Meteor Mags: Omnibus Edition

by Matthew Howard

  “A boy?”

  “Aye. Let’s find ya clothes for a lad. Yer father’s, perhaps. If ya can stomach strippin’ yer old man.”

  She could, and she did, though it moved her to a fresh wave of tears, now silent.

  McTavish cut her hair with a pair of scissors she salvaged from the cabin. He was not the last person to see tears stream down her pale cheeks, but he was the last to hear her weep aloud.

  1723. From Magdalena’s Memoirs.

  Soon after joining Father’s crew, I learned a French settlement to the north had hung five mates of the men I sailed with. The ship Father took me aboard was a vessel sworn to vengeance, and in my grief its bitter path of destruction soothed me. I felt a rage which could only be calmed by the annihilation of people and property all along the colonial coast.

  On our journey northward, I studied the face of each townsperson and sailor we encountered. But I never saw my parents’ murderers—not among the colonists, nor in the crews who joined us when captured and offered a chance to sail under the black flag.

  It did not, at first, occur to me that we were no better than the marauders I wished to meet once more. But one can only hear the cries of human misery so many times. To inflict upon the world what was inflicted on one’s self brings only momentary satisfaction, and then bitter regret. I resolved that one day I would regret no longer.

  With the violence came plunder, and we ate well until reaching the accursed city and its fortress. Our fortune was rare in a time when starvation, scurvy, whippings, drownings, and amputations defined a sailor’s life. The mutinous fugitives I sailed with that first year had survived such horrors, and knowing their mates had been hanged for pursuing liberation from their suffering provoked them into murderous rage.

  In the siege of the northern settlement, we were joined by two frigates carrying the defectors from half a dozen merchant and naval voyages. Their booming cannons echoed ours during the melee. I spent much of it as a powder monkey, supplying the cannons. But when victory was assured, I joined the crew on deck to see what mayhem we had wrought.

  The sun had set, and three French ships burned on the waters of the bay. Their blaze illuminated the besieged fort. Though a stone wall created a barrier between the bay and the buildings, it proved vulnerable to our cannons, and the wooden buildings beyond it groaned, shuddered, and collapsed in the aftermath.

  Father’s scent reached me before his hand squeezed my shoulder. Sweat dampened his coarse, calico shirt. He worked as hard as any man I ever met, and the reward for his skill with a rope and a sail was a place on the main deck during battle—or high above the deck, if need be. At the time, I was only beginning to understand what one could accomplish with a crew of such men, willing to undertake a profession that could result in mutilation as easily as riches.

  I slid my arm around his waist, and he held me.

  “Just look at them run.” He gave me a squeeze. “I hear yer doing a fine job as a powder boy.”

  A cannon took as many as twelve men and two powder boys to operate, but by then I could do the work of any two of them. “Look there.” I pointed.

  Lifeboats surrounded the floating inferno on the bay. No one on my ship nor our confederates’ offered to help the sailors in the lifeboats. Those men paddled away from the wooden coffins as their masts collapsed and their timbers filled the sky with black and rolling billows.

  I considered the plight of the dispossessed sailors as their lives went up in flames. To serve aboard a ship was suffering. To have the ship taken away was suffering. What was the difference? Regardless of circumstance, all human life was suffering, and the only release was death.

  It was not the last fort we sacked that year. That honor fell to a papist outpost on the southern coast. Its barracks proved no match for 24-pound iron shot, and its open plaza surrounded by four walls offered scant protection from the hell our frigate’s cannons rained down from the sky. We shelled the Spaniards into submission until the wind carried the smoke away from our cannons and stoked the fires spreading through the crumbling ruin.

  My shipmates took much pleasure in firing smaller weapons at the only structure still standing: the bell tower. They gathered by the deck rails, placing bets on which marksman could strike the bell first. We were proud of our flintlock muskets and long rifles then. Though slow to load, a long rifle could be accurate at 250 meters. Sadly, no one I sailed with that day lived to see the next century’s advancements in firearms.

  I found Father and joined him in cheering our mates to hit the church bell. But my heart was not as light as my shouting suggested. These papist fortifications sprang up where their empire’s so-called explorers, los conquistadores, had done all they could to exterminate the locals. Then the priests arrived to enslave the minds of any survivors and keep them compliant.

  I heard no prayer nor holiness in the shimmering toll of that iron bell, only the cries of native women as their babies were cut from their wombs, and the screams of men with eyes torn out, tongues missing, and blood streaming from their severed limbs.

  One after another, rounds of shot rang the bell. Each time, my fellow villains drank to their success. Rum fueled their desire for even louder revelry. They decided to aim a cannon at the bell. Surely that would ring it loudly enough to bring down the entire tower.

  None of them considered whether it might also bring down the hand of an angry god to smite them. These men had already made a deal with death herself, painted her visage on their flag, and sworn allegiance to her code.

  “To a merry life,” they toasted each other, bashing their mugs together and spilling rum across the deck, “and a short one!”

  It was not a question or a wish. It was a certainty.

  1729. From Magdalena’s Memoirs.

  Father was typically kind to me, and I would be loath to paint him as abusive. But his personal demons held him firmly in their sway when he was drinking, which over the years became constant.

  As to the source of his pain, I can only surmise he lost a lover before we met, for in one of his inebriated but lucid moments, he told me, “You remind me so much of her.” His eyes lingered on my face and hair, and then he passed out. He never mentioned it again, nor did he ever cut my hair after that.

  Had I more experience in affairs of the heart at that age, I might have pitied Father more than myself. My bruises healed in days. His broken heart never did.

  By the time I was fifteen, my red hair fell past my shoulders. My body became a young woman’s, and Father and I could not maintain the pretense of my maleness much longer. This development threatened my sailing career and endangered the friendly partnership the old man and I enjoyed for more than half a decade.

  After the privateering expedition which would be our last, we took lodging in a tavern. Father celebrated our recent looting by binging on drink for three solid days. The final night, he returned to our room upstairs in a sorry state, hardly able to stand. He stumbled on the way to bed, and I rushed to his side.

  He shouted, “Don’t touch me,” and lashed out blindly. I was no stranger to a brawl, but his sudden savagery caught me unprepared. His fist struck my face, and I stumbled backwards until I met the wall.

  I did not think nor hesitate to spring on him. I took the sailor to the floor, immobilizing him by sliding my arms under his and locking my hands behind his head. I shoved his face into the floorboards. “Old man, if you lay another hand on me, you will lose it!”

  He struggled like a fish flopping on deck, but I held him down. Should I have considered his years of kindness? Our travels and conquests together? Such are questions we ask later, after events escape our control. In the heat of conflict, we only seek to destroy all threats. I snarled in his ear. “You drunken bastard. I am walking out that door, and you will do nothing to stop me.”

  His struggling turned to sobs, and he pleaded, “Don’t leave me, Maggie.”

  But that’s exactly what I did.

  1731. From Magdalena’s Memoirs
.

  Gambling in the colonies had not become so commonplace as in Europe, where royalty and the rising merchant class possessed excessive amounts of money to throw away on frivolities. The early colonists consisted of aspiring traders and trappers, criminals sent by forced transportation to labor in the New World, slaves brought from across the Atlantic, and a host of cultists whose religious fervor was unwelcome in the Old World. This motley crew of settlers struggled with daily existence, and only when the wealth of the unspoiled continent was more efficiently plundered did the games begin in earnest.

  Chief among sports wagered on for leisure and excitement were contests of speed and strength between horses. Breeding the American mustang with European imports produced a sturdy, short-limbed horse preferred by farmers for its muscle, but also capable of tremendous bursts of speed over short distances. The colonists gambled on quarter-mile races between these steeds, and the breed became known as the Quarter Horse.

  I learned the temperament and capabilities of these fine animals as I made my own life on land. I stole anything not nailed down, and quite a lot which was. A horse race made a convenient place to wager my plunder and increase it. The races often took place in the middle of a town’s main street, and they were not difficult to find.

  But I played a second, more important game. The code of the sea forbade the presence of women on ships. Though the code was sometimes broken, the likelihood of being accepted on a crew was virtually nonexistent. If I wanted the sea, I needed my own ship, and to command my own crew—both of which required more money than I had.

  So, I studied the races and made it my business to discover the identities and habits of the wealthiest spectators. For in the north, in New York, the quarter-mile races of the commoners gave way to the much longer Thoroughbred races on tracks built for the moneyed elite of the thriving port. Up the continent I travelled—watching, learning, and dreaming of vast sums of wealth.

  1732: Long Island, New York.

  Around the oval track at Hempstead Plain, a crowd seethed and hummed like a single beast. Townsfolk and the upper crust rubbed shoulders in a disorganized array of ladies and gentlemen on horseback, and families in horse-drawn carts. Children’s laughter and adults’ arguments blurred in a symphony of noise, arrhythmically punctuated by the horses’ whinnying and stomping. Though chaotic, the mood remained as light as the sun-filled afternoon breeze. It paid a visit now and then to sweep the air clean of the stink of animal sweat, manure, and greed.

  Through the bustling mass of horse and humanity, a young woman made her way. Only a few locks of her fiery red hair escaped the cover of her cloak, an intricate and hooded silk brocade stolen from a tailor, and having recently belonged to the wife of a wealthy landowner in Charleston.

  An especially loud congregation of suited men identified the gambling station, the hub of pari-mutuel betting. At the edge of this swarm of wagering rabble stood a man whose suit cost as much as some of the bettors’ plots of land. He sipped from a flute of champagne and enjoyed the frenzy with the remote curiosity of a naturalist recording the habits of songbirds.

  Though he gambled, his wager that day was not a casual bet but the entry fee to run his horse in the sweepstakes. Should his stallion win the race—an outcome both he and the bookies found highly probable—he would walk away with all the entry fees.

  Magdalena feigned a loss of balance from the jostling crowd and fell against him. She clutched his arm for support, and the champagne splashed out of the glass, over his gloves and onto his coat. “Forgive me, sir.”

  He was unprepared for the beauty hidden in her cloak, and the retort he would have given a common wench for her clumsiness evaporated from his lips.

  “Oh, my,” she said, without removing her hand from his arm. “Sir Archibald! I am truly sorry.”

  His startle spread into a pleasant smile. “Do be careful in this crowd, Miss. It’s safer for a woman near the grandstand.”

  “But I must be here to place my bet on Shining Star. What luck that I should meet his owner!”

  Women did not often attend the gambling station, nor carry substantial sums of money at these public gatherings, and her contravention of these facts painted a dramatic portrait of her social standing for Archibald. “Shining Star is a magnificent animal, my dear, and he will not disappoint either of us today.” His hand rested on hers where she still held his arm. “Whom do I have the pleasure of addressing?”

  “Magaidh Ruadh,” she lied, pronouncing the Gaelic as Maggie Reid, “and my only disappointment is in the odds. One can hardly make a profit betting on the favorite at Newmarket. But I was perhaps too adventurous with long odds last month in Virginia.”

  “One can always find excellent sport in Virginia, though our tracks here are the equal or better of any.”

  “And your horses, too. In South Carolina, the Jockey Club talks of nothing but following your example and importing the English Arabian. I have traveled a very long way to see yours in action, sir. And to see if such a fine steed had an equally fine master.”

  She pressed her body to his, and the frank invitation written on her scarlet lips and in her glowing green eyes made an immediate and visceral impression on the gentleman. “Miss Maggie the Red, I will show you all the action you desire. Accompany me to the stable, and you can see firsthand the Arabian who will win today’s sweepstakes.”

  “It would be my pleasure.” She accepted his offered hand. “Archie.”

  Shining Star was every bit as majestic as Archibald boasted, and it came as little surprise when he broke from the pack on the backstretch. Magdalena and Archibald cheered him from the railing, and as the animal surged past them at the final post, the young woman could not help but thrill to his strength and power.

  Over the riotous clamor of the crowd, his hooves pounded the dirt with the force of a thunderstorm at sea. When he blazed across the finish line in first place, a wave of excitement overtook the cold and calculating young woman. She threw her arms around Archibald, and though her seduction was a ruse, she felt a moment of passion in their shared conquest she would not soon forget. Then his lips were on hers, and his fate was sealed.

  Archibald treated a circle of friends to dinner at a hotel, and afterwards the men smoked cigars and drank bourbon at their host’s expense. Magdalena stayed close to him, smoking and drinking with the enthusiasm of any of the men. Though an outsider to their boys’ club, she disarmed them with charmingly horrific tales of small-town Quarter Horse races in which men and steeds either met their doom or made their fortune—or both.

  The revelry continued long into the night, but Archibald and Magdalena vanished from sight after only two hours. With lips and hands they explored each other in the gentleman’s carriage, while the driver and horses delivered them to one of the homes he kept on Long Island. Through an iron gate they rode into a courtyard where a fountain bubbled quietly at the crickets to keep them company.

  The servants slept in their separate house, and the driver rode away to the stables to put away the horses and sleep himself, and only an elderly butler awaited the couple inside. Archibald took a candle from him and waved the old man back to his chair by the fire, where the logs crackled a lullaby and made the butler’s eyes heavy.

  “Take a seat, Maggie.” Archibald patted the pillows on a chaise lounge. “I won’t be but a minute.”

  She acquiesced, reclining with the nonchalance of a cat. “Don’t keep me waiting,” she said, and the fire snapped at her, casting daggers of light.

  Archibald and his black leather satchel disappeared into the shadowy hallway. He carried his winnings to his library where he pulled a book from a shelf. He opened it to remove the iron key hidden in its carved-out pages.

  The bag he set on the floor next to a wooden strongbox, a chest a meter wide, reinforced with an iron frame, and held shut by a padlock. Archibald set the heavy lock aside and lifted the lid. Inside sat a mountain of coins in a variety of colonial denominations, a dozen bars of silve
r and gold, and a black velvet bag. Though its drawstring held it shut, the bag contained Archibald’s second most famous and decidedly non-equestrian import to the colonies: diamonds. In all, the strongbox contained enough spoils to convince a captain to part with his ship, and to convince a crew to man one.

  If the gentleman had thought of it like that, he might not have been caught unaware by the arm which clamped tight around his neck, its elbow at his windpipe, the forearm and upper arm pressing forcefully into the arteries on either side. Only the briefest cry escaped him. His hands instinctively flew to his throat to pry himself free, but she kicked his knees from behind. He tumbled to the ground, ensnared.

  The pressure on his carotid artery stopped the blood flow to his brain quickly. It was a terribly efficient chokehold Magdalena held him in, much cleaner and quieter than the savage, four-minute struggle for oxygen an attempted suffocation led to. Yet it was not instantaneous, and the next quarter minute of his flailing and kicking gave Magdalena pause to consider how her legs would dance a similar jig beneath the hangman’s noose if she were ever caught.

  Even a man hardened by a life at sea would have succumbed to the treacherous grip, so it brought a swift end to consciousness for the man with soft hands and more experience hob-knobbing at the Jockey Club than struggling for survival aboard a privateer. But the hold was not fatal, and Archibald would live to race his Shining Star another day. In later years, he read lurid reports of a brutal yet beautiful pirate queen, and her description so precisely matched that of Maggie Reid that he considered it a monumental stroke of fortune she had left him alive.

  The old man by the fireplace hardly stirred when Magdalena let herself out, taking with her the satchel, now stuffed with all the loot it could hold, and a flintlock musket to deal with anyone who got in her way between the door and the stable.