@hatigave gave me permission to be a menace
There’s been no shortage of bad luck in Anne’s life over the past almost-year. She’d managed to fall pregnant, be entrusted to the care of strangers interested only in what was in her belly, lose the baby, miss Jack’s last visit to port, and now she’s been found out mid-afternoon the day after she’d stowed aboard another ship. If she didn’t know any better, she might’ve started thinking she was cursed.
She isn’t surprised that the men who’ve found her only speak in Spanish. (She’d stowed aboard in fucking Havana, in the heart of Spanish Cuba: English is less common than wealth in these waters.) What surprised her was how quickly she was found. They had been less than a full day at sea and she in particular had been wedged behind an assortment of crates in the bowels of the hold. If that was a regular check, this is the tightest ship Anne’s ever been aboard, the fucking navy’s own included. If that wasn’t a regular check, though, there’s more to fear than well-trained sailors on this ship.
For the time being, the sailors—pirates or merchants to guess by their clothes—have made the halfway fatal error of leaving her alone. Tied to a chair in the locked captain’s quarters, perhaps, but alone. And halfway to making a break for it; as soon as she gets this coil around her thumb and down, she’ll have a free hand and then, oh!, then she’ll be dangerous. Able to get free and get armed, maybe even get into a position from which to surprise them. Anne presses through the screaming pain her body’s in—the birth hadn’t gone well for anyone, truth be told—by imagining the look on the louder one’s face when she gets her hands on him.
Attempts to escape and fantasies of revenge alike shrivel up and die in the sudden light flooding the doorway. Anne sets her face into a snarl and prepares to bark like the mad bitch she is at the best opportunity. Even sweating and pale, even with dark bags beneath her eyes and fever hues in her cheeks, Anne knows how she looks: striking. The one word she’s heard everyone use for her. Striking, with her long auburn hair and unnervingly pale green eyes. Striking, taller even than most men she met and twice as mean. Striking, with her hand balled into a fist and slamming into the first person within arm’s length. And that’s even without her signature hat and long coat, both of which sit in front of her on the desk, alongside her rapier and two of her four smaller blades. (Her pistols, alas, had been a casualty of escape from the Villa.)
Stripped of hat and pistol, there’s clearly truth to what Anne’s said since the first day she saw it: the woodcarving accompanying her wanted poster could be any redhead with a hat and pistol. How the artist had avoided any other identifying measure should be a complete mystery—but answers for itself an inch below the face, where an equally generic-looking bosom is presented naked to the viewer.
It was the plausibility of the woman before them being anybody but Anne Bonny that had sent her captors scrambling back to their captain, shouting about a redheaded stowaway armed to the teeth. It was the possibility of her being nobody but Anne Bonny that had lured their captain here. And it was the likelihood that none of these fuckers spoke a lick of English that kept Anne Bonny from loudly comparing them to disease-ridden ballsacks.
