smackenzie

Margaret Lawton, Lady Cleystone, first went to sea at the age of seven, as a passenger on a merchant ship owned by a cousin. They were at sea only two weeks, but she ended the voyage in love with sailing. Women had been allowed to serve in the royal army and navy for the past two centuries, so when she was of age she enrolled in the Naval Academy and eventually received a commission in the navy.

Margaret - now Captain Lawton - served king and country faithfully for three years. But then the king died without an heir and the kingdom split behind warring nobles, finally settling into two factions - that of Penelle, Baroness Delat, and Sebastian, Duke Laverry. Margaret threw her support behind the duke, believing him to be the more honorable candidate with the stronger claim. Despite the two centuries of female soldiers and sailors, the military was not a very popular career for women, and other officers and aristocrats occasionally looked askance at Margaret when she wore her full regalia to official occasions and ceremonies. She knew there were rumors that she supported the duke out of love, that the two of them had had an affair, that she had seduced him, that he had seduced her. She ignored them all.

Captain Lawton and her ship the Black Lightning ran blockades and formed blockades and chased the baroness' fleet up and down the coast and across the seas. She sank supply ships and merchant ships friendly to the baroness' cause. She was fired upon in turn and nearly boarded three times, but the Black Lightning was fast and her cannon were powerful and her crew was skilled, and she came through the years of civil war intact.

Margaret, however, did not. The duke managed to win the throne, but he was ousted after a week and ultimately lost his claim to rule. He fled across the sea to the welcoming country of Essanay, some of his followers trailing after. The nobles who had supported him in his fight for the crown were given a choice - swear fealty to the baroness, now Queen Penelle, or follow the duke into exile. Some chose to stay.

Margaret went home to Cleystone Hall, her family's ancestral seat, to discover that for her support of the duke's unsuccessful claim to the throne, she had been stripped of her title, her estates, her inheritance, her rank, and her ship. She refused to disavow the duke and transfer her loyalties to the queen, and was summarily packed onto a crowded ship and sent away.

What was she to do? The duke - she would always refer to him as the king-in-exile, despite the fact that he had only ever been king for a week and the only people who recognized his right to rule were the men and women who had gone into exile with him - had no navy of his own, and she could not join the crew of an Essanian ship. She had no money, no title, and no rank, nothing but anger at the baroness - Margaret always thought of her as the Usurper - and a desire to see the duke on the throne.

She did not fit in with the genteelly disappointed, disinherited exiles surrounding the duke. Some of her fellow military men and women turned to criminal enterprises, using the skills they had learned on the fields of battle to harry ships at sea and merchant caravans on land, to stir up rebellions and try to gather support for another grab at the throne. So Margaret turned to piracy, serving as quartermaster under an Essanian captain and eventually getting voted captain herself.

A year after losing her lands, her ancestral hall, and the Black Lighting, a year after going into exile, she and her pirate crew captured her old ship, now called the St Catin. Margaret had it repainted, refitted, and returned to its former name. She ran her new flag up the flagpole. She accepted that there was another bounty on her head - not just for piracy, but for stealing a royal military vessel. She did not care.

A year after that, Margaret Lawton - once Lady Cleystone, once Captain Lawton of the King's Navy - now Red Maggie, commander of a pirate ship with a nearly all-female crew, sailed the seas chasing merchant ships, disrupting trade, and causing mayhem. There were bounties on her head. There was fear at the sight of her flag. There was an uneasy acceptance of some of her plunder into the coffers of the exiled duke, in preparation for the day he made another assault on the throne that Red Maggie believed should be his.

And there was the Black Lighting, and the open water, and the freedom of being her own woman. And if the price of that freedom was giving up her home and her name, well, she could live with it. Her home was her ship and now she could make her own name.

words: 841
total words: 841