Chapter 14: A trip of Discovery

Albert married Carol a week later.

That was probably the most noble thing he had done in an exceedingly long time. The lawyer had checked his credentials, and grudgingly, with a few growls and threats from Albert, he had finally signed the trust over to Lord Ronald Pirelli and his new wife, Lady Carol.

When Albert had gone over the Portfolio, he knew the bastard lawyer had been milking the Trust and cheating Carol. Also, he should have handed it over to her when she turned twenty-five, married or not. Carol was not pleased to learn this. However, she did tell Albert that she was still delighted to be married to him.

Albert did some checking, and the share certificates in the mine were indeed worth a small fortune if they had been real. When Carol went to sell them, she got told she had copies and not the real things. Neither of them was really surprised that the bloody lawyer had swapped them with fakes and then taken off.

They wanted their money, so they went to look for the lawyer. They were horrified to learn that he took ship and went to Iceland. Carol presented the ticket she’d kept at the Shipping Office and learned that she could still use it or redeem it. So, they used it to book passage on the next ship out, in four days, since Ronald had booked a double cabin for himself and one was available on that ship.

Carol also gave Albert, Ronald’s banking book. Albert had no problems forging the signature, and so they went to the bank. The bank manager was a bit dubious at first because the book hadn’t been used in over ten months.

Albert produced all of his papers and explained that he had been in a serious accident and his new wife had found him and nursed him. He’d forgotten about this account until Carol found the passbook in his effects when they needed his birth certificate so they could join.

It was very plausible as he still wore the bandages and when his lip started bleeding from all the talking and Carol started fussing, the bank manager gave in and let them shift the funds to the new Joint account he let them create. He was also able to organise Carol’s other accounts to be consolidated into the new one.

They had enough funds to see them comfortable for about a year or possibly two if they were careful or until they got the certificates back or forced the damn lawyer to give them the money he stole if he had already sold them. They needed that money to fix Albert’s face.

So, they boarded the ship to Iceland.

It was called Iceland for an incredibly good reason.

After three weeks of travelling into even colder weather than they had experienced in Bavindor, they made it to Iceland. It had been a shitty trip. The freezing salty winds caused the skin around Albert’s scar to dry and crack, and he developed a rash. The rash looked like small pimple sized sores. They spread along the scar and then extended to cover his cheek, nose and all over his chin.

The sores wept. Albert needed the bandages for real, and he even had to get the ships doctor to treat the puss filled sores because Carol found then quite nauseating. The fact she had sea-sickness for the whole trip made her just as miserable as Albert was.

The doctor didn’t have the cleanest habits, and he inadvertently infected the inflamed skin with a rather nasty bacterium that turned the small pimples into ulcers. By the time they arrived in the port city of Crystal Rock, Albert was quite ill.

The port authorities refused to let him off the ship and had him quarantined until a special doctor they had called for had come to see him. This doctor had him moved to a special infections unit at the hospice that was also attached to their main prison. Here, an apothecary made up some rather smelly concoctions to smother his face with and some other potions that Albert had to ingest daily.

They forced him to stay in the hospice for eight weeks while they completed the treatments. The infection was rather virulent, and the doctors found it was awfully hard to kill. Albert’s fever would abate for a few days and then return. They even resorted to operating on his face to clean out the infections and reseal the wounds. Albert was so sick that he couldn’t leave even if he wanted too.

The apothecary and the doctor had also realised he was getting over an addiction that he’d had for an exceptionally long time and suspected the harmful narcotics in his system were not helping them either. Albert was put on a strict diet, and if he had tried to leave, he would have found that he was in the Prison section of the Hospice.

The one upside as far as Albert was concerned was that the surgery and the treatments did end up working very well. By the time he finished healing the scars were barely visible and even the pox-like scars from the worst couple of ulcers were very faint, and they did break up the old scar near his nose. His face certainly looked a lot prettier.

The worse part of being confined was that Carol was only allowed to visit him for an hour each day and she wasn’t allowed to touch him during the first month because of how contagious they considered him. Not that he felt much like sex during that month anyway, with his fever going up and down all the time.

The other upside of his stay was that they made him keep up his workouts as they said it would help push the infection from his body. They told him it was all part of his rehabilitation. He’d sure shed a lot of the weight with the fevers and work-outs. He looked a lot more fit and healthy when he left the hospice.

They hadn’t let Albert shave in all of that time and by the time, he was healed enough that they let him shave; he kept the moustache and just shaved his cheeks to leave a neat goatee-beard that covered his chin well. Only a very thin scar from under his eye to his nose was visible in certain lights and no one associated it with a sword slash.

During Albert’s last two weeks he was not happy to find out that, Carol couldn’t visit because she was also incarcerated.

One of the downsides of Albert being stuck in the prison hospice was that Carol had to conduct the search for the shitty lawyer by herself.

She decided that after two weeks of making no progress and since Albert was out of the picture as such, she would appeal to the law since she couldn’t locate the lawyer by herself and the bribes being asked for to help her were just too expensive.

She was rather surprised that she gained sympathy with the local police. Unfortunately, she also called attention to the fact that she didn’t have the money to pay for Albert’s treatments. She had played up to the fact that her sick husband desperately needed that money for his treatments and she couldn’t afford to stay here for months, while he got better without it.

When the hospice told her that she would have to pay for the treatments before they could continue, she challenged them. She pointed out that the Port Authorities authorised the treatments, not her. They countered that she brought a contagious disease into the city.

Again, she countered and said that he’d not developed the ulcers until after the doctor on the ship treated his rash. Also, two other people who had the same rash and didn’t go to the ships doctor didn’t get sick like her husband did. The hospitals own records showed that what she said was true. So, the Port Authorities had to pay for Albert’s doctor bills because they’d had him admitted.

He could have been out in five to six weeks, as a day patient, but someone decided to milk the cash cow, and he was kept for eight weeks. That didn’t solve Carol’s other problems as his absence, in fact, made her life harder. She still had to live somewhere while she waited for Albert.

Carol was not always the most careful of people with money, and she didn’t keep a good eye on her expenditures. They used different currency here for starters. Carol found things that sounded less expensive were in fact twice as expensive when she tried to change her money for the local currency and pay for them.

She should have found cheaper accommodation and places to eat, since the expensive hotel was eating through her savings at a prodigious rate as they didn’t bother informing her of the massive excess bill she was racking up until they demanded payment at the end of the first month.

The lawyer she had to hire to represent her the first time had his hand out. Even though she won her case, he wanted to be paid. He also cheated her. If she had known their system and checked with the courts, she would have learnt that he had already been paid by the Port Authority.

The lawyer that stole her share certificates had also managed to evade the authorities. He’d only stayed in Crystal Rock just long enough to hock off the shares, and he was long gone before Carol and Albert had even got there.

Carol had run out of money by the end of her sixth week. Normally she was quite astute but with Albert being sick, the odd accents, strange money and shysters she had managed to attract and not recognise, all contributed to beguile her and made sure she was parted from her money as quickly as it could happen.

It wouldn’t have happened if Albert were with her simply because he had gotten smart in D’Jang before he ran out of money. She had refused to pay the excess bill in week five as she had by this time, worked out what was going on.

She now believed that they were trying to rip her off because she refused to sleep with the hotel’s manager. She had realised that the bigger bill was for all of the extras that they had conveniently not included in the weekly bills or told her were separate charges. She again ended up in court and had become a guest of the constabulary as the hotel had kicked her out and counter-sued.

She put on the waterworks and accused the hotelier of taking advantage of a poor woman from a foreign country whose husband was sick and in hospital. Unfortunately, this time the system worked against her.

The magistrate she got, being gay, was immune to the effect that Carol could produce on men. The magistrate was as apathetic to her plight as the hotelier was crooked. He also had an incredibly low opinion of women and was of the view that no one had forced her to stay at the hotel, even if the Hotel had ripped her off by using not strictly fair means.

He didn’t care where she said her husband was and didn’t bother to check. Carol wound up sitting in a cell at the local jail for the last two weeks of her stay, for non-payment of bills, until the hospital released Albert when they got the extradition order.

Albert was not happy to find himself being expelled from the country.

After two fairly miserable months, the couple were escorted onto an ore-freighter.

They were put in the meanest of staterooms that could even hold that name, and thus they were deported and told never to come back. They were even locked in until Captain Jamil had the ship out to sea. Carol and Albert didn’t care so much about being locked in as they finally got to spend some time together.

At least their possessions had been looked after, and they did get them back. Carol had insisted that they go to jail with her and she had refused to leave the hotel without them. By their laws, because she was a wife of a foreign Lord, they couldn’t confiscate the baggage if they were going to deport them.

Carol had been that hot for sex, she had been on Albert faster than a leech. Albert had found himself flat on his back with a randy woman stripping him. He’d just chuckled and let her have her way because he knew she would ride him hard, just how he liked her too.

He was surprised that he hadn’t really felt horny while he was sick until he had Carol back in his arms. He even had fun teasing Carol about who she had fucked while he’d been sick. He was rather surprised that he believed her when she said she hadn’t screwed anyone.

She explained that the local men she came into contact with wore some sort of cologne that made her sneeze uncontrollably if they got too close to her. She had even giggled and told him that one of the guards who had tried to accost her in prison gave up when she snorted snot and phlegm all over him.

Their pleasant reunion was, however, short-lived as the couple were horrified to learn the next morning that Captain Jamil expected them to work on the ship to help pay for their food and accommodation or they would starve. Neither of them had ever worked at a menial job in their lives.

Carol also had a feeling that the Captain intended for her to work on her back. She got one whiff of him, sneezed violently and then threw up. Jamil was not happy to learn that Carol suffered terrible seasick. He also didn’t realise that he and his men trying to approach her for sex were also contributing to her illness.

Carol got so sick and dehydrated over the first week that both Captain Jamil and Albert were worried that she would die on them. Albert got left alone mostly because he was the only one who could get near Carol. So, he got to clean up her messes.

Albert did at least, strike up a modest friendship with the Captain and he would let Jamil win at King’s occasionally to get some of his money back. He told Jamil that the stuffy room was not good for Carol and they rigged a small tent outside their cabin that opened onto the aft deck. It was also easier for Albert to wash down this bit of deck if she missed the bucket.