Chapter 53
“You’re sure about this?” Anne asked. Her nerves quivered. She couldn’t bear to see Jack again after their harsh words the night before. But this was more important.
“If what you say is true, then yes,” Mary said.
“You’ll say it was all your idea?”
“As you insist. Though I still think you should take some credit.”
Mary knocked on the door to the captain’s quarters. It swung open, and inside sat Jack, Corner, and Featherstone hunched over the map table.
Anne caught Jack’s eyes. Those dark circles. The glaze from drink. He appeared to have slept about as much as she had.
I’m sorry, that look said.
I am, too, said hers, though her instincts wavered. Had she done something so wrong in voicing her concerns? In being angry about taking Dorothy aboard?
In not wanting to lie with him, after all of that?
But that look of remorse undid her, stitch by stitch. She yearned to touch him. To burn in his heat and make everything all right. To get him alone. To put the hurt behind them and bury it. To forget about the present crisis and predicaments.
“I have a proposition, a way to utilize the full strength of our small crew to take on larger prizes,” Mary said.
Jack tore his attention from Anne to Mary, resting his chin on his fist with obvious annoyance. Featherstone tapped the table.
“What do you have in mind?” Corner said with his usual cheer, sitting taller.
“This week, we exposed our position and the uniqueness of our crew.”
“Aye,” Jack said. “As you made everyone aware of yesterday.”
Mary squared her shoulders. “But what if, rather than ignoring this liability, we used it as a weapon?”
This caught their curiosity. The men listened as Mary explained more or less the plan Anne had described the evening before. The nonsense about sirens and mermaids and murder ladies.
“The Cretions?” Jack probed.
“Cretans,” Anne corrected. “But where these beliefs come from doesn’t matter.
Whatever their origins, we can all agree that men fear women aboard ships.
” She studied the bookcase, the instruments and hourglass on the shelf.
The bottles littering the floor. “Half of you protested my joining Rackham when I first came aboard the Ranger. Did you not? Superstitions. Strong beliefs. A vocal resistance that my being there ‘wasn’t right’ and ‘wasn’t natural. ’”
Jack took her hand. “It doesn’t matter what they thought.”
Anne squeezed Jack’s fingers. “I know. And I proved myself. But there is a reason why we don’t meet other crews with women beyond the occasional cook or caretaker.”
“What about a siege led by a pair of defiant women?” Mary beamed, then turned back to the ship’s leadership. “What would be scarier to opponents than storming their decks like that?”
Corner laughed, then cleared his throat and scratched his shaved head when he saw this was not a joke.
“For our next prize that is actually worthy of capture, I propose you send the two of us to the front. We’ll wear trousers and let our shirts hang open, our breasts bare and visible.
We’ll scream and holler like the rowdiest of rogues, but we’ll wear our hair down like gentle maidens.
We’ll be warriors, and we’ll be women, a sight of sirens, mermaids, and corrupted female power alike, and while they’re gaping in shock and horror, shaking in their boots and fearing for their souls, we’ll take the ship before anyone has a chance to raise a blade against us. ”
Anne quite liked the plan. Could Jack listen long enough to agree?
“I’ve never heard of such a strategy,” Corner said, searching the others. “But it could work. What do you think, Captain?”
Anne watched as the words sank into Jack’s mind, his hand combing through his hair.
“Why not?” he said, glancing up at Anne.
His eyes crinkled. “We’ll try it. My only modification is insisting that the full crew flank the women for protection.
I won’t put the mother of my child in any real harm’s way.
” He opened up a fresh bottle of ale. “Now, if you’ll excuse us,” he said, resting his golden gaze on Anne’s lips as he took a swig.
“Anne and I have some private matters to discuss.”
Within the day, while traveling west alongside Point Fortaleza and scaling the coast of Dry Harbour Bay, Anne heard the words she’d been anticipating in the marrow of her bones.
“Merchant ship straight ahead!” Fenwick called out, running as fast as his bowlegs could carry him to hand Jack the spyglass.
“Make chase,” Jack ordered, and the whole crew sprang into action.
Anne took the spyglass to study their victim. The white letters on the side spelled out Mary and Sarah. A large sloop like theirs. One mast, with a jib and mainsail, and fractional rigged. It moved slowly. Weighed down with something of value, she bloody well hoped.
This better be worth it.
“To your positions!” Corner shouted, rallying the sailors to grab the oars as the shipmaster saw to the lines.
“Let’s move, let’s move.” The Revenge sprang forward with a lurch, nearly knocking Anne to her knees.
The sails caught the wind and the liquid blue flew beneath them as the oars carried the sloop forward, hurtling toward their target.
The Jolly Roger flew above, snapping like teeth.
Anne swallowed, turning to Mary for reassurance. Mary didn’t notice. Instead, she checked her cutlass, appraising it from point to hilt before turning her attention to the three Queen Anne pistols she’d strapped to her waist.
Anne shifted under the weight of her own pistols, strapped in a harness at her side. At four months, she was beginning to show, even under her borrowed canvas breeches. Her cutlass hung beside her leg, and she’d fastened her dagger to her thigh.
“Boarding pikes out!” Corner called to the crew with a trill—no doubt curious to see what would happen next.
Jack flashed a forced smile, then looked at Anne. “Ready?”
Her stomach somersaulted. She liked and also didn’t like his intense stare as she loosened the front laces of her shirt—his calico shirt—to reveal her swollen belly and enlarged breasts.
Her thighs felt sore from a rough morning of lovemaking—rougher than she cared for.
She worried there might be a visible bite mark on her neck. What might the others think?
Who was she kidding? Rackham couldn’t keep his hands off her and hadn’t since she’d first joined his crew. They took no notice anymore. This wasn’t about them. What did she think?
You’re angry.
You’re always angry.
Mary’s words. But hadn’t Ellen also said as much? She brushed the thought away.
“Anyone here caught ogling Bon need not worry about returning aboard,” Jack yelled. “Understood?”
Everyone shouted in acknowledgment as Anne finished opening her shirt laces.
She hunched, suddenly feeling shy, and clutched her cutlass in one hand, a flintlock pistol in the other.
Her hair whipped all around her, red veins flying in the corners of her vision.
A damn nuisance. How was she supposed to see? She preferred it tied back.
Anne stepped forward to join Mary, who’d loosened her own shirt and was staring straight ahead. Anne scanned behind them for Thomas, who stood a way back, then looked again at Mary. The paleness of her chest, the slight bulge of her growing belly.
Mary set her jaw, her eye on the prey. Beautiful. Fierce. That chilling calm.
Does Mary really not need Thomas?
Do I need Jack?
Shouts from the sailors broke Anne’s trance, and she braced herself. Her blood hummed, a bonfire raging.
Act. Her own words.
Learn to channel your anger. Mary’s words. It’s like fear. You have to move through it.
“Now!” Corner roared as Jack fired a warning shot.
The crew closed the gap with boarding pikes.
Mary surged forward, cutlass raised as she flung herself onto the merchant’s deck with a wild, animal scream.
Anne leapt next, shrieking like she hadn’t since she was a child—hard enough to strain her throat, hard enough to shatter glass.
She swung her blade, cursing and slicing at the air, as the sailors’ eyes bulged in horror and their jaws dropped in disbelief.
Anne swung and slashed at the space between them.
Mary at her right. A roar, a swell of bellows from the men behind her, beside her.
Jack somewhere in that sound. She lunged and raised her blade.
Drew strength from this rush. The raw energy of a battle cry.
Her lungs singing, vibrating, ribs cracked open.
Eve redeemed, freed. Anne was a siren, thirsting for revenge, a mermaid wreathed in seaweed, snatching her own life from the depths, from all who once stood in her path.
She was power, unapologetic. A warrior. A woman.
A myth and a fact—for herself and for all those voiceless others. A force to make the whole earth shake.
A musket dropped on the deck planks, then a clatter of swords. Anne heaved, her whole body shaking. She snarled like a wolf at the sailors stepping back, running away from her and retreating toward their rowboats. She felt the wind ripple her naked skin into gooseflesh.
Move your anger from your head into your bones.
“We’re English pirates,” Featherstone called out. “We’ll not harm a single one of you if you turn over your schooner.”
The schooner’s captain, Dillon, surrendered. The ship was theirs in a matter of minutes.