Chapter 28
Caribbean Sea
As Anne scoured the starboard deck on her hands and knees, the Swallow’s ship dog pranced in circles, nudging Anne for attention.
“Enough, Mops,” Anne laughed, moving her supplies out of the spaniel’s path.
The grit of the holystones had made her knuckles raw.
“You’ll knock me and this damn bucket over.
” Sun baked the back of Anne’s neck and the lower part of her legs, where she’d rolled up the patched breeches she’d inherited from Alby.
Her red kerchief—a gift from Dutton—held up her hair.
Captain Elford had assigned her this job of swabbing the deck today, but it wasn’t always her appointed chore.
Anne’s main job was to wield her female dress and innocent mannerisms to deliver suspicious packages to the Royal Gullet Tavern and Barrels & Bones.
Captain Elford allowed no one but Anne to carry out these deliveries.
Ellen would be proud of her performances—if not the illegal methods of the crew. Ellen would also have no problem saying their crimes aloud: petty thievery, black-market liquor dealing, tax evasion.
Piracy.
Then again, Anne felt that Ellen would have understood her desperate situation. Ellen, whom Anne had still not found in all her voyages through the Caribbean. Not in Nassau, Port Royal, Havana, Petit-Goave, or Tortuga.
Mops pressed her wet nose against Anne’s cheek, interrupting Anne’s scrubbing.
After two years aboard this sturdy, eighty-foot, two-masted merchant brigantine, Anne had proved her usefulness with canvas mending, cooking, and cleaning.
She’d also managed to gain the small crew’s trust, and they’d finally let her in on their secrets.
She’d heard less and less of their vocalized superstitions about women aboard—and she worked harder than any man in their company.
She’d filled a marrow-deep need to belong and had earned, at bloody last, the respect of everyone.
Everyone, that is, except her husband.
The dog licked the sweat from Anne’s brow and Anne relented, tackling the dog and burying her face in Mops’s auburn fur.
“I love you better than anyone,” Anne cooed, scratching Mops’s ears.
“Mops” was short for “Toddy Mops,” known in full as “Toddy Mops, Agatha, Belonna, Nosewise, Rumbullion, Sophos, Doubloon—Grand Duchess of the Swallow.” The crew also called the dog “Parrot” when she wouldn’t stop yowling, “Shark” when she nipped at suspicious sailors, “Barnacle” when she stood in everyone’s way, “Mrs. Beans” when she got into the food rations, and “the Kraken” whenever the dog sprinted down the deck like a demon out of hell—nails slipping and sliding on the planks—once they announced that land was in sight.
Mops, a great listener, paid constant vigil to Anne’s bouts of grief: her guilt over Mam’s death, Da’s red-rimmed eyes and gutting words when he’d cut her off without a second look, the nightmares.
Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, the nightmares of Nathaniel smirking in her doorway.
The paper knife gripped in her shaking hand.
The dog rested her snout on Anne’s shoulder, like a hug.
Everyone—whatever they called the spaniel—adored Duchess Toddy Mops.
She was their favorite captain. Anne never knew she could love a dog after what happened at the Cormacs’ estate.
She never knew she could love herself again. Maybe even for the first time.
And yet, here she was, arms wrapped around the most beautiful, perfect being that ever breathed. Even if Anne was less so. James would be the first to point that out.
As if on command, the Devil appeared. Mops’s tail stopped thumping against the deck.
“Happy anniversary, James,” Anne said without looking up. She quit her play and dunked her hands into the bucket, noting that the water matched the color of his unwashed scalp.
“A fine enough day,” he said quietly, standing at the rail.
Anne watched as he gazed out at the opal blue and bit into a sugar apple.
Did he find this day fine? How, and in what way?
It was hard to discern what her husband approved of.
She knew he appreciated sunsets over sunrises, took pride in his quick knots, and enjoyed curing his own salted meats.
But what else? The crew clearly preferred her company to his sulky brooding, and they never made any inappropriate advances.
She felt safe, a strange feeling she was beginning to identify in her bones.
The men talked to her openly of their pasts: Alby and his troubled relationship with his father, Dutton’s late wife, Murphy’s home in Dublin and how it compared to Anne’s beloved Kinsale.
A warm Caribbean breeze blew across her skin as she swabbed the deck, the Swallow’s sails snapping to catch the swell. “A fine day to remember our agreement,” she said.
Two years. That was the bargain they’d made at the onset of their marriage: James would keep her safe in his care, and Anne would earn back the money he felt she’d robbed him of.
He’d lied about the crew’s involvement in small-scale piracy, and she’d concealed the truth about her nonexistent dowry after Da cut her off.
The arrangement made Anne and James even.
Now, they could dissolve their union. They hadn’t shared a bed in over a year.
Anne had little interest in him or in carrying his child, and James—whether from his generally low appetite for such things, or maybe from knowing what evil had brought Anne to his ship in the first place—didn’t press the issue.
A mercy. Anne could be free of her obligation toward him and determine her next steps, with a bit of coin to her name, even if she was in no rush to leave the Swallow.
“There’s something I need to talk to you about,” James said.
Mops took off down the deck when she heard Captain Eford emerge from his quarters.
“Being …?” Anne disliked how, as the time drew nearer, James Bonny changed the subject whenever she brought up their arrangement.
How he stared at her, with scowl marks etched into his forehead, whenever the others laughed at her snide remarks and jokes during lantern-lit meals.
The jokes seemed to rise from nowhere, no longer trapped behind a wall of fear and restraint she’d known all her life.
She refused to believe his crusty mannerisms masked genuine feelings for her. Anne had no intention of getting attached. His affections, if real, would not change the terms of their agreement.
“In private,” James added when Captain Eford was out of sight.
Anne bit her lip, cursing Mops for abandoning her. She stood, wiping her gritty hands on her trousers. She’d need to change into her blue dress for dinner.
Anne joined James at the rail and inhaled the salt air and wide horizon, vast and blue, limitless and unbound. The brine of the wind rippled over her like a baptism.
This view—the one James so detested, always complaining it wasn’t a large farm or a piece of valuable property he felt like he deserved—never failed to sweep her off her feet.
“The king has issued an important proclamation,” James said.
“And what could a king say that has anything to do with us?” Whatever her quibbles with James, she spoke her mind. He never hurt her beyond cruel words.
James moved closer, and she could smell his sour breath as he whispered. “King George is offering pardon and a reward for those willing to report certain offenses.”
The ship swayed, but Anne held her ground. “What kind of offenses?”
“It doesn’t matter. What does matter is—”
“What kind of offenses?” Anne repeated.
James growled. “Now you care to ask the hard questions, do you? Now that you’re away from the pining lovers you fawn all over?”
Anne swallowed. “You and I both know that isn’t true.”
James seemed to try again, running a hand through his stringy hair.
He moved to touch her shoulder, an uncharacteristic gesture that made Anne flinch.
She heard him hold his breath, as if wounded, before dropping his arm to his side.
“We wouldn’t have to scrape together a living anymore.
According to reliable whispers at the docks, the king is offering you and me a way off this ship. ”
Anne’s stomach sank. “But I don’t want to be off this ship.”
“You’ll do what I say. You’re my wife. My wife.”
“Under very specific and limited conditions, I’ll remind you. Which are no longer valid.”
He balled his fists and kicked the bulwark of the ship.
“Damn you, Anne! Let’s keep this simple.
I am your husband. Where I go, you go. The king is offering a price far more than what we could make trading watered-down booze, and you’re telling me you’d choose to remain?
Hasn’t it been you, all along, who has been groveling for more pay to ‘start afresh’ and other such nonsense? ”
Anne felt the rage scorch up her neck and into her cheeks. “What does this price require?”
“The details don’t concern you.”
“If you expect me to follow you like a helpless whelp, you’ll find that it does concern me,” she said.
He growled. “Reporting certain criminal activities.”
“Namely?”
He lowered his nose to her face, his contempt hot enough to smell. “Acts of piracy.”
Her stomach twisted, and her pulse quickened. “Our activities, then?” There. She’d said it. She’d said it aloud.
James barked out a laugh. She wasn’t sure she’d ever heard him laugh, and the sound unnerved her. “I’ve been in these waters, fighting for a living, longer than your pretty little head has been at needlework with your ass atop a fine cushion.”
Anne bit her tongue, determined to decipher every word spoken and unspoken.
“So yes, Mrs. Bonny. You could say I know a few pirates. And I won’t be sorry to see them go, or to fetch a coin for my troubles.”
Think.
Act.
Which one is supposed to come first again?
“Understood,” Anne ground out, forcing a tone of indifference.
“And the sum is quite substantial?” How could he?
How could he do this to the other men? Murphy and his intent to return to Ireland’s emerald shores.
Alby and the debts he owed after a life as a failed sharecropper.
Dutton, that soft-spoken man, who wished to purchase a quiet farm in a village where he might die in peace.
Even Captain Eford had simple dreams of a modest retirement near his children.
What other loyalties would James be willing to break?
He spun around. “You accept, then?”
“What choice do I have?” she feigned, her mind sifting through the facts and remaining choices. “I only hope you will pay the small share you owe me, now that my debt is paid. That we can settle things between us for good.”
He huffed.
“You do plan to uphold our deal, of course.” She shouldn’t have said it, that extra cry for reassurance. But the tremor in her throat wouldn’t swallow it down.
“We’ll discuss all that later,” James said, looking off to where Dutton now took the helm. “Tell no one,” he said. “I’ve devised an excuse to return to Nassau tomorrow morning. Then, you and I will debark and arrange a meeting with Governor Woodes Rogers.”
With that, he turned on his heel and made for the crew, leaving Anne alone with her jaw clamped hard enough to break teeth.
What could James do, at his absolute angriest?
She clutched her elbows and squeezed her eyes shut. Tomorrow, she would find out.