Chapter 34
Spanish Town, Jamaica
“So,” Johnson said, clearing his throat and loosening his cravat in the blazing heat of the cell. “Captain Rackham is the father?”
Anne snorted at his visible discomfort. She’d spared him all the best parts—including the wild nights that followed, first at the Jubilee and then in the captain’s quarters on the open sea with nothing but the wind for direction.
Those memories still burned bright. The days so long and ripe, bursting with promise.
What might have happened if they’d never returned?
If they’d never stepped foot on Nassau again after their year at sea?
But a woman, of course, should never refer to sex and admit, however vaguely, that she enjoyed it.
Least of all to a gentleman like the old salt in front of her.
Well, to hell with that. What did Captain Johnson know of actual discomfort?
She rested her hands on the hard round of her stomach, the calico fabric of Jack’s shirt sticking to her sweaty skin.
“Yes,” she finally answered. “Jack was the father of my first and also this feisty one.”
The captain’s eyes bulged with shock, but he kept his focus on the paper in front of him, determined not to catch her gaze. “You … had another child with the pirate?”
Should she draw this out, maybe even lie? He probably deserved it. If he could survey her like a trapped bug, why couldn’t she? No. She’d tell the truth, protect her heart, and he’d do with it whatever suited his purposes.
“I lost the baby,” Anne said. She considered studying the stone wall, but instead, she stared without blinking at Johnson.
A part of her wanted to force him to listen.
To tell him of the night she realized she’d missed her monthly, of the shock and pit of nothingness she felt in the cellar of her heart when she first understood.
Of the immediate dread that followed the nothingness, a fear that she was somehow not a real-enough woman because she felt more trepidation than excitement.
But she was young, still so young, and without Mam.
She couldn’t tell him of the courage it took to tell Jack, how he picked her up and spun her around so long she nearly passed out, then his overbearing insistence that she disembark and take rest in Cuba.
How he’d called her “delicate.” How he’d refused to let her stay aboard the Ranger in her condition despite her protests.
Of the night she awoke in a strange home with a sharp pain in her abdomen.
The cramps that clamped and seized her insides like an unrelenting storm that brought her to her hands and knees.
Of the blood like a slaughterhouse, how it covered the Spanish tiles.
How she would have called out if she hadn’t been friendless and alone.
How only then did she weep, how only then did she feel the potential in the wake of the loss, the fear and the hope and the ambivalence all together, all at once.
But if she couldn’t tell Johnson all of that, she would at least make him take note of the first pregnancy.
“Where did you last see the child?” he asked, still refusing to look up.
Simpleton. “I didn’t ‘leave’ the child anywhere.” She refused to diminish the experience by clarifying that the child made it only five months in her womb. “I did everything I could.”
“Right, of course,” he said, eager to escape the details. “And this time?” he gestured. “You’re sure Rackham is the father?”
At this, Anne rose to her full height and glowered. A bead of sweat dripped down her forehead. “Yes. I’m sure,” she spat.
“I only meant—”
“We’re done here for the day.”
“Miss Bonny, please, I didn’t intend—”
She stood. “Consider your questions, then try again tomorrow.” She gestured toward the corridor, like a grand hostess offering a polite farewell, as if she opened and closed the door of her own free will.
It didn’t matter that it owned her—that these walls kept her inside while Captain Johnson went back and forth between cells as he pleased. It didn’t matter that she’d lost everything and had made a thousand mistakes. She still had her dignity.
Johnson seemed to comprehend. He jumped from the three-legged stool and tucked away his possessions.
“My request for paper and quill?”
“I’m working on that.”
“Consider better answers, too, Captain,” Anne said. Though the fury had left her face, she still felt the angry hum of it throughout her limbs. “I might grow impatient.”
“Of course,” he said, offering a curt bow before the guards led him away, toward a cell Anne was not allowed to enter.