Me, I sat on the terrace of my homestead with Anne, Adewalé and Ah Tabai.
“Gentlemen, how do you find it here?” I asked them.
I’d offered it—my home as their base.
“It will work well for us,” said Ah Tabai, “but our long-term goal must be to scatter our operations. To live and work among the people we protect, just as Altaïr Ibn-La’Ahad once counselled.”
“Well, until that time, it’s yours as you see fit.”
“Edward . . .”
I had already stood to see Anne, but turned to Adewalé.
“Yes?”
“Captain Woodes Rogers survived his wounds,” he told me. I cursed, remembering the interruption. “He has since returned to England. Shamed and in great debt, but no less a threat.”
“I will finish that job when I return. You have my word.”
He nodded, and we embraced before we parted, leaving me to join Anne.
We sat in silence for a moment, smiling at the songs, until I said, “I’ll be sailing for London in the next few months. I’d be a hopeful man if you were beside me.”
She laughed. “England is the wrong way round the globe for an Irishwoman.”
I nodded. Perhaps it was for the best. “Will you stay with the Assassins?” I asked her.
She shook her head. “No. I haven’t that kind of conviction in my heart. You?”
“In time, aye, when my mind is settled and my blood is cooled.”
Just then we heard a cry from afar, a ship sailing into the cove. We looked at one another, both of us knowing what the arrival of the ship meant—a new life for me, a new life for her. I loved her in my own way, and I think she loved me, but the time had come to part, and we did it with a kiss.
“You’re a good man, Edward,” said Anne, her eyes shining as I stood. “If you learn to keep settled to one place for more than a week, you’ll make a fine father too.”
I left her and headed down to the beach, where a large ship was coming into dock. The gang-board was lowered and the captain appeared holding the hand of a little girl, a beautiful little girl, who shone brighter than hope, just nine years old.
And I thought you looked the spitting image of your mother.
SIXTY-SEVEN
A little vision, you were. Jennifer Kenway, a daughter I never even knew I had. Embarking on a voyage, which went against your grandfather’s wishes but had your grandmother’s blessing, you’d sailed to find me, in order to give me the news.
My beloved was dead.
(Did you wonder why I didn’t cry, I wonder, as we stood on the dock at Inagua? So did I, Jenny. So did I.)
On that voyage home I got to know you. And yet there were still things I had to keep from you because I still had much I needed to do. Before, when I talked about having loose ends to tie, business to take care of? Well, there were still more loose ends to tie. Still more business to settle.
• • •
I took a skeleton crew to Bristol, a few of my most trusted men. We sailed the Atlantic, a hard, rough crossing, made bearable by a stay in the Azores, then continued our journey to the British Isles and to Bristol. To home—to a place I hadn’t visited for nigh on a decade. A place I had been warned against ever returning to.
As we came into the Bristol Channel the black flag of the Jackdaw was brought down, folded up, and placed carefully in a chest in my cabin. In its place we raised the Red Ensign. It would be enough to allow us to land at least, and once the port marshals had worked out the Jackdaw was not a naval vessel, I’d be ashore and the ship anchored off shore.
And then I saw it for the first time in so long, the Bristol dock, and I caught my breath. I had loved Kingston, Havana and above all Nassau. But despite everything that had happened—or maybe because of it—here was still my home.
Heads turned in my direction as I strode along the harbour, a figure of mystery, dressed not like a pirate but something else. Perhaps some of the older ones remembered me: merchants I’d done business with as a sheep-farmer, men I’d drunk with in the taverns, when I’d boasted of going off to sea. Tongues would wag, and news would travel. How far? I wondered. To Matthew Hague and Wilson? To Emmett Scott? Would they know that Edward Kenway was back, stronger and more powerful than before, and that he had scores to settle?
I found a boarding-house in town and there rested the night. The next morning I bartered for a horse and saddle and set off for Hatherton, riding until I reached my father’s old farmhouse.
Why I went there, I’m not quite sure. I think I just wanted to see it. And so for long moments that’s what I did. I stood by the gate in the shade of a tree and contemplated my old home. It had been rebuilt, of course, and was only partly recognizable as the house in which I had grown up. But one thing that had remained the same was the outhouse: the outhouse where my marriage to your mother had begun, the outhouse in which you were conceived, Jennifer.
I left, then halfway between Hatherton and Bristol, a road I knew so well, I stopped at a place I also knew well. The Auld Shillelagh. I tethered my horse outside, made sure she had water, then stepped in to find it almost exactly as I remembered it: the low ceilings, a darkness that seemed to seep from the walls. The last time I was here I had killed a man. My first man. Many more had fallen beneath my blade since.
More to come.
Behind the bar was a woman in her fifties, and she raised her tired head to look at me as I approached.
“Hello, Mother,” I said.
SIXTY-EIGHT
She took me to a side table away from the prying eyes of the few drinkers there.
“So it’s true then?” she asked me. Her long hair had grey streaks in it. Her face was drawn and tired. It was only (only?) ten years since I’d last seen her but it was as though she had aged twenty, thirty, more.
All my fault.
“What’s true, Mother?” I asked carefully.
“You’re a pirate?”
“No, Mother, I’m not a pirate. No longer. I’ve joined an Order.”
“You’re a monk?” She cast an eye over my robes.
“No, Mother, I’m not a monk. Something else.”
She sighed, looking unimpressed. Over at the bar, the landlord was towelling tankards, watching us with the eye of a hawk. He begrudged her the time she spent away from the bar but wasn’t about to say anything. Not with the pirate Edward Kenway around.
“And you decided to come back, did you?” she was saying. “I heard that you had. That you sailed into port yesterday, stepped off a glittering galleon like some kind of king. The big I-am, Edward Kenway. That’s what you always wanted, wasn’t it?”
“Mother . . .”
“That was what you were always going on about, wasn’t it? Wanting to go off and make your fortune, make something of yourself, become a man of quality, wasn’t it? That involved becoming a pirate, did it?” She sneered. I didn’t think I’d ever seen my mother sneer before. “You were lucky they didn’t hang you.”
They still might if they catch me.
“It’s not like that anymore. I’ve come to make things right.”
She pulled a face like she’d tasted something nasty. Another expression I’d never seen before. “Oh yes, and how do you plan to do that?”
I waved a hand. “Not have you working here, for a start.”
“I’ll work wherever I like, young man,” she scoffed. “You needn’t think you’re paying me off with stolen gold. Gold that belonged to other folks before they were forced to hand it to you at the point of your sword. Eh? Is that it?”
“It’s not like that, Ma,” I whispered, feeling young all of a sudden. Not like the pirate Edward Kenway at all. This wasn’t how I’d imagined it would be. Tears, embraces, apologies, promises. Not like this.