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Chapter 8
Tyburn without the crowds of a hanging day was a desolate place. The gallows stood, ominous and silent, overlooking a muddy field. From her seat underneath a tree, Anamaria could see the road leading back into London and smoke rising from the buildings at the edge of the city.
A solitary noose hung from the gallows-tree, moving gently sideways in the breeze. Anamaria shivered and hugged her arms around herself.
It was a long time before anyone appeared on the road from the city. She looked up at the sound of cart wheels, and watched silently as it approached. But nobody jumped out, and the solitary driver did not even notice her as the cart rattled past the crossroads and on, towards Oxford.
She began to entertain all the possible reasons why Jack Sparrow had not come. Perhaps Jimmy had not gone to Newgate. Or had been unable to get inside. Maybe they had been caught on the way out. The boy and the pirate could be under renewed guard, or worse, dead.
The thoughts began to depress her after a while, and instead Anamaria began to systematically work through her memories of all the time Jack Sparrow had escaped from prisons. There were the times in Port Royal, of course, with the help of Will Turner. But also she remembered the evening a bedraggled young pirate had clambered back aboard the Black Pearl after weeks in the hands of the East India Company, when the entire crew had given him up for lost. And there had been other seemingly miraculous escapes, brought about through a mixture of luck and skill.
She pulled out a hunk of bread, and chewed it as she waited. Dusk was falling now, and Anamaria wondered how long she ought to wait before either heading back into the city or risking the open road at night. Taking out her dagger, she tested the point and was pleased to find it sharp - but still, she wished she had a pistol at hand too.
A lone horseman rode by. Anamaria looked up, but this was no Sparrow, and soon the horse's hoofbeats had faded into the night.
It was perhaps half an hour later when she heard the singing. She gripped the hilt of her dagger and waited. The voice grew closer, and now she could make out the cheerful, off-key words.
"Yo ho, yo ho," the voice sang, "a pirate's life for me!"
Anamaria smiled, and stood up.
Underneath the gallows tree, the singer halted. The figure was draped in something nondescript and shapeless, and was bent over with a basket on its arm. It looked up, put the basket down, and shrugged off the drapes.
Anamaria, trying not to break into a run, hurried across to the singer.
"Jack!" she said, joyfully.
"Sorry I'm late," said Jack Sparrow, grinning a glinting grin.
She hesitated a moment, torn between hitting him and hugging him. Elation won out, and she threw her arms around his too-thin frame. He took a second to respond, but returned the embrace with verve.
"I was worried it had gone wrong," Anamaria said, once the hug was over.
Sparrow picked up his basket. "Food? No? Don't mind if I do, do you?" He brought out a pasty and bit into it. "Nah, that Jimmy was a sharp'un if ever I saw one. Slipped into the gaol as easy as you like …" He paused, chewed and swallowed, and said, "Reckon we ought to be movin' on. We'd best be well on our way to Portsmouth 'afore dawn."
She nodded, and they set off. Jack Sparrow continued his tale.
"Anyway, he got himself into Newgate and found me. Don't know what you said to him, love, but he was all starry-eyed and quite won over with the idea of meeting a pirate."
Anamaria smiled.
"Young Will's keys worked a treat," Sparrow went on, "and soon we were nipping out of that place, me with a great hat on me head and pretendin' to be a beggar. Luckily the guards are slowish, so out we came into Newgate Street. I'd have set off there'n'then to meet you, 'cept Jimmy had a better idea. Turned out his gran sells fish in Eastcheap, so we popped along to see her and laid low there until he had to get back to Greenwich and we guessed it'd be safe for me to toddle along here. Gran lent me a shawl, and chopped off me beard - and that feels odd, it does - and I pretended I was an old woman if anyone came near."
"You cut off your beard?" Anamaria peered at him in the darkness, and realised that indeed the neatly-plaited beard had been shorn from Sparrow's chin.
"Wasn't prepared to be taken up as the Bearded Woman at the fair," Sparrow pointed out. "It worked, anyway, and here I am."
"Et maintenant?" Anamaria asked.
Sparrow walked for a few paces without saying anything, and she watched him sideways.
"Now?" he said, eventually.
"Yes."
"We head for Portsmouth."
"But are there not lots of Navy people there?" she said.
"Hide in plain sight," Sparrow returned, as if it was obvious. To him, it probably was.
They walked well into the night, and took shelter for a few hours in an old hut. Anamaria was exhausted, and fell asleep immediately; but waking once or twice due to the cold she saw Sparrow sitting up, his head against the wall, gazing into the darkness.
In the morning light they set off again, amid mist rising from the fields. Examining Jack Sparrow as they walked, Anamaria was shocked at his appearance. Cutting off the beard had made him look younger, but his face was gaunt and devoid of its usual tan. He looked ill, and she could not recall ever having seen him anything other than full of verve, lit from within by a particularly Sparrow-like spark.
"Have we got enough food?" she asked.
He displayed the contents of his basket - dried apples, some bread and a couple of pies. "Enough."
They continued walking. After a while, he launched into one of his stories, something about a French merchant and a velvet coat, and she listened and tried to pick through the words to work out what he was not telling her.
That evening they risked an inn. In the privacy of their room Sparrow took off the scarf wrapped around his hair and shook out the braids so that they jangled.
"Have you got a knife?" he asked.
Anamaria, occupied with picking burrs out of her own locks, looked up. "Eh?"
"A knife," Sparrow repeated. "It occurs to me that Norrington's little helpers'll be looking for Jack Sparrow, complete with all he should come with." He held a strand of beads before his eyes and squinted at them. "It'll grow back, anyway."
She took out her knife, and touched its edge. "Are you sure?"
"You've got me this far," Sparrow said. "Let's get home before we start worrying about such fripperies as beads and hair, shall we?" He pulled a chair up to the edge of the bed, and sat on it. "Go on. Before I change me mind."
Taking one thick hank of hair between her fingers, Anamaria began to cut. Pieces of hair, intermingled with trinkets, fell to the wooden boards, and all the while Sparrow stared fixedly ahead. She was glad she could not see his expression.
Once she was finished, having hacked off the strands of beads and chopped his hair to shoulder length, she picked up the discarded ornaments and passed them to him.
"Later, you will need these," she said.
He stood up, and turned around. "What does it look like?"
To Anamaria, it was as if the years had rolled away, and the young daredevil pirate she had once known stood before her. Sparrow looked more like an untested boy than a seasoned captain.
"Norrington will not recognise you," she said.
He looked pleased. "Good. That's the whole point. Now we can travel a little faster and get a lift on the stagecoach tomorrow. Sooner we get to Portsmouth, the sooner we'll find a vessel."
They swept the hair into the fireplace, where it burnt with a terrible smell, and then both pulled off their boots. Sparrow waved a hand towards the bed.
"Go on, love, you take it. I'll bed down by the fire. Warmer."
"How long is it that you've been a gentleman?" Anamaria asked, turning back the thin blanket.
"Truth is," said Sparrow, rolling himself in Jimmy's grandmother's wraps, "it's been too long since I slept in a bed. I'll get more rest this way. Go on. We've a long way to go tomorrow."
She slid under the cover, and closed her eyes to Sparrow's soft humming of a sea shanty.