CHAPTER 10 – A new life begins. Cutting old ties.

It wasn’t a big property, initially, but big enough for privacy. Robert wanted to remain with me, and two other men followed him. Susan as well remained, as we bound tightly and felt like sisters, passing often hours telling each other stories about John. But life must go on. I was still barely nineteen, and I fought on the sea for less than five years, seeing more death and fighting more battles than most seasoned fighters. It was time to look for a husband, though the idea didn’t appeal to me much, but at the time, it was almost mandatory, also for protection, and to start a real life.

The meeting with the man who would successfully replace, at least in part, John, was the consequence of another tragedy. Sort of. I had secretly buried most of my treasure below the floor of the cellar of the house, working all alone long before we moved there, and not even Susan had knowledge of it. But a very small part of that treasure, if still big enough to make many men drool after it, was buried in a corner of the property, that while hidden from the road and neighbours, was in a place in open sight from the house and most of the rest of the property, inside a circle of trees.

So, one late afternoon, when I knew I would be home alone for several hours, I was digging out some doubloons to bring to the smelter and convert into ingots, when I heard steps. I turned, and in front of me I could see Robert and the other two men, accompanied by at least three others whom I had never seen before.

“I’m sorry, Miss, but misfortune hit us, and we thought that sharing your part would allow us to get out of trouble.” Their part would have allowed them to live in luxury, because it was almost as big as mine, and they were still living with me, at my expense. Losers.

“Robert… what a pity… what would John think?”

I could see him lower his head.

“John is dead. Please, Miss, don’t do anything stupid. I don’t want to see you hurt.”

One of the men intervened. “Neither I. We can live in her house and keep her as a housemaid, enjoying her and her friend. What are you looking at? Keep digging our gold, don’t slack!”

I kept digging. Robert, the only man I managed to trust, after father, and then John. Pity. I may not live until the next day, but I’d surely try to make so neither of them could. I dug toward the chest with the few ingots, heavy and uncomfortable to move, where I hid a device that was a simple twenty-centimeter-long tube, with a strong spring inside and a steel dart that would be shot at several metres, plus a rapier with which I was a master.

While digging, I could see that Robert was discussing with Anthony, the one who said he wanted to use me. Seeing me as a woman for a few months made them already forget who I was. Good for me.

I reached the chest and stopped, in case they would think I was too eager to open it, and they would have checked it. I shouldn’t have worried; they stopped the discussion and looked at me. “So? Open the chest and give us the gold! Are you really that dumb, woman?”

I did as I had been told, making sure that my body would cover the rapier, which I leaned against the wall of the hole where they couldn’t see it, and hid the small tube in my wide pants. It wouldn’t be proper for a woman to show the form of her legs, even if, as a pirate in the past, I wore much tighter pants. Anyway, I took a 12Kg ingot and moved it on the ground out of the hole.

At that moment, we heard a horse arriving at the house, and the rider saw us and called.

“Hey, of the house! I’m looking for the owner!”

They had instinctively turned to see the man, and I quickly extracted the tube and shot at the one who wanted to use me, hitting him in the nape of his head from a lower position, and so having the dart killing him instantly by planting it in his brain. Meanwhile, I cut the tendons of the one who was next to the hole with one of my ever-present knives, and taking the rapier, I jumped out of the hole to face Robert and the rest of them. At that moment, Robert turned and shot one of the other three in the chest with his pistol, while I was shouting that they would never take me alive for the benefit of the stranger who, hearing a damsel in distress, intervened and shot one of the remaining two, while I engaged the other, a local who wasn’t used to sword fighting, more used to brawls, and soon succumbed.

The man was there a moment later, saw the gold, the men, one of whom was vomiting for the shock of the cut tendons, and asked me, “You are the owner?”

I answered “I am.” And he lowered his gun and sword to the ground, moved a few paces away, and sat. Robert had been hit, and after I finished the agonizing man, I went to him. The wound was severe, and he was dying. “Captain Ash… I didn’t want to betray you, but if I refused, they would have killed me, so I pretended to join them to protect you. You and John have been the only family I have known for decades… you, Cyndria, reminded me so much of my poor daughter, taken by the fever with her mother. You must believe me, I never betrayed you!”

“I believe you, Robert.” He smiled, confided to me where he hid his own gold, and died.

I turned to the man. “Who are you, and what do you want?” I wasn’t being friendly.

“My name is Arthur McMillan. I was looking for a job. They told me you may be in need of someone for maintenance jobs in the house and property. I can do that.”

“And what do you ask for?”

“A bed, food, and a small sum for my personal needs.”

“And what about the things you witnessed?”

“What things? I saw a beautiful young woman walking in her park. Was there anything else I should have seen?”

“You aren’t interested in that yellow thing? Do you know what it is?”

“I know what it is. I worked as a bank escort in the past. No, I’m not interested in it. I don’t like to get things I didn’t earn, and that certainly wouldn’t be something I could earn.”

“Ok, help me clean the mess, and then we will have a talk.”

So, I took the whole treasure from the hole, moved it temporarily to my own room in the house, closed the hole, and planted a new tree to justify the moved soil, and then we loaded the bodies, moved to one of the many swamps around the Genesee River, and we threw them there, where they sank in the quicksand.

Two hours later, I was refreshed and was talking with this young man in front of the rest of the dinner Susan had left for me, when she arrived home. I made the introductions and allowed her to make her evaluations. She never failed to understand people, and she warned me about the other two, but I thought she simply misunderstood their rough behaviour for bad intentions. Instead, she had been right, as always. I would trust her completely from then on.

I showed the man where he could sleep; the servants’ quarters were still to be completed, since we weren’t used to having any, save for little Siobhan, who had a room in the house, being more family than servant. It was time to hire some.

Susan would examine the candidates with me, and we chose young women without that bad need to appease people that makes them good puppets in the hands of the right man, and a couple of robust men for the heavy work, and to discourage unpleasant visits.

In that period, I received a communication from one of my old trusted contacts who sometimes visited, that the Dolphin had been sunk by a Spanish fleet. They managed to sink two ships before being hit too heavily. The survivors were executed before the attackers realized that Captain Ash wasn’t aboard, and only a mortally wounded man cleared the fact that Ash had retired and they would never find ‘him’. They died heroically, as they wished, and kept their fame high.

In the next months, I came to appreciate Arthur a lot. And to trust him a lot. He was a wonderful carpenter, a good mason, and a decent blacksmith, so he helped me to project and realize a small addition to the house. We added stone walls to the ground floor, covering them with wood, and leaving a new room completely closed. Inside that, I dug a hole and below it made another room with all six sides in stone. A mechanism would help me open the hatch. There, I put the part of fortune that was still hidden in my own room, and later the part that Robert revealed to me, where he hid it. The closed room became my personal study, refuge, and workshop, with its six sides in stone. Another mechanism would open the hatch to my personal rooms, inside a small cabin room where I used to keep my older dresses. My room appeared in everything as a normal room, as any other of the house, with a wooden floor that hid the stone, and wooden walls like the rest of the second floor. I was very satisfied. It was after we finished that job that we first kissed. It was not a month later that we made love for the first time. Three months later, we were married. I was Sandra McMillan Hood. I had to change my name and choose Sandra, similar to my real name, and Hood, in honour of John, which I kept. By then, Arthur knew most of my story and was fine with it. He didn’t care even that I could kill him in a dozen ways at any moment. He knew I wouldn’t do it.

Susan was happy for me. She lost her beloved and wasn’t positive that she would find someone else. I knew the real reason was that her heart was still in a castle in Wales, where the young brother of her dead husband was probably thinking about her. Their marriage would be a scandal, and he loved his land too much to follow her. She loved him too much to return there.

Siobhan found a good boy, the son of our stable keeper, who started helping his father soon after we hired him, and they married a few months after me.

My daughter, Megan, was born on the tenth of October 1786. She was bright and very active. I lost a couple of children afterward, which threatened to depress me, but Megan was always there to make my days bright. In early 1791, I found I was pregnant again, and hoped not to lose this. I gave birth to twins on the eighth of October 1791, but I had complications, though, and that led to my inability to further conceive. I remained in bed for almost two months, but little Megan almost never left my side, Arthur and Susan were there as much as possible, and Siobhan, with her one-year-old child, helped me with the twins, a male and a female whom I called John and Susan, so I could have them with me almost twenty-four hours a day. My convalescence wasn’t too hard. I was used to exercise, and started retraining my body. It took me five months, but I was almost as good as before having children. Just my chest was permanently grown because of the pregnancies. If after Megan it returned to almost its original size, now it has reduced some, but had remained bigger than it was before. I had to learn to move and exercise, taking that into account.

Why do I talk about it? Because it was probably what caused the death of Susan, even if maybe I’d be dead as well had I been as fast as before.

A group of Spanish officers who lost their fathers in some of the ships I sunk, somehow found me. I soon learned that their revenge was just an excuse for their greed, and they were after the fabled treasure of the famous Captain Ash. They didn’t believe that Ash was a woman, but believed that the scar was a camouflage. When the group arrived at my house, in the summer of 1792, I was on the porch rocking the cradle of the twins, and Megan was there talking with Aunt Susan and cousin Siobhan, who Susan formally adopted a few years after we settled there. The group of eight mounted men entered the property and dismounted. Susan and I went to see why such rudeness, Megan and Siobhan brought the babies inside and ran to call the men of the house.

Susan whispered to me, “Big troubles.” Arthur arrived a moment later, with a modern rifle, much more precise and efficient even than our old long-barreled muskets.

The first man, probably the leader, spoke. In Spanish. “We are looking for a man who has been a sailor until a few years ago.”

“I’m sorry, we don’t understand Spanish.” Answered Arthur.

The man repeated the request in English. His little trick failed.

Arthur answered again. “There were three men who could have been sailors and lived here in the past, working as helpers. They left after they caused some trouble in town.”

“Our information says that a man known as Captain Ash is still living here. He has a big reward on his head, and if we don’t find him, we may have to inform the Spanish authorities and the local authorities that you shelter a criminal.”

“You do what you must; there is no criminal here. And a criminal for the Spanish could be considered a hero around here, you know that, right?”

The man got angry. “We’ll search the house, in the name of Her Majesty the Queen!”

Arthur aimed the rifle at him. Siobhan, unobtrusively, brought me and Susan rifles too, and the knives to me, then retired inside to protect Megan, who wanted to run to me. I, too, aimed at them. We had one bullet each; they had eight. Well, five, if our aim was good. Still too many. I whispered to Susan to go back inside. She refused.

“You are on private property, and your queen wouldn’t have any authority here even if she was the Queen of the British Empire!”

The man had the gaze of the one about to shoot. He tried it by suddenly raising his gun, but I shot first. Arthur and Susan shot too, and two other men fell. I jumped on the one I shot, who didn’t press the trigger, and the gun jumped from his hand. I took it in flight and shot another man who shot in the direction of Arthur, while with a swing of the rifle, he made the head of a third explode, hit by the improvised mace, which broke. I kept moving, unsheathing the knives, and butchered the remaining three men. Then I turned and saw both Susan and Arthur on the ground. I screamed and ran to them. Arthur was alive and fainted from the bullet that grazed his head. Susan, instead, had been hit in the stomach and a lung. She managed to say a few words, with me and Siobhan crying next to her.

“Siobhan, you’ve been like a daughter to me. I’m proud of you. I leave you all that I own. Sandra… you’ve been more than a sister, and helped me so much to cope with John’s death. I love you both. At last, I’ll meet John. I lived a good life, thanks to the two of you, thank you.” Then she died.

A moment later, three horses arrived galloping. It was the local Mayor, with two bodyguards.

“Mrs McMillan, what happened?”

“These bandits. They arrived, babbled about some old sailor living here, and wanted to search the house. When we refused, they started shooting. We got rifles while they were talking, so we defended. Before he killed the last man, Arthur was hit on the head, but I think he’ll survive.”

The bodyguards checked the men and brought everything they found to the mayor. Arthur was rousing then, as I didn’t want to move him until he was conscious again. We helped him in. The mayor sent a man to get a wagon in town, and we then brought Susan’s body inside.

“Mrs McMillan, may I have a word with you in private?”

“Of course, Mayor.”

“Mrs McMillan … Arthur told me some of your… abilities. Hints, truly. Between us, he didn’t kill more than one or two of those men, did he?”

“Would that change anything?”

“Not really. It was just for my own curiosity.”

“Consider your curiosity satisfied, Mayor.”

“I will. I’ll consider this for what it is. An attempted assault of wannabe brigands who found their first victims too hard to bite.”

“Thank you, Mayor.”

We buried Susan solemnly in the local cemetery, where I paid for a mausoleum. It would be Siobhan’s and eventually my family’s last place of rest.

The rest of our lives went on quietly. No more attempts from Spanish. I trained my children in self-defence, weapon use, and swordsmanship. Megan was so similar to me that it seemed as if I was looking at myself in a mirror.

She married in 1803 and had a daughter in 1804. Little Jenny was an earthquake since birth. Megan, though, made it a tradition and started training her, and her three other children, Hanna (1805), Samuel (1806), and Christine (1808) in self-defence. My children, John and Susan, never married, even though I know they had very discreet relationships over the years.

In 1817, a man of about sixty visited me. He introduced himself as Mervin ap Connel, Count of Cwm-yr-Eglwys. I understood immediately.

“You are looking for Susan, aren’t you?”

“I am. I am free of obligation, and wanted to see her again, if it’s convenient.”

“Sadly, you can’t. She died twenty-five years ago, defending this house and her adopted family.”

I accompanied him to the cemetery. “She would be happy to know you came. You were often in her thoughts. I think she loved you deeply, more than she loved your brother. She didn’t want to cause a scandal by returning. And knew you loved your land and your people too deeply to damage them.”

“I imagined that. I had to marry, and luckily, I found a good woman and got a son who inherited the love for our land. But I’m now a widow, and I have not much left to live. My son, after some attempts to stop me, understood and gave me his blessing. A trip back to England would kill me anyway. Do you know a place where I could rent a room?”

“You are my guest, Count. I’d like to know some about Susan's youth. She told me much, but I was engaged with her brother when he died, so we mostly talked about him.”

“I can’t burden you with my presence.”

“No burden, the house isn’t bigger just because I don’t need it bigger, so don’t worry.”

“I want to ask you a favour…”

I knew already. “You want, if possible, to be buried next to her.”

“I’m that transparent?”

“You made your last travel to come here and find out if you could live your last time with her… It’s obvious. And the answer is yes. I know that would make her happy, and I would never deny her anything.”

The count lasted three months, then was buried next to Susan. I had a message carved in marble on their tombstone. “Life kept them apart; their love will be reunited in the afterlife.”

Jenny married at eighteen in 1822, and she too had a daughter that same year, whom she called Laurell. We were happy grand-grandparents. She didn’t have other children, sadly.

Samuel died falling from a horse in 1824, shocking the whole family.

Christine married at twenty, in 1828, and gave us another grand-grand-daughter, Emily, in 1829.

Arthur died in 1830 at the age of sixty-eight. It saddened us all. I thought about my father. He would be so happy to see me now, and know that his sacrifice saved me and gave me so much love, once I was purged of all the hatred of my revenge. How much he would have loved all the children, and to teach them all his knowledge.