by Sally Watson
And then there were only two of them. A musket cracked and Tom fell—killed instantly—at Mary’s feet.
Mary went berserk. She forgot the enemy, about to board; turned to the hold with a twisted face.
“Filthy cowards!” she shrieked, and fired into it. A howl rose. “Desert my Tom, will you—” She fired again, and was again rewarded by an anguished yell. Jade only half saw. Alone by the bulwarks, she was standing by to repel boarders.
It wasn’t much of a fight, she was later annoyed to remember. She fired both pistols and then drew her cutlass. But they swarmed over her before she had time to do any serious damage with it. And Mary hardly had time to turn from the babbling and wailing hold before she, too, was seized.
The commander, one Captain Barnett of the English Navy, stared at the captured pirates with moderate satisfaction and considerable awe. The victory, somehow, lacked—er—something. Mary, entirely unsubdued, raged like several tigers in the hands that held her, while Jade—scorning useless struggle—simply stood still and looked at him as if he were something particularly slimy that had just crawled up from the bilge. Anne, pulled unconscious from under the tangle of rigging, still held a pistol in one hand and a cutlass in the other. And out of the hold, stumbling and mumbling and demanding protection from Mary, came five uninjured pirates carrying a dead one and Jack, limping from a bullet in his leg and claiming bitterly that she’d shot him—as she had. Mary at once announced that she was sorry she hadn’t done a better job of it.
Jade contradicted her. “I’m glad you didn’t kill him,” she announced fiendishly. “Now he’ll hang, and he’ll hate that, the crybaby! I hope he hangs before we do, so we can laugh at him.”
“So do I!” agreed Mary, who seemed to be in a state of crazy shock, unable to feel or care about anything. Jade, for her part, was in a spirit of wild exaltation. There was nothing to lose! It was all over now—and instead of feeling hopeless, she felt recklessly free to say and do anything she liked.
It went to her head. She grinned with unholy joy, laughed aloud at the expressions of her captors, and especially at Captain Barnett, who was regarding the three of them incredulously.
“Furies!” he said, fascinated. “Amazons! Right out of Greek drama! By gad, what couldn’t Sophocles have done with these three!”
The soldiers and Mary, not in the least versed in the classics, merely looked blank. But Jade grinned again, her most irreverent lopsided smile, and announced pleasantly that she’d gladly play Medea. And then laughed again, with genuine delight, at his face.
It wasn’t until the captives had been heavily shackled and transferred to the enemy sloop, and the order given to head at once for Port Royal that reality sobered Jade as if she’d been dumped into a cold ocean.
Port Royal!
It really wasn’t fair, she decided, staring with mild astonishment at the chains on her wrists. It really wasn’t. Why should her own personal consequences reach out to hurt other people? Why should her family have to drink her brew? Hadn’t she given them enough heartache already?
CHAPTER TWENTY
The Prisoners
The sloop sped on its way, rejoicing and incredulous. They had actually got Anne Bonney at last! Right there, in that cabin, unconscious and shackled and triple-guarded. Nervous lest she somehow vanish after all, a guard opened the door for at least the tenth time in half an hour and poked a mistrustful head inside.
No one stirred. Anne Bonney lay with closed eyes on the only bunk, and Mary Read sat staring numbly at nothing, and the little one was curled up on the floor, her face invisible.
Crying, no doubt, said the guard loudly, and bent to look.
Jade instantly feigned sleep, stirring a little as she felt his peering stare, and snuggling into her own arm like a child disturbed.
“Zeuks!” said the guard unbelievingly. “She can’t be asleep!”
“Mmm,” Jade murmured, snuggling harder. “Was. G’way.”
She listened to his baffled retreat with mild satisfaction, and returned to her problem: that of not being recognized in Port Royal, even by her aunt and uncle. And having finished a tentative plan or two—all she could really do now—she sat up and turned her contrite attention to her fellow prisoners.
They were both altogether dazed: Anne from the falling mast and Mary from the shock of Tom’s death. And Jade, selfishly engrossed in her own problems, hadn’t even noticed! Remorsefully she bent over the cut and bruised Anne, received a groggy flicker of smile, and turned to poor stricken Mary with almost motherly concern. She was the strong one now. Later she might be frightened or despairing—but right now hanging didn’t appear nearly as terrible as being flogged or losing Rory had been, and she had survived both of these things with head held high.
It was almost a relief to have it all but over, and a well of gladness was in her that for Rory it had been the keen clean death of a storm at sea. . . .
The thought told her how to reach Mary.
“Listen!” she said, and kneeling, put an urgent hand on the limp manacled wrist. “Listen, Mary! What we told Jack is true! We can be glad for Tom; he’s lucky; he never felt any fear or pain! And he’d have hated hanging worse than we will; you know he would.”
Mary stirred, took a deep breath, raised her head. Slowly her face came to life.
“Yes, of course! How stupid of me!” She sobbed once, buried her face in her hands, and looked up with wet serene eyes. “I’m all right now,” she said firmly. And from then on nothing moved her, nor could. Calm and gallant, she would play the farce to the end—but she wouldn’t care how or when it ended.
Anne spoke from the bed, in the weak but rational voice of someone awake long enough to have sorted things out quite accurately.
“Is Tom dead, then? I’m glad, too, Mary. Lawes—” She didn’t finish—nor need to, as far as Jade was concerned. She remembered far too well the malevolence when he spoke of Anne Bonney.
But they were too tired and too drained to worry. There was nothing they could do. They had always expected this to happen some day, had discussed it with cheerful fatalism. Now they settled down quite easily and comfortably with the hard reality. As Anne observed wisely, there was no hope to torment them with uncertainty, and one can always come to terms with the inevitable.
“Though easier fed than hungry,” she added, wistful. It was a long time since they had eaten.
“I suppose this is the last time we’ll feel a ship under us,” said Jade regretfully as the sloop heeled over again, tacking against the wind. And for some irrational reason this was a more pangful thought than that of the gallows. They all fell into sad silence just as a new guard opened the door, stuck his bushy head in with the air of a cannibal making sure his dinner hasn’t run away, and leered.
“No fight left in this lot, either,” he announced, pleased.
Three heads turned to regard him coldly. Jade elected herself spokesman. “Where’s our dinner?” she demanded, tart as lemons. “How can Lawes hang us if you starve us first? You go tell that captain of yours that the Furies are hungry!”
The head gawped and retreated, sped on its way by what sounded remarkably like a chuckle from the bed. “That’ll show ’em,” said Anne with great satisfaction.
The arrival of the sloop back in Port Royal caused a crowd to start gathering at once as rumors flew. Anchor dropped, and a small-boat went ashore. “To get Lawes, I dare say,” said Anne philosophically. But it came back bearing instead the lean gray-wigged figure of Dr. Hughes. Jade drew a sharp breath, withdrew from the tiny window in haste, and fell into frantic thought.
“Our first public reception,” murmured Anne, and looked with discontent at their worn and slept-in sailcloth trousers and jackets, and the rumpled cotton shirts. “Oh for velvet breeches and silk blouses and a hairdresser!” And she turned to the door as it opened to admit the doctor.
“I’m sorry to see you again in these circumstances, Mistress Bonney,” he said with grave courtesy, and
fixed a sharp professional eye on her battered face and shoulder.
“So am I,” returned Anne drily as he bent over her, clearly here to make sure she didn’t cheat the gallows by dying first. “But I rather think the rest of Jamaica will be in whoops of joy over it.”
“Mostly,” he agreed, not mincing matters. “Mmm—that hurt? No? Good. Just cuts and bruises here; no bones broken . . . There are a few people here who remember you kindly, though I don’t suppose you’ll find it noticeable. They—” He straightened and found himself confronted by a thin, deeply tanned figure with cropped honey-gold hair and a fined-down face all eyes and mouth and jutting cheekbones. It looked almost familiar.
“Good heavens!” he discovered faintly. “It’s Mistress Melanie! What are you doing alive and in such company, poor child?”
“Being a pirate,” said Jade, uncompromising.
Behind her, Anne and Mary exchanged glances and launched instantly into a conspiracy.
“We captured her,” they said firmly. “Held her prisoner. Forced her to be a pirate. But,” they added with slightly more truth, “she always sat in the rigging and refused to fight.”
“Don’t be silly,” said Jade, struggling somewhere between annoyance and affection. “Anne never forced anyone to be a pirate,” she told Dr. Hughes. “Besides, just you try to tell that lot—” She jerked her chin at the door, “—that I never fight! How many wounded have they got in the crew?”
“Four.” Dr. Hughes still looked bemused. “Two with bullet wounds and two with cuts.”
Jade smirked. “Me!” she bragged, and then came to her own urgent business. “Anyway—” She cocked a quizzical but worried head at him, wondering how best to present her case. “I’m not who you think,” she tried. “I’m Jade—er —Green.”
He stared down at the pointed brown face. “You’re not,” he said with conviction. “You’re Melanie Lennox. You’ve changed almost out of recognition, I admit, but you can’t fool a doctor. We notice things like bones and the shape of an ear. Besides, I remember when you cut off your hair. How did you come here, child? We all supposed you drowned at sea.”
“Yes, I know, and it’s better that way. To stay drowned, I mean.” Jade felt that she was not explaining this as lucidly as she might. “Melanie, that is. And I’ll be someone else, like Jade Green. Oh, please, can’t you see?”
He narrowed gray eyes as if he might be starting to. “What is it you want, exactly?” Dr. Hughes asked, direct.
“Bandage my face so no one can recognize me, and don’t say anything,” she replied, as direct. “And when they hang an ordinary pirate named Jade Green, my aunt and uncle—”
He shook his head, startled. “Your aunt and uncle? My poor child, of course you wouldn’t know. Your aunt’s dead. Of yellow fever. She never even knew the Pearl had gone down. And your uncle sold everything and went back to Prussia.”
She stared, shocked. Poor Aunt Louisa! Or was she lucky? She had never seemed very happy to be alive. Muddled, Jade fixed her eyes on her chains, and then looked up again to find them all watching her. This was a time for practicality, not sentiment.
“There’s still my name, and other people who might recognize me. My family in Virginia mustn’t find out!”
“But my dear child, they think you drowned!” he protested. “Surely they’d be happy—”
But she leaned back against the bulkhead in a pose of unconscious grace and quite deliberate mockery, pulling her mouth into its one-sided smile.
“Oh, yes,” she drawled, her voice harsh as Rory’s. “Overjoyed to have their dear daughter raised from the sea to hang for piracy! Delighted! Oh, do please be sensible and help!”
Dr. Hughes stared at her for a moment, and then nodded, his gray eyes warm.
“If you really want it. But I don’t think the bandage is needed. You’ve changed completely. I saw you more than anyone here I think, and I’m the only one to have seen you at all after you cut off your hair, am I not? And its been nearly a year since then.” He stared at her with keen eyes, perhaps regretting the young softness gone from her face. “No one will recognize your face, my dear. If anything gives you away it will be your voice and personality.”
“Behold how I am French,” suggested Jade at once, in Monsieur Maupin’s best accents. “And I name myself Jade—uh—Loupin.” She grinned briefly to herself. Jade Wolf. Monsieur Maupin would have appreciated that. Had she chosen it partly because it was similar to his name, and she was suddenly longing unbearably to see him? The grin had died, and she set her chin strongly.
“Yes, yes; that might do.” The doctor sighed, looked at the three of them sadly. Such a pity! “Be careful in front of Governor Lawes, child; you’re liable to see a good deal of him, you know.”
“Oh, he won’t much notice anyone but me,” predicted Anne wryly, and no one argued with that.
And so, in a strange mood of calm practicality quite unsuited to a funeral, one Melanie Lennox was buried forever; and Jade Loupin, pirate, was led with her fellow-prisoners to the dungeons below the fortress of St. Jago de la Vega.
There was no conversation between the half-dozen aggrieved men pirates and the unforgiving female ones as they clanked their way down the stone steps into darkness. A heavy iron-barred door opened, swallowed the men. And the next one down the corridor creaked open in turn. . .
The lantern in the corridor outside sent a dim flicker of light through the bars and across solid stone walls of the cell. They needn’t, as Anne observed at last, waste their time with any thoughts of digging out.
Mary shivered. The cell was no warmer than it was opulent, and it was as if the sun’s warmth had never existed. A pile of straw and a thin blanket, a bucket in the far corner, two wooden benches . . .
Anne and Mary sat down on them wearily, and Jade—already chafing for air and exercise, herself—regarded them with worried eyes. Pity filled her, for them and for the unborn babies who must die with them.
And then footsteps clomped down the steps at the end of the corridor, and she set her mind against pity, which could only weaken them against their enemies.
The footsteps materialized, became the portly form of Governor Lawes, looking, in the murky yellow light, as expectant and happy as an enormous child on Christmas morning. He applied his nose to the bars, squinting into the gloom, clearly half fearful that St. Nicholas had deceived him after all. Anne’s red hair gleamed dully back at him, convincing him that it was really true, and the governor whooped with glee. His rosy face turned rosier; he chortled, he capered, he crowed; his joy was unbounded.
Jade, one shoulder leaning against the cold stone of the wall, watched him with an oddly detached interest. Governor Lawes was no hypocrite, as she had noticed before. He was gloating unashamed, enjoying his revenge with simple wholeheartedness, glorying in it. Magnanimity in victory was not for him; he believed in rubbing it in.
“Ah, Mistress Bonney,” he announced at last when he could stop bouncing long enough to bellow for more lanterns and peer through the bars again with a joyful blue eye. “You can’t imagine how delighted I am to see you here!”
Anne, smouldering at him from hooded eyes, said she could easily imagine, at which Lawes beamed with the loving look of Morgan the cat with live rats to play with, and added that he had been waiting a long time for this.
“Told you I’d catch and hang you, didn’t I?” he burbled, and waited hopefully for an explosion of the famous Bonney temper.
Except for clenched fists, Anne failed to oblige him. “You took long enough,” she shrugged, disappointingly mild.
Lawes drooped, recovered, sniggered. “You’re very meek all of a sudden,” he jeered. “Such fierce bold pirates! Come, ladies, show me how fierce and bold you are!”
They declined. Mary yawned delicately, Anne turned an indifferent shoulder, and Jade contrived to look faintly amused. They were no fun at all.
Governor Lawes was beginning to look like Morgan disappointed because the nice rats woul
dn’t play anymore. “I thought you had more spirit,” he mourned. “Who’d think you’d break so easily, the deadly Anne Bonney? Oh, do show a little fight!”
Jade couldn’t possibly keep quiet an instant longer. Her eyes gleamed green. She carefully arranged her French accent. “Me, I think you are a very silly man,” she drawled huskily.
Lawes turned startled and interested attention to her for the first time. “What’s that?” he demanded, not missing the insolence of her pose. Good! He was going to get something besides this infuriating show of unconcern.
“A very silly man,” she repeated with relish. “We, voyons, are not so silly. We do not fight when it is not now the time for fighting. You wish, sans doute, that we undignify ourselves by beating at the walls, or cry to be let out, or scream at you, non? That would amuse you very much, I think. But we do not wish to amuse you, silly fat man.”
Lawes regarded her with appreciation. “You can’t help amusing me,” he retorted genially. “It amuses me to see you in there, and it amuses me to see the bold face you put on it, and it will amuse me even more to watch you hang, my dear. And how will you like that, hmm?”
Jade had a gift for the disconcerting.
“Tiens, it will not amuse me very much at all,” she admitted with a cheerfulness that utterly discomposed him for the moment.
They eyed each other like swordsmen found worth each other’s mettle. Jade, idiotically, felt better than she had since the hurricane. Life promised to be not without interest, after all—what was left of it.
Then Lawes turned back to his pet enemy Anne with brand new affability.
“I’m having a new scaffold built on Gallows Hill,” he informed her with gleeful menace, watching for a sign of flinching and getting none. “Imagine yourselves standing there,” he urged them, “with the noose just slipping over your necks!”
They did, of course. The invitation was compulsive. And although the idea had long ago lost the terror of novelty, yet here, in the dank cell and the cold reality of here and now, it bared its teeth again. Something clenched its fist briefly and unpleasantly in the pit of Jade’s stomach, so she slitted her eyes and contrived to look more amused than ever. Anne shrugged, and Mary appeared to be so bored by the whole subject that she could scarcely keep awake. It was a really splendid performance, and Jade was proud of them all.