by Sally Watson
Lawes concealed any disappointment very well indeed. One might almost have thought he was Morgan discovering that the nice rats had decided to play some more after all.
“I’ll be back,” he promised gaily. “I’m giving a party tonight to celebrate your capture. Sorry I can’t invite you, but never mind; I promise we’ll be thinking of you.”
“We’ll be asleep,” said Mary firmly, and yawned again.
True to his word, Governor Lawes did return, every day of that long three weeks. Jade looked forward to his visits and the verbal duels with him as the one taste of seasoning in unsalted time. Malevolent though he was, he played the rules she knew, neither giving nor asking quarter, even seeming to enjoy the points she scored almost as much as the ones he did. And although they detested each other, it was with a measure of grudging esteem.
He stood peering at her speculatively one day when her accent had slipped, as it frequently did.
“I know you,” he said, groping in his memory.
“You don’t!” Jade contradicted at once.
“I do!” He remembered suddenly, and his protuberant eyes widened, disbelieving. For an instant they glared at each other like gladiators deciding whether and where to strike first. Then common sense asserted itself, and he shrugged his mustard taffeta shoulders. “Perhaps not,” he decided, vaguely baffled.
“Non,” Jade agreed, relieved.
But Anne was a great disappointment to him. She refused to fly into helpless rages and declined the game of repartee, leaving it all to Jade.
“You’re better at it,” she said. “I’d just lose my temper. Besides, why give him the satisfaction of arguing?”
“For my satisfaction,” snapped Jade, and girded her loins to do new battle with a newly-arrived flock of gaping and jeering public.
For the public came at all hours to see and taunt the wild pirates in their cages. They thrust malignant faces against the bars to peer, ogle, comment, and to hurl abuse like dung. Jade longed daily to jump into the clean salty sea to wash it off. It was far more loathsome than the running duel with Lawes—but it did keep her in battle spirits. Unthinkable ever to quail before those cruel and malicious eyes, avid for any hint of weakness! And Mary’s bored silence, or even Anne’s sinister air of a brooding volcano, weren’t even very effective as defense, much less as attack.
“You can’t be subtle with yapping dogs,” Jade fumed. “They just think you’re too despairing and broken-spirited even to answer back. I’ve heard them say so, and so have you!”
“Who cares what they think?” asked Mary from the depths of her own indifference.
But Jade cared. So did Anne, at last. Together they worked out half a dozen different kinds of verbal stop-thrust—a riposte without parry, said Jade contentedly, that even Monsieur Maupin would have approved. There was no need for defense now.
The most effective was to discuss gallows and hanging even more cold-bloodedly than their would-be tormentors. This not only shocked and confused the enemy, but it also wore such callouses on their own nerves that they were almost immune to any attack on that subject.
“You ought to see the new scaffold we’re building!”
“See it! We’re going to try it out!”
“It’s a huge one, especially for you cursed pirates.” “Well, I should hope so, it’s the least you could do for anyone as important as Anne Bonney. We’re expecting a brass band and fireworks, too, you know.”
“Have you repented?” asked one long-faced man with lugubrious malice.
They looked at him, gleaming. “You’d be surprised at what we repent,” they told him.
And when threatened with the torments of hell, the female pirates had the insensitivity to remark that it sounded terribly interesting, and they could hardly wait to see some of their old friends.
Next, Jade developed the distracting habit of keeping in trim by doing acrobatics at odd moments, whenever she felt the need to express her feelings or stretch her muscles or confuse the enemy. And visitors found it difficult to keep their minds entirely on the subject with someone persistently grinning at them upside down or bending into a wheel. It was, to say the least of it, a highly unsuitable attitude.
And if Jade had her hours of black depression, when the fear so well bottled up beneath the floor of her mind banged and shouted to get out and the long nights dragged without end, no one had any cause to suspect it. Especially not Mary and Anne, who doubtless had their own dark hours to cope with. For some reason Jade felt it her responsibility to keep up their spirits and lead the counter-attacks.
One day, newly inspired, she informed Governor Lawes with ghoulish glee that she had decided to become a ghost.
“Think how Jamaica will be famous,” she pointed out zestfully. “To have the only haunted gallows in the world! I cannot think, me,” she decided in surprised tones, “why it is that no one has ever done it before.”
“Lovely idea!” approved Anne. “But I certainly shan’t waste my time haunting the gallows.” And she looked meaningfully at Lawes.
But this fell disappointingly flat, for the governor was too elated with news of his own even to notice what they said.
“Charles Vane has been caught, too!” he announced, pink with jubilance. “They’re bringing him here, and you’ll all be tried and hanged together.”
The dismayed silence lasted only an instant. They rallied under his sharp eyes.
“Very sociable,” they said brightly, not fooling him for a moment, but at least not giving him any more satisfaction than they could help.
When he had gone off jauntily to throw another party of celebration, and the door was temporarily empty of mockers, the cell sank into dismal silence. Mary leaned back against the damp wall with a sigh and a cough, Anne slumped into bleak dejection, and Jade hugged her knees and rested her forehead on them with a sigh. This dreary captivity was a part of the consequences she hadn’t foreseen, and it was getting harder and harder to bear without self-pity.
“Poor Vane,” said Anne.
Jade said nothing. She liked Vane well enough, but he was no worse off than the rest of them—especially Mary and Anne. Any pity she dared indulge in, went to them.
“At least he’ll have that much less time to spend buried alive,” she muttered sourly. “I’ll be glad when it’s the fifteenth.”
Mary coughed and nodded fervent agreement, but Anne turned on Jade, tempestuous.
“Will you! Have you thought what the trial will be like?”
Jade had. All the venomous tongues and virulent faces and pitiless eyes, all at once. Hundreds of them—and in broad daylight, with no protective dimness. . . . Oh yes, she’d thought! She shivered.
“Yes,” she said, defiant.
“Well?” blazed Anne, caustic with nervous strain. “Well?”
“Well what?”
“But I suppose you won’t mind, will you?” Anne’s sneer was withering. “The heroic Mistress Iceberg-without-nerves; you never mind anything, do you?”
Jade shoved her chin out. “I’ll mind. I’ll hate it!”
Anne stared. “Well, I’d have thought you’d be too proud to admit it,” she said in tones of deep disillusion.
“Oh, would you!” snapped Jade, and scowling, paused to think about it. Denial was defense, and against her principles. “I’m too proud to deny it,” she discovered, nose in the air.
“Stop it, both of you!” Mary pleaded. “Don’t take it out on each other! It’ll be all over soon now, you know; it’s just the waiting.”
Anne sputtered and glowered for a moment longer, then laughed and crossed the cell to put a pacifying arm around Jade’s sullen shoulder.
“Sorry,” she said. “I’m even sorry I encouraged you to sign on with us. You could have been back home in Virginia reading about our capture with faint regret.”
It didn’t sound as heavenly as it should have done: not even the thought of light and warmth and space.
“Virginia’s only another ki
nd of prison with a longer sentence,” Jade sighed. “I’m glad I joined you. It was the only time in my life I was free and alive. And I never had a single beating!” she remembered, astonished.
“You might still plead compulsion, though,” persisted Anne, eager to make amends. “After all, you were less a volunteer in coming aboard than Cornelian and Besneck, and they’re doing it.”
Jade wrenched away angrily. “Yes, I’d be likely to, wouldn’t I?” To try to sneak out of consequences, and betray her friends as well; how dare Anne even suggest it? “Anyway,” she added, dropping into prosaic realism, “what would I do if I were set free? Crawl back home to make my family wish I really had drowned? Sell myself as a bond slave?”
She stopped there, other possibilities being even less attractive. The subject was dropped. There was no place in society for a girl like Jade.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The Trial
The light was blinding, the heat was an astonishment after the cold dimness of the dungeon, and the noise was an assault. The courtroom was filled with a gallows mob, lusting for blood and scandal. Ribald and sadistic, they overflowed the building and swarmed in the street as at a devils’ carnival, eating and drinking, laughing and staring, buying miniature gallows as souvenirs from prospering hawkers.
A roar arose at the sight of the prisoners, causing Jade to shrink inside her own skin like a panic-stricken snake trying to escape by shedding. This was far worse than she’d imagined; surely a bit of hell itself, fed with pure essence of hate. For a moment she thought she really couldn’t face it. Then she pulled herself together with a small gasp and an even smaller smile of self-mockery. As if she had any choice! Or, rather, the only choice was whether to face it with dignity or without—and that was no choice at all.
Clanking, the prisoners were wedged through the bloodthirsty crowd. Jack shook as he walked, his face wiped blank by fear. His cronies shuffled sullenly. But Charles Vane studied the crowd with a clinical interest that Jade found admirable, and Mary was wrapped in her cloak of indifference. As for Anne, the target of all the worst and loudest abuse, she was like a queen. The flaming hair was pulled severely back from her pure classical profile; she was tall, remote, altogether magnificent.
Jade, comparing Anne with the mob around them, was suddenly and fiercely glad to be where she was, against them all. She stared at them, tingling with loathing and battle-joy. No matter that she was a prisoner, that she was ragged and dirty in cotton trousers; no need to wish for velvet breeches and her flame blouse! She was better than any of them, could out-scorn them right to the gallows. Not with Mary’s detachment or Anne’s majesty, but with her own style of irreverent flippancy. Her head lifted proudly on its slim neck.
“Stretching it for the noose?” jeered a pimply youth as the file of prisoners jangled past.
“But of course,” she flashed back, even remembering her accent. “It will be of a good fit, non?”
There was laughter, not sympathetic, but definitely appreciative. The mob was here to be entertained, and the better show put on, the better they liked it. And Jade promised to be the most entertaining of all the pirates.
“Ah, they like you,” came Vane’s dry voice from just behind.
She turned an inquiring look over her own shoulder, carefully calm, matching his dryness. “Dogs like bones, too,” she retorted.
He chuckled, so naturally that Jade wondered whether he too had walled away his fear deeply, or whether he truly had none. “You’ll do,” he approved. “Actually, I was thinking of bull-fighting. They do like a spirited bull. . . .”
It was horribly apt—and just the thing Rory might have said. Jade grinned at the thought, and imagined she could feel him beside her, disrespectful and unyielding.
They were squeezed into the prisoners’ dock now, the target for all the pitiless eyes. Jade, in the front row between Anne and Vane, was grateful for the sheltering height of one and bulk of the other. She no longer felt flippant, and it took a certain amount of effort to keep the insouciant smile fixed in its place.
Governor Lawes—now Judge Lawes—was in his place, no longer a clownishly vindictive little man, but a powerful and baleful magistrate in a huge gray judge’s wig, pounding his gavel for quiet. The crowd buzzed itself into silence. A town crier settled himself on the broad windowsill where he could repeat all the proceedings to the avid hundreds outside. And the trial was on, as solemnly as if there were any doubt about the outcome.
In danger of becoming very much oppressed by the whole thing, Jade raised her impudent face to Judge Lawes, who was eyeing her with a kind of affable ferocity that was not in the least comforting. He reminded her strongly of Morgan when he had finished playing and was out to kill. Moreover, he was making no pretense at impartiality. His opening speech, addressed to Anne, was a small masterpiece of invective, and one which left very little for the Prosecutor to add. The kindest thing he called her was “a lusting, thieving, oathing female, best made use of on the gallows.”
Jade stood still, trying not to be sickened. The town crier was repeating it all, zestfully, to the outside audience, and the crowd murmured approvingly, and Anne—Anne stood erect and unashamed, like Antigone under the flaying tongue of Creon. Jade’s heart lifted in admiration. She curled a derisory smile at the mob, who were clearly irritated at such unflinching stoicism, and she stood proudly closer to Anne.
Considering everything, it was a fairer trial than Jade had expected. To be sure they had no barrister to defend them, and this might have been a distinct handicap had they been innocent. As they were blatantly guilty, it didn’t matter except in principle. And Judge Lawes, ignoring the shouts of “Get on with the hangings!” scrupulously called witness after witness to testify against them.
“As if we needed all this proof!” murmured Jade. “We’ve never denied any of it, not even Jack.”
“Proper legal form,” said Anne from the side of her mouth. “Besides—” She grinned shrewdly. “He does love to rub it in, you know.”
Astonishing how many witnesses appeared! From all around the Jamaican coast they came: from the fishing boats and villagers and small trading ships that had been robbed. All were delighted to testify against the pirates; all were particularly eager to punish the females who had dared so affront masculine dominance.
Jade listened, cynical and embittered but not at all astonished, until the woman from the canoe—one Mistress Thompson—took the stand and behaved in exactly the same way. Why, demanded Jade in an aggrieved whisper, should she turn against her own sex that way?
Mistress Thompson turned at the sound, met her indignant stare, and returned it dourly. “You’re the one I hit with my paddle,” she remembered with satisfaction.
The judge’s gavel beat through the noisy tittering and bawling crier. “You hit her?” he echoed, incredulous. “That one? You’re sure?”
Mistress Thompson asserted indignantly that of course she was sure, and Jade at once supported her.
“Of course she did, and poked Bixby in the stomach, too. You men think just because someone’s a female she shouldn’t have any spirit or courage, and if she does, you either won’t believe it or punish her, and if you ask me—”
“Silence!” brayed Lawes as the crowd broke into booing, applause, and imprecations, and the town crier gabbled out the window. Mistress Thompson stared at Jade doubtfully, getting the point and bewildered by it.
“She didn’t hit back, nor let the others,” she conceded fairly, and was at once dismissed from the stand, to be replaced by the skipper of the turtling boat. After that Captain Barnett testified with damning admiration that the women and the late Tom Deane were the only pirates to show fight on the day they were captured.
Finally came Besneck and Cornelian, saving their own skins by swearing that they’d been forced into piracy. And if they were at all embarrassed or shamed by the eight pairs of contemptuous eyes boring at them from the prisoners’ dock, they never showed it. Probably they d
idn’t even notice, being single-mindedly devoted to the business of self-preservation.
“Slimy dogs,” said Jade between her teeth, but Vane smiled down at her philosophically.
“What does it matter? They aren’t hurting us any. And would you be in their shoes?”
“No!” Jade hissed, and meant it. For just one instant she had glimpsed their world: a place where the end always justified the means. It was a terrible world.
Besneck was being questioned now about life on the Juanita. “And what about the orgies?” demanded the judge with an air of expecting to be deeply shocked but not surprised.
“Orgies?” Besneck looked confused. Nobody had told him about any orgies, and although he was perfectly willing to invent anything that might please the court, he had no idea what to invent. Perplexed, he fell back on the prosaic truth.
“There wa’n’t any, Y’r Honor.”
Deep and audible disappointment filled the room. Governor Lawes beetled his skimpy brows skeptically. “None? Nonsense, man! Tell the truth, now: what was it like living with a band of evil, vicious pirates?”
Besneck looked apologetic. “Uh— Well, Y’r Honor, us men got drunk whenever we could find any rum,” he offered hopefully.
Jade giggled. Sharp from the crowd came one curt bark of laughter that made her catch her breath and stare. There was a distraction rising from the far door, a narrow swathe cut through the unwilling pack, a rising murmur of protest. Judge Lawes banged for order, and in answer there came a new urgency to the ripple, a new volume in the murmur. A seedy little man popped into view, looking as if he wished he were somewhere else, but prodded unmercifully by the two figures behind him.