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 hell-cats, Mary and Anne cursed out the crew and fought with pistols and swords but were overcome, and the whole lot of them were taken across the island to Spanish Town jail.
Like I say, they’d tried and hanged Jack already.
Now it was the turn of Anne and Mary.
I hadn’t seen many court-rooms 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 bade 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 made 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.”
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 around 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 court-room. They weren’t there on pirate-hunting business, though. They were there on Templar business.
“She is a beautiful woman, I’m told,” said Torres, with a nod 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 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 pier
cing 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.
“Where is it? Where is The Observatory?”
Every day I’m up there he’s a bigger pain in the arse, isn’t he? Every day wasted is Black Bart’s triumph over the Templars. There’s that, at least.
“You want to go back there tomorrow?”
“Sure.”
I wasn’t sure I could take another day. In a strange way I was trusting them not to kill me. I was trusting in my resolve being greater than theirs. I was trusting in my own inner strength.
But for another day I hung there, crouched and crumpled in the gibbet. Night fell again, and I heard the guards taunting me, and I heard them gloating about Calico Jack, and how Charles Vane had been arrested.
Charles Vane, I thought. Charles Vane . . . I remember him. He tried to kill me. Or did I try to kill him?
Then the sounds of a short, pitched battle, bodies falling, muffled groans. And then a voice.
“Good morning, Captain Kenway. I have a gift for you.”
Very, very slowly, I opened my eyes. On the ground below me, painted grey in the dead light of the day, were two bodies. My friends, the Templar stooges. Both had slashed throats. A pair of crimson smiles adorned their necks.
Crouching next to them, rifling through their tunics for the gibbet keys, was the Assassin Ah Tabai.
I assumed I’d never see him again. After all, the Assassin Ah Tabai was not the greatest supporter of Edward Kenway. He probably would just as soon have slit my throat as rescue me from jail.
Fortunately for me, he chose to rescue me from jail.
But—“Do not mistake my purpose here,” he said, climbing the ladder, finding the right key for the lock and being good enough to catch me when I almost fell forward from the gibbet. He had a bulging leather flask and held the teat to my lips. As I gulped I felt tears of relief and gratitude pouring down my cheeks.
“I have come for Anne and Mary,” he was saying as he helped me down the ladder. “You owe me nothing for this. But if you would lend me your aid, I can promise you safe passage from this place.”
I had collapsed to the ground, where Ah Tabai allowed me to gather myself, handing me the leather flask once again.
“I’ll need weapons,” I said after some minutes.
He smiled and handed me a hidden blade. It was no small thing for an Assassin to hand an interloper a blade, and as I crouched on the ground and strapped it on I realized I was being honoured in some way. The thought gave me strength.
I stood and engaged the steel, worked the action of the blade, then slid it home. It was time—time to go and save Anne and Mary.
SIXTY
He had some distractions to set off, he said. I was to look for the women while he saw to them. Fine. I knew where they were being held, and not long later, when the first of his explosions gave me just the distraction I needed, I was able to slip back into the prison compound and make my way there.
Then, as I drew closer, what I heard was the sounds of screaming and the unmistakable voice of Anne Bonny.
“Help her, for God’s sake. Fetch help. Mary’s ill. Somebody, please.”
In return I heard the sound of soldiers trying to shut her up, thumping at the bars of her cell with their musket butts.
Not to be silenced, Anne was shrieking at them now.
“She’s ill, please, she’s ill,” Anne was screaming. “She’s dying.”
“A dying pirate, there’s your difference,” one of the men was saying.
I ran now, heart thumping, feeling the pain at my side but ignoring it as I turned a corner, one hand on the cool stone wall to steady my progress and the other engaging the blade at the same time.
The guards were already rattled by Ah Tabai’s explosions and Anne’s screaming. The first one turned and raised his musket but I swept my blade under and up, thrusting it through his rib-cage, gripping the back of his head and wrenching it into his heart at the same time. His mate had turned at the sound of the body thumping to the stone and his eyes widened. He reached for his pistol but I got to him before his fingers curled around the grip, and with a shout leapt and struck downwards, plunging the blade into him.
Stupid move. I wasn’t in the condition for that kind of action.
Immediately I felt a searing pain along my side. Pain like fire that began at the wound and rolled up and down my body. In a tumble of flailing arms and legs I fell with my blade embedded in the guard, landing badly but pulling it free as I rolled to meet the attack of the last guard . . .
Thank God. Ah Tabai appeared from my right, his own blade engaged, and seconds later the last guard lay dead on the stone.
I gave him grateful eyes and we turned our attention to the cells—to the screaming.
There were two cells beside one another. Anne stood, her desperate face pressed between the bars.
“Mary,” she was pleading, “see to Mary.”
I didn’t need telling twice. From a guard’s belt I liberated the keys and tore open Mary’s door. Inside she used her hands for a pillow on the low, dirty cot where she lay. Her chest rose and fell weakly, and though her eyes were open, she stared at the wall without seeing it.
“Mary,” I said bending to her and speaking quietly. “It’s me. Edward.”
She breathed steady but ragged breaths. Her eyes stayed where they were, blinking but not moving, not focusing. She wore a dress but it was cold in the cell and there was no blanket to cover her. No water to touch to her parched lips. Her forehead was shiny with sweat and cauldron hot when I touched a hand to it.
“Where’s the child?” I asked.
“They took it,” replied Anne from the door. The bastards. My fists clenched.
“No idea where she is,” continued Anne, then suddenly cried out in pain herself.
Jaysus. That’s all we need.
Right,
let’s go.
As gently as I could, I pulled Mary to a sitting position then swung her arm around my shoulder and stood. My own wound grumbled, but Mary cried out in pain and I could only imagine the agony she was going through. After child-birth she needed rest. Her body needed time to recover.
“Lean on me, Mary,” I told her. “Come on.”
From somewhere came the shouts of approaching soldiers. Ah Tabai’s distractions had worked; they’d given us the time we needed, but now the troops had recovered.
“Search every cell,” I heard. We began stumbling along the passageway back towards the courtyard, Ah Tabai and Anne forging ahead.
But Mary was heavy and I was weak from days and nights spent hung in the gibbet, and the wound in my side—Christ, it hurt—something must have torn down there because the pain flared, and I felt blood, warm and wet, course into the waistband of my breeches.
“Please, help me, Mary,” I begged her, but I could feel her body sag, as if the fight was leaving her, the fever too much for it.
“Stop. Please,” she was saying. Her breathing was even more erratic. Her head lolled from side to side. Her knees seemed to have given away and she sank to the flagstones of the passageway. Up ahead Ah Tabai was helping Anne, whose hands clutched at her stomach, and they turned to urge us on, hearing more shouting from behind us, more soldiers arriving.
“There’s no one here!” came the shout. So now they had discovered the break-out. I heard more running feet.
Ah Tabai and Anne were at the door to the courtyard. A black square became a grey one and night air rushed into the passageway.
Guards behind us. Ahead of us Ah Tabai and Anne were already across the courtyard and at the main gate, where the Assassin had surprised a guard who was sliding down the wall, dying. Anne was screaming now, needing help as they clambered through the wicket door of the prison compound and out into a night glowing orange with the fire of Ah Tabai’s explosions.
But Mary couldn’t walk. Not anymore. I grimaced as I bent down and scooped her up, feeling another tearing sensation in my side as though my wound, though a year old, simply couldn’t cope with the extra weight.
Assassin's Creed: Black Flag Page 26