There, where the beach met the sea, was moored a yawl, the coxswain and rowers silent sentinels with the sea at their backs as they awaited their captain—Captain Bartholomew Roberts, who stood before me at the entrance to the beach.
He crouched. His eyes flashed and he smiled that peculiar joyless smile of his. “Oh . . . your Jackdaw has flown, Edward, eh? That’s the beauty of a democracy . . . The many outvote the one. Aye, you could sail with me, but with a temper as hot as yours I fear you’d burn us all to cinders. Luckily I know the King’s bounty on your head is a large one and I intend to collect.”
The pain was too much. I could hold it together no more and felt myself passing out. The last thing I heard as the darkness claimed me was Bartholomew Roberts, softly taunting me.
“Have you ever seen the inside of a Jamaican prison, boy? Have you?”
PART IV
FIFTY-SEVEN
A lot can happen in six months. But in the six months to November 1720, it happened to other people. Me, I was mouldering in jail in Kingston. While Bartholomew Roberts became the most feared pirate of the Caribbean, commanding a squadron of four vessels, his flagship The Royal Fortune at its head, I was trying and failing to sleep on a roll on the floor of a cell so cramped I couldn’t lie straight. I was picking maggots from my food and holding my nose to get it down. I was drinking dirty water and praying it wouldn’t kill me. I was watching the striped grey light from the bars of the door and listening to the clamour of the jaiclass="underline" the curses; night-time screams; a constant clanging that never ceased, as though someone, somewhere, spent all day and night rattling a cup along the bars; and, sometimes, I was listening to my own voice, just to remind myself that I was still alive, when I would curse my luck, curse Roberts, curse Templars, curse my crew . . .
I had been betrayed—by Roberts, of course, though that was no surprise—but also by the Jackdaw. My time in jail gave me the distance I needed to see how my obsession with The Observatory had blinded me to the needs of my men, and I stopped blaming them for leaving me at Long Bay. I’d decided if I was lucky enough to see them again I’d greet them like brothers and tell them I bore no grudge and offer apologies of my own. Even so. The image of the Jackdaw’s sailing away without me burned like a brand on my brain.
Not for much longer though. No doubt my trial approached—though I had yet to hear, of course. And after my trial would come my hanging.
Yesterday they had one. A pirate hanging, I mean. The trial was held in Spanish Town, and five of the men tried went to the gallows the day after at Gallows Point. They hanged the other six the next day in Kingston.
One of those they hung yesterday was “Captain John Rackham,” the man we all knew as Calico Jack.
Poor old Jack. Not a good man but not an especially bad one, either. And who can say fairer than that? I hoped he’d managed to get enough liquor down him before they sent him to the gallows. Keep him warm for the journey to the other side.
Thing was, Calico Jack had a couple of lieutenants, and their trial was to start this very day. I was due to be brought up into the courtroom, in fact, where they said I might be needed as a witness although they hadn’t said whether for the defence or the prosecution.
The two lieutenants, you see, were Anne Bonny and Mary Read.
And therein lies a tale. I’d witnessed the story’s beginning with what I saw at The Observatory: Calico Jack and Anne Bonny were lovers. Jack had worked his charm, tempted her away from James (that scurvy toad) and taken her to sea.
On board she dressed as a man and she wasn’t the only one. Mary Read was aboard ship too, dressed as James Kidd, and the three of them—Calico Jack, Anne and Mary—were all in on it. The two women wore men’s jackets, long trousers and scarves around their necks. They carried pistols and cutlasses and were as fearsome as any man—and more dangerous, what with having more to prove.
For a while they sailed the neighbourhood terrorizing merchant ships, until earlier in the year, when they stopped off at New Providence. There on August 22, the year of our Lord 1720, Rackham and a load of his crew, including Anne and Mary, stole a sloop called the William from Nassau harbour.
Of course Rogers knew exactly who was responsible. He issued a proclamation and despatched a sloop crammed with his own men to catch Calico Jack and his crew.
But old Calico Jack was on a roll, and in between splicing the main brace, which is to say carousing, he attacked fishing boats and merchant ships and a schooner.
Rogers didn’t like that. He sent a second vessel after him.
But old Calico Jack didn’t care, and he continued his piracy westward until the western tip of Jamaica, where he encountered a privateer by the name of Captain Barnet, who saw the opportunity to make a bit of money in return for Jack’s hide.
Sure enough, Jack was boarded and his crew surrendered, all apart from Mary and Anne, that was. From what I heard Jack and his crew had caroused themselves stupid and were drunk or passed out when Barnet’s men attacked. Like hell-cats, Mary and Anne cursed out the crew and fought with pistols and swords but were overcome, and the whole lot of them were taken across the island to Spanish Town jail.
Like I say, they’d tried and hanged Jack already.
Now it was the turn of Anne and Mary.
I hadn’t seen many court-rooms in my life, thank God, but even so, I’d never seen one as busy as this. My guards led me up a set of stone steps to a barred door, opened it, shoved me out into the gallery and bade me sit. I gave them a puzzled look. What’s going on? But they ignored me and stood with their backs to the wall, muskets at the ready in case I made a break for it.
But made a break where? My hands were manacled, men were wedged into the gallery seats all around: spectators, witnesses . . . all of them come to lay eyes on the two infamous women pirates—Anne Bonny and Mary Read.
They stood together before the judge, who glared at them and banged his gavel.
“The charges, sir, I will hear them again,” he called to the bailiff, who stood and cleared his throat.
“His Majesty’s Court contends that the defendants, Mary Read and Anne Bonny, did piratically, feloniously, and in a hostile manner, attack, engage, and take seven certain fishing boats.”
During the minor uproar that followed I sensed somebody sit behind me. Two people, in fact—but paid them little mind.
“Secondly,” continued the bailiff, “this Court contends that the defendants lurked upon the high seas and did set upon, shoot at, and take two certain merchant sloops, thus putting the captains and their crews in corporeal fear of their lives.”
Then matters of court receded into the background as one of the men sitting behind me leaned forward and spoke.
“Edward James Kenway . . .” I recognized the voice of Woodes Rogers at once. “Born in Swansea to an English father and Welsh mother. Married at eighteen to Miss Caroline Scott, now estranged.”
I lifted my manacles and shifted around in the seat. Neither of my guards with their muskets had moved, but they watched us carefully. Beside Rogers, every inch the man of rank, sat Laureano Torres, dapper and composed in the balmy heat of the court-room. They weren’t there on pirate-hunting business, though. They were there on Templar business.
“She is a beautiful woman, I’m told,” said Torres, with a nod in greeting.
“If you touch her, you bastards . . .” I snarled.