February Tale
Grey February skies, misty white sands, black rocks, and the sea seemed black too, like a monochrome photograph, with only the girl in the yellow raincoat adding any colour to the world.
Twenty years ago the old woman had walked the beach in all weathers, bowed over, staring at the sand, occasionally bending, laboriously, to lift a rock and look beneath it. When she had stopped coming down to the sands, a middle-aged woman, her daughter I assumed, came, and walked the beach with less enthusiasm than her mother. Now that woman had stopped coming, and in her place there was the girl.
She came towards me. I was the only other person on the beach in that mist. I don’t look much older than her.
‘What are you looking for?’ I called.
She made a face. ‘What makes you think I’m looking for anything?’
‘You come down here every day. Before you it was the lady, before her the very old lady, with the umbrella.’
‘That was my grandmother,’ said the girl in the yellow raincoat.
‘What did she lose?’
‘A pendant.’
‘It must be very valuable.’
‘Not really. It has sentimental value.’
‘Must be worth more than that, if your family has been looking for it for umpteen years.’
‘Yes.’ She hesitated. Then she said, ‘Grandma said it would take her home again. She said she only came here to look around. She was curious. And then she got worried about having the pendant on her, so she hid it under a rock, so she’d be able to find it again, when she got back. And then, when she got back, she wasn’t sure which rock it was, not any more. That was fifty years ago.’
‘Where was her home?’
‘She never told us.’
The way the girl was talking made me ask the question that scared me. ‘Is she still alive? Your grandmother?’
‘Yes. Sort of. But she doesn’t talk to us these days. She just stares out at the sea. It must be horrible to be so old.’
I shook my head. It isn’t. Then I put my hand into my coat pocket and held it out to her. ‘Was it anything like this? I found it on this beach a year ago. Under a rock.’
The pendant was untarnished by sand or by salt water.
The girl looked amazed, then she hugged me, and thanked me, and she took the pendant, and ran up the misty beach, in the direction of the little town.
I watched her go: a splash of gold in a black-and-white world, carrying her grandmother’s pendant in her hand. It was a twin to the one I wore around my own neck.
I wondered about her grandmother, my little sister, whether she would ever go home; whether she would forgive me for the joke I had played on her if she did. Perhaps she would elect to stay on the earth, and would send the girl home in her place. That might be fun.
Only when my great-niece was gone and I was alone did I swim upward, letting the pendant pull me home, up into the vastness above us, where we wander with the lonely sky-whales and the skies and seas are one.
March Tale
. . . only this we know, that she was not executed.
– CHARLES JOHNSON, A GENERAL HISTORY OF THE ROBBERIES
AND MURDERS OF THE MOST NOTORIOUS PIRATES
It was too warm in the great house, and so the two of them went out onto the porch. A spring storm was brewing far to the west. Already the flicker of lightning, and the unpredictable chilly gusts blew about them and cooled them. They sat decorously on the porch swing, the mother and the daughter, and they talked of when the woman’s husband would be home, for he had taken ship with a tobacco crop to faraway England.
Mary, who was thirteen, so pretty, so easily startled, said, ‘I do declare. I am glad that all the pirates have gone to the gallows, and Father will come back to us safely.’
Her mother’s smile was gentle, and it did not fade as she said, ‘I do not care to talk about pirates, Mary.’
***
She was dressed as a boy when she was a girl, to cover up her father’s scandal. She did not wear a woman’s dress until she was on the ship with her father, and with her mother, his serving-girl mistress whom he would call wife in the New World, and they were on their way from Cork to the Carolinas.
She fell in love for the first time, on that journey, enveloped in unfamiliar cloth, clumsy in her strange skirts. She was eleven, and it was no sailor who took her heart but the ship itself: Anne would sit in the bows, watching the grey Atlantic roll beneath them, listening to the gulls scream, and feeling Ireland recede with each moment, taking with it all the old lies.
She left her love when they landed, with regret, and even as her father prospered in the new land she dreamed of the creak and slap of the sails.
Her father was a good man. He had been pleased when she had returned, and did not speak of her time away: the young man whom she had married, how he had taken her to Providence. She had returned to her family three years after, with a baby at her breast. Her husband had died, she said, and although tales and rumours abounded, even the sharpest of the gossiping tongues did not think to suggest that Annie Riley was the pirate-girl Anne Bonny, Red Rackham’s first mate.
‘If you had fought like a man, you would not have died like a dog.’ Those had been Anne Bonny’s last words to the man who put the baby in her belly, or so they said.
***
Mrs Riley watched the lightning play, and heard the first rumble of distant thunder. Her hair was greying now, and her skin just as fair as that of any local woman of property.
‘It sounds like cannon fire,’ said Mary (Anne had named her for her own mother, and for her best friend in the years she was away from the great house).
‘Why would you say such things?’ asked her mother, primly. ‘In this house, we do not speak of cannon fire.’
The first of the March rain fell, then, and Mrs Riley surprised her daughter by getting up from the porch swing and leaning into the rain, so it splashed her face like sea spray. It was quite out of character for a woman of such respectability.
As the rain splashed her face she thought herself there: the captain of her own ship, the cannonade around them, the stench of the gunpowder smoke blowing on the salt breeze. Her ship’s deck would be painted red, to mask the blood in battle. The wind would fill her billowing canvas with a snap as loud as cannon’s roar, as they prepared to board the merchant ship, and take whatever they wished, jewels or coin – and burning kisses with her first mate when the madness was done . . .
‘Mother?’ said Mary. ‘I do believe you must be thinking of a great secret. You have such a strange smile on your face.’
‘Silly girl, acushla,’ said her mother. And then she said, ‘I was thinking of your father.’ She spoke the truth, and the March winds blew madness about them.