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The last time she went to Eleanor Guthrie, it was for help. Anne would think this was evidence of how quickly fortunes shift, save for the fact that the last time she went to Eleanor Guthrie, it was also for murder.
And that’s still the same.
Even as one of the most recognizable pirates, it’s easy to get through Nassau unnoticed. There’s nobody out on the street ‘cept for the guards, but the smoke from the Underhill estate keeps their eyes on the interior. They’re not looking for a small rowboat on a moonless night.
And Anne, Anne can move quiet.
It’s an odd feeling. Having to sneak through her own town, past all the buildings that are being remade in England’s image. Past the fucking church, its wooden bones barely distinguishable from the night sky. She doesn’t want to lay a claim to this place the way Jack and Flint do— Nassau is nothing but buildings on dirt, and it won't save them. But she wants streets she can walk down and people who respect her and a place to sleep when they aren’t sailing.
(And—)
And then there’s the governor’s mansion.
Welcome home.
It’d be hard to break into if she hadn’t lived here for months, when they were flush with gold and success. If she hadn’t known which windows don’t have glass, and how easy it is to pry open the shutters. She climbs as quietly as she can into the hallway, and is nearly to the stairs before she sees anyone.
She kills the guard before he realizes what’s happened.
She thinks, this is my house, motherfucker.
It ain’t, of course. But there are still signs of them, strewn around—nobody has fixed the baluster Jack had kicked out when he was having an emotion about something, and there’s still the mark on the wall from where Idelle threw a bag of money at Jack’s head. Anne traces the dent with her thumb.
There’s another guard outside the door to the governor’s rooms. He’s staring straight ahead, shoulders square. She avoids the creakiest floorboards until she’s only a few feet away—he turns, swings—but her sword is already in his chest.
She catches his shoulder and lowers him to the ground carefully, so he doesn’t crash.
And then she opens the door.
“Good evening, cunt.”
It seems appropriate, somehow.
Eleanor Guthrie is sitting behind a desk—the governor’s desk—looking through some papers. The candle has burned low, and if it weren’t for the room they’re in, it could be a look back in time. She glances up as Anne enters, and then freezes. One of her hands drops below the table, and Anne draws a knife.
“Hands where I can see ‘em.”
Eleanor raises an eyebrow. “Is this an arrest?” She appears to be looking at Anne, but her eyes are just narrowed enough to tell Anne she’s really got an eye on the door. Waiting for someone to save her, maybe. Or looking for a chance to flee.
But there’s no one out there. The bodies have already fallen.
“It’s an execution,” Anne says, because if she can be honest with anyone it’s a woman who’s going to be dead soon. A woman who should already have been dead a few times over.
Maybe she does die, and then fucks the Devil until he lets her back out.
“Well, I’m honored.” She doesn’t sound particularly honored, or concerned, but she’s still watching the door. Afraid, and trying to hide it. “You can’t have missed the governor’s ship out there, so you know he isn’t here.”
“He ain’t who I’m after.”
“Of course.” She pushes away from the desk, and Anne tenses to move in case she pulls out a pistol. But Eleanor just walks over to a table in the corner, where a few bottles have been left. “Care for a drink?”
“Excuse me?”
Move. Move now. Shoot her, stab her, do something—but Anne doesn’t move, because in the low light like this, she can look past Eleanor’s fancy dress and fancy hair and see the woman who said your plan isn’t risky enough. The woman Max loved, and what the fuck is Max going to think?
Max is going to be going about her day and someone is going to come give her the news, or she’ll find Eleanor herself, and—and Anne can’t afford to think like that, because Max left Jack for dead. She deserves to lose Eleanor.
God, Anne's so tired of this.
“So let me guess,” Eleanor says, when Anne doesn’t speak. “Teach sent you. Long John Silver didn’t send me a black spot first, and I like to think that Flint, at least, would come kill me personally.”
They were friends, weren’t they, Eleanor and Flint? Anne wonders if Flint would ever do it. Probably. But maybe not like this.
But Eleanor deserves to know what she’s dying for. There ain’t much point in a killing like this if she doesn’t. “They want justice for Vane.”
Eleanor snorts. “And they aren’t man enough to come do the work themselves, are they? Tell me, do you ever get tired of being used as a pistol? You didn’t even like Charles.”
That’s not fair. Anne doesn’t much like most people. “I liked him fine.”
“And now you’re risking your life to kill me, knowing full well that what that will inspire my husband?” She holds out a tin cup of whiskey, but Anne shakes her head. Recent actions aside, she isn’t a fucking idiot—there could be anything in there. Eleanor takes a sip, and doesn’t drop dead. Maybe she's just as tired as Anne is.
“He won’t last a week without you whispering in his ear, telling him what to do.”
Eleanor raises her cup a little in acknowledgement. “I’m not the only woman he relies on,” she says. “Are you planning to kill her, too?”
Wrong, wrong, wrong. Anne sticks her knives back in their sheaths, because holding them and thinking about Max is—
“Fuck you,” she says. “Max didn’t kill Vane.”
“Max was the one who realized that you already had a plan in place to rescue Jack. Without her, you might have all gotten away. And Max was the one who kept you from making a successful attack on the harbor just last week.”
She doesn’t want to know this. She doesn’t want to know this. And she does want to know, so she can hold onto that anger. So she’ll be able to— “Fuck’s your point? You want me to kill her?”
“No. I don't think you want to kill her. And I want you to not want to kill me either.” Eleanor pauses to swallow what looks like half the cup. “Is it working?”
Anne shrugs. “Not enough to make me change my mind.” What she wants doesn't matter right now. She has a job. It’s not like she hasn’t killed Max’s friends before. She just has to move fast—to stab— twist— “Got anything else?”
Eleanor hesitates, hand dropping to her stomach. She looks at Anne fully, now. Not facing the wall or the door.
Anne looks at Eleanor’s stomach as well. It looks perfectly normal to her, but then, corsets can cover a lot. “No fucking way.”
“Mm.” Another swig down, and this time, Anne holds out her hand for the cup. Eleanor passes it over.
“You could be lying to me.”
Eleanor runs a hand over her face, giving Anne at least a six second window to kill her, before she sits back down at the desk. Not how she used to sit, like her desk was the castle from which she ruled over Nassau. This is a defeated slump behind the last barricade. “Well, I could be. But you’d have to wait around for a month to find out for sure, and I don’t know if you have that kind of time.”
“Because that’s what this world needs,” Anne mutters, and drinks. The governor’s rum is better than anything she’s got. She should steal some when she leaves. “A lil' Eleanor Guthrie.”
“Technically it’s Eleanor Rogers, now.”
“Fucking hell.”
“Quite. You want a chair?”
Anne takes the chair.
This shouldn’t change anything. Any spawn of Rogers is going to grow up to be an evil shit. But she ain’t exactly in the baby murdering business either.
“You don’t sound happy about it.”
Eleanor shrugs. “Hardly ideal, is it? This isn’t a place or time for a child. I never thought—” she stops, but Anne can guess.
It can’t have been that long. Not long enough to show, that’s still enough time to just…
“If you asked Max,” Anne says carefully, “she’d know how to… solve it, if that’s really how you feel.”
Eleanor’s arm tenses. “I thought about it. But then I thought, what if there’s one good thing I can get from this place?”
Get from this place. Like she isn’t staying?
“Eleanor Guthrie,” Anne muses. “Married and with child. Who would have fucking thought.”
“I fucking didn’t.”
Ah, there’s the woman that Anne remembers.
“It wasn’t so long ago Flint chained Silver to my couch, and you and I could scare him into doing what we wanted,” Eleanor continues, pouring herself some more. Anne wonders if all that’s good for the baby, and then tells herself it doesn’t matter because she’s going to kill them both—
Fucking hell. That was never an option, was it. “Now Silver’s a king, or some shit,” Anne agrees. “Max owns half the town. And you’re the wife of the governor.” She thinks Silver might outrank her, and if she were more like Jack, she’d be bitter about it.
“And what are you?”
She’s the only one who hasn’t lost her goddamn mind, is what. “I’m me,” she says. “Never felt a need to become anyone else.”
“That’s admirable, I suppose.”
But there’s something admirable in Max, and maybe even Eleanor, Anne thinks. They can both change. They’re both survivors. They’d never have dived off a warship and into a battle.
But God, did it feel good.
“How is she?”
Anne shouldn’t ask. Doesn’t even have a right to ask. Because she’s furious and betrayed and she said it before she could stop herself, because she thinks in this moment, Eleanor might answer.
Eleanor looks at her again. Eleanor has never looked at her this much. She doesn’t think anyone has, except Jack and Max, or someone on the end of her sword.
“As well as any of us.”
That ain’t an answer, but Anne doesn’t know how to ask what she wants: is she happy, is she safe, because there’s a war on, or is she sorry, because it doesn’t matter.
She drinks instead, trying not to stare at Eleanor’s stomach, where something is growing. Something new, that could one day be entirely itself.
“I could lie,” she says, before she can think about it too much.
“Excuse me?”
“I bring Teach—I don’t know, some of your hair. Put your clothes on one of the guards and burn the body. Everyone will think you’re dead, and you can grab what money you can and escape. Take her with you. Go somewhere safe.” Eleanor’s death would embolden the pirates, and her loss would weaken the governor. Max and the baby could be safe, and Anne wouldn’t have to look at Nassau Town and wonder what will happen if they burn it all down. “Rogers would even think I stole the money.”
They stare each other down for a moment, but it’s Eleanor who looks away this time. She pushes away from the desk and leans so close to the window that her breath fogs the glass.
“You’re asking me to run away. With Max.”
Anne shrugs, but Eleanor can’t see her. “Why not?”
“Why not—would you—” she stops. “I was going to ask if you would run away with Jack and leave Max behind, but you did do that, didn’t you.”
“Max left me first.” She shouldn’t answer. It’s petty and childish and not the argument she wants to make. She hadn’t thought she’d be leaving Max to anything like this.
“She asked me to run away with her, once.” Anne knows this. It’s what set them off on this path to start with. “Maybe I should have done it. But I had put too much of me into Nassau to leave it behind. Were I to ask her to leave, now, I think her answer would be the same. And despite what you seem to think, I do care for my husband. The thought of causing him that much pain—”
Eleanor Guthrie, worried about bringing pain to the people who love her. Ha. “Even to save your own life? Your child’s? Max?” What’s Woodes Rogers, to all of that? Her jailer? Her duty? Or does she really love that scarfaced smug shit?
Then again, Eleanor had loved Charles. Or Anne thinks she loved Charles. Maybe she’s just got shit taste in men.
“I do appreciate the offer. Even if it I know it’s not really for my benefit.”
Anne pours herself some more rum. Might as well get as much as she can, considering what she’ll face when she returns.
“But you’d benefit.”
“And I would have to live with it. No. The outcome isn’t as certain as you seem to think it is. But if you’re right and I have to leave, I’ll do it with my husband. Or not at all.”
Maybe Eleanor’s not a survivor. Maybe she’s an idiot.
But Anne doesn’t think so. Eleanor’s probably coming up with strategies now, to defend against whatever Flint has planned. She just has to hope Flint has anticipated them.
Or she has to hope that Flint dies, quickly and easily, and she, Jack and Teach can go on the account a little farther away. She wants Rogers gone. She wants Nassau back. Maybe she even wants Max back, somewhere under all that anger. But she doesn’t want any of those things drenched in blood.
Except maybe Rogers.
“Just hope it’s Flint that finds you,” she says. “And not Teach. Next time, he won’t send me.”
Eleanor finally sits back down. “And you. Keep clear of Captain Berringer.”
Anne’s the one that stands now. She puts the cup back on the desk, and wonders if she’s ever going to see Eleanor Guthrie again.
Maybe it doesn’t matter.
She leaves the way she came, and no one stops her.