"I was doing fine," he said hoarsely. "I'm a retired Army major, I had slaves and stables, the plantation was thriving ... I was a gentleman."
Beth resisted the impulse to ask him why he had turned to piracy, if all that was true. Instead she just asked him, "Would you like to go back?"
Again he looked at her. "Yes. But I can't. I'd be hanged."
"Take the King's Pardon."
"I - " He stuck a finger in his mouth and gnawed at the nail. "Thatch would never let me."
Beth's heart was pounding. "We could sneak away tonight, you and I. They're all distracted by this thing they've got to do up the river." Looking up the shore to her right, she wondered why they called that expanse of marsh a river.
Bonnett smiled nervously and licked his lips again, and once more she smelled the brandy. "You and I," he began, reaching out a pudgy hand.
"Right," she said, stepping back away from him. "Escape. Tonight. When the hunsi kanzo is busy up the river."
The reference to Blackbeard sobered Bonnett, and he scowled and resumed chewing his fingernail.
Not wanting to let him see the desperate hope in her eyes, Beth Hurwood looked away from him, back toward the marsh, perhaps, she thought, they call it a river because it's so nearly one. All the local moisture does tend to move westward, though as slowly in most places as brandy working its way through a fruitcake, and the shallow evening fogs certainly follow the course of it and would soon drench an exposed person almost as thoroughly as if he'd been swimming.
She closed her eyes. Calling this swamp a river seemed typical of the way this dreadful New World worked - everything was still raw and unformed out here on the world's western edge, and bore only the most remote resemblances to the settled and solidified eastern hemisphere. And though now she heard Bonnett shift on the log, and quickly turned to face him, it fleetingly occurred to her that the undeveloped nature of these lands might have a lot to do with why her father had come, and why he had taken her with him.
Bonnett was leaning forward, and in the early twilight she could see the frown of tenuous determination on his pudgy old face. "I'll do it," he said almost in a whisper. "I think I must. I think going up the river tonight would be the end of me ... though no doubt my body would still walk and speak and carry out Thatch's orders."
"Are there enough men aboard your ship right now to sail it?" she asked, standing up so quickly that the hut rocked on its wooden stilts.
Bonnett squinted up at her. "The Revenge? We can't take her. Do you imagine no one would see or hear us raise anchor and set the sails and move out? No, we'll provision a boat and put in it whatever we can find to improvise a mast and sail, and row away down the coast with muffled oars, and then just take our chances on the open sea. God's far more merciful than Thatch." He gasped suddenly and grabbed her wrist. "Christ! Wait a minute! Is this a trap? Did Thatch send you here - to test me? I forgot your father's his partner ... "
"No," said Beth tensely. "It's not a trap. I've got to get away from here. Now let's go get that boat."
Bonnett released her wrist, though he didn't look entirely convinced. "But ... you've been with them for nearly a month, as I hear it. Why have you waited until now to escape? I'm sure it would have been far easier at New Providence."
She sighed. "It never would have been easy. But - " Another bird flapped past overhead, making both of them jump. Beth laughed weakly. "Well, for one thing, until we arrived here I didn't think my father actively meant me any harm, but now ... well, he doesn't mean me any harm, but ... the day before yesterday, when we were disembarking, I cut myself, and my father was frantic with worry that it might mortify and give me a fever. He told Leo Friend that the protective Caribbean magics," she spoke the words with distaste, "are sluggish here, and they'd have to watch me closely for any sign of illness. But his concern was ... impersonal - it wasn't the concern of a father for a threatened daughter, but more like, I don't know, a captain's concern for the seaworthiness of a vessel his life depends on."
Bonnett hadn't really been listening - he patted the curls of his wig in place and licked his moustache, then stood up and walked over to where she stood - the hut swayed dangerously - and leaned beside her. Grotesquely, his face was puckered into a trembling but insinuating smile. " 'For one thing,' you said." His voice was huskier now. "Is there another?"
Beth wasn't looking at him, and she smiled sadly. "Yes; foolish, but I think so. I didn't figure it out until Tuesday, when the Navy killed him - he was aboard that boat, the Jenny, and Friend says none of them could have survived that broadside - but I don't think I really wanted to get away, without ... well, you never met him. A man who was also a passenger on the Carmichael."
Bonnett pursed his lips and stepped away, letting his paunch relax again. "I needn't take you, you know," he snapped.
Beth blinked in surprise and turned to look at him. "What? Of course you need to. If you don't, what's to stop me from raising the alarm before you're well away?" Abruptly she remembered that this was, despite the good manners, a pirate, and she added hastily, "At any rate, your case will certainly look better to the authorities if you've not only repented but rescued a captive of Blackbeard's as well."
"Something in that, I suppose," Bonnett muttered grudgingly. 'Very well, now, listen. We'll go, right now, by separate routes, to the shore, where one of the Revenge's boats is dragged up on the sand - you'll see me by it - and you'll get in quick and crouch low, out of sight. There's old canvas in there, hide under it. The tide's nigh again, so it shouldn't be difficult for me to wrestle the boat into the water. Then I'll row us out to the Revenge, load as much stuff into the boat as I can without raising the suspicions of that treacherous crew, and then just row away south along the coastline. Can you navigate by the stars?"
"No," said Beth. "Why, can't you?"
"Oh, surely," said Bonnett hastily. "I was just, uh, thinking of when I might be asleep. Anyway, if we just bear south we'll be in the trade lanes before too long. And then," he went on, stepping to the ladder, "if I can get far enough away from him before he learns that I've fled, maybe he won't be able to call me back."
This didn't reassure Beth, but she followed him down the ladder to the sand and walked off, away from him. She hoped to skirt around the three fires and make her way to the shore without being seen by the ever-vigilant Leo Friend.
Slowly and thoughtfully, with lines of genuine sorrow almost ennobling his pouchy face, Stede Bonnett plodded straight down the sandy slope toward the fires, his boots making sounds like slow crickets as the leather soles rasped against the saw grass.
Talking about escape with Hurwood's daughter - and then letting himself be aroused by her, even, foolishly, thinking she might respond in kind! - had brought back with far too painful a degree of clarity the life he'd been deprived of three months before. But of course even if he succeeded in escaping Blackbeard and taking the pardon, he could hardly return to Barbados and his wife. There was some consolation in that.
Perhaps in some other country, with another name, he could start over again - he was only fifty-eight, after all; with reasonable care he was a good decade short of needing to take up religion. There would still be many young women for him to focus his attention on.
For a moment a smile puckered his face, and his hands caressed an imaginary form, and he felt the old confidence, the old sureness of himself - the wife he married four years ago had taken it away from him, had made a cowed little man of what had once been a stern officer, and it wasn't until he met the girls at Ramona's that it was restored - but then, of course, he remembered how he had left the last of those girls, and he was dropped right back into the horror he'd been living in for three months. His wrinkled old hands fell back limply to his sides.
Out on the redly glittering face of the sea, looking in end-on silhouette like the upright black skeleton of some leviathan, Blackbeard's Queen Anne's Revenge stood motionless at anchor. Bonnett instantly looked away from it, not sure Blackbeard couldn't track his thoughts back along the line of his gaze.