Chapter Text
Early in his tutelage, Stede Bonnet learned the meaning of the word “soulmate”. It was spoken—albeit derisively—by his tutor, a station-climbing young man who had forsaken his own partner in pursuit of a position amongst the gentry, but young Stede was utterly taken by the concept. In fact, in his very first act of piracy, Stede had stolen the tutor’s book on the subject off of his desk at the end of his lesson and hidden it away in his mattress to read by candlelight later that evening.
Medical and religious leaders of the time had not completely discerned the mechanism by which soulmates were assigned to the living, but all seemed to agree that they were immutably connected to a person’s soul, their truest being. This, of course, did not mean that all soulmates ended up married – some were separated by early death, others by the duties of their respective stations (even holy men sometimes had soulmates, which they generally disregarded to follow their god), and still others met so late in their lives that they had already succumbed to the comforts of marriage to another. Not everyone had a soulmate, either, though it was said to be no indication of a person’s virtue. The book stated that in London in the year 1697 an estimated 58% of people admitted to having a soulmate, odds that Stede did not find particularly comforting.
Still, he was very young at the time of learning of soulmates, and the clever book clearly stated that most people established their soul connections between the ages of eight and twelve. The most common signal of a connection was a set of recurring dreams of a pair of lips, pulled into a smile or a sneer or whatever the intended person most commonly wore. The dreams would change with time as the soulmates grew – a young lady could expect to watch the progression of her young man’s beard, for example, if he didn’t shave it. As you drew closer to meeting your intended, the scope of the dream would expand, revealing first a nose and then a chin, up until the very night before when one would generally glimpse the eyes of their beloved for the first time. The accounts in the book related the event of meeting your soulmate as utterly life-changing, no matter the circumstance, and Stede fell asleep that night curled around the book with the fervent hope that he would begin dreaming of a kind smile in the pursuant years.
He learned quickly, however, not to mention this notion in the vicinity of his father. A stern, judgmental man, Mr. Bonnet had no soulmate and was rather proud of the fact. “Just one more thing people think they’ve earned without an ounce of sweat behind it.” He grumbled after cuffing Stede in the ear for mentioning what he’d read in the soulmate book. “And besides, they’re largely useless anyway. What good is it to be bound to someone without prospects, without land? You’d better pray you don’t have one, Stede Bonnet, because you won’t be marrying them anyhow.”
This hadn’t yet occurred to Stede, and his eyes couldn’t help but well up with tears at the notion of having a soulmate but being unable to be with them due to familial obligations. Though he turned away as quick as he could, he couldn’t quite hide the tears from his father, which earned him another thwack to the head. He swiftly scurried out of reach and spent the rest of the day locked in battle with himself over which would be better – to have a soulmate he’d never be allowed to wed, or to not have one at all. Only the tiniest piece of his heart considered the scenario whereby his soulmate would have land or wealth; after all, if they were anything like the other well-born children he’d met in his short life, he wasn’t sure he’d want to be their soulmate after all.
In a stroke of luck, or perhaps misfortune, Stede didn’t have to wait long to put that notion to bed.
He shook awake, bleary-eyed, just a few nights before his ninth birthday, feeling like the entire world had shifted under his feet. He didn’t often remember his dreams, but with stark clarity could he recall a crooked smile, one of the front teeth missing with the barest peek of its replacement growing in at the gums, a smudge of something grey-brown on the sun-kissed upper lip. Warmth bloomed in his chest with a start as he realized what this meant – a soulmate! I have a soulmate! Despite the myriad ways he knew it could all go wrong, Stede was filled with complete and inconsolable glee at the notion.
In perhaps the first truly smart move of his life, he kept the secret of his soulmate close to his chest – not his father, nor his “school chums” (read: bullies), nor even the kind servant women he sometimes helped in the laundry learned a thing about his dreams. That liminal space, between reality and heaven, belonged to him and his mysterious other half alone, and Stede felt no rush to change that. He reveled in the slow return of the front tooth, of the chapped lips in the winter and the beads of sweat in the summer, and wondered endlessly what changes his match would notice in his own dream-borne countenance. It was a surprise, though not an unwelcome one, when he saw his soulmate begin to develop a beard; rather than feel shame, Stede merely ran his fingers lightly over his own, wispy facial hair and wondered how they might interact if they were to ever get the chance to kiss.
And yet, even as the years drug on, no further details of his match’s face were revealed. The dreams stayed stubbornly locked on the lips, no widening of perspective, and when Stede came to what his father called ‘marrying age’ he was forced to admit to himself, finally and damningly, that there was no sense believing he might be allowed to marry his soulmate. He tried to be cheerful when he met Mary, truly, but there was a sullenness in his heart that even his healthy fear of his father could not quash. Once or twice during the day’s proceedings, Stede thought he caught the same expression on Mary’s face, but it quickly slid back behind her neutral, attentive countenance.
Perhaps, he thought, half grimly and half hopefully, there’s someone else she’s hoping to meet one day, too.
Never mind that neither of them ever brought the subject to discussion. Never mind the births of their two children – both of whom Stede found himself loving dearly, if sometimes distantly, nervous that the specter of his own father might seep out of his cracks if he got too close. Never mind the nights he woke fitfully from unshakeable dreams to find Mary already awake, something a trifle empty and sad in her eyes. No, never mind any of that, Stede Bonnet, the grumbling voice of the elder Bonnet spoke in his mind, this is your life and this is your family and this is what you will do until you are peacefully in the grave. And Stede, as he had seen fit to do for his life until that point, quietly accepted what felt necessary, and looked for minute points of pleasure to bide the time until that grave met him.
And then, the dreams changed.
The first night, when Stede woke with a start, he wasn’t even sure if he could believe what he had seen. No matter that he had been looking at the same salt-and-pepper beard for years now, could’ve sketched the lips and wavy curls from memory if he had had an artistic bone in his body – no, it must be a trick of his desperate mind that thought he’d seen just a touch more mustache than he’d ever noticed before. He rolled over and went back to sleep, quieting his mind as he had become so adept at. The second night, too, he shrugged away the notion. The third night he tried, oh he tried, to ignore the fleck of something caught in the beard a bit further from the lips than he should’ve been able to see. It’s nothing, he thought, I’m imagining things, just a crumb or something, in a perfectly normal spot by the mouth.
The fourth night, though, even his mental gymnastics couldn’t deny that the face was coming into fuller focus. For a hazy moment, he imagined he even caught a sliver of a nose, a richer, darker brown than he remembered – and oh it had been years since he had seen his soulmate’s skin, what with the magnificent fullness of the beard surrounding the lips. The thought alone left him feeling unmoored, breathless.
When Stede awoke that night from the dream, and let the quiet, shivering hope of the growing reality roost in his chest, he stole quickly out of his and Mary’s bedroom and down to his study to pluck the miniature ship from its hidden crate. The construction of the full-sized marvel was still well under way, but Mary’s negative reaction to the replica had disabused him of the notion that they might all set sail in the way he had hoped. He had, earnestly, wanted to bring his family with him on an adventure, something that might make him happier without completely disrupting what was expected of him.
Now, though? Stede looked at the model ship in his hands and thought of a sun-browned nose, of a beard he’d seen riddled with salt and sand for a decade or more in his dreams, and began to admit, if only to himself, that setting off down this path was a bit more selfish than just wanting a familial adventure. Somewhere – and with any luck a somewhere not so far from Barbados – there was a sailor with a beautiful beard who had been dreaming of his own unremarkable lips, and there was a yearning within him, deeply rooted and barely comprehensible, that could no longer let the years wilt away without finding them.
And so, when the construction was completed, when he had found the beginnings of a crew and quietly sent several dozen crates of essentials to be unloaded onto the ship, Stede Bonnet wrote his wife a letter, gently kissed his sleeping children goodbye, and set out in search of his soulmate.