"He never took me seriously. 'A woman cannot be a captain', he used to say", - Angelica complains, and it's hard to say what prevails in her words: resentment, anger or regret she cannot prove her father how wrong he was. Now Angelica is a captain, she has more than fifty, always dirty, alcoholized till bones sailors under her authority, but she doesn't look happy, although that didn't mean she's too unhappy.
When she and Max are in a bed together and Angelica talks about her long-standing worries, she often reminds Max of a resentful kitten. But Ange is into her thirties, she's old enough for marriage. This thought is making Max nervous: they all leave her for men, one way or another. Eleanor, Anne, and someday Angelica will leave her too, when she gets bored of sailing.
"I'm sure your father would be proud of you" - Max lies, knowing fully well that she is. She has no idea what Teach could have told her , but he died not because of Angelica, but because of that idiot Charles Vane. The ungrateful idiot.
"You are trying to comfort me, aren`t you?" Angelica chuckles gently. She sits down in the bed, enfolding her knees, really looking so much like a kitten people forgot to feed and caress. Her olive skin on white sheets looks almost as dark as Max's, despite Angelica not having a drop of negro blood. Her mother was from the Spanish merchant`s family whose ship was captured by Teach. He had been still young then, and they say that women liked him. But as Max understands it`s much more like true that he had raped Angelica`s mother. The same way Max' father treated her mother. In the same way people from Vane`s crew had been raping her till Anne intervened. Max has quite a long bill to the manhood and sometimes she needs to make efforts not to think about it too often.
"You think about your father too much. He is dead, you're alive. You can't change anything, so it doesn't matter. What is the point of feeling sorry for yourself?"
Angelica winces. Max hopes that sooner or later Angelica will accept her advice. Max herself has too many regrets, and every day she struggles with them. She hopes Angelica will come to peace with her demons more quickly than it had taken her, though there were days that Max wonders has she actually conquered her own demons.
"Come here", Max pats the sheets next to her,"Don't think about men, think about me. Or better, do."
Angelica is smiling. It seems Max succeeded in chasing away Angelica`s obsessive thoughts. For a while but that's good enough. Someday - in a month, in a year, inevitable as death - Angelica`ll leave her, they all leave but that day hasn't come yet. So Max is smiling too and kissing back her lover.