.
First off, this whole fic is a thank you to RebelGeneral who managed to coax me out of my usual I'm done and that's it stance to dip my fingers into Caribbean waters once more, even if for a short while. Never say never, as they say.
For those of you who have read Double Jeopardy, the events described here happen simultaneously with the first part of Chapter 3 to the point that it can be considered a companion piece showing what Charles was up to while his erstwhile beloved was busy realising her blunders.
For those of you who have not and/or do not plan to read that one, this fic assumes that Eleanor had a belated change of heart / moment of weakness at Vane's execution and shouted at the last moment to stop the hanging; it went on anyway, but Vane's allies got him out.
.
xxx
.
"She's beautiful."
For the briefest of instants, Jack's excited praise catches him unawares. It's a good thing he has had years of practice keeping an impassive face; once he realises what the compliment refers to, he immediately thinks how mortifying it would have been to have misunderstood it.
"Referring to something called William as a she is positively fucked up, Jack."
"Strictly speaking, so is referring to something called William as beautiful, Charles. But still, she is a beautiful sloop."
"She sure is fast," he concedes. The sloop in question has been a real breadwinner for John Ham, its current owner, a merchant in-name-only who made a living for years plundering Spanish vessels in the relative vicinity of New Providence, until fear of retribution, considering that England and Spain are once again on the brink of war, drove him to move his family home from a nearby island where they were the sole inhabitants, to bustling and better-defended Nassau. Just in time for Vane and Jack, and Anne and the crewmen they recruited from among renegades who regretted taking the pardon, to seize the opportunity and procure themselves a getaway vessel. For the moment, they are camped out on uninhabited Arawak Cay, Jack and Anne's makeshift rescue headquarters a mere 100 yards off New Providence and half a mile west of Nassau harbour where their crewmen brought him two days ago, on the evening of the failed execution, after lying low in a nearby warehouse, and are waiting for nightfall to put their plan in action. "You certain there are only two hands aboard?"
"Anne asked them point blank yesterday and that's what they said. She pretended to have business with Ham; they never recognised her in a woman's dress and with her hair done up, so they thought that all her questions about the sloop were idle curiosity." It looks like Anne's reconnaissance mission the day before, conveniently timed to coincide with Ham's absence from the sloop, yielded them a wealth of valuable details she gleaned under the guise of an impressionable female about the sloop's layout, crew, and routines – details that they never would have thought of disclosing to a male stranger. Anne has her talents, after all, besides scowling and winding Jack up.
"You sure you don't want me to come along? I swear I'm feeling much better today, Jack, and you know I'm not bad in a fight."
Jack shakes his head with determination bordering on vehemence.
"Absolutely. No. Fucking. Way, Charles. Day before yesterday you were half dead when they got you away from the gallows, yesterday you were laid down here with the stiff neck driving you crazy, and today you want to go board a ship with us?"
And therein lies the problem; he can protest all he wants about feeling much better, and he is feeling much better, what with the pulled muscles in his neck having had two days of rest; but to anyone looking at the facts, a man who was all but hanged two days ago wanting to join a boarding party sounds in-fuckin-sane. Then again, his neck might not be bothering him that much but the bruises he acquired courtesy of Governor Rogers are another matter. Knowing what he knew of Rogers, by all accounts a self-possessed and intelligent adversary, he was surprised at the man's unbridled fury, thrashing him with the stake even when it was clear he could not get away with the fresh leg wound, when Rogers' and the militiamen's energies would have been better spent trying to recover the treasure chest; if he were prone to far-fetched theories he would almost have suspected an irrational motive for such a senselessly vicious beating. He was lucky to have withstood it with all his bones intact, but some of those bruises are still fucking sore and could mess with his reactions to the point of making him a liability.
"We're a dozen men already and they are two crew hands. Seriously, we'll manage," Jack mutters on in the meantime, even though he does not try to argue. Seeing his expression which, he suspects, is best described as stony-faced, Jack hastens to add: "It's going to be yours anyway, Charles. I'll give you command as soon as we have her. Just- let me give her to you as the least I can do to pay you back for saving my hide." Seeing how he is about to protest, Jack makes an earnest, puppy-eyed face and adds "Please?"
He has to chuckle at this. "I guess it can't go too wrong. What time are you two planning on boarding her?"
"We ten, you mean," Jack corrects him, though he knows it already. "Midnight."
"Very well." Six more hours and they can be out of here. "We'll put a man to look out for you at the strait between Silver Cay and this one, and come aboard as soon as he spots you. You'd better not be too late or else I'll lose my wits here," he adds unnecessarily, and Jack duly rolls his eyes. He half lifts his back off the cushions to stretch his muscles; the makeshift bed is a lot better than could be expected to be found in a flimsy shack on Arawak Cay, but spending two days straight in any bed and without any enjoyable occupation was bound to grate on him sooner rather than later.
Jack immediately jumps up and, propping him up with one arm, does his best to fluff the cushions, or at least punch them into a less-flat shape, behind his back. It is both touching and rather ridiculous.
"Jack, for fuck's sake leave it," he admonishes his companion good-naturedly. "If I needed a wife I'd have fucking taken one years ago."
Jack gives him a dirty look, and he suspects that he may just have been un-circumspect enough to have walked into a trap of his own making.
"Except that you were too busy courting a harpy who tried to hang you."
Here we go.
The best he can do under the circumstances is remind Jack that the woman he is referring to was by far not the only one to have shared his bed, nor even his most frequent female visitor, in his final months on Nassau; that honour, if it be so termed, would probably be Idelle's, if he was not too drunk to have forgotten whole tracts of time spent with other girls. The part he leaves unsaid is that as far as harpies go, Jack's fair lady could give anyone a run for their money.
"And if you're so keen on filling the role of a dutiful wife," he taunts, ignoring Jack's scowl, "then be a sweetheart and bring me some more rum."
Jack pretends to be put out by the request, but he does stand up and go fetch the flask, his tall, spare frame looking out of place in the low cabin.
"Undiluted," he reminds Jack, seeing how he is carrying a water skin along with the rum.
"Charles," Jack begins in a tone of practiced patience; in the short space of two days, they must have had this same conversation a dozen times already, "it's not the rum I'm trying to spare, it's your throat. If you swallow it wrong and start coughing, there's no telling what sort of damage it could cause…"
"It's rum, not gunpowder, Jack," he argues, and is pleased to see his companion set aside the water skin. "And I won't gulp it down."
"Remember what happened yesterday when you tried to smoke a cigar?" Jack reminds him unnecessarily. "You said it wasn't dangerous either, and then you had to sip water for an hour to get rid of the cough."
"That was a day too soon," he concedes. "But seeing how I've been stuck here two days and now you propose to leave me here for a third evening in a row while you go steal the sloop, I could at least get pissed to pass the time."
Jack seems to ponder the issue. "I could send one of the boys into Nassau after sundown to get you a girl," he suggests tentatively. "I'm sure Idelle would be very happy to see you again…"
He starts to shake his head and immediately winces. He may be feeling much better, but for now he will have to stick to other ways of expressing disagreement. "It'll have to wait until we're out of here, Jack. I'm not even sure I can get it up," he adds wryly ; he has been tended to by Idelle and the others in worse states than this, and had no reason for such concerns, but for some reason he really is not keen on female company now.
"I fear you and not getting it up don't belong in the same sentence, Charles," Jack teases him. "Besides," he adds, mock-innocently, "I heard that people being hanged have the most incredible hard-ons."
"How would you know, if none of them live to tell the tale?" he counters, and adds, while Jack is busy pondering this deep observation, "Didn't happen in my case, I tell you. Maybe I didn't get strangled badly enough."
"Or maybe it was that crazy bitch watching you that ruined it-" Belatedly, seeing his scowl, Jack shuts up, which of course only makes it more awkward. He uses the pause to sip the rum; Jack is visibly looking for a way to backtrack.
"Surely you weren't, well, swayed by her yelling for the hanging to stop when by all accounts it would have been too late, were you, Charles?" Jack asks presently, and he is glad to have the excuse of the rum mug at his lips not to answer at once. Jack wasn't even there; how does he know if it was too late or not? And seriously, after the rousing speech he made, all they remember and gossip about from the whole occasion is that one instant?
"Drop it, Jack." He tries to inject just enough menace into his voice for the implicit threat to be effective, but not too much so as to truly offend. "I'll never see her again, so what the fuck does it matter what I was or wasn't swayed by?" he adds, conscious of having suppressed a sigh. "We're out of here tonight and that's the end of it."
Jack is glad of the excuse to change the subject. "What are you thinking of doing, Charles?"
He ponders the question. "Unless you're determined to go keep an eye on Flint guarding the treasure, I'd say we may be better off on our own for a while." That, of course, implies that Jack – and, importantly, Anne – will not baulk at being under his command, considering that Jack has been captain in his own right since. "Flint has all our ships anyway, and enough of a tactical brain to instruct their acting captains to command a good defence, so us being around could only lead to arguments. I have a sense that he will fuck us over one way or another, but us being there won't necessarily prevent it."
Jack takes this with a soft snort, his shoulders sagging. "Just as we finally had our hand on a good prize…" he says wistfully.
"You do have your hands on a good prize now. Or you will, in six hours' time." He does his best to sound encouraging. "And with that sort of prize, knowing how fast and easy to handle she is, we won't be short of other prizes, Jack. Besides, you can at least take comfort in the knowledge that whatever Flint does with the chest, there's no way he can take it off the island until the attack is off, and then, assuming his defence is successful and he survives, he'll have to wait for the hurricane season to end to move it, should he want to, or else he'll risk losing it all in a storm. We can cruise north to the Carolinas in the meantime, take some plunder, hopefully get ourselves another ship so you can have your command back – " he shoots a grin at Jack, and sees the other man's mood pick up somewhat, "and come back south and look Flint up toward the end of November."
"Sounds like a plan to me, Charles," Jack says with unexpected conviction. Hopefully, knowing how Anne has him by the balls in the matters of all major decisions, it will sound like a plan to Anne, too; but unlike Jack, he knows better than to voice such thoughts.
"Captain?" Tanner, one of their new recruits, pokes his head into the cabin; seeing that Vane is awake, he shrinks somewhat, and tries again, his voice more sheepish. "Captain Rackham?"
Jack raises an eyebrow for an answer.
"Mistress Bonny is waiting to go over the plan with us, and she asked for you…"
Talk of the devil.
Jack is getting up already. "Duty calls, Charles. I'll see you before we're off."
He half wonders if he should tag along to listen to their briefing just for the hell of it, then figures that so long as Jack won't let him board the sloop, it will only annoy him to listen about tactical detail he will not be using. "Go on."
And with that, for the first time in three days, he is left on his own.
xxx
It is an hour past sunset, and with Jack gone and the skies finally dark, he gets out of the cabin, the half-empty rum flask in his hand, and walks east through the prickly underbrush for a couple of hundred yards until he reaches the narrow strip of sandy beach, glowing dimly at the edge of the dark water, and sees the faintly twinkling lights of Nassau harbor beyond. He is confident that no one can see him at this hour from the other side, and is glad that the crewmen are either at Jack and Anne's assembly or busy stealing the extra pair of rowboats they will need to mount the attack, if it can be so called, on the sloop.
This way, his private farewell to his home is nobody's business.
It has been the only home he ever knew. He cannot possibly apply the term to the filthy hell of the slave camp; he could, and did, consider Jennings' ship, and then Blackbeard's ship, and then the Ranger his home, but as homes go these are not very reliable ones, always at the mercy of the sea and of the fortunes of war. Say what he might about the treacherous nature of domesticity, and it is true that he cares little about the petty comforts, it is still a good thing to have a place to come back to, no matter how dingy, or dangerous, or rowdy. And Nassau has been it, for the better part of fifteen years; a hell of a lot of time. It has seen him at his most powerful, striking fear in the hearts of less distinguished citizens at the mere sound of his name, and at his weakest, crawling through filthy streets in a drunken haze; it has witnessed both his moments of sublime happiness and his hours of most abject misery. He has called on a couple of dozen ports in the meantime, from lawless Tortuga to stuffy Charlestown, but had he known for sure that he would never see any of those again, it would have mattered next to nothing. This is different.
Like it or not, the place sprouted roots too deep in his heart, and it is not so easy to rip it out without leaving a bleeding wound. He wonders if Teach felt the same when he, Charles, drove him out – or as Blackbeard himself prefers to see it, when he chose to leave. He certainly managed to get over it, making himself a good home on Ocracoke; he is not that good at dissembling for his nonchalant assessment of Nassau's transformation in his long absence to have been a pose.
The question is, was Blackbeard right?
He may well be; when they were tearing their way out of this harbour three months ago, Charles himself was convinced that Nassau was finished with Rogers' arrival, with his former brethren queuing to turn him in for a reward, with fucking Redcoats swarming all over. Then Flint came after him and gave him the speech about home, and swayed him, and flattered his vanity with the notion that the great Flint was willing to risk his life fighting for Charles' allegiance; the wily fucker always knows what to say to people to get them to do his bidding without realising it. After all, if he managed to fool Eleanor…
Not a good train of thought.
…and then Jack got into trouble, and there was no question about whether to go back. But it was far from the triumphant homecoming at the helm of an avenging fleet that he had in mind.
At least he got Jack out, and amazingly, lived to see Jack rescuing him in turn. Curious how two days ago he thought he had ended up, oddly enough, dying at home; now it looks instead as if he is all set to live elsewhere.
Curious how, where two days ago he saw death as his final freedom, as a state of blessed peace, he now sees his continued survival as an interesting twist, not altogether unwelcome.
Curious how all it took was a single word uttered by a woman he has no business thinking about.
He takes a long gulp from the flask, careful to swallow it down; the fort, his erstwhile seat of power, is a good half a mile away, but it would be momentously stupid to be discovered and scuttle their entire plan because of a coughing fit, should some piece of shit boat be slipping by in the darkness and think it proper to alert the officers onshore to squatters on the island.
The absolute worst part is, he knows, and he is never one to lie to himself no matter how painful the truth, that the greatest reason he has called Nassau home all this time has a name.
And she bloody well kept her promise from three years ago of throwing him out of the fort and into the sea; they were Nassau's feuding royalty, its cursed star-crossed couple, and in the final tally she has managed to hold on to her throne as its heartless queen, and he will have to make himself a life and a home on shores unknown.
And yet he cannot hate her.
He never could.
No matter how well he knew he should hate her, or at least leave her be; no matter how much pain she had managed to inflict on him, from minor vicious jabs to full-blown stabs to the heart. Charles is anything but a sucker for punishment; from as far back as he remembers himself, the rule of survival and success in his case seemed to be kill or get killed, and he did not much care about the getting killed part. Any sign of disrespect toward him met with quick and ruthless retaliation; and he has been known to be cunningly vindictive on several occasions where he suspected treachery toward himself, even though, he has to admit, he mellowed out a good deal in later years, especially since he allied himself with Teach, compared to his youth when he was filled with burning anger seeking an outlet for having been robbed of twenty years of what, for others, is the happiest time of their lives.
But where he has known better than to lower his defences with anyone save for a select few, where he never backed down from fights even where victory was far from assured, and almost inevitably came up winner regardless, he managed to let it all go to hell in her case, endlessly backing down and making concessions in the hope of holding on to a place in her heart.
He takes another long draught from the flask. It is not as if she were even the most beautiful woman he had laid eyes on, or bedded; he can have women with better bodies than hers, and with faces no less pretty. But none, he is certain, with a mind as fierce as hers; none so hell-bent on keeping her freedom from fools who would try to command her; and in that sense, she is exactly like him. She was his impossible prize; there were easier ones within reach but nowhere near as precious, and any half-good pirate remotely worth his sea legs will know that greater reward justifies the greater risk, the more painful sacrifice needed to attain it. Some things and some women are worth fighting for, an no one and nothing in his life has challenged him as much as she has.
And besides, he knows that, strange as it may seem, the ice queen exterior does hide a heart, even though a well hidden and closely guarded one. There was even a time, long ago, when he was so arrogant as to think he had assured himself a place in it; there were crazy moments of misguided hope since that he had regained it. It would be easier to know that she was completely devoid of humanity; but he has seen it, and in those brief moments he loved her more than ever – when she struggled to maintain her hold on power in acrimonious meetings, when she watched Low murder her allies before her eyes; when, if he has to be honest with himself, she watched his drunken revels with the brothel girls, even though by then he was so bitter as to be past caring. He saw the glimmer of pain in those lucid, cool grey eyes, belying her outward demeanour; even though her more usual reaction to being hurt was to lash out; exactly as his own. And it was the knowledge that her cruelty proceeded from pain that made him forgive her, even when she mauled him in prison; had she listened to him in silence and left, somehow it would have been a lot more painful. It was the knowledge that he had managed to hurt her beneath the icy exterior that told him that however cruel her words, she was not altogether indifferent.
Is not altogether indifferent…
He slams a fist into his thigh, lifts the flask to his lips, and methodically drains whatever is left. Good luck with numbing his mind; he has been on too many drunken binges not to be able to hold his liquour. But maybe he can at least drink some reason into himself. She is Rogers' lover now; it might be curious to see how long that lasts and how it ends, but it is none of his concern. For better or worse, he will never see Eleanor Guthrie again.
And yet, for reasons he does not want to even think about, the knowledge that at the very last instant, seeing him die, she wanted him to live makes him just a bit happier to be drawing breath.
He swings his arm and flings the empty flask into the lapping waves, and turns to walk back to their camp, picking his way by the rising moon.
xxx
Sure enough, Jack has been back in the cabin for some time by then.
"Where the fuck have you been, Charles?" He practically jumps up from the bench, although the worry is by now redundant.
He wonders if he could risk appearing a romantic sap by telling jack the truth, or use the crude but un-opposable pretext of taking a shit, but instead he just shrugs, and thankfully, Jack does not question him further.
"We're all ready," Jack continues in a calmer voice. "We got the boats; now we'll need to row around the cay so we can come toward the sloop from the far side of the harbour. So I guess we'll be on our way now, Charles."
"You all set otherwise?"
"As set as can be. We'll see you soon, Charles, and you'll have your prize. Remember, by the time we see each other tonight you'll be Captain again, so don't do anything stupid in the meantime."
Of course Jack knows he can get away with the admonition given the circumstances; but it does not mean that Charles will ever openly admit it; so he says the only thing that conveys the whole range of what he wants to say.
"Fuck you, Jack."
.
fin
.
Endnote
Jeopardy readers will be familiar with my penchant for research-filled endnotes; but where in that case they were more or less in proportion to the size of the fic, here it is a slightly ridiculous case of the endnote being almost as long. However, seeing how I copped out of re-typing this account in my notes back there and how it is directly relevant to the events here, I am including the excerpt from Charles Johnson's 1724 book on his contemporary pirates about how Jack and Anne Bonny stole the William from Nassau on August 20, 1720. In my timeline that has been conditioned by the tweaks imposed by the show, this happens at the end of October 1718; and I just realised that my references to a moonlit night in Jeopardy are not only at odds with the rainy night per Johnson, but also not that plausible given hurricane season timing. Let us assume that the skies parted on that particular day to help things along for my purposes ;)
.
[….] "they plotted together [with Anne] to seize a sloop which then lay in the harbour, and Rackham drew some brisk young fellows into the conspiracy. They were of the number of the pirates lately pardoned, and who, he knew, were weary of working on shore, and longed to be again at their old trade.
The sloop they made choice of was betwixt thirty and forty ton, and one of the swiftest sailors that ever was built of that kind. She belonged to one John Ham, who lived upon a little island not far from Providence, which was inhabited by no human creature except himself and his family (for he had a wife and children). His livelihood and constant employment was to plunder ad pillage the Spaniards, whose sloops and launches he had often surprised about Cuba and Hispaniola, and sometimes brought off a considerable booty, always escaping by a pair of good heels; insomuch that it became a by-word to say "There goes John Ham, catch him if you can." His business on Providence now was to bring his family in order to live and settle, being weary, perhaps, of living in that solitude, or else apprehensive, if any of the Spaniards should discover his habitation, they might land and be revenged of him for all his pranks.
Anne Bonny was observed to go several times on board this sloop; she pretended to have some business with John Ham. Therefore she always went when he was on shore, for her true errand was to discover how many hands were aboard, and what kind of watch they kept, and to know the passages and ways of the vessel.
She discovered as much as was necessary; she found there were but two hands on board; that John Ham lay on shore every night. She inquired of them; whether they watched? Where they lay? And asked many other questions, to all which they readily answered her, as thinking she had no design but common curiosity.
She acquainted Rackham with every particular, who resolved to lose no time, and therefore acquainting his associates, who were eight in number, they appointed an hour for meeting at night, which was at twelve o'clock. They were all true to the roguery, and Anne Bonny was as punctual as the most resolute; and being all well armed, they took a boat and rowed to the sloop, which was very near the shore.
The night seemed to favour the attempt, for it was both dark and rainy. As soon as they got on board, Anne Bonny, having a drawn sword in one hand and a pistol in the other, attended by one of the men, went straight to the cabin where the two fellows lay who belonged to the sloop. The noise waked them, which she observing, swore that if they pretended to resist, or make a noise, she would blow out their brains (that was the term she used).
In the meantime Rackham and the rest were busy heaving in the [anchor] cables, one of which they soon got up, and for expedition sake they slipped [= let go of] the other, and so drove down the harbour. They passed pretty near the fort, which hailed them, as did also the guardship, asking them where they were going. Hey answered, their cable had parted, and that they had nothing but a grappling on board, which would not hold them. Immediately after which, they put out a small sail, just to give them steerage way. When they came to the harbour's mouth and thought they could not be seen by any of the ships, because of the darkness of the night, they hoisted all the sail they had, and stood to sea. Then calling up the two men, they asked them if they would be of their party, but finding them not inclined, they gave them a boat to row themselves ashore, ordering them to give their service to Ham, and to tell him they would send him his sloop again when they had done with it."