A loner, Patch would spend his days on the parapet looking out to sea. He had been a pirate in life and still a pirate in death and damn proud of it. The sea and adventure were everything to him but sadly, upon their capture, it became a distant dream.
Patch was the oldest of the captive orphan children, fifteen when he died and not far from his 16th birthday and freedom.
It was a cruel day that took the lives of all nine orphans when their boat was destroyed in the storm and they were spirited to Ravensbreath Island.
In his pirating days, before capture and before his death, when he was free, Patch's life was full of perilous adventure and he came away with many scars, including a head of hair turned snow white, which he wore with pride.
His last voyage was on the Farwind, under the command of the bloodthirsty Captain Bedard. Obscured in a strange heavy fog at dawn the ship was ambushed by the even bloodier Captain Jaunk. All hands on both sides fought to the end but the Farwind went down in the shark infested waters of the Caribbean.
The sharks swarmed the men clinging to the flotsum of broken ship bobbing in the choppy blood red sea. Most, including Bedard, were chewed up and swallowed like Sunday lunch, but Patch, who was small, being still a boy, managed to haul himself into a fractured whiskey barrel, although he was gravely wounded as well.
Patch drifted on the waves and in and out of consciousness as rivulets of blood drained from his mangled body, luring sharks along.
But by some miracle, before Patch became a meal too, a passing navy vessel spotted the floating debris and the boy curled up in a broken barrel and retrieved the lot from the waves.
Patch survived but was badly maimed, having lost half a leg, part of one hand and his right eye. But none of that compared to the heartbreak of waking up weeks later and finding he'd been shipped to London and placed in a workhouse until his sixteenth birthday which, as we know, would never come.
Two centuries on and Patch has kept mostly to himself, preferring secluded places on Ravensbreath Island where he can gaze out to sea and play haunting melodies on his pipe.
There is much more to Patch's story and will be revealed in time.
The ghost children's
