Not Quite Dead (A Lowcountry Mystery)

Chapter Thirteen

December 1732

I have no way of knowing whether the person who finds these words will know any part of my story, and so I'll start at the beginning. It may already be too late for me, but I have to try. For Jack, and for our son. The child has no ownership in the misdeeds and sins of his parents, and no matter what, deserves to live the life he chooses.

Whether or not this tale makes a difference, I'll tell it. Because it cannot die with me.

I know that the true beginning of my story rests in Cork, Ireland, and with the scullery maid my father forced to lie with him, an atrocity that resulted in my birth, but surely after all I've done, and the prominence of my father in Charleston society, those details will survive. It matters not that I was a miserable child after my mother died, or that my father hated the fact that his daughter, the one child he had left to him, preferred to run around barefoot in tattered clothes as opposed to the fine dresses he brought home from his frequent trips abroad.

It matters not that I never loved him, that no one bothered to love me, not until much later.

I am guilty of many of the transgressions that stirred my father's hatred, even stabbed a few people under his employ, but none of them were innocent. I've never harmed a single man, in all my life, who can claim to be that.

Who among us can?

When James Bonny arrived in my life, he appeared as a lifeline. A preserver, a way out of the hell on William Cormac's plantation, or of the marriage he would eventually force on me. If I give my father credit for anything, it is that he was able to see through James's facade immediately, while my first husband's cowardly nature did not show itself to me until after we had wed and moved to New Providence Island around my sixteenth birthday.

It was then I learned, in a personal way, of the pirate life. James Bonny was small-time, in brains and heart and courage, and lacked the grit to become a great corsair. He was nothing more than a cutthroat and a common thief, and later a betrayer of the men who had once crewed ships through the Caribbean alongside him. He got me with child against all of my efforts, but the girl was dead when she slid from my body. Weak, like her father, and probably for the best—I would never have harmed my child, but loving anything half James Bonny would have challenged my heart.

It was shortly afterward that I met Jack Rackham—Calico Jack, to most. I sat on the docks, drowning the sorrows of my life in a bottle of rum and contemplating how I could have been so stupid, trading the prison my father constructed to one gaoled by James Bonny, when a man sat beside me. Despite the fact that I hadn't showered in days, that I wore breeches instead of a dress, my feet were bare, my hair a mess, Jack's first words to me were "You're a beauty."

I think I fell in love with him then, before I ever chanced a look at his face. The mud caked on his hands and under his nails told the tale of a workingman, the kind of man who didn't expect others to do for him. I had never known a man like Jack, and I am never like to again.

When I did look up, into eyes so midnight blue I spent days of my life searching them for the stars, I was lost—and also found. Jack Rackham was everything I'd searched for in another human being—alive, filled with vigor and lust, starving for the next adventure. His filthy, matted hair, bronzed skin, missing teeth, and stench would have sent polite society ladies shrieking in the other direction, and the fact that the sight of him filled me with such desire I struggled to keep my hands to myself proved to me, once again and beyond all shadow of a doubt, that I was not like other women. Could never be, and was never born to be.

When Jack asked me to come with him when he put the Revenge to sea, I said yes without a moment's hesitation. I would have the life I'd always wanted, with a man by my side who wished to put my proud, fighting nature on display instead of squashing it until it shriveled and died.