Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
January 1723
“Do not take the cutlass, Odin. It makes you look like a
bloody pirate.”
Odin stopped before the Phoenix Tavern’s swinging doors and
glared back at Spider John Rush. Caribbean sunlight streamed in
around him, and he stood in silhouette, with the wide-brimmed hat on
his head and the cutlass dangling from his belt making him look every
inch the sea thief. “And what should I look like, Spider John?”
Spider swallowed his tot of rum—his third of the young morning—
then swiveled on his barstool to stare into the one-eyed bastard’s face.
The hideous scars where half of Odin’s face had been ripped off long
ago were hidden in shadow, for which Spider was thankful. He had
come to regard Odin, crazy though he may be, as a friend after all their
shared adventures, but still had difficulty looking at the man.
“I am serious, Odin. There are navy fellows out there looking for
us. You think them dull, but they may be sharp enough to reckon we
would show when Dobbin swings. They will be watching for us.”
Odin drew the cutlass from its scabbard, stirring the sun-drenched
dust motes. “Then I reckon I just might need this bloody goddamned
thing. Aye? Ha!” Odin rushed out of the tavern.
Spider winced. “Bloody stubborn Scot.” There was no talking sense
into a man who had survived piracy as long as Odin had. The man was
at least sixty, judging by his appearance and stories.
“Is that fellow always so reckless?” Duncan, the barkeeper, deftly
mopped up a spill on the scarred oak.
“Aye,” Spider answered quietly. “He owns an unlikely lifespan, for
a man who was—was, I say—a pirate for most of his life. Dangerous
profession, to be sure, yet Odin still lives and breathes. It has made him
rather fearless, and he won’t heed reality.”
“Reality?”
“Odin and I are wanted men, Duncan.”
The barkeeper nodded.
Spider peered out a window and watched Odin shamble down a
dirty road. The old man often bragged of sailing with Blackbeard and
wrestling giant squid and screwing mermaids. If Odin wanted to wave
a blade in front of King George’s valiant fellows, there probably was no
stopping him.
Most days, Spider found Odin’s unrepentant attitude amusing.
Today was not one of those days.
“You stay the hell away from me and the boy, then, Odin,” Spider
muttered. “Me and Hob, we ain’t bloody pirates no more, even if you
want to be one.”
“More rum, John?” Duncan held up a bottle. The man leaned
across the bar and whispered. “And, for God’s sake, quit talking out
loud about pirates. I can vouch for most of these folk, but not all.”
Spider took a quick glance around the taproom and nodded.
“Maybe you have had enough rum,” Duncan said, scratching his
neatly trimmed beard.
“Jesus, no,” Spider replied. “I’m going to watch a friend die. And
I may bloody well be next. There is no goddamned such thing as too
much rum.”
Duncan, an old sailing mate from long ago, sighed heavily and
poured Spider another. It was gone within three heartbeats.
An hour or so later, after slipping through the puddle-riddled
streets and alleys of Port Royal and hopping aboard a wagon full of
people eager to see pirates swing, Spider felt utterly alone in the crowd
that gathered before the gallows.
That could be my noose, he thought.
The gallows, still dark and dripping from the morning’s brief rain, stood
strong and sturdy in the brisk Jamaican wind, a counterpoint to
the swaying palms nearby. Spider looked at the solid timbers and the
dangling nooses and imagined himself up there, shaking, silently asking
God’s forgiveness while awaiting the sudden final drop.
That image had haunted him a long, long time. It haunted most
pirates.
Spider tried to convince himself that most of the danger to him and
his friends had passed. His Majesty’s Ship Austen Castle, the frigate that
was supposed to have carried them to England as prisoners on charges
of piracy and espionage, had sailed from Port Royal a week ago. On
that score, at least, his escape was complete. But years on the piratical
account had taught him to be ever wary, and there was another navy
frigate anchored in the harbor. So long as the king’s men were here,
and so long as criers spoke of bounties, no pirate was safe. Not even one
whose most fervent wish was to leave piracy behind and return to his
wife and son. He touched the carved pendant dangling from his neck,
and, for a moment, pictured himself handing it to her.
Since the escape, Spider had assumed a false name, that of a good
friend who had passed beyond this life and no longer had need of it.
John Coombs, he was called now. Not John Rush.
Spider also had been careful to alter his appearance; his long
brown hair was now cropped short, and he had allowed his beard to
grow shaggy to hide the vicious sword cut across his chin, earned in
winning his unlikely freedom. That beard got in the way when he sawed
wood, hammered nails, or did other tasks common to ship’s carpenters,
and he vowed to cut it the first chance he got, but it was worthwhile as
long as he was trapped here on land.
Spider kept his hands tucked into his pockets as much as possible
these days, to hide the stub where the small finger of his left hand used
to be. That was the kind of telltale detail eyewitnesses might remember.
Despite all those precautions, and even though he and his shipmates
had managed to hide out at his old shipmate’s tavern, Spider was
nervous. The unsettling nature of being ashore, where danger might
step out of the crowd or any looming door or alleyway at any moment,
always rattled him. But it was worse than usual now. The dangling
nooses seemed to beckon him. He deserved to swing on the gallows as
much as any of the poor souls who would be hung today.
He’d never wanted to be a pirate, of course, and he prayed to God
he would never have to be one again, but he’d been caught up in that
world and he’d done the bloody work necessary to survive in it.
A ship’s carpenter by training, he’d been forced to join a pirate band
at a young age. The choice then—as it remained throughout the years
of his pirate career—was to rob, fight, and kill, or be tossed overboard.
Only good fortune had placed him here among the watchers
instead of on the gallows.
I will not squander this chance, he thought. I will work my way
home, to Em and little Johnny. I will live a better life, by God.
