Sea Witch

by Hollick, Helen

  Jesamiah did not trust pardons, governors, politicians or governments. The only cheering thought, he did know this particular Governor. Perhaps he would turn out to be better than the rest of them? Woodes Rogers. The man he had met in Cape Town. He had appeared to be a man who liked the sound of his own voice and listened only to his personal opinion; but he was also scrupulously honest. In Jesamiah’s view, to the point of rabid stupidity.

  That was all a while ahead yet. Rogers would not be coming to Nassau until the tail end of July. Until then, Jesamiah intended to put the fear of the Devil into anyone who glimpsed the Sea Witch’s topgallant sails appear over the horizon.

  Twelve

  From across the churchyard, Stefan watched Tiola tidying Jenna’s grave, a task she did every Sunday after the service of worship he insisted his household attend. He wished she would let go of the past and concentrate on the future.

  This Sunday, however, things were different. Tiola had her ability of Craft returned and she intended to use it to seek the truth. While her body undertook the menial task Tiola ignored the Dutchman’s close proximity and skilfully directed her mind to a different plain and a different time.

  Looking down through a time-shifting haze of mist, she saw herself kneeling beside the grave, seemingly engrossed in what she was doing. Saw the spread of the churchyard, Stefan impatiently watching her. As she drifted higher, her view widened: Table Mountain, Cape Town, the beach and the pound of the surf. The harbour.

  And the scene wavered, changed into the past. Black smoke spiralled into the sky, a warehouse was ablaze, people standing, pointing. Across the bay a ship was about to make sail, her hawser cut, her stern swinging outward. Rough-dressed sailors were swarming up the rigging – and a man was running along her deck, leaping to the jetty, shouting.

  Her heart lurched. Jesamiah! The moment when he had shattered her heart!

  From a great height and distance Tiola observed Jesamiah confronting Jenna. Saw him draw his pistol – she caught her breath. Had she been wrong?

  She closed her eyes in relief when he tucked the weapon away and sprinted for his ship. She had never believed, had never accepted that Jesamiah had dispassionately shot Jenna.

  No sound, save for the singing of the drifting winds of Time weaving together the past and the present. She could see the puffs of smoke as muskets were fired from the jetty, the spatters of dust and splinters of wood as lead shot found a target. Her heart was beating fast as Jesamiah scrabbled aboard his ship. There was Stefan agitated, talking to Jenna and then his face broke into a smile, pleased at something she had told him.

  Then Jesamiah took a musket into his hand, he levelled it, fired at Stefan – and Stefan was swirling Jenna around to duck behind her.

  Tears streamed down Tiola’s face. All they had told her had been lies! Jesamiah’s bullet had killed Jenna, but his aim had been for Stefan – and at that distance, he would not have expected the shot to do damage; the killing had not been intentional. And he had not sailed without her. He had waited as long as he possibly could; had been distraught when she had not come. Tiola’s watching spirit followed behind the Sea Witch as she heeled out to sea. She saw him at the taffrail, his knuckles clenched white, the distress contorting his face. And her heart broke all over again. She tried to call out to him, her voice shouting his name – but the shifting of Time was a fickle thing, and the scene shimmered and faded.

  Was his pain still there, these months on? Or had he now forgotten her, set her aside as just another whore bedded and pleasured? Until she found him again, in the present time, in the present world, Tiola had no way of knowing the answer.

  Other scenes were shimmering in her vision as if they were illusions created by a haze of heat across a barren desert. She was to be shown something more then.

  Jesamiah. Ten years old with his mother, admiring a boat moored to a jetty. The father, looking so much like his younger son, proudly showing off her sleek lines. A second boy, older, stood scowling in the background. Another blur of movement, a rapid change of time and location; the elder son kneeling on the younger’s back, painfully twisting his arm – holding his head in a barrel of rain water – kicking him where it hurt most. She was watching Jesamiah’s childhood. His daily misery.

  Another shift of scene: a few years later and that same boat was now burning. It was night, the sky pocked with silver stars, and early autumn, for the trees were turning to russet, gold, and red. The Acorn. Her hull and deck were soaked with scattered pitch, the flames were licking up her masts, devouring the canvas of her sails. In the reflected light Tiola could see him clearly, Jesamiah, not quite fifteen years old, kneeling on the jetty, weeping for the thing he loved being destroyed so callously.

  And again the scene moved on, the time-shift a mere flicker, like the blinking of an eye. Half an hour ahead? Perhaps less.

  I do not want to see this, Tiola thought, recognising the malevolent presence of the Dark Power swirling around the two figures a way below her hovering spirit. The stars had gone. The black, enshrouding cloud of evil had stalked in to swallow everything, to play its nasty game of mischief.

  She was about to discover what Phillipe had done to so hurt Jesamiah – and what had given him the strength and courage to finally turn on his brother. To claim his right of freedom.

  Two graves. One, their father’s, new-dug. Phillipe, a man, was dragging the brother he hated by the hair, the boy kicking out, screaming, pleading to be left alone. Phillipe made Jesamiah stand by his mother’s grave and forced him to urinate on the mound, her resting place not yet a week old. Steeped in misery by years of intimidation and torment, the boy’s submission was indoctrinated by fear. And then Phillipe kicked at his brother’s knee, sending him sprawling with a cry of pain across the grave. Appalled sickness gorged into Tiola’s throat. She shut her eyes, turned her head away, could not watch what happened next. Could not so blatantly pry into the sordid privacy of Jesamiah’s defilement.

  When she opened them again, Mereno was leering as he straddled the boy and pushed his face into the muddied puddle of piss.

  “Tell me she was a whore. Let me hear you say it!”

  With tears of pity wetting her cheeks, Tiola heard Jesamiah’s answering sob of despair. “She was a whore, my mother was a whore.”

  “A fucking whore!”

  “A fucking whore.”

  Mereno moved away crowing his triumph. Turned his back on a boy, who with shaking fingers was buttoning his breeches, trying to make himself decent; mortified at the abuse and because he had so insulted and betrayed his mother. The misery was breaking him apart. His spirit, his weeping soul, was on the very edge of being shattered beyond repair.

  With compassion flowing through her, Tiola stretched a hand through the barrier of Time. Rested her palm between the boy’s shoulder blades. A friend, a lover’s, touch.

  ~ Jesamiah. This is not your shame, but his. Words are only words; saying things you do not mean cannot harm your mother. It is what is in your heart that matters. And you have a good heart. ~

  The boy looked up, confused, puzzled. Clearly he had heard her voice in his mind.

  Was it wrong of her to interfere? Perhaps. But those who brutalised the weak or the afraid had no right to remain unchallenged. Evil fed upon itself to mutate and grow beyond control. It was not interfering for one of the Wise Ones of the White Craft to put an end to the harm of the Dark Power.

  ~ Fight him Jesamiah! ~ she ordered, sending her courage into him through that touch of love. ~ I give you my strength. Get up! Fight back! ~

  As her spirit re-entered her body, Tiola brushed earth from her hands. So now she knew when and how her soul had brushed against his. When he had desperately needed help to survive, a subtle manipulation of existence had allowed her to be there in his past, her presence igniting the anger he had needed to fight for his dignity, freedom and his life. If he had stayed there on his knees, drowning in his shame? Then the good man Jesamiah was, beneath his rough ex
terior, would never have come into being. His life would probably have ended there, that night, the deed commissioned by his own hand.

  Jesamiah is a part of me, as I am a part of him, she thought, as her fingers slipped into the pocket-bag at her waist to withdraw something small and gold. Our souls are love and lover, and we have been torn apart. An arm ripped from its socket, the sun made into forever night. And this little death that is forced between us, is become unbearable to endure.

  Helping Tiola to her feet, Stefan frowned as he glimpsed something shining in her hand. A ring. That damned pirate’s ring!

  He said with disapproval, pointing at it, “I thought you had discarded the thing the day Acorne committed murder.”

  Tiola put the ring away, stepped a pace from him, rejecting his touch. “But he did not, as you implied, deliberately shoot Jenna did he Stefan? It was not as you told me. All of it was lies.” What she had learned filled her with anger. She wanted to strike him, shout at him – shout to the world his deceit and defamation of Jesamiah. But she could do none of it for she had to know where her pirate was now. Had to get to him.

  She raised her hand, gracefully wove her fingers into a figure of eight pattern. “Hie…sssh; you will tell me all I wish to know of your acquaintance with Phillipe Mereno and your intentions about Jesamiah Acorne. And then you will forget I asked, as you will also forget we stood here beside this grave of the woman who took the shot meant for you.”

  There was much she could do with her power, but as much she could not. Some things required Craft, for others the natural wit of a woman’s charm would need to suffice instead. She could not risk exposing her abilities – she would not be helping Jesamiah were she to get herself hanged as a witch. A woman of her young age would attract questions and suspicion were she to travel alone. Yet to stop Stefan or Mereno from killing Jesamiah she had to get to Nassau for the arrival of this new Governor and his offer of unconditional amnesty to all pirates.

  The solution was the only one she could think of that would not compromise her safety or draw undue attention. It was perhaps dramatic, but simple.

  When next he asked, Tiola agreed to become Stefan’s wife.

  Thirteen

  July – 1718

  While she was incapable of fear, Tethys felt a disturbance, a tremor of concern, which trickled through her transparent, fluid, mass. An unbalance distorted the equilibrium of her world, her anxiety caused through the not knowing from whence it came. Tethys knew everything but this. This was new and as yet unrecognised. A capability which, while not a threat was ambiguous in its intent.

  Diligent, she searched for the source of the intrusion.

  It came, she eventually discovered, from one of the ships gliding upon the surface of her domain. Not one of those pirate ships with their loud ways and roaring cannon – although she kept a part of her awareness on the blue-hulled one. No, this was from a ship that had sailed from the hot, dry lands of Africa to the turquoise, crystal waters of the Caribbean and the scattered islands of the Bahamas.

  Not that Tethys cared for the quaint names these humans gave the land forms. All that concerned her was the potential capability surging from a female aboard that ship. A capability which intrigued, and a little – just a little – unnerved her.

  Captain Woodes Rogers’ arrival at Nassau on New Providence Island was to be five days later than expected. With capricious winds, the flux of the tides and a voyage length from England of something near two months, this was entirely understandable. Stefan van Overstratten, however, was not a man who contemplated the virtues of patience. He fretted and fussed, his temper raw and his disappointment in his wife increasing daily.

  They had been wed on the first day of May. Tiola had wanted a private ceremony, Stefan a grand affair. As always, he had his way. These three months on, he well understood women took time to begin breeding, but as yet there was not a sign of her womb quickening. His doubts were rising about his wife; that perhaps she would be unable to produce children had never occurred to him. Her barrenness with the pirate he had assumed to be Acorne’s lack, not hers. He would not be knowing that through her Craft Tiola had control over the working of her body. It was for her to decide when she would be nurturing a child within her womb. Nor would he know she regretted not giving Jesamiah the son he would have been proud of, or that she had no intention of permitting Stefan’s seed to impregnate her.

  For the week they had been here, Tiola had spent most of the daylight hours observing the jumble of ships resting at anchor in the harbour, looking for one particular ship. As had Stefan, for a different reason. Nassau was busy, the harbour filled with vessels of all sizes and states of sea-worthiness. Close on three thousand men, scavengers of the sea as Stefan called them, had descended here – from curiosity more than pursuing a government-granted pardon. They took the opportunity of freedom from harassment by the authorities to careen, and to enjoy the available women and plentiful supply of rum and ale. The taverns and brothels, delighted with the glut of trade, made the most of it while it lasted.

  Lodging at the Governor’s official residence, empty and echoing with only servants and themselves to rattle around the private quarters on the first and second floors, Tiola felt the days of anxious waiting crawl by. Life, even if it was only that of degenerates, was stretched in a ragged uproarious muddle along the beach, straggling between the campfires and whore-tents. It was not in this pink-and-white painted, bleak house. Was most certainly not in her marriage, although she had not expected it to be. Stefan demanded everything for himself. Unlike Jesamiah’s fire of lovemaking, he had no tenderness and no understanding of her passion or her needs; his act of sex was impersonal and devoid of emotion, completed in a matter of minutes. He used her as was his right and for his own satisfaction; treated her as if she were an object devoid of feeling.

  The temptation to use Voice and send him from her had pushed her self-restraint to the limit on several occasions, yet she had to wait, had to maintain this pretence. An ear soon became deaf to familiar sounds. The repetitive use of Voice would diminish its strength, Stefan would become immune to its command and she could not risk that, in case Jesamiah came. Use Craft unnecessarily and the illusion was at risk of wearing transparent thin and then ripping apart. She could suffer Stefan’s tedious attentions for they were merely inconvenient and irritating, were not life threatening. But how she missed the sensuous touch of Jesamiah’s hands! His tongue and lips exploring her body, his skill of lovemaking which could conjure such prolonged delights of aroused pleasure! How she missed the sensation of his own release exploding inside her as, together, they reached the height of a dizzy crescendo. She wanted him. Oh, how she wanted him!

  Tiola sighed, thrust away erotic thoughts of Jesamiah and concentrated on the ships in the harbour. The one advantage to the Governor’s house: the view from this first floor front window gave out over the bay. A ship was carefully nudging her way over the sandbar, a Royal Navy frigate, flying the Great Union Flag from her stern ensign staff, the Jack from her bow. Not one of those vessels at anchor even remotely resembled Sea Witch.

  Would she look the same as when Tiola had last seen her? Jesamiah would have altered and refitted her, made her into a pirate ship with cannon and gun ports. He had re-painted her hull, that fact appeared to be widespread knowledge, for every indignant statement of his attacks had reported a blue-painted hull. Did Sea Witch still have the figurehead? The lady with the generous bosoms? Tiola smiled at the thought. Knowing Jesamiah, she would still be there in all her glory.

  If only she knew where Jesamiah was and what he intended to do! Was he on his way to Nassau or was he somewhere else, on the far side of the world perhaps? The idea of remaining Stefan’s wife and tolerating his dull and arrogant presence for no reason filled her with dread. All this could be such a waste of time – but if Jesamiah was coming, if he was even now just beyond the horizon…To see him again she would suffer a thousand indifferent nights with Stefan grunting on top
of her. If only Jesamiah would lower the barrier he had erected against her and allow her to enter his mind!

  On the long voyage across the Atlantic she had persistently called to him. Leaning on the lee rail, pretending to be mesmerised by the churn of the sea, she had slowed her heartbeat, set her mind to think only of Jesamiah; the memory of his face, his voice, his smell. Had met nothing beyond a blackness that would not yield to her probing. Subconsciously – he would not have been aware to do so deliberately – he had created a shielding wall, blocking her thoughts from connecting with his, and until she physically saw him there was nothing she could do to tear it down. But if he came, Stefan was also waiting.

  Exasperated, Tiola whirled away from the window, an explicit and crude sailor’s cuss Jesamiah had occasionally muttered leaving her lips. Found her husband leaning against the doorframe, watching her intently with a disapproving stare.

  “So disappointed to see me?” he commented as he crossed the room. “And a sailor’s oath as greeting? I was unaware a gentlewoman would know of such filth.”

  How long had he been standing there? Spying on her? She made light of the expletive. “I must have heard it aboard your ship. I have no idea what it means.”

  “Or perhaps your pirate used it?” Stefan walked towards her, took her hands in his own, his thumbs rubbing the soft skin across her knuckles. His own hands were smooth, unlike Jesamiah’s there were no calluses across the palms, no stains of tar or gunpowder ingrained beneath the nails. “It sounded the sort of lewdness an immoral felon such as he would utter.”

  “If he did, I cannot recall it. Indeed I remember little of those months. I was a naive young girl, Stefan, blinded by the lure of adventure. Those childish days are behind me, I am your wife and I have matured into sensibility.”

  He shifted his fingers to encircle her wrists, his breath, tainted with tobacco and brandy, unpleasant on her face. “Oh I think not. I think you remember very well. I think you remember him very well.”