Free Lightkeeper's Wife by Sarah Anne Johnson Page B

everything.”
    â€œWe’ll let them take what they want and hope they don’t notice you. No telling what they’ll do with a woman,” he said. “You’ve got to hide.”
    The sound of Daniel’s voice infuriated her. “You need to gather the men. You let our daughter die, now you’re going to give up without a fight?”
    â€œStop it, Annie.” The conviction of her rage caused him to doubt himself, not as a ship’s captain, but as a man—had he let his daughter die?—and this was where she found her stronghold. She took the pistol he kept beneath the foot of the mattress ticking, and she tossed the machete hanging from a sling by the doorway directly at him so that he caught it by the handle.
    â€œThis is not a fighting ship,” he said, but once armed with Daniel’s pistol, Annie shoved past him.
    On deck, she found O’Malley. “Go below, get arms. You’ll take your orders from me, not the captain. Do you understand?”
    O’Malley eyed the pistol and hesitated.
    â€œAre you in, O’Malley?”
    â€œYes, ma’am.”
    Annie hid behind the bulwark to watch the pirates work with a frenzied sense of purpose, unloading crates of cargo one after another and loading them onto their own ship. They wore guns, machetes, hammers. Fear broke through her resolve, but she realized that she wasn’t afraid of being robbed. She was afraid of dying. She didn’t want to die, and she wasn’t going to let her husband’s cowardice cost her her life.
    When Donovan, Nickerson, and O’Malley appeared from below, armed with pistols, she said, “We can protect our ship, or we can roll over like dogs. What’ll it be?”
    O’Malley scanned the deck for Daniel, then eyed Annie. He looked from one of his fellows to the next. “We’ll fight, ma’am.” O’Malley spoke for the lot of them. A few more men came up from belowdecks, armed and cautious.
    â€œAll right, then.”
    â€œIf we go at them from the stern, we’ll surprise them. That’s our only chance. Wait until most of them are on their own ship stowing the cargo. When they come back across the gangplank we can shoot them one at a time,” O’Malley said.
    â€œWhere’s the captain, ma’am?”
    â€œGathering ammunition, and getting the rest of the men in formation. He wants to try to reason with them, but there’s no reasoning with men like this.” Her lie came easily. She didn’t want to tell them that he was hiding.
    She ventured up the ladder to peer across the deck. “You’ll wait for my signal,” she said. When one of the pirate crew, a thin man in oversize trousers held about his waist with a rope—he looked more like a pauper than a pirate—caught her eye, she fired and hit him in the leg.
    â€œThat’s her signal,” one of the men said, and they ran up the ladder on either side of her.
    She aimed again and got the man in the shoulder. Shots rang out until three pirates lay on the deck near the hold, blood pooling around them. Annie loaded her gun and readied herself for the attack. She positioned herself aft of the helm so that she had a clear shot to the gate where the pirates boarded, and when they began running across, guns and cutlasses raised high, she and the crew fired. The flinty smell of gunpowder and smoke filled the air. Daniel was a fool. “The worst kind of fool,” she muttered.
    The Intrepid ’s crew picked up arms from the fallen pirates and fought the men coming at them from the other ship. They took orders from Annie, and she led them into surrounding the pirates, and shooting at them from behind cabins, and distracting them with stray shots from the foredeck while a group of sailors attacked from behind.
    The danger heightened her senses so that she could feel and hear an approach from behind or the backward swing of a cutlass or a