Ida

It was a long ride down from the Wee Wah Lodge and into Manhattan on a weekend kindly given by Mrs Spedden when she didn’t need her maid so much. Even in early June, the weather there was hotter and harsher than anything Ellen Bird had ever been used to, back in Norfolk where she was born. The colours were all wrong too. Ellen felt a stab of loss in her chest, tucked under her right breast; she missed the summers in England. Not for the first time after, she was surprised by feeling anything at all, as if she’d breathed all of her feeling out in puffs of vapour in the icy air. As if she had no right to feeling at all, any more.

She hadn’t slept well since it had happened. Two months later, she still woke up struggling to breathe, and there weren’t enough sheets on the bed, ever, to make her feet feel warm. On the train, even in the oppressive heat of a New York summer, her feet didn’t feel truly warm. Maybe they never really would again? Perhaps that was the small price paid for her survival? If so, she would have given it again. She would have given anything to save herself from going into the water that night and, if that made her a coward then she was nothing that God didn’t make her, and it wasn’t like she hadn’t suffered, afterwards. It wasn’t like she hadn’t prayed for all those people, fifteen hundred and more souls, their bodies made of out of salted ice.

It wasn’t as though she hadn’t wept.

A woman asked her if she might take the seat beside her, close to the window, and Ellen rose to make way. Her overnight bag was tucked into the wire rack above her head, but she kept the large package close to her chest. She had carried it back from the middle of the sea with her, on her shoulders. She’d huddled in it on the deck of the Carpathia, away from the fearsome frost. She’d carried it all of that way, by then, and she would carry it a little further still. It was the least that she could do, when Mrs Straus had been so kind to her, in what time she’d known her. It hadn’t been very long, not in the grand scheme of things, but it might as well have been forever, for everything that had happened, and everything that Ellen had seen come to pass.

Around her, people nodded and dozed in the heat. Ellen closed her eyes but stayed awake, bolt upright in her seat, padded for comfort on long rides. She worked her fingers through the join in the edges of the brown packing paper, until she found the the fur, black as night and so soft. Sable, Mrs Spedden had said. Sable, which had once run free in Russia, and survived the cold twice over. When the steward had come, he’d suggested top coats and hats. It was wickedly cold up on the deck in the night. Ellen had helped Mrs Straus into her fur and her lifebelt before she’d put on her own coat. That was what you did. You helped your mistress, then you helped yourself. She’d still been fastening her buttons with clumsy gloved fingers as they’d made their way up onto the deck. All the way there, other maids had been brushing past them, bobbing heads in apology as they hurried down the halls. So many of those girls must have drowned, after they went back to boil water for tea. Nobody thought they were going to be out there for a very long time. Those other women thought that it would blow over and it never occurred to one of them that they might be sending those girls to their deaths. Mrs Straus had never cared for tea.

That ship was supposed to be unsinkable.

Between her glove and the cuff of her dress, Ellen’s wrist was bare. She’d never had the money to waste on a watch. That night on the deck she hadn’t worn a watch and so it had felt like eternity and no time at all, both at the same time. It had all happened too fast for her to truly understand it. It was the finest ship in the world, but it was a piece of fine work that unravelled to nothing but threads and pins in a matter of minutes. Gone, all gone.

People would like to talk about it, maybe: the bravery of some people and the cowardice of others…how quickly everything had fallen apart, there, right at the very end. They’d somehow make it loud and exciting, or dignified and solemn with the weight of some great history. It hadn’t felt like great history, at the time. What it had felt like, at the time, was knowing the date of her own death, down to the minute. What it had felt like, actually being there, was knowing that she could no longer believe in God as she had believed in Him before.

There had been children crying, and women crying, and even the odd man crying, and everything had gone to Hell. Ellen had been too frightened to make a sound, and Mrs Straus had taken her firmly by the hand and drawn her with her and made sure that she wasn’t lost. That was a brave woman, right there. That was a woman who had bore seven children, and lost one, and kept going. That was a woman who had sailed to a new world in her youth, and made her life there, and made it well. If Mrs Straus had been afraid then she hadn’t let it show. She had taken Ellen by the hand and drawn her with them, all the while following her husband, and never letting him out of her sight.

The band was playing. The band had been playing something that Ellen had last heard when people were dancing. Nobody was dancing then, but, all her life, Ellen would remember the song that they were playing. Mrs Straus had called it something in German, and Mr Straus had nodded his head.

Life boat no. 8. Ellen had turned thirty-one years old the day before entering Mrs Straus’ service, and two days before they left Southampton, but if she lived for forever and a day, she would never forget the number painted on the white wood of the boat. Eight. Her luckiest number forever. Women and children only, the officer had been saying. Women and children only, but he’d made an exception for Mr Straus with his grey whiskers, his hand holding onto Mrs Straus’ so tightly that, in their gloves, their knuckles must surely have been bone white. Ellen had already been in a seat on the far side of the boat, ushered in by the steward and Mrs Straus both. She couldn’t do anything but watch them, and try to hear them, over all the rushing noise of the people and the water.

Mr Straus had begged her, begged his Ida, in the end. He’d begged her to be a little selfish…To not always think of others. He had known, then, that he would not go in the boat while they were still women and children to take those seats, but he had hoped that Ida would go with Ellen, go on without him and live to go home and remember him as a hero to his children. He had hoped that Ida would go on without him, and live.

Ida Straus set foot in lifeboat no. 8. just the once. She’d lost her hat, somewhere in the chaos, so, when she swept the sable fur from her shoulders, her hair blew against her cheek in soft grey curls. She’d settled the fur around Ellen’s shoulders and said something to her in German, something that Ellen would never understand but never forget, either. I will not be needing it, she said, and stepped out of the boat and back onto the deck. The lifeboat started to lower, with a sick sway, and Ellen had lost the couple in the dark up above them, and she had never set eyes on them again.

The papers would repeat what Ida Straus had said next, said to her husband, when they held her up as an example of Jewish womanhood, of good wives. They’d report it word for word, as repeated to them by witnesses, but it came to Ellen mostly by the reading of her lips.

“We have lived together for many years. Where you go, I go.”

It had become her story then, she supposed. The story of Ellen Bird, who was born in Old Buckenham, Norfolk, the daughter of a shepherd and his wife.

Ellen Bird, who survived the sinking of the Titanic.

She counted thirty five women in lifeboat No.8. Thirty five of them, and how many of them had left husbands or fathers behind? Some of them wore very fine coats, but none of them as fine as the fur that Ellen huddled in, the one that Ida Straus wouldn’t be needing any more, no matter how cold she got before the end. As they watched, the ship sank lower and the sky got darker still, and the man in the boat, the one in the uniform, he told them to row towards the light in the north. They rowed, hard as they could, but Ellen never saw a light.

From the dock, she’d thought that it was surely too big to move under its own power and, as she watched it tilt and swoon into the cold, dark water, she wondered at the fact that it had stayed afloat for as long as it had, at all. Ellen felt every crack and every sig of the great ship in her bones and yet it all fell apart so quick. The water rose and lapped at the polished deck and people ran and screamed, with nowhere to go. They watched from the lifeboats, so afraid that, at the last moment, the whole ocean would somehow open and take them all down with Titanic, punishment for the sin of pride, for imagining that there was anything in the whole wide world that God couldn’t sink, if he chose. The propellers had come right out of the water, like teeth, like a woman with her mouth open, and crying towards heaven for release. A release that would never come, because Titanic was going down, and there would be no saving her. The great funnels fell, which looked to Ellen for all the world like someone throwing up her hands in utter despair, and, not long after that, the lights went out, and the women on the boat watched what happened next by the sickly green glow of the flares. They watched as Titanic folded in on herself, with a great cracking, splintering sound, and sank finally below the surface, and died.

Gone, all gone, and fare thee well, Titanic. Fare thee well.

There was such screaming, afterwards, such horrible noise. One of the men in the boat wanted them to row back, to pick up some of the poor souls who’d gone into the water, so cold, and some of the women agreed with him, but most didn’t. Most were fearful of being dragged under by the sheer weight of people scrambling to be saved. Ellen herself was too terrified to say a word, and, in the end, they started to row again, away from where Titanic had been, pulling towards the light.

Rowing, Ellen sweated under Ida Straus’ sable fur, and it took such a long time for all of the screaming to stop.

Pennsylvania Station was cramped and noisy, such a flood of people. Ellen stood still, the package clasped against her chest with one arm, and let them pass around her. She didn’t have it in her to force her way past them, through them. She’d done all the surviving that she physically had in her. There had been over two thousand souls on board when they’d left Ireland, nothing between them and America but all of that water. She’d never expected it to be so cold, the water. People had told her that they’d pulled nine people out of the water, but three of them had gone too far to be saved. Their bodies were already solid ice, and they died on the deck of the Carpathia. Rescued, they were, but never saved.

What she wanted, when she came out of the station, was a breeze, a gust of fresh air to blow away the train and the dreams and the smell of other people. The air was muggy and heavy. She wished that it would rain to cool things off. Rain was a good thing in summer, and a million miles away from the dry, dry cold which haunted her. Walking, the package was cumbersome. One handed, she shifted it against her chest so as not to drop it. It would be wrong to drop it now, so close to the end of her pilgrimage. As she walked down 7th Avenue, it occurred to Ellen that this would have been her home, if she’d come here with the Strauses; that she would have come to know this place well. Instead, Ellen had come to this place like any other migrant, and known that she could not go home. America was her home. She had been delivered. She had been given to a new world.

She was bringing the fur back. She was returning it to its rightful place. In her little room back in Tuxedo Park, she’d kept it folded under the bed, and, occasionally, she’d removed it, buried both of her hands in the soft thickness of it and remembered the little boat, remembered the rowing, and the praying, the soft sound of some woman behind her weeping for her man, lost at sea. Pull for the light, the man had said but the only light that Ellen ever saw was the one behind them. The Titanic’s lights, which, one by one, flickered, and went out. When she touched it, she remembered those things, but she also remembered the kindness in Ida Straus’ face and the iron in her handns when she’d pushed Ellen down into Lifeboat no.8, and gotten out herself, and gone back to her husband’s side. A paper that Ellen had seen called it heroism, Mr and Mrs Straus and what they’d done. They’d talked about radiance over all humanity, like something bright. Like the sun rising. To Ellen in the boat, all it had looked like was love, pure love. Simply that.

Mrs Spedden had checked for Ellen, found out that Mrs Sara Straus Hess lived at 154 West 22nd Street. As she turned the corner, onto the street of large, redbrick houses, Ellen rehearsed what she was going to say to Sara Hess, who had been Sara Straus.

Good afternoon, Ma’am. My name is Ellen Bird and I was in Mrs Straus’ service when she boarded the Titanic, and this was hers, and she gave it to me, and now I’m giving it to you, because its too fine a thing for me and if she’d lived then she wouldn’t ever have seen it with a person like me. I’m sorry that your mother died, Miss. I’m sorry that your father died. They were good people, Miss. They were good people, and they saved me, God bless them. They saved me.

On the doorstep of the house, Ellen paused. She set her overnight bag down by her feet, and she straightened her hat, and the plain collar of her dress. She hugged the fur against her like something very precious. Brown packing paper crackled. She reached up, knocking on the door with three raps on the brass knocker, shone to within an inch of its life. A shiver went down her spine, turned the sweat between her shift and skin cold. It had been two months, and still no sign of Ida Straus’ body. They waited as long as they could to bury Isidor, longer than they should have but, still, Mrs Straus had not come home to New York City.

As she stood on the doorstep, listening to footsteps coming towards her from inside the house, Ellen wondered if she was going to spend her whole life thinking about Mrs Straus and the hundreds of others who were never going to come home, if she was going to spend her whole life, however long she had left, just thinking about them, and pulling towards the light.

Bridget

In the Fall, the leaves in the cemetery change and some idiot’s been by with roses again, stems carefully de-thorned, wrapped in lengths of crêpey black ribbon which blows in the breeze. They are, she thinks, a thoughtless extravagance. Some days, she thinks that she likes that about them best.

Fall is a moving season.

She looks at the carved stone benches, the wet leaves, reddish and gold, and she things about these things and who knows what the other-she thinks. They have never pretended to understand each other. They come from the same house in different places.

The other-she wears a red bodice and she smokes a pipe, though the smoke is odourless and colourless here, in this place. The wind takes it. She sits with her knees wide spread on the wet stone bench, her ruddy skirt kilted between her thighs, her boots muddied, though God knows where the mud comes from. Because they never leave the bench. Someone carved their name there (their shared name), and kept them. They stay.

Bridget Bishop. Hanged June 10, 1692.

And that’s the truth of it, and there is no justice in the world but the justice belonging to God.

They sit together on that bench, shoulder to shoulder, thigh to thigh, a carefully black wrapped stem across their knees…the both of her. The two of them, and the children come running and laughing along the road. The children, not children at all but young women, tall and graceful in unfamiliar clothes, old enough to run homes and bear children, bear husbands, but still, they run like children, laughing, with the wind pulling at the unbound length of their hair.

And they are both jealous but they recognise that times do change, and that this is a moving season.

Here it is: to begin with, she was Bridget Wasslbee and she was not the best wife, but she tried. There was gagging in the marketplace and whipping, and all because she raised her voice. You shouldn’t raise your voice. Those girls, those running girls, they shout and laugh.

I am no witch. I am innocent. I know nothing of it.

Like it mattered what she knew and didn’t know. Women fall and are taken into history and sometimes they hang you so that, centuries later, the leaves will still turn.

“They made you up,” she says, when she’s feeling old and vicious and unloved. “They made you up because a good story is better than a bad one.”

The other shrugs, her linen stained above her red bodice, her pipe leaning between her fingers. Their shoulders brush and the roses falls to the floor and maybe someone will pick it up and maybe the wind will take it. There will be other roses.

“Better made up than forgotten.”

Too, too cruel. Too cruel by far.

These are the things which they do to each other. These are things which she does to herself.

June 10^th, 1692. Even if that wasn’t carved beneath her backside, she’d remember it. Red bodice and brown, they sit beside each other on the bench. Once, up on the hill, there was an oak tree, and they hanged her there alone, and both of them died.

And that’s the truth of it, and there is no justice in the world, not one bit.

(This memorial is dedicated to the enduring lessons of human rights and tolerance learned from the Salem witch trials of 1692).

Bonney & Read

The noise comes back first. The noise, the appalling noise, wood splintering, cannon firing, men screaming and the whole world reduced to something blown entirely apart. Yes, that’s it. We were blown completely to pieces. What was it that she said? Dogs…dogs. Something about…weaklings and women. She didn’t have to make it worse for them. It was already bad enough. They were boys, babies, not one of them over twenty and she honestly expected them to be brave? I loved her, I would have gone to the end of the world for her and yet, I could have hated her for the boys. Those poor boys.

That wasn’t how it was supposed to end.

No, no, no. Not there. Back. I can’t start there, I’ll finish too soon. Portsmouth. I like the way that that word tastes. Ports-mouth – round, like something beginning, and kissable like lips. My life, my little land lover’s life, could have been over; I’d had my three times three bad luck, and then I saw The Vanity floating out in the harbour. Easy enough to take a shilling, hers if not the King’s. Easy enough to swear featly to her, in her shiny leather, her stolen gold. There was no shortage of new recruits, and one by one we knelt and, one by one, we swore our loyalty to her, Anne Bonney, kohl-eyed pirate queen, star of many a sea. Calico Jack Rackham was there too, twirling his waxed mustaches, flashing his gold teeth, but it was Annie who held the eye. On second thoughts, forget Portsmouth in the drizzling rain. Start with them. Just picture it; pretty girl, handsome rogue, best ship in the world. Doesn’t it sound like a dream?

Let me start over once more. Once more. I’m new at this.

After Portsmouth, newly in Anne Bonney’s service, it was the Caribbean for us, for me. Not strong enough to heft cannon, not slight enough to walk the tightrope, powder at my hip, I spent a lot of time at Annie’s side. She’d been lonely without me, she said. She took lovers, though. Everybody knew (everybody did). Annie had a taste for pretty Christian boys, fed them rum and rolled them. Never let any of them really touch her, though, not until me. Annie had made herself into a tower; I watched boys scale her and slip, never to be seen again. And it wasn’t that I didn’t want into Annie’s knickers, I did, but that wasn’t the only thing. I was her confidante, see? There were things about her which nobody knew but me. I didn’t want to climb, Annie. I wanted to take her apart brick by brick.

“Come here and sit beside me, handsome boy,” she used to say. Like a dog, I was there when she called.

On the deck, she sat with her head against my shoulder. I knocked my wrist again the keys bunched around her neck to hear them chime dully.

“What are those for?” I said, as she wrapped them in her fist to silence them.

“A key for every room where I ever left something precious,” she said. Over the years, I pieced together what it was that Annie meant when she said ‘precious’ – gold, silver, jewels, paperback novels and baby bones. There is more to life, pretty girl, than riches.

Still, on the deck. We were on the deck, her head was against my shoulder, and I was thinking about the way that she smelt. In the sticky heat of the tropical night, she sweated, sweet and sickly but there was also the perfume in the coils of her hair, copper, gunmetal, gunpowder clinging to the tails of her coat. She smelt like a woman, but more than that. She smelt like the place between decks where the cannon are. Anne Bonney smelt ready to fire.

“Tell me a story, Read.”

“A story, Captain?”

“A star story, if you please.”

“A star story.” She could navigate by them but nobody had ever taken the time to tell her the stories. Vainly, I searched for something I knew; a hunter after a bear, or a faithful mutt, anything. They’re all messed up down there. I did the best that I could, though. I improvised.

“Did I ever tell you the one about the mermaid and the desert?” She shook her head against my arm. “You see those stars there? Her tail, see, and her tangled hair?” I was warming up. “If the Pacific is a woman (and she is) then the desert is a woman too. The sea, she’s a broad hipped, bare footed dancing dancing dancing girl, hands over her head good time girl, all things to all men, bearing no grudges, remembering nothing. The desert, though, she’s older, meaner. The desert fucks and eats the bones for breakfast. You know the kind of girl I’m talking about. Now…you imagine that poor mermaid, ripped out of her Pacific slumber, perfect and dumped in a damp whole in the middle of all that desert. Imagine being taken out of all that vast coolness and waking up one morning too big for your very small pond. Horrible, isn’t it? A pond. No…it wasn’t even a pond. A puddle. A drip. A teacup’s dream of utter fullness.”

“What did she do?”

“What did she do? Sang out of tune, of course. The world crime the mermaids have is discord. A siren would have had her eyes for less. And now the sky is the only blue she ever sees, a great dry desert, cold, and there are no tides for her now. She is a gilled creature; she chokes on clouds. Her world is murky and silt laden. She dreams of breaking waves.”

Annie made a soft, content sound and pressed her cheek against my shoulder, sleeping, rising and receding like the tide. She was as much of a puzzle to me as she was to everybody. She liked to bare her teeth and growl. The crew told stories about a husband who turned King’s evidence, a baby who died of lack of love. Anne Bonney was a storm, a lot of noise, but beyond that, what I remember is her when she was quiet. Annie was a roaring, wild girl, but it’s when I think about the quiet times that it all comes rushing back without warning, like opening floodgates. Like blowing charges. At night, I lay awake and imagined Jack touching her; the other ones came and went but Jack stood his ground. In my hammock, I cataloged her; the imagined weight of her breasts, the way that her hair would feel on my face if I closed my eyes, the taste of her if I sucked my fingers after. Was I ashamed? I never was. It never felt wrong to me. Wanting her was like looking at the ocean from the crow’s nest, from the very top of our moving world; it was bigger than all understanding.

Was I jealous of Jack? Oh God, yes. I hated everything about him where she was concerned. She was so difficult to talk to but Jack seemed to have the knack, the sort of thing that only that comes from long practice. I think that she needed the both of us, Jack and me, one for her left hand, one for her right. Annie had the feel of a not whole person; she needed other people to help her keep her shape. Yes. That’s it. There was too much of the sea in Annie. She never knew when to stop. There was a night, that night, not the beginning of the end but the point after which nothing could stay the same. We’d been in the islands for nine months or a year; I’d told her all of the star stories that I knew. That night was a wild party night. A blue heavy moon, Annie’s mouth spiced with fruit and rum, her jewels the spoils of running battles and all of her heat spilling over. Too hot to spend much time below, so we made a circle of warm light on the deck, out in the air and while men aged against each other and sang Annie danced in slow spirals, her linen skirts kilted up above her knees.

“Oh, Annie, oh, Annie,” I called to her, “Come sit here with me.” It was the first time in all of that time that I demanded anything of her. I was almost surprised when she came. She dropped down onto her hands and knees and crawled to me, too drunk to walk steadily. Behind me, Jack was saying something but I didn’t hear him, distracted as I was by the fragrant shadows between Annie’s breasts. She knelt in front of me, her hands resting on my knees, and Jack was still talking and I didn’t catch a word. Annie’s kiss was sharp and sweet, a flicker of her tongue. Oh, God, she caused a flood in me.

I think that that was what did it for Jack, that kiss. It’s that old thing about the Queen’s head, isn’t it; if the Queen stands, you bow, if she sits, you kneel, and, when the Queen is sleeping, you get on your belly and kiss the ground. Jack could take the stupid, gaudy boys, he could take the singing and the dancing and the noise, but he couldn’t quite take that moment when Annie crawled and her head was lower than mine.

When he slammed me back against the wall I let him; I’d seen Jack beat a man into unfamiliar angles for Annie or because of her. He always pleaded headaches or remorse by morning and Annie made a big show of weeping and sponging scrapes and bruises. I didn’t fancy scars, wasn’t sure that I could carry off a heroic limp. I didn’t want to know if Annie would weep for me.

“Did you ride her, Master Read?”

“What would be the difference if I did?”

“I am asking you if you fucked her?”

“Wouldn’t be the first, would I, Jack?”

When he hauled back and punched me, still holding my shirt, I heard linen tear. Much mending leaves weak points. Blood trickling, my nose hot and tight in a cold face, I looked up at him. He’d torn the front of my shirt. If I’d been a girl like Annie it would never have worked, not in a million years, but I was all angles, see, and there’s a lot that you can do with linen bandages pulled tight, and hope. When he yanked me to my feet, he pushed his hand inside my shirt. There wasn’t much to feel.

“You lied to us, Master Read.”

“Mary,” I said.

“Like the virgin,” said Jack, smiling.

“Nothing like that at all,” I said.

Of all the things that I ever expected of Jack, Jack, Jack the Cad Calico, I never expected that he’d turn locksmith on me. He’d tried it on with me before; boys, girls, it was all a warm body to Jack, but he’d made so much noise, caused such a caper that giving him the slip had been easy. I never expected him to sit down on the deck, make me sit down beside him, one arm around my shoulders, one hand still tucked inside my shirt. He fished a flask from somewhere.

“I’m in love with her.” It was the first time that I’d ever said it. Saying it made it real.

“You too?”

“But she’s so cold.”

“It isn’t cold,” he said, “so much as that she doesn’t love. Not anymore. Not anybody.”

“Why not?”

“Has to do with rotten husbands and dead babies and other lives.” He raised a toast to nobody in particular, to the sea, maybe, or to Annie. “There was a time when I wanted her to wear my ring. Now…now I realize that that isn’t our Annie, not at all. You make a wife out of a woman like that, you put out all of her light.” Yes. That’s exactly what he said. You put out all of her light.

“Why do you stay then? If she’ll never…if there’ll always be others?” I was just beginning to realize that what Anne did best of all was break people, by burning and cooling too quickly, leaving people cracked and useless after. She ruined Jack’s life. She ruined mine as well. She kept us there too long.

“Why?” said Jack, finally. “Because sometimes it’s just bliss to bask in borrowed light.”

When Annie found out, found me in Jack’s arms, she smiled.

“I always knew that there was something peculiar about you, Master Read,” she said. “Soft hands and stories indeed.” A normal woman might have screamed and thrown things, not shrugged her shirt from her shoulders and lifted her breasts in her hands. Annie was not a normal woman. Neither of us were.

“Come to bed, love,” said Jack, lifting the blanket, and Annie slid between our bodies, her skin cool like the spray from waves. And that was how it was then. Not for a long time, but for a while…It was…Yes. It was. It was two years, which didn’t feel like long time at all and probably wasn’t. In the autumn, not that there are seasons at sea or that far south, but in the autumn, Annie’s belly grew round and tight, firm around Jack’s child. We should have known that the end was coming, with Annie read to bear fruit and the sky always very blue. Bad things always happen on beautiful days. Fruit turns rotten.

The sun shone brightly on those handsome navy boys.

“I think that I’ll give it a miss, girls,” said Jack, stumbling on his trousers. Not a bad bloke, Jack, handsome and funny but not quite brave, which made him predictable, not bad.

“We’ll all go down the same way, Jack,” said Annie, lovely and angry and loading her guns. “You can do it shitting yourself and begging or you can do it properly, but you’ll still go down.”

Jack grinned, all bravado.

“Have a good afternoon, Ladies,” he said, and doffed his hat.

Outside the door, the world was very bright. Annie kissed me on the mouth in the light from the doorway and I mistook the first shots for the shudder of my heart. And I lost her, as she stepped out.

It was a losing fight from the very beginning, when Annie shot three of our boys for hiding and kept them in the hold forever. The things which Annie did are legend, now, shot the boys when they wouldn’t fight, called frantically for women like we were ordinary in any way. We were extraordinary. There was never anything like us. We were beautiful and terrible and Annie was bloody terrifying. I wish that I had died there, instead of the slow drowning which followed. I was never going to die there. That isn’t how stories like this one end.

With my head pulled back by my hair, I watched the Commodore strike Annie, watched her go down on her knees. At least if the Commodore was there, Annie would be safe, from rape and that kind of woman’s death. I was still wearing my boy’s coat. They bought Jack out in heavy chains, his eyes swelling shut, black ugly bruises. It was the last time that I saw Jack alive.

The trial was a face, a joke, a play on words. Annie pleaded pregnancy, and I followed suit. I couldn’t remember the last time that I’d bled by then, not in that way that didn’t leave a scar. I have a feel that a woman’s body can be all scar and where she’s sensitive are the places where she isn’t quite healed. Annie and I saved ourselves by showing ourselves up as whores; better a whore than a quick drop and a slow dance. Not that being a whore saved Jack. I didn’t see what happened to Jack, but I can imagine it; there’s no worse death for a handsome man than hanging. Hanging ruins a face. I heard what Annie said to him; “if you’d fought like a man, ye needn’t now be hang’d like a dog.” Sounds like her, doesn’t it? Always did know how to make things worse, our Annie.

What became of Anne Bonney…She never hanged, that’s for sure. Too clever for that, Annie. Liar. Bitch. Escape artiste extraordinaire. Anne Bonney, stuff of legend and banner headlines. There are a lot of ways that Anne Bonney’s story can end. Just think; Annie on her Irish daddy’s plantation, her bastard fostered, dwindling into an old maid’s life. No? What about the husband; the one who gave the game away, the one who gifted Annie with nothing but dead babies. John Bonney. What about him? Imagine what a trophy wife Annie would have made by then, sun-edged, scarred, grown tight and lithe and well-oiled, shrunk by salt to be her most useful size in her stolen gowns. Still no? No, no. Too, too sad. Okay. I’ll have one last try.

Listen:

Annie is nowhere where I’ve been before and she’s very happy. She is walking with bare feet and her hair is shining in the sun. She’s…she’s hand in hand with a little girl and the sea is as clear as a true heart and the exact blue of loss and there she is, Annie Bonney, pirate queen. There are other girls there, but she’s too old for that kind of life. She has another role now; my heart is buried in the soft warm sand and Annie is the keeper of our secret history. Annie takes her little girl swimming and it occurs to me that the sand that clogs my heart’s pathways is a bit like Annie’s memory, warm and soft but somehow coarse and it’s good. It’s very good.

“Is that it? That can’t honestly be it.” I thought that you were sleeping, thought I’d detected that sodden slowness in your breathing but no.

“That’s it.” Since you’re awake, I shift my body up against and under yours, lifting weight off of my numb shoulder. Your hair smells faintly of cigarettes smoke and beer; even after they sent the smokers out into the cold, the scent clings to their clothes.

“That can’t be it…There’s no happy ending. It doesn’t even end.”

“Nobody knows what happens to Annie. I told you what happened to Jack.” Stories, always stories with you. Pirates are exhausting. Next time, something easier…children, railways, a summer of slow days.

“Yes. Yeah, okay…but what about Mary? Don’t tell me she’s a…a…” Somehow the burns on your hands make them more graceful instead of ugly. “A literary device. Don’t tell me that she’s just a way of proving that you’re cleverer than I am.” I’m not cleverer than you. I just know different things.

“Mary, Mary.” I’m too tired for this; yeah, my story was imperfect, but I had thought that it was over and I’m sleep now and that ship…sailed. “Died of pneumonia. Very sad.”

“She drowned.” And that’s where you’re cleverer than me, lovely; the ways in which you care.

“It was a long time ago,” I say, and I’m sorry that the story which I told you was a sad one. You roll against me, your breasts pressed flat against mine and if you can’t see than you’re Anne Bonney and I’m Mary Read you’re blind and never leave me never leave me never.

“Tell me a star story,” you say.

“Alright,” I say.

Okay.