Chapter 10

They took us to Spanish Town in chains.

I want to note that the chains were unnecessary. Where exactly did they imagine we were going. We were two women on a cart surrounded by Navy sailors in a British colony in 1720. The chains were not security. They were theatre. The British Empire has always understood that theatre is half of governance.

The prison was what prisons are. I will not elaborate on the conditions because elaborating on them serves no purpose and I have limited pages and more important things to record. I will say that I had slept in worse places and eaten worse food and that the Flemish winter of 1709 had prepared me adequately for physical discomfort of most varieties.

I thought about Thomas constantly.

I did not know where he was. That was the specific torture of those first days, not the chains or the cell or the smell or the knowledge of what was coming. It was not knowing. He had been below deck when they took us. He had stayed where I told him to stay. Whether that had saved him or simply meant he was taken quietly rather than fighting I did not know and had no way of finding out and the not knowing had a weight that the other things did not.

I asked once. A guard, young, not unkind, the kind of young man who had not yet been in the position long enough to perfect his indifference. I asked him about the rest of Calico Jack’s crew, what had happened to them, where they were being held.

He looked at me with the discomfort of someone who has information they do not want to deliver.

I told him to say it plainly.

He said the crew had been taken without significant resistance. He said they were being held separately. He said the trial was scheduled for November and that the charges were piracy on the high seas which carried a mandatory sentence and that I should probably speak to someone about my situation before then.

I asked him about a young man. Dark haired. Good with charts.

He said he didn’t know specifically.

I looked at him for a moment. He was telling the truth about not knowing. I had spent twenty years reading men and he was telling the truth.

I thanked him and he left and I sat in the cell and held the not knowing and converted it the way I converted everything, into something that could be carried without stopping me from moving.

The trial was in November.

I had been in courtrooms before, briefly, in other contexts, and I understood their essential nature which is performance with consequences. The law is theatre with a trapdoor. Everything proceeds according to script until the moment it doesn’t and then the trapdoor opens and whatever falls through it is gone.