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Your mother was a sailor before you. In the half-forgotten corners of your mind you can remember her striding through the door after a long voyage at sea and pulling you into a bone-crushing embrace. She smelled like the ocean, as if the salt spray had soaked her uniform so thoroughly it could never be washed out. You remember how she would drag you onto her lap with a laugh and tell you the most wonderful stories, tales about mermaids and men who sailed ships by themselves. At the end of every tale she would look deep into your eyes, the laugh lines of her face fading into solemnity. “Elizabeth,” she would say. “There’s nothing in this world that can’t be cured by saltwater-- sweat, tears, or the sea.”
You have always remembered those words, even though it seems like your mother passed a lifetime ago, god rest her soul. You held them in your clenched fists like talismans when you joined the royal navy in her footsteps. They carried you through mutinies and promotions alike, and when you boarded your very first command and heard yourself called “Captain Villiers,” you believed with every fiber of your being that they were true.
You can’t help but feel bitter as you sit in a dingy tavern and stare into your tankard of ale. The sea is lost to you now, as is the taste of sweat on your lips, and all the tears in the world have been useless in getting either of them back.
***
You meet Marie Villeneuve for the first time in the smoke-choked aftermath of battle. She introduces herself and explains that since all her superiors are dead, she will tender you her ship’s surrender.
You’re placed in command of her ship; she offers you her parole and you accept it, and then invite her to dine with you. You talk late into the night.
In all the newspaper articles and history books it will be written that you and your fellow Albions won the battle, and Marie and her fellow Gauls lost it. Later you will be hard-pressed to say if she truly lost that day, or if either of you won anything worth winning, in the end.
***
You run into Marie at a ball during peacetime. One thing leads to another and you end up in her bed. The next night she ends up in yours, and the night after that you’re back in hers again. You meet often, sometimes in quiet inns and taverns, sometimes at high society balls where every dance and card game is complemented by the drag of her eyes over your body, eager and admiring. At the end of every night you pull her onto the sheets beside you and trace her body with your fingers while she laughs. You want to know every inch of her skin like your own body . Perhaps then you will be able to construct her perfectly in your mind after you can no longer see each other. Both of you know that the weight of the future hangs before you, unavoidable and achingly heavy, but you rarely speak of it.
On a moonlit April night you lie next to her in bed and place your head upon her chest so that you can listen to the steady rhythm of her heartbeat.
“You’re the greatest woman I’ve ever known,” you murmur. The words are unbidden; they surprise even you.
Marie looks down at you obliquely, the light of the moon casting her skin a soft alabaster. “You may care for me, ma chérie. But your heart belongs to another great lady, I think.”
You scoff and roll her over so she’s pinned beneath you. “I have no great love for the Motherland.” You lean in, planting kisses in a line up her jawbone.
“Mmm.” She arches up into you, letting her lips drag against the tip of your ear. “But I spoke of the sea.”
You still for a moment, long enough for you to feel your damp skin shiver in the night air. The dampness of sea salt would not feel so different. You force a smile and look down at Marie. “I think you know some tricks that the sea does not.”
Her eyes are wide in the dark beneath you, her lips parted in desire. “Perhaps you’re right.” And then she smiles up at you, wide and wet and full of promise.
“Show me,” you breathe.
You are enraptured by the tang of her sweat on your tongue and the breathy half sobs that you tease from her as the morning light threads through the shutters.
For those brief moments all the shackles of honor and obligation that chain you both are free and you are able to love her with all of your being, perhaps more than you should.
***
It is your last morning together; hostilities began again with the onset of summer and you both have your orders.
You wake up at first light and extricate yourself carefully from Marie’s sprawled limbs. You gather your things in the weak half-light of the unlit room; you don’t want to risk waking her by building up the fire.
As you stand by the door you look back one last time, as if some part of you hopes to draw this moment out into endlessness. You watch as she begins to stir, as her hand reaches up to rub at sleep-deadened eyes. You can tell when she’s awake enough to notice you watching her; you see the drowsy smile begin to stretch across her face. You can tell when she looks closer and sees you’re dressed and packed, your hand on the doorknob, your face drawn with regret.
Her gaze sharpens and her lips part to form words; her tongue darts forward to touch her teeth and you can tell, even without hearing her, what she’s about to say.
You stride out of the room and close the door behind you before she has a chance to say things you won’t be able to forget. You’ve always been fast on your feet.
***
Your new ship, the HMS Dauntless, is everything you could want in a command. You busy yourself with fine-tuning the crew into a deadly instrument of war and do your best not to think about Marie. Some days you even succeed, but the nights in your solitary cabin stretch long and every lantern flicker reminds you of the curls of her hair in your hands.
A new set of orders from the admiralty should have provided a distraction; you find yourself almost looking forward to a battle in which you can lose yourself in. And you are intrigued at first when the Admiral steeples her fingers in thought and begins to tell you of the Gaulish frigate you are to hunt down.
“He's a 44-gun frigate, called Lynx, under the command of a Captain Villeneuve."
Marie. You manage to keep your face a blank mask but inside you everything lurches forward.
The Admiral frowns. “Are you familiar with Madame Villeneuve?” she asks, one brow arched.
“Our paths have crossed before,” you manage to say.
The rest of the meeting passes in a murmur around you, although you notice wary glances from the other Captains are sent your way from time to time. You can’t be bothered to reassure them; everything seems slowed down, as if you were treading water. Your blood is roiling in your veins; your insides have turned to ice.
“Madam Villiers, are you quite alright?” one of your fellow captains asks.
You nod briefly in her general direction before taking a deep breath and letting the faint tang of salt on the air steady you. There is nowhere to go but forward. You have a ship to sail, a battle to fight, and at the end of it, a good woman to kill.
***
As you stand against the railing of the Dauntless and stare out at the Lynx, you realize it would be easy enough to catch up to the enemy ship and engage the Gauls. You are the Captain; it would be only fair that you lead the boarding party.
Closing your eyes you realize: there are a million possible futures branching out from the moment you step aboard the Lynx.
Maybe as you clamber over the rail you see her, her hair glinting in the afternoon sun. The battle around you slows and recedes so there’s nothing but the rush of blood in your ears, the surprise in her eyes as she turns to see you, and the cool metal of a trigger under your finger. You draw your musket and shoot her between the eyes; she falls over dead.
Or perhaps you hesitate when you see her because you’re remembering the last time your gazes met, as you said goodbye to her with your mouth and hands because you couldn’t bring yourself to say the words aloud. The memory confuses you and you fumble as you reach for your gun; she outdraws you and aims it with a hand that’s faintly shaking. You start towards her, perhaps to challenge her, perhaps to apologize for running away. The movement startles her and her hand clenches around the gun; the bullet hits you in your chest and you crumple. The last thing you see is Marie standing stock-still, watching you in horror as the battle rages on around your corpse.
Or mayhap you don’t hesitate at all. Maybe you forget about your gun and pull out your rapier instead. You charge forward because you can’t think of anything else to do. You’re almost as shocked as she is when you run her through; the grunt of shock as your rapier wedges itself deep in her belly could come from either of you. Her deadweight sags heavy on your sword as the light in her eyes fades.
That’s assuming she doesn’t draw her sword in time. If she does, she won’t be able to bring herself to do anything more than make half-hearted slashes that you easily parry. You do this for what feels like an eternity until an errant musket ball fired by one of her comrades lodges itself in your left lung. As you cough heady sprays of blood across the deck you think you can see Marie out of the corner of your eye; you think she might be crying.
Or perhaps you both draw your swords at the same time and trade a few blows in earnest. You notice that she tends to let her guard open right after she parries; it’s been drilled into you over the course of hundreds of duels, to take advantage of such weaknesses. After her next parry you slash your rapier down, separating her hand from her body. The scream that tears itself from her lungs will haunt your dreams forever. You know wounds and you can tell with a deep rooted certainty that this one will curdle and run black before a fortnight, sending Marie into raving fever trances before death finally takes her.
You can imagine a hundred million ways the battle will go, each and every one in perfect detail. You can see the logical inevitability of each one like the fine-tuned workings of Swiss clockwork. In not a single imagined future do you both survive.
***
The memory of your last morning together is heavy in your mind as you stand aboard the deck of the Dauntless, watching the Lynx float in the distance.
“Retreat,” you croak, and the word already tastes like defeat on your tongue, leaden and bitter.
Your lieutenant, Madam Benton, shifts awkwardly next to you, biting her lip like she’s not sure she heard you correctly. “Captain?”
“Do not engage,” you repeat. You don’t look her in the eyes. “We can’t risk it… the wind is against us.”
The wind is perfectly fine and you both know it. Benton’s mouth opens and closes once. She swallows and frowns and finally nods, leaving to give the orders to the crew. The orders that will end your career and damn your name so thoroughly that you will never be considered fit for command again.
You turn from the Lynx and brace yourself against the railing, digging your fingers into the wood so hard that your knuckles burn white from the effort. If you hold onto the ship hard enough they won’t take it away. You inhale deeply, as if to fill every inch of your lungs with salt air that you can dole out in tiny increments when you need it most, when you’re dying for a view of the sea. Perhaps it will even be enough.
It won’t be and you know it. When you’re shouted down for your cowardice by the admiralty and kicked out of the Navy in disgrace you try to pull back the smell of the sea or even the taste of Marie’s skin but you can’t quite remember either, and the sting of tears on your cracked lips is a worthless substitute for both.
***
It isn’t half past noon yet and you’re already drunk. You glare down at a the half empty tankard in front of you and think that perhaps if you drink enough, this tankard and another three or four after, the room might start to spin around you. Maybe then, if you close your eyes and ignore that the air smells like stale beer rather than salt, you will be able to pretend that you’re at sea.
You hear the door to the inn open and shut; you don’t bother to look up. The air suddenly feels sharper around you. You think at first it’s just a February draft, but you dismiss the thought almost immediately. Somehow you know with a sudden surety that it’s her, and you know that she’s watching you. Lifting your ale you take a bigger gulp than you normally would and grimace at the taste. You’re not going to talk unless she does first; the tatters of your pride won’t let you.
“I gave the order too,” she finally says.
Your head feels too heavy to lift properly. You rest your chin in the cradle of your arm so that you can watch her while hiding your expressions in your beer soaked sleeve. “Hello, Marie.”
“The order to retreat,” she clarifies, as if she didn’t hear you. “I gave it too, when I saw the name of your ship.” She favors you with a small smile. “You were just faster at getting away.”
That drags a laugh out of you, a real one this time. You think of your last morning together, your half-formed name on her lips as the door slams behind you. “I always was.”
“Elizabeth…”
You don’t want her pity; you think you might drown in it if you let yourself. “I heard,” you interject, “I heard that you were honorably retired.” You don’t mention that you’ve heard a great deal more than that, that you spend the coin leftover from ale on gossip bought from Gaulish sailors passing through. You know she made commodore in the fall and was retired shortly afterwards due to a musket ball to the knee. You’ve heard she still isn’t married.
Favoring you with a wry grin, she hoists her leg on the table, pulling the edge of her breeches up so you can see the twisted scars hiding beneath. “Won a title, some gold, and a nasty scar.” Her smile falters and she puts her leg down. “Lost my ship, lost the sea.”
Downing the last dregs of beer in your mug you reflect that you shouldn’t feel bad for her, not after what you’ve gone through. You do anyway, of course.
She sighs. “Do you remember, Elizabeth? The sea? What it’s like to feel the wind in your hair at first light?”
You remember, that and more besides. You remember the rough wood of the railing digging into your palms, you remember the screech of the anchor as it was hoisted, the flapping of the sails in the wind. You remember the tang of the sea spray burning your eyes and stinging your wind-chapped lips.
And you remember Marie, shuddering beneath you, her hands tangled in your hair as you kissed her and tasted her and loved her. “How can you ask me that?” you whisper.
Looking up you see that her face has softened. She gestures around her at the tavern and for the first time in days you see what it must look like: the soiled straw strewn across the floor, the soot stains by the hearth. Meanwhile your hair clings in tangled webs around your face; you haven’t bathed in days.
“I thought you might have forgotten. This is not the Elizabeth Villiers I knew,” she says.
You snort. “The Elizabeth you knew had a ship.”
“Lucky then, that I’ve found a ship.” She examines her fingernails: the picture of nonchalance. You can see how she’s clenching and unclenching her teeth; you aren’t fooled in the slightest. “A Bermuda sloop. New purchased, with my life’s savings. He’s not new, not by any stretch, but with a fresh coat of paint I’d say he’ll do fine. All I need is a commander to steer him.”
You can feel your heart begin to beat faster, steady and unrelenting as waves on the beach. “You would take me for a pirate?”
Her laugh is bright and airy, and you know she’s laughing because you didn’t say no. “I was planning on trying the merchant’s life, actually. The Indies tea route, perhaps? Although,” she says, her voice dropping an octave, “you would look very dashing in a pirate’s hat.”
You close your eyes and let the possibilities bloom in your mind. You can see it, a new life, stretching out before you, as endless and bountiful as the sea itself. “An intriguing proposal, Madam Villeneuve,” you allow yourself to say, ladylike. As if you weren’t covered in beer and stinking six ways from Sunday.
She looks scared and you realize she thinks you might refuse. You’re afraid too, of a future that’s suddenly undefined by orders or fate. You and Villeneuve are quite a pair, you reflect. You’ve faced the worst nature and womankind have to offer, bloody battles and stormy seas, with swords drawn and teeth clenched. But it’s this moment, free from everything but the weight of your own honor, that makes you afraid. “Marie,” you finally say. “Of course.”
The light in her eyes at that moment is more beautiful than any sunrise over the Atlantic you’ve ever seen. As you rise to take her hand in yours you fancy that you can smell the tang of the sea on the air and taste her lips on your tongue, and you have no idea which is more wonderful.