At last, enough of the smoke cleared to see that the British frigate was coming round, describing a long circle in order to use its starboard guns. But then she ran into a spot of bad luck. Before the ship could be brought to bear, the same wind that had dispersed the smoke dropped, and her plump sails flattened and she slowed. We had been given our second chance.

“Man the guns!” I shouted.

Those members of our crew still on their feet were scrambling to the mounted guns. I manned a swivel gun and we delivered a broadside that the attacking frigate could do nothing about, our shot doing almost as much damage to them as they had to us. It was our turn to cheer. Defeat had turned, if not quite to victory, then at least to a lucky escape. Perhaps there were those of us who were even wondering what treasures might be on board the British vessel, and I saw one or two of our men, the optimistic few, with boarding hooks, axes and marlinspikes, ready to lash the ship close and take them man-on-man.

Their plans were dashed by what happened next.

“The magazine,” came the cry.

“She’s going up.”

The news was followed by screams and as I looked from my post at the swivel gun towards the bow, I saw flames around the breach in the hull. Meanwhile, from the stern came the cries of the captain, while on the poop-deck of the ship opposite, the man in the robes leapt into action. Literally. He unfolded his arms and in one short jump was on the rail of the deck, then in the next moment had jumped across.

For a moment the impression I had of him in the air was like an eagle, his robes spread out behind him, his arms outstretched like wings.

Next I saw Captain Bramah fall. Crouched over him, the hooded man’s arm pulled back and a hidden blade sprang from within his sleeve.

That blade. I was transfixed by it for a second. The flames from the burning deck made it alive. And then the hooded man drove it deep into Captain Bramah.

I stood and stared, my own cutlass in my hand. From behind I vaguely heard the cries of the crew as they tried in vain to stop the fire spreading to the magazine.

It will go up, I thought distractedly, envisioning the barrels of gunpowder stored there. The magazine will explode. The English ship was close enough so that the explosion would surely blast a hole in the hull of both ships. All of this I knew, but only as distant, distracted thoughts. I was spellbound by the hooded man at work. Mesmerized by this agent of death, who had ignored the carnage around him by biding his time and waiting to strike.

The kill was over, Captain Bramah dead. The assassin looked up from the dead body of the captain, and once again our eyes met, only this time something flared within his features and in the next instant he had bounded to his feet, a single lithe jump that took him over the corpse, and he was bearing down upon me.

I raised my cutlass, determined not to go easily into the great unknown. Then from the stern—from the magazine, where our men had obviously failed to douse the fire whose fingers had found the stores of gunpowder—came a great explosion.

I was blasted off the deck, flung in the air and finding a moment of perfect peace, not knowing whether I was alive or dead, whether I still had all of my limbs and in that moment not caring anyway. I didn’t know where I would come to rest: whether I’d slam to the deck of a ship and break my back or land impaled on a snapped mast or be tossed into the eye of the magazine inferno.

Or do what I did, which was slap into the sea.

Maybe alive, maybe dead, maybe conscious, maybe not. Either way I seemed to drift not far below the surface, watching the sea above, a shifting mottle of blacks, greys and the flaming orange of burning ships. Past me sank dead bodies, eyes wide open as though surprised in death. They discoloured the water in which they sank and trailed guts and stringy sinew string like tentacles. I saw a smashed mizen-mast twirling in the water, bodies snared in rigging dragged to the depths.

I thought of Caroline. Of my father. Then of my adventures on the Emperor. I thought about Nassau, where there was only one law: pirate law. And, of course, I thought about how I was mentored from privateer to pirate by Blackbeard—Edward Thatch.

TWENTY-THREE

All of this I thought as I sank, eyes open, aware of everything happening around me, the bodies, the wreckage . . . Aware of it, yet uncaring. As though it was happening to somebody else. Looking back, I know it for what it was, that brief moment—and it was brief—as I sank in the water. I had, in those moments, lost the will to live.

After all, this expedition—Thatch had warned against it. He’d told me not to go. “That Captain Bramah’s bad news,” he said. “You mark my words.”

He was right. And I was going to pay for my greed and stupidity with my life.

Then I found it again. The will to go on. I grasped it. I shook it. I held it close to my bosom from that moment to this and I’ll never let it go again. My legs kicked, my arms arrowed, and I streaked towards the surface, breaking the water and gasping—for air, and in shock at the carnage around me, watching as the last of the English frigate slipped below the water, still ablaze. All across the ocean were small blazes soon to be doused by the water, floating debris everywhere and men, of course: survivors.

Just as I had feared, the sharks began to attack, and the screams began—screams of terror at first; and then, as the sharks first circled then began to investigate more insistently, screams of agony that only intensified as more predators gathered and began to feed. The screams I’d heard during the battle, agonized as they were, were nothing compared to the shrieks that tore that soot-filled afternoon apart.

I was one of the lucky ones, whose wounds were not enough to attract their attention, and I swam for shore. At one point I was knocked by a shark gliding past, thankfully too concerned with joining the feeding frenzy to stop. My foot seemed to snag what felt like a fin in the water and I prayed that whatever blood I was leaking was not enough to tempt the shark away from the more plentiful chum elsewhere. It was a cruel irony that those more heavily wounded were the ones who were attacked first.

I say “attacked.” You know what I mean. They were eaten. Devoured. How many survivors there were from the battle, I have no way of knowing. All I can say is that I saw most survivors end up as food for the sharks. Me, I swam to the safety of the beach at Cape Buena Vista, where I collapsed with sheer relief and exhaustion, and if the dry land wasn’t made up entirely of sand, I probably would have kissed it.

My hat was gone. My beloved three-pointer that had sat upon my head as man and boy. What I didn’t know at the time, of course, was that it was the first step in my shedding the past, saying good-bye to my old life. What’s more, I still had my cutlass, and given the choice between losing my hat and cutlass . . .

So, after some time thanking my lucky stars and hearing faint screams in the distance, I rolled onto my back, then heard something from my left.

It was a groan. Looking over I saw that its owner was the robed assassin. He’d come to rest just a short distance away from me and he was lucky, very lucky not to be eaten by the sharks, because when he rolled over to his back he left behind a patch of crimson-stained sand. As he lay on his back with his chest rising and falling, his breath coming in short, jagged gasps, his hands went to his stomach. His obviously wounded stomach.