by Sally Watson
They landed on the deck in a laughing tie, and would have followed this by a race to the fo’c’sle, but the way was blocked by one Joseph Rafferty, a short stocky fellow with a long Irish upper lip and the pugnacious eye of a born trouble-maker. He had half a dozen men behind him—the ones who were cronies of Calico Jack and liked trouble—and they all had belligerent gleams in their eyes.
“Look, you, Jade,” said Rafferty. “We’re needing no part-time pirates. You fight, or you get off.”
Jade glared back at him, always delighted to pick up anyone’s gauntlet. This was much more promising than letting Domino show her up in marksmanship yet again. “Who says so?” she challenged. “Who made you captain?” “I say so! And crew can kick you off any time, or Anne Bonney, either.”
This was true enough. But Jade didn’t believe Rafferty could get even a quarter of the men to vote against her. She was well enough liked, she did her share of the work, and if she didn’t fight on some occasions, neither did she take a share of the loot those times. A reasonable and conciliatory person would have pointed these facts out, coolly and logically. Jade, being neither, did not. Instead, she looked him levelly in the eye, reminding him of his own galling shortness.
“I fight when—and whom—I choose,” she said, chin jutting and teeth bared and a positively hopeful look on her face.
The other men laughed approvingly. They liked spirit in a wench, so they did. And while Rafferty contemplated this sudden loss of support, Domino—magnificent in her deep violet breeches and fuchsia shirt—took the offensive right away from Jade. Towering above them both, she looked down, tapped Rafferty’s collarbone lightly with a long black finger, and purred at him in English that by now was almost as fluent as she chose it to be.
“You saw me put ju-ju on Barton, yes? And what happen to Barton, hmm? Anyone who annoy my friends, I put ju-ju on him, too.” And she smiled. It was a smile of great beauty: one that would have put any sculptor into ecstasies over line and plane and curve, but it entirely failed to enrapture Rafferty. He muttered himself away, and no more was heard about Jade not fighting.
But Jade turned a reproachful stare upon Domino, who knew she liked to fight her own battles. . .
Domino knew, all right. She transferred the smile to Jade. “Lock me in cubbyhole, hmm?” she remembered. “Leave me out of venture, like baby, hmm? Now I start to get even.”
“Beast!” said Jade, and laughed helplessly.
And as it happened, the next ship they took was a Dutch slaver, and the ferocity of Jade’s fighting this time was awesome. The Quartet—a fighting team—launched itself in a wedge across the deck, annihilating all opposition, driven by devils of scarlet rage. They could probably have taken the slaver alone. Even Anne almost forgot to fight, watching them.
When it was over, it was Domino who talked to the poor half-dead Africans emerging from ’tween-decks. Knowing half a dozen African languages, she found one that most of them spoke, and explained that they were to be set free, not back in Africa, but on the beautiful island of Hispaniola just visible on the starboard beam.
The other pirates stared, amiable but baffled, at the passionate gentleness of their foursome toward the slaves. Odd thing, to care like that about a bunch of Blacks who didn’t even speak English. Still, they were a tolerant lot, and didn’t begrudge a certain amount of eccentricity. The only one to jeer was the smarting Rafferty, and Dickson stuck a huge elbow in his stomach, which at once discouraged any more.
“Worthless haul, that,” grumbled Jack when the slaves had been set ashore in a lovely cove, and the Queen Royal spread her wings again and sailed away. And he looked rather sourly at Jade, who laughed aloud. Worthless! It was worth her whole life! Nearly a hundred human beings who—God willing—would never be slaves now, after all!
“Eh bien,” Pierre shrugged philosophically. “Who knows, perhaps tomorrow we find for ourselves un veritable Spanish treasure galleon!” And everyone laughed. Such things were rare indeed. Even Jack and Anne had captured only two in their entire careers.
Nine days later they really did overtake a Spanish treasure ship. Pierre at once announced, awed, that he clearly had prophetic powers, in addition to his many other talents. After which he put his flute away and armed himself to the teeth, with no foolery, for the Spaniards were well armed and preparing to fight.
Jade, stubbornly refusing to bend her principles even for Spanish treasure, went aloft, where she watched with disapproval and wild excitement warring within her. One anxious eye on the other three-fourths of the Quartet (she hated letting them go into battle without her!), she also managed to see Calico Jack Rackam give an exhibition of sheer cowardice that she could hardly believe.
It was a corpse that unmanned him: a headless Spanish corpse, still running in reflex action, straight for Jack, before it fell to the deck. And a horrid enough sight it was, too—but hardly worth what Jack made of it. His mouth opened in a yell of sheer funk, he threw his pistol to the deck, turned, and began to stumble blindly back to the safety of the Queen Royal.
Anne caught up with him as he was climbing the bulwarks. Her own pistol was in her hand, her eyes afire, her face relentless.
“Take your choice, Jack!” she snarled, and with the pistol pressed firmly against his head, very little explanation was needed. “Fight—or not.”
Jack, who had a well-developed sense of self-preservation, at once perceived that even being chased by headless Spaniards had something to be said for it. He chose, prudently and at once, and turned back into the battle that was by now all but over, anyway. After which, seeing the contempt on every face and the undoubted writing on the wall, he banished himself once more to his den in the hold, not even waiting to see the treasure.
It was finally all aboard, piled in Anne’s salon in astonishing profusion. Bars of gold and silver were there, and bags of ducats and doubloons, sovereigns and pieces of eight, and jewels that caused even Jade a pang of covetousness. She sat on the narrow window ledge while it was shared out, watching with detached interest.
“Do you really not want any?” demanded Tom with astonishment, and she shrugged.
“What for? I don’t need to buy anything.”
Nothing at all was said—out loud—about Jack’s cowardice until they put ashore on the lovely small island of St. Catherine for fresh supplies of water and live turtles and other supplies—and also to spend some of their loot. There, in front of the tavern, before anyone went in, the crew gathered and Rafferty spoke.
“I move we vote to depose Calico Jack. No coward ought to command a pirate ship, or any other.”
No one was taken by surprise. It had been in the air. But Jade and Rory exchanged worried glances. All very well about Jack—but what of Anne? Rory stepped forward.
“He doesn’t command it, in fact,” he pointed out. “And we’re getting along very well as we are.”
“Well, if he don’t command, he oughtn’t to be captain.”
“Well, ’tis Mistress Bonney who captains us, and what’s wrong with that, then?”
A vivid argument burst out, and then Anne made a moving speech about the perils of rocking the boat. Rafferty scowled.
“Oh, and you would be saying that,” he sneered. “You’re wanting to go on running the ship yourself, and living in that fine cabin of yours, don’t you? Well, I say down with cowards and females, and let’s get rid of the lot, and here’s my vote for it.”
“And here’s mine against it,” said Anne briskly, and pulling a pistol from her waistband, she calmly shot him. “Any more votes?”
Jade gaped with the rest, stunned and sickened. Anne had violated written and unwritten law—had killed a man for expressing his opinion. There was an ominous muttering from the others. Where she stood, alone before them all, she could herself be shot down at any instant, easily, by any one of them. And the pirates were in the mood.
Anne knew it, flung their anger back at them with laughter, challenging them to do it. Her hair bla
zed and blew in the wind, and the fired pistol hung carelessly from her hand.
“I’ve used my vote,” she taunted them, thrusting it back into her waistband and standing as defenseless as Rafferty had been a moment earlier. “Any more?”
There were no more. They were defeated by her defenselessness, outbluffed by her boldness; they loved and hated her for it. Moreover they were practical men, and there was no other among them with Anne’s imagination and cleverness and audacity in battle. The subject was quietly dropped, and they all trooped into the tavern.
But Jade, deeply shocked, avoided Anne Bonney for days.
And Anne, nothing if not observant, finally taunted her with it.
“Did I offend your fastidious notions of fair play?” she jibed, and narrowed her light hazel eyes at Jade.
Jade narrowed her green ones back again. “Yes,” she said, uncompromising.
“Sail off the starboard bow!”
The Quartet abandoned cutlass practice and raced for the shrouds along with a score of others. There it was, hull down on the horizon. “Some sort of British official flag,” reported the far-sighted Rory, squinting.
“Take lookout,” Anne told him. “We’ll go have a closer look, but sing down if it begins to look like a man-of-war, and we’ll just put about and fall over the lee horizon. Especially,” she added wryly, “if it should turn out to be the Diamond, Winchelsea, or Ludlow Castle.”
Everyone grinned appreciatively. Last month they had captured a shipload of wretched lunatics on their way to slavery on plantations, and had considered it only right to set them ashore, kindly, on the Jamaican coast. Now the infuriated Governor Lawes had no less than three warships out hunting the Queen Royal.
“We fight him anyway,” Domino urged, dissatisfied with the notion of running, but no one paid any attention. There was no profit at all in clashing with a warship, even if they should win; and only a fireater like Domino wanted battle for its own sake.
But this, it was presently clear, was not a warship. It was a puzzle. There was something wrong about that ship, and it grew more evident the closer they got. For one thing, it was neither running nor preparing to fight . . . and now it could be seen that the captain was rushing about the deck screeching at his crew—or was it marines? —who stood in a well-disciplined but stubbornly unmoving line, as far from the pirate ship as the bulwarks would permit. And in the middle of the waist was a sight that made a shudder run over Jade—and not Jade alone.
“Prison ship,” muttered Dickson hoarsely, staring at the whipping post, the multiple rack, the chains and shackles—and the four limp bodies hanging there.
In deathly silence the ships closed. Waves slapped against the hulls, the wind hummed sorrowfully in the rigging, a sail flapped, and the captain of the prison ship—a ludicrous little bald man with a black eye and bruised face—indulged himself in a shrill tantrum.
Anne broke the silence at last. “We’re pirates,” she announced rather unnecessarily. “We’re coming aboard.” She stood on the bulwarks holding easily to the main shrouds, a vivid figure in her sapphire shirt, and with a grim eye fixed on that grim rack.
“You shan’t!” yelped the captain, but he was altogether wrong. They did. Came aboard with no opposition more than the little man’s petty fury; came aboard and found things that Jade could never bear to think of later. The ragged, filthy, beaten men who hobbled, cheering, from the deck house, chained painfully foot to neck, turned out to be the lucky ones—the trusted convicts, far better off than those in the writhing black hell below decks. . . .
Jade left the scene precipitately.
“Squeamish!” said Anne some time later as she opened the salon door and saw Jade’s greenish face. “Said so all along. Mind the stool, Pierre. Put him on my bed. . . . Easily. . . . There! Never mind, young Jade, you aren’t the only one this time: most of us lost our dinners. If you’ve got your stomach back, you can give me a hand with this fellow. He’s far more damaged than you were when we found you.”
Jade swallowed and crossed to the bed, to stare down, wincing, at the mangled flesh of the tall young man, unconscious there. “Who is he?” she asked, wondering at Anne’s expression—as though this were someone who mattered terribly.
“Dr. Michael Radcliffe, they said. Ship’s surgeon. He’s the one who blacked the captain’s eye, protesting the treatment of the prisoners. Just before they did this to him.”
“Oh,” said Jade comprehendingly, and her own eyes lighted up. She loved courage as Anne did; loved gallantry even more. This man was not going to die if they could help it!
Nor did he. Courageous still, he fought his way back from death, nursed by Jade and Domino, Pierre and Mary and Tom—but most devotedly of all by Anne.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Hurricane
As summer moved along and the hurricane season drew near, when prudent ships lay to in some sheltered cove for careening and general repairs, as the Queen Royal sauntered over blue seas, as Dr. Radcliffe slowly fought his way back to vigor—Anne Bonney blossomed. Her hard beauty softened until she looked like what she was: a very young woman, just twenty, and really in love for the first time.
The crew (sentimentalists almost to a man) watched with benign interest. Anne’s husband was dead, and mourned by no one, but what of other matters? Suppose Radcliffe ungratefully failed to return her love? Or suppose he was already married? For it was clear to everyone that this was no casual flirtation. And Jack, who had discarded many women only to have Anne turn the tables on him at last, growled and grumbled and glared.
“Watch out for that harpie,” he told Dr. Radcliffe on the first day the invalid appeared on deck. “She eats men. For breakfast.”
The doctor laughed, singularly unconcerned. And, as Jade had already noted with satisfaction, his eyes had a most satisfying tenderness when they rested on Anne.
It was a great shock to everyone when he refused to sign on.
“Me turn pirate?” He looked startled and amused. “But why on earth would I do that? Let me be quite honest with you, my friends.” His intelligent brown eyes smiled around at them all, kindly and tolerant. “I’m a surgeon, and my business is saving life, not taking it. I’m sorry if I offend you, but your life seems so pointless to me.”
There was an astonished silence, broken almost at once. “That’s exactly what I keep saying!” yelped Jade, leaping up.
Jack glowered, most of the pirates looked bored, and Michael Radcliffe eyed his unexpected supporter with mild surprise. “You agree? Then why on earth are you here at all, a nice young thing like you?”
“Because it’s less intolerable than anywhere else,” Rory growled, bristling at the slight air of condescension. “All very well if you’re a doctor, but what’s an ordinary person to do if he wants to make the world a little less foul? Here at least we can destroy a few things now and then that need destroying, like that prison ship of yours. And where would you be if it weren’t for us?”
“Touché,” he admitted good-naturedly. “But a young girl—”
“Isn’t supposed to be a person at all,” snapped Jade. “How would you like it, being marked down as a sort of second-rate human just because of the body you happened to get born into?”
“I see.” He looked thoughtful. “Well, that bears thinking about, I confess. But as to piracy— I shall gladly stay with you for the time being, and be your temporary surgeon. But not permanently, I’m afraid. Only until I—er—get my bearings and do a bit of planning and sorting.” And his eyes turned automatically to the silent Anne, who had confided to Jade only yesterday that she was sick to death of piracy and only wished there were somewhere in the world where she could wipe out her past and be a respectable, law-abiding wife—er—woman.
That was what being in love did to a once proud and independent pirate! Jade looked along her own slim shoulder at Rory, and thanked her stars that they were only good friends.
It surprised no one in the least when Anne and her Mic
hael, shining, stood hand in hand and proclaimed to God and the pirates that they were man and wife. Nor did it surprise Jade in the least when Michael remarked later that he was determined to have it done again, legally, as soon as he could figure out a way to cope with Anne’s outlawry. He was a law-abiding man, was Dr. Radcliffe, and it must have been very disturbing to fall in love with a notorious pirate.
“We might go into the backwoods wilderness of America,” he mused. “Shenandoah Valley, or the Piedmont, or Blue Ridge. Law will come in with settlers, but they won’t ask too much about the past.”
“Whose law?” spat Rory. “White man’s law, making it legal to cheat and rob and murder the Indians whose land it is?” And he stalked away in a fit of black humor that reminded Jade of the days on board the Pearl, leaving an astonished Michael staring after him with so bewildered a face that Jade—stalking loyally at Rory’s heels—was torn between laughter and rage that the righteous-minded Dr. Michael didn’t even know how he’d offended them.
“I used to think I could always go live with the Iroquois,” gloomed Rory when they’d planted themselves at their favorite spot at the tip of the fo’c’sle. “But it would be worse than this. You’d have to watch it all happening, and not be able to do a thing. I won’t go!”
“Of course not,” agreed Jade, who couldn’t imagine ever leaving the sea, in any case. “Why should you?”
But Rory just growled blackly and called her a henwitted idiot, leaving Jade to figure out by herself that when Anne left, a number of things might be quite different.
And then, as if Mary and Tom had started a positive epidemic, Joshua and Domino married themselves, by the rituals of Domino’s old home, now wiped from the earth. There was something strangely exalting about it. Jade couldn’t imagine God taking offense because it was a pagan rite. But for herself, she wasn’t at all sure she approved all this romance. It was uncomfortable. She found herself turning more and more to brusque, comfortable, unsentimental Rory, who saw no romance even in the lyrical beauty of St. Catherine’s Island, but only a good place to wash clothes and get fresh water.
