@pennyinyourthoughts continues to be my friend for some reason.
It’s been most ways of a week, near as Anne can tell, that she’s been stuck in this hell. There’s the vaguest impression of the hour from the sky, slightly brighter when the sun is out, or so she assumes. Mostly, it’s a soft, featureless, grey world, inhabited by a gentle sea and a ship she’s only ever seen once before. There’s no clock, no calendar, not even a captain’s log by which tell the time or guess the date, except for the one Anne’s started.
As far as hells go, this one is almost pleasant. She’s taken Bonnet’s quarters as her own, in part because it’s large and in part because it’s quite nicely stocked, with a feather bed and pillows, a fainting couch and an armchair and a fucking fireplace she’s smarter than trying to light, and most importantly, a library. A choice library, filled with as much classic literature as contemporary adventure tales, heavy with books good for running a ship and the history of pirates. She’ll have to give him a fairer shake, if ever she leaves this damned fog to see him again: he’s clearly not a man as beneath her notice as she’d taken him to be.
Anne stands at Bonnet’s bookshelves now, running her fingers over the spines of each book in the row. The ship’s well provisioned yet fully abandoned. With the chores of the day completed and the approximately mid-afternoon sun making a lighter grey of the fog, there’s really nothing left to do but go mad or read a book. It’s not exactly a difficult decision to make.
“Homer or…history?” she asks the empty cabin, more to hear a voice with her own two ears than anything else.