The Dread Pirate Molly Hawke Ch. 01

"Yes," he nodded, "You told me to make sure that I had a good time, so I did. Now I've spent all of my money on that pair. They're cousins and you can't buy one without buying them both. I need to get back out to sea before I fall in love."

They walked down the stairs together in silence and it wasn't until after they'd settled up and begun to walk back to the harbor that she turned and asked, "Is there really a danger of that? You'd fall in love with those two?"

He didn't look at her and he just spoke as he walked on, "More than I already have? Yes."

After that, she took more of an interest in Willem, since without saying a word to her he'd undertaken her care and had always watched her back. She watched him for a time then as he went about the business of being her second in command.

Willem had come from humble beginnings, being one of the bastard sons of a lower English lord who'd burned through his wealth as though it was lamp oil and died penniless. But that hadn't had any effect on Willem one way or the other, since he'd been the only child of an English servant girl who'd been brought along when her lover had sailed to the New World and then left her there when her belly began to swell.

He was a bit older than his captain, with hair which couldn't seem to decide on which shade of brown it wanted to be. Strong and fit, and having no fear of either work or sailing through anything in even a bathtub, as he often joked, it wasn't hard to like him.

After his incident with the couple of cousins, She decided to undertake his care and the next time that they were in Tortuga, Willem found her beside him as he was drawn inexorably up the long hill toward the Wayward Maid.

"What are your plans, Captain," he asked a little cautiously.

But she smirked at him, "I intend to see that you get your money's worth this time and more. In fact, it will be my money's worth, since I will be buying the cousins on your behalf."

Willem stopped then, "I can't have that, Captain. Look here --"

"Bess", she smiled, looking up only a little at him, since she was a tall girl to most.

"Bess?" Willem's features twisted a little along with his head in confusion, "I thought you were Molly."

"Bess," she nodded as she held her smile, "It me name, you know. What I given when me born, Willem."

He shook his head, "Alright, look here. Bess, I can't have you doing that. I have no wish to be in your debt more than I already am for giving me a life which is my own and where I needn't have to work myself into the ground. It wouldn't be right to me."

"So instead, you work yourself into the deck for me, Willem? Is that what we are about?

No," she shook her head, "I'll not have it. I'll see to it that you enjoy yourself once with no cares over your money."

"But --"

Bess stood before him with her hands on her hips and a bright green glare in her eye and she said, "Fine, Willem, If you won't take the gift of my money, then we'll pool our gold together and we'll both buy them."

"Uh," he looked very confused now.

"Together, Willem, and we'll take our pleasure at the same time, If that does not please you, then I'll have you in a bed to myself and we'll save a barrel of gold."

His jaw dropped and it made her laugh, "Come on, let's see what our luck brings."

A few hours later, Willem groaned as he spent into the young man underneath him and he lay back to catch his breath and reach for the bottle again as he watched Bess.

She was on her back with her legs up while the girl lapped hungrily between her legs.

"I would never have had the thought to see you like this," he smiled, "in a bed with a girl loving you in this manner."

"I have never done it before," Bess heaved a little breathlessly, "But my little lover here is so good at this and for what this costs, I will have my money's worth."

Bess threw her head back and bucked as she held the whore's head gently. The way that Bess looked to him, Willem knew that he'd never leave her and would always seek to protect her.

They kept at the two whores for two days, but on the third, they just stayed in bed together.

Their relationship changed after that.

Bess would seek out Willem and see him issuing orders as the ship was squared away for the night and when he was done that, he'd turn and she'd just look him in the eye and tell him to follow her. The next thing he knew, he was in some corner of the quarterdeck in the shadows where she'd sink to her knees because she wanted to feel his cock in her mouth.

Sometimes he'd come to her as she was deciding where they ought to go next to turn a bit of cash. He wouldn't say a thing to her. He'd get to his knees and she'd feel him there under the table when he kissed his way up her bare leg slowly.

And she finally knew the bliss of loving with a man who'd give her all that he had as he loved her slowly for hours in a rainstorm.

It wasn't a love which had sprung out of the air in the way that a flower might seem to almost jump out of the ground in the spring. I was something which came out of need and respect between them.

For the first time since she'd stepped aboard Alexander Hawke's ship and begun her metamorphosis into the dread pirate Molly Hawke, Bess could catch glimpses of a life with Willem after this.

They spoke of it, and began their plans.

They only needed just a little more gold to pay out their crew and pay for passage to somewhere where no one knew their names.

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Capture and Forgetfulness

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It was only a matter of time before Bess was apprehended and when it happened in an ambush on a sandy beach one evening, Bess watched Willem fall in her defense as musket-fire rang around them all. Her tears streamed down her face as she kissed his already-dead cheek and got to her feet, stuffing her dueling pistols into her waistband as she did. She reached for her shirt and drew it around her shoulders as she began to walk.

She saw who it had been, a dark-haired young soldier with a pinched face who had managed to get close enough to shoot from behind a tree. In an instant, she saw that his hope had been to be able to improve his lot by rising on the fame of being known as the one who had killed the infamous first mate and lover of the pirate Molly Hawke.

Her first quiet words as she walked brought a crash of thunder as the lightning which had birthed that sound tore across the heavens over them very close by.

Rain pelted down as she walked through the darkness, a half-naked woman with dark skin and red hair with green eyes which blazed in her hatred. Out in the cove, the wind whipped the tips of the waves clean off as froth and the sky flickered with her wrath.

She was hit in the meat of her thigh, but she walked on as though she didn't feel it.

The soldier was trying desperately to reload his Brown Bess musket as she came to him. When he raised the piece and cocked the hammer, Bess pulled it out of his hands, shot another soldier who was running over to help and then she beat the first one with the musket several times.

As he lay on the ground crying and holding his bleeding head, she knelt over him and drew one of her pistols.

"Ya came for Molly Hawke," she said, "Well now you face her with no tree to hide behind, coward.

We 'ave business, you and I."

He whimpered and tried to hide his face. Her rage brought a bolt of lightning down on a nearby palm which fell and pinned three men under it, killing one of them.

"Look at me, you little mouse."

She grabbed him by the hair and lifted his head to look into his eyes.

"Look at me before you die. You're no man if ya can't face me like a man faces what come to him over what him do."

She saw into his terrified gray eyes as they filled with his fear.

"Ay-yah," she said as she got her first look at him clearly.

"I 'ave done nothing to you to make you shoot down the man that I love. But I do something now and seal my own fate into the bargain.

Ya wanted to make it better for yaself by killing what was mine?"

She lowered her face to his, "Me take all that you have - all that you are and will ever be."

He tried to look away again and she laid her pistol down on his chest and punched him in the face over and over until he could do nothing more than weep like a child.

Her knuckles bled freely from being ripped open on the shards and stumps of the teeth that she'd broken in his mouth, but she felt none of it.

She only smiled at him.

"Your bad luck to get outta bed today, boy."

He began to whimper as Bess picked up and cocked her piece with her thumb and began to mutter at him, holding his terrified eyes with her own gaze the whole while.

"Ya spirit not rest after this, ya know, not after my curses upon your filthy little soul," she said, "If I see it when my own soul wanders, when I am dead, I be sure ta torment you forever."

He began to bawl like a small boy.

She shot him in the face and jammed her pistol down his throat as far as she could.

Bess stood up then and threw down her pistols after seeing that her men would fight to the death for her -- and they were losing in the face of a determined -- and numerically superior force on the beach where she and her crews had often gone to let off a little steam.

"Run if you can!" she shouted as she stepped forward painfully now, feeling the musketball in her thigh.

The English colonel that she faced over the twenty yards of sand ordered his men to cease fire and he stared at her. "Stand where you are and declare your name."

After two years, Bess felt as though she'd had enough. She looked at the bodies around her, and wanted to drag this out longer so that more of her men might get away.

She pulled off her kerchief and looked the man in the eye as she pointed at the ruined body that she'd left and spoke in a clear voice.

"Such brave heroes, who shoot down a man for protecting his woman.

I am Molly Hawke," she said, and the next thing she knew, she was in irons.

Her jailors were quick to fetch a doctor for her leg and to determine that she was not discernibly pregnant. They wanted to have her in the gibbet as quickly as possible to prevent her from 'pleading her belly' if she was with child. Bess wasn't pregnant anyway and the ten days of her imprisonment passed quickly. When she asked about a trial, she was told that only freemen were given trials. It was a lie and she knew it, but there was nothing to be done about it so she sat in her cell and waited.

On the day before she was to be hung on the yardarm she had a very few visitors. Her mother and grandmother and a few others made sure to pay the guards well so that they might have the needed time alone with Bess. When the jailors looked in on them, they saw that all of the women had gone, though no one saw anyone leave and Molly Hawke lay as though dead on her bunk.

The doctor was summoned and he was not able to find any sign of life. There was no pulse or breathing going on and he saw no fog on a mirror held to her nose and lips. The point of a blade pressed into her soles drew no response and so he declared her dead and her body was released to her grandfather the following day.

Old Tumweh took her home, muttering over her all of the way and though all of them did their best to bring her out of the trance, they gave it up after two days of trying and she was laid into a rough-made casket with a letter from her mother while her family grieved. They didn't bury her because they knew that she wasn't dead. They looked at her often and she looked to be asleep.

She slept through the lives of her family and was still in the box when the last one passed, a nephew two generations on.

He died an old man of eighty-three at his home on the other side of the island. He'd never seen his great aunt awake.

And no one, not a soul, had seen it when she'd awakened.

When she'd realized that no one lived near where she'd woken up, she'd wandered around a little and found that no one lived in the whole area anymore. When she'd been a girl, there were about a hundred other Maroons living in a community all around her. Now there was nobody.

She left and walked away through the swamp until she found drier ground and eventually, she'd reached the coast, having seen few if any people. Those that she did see couldn't see her and her efforts to make her presence known had all ended badly, so she just walked on. Finding herself on the northern shore, she looked around until she found a boat. She didn't know it, but she was near Montego Bay and she'd found a fishing boat leaving for a day's work. She rode it looking at the men and deciding that she wanted to move on. A little quiet thought and she found that the elements still responded to her will in a small way. No matter what the concerned fishermen did, they found themselves sailing northward to land on the southern shore of Cuba where Bess stepped over the side and swam to shore.

From there, it was the same story. She saw few people and kept heading as north as she could sense. Another much longer fishing boat ride and she found herself wandering the bayous of Louisiana and feeling more at home. That was where she met Brian.

It wasn't the normal sort of meeting. She only noticed him because he could see her for some reason. He was sixteen and Bess told him quite often that he was beautiful, with dark eyes and long shiny black hair and skin a little darker than that of the others of his tribe. He was an orphan, but he told her a little proudly that he was almost a man and he was already running a trapline, catching his own food and hunting as well. All that, and he had a boat, so the two of them became friends and she stayed with him for almost two years.

Brian had confided to her that he felt drawn to other men. She remembered the way that he'd fallen silent as he'd told her. There was an awkward silence then for him and a wondering one for her until she'd asked him why he'd stopped speaking and he'd told her that he'd been waiting for her scorn or at least her disapproval. She laughed then and said that she was relieved because from his silence, she'd thought that she'd said something wrong. The two of them had laughed together over it and they remained very good friends until the day that he'd almost been murdered. He hadn't been killed, she thought bitterly afterward, but it still marked the beginning of the end.

When she found him, he'd been beaten three-quarters of the way to death and through her tears for him, Bess saw the cause of it at once in the jangling and painful images which flooded his damaged mind. From his memories, she saw what had happened. He'd been baited into coming alone to meet a man who'd expressed a reciprocal interest. That man and two others had beaten Brian to a pulp.

She took care of him and did her best for him, but though she was able to find his mind, she couldn't help him reconnect to his body. He was only a little passenger -- a little bit of consciousness who was trapped inside a body that he no longer had control over. As his body slowly healed, she tried and tried, but though she found that she could 'get inside' and operate the nervous system connections, she couldn't find a way for him to do that. Instead, she found that he was getting smaller and weaker.

One day about two weeks after the beating, she slipped inside and found that what was left of Brian told her that he wanted to die. She stayed with him for the ten days that it took for that to happen and then she buried him. After that, she hunted the ones who had killed her friend.

She found the trio far back in the bayou, which she thought was rather convenient. They were drinking by a fire and she just walked up and bound them where they stood after they'd jumped up to run. She told the terrified men that she was a friend of the young man they'd beaten and that he'd died as a result. She noted that they didn't seem regretful in any way, other than the strong want to escape which she could read in them.

"You don' understand," she said, little more than a wavering image before them in the semi-darkness there. That was what she was to them -- a wavering image who spoke with an island accent.

"The boy you beat down. Him name Brian and 'e was my friend. Him never harm a soul and him die for what?" She came closer and two of them began to soil themselves as she screeched painfully into their ears.

"WHAT HIM DIE FOR?"

She looked from one to the next, "Since you will not answer me, I take away your ability to speak."

They stood where they had to. Bess allowed them only what they needed to breathe, to see, hear and think.

"It take me friend a few weeks to die, ya know. It my desire to see you suffer just as long and more. It take time, but I have plenty to devote to three stupid things like you. I going take away everything that you have, and the first thing I take is ya 'ope, but that will only be after I beat you as you beat down my friend. I was there to take care of him. But there will be no one here for you to wash you and wipe ya ass after you shit yourself."

They began to make sounds then, desperate noises and nothing comprehensible. She left them standing there, held up by nothing more than her vengeful will as she went from one to the other and administered everything which she'd found in Brian's memories. Sometimes she used her fists and her feet. Other times, she used the same club which had been used on Brian, since it was there.

The beatings took almost an hour and still she let each of them stand while she beat them one at a time. They couldn't move much or even try to get away. At times, she let them fall down, but it was only because she'd remembered not to overlook the way that they'd kicked Brian while he lay begging for his life on the ground.

"The body die from thirst," she said pleasantly, "not from starving. Ya beat Brian so hard that ya leave him broken inside. Ya break his body and his will. You break his mind. It my task and my pleasure to return the favor," she said as she swung the very end of the club against the mouth of the one who had broken so much of Brian.

"How important is it now what you want to lie against in the dark? Does it matter to you now what Brian wanted? Him want to be loved, and if he cannot find that, then he only want a little joy in a quiet place."

She swung the bat upward and in two strikes, she broke more than one soft organ inside another one of them and she made sure that one external thing there would never rise again.

She slid inside their heads and laughed at the damaged little things which they'd become. Over the days, friends and family of the three came seeking them, but found only a burned-out firepit, empty and half-empty bottles, and bags of stolen property.

All of it lay scattered in a clearing which was clearly deserted but rang with the cries which the trio had made as Bess had broken ribs and smashed teeth. She let the sound play over and over and watched as the people searched everywhere, walking right past the three men who stood in her iron grasp. When the last of them finally died, she left them in heaps to rot where they fell.

The next day, she took Brian's boat and though it took her months, she didn't leave that boat behind until she could go no further and began to walk.