Eleanor journeys to Fort Nassau, for the very first time since her father was crucified there, and ends up confronting Charles Vane about the murder. As the ugly truth is revealed, Eleanor renders her personal judgment of Charles and makes peace with her father's ghost. (includes Charles' POV)
(warning: acts of violence and explicit language)
Chapter 27 - The Beast
On her way to the Fort the next day, Eleanor felt the unwelcome dread in her rise. The weather was grey and overcast, adding to a sense of foreboding. Eleanor had avoided Fort Nassau, since her return, for there were too many ghosts in there for her. But now she had to go into a dirty, dank cell, and confront the very man she loathed but allowed to fuck her in there.
Halfway, she had to cross a small natural rivulet of brackish and undrinkable water that streamed into the bay. Normally one could wade through in boots and have the water barely came to the ankles. But last night's rain had even submerged the stepping stones. There was no way she would manage to cross without wetting and muddying her stockings, shoes and petticoat. In the past, she would not have cared one jot about it, but she had to be a civilized lady in front of Charles. She even put on her best shoes. If her attire ended up stained, that bode ill for the rest of her behavior in his cell.
An older former pirate Khar (of Captain Throckmorton's crew) had just moored near the crossing with a skiff, helping visitors from the interior that he had ferried to Nassau on land. He had flashing grey eyes, and his beard was long and unkempt. Noticing her predicament, Khar waded upriver and grinned at her. "Allow me, Miss Guthrie."
Before she could protest, the rough seaman in his reddish-brown justaucorps lifted her in his arms and carried her across. When she was safe and dry on the other side, she gave him a penny for his gallantry. "Thank you, Khar."
"I'll probably still be here, when you return, miss. Or one of my colleagues coming in with the Misses Memory may help you," Khar told her and lifted his stained tricorne hat at her.
The fort lay on top of a hill, outside of town - a looming, brooding, inaccessible rock of three walls thick, throwing a shadow across her heart. The red waves started to crash into her again, and she clutched the paper in her hands. Three big mangy stray dogs followed their nose along the path up the hill. When she passed they looked up, barked and barred their teeth at her, standing protectively over a kill. Whatever animal it used to be was impossible to discern, except that it once had been furry. It was just bones, blood and leftover fluff now. Eleanor shuddered, while her escorts stamped the soil to shoo the dogs away from her.
Her escort knocked on the old and gnarled wooden gate. Despite it showing signs of wear, tear and being shot at, it still was sturdy and solid. The little hatch inside the door opened like a window and a man's face appeared. The patch over his eye revealed the man had seen battle somewhere already. The hatch closed and the bar and lock were taken from the gate. It swung open, whining and crying on the rusty hinges.
A captain with tanned face and icy blue eyes came forward, from what seemed to be the improvised mess. Somehow, she had not seen him before on the ships or patrols. His features were severe and stiff. He wore a grey haired bag wig, rather than a white or brown one. His noble mien could have been called handsome and he might even be younger than Woodes, but he looked as if he had never smiled and instead his sour face was stamped on his features to last forever. He frowned at her. "What is your business here?"
"I am here to see the captive pirate," she said, with as much authority she could put into her own voice. She gave the governor's letter to him. She had written it, but Woodes had signed and sealed it.
Warily, the captain took his time in reading it, looked at her, at his younger colleagues that were her escort. "Follow me, M'am," he said coolly.
A drill exercise was being performed in the courtyard. Woodes had told her that after Vane's capture he ordered extra guards at the fort so that it would total fifty. For the first time since they found her father there, Eleanor saw the courtyard again. Her father had already been taken down, when they informed her of his death. She looked away from the place where his cross had been, and closed her eyes for a moment. She wanted to forget that haunting image. The captain led her to a side door, opened it and grabbed a torch.
Nervous, she straightened her frock and her stomacher, before she followed the captain inside the fort, into the narrow corridors, black as the night. Even the torches and their light seemed to be swallowed up by the shadows. The tropical damp air trapped inside weighed on her breath. It smelled of moist, rotten earth inside. They went left, right, left and left again, up and down, and then down some more on serpentine stairs. Eleanor used to know her way in the fort, but now she felt as if being led into a maze where every wrong turn would be a dead end.
The captain was not wholly unfriendly. "The previous one was much tamer, more polite and friendlier," he commented during the long, hazy way to Charles' cell. "When they dragged Vane in here yesterday, we needed several men to subdue him, and he knocked some of my men a blue eye. He's powerful like a beast. So, we put him in chains, hands and feet. Though he has mobility, the chains at his feet are attached to a ring on the wall. He roared and raged all night. But he has been sullen and passive since this morning. So, I think you can see him safely, M'am. We have two guards outside for extra precaution. If he tries anything, just yell for them." The captain pointed to the other end of the hallway. "His cell is at the end."
He can't hurt me, she told herself. He's in chains. And he certainly won't get to fuck me ever again. All he has are words, she reminded herself. No matter how venomous, they cannot hurt me if I don't allow it. She straightened her back and marched to the cell, the heels of her lady's shoes echoing across the stones of the corridor, her frock swinging and rustling. It is not me who is the captive in that cell. I will not hang. He will. The guards greeted her and unlocked the door. Tea! Tea! Tea! Eleanor recited to herself, closing her eyes, and then opened them, feeling calm, like the eye of a tempest, before she stepped inside and the door was locked behind her.
There he sat - the murderer, that fiend – on a stone seat in the beam of daylight falling into the naked cell. First he looked at her, but as soon as he recognized her, Charles looked away, at his fiddling fingers, hunched over. She had once thought him handsome, sexy and hot. But now she saw a vile troll, an abhorred slave in which no goodness could ever take, capable of all ill, a thing most brutish. And so this place, that he had stolen from Hornigold while he longed for the sea, and that made him believe he was king of the island, was now his prison cell – a far more decent one than the one he had imprisoned Abigail in, clean at least and allowing for light. England treated him better than he had treated other human beings who never did him any wrong. Look he even has a table to write. And yet she knew he would not care for that. It would be the chains that bothered him. Well, he deserves to be confined into this cave, into this rock. No one belongs to be put in a prison cell left to rot more than him. Except, he would not be left here, forgotten and left to decay.
When Charles heard the door being unlocked he had expected to see a gloating governor. But as soon as he recognized Eleanor entering, he looked away. Though he hated her for betraying him for Flint and England, his heart still skipped a beat whenever he saw her. She always had that effect on him, making him feel things he felt for nobody else, nervous and weak in the knees. He had avoided having a glimpse of her since he arrived back on the island two days ago, staying in hiding in one of the beach huts the first night. And yet, he had been moved into complete silence, when he saw her in a blue petticoat standing in the surf, picking up shells and watching the sunset. She was unaware that anyone was watching her, and thus unguarded and free in her behavior. He saw the old Eleanor then, and he had smirked to himself, thinking, "The new governor does not know who and what he has taken in his bed. He's no match for her. She has him wrapped around her little, pretty finger."
Charles was certain that Eleanor fucked the governor since he saw her on the Delicia, walking towards the governor and then disappear with him together into the hull. Why else would she be wearing all those fancy dresses while those clothes were not her? Why else would the man dress her up in a mantua and petticoat? Why else would he smile at her? He had been able to resist the image, though he cursed her as the whore and thief that she was, when he escaped with Edward, reminding himself that the governor had excluded him from the pardon to please his lover, that she flaunted herself on the deck to provoke him into making a mistake. He was going to start a new pirate life, away from Nassau, away from her, free to fuck, steal and murder whomever he wished, free from niceties, burdens and possessions. He had looked forward to Ocracoke, grateful of the chance Edward had given him.
But he had read the Spanish spy reports on the governor, knew that the Urca gold exchanged into gems and pearls was the governor's weakness. How not returning it would get the Spanish to raze Nassau. And then whenever he closed his eyes in his hammock on the way to Ocracoke he was in hell imagining that handsome man in fancy clothes fuck Eleanor. The image of her lying on her back, mouth half open, face alight with ecstasy, breasts bumping up and down and calling that man's name when she came ate at his very soul. It just was not right. Eleanor belonged to him and only him. She had given her maidenhood to him. She should be crying out his name. I hope she does, by accident sometimes, he had thought in pain and agony.
He wanted to stand by his honor with Edward when Flint appeared from the dead at Ocracoke, just as Eleanor had come back from the dead. But as Edward was about to kill Flint, he remembered Eleanor telling him in his opium haze that he could take the island from her and her anytime he wanted to. All Charles needed to do was actually do it. And so, in a split second he came between Edward and Flint, saved Flint's life and sailed off with him to the Maroon island and Nassau. And then when the English were lured to the Maroon island, killed off, and the Spanish sailed for Nassau, he would kill the governor personally and save her, like he had saved Flint in Charleston.
It needed to be done all in secret though. He had to take it all first, before revealing himself to Eleanor, just as when he took Fort Nassau from Hornigold. That was the only way she would stop resisting the truth that they were made for each other. It was this knowledge that enabled him to just spy on her from his hiding place that evening on the beach. But that goddamn governor was made of hard ebony, made of sterner stuff beneath his fancy clothes, not a wimp like Richard Guthrie. Still, Charles was stronger, and even when he saw the cavalry come to the governor's aid and knew he would be caught, Charles had to resist for as long as he could so that Anne could get away with Jack and Flint with the cache. He was tempted to kill the governor right then and there. He could have snapped his neck if he wanted to. But with the governor alive, chances were higher they would let the others run and help the governor back. So, instead he enjoyed rebuilding the governor's handsome face into a ruin. Let Eleanor fuck that beat up face tonight, he had thought, and be reminded that I left my mark on him. Well, if there was any fucking done that night, given the fact that he had hit the governor right in the groin too. Admittedly, Charles had enjoyed raping Max for similar reasons. Eleanor paid money to have her exclusively for herself. Max had believed she could two-time him and win Eleanor's love all to herself. But if Eleanor would ever find Max, she would know he had put his cock in every hole. Of course, he ended up regretting doing that afterwards.
Regardless, he was caught and Eleanor was here, only a few feet away from him, looking daggers, making him weak in the knees. He hated feeling soft and weak, least of all her knowing it. Slowly, Charles turned his head and looked at her.
Eleanor took a deep breath and unfolded the paper. "I, Charles Vane, do hereby plead guilty to the charges of treason and high seas piracy."
At a distance, she stood fierce and severe near the door. He did not buy that calm, cold English exterior of a proper lady. Eleanor was no lady. She was special, and wherever she walked she seemed to be made of a different matter than other people. It was as if the light sought her to distinguish her from anybody else. And she was hot and temperamental.
Eleanor continued to read aloud. "I understand that the sentence for my crimes is to be hanged by the neck until dead." She looked up from the letter and to him, wanting him to know that he would die, that she wanted him dead. There would be no deal for him, no reprieve, no pardon. She looked back down at the paper and continued to read it aloud. "It is my hope that in exchange for this plea I might be spared the humiliation of a public trial, and that my execution be carried out privately and mercifully." That was all he could get out of it, a merciful and private death. She had done it, read the verdict like the judge in court once did for her. Woodes could be proud of her, so far. Stiffly she strolled to the desk and dropped the plea onto the desk. She faced him. "At noon tomorrow, you'll be transported under guard to the bay, where you'll be boarded onto the Shark and sent to London to face a Court of the Admiralty."
Woodes had loathed to part with one of the HMS ships while they were on the verge of a possible war with Flint, perhaps Teach, maybe even Spain – at worst all three of them at once. Eleanor had expected he'd use the Gloucestershire for it. But since Charles was not yet convicted and the risk of the ship carrying him to England being attacked was too great it had to be a ship of the Royal Navy, with enough guns to defend itself and the right to judge and sentence a prisoner on sea if must needs. The Shark was the smallest of the navy's ships, with the fewest guns.
Eleanor took a small step into his direction and lowered her eyes, softening her voice. "Agree to this plea, and the governor will endorse it. We'll see to it that it is heard favorably and your experience in London will be short and dignified." It made her feel better to offer the mercy, to promote it. But she spoke severely, when she added, "Refuse to sign it, and your experience will be anything but."
Charles suppressed a chuckle at her saying that she would make sure it would be heard favorably. He furrowed his brow. "You came all the way down here to ask me to beg for mercy?" His familiar hoarse voice almost made her reel. Eleanor had once thought his voice sexy, special, unique. It grated her ears now. And yet it did something to her system, to her brain when she heard it. It was a voice she had known for eight long years, one that her body knew too well. "What a fantasy this must have been for you. Well, even if I did sign that, we both know how empty the victory would be, seeing as you don't give a shit about my piracy or my treason." Hearing him speak, seeing his face move. The years all came back to her. "The only crime of mine that angers you is the one that no one else cared enough about to even call a crime. Am I wrong? Is the murder of Richard Guthrie mentioned anywhere on that page?"
He's doing it all over again. He never really listened to me, did he? Once she had berated him for missing the meeting of the consortium. What had he said? "The woman who stole ship and crew out from underneath me has no appetite for any of that. I think that's why you're so frustrated with me... because you know all this, because you know I know this, and because you know you are so much more like me than anyone you've ever met in your entire life." He was always ready with his opinions of her, telling her what he believed she was thinking. And he was always wrong about her. He had made up this imaginary Eleanor who was his female twin who wished the wild freedom he always talked of, his lioness. And whenever she did something that was the opposite of what he believed about her, he would come up with this contrived "I know, you know" bullshit.
And now he was patronizing her again. He never knew me at all! No, I did not fantasize about you, period, only your death. If it had been up to her last night, she would not have given him mercy. Still, she had done as Woodes wanted and when doing it, she felt good, felt that Woodes was right in making her do so. She could make peace with a merciful death for Charles. "You fucking coward," she whispered bitterly. Here she was offering him mercy, but all he could do was twist the knife even further. She stepped towards him, towering over him, hands hanging beside her for he deserved no stance of respect from her. "When Charles Vane takes something from a man, he looks him in the eye and gives him a chance to deny him." She crinkled her nose in disgust. "It's all bullshit. It was always bullshit."
Now, Charles saw more of that real Eleanor returning, not that fake English bitch who cited some pretty words about him begging for mercy. She stood closer. I still affect her. And she affected him. He could smell her, like a breeze of fresh air, of the sea, waves and the beach, womanly.
Eleanor could not possibly hold in her rage about her father's murder anymore. "You stole my father from me in the dead of night like a rank fucking cutpurse," she spat. "And you did it because you weren't man enough to face me, to show yourself." She could not hide the pain either. "So you found the lowest, cruelest, weakest deed imaginable and acted it out upon an innocent man with whom you had no quarrel, knowing that I had finally begun to build something with him, that I was finally able to see the good in him."
"He was a shit," Charles said callously. She is such a liar. Her father never cared about her. Hell, she hated Richard for years. Richard would never have lifted a finger against Ned Low. Ned Low could have murdered her and Richard Guthrie would have done business with his daughter's killer. But he had killed that madman with his own hands, for her.
Eleanor stared appalled at him. "What did you just say?" she gasped.
Charles rolled his eyes. "He was a cowardly, selfish, treacherous shit who cared only for himself and for you not at all." Eleanor was truly shocked, shaking, that he could not even admit to her he had done it to avenge himself on her. No, he tried to blame her father, as if he did her some favor. "You know this. All your life you knew this," he told her. His icy eyes pierced her like needles. He was actually smirking. "Then suddenly he walks back through your door, tells you he can give you all of the things you want, tells you I'm your enemy, and, just like that, his love is sacred and mine is a inconvenient obstacle to your ambitions."
Inadvertently, Eleanor shook her head lightly at this. Is he mad? Does he truly believe that if he murdered my father that I would love him for it?
Charles chuckled. "The life cycle of your affections - a man you love who speaks the truth shunted aside in favor of the next who will tell you whatever you want to hear." And he was not solely implying Richard Guthrie. Eleanor loves me. Charles was sure of it. Not that governor, who no doubt whispers compliments and lies in her ear all the time.
A man I love, echoed inside of her skull. It instantly brought Woodes to mind. He will not be silent and say, yes please, she heard Woodes warn her. He will use words to goad you, to hurt you, to keep you there. Charles is the prisoner. Not me. I can walk out of here. I'm free to leave whenever I want. Now that she knew his reason, his twisted mad belief that he did it for love, that she only had turned to her father for ambition or to hear pretty things - she had no other word for it than that he was outright pathetic. "Goodbye, Charles." She turned away from him and walked towards the door.
Just as she reached for the handle, Charles said, "He betrayed you, Eleanor." She froze and listened. "When my men brought him to me first, he begged for mercy. Then he promised to make me rich."
Yes, initially Charles wanted to go after her. His men were bloodthirsty enough for it. But he could not. So, he ordered them to catch her father for him, knowing it would hurt her, anger her if he took from her who she loved, as well as hamper her contacts with the interior farmers. As Richard begged for mercy while Charles had not even touched the man, he saw it so clearly suddenly. The man is weak. Such weakness does not even deserve to live. In the wild, Richard would be some weaker, inferior grazer, too slow and too fragile to live for long, except to be a lion's meal. How can a weak man like that father a daughter as strong and wild as Eleanor? Fathers are always the problem, aren't they? Richard never even recognized how special Eleanor was and wanted to keep her as weak as himself, just like Albinus tried to keep me weak. And Eleanor allowed it, craving for a man's love who could never appreciate who she truly was. And so he tortured him for hours, instead of outright killing him, to show Richard what a weak, undeserving lowlife he truly was.
As Charles revealed that her father had begged, Eleanor imagined what she had attempted not to picture at all - her father dragged in front of pirates, tortured with hot irons, hammers breaking his fingers, ankles, knees. Her father was no fighter, no hero, not even all that mentally strong to withstand any kind of torture for long. Her father had been a weak man, but he was her father. Of course he begged for mercy. Of course he promised him money. She squeezed her eyes shut, not wanting to hear her father plead as she knew he would have.
"But when he realized neither had any effect, he promised to deliver you to me. Promised to exchange your life for his."
When that blubbering coward offered to give him Eleanor, Charles had laughed in Richard's bleeding and broken face. "You? You will give me your daughter?" It had been too funny. "You don't even deserve a daughter like that, let alone give her away. The insult alone. Hahahaha." Right before he broke the man's neck in a rage, he whispered to him, "I don't ask for what is mine. I take it!"
Something snapped inside Eleanor. She saw red, only red! My father a traitor, because he offered me under torture? Is that Charles' evidence? He has to ruin and defile even the memory of my father, drag me through the imagination of it for this?
"That is who your father was, Eleanor. And you know it's true."
Eleanor had whirled around, stepped towards him and like an avenging fury smashed her fist in his face with all the might she had in her. You had no right! No right at all! Then she swung her other fist into him, crying out in anger and rage. She grabbed him by the neck and knuckled him several more times. He did not even fight back. She grabbed his throat. I can do it. She wanted to do it, to squeeze her hands around his neck and throttle him.
They had fought before, but this – this was different. Charles felt her desire to kill him, all her hatred for him in each and every punch. He bore it, because she was with him now, touching him, close. Fighting or fucking. Fucking or fighting. When it came to her, there was little difference. He wanted to die. Better to die by her hand, here in the fort where he had fucked her, than some noose in some strange country, and she would be forever his in mind and heart, in hell, together, forever. She was the sole person who was his match, the sole one who had the right to kill him.
But then Eleanor could not look at his despicable face for one more second. She did not even want to touch him anymore. He was that vile to her. He stank of piss and blood, sour sweat, of sunburned salt on the waves mixed with sand. A smell that was familiar to her, too familiar, and that repulsed her now - rank, stale, decaying. She roared in his face, in frustration and anger, because she hated him so much that she could not even strangle him. She recoiled into a dark corner and shrieked all her anger, frustration and pain out of her body against the wall, feeling trapped and imprisoned with him in a black hell of human darkness, until she had no breath anymore.
Leaning her hand against the wall for support, she gasped and sucked in a breath of life. Eleanor reeled on her feet, and came back to some level of reason. Tea! When you are trapped in there with him, think of tea! She remembered her mother pouring tea for her father and how her father looked at her mother with love and admiration. Like Woodes looked at me yesterday evening. Whatever her father was – weak, cowardly, corrupt - he had loved her mother. Her father had been a good man, a decent man. Her mother's death had broken him as much as it had damaged her, and for years they had dealt with the grief differently. Him in a house at Harbour Island that resembled the dream-house he talked of over tea to her mother, free from pirates – all very English, civilized and proper. Amidst the pirates, Eleanor had tried to do the same by making Nassau a place her mother would have been proud of. In the end, her father had recognized they shared the same pain and goal. Charles could never comprehend that. He had never known a mother or a father, a parentless slave child in a world of cruel men who were no better than beasts. "You're not a man," she said, hoarse. She was tired, empty. "You're deformed. Unformed. Flesh, bone, and bile, and missing all that which takes shape through a mother's love."
His head low, Charles heard her. She was real then. Her voice was too raw with emotion. And it shook him. He lifted his head and leaned against the wet and cold, stone pillar behind him, catching his breath. A mother? I never had any mother. A woman had birthed him. She had no face nor a first name. She died giving birth to him on a convict ship sent to the Americas. All he knew of her was that her last name was Vane and that she had named him Charles, like the king. It only showed that she had been an ignorant woman, since the Puritans of the colonies supported a rebellion against Charles II, who made his Catholic brother heir. What does a mother have to do with it at all?
Disbelieving that a man could be that mad, Eleanor shook her head and chuckled at the craziness of it. "You cannot comprehend what you took from me or why it was good, because there is no goodness in you." Eleanor spoke softly, grief stricken, and Charles sagged his head, feeling his heart of fragile glass break into a thousand pieces. "There is no humanity in you, no capacity for compromise, nor instinct toward repair, nor progress. Nor forgiveness."
The last she had said almost so angelic, that Charles was compelled to look at her. While, he had forgiven her betrayal, perhaps for the first time he realized why she could not see that. In that moment, he did not see a peerless fighter or a nature's child, but a quiet, gentle soul who valued harmony, who aspired to all those things in herself and the people around her. This was the light and specialness he had seen, that of an angelic mother, but never recognized for what it was, because he was born from darkness.
She turned around and could finally face him again. "You are an animal." Eleanor knew that Charles believed he loved her. And in that moment she could admit that Charles probably did feel an instinct to bond with her and keep her around, protect her, kill any rival. She could see he would call it love, for lack of knowing what love actually was. Love made people empathize, compromise, work together to build a better future, and forgive. It inspired people to be a better person and to think and feel for two. Charles never truly loved me, nor I him, for I cannot forgive him. Charles never had been raised to comprehend it. But she had been raised to love truly, by her mother. She had found her true love, but he was not here in this cell.
"Nassau is moving on from you, and so am I." She spared him not another look or chance to speak to her and walked to the door, as he saw that judging angel leave him forever alone in the darkness, while she would return to the light. Eleanor knocked and said trembling, "Open up!" to the guard behind the door.
Eleanor was still shaking, feeling raw and emotional, as she was guided back to the courtyard by the guard. He smiled sympathetically to her, holding the torch for her. As Eleanor came out into the glaring light she had to shield her eyes for a moment after emerging from the darkness. She looked in the direction where her father's cross had been. This time, she decided to walk over and commemorate his memory, the old memories with her mother, and the last one when he held her, when she could lean on him and lay her head on his shoulder and imagine a better future for Nassau.
Silent tears rolled down her cheeks. I'm so sorry, father. I was blind, believing him to be a better man than he ever was, ever could be. Eleanor could not stop her tears even if she wanted to, though she sniffed her nose and rubbed them away with the back of her hand. To the ghostly memory of him, she whispered, "It's here, father. The future mother and you wished for has come, in the shape of a great man, a good man. And I'm helping him. You would be proud of me. I love him. I love you. I forgive you."
"Will you be alright, M'am?" The icy looking captain appeared behind her, looking at her with worry knotted into his brow.
"Yes, thank you," she smiled at him.
"Could we provide you with something, some relief?" She shook her head. "Truly, you look shaken, as if you have seen a ghost."
She snuffled her nose once more and inhaled for breath, while smiling at the man. "Perhaps I did see one, or two."
He looked strangely at her for a moment, before telling her, "I must inform you that a messenger came earlier to beg for your return as soon as possible. But you were already inside with the prisoner when the message arrived and seemed too distraught a moment ago to interrupt."
"I will leave at once, Captain. Thank you, for your concern and allowing me some privacy earlier."
The captain stared at the spot that she had been looking at for a moment. "I do not mean to pry, miss, but you mentioned two ghosts."
"My father was murdered here, Captain. I was saying my farewell to him, making my peace with it." As she said it, Eleanor realized she had made her peace with him being dead and gone, finally. Her father was not a specter raging for revenge, but at peace with the woman he loved, with her mother. She saw them drinking tea together in her mind. Goodbye father, she thought, and hurried to the gate where her escort waited for her. "Let us get back."
(Underworld journey= Eleanor's journey to Fort Nassau. The river with the help of ferryman Khar, alludes to the Achethon, Charon, and the obol the soul has to pay for the crossing. Brackish water is undrinkable and no environment for life. Eleanor pays a penny instead of obol. The three mangy stray dogs stand for the three-headed hellhound Cerberus who eat his victim (souls trying to escape) until there's nothing left but bones. The distance from Fort Nassau to the rivulet, and from the rivulet to Nassau market square matches that of the distance between heaven (Olympus) and Tartarus (lowest section of the underworld and prison of criminal souls). Tartarus is a fortress with three walls, in which once the Cyclopses were imprisoned, hence the guard at the door has an eyepatch. The captain resembles the ruler of the underworld, Hades (though no beard): handsome, noble, dark tanned, severe and cold looking, looking older than his years. While Hades is feared (naturally), his severeity has to do with strictness, not lack of empathy. The Hekatonkheires (3 giants) guarded Tartarus. Their name means hundred-handed-ones. They had 50 "heads" and 100 "hands". So, when Rogers ups the guards in the fort to 50, there are "50 heads and 100 hands" guarding the fort. She's offered "refreshment", but living visitors must refuse to drink or eat. Otherwise they are bound to stay there forever. Other allusions to concepts related to death or underworld: cold, suffocating, darkness, night, black, forgotten, dead end, rotting, soil, hell, ghosts, ...
Tempest's Caliban: 1st chapter refers to Charles Vane as Caliban, the slave creature whose mother died at birth and who was raised by Prospero to no avail. Caliban is intelligent but a base figure with low aims. After trying to rape Miranda, he's put in a "rock/cave" as his prison. Caliban wants to take Prospero's island, using unsavory arrivals. His mother was some evil witch, while his father is said to be the Devil (according to Prospero). Vane's seating, posture, portrayal and Eleanor's final judgment of him in the 3x09 scene together with his slave background, the murder of Eleanor's father, their affair, his alliance with Eleanor's enemies are easily made into an anology. Eleanor's first thoughts of him being troll-like when she sees him are adapted from Prospero's speech about Caliban.
Victim-murderer confrontation: the 3x09 scene is a therapeutic confrontation of victim versus criminal to learn his motive and cathartic chance for the victim to tell the criminal how they hurt the victim. One of the reasons I made Eleanor a non-Christian deïst and Rogers a Christian deïst, is that the latter would tend to lean to "forgiving the criminal", whereas Eleanor does not forgive Vane. She makes her peace with her dead father instead. Some crimes or betrayals cannot be forgotten nor forgiven, when the violator is unrepentant. Pity, mercy and avoidance can achieve a similar healing result.
Trauma-bonding: Their relation is that of a trauma-bond, very strong hormonal addiction. Pain and abuse form a bond that is as strong or stronger than love and the major reason why abuse victims return to the abuser. It compels people to behave in a way they don't want to, and might even be OOC. Hence, Eleanor's brain is affected by his voice. The sole remedy is 'no contact'. Eleanor sees Vane more and more in a manner that enables her to separate from him, after a period of separation such as her recovery period from her abortion, the break-up, and being away from the island. It lifts the "fog" such a relationshit creates in the brain. In order to re-establish the trauma-bond and overcome the separation the other partner increases the violence to trigger trauma feelings.
Father-mother: Charles liberates himself by killing Albinus, his devilish father figure. Charles saved/rescued Eleanor by killing Ned Low. Charles' motive aimed to liberate/rescue Eleanor from her father. Though a coward and weak, Eleanor's father was not an Albinus nor Ned Low. Charles makes an anology that does not hold up. The key is the mother. She's the glue that binds Eleanor and Richard, and a part of Eleanor. Him never having a mother is what makes him blind to her dead mother's influence. It's not the father that's her isue, but the mother who's her solution.)