Trust is a very important thing to Abigail – she is a woman who values honesty and ( all ironies aside ) was raised to uphold the truth first and foremost as the virtue most valiant among men. It is for this reason that her relationship to Charles Vane is so poignant – even if it is a rather subtle note in their brief time existing in one another’s spheres. 

When Abigail was presented with a letter from Miranda Hamilton – a woman she remembered from her childhood – she had every reason to want to run toward that comfort and familiarity. Yet despite this, she hesitates and informs Eleanor that she has been promised a safe return home by Captain Vane – she trusts him despite everything she has been taught about pirates and every reason she has to be fearful of her position. 

Even though she holds in her hand the promise of safety, she does not fall blindly to it and she displays a clear reluctance to leave – which is strange until one considers the fact that, when the fort was under attack and Abigail had no idea what was going on, Vane ordered his men to have her kept safe and unharmed. That no one was to touch her. 

Considering her time with Low, Abigail knows one thing with alarming surety – that was not an order Captain Vane needed to deliver. Harm to her person – physical injuries of any sort – would not change her weight in gold for being returned alive. Yet he did give that order and – as we see from how remarkably undamaged she is in a physical sense in the wake of her ordeal – it is an order that was executed in full. 

Abigail Ashe has no reason to doubt in Captain Vane because he has granted her none. He has been honest in his intentions from the start – to ransom her to her father – but he has done so in a way so remarkably different from Low that Abigail is not blind to what one may dare to consider an honorable trait in him. It is in fact because of Vane and his actions that Abigail was open to observing Flint and his crew critically, rather than hiding in fear throughout the duration of her journey. Abigail’s ability to trust in pirates, and believe them to be something more than monsters, started with her treatment as Captain Vane’s hostage.  

I mention all of this partly due to various verses I have either present or in the works in which Abigail refuses to leave, or in some other way, finds herself in service to Vane by personal choice after the events of Charlestown – but mostly, because I was captivated by her resistance to leaving and needed to rewatch the entire arc to figure out where that resistance stemmed from.