"Your manners are perfectly [i]delightful,[/i] Monsieur," Antoinette replied, her warm, silken Parisian-accented English lingering like a lovely perfume on the air between them, "But [i]you[/i] are the one who is injured, and I would not wish you near to the edge of the bench. Why, we might hit a rut, a pot hole, and you be flung to the ground. [i]Non, non non,[/i] that will simply never do!"

"You go on now Monsieur, up you go, right next to my Oncle Nathaniel... "

[i]'Because honestly, if I must sit between Monsieur Jax and an impish Sir Greene with his little boy's sense of mischief? I might very well have to shove the fool off one side, the old man off the other, lay reins over the palfrey's back and disappear for parts unknown... '" [/i]

That thought alone lent a touch of sincerity to Antoinette's smile as she watched the poor, injured man hobble himself up into the carriage seat. Commander Murray was there by her side in a moment, ready with a firm hand and arm to assist her back to the end of the carriage seat. He took the moment the young woman reached across Jax to retrieve the reins from her great uncle, to catch the privateer's gaze with his own. 

The military man repaid Jax's grin with a cool smile of his own before he turned to remount his bay stallion, the narrowing of his dark eyes promising without a single word that [i]he[/i] at least knew exactly who Jax was. No, he might not know the pirate's name, but Robert Murray did not become the officer of the Fort Charles garrison by being either unobservant [i]or[/i] a dullard. One of Thomas' then, from the abattoir they had made of the Black Boar this night past... 

"Where would you care to go, Monsieur?" Antoinette asked, the palfrey's reins back in her evergreen silk-gloved hands, veiled grey eyes regarding this odd, strangely dressed man. 

"Indeed my good man, where [i]is[/i] your ship berthed?" Sir Greene interjected, his face turning toward Jax where he sat. "I should dearly like to know her name, perhaps even be introduced if you have a mind, and the moments to spare."

"Though [i]not[/i] of course, before I know [i]yours,[/i]" the elderly man exclaimed with a little boy's smile, making to slap one hand on Jax's leg. One bushy, silvery white eyebrow raised curiously as the gnarled fingers of his hand ran lightly, almost reverently over the hard binding he'd inadvertently touched.

"Oh now, what have we [i]here?"[/i] Sir Greene asked, that boyish smile growing to a wide grin of delight. For all Jax's coarse speech, it seemed the man had a bit of play in him as well there. The blind man chuckled warmly. "A book then? Antoinette reads to me always, whenever she visits me here in Port Royal. Ah, there is precious little better, than the accumulation of wisdom and knowledge between the bound pages, would you not agree? Well perhaps you might indulge an old man's curiosity thrice over: your name, the name of your ship, and the name of the book you carry?"