“I’m sorry to see you here, Jack, but if you’d fought like a man, you needn’t be hanged like a dog.”

Anne couldn’t quite keep the last words she’d said to her captain and erstwhile lover from cavorting through her conscious mind, each repetition easing her back lower on the damp, filthy wall that served as a headboard for her cot. This, in turn, inflamed the rivalry between her seven months pregnant belly and the rest of her body. Her grating headache and the regret that inevitably followed a flareup of her temper, come by honestly in County Cork but always seeming out of place in the Carolinas, did little to help her mood.

She wished she’d said something else to Jack, or that she’d been allowed a proper farewell to Mary. Normally she would have let it go, but here, with only her child keeping her from the headsman, she had little to do but think, and her thoughts were stubborn companions, always leading her down the road with the brambles and the shadows, and so she sat and waited, nursing her mistakes.