Rogers leaned forward. I felt a nudge at my shirt and looked down to see the muzzle of his pistol in my side. In the year since my fall from The Observatory I had by some miracle avoided gangrene or infection, but the wound had never quite healed. He didn’t know about it, of course, he couldn’t have. But still, somehow he’d managed to prod it with the barrel of his gun, making me wince.
“If you know The Observatory’s location, tell us now and you’ll be out of here in a flash,” said Rogers.
Of course. That was why I hadn’t felt the burn of the hangman’s noose so far.
“Rogers can hold these British hounds at bay for a time,” said Torres, “but this will be your fate if you fail to cooperate.” He was gesturing out to the court-room, where the judge was speaking; where witnesses were telling of the awful things Anne and Mary had done.
Their warning over, Torres and Rogers stood, just as a female witness described in breathless detail how she’d been attacked by the two women pirates. She’d known they were women, she said, “by the largeness of their breasts,” and the court liked that. The court laughed at that until the laughter was silenced by the rap of the judge’s gavel, the sound drowning out the slam of the door behind Rogers and Torres.
Anne and Mary, meanwhile, hadn’t said a word. What’s the matter? Cat got your tongue? I’d never known them lost for words before, but there they were, silent as the grave. Tales of their derring-do were told, and they never once butted in to correct anything egregious, nor even said a peep when the Court found them guilty. Even when they were asked if they could offer any reason why sentence of death should not be passed. Nothing.
So the judge, not knowing the two ladies, and perhaps taking them for the reticent sort, delivered his sentence: death by hanging.
And then—and only then—did they open their mouths.
“Milord, we plead our bellies,” said Mary Read, breaking their silence.
“What?” said the judge, paling.
“We are pregnant,” said Anne Bonny.
There was an uproar.
I wondered if both the sprogs belonged to Calico Jack, the old devil.
“You can’t hang a woman quick with child, can ye?” called Anne over the noise.
The court-room was in turmoil. As if anticipating my thoughts, one of the guards behind nudged me with his musket barrel. Don’t even think about it.
“Quiet! Quiet!” called the judge. “If what you claim is true, then your executions will be stayed, but only until your terms are up.”
“Then I’ll be pregnant the next time you come knocking!” roared Anne.
That was the Anne I remembered, with the face of an angel and the mouth of the roughest jack-tar. And she had the court-room in an uproar again, as the red-faced judge hammered at the bench with his gavel and ordered them removed, and the session broke up in disarray.
FIFTY-EIGHT
“Edward Kenway. Do you remember you once threatened to cut off my lips and feed them to me?”
Laureano Torres’s face appeared from the gloom outside my prison-cell door, framed by the window, divided by the bars.
“I didn’t do it, though,” I reminded him, my disused voice croaking.
“But you would have done.”
True.
“But I didn’t.”
He smiled. “The typical terror tactics of a pirate: unsophisticated and unsubtle. What say you, Rogers?”
He lingered there too. Woodes Rogers, the great pirate hunter. Hanging about near my cell door.
“Is that why you’ve been denying me food and water?” I rasped.
“Oh”—Torres chuckled—“but there is much, much more to come. We have the little matter of The Observatory’s location to extract. We have the little matter of what you did to Hornigold. Come, let us show you what lies in store. Guards.”
Two men arrived, the same pair of Templar stooges who’d escorted me to the court-room. Torres and Rogers left as I was manacled and leg-irons were fitted to me. Then, with my boots dragging on the flags, they hauled me out of the cell and along the passageway, out into the prison courtyard, where I blinked in the blinding sun, breathed fresh air for the first time in weeks, then, to my surprise, out of the main prison-gates.
“Where are you taking me?” I gasped. The light of the sun was too blinding. I couldn’t open my eyes. It felt as though they were glued together.
There was no reply. I could hear the sounds of Kingston. Daily life carrying on as normal around me.
“How much are they paying you?” I tried to say. “Whatever it is, let me go, and I’ll double it.”
They came to a halt.
“Good man, good man,” I mumbled. “I can make you rich. Just get me . . .”
A fist smashed into my face, splitting my lip, breaking something in my nose that began to gush blood. I coughed and groaned. As my head lolled back, a face came close to mine.
“Shut. Up.”
I blinked, trying to focus on him, trying to remember his face.
“I’ll get you for that,” I murmured. Blood or saliva ran from my mouth. “You mark my words, mate.”
“Shut up, or next time it’ll be the point of my sword.”
I chuckled. “You’re full of shit, mate. Your master wants me alive. Kill me and you’ll be taking my place in that cell. Or worse.”
Through a veil of pain, blood and piercing sunlight, I saw his expression darken. “We’ll see about that,” he snarled. “We’ll see about that.”
The journey continued, me spitting blood, trying to clear my head and mostly failing until we came to what looked like the foot of a ladder. I heard the murmured voices of Torres and Rogers, then a squeaking sound coming from just overhead, and when I raised my chin and cast my eyes upwards, what I saw was a gibbet. One of the stooges had climbed the ladder and unlocked it, and the door opened with a complaint of rusty metal. I felt the sun beat down upon me. I could die in there. In the sun.
I tried to say something, to explain that I was parched and could die in the sun and if I did that—if I died—then they’d never find out where The Observatory was. Only Black Bart would know, and what a terrifying thought that was—Black Bart in charge of all that power.
He’s doing that right now, isn’t he? That’s how he got to be so successful.
But I never got the chance to say it because they’d locked me in the gibbet to let the sun do its work. Let it slowly cook me alive.
FIFTY-NINE
At sundown my two friends came to fetch me and take me back to my cell. My reward for surviving was water, a bowl of it on my cell floor, just enough to dab on my lips, keep me alive, to use on the blisters and pustules brought up by the sun.
Rogers and Torres came. “Where is it? Where is The Observatory?” they demanded.
With cracked, desiccated lips I smiled at them but said nothing.
He’s robbing you blind, isn’t he? Roberts, I mean. He’s destroying all your plans.
“You want to go back there tomorrow?”
“Sure,” I whispered. “Sure. I could do with the fresh air.”
It wasn’t every day. Some days I stayed in my cell. Some days they only hung me for a few hours.
“Where is it? Where is The Observatory?”
Some days they left me until well after nightfall. But it wasn’t so bad when the sun went in. I was still crumpled into the gibbet like a man stuck in a privy, every muscle and bone shrieking in agony; I was still dying of thirst and hunger, my sunburnt flesh flaming. But still, it wasn’t so bad. At least the sun had gone in.