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The room was silent except for the constant rhythm of her future husband’s breath, a far cry from the gentle lull of waves that had sung Eleanor to sleep every night when she had lived in the inn as the unofficial pirate queen of Nassau. The governor’s mansion was far enough from the shore that while inside, if one did not know any better, it would be easy to believe that the ocean was not there at all. This fact made Eleanor uneasy and troubled her sleep.
In time, Eleanor reasoned, she would be molded to fit this life. Shaped by necessity and her will to survive, she would meet what was required of her and become the perfect image of a civilized governor’s wife. Any day now, they would receive word that Rogers’ divorce had been finalized and Eleanor would find herself wed. Even with all of these months to come to terms with this novel conception of her future, Eleanor still struggled to envision herself as someone’s wife.
Eleanor often wondered what the person she had been, the version of herself that almost took Max’s hand and left everything behind, would think of the person she was now, of the person that she was on the verge of becoming. It was on nights like these, when sleep evaded her like an ex lover, that Eleanor found herself dwelling on what could have been. She was haunted by the alternate life she would have lived on the run with Max, a life spent moving from one place to the next like the ocean wind.
She imagined waking every morning with Max in her arms, completely unbound by expectations and with the absolute freedom to end every night anywhere within a day’s journey of where she had been when the sun had risen. Nassau was her home, her truest love, her past, and her future, but in a way, it had also become her prison. In the time since that fateful day when Max had begged Eleanor to choose her over her own machinations for power, it had become Max’s prison too.
Eleanor knew better than anyone else that the chair, in the office that had once been hers and now belonged to Max, was a chain as much as it was a weapon, confining its owner to an island that would never love her back and forcing her to pay the ultimate price. Max had paid it, just as Eleanor had before her. When forced to choose between the safety of her new love, Anne Bonny, and the security of Nassau in the face of a colonial threat, Max had chosen the latter, fully believing she had condemned her lover to death.
“In this moment, I am you,” Max had said to Eleanor in the aftermath, breaking the part of her heart which had once belonged to Max. Deep down, Eleanor knew that despite everything, it always would, even as she was about to commit herself completely to Woodes Rogers.
As if sensing her rebellious thoughts in his sleep, Rogers shifted, throwing his arm over Eleanor and holding her close. Already plagued by an uncomfortable sense of displacement, the added contact gave Eleanor the disquieting impression that the walls were beginning to close in around her as she felt her lover's breath on the base of her neck. Taking a moment to compose herself, Eleanor let her gaze fall to the man that she now loved, who in a few days time would give her his name.
Eleanor Rogers. She had tried it on many times in the past weeks, though it never felt quite right on her tongue. Eleanor hoped that she would grow into the name, just as she had the fine dresses and stuffy corsets. There was no place for Eleanor Guthrie in Woodes Rogers’ world, a world that was now hers as she prepared herself to become the wife of a governor. A governor's wife did not command men or control island commerce or work with pirates. In order for their dreams for Nassau to become a reality, everyone on the island, both ex-pirates and soldiers, needed to accept Rogers’ legitimacy and to achieve such a feat, Eleanor was poised to play the role of a proper English wife.
Eleanor would always let her opinions be known to her husband behind closed doors, but she was prepared to defer to him in public for the benefit of his reputation even as the thought of the act made her skin crawl. She already heard the whispers in the streets, how the Guthrie woman had been tamed by a good English man and while they angered her, they were not nearly as dangerous as the rumors that posited that the new governor was merely Eleanor Guthrie’s puppet on a string. Eleanor was willing to contort herself into whatever shape was required to play the part that would allow her to will her vision of Nassau’s future into existence.
As Eleanor shut her eyes in an attempt to sleep, Rogers’ touch almost began to feel like a comfort instead of an imposition. She told herself that as she slipped into unconsciousness, the wrongness of the silence would fade and the walls would return to where they had been when the night began. Tomorrow, Eleanor would walk close enough to the shore to hear the swell of the sea and gaze at the spot where the restless depths met the endless sky, but for now she resigned herself to chasing sleep as Eleanor Rogers instead of Eleanor Guthrie, who would have never wished to spend her nights this far away from the ocean. Returning her fiancé’s embrace, Eleanor placed her head on his chest and imagined that his breaths were the sound of waves.
In her dreams, Eleanor Guthrie kisses Max in a place far beyond the horizon, seeing her own joy reflected back at her in the eyes of the woman she loves.