Satisfied, he bent to the raised dais in front of him and placed the crystal inside. And then, something happened – something I still can’t quite believe – the glow on the walls seemed to ripple like mist, coalescing, not into fog but into images, a series of opaque pictures, as though I was looking through a window at something, at …
56
Calico Jack Rackham, as I live and breathe.
But I wasn’t looking at him. No. It was as though I was him. As though I was looking through his eyes. In fact, the only reason I knew it was Calico Jack was the Indian fabric of his coat sleeve.
He was walking up the steps towards the Old Avery. My heart leapt to see the old place, even more careworn and dilapidated than ever before …
Which meant that this wasn’t an image from the past. It wasn’t an image I had ever experienced myself, because I’d never seen the Old Avery in its current state of disrepair. Hadn’t visited Nassau since the true rot set in.
And yet … And yet … I was seeing it.
‘This is bloody witchcraft,’ I spluttered.
‘No. This is Calico Jack Rackham … Somewhere in the world at this moment.’
‘Nassau,’ I said as much to him as to myself. ‘This is happening right now? We’re seeing through his eyes?’
‘Aye,’ said Roberts.
It wasn’t as though I returned my attention to the image. It was simply there in front of me. As if I was part of it, inside it. Which in a way I was, because when Calico Jack turned his head the image moved with him. I watched as he looked towards a table where Anne Bonny sat with James Kidd.
A long, lingering glance over Anne Bonny. Over certain parts of Anne Bonny. The dirty bastard. But then, oh my God, she looked over from the table where she sat with James Kidd and returned his look. And I mean a proper lascivious look. That roving eye I told you about? She was giving old Calico Jack the full benefit.
Bloody hell. They’re having an affair.
Despite everything – despite the wonders of the Observatory – I found myself suppressing a chuckle to think of James Bonny, that treacherous turncoat, wearing the horns. Calico Jack? Well, the poxy git had marooned me, hadn’t he? So there was no love lost there. But he did give us our weapons, ammunition and grub, and, well, he did have Anne warming his bed, so you had to hand it to him.
Now Calico Jack was listening to Anne and James chatting.
‘I don’t know, Jim,’ Anne was saying. ‘I haven’t the faintest idea how to pilot a ship. That ain’t work a woman does.’
What on earth were they cooking up?
‘Tosh. I’ve seen a score of ladies who can reef a sail and spin a capstan.’
‘And would you teach me to fight? With a cutlass, like? And maybe how to handle a pistol?’
‘All that and more. But you have to want it. And work for it. There’s no stumbling into true success.’
And now Calico Jack confirmed what I thought. His disembodied voice seemed to echo off the stone. ‘Oi, lad, that’s my lass yer making love to. Lay off or I’ll cut ya.’
‘Up your arse, Rackham. “Lad” is the last thing you should be calling me …’
Oh yes? I thought. Was James Kidd about to reveal her disguise?
James was reaching beneath his/her shirt and Calico Jack was blustering, ‘Oh, is that right … lad?’
Roberts removed the cube from the Observatory controls and the image evaporated.
I bit my lip and thought of the Jackdaw. Adé didn’t like our current situation. He’d be dying to make sail.
But he wouldn’t do it without me.
Would he?
But now the glow that hung in the chamber before us became something else again, and all thoughts of the Jackdaw’s intentions were forgotten as Roberts said, ‘Let’s try another. Governor Woodes Rogers,’ and placed another crystal cube into the console and new images formed.
We were seeing through the eyes of Woodes Rogers. Standing with him was Torres and not far away was El Tiburón. Suddenly the vision was filled with the image of a blood vial being held up for examination by Rogers.
He was speaking. ‘You have a bold idea. But I must think it carefully through.’
The Observatory chamber room filled with the sound of Torres’s reply.
‘A simple pledge of loyalty is all you need suggest to the House of Commons. An oath, a gesture and a simple ceremonial dram of blood taken from the finger. That’s all.’
Christ. Whatever Anne and Mary had been cooking up, it was nothing compared to this lot. Still trying to control the bleeding world – bleeding being the operative world. And doing it how? The English parliament.
Now Rogers was speaking. ‘The ministers may give me trouble, but it should be easy enough to convince the House of Lords. They do adore an excess of pomp and circumstance.’
‘Exactly. Tell them it’s a show of fealty to the king … against those revolting Jacobites.’
‘Yes, indeed,’ replied Rogers.
‘The crucial detail is the blood. You must get a sample from each man. We want to be ready when we find the Observatory.’
‘Agreed.’
Roberts removed the cube from the console and looked at me, triumph in his eyes. Now we knew what the Templars were plotting. Not only that, but we were one step ahead of them.
The images had gone, the strange glow had returned to the walls and I was left wondering if I’d imagined the whole thing. Meantime, Roberts pulled something from the console and held it aloft. A skull. The skull in which he’d placed the vials of blood.
‘A precious tool, you see?’
‘Sorcery, that’s what it is,’ I said.
‘Not so. Every mechanism that gives this device its light is a true and physical thing. Ancient, yes, but nothing supernatural or strange.’
I looked doubtfully at him, thinking, You’re kidding yourself, mate. But decided not to pursue it.
‘We’ll be masters of the ocean with that,’ I said. Wanting to hold the skull, reaching out to take it from him and overcome with the desire to feel the weight of it in my palm, I felt a tremble as he came forward with it, his hand outstretched. But then, instead of giving it to me, he whipped it round, striking me in the face with it and knocking me across the floor of the Observatory and over the precipice of the pit.
I fell, slamming into the stone on the way down, whipped by the vegetation that clung to the rock face but unable to get a grip on it and stop my fall. I felt a searing pain in my side, then smacked into the water below, thanking God I had the presence of mind to turn my fall into the semblance of a dive. From that height that instinct might have saved my life.
Even so my entrance into the water was a messy one. I crashed into it and floundered, swallowing water, trying not to let the pain in my side drag me under. As I broke the surface and gasped for breath I looked up, only to see Roberts gazing down on me.
‘There’s nothing in my code about loyalty, young man,’ he taunted me, his voice echoing in the space between us. ‘You played your role, but our partnership is done.’
‘You’re a dead man, Roberts,’ I roared back, only I couldn’t quite manage a roar. My voice was weak, and anyway he’d left and I was too busy trying to tend to the flaming pain in my side and get myself to safety.
When I collected myself what I found was a branch sticking from my flank, the wound colouring my robes red. I yanked it out with a scream, tossed the stick away and clenched my teeth as I held the wound, feeling blood seep through my fingers. Roberts, you bastard. You bastard.
Somehow, despite the pain, I managed the climb back up the walls of the pit to the Observatory. I retraced my steps, through the bridge chamber and past the corpses at the entrance, limping back down to the beach, pain-sweat pouring off me. But as I stumbled out of the long grass and on to the beach what I saw filled me with anguish. The Jackdaw, my beloved Jackdaw, had left. There was just the Rover anchored offshore now.
And 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.
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 Four
* * *
57
November, 1720
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 jail: 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, and I would curse my luck, curse Roberts, curse the 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 were 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 sailing away without me burned like a brand on my brain.
Not for much longer. 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 hanged 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 of the prosecution.
The two lieutenants, you see, were Anne Bonny and Mary Read.
And therein lies a tale. I’d witnessed the story, beginning with what I’d seen 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’d 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 round their necks. They carried pistols and cutlasses and were as fearsome as any man – and more dangerous, what with having more to prove.
And for a while they sailed the neighbourhood terrorizing merchant ships, until earlier in the year when they stopped off at New Providence. There on 22 August, 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 Woodes 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 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 hellcats Mary and Anne cursed out the crew and fought with pistols and swords, but were overcome, and then the whole lot of them were taken across the island to Spanish Town jail.
And, like I say, they’d tried and hanged Jack already.
Now it was the turn of Anne and Mary.
I hadn’t seen many courtrooms 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 bid 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 make 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.’
And 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 round 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 courtroom. They weren’t here on pirate-hunting business, though. They were here on Templar business.
‘She is a beautiful woman, I’m told,’ said Torres, with a nod of his head in greeting.
‘If you touch her, you bastards …’ I snarled.
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 time since my fall at 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 he’d still somehow 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 up to now.
‘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 indicating the courtroom, 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’. 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 here 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 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 courtroom 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 up the duff the next time you come knocking!’ roared Anne.
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