If the Tide Turns, page 19
“Bellamy, wrap up your dramatic act and come quick. The prisoner, the carpenter—Davis. He’s escaped.”
Sam came to himself slowly, then all at once, vision tunneled, his whirling thoughts narrowing on a purpose, an outlet for the windstorm, a rudder in a directionless disaster. Bile lingered on his tongue. How dare Davis escape.
How dare she break our promise.
And just beneath that: How dare I break mine?
“Search the town,” Sam yelled, springing up and balling his fists. “Find him.” He bolted back for Hamann’s tavern. The island was small. Too small for one person to hide. He’d threaten the devil out of Hamann if he had to. Davis wouldn’t get away from him.
I’ll burn the town down, Sam thought with blind fury that made his skull rattle. I’ll burn this whole place to ash if I have to.
CHAPTER 33
“Don’t lie to me,” Justice Doane said, his lip curling as he glared down at Maria in the jail. His thick fingers wrapped around the iron bars. “You were seen. Who helped you? How did you escape?”
Here we go again.
Maria leaned against the stone wall, the fresh scabs shooting warnings in response to every word hurled at her. Despite the physical discomfort, Maria felt a strange calmness, a reassuring certainty similar to the night before the whipping. She would never give Elizabeth away. There was nothing they could do or say to change her mind. She merely had to endure.
“Shall I call in the witnesses?”
“Do what you like, but there is nothing to report. I got away. You got me back. You have me trapped here in this little cell, do you not, for a crime I didn’t commit? What seems to be the problem here for you?”
“Wicked, disrespectful woman,” Doane said, spittle flying. Maria hid a thin smile. Watching Doane had proved an interesting sport, perhaps a way to cope, seeking a distraction from her visceral fears of bodily pain. He’d begun to unravel like a botched weaving with each passing day. Baffled by Maria’s lack of cooperation, he’d grown all the more insistent and appeared all the more ridiculous in his efforts to control. His flushed cheeks puffed out like a child’s during a tantrum, and blotches formed around the edges of his mouth.
Maybe we can change the world, Maria said to the audience that used to be Sam, but sometimes their baby. She didn’t know who she addressed now. Maybe God. Maybe herself. Maybe all of them at once. In small ways. In risking everything, I have stumbled upon a startling power that I never knew I possessed.
Fearlessness alongside fear. A refusal to participate in this narrow life they had on offer for her. An unwillingness to play the part they’d written for her to fill so they could congratulate themselves by comparison.
They’d found Maria the morning after she and Elizabeth had angrily parted ways. Limping down the brambly sand path, going northward to Billingsgate, she hadn’t made it far without the cover of night. Fortunately her captors, more merciful than Doane, brought Maria to her cell without checking her pockets or confiscating her herbs. At least she’d have some meals, however meager, and shelter from the unwieldy spring weather as her body recovered from the birth and lashes.
Had Eastham ever elected to whip a woman more than once? Maria didn’t know. But she took some small comfort in knowing they wouldn’t kill her. Not after the united horror from the Massachusetts colonists following the events in Salem.
But what else they might do, Maria figured she’d soon learn.
“If you fail to provide a name, you will confirm our suspicions. This dark-hooded figure was Satan himself. You sold your soul in exchange for safety. Do you deny it?”
“Yes, I deny it. You speak nonsense, and you know it.”
“Then who? Who else?”
Maria’s eyes narrowed. “I have nothing new to say.”
Doane kicked the bars, knocking over a bowl of murky water. He strutted out, leaving Maria alone at last.
* * *
On the day they finally led Maria, wrists bound, out of the prison, her vision strained against the May morning. Two solitary months without direct sun, two months without fresh air.
Though her body had healed, the muscles along her back clenched with fresh memory as her attention flicked to the post, then up at the too-bright sky—anywhere but at her accusers. She blinked. Globs of gray clouds streaked overhead in the cold air. She took a deep breath, then dropped her gaze. Another crowd had gathered. By the looks of it, the same hardened faces, their eyes rimmed with something new.
Fear.
She swallowed, bracing. But rather than tie her bonds to the whipping post, Doane unlocked the irons. Her hands dropped free, and she rubbed the green bruised skin.
Maria whirled, eyes scanning Doane, then the witnesses, for answers. A silence hung in the air like static before a storm.
“May I . . . go?” Maria asked, her voice hoarse from lack of use.
“This woman has been accused by spectral evidence.” Doane clapped his hands over his ears, and Maria watched as another woman in the crowd did the same.
“Don’t listen to her!” another person screeched.
“Enchantress.”
“Satan worshiper.”
“Witch.”
Witch? Maria almost laughed. She didn’t have time to react before a pebble glanced off her arm with a needle-like sting.
Startled, her head snapped in the direction of the throw: an elderly woman, Mrs. Walker, mouth twisted in revulsion. All at once, Maria understood.
Run.
Maria picked up her skirts and stumbled out of the commotion. Rocks began raining down, most missing, a few ricocheting.
“Witch!” came a wail as a stone struck her hard in the shoulder. Maria winced, but ran on with difficulty. Chest heaving, boots pounding, Maria pushed ahead as fast as her weakened body could carry her, the sounds trailing her like sharks after fresh blood.
“Witch.”
“Witch!”
“Be gone!”
* * *
By dusk, Maria had reached the wilderness of Billingsgate in a state of total exhaustion. Sweat dampened the roots of her hair, and blisters ravaged her heels. She hadn’t seen a soul since fleeing her accusers in Eastham, hoping she’d gone far enough. She needed to make camp.
Golds from the final breath of day bathed the meadow flowers, sending streaks like beams between the speckled alder branches onto carpets of budding mayflowers and white bayberries. How dare they appear so alive, audacious to grow, in spite of everything? Color itself seemed a strange sight after weeks of staring at a wall. How dare it be the height of spring, when her dear son should have been born? When Sam should have been home?
Heaving, with her hand clamped to the pulsing ache in her side, Maria stumbled across an abandoned fishing shack. A whaling cabin, from the looks of it, dilapidated beyond recognition save for the charred earth left from the try-pot fires for curing whale blubber and a stone chimney against the northern wall. The tucked-away shack sat among some pitch pines, close to a brook, neighboring the towering dune cliffs overlooking the Atlantic shore.
It would have to do.
She surveyed the empty room inside, then broke off a pine bough to sweep out the debris and insects. Sap stuck to her palms. If only she had Sam’s hatchet. A swell rose up in her throat, which she pushed back down. With enormous effort, she dragged a few fallen pines to prop against the outside slats to cover some gaps in the beams. The cooking hearth and chimney seemed functional enough. She’d need to replace the roof. Make a door. Then a thousand other things if she had any chance of surviving in the forest on her own.
Just as well, Maria thought. When the initial adrenaline of urgency subsided, when the blinding thoughts of survival dwindled, then the harder thoughts and emotions would come crashing in again, the white-hot grief, the despairing isolation that pelted her during the harrowing nights in prison, and now, something more.
Witch.
There would be time. Far too much time. She’d need a fire, and a shelter, built by the strength of her own two hands.
Maria gathered a pile of sticks, propping one up against a rock. Using all her weight, she jumped and split the wood in two.
CHAPTER 34
“Thank you, Bellamy,” one of the rescued pirates professed, bowing to kiss Sam’s hand as they welcomed the new crew members aboard the Marianne two months after the incident in Spanish Town. The man’s clothes hung like rags.
Sam held up a palm to stop the uncomfortable gesture. “You’re welcome here, brother.” Though in truth, Sam didn’t know how grateful this survivor should be. By all accounts from these small-scale pirates they’d plucked off an island outside of St. Croix, they wouldn’t have been attacked—and their friends’ sloops sent to Davy Jones’s locker—if it weren’t for Sam’s growing reputation. The British Navy had meant the ambush for Black Bellamy, not them. A tremor of guilt lodged in Sam’s throat.
The navy was still searching. These few surviving pirates were lucky to have escaped with their skins.
Paulsgrave Williams took note of the influx of men by their names and skills, while Julian and Hoof aided with translation as needed. Webb and Abell divided the arrivals among the sloops in the fleet, with John Brown modeling his silver-buckled shoes and offering encouragement. Quintor and a few others distributed hammocks and immediate provisions. Even Little King helped, hauling buckets half his size filled with fresh water, which the rescued men gulped by the cupful.
The bustling noises seemed far away as Sam leaned against the rigging. The British Navy was after him. Him, Samuel Bellamy. He let the words knock around in his skull. The king’s fighting arm at sea. Sam’s former employer. His days and nights for the vast majority of his life.
And they felt threatened. By a cabin boy who hailed from a tenant farm in Devonshire.
His mouth went dry. Something about this felt different than evading Henry Jennings in those tiny periaguas eight months ago. Though a twinge of fear flooded his veins—for he knew what the vengeful British were capable of, and he could imagine that violent death well enough—another feeling met the nerves head on: something like satisfaction, or a tentative form of pride. Sam and his party had made a name for themselves. They’d collected prizes and amassed weapons and cannons to rival warships. They’d attracted the attention of the tyrants. They’d made a difference, a statement. Now, Sam had their attention, and he would keep it that way—brandishing the cause, inviting others to turn against oppression—all the while staying one knot out of reach.
Or get caught trying.
Maria, would you care?
Sam bit his chapped lip, careful to stop himself from that unbearable line of thinking.
Dr. Ferguson had joined the throng, tending to a few new arrivals suffering from dysentery. The doctor cursed, shaking his red curls at the state of the survivors. Sam could always count on Ferguson, a Scottish Jacobite fleeing retribution from the 1715 rising against England. Ferguson despised the King’s Navy and foul treatment toward fellow rebels more than most. One patient of his had missing teeth and bleeding gums. Another’s eyes glazed with fever, his frame trembling like an aspen leaf. The tender application of Ferguson’s skillful hands to grind cinchona bark into medicinal quinine, as well as his gentle words to help ease the patients’ anxiety about the syringe, reminded him of Maria’s kindness and courage all over again. Or maybe it was Ferguson’s flaming hair, akin to the fiery locks of Maria’s sister.
There was no escaping it. Though it had been 52 days since he’d heard news of Maria’s marriage (but who was counting?), he didn’t think about her any less. Maybe the opposite.
He’d promised to raze Spanish Town to the ground in order to find the runaway carpenter, Thomas Davis. The memory scalded despite Sam’s efforts to excuse his threat as something wholly outside of his usual character. And yet, he had threatened it, dragging Davis against his will back aboard the Marianne—Davis’s ice-blue eyes shooting daggers. Though they’d set sail without lighting a single flame, Sam’s whole body shook like he’d swallowed wildfire. He couldn’t string together more than a few words for days. His men avoided him, making only necessary inquiries. Even Little King gave him space. Once the shock abated like a haze of smoke, then the blinding anger and self-hatred, Sam was left with gut-plummeting grief and unanswered questions that hovered around like phantoms. No matter how many times he paced the starlit decks after dusk, watched the waves rise and fall, tracked the majestic sun as it rose and fell along the horizon, or buried himself with his increasing number of duties as Commodore, the closure never came.
Did you mean it, Maria? That night on the dunes last August?
Did you really love me?
And each time, a swirl of infuriating tenderness in his chest that echoed an irrefutable yes. Yes.
Yes.
* * *
After the commotion had settled down and it was clear that Sam was only getting in the way of the intake process, he slipped into the quiet of the hold. He sat alone among the sacks of silver, gold, and ivory, and the barrels filled with sweet-smelling molasses, sugar, and spices he couldn’t pronounce—alongside casks large enough to satisfy a palace. The Marianne never needed a guard; a happy crew serving under fair terms had no incentive to steal. He removed his tricorn, then unloosed his brace of pistols. The candle wick flickered as Sam summoned a moment of calm.
Her dancing eyes when they verbally sparred. The sweep of her collarbone during swimming lessons. Their vows, bound with their bodies on the sand beside the restless crash of ocean. Hadn’t she too been willing to risk it all? Open-minded enough to understand his constraints and risks to give her a better life, and the potential to make a real difference, too?
Maybe he’d imagined it. Willed it to be true. Or maybe he thought too well of himself.
Her letter was clear. He’d crossed a line, become someone unworthy of her—intentions be damned. What must she think of him? A bloodthirsty pirate, no better than Jennings or any other brute raiding the seas. Maria may have broken her word to wait, felt she needed to marry Hallett despite her initial displeasure, but what about Sam’s word? He’d been delayed, a point he regretted.
But he’d promised he’d return with a ship full of gold. He threatened to do nothing less when he stormed out of Mr. Brown’s punitive presence. Recalling the memory, Sam’s pride bristled like fur on the back of a wounded wolf still fighting.
Sam glanced around at the amassing loot in the musty hold. The wood creaked as the sloop rocked. He could hear the rocky ballast shift in the bilge beneath him and a rat scurry.
Not a ship-full yet—especially when split among his brothers. But with time, at this pace . . .
But it never would have been enough—no matter the amount—to be worthy. He seethed with regret. Did he owe it to her to return, to risk his neck to at least apologize in person? Did he owe it to himself?
Or, was that selfishness speaking? A chance to flaunt his success, to better explain, to prove his love, to beg for her forgiveness, to duel with Hallett, or to indulge his desperation to see her again, no matter the cost? Each motive pointed back to him, tasting like the bitter dregs from one of his impassioned speeches. She’d told him clearly not to try. Maria had her wits about her and the inner strength of a lion. She knew things about the world he didn’t, including limitations placed on women that he’d never experienced. Dismissing her sensitivities and intuitions, her reasons—however unpalatable—seemed demeaning to everything he knew about her. He trusted her. He’d always trusted her.
Did he love her enough to give her peace, to not compromise her again, even if he knew in his heart he could not, would not, let her go?
Sam sighed, inhaling the scent of damp oak in the hold, noting the growing piles of treasure.
Had it all been for her?
Or is this about me?
“We need to clear these waters,” Hoof hollered from the hatch above. “And quick.”
Climbing up the ladder, Sam returned to the sun-blinding deck. He was greeted by the smell of unwashed bodies and the sound of shuffling boots. Sam blinked, and the mainsail flapped in the wind.
Julian caught up to Hoof and Sam, his lips pursed. “I’d rather not have a scuffle with the navy,” he said.
Sam exhaled. “Aye.” He glanced at Paulsgrave, who was finishing making post assignments for the arrivals. “Williams, how many men aboard the flotilla now?”
“One hundred and eighty,” he shouted.
Sam’s jaw dropped. They were running out of space to put them all—soon, they’d need another flagship. So many souls, from so many lands far and wide. Each man trusting him to lead them well. Sam still had a job to do, a world to see changed—with or without Maria by his side.
For now, they’d make for Hispaniola.
He placed a steadying hand on each friend’s shoulder. “Navigate us toward the Windward Passage.”
CHAPTER 35
The cold ocean felt sweet and electrifying, like a kiss against her bare skin. Maria dove under, her hair fanning as she wove her arms through the water. How good it felt to swim, a chance to stretch her sore muscles. She’d given up swimming during her marriage and through the long winter months. Here at the onset of summer, a mysterious oneness welcomed her without question, a balm for her constant nerves and aching loneliness, the surges of anger. Echoes warbled in her ear. Salt stung her opened eyes as she searched for bits of rope, a stray hook, anything to add to her collection of survival supplies.
This time while scavenging, her favorite chore, Maria’s fingers curled around something shimmery buried in the sand along the ocean bottom. Heart leaping, she launched for the surface. She broke for air to examine her find.
It was a small hand mirror, corroded around the edges and coated with mud. Nothing she could use to feed herself, or hunt with, to her disappointment. Maria scrubbed away the sand, and the glass glinted with the summer sun. She caught her own reflection.
