John just looked at Lawes and smiled.
Lawes did not smile back, but instead said these words: “You, Calico Jack Rackam, along with your fellows, are to go from hence to the place from whence you came, and from thence to the place of execution, where you shall severally be hanged by the neck, ’til you are severally dead. And God of his infinite mercy be merciful to every one of your souls.”
The Governor’s business being thus concluded, the court adjourned till twelve days hence, morning nine of the clock in the forenoon to hear the case against me and against Read. As for John, his execution was set for the evening of the day after next.
chapter 33.
It was Friday, the eighteenth day of November, and the church bell was tolling nine of the clock of the forenoon. The bells of the Cathedral of St. Jago de la Vega were loud and strong and I could hear them echoing over the town square, over the roofs of the low houses, and through the walls of the jail. Hard after, a voice slithered into my ear through the door of my cell.
“Your precious Rackam’s gonna get ’imself hung today,” said the voice. “Old Governor Lawes will hang him on the tip of the Palisadoes he will, when the clock strikes noon.”
“Take me to him!”
“You’ll be seeing ’im shortly enough, missy— whether in this life, or in the next.”
I tried to sleep, but could find no purchase in my slumber. In my mind’s eye, I imagined the noose ’round John’s neck, and the hard gray eyes of the Governor upon him. I grabbed hold of the bars of my window and pulled them, but to no avail; next I threw myself against the door of my cell and, being granted no success, did so again with increased vigor before collapsing on the stone floor.
We had escaped hard situations before; there had to be some way out, some means of changing our fate. I closed my eyes and thought of Read: perhaps he was planning something, a jail break or a daring escape or a clever bribery.
“Guard!”
I heard footsteps in the outside hall.
“Guard, I know not your name or your financial position. But you should know this: I have treasures beyond your dreams that are yours for the taking if you would only but loose me from this place.”
“My name is none of your concern,” said the jailer, whom I did not see but heard through the walls. “As for your treasure, every privateer tempts me with such dreams, and I dismiss them, at each turn, as the products of fantasy and desperation.”
“But—”
“Your Calico Jack will face his end today, missus, and there is nothing that you, nor I, nor the Devil himself— whose cause you served— can do to stop it. Reflect on God and your crimes. Your end approaches as well. Now be silent!”
I heard his footsteps head off down the hall.
“Guard! Guard!”
There was only silence as an answer to my entreaties; I pounded the door with my fist until my hand turned bloody. Next I sank to the floor again and buried my face in my lap. I tried to clear my thought; surely reason could find a path out of this place.
The bells of the Cathedral of St. Jago de la Vega tolled ten times.
Perhaps John had a plan, or Zayd or First-Rate. They were all able men, and had fought and thought their ways out of many a tight corner. Ride or die! None of them feared death, that was the truth. Therefore, each and every one of the men imprison’d would be free and clear-minded to focus on eluding the end that Lawes had set out for us, one and all.
By my faith, this was not the way it was meant to end! I thought back and wondered if there were things that we could have done differently. But, ahhh, none of us could have changed our spirits. I was already dying a slow death trapped in domestic tranquility; if we hadn’t been pulled back into the life for this operation, it would have been another, or some other outlaw action down the line.
I wondered if John was thinking of me. I wished there was some way I could send word to him, to let him know that I was still alive, that there was still hope. There had to be some way of reaching him, that needed to be my focus. This region was full of privateers, and most of the citizenry supported our cause, and not Lawes. Perhaps some bystanders could be recruited to avert John’s grim sentence. Yes— that was a course of action.
“Guard! Guard! Guard!”
The footsteps again.
“You must have some need, some thing you want. Come— tell me what in the world would suit your desires and, to merit my release, I will fulfill it.”
Silence.
“Come now, guard! Time is awasting! Tell me straight!”
A voice answer’d, but it was an unexpected sound.
I recognized the voice. It was Governor Lawes.
It was then that His Excellency Nicholas Lawes, Governor of Jamaica, told me John’s secret. He told me out of spite, out of jealousy, and perhaps out of the fear that he could never fill the place in his master’s heart in which John once resided. Once the secret was told, I knew it was true, and I did not question it. I fell silent and listened to Lawes’s footsteps fade down the corridor. I thought of the sweet times in Clarendon parish when John asked me to dress up in men’s clothes and together we made the transit of Venus and, after those recollections of joy, I wept bitter tears.
The bells of the Cathedral of St. Jago de la Vega tolled eleven times.
The door to my cell swung open suddenly and Flat-Nose and his fellows burst in, clapping chains on my hands and feet and leading me roughly out into the hall and, with rapidity, out of the prison.
“Where are you taking me?”
“To see your sweet Calico Jack,” said Flat-Nose.
The mobs ringed ’round the prison had increased in size and had multiplied in their passion. There were many hundreds of people massed at the doorway, women and men, adults and children, well-to-do and not-so-well-to-do. Their voices, at first, did not seem like human voices to me— I heard a parrot’s caws and dog howls and the squeal of cats and the calls of other beasts. Newspapers were shoved roughly before me bearing crude renderings of my likeness.
The day was violent hot and there was no wind. I was escorted down the narrow strip of land that is the Palisadoes. I could see black rings of crows circling in the sky far out ahead of me.
“They’ve already hanged six and four more,” said Flat-Nose. “Calico Jack was saved for the last.”
Now I was close up and could see the awful sight. Zayd, First-Rate, Hunahpu, and several other crew members from the Will were hanging from wooden gallows that had been set up in a rough line at the end of the beach. A crowd circled all ’round the scene; some in the mob were laughing, others singing, still others had fists upraised and were baying for more blood. Near the back of the crowd, mounted on a great white horse, was a tall figure in a great purple coat. By his bearing and the honor guard accorded him, I took him to be Governor Woodes Rogers, come to see his nemesis meet his final reckoning.
Rogers’s face was a horrible contradiction. He might have once been judged by some as handsome: he had large eyes, a strong nose, a high forehead, and long sloping cheeks. But because of a musketball that had pierced his left cheek in a sea-battle, his upper jaw was mangled, a large section of his top lip was peeled away, several teeth were missing, and his red gums were exposed. He looked like a corpse, skillfully prepared by the undertaker, which had subsequently been feasted upon by vermin.
The bells of the Cathedral of St. Jago de la Vega tolled twelve times.
John had not arrived. His execution time had come, and he had not been brought before the crowd. Could he have escaped? Did he win some pardon? No, no, no— I could not allow myself to feel hope. I could not permit myself the luxury of anticipating anything but grief and blood. I tried to beat down with fists the feeling surging within me, triumphant, like the surf hitting rocks on the shore and leaping toward heaven, that there was a chance John had evaded his death sentence. But why couldn’t I hope? Why shouldn’t I hope? John had eluded tragedy before, so many times, too many times to enumerate. Why couldn’
t he do so again? Why shouldn’t he do so again? The bells had tolled. His time had come and he was not here. Why shouldn’t I dare to imagine us together again, in a house, some small home in the Blue Mountains, eating sweet fruits and counting clouds, or perhaps sailing on the waves again, with a new ship and a new crew and a new life and the breeze at our backs. John was not here. I could hear the talk among the throngs who had gathered. Murmurs ran through the crowd like the wind through a field of long grass. John had escaped. John had been pardoned. John had been granted a letter of marque. There were rumors, there was gossip, there were whispers and shouts and pushing and shoving and the pointing of fingers and everyone had an opinion but nobody knew anything.
The bells of the Cathedral of St. Jago de la Vega tolled once.
Now I saw John. When he arrived, hope left. The execution had simply been delayed, not abrogated. John was unshaven, his hair was wild, his clothes unkempt, but his eyes were calm. On his feet, he wore his square-toed boots, which his guards had let him keep, perhaps to show they caught him in action, or perhaps so his footwear, in its finery, could mock, by contrast, the wretchedness of his condition. Beside John was Poop, clad in rags and slippers and choking back sobs. They were both led up the stairs of the gallows. They were to die in succession.
My feet were bound, so I could not run to my darling John; my hands were chain’d and so I could not wave out to him. I called to him, but I could not be heard above the din of the mad crowd. And now a chant was going up, started by the men who owned the whores and then carried on by the whores themselves: “For the Children! For the Children!”
But, soon enough, the chant had transmogrified into something more direct: “Blood! Blood! Blood!”
I often wondered, in later times, what John might have said had I been able to converse with him that last time on the Palisadoes. I do not think he would have said any of the sad, small things that doomed lovers say in fairy books, nor would he have performed some show of comforting bravado, nor would he have bared his heart in the way that lovers sometimes do when both realize that their current moments together will be the last that this life allows them.
No, I do not think he would have told me that secret that was unreveal’d until his final hour, the one that Read surmised and I guess, in some way, I always knew. He would not have told me that he never romanced Rogers’s daughter, and that the story was a front, a ruse, a lie, to cover another deeper deception. He would not have told me that he and Woodes Rogers, on some voyage long ago, shared those things that men sometimes share on sea-voyages, when one comes to know one’s fellows in a way one never would on land. To John, all flesh was flesh, and this episode was just one of many; but to Rogers, it was a moment of deep ignominy, of weakness, of sin, and it was his drive to purge himself that drove the Governor on his campaign to destroy John and all who sail’d with him. John was ashamed only that he had picked a companion so recklessly. But, by my faith, John would have said nothing of all this.
“Blood! For the children! Blood!”
Now Poop had begun to sob openly, tears running down his cheeks.
“Look at the pyrate! He cries like a woman!”
The crowd jeered and laughed and hurled dead lizards and chicken heads and other refuse and bade him to cry more. John bent down and, with intensity, whispered something to his young companion. Poop swallowed hard and ceased his sobbing.
Now John was moved above a trapdoor and a noose was placed around his neck. He stood for a moment, motionless, silent, his face white but shining, like a cloud lit from behind by the sun.
“Blood! Blood! Blood!”
“Look at the mighty Calico! He’ll die in his shoes!”
Then, insolent to the last, John kicked off his square-toed boots. One flew into the crowd, over the heads of the mob, ’til it was lost in a sea of converging bodies; the other fell right at the hangman’s feet. Poop, his face wet with tears, stood straighter. John smiled and met the eyes of the spectators.
At the back of the crowd I saw Rogers raise a long arm and bring it down.
And so the order was given: John dropped through the gallows’ trapdoor, and, with a loud crack, his neck was snapped. Poop was hanged next, and his body flung into an alley at the end of Thames Street, where it was stripped by whores and devour’d by dogs and rats. Later, soldiers under the command of Nicholas Lawes carried John’s body to Plumb Point where it was hung on Gibbets in Chains as a public warning to lawless privateers. The last time I saw John, crows were stripping flesh from his tongue.
chapter 34.
I had, that night, a dream of the most peculiar and disturbing character and, like phantasms of that particular sort, upon waking, I could scarce remember the contents of my fantasy. However, another sight greeted my eyes, which, at first, seem’d to me the product of some cruel mirage, like a vision of some green oasis to a traveler who has been on a long trek through the sands of some parched desert. Read stood before me.
I had scarcely embraced him before he tumbled, near lifeless, into my arms. A sort of flux he had, and his skin was hot and damp, and he called out things that made no sense. His legs and arms were mark’d with scratches and wounds as if he had been the subject of assault. In addition, some guard had done Read’s hair up in pigtails and smeared cosmetics across his lips and cheeks in crude red strokes. Wetting my fingers, I wiped off the cruel gesture, and removed the ribbons from his hair.
“Read!”
His eyes fluttered open and they seem’d to meet mine, and he caressed my cheek as you would that of a lover.
“A thousand waves roll over me,” he said. “I feel crabs scuttling sideways across my mind.”
We had scarcely a moment to spend together ere the guards clapped us in chains and conducted us toward the courtroom. As I was marched through the crowd, a copy of the Boston Gazette was thrust before my eyes. An article that purported to be about my predicament quoted me as having said to Rackam: “If you had fought like a man, you hadn’t a been hung like a dog.” By my troth I would never have uttered such words!
“Say what you will!” I cried. “I’ll see you all in hell or on the high seas!”
The courtroom, on this morning, was packed to overflowing and Lawes, having entered, quickly moved the proceeding toward its start.
The register made his familiar cry: “Articles exhibited in a Court of Admiralty, held at the town of Saint Jago de la Vega in the said Island, the twenty-eighth of November, in the seventh year of the reign of our sovereign Lord George, by the grace of God, of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, King, and of Jamaica, Defender of the Faith,” etc.!
The register then read the charges that accused us, both Read and myself, of things that we never did and recounted things said that we never uttered. After all was read, we, the prisoners, were asked by the register what we had to say.
“Mary Read, alias Read, and Anne Bonny, alias Bonn, are you guilty of the pyracies, robberies, and acts of terror, or any of them, in the said articles mention’d, which have been read unto you?” it was asked. “Or not guilty?”
Whereupon we both answered “not guilty” and I was much pleased and grateful that Read had found his senses for that one utterance.
The witnesses were subsequently called and, by my troth, I had never seen even one of them in all my life before these trials began and they recounted such lies that would make him that rules the world below choke on the words.
Dorothy Thomas, a maid of adult age and stout, deposed that she, being in a canoa at sea, with some stock and provisions, at the north side of Jamaica, was taken by a sloop commanded by one Calico Jack Rackam who took out of the canoa most of the things that were in her, and she further said that the two women, being Read and myself, were then onboard the said sloop and that we wore men’s jackets, and long trousers, and handkerchiefs tied about our heads; and that each of us had a machete and pistol in our hands, and cursed and swore at the men to murder her, and that they should kill her to prevent her coming
against them, and Dorothy further said that the reason of her knowing and believing us to be women was by the largeness of our breasts.
And then the same Frenchmen who testified at Rackam’s trial were produced as witnesses, being John Besneck and Peter Cornelian, and they came to the bar and were sworn.
These next two witnesses, meaning the Frenchmen, declared that the two women now in shackles, meaning me and Read, were on board John’s sloop at the time that their ships were taken by John and his crew. They went on to say that the women they saw were very active on board and willing to do any thing, and that I, Anne Bonny, handed gunpowder to the men, and that when we saw any vessel, we gave chase or attacked, and we wore men’s clothes and, at other times, we wore women’s clothes, and that we did not seem kept, or detain’d by force, but remained of our own free will and consent.
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