She met Roger Blake Wolfe on a summer eve when he came into the tavern for a mug of ale and dish of sausage. Dozens of sailors had wooed Mary Margaret in vain but with Captain Wolfe’s first smile she was smitten. He was not tall but carried himself as a tall man. He wore a close pointed beard and his black hair and hazel eyes would be replicated in his sons. So too his cocky grin. He began showing up at the tavern every night and each time she caught sight of him her breath deepened. He gladdened her. Made her laugh. Made her blush and feel warm with his compliments. His speech was tinged with the brogue of his Irish da. He was the only one she ever permitted to call her Maggie. She had known him barely two weeks the first time she sneaked out her window late one night to rendezvous in a moonlit copse above the harbor. She was seventeen. He was her first lover and her last.
Mr Parham too had taken a shine to the captain and when Mary Margaret, after barely two months’ society with the man, told her father they were in love and wanted to marry right away, he did not object. The next day he received Captain Wolfe at home and granted his request for his daughter’s hand. Mary Margaret was pleased but had expected resistance. Ever since her childhood both her father and her mother, a comely and lettered woman who died when Mary Margaret was twelve, had many times warned her about sailors as a breed not prone to cleave close to the hearth. Her father’s ready acceptance of the marriage convinced her he knew the real reason for her haste.
Her conviction was correct. Mr Parham had easily intuited Mary Margaret’s compelling condition and knew it was not the less compelling for being as old as morality and as common as cliché. Given that the usual course of sailors in such a state of affairs was to abandon the girl to her shameful fate, the real surprise to Mr Parham was Captain Wolfe’s willingness to marry Mary Margaret. It was testimony to the man’s honor that he would not forsake mother and child to the disrepute of bastardy. But while Mr Parham had no doubt of his daughter’s unreserved love for the captain, he knew the captain’s love for her was of a different kind and that probably sooner rather than later the man could not help but break her heart.
On a crisp afternoon in early October they were wed in a maritime chapel overlooking Portsmouth Bay. The next six weeks were the happiest of Mary Margaret’s life. The captain was only twice absent from home and for only a few days each time, once to Gloucester and once to Portland, on business which he did not confide and about which she did not inquire. He had told her little of his past, saying there was little enough to tell. His Irish father a boat builder by trade, his English mother a beauty with a hearty laugh, both of them killed in a house fire when he was a child, and then a London orphanage until he ran away to sea. This bare synopsis was ample to her, as the man himself was her absorption. She liked to watch the play of his form as he axed cordwood, to see his enjoyment in meals of her making, to feel his fingers loosing her hair from its braid, to wake before him early of a morning and watch him still at sleep. To share in his love of dancing. Among her most joyful memories were those of high-stepping with him to the fiddles and pipes on a dancehall Saturday night. Sometimes when he was full of drink he would sing humorous bawdy songs and she would laugh even as she admonished him to mind his manners. He was a man of wit and easy laughter, she told her sons, and had a gift for telling a tale.
“Was he a good fighter?” Samuel Thomas once asked, his eyes avid. And was puzzled by the melancholic look his mother fixed upon him. Then she sighed and said yes, the captain could surely fight. She had witnessed the proof of it one busy evening in the tavern. There was a sudden commotion at the rear of the room and she looked over there to see a large man speaking angrily and pointing a finger in the captain’s face, but she could not hear his words for the clamor of the crowd forming about them. Then she had to stand on a chair to see—and she nearly cried out at the sight of the man brandishing a long-bladed knife such as the shark-fishers used, and the captain barehanded. The circle of spectators moved across the floor with the two men as the sharker advanced on the captain with vicious swipes of the knife. She mimicked the sharker’s action—swish swish swish—and how the captain hopped rearward with his arms outflinging at each pass of the blade. Her eyes were brighter than she knew as she reenacted the fight for her sons, who were spellbound. Then a heavy tankard came to the captain’s hand, and in his next sidestep of the knife he struck the sharker a terrific blow to the head, staggering him. Then hit him again and knocked him stunned and bloody-faced to the floor. He kicked away the knife and stood over him with an easy smile and the room thundered with bellows to finish him, finish him! The man was on all fours when the captain clubbed him on the crown with the tankard and he buckled like a hammered beef. The walls shook with cheering. The unconscious sharker was dragged away by the heels to be deposited in the alley. The captain grinned whitely in the blackness of his beard and fired a cigar. Then his eyes found her still atop the chair and her hand to her mouth. And he winked.
“Yowwww. . . .” the twins said.
The more Mary Margaret told of him, the more vivid became her recollections—and more than once, as she described the captain’s mischievous laugh or the cant of his sailor’s walk or the distant cast of his eyes when he spoke of the open sea, she would be weeping before she was aware of it.
Came a cold November morning he told her he had been commissioned to transport a cargo out of Gloucester to Savannah and would be gone for perhaps three months. And that afternoon, carpetbag in hand, he kissed her goodbye and patted her haunch, said, “Fare ye well, Maggie darlin,” and left her forever.
She of course did not divulge to her sons that she was already carrying them when she had stood at the altar with their father. She believed it was none of their affair and felt no qualm about keeping the secret. But her deliberate lies to them about the captain’s true profession and mode of death troubled her and became ever harder to bear. They were nearly thirteen when she told them the truth. Indeed, let them read it for themselves, handing them the British Embassy’s letter in evidence of the shameful facts. She was prepared for their shock and humiliation. Was prepared to tell them they had no call to feel disgrace, that their father’s criminality was his own dishonor and in no way reflected on them. Their response was not what she was prepared for.
“A pirate!” Samuel Thomas said, turning to his brother. “A pirate captain!”
“Executed for murder!”“
“I’ll wager it wasn’t murder! I’ll wager it was self-defense but he couldn’t prove it!”
“I’ll wager that even if it was murder he had good cause and whoever the fella was had it coming.”
Mr Parham, whom Mary Margaret had permitted to be present, chuckled at their exchange—then swallowed his smile and went mute under his daughter’s furious scowl.
They begged to know more and were disappointed when she said she knew no more to tell. Did she at least know how he had been executed? Had he been hanged? Shot? Buried to his neck in the beach at low tide? She was appalled by their macabre questions and gesticulated in exasperation as she said she didn’t know how he had met his end and didn’t care, that it hardly mattered, after all.
The boys stared at her in wonder. How could such a thing not matter? They looked at each other and shrugged. They could not get enough of reading the letter and would henceforth handle it with the care of surgeons, lest it tear at the folds. Each wanted to be its keeper, so they tossed a coin that put it in John Roger’s custody.