sodomites get an equal share in piracy.’ and if marcellus’s grin is surprised and genuine as he follows, away from what he’s ever known, that’s his own business.

it’s 1711, marcellus is 29, and he’s becoming, for the first time, a pirate.