by Sally Watson
Then Bixby roused himself. “She were unconscious,” he announced. “Been flogged, she ’ad.”
Speechless silence for an instant, even from the town crier gaping from the window sill.
“In the name of heaven, why?” demanded the astonished governor, staring at Jade’s sullen face.
“I loosed some slaves,” she informed him aggressively, hating this. “And I’m not sorry, either.” She felt pierced by eyes. Better their hate than their pity!
“Hmm!” The judge’s blue button eyes regarded her with uncomfortable shrewdness, turned to Thrumpton. “What’s all this got to do with the charge?”
“Uh—” The barrister shuffled his notes, flustered. “If she—er—If it was without her consent—”
Lawes silenced him with a contemptuous glance, turned to Jade. “Did you consent willingly to become a pirate?” he asked, coming to the heart of the matter. And Jade rose almost gratefully to the challenge.
“Yes, I did!”
In the heavy silence Thrumpton sat down, a broken reed. One could almost hear the clash of figurative rapiers between Jade and the judge, almost see his point at her throat.
“Have you any more pleas to make, Mistress Loupin?” The crowd held its breath. Bets were hanging on this moment. For an instant Jade was back in Williamsburg, with Father inviting her to back down rather than take another beating. She jutted her chin, stared back at him in unyielding silence and with the small lopsided smile by habit on her still face. A sigh swept the court.
“Then I sentence all of you to hang by your necks until you are dead,” said Lawes with infinite satisfaction.
Rory, poised, at once shoved forward purposefully, demanding equal treatment. But his voice was drowned by the sudden growl of a mob discovering that they had after all, a soft spot for the French wench. “Reprieve!” shouted someone, and the word was picked up. “Reprieve for the girl! Treat her like the other females!”
For an appointed governor, Lawes had an extraordinarily strong sense of political expediency. One might almost have thought he’d been prepared for this, for he instantly banged his gavel with an air of a man interrupted in mid-sentence.
“Silence!” he bawled. “Or I’ll clear the court!” And when order once more prevailed, he resumed as if he had never paused at all. “I further declare that the hanging of the male pirates shall take place three days from now, on November 28, and that the girl Loupin shall remain imprisoned with the other female pirates to be hanged at the court’s pleasure.”
Jade stood still, dazed and vaguely depressed. Rory, halted in his tracks, turned baffled eyes to hers. And Vane smiled down at her wryly.
“Well, I don’t envy you, girl. It’s having your tail cut off an inch at a time. Better to have it over.”
And Jade was strongly inclined to agree.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Mary’s Escape
The sound of feet and the clash of fetters in the corridor brought three somber faces to their cell door on the morning of November 28. Heavily guarded and chained, the little procession would have clanked on past but that Vane brought it firmly to a halt, wearing a look of exasperation that fitted ill with a man about to be hanged.
“For heaven’s sake, Anne, see if you can talk some courage into Jack!” he said curtly and fixed a commanding eye on the about-to-protest jailors. “You’re not going to deny the poor man a last word with Mistress Bonney, are you?” he asserted, so reasonably that the protest died unspoken. In any case, it was quite clear that without something potent Calico Jack would probably have to be carried to Gallows Hill. He was ashen and shaking, and he looked at the three faces in the cell as if he didn’t recognize them.
Pity and contempt fought in Anne’s voice. “Lud’s blood, man, pull yourself together!” she said impatiently. “The least you can do is go out there and die with your head up!”
He shivered, in the grip of sheer panic. “You can talk big now, but when it’s your turn—”
“When it’s our turn we’ll laugh in their faces,” retorted Anne, “and you know it. Where’s your pride, Jack?”
But that, Jade suddenly realized, was precisely his trouble. He’d never had any pride; only conceit, which never yet produced courage. He looked at Anne blindly.
“But I’m going to die now,” he bleated in piteous terror.
“And serve you right!” Mary broke in, still unforgiving. “If you’d fought like a man six weeks ago, you wouldn’t be about to die like a dog now.” And she turned a pitiless back on him—the more pitiless, perhaps, because it was really just as well Tom had been killed that day, and saved from this.
Jack looked like a kicked puppy. Anne shrugged helplessly. But Jade suddenly felt herself in Jack’s skin, reliving that dreadful night on the Pearl. By the narrowest of margins she had kept from breaking; who was she to judge Jack? Moreover, she had discovered something in those hours of fear. . . .
“Jack!” she said quickly. “I’ll tell you the secret! It’s all a big act! Courage is nothing but pretending you aren’t scared when you really are.”
He was looking at her doubtfully, but at least with focussed eyes. She pressed her point.
“You can act it as well as anyone. You’re Calico Jack Rackam, remember? Be a bold pirate and a dashing hero; die proudly and bravely; think of a joke to make at the very last.” Jack flinched at this, but he had an air of dawning discovery. Jade put a thrill into her voice. “Play to the audience, Jack! Make them admire and envy your courage! Give them something to remember!”
He gripped the bars, stuck his haggard face close to hers, staring with a kind of hungry hope. “Is that what you do? You’ve been pretending all along? Have you?”
“Of course! Everybody does!” But he was only half persuaded. Jade set her teeth and pretended she didn’t loathe confessing her own weakness. “D’you think I don’t know? You can be so scared you’re choking to death from it, and still fool them! When I was waiting to be flogged—” Her voice quavered slightly, and she broke off, deeply mortified.
But it was the most convincing thing she could have done. Jack knew all about that episode; the recruits from the Pearl had told the story often enough, and with graphic detail. Jack had enviously supposed Jade to be a creature unfairly born without nerves. But if it was all an act, after all. . . .
He took a deep breath and straightened his shoulders. “Yes,” he said. “All right.” And he took his place quite steadily at Vane’s side. The guards stopped leaning against the walls and looked alert.
Vane smiled. “Au revoir—and good luck.”
The file clanked up the stairs and was gone, leaving a long long silence behind.
Jade stood still for many minutes, forehead pressed against the bars, feeling drained of everything. Vane had been right: better to have it over. Better to be free from this terrible damp dungeon and out under the hot sun, wits and pride and courage all rising to meet the last danger of all. She visualized it, and felt nothing except that it would be a splendid dramatic scene to be played to the hilt, like a Greek tragedy, but soon and finally over. Looked at like that, it wasn’t at all a bad death; not at all.
She turned slowly to face the bleak dimness of the cell and the painful wheeze of Mary’s breathing, and Anne’s ferociously bad temper. Six months more of it to be endured—and with a noose at the end, after all.
“I wish I were with them!” she said violently.
“Hold your tongue, crybaby!” snarled Anne.
They were ready to kill themselves or each other when Michael and Rory finally came. Rory was looking savage, himself, and Michael’s forced manner didn’t fool anyone.
“They were all magnificent,” he reported, holding Anne’s hands through the bars. “Even Jack. Do you know what he did? He not only got hold of himself and faced it like a man—”
“Or woman,” growled Rory, insisting on fair play for the sexes.
Michael ignored the interruption. “He actually stood up there and
pleaded for your lives to be spared! Said you suffered enough. Brave and dignified as a lion, he was, Anne; you’d have been proud of him.”
“I’m glad,” said Anne softly into the stretching silence.
And nothing more was said, and the men went off to protest once more about the cell and Mary’s worsening health, and pass petitions among the possibly-softened Jamaicans.
The days dragged now. Few people even came to taunt them any more, for the novelty had worn off. Jade would have welcomed any number of malevolent faces against those blank bars, or almost anything at all to vary the monotony. And the only outlet for her driving energy was her self-taught acrobatics, which she practiced by the hour, even though it made her cellmates snappish and irritable.
Then even that had to stop, for Mary was really ill. Michael argued and shouted at the governor in vain; Lawes said callously that it was just a trick to get luxuries, and they deserved to be uncomfortable, and he’d have Michael and Rory jailed too if they didn’t stop pestering him. Even Dr. Hughes failed to be convinced that there was anything very wrong. A bit of an ague, he said, and a wonder they weren’t all three in a much worse state—especially Anne and Mary—considering everything.
But less than a week after the execution, Jade and Anne awoke one morning to find Mary talking to Tom, in high delirium.
The jailor, summoned, went reluctantly up to report it. In a short time Dr. Hughes arrived, and Mary was borne off to the infirmary, still babbling endearments. But as they picked her up, she stopped prattling, opened eyes that looked remarkably rational, and fixed them on Anne.
“I’m going to escape,” she remarked conversationally but with determination.
And she did. A few hours later Dr. Hughes came down to tell them that Mary was dead. Anne buried wet cheeks in her hands, but Jade stared straight ahead, seeing nothing.
“I’m glad,” she said stonily.
Governor Lawes visited them early the next morning, furious with Mary for having slipped through his fingers, and apparently harboring a dark suspicion that she’d done it on purpose and for spite . . . Perhaps in a way, she had.
Jade and Anne, grateful for the dimness that hid their reddened eyes, at once began coughing pointedly, and announced their firm intention of following suit.
And Lawes, suspecting that he was being manipulated but not daring to call the bluff, angrily had them transferred to an upstairs barracks room, barred—but with a window!
Light and air and warmth! Impossible not to bask in it! Impossible to grieve very long or deeply for Mary, who had never since Tom’s death wanted to live, anyway—and whom they were to follow. Impossible to dwell on their own postponed executions, far off and insignificant. Their spirits soared; they nearly fought over occupation of the window with its view of the sea and the shaft of yellow sunlight that flowed in daily. How could they ever have taken for granted the heavenly blessing of sunshine?
But within a few days Jade plunged into deep and utter gloom. As always, her valor forsook her when she no longer faced a crisis. She couldn’t bear being caged! She wanted wildly to be at sea again, a cobalt sea misted with frost-white spray of sundrift, and the wind humming in the rigging and masts swooping with the dance of the ship. Six months more of this would kill her! . . . Literally, she remembered with bitter humor.
Like a ferocious young leopard she paced and snarled, snapped Anne’s head off, swore at the jailors, refused her food, sulked at Lawes (who, deprived of his verbal duels, went off in the sullens, himself), smouldered at Rory and even at Joshua and Domino when he brought them to cheer her up, and finally lapsed into brooding silence.
She was not whining. But she couldn’t help her thoughts. And it seemed to her that it had all been useless. The world was ugly and unjust, and would never be any better, and it was a waste of effort to fight for anything—or even against anything. Her own life had served only to make her family unhappy, and it would be better if she had never lived at all.
Rory hadn’t discovered this yet, was not yet tired of fighting man, God, and the devil. He and Michael were engaged in a passionate and tireless campaign for her life and Anne’s. None of them believed it could succeed, but as Anne remarked wisely to Jade, “It makes them feel better to think they’re keeping our hopes up. Besides, they have to do something, poor dears.”
The something bore some fruit, at least, in the form of a petition signed by all the important planters and doctors in the area that Anne be allowed to take daily walks for the sake of her health.
And so the notorious pirate queen appeared again to the fascinated citizens of Port Royal, no longer shackled, but escorted by two guards, Michael, and an assortment of journalists and pamphleteers hardly able to believe their eyes and ears. This was Anne Bonney? This gentle and sedate young lady dressed so demurely in a new contouche of puritan brown which had been given her (and which made a magnificent setting for that bright hair, now in a smooth knot in back)? Mistress Bonney walked with a subdued meekness that was altogether disarming. Mistress Bonney did most heartily repent of all her evil ways. Mistress Bonney, said the pamphlets (which sounded suspiciously like Michael’s style) had put down the demon within her, and would die before committing again any offense against the laws of God or man.
Which, as Jade observed sardonically, was perfectly true.
Anne Bonney, whispered Jamaica, was clearly a reformed character. But what of the little French vixen, they asked each other? Whispers swept the town—mostly started by Rory (who was developing a great talent for dramatic and tear-jerking propaganda) and helped on by Michael and even Joshua. She was ill, ’twas said. Dying, like Mary Read, poor soul. Broken at last by imprisonment and humiliation. Pity, ’twas. Spunky little thing she’d been. . . .
Jade wouldn’t have cared terribly had she known. She forced herself to get up and dress and go through the empty routine of eating and listening to progress reports and pretending a kind of cheerful cynicism. After all, she owed that much to her self-respect; and anyway, it was surely part of the bargain to pay the piper with a smile. Even a pinched, crooked little smile that didn’t fool anybody. . . .
And all the time, under the smile, she was drowning in bleak despair that was really almost worse than the black fear of the Pearl, or the weeks when she thought Rory was dead, and far worse than the pain of the flogging. Pain and fear and grief could be absorbed, or buried, or conquered. But endless dreary hopelessness. . . .
And then at last Rory’s voice broke through it. “It isn’t enough.”
She focused her mind again, saw the hot sunlight edging the window, and Anne across the room talking with Michael and the ineffectual Thrumpton, and Rory standing looking down at her. He was gray and grim from the strain of trying to save her life in all directions at once, and the anger was almost drained out of him.
“What?” she asked huskily.
“I said, it isn’t enough, is it? Courage, I mean. By itself it’s just useless heroics.”
Jade looked at him for a long time. It was true. And it didn’t make her feel any better. “What, then?”
“I don’t know.” His face was more than ever like something carved with a dull knife—but under the weariness there was still purpose and intelligence and determination. He’d never be defeated! Jade sat a little straighter while he groped after an idea. “Something—that gives reason and purpose to courage?”
“Like reforming the world?” Her voice was bitter and low.
Rory’s eyes had begun to gleam with that sardonic amusement of his. “Perhaps the world’s just a wee bit big to take on,” he suggested blandly.
“Then there’s no use in anything! Are we supposed just to close our eyes and let things like cruelty and injustice go on happening, and not even try to do anything? Well, I won’t play those rules, and if that’s what God wants, I won’t—mfffgh!”
Rory had placed his horny palm firmly over her mouth. “Shut up and stop fighting God,” he ordered her kindly. “In the first plac
e it’s no use, and in the second place I don’t think He’s fighting back, and in the third place I think it’s really yourself you’re fighting in the first place. Whose good opinion really matters most to you, anyway?” he challenged her, as she jerked her head away, glaring.
“Mine!” she sputtered.
“Aye. And quite right,” he agreed surprisingly. “And your own good opinion says you have to try to do something about the awful way humans treat humans. But—” His eyebrows slanted, self-mocking. “Could it be you and I have taken ourselves a bit too seriously? Could it be we’ve even been a wee bit conceited, going out to reform the world and not stopping to think that we might need to reform ourselves first?”
Jade blazed. “Well, I like that! If we—” She stopped. She frowned. She thought about it. “Oh,” she said doubtfully, and looked several questions at Rory. “Do you suppose we’re being punished for that Greek thing in their plays? The one that meant arrogant pride, and always came to a fall?” It was a shattering thought.
“I don’t know anything about Greek, but I don’t think God punishes us. I think He just lets His Law take its course. I think He has just one Law, that sooner or later, in this world or another, everybody reaps just exactly what he’s sowed. And I think the whole purpose of life is to learn some wisdom and courage from it.”
He looked slightly astonished at himself, as if he hadn’t really known he believed all that until he heard himself saying it. Jade, deeply impressed, digested it for a while.
“What good will it do us to learn wisdom if we both hang?” she asked, more as a point of argument than anything.
Rory grinned. “You’ve got it backwards. What does it matter whether we hang, if we’ve learned a little wisdom?”
Jade took a deep breath. Nothing had really changed— and yet everything was different. She was somehow coming through the gray fog and finding that there was light on the other side, and a new kind of serenity. She felt much better—well enough to launch into a spirited argument.
