Lightkeeper's Wife

by Sarah Anne Johnson

  He reached for her hand. “I must ask you to respect my decision,” he said, his words gentle now.

  She pulled her hand from his. And if I cannot?

  Daniel stood. “I don’t understand your reckless mood.” He tossed his linen napkin onto the table and stormed from the cabin.

  ***

  The wind blew steady from the northwest, and Intrepid sailed close-hauled, the sails trimmed and full. Annie stood with the first mate, Donovan, a freckled Irishman. He was compliant and followed orders in a way that made him invisible, like part of the ship that functioned so well one barely noticed it. His red hair curled up in the back as if caught by the wind, and he always tried to flatten it with spit on the tips of his fingers, trying to rid himself of his one distinctive feature. Daniel was belowdecks, scanning the blue-backed sea charts. “The captain has said you could explain to me how to read the compass and hold the ship’s heading.”

  “He did, did he, ma’am?”

  “Yes,” Annie said. “Do you question it, Donovan? Because I can have him deliver the order himself, if you like.”

  “No, no, no. That’s okay, ma’am. I can teach you. It’s just…never mind. Come stand over here by the binnacle compass.”

  The compass was situated by the helm in a housing three and a half feet off the deck and protected beneath a glass globe. From the wheel the ship’s heading could easily be read. Annie took her position beside Donovan and awaited instructions.

  “If you want to head down a few points east, you steer toward east on the compass.” He demonstrated, tilting the wheel slightly to change the ship’s course. “Give it a try, ma’am. Take the helm and hold your course.”

  At first, standing behind the huge wheel with her skirts billowing in the wind and her body braced against the lean of the boat, Annie was surprised by the weight of water against the ship’s rudder.

  “You steer with your whole body, ma’am, like this,” Donovan said, leaning his weight in the direction he wanted the wheel to turn, using his legs and arms and torso to guide the vessel through the wind. “Now take us two points into the wind and keep her as close to the wind as you can get her,” he said, relinquishing the wheel.

  Annie took the steering pegs in her hands, braced her legs, and leaned her body into the wheel, her eyes shifting from the compass, up to the sail to check for a luff, back and forth, until she held the ship’s position as Donovan had requested.

  “Fine job, ma’am,” he said.

  “You get the heading from the navigator, who gets it off the charts, is that right?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said.

  Annie learned to handle the sextant, how to balance it against the horizon and take a mark, how to look up the figures in the tables and locate the ship’s position on the chart. When Daniel ventured belowdecks one afternoon, he discovered her bent over a book containing columns of numbers, her finger running up and down the page as she wrote on a piece of scrap paper. “What have we here?” Daniel asked. “I’ve not allowed you to steer the ship, so you’ve found another way to direct our course?”

  “I thought I could teach myself some navigation to pass the time, Daniel, then we could talk about it over dinner. You could instruct me.”

  “I’ve told you how I feel about you working on the ship. It undermines my authority with the men. I’ll not have it.”

  “What are you so afraid of? That I might be good at this?” she asked, glaring at Daniel, her eyes a hot beam of light. Then they heard the noise overhead, a scuffling on deck as a group of eavesdroppers dispersed.

  “There, now you’ve done it,” Daniel said. “I’ll not have you talk to me like that again!”

  Daniel’s anger didn’t discourage Annie from steering the ship and watching the crew in the rigging as they tied a yardarm off in rough weather. She asked the men questions about the rigging and learned which line hauled which sail. After mastering the differences, she watched the sailors on deck and bribed them with Daniel’s money into teaching her how to tie a square knot, sheet bend, bowline, and to tell her what each knot was for. It was clear that some members of the crew resented her presence among them.

  “That was my wife I’d swat her right back into the kitchen. She don’t like her fancy cabin, I’d put her to work scrubbing the decks. Who does she think she is?”

  “Nothing but bad luck.”

  “Ladies on ships always are. I’ll not go near her for any price.”

  Annie stepped out from behind the foremast where she’d been eyeing the halyards and glowered down at the two men weaving monkey’s fists into the ends of frayed lines. “I could have you cowards banished to the bilge to sleep with the rats for the rest of this journey. You dislike my being on this ship and trying to make myself useful, then speak to me directly.”

  One of the sailors, a man named O’Malley, leaned back to take in the length of her. He was a tall Irishman from Dublin, freckled and weathered by thirty-one years of life, nineteen of them at sea. She knew from Daniel that he was discontented with his position among the crew and wanted a promotion with higher pay, but he wasn’t going to get either. Daniel had taken a natural disliking to the man, and there was nothing to be done about it. “We’re not to speak to the captain’s wife.”

  “She just gave you permission,” Annie said.

  “We’re hired men, ma’am, paid to do our job, nothing else,” the other, called Nickerson, said. She knew he was respected among the crew. His opinion carried weight. He often sat on the bulwark dressing the men down for lazy seamanship, or rallying them to change sails in rough seas.

  “It’s wrong for a woman to be working on a ship,” O’Malley said, meeting her eye. “It ain’t done, and the men don’t like it.”

  Annie listened without interrupting.

  “With you roaming around we have to watch our language and worry you’re going to see something or report back to the captain. If you were one of the crew, that’s one thing, but you’re not. You’re the captain’s wife.”

  “I’ll not report anyone, if you’ll agree not to report me. In fact, I’ll pay each of you to persuade the men that I’m one of you, not against you, but with you.”

  The sailors looked back and forth between each other. “With us how?”

  “I intend to sail this ship.”

  “How do we know we can trust you?”

  “I care more about learning to sail this ship than I do about whatever trouble you and your mates manage to get yourselves into. You’ve seen me take the helm. You know I’m serious.”

  O’Malley had an odd habit of pinching his cheek when he was thinking or bothered by something, and he went at it good and hard now. Annie wasn’t sure how to assuage him. “I’ll bring the coins after your dinner this evening.”

  O’Malley smiled and nodded, as if she’d solved a puzzle he’d been trying to figure.

  “How do I know I can trust you?” Annie said.

  “We’ll get the men to come around, ma’am. We can help them see things different. Will that prove it to you?”

  She looked at the men, their eager eyes and serious faces. “All right, then we have a deal?”

  The men nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”

  ***

  On a bright, nearly windless afternoon Annie announced to Donovan, “I want to go up into the rigging.”

  “That’s taking it too far. You have to talk to the captain about that, ma’am. I couldn’t allow it. It’s dangerous up there, even for a man, with the waves tossing the spars back and forth and the swing of the mast. You have to be strong to hold on. The captain wouldn’t allow it. I’m sorry.”

  “I’ll talk to him.” Annie disappeared belowdecks and reappeared sometime later with Daniel’s old breeches pulled on beneath her calico dress. Her loose skirts swelled in the air around her and she let them fly. With the ocean in her lungs, she grabbed
the ship’s rigging and swung her weight around to climb the rope ladder. There was no reason she couldn’t make it to the crow’s nest. At first, she gripped the ropes so hard that her knuckles went white, but then she got her footing and kept her weight on her feet, using her hands for balance. Her legs did the work of climbing up, up, over the decks and the sea and the men. The air was silent except for the sound of the wind against the sails. No voices, no boots scuffing the decks, no hammers pounding or hatch covers slamming. Just air and sky. As she climbed, she felt herself entering another world entirely, as if she could become part of the sky to look across at flying birds and see their wings and fine heads cutting the wind instead of looking up to see their bellies and feet pressed flat against their white breasts. She ducked under the rim of the crow’s nest and sat against the mast, her arms draped over the rim.

  A crowd of sailors gathered below to watch. Daniel had been called topside. He was a speck down there, indistinguishable from the other men. Had she ever loved him, or had she loved the idea of sailing around the world and living at sea? Whatever it was in her that had cared for Daniel had died when the baby died. She couldn’t stand the sight of him as he stood below staring at the bottoms of her boots. His arms beat the air, sending a signal she chose to ignore. As the wind picked up, the mast rocked to and fro in great sweeping arcs, and Annie gave herself over to the motion. She focused her eyes on the steady line of the horizon, and then she climbed down, one foot first, then the next foot feeling for the ratline. With each step into the world of the ship, the air closed in around her. The expansive silence of wind and sky atop the mast shrank to the noise of the crew shouting up at her and Daniel cussing out Donovan, whom he blamed for Annie’s trespassing on the ship’s rigging.

  Some of the men gathered by the bowsprit, snickering loud enough for the captain to hear. They scattered when she swung herself from the rigging onto the deck, landing with her knees bent, using her legs like springs to break her fall. She gazed at Daniel triumphantly.

  “I will speak to you in my quarters,” he said, teeth clenched, and turned a dismissive shoulder to her.

  Annie sat at the table in the captain’s quarters, tapping her fingers restlessly, as if he’d kept her waiting. He flung himself through the cabin door and unbuttoned his coat, threw his shoulders back as if he could bolster himself for the conversation, drawing upon his authority as captain of the ship since she didn’t respect his authority as her husband.

  “You’re making me look ridiculous in front of my crew, Annie. You can’t dress up in my clothes and climb the rigging like a man. It’s simply not acceptable!” He sputtered these last words and wiped his sleeve across his mouth. “It’s practically immoral,” he said, calmer now and seemingly convinced of the validity of his argument.

  Annie stared into his bloodshot eyes and wondered what she’d seen in him that made her marry him. He’d seemed courageous to her four years ago, a man who sailed around the world conducting his business, buying and selling goods to make a profit.

  Daniel cleared his throat. “It was a reckless thing to do. I’ll not have it happen again. Not on my ship. I’ll put you off at the next port and you’ll not sail with me again. I can’t be concerned about you putting yourself in danger when there are real dangers to consider. Do you understand?”

  Annie sat up straight now. She blew across her red, burning palms, chafed from holding on to the rigging, and looked into his face. “It’s no more dangerous for me to go aloft than for one of your men, Daniel, and I’ll do it again.”

  “Since that baby died, you’ve done nothing but try to humiliate me. You’ve embarrassed me in front of my men and eroded my authority. You’ll not climb the rigging again.”

  “I’ve embarrassed you, that’s all you have to say?” she stood and yelled back at him.

  “I’ve been a much better husband to you than you’ve been a wife to me. At least I’ve tried, Annie.”

  “You left me alone to lose our baby,” she said, bitter and disgusted.

  “You’ll never forgive me. If I’d been there, the baby still would’ve died.”

  “But you would’ve been there! You fool!”

  The cabin door slammed behind her. It rattled the brass lanterns in her wake. On deck, she felt free of him. He might be captain of the ship, but she was in charge of herself, and he could not take that away from her.

  ***

  The next morning she was in the cabin when Daniel ran down the steps to tell her that they’d been boarded by pirates. His voice was fused with authority and fear. She heard a scuffle on deck, strange men barking orders.

  “They’re onboard?”

  “They said if I turned over the cargo and supplies they’d leave us with our lives. I don’t see any choice. I don’t have the manpower or weapons to fight them.”

  “You can’t let them take the cargo,” she said. “If you don’t fight, we’ll lose everything.”

  “We’ll let them take what they want and hope they don’t notice you. No telling what they’ll do with a woman,” he said. “You’ve got to hide.”

  The sound of Daniel’s voice infuriated her. “You need to gather the men. You let our daughter die, now you’re going to give up without a fight?”

  “Stop it, Annie.” The conviction of her rage caused him to doubt himself, not as a ship’s captain, but as a man—had he let his daughter die?—and this was where she found her stronghold. She took the pistol he kept beneath the foot of the mattress ticking, and she tossed the machete hanging from a sling by the doorway directly at him so that he caught it by the handle.

  “This is not a fighting ship,” he said, but once armed with Daniel’s pistol, Annie shoved past him.

  On deck, she found O’Malley. “Go below, get arms. You’ll take your orders from me, not the captain. Do you understand?”

  O’Malley eyed the pistol and hesitated.

  “Are you in, O’Malley?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Annie hid behind the bulwark to watch the pirates work with a frenzied sense of purpose, unloading crates of cargo one after another and loading them onto their own ship. They wore guns, machetes, hammers. Fear broke through her resolve, but she realized that she wasn’t afraid of being robbed. She was afraid of dying. She didn’t want to die, and she wasn’t going to let her husband’s cowardice cost her her life.

  When Donovan, Nickerson, and O’Malley appeared from below, armed with pistols, she said, “We can protect our ship, or we can roll over like dogs. What’ll it be?”

  O’Malley scanned the deck for Daniel, then eyed Annie. He looked from one of his fellows to the next. “We’ll fight, ma’am.” O’Malley spoke for the lot of them. A few more men came up from belowdecks, armed and cautious.

  “All right, then.”

  “If we go at them from the stern, we’ll surprise them. That’s our only chance. Wait until most of them are on their own ship stowing the cargo. When they come back across the gangplank we can shoot them one at a time,” O’Malley said.

  “Where’s the captain, ma’am?”

  “Gathering ammunition, and getting the rest of the men in formation. He wants to try to reason with them, but there’s no reasoning with men like this.” Her lie came easily. She didn’t want to tell them that he was hiding.

  She ventured up the ladder to peer across the deck. “You’ll wait for my signal,” she said. When one of the pirate crew, a thin man in oversize trousers held about his waist with a rope—he looked more like a pauper than a pirate—caught her eye, she fired and hit him in the leg.

  “That’s her signal,” one of the men said, and they ran up the ladder on either side of her.

  She aimed again and got the man in the shoulder. Shots rang out until three pirates lay on the deck near the hold, blood pooling around them. Annie loaded her gun and readied herself for the attack. She positioned herself aft of th
e helm so that she had a clear shot to the gate where the pirates boarded, and when they began running across, guns and cutlasses raised high, she and the crew fired. The flinty smell of gunpowder and smoke filled the air. Daniel was a fool. “The worst kind of fool,” she muttered.

  The Intrepid’s crew picked up arms from the fallen pirates and fought the men coming at them from the other ship. They took orders from Annie, and she led them into surrounding the pirates, and shooting at them from behind cabins, and distracting them with stray shots from the foredeck while a group of sailors attacked from behind.

  The danger heightened her senses so that she could feel and hear an approach from behind or the backward swing of a cutlass or a pistol’s cock in time to react. The motion of her body felt separate from herself, as if her physicality had a mind of its own, her body driven by instinct rather than reason. Annie strode across the deck until she heard the words, “Stop. Don’t move. Not a muscle, or I’ll take your head off right here.” Her body froze and her senses took in the sound of a man’s heavy breathing. He stepped closer, nearly pressed himself against her back but did not touch her. His heat radiated through her jacket. “Turn around slowly,” he said, and she followed his orders. “A wench who thought she could save her ship. Well, I’ll be.” He seemed pleased with himself to have captured her. “You could be very useful to me,” he said, and turned her by the shoulders to face him. “If you’re willing to fight like that.”

  She considered the man in front of her, thick arms and menacing eyes. He was taller and wider and certainly stronger than her, his gun pointed at her ribs. Thick black hair rolled in waves to his whiskered jaw, and sideburns tapered to a fine point near his chin.

  “I’m the captain here, Jack Hawkins. I’ll sign you onto my crew. How would you like that? The wayward life of a pirate? It’s so easy even a woman could do it,” he said, rubbing his closed fist over his mouth. “It’s that or else I’ll kill you where you stand. Or keep you for my own use. I haven’t decided which.”