Chapter 59
Spanish Town, Jamaica
Of all the stories Mam had told Anne about her days in prison, she’d never described the smell.
“In you go,” the guard said, stepping inside as he led her by the elbow. The cell door swung closed, the air abandoning her lungs.
Thick stone walls. A single cot. A three-legged stool. Anne gagged, avoiding a glance at the chamber pot she only hoped she’d find clean. The odor of the room didn’t promise anything.
She kicked at the straw. Old but not damp.
“You’ll get slop once in the morning, once at night. Water, too.”
“Practically a feast,” Anne said, swallowing down bile.
“How hospitable Jamaica is.” The burly guard did not acknowledge her humor.
But so long as her words had barbs, she wouldn’t collapse into complete rubble.
Not yet. Not while any of these devils watched.
Her stomach ached as if the baby—five months along—was already protesting.
Sorry, my little one.
“Hands up,” the guard ordered. Anne hesitated. If she’d had her knife, she might stand a chance. Spring for the door—assuming it wasn’t locked yet. Puncture the liver of the other guard outside the door through the ribs, just as Mary had taught her.
Mary. Her throat tightened. Torn away from her and thrown into some other corner of the garrison. The men were taken to the other end to await their immediate trial.
Anne raised her wrists, the irons clinking. Then the guard took a small key and unlocked one. “You’ll not be needing these,” he said.
She let the cuff drop and the weight fall, then rubbed the welts on her wrist. “And why not?” She couldn’t take him out, she knew. Not while he had that musket. But at least she could pretend. Try.
He unlocked the other shackle, then held the bonds at his side. “Who would you attack? You’ll be here alone,” he said.
Alone.
She let the word swallow her whole.
The first days were the hardest, until they weren’t, the weeks worsening with passing time, eroding into new layers of hell.
She bit her fingernails until they bled, disappeared.
She screamed with despair, then rage, her voice echoing back at her in the dark.
She sang songs to her growing belly in Irish, the meanings lost to her while the words and somber melodies still stuck to her mind.
She counted the passing days of light slipping through the slats in the upper wall, then the nights.
The bowls of slop and stale bread that left her more ravenous than before.
These conditions she might have weathered. Surely she’d been through worse than the gaol?
But the silence was wretched. The loneliness.
The waiting. To die, to go mad. She wasn’t sure which would come first.
After two weeks, Anne lay in a sweaty heap on her cot. Jack’s clothes clung to her like barnacles on a hull. She traced circles on her stomach, as if teaching her baby its letters—the way Da had taught her.
Anne came to attention when she heard steps coming down the corridor. The sun was still bright, and she’d already had her morning slop.
She gasped as two guards led Jack to her cell, his head lowered in defeat.
“Ten minutes,” one growled, kicking him inside and locking the door behind him.
“Jack?” She hardly recognized him, hardly knew how to feel. His torn calico shirt. His trousers stained with filth. The blond of his hair darkened with sweat and dirt.
She didn’t know what to do, or why the Devil he stood before her now like a ghost.
“Bon,” he said, taking a wobbly step forward. His irons clanged as he fell before her in a heap of convulsive sobs.
She swallowed, feeling the room spin.
A room she was in because of him.
Anne took a step back.
“They found me guilty, Bon,” he said, trying to steady his voice. “I go to the gallows in an hour’s time.”
He leaned forward, his tears falling onto her bare feet.
“I begged them. I said, ‘Let me see her. One last time, let me go to her.’ A dead man’s final wish.”
Anne placed her hands protectively on her stomach. She let the horror sink in. What his body would become in a gibbet, tarred and then picked by vultures. His soul deprived of a burial. Her throat tightened, threatening to cut off her heartbeat.
“Say you forgive me, Bon,” he said. “That’s all I need, all I ask.”
At this, her blood iced over. She refused to look at him. “I’m sorry to see you here,” she paused, feeling heat rise to her face. “But if you had fought like a man, you need not hang like a dog.”
He let out a bitter howl, beating a fist on the floor and fighting to compose himself.
“Please, Bon,” he said, rising, searching her face.
She found his eyes. Those bottomless golden eyes she’d gotten lost in a thousand times. Now somber and sobered. The image of misery. Defeat. Anguish seared into his pupils.
“Who else?” Anne said, feeling the flare of anger waning to ash.
He swallowed, the knob of his throat bobbing. “Featherstone, Corner, Earl, Howell.” He stopped. “Everyone, all of us, except for you and Mary.”
Anne’s attention sharpened. “You mean—”
“They’ll try you separately.”
Anne bit her lip, understanding. Putting her and Mary on trial beside the men created the ability to make an argument that it was their common-law husbands who’d influenced their “impressionable minds.” It was a mistake Governor Nicholas Lawes would not make in his courtroom.
A separate trial would take her and Mary’s sins into full accounting. No mercy, as Mary had warned. Now, they would answer for it all.
Jack stood, his trembling figure before her. He reached for her hands, and she didn’t pull away.
He wouldn’t die with her forgiveness. She couldn’t grant that, and to say it would damn herself to follow him straight to hell. But curse them all, she still cared for him.
She’d cared for all of them.
Anne and Jack held each other and wept, their foreheads pressed together—all words and excuses spent—until the guards came and dragged him away.