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Stede wasn’t exactly sure what he would find, barging into his old home after months away. Not to mention…looking the way he did now.
So much had changed since he’d seen them last. He was different, inside and out. Would his children, his husband—would they even recognize him? Would they kick him out, call the authorities? Would they have him institutionalized? Or, perhaps, even worse: would they expect everything to be exactly as it was before?
But then, wasn’t that the very thing he wanted? Otherwise, why had he come so far? Given up so much? Abandoned this new life he’d built, and left the one person who ever, ever—
Stede swallowed hard and shoved away the thought.
He wasn’t cut out for it, that life on the sea. That world of freedom and self-determination, where he could hurt so many with his inadequacies.
It had been too good to believe at first. When a woman at port had told him she could make his chest as flat as any man’s. When she’d given him a serum to make that same chest grow hair, to broaden his shoulders and deepen his voice. He would have paid her any price, he would have given her the moon if she’d asked. Her price hadn’t been quite so high, but still he left her with all the gold he could spare and taken with him all the joy he imagined he could possibly hold. Then, when, in spite of all that had changed in him (not to mention all that hadn’t) he’d met someone—an incredible, intelligent, lovely someone—who seemed to like every bit of it. Who looked at it all and didn’t flinch. Who had—
No, but that was over now. And there was nothing left but to come home. To face the man whose name he took, whose clothes he stole. Whose children he unmothered, by nature of being who he was.
Whatever was repossessed from him, whatever of himself was stripped away by his return, it was nothing less than he deserved. What kind of man did he think himself, weak as he was? Cowardly as he was? What kind of man could he hope to be with so much failure in his wake?
He pushed the door open before he could have second thoughts, and stepped into the foyer of the house he had once lived in.
“Darling,” he said, hearing the gravel in his voice. The days without water, the sobbing in the woods. The fragmented edges left by the fading effects of the serum. What would happen, now that he didn’t have it? “I’m home.”
But when he looked in the drawing room—the one he’d decorated himself in the dreary early days of marriage, the one he’d spent awful days and days trapped in, floating further from himself, from the family that was all he had in the world, and that still seemed to have so little interest in him—his husband wasn’t there.
Instead, there was a woman. Wide-eyed with astonishment. Wearing his husband’s round face and a familiar dress. One he himself had left behind so many months ago.
There was a circle of women in the parlor around her too, staring in shock at the intrusion, but he hardly noticed them. All he saw was her. In his house. Wearing his clothes. Looking for all the world like the husband he’d left behind.
They gaped at each other a long moment, Stede’s brain trying desperately to sort the pieces of this picture into a shape that made sense.
Then the woman stood up and vomited into her tea.
*
When an adult had disappeared from the Bonnet household, someone had to be declared dead. It was the only way for the estate to carry on. For the children to get closure. For things to end clean. But it was also something of an unexpected opportunity.
Someone had to be dead. But it didn’t have to be Mary Bonnet.
When she had woken up with her clothes all stolen, a chunk of her fortune gone, a note from her wife saying she was headed to the sea, that she would never be back, there was part of her that just thought: finally.
It wasn’t that they hated each other. Nothing so dramatic as that. Married life had been unpleasant in the usual ways: the two of them had never quite clicked, despite all attempts otherwise, and they’d settled into a kind of quiet acceptance of one another, if not love. The relief, Mary realized, had less to do with the disappearance of her spouse, and more to do with the disappearance of all those other demands that marriage represented.
Being the man of a household, a husband to a wife: she had known for some time that she wasn’t either of those things. The version of herself she held in her mind was very different from the way others must have seen her. But she kept it all private, hidden, wrapped up in the deepest corners of herself. What was there to be done when bills needed to be paid and children needed to be raised and an estate needed to be run? That was the work of a man, and so a man she would be.
But all that could also, she realized, holding the note at the edge of their bed that morning—sun streaming in the windows, the children just stirring in their rooms, a new day beginning—be the work of a widow.
It took some effort, of course, but in truth, it was all easier than she’d imagined. Mourning lasted some weeks, during which time she found a doctor in town willing to prescribe a few things she’d heard whispers of—in books, in bars, from other “boys” she’d gone to school with. She took them and she waited and finally she emerged, after an appropriate period of weeping for her missing husband, as Mary Bonnet.
The original Mary had never been sociable, never had much success making friends with the ladies of town, so most people, upon meeting the new Mary Bonnet, remained politely quiet about their memories of a very different woman with her name. They must have misremembered, they thought. Or else grief had changed her so utterly that she would never be the same. At any rate, this version of Mary was such a delight to know, they found, and so it was hardly any time before the old one had faded to nearly nothing in their memories, replaced entirely by the new and improved Mary Bonnet.
There were others who knew, of course. Who saw her and smiled. Widows themselves, some of them, or else hailing from far away—lookalike cousins of children who had been sent to live with distant aunts and uncles and never returned. She gathered them to her parlor, talked of art and music and culture and beauty—the kinds of things her old world of men cared little for, unless it was to do with profit or war or glory or the conquest of women—and lived, really lived, for the first time she could remember.
The children, to their credit, seemed not to think much of the switch. She’d always been the first to mother them anyway, the first to attend to their hopes and fears, their wellbeing and happiness. Their other mother, the one who had left them, did little more than feed them and daydream, occasionally playing games of her own invention before tiring and leaving them to their own devices. This mother had all the love and the time in the world. Ideal for everyone, all considered.
In her time unmoored from the engagements of high society, from which widows were so blessedly exempt, she painted and drew and surrounded herself with things that made her world worth living in.
She had made a life for herself—and one that she quite liked. One that she was not willing to give up for anything or anyone.
*
The ladies were hurried out of the parlor, with some extra convincing required for a blonde one with an eyepatch, who looked at Stede rather menacingly as she passed.
“You sure you’ll be alright with this one, Mary?” she said, shooting more venom with one eye than Stede had yet seen anyone else manage with two.
He jumped at the sound of the name, shocked for a moment at being recognized by a complete stranger, opening his mouth to speak, but before he could, the woman behind him replied quickly.
“I’ll be fine, Evelyn,” she said quickly. “I promise. Just give me a few minutes of alone time with…just give us some alone time, would you please?”
The woman finally acquiesced, allowing the door to be shut behind her, leaving Stede and the woman alone in the house in stunned silence.
They just stared for a moment, unsure where to begin.
“Mary?” Stede finally demanded, aghast. “You told everyone you were dead, and took my name?”
“Well, you weren’t using it anymore,” she said, almost defensively. “Seemed a shame to let a perfectly good name go to waste.”
Then she got a good glimpse at him. Looked him up and down, then cleared her throat awkwardly. “I assume there’s erm…another name you’ve been using as well, then?”
Then it was Stede’s turn to be sheepish.
“I’m…well—” he shifted awkwardly from foot to foot, wrung his hands. “I go by Stede. These days.”
Her eyes looked near to popping out of her head.
“Stede?” she demanded. “You…you’ve been living these past few months as a pirate using my name?”
“Yes, well,” Stede huffed. “Seemed a shame to let a perfectly good name go to waste.”
They stared each other down. The longer he looked, the stranger it felt. Someone wearing his old clothes, living with his old name. Like being inside a mirror and looking out at the real world on the other side.
This was all going to be much more complicated than he’d thought.
*
Things would stay as they were for now, it was decided.
Mary was entrenched in town as Mary, more known and liked there than Stede ever was. She spread a tale of extended convalescence, allowing him to forego seeing old “friends” under the guise of being unwell. The threads of their lives were too tangled now to be unwound into their previous shape. Which was well enough, Stede supposed. He could keep his wardrobe, keep living as he had been these past few months.
Well. Almost as he had been.
It should have been a dream, better than his wildest hopes. He got to keep his home, his family, his wealth, and his manhood with it. What else could he possibly have wanted? How much luckier could he have gotten?
But as he watched Mary (she was Mary now, his wife, and he was Stede, her husband, and how quickly the world had made space for those truths…), saw her moving through the world they had once shared with so much grace and ease, with comfort he never had, he found that he didn’t feel lucky. He didn’t feel at ease here. Some things were better, sure, but he didn’t feel any more right in his skin than he ever had before running away.
What was it then? If it was wrong before he left to become who he was, and it was wrong when he was at sea, and it was wrong in Ed’s arms (God, don’t think about that, think about anything but that), and it was wrong back where he belonged, even with all the right roles and titles and names—then what was right? Where was he meant to be? Was there any version of Stede Bonnet who had all the right pieces to make a whole person?
*
“The Widow Bonnet?” Stede said, holding a pamphlet plucked from the desk of Mary’s studio. Her work was lovely, expressive and lush. It had blossomed since he’d been home last, when she’d occupied herself with little sketches in her study. But he found he could hardly look at them. The reminders of her growth, of her flourishing without him.
She turned from her paintings, her smile dimming. “Well, it was true enough,” she replied. “Wasn’t sure then that ‘Mary’ would stick, but I actually like it now. Good for an artist to have a penname.”
“I think it lends an air of mystery,” said the man named Doug, grinning. He followed her everywhere, it seemed, looking at her with wide, sweet eyes. She smiled and blushed, bumped him with her hip. She said he was her painting instructor, and Stede chose to believe it, though something unpleasant seethed in him when the two were together. The tenderness he saw between them.
“Okay,” Stede said, trying to keep his voice steady. “Could be time for a new name now, though, yes? You’re not really…a widow anymore, are you?”
She plucked the pamphlet from his hands, scowling. “And whose fault is that?”
*
“I don’t want your old food!”
Alma stomped away, tossing down her silverware so violently that it clattered onto the floor.
“Who are you again?” Louis asked as she vanished up the stairs. Mary stared at him with pursed lips from the far side of the table, furious. He couldn’t blame her. She’d gone through so much to make things simple for the children. To minimize confusion, make their lives as straightforward as she could. And here he was, muddying the waters. Mucking up this life they’d built.
“I’m your father, Louis,” he said, trying to sound more confident than he felt, but couldn’t help wondering if even he knew the answer.
*
A bar was risky, given all the subterfuge about who was who in the Bonnet household, not to mention the fact that his serums had run out days ago. He imagined he could feel his face warping out of shape without it, though his image in the mirror looked the same as ever.
But Stede needed a drink, and he needed to leave the deepening shadows of the house, which seemed all the darker for Mary’s light. She was so happy with this new life of hers, his intrusions notwithstanding. Why wasn’t he?
“Is that…Stede Bonnet?”
He jumped, sloshing ale all over his sleeve and looking around for the exit. But before he could make a break for it, a hand dropped onto his shoulder, wheeled him around to see a smiling, familiar face.
“Oh!” He was so astonished, he forgot that he needed to run, to hide, to be someone entirely else. “Oh, you’re—”
“Jeffrey,” said the man, grinning. “I used to know your…wife. She might have known me by a different name, but…well, anyway, I’m Jeffrey! Fettering?”
Stede nodded, too stunned to speak.
He knew a Fettering from school, certainly. An almost-friend from long ago. Someone he hadn’t seen since long before his marriage, and who certainly had never met Mary. That Fettering indeed had a different name, in a different world. He never imagined that there were others here. People who felt as he did.
“I just wanted to let you know,” Jeffrey said, dropping his voice conspiratorially, “that there are some of us who think what you’ve done is really quite incredible. Inspired me when I first heard about it.”
“Well…thank you,” Stede managed finally, sipping his ale when he noticed his mouth had gone dry. “I’m glad to hear it.”
He was invited to a table of men from out of town—people who wouldn’t know him, had no former Stede Bonnet to compare this one to. They asked questions about his time away, begged tales of piracy, of adventure. There was a time when he would have given anything to be here. A man among men, implored to share his thoughts, his passions, his interests to an enraptured audience.
But he could hear the things they believed and wanted and assumed just under the breath of their voices. The things they hoped to hear. He had never been much good at satisfying the expectations of others, and now, he found, he wished he didn’t want to.
“And what of the pirate Blackbeard?” One asked. “Is he as terrifying as they all say?”
Stede tasted the answer on his tongue before he said it. The truth of it. Of Ed’s loveliness, his kindness. When he said it, he tasted the molasses of Ed’s tea and the marmalade they shared.
But it wasn’t the answer they wanted. It was true but it was wrong. So Stede gave the right one. And felt like he’d kicked Ed’s very knees out from under him when he said it, felt the ale souring in his stomach the whole way home.
*
He wasn’t supposed to be at the gallery. Was supposed to be at home, watching the children. Making sure they’d said their prayers, scrubbed behind their ears.
But he showed up anyway. Drunk and nasty, scowling at the art and the patrons and Mary herself. He wasn’t sure why he did it, besides the fact that he felt like he was disappearing and couldn’t think how else to reassure himself he was still solid.
He felt sick with himself, doing it. Pulling the attention from Mary, who had worked so hard and done so much for herself. Her paintings really were quite lovely.
“Behold, the Widow Bonnet’s undead groom!” he said and stumbled into a bow.
He should belong here, shouldn’t he? With his wife? With his people? The society he was meant to be a part of? This was what it meant to be a man. Possession, confidence. Taking what was his. Wasn’t this what he’d wanted?
When a gentle touch fell on his shoulder, he whirled around, knife in hand, nose to nose with Doug’s kindly face. His eyes round and vulnerable. Asking not to be hurt.
Everyone was staring and Mary looked horrified and he stepped back just as quickly, let Doug up with his apologies, and knew with sudden, cold certainty that there was no place for him here. Not anymore, at least, but probably not ever.
Exactly where he was supposed to be, however, was too frightening to contemplate. Too impossible to imagine. There was nowhere he was meant to be, he thought. Nowhere that he wouldn’t cause harm. Do damage, create pain. There was no way for him to be in the world without hurt.
He thought of Ed’s eyes, tender, pleading. Asking, in his own way, not to be hurt. And the hurt he’d caused Ed anyway, before and after. The pain he’d certainly caused his whole crew, just by being him. By failing to be the things he needed to be to keep them all safe.
So when he woke up that night, with Mary looming over him, skewer pressed against the taut skin of his eardrum, he screamed—obviously, it was terrifying—but also there was part of him that was relieved. At least I don’t have to work it all out, he thought. At least someone gets the life they want because of me.
But then Mary sat down. Looked at him seriously, and said, more gently than he expected: “We had such a good thing going, Stede. Why did you come back?”
And that, he didn’t know how to answer.
Why had he come back?
It seemed like the right thing to do, was the first thought that came to mind. It was wrong to abandon one’s family, so unabandoning them seemed like a step in the right direction, if he wanted to make up for his many shortcomings.
But that wasn’t the whole truth. It was as wrong to leave them now as when he’d first done it, and he spent months at sea before returning home.
The real reason was…well, that he was afraid. Of who he was and who he wasn’t. Of what he’d done and failed to do. Chauncey and Nigel were dead, his crew was under the heel of the British, and Ed…had given up everything. For him. For someone who had so little to offer, who seemed only to make mistakes and wreck the order of things. For someone like Ed—someone sweet and kind, someone brilliant and beautiful—to leave a life behind for someone like him, who had done nothing but ruin the pieces of a life that had been given to him, who was as bad at the life of piracy as he was at the life of domesticity. That was something he couldn’t abide.
That was the reason, really, and he didn’t even know it until that moment. Ed was the reason. For everything in his whole life, Ed was the reason.
And the understanding so stunned him that for a long moment, all he could do was sit and stare and wonder at what else he had missed, to have missed something as obvious as this.
*
For all their differences, for all the things she had resented about him, Mary found that, even after all this time, she understood a few things about her husband.
First, that really, when it came down to it, he was good. Careless, thoughtless at times, yes, but never cruel. He was never the kind of person to do harm. And his returning had never been intended to do her harm.
Second, that the things he wanted were the same as the things she wanted, really. Love, peace, the chance to live as who she really was. But that he would never find them here, following the same path she’d taken.
The world was not built for either of them. For the kinds of lives they needed to lead to be happy. For their ways of being in the world. But she’d always been the stubborn sort. She’d dug her heels in and built and built and carved out a space for herself in this world where she was never meant to be. She had love here, and joy. Peace. Stede had nothing anchoring him here. He would need to do that work on his own.
“What’s it like?” he asked suddenly, “To be in love?”
And then the pieces came together.
She told him about it. About Doug and all the ways he’d been there for her. The ways he’d been gentle and sweet, and saw her, all of her, without flinching. The ways he challenged her to be better, and made her feel like she was always already enough, just as she was. The way they weren’t halves of a whole, but two complete pieces, each more comfortable for being shaped to nest side by side.
She hoped Stede’s someone was like that. Someone who saw him, understood him. Someone worth building a life with. Judging by the look on Stede’s face, the peace that washed over it as she spoke, they were.
“If I were you,” Mary said, “and I have been…” Stede couldn’t help but laugh, and she took his hand. “I’d stop trying to fit in with people who don’t deserve you, and go find the person who does.”
Everything in him seemed to unwind. Looked at her and didn’t say anything, but smiled, and she felt a sudden surge of affection for him—more, perhaps, than she ever had before. This person who never meant to be in her life, but gave her the pieces she needed to make her life her own.
"Sorry for taking your name," he sniffled. "I just always thought it sounded nice. Stede...sounds tough, you know?"
She grinned. "That's alright. You can keep it. I like it better on you anyhow."
"And you're a better Mary than I ever was." Stede said. "It suits you."
They would make things right together. Somehow, it felt like they were always meant to. She folded him into a hug that felt like the first moment of honesty they’d ever shared. Which reminded her…
“I should mention,” she said suddenly, pulling away. “I know someone in town who can get you whatever serums you’ve been using. I’m sure you’ve run out by now. That can’t have helped things tonight.”
Stede’s eyes went wide and he practically collapsed with relief beside her. “Oh, thank god, it’s been a nightmare. Why didn’t you say sooner?”
“I guess I was a little bit angry,” she admitted and laughed a little without meaning to. Stede laughed at that too, though, so she couldn’t feel too bad about it. “My own little punishment for you. I’m sorry, a bit over the top, now that I’ve tried to kill you too.”
“No, no, I deserved it,” he said. “Serves me right for coming back like this.” He sighed, shook his head. Then grimaced. “But I really would love to make a stop over there. First thing in the morning, please.”
*
It wasn’t just this home. It wasn’t just this name. The way people saw him, the way he moved through the world. Those weren’t the things he had to make his peace with.
It was this life, he realized. Every piece of it had to be his own, because that’s what it already was. All the things that were wrong about him, cursed about him—none of it was more real than the names that world gave him. Than the things it told him he had to be. He had never been that person. He’d proven that, again and again. And no one could turn him into something he wasn’t.
No more running, no more hiding. He thought of Ed, his crew, the life they built. He thought of Ed some more: his hair, his laugh, the way his name sounded on his tongue. Of the way Ed looked at him and saw all of him. Loved all of him.
That was where he belonged. This time, for the last, true time, he was going home.
Mary had organized everything. Made it all simple, with the help of her new friends, their children, her new love (they were really quite sweet together, she and Doug, now that he looked with open eyes). She’d even gentled the children toward him somewhat—Alma, at least, seemed to understand, kept half his orange to remember him by.
Mary was more than he ever deserved, to do all this after everything he’d put her through. And now she would have her peace. The life she always wanted. She squeezed his shoulder as they loaded up the carriage, smiled at him. He really would miss her, he thought. But the best gift he could give her was his absence. His name, too, good riddance too it. And her freedom in this new life she was building.
He hoped it was everything she dreamed it could be.
*
Stede Bonnet was dead. Really dead this time, and never coming back.
After everything, Mary stood over the stranger’s corpse, conjured up by Evelyn’s boy, wearing a suit that she had worn and hated for so many years, dirty and unrecognizable now. The body didn’t look like Stede. And it didn’t look like her. But everyone seemed willing enough to believe. To see only the things that the two of them had wanted them to see.
“To Stede Bonnet,” she said, smiling and taking Doug’s hand. A long way off, Stede was wiping blood from his face and grinning, said a silent thanks and farewell and sorry for everything to Mary Bonnet. She could almost feel the two of them splitting off for good: the life she’d left and the life she’d built, parting ways at the shore. Mary raised her glass in a toast.
“Complicated. Hard-headed. Really quite irritating at times. And now, free.”