At the insistence of his gun barrel I put my hands in the air.
“Another dire situation, Roberts. We must stop meeting like this.”
He smiled grimly. Does he bear me any ill will? I wondered. He had no idea of my plans, after all. A crazy part of me realized that I wouldn’t have been surprised if he could read minds.
“Stop following me and your wish would come true,” he said.
“There’s no need for this. You know I’m as good as my word.”
Around us the jungle was silent. Bartholomew Roberts seemed to be thinking. It was odd, I mused. Neither of us really had the measure of the other. Neither of us really knew what the other one wanted. I knew what I wanted from him, of course. But what about him? What did he want? I sensed that whatever it was, it would be more dark and more mysterious than I could possibly imagine. All I knew for sure was that death followed Bart Roberts and I wasn’t ready to die. Not yet.
He spoke. “Our Captain Howell was killed today in a Portuguese ambush. Headstrong fool. I warned him not to come ashore.”
It was to the recently deceased captain that Bartholomew Roberts’s thoughts went now. Evidently deciding I was not a threat, he holstered his pistol.
And, of course, the attack. I thought I knew who was behind it.
“It was orchestrated by the Templars,” I told him. “The same sort who took you to Havana.”
His long hair shook as he nodded, seeming to think at the same time. “I see now there is no escaping the Templars’ attention, is there? I suppose it is time to fight back?”
Now you’re talking, I thought.
As we’d been speaking I’d watched him peel off his sailors rags and pull on first the breeches of the dead captain, then move to take the shirt as well. The shirt was blood-stained so he discarded it, put his own back on, then hunched his shoulders into the captain’s coat. He pulled the tie from his hair and shook it free. He popped the captain’s tricorn on his head and its feather wafted as he turned to face me. This was a different Bartholomew Roberts. His time aboard ship had put health back in his cheeks. His dark, curly locks shone in the sun and he stood resplendent in a red jacket and breeches, white stockings, with a hat to match. He looked every inch the buccaneer. He looked every inch the pirate captain.
“Now,” he said, “we must go before Portuguese reinforcements arrive. We must get back to the Rover. I have an announcement to make there that I’d like you to witness.”
I thought I knew what it was, and I was surprised in one way—he was but a lowly deck-hand, after all—but unsurprised also, because this was Roberts. The Sage. The tricks up his sleeve were never-ending. Sure enough, when we arrived at the Rover, where the men waited nervously for news of the expedition, he leapt up to a crate to command their attention. They goggled at him up there: the lowly deck-hand, a new arrival on board to boot, now resplendent in the captain’s clothes.
“In honest service there are thin commons, low wages and hard labor. Yet as gentlemen of fortune we enjoy plenty and satisfaction, pleasure and ease, liberty and power . . . so what man with a sensible mind would choose the former life, when the only hazard we pirates run is a sour look from those without strength or splendour.
“Now, I have been among you six weeks, and in that time have adopted your outlook as my own, and with so fierce a conviction that it may frighten you to see your passions reflected from me in so stark a light. But . . . if it’s a captain you see in me now, aye then . . . I’ll be your bloody captain!”
You had to hand it to him, it was a rousing speech. In a few short sentences proclaiming his kinship, he had these men eating out of the palm of his hand. As the meeting broke up I approached, deciding now was the time to make my play.
“I’m looking for The Observatory,” I told him. “Folks say you’re the only man that can find it.”
“Folks are correct.”
He looked me up and down as if to confirm his impressions. “Despite my distaste for your eagerness, I see in you a touch of untested genius.” He held out his hand to shake. “I’m Bartholomew Roberts.”
“Edward.”
“I’ve no secrets to share with you now,” he told me.
I stared at him, unable to believe what I was hearing. He was going to make me wait.
FIFTY-ONE
SEPTEMBER 1719
Damn the man. Damn Roberts.
He wanted me to wait two months. Two whole months. Then meet him west of the Leeward Islands, east of Puerto Rico. With only his word to take for that, I sailed the Jackdaw back to San Inagua. There I rested the crew for a while, and we took prizes when we could, and my coffers swelled, and it was during that period, I think, that I cut off the nose of the ship’s cook.
When we weren’t taking prizes and when I wasn’t slicing off noses, I brooded at my homestead. I wrote letters to Caroline in which I assured her I would soon be returning as a man of wealth, and I fretted over The Observatory, only too aware that with it lay all my hopes of a fortune. It was built on nothing more than a promise from Bartholomew Roberts.
And then what? The Observatory was a place of enormous potential wealth but even if I found it—even if Bart Roberts came good on his word—it remained only a source of potential wealth. Wasn’t it Edward who had scoffed at the very idea? Gold doubloons was what we wanted, he’d said. Perhaps he was right. Even if I found this amazing machine, how the bloody hell was I going to convert it into the wealth I hoped to acquire? After all, if there were riches to be made, then why hadn’t Roberts made them?
Because he has some other purpose.
I thought of my parents. My mind went back to the burning of our farmhouse and I thought anew of striking a blow at the Templars, this secret society who used its influence and power to grind down anyone who displeased it; to exercise a grudge. I still had no idea exactly who was behind the burning of my farmhouse. Or why. Was it a grudge against me for marrying Caroline and humiliating Matthew Hague? Or against my father, mere business rivalry? Probably both, was my suspicion. Perhaps the Kenways, these arrivals from Wales, who had shamed them so, simply deserved to be taken down a peg or two.
I would find out for sure, I decided. I would return to Bristol one day and exact my revenge.
On that I brooded too. Until the day came in September when I gathered the crew and we readied the Jackdaw, newly caulked, its masts and rigging repaired, its shrouds ready, its galley stocked and the munitions at capacity, and we set sail for our appointment with Bartholomew Roberts.
• • •
Like I say, I don’t think I ever truly knew what was on his mind. He had his own agenda and wasn’t about to share it with the likes of me. What he did like to do, however, was keep me guessing. Keep me hanging on. When we’d parted he’d told me he had business to attend to, which I later found out involved taking his own crew back to Principé and exacting his revenge for the death of Captain Howell Davis on the people of the island.
They’d attacked at night, put to the sword as many men as they could, and made off, not only with as much treasure as they could carry but the beginnings of Black Bart’s fearsome reputation: unknowable, brave and ruthless, and apt to carry off daring raids such as the one we were about to carry out, for example. The one that began with Roberts insisting that the Jackdaw join him on a jaunt around the coast of Brazil to the Todos os Santos Bay.