Only Life That Mattered

by Nelson, James L.

  Mary Read pulled her tall boots off, let her regimental coat fall in a heap, her sword and belt on top of that, and laid down full length on her blanket, inside her little tent.

  Beside her, she heard Frederick do the same, heard him give a little moan as the weight came off his feet. She opened her eyes, watched him for a moment in the light of a single candle, guttering in a lantern, that filled the small tent with warm, soft light.

  She closed her eyes again but her mind was whirling, and it was not about that bloody day she was thinking. Rather she was thinking about their situation, the two of them, together in that tent.

  Every night for almost a year they had lain down together, side by side, slept as close as man and wife. Mary had known plenty of married couples who did not share as much as she and Frederick did. But Frederick of course did not see that. Only she could think of it that way, because only she knew the truth.

  She could stand it no longer. So what if Frederick was scandalized, so what if he rejected her, reported her to the colonel, had her thrown out of the regiment? After that morning she had had her fill of cavalry attacks in any event. The bloody death that had stalked them all that day, their wild attack on the artillery park, improbably successful, the horror of slaughtering men, the near miracle of their escape, all combined to fill her with a reckless, careless abandon.

  She let out a little groan, flexed her arms. “Are you hurt, Frederick?” she asked, her voice low, soothing.

  “I am hurt all over,” he said, “but nothing mortal, I think. You?”

  “I am the same. But I took a bad hit on the ribs. I fear one might be broken.” She reached a tentative hand to her neck, unfastened the top button on her loose fitting shirt. It took some great resolve to make her fingers work the buttons, one after the other, with the necessity of keeping her sex hidden so ingrained in her.

  One button after another and her shirt fell open and the cool air touched her skin. Her breasts were not large—had they been she would never have been able to get away with her guise for as long as she had—but they were full and round and unmistakably feminine.

  She closed her eyes, overcome with a sense of finality, more afraid than she had been all that day, more afraid than she had been in the wheat field or running up the line of artillery emplacements. This was the sensation of taking wedding vows or stepping up to the gallows: final, irreversible. She felt her recklessness melt away. What if Frederick did reject her?

  She ran a hand over her ribs, as if probing for a broken bone. Tensed, waited for Frederick to notice. She felt her panic mounting, wished she had not done this, wondered if it was too late to stop.

  “Do you . . .” Frederick began and then he gasped, a sound of pure shock, and Mary started, her terror no longer an act. She sat up fast, pulled her shirt closed over her breasts.

  She looked over at Frederick, her eyes wide in genuine fear. He was staring at her, his mouth hanging open, half up on his elbow, and she thought, the die is cast.

  For a long time they were silent. Mary turned her face away. She felt the tears welling up, felt one roll down her cheek. Tears, dear God, after all I have seen! she thought. There were times when she had wondered if she would ever cry again, if all of her femininity had been stamped out of her, living so long in the guise of a man, following her brutal calling.

  She had so long envisioned this moment, had long calculated how she would feign embarrassment and fear and uncertainty. She had not counted on those feelings being real, but now that the moment was upon her they were very real indeed.

  “Say something, goddamn it,” she said at last, her voice low and husky, choking back the tears.

  “Dear God . . .” Frederick managed, “. . . you are . . . are you . . . Dear God, are you a woman?”

  “Yes, Frederick, yes. I am a woman. My . . . I’m . . . my name is Mary.”

  Frederick shook his head, looked away, and Mary wondered what possible revelation could be more shocking to him than that. Was there anything at all that could more completely shake his understanding of the world than to find out that his tent-mate, his comrade in arms, was a woman?

  “But you . . .” Frederick stammered, “. . . you have served with the Regiment of Foot . . . and you told me you served aboard a man-of-war as well . . .”

  “I did. I did not lie to you.”

  If he had replied that her whole life had been a lie to him, she was ready to point out that she had never explicitly told him she was a man, but he did not say that. Rather, he asked, “How have you managed . . . this?”

  Mary sighed, pulled her shirt tighter around herself. “I have been playing the man most of my life.”

  “But . . . how . . . ?” Frederick looked away, and Mary could see him reviewing in his mind all the moments when her sex might have been revealed, seeing for the first time all the ways she had kept herself hidden. “My God . . .” he said. “Why?”

  “My mother, she was a good woman . . . her husband was a sailor, you see, and once, soon after they were wed, he went off voyaging and he never returned.” Mary paused, threw her head back, closed her eyes. She had never told this story to anyone but herself. These were memories long put away, and it was with great agony that she now wrenched them from their hiding place.

  “My father was lost at sea, I reckon. My mother was tempted by another man. It happens, you know, even to good women, particularly when they are grieving as my mother must have been. This man got her with child . . . me . . . and abandoned her.”

  Frederick was looking at her now, not with horror or disgust, not with prurient interest, but with something she could not define. “Go on,” he said, and his voice was soft.

  “I had a brother, a few years older than me. He died soon after my birth. My mother was desperate, but she could not apply to her husband’s family for help, not with a bastard child. So once I had grown a bit she dressed me as her lost son, passed me off to her husband’s family as their grandson, and they supported us.

  “I spent most of my life thus. A boy. My grandmother died when I was thirteen, and I went to work as a foot-boy to a noble French woman but had no stomach for that, so I entered aboard the man-of-war. I have been from the one place to the other ever since.” She gave a weak smile. “Like so many other young fellows.”

  For some moments Frederick was silent, thinking about this, trying to get his mind around this extraordinary turn of events. Finally he said, “This was no accident just now, you revealing yourself to me, was it?”

  Mary bit her lip, shook her head.

  “Why? I was in no way of discovering you.”

  She closed her eyes again. Fear and humiliation were emotions foreign to her, and in that quiet moment she felt them turn to defiance, and anger.

  Charge right into the guns, it’s the only way.

  “Because I love you, Frederick.” She looked up and spit the words out. “I love you and I could not stand to live another moment without you knowing the truth. God, we were nearly killed this day! Perhaps we will be killed tomorrow. I did not want to die with you never knowing.”

  At that Frederick chuckled, shook his head, and Mary felt a renewed flash of anger. “You think this funny?”

  “No, no, I do not. There are so many thoughts, all crowding together . . .” Frederick paused to let those thoughts settle. “Yes, I suppose it is funny. We were nearly killed today, in battle, two troopers in a regiment of light horse. But you saved us, saved us all. A woman.”

  He shook his head again. “So much makes sense now . . . how could I have not seen this?”

  “People do not see things where it does not occur to them to look. That is how I have passed for a man for so long.”

  They were silent again, and then Mary said, “Do you hate me? For this?”

  Frederick looked at her, and his face was kind, thoughtful, concerned. He seemed surprised by the suggestion. “Michael . . . Mary . . . no, no. I could never hate you. We’re . . .” He paused. “God, I don’t know wh
at we are. But I could never hate you.”

  Mary smiled with relief. How many men would have felt that way? Every man that Mary knew would have been furious at the thought of a woman fighting at his side. But not Frederick, and it only served as further proof of how justified was her love for him. “You are a beautiful man,” she said.

  He shuffled closer to her, put his arm around her back. “My God, Mary, you cannot know what this means to me. I . . .” he shook his head and looked up at her, looked her in the eyes. “I . . . you see . . . I . . . it’s a relief. Do you see? Dear God,” he chuckled, shook his head again.

  “I thought there was something wrong with me, the feelings I had . . . can you imagine, thought I was turning into some kind of bloody buggerer! My God, my God . . .” he smiled, a full smile of profound relief, “. . . do you see what a salvation this is?”

  And Mary smiled as well and she thought she might burst with happiness. Frederick sat up, beside her, and put his arms around her. Their faces were inches apart. Mary looked into his brown eyes, those eyes she loved so well, those eyes she had stared at so often, but never this close.

  And then they pressed their lips together and Mary put her arms around him, ran her rough fingers through his thick hair, kissed him with the pent-up passion of a year and more.

  He pushed her gently down on the blanket and lay beside her and they kissed. She felt his hand on her bare stomach, his long, gentle fingers running over her skin, and she felt a shiver run through her.

  His hand moved slowly over her warm flesh, over her breast. He cupped her in his big hand and gently squeezed, and it thrilled her, but it was not right.

  She put her hand on his, gently moved it away. He leaned back, looked down at her.

  “I love you, Frederick. I’ll do anything for you. But I won’t be your whore.”

  At the close of the campaigning season they were married.

  It was with no small fear that they revealed the truth of Mary’s gender to the captain of their company of Walpole’s Regiment of Light Cavalry, and announced their plans. There were many possible outcomes to their deception. Hanging was not out of the question.

  But they were not hung, not even close. The revelation of Mary’s sex stunned the captain, indeed it stunned the entire army, just as it had stunned Frederick Heesch. But so well-liked was Corporal Read, and so respected, that the news was greeted with amazement, then good humor and delight. The story of two troopers marrying became the great joke of the age.

  And when at last they did marry in the small church in Rijsbergen —Frederick in his regimentals, Mary in a silk dress happily donated by Colonel Walpole’s Flemish mistress—the church was packed to standing room only with all of the officers of all the regiments of horse and foot and artillery, along with a few select troopers, and the courtyard was jammed with those who could not get in the church.

  The captain stood as Frederick’s best man. Colonel Walpole himself gave Mary away.

  For a wedding present the two were given their honorable discharges from Walpole’s Regiment.

  A collection was taken up for the young couple to set up housekeeping, and so enthusiastic were their former fellow soldiers that Frederick and Mary Heesch found themselves in possession of a significant sum of money.

  They went with the army to winter quarters in Breda and there, not far from the great castle that dominated that city, they bought an inn, under the sign of the Three Trade Horses. With the city crowded with soldiers the inn would have been a success in any event, but the great fame that now attended the couple assured them a steady flow of officers and men, eating and drinking and taking their ease at their establishment.

  Mary wore silk dresses and let her hair flow free under cotton mob caps, and the soldiers who had known her before as a horse soldier did not know how to treat her now. They would hem and haw and stammer over their words until Mary sat with them, a mug of beer in hand, straddling a bench like she was on horseback again, and talking the language of the soldier, which was still her language when she chose. She would set the room roaring with some off-colored story and then they were all brothers in arms again.

  And for Mary, a hundred times a day the old instincts to hide her sex would flash in her mind, only to be set aside with the realization that she did not have to do that anymore. She had never realized how much maintaining the lie had consumed her, what an extraordinary effort it had taken, until she no longer had to do so. It was like the sensation of stripping off a wool uniform on a hot summer day.

  Frederick, gregarious and affable, set the mood, but Mary ran the place, with her quiet efficiency and command presence. She supervised the servants, kept the books, dealt with the farmers and dairymen and brewers and distillers that supplied the inn. There was never a military outfit that was more well organized or efficiently run.

  For a year and a half, Mary felt as if she had finally arrived at that place she had been seeking all her life. Then one morning Frederick woke with a cough. A week later he was dead.

  Soon after, the Peace of Utrecht was signed and the war ended. The army went away and there was no more business for the Three Trade Horses. So, when all of her money was gone, when all of her servants had been let go, when everything that could be sold had been, Mary Heesch once again donned men’s clothes.

  There was no living to be had for a penniless widow in a foreign land. Without Frederick, Mary found the trappings of a woman intolerable and she longed to slip back into the comfortable guise she had known most of her life. So one day Mary Heesch left Breda for good and remade herself into Michael Read. She did not use the name Heesch, because every time she said it, it was like a knife through her chest.

  She served for a while in a regiment of foot in a frontier town in Holland, but it was a living death. She could no longer stand to be in the Netherlands, could not endure the army life. She drifted to Amsterdam. Recalled her time in the Navy. The life of a sailor had not been so bad. She thought that perhaps she would try that again.

  Shipboard. It seemed as good a place as any to work and to live and to wait for her life to be over.

  CHAPTER SIX

  NASSAU WAS A DREAM made substance to Anne Bonny, and something less than that to her husband.

  They had been married a fortnight when they arrived at that island. The first two days of their union had been mostly taken up with making love, awkwardly and clumsily. Sex, to James Bonny, had always been the end result of a financial transaction, and he was not accustomed to bedding a woman who wanted more than money for her effort. The rest of the time they spent arguing about what next to do with themselves.

  In the end Anne won out concerning their future, as she knew she would, though with more effort expended than she had counted on.

  Nassau it was.

  James secured a berth as seaman aboard a ship bound for Nassau. The difficulty had been in finding such a ship; there was not so much trade with New Providence, and most honest ship masters were loath to sail into that pirates’ lair.

  But Nassau, like any town, needed supplies: food, cloth, rum, manufactures. And unlike most colonial towns, there was ready money to be had there, in the form of the disparate coin that the pirates took from honest ships of every nation. For a ship master who did not mind the risk of sailing into the lion’s den, and was not overly particular about where the coin in which he was paid had come from, then there was real money to be made in trading with New Providence.

  Once such a ship had been found, hiring on was not a problem. There was a dearth of seamen in the colonies, and fewer still who wished to sail in harm’s way.

  The next day Anne used half of the money she’d stolen from her father to buy passage aboard that same ship. She sailed under her maiden name. No one knew that she and the new seaman were man and wife.

  The ship was a week sailing to New Providence. It was the first time that Anne had been at sea since she was eight, since sailing from Ireland to the Colonies. She remembered little of that v
oyage, having only vague impressions of fear and loneliness, the ache of leaving the only home she had known, the terror of the big sea and of a future in an unknown and wild land.

  And here she was again, she realized: leaving home, off to some dangerous and unknown place; but there was no fear in her heart now, no loneliness or despair. She was in rapture with all that she saw, the beautiful ship that towered over her, the blue, blue water through which they plowed, cleaving their long wake, startling white against the blue sea. The dolphins, the flying fish, the hundreds of little sounds that made up the orchestra of a ship at sea, she loved it all.

  After four days underway she prevailed upon the master, who was quite taken with her, to let her go into the rigging aloft.

  He had been shocked at first, flustered at the suggestion. But Anne was persuasive, and the master relented. She donned her coarsest working clothes, and with the master as her guide, clambered into the mizzen shrouds and started to climb.

  The master was attention itself, showing her how to hold the shrouds and not the ratlines, how to maneuver around the running gear that threaded its way between the black standing rigging. He put his arm around her waist in a most protective manner, even augmented her safety with a helpful hand on her ass now and again, but Anne ignored those liberties, because her spirit was soaring.

  Up and up she went, with the ship growing narrower below her. Up into the great arcs of canvas, gray and black tar–stained against the blue sky.

  She paused under the platform half way up the mast.

  “That there is what we call the ‘top,’” the master explained. The shrouds were narrow there, where they came together near the mast head, forcing the master to press hard against her. “In this here case, the ‘mizzen top,’ on account of its being on the mizzen mast, do you see?”