Chapter Text
By March, Mary finds she has forgotten what clean air smells like.
She remembers it in pieces sometimes. A salty breeze sharp over a ship’s rail. Rain on hot boards. Crushed leaves beneath her boots in the jungle at Tulum, green and bitter, wet with dew. Such recollections come most often with the fever, and for one merciful instant she wakes believing herself elsewhere.
Then she draws breath, and prison stench comes back to her entire.
Human waste stewing in buckets. Rotting straw. Sweat, blood, vomit, piss. The drains along the outer passage do not drain, but sit brimming beneath a black skin of grease and insects. When hard rain drives under the tiles, the channels swell and spill from one chamber to the next, carrying ordure beneath the doors. The women climb upon the stone ledge where they sleep, drawing up their skirts to keep the wet from their legs, while rats swim through the flood as boldly as fish.
There are twelve of them now, Mary knows. Twelve women in the chamber, though the number changes with every assize. Thieves, runaways, murderesses, debtors whose keepers have tired of maintaining them elsewhere. Two children sleep among them, one still at the breast, though the mother’s milk has near dried up. Only thin bars divide the sick from the sound. At night they lie side by side upon straw that has not been changed since before Christmas, each woman breathing into the next woman’s mouth.
If hell has an earthly door, Mary thinks, it opens into Kingston Gaol.
“Mary.”
Mary opens her eyes. The chamber swims about her, walls swelling and shrinking with the beat inside her skull. For a moment she cannot recall where Anne lies. Then a hand touches her wrist.
Anne is crouched beside the ledge, her red hair hanging in damp strings about a face made thin by hunger. Pregnancy has rounded her middle but stripped the rest of her near bare; her wrists are thin as kindling, her collarbones too sharp above the neck of her shift.
Mary looks at the swell beneath Anne’s hand and feels, absurdly, a small ache of gratitude. How strange a mercy, that they should both have quickened at the same time. If they must endure this torment, then at least they endure it together.
“You were muttering again,” she says.
“Was I?”
“Aye.”
“What did I say?”
Anne hesitates, which tells Mary enough.
She turns her face toward the wall. The stones are wet beneath her cheek, furred with a pale mold. “Never mind it.”
“You called for him,” Anne says.
Mary closes her eyes and places a hand over the hard swell of her belly. Beyond the chamber, someone begins to cough. The sound comes from the men’s side of the prison, deep and tearing, followed by retching and the splash of something striking the passage floor. Then silence.
Mary has listened to the voices beyond that wall for months. She had heard their curses, their prayers, their songs, the names they cry when fever takes them. Every night she has waited for Edward’s voice among them. It has never come.
She knows he was brought here after sentencing. She knows only that. Whether he still lives, no one will say. The rope may have taken him in the winter. Fever may have done what the hangman did not. He may lie sick within a dozen yards of her, or cold beneath the prison yard, and Mary has no means of learning which.
It does not matter. Her child—their child—will be born in a matter of weeks, her execution stayed no longer. She will hang, and if Edward has gone before her, she can only hope he will be waiting somewhere beyond the rope.
“Drink,” Anne says.
Mary opens her eyes again and sees the cup held before her, the water inside clouded brown. Something floats upon the surface. A dead gnat, upon closer inspection.
Her stomach turns at the sight of it.
“No,” she says.
“You must.”
“I shall only bring it up.”
Anne slides one arm behind her shoulders and begins to raise her. Mary tries to help, and discovers with a stab of terror she will not let reach her face that she has scarcely strength enough to lift her own head. Her belly drags heavily to one side, hard and cumbersome. The child shifts within her as she moves, a slow, painful rolling that makes her wince.
Anne feels it.
“There now,” she murmurs, pressing her palm to the taut curve. “There’s the little rogue stirring. D’ye feel him? He wants a drink.”
Mary leans against her, trembling with the effort. “You’ve no proof it is a he.”
“I’ve proof enough. Only a boy could cause such misery before he has drawn breath.”
A smile touches Mary’s mouth and vanishes at once.
Anne brings the cup to her lips. The water smells of the barrel, of old wood and iron. Mary turns away.
“For the babe,” Anne says.
Mary takes a swallow. The dirty water sits sourly in her stomach, threatening to return the way it came. She manages two more before she turns her face away, and Anne does not press her further, only sets the cup down upon the ledge where it will attract, within the hour, its own small congregation of flies.
“There we are,” Anne says, stroking Mary’s hair. “Was that so terrible.”
Mary grunts weakly in reply.
She can feel Anne’s bones through the damp linen pressed between them, every rib sharp as a stave beneath the skin. It is a terrible thing, almost beyond belief, that Anne Bonny should have been reduced to this. Not a month ago Mary had watched her stand nose to nose with a turnkey twice her breadth over a heel of bread, calling him a poxed, piss-drinking son of a sow until the man had struck her hard enough to split her lip. Anne had spat the blood at his boots.
Now her hands shake where they pass through Mary’s hair, her breathing a wet rattle.
“You ought to rest,” Mary says. “Not spend yourself over me.”
“I’ll spend myself how I please.”
Anne slides carefully onto the ledge and gathers what little straw remains beneath her shoulders. Most of it has gone black with moisture. The rest has been crushed to powder beneath the bodies of women who have slept, bled, sickened, and perhaps died upon it.
“Someone must tend you,” Anne says, “for you’ve made a poor business of tending yourself.”
Mary lets out a sound that might have been laughter if she had possessed breath enough to finish it.
Anne settles beside her. Across the cell, near the barred door, the nursing child begins to cry again. It is a thin, exhausted sound, more like the mewling of a kitten than the voice of a human infant. Its mother rocks it beneath her shift and murmurs nonsense into the dark patch of hair upon its crown.
“D’ye hear him?” Anne says after a while. “Poor mite.”
“He is hungry.”
“Aye. As are we all.”
Mary turns her head to look at her. In the gray light climbing slow through the barred slit of a window, Anne’s face looks older than it has any right to. Too old for someone of her twenty years.
“You’re not eating,” Mary says. “Whatever is brought to you, you give to me.”
“I eat well enough.”
“You push your share beneath my nose as soon as the gaoler’s gone. Think I don’t see it?”
"I've less appetite than you."
“You’ve none because you give me your share. You forget you are with child as well.”
At length Anne sighs. “What use is bread to me?” she says bitterly. “I’ve not felt the babe quicken in three days.”
Mary’s palm finds her stomach again. Beneath the coarse prison shift, the child lies heavy and low, so large now that Mary can hardly remember what her body looked like before. Her back aches without cease. Her ankles have swollen. At night, cramps seize her calves and wake her sweating, and sometimes a tightness gathers across her middle so fiercely that she thinks the pains have begun, only for them to fade and leave her trembling in the dark.
She does not know whether this is ordinary. There is no midwife in this place. Only women who have borne children before, and women who have watched others die trying.
A coughing fit takes her then, wrenching through her ribs until she must turn away and bury her mouth in the crook of her arm. By the time it passes, her eyes are watering and a sour, coppery taste coats the back of her tongue.
“If I do not live to see the noose—” she rasps.
“No,” Anne says quickly.
“You must listen.”
“I will do no such thing.”
Mary reaches for her, fingers closing around Anne’s thin wrist. Anne has turned away, but not before Mary sees the fear in her eyes.
“If I do not make it,” Mary says again, more softly, “and if you get free of this place—”
Anne laughs once, sharply. “Aye. I shall stroll out after breakfast.”
“—you must find Edward.”
Mary draws breath, but a cough rises at once, clawing up through her chest. She holds it down until the pressure swells painfully beneath her ribs and black motes gather at the edges of her sight.
“If he is here,” Mary continues when she can speak again, “and if you can find him, tell him there is still good in him.”
“Mary—”
“Tell him I knew it, even when he did not. Tell him I was never sorry for knowing him.”
“You can tell him yourself, you daft woman.”
Anne tries to wrench her wrist free. Mary’s grip tightens.
“Promise me.”
“No.” Anne’s voice cracks upon the word, and she looks furious with herself for it. “I’ll make no promise that gives you leave to die.”
“Anne, I beg of you.”
Anne’s bottom lip trembles. She presses it flat.
“Christ, but you are tiresome,” she says at last.
“So I have been told.”
Anne reaches for Mary’s hand then and threads their fingers, clammy palm pressed to clammy palm. Only yesterday, it seems, they were aboard the William together. Mary remembers the bright white dazzle of noon on the water; Jack bawling orders from the quarterdeck; the deck pitching beneath them while Anne cursed the men for hauling too slowly.
That life feels impossibly distant now.
“You said the father was a man aboard the William,” Anne says. “That is what you told me.”
Mary’s stomach turns with sickness and dread. Somewhere in the passage, a rat gives a small wet scream beneath a boot heel. The woman nearest the door lifts her head, listening for bread, for water, for the tread of a gaoler, and, finding none, lowers herself back onto the fouled straw.
Anne does not look away from Mary.
“It is his, is it not?” she asks. “Edward’s.”
For a while there is no sound between them but Anne’s rough breathing and Mary’s own, thin and uneven in her throat. She had thought, foolishly, that she might carry the truth down into the dark with her. Edward had enough sins upon his soul without being given one more grief to bear. If he yet lived, the child would only bind him to a woman already promised to the rope. If he were dead, what use was there in crying out that Captain Kenway had left a babe behind him—a babe he would never hold, never name, never know?
“Aye,” she says.
“When?”
When. A weary laugh catches in Mary’s chest and becomes another cough. Was it the evening they had slipped away to a private beach, where the palms grew black against a blood-red sky? Was it the day after, in his cabin aboard the Jackdaw, with rain beating hard upon the deck overhead? Or that midnight upon the shore, when she had let him draw her down into the sand, body to body and mouth to mouth, and had not thought once of consequence?
“The last we docked in Nassau,” she manages, wiping her mouth with the heel of her hand. “If you look for me to name the night, I cannot say. There were too many to count.”
Anne gives a short, incredulous sound. “Mary,” she says. “You cunning jade.”
“Spare me.”
“Too many to count, was it?”
“I said spare me.”
“I knew there was something.” Anne wipes her wrist across her damp forehead, her expression caught somewhere between grief and triumph. “Christ alive, I knew it. He ever looked at you as though you’d hung the blessed moon.”
Mary closes her eyes. “He looked at every woman so.”
“Not that way.”
“It meant nothing to him,” Mary says fiercely. “Edward has a warm hand for any willing creature and a soft word when it serves him. You know that as well as I.”
“I know he is led by his cock more oft than by his sense, but that does not make him heartless.”
Mary studies her a moment and looks away. It is true. Edward is not a heartless man. She had thought so in the beginning, when she had taken him for a handsome brute with gold in his eyes, a man made for pleasure and violence and little else. But he has proved time and again, much to her vexation, that there is a heart beating in that great chest of his. A troublesome heart. A heart she has unfortunately come to love.
“I am no stranger to loving cross-grained men,” Anne says, as if to comfort her.
Mary feels a pang of sadness then for Jack, who had gone to the gallows in November. Foolish, cowardly Jack, whose death had been brought to them by his murderers, soldiers come to the women’s ward to tell Anne how much he had struggled, how swiftly his courage had deserted him, how his fine coat was stripped from his back before the rope took him.
Anne’s face changes as if she has followed Mary’s thought and found him there.
“Aye,” she says. “Do not look at me so. I know what he was.”
“He loved you.”
“He was a fool. A strutting, bragging, silk-loving fool. But he had a merry heart.”
Mary says nothing. Anne’s eyes have gone foggy, fixed not upon the sweating prison wall but upon some kinder place beyond it.
“Does Edward know?” Anne asks at last. “About your babe.”
Mary shakes her head. She did not have the chance to tell him before Assassin business stole her from Nassau.
Anne gives her hand a squeeze, fingers brushing over Mary’s coarse knuckles. “Well, Jim,” she says lightly, though her voice is not light at all, “when your friends come to fetch us—the ones you told me of—we shall find him. And when we do, I’ll take him by the ear and hold him still while you tell him proper.”
Mary wants to tell her there will be no rescue—that she has not heard so much as a whisper from the Brotherhood since their capture. She wants to say that Ah Tabai may have already judged them lost, and wisely so. No Mentor would cast away good men for two condemned pirates, one sick unto death and the other carrying a child that may already be gone.
Yet hope has entered Anne’s voice. A little spark, weak but living, and Mary cannot bring herself to stamp it out.
“You may hold him by both ears, if it pleases you,” she says.
Anne smiles weakly. It remains upon her face for another moment before fading, worn away by exhaustion.
***
April arrives, and Mary can no longer rise without help.
The fever has ceased to come and go. It lives in her now, banked low beneath the skin, so that even when she shivers her face burns beneath Anne’s palm. Her cough has deepened. At times it takes her so violently that the women nearest must brace her upright lest she pitch from the ledge, and afterward she lies with her lips parted, drawing thin, whistling breaths while rusty stains dry upon the sleeve pressed to her mouth.
She has grown thinner everywhere but the belly.
Her face has sharpened. Her breasts and shoulders have wasted. The bones of her wrists stand up beneath skin gone almost translucent, and her fingers are so swollen in the joints that she cannot close them properly. Yet the child has grown vast and hard, filling her from hip to rib, dragging low between her legs. When it moves, the whole shape of it may be seen shifting beneath her shift, a heel or elbow pressing outward as though the babe seeks already to escape her failing body.
The spring rains have come early. For three days water has hammered the roof and poured beneath the broken tiles. The drains are swollen black and rank, and the floor of the chamber lies beneath two inches of filth. The straw has soured entirely. There is no dry place left in the cell.
Mary dreams of drowning.
She dreams that she stands aboard the Jackdaw while the sea rises over the rail, though the deck remains level beneath her feet. Edward is upon the quarterdeck with his back to her, calling orders she cannot hear. She tries to reach him, but her belly is too heavy and the water has climbed to her throat. When at last he turns, his face is not Edward’s but the gaoler’s, smiling through rotten teeth as he lifts the hangman’s rope.
She wakes choking. Anne is beside her at once, pulling her upright.
“Easy,” she murmurs. “Easy now. It was but a dream.”
Mary clutches at her arm. Her nails have grown soft and ragged, but Anne winces beneath them. She has worsened too. The wetness in her breathing has become a cough of her own, and her hair has lost much of its fire beneath dirt and sickness.
It is a small mercy that the child within her has stirred again. Mary felt it beneath her palm three nights after their conversation, a faint flutter low in Anne’s belly, and Anne had laughed and wept at once.
Now Anne shifts nearer and presses the back of her hand to Mary’s cheek.
“You are hotter.”
“Am I?”
Anne’s mouth tightens, but her hand moves gently through Mary’s damp hair.
Mary grimaces then, body drawing taut against the stone ledge. A pain has lived in her lower back for hours. At first it was no different from the constant ache she has borne these last months, but by afternoon it has begun to deepen at intervals, gathering slowly until it seems her very bones are being prised apart.
One happens while Anne is smoothing her hair from her brow. The cramp starts low in her back and rolls around her middle, firming the weight of her belly until it feels no longer made of flesh but stone. Pressure bears downward between her hips.
Mary draws in a shuddering breath and holds it.
Anne’s brows draw together in concern. “What is it?”
“Nothing.”
“Mary.”
“Only pains.”
“How long?” Anne asks. “How long have these pains troubled you?”
“I am forever in pain.”
“Do not trifle with me. When did they begin?”
Mary lets the breath leave her by degrees as the cramp loosens its hold. Sweat slips from her temples into the damp hair at her ears.
“Last night,” she says hoarsely. “They come, and then they pass.”
“That is the very nature of birthing pains, you witless creature.”
“It is not time. I have weeks yet.”
Another pain takes her before Anne can answer.
It begins in the small of Mary’s back, a deep, grinding ache that gathers bone by bone before closing about her middle. Her belly draws hard beneath her palm. She clutches at the edge of the stone ledge, breath hissing between her teeth—
And then warmth spills beneath her.
It runs over her thighs and down between her knees, pattering from the ledge onto the blackened floor. Clear at first, then pink where it mingles with old blood and the foul water creeping through the straw.
For one mortifying instant Mary thinks she has lost command of her bladder. It would not be the first time in these last weeks, weakened by fever and the child pressing low upon her.
Shame burns hot across her face when Anne jerks away, her gaze dropping to the spreading wetness.
“Your waters,” Anne rasps.
“No.”
“Aye.”
“It cannot be. I am telling you, there ought to be weeks.”
Mary presses both hands beneath her stomach, as though she might hold the child where it is by strength alone. Another warm trickle escapes her and sinks into the straw.
“No,” she says again. “No, I shall not have it here.”
Anne’s face tightens. She climbs onto the ledge beside her, slipping one arm around Mary’s shoulders before the next shiver can take her.
“Listen to me,” she says. “You are going to have the babe here—both of us—and all shall be well.”
“We’ve no clean water,” Mary whispers.
“We shall find some.”
“There is not so much as a clean rag in this cursed hole.”
“Then we shall use a filthy rag and curse it afterward.”
“Anne—”
“All shall be well,” Anne says again. “The babe has endured this place as long as we have. It is a stubborn little thing already. It will come forth squalling and ill-tempered, just like its mother.”
A cough rattles from the next cell, then. A face emerges from the darkness beside the partition: an elderly woman with silver hair shorn close to the skull. A washerwoman taken up for receiving a parcel of stolen linen and left to rot when no one came to pay her fees.
“Stop feeding the poor lass fancies,” she says.
Anne’s head snaps toward her. “I tell her what she needs to hear.”
“She needs truth more.”
“She needs a midwife.”
“Aye, and unless one tumbles down from Heaven with clean sheets beneath her arm, she has you.”
Anne’s face empties. “Me?”
The woman pulls herself nearer to the partition, wincing as her swollen joins scrape across the stone. “You have hands, have you not?”
“I have never birthed a babe.”
“Nor had I the first time one came upon me.” The old woman’s eyes drop briefly to Anne’s belly. “And you would do well to learn. Your own hour may not be so distant.”
Mary’s fingers close around the edge of the ledge as another pain begins to gather in the small of her back. It rolls slowly around her middle, drawing the great curve of her belly tight beneath the shift.
The old woman watches it happen.
“There,” she says. “Put your hand upon her, redhead.”
Anne obeys. Her hand spreads over the crest of Mary’s stomach, and her eyes widen at the unnatural hardness beneath her palm.
“Wait till it eases,” the woman says. “Then you must see how low the babe lies.”
Anne looks to her. “How?”
“Feel above her cunny.”
Mary’s eyes cut angrily to the partition. Anne’s brow lifts.
The woman gives them both a toothless look of impatience. “We have all the same parts, girls. No need to faint for hearing them named.”
“No one is feeling anything,” Mary says through gritted teeth, pressing her head against the wall. “Do not come near me.”
Anne’s hand remains upon her belly, though she does not move it lower. “Mary—”
“I mean it.”
“The woman is right. What if the babe is coming feet first? Or lies crosswise?”
“Then it does.”
“You will die.”
“I shall die anyway!” Mary snaps.
The pain loosens at last. She sags against the stone, trembling, sweat slipping coldly into her ears and hair.
“They will give me what time they deem proper for the milk to dry, and then put a rope about my neck,” she says. “Whether I bleed out upon this stone or swing in the yard, what difference does it—”
“Quiet!”
Anne’s voice cracks through the chamber so sharply that even the child mewling at its mother’s breast falls silent.
Mary stares at her. Anne has gone white beneath the grime. Her hand is still pressed to Mary’s belly, fingers spread over the place where the child lies beneath the rigid flesh.
“Do not speak so,” she says. “I will strike you.”
“You have not strength enough.”
“Try me.”
Her jaw twitches with anger. She lowers herself onto the wet stone before Mary and sets both hands upon her knees.
“Mary Read, you are the toughest bitch I ever knew. You have stood in shot and smoke when better-fed men fled weeping for their mothers. You shall not lie here and tell me a child has bested you before it has so much as shown its face.”
Mary closes her eyes.
“I am tired.”
“Aye. Be tired.”
“I have no strength left.”
“Then use mine.”
Mary lets out a shaky sob.
Anne’s face softens, though her voice does not. “Come,” she says. “Let me see.”
When she eases Mary’s thighs apart, Mary offers no resistance. She has not strength enough for modesty now. She sags against the wet stones while Anne gathers the sodden shift above her knees, exposing her to the foul air of the chamber.
Anne’s fingers are clumsy at first.
“Not there,” the woman says from beyond the partition. “Higher. Press above the bone.”
“I am pressing.”
“You are pawing at her like a dog at a buried joint.”
“Then cease your prattle and tell me plain.”
Fingers probe and press. The old woman murmurs instructions: where Anne ought to touch, what hardness she must seek, how to know whether the child has settled deep. Mary feels it all from far away, as though she is being handled in a dream.
She looks elsewhere.
A crack runs across the ceiling above them, narrow at one end and branching at the other like a black river seen from a great height. She has studied it for months, assigning it likenesses as one might do with clouds. Once it was the coast of Cuba. Another time it became the whole line of the Spanish Main, every dark stain an island and each bright bead of damp a ship lying at anchor.
Now she follows it away from herself.
Past the prison roof. Past Kingston, its red tiles and crowded lanes. Past the harbor forts and the white sails riding beyond them. Out over the shoals, where the water deepens to blue and no wall can contain it.
For one brief instant she is standing at the bow of the Jackdaw.
The wind lifts her hair. Canvas cracks overhead. Edward is somewhere behind her, laughing, his voice carrying warm along the length of the deck.
“I feel it,” Anne says.
The deck vanishes. Mary’s eyes move down.
Anne is between her knees, one hand pressed beneath the hard shelf of Mary’s belly, the other braced against her thigh. The red has gone from her hair in the prison dimness. She looks almost gray.
“What?” Mary asks.
“Something hard.”
“The head,” the old woman says.
Anne looks toward the partition. “You are certain?”
“Aye. The babe lies where it ought to.”
Anne eases the shift down over Mary’s knees. “There,” she says. “You see? One calamity avoided.”
Mary looks again toward the ceiling. The crack has become only a crack. Wet stone. Mold. A drop of water gathering along one black branch until it swells and falls.
“It is coming,” she grits out, another pain gathering before the last weakness has left her limbs. It begins in her back, a low inward turning, and already she knows it will be worse than the others.
The pain deepens as the contraction closes around her. She grips Anne’s fingers and bends forward, chin to breast.
“Do not hold your breath,” the old woman says.
Mary discovers that she is. She lets it out in a broken moan.
“There,” Anne murmurs. “Again.”
Mary draws another through her nose. Her hips feel as though they are being pulled apart with wedges. Something presses hard against the base of her spine, then lower, a great unyielding weight bearing down between her thighs.
“I must push,” she gasps. “I cannot help it.”
“Not yet,” says the old woman. “Pant, if you must. Quick breaths.”
Mary tries. Her mouth opens, breath coming shallow and fast, but her body bears down despite her. The muscles of her belly seize with instinct, and a cry tears from her throat.
The women in the chamber stir.
The nursing mother lifts her head. A young thief crawls nearer from the opposite wall, dragging a ragged blanket behind her.
“Shall I fetch the turnkey?” she asks.
“Fetch him how?” another woman mutters. “Through the bars?”
“Shout,” Anne says desperately. “All of you. Shout till the whole cursed gaol hears.”
The cry rises at once.
“Turnkey!”
“Gaoler!”
“A woman in travail!”
Hands strike iron. A wooden cup rattles along the bars. From the adjoining cells, other voices take up the call, passing it down the women’s ward until the dank room rings with it. It continues until their voices fray, until boots sound at the far end of the passage, walking without haste.
The redcoat who appears beyond the bars is not the gaoler they know. He is young, scarcely older than Anne, with a narrow, pitted face and pale brows that nearly vanish above his eyes. His musket rests easily against one shoulder.
He stops before the cell and looks upon them with annoyance.
“What devil’s din is this?”
“She is in labor,” Anne says. “Fetch a matron.”
The soldier raises the lantern in his hand.
Its light reaches Mary upon the ledge. Her knees are drawn up, her shift wet and clinging, her hands locked beneath the great curve of her belly.
He looks at the soaked straw. Then he smiles.
“Well,” he says. “So she is.”
“Fetch someone.”
“I heard you.”
“Then why do you stand there?”
The young soldier leans one shoulder against the wall, his lantern held high enough that its light falls through the bars and lays the chamber bare: the black straw, the women huddled in their rags, Mary upon the ledge with her shift soaked beneath her and both hands braced around the hard weight of her stomach.
“Because,” he says, “I take no commands from a pirate whore.”
Anne rises too quickly.
For one moment Mary thinks she will fall. All color leaves Anne’s face; her hand flies to the rounded swell beneath her shift, fingers splayed as if to steady the life within her. Then fury takes the place of strength. She steps to the bars and closes both hands around them.
“You shall take one from me,” Anne says, “if you wish to keep your liver.”
The soldier smiles. “Watch your tongue, Bonny. The only thing sparing your life is the brat in your belly.”
Behind her, Mary cries out.
Her chest heaves. She bows over herself, one hand braced upon the ledge, the other pressed between her thighs as though she might hold herself together by force alone. The pain has come back stronger, grinding low through her hips with a pressure so deep and terrible she cannot think past it.
Anne turns at once. “Mary?”
The panic in her voice amuses him. The soldier rests more comfortably against the stone, watching as Anne hurries back to the ledge.
“Which father belongs to which?” he asks brightly, slotting the musket between the bars and gesturing with it to Anne’s swollen belly. “Rackham’s whelp in the red one, I suppose. Poor Jack did not look so fine upon the scaffold.”
“Hold your tongue,” Anne spits over her shoulder, eyes shining with murder.
“He kicked, he did. Kicked like a rabbit in a snare.”
Mary feels Anne’s fury as plainly as heat from a fire. It seems to pass through the arm she has laid across Mary’s shoulders, making every muscle in her go rigid.
“Leave him,” she pleads. “Don’t listen.”
“And this one,” he says, turning the muzzle on Mary. “Mary Read. Or is it James Kidd? God save us, what manner of man would sow his seed in a curiosity like you? Edward Kenway, perhaps?”
Mary’s face collapses at the mention of his name. The soldier chuckles darkly, pleased that he has struck a nerve.
“So that is the truth of it, then. Kenway’s bastard, eager to meet the world,” he says. “Should I tell the babe how its father fouled his breeches when he swung? How he called upon God after spending half his life spitting in his face?”
Mary grits her teeth, tears springing to her eyes. Dead, she thinks. If not for the child forcing its way out of her body, she might have gone entirely out of herself with grief. Edward is dead. Edward is dead, and she never told him. Never let him set his hand to her belly. Never let him know that some part of him had taken root beneath her heart and lived.
“You lie,” Anne hisses.
“Hanged clean, or near enough,” the soldier taunts, flinty eyes flicking back to Mary. “They say he danced a pretty jig at the end. That he cried out for you. Mary, Mary, Mary, like a child bawling for its mother.”
“You lying dog!”
“Quiet, bitch!” The soldier snarls. The muzzle scrapes iron and comes level with Anne’s breast. The soldier’s face has changed now, the amusement thinning into anger at being challenged by a woman he cannot strike without opening the cell.
“You’ll keep that tongue behind your teeth,” he warns, “or I shall teach you some manners.”
Mary’s body bears down before she can stop it. A raw, tearing pressure forces through her, and she wails, the child moving lower within her.
The soldier spits crudely into the passage. “I’ll tell the gaoler there is trouble,” he says, turning on his heel.
“Tell him there is a woman in travail,” Anne snaps. “Come back with help, damn you!”
His footsteps continue down the passage. The lantern light swings along the wet wall, grows thin, and is swallowed by dark.
“Redhead,” the old woman says sharply. “Leave him. The babe will not wait while you curse a fool.”
Anne’s fury falls from her face at once. She sinks to the damp floor between Mary’s thighs again, guiding one of Mary’s hands to her arms.
“Hold fast to me,” she says. “Hard as you please.”
Mary does, her fingers closing on her like hooks.
“What do I do?” Anne asks the old woman.
“Look. See where she is.”
Anne shucks up Mary’s shift again, her face paling.
“What?” Mary gasps. “What is it?”
“The head,” Anne says. “I can see the head.”
“Good,” says the old woman. “Good. Now, lass, you will need to bear down on the next one. As much as you can.”
It comes vast and merciless, starting in Mary’s back and sweeping through her until there is no thought left in her but the need to force the child down and out. She bears with it as commanded. The pressure becomes a ring of fire, sharp and splitting, and Mary screams without shame, without restraint, not caring who hears her. Let Kingston hear. Let the governor hear. Let Edward, wherever they have buried him in darkness, hear and know she is still alive.
“That’s it,” Anne says, voice shaking. “That’s it. I have him. Mary, I have him.”
Another push, then another, then another. The head comes fully.
“Shoulders now,” either Anne or the old woman says—Mary cannot say, because all the sound around her seems to be coming from underwater. “One more. One more good push, and easy does it.”
Mary howls, the sound torn from the last reserves of her strength. She feels the child shift inside her, feels Anne’s steady hands guiding what her body can no longer hold. Then comes a sudden, aching release—a slippery rush—and the weight that had been part of her for so many months is gone. The babe slips free into Anne’s waiting hands.
“A girl!” Anne exclaims, laughter and tears mingling in her voice. “Mary, do you hear me? We were wrong. You have a daughter. A beautiful little daughter.”
A daughter. The thought drifts through Mary’s exhausted mind as she sinks back against the wall, every muscle trembling, sweat cooling on her skin. A little girl.
Perhaps she will have Mary’s dark hair and Edward’s fair eyes. She imagines a child racing barefoot across a ship’s weathered deck, laughter carried away on the salt wind. A daughter who will grow up with a blade in one hand and a book in the other, equally at home among pirates and Assassins. A child who will never spend a single day wondering whether she is loved.
“Please,” Mary whispers, reaching for her. “Let me see her.”
Anne, stunned, does not give the child over.
“Anne,” Mary says. “Does she cry?”
“Rub her down,” the old woman commands. “Quickly, now.”
Anne obeys and bends over the babe, rubbing hard at the child’s chest with a fouled rag. “Come now,” Mary hears her mutter. “Come, little maid. Draw breath.”
The old woman hangs her head in defeat. “Redhead.”
“She is only—” Anne rubs harder, her own breath catching. “Come, sweetheart. Come. Be not so idle at the very start.”
Mary leans forward with a wounded groan, squinting down where Anne kneels.
The babe is very small. Smaller than Mary had imagined a child could be and still be formed entire. Slick with blood and vernix, limbs folded close, a dark cap of hair plastered against the skull. She lies limp against Anne’s filthy shift, her head lolling against Anne’s wrist. One arm hangs loose, impossibly delicate, fingers curled.
There is no coughing, no crying. No startled gasping of life.
“Give her to me,” Mary croaks.
Anne shakes her head, tears spilling freely now through the dirt on her face. “Wait.”
“Give her to me.”
“Mary—”
“Give me my child.”
Slowly, Anne lays the girl in Mary’s arms. Mary gathers her close against her breast, one hand cupping the tiny head. The face is very small, the eyelids sealed. While she has her mother’s coloring, Mary can see plainly that the babe has her father’s mouth. She has seen those lips before.
Mary counts the fingers because there is nothing else to do. Five on one hand, five on the other. She touches each one with the tip of her own and thinks of all the hands that will never be held by this one. Of all the ropes and rails and cups and little wooden toys. Of Edward’s thumb, perhaps, caught in that impossibly small fist.
Anne’s face crumples. “I tried.”
“She—” Mary begins, and turns her face away to steady herself. “She moved this morning. I felt her. She turned beneath my hand.”
“Aye, love. I know.”
“She kicked me half to pieces these last weeks.”
“She did.”
“She was strong.”
Anne nods quickly, fiercely, as though she would fight any soul who dared deny it. “She was.”
Mary presses her cheek to the child’s damp head. “I would have liked to hear her cry,” she says mournfully. “Just once.”
Anne wipes at her own face and fails to stop the tears.
The afterbirth comes at last, and the cord is cut with a sliver of broken pottery one of the women offers up, wiped as clean as anything in that place can be. The babe is wrapped in a scrap of torn linen. Anne cleans the blood and birth-water from Mary’s thighs with shaking hands, whispering apologies Mary scarcely hears.
She holds her daughter until dawn. When the gaoler comes, he tells her the child is to be taken for burial with the other infants born dead in the prison.
Mary does not surrender her at first. Her arms lock tight around the small bundle, and for one terrible moment it seems they will have to tear the babe from her by force.
At last, with Anne murmuring brokenly beside her, Mary lets them take her.
Only when the bundle has passed from her hands does she understand what she has failed to do. She had not named her.
* * *
Two days after the birth, Mary loses all sense of where she is.
The world has loosened slowly, the walls of Kingston Gaol having fallen away like a teased knot. The bars remain, and yet they are not bars. The stones sweat, and yet they are not stones. The women speak, and their voices pass through her as wind through sailcloth, full one moment and gone the next.
She lies upon the ledge with her knees drawn crookedly beneath the ruined shift, too weak to straighten them. Beneath the sour linen, blood still seeps from her in slow, dark tides Anne tries to hide from her by folding rags between her thighs and taking them away before Mary can look. But Mary smells it. She smells herself rotting by inches. Blood, milk, fever-sweat, prison filth. The stink of birth without life.
Her breasts have come in hard and aching.
That seems, to Mary, the cruelest joke of all. The child is gone, and yet her body has not caught on. It labors, preparing nourishment for a mouth that will never seek it. Sometimes milk wets the front of her shift, and she stares down at the spreading patches in dull confusion, wondering why she has spilled, why no babe has been brought to her, why the small weight is not laid against her breast.
She remembers, briefly, and then she does not.
“Mary.”
Anne’s voice comes from very far away. From the far side of the sea, perhaps. From a ship.
“Mary, look at me.”
Mary opens her eyes.
Her mother sits beside her. For a moment this seems perfectly ordinary, though her mother has been dead so many years that Mary cannot remember the precise sound of her voice anymore.
“Mother,” Mary says.
Anne’s face changes.
“No,” Anne whispers. “No. It is me.”
She blinks sluggishly. When she opens her eyes, her mother has vanished, and the narrow passage is filling with water.
It pours silently through the barred window, clear and blue, not the black filth of the prison drains but seawater, green where it gathers in the corners. Fish move through it. Small silver ones, flashing near the ceiling. The women on the floor do not seem alarmed. They sleep as the tide rises over them. The nursing child floats past Mary’s ledge, curled and peaceful, its mouth open as though searching for the nipple.
Mary reaches for it.
Anne catches her hand. “No. No, stay down.”
“But the child—”
“There is no child there.”
“She is raving,” the old woman says.
“I know what she is,” Anne snaps. Her fingers close around Mary’s wrist, two bones wrapped in damp skin. “Mary. Mary look at me.”
Mary tries. She attempts to sit up, but finds herself coughing. Blood comes up warm and coppery. It beads upon her lips before slipping toward her chin.
“Oh,” Anne says, and now she is crying. “Oh, Christ.”
A sound comes then from somewhere further down the prison. Not thunder, though it rolls along the stone as thunder might.
Boots. A great roar of many boots.
The water shudders. The silver fish scatter. Mary turns her head against the stone and listens.
She hears shouting. Voices, cut short by other sounds: steel scraping steel, the blunt thud of bodies meeting wall and floor, a cry that begins in rage and ends in a wet choke. The women in the chamber stir. One of them sits upright at once, eyes wide, clutching her ragged blanket to her breast.
Shadows fall across the bars.
Mary can see men in the passage, though she cannot make sense of them. He has a wobbly gait, as though the floor will not stay under him. His face is gaunt beneath grime, his beard grown rough along his jaw. There is blood at his temple, dried black against the fair hair hanging loose around his face, and one side of his mouth is split.
In his hand is a ring of keys.
Distantly, Anne’s voice rises in alarm, then disbelief. “—are dead.”
“I was in irons,” the man says, wrestling the key toward the lock. “And Mary?”
“She is in a bad way, Edward.”
Edward? Mary’s eyes roll beneath the lids. She thinks fondly of the first time they met—in Nassau, introduced by Anne. Edward Kenway had smiled as if the whole world existed for his amusement, fair and handsome and insufferably pleased with himself, and she had disliked him at once.
“Mary,” he says softly, his voice cracking.
Her eyes open to slits. He is kneeling over her now. There is blood on his shirt. Blood in the fair hair at his temple. His face swims above hers, not the face she remembers from the deck of the Jackdaw or the beaches of Nassau. He looks older. Frightened in a way that does not become him, though it moves her strangely to see it.
She studies him through the fever-haze and thinks, with wonder, that she has never seen Edward Kenway so sad.
“Have you come to take me away?” she rasps.
To heaven, perhaps. Or hell. Or whatever place is prepared for those who have lied and fought and loved badly, and too late.
Edward’s face falls. The brave set of it goes slack, and all the grief beneath shows plain.
“Aye,” he says, and his hand comes to her cheek. “Aye, lass. I have.”
His palm is warm. The dead ought not to be warm.
Anne makes a small sound behind him. “She has been wandering. Fever took her hard after the birth.”
Edward’s eyes do not leave Mary. “Birth? Where is the babe?”
“She did not make it.”
Another clamor rises down the passage. Furious shouts, followed by the unsheathing of swords. Ah Tabai appears at the open door, rain darkening his robes. There is blood on his sleeve that does not appear to be his own.
“Kenway, we must go,” he says.
Anne moves closer to gather Mary’s sodden shift down over her legs, assisted by Ah Tabai’s hand at her arm. “Mind how you take her up. She has bled and bled, and the fever—”
“I have her,” Edward says, and slides one arm beneath her shoulders.
The movement sends agony blazing through Mary, ripping from between her legs up into her belly. She cries out before she can stop herself, and Edward freezes briefly before lifting her up into his arms.
“I am sorry,” he murmurs into her hair. “Mary, God forgive me, I am sorry.”
It is the only thing she hears before the pain swells beyond bearing. All of it—Edward’s arms, Anne’s voice, the wailing of women begging to be saved too—slips away from her at once.