Chapter 2

"The Heart of a Pirate: The Tale of Anne Bonny" is part of a 25 chapter serial fiction work co-sponsored by The Writing Salon and OurEcho. The work is being written by Jamie Wilson and edited by Allegra Huston.

As part of this of this project, we have developed a homepage specifically for the project to enhance the mood and allow you to lose yourself in the story. All chapters will be posted into the traditional OurEcho intereface, but we invite you to check out The Heart of a Pirate homepage - The Heart of a Pirate.

I don't remember aught of my life in Ireland, but I remember the ship that took us away from there, the salt and tar tang of it and the way the canvas of the mainsails snapped and winnowed in the sharp breezes. And I remember when we sailed into Charleston Harbor, the tall ships that rose up around us creaking and swaying with the faintest motion of the water, the ship's bells and gulls making loud noises that startled, and the gulls feasting on things floating in the water.

Mostly I remember the smell of fish and of the bodies on the ship next door, for it was a slave transport and when we sailed close they were casting overboard the bodies of the dead. I can't abide slavery for that reason, and it may have been part of what drove me from my pa, for he made his fortune on the backs of those unfortunates. I sailed alongside many an African man, and they are fierce and loyal.

These Africans, though, floated in the water, some mercifully face down, others with dead eyes looking up at me. A seagull swooped down and landed on one, and I turned away. My mam drew me away from the fo'c'sle of the ship, over to the boarding plank, and we waited til the ship had well docked and we removed us from there and its evil sights and smells.

A coffle of slaves huddled on the pebbled docks near us, and I remember alternately staring and looking away. But there were so many more things to look at! Seagulls dove and japed at one another for a scrap or two of food, and great crates of tea and cloth being shipped in, and barrels of molasses, while tobacco with its spicy smell and bales of cotton and ricks of timber in all lengths rested on the dock to be carried off by the ships.

I fell in love with the sea and ships that very moment, all the beauty and ugliness and life and heady stench of it.

And then I squealed in excitement, for there on the docks was Papa! Mam gasped, though she could not wave with her shackled hands without releasing me, and that she would not do. But he waved at her, and turned back to his negotiations with the ship's quartermaster, engaging in a ferocious argument. At last, he passed a small bag of coins to the man, and after an infinitely long time, we docked. The quartermaster waved to my mother to come down right away.

"Your papers has already been sold to this gentleman what wanted you."

Mama smiled -- no, she beamed. That expression is the way I shall always remember her, for her face gleamed in the setting sun, and her heart was in her eyes as she placed her hands, rubbed raw by shackles, into Papa's.

He looked down into her eyes, ignoring me as I hugged his legs. "Peg, darling Peg, will you marry with me? I can't live without you, me darling."

"You're certain?"

He nodded. "There's none will know better, my Peg. I bought a ring special for this moment, and if it makes you feel better we'll find a churchman outside the area to marry us in the eyes of God as well as man."

I watched, thumb in my mouth, as she flung herself into his arms, my beautiful mother, and Papa was laughing and holding her, or trying to, for her skirts kept slipping upward and he had to keep rearranging them. That was the day my Papa became a bigamist, for it was not til shortly after that his divorce papers were sent to the king, who promptly denied them. He hung up his law shingle the next day, and got a ton of customers the day after.

* * *

Not long after, Pa bought the plantation and we were all taken to live on it, and I grew up there with my own room and a flute and a serving girl of my own, a red-haired indentured lass we brought from Ireland because I would not have a black girl around me; it reminded me of those dead eyes. It was this maid, who was in her twenties and had a little girl of her own, whose daughter insulted me when I was fourteen.

I suppose I had a fair normal childhood, though I was always boyish in ways. I learned to sit proper, and to serve tea and clean and make certain a household runs well, and to read and cipher enough to keep household accounts. I also learned to speak French and Spanish, and that's served me well these long days on ship.

My pa well liked my love for boyish activities, and he taught me to sit a horse and ride rough if I needed to, and to shoot straight and aim my dagger for the groin, for he knew well what men were capable of if not deterred in a most direct manner. Mama fussed and argued with him, told him that no lady would learn these things -- and her grown up a poor farm girl, tussling with boys to preserve her own honor!

Papa just laughed. "I'd rather she learn how to keep herself an unsoiled lady than me having forever to worry about her, Peg."

I ran wild and free over the plantation, a sandy-soiled home that grew trees better than it grew cotton. It was the long-leaf pine that our plantation grew most, and that tree's provision of the seagoing necessities of resin, turpentine, and timber that made us friends in the shipping industry. My pa quickly left his legal practice to make money off these pitch pines and farming, and later went in partnerships with many ships when he supplied stores, free of charge or on credit, to repair and refurbish their vessels.

I disliked the pines. They stank, and were hard to climb and sticky besides, though the aged ones reminded me of tall ships. I preferred to ride through our few open areas, or to hunt rabbits and other small game. Mama didn't care for this when I finally was caught, and my activities were curtailed, but Papa was rather proud of it.

Yet an idyllic childhood such as mine could not last forever, and at last Mama captured me and shackled me into being a lady. She had at least been a chambermaid and had some idea of how a lady should get on.

"Crook your finger just so, Anne."

"When you sit down, do not cross your legs at the knee. Cross them at the ankles, and sit straight and leaning slightly forward. You should put a questioning look on your face when a young man speaks, and a pleasant smile the rest of the time."

"Anne, for heaven's sake, put on a dress and remove that garb."

She deviled me to death, I swan.

But I also ran afoul of Bride, daughter of my maid Sheila. Bride was red-haired and jealous, for my hair was prettier than hers, my clothes nicer, and my ways more ladylike than her servant's ways. That was because I WAS a lady, and she a harridan of a servant, and I did my best to put her in her place.

But this fool Bride, she took to taunting me. "I know a secret," she started, and this went on for days until, sick to death of her, I finally asked what the secret was.

"I know how you were born. You're a bastard. Your papa took your mama, and they weren't married then, and they aren't married now. Bastard."

Well, I have a bad temper, a foul and ill mood that blows through my head, washing away the webs of clear thought with a red tide of rage. And I saw red when Bride said that, indeed I did.

I hardly remember what happened, save that I ran to the kitchen and snatched up the first knife I saw. Mama, in her ladylike lessons, had forbid me to carry a knife. But the kitchen paring knife was good and sharp, and it was well for Bride that it had a tapered point and not a blunt one, for it came out easy enough after.

I chased that bitch down. I grabbed her by her long red braid, right there in front of her mother and the African slaves and everyone, and I commenced to stabbing. I only got the one good lick in, and her shrieking in terror and horror, before the girl's screams called her mama to her side, and did I catch it then! For no one would listen to my side, even had I been brave enough to tell.

For days, I sat in my room alone, with nothing to do but read and pace and play my flute. I would have climbed out the window, but I felt a little remorseful, for I had not meant to harm the girl quite so badly. Scare her, yes, even into leaving the farm, but I never meant to try to kill her.

And then, I also never wanted to be called a bastard. My parents were married, as far as I was concerned, and anything that happened before didn't matter so much now. At last, Papa came to see me, and in my agitation I yelled at him. "Why did you not tell me?"

"Tell you what? That your mother and I were never married? It doesn't seem important to me, for we're as much as married now. And you're our beloved daughter, the only child of my heart. It matters not what our status is."

"It matters to me! You taught me that good girls don't do such things."

"Aye, and good girls don't take to stabbing other girls, neither. I don't know what I taught you that made you think it was well for you to try to kill poor foolish Bride."

"You taught me that one person could beat another. You beat the slaves."

"And I beat my servants as well, and I've been told I need to beat you, though I haven't the heart. People take beatings all over, Annie."

"I want Bride gone. I want her away from me."

"Already done."

"And I want my own horse."

Papa laughed. "Hold there, now, Annie! You half-kill another girl and you ask me for a reward?"

I turned around, looking at him from under my lashes, and laughed. "It was worth a try."

"Well, and as it happens, things are going to change. Your mama has decided she's not capable of turning you into a lady and so we're sending you to the new girls' school that just opened up in Charleston."

Girls' school? "What do they teach?"

"How to be a proper lady."

"Sounds dreadful."

"You've no choice. You sealed your own fate, Annie-girl."

I spent two weeks in my room, eating bread and drinking water and nothing else, but when I came out again, Bride had been moved. She'd indentured herself to a farmer up the road for the money to head herself westward into Georgia, and I guess she made it for I never saw her again.

I hated that school worse than poison. Every day they dressed us in frilly clothes, and regularly took us for long shopping walks. I despise shopping for clothes. Calico Jack, now, he was ever a one for fine dress, but I never did give no mind to them. I was nothing but bored on their little feminine excursions, and I never did care to stay with them, but always slipped off. Sometimes they caught me, sometimes not, but they could hardly punish me worse. And then, I've always been good at behaving contrite.

One day, when I slipped away, there was a great hullabaloo in the street on the other side of a muddy alley, whistles and catcalls and shouts of "Thief!" This was interesting, at least, so I stood and waited to see what would come out the other end.

Even in the bright light of summer, this alley was dark and noisome, with flotsam from an old wreck filling parts with lobster traps and old worm-riddled boards. I could barely make out a shadow moving toward me, swaying a bit like a ship. Probably, I thought, a sailor just touching the land with his feet.

But it was no sailor, or no ordinary one. What do you imagine but a great hulking man in a purple frock coat and black beaver hat came lumbering out, running as best he could, for he was dead drunk and carried a sword in one hand and a big jug of rum in the other. I suppose he'd stolen the rum jug, for it was very large for a man to be carrying it, more the size for a tavern to keep on the bar.

He was the handsomest thing I'd ever seen up to that day, with long black curls on his head and dark skin, red lips, and he even had all his teeth. He may have been Spanish, for his cheeks had that swarthy look to them. At the least, his skin had seen a lot of sun. He wore a gold ring on every finger of his hand, and another gold ring in his ear.

And then when he lurched out of the alley, he saw me, all prim and proper, looking at him with interest instead of the horror any proper-bred young miss would have shown.

Well, he laughed out loud. And then he did something I have never to this day told a single soul.

He bent over me and kissed me, a nice kiss rather than one with tongues wagging and unwanted rubbing of bodies. I remember his half-grown beard tickled and the scent of rum on him burned my nose. He pulled away and looked at me cock-eyed, then shoved the sword under one arm, took one of those rings off his fingers, and pressed it into my hand, wrapping my fingers around it.

And then he ran away, for the pursuers had gotten wise to the alley and were coming up it.

I misdirected them, of course, pointed them south when he went north, and then I went back to the school to take my lecture. It was not til I was in my room alone that I could look at my prize. A large red ruby, it was, with a carved gold band and initials on the inside. ET.

I like to fancy the pirate was Blackbeard, for ET could well be Edmund Teach. Maybe it was and maybe it wasn't, for I never met him, but it's a nice fancy. I kept the ring until I left James, and then I pawned it for pistol and shot when I went on the account. I wish I had it back.

Story ID:	746
Written by:	Jamie Kai Wilson (bio, link, contact, other stories)
Story type:	The Heart of a Pirate
Location:	New Providence Bahamas
Year:	1720
Person:	Anne Bonny