THE
ONLY LIFE
THAT
MATTERED
Selected Historical Fiction Published by McBooks Press
BY ALEXANDER KENT
The Complete
Midshipman Bolitho
Stand Into Danger
In Gallant Company
Sloop of War
To Glory We Steer
Command a King’s Ship
Passage to Mutiny
With All Despatch
Form Line of Battle!
Enemy in Sight!
The Flag Captain
Signal–Close Action!
The Inshore Squadron
A Tradition of Victory
Success to the Brave
Colours Aloft!
Honour This Day
The Only Victor
Beyond the Reef
The Darkening Sea
For My Country’s Freedom
Cross of St George
Sword of Honour
Second to None
Relentless Pursuit
Man of War
Heart of Oak
BY PHILIP MCCUTCHAN
Halfhyde at the Bight
of Benin
Halfhyde’s Island
Halfhyde and the Guns of Arrest
Halfhyde to the Narrows
Halfhyde for the Queen
Halfhyde Ordered South
Halfhyde on Zanatu
BY JAN NEEDLE
A Fine Boy for Killing
The Wicked Trade
The Spithead Nymph
BY JAMES L. NELSON
The Only Life That Mattered
BY JAMES DUFFY
Sand of the Arena
The Fight for Rome
BY DEWEY LAMBDIN
The French Admiral
The Gun Ketch
Jester’s Fortune
What Lies Buried
BY BROOS CAMPBELL
No Quarter
The War of Knives
BY DUDLEY POPE
Ramage
Ramage & The Drumbeat
Ramage & The Freebooters
Governor Ramage R.N.
Ramage’s Prize
Ramage & The Guillotine
Ramage’s Diamond
Ramage’s Mutiny
Ramage & The Rebels
Ramage’s Signal
Ramage & The Renegades
Ramage’s Devil
Ramage’s Trial
Ramage’s Challenge
Ramage at Trafalgar
Ramage & The Saracens
Ramage & The Dido
BY FREDERICK MARRYAT
Frank Mildmay or
The Naval Officer
Mr Midshipman Easy
Newton Forster or
The Merchant Service
Snarleyyow or
The Dog Fiend
BY V.A. STUART
Victors and Lords
The Sepoy Mutiny
Massacre at Cawnpore
The Cannons of Lucknow
The Heroic Garrison
The Valiant Sailors
The Brave Captains
Hazard’s Command
Hazard of Huntress
Hazard in Circassia
Victory at Sebastopol
Guns to the Far East
Escape from Hell
BY JULIAN STOCKWIN
Mutiny
Quarterdeck
Tenacious
Command
BY JOHN BIGGINS
A Sailor of Austria
The Emperor’s
Coloured Coat
The Two-Headed Eagle
Tomorrow the World
BY ALEXANDER FULLERTON
Storm Force to Narvik
Last Lift from Crete
All the Drowning Seas
A Share of Honour
The Torch Bearers
The Gatecrashers
BY C.N. PARKINSON
The Guernseyman
Devil to Pay
The Fireship
Touch and Go
So Near So Far
Dead Reckoning
The Life and Times of
Horatio Hornblower
BY DOUGLAS REEMAN
Badge of Glory
First to Land
The Horizon
Dust on the Sea
Knife Edge
Twelve Seconds to Live
Battlecruiser
The White Guns
A Prayer for the Ship
For Valour
BY DAVID DONACHIE
The Devil’s Own Luck
The Dying Trade
A Hanging Matter
An Element of Chance
The Scent of Betrayal
A Game of Bones
On a Making Tide
Tested by Fate
Breaking the Line
THE
ONLY LIFE
THAT
MATTERED
The Short and Merry Lives of
Anne Bonny, Mary Read,
and Calico Jack Rackam
JAMES L. NELSON
MCBOOKS PRESS, INC.
ITHACA, NEW YORK
Published by McBooks Press 2004
Copyright © 2004 by James L. Nelson
This book was previously published in a significantly different form by
Tor Books in 2001 as The Sweet Trade by Elizabeth Garrett.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without the written permission of the publisher. Requests for such permissions should be addressed to McBooks Press, Inc., ID Booth Building, 520 North Meadow St., Ithaca, NY 14850.
Cover illustration by William M. Benson
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Nelson, James L.
The only life that mattered : the short and merry lives of Anne Bonny,
Mary Read, and Calico Jack Rackham / by James L. Nelson.
p. cm.
ISBN 1-59013-060-X (trade pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Bonny, Anne, b. 1700—Fiction. 2. Read, Mary, d. 1720?—Fiction. 3. Rackham, John, d. 1720—Fiction. 4. Caribbean Area—Fiction. 5. Women pirates—Fiction. 6. Pirates—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3564.E4646O55 2004
813’.54—dc22
2004004758
All McBooks Press publications can be ordered by calling toll-free
1-888-BOOKS11 (1-888-266-5711).
Please call to request a free catalog.
Visit the McBooks Press website at www.mcbooks.com
Printed in the United States of America
9 8 7 6 5 4 3
To Lisa Marie Nelson
The pirate who first told me about Anne and Mary
And then plundered my heart
Contents
Author’s Note
Prologue
Book One: Fate Inexorable
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Book Two: The Sweet Trade
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Book Three: A Tryal of Pirates
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Historical Note
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I AM VERY MUCH INDEBTED to the people who helped with the writing of this book. Thanks to Dirk Bes for the Dutch and Veronica Hanna for the Spanish. Any linguistic mistakes are entirely my own. Dolores Carbonneau gave invaluable assistance with birthing, both real and fictional. Thanks to Ken Kinkor, pirate scholar, for answering my questions and to my early readers, Lola Furber, Melissa Sparks, and Elizabeth Page. Thanks to Stephanie Lane for believing in this book in the first instant.
The story of Calico Jack, Anne, and Mary is an incredible one, and it holds a special place in my heart. The reality of pirate life was not romantic, and neither is the story of these three people. It is a gritty, often ugly story and a part of the real history of piracy in the Caribbean. The people at McBooks Press, with their history of producing some of the best maritime fiction currently being published, have understood better than any other publisher could where this book fits. I am very grateful to Alex Skutt, Jackie Swift, Judy Dietz, Chris Carey and all of the people at McBooks for giving this book life. And thanks as well for all they have done for me and for the advancement of maritime fiction in this country.
My deepest appreciation goes out to Nat Sobel for his efforts on behalf of this book.
A short life but a merry one!
—J.L.N.
PROLOGUE
THE BELLS RANG out from the whitewashed towers of St Jago de la Vega on Jamaica’s north shore. Their deep bass tone filled the narrow cobbled streets, the cool stucco homes, glanced off the red-tiled roofs of the government buildings, so like those of Old Spain on which they were modeled. Pealing, pealing . . . Today the court sits in session. Today is a trial of pirates. Today will be tales of the sweet trade, of murders and crimes most notorious, villainy on the high seas.
The ringing found its way into Mary Read’s cell, where she sat on the stone bench—an outcropping of the cell wall, really—and traced with her eyes the lines of dark mold that snaked along the mortared crevices between whitewashed bricks.
A pretty sound, she thought. She had been hearing the bells for five minutes, but she was just now listening. Pretty, for a death knell.
A shaft of morning light came in through the single window, divided into five equal parts by the iron bars. The light looked like a solid thing as it passed through the ubiquitous dust, as if Mary could reach out and break off a piece and hold it in her hands.
At least it is warm, she thought, warm and dry. There were times enough in her life when she would have gladly traded freedom for a prison cell, if it meant being warm and dry. In fact, she mused, that was just what she had done, and she still reckoned she had ended up with the best of the bargain.
She shifted uncomfortably, looked up at the arched ceiling. It was stone, whitewashed like the rest of the cell, like all the buildings of those Spanish colonial towns. Now that the British were the masters of Jamaica, it was a wonder to Mary that they did not paint everything brown, or some such dreary tone, as the British were wont to do.
But no, the West Indies would not allow that. It affected people, it got inside them, and before the English could remake the West Indies into a drab replica of London, the West Indies had remade them in her own bright image. Mary had seen it happen time and again, to Englishmen on Nassau and Jamaica and Bermuda. It had happened to her, and that was why she loved the West Indies so.
She stood up at last, paced the few steps forward and then back again. Her body still ached from countless bruises, some overlapping one another, purple and ugly. Her skin was hard and tight where a dozen lacerations were just now healing.
She paused, stretched, idly scratched herself. Realized what she was doing and stopped, thinking, I have been too long in the company of men.
She was wearing a dress of sorts, no more than a crude homespun wool sack with sleeves. It hung like a monk’s robe and itched intolerably, and caught in the sharp places of her half-healed wounds. It was difficult to get any relief from the scratching fabric and the vermin that were starting to plague her.
Mary Read was no stranger to itchy clothes and vermin, but familiarity in this instance did not bring comfort.
The cell, her home for the past few weeks, was not a closed room, with four solid walls and a single, impenetrable door. Rather, the front of it was all bars, floor to ceiling and side to side, an entire wall of bars. It made Mary feel like a circus animal, there on display for the amusement of others, and she hated that.
Anne’s cell was directly across the narrow stone alleyway that ran down the length of the cellblock. They had unimpeded communication across that five feet of space, and that alone kept Mary from going mad. Confinement was something new to her, and it did not sit well.
She paced again to the front of the cell, thrust her hands through the bars, rested her forearms on a crosspiece, laced her fingers together. She arched her back, flexed her legs, groaned slightly as she worked out the kinks that came with sleeping on a bed of matted straw. Not bloody seventeen anymore, she thought.
Mary looked across the alley into Anne’s cell. It was on the west side of the building and did not get the morning sun and was still mostly lost in shadow. Near the back wall, on a straw bed like hers, she could make out the hump of rumpled homespun that was Anne’s sleeping figure.
The ringing stopped. Mary looked up, cocked her ear, listened for . . . something. Anything. But there was only silence in the wake of the bells.
Mary looked back into the darkness of Anne’s cell. Anyone who did not know Anne would have to believe she was feigning sleep, or was too bitter and despondent to rise. How could anyone actually sleep on such a morning? But Mary knew her friend well, and knew she was genuinely asleep, slumbering untroubled.
Anne Bonny was twenty years old, seven years Mary’s junior. She still had the sense of indestructibility that accompanies youth, and she had not a fraction of Mary’s experience with violence and death.
For a few minutes Mary watched Anne sleep and involuntarily she smiled and shook her head. Even if Annie lived to see old age—an unlikely prospect—she probably would grow no wiser. Anne was not one for lessons. Her passions burned like a pyre and she was ruled by them, and Mary loved her for that.
“Annie! Annie! Stir yourself!” she called across the alleyway. She saw Anne move a bit, heard her mumble something incoherent. “Come on, Anne! They can’t hang you lying down like that, you know.”
At the far end of the cell, all but lost in shadow, Mary saw Anne sitting up, heard her spit a bit of straw from her mouth.
“Oh, sod it,” she heard Anne mutter. Anne was not given to springing cheerfully from bed, not even in the best of times.
At last she stood up and staggered toward the front of her cell. Her thick, reddish blond hair was askew, falling in great disorganized piles over her shoulders and hanging half over her face. Bits of straw clung to it, nearly the same color as her wild locks. She paused, arched her back, ran her fingers through her hair, forcing it into some kind of order. “Sod it,” she said again.
Mary waited silently while Anne stretched and scratched and came a bit more awake. It was pointless to try and talk to her now.
Finally Anne yawned, wide, like a lion, flashing flawless white teeth. Mary had to marvel again at what a beauty she was, even in those unfavorable cond
itions. It was no wonder that men had died for her, that more would die before her story was told.
“Mary, dear, did I hear bells?” Anne asked at last.
“You did. They are a signal that a Court of Admiralty will sit today.”
“A Court of Admiralty? Whoever is to be tried?”
“Pirates, as I hear it. Notorious cutthroats and picaroons.”
“Detestable people. I wish they would hang them all.”
Mary smiled and Anne smiled back. “They may yet, Annie, my dear.”
“Indeed. Well, I must now go and express my opinion of all Courts of Admiralty and prosecutors and judges and such,” Anne said, and with that she retreated to the back of her cell and made use of the night jar there.
When she was done she returned to the bars that fronted her cell and said, “Do you reckon they will give us a shift of clothes? Or a hairbrush, at all?”
Mary shook her head. “The prosecutor will find it more convenient to prove us pirates and sluts if we look like pirates and sluts. I do not think they will give us leave to look otherwise.”
Anne nodded. “Would they but give me back my cutlass and a brace of pistols, I would show them what a pirate and slut I truly am.”
At the far end of the alleyway a key rattled in a lock, loud in the still morning. Neither woman made an effort to look. They knew who it was, why they were coming.
Their eyes met and Mary gave Anne a half smile and Anne gave Mary a slight cock of the eyebrows, and then the heavy door at the end of the walk swung open and the footfalls on the stone floor echoed around the cells.
Quite a lot of footfalls. The thickset jailor in his homespun coat, wool stockings over thick calves, worn shoes, battered cocked hat over thinning hair. Beside him the bailiff in the more elegant dress of the court: silk coat and waistcoat down to midthigh, breeches to match, silk stockings, silver buckles on his shoes. A guard of four soldiers trailed behind.
“Look how many they have sent,” Anne said. “One would think these men afraid of us, weak and helpless women though we be. Sure we are not a threat to great brutes such as yourselves?”
“Shut yer gob,” the jailor growled, though he did not sound as fierce as he might have wished.