by Pam Godwin
“Mother, wait!” I grabbed the bridle, halting her. “If there’s any love for him left inside you, you will save him!”
She bent down and slapped my hand away, her lips pulling back in a sneer. “I love him so viciously I would die for him.”
Her declaration slammed into me, knocking the wind from my lungs. She lunged the horse forward and dashed into the gloom of shadows.
I staggered after her, but she was already gone.
My father would be in the town gaol, so that was where I needed to go. But not drenched in blood. And not without a horse.
Stripping out of the gown, I found only a few stains on the petticoat and bodice of my stays.
I stuffed the dress inside the hollow of a dead tree, retied my father’s compass to my waist, and turned in the direction where the sky was the lightest. East. The beach. Once I reached the sea, I could follow it south to the port of Charleston.
As I walked, I pushed through the pangs in my body and listened for the neigh of a horse.
Thirst was the most gnawing ache. And hunger. The throbbing in my face, backside, and feet dulled in comparison. But when I spotted a horse through the trees, all physical pain gave way to exhilaration.
It took me several minutes to mount Grisdale’s horse, and several more to race to the beach. When I emerged from the woods, the sun was already cresting the horizon.
My father’s boots and cutlass still lay in the sand, but I didn’t stop to collect them. I galloped south, eyes on the water, searching for his ship as I followed the shore to town.
If I had a spyglass and climbed one of the tallest trees, perhaps I would spot Jade.
I sped onward, spurred by images of a noose around his neck. Would they hang him at dawn? Or force him to attend Sunday service, preach to him about his sins, and hang him after?
Tears stung my eyes, and my entire body shook in the saddle.
My mother would stop them. She loved my father. How had I ever thought she didn’t? She would save him, and we would sail away.
We would be a family.
The thought was so comforting I let it play out in my head—my father standing at the bow of his ship with his hands on the railing and the wind in his hair, the countess and me flanking his sides and sharing joyous smiles. He would sing off-tune, and we would laugh and join in. The destination wouldn’t matter because we would already be home, together at sea, as we were meant to be.
I choked on tearful laughter and propelled the horse faster. Chest tight and fingers clinched around the reins, I abandoned the fringe of forest on my right and approached the edge of town.
Piers stretched like fingers out to sea, and buildings scattered along the walkways that lined the beach. The sun sat just above the water, and a few townsfolk meandered from one place to the next.
The gaol wasn’t visible from the beach, and I questioned the wisdom in entering the town half-dressed and guilty of murder.
In the distance, a bell tolled, signaling the start of Sunday service. Most of the residents would be gathering there.
With a shaky breath, I searched the buildings for a sign of the countess or her horse. My gaze darted over pathways, faces, shadowed alcoves, and… An ominous structure. One that didn’t belong on the beach.
I urged the horse closer, squinting at the wooden platform that appeared to have been moved from the center of town.
Two uprights towered over it, and something hung from the crosspiece.
Not something.
Someone.
A cold sweat swept over me, and sickening dread muted everything around me.
My mind fractured, and I didn’t recall dismounting the horse. One moment I was in the saddle. The next I was standing at the foot of the gallows, staring up at a dead man.
A tide of tears warped my inspection of his face, so I focused on the feet that dangled at eye level above the platform.
Feet that were covered in deerskin shoes, decorated with porcupine quills and glass beads. And splotches of blood.
Numbness spread across my skin.
The shoes weren’t real.
Not real. Not real. Not real.
None of this was real.
I pressed the heels of my hands to my eyes, rubbing away the blur of a nightmare. Then I forced my gaze back up.
Broad shoulders. Wide mouth. Sun-bronzed skin. Gold earring. Red hair.
No. It wasn’t possible. Captain Edric Sharp was invincible.
“Father?” My arms reached for him, and I willed him to lift his chin, to open his eyes, to give me a smile. “Father, please!”
Sunlight cast his body in stripes of gold and shadow. The rope creaked, but the wind seemed not to stir.
Nothing stirred. Not his arms in the restraints. Not the lashes fanning his cheekbones. Not a twitch on his lips.
He floated above me, suspended, unreachable, unmoving.
Dead.
Gone.
He was gone.
My mouth hung open, but no sound came out. No scream. No breath.
He would never hug me again.
He died alone.
I gripped the back of my head and curled around the anguish in my chest, rocking, shaking, unable to stem the onslaught of pain. It gathered in my throat, throbbed along my teeth, and broke the air in a wailing, guttural howl.
I didn’t know how long I lay bent over the platform, sobbing in a pool of loss and heartbreak. I didn’t lift my head until voices sounded in the distance.
Cupping cold fingers over my mouth, I captured the cries that tumbled out.
My legs turned to water, and I collapsed beside the gallows, unable to mute the sounds behind my hand.
In the back of my mind, I knew I couldn’t stay here. Not without being questioned about my inappropriate attire, the stains on my undergarments, and the disappearance of the Marquess of Grisdale.
I thought of my mother. She’d ridden off in this direction and would’ve found him, same as me.
She needed me as I needed her.
I needed her strength, her wisdom, her arms folded tightly around me. I just…
I desperately needed my mother.
Moving through a fuzzy, grief-leaden trance, I peered over the platform and spotted a group of redcoats gathered on the road that led through town.
My only escape was back the way I’d come.
As I rose to my feet, something caught the men’s attention. They turned away to greet the approach of a loose horse.
The horse I’d stolen from the marquess.
My chest tightened. I’d lost my ride.
I lost my father.
With the soldiers distracted, I stared up into his face and choked, “I love you with everything I am, and I don’t want to leave you. But I think…” I stole a glance at the redcoats. “I think you would be angry if I didn’t run now.”
Drawing in a tear-soaked breath, I forced myself to turn away. Then I ran.
My feet pounded the warm sand, and my arms pumped with the motion. I didn’t look back, didn’t slow, no matter how shaky my legs became.
Seashells and rocks sliced the soles of my feet. Labored breaths scorched my dry and thirsty throat. The pain pushed me harder, faster, and when I reached a stretch of barren shore, I screamed.
Tears streaked my face, and I kept running. Crushing sorrow strangled my insides, and I quickened my pace. Muscles tore in protest, and I cried louder, sobbing brokenly from a bottomless well of pain.
Every kilometer was a just punishment, the abuse on my body a price for my failures. No one deserved a beating more than me, and I absorbed that pain until my bones buckled upon the beach.
The sun’s heat burned my back, and I lifted my pounding head, squinting through tangles of hair.
A towering cliff rose before me, and the shore curved inward, forming a crescent that spanned sixty paces.
The beach where my father was arrested.
I crawled to the shade of the nearby outcropping of trees, and my ears perke
d to the sound of buzzing.
Swarms of flies hovered over the brush, and as I drew closer, I saw the blood-soaked fur.
My father’s dead hounds.
With a nauseated cry, I pushed to my feet and staggered along the inlet in the direction of his cutlass and boots. I summoned just enough energy to gather his belongings before crashing to the sand.
My heart pulled toward my mother, and my desperation to find her seemed to conjure her out of the sky.
Lying on my back, I gazed up at the cliff, and there she was, floating on the edge of the precipice.
Golden hair whipped around her head, her arms stretched out to the sea. She was an apparition of unearthly beauty, screeching fiercely into the wind.
“Edddddric!” A loud shrill cry shattered her voice as she chanted his name over and over.
She didn’t look down at me, didn’t move her attention from the sea.
How was she in the sky? Soaring over me like an angel? I must have been dreaming her.
Because I needed her.
But something didn’t feel right.
I curled my hands in the sand, testing the scratchy grains against my skin. Would I be able to feel that in a dream?
Why was she on the cliff? Had she floated there? Or climbed?
Panic stitched through my chest, and I fumbled to my feet, clinging to my father’s possessions.
Seagulls swooped and cawed around her, and she mimicked their form.
“Edric, my love!” Arms open like a bird, she stepped off the cliff and took flight. “Edric!”
Her gown rippled around her, and the bellow of her cry broke with the tide. But instead of gliding out to sea, she plunged to the rubble of boulders below.
My entire body jerked as she hit the rocks.
I would die for him.
Numb paralysis spread through me.
Not real.
My feet carried me forward, but there was no feeling. No breath.
Muscles failed, and I used the cutlass for support, stabbing it into the sand and stumbling closer. Closer. Until her broken form filled my view.
I didn’t feel the surf batter me into the cliff as I climbed the moss-slick boulders. The ocean would’ve been frigid this time of year, but I couldn’t feel the water as it soaked into my clothing.
With fingers locked around the boots and cutlass, I made it to my mother’s side.
She lay on a rock twice her size, her neck twisted at an unnatural angle. I curled up against her chest and touched the red skin around her open eyes, collecting the tears there.
“I loved him, too, Mother.” Agony unfurled in my breast. “Why did you leave me? I needed you.”
Blue eyes of glass stared back.
She doesn’t see me.
I tucked the boots and cutlass between us and pulled her arm around me. A trickle of blood fell from her mouth. I wiped it away and burrowed closer, burying my face in her neck.
The soft silk of her hair fluttered against my lips as I sobbed. Her delicate frame lay like twisted driftwood against me. I pulled her closer, straightening her skirts, arranging her limbs, and clinging to her embrace.
There was only so much suffering a person could endure before they broke. Sometimes, broken things couldn’t be put back together.
My body wasn’t broken like my mother’s, but I was empty all the same. And tired. So very tired.
Closing my eyes wasn’t hard. They pulled shut on their own.
When I opened them, I was greeted by nightfall.
Moonlight sparkled over my mother’s skin, giving her an ethereal glow. Eventually, someone would find us and take her away from me. Or maybe the crabs would take her. I leaned up to flick one from her hair, and a pair of jackboots stepped into my view.
Craning my neck, I looked up to find Charles Vane standing over me.
I licked cracked lips and rasped, “My father…”
“I tried to rescue him.” He crouched beside me, his expression unreadable in the moonlight. “They hanged him at dawn. Moved the gallows to the beach and did it right there to send a message to us. His crew.”
“You were there?”
He nodded stiffly. “So was she.” He glanced at the countess. “Your mother?”
“Yes.”
“She arrived as it happened and…” His brows furrowed as he gazed up at the peak of the cliff. “She went mad.”
I followed his gaze. “Did it take her pain?”
“I suppose it did.”
“This day took everything from me. Everything I loved. Everything I had.” I studied the rocky face of the cliff, wondering if I had the strength to climb it.
“Not everything.” He bent over me and scooped up my mother’s body from the rock. “I couldn’t save Captain Sharp, but I can save you.”
As he strode away with her, I pondered his words with a sluggish mind. Did I want to be saved? What was left to salvage?
Moments later, he returned and lifted me into his arms. I’d never felt so weak and lifeless. I didn’t even have the will to struggle as he carried me into the sea.
Muscles flexed beneath me as he lowered me into a jolly boat. My father’s boots and cutlass joined me.
And I wasn’t alone.
Two dead bodies lay at my feet, and the sight of them together breathed life into my heart.
“How?” I crawled toward my parents and gripped their cold hands, lacing their fingers together in the squeeze of mine.
“I stole his body from the gallows.” He climbed into the boat behind me. “Captain Sharp deserves a burial at sea.”
“Thank you.” I lay down beside them and wrapped my arms around my father’s chest. “What will happen to me?”
“That’s up to you.” He stabbed the oars into the black water and pushed out to sea. “Jade is yours. The captain was very clear on that point the night he took her.”
“I’m only fourteen.”
“I’ll captain her until you earn the crew’s trust.” He tipped his head, studying me. “I was younger than you, orphaned like you, when I chose this life. I have no regrets.”
“I’m a girl.” A broken, empty girl. I tightened my hand around my parents’ entwined fingers. “The crew won’t accept me without my father.”
“Don’t give them a choice.” His gaze flitted over me, and a smirk touched the corner of his mouth. “I saw a fearless fire burning inside you yesterday. Get that back, Bennett, and naught will stand in your way.”
I felt it. A spark of something beneath the cold, heavy weight of pain.
Something to live for.
My hand fell to the compass that hung from my waist.
When you’re ready, you will follow it and claim what’s rightfully yours.
I closed my eyes and cried.
March 1721
Port Royal, Kingston Harbor Jamaica
Seven years had passed since I lost my parents. I still felt it, the deep gnawing pain in the torments of my soul. I tried to shake it loose, tried like hell to pretend the damage wasn’t there. But it clung.
Especially tonight.
The mantle of twilight shrouded me in desolation as I stood before another corpse hanging from a noose.
Another buccaneer.
Another great man ripped from my life.
One day I might find the hempen halter around my own neck. Pirates never died in their beds. But today wasn’t my day.
A reminder that I shouldn’t be here.
I’d been on the run since I was fourteen, constantly looking over my shoulder. Even now I subtly tilted my head, probing the empty alleyways around me, my senses on alert for the one thing I couldn’t outrun forever.
Death.
My would-be reapers came in many forms. Pirate hunters sought the bounty my capture would award them. Navy officers desired the accolades from bringing down the pirate daughter of Captain Edric Sharp. Enemy buccaneers and fellow criminals wanted to eliminate me as the competition. And there were others, one in particular, wh
o hunted me with single-minded focus, determined to reclaim what he’d lost.
He was the most dangerous of them all.
My presence in Jamaica was a risk. But I had to come, even as I knew I would arrive too late.
When I’d learned of Charles Vane’s capture, I was a week’s journey away.
I arrived three days after he hanged.
And he was still hanging.
I covered my nose against the stench and ordered myself not to cry. I hadn’t exposed that kind of weakness in a very long time.
Charles had seen me at my lowest point. One of them, anyway. The night he collected my parents’ bodies and carried me away from Carolina, we began a friendship that survived battles and sickness, victories and losses, time and distance.
And now death.
I owed him my life. A debt I would never be able to repay.
My trembling hand went to the jade stone that hung on the leather choker around my neck, one of the few things I retained from childhood. I’d lost so much in the past seven years and smiled so little.
Just like my mother.
But unlike her, my dream had always been to live on a ship. I’d obtained that and fought every day to keep it. Jade belonged to me, and I’d wrangled her under my command with a ferocity that would’ve made my father proud. I loved the life I’d chosen, craved the rocking beneath my feet even now, but it wasn’t easy.
I’d made a lot of mistakes, one of which left a terrible hole in my heart.
Shadows stirred in my periphery, and a well-built pirate approached my side. We didn’t make eye contact as he paused to view the body with a respectable amount of space between us.
He towered several heads taller than me, all lean muscle and vibrating intimidation. His brown hair was sheared up the sides, leaving a stripe of tousled length from the peak of his forehead to the base of his skull. Rings of gold lined his ear, and a square jaw underscored his hard mouth.
As wickedly attractive as he was ruthless, he could probably eat me in one bite.
I trusted him with my life.
Reynolds wasn’t just my quartermaster and second in command. He was one of my closest friends.
“We should go, Captain,” he said under his breath. “A lady of your station wouldn’t linger at Gallows Point after dusk.”