What a scandal it was: Caroline Scott marrying beneath her would have been cause for gossip enough. That she had spurned Matthew Hague in the process constituted quite a stir, and I wonder if that scandal might ultimately have worked in our favour, because while I steeled myself for retribution—and for a while I looked for Wilson round every corner, and my first glance from the window to the yard each morning was filled with trepidation—none came. I saw nothing of Wilson, heard nothing of Matthew Hague.
In the end, the threat to our marriage came not from outside—not from the Cobleighs, Emmett Scott, Matthew Hague or Wilson. It came from the inside. It came from me.
I’ve had plenty of time to think about the reasons why, of course. The problem was that I kept returning to my meeting with Dylan Wallace and his promises of riches in the West Indies. I wanted to go and return to Caroline a rich man. I had begun to see it as my only chance of making a success of myself. My only chance of being worthy of her. For, of course, yes, there was the immediate glory, or perhaps you might say stature, of having made Caroline Scott my wife, taking her from beneath the nose of Matthew Hague, but that was soon followed by a kind of . . . well, I can only describe it as stagnation.
Emmett Scott had delivered his cutting blow at the wedding. We should have been grateful, I suppose, that he and Caroline’s mother had deigned to attend. Although for my own part I was not at all grateful and I would have preferred it if the pair of them had stayed away. I hated to see my father, cap in hand, bowing and scraping to Emmett Scott, hardly a nobleman after all, just a merchant, separated from us, not by any aristocratic leanings but by money alone.
For Caroline, though, I was glad they came. It wasn’t as if they approved of the marriage, far from it; but at the very least, they weren’t prepared to lose their daughter over it.
I overheard her mother—“We just want you to be happy, Caroline”—and knew that she was speaking for me alone. In the eyes of Emmett Scott I saw no such desire. I saw the look of a man who had been denied his chance to clamber so much higher up the social ladder, a man whose dreams of great influence had been dashed. He came to the wedding under sufferance, or perhaps for the pleasure of delivering his pronouncement in the churchyard after the vows were made.
Emmett Scott had black hair brushed forward, dark, sunken cheeks and a mouth pinched permanently into a shape like a cat’s anus. His face, in fact, wore the permanent expression of a man biting deep into the flesh of a lemon.
Except for this one occasion, when his lips pressed into a thin smile and he said, “There will be no dowry.”
His wife, Caroline’s mother, closed her eyes tightly as though it was a moment she’d dreaded, had hoped might not happen. Words had been exchanged, I could guess, and the last of them had belonged to Emmett Scott.
So we moved into an outhouse on my father’s farm. We had appointed it as best we could, but it was still, at the end of the day, an outhouse: packed mud and sticks for the walls, our roof thatch badly in need of repair.
Our union had begun in the summer, of course, when our home was a cool sanctuary away from the blazing sun, but in winter, in the wet and wind, it was no kind of sanctuary at all. Caroline had been used to a brick-built town house with the life of Bristol all around, servants to boot, her washing, her cooking, every whim attended to. Here she was not rich. She was poor and her husband was poor. With no prospects.
I began visiting the inns once more, but I was not the same man as before, not as I’d been in the days when I was a single man, the cheerful, boisterous drunk, the jester. Sitting there, I had the weight of the world on my shoulders, and I sat with my back to the room, hunched, brooding over my ale, feeling as though they were all talking about me, like they were all saying, “There’s Edward Kenway, who can’t provide for his wife.”
I had suggested it to Caroline, of course. Me becoming a privateer. While she hadn’t said no—she was still my wife, after all—she hadn’t said yes, and in her eyes was the doubt and worry.
“I don’t want to leave you alone, but I can leave here poor and come back rich,” I told her.
Now, if I was to go, I went without her blessing and I left her alone in a farmyard shack. Her father would say I had deserted her, and her mother would despise me for making Caroline unhappy.
I couldn’t win.
“Is it dangerous?” she asked one night, when I spoke about privateering.
“It wouldn’t be so highly paid if it wasn’t,” I told her, and, of course, she reluctantly agreed that I could go. She was my wife, after all, what choice did she have? But I didn’t want to leave her behind with a broken heart.
• • •
One morning, I awoke from a drunken stupor, blinking in the morning light, only to find Caroline already dressed for the day ahead.
“I don’t want you to go,” she said, then turned and left the room.
• • •
One night I sat in the Livid Brews. I’d like to say I was not my usual self, as I sat with my back to the rest of the tavern hunched over my tankard, taking great big gulps in between dark thoughts and watching the level fall. Always, watching the level of my ale fall.
But the sad fact of the matter was that I was my usual self. That younger man, that rogue always ready with a quip and a smile, had disappeared. In his place, still a young man but one who had the cares of the world on his shoulders.
On the farm Caroline helped Mother, who at first had been horrified by the idea, saying Caroline was too much of a lady to work on the farm. Caroline had just laughed and insisted. At first when I watched her stride across the same yard where I had first seen her sitting astride her horse, currently wearing a crisp white bonnet, work boots, a smock and apron, I’d had a proud feeling. But seeing her in work-clothes had come to be a reminder of my own failings as a man.
What made it worse somehow was that Caroline didn’t seem to mind; it was as though she was the only person in the area who did not see her current position as a descent down the social ladder. Everybody else did, and none felt it more keenly than I.
“Can I get you another ale?” I recognized the voice that came from behind me and turned to see him there: Emmett Scott, Caroline’s father. I’d last seen him at the wedding, when he refused his daughter her dowry. But here he was, offering his hated son-in-law a drink. That’s the thing about the drink, though. When you’re into the drink like I was, when you watch the level of your ale fall and wonder where your next one is coming from, you’ll take a fresh mug from anyone. Even Emmett Scott. Your sworn enemy. A man who hated you almost as much as you hated him.
So I accepted his offer of an ale, and he bought his own, pulled up a stool, which scraped on the flag-stones as he sat down.
You remember Emmett Scott’s expression? That of a man sucking a lemon. At that moment, talking to me, the hated Edward Kenway, you’d have to say he looked even more pained. I felt completely at home in the tavern, as it was an environment in which I could lose myself, but it didn’t suit him at all. Every now and then he would glance over one shoulder, then the next, like he was frightened of being attacked suddenly from behind.
“I don’t think we’ve ever had a chance to talk,” he said. I made a short, scoffing laugh in reply.
“Your appearance at the wedding put paid to that, did it not?”
Of course the booze had loosened my tongue, made me brave. That and the fact that in the war to win his daughter I had won. Her heart, after all, belonged to me and there was no greater evidence of her devotion to me than the fact that she had given up so much to be with me. Even he must have seen that.
“We’re both the men of the world, Edward,” he said simply, and you could see he was trying to make himself seem in charge. But I saw through him. I saw what he really was: a frightened, nasty man, browbeaten in business, who kicked downwards, who probably beat his servants and his wife, who assumed the likes of me ought to be bowing and scraping to him, like my mother and father had done (and I had
a twinge of rage to remember it) at the wedding.
“How about we do a deal like men of business?”
I took a long slug of my ale and held his eyes. “What did you have in mind, father-in-law of mine?”
His face hardened. “You walk out on her. You throw her out. Whatever you want. You set her free. Send her back to me.”
“And if I do?”
“I’ll make you a rich man.”
I drained the rest of my ale. He nodded towards it with questioning eyes and I said yes, waited while he fetched another one, then drank it down, almost in one go. The room was beginning to spin.
“Well, you know what you can do with your offer, don’t you?”
“Edward,” he said, leaning forward, “you and I both know you can’t provide for my daughter. You and I both know you sit here in despair because you can’t provide for my daughter. You love her, I know that, because I was once like you, a man of no qualities.”
I looked at him with my teeth clenched. “No qualities?”
“Oh, it’s true,” he spat, sitting back. “You’re a sheep-farmer, boy.”
“What happened to ‘Edward’? I thought you were talking to me like an equal.”
“An equal? There will never be a day when you will be equal to me and you know it.”
“You’re wrong. I have plans.”
“I’ve heard about your plans. Privateering. Becoming a man of substance on the high seas. You don’t have it in you, Edward Kenway.”
“I do.”
“You don’t have the moral fibre. I am offering you a way out of the hole you have dug for yourself, boy; I suggest you think about it very hard.”
I sank the rest of my ale. “How about I think about it over another drink?”
“As you wish.”
A fresh tankard materialized on the table in front of me and I set to making it a thing of history, my mind reeling at the same time. He was right. This was the most devastating thing about the whole conversation. Emmett Scott was right. I loved Caroline yet could not provide for her, and if I was truly a dutiful husband, then I would accept his offer.
“She doesn’t want me to go away,” I said.
“And you want to?”
“I want for her to support my plans.”
“She never will.”
“I can but hope.”
“If she loves you as she says, she never will.”
Even in my drunken state I could not fault his logic. I knew he was right. He knew he was right.
“You have made enemies, Edward Kenway. Many enemies. Some of them powerful. Why do you think those enemies haven’t taken their revenge on you?”
“They’re frightened?” There was a drunken arrogance in my voice.
He scoffed. “Of course they’re not frightened. They leave you alone because of Caroline.”
“Then if I was to accept your offer, there would be nothing to stop my enemies from attacking me?”
“Nothing but my protection.”
I wasn’t sure about that.
I sank another ale. He sank deeper into despondency. He was still there at the end of the night, his very presence reminding me how far my choices had shrunk.
When I tried to stand to leave, my legs almost gave way and I had to grab the side of the table just to remain on my feet. Caroline’s father, a disgusted look on his face, came to help me and before I knew it he was taking me home, though not because he wanted to see me safe but because he wanted to see to it that Caroline saw me in my drunken state, and indeed she did, as I rolled in, laughing. Emmett Scott puffed up, and told her, “This tosspot is a ruined man, Caroline. Unfit for life on land, much less at sea. If he goes to the West Indies, it’s you who will suffer.”
“Father . . . Father.”
She was sobbing, so upset, and then as I lay on the bed I saw his boots move off and he was gone.
“That old muckworm,” I managed. “He’s wrong about me.”
“I hope it so,” she replied.
I let my drunken imagination carry me away. “You believe me, don’t you? Can you not see me, standing out there on the deck of a ship that is sliding into port? There I am, a man of quality . . . With a thousand doubloons spilling from my pockets like drops of rain. I can see it.”
When I looked at her she was shaking her head. She couldn’t see it.
When I sobered up the next day, neither could I.
It was only a matter of time I suppose. My lack of prospects became like another person in the marriage. I reviewed my options: Emmett Scott offering me money in return for having his daughter back. My dreams of sailing away.
Both of them involved breaking Caroline’s heart.
ELEVEN
The next day I went back to see Emmett Scott, returning to Hawkins Lane, where I knocked on the door to request an audience. Who should answer but Rose.
“Master Kenway,” she said, surprised, and going slightly red. There was a moment of awkwardness, then I was being asked to wait, and shortly after that was being led to Emmett Scott’s study, a room dominated by a desk in its centre, wood panelling giving it a dark, serious atmosphere. He stood in front of his desk, and in the gloom, with his dark hair, his cadaverous look and dark, hollowed-out cheeks, he looked like a crow.
“You have thought my offer over, then?” he said.
“I have,” I replied, “and felt it best to tell you my decision as soon as possible.”
He folded his arms, and his face cracked into a triumphant smirk. “You come to make your demands, then? How much is my daughter worth?”
“How much were you willing to pay?”
“Were?”
It was my turn to smile though I was careful not to overdo it. He was dangerous, Emmett Scott. I was playing a dangerous game with a dangerous man.
“That’s right. I have decided to go to the West Indies.”
I knew where I could reach Dylan Wallace. I had given Caroline the news.
“I see.”
He seemed to think, tapping his fingertips together.
“But you don’t intend to stay away permanently.”
“No.”
“These were not the terms of my offer.”
“Not quite the terms of your offer, no,” I said. “In effect, a counteroffer. A measure I hope will find your favour. I am a Kenway, Mr. Scott, I have my pride. That I hope you will understand. Understand too that I love your daughter, however much that fact may ail you, and wish nothing but the best for her. I aim to return from my travels a rich man and with my fortune give Caroline the life she deserves. A life, I’m sure, you would wish for her.”
He was nodding, though the purse of his lips betrayed his utter contempt for the notion.
“And?”
“I give you my word I will not return to these shores until I am a rich man.”
“I see.”
“And I give you my word I will not tell Caroline that you attempted to buy her back.”
He darkened. “I see.”
“I ask only to be given the opportunity to make my fortune—to provide for Caroline in the manner to which she has become accustomed.”
“You will still be her husband—it is not what I wanted.”
“You think me a good-for-nothing, not fit to be her husband. I hope to prove you wrong. While I am away you will no doubt see more of Caroline. Perhaps if your hatred of me runs so deeply you might use the opportunity to poison her against me. The point is, you would have ample opportunity. Moreover, I might die while at sea, in which case she is returned to you forever, a young widow, still at an eligible age. That is my deal. In return I ask only that you allow me to try and make something of myself, unhindered.”
He nodded, considering the idea, perhaps savouring the thought of my dying while at sea.
TWELVE
Dylan Wallace assigned me to the crew of the Emperor, docked in Bristol harbour and leaving in two days. I returned home and told my mother, father and Caroline.
There were tears, of course, and recriminations and pleas to stay, but I was firm in my resolve. After I had broken my news, Caroline, distraught, left. She needed time to think, she said, and we stood in the yard and watched her gallop away—to her family, where, at least she would give the news to Emmett Scott, who would know I was fulfilling my part of the deal. I could only hope—or, should I say, I hoped at the time—that he would fulfil his part of the deal also.
Sitting here talking to you now, all these years later, it has to be said that I don’t know whether he did. But I will. Shortly, I will, and there will be a day of reckoning . . .
But not then. Then, I was young, stupid, arrogant and boastful. I was so boastful that once Caroline was away, I took to the taverns again, and perhaps found that some of my old liveliness had returned, as I took great delight in telling all who would listen that I was to sail away; that Mr. and Mrs. Edward Kenway would soon be a rich couple thanks to my endeavours on the high seas. I boasted about it, in fact. I took great delight in their sneering looks, their rejoinders, either that I was too big for my boots, or that I did not have enough character for the task; that I would soon return with my tail between my legs; that I was letting down my father.
Not once did I let my grin slip. My knowing grin that said, “You’ll see.”
But even with the booze inside me and my departure a day or so away—or maybe even because of those things—I still took their words to heart. I asked myself, Do I really have enough of a man inside me to survive the life of a privateer? Am I going to return with my tail between my legs? And yes, I might die.
Also, they were right: I was letting my father down. I’d seen the disappointment in his eyes the moment I delivered the news and it had remained there since. It was a sadness, perhaps that his dream of running the farm together—fading as it must have been—had finally been dashed for good. I was not just leaving to embrace a new life but wholeheartedly rejecting my old one. The life he had built for himself, my mother and me. I was rejecting it. I’d decided I was too good for it.
Assassin's Creed: Black Flag Page 5