Chapter Text
The first time Stede died, Mary Bonnet had actually believed he was dead.
After all, Stede was Stede. And he’d run off to be a pirate. Mary had given him three months then figured he’d probably been shot by the navy or thrown overboard by his crew, or possibly just got a very bad hangnail and couldn’t locate the manicure scissors in time. Regardless of how it may have happened there was little doubt in her mind that Stede had no chance of surviving long in the ‘new life’ he’d insisted on claiming for himself, and so after the three-month mark had passed, she duly reported his death to the appropriate authorities.
His subsequent reappearance, very much alive indeed, had therefore come as both an unpleasant shock and a headache-inducing legal tangle. Fortunately, he didn’t remain alive again for long.
The second time Stede died she knew of course that he wasn’t actually dead, and had rather more confidence in his ability to keep himself alive even amongst pirates. This turned out to be a surprisingly useful bit of knowledge as the years passed and Doug, bless his dear, sweet soul, grew first confused and then hurt by her continued lack of interest in marrying him.
Mary explained, as gently as she could, that while the world might think Stede was dead, she knew and he knew and more importantly God knew that he wasn’t, and Mary really didn’t want to have bigamy on her conscience.
This was true. It was not, possibly, the whole truth. The whole truth involved Mary’s current life and her enjoyment of it, the freedom, the wealth that was hers to control. The way she could cultivate her interests with no one around to stop her or criticise or make a fuss if she didn’t do as they wished. There was truly no better way to live as a woman than to be a wealthy widow, as she and her friends so often remarked. Mary had put in the years with Stede and now she was reaping the rewards, and no way was she going to give that up, not for anyone. Not even Doug, however much she loved him. She’d never be any man’s property ever again.
And so she remained, quite contentedly, the Widow Bonnet.
It was for this reason that Mary made sure to keep a keen eye on Wanted posters and a sharp ear on news reports, anything that might give a clue about Stede and whether he continued to remain among the living. She didn’t know if he’d gone back to pirating or just found his Ed and settled down somewhere with him, to live a quiet life. On the chance that it was the former, she wanted to know as soon as possible if he’d been killed for real, in case she needed to buy herself some time to come up with another plausible reason not to marry Doug.
And so it happened that one day, three years or so after Stede’s most recent death, she was shopping in town and took a moment as she always did to browse the bulletins tacked to the main notice board when one in particular first caught her eye then demanded every particle of her attention. It was a Wanted poster, not in itself remarkable, one of the sort that announced in bombastic terms a generous reward for a dastardly pirate with a long list of crimes and featured a drawing of the pirate in question—in this instance a simple pencil sketch of a face that Mary would recognise anywhere. She had spent years married to the man attached to it, after all.
Though the face in the drawing had undergone a change or two, she noted. Stede looked rougher now. Rakish even, with a short, pointed beard and hair that fell to his shoulders in waves which somehow managed to convey the impression that they were gloriously windswept, even in a few pencil-drawn lines. But then, Stede always did have good hair.
The Pyrate Captain Thomas, the poster proclaimed. Reward. Followed by a list of the crimes Stede was wanted for. Piracy—of course. Murder—that one was more surprising. Destruction of a vessel of the King’s Navy—well, naturally. She’d have thought that fell within the purview of ‘piracy,’ but apparently not. There were other charges too, lesser ones. And then, at the bottom of the sheet, the most surprising thing of all.
Known associate of the Moste Fearsome Pyrate Blackbearde.
Was he? Mary blinked in astonishment. That seemed like elevated company for someone who was still a novice pirate, despite his impressively long list of crimes.
Something tickled at the edges of Mary’s mind, something she’d read years ago. Something Stede had read to her, perhaps? About Blackbeard, and his real name. What was it? Tache? Tosh?
Teach. That was it. Edward Teach.
Ed.
Mary’s eyes went wide as she recalled that long-ago night, the soft, awed look on Stede’s face as he whispered, his name is Ed.
But it couldn’t be. It couldn’t. Her not-actually-all-that-dead husband couldn’t really be in love with Blackbeard.
Could he?
As unobtrusively as possible, Mary tore down the poster bearing Stede’s face. The last thing she needed was someone else around here—Doug, perhaps, just to choose a name at random, though really any of Stede’s old acquaintances would do—recognising him. They’d be bound to start asking impertinent questions, about how a notorious pirate could so closely resemble a dead aristocrat, for example. Just the tiniest seed of doubt was all it would take to get people wondering how plausible it really was that said aristocrat might be mauled by a jungle cat, run over by a carriage, then crushed by a piano all in the space of five minutes.
Honestly, Mary was still surprised by how completely everyone seemed to have bought that particular bit of fuckery.
She folded the poster and slipped it into her pocket, then hurried home, where she took it out again, unfolded it, stared at it for several long minutes, then ripped it neatly in two and tossed the pieces into the fire.
It was another seven years before she thought of it again.
Mary had never been a great fan of the ocean, which for a woman born and raised on an island was more than a little unfortunate. She did, however, love the storms that sometimes blew across Barbados, from that very ocean she so disliked. They made her feel alive, energised, and she often found herself in her studio on stormy nights, painting furiously as wind and rain lashed against the windows and howled through the air outside.
So loudly did they lash and howl on one particular night that Mary, hard at work on a new kind of flower, almost didn’t hear the banging on the door. When at last the noise broke through her concentration, she froze with her paintbrush hovering over the canvas and listened carefully.
Yes, there it was again, decidedly. The sound of a fist pounding heavily on her studio door. This time accompanied by a deep voice that cried “Bonnet! Widow Bonnet! Mary Bonnet, open the door!”
Rude, thought Mary. First to call at this time of night in this weather, and second to employ that tone of voice. She set aside her brush and palette, picked up an iron poker from the fireplace, and went to answer the door. If only to give the caller a piece of her mind and send him on his way.
When she opened it, however, she forgot everything she had intended to say.
Two men stood outside her studio door, or rather one man stood there, fist raised as though to knock again. The second man leant heavily against the first, barely upright and bleeding from several wounds. The man with the fist was also bloody though in a far better state than his companion, whose shirt was so drenched in red that even the heavy sheets of rain couldn’t wash it away, and whose face was half-hidden in the first man’s hair—until with a groan he turned it towards the light shining out from the studio.
Stede. Mary drew in a sharp breath. The limp, bleeding man was Stede. Stede from the Wanted poster, bearded and rakish—and pale. Dreadfully pale.
Deathly pale.
Mary’s eyes flew to the other man. He too had a beard, a long, thick, wavy one. It was grey, mostly, iron grey, the man’s eyes a deep brown and full of warring emotions—wariness, anger, exhaustion, desperation—and a soul-deep terror.
So this was Ed, thought Mary. Edward Teach. Blackbeard. Stede’s Ed.
“Please,” he said, and Mary stepped back to hold open the door.
“Get him inside,” she said crisply. “There’s a chaise by the fire.”
Relief flared in his eyes. “Thank you,” he whispered. “Thank you.”
Mary gave a brusque nod, held the door as he dragged Stede through it, then shut it behind them and collapsed heavily against it. The poker fell from her shaking hand with a clatter that set her heart galloping faster even than it already was. She pressed the heel of her hand to her chest, as though by doing so she could prevent it escaping the confines of her ribcage, then allowed herself a moment to just be like that—just a beat or two of panicked what the fuck do you actually think you’re doing, woman before she she stood straight, pulled herself together, and followed history’s most feared pirate and her late husband into the small sitting area of her studio.
When she got there, Blackbeard—no, Ed, she was going to have to think of him as Ed—had eased Stede down onto the chaise longue and was crouched beside him, one hand gripping Stede’s and holding it against his chest, the other resting on Stede’s forehead. As Mary watched he ran his fingers through Stede’s hair, cradled his cheek and stroked a gentle thumb along his cheekbone. A small touch but one that looked well-practiced and so profoundly tender she could hardly believe it had come from such a man—then she caught a glimpse of Ed’s face. The expression he wore nearly brought her to tears. Stark heartache and raw, paralysing fear—the look of a man in very real danger of losing what he loved most in the world.
Mary thought about what Doug might look like if she lay wounded and dying in his arms, how he would feel. How she would feel, if it were Doug on that chaise. She drew a deep, steadying breath and set her jaw. Stede wasn’t going to die, not this time, she thought. Not if she had anything to say about it.
“You’ll have to move aside,” she said. Her voice came out rather reedy; she cleared her throat before continuing. “So I can treat him.”
“Do you know what you’re doing?” Ed’s voice was gruff.
“I’m not a doctor,” said Mary, which wasn’t strictly a lie, “but I’ve patched up my kids many times.” She moved purposefully to Stede’s side, relieved when Ed readily stepped back to give her room. “What happened to him?”
“Ambush,” growled Ed. “We were—”
“No,” interrupted Mary. “What are his wounds?”
“Shot,” said Ed. “Through the shoulder. A few gashes and stab wounds but that’s the major one. Close range, too. His bone may be broken.” Ed’s voice cracked and he raked a hand over his face. “Do whatever it takes,” he said. “Cut his fuckin’ arm off, if you have to. Just keep him alive, okay? Just keep him—”
“Shh,” said Mary soothingly. Without fully meaning to, she reached out and put her hand on Ed’s arm. “I’m not going to let him die,” she said. “Okay, Ed? He’s not going to die.”
Ed nodded. “He’s not gonna die.”
Mary gave his arm a squeeze then turned her attention back to Stede. She probed cautiously at Stede’s shoulder, but the wound was obscured by congealed blood and the wet, clinging shirt, and she couldn’t get a good look at it.
“Ed,” she said, “behind you on a little table there’s a pair of scissors. Hand them to me, please?”
Ed did as she asked. Carefully, Mary cut away Stede’s shirt and peeled it back from the wound.
“Do you know if the bullet passed through?” she asked.
“I think so. He was bleeding in the back too.”
“Good. I think that’s good.” She hoped it was, anyway. “Let’s take the whole shirt off him.”
Together she and Ed cut away Stede’s shirt and used it to dab away the clots of blood that clung to the edges of the wound. Mary was no expert in gunshot wounds but she had a good grasp of anatomy and from what she could observe and feel after an exploratory prod or two, not only had the bullet passed through Stede’s shoulder, it had managed to do so while avoiding both his shoulder blade and collarbone. He’d been, relatively speaking, lucky.
“Missed all the important bits,” muttered Ed when she informed him of this, almost to himself and with a slightly manic chuckle. “Will he survive?”
Mary hesitated for a long moment as she considered the man beside her. Tall enough to be effortlessly intimidating, with a loose-limbed grace of movement only slightly hampered by the brace he wore on one knee. Wild-looking, leather-clad, heavily tattooed. Handsome, she supposed, if you were into that sort of thing. Now that the immediacy of his fear had abated she could see intelligence in his eyes—the astute, observant kind—and another fragment of memory tickled at her mind. Blackbeard was reputed to be a brilliant tactician. A genius strategist. Certainly a man eminently capable of thinking beyond conventional ways of doing things.
“That depends,” she replied. “What are your thoughts on witchcraft?”
“The real danger now is infection,” Mary explained to Ed some minutes later as she rifled through the supplies in her special cupboard. “As I’m sure you know. Bullets can drag bits of cloth fibres from the shirt into the wound, along with dirt or other foreign particles. If those get stuck then the wound can suppurate and that’s life-threatening.”
“Yeah.” Ed nodded. “I’ve seen a lot of men die from that.”
“It’s good that the bullet went straight through so we don’t have to dig it out,” Mary continued. “But it’s been so long since he was shot—how long, would you say?”
“Eight, nine hours maybe.”
“Yeah. Long enough that if anything is caught inside the wound it’s probably already begun to fester. We have to flush that out then wrap the cleaned wound in some linen packed with a few medicinal things to prevent any new infection before it starts.”
“And you have medicine like that?” Ed picked up a bottle and frowned at the label. “Calabash,” he said. “The fuck’s that?”
“It’s for reducing fever.” Mary plucked the bottle from his hand. “We’ll worry about that later.” She set the calabash back down and glanced at Ed. “Do you read?”
He nodded. “'Course. With Stede, all the time.”
The gruff tone of his voice caught Mary’s attention, and she looked at him more closely. As she watched he seemed to crumple in on himself, overcome by whatever was going on inside his head, his throat working as he fought back tears. In a brisk, no-nonsense voice Mary said, “Well you can help me then. Find a bottle labelled gavilana, please. G-a-v-i-l-a-n-a.”
She could see immediately that the tactic had worked. Ed snapped into focus and began to search in earnest.
He found the gavilana quickly, then several other things she asked him for, and soon they had collected everything she needed. Mary had never treated a bullet wound before but she had a solid idea of what would need to be done and how, and she set immediately to work. With Ed as her assistant she first flushed out the wound with a saline solution then bound it up tightly in strips of clean linen along with a poultice of gavilana, bush basil, and tree moss to prevent infection and help it heal quickly. Once the bandage was tightly secured, she mixed a few teaspoons of mimosa into some water with lemon and honey and left Ed to coax a barely-conscious Stede into drinking it while she tidied up and put her potions and powders back in their cupboard.
On her way back she stopped in her bedroom. Doug was there, sound asleep, bless him. He could sleep through most anything and was well used to her restlessness during storms. She pressed a kiss to his forehead, quietly collected some spare blankets and pillows from the wardrobe, and then, after a moment’s consideration, added one or two items that still reposed at the back of it, even after a decade.
Mary had often asked herself why she’d never got rid of Stede’s clothing, but never could produce a satisfying answer. Now, perhaps, she knew.
When she returned to the studio she found Ed seated on the edge of the chaise with Stede’s head cradled in one arm. His other hand held the glass to Stede’s lips, patiently easing small amounts of the liquid into his mouth, with impressive success despite Stede’s incoherent protests.
“Shhh, love, you need to drink it,” he murmured, in a tone so gentle Mary marvelled to hear it. “It’ll help with the pain.” She watched as he emptied the glass and made sure Stede swallowed every drop, then carefully eased him back against the sloping armrest of the chaise. He set the glass down then slowly, rhythmically, began combing his fingers through Stede’s drying hair, another plainly well-practiced gesture which seemed to have a soothing effect on both of them. The lines of strain on Ed’s face eased as Stede sighed and leaned into his touch.
“Ed,” he murmured.
“I’m here, darling,” Ed replied, still in that gentle voice. “I’m here. Sleep now.”
Gradually Stede’s breathing evened out and deepened, and Mary realised she’d been standing in the doorway watching them for the best part of half an hour. She tiptoed backwards then made a noisy production out of opening the door and walking through it, to give Ed plenty of warning of her arrival. When she looked at him again he had moved to one of the two armchairs that flanked the fireplace and retrieved the empty glass from the floor. This he held up for her to see.
“He finished it all.”
“That’s good.” Mary took the glass from him and exchanged it for an armload of blankets and pillows. “Would you mind tucking him in?” she asked. “I brought some of his old clothes down too. Those wet breeches and stockings can’t be doing him any good. If you can, ah, manage that, I’ll take the glass back to the kitchen.”
Ed nodded, and Mary gave him what she hoped was ample time to get Stede changed and settled in before returning, this time with a gently steaming infusion of calabash, fever grass, and soursop leaves. Ed occupied the chair again, which he’d dragged over closer to the chaise and was currently reclining in with what Mary suspected was a deceptively relaxed pose, his fingers steepled beneath his chin.
He looked up when he heard her come in. “What’s that?” he asked, indicating the cup in her hands with a nod.
“Calabash,” she replied with a small smile. “Along with other things. We can give him some if he grows feverish.” She set the cup down on the table, then pulled the other armchair over to face Ed’s and sat down in it. Stede’s head rested on a pillow now, with a blanket pulled up to his chin. His wet breeches and stockings, she noticed, had been hung carefully over the fire screen.
Ed’s eyes were fixed intently on Stede, and Mary could feel anxiety radiating from him. “Hey,” she said. “We’ll need to stay awake and keep an eye on him for a while. At least an hour. Why don’t you use the time to tell me what happened?”
He shot her a glance, and a frown. “It’s a long story.”
“As I said, we have time. And I’d like to hear it.”
This was true, she realised. She was curious. After ten years of barely sparing Stede a thought except to wonder whether he’d got himself killed yet, suddenly she was keenly interested to hear how he’d been living. And how he’d managed to almost-die yet again.
Ed rubbed his chin for a moment, looking thoughtful, then he settled back in his chair and began to speak.
They were retired from pirating, Ed began by explaining, for the most part at least. It was a young man’s game and he’d been growing weary of it for some time before he and Stede had even met, but he’d stuck it out for a few more years to quench Stede’s thirst for adventure before they finally settled down together on a quiet island with a hard-to-find inlet perfect for concealing sailing ships, and made themselves a tidy income running some minor smuggling operations.
As one does, Mary thought, when one retires from pirating. Naturally. What else?
However, Ed continued, they had some former associates who were still quite active in the piracy game and so they liked to go along on a raid or two every now and again, just to keep the old skills honed and the reputation fresh, you know? A pirate’s reputation is everything and Stede at least was still rather fond of his.
Mary nodded in complete understanding. Of course he was, she thought. He’d worked for it. And who could understand the importance of reputation better than a society widow?
“So I dug out my old Blackbeard getup, I don’t wear it much these days you know, it’s hot and not great on the skin and Stede actually prefers it when I wear—uh. Yeah.” The words flowed easily from Ed as he warmed to his topic—a bit too easily perhaps, as he shot her a faintly abashed look then cleared his throat self-consciously. “Anyway. I got all kitted out and Stede did too, and we met up with our mates and went off to intercept this ship they’d heard was hauling some pretty fine loot, but when we got there we found the fuckin’ British Navy waiting.” Ed’s expression darkened and he clenched a fist against his thigh. “I fuckin’ hate those guys, and they really fuckin’ hate Stede. Like it’s basically a vendetta at this point. He killed a few of their officers and took a few others hostage, sank a ship or two and for some reason they take that really fuckin’ personally. I mean, if I held that kind of grudge against everyone who’d ever killed one of my crew or tried to kill me there’d hardly be anyone left on the fuckin’ ocean I didn’t hate. Have a bit of perspective, man.”
“Hmm,” said Mary. It seemed the only practicable response.
“So anyway, we gave ‘em a solid fight.” Ed’s expression shifted into satisfaction. “Got ‘em pretty good too, in fact, soundly damaged two of their ships, but in the end they are the British Fucking Navy if you please good sir, and they boarded us. Didn’t expect to find me and Stede on board but man, the looks on their faces when they did. Like they’d found fuckin’ El Dorado.” His lip curled in a sneer. “Opportunistic bastards.”
Opportunism struck Mary as rather more of a pirate trait than a naval one, but she forbore to mention this and Ed continued.
“Now, me and Stede have this thing we do,” he said, leaning in closer to her, “this move we pull when we’re cornered and need to escape, a slick little two-step sort of thing that Stede devised, and we did that. Nearly worked too, but we’re a step slower than we used to be, age, you know, not a pirate’s friend, there’s a reason so many of us die so fuckin’ young, anyway we weren’t quite fast enough and Stede got shot. We fought our way out even with him wounded and got away in a dinghy, barely, only because their ships weren’t at the right angle to hit us and our mates had jammed the guns on their ship before the Brits boarded.” He leaned back again and began to drum his fingers absently on his knee brace. An unconscious habit when he was feeling anxious, Mary surmised.
“Had no bloody clue where to go, though, our island was too far and Stede was losing blood fast and we couldn’t go to a doctor anyway because of the whole being wanted pirates thing and then Stede thought of you.” He glanced up at Mary, just briefly, and with more uncertainty than she would expect from him. “Barbados was close enough that we could get there in a couple hours and Stede said, he said—” Ed broke off and swallowed hard. “‘Mary won’t turn us away,’ is what he said. ‘She’ll help.’ I didn’t believe it, I’ll level with you, but we were out of fuckin’ options and so I brought us here. We stowed the dinghy on a little spit of sand farther from this place than I’d’ve liked but at least it was well hidden. Then we headed inland. Stede seemed okay at first but then he started bleeding real bad again and stumbling when he tried to walk and then it started fucking storming. Had to drag him the last two miles at least when I could barely see where I was going and I honestly thought—” his voice broke “—I thought he was gonna die before I could make it. I thought ‘he’s gonna die right here in my arms and then I’ll have to shoot myself in the fuckin’ head and leave us both here to rot in a goddamn jungle because I can’t—without him I can’t—I can’t’.”
He met Mary’s eyes and held them this time. His own were wet with unshed tears and brimming with emotion. “If he lives, I consider that a life debt,” he said quietly. “My life, owed to you. He’s my life.”
Mary felt breathless, overwhelmed. Ed’s devotion was a palpable thing and it both warmed her heart and made her feel frantic, like she wanted to run to Doug and wrap herself around him, listen to his heartbeat pound in her ear and feel his breath in her hair. “There’s no debt,” she replied. “Truly. Stede and I made terrible spouses but I like to think that in different circumstances we could have been friends. And even if that weren’t true, I still wouldn’t let him die.” Despite the fact that she had once very nearly murdered him, this was the honest truth—not a mere platitude to appease the dangerous and dangerously emotional pirate captain sat across from her. Not entirely.
And anyway, she had a feeling that if anyone could overlook attempted murder, it would be Ed.
Ed, who was smiling at her now. “Stede was right about you,” he said. “Thank fuck he was right.”
Stede shifted on the chaise and Mary moved to check on him. His temperature was normal and he appeared to be sleeping soundly, his breathing deep and even and a bit of colour blooming in his cheeks. A stark contrast to the state of him when he’d arrived, pale and delirious and all but passed out from pain and loss of blood.
“I think he’ll be okay for the night,” she said. “And it’s really late. You should get some sleep. I can show you to one of the guest rooms—”
“Ah, no.” Ed gave his head a vigorous shake. “Thanks, but I couldn’t leave him. I’ll stay here, if that’s all right.”
Mary smiled. Given what she’d learned of him this evening, it was hardly surprising he’d refuse to leave Stede’s side. “Of course,” she said. “Let me get you some more blankets, though.”
“I’d like that.”
She hurried upstairs again to collect more bedding and when she returned directed Ed to a crate of paint pots that he could drag over to rest his feet on and stretch out. This he did, sighing when he extended his bad knee. Mary set the blankets down on the arm of the chair and then on top of them she placed another pair of breeches and a shirt. “Stede’s clothes,” she said.
Ed looked up. “Sorry?”
“Stede’s clothes,” Mary repeated. “Old ones that he left here. When he ‘died.’” She made inverted commas in the air with her fingers. “I still have them, they’re what he’s wearing now. I brought these ones for you. In case you wanted to change out of—” She gestured at his leather. “It’s just you said it wasn’t very comfortable and also it’s wet, and I really do think you should get some sleep tonight, if you can. So, ah—”
“Yeah.” Ed smiled again. He really had a lovely smile, Mary thought. “Wouldn’t be the first time I’ve worn Stede’s clothes. Thanks.”
Mary returned the smile. “You’re welcome,” she said.
When Mary returned several hours later—hours she’d spent tucked snugly in the warmth of Doug’s arms—to check on Stede and see if Ed wanted any breakfast, she found him sprawled bonelessly in the chair with his legs on the crate, wearing a pair of Stede’s old breeches and, from what she could see that wasn’t covered by the blanket, nothing else. His leather outfit was folded neatly and laid to the side along with his knee brace, and he’d pushed the chair and crate up flush with Stede’s chaise—so close that their legs were touching, so close that Ed could hold Stede’s hand against his cheek as they slept.
As quietly as she could Mary checked Stede’s temperature—still normal—and his bandage—would need changing soon but could last another few hours. Then she tiptoed from the studio and carefully closed the door behind her, leaving both men to their much-needed rest.