I looked at my boots.

“Come here,” he said, “and read this.”

I did as I was asked, reading aloud a short communication with news of a treaty between the English, the Spanish, Portuguese . . .

“Does it mean . . . ?” I said, when I had finished.

“Indeed it does, Edward,” he said (and it was the first time he’d ever called me by my name rather than “son” or “lad’—in fact, I don’t think he ever called me “son” or “lad” again). “It means your Captain Alexander Dolzell was right, and that the days of privateers filling their boots are over. I’ll be making an announcement to the crew later. Will you follow me yourself?”

I would have followed him to the ends of the Earth but I didn’t say so. Just nodded, as though I had a lot of options.

He looked at me. All that black hair and beard lent his eyes an extra penetrating shine. “You will be a pirate, Edward, a wanted man. Are you sure you want that?”

To tell you the truth, I wasn’t, but what choice did I have? I couldn’t go back to Bristol. I didn’t dare go back without a pot of money, and the only way of making money was to become a pirate.

“We shall set sail for Nassau,” said Thatch. “We pledged to meet Benjamin should this ever happen. I dare say we shall join forces, for we’ll both lose crew in the wake of this announcement.

“I’d like you by my side, Edward. You’ve got courage and heart and skill in battle, and I can always use a man with letters.

I nodded, flattered.

When I went back to my hammock, though, and was alone, I closed my eyes for fear that tears might squeeze out. I had not come to sea to be a pirate. Oh, of course, I saw I had no other choice but to follow that path. Others were doing it, including Thatch. But even so, it was not what I had wanted for myself. I’d wanted to be a man of quality, not an outlaw.

Like I say, though, I didn’t feel I had much choice. From that moment on, I abandoned any plans I had of returning to Bristol as a man of quality. The best I could hope for was to return to Bristol as a man of means. My quest became one of acquiring riches. From that moment on I was a pirate.

PART II

TWENTY-TWO

JUNE 1715

There is nothing quite so loud as the sound of a carriage-gun blast. Especially when it goes off in your ear.

It’s like being pummelled by nothing. A nothing that seems to want to crush you, and you’re not sure whether it’s a trick of your eyesight, shocked and dazzled by the blast, or whether the world really is shaking. Probably it doesn’t even matter. Probably both. But the thing is, it’s shaking.

Somewhere the shot impacts. Boat planks splinter. Men with their arms and legs torn off and men who look down and in the few seconds they have before dying realize that half of their body has been shot away, begin screaming. All you hear in the immediate aftermath is the shrieking of the damaged hull, the screaming of the dying.

How close you are will determine how handsomely you react. I wouldn’t say you ever get used to the blast of a carriage-gun, the way it tears a hole in your world, but the trick is to recover swiftly and recover from it more swiftly than your enemy.

We’d been off the coast of the Cape Buena Vista in Cuba on a ship led by a man known as Captain Bramah when the English had attacked. We called those upon the brigantine the English even though English made up the core of our crew and I myself was English by birth, English in my heart. That counted for nothing as a pirate. You were an enemy of His Majesty (Queen Anne had been succeeded by King George), an enemy of the Crown, which made you an enemy of His Majesty’s Navy. So when we saw the Red Ensign on the horizon, the sight of a frigate foaming across the ocean towards us, figures running to and fro on her decks, what we said was, “Sail ho! The English are attacking! The English are attacking!” with no bother for the small details of our actual nationalities.

We were too busy trying to stay alive.

This one came at us fast. We were trying to turn and put distance between us and her six-pounders, but she bore down upon us, slicing across our bows, so close we could see the whites of the crew’s eyes, the flash of their gold teeth, the glint of sun on the steel in their hands.

Flame bloomed along her sides as her carriage-guns thundered. Steel tore the air. Our hull shrieked and cracked as the shot found their mark. The day had been full of rain but the powder-smoke turned it into a night full of rain. It filled our lungs and made us cough, choke and splutter, throwing us into even more disarray and panic.

Then that feeling of the world crashing in, that shock, and those moments of wondering if you’d been hit and if maybe you were dead, and perhaps this was what it felt like in heaven. Or most likely—in my case at least—in hell. Which, of course, it must be, because hell is smoke and fire and pain and screaming. So whether you were dead or not, it made no difference. Either way you were in hell.

At the first crash-bang I’d raised my arms to protect myself. Luckily. I felt shards of splintered wood that would otherwise have punctured my face and eyes embed themselves into my arm, and the force was enough to send me staggering back, tripping and falling.

They’d used bar-shot. Big iron bars that would blast a hole in virtually anything provided the distance was close enough. They’d done their job. The English had no interest in boarding us. As pirates we would inflict as little damage upon our target as possible. Our aim was to board and loot, over a period of days if needs be. It was difficult to loot a sinking ship. But the English—or this particular command, at least—either they knew we had no treasure aboard or they didn’t care—they simply wanted to destroy us and they were doing a bloody good job of it.

I dragged myself to my feet, felt something warm running down my arm and looked to see blood from a splinter blob to the planks of the deck. With a grimace I reached to tear the wood from my arm and tossed it to the deck, barely registering the pain as I squinted through a fog of powder-smoke and lashing weather.

A cheer went up from the crew of the English frigate as she churned past our starboard side. There was the pop and fizz of musket and flint-lock-pistol shot. Stink-pots and grenadoes came sailing over, exploding on deck and adding to the chaos, the damage, and the choking smoke that hung over us like a death shroud. The stink-pots in particular let out a vicious sulphur gas that sent men to their knees, making the air so dense and black that it became difficult to see, to judge distance.

Even so, I saw him, the hooded figure who stood on their forecastle deck. His arms were folded, and he stood still in his robes, his entire demeanour emanating unconcern at the events that were unfolding around him. I could tell all this from his posture and eyes, which gleamed from beneath the cowl of his robes. Eyes that, for a second, were fixed on me.

Then our attackers were swallowed up by smoke. A ghost ship amid a fog of powder belch, sizzling rain and choking stink-pot fumes.

All around me was the sound of shattering wood and screaming men. The dead were everywhere, littering torn planks awash with their blood. Through a gash in the main deck I saw water on the decks below, and from above heard the complaint of wood and the tearing of the shroud. I looked up to see our mainsail was half-destroyed by chain-shot. A dead lookout with most of his head shorn away hung by his feet from the crow’s nest and men were already scaling the rat-lines to try and cut the broken mast free, but they were too late. She was already listing, wallowing in the water like a fat woman taking a bath.