Chapter 60
Spanish Town, Jamaica
One early morning, ten days after Jack appeared in her cell, five guards came to collect her for her trial.
And Mary’s. The chance to see her again, to put their minds together, to get themselves out of this disaster.
The guards clamped the cold irons on Anne’s wrists, then led her away.
They pushed Anne through a thick crowd gathered in some kind of square, a large common area flanked by redbrick buildings.
The town hall, brilliant white with a crimson cupola, towered at the end of the lawn.
The square was packed with Spanish Town onlookers catching glimpses and shouting.
Gentlemen, noblewomen, elders, fishmongers, and prostitutes alike pressed together likes waves on the sea, craning to gawk.
Anne cursed, the staggering light of the sun blinding. “Is there always such a turnout?” she asked one guard. How long would it take to walk through this bog of sweaty bodies?
“Never,” he grunted, pushing her at last inside the town hall building. They were met with a thick wall of heat.
In the single room with rows of benches, Anne saw hundreds of people, her eyes adjusting again. She blinked, scanning for the only person she cared to see. Then she spotted her, seated on the bench.
“Mary!” she yelled, squirming to run to her. A guard yanked her irons back, and she glared at him. “We’re on our way over there anyway!” she snapped. She spun and found her friend’s face again. Mary hadn’t noticed her yet.
She looked a stone lighter since Anne had last seen Mary, her face gray.
Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. What have they done to you?
When she reached the bar, she grabbed Mary’s hands. They were burning. “Mary?”
She turned, the corner of her pale mouth lifting. “It’s so good to see you, Anne.” Mary breathed a sigh of relief.
“What’s wrong? Is it the baby?”
“No,” Mary shook her head. Anne tried to press a wrist to her forehead, to judge the strength of the fever, but her chains prevented the movement. A guard then locked their shackles to the bench.
“All rise!” came an order, and the shoulder-to-shoulder crowd rose to their feet.
Anne turned from Mary to stare with astonishment at the number of people packed into a single room of the town hall. A spectacle. The smell of unwashed bodies. Then she and Mary stood, facing them all. Her stomach lurched.
In walked Governor Lawes, a wrinkled man in his final years.
The former Chief Justice of Jamaica would oversee the trial.
He looked grim—had to be, Anne figured, taking over as governor after his predecessor, Archibald Hamilton, was arrested for consorting with pirates.
Ellen had been right about everything, the blurry line between them all.
Pirates. Power. Pretenders. Governor Hamilton had stoked the fires of the most vicious privateers, brutes and torturers like the infamous Henry Jennings.
But in the end? A court in England acquitted Hamilton. He still continued on in politics, a prosperous career rolled out before him.
Anne watched Governor Lawes smooth out his papers on the table behind the bar. His powdered wig was starched and curled, and the thought of wearing it in this heat made her head itch. His spectacles hung low on his nose, his lined forehead creasing into folds as he croaked, “Order in the court.”
To begin, he read the king’s proclamation, “An Act for the More Effectual Suppressions of Piracy,” the very document, Anne scoffed, that Bonny had used to justify turning in their companions on the Swallow.
“All piracies, felonies, and robberies committed in or upon the sea, or in any haven, river, creek, or place, where the Admiral or Admirals have power, authority, or justification, may be examined, enquired of, tried, heard, and determined and adjudged, according to the directions of this act, in any place at sea, or upon the land, in any of his said late Majesty’s islands … ”
So much effort—so many fancy words—Anne thought, for avoiding the appearance of barbarism.
“… and to summon witnesses, to do all things necessary for the hearing and final determination of any case of piracy, robbery, and felony, and to give sentence and judgment of death this day.”
The monotone preaching ended. A silence fell. Then, the trial began in earnest.
“The first witness,” someone called out, welcoming a man to the stand. “Please step forward, Thomas Spenlow, captain of the Neptune.”
Anne felt Mary stiffen beside her. Anne took her hand, squeezing.
“Whatever Spenlow says, we can use it against him. If he calls us pirates for being aboard the Revenge, we can accuse him of being aboard the same ship for days.” Anne faced her, voice low.
“Whatever you say, do not change your plea to guilty. We have to appear penitent and demure, even weak, if it helps us gain their sympathy. Do you understand?”
Mary nodded, but a shadow passed across her pale face.
Captain Spenlow took the bench. He appeared clean, perfumed since she’d last seen him on their decks. What a pompous prick. She swallowed as the questions began.
“Tell us what you saw, Captain Spenlow.”
He described how the Revenge took his schooner captive, making it trail after them for days while Rackham kept him aboard as a prisoner.
“And did you see women among the pirates? These ones, perhaps?”
“I did,” Spenlow said, refusing to look Anne’s way. “The one called ‘Bon’ worked as a leader among the rogues. She gave the men gunpowder and issued orders of when and where to shoot.”
Anne tried to speak out, but then she remembered her own advice to Mary. Apparent weakness of mind might, among this crowd, prove favorable.
“Next witness,” the governor called. “Mrs. Dorothy Thomas.”
Anne’s gut hit the floor, a string of curses pummeling her brain like grapeshot.
Damn you, Jack.
Dorothy smoothed out her skirts. She’d painted rouge on her cheeks, and the court watched with rapt attention.
“Can you tell us, Mrs. Thomas, of your harrowing account?”
Anne clenched her hands so hard she thought her fingers might punch through the other side.
“Two women”—she pointed—“who wore men’s jackets and long trousers, and kerchiefs tied about their heads, stole me from my canoe and pulled me into their pirate ship.”
Dorothy shot daggers across the courtroom, and Anne almost rose to her feet to shout. Mary put an arm out.
“They had a machete and pistols in their hands. They cursed and swore.”
Guilty, Anne mused.
“But that one there …” She shook a damning finger at Mary. “I heard her. She said they should kill me! That if not, I’d come against them.”
The court gasped, and Anne bit her lip hard enough to draw blood. The iron swelled on her tongue.
Mary did not move. She, of course, had foreseen it all.
Anne exhaled. If Jack wasn’t already dead—the thought made her insides clench—she might push a sword through him herself.
Notetakers wrote furiously as the gathering glared at Anne and Mary with revulsion.
“Are you so sure they were these women you see here?” Governor Lawes said. “What you are describing—”
“I’m sure,” she said. “I knew them to be women on account of the largeness of their breasts.”
This seemed to put all doubts at ease. Anne’s mouth went dry.
A series of debates followed—curious ones about whether or not women could be hanged like men and much tedious discussion about their nudity in battle.
Then at last, Captain Jonathan Barnet took the stand in his red uniform. A hush fell over the room. He looked no different than three weeks earlier when he’d taken them at Negril’s Bay.
Sweet and Merciful Jesus. Barnet had seen it all. He knew what they were. And all doubts of that were dispelled as he eloquently described the scene and how, blow by blow, he crept upon the Revenge and took them captive.
“You are a seasoned privateer, are you not, Captain Barnet?”
“Served faithfully under Governor Hamilton, your predecessor. And I was rewarded generously by your excellence for capturing the stolen William with a nice sum of two hundred pounds and a substantial plantation near Montego Bay.”
Anne didn’t try to hide her disgust. Barnet had been given a plantation—worked and run by enslaved people—for her capture? And yet she was the one on trial, while he sat there in uniform?
If only she could call Ellen as a witness, or anyone she knew, for that matter.
Firebrand Mam. Monsieur Perrin. The crew on the Swallow.
All the friends she’d sailed alongside. Bloody hell, Anne wasn’t innocent—not by a long shot.
She’d long since shed the privilege of innocence some women could hide behind.
But she had her reasons for her actions.
She had not acted fairly, but life had not been fair either.
“Then you recognize a pirate when you see one. Tell us: Did the women you see before you engage in acts of piracy?”
He took a moment before responding. “I found them to be the bravest and toughest opponents I have ever faced in my career,” he said with a tone of what might have been regret. “I was most impressed.”
The murmurs escalated, and Governor Lawes ordered the court into silence. He turned to Anne and Mary. “You stand by your plea of ‘not guilty’?”
Anne and Mary both rose.
“Not guilty,” Anne said with emphasis. It was worth a chance, and they had very few of those. She looked to Mary.
“Not guilty,” Mary followed, taking a seat again.
Anne’s head swam. What to do, what to do? Think, you fool.
What else? What else could she do? They sat, speechless, the commotion rising in the room as the authorities deliberated. The tension so thick it would take a cutlass to slice through it.
“You, Mary Read and Anne Bonny, alias Bon, are to go from hence to the place from whence you came, and from thence to the place of execution; where you shall be severely hanged by the neck till you are severely dead. And God in His infinite mercy be merciful to both of your souls.”
Not this.
The court gasped, the noise rising to a crescendo, at the unprecedented declaration. The British crown didn’t hang women—everyone knew it. Even murderers.
But to them, Anne and Mary were worse, far worse, than common murderers. Her head pulsed. It didn’t matter that Anne had never killed anyone. They were two women who dared to subvert the rules and roles of the world.
She tried to stand, but her legs failed her. Mary took her hand.
Not this. Think! You’re a lawyer’s daughter.
“Do you have any reason why you should be spared the death sentence?” Governor Lawes asked.
Act. Now, or never.
Anne slammed her hands on the table, then stood. Her knees trembled, but she placed a palm on her stomach. Her very last defense.
“We pray that the execution of the sentence might be stayed.”
The onlookers muttered with renewed surprise as Anne helped Mary stand, each still wearing the baggy breeches and men’s shirts they wore while fighting in Negril’s Bay. “We are both with child. We plead our bellies and ask that the court stay this sentence until matters can be arranged.”
“Lies!” a gentleman screeched as Governor Lawes proclaimed this adjustment to the sentence.
What followed came in flashes. The bellows of outrage in the town hall.
A woman crying, shrieking. Another fainting.
Sweat slipping down Anne’s spine, her heart thumping like a stampede.
The guards ushering her and Mary away from the town hall, outside into the sunlight, hauling them back toward Middlesex Prison and its foul air, its despicable conditions.
Its unending darkness and lancing solitude. That gut-churning, animal odor.
“How did you do it?” Mary asked as they wove through the pack of hungry wolves in the street, everyone gawking to see the hellcats as thoroughly advertised. A carriage stopped in their path, forcing the guards holding them to skirt it.
“I only bought us time,” Anne said, panic punctuating her words. “But I’ll think. I’ll think up something. Mary, I’ll—”
“Time is all I needed.”
Hands grabbed Anne’s shackles, dragging her from Mary now that they’d reached the garrison again.
“No!” Anne yelled, fighting off the guards. “Give us a moment, you miserable devils.”
“The prison doctor must confirm if your statements are true.”
As if it wasn’t apparent? Anne threw out her elbow, then swung around, reaching for Mary.
Mary.
That strange glow on her features.
Calm, a steely face she wore well and often. That pained look behind a tiny smile.
But also something new.
Relief.