Only Life That Mattered

by Nelson, James L.

  She thrust a knee straight up into his groin and he gasped, bent over, tried to curse her. She raked his face with her nails, leaving four bright red gleaming lines across his cheek.

  Knee up into his face and he was down and she was kicking him in the groin, over and over, and he could do nothing but lie there and hold his hands over his crotch and scream like an injured animal. And when she was done with that she leapt on him and pounded on his head and slashed at him with fingernails, screaming like a banshee, like one of the legendary spirits of her native Ireland.

  She felt big hands on her shoulders, then more on her arms, and her father and one of the servants lifted her off the boy and as they pulled her away all she could do was kick and claw at the moaning figure in hopes of wounding him one last time.

  Anne learned a great deal that night, about herself, about her power over others, and about her own potential. She was amazed and frightened and intrigued, all at once, by this demon she had discovered within her.

  The young man who footed the bill for that lesson spent the next two weeks recovering in bed.

  “I do,” she told the preacher.

  Her rage was legendary. In Charles Town it was taken as fact that she had slashed a servant girl with a clasp knife, and there was no point in her denying it, though it wasn’t true. The little bitch had been too fast, had leapt back from Anne’s attack, fled out the door and away before Anne could plunge the blade into her.

  At least Anne had managed to cure the servant girl of her habit of stealing perfume.

  “And do you, James Bonny, take this woman to be your lawfully wedded wife, to have and to hold, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, till death do you part?”

  Anne watched her bridegroom as he listened to the words. His face was in profile and she noticed for the first time how weak his chin looked, as if he had no chin at all. Why hadn’t she noticed that? There was stubble in patches where whiskers grew between weekly shaves, but it was clear from the pattern that James Bonny would never grow a real beard. His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down in his long neck. His hand was clammy and wet in hers.

  He was dressed in a sailor’s blue jacket, loose trousers, wool stockings, battered shoes. The clothes were old, patched, tar-stained, but of his two suits, this was the better.

  “I do,” he muttered, as if he did not really wish to, but was too afraid to decline.

  “Then I pronounce you man and wife.” The minister did not sound any more pleased about it than did James Bonny. “You may kiss the bride.”

  James Bonny turned to her and they faced one another, eye to eye. James was less than half an inch taller than Anne. He kissed her, with the same grudging cooperation with which he had married her.

  Anne kissed him back, put her arms around him, squeezed him tight. He was thin, girlishly thin, and though he was strong and agile in the way of topmast sailors, he was limp now and unresponsive. But Anne did not care. She was delirious with joy, with excitement.

  She was married, and she was free.

  Her father had kicked her out of the house for her insisting that she would marry the broke and homeless sailor James Bonny. And now, because of that, William Cormac had no hold on her at all.

  She was Anne Bonny now, and the entire world was opened up to her.

  And at her side, a man who had sailed half the oceans of the world, a man who was not tied down to a grand family and a plantation in South Carolina, but someone unfettered, ready to wander with her, wherever their adventurous spirits might lead.

  Anne liked James Bonny, seaman. But she was deeply in love with the idea of him: a young sailor, a footloose and wild companion, one who had roamed the world before her and would take her along now.

  They thanked the minister, took their certificate from his wife, and left the church. The cobbled street was lined on either side by the brick homes of the Charles Town elite. It was dark, and a cool, wet breeze wafted in off the ocean. There was a rustle of something, a door closed, a burst of laughter from far off. They took a few steps down the street then stopped. They had nowhere to go.

  “Anne, it ain’t right, a girl and her father, fighting like that . . .” James turned to Anne. “Now that we done it . . . got married, I mean, don’t you reckon the thing for it is to go back and tell your father you’re sorry and ask won’t he bless our union?”

  Her father had physically pushed the two of them out the front door of the big plantation house, one of the finest around Charles Town, in which she had lived since she was seven. He had slammed the door as they stood there under the two-story porch supported by columns, like some kind of Greek temple. Anne was poorer now than she had ever been in her life. Destitute. It excited her.

  James Bonny had figured that marrying Anne would assure him a life of wealth and ease and he was not happy about this latest turn. Anne understood that and imagined he would get over it.

  “James, James, my beloved James! We are free now, don’t you see that? The whole world is out there for us to conquer!” But James Bonny, who, at twenty-two years of age, had been free with the whole world before him and not a groat in his pocket for the past eleven years, was not swept away with the romance of the thing. He turned and spit on the street.

  “Anne, you are a silly girl, a goddamned silly girl. You don’t have a buggering notion what you’re about.”

  Anne felt the anger flash in her head, but she was silent and let it pass. Then she stepped closer to James, put her arms around his neck, pressed her body against his, rubbed against him just a bit, and whispered, “I’ve enough money for a room, at least, for a couple of nights. It’s time you had what you’ve been wanting for so long, my darling husband.”

  “What dross have you?”

  “I have some money, don’t you worry about it.” Anne had seen this moment coming and had stolen a decent dowry from her father’s desk. William Cormac owed her that much at least, even if he did not believe it. “Now come along, my darling.”

  But James Bonny was not distracted from his unhappiness. Raw desire did not sweep away every other consideration, as Anne had thought it would, as it always had with every other man, and she did not find that a hopeful sign.

  He scoffed, a soft sound in his throat. “And then what, Anne? Then what? Once it’s gone I’ll need to find a ship and leave you behind, and you without enough money to set up housekeeping. No place even for you to live.” James Bonny had thought to ease his burden in life by making a good marriage, but instead he had doubled it.

  Anne pressed her hands flat against his chest, pushed away until she was looking in his eyes. She had been thinking about this moment for some time, this point when her dock lines were slipped, when she was floating free. Staying in Charles Town to “set up housekeeping” was not an option she had ever entertained.

  Her mother had died seven years before, and from that point until now she had run her father’s house. She was done with housekeeping.

  “James . . . I won’t have you run off alone. I love you; I can’t be parted from you. We must go together.”

  “Together?” James shook his head, incredulous at his new bride’s foolishness and naiveté. “Anne, you ain’t thought this through. Where are we going to go together?”

  “Nassau,” she said without a pause, because in fact she had thought it through, had thought it through quite thoroughly.

  “Nassau? Nassau’s a wicked place. Ain’t a thing to be found but pirates and whores and all manner of villains in Nassau.”

  “I know,” said Anne. She felt herself shiver. The thought of such wickedness thrilled her from keel to truck.

  CHAPTER TWO

  FLANDERS. The summer campaigning season of the Grand Alliance. A full nine years before Mary Read would stand at the bar in St Jago de la Vega in Jamaica and half a world away. The year, 1711. Mary’s eighteenth.

  She rode through the pre-dawn black, the horse and saddle between her legs as easy a fit as a well-worn hat. The smell of the ho
rses, the cumulative sound of a hundred or more riders moving together, was all so familiar now that they did not intrude at all on her thoughts.

  She reached down and adjusted her saber where it was chaffing on her thigh, cleared her throat, and spit on the dirt road below her.

  She was a horse trooper, a corporal in a light cavalry unit. She was not Mary Read, of course. Mary Read was someone locked away deep in her memories, a fragile doll to be pulled out and examined once in a while, a thing for her to marvel at, and then put away, unseen.

  Rather, she was Michael Read, Corporal Michael Read, of the second platoon of E Company of Walpole’s Regiment of Light Cavalry. A young man making a military career, fighting for his country, and no one knew or suspected anything different.

  Walpole’s was one of those elite squads formed in England by some well-heeled gentleman with a thought toward soldiering and money enough for a commission and for equipping his recruits. Once formed, the regiment of light horse had been sent to the killing fields of Flanders to do battle with the French and stop the alliance of the Bourbon household in Spain.

  Mary, in point of fact, didn’t care a pile of dung who sat on the throne of Spain. But she was a cavalry soldier, had been a foot soldier before that and a sailor aboard a man-of-war before that. She had spent most of her life masquerading as a boy and man, serving the King of England under arms. She went where she was told to go, and killed whomever she was told to kill.

  Frederick Heesch, her tent-mate, rode just a little ahead of her and to the right. Mary gave her horse a nudge with her heels, brought herself up alongside Frederick. She wanted to hear his voice.

  “Frederick,” she said, soft, so the sergeant would not hear her over the sound of the horses’ hooves, “have you got a plug?”

  Frederick looked over at her and shook his head, his expression a mix of surprise and bewilderment. He dug in the pocket of his regimental coat, pulled out a twisted hunk of tobacco, handed it over to Mary. She tore off a piece with her teeth and handed it back.

  “What in hell are you doing here?” Frederick asked in the same hushed tone. Frederick’s platoon, but not Mary’s, had been ordered for the morning’s fight. Any sensible person in Mary’s position would still be safe abed.

  Mary shrugged. “Came to this God-forsaken country to kill Frenchmen. Hate to miss the chance.”

  Frederick smiled at her, that wonderful smile of his. “Not so Godforsaken, you fucking English roast-beef.”

  Frederick Heesch was Flemish. Like so many of his countrymen he chose to fight with the English army, which promised more action than the forces of his native land. His heart and spirit were set on warfare, and he was eager for combat. But he was a thoughtful person, good-natured, with a ready wit. Mary did not think he possessed the soul of a warrior.

  His fellow soldiers liked him as a good and decent comrade in arms. Mary Read loved him, deeply, profoundly. She would not let him ride into battle alone, without her to watch his back. That was why she was there.

  The trooper riding ahead and to their left swiveled around, frowned when he saw Mary. “Read? What are you doing on this raid? I swear to God, I think you and Heesch are buggering each other.”

  “Are you jealous, Adams? ’Cause I’m happy to do you too, if you wish,” Frederick offered.

  Mary blew Adams a kiss. “Reckon the Frenchies will bugger us all good before Heesch can.”

  Mary allowed her horse to fall back and she rode with the others near the back of the regiment, far from Frederick. There would be opportunity later to get close to him, but for now she was better off keeping her distance, lending some credence to her claim that she was there for the fighting alone.

  The morning light spread farther and farther along the horizon, though the sun was not to be seen through the impenetrable clouds. Mary breathed deep in the clean morning air, took in the smell of the wet grass and the horses and a touch of wood smoke from some distant fire. The gathering dawn revealed patches of dark and light green fields and little bursts of trees spread over the rolling country through which they rode. Here and there was a house, a farm, a tiny village tucked amid the downs.

  It seemed an unlikely location for a bloody raid. But out there, somewhere, Mary knew, was a French foraging party, scouring the countryside for whatever food and firewood they could gather, a systematic search for those things that would sustain an army in the field. And covering those foragers would be infantry and perhaps even cavalry, to keep their own people from deserting and to protect them from exactly the kind of attack that was about to take place.

  This would not be a grand fight, a history-making battle. It would not be a Donauwörth or a Blenheim or a Ramillies. The real fighting had moved south, into France and Spain, and only vestiges of the armies were now left in Flanders, to snipe at one another and stage small-scale battles and raids on one another’s foraging parties.

  But that did not matter to Corporal Read. She had seen enough of real warfare to know that it was not somehow more glorious to die in the midst of an epoch-making fight. She knew death in all its guises, knew the twisted, broken bodies, the dull eyes staring toward heaven, the flies swarming around gaping wounds, knew it was just as horrid in a foraging raid as it was in a battle between the great armies of nations. It was not for her, and she would see it would not happen to Frederick. She could not allow so perfect a man to end up a mangled and bloody corpse.

  Perhaps they are wrong about the grand forage, she thought. Or perhaps the French have fallen back to their lines. Mary wished that bloody war did not have to intrude on that fine morning.

  They had sat up the night before, Mary and Frederick, outside their tent, with the light rain falling on the fly. They drank whiskey and talked about life after the war.

  “What will you do, Frederick,” she said, “after the last Frenchman is dead and the war ends?”

  “I have been thinking of that,” he said. “I would like to open an inn, I think. Have a kitchen where I could make food, have rooms, a public house. Travelers coming and going, and I would be there to welcome them. Have a place where people wished to gather, where they would feel welcome. It would be a fine thing.”

  Mary nodded as he spoke, tipped the bottle back and let the rough whiskey run down her throat. How many men in that army would have harbored such a dream? Most would dream of their own tavern, where they could become insensibly drunk for free. But Frederick wanted to cook and to see to the comfort of others.

  She pictured the inn, a huge fire burning in the front room, servants bustling about, Frederick greeting guests, supervising in the big kitchen. A warm, well-lit space, the glow of the fire illuminating the painted plaster walls, the rich tapestries.

  And she put herself in the image as well. In her imagination she was wearing a fine silk dress and frilly petticoats, a cotton mob cap, her long hair hanging free down her back and shoulders. Perfume. She saw herself taking her ease in a big copper bathtub. Frederick putting his arms around her, kissing her cheek, telling her how much he loved her.

  “It would be a fine thing, indeed,” she said.

  Mary’s dark brown hair was shoulder length, bound in a queue like a man would wear it. Under the regimental coat, the loose-fitting shirt, the canvas breeches, her body was strong and feminine, but not so womanly that the bulky clothes of a soldier would not hide it.

  And that was good, for if she had been discovered, she would have been tossed out of the regiment within the hour.

  Regardless of all the notable actions, the duty above and beyond the call, all the dead Frenchmen she had left in her wake, it would be, at best, her sword broken over the captain’s knee, the red coat stripped from her back, and an escort to the edge of the camp.

  At the worst, they would hang her.

  Not that she felt in any danger of discovery. She had played the man long enough that that fear no longer nagged at her. There was so rarely an occasion for one to be completely naked that the issue never arose, and she had
grown so skilled at keeping covered that she could even sit on an open latrine with her long shirt over her knees and no one the wiser. Her voice was naturally deep for a woman, average for a young man. She knew how to speak a man’s language, could joke and curse and sing coarse songs like the seasoned trooper she was. And more to the point, the very idea that she could be a woman was too incredible to ever even occur to her fellow soldiers.

  No, discovery did not worry Mary Read. It was a possibility she had lived with most of her life. But as long as Frederick did not know the truth of her sex, then she could never be more to him than tentmate, comrade at arms, protector.

  From him, she hoped for more. She did not know how much longer she could bear his not knowing the truth. Not very long, that much she knew.

  On the eastern horizon the sun made a dull yellow disk behind the clouds and Mary spurred her horse forward again until she was at Frederick’s side. “Fella in Rogers’s Company said they shifted them dragoons south,” she said, mostly because she felt like saying something.

  One of the troopers grunted. “Fine by me. Them dragoons is fucking murdering bastards.”

  And then over the sound of their trotting mounts came the sharper sound of horses at the gallop. A buzz ran through the light horsemen, orders shouted down the line and the combined regiment reined to a stop. The scouts were back with information about the enemy’s position. Mary did not have to hear or see them to know that. She had been in that place enough times to recognize what was happening.

  Colonel Richmond, commanding the combined regiment, wheeled his horse away from the front of the line, rode down the flanks, captains, lieutenants, sergeants trailing behind like a comet’s tail. “There’s infantry cover for the foragers; spread out on the open ground beyond the next rise,” he called out, his sword in his hand for emphasis. He made a stirring, martial sight, sitting atop his chestnut stallion, his long red coat vivid, even in the dull light, as he passed orders along the line.