At last they were in the mouth of the channel, tucked in between the island and the mainland. On either hand, the shorelines were a thick tangle of mangrove, impenetrable, impossible to determine where the water left off and the shore began, a dark and wild place. Jack ordered the sloop to luff up and the anchor let go. The Pretty Anne was as hidden from view as she could get.
The anchor plunged into the clear water and took firm hold of the sandy bottom. The sails came down on a run and were hurriedly stowed. The breaker of rum came up on deck, and the portable stove and the unhappy goat they had purchased in Caibarién, and soon a grand bacchanal was under way, with the sky growing dark and the evening warm and the sloop gently rocking in the swell.
Anne drank her share of rum—no insignificant amount—and dined on goat and enjoyed the rough companionship of her tribe. She was glad to be back with Calico Jack, glad to have his company, his fawning attention, as annoying as he was being that moment. He was ready to dive below for a flourish, she could tell, and it was irritating him that she wished to stay on deck and enjoy the company of the others.
She ignored him and his ill-disguised peevishness, and continued her banter with Dicky Corner and George Fetherston and Mary Read and Noah Harwood and her fellow rogues.
Anne Bonny had gone to sea so that she might be with Jack, but it was more than that now. She was more than Jack’s woman. She was a part of the crew, an equal to any in their company, and she was starting to resent Jack’s assumption that she was there as his plaything.
At last the men began to drift away and find places to sleep, or to change from a sitting position to one that was prone or supine. Mary had lain on her back on the main hatch, enjoying the stars, and now she was breathing soft and regularly.
Anne stood and stretched. “What, ho, Jack? Are we for bed?”
Jack, who had been leaning against the bulwark with arms folded, straightened and said, “I reckon,” though he was annoyed, and Anne wondered if he still wished to make the beast with two backs. Either way, she would be content.
Jack picked up the lantern that was sitting on the hatch and they stepped aft and climbed down the narrow scuttle to the tiny great cabin. Anne stepped aside for Jack, stretched her arms, and said, “Oh, I am exhausted.”
Jack came down behind her, hung the lantern on a hook driven into an overhead beam, then put his hands gently on Anne’s waist and turned her around until she was facing him. For a second she was looking up into his eyes, and then he pulled her toward him and kissed her.
Anne was ready for a rough kiss, a coarse embrace, the kind of love-making that was as much an expression of anger as love, but it was not there. Jack’s lips on hers were tender, and passionate and exploring and forgiving, but more than anything they were desperate for her.
She was surprised, but his kiss made her own passion flare like an ember in tinder, and she wrapped her arms around his neck and pulled him into herself and for long moments they stood, devouring each other.
Anne felt Jack’s hands moving down her back, over her bottom and down her thighs. He took hold and lifted and Anne lifted her legs and wrapped them around Jack’s waist and he was holding her like that, and she was wrapped completely around him, arms and legs, and their lips never came apart.
Jack carried her across the cabin, moving with precision, avoiding the hundred obstacles there, and Anne felt as if she were clinging to a rock, so strong were Jack’s arms, so steady was he on his feet.
He laid her down on the cushion on top of the after locker and with a swift motion shed his coat and his waistcoat as Anne lay on her back and watched him. He moved like a dancer or an expert swordsman, not a wasted motion, his allure undeniable, and Anne felt herself growing hot.
He came down on top of her, resting on his elbows, kissing her mouth, running his lips over her neck and pulling her shirt aside and kissing her shoulders. He took little bites of her neck and with his tongue he tickled her behind her earlobe and she gasped—she could not contain herself—and wrapped her arms around him and pulled him tight. If Jack sometimes did not seem so sure of himself on the quarterdeck, in these maneuvers he was absolutely composed of confidence and he had no equal.
Anne felt her desire and her love and her relief all building in equal measure. It was so good to be back aboard, to have her Calico Jack back, have things the way they had been. Cuba, the baby, it was just an interruption, and it had changed nothing, and Anne’s trepidation began to melt away.
Jack ran his lips down her neck and over her chest. His fingers curled around the edge of her shirt and then he pulled and the fabric parted and Anne felt the cool evening air and Jack’s warm mouth on her breasts and her hard nipples.
She moved under him and savored the sensuous pressure of his body on hers. And then she half sat up and gently pushed Jack off and he let her. She stood and pulled her tattered shirt off and let it fall and undid her slop trousers and let them fall. For a second she stood there, running her hands over herself, watching Jack as he watched her.
Then she kneeled before him and unbuttoned his shirt and ran her lips and hands over his strong chest, his flat stomach. She pushed the shirt off his shoulders, worked the buttons on his breeches, and peeled those and his socks off in one practiced motion. She took his hard cock in her mouth, reveled in his manly smell, enjoyed the way that Jack writhed and groaned with the pleasure of it.
At last he eased her back onto the cushion and entered her, and they fell into the familiar rhythm of their lovemaking.
It was when they coupled like that, with a motion so perfect that it did not seem possible that they could be two separate people, it was then that Anne was certain that she and Calico Jack were together through some force greater than simple coincidence. It was too perfect to be chance, the way they gave such pleasure to each other, the way that together they came to their gasping, teeth-clenching climax, trying to mute the screams that threatened to burst out of them, their bodies seeming to compact and then explode out like hand grenadoes.
And then lying together, their skin slick where it was pressed together, breathing hard in a kind of numb rapture.
It was in that blissful situation that Anne fell asleep in Jack’s arms. At some point in the night she was aware of him pulling a blanket over them to defend against the night air that was cool on their naked skin, but other than that she slept, deep and luxurious.
It was bright daylight when she woke and she was aware of some commotion on deck. She sat up and listened, and it seemed that whatever was happening had been happening for some time.
The scuttle overhead opened and Jack, in clothes hastily pulled on, came below.
“Jack, my dear, whatever is it?”
“It is the Dons. The damned, goddamned Guarda del Costa,” he said, and in the morning light Anne thought he looked very pale.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
FROM THE MASTHEAD, the Spaniard was clearly visible, at least through a telescope. She was hull-down, running west along the coast under easy sail. She was ship rigged—three masts, square sails on all masts— though she was not a large vessel. What the British would call a sloop-of-war. Perhaps eighteen great guns, nine- or twelve-pounders. Not huge, but vastly superior to the Pretty Anne. She seemed in no great hurry.
“Could we not run for it? Sure we could sail away from that beastly thing?” Anne asked. She and Mary were in their favorite spot, up on the crosstrees, enjoying their rare privacy.
“Beastly she may be, but she would run us down,” Mary said. “The speed of a vessel has much to do with her length, you know. And see here, she sails in company with another.”
Mary had just seen the second vessel. She was off the Spaniard’s lee quarter, and the guard ship hid her from the Pretty Anne’s view, until that moment when the guard ship sagged off to leeward, exposing the other ship.
“Deck, there!” Mary called out.
“Aye, aloft!”
“There’s another there as well, off the Guarda
del Costa’s lee quarter. Looks to be a sloop. Could be a prize, can’t tell.”
How that news was greeted on deck, Mary could not tell either. She and Anne turned their attention back to their approaching enemy.
“You said yourself that she is not a man-of-war of any great size,” Anne continued, “and they are only Dons, for the love of God. I don’t see why we do not attack them and take their ship. This sloop is halfrotten; we need a new one.”
Mary shook her head. “She may not be of a great size, my dear, and they may be but Dons, but they are too much for us.”
“Are you afraid?”
“No, but neither am I a fool.” Mary paused for a moment and then added, “I would be afraid, were we to attack them.”
“Well, I am not afraid, nor am I a fool. I reckon I am just too brave, is all.”
Mary smiled at her friend. “You would be surprised at what close cousins bravery and foolishness be.”
“Humph,” Anne said, and said no more.
The two women watched the slow approach of the Spaniards for ten minutes more and then returned to the deck. They slid down the backstay and right into the midst of a hot debate on the best course of action.
“Damn them, the damned bloody Dons!” George Fetherston was ranting. “Ain’t but a sloop, and them just Dons, I say we are for them!” He shouted the last words in such a way that he hoped would bring a cheer from the men, but they remained silent and stared at him.
“There, do you see?” Anne said to Mary in a soft voice. “I am not the only one who is for attacking.”
“Yes, Annie, but Fetherston is a fucking lunatic. I would expect better from you.”
And then Richard Corner stood and said, “What ho, Jack? You are captain here, what say you?”
“What? Well, see here now, you know . . .” Jack was pacing. His sword was out and he was casually swinging it, using it as a walking stick in a most dramatic fashion. He stretched and yawned in a great display of disinterest.
He is scared half to death, Mary thought. She looked around at the others to see if they, too, could see how the captain’s guts were churning, but she saw no sign of it. Perhaps these wild men had not witnessed as much fear as she had. She kept her mouth shut.
“Well, this is a hell of a spot, you know.” Jack was still extemporizing. “And seeing as how we are not in a fight, I am not, as it were, in sole command, so I would leave it to you gentlemen—” he bowed an elegant bow that brought a few smiles “—to decide on the course of our action.”
“They’ve bloody got us now, was we to show ourselves,” offered Noah Harwood, a simple statement of fact. “I reckon we should tow the sloop into the channel best as we can, see if these bastards don’t sail on past and never discover we’re here.”
This at last met with murmured consent, Mary adding her sounds of affirmation to the others. It was the only course that made sense.
“Are we agreed then?” Jack asked brightly. He seemed buoyed now that a decision had been rendered. Mary suspected that he was relieved that the others had not voted to attack, but she was loath even to think it. Cowardice was the most heinous of things; she could not accuse anyone of it, not even in her thoughts alone, without genuine and irrefutable proof. She would not brand Jack a coward.
Being afraid was not cowardice; Mary understood that. Everyone was afraid, save for madmen like Fetherston and dumb beasts like Corner. It was what you did with the fear, how you used it, that would make a man a hero or a coward. She wondered what the bold Calico Jack would do if the iron really started to fly.
But Jack was giving orders now and his old aplomb had returned. He slid his sword back into his sheath and said, “Let us have the longboat over the side with the five-inch cable to the bitts. I reckon that will do it.”
The men moved fast, despite the hard night of drinking they had had, despite the still air and the sweltering heat and the bugs from the close-by swamps.
They swayed the longboat over the side and attached to the samson post in its bow the cable, a hemp rope five inches in diameter and nearly two hundred yards long, the lightest of the cables.
With the windlass they hauled up the anchor by which they were attached to the bottom, their hands sweating and slick on the oiled handspikes they used to turn the big winch. It took half an hour and then the anchor was up and hanging from the cathead, and Mary and ten of the others took their place in the longboat, the long oars held straight up like columns in a Greek temple.
“Very well,” said Dicky Corner, standing in the sternsheets and holding the tiller. “Ship oars! Give way, all!”
The oars came down and the boat crew pulled and fathom by fathom they hauled the cable out, rowing farther up the narrow channel that ran between the island and the mainland. The water grew more still, the air more close and oppressive, and the men and Mary rowed on.
They pulled for one hundred feet and then the strain came on the heavy rope, and the Pretty Anne, which had begun to drift with the gentle current, fell into line with the boat. Twenty feet astern of the boat, the cable rose out of the water and ran in a great curved line to the Pretty Anne’s bow.
For a moment they seemed to be stopped. Mary glanced at the shoreline as she leaned into the oar, grunting with the effort, sweat running unimpeded down her face. They were pulling hard, but they were going nowhere, held back by the weight of the sloop.
Oars up, lean forward, oars down, blades biting into the water as they put their backs into it, and this time there was some movement, a grudging forward motion as the boat began to pull the sloop behind.
Blades up, dripping water, lean forward, blades down, pull, inch by inch the boat made forward progress, pull by pull their speed increased as the sloop built her own momentum. The thick jungle crawled by as the sweating crew of the longboat pulled the Pretty Anne farther up the channel, to a place where she might be hidden from sight of the passing Guarda del Costa.
Dicky Corner looked over the side, down through the clear water. He turned and hailed the sloop. “That’s it, lads! You may come to an anchor here!”
The channel was no more than five feet deep beyond that point, and the Pretty Anne needed nine feet at least to move. They had pulled themselves up into a dead end, and if they were seen, then they were trapped. They had gambled everything on the Spaniards’ inattentiveness.
They rowed the longboat to the edge of the mangrove swamp and with their cutlasses they hacked away what foliage they could and brought it back to the sloop. The branches were hoisted aloft and lashed to the topmast and the yard to further disguise the sloop, and then there was no more that they could do. They were hidden as well as they could be, and now it was only a matter of waiting.
The breaker of rum made another appearance. “Need something to pass the bloody time, till this damned Spaniard sails us by,” Fetherston announced as he plunged his tin cup into the little barrel, and the others concurred as they did likewise.
The sun moved off to the west and the long shadows of the mangroves reached across the channel and wrapped themselves around the Pretty Anne. The shade brought a certain relief—from the relentless sun and from the discomforting sensation of being exposed. They were not in the bright light now, but lurking in the shadows, an altogether more secure place to be.
John Howell, who had the watch aloft, came riding down the backstay and stepped onto the quarterdeck rail. “Reckon that Don will be in sight from deck here directly,” he said.
Everyone on deck fell silent, and they all gravitated toward the bow, which was pointing toward the open ocean. They climbed up on the rails and up in the shrouds and they looked out from their shadowy place, out toward the brilliant blue and flashing white of the sea. Nobody spoke. Now they were holding their breath.
They were not at the bow for above a minute when the Guarda del Costa’s spritsail and spritsail topsail, two little squares of white against the blue, appeared around the corner of the island, and then, inch by inch, the rest of the ship
revealed itself as she passed by that unremarkable spot of coast, patrolling in her unhurried manner. She was a bit more than a mile away. She looked lovely in the late afternoon sun.
In her wake, trailing like a stubborn child, came the sloop that Mary had first seen from aloft. She looked very like the Pretty Anne.
Corner had the telescope to his eye, and after the pirates had watched the Guarda del Costa for some minutes he said—it was no more than a whisper—“I sees eight gunports.” Heads nodded at this news, but still no one spoke.
“Sloop’s got Spanish colors over English,” Corner announced next. That meant she was the guard ship’s prize, an English sloop that had unwisely wandered too close to the Cuban coast and had been snatched up by the Guarda del Costa.
Mary felt sorry for those poor souls on the sloop. It would go hard on them. But her sorrow was the kind that she had felt looking at the battlefield dead—sorrow mixed with relief that it was they and not she. She knew that the others felt the same, save perhaps for Fetherston, who seemed too wild to think on another’s distress, or that mean little bastard Billy Bartlett, who gave not a cuss for any person other than himself.
The guard ship sailed on. She was nearly across the mouth of the channel, her bowsprit just becoming lost from sight around the western headland with never a change in direction, and that brought a general easing of tension on the deck. Mary could see heads nodding, the first glimmers of smiles on the men’s faces. Jack Rackam seemed to be moving toward a quiet euphoria.
And then Corner said, “She’s hauling her wind,” and all that good humor was crushed under the weight of those quiet words.
Heads snapped up, men stood more erect, craning their necks out to sea. The Guarda del Costa was wearing ship, turning from her present course until her bow was pointing almost directly at the Pretty Anne. The pirates waited for her to keep turning, to spin around through 270 degrees, to sail off toward the northeast on some unknown mission. But she did not.
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