Chapter 40 #2
“Don’t answer if you’d rather not, but I’ll say it in case in case you do: When was the last time you bled?” Anne asked.
Mary exhaled. “I don’t keep track. It comes and goes without consistency. Always has. What you are suggesting is—”
“Impossible. Thomas said as much. But why?” She placed a hand on Mary’s.
Mary squeezed, then pulled away and looked off at the black ocean.
After a long moment, she finally spoke. “I was married once. To a good man named Bjorn. All we wanted was a child. I ached to be a mother more than I longed for anything in my life. And there was no shortage of trying, I assure you.” Anne thought she heard a smile behind Mary’s words.
“But that hope was never realized. Month after month, disappointment after disappointment. Until eventually, God also snatched the love of my life from the warmth of my arms. I took it as a sign. So did his resentful father. My questionable past, and never producing a child, earned me nothing in the end.”
“A sign?”
“That maybe I’d sinned. That I wasn’t a real woman after all, that my choices had turned me into a monster.
I met my husband in the army. It’s a long story.
But I’ve spent all except those precious wedded years of my life pretending to be Mark Read, the man you met.
I’ve been a sailor and a soldier. A barmaid in Breda and now a barkeep here in Nassau.
When Bjorn died, and his father made sure I lost the inn we’d built together, I tried to return to the army.
They turned me away on grounds of an “unfit mind,” a condition recorded upon my release in the cavalry.
Desperate, I booked passage to America, boarding as Mary Read—a woman.
During that strange summer, circumstances …
changed. I became a navigator on the ship. ”
“Which landed you here.”
“Which landed me here,” Mary repeated. “Thomas was on that merchant vessel. This was after Rackham banished him from his own crew. Thomas and a handful of others knew me—know me—as a woman. I didn’t want to return to a life of lies when I set passage west, so I traveled under my true name.
The ship’s leadership was so vile, so cruel, that the whole crew revolted before we reached America.
Voted to turn pirate. They commandeered the ship with big promises of grand dreams and riches and fairness and equality.
They didn’t believe me when I told them I was a trained navigator.
” She huffed. “But they saw my merits soon enough. And to their credit, they took me on while knowing I was a woman. That told me a lot about them. I was vulnerable. Lonely. Unmoored. And in the pit of my heart? I leapt at their ideals, however unlikely they seemed in practicality. I sailed with them just long enough to make passage here. Thomas and I became friends and decided to break with the pirates and live in this free haven until we each came up with a better plan. One thing led to another.”
Anne fought to keep her jaw closed. What might her own life have looked like if she’d continued to dress as a boy after that brief stint as a child? “You’ve fought in wars?”
“Battles, yes.”
“And sailed under merchants and pirates alike?”
“Yes. Since I was a child.”
Anne leaned forward and the boat shimmied. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! All of that? And you think somehow you are a sinner rather than being the most remarkable woman I’ve ever heard of?”
Mary gripped the oars. “The tide is taking us out. We should return. Thomas found you another place to stay for the night.”
Anne snatched the oar away. “You’ve outsmarted them all!”
Mary pulled some kind of maneuver, knocking the paddle out of Anne’s hand and putting it back into her own again with ease. “I’ve survived. There is a difference. I’ve killed and deceived, lived half lives and run. And I’ve lost everything—everyone that ever mattered.”
Anne backed down at the rare rawness in Mary’s tone, but the wonder still flooded her veins and left her dizzy and brazen. “Not everyone. Not this child.”
When Mary answered with silence, Anne dared to continue.
“You don’t have to believe me. Not yet. And it must hurt like the Devil to know it’s not Bjorn’s.
” Anne’s fingers rested on her own stomach.
Not feeling ill, she often forgot she was carrying a baby.
Though she had never felt that palpable desire for children the way Mary described, she could recognize it clearly.
“I can’t pretend to fathom all of your pain.
But what if what I say is true? What if you aren’t being punished, as you seem to believe?
Terrible things happen. Wearing dresses doesn’t mitigate disaster, as you have observed. ”
Mary took long, slow breaths as she rowed to the fishing dock. Anne willed her to speak again, to say anything, but it was clear that Mary had no more she wished to share that night.
They tied off the rowboat, and Mary threw her a cloak. “Put this on. You’ll stay nearby with a fisherman until tomorrow. Had to pay him a fee to keep quiet. Someone will come for you, but only after we devise a meeting between Bonny and Rackham and come to an agreement.”
A pang of longing for Jack walloped her, but she nodded with understanding.
How vile, to think of the two men talking together.
But without another word, Anne and Mary walked the dark, sand-covered paths.
Anne’s boots felt heavy with exhaustion.
Questions pummeled her skull. She warred with herself, humiliated to be so dependent on these people risking so much, worried she’d offended Mary again, and desperate to repay her kindness.
Nothing else moved except for palms in the whistling wind from the open ocean.