"When you return, are you going to explain to Peter what it is you're trying to accomplish here?" "A Nassau that can self-govern." "This is not a man that we can negotiate with," " that I can negotiate with." " Of course you can." "Because you will have just presented him with his only daughter." "I can only scavenge leads for so long." "I have an appetite for something larger than that." "For this, I need a partner I can trust." "A launch landed on the beach a short while ago." "They told Flint the gold was gone." "What did they tell you?" "The Urca gold is on that beach." "It is almost entirely undefended." "Do you know of a crew who might be willing to aid in this endeavor?" "Abigail, you are no longer a hostage." "I'm going to get you out of here." "So, what's the plan?" "Leave me to answer for this among the men?" "My death sentence." "You will hear from me again." " You're Captain Flint?" " My name is James." "James McGraw." "It's all right." "You're all right." "I'm here." "Shh, shh." "Shh." "No!" "No!" "No!" "No!" "Shh, it's all right." "I'm here." "Shh, you're all right." "Last night was the first of my journey home." "Still, my dreams are haunted by the faces of those pirates that first captured me." "Now I find myself in the custody of another band of pirates." "I'm told they're different, and I will say that so far these men have treated me civilly, even courteously." "They've even afforded me the tools to keep this journal." "And though they will almost certainly destroy these pages before we disembark, eliminating any record of their activities or their identities... just the act of putting my thoughts to paper has helped me feel myself again." "To construct for myself an illusion that I'm still on the Good Fortune nearing the end of a long voyage, recent events were themselves the nightmare, and that these men are simply sailors tasked with delivering me home." "Get off me, I tell you!" "I'll kill you!" "Hey, hey, come on!" "Stop, you!" "I said cut it out." "I don't know who started it, but it stops right now." "Take him away!" "Get back to work!" "But it is only an illusion." "And a fragile one at that." "My father told me about these men, about their natures, so I know that any appearance of civility from them is but a glimpse of the men they once were." "A ghost that shows itself only while the darker things that now govern their souls lay dormant." "Though I'm forced to wonder if this illusion is no accident at all, but theater for my benefit, orchestrated by someone so awful, even monsters such as these have no choice but to dance to the tune he plays for them." "Which leads me to the one thought" "I find most frightening and most difficult to dismiss." "What happens if that man decides the theater no longer serves his purposes and he lets the monsters loose?" "Everything all right?" "Yes." "I'm all right." "She was writing about me." "Do you think?" "I suppose I can't blame her." "A girl her age with what she's been through." "It's a credit to her that she can function at all." "Look at her." "When I first learned she was on the island," "I saw in my mind a five-year-old child hiding behind her mother's dress." "Then I saw her." "I realized she's a woman." "It's like she's some sort of clock that's finally struck its chime and woken me from this dream we've been living, reminded me how many years separate me from a world I still think of as home." "How unrecognizable the woman I am now would be to the woman I was then." "I recognize you." "You recognize me?" "Yes." "So that's in our favor." "The question is... will Peter recognize either one of us?" "Five million pieces." "Five million fucking pieces." "Five million pieces." "Jesus Christ." "How in the fuck am I supposed to prepare to carry five million pieces of eight across an ocean without anybody knowing I'm doing it?" "!" "I don't know, but perhaps if you asked a little louder, there might be someone on the moon who could help you." "Why don't we lower our voices and begin again?" "Have you begun the men clearing the ship's hold?" "Everything that isn't bolted down is being moved onto the sand." "I told him I needed to refigure how she was carrying her weight." " Is that something one does?" " No." "It's all I could think of given that there's no good reason to empty a ship while she's in the bay unless you're making room to fill that space with something else." ""Oi, Featherstone, what is it we're making space for by emptying all this stuff?"" ""Oh, nothing, gents." "I just want to..."" "Try to refigure how she's carrying her weight?" ""...refigure how she's carrying her weight," exactly." "Fuck!" "Even if somehow we can set sail to retrieve this gold without anyone knowing it, even if the intelligence is correct and the gold is retrievable, we haven't even begun to address the issue of where we'll put all that gold, much less defend it." "I mean... is this really something we're capable of doing?" " Yes." " Yes?" "Yes, we are capable of doing this and more." "We will have that prize, Mr. Featherstone." "We've all come too far to let an opportunity like this pass us by." "Would you not agree?" "I humbly suggest you continue unloading the hold." "By the time anyone expects to reload it, you will be close enough to departure to tell them the truth, yes?" "Is it possible for two men days removed from unending wealth to be any less happy?" "All right, I can see that you are angry." "But are you angry with Anne for leaving or are you angry with me for offering her the opportunity?" "It would help me to understand with which I am dealing." "For so many years, I knew her." "Perhaps the only one who truly knew her." "But for weeks, with everything we've been through, everything she's done... she's a fucking mystery to me." "So now I realize two things are possible... one, something has changed within her, something so significant that she's turned into someone I barely recognize, or, two... it was a fantasy that I ever knew her at all." "And the most disturbing thing about it is, because it's Anne..." "I will likely never know which it is." "Am I angry that she's gone?" "Maybe with everything that lies ahead of us, perhaps it's for the best." "I'm here to see the lady of the house." "She's occupied." "Tell her it's news from home." "Use those words, please." "Good morning, dear." "What do you have for me?" "The quartermaster, Featherstone, met with Max and Rackham behind closed doors again." "Entered in a huff, left in a huff." "Could you make out their words?" "No, and I fear if I pressed any closer, they'd have found me out." "Ma'am, you know I am eternally in your debt for how you treated me when you oversaw the inn, but please don't ask me to delve into this any further." "It's all for a good cause, rest assured." "You haven't even told me what this is all in service of." "Who the information's being purchased for." "When last we spoke, you said you were still undecided as to who would assume control ostensibly of the operation." "I was just wondering if you'd reached a decision." "Not yet." "Shortly." " Is that all?" " Yes, ma'am." "No news from the fort?" "The doors are still shut." "No word from inside." "Either they're plotting some sort of reprisal against us over the disappearance of Miss Ashe or..." "Or they're still choosing a new captain." "Yes, ma'am." "Ma'am, the lady is here." "She's here right now?" "Yes, ma'am." "Said it was urgent." "All right." "Were we scheduled to see each other today?" "No, ma'am." "But I have news I think you'll want to hear without delay." "May I sit?" "When you engaged me to monitor the goings on across the way, for a generous stipend, I might add," "I must confess," "I thought you'd overestimated our young friend Max, worrying that she was clever enough to create any real trouble..." "I'm sorry, is there a point you are trying to make?" "I was wrong." "There is something afoot at the inn." "I believe I know what it is." "And I believe you'll want to know it, too." "Next item!" "I know my role here is to recount information to you." "But with what lies ahead," "I'm hoping you'll indulge me in a personal account." "About five years ago, I served on a merchant vessel running slaves in and out of Charles Town." "I remember the first time I saw those walls, those patrol ships, and those fucking guns." "The first mate leans in as he sees that look on my face." "He says, "That, son, is a town resolved never to be fucked with."" "And as we're unloading our cargo, we watch a gathering in the square... a gallows." "And we watch as they haul up a man named Solomon Little." "And they announced to the crowd that this man..." "When Captain Flint first arrived on this island, he gained influence faster than any man I'd seen before." "Or since." "I heard men say it was because of the violence." "I heard them say it was his charm." "But it was clear to me the reason why he was so good at bending men towards his will was he knew the power of a story and how to harness it to his own ends." "That man there, I would argue, may very well be his equal." "...as they put the rope around his neck." "And I listened to that excited talk..." "You know it isn't even his." "What do you mean?" "The pirate story is Bernard's." "I've heard him tell it before." "That bit about the first mate I've heard before, too." "Jeffries, I think." "Can't remember." "Can't trust a fucking thing out of his mouth." "Yeah, the story's his, the story isn't his." "But the power of the telling... that is clearly his." "At the moment, he's using it to help the captain." "But God help us if he ever realizes what else he could use it to accomplish." "And as he swung," "I watched the crowd jeer at him." "I watched them laugh and celebrate." "Women, children, all of them." "I tell you, friends, what lies ahead isn't just the governor nor his lieutenants or his soldiers or their guns." "The people of Charles Town are eager to see you and me dead." "If Captain Flint is to come through this alive, we will need to be focused and at our best." "What the hell was that?" "What?" "When you two returned and the three of us stood on that beach, what did I say to you?" "You said if we told Flint the gold was gone, you'd get another crew to go back and get it and we could have a bigger share." "Well, there we go." "There's the problem." "It seems you only heard half of what I said that night." "I also said that if anyone, anyone even remotely suspected something was off about our story, if they even detected the faintest whiff of it, we would all be dead men." "That sounds familiar, does it not?" "All right." " I understand." " Do you?" "The men on this ship face grave danger ahead." "So when you sit behind them grinning like a fucking child, you can see how that presents a problem." "How it might elicit the very questions we came on this fucking trip to avoid in the fucking first place." "I said I understand." "No one's asking questions." "No one knows shit, so leave me alone about it." "That man has the potential to be a very real problem for the two of us." "The other day," "I received word from one of Max's girls that Charlotte had left the island, ran off with a man in the middle of the night." "So in love, they say, with a man from Flint's crew, a man named Logan, that they started a life together in Providence." "What is that?" "Charlotte's savings." "Charlotte didn't trust the other girls, didn't trust the turns." "So she entrusted it to me to watch it for her." "She and this man leave the island on the eve of securing an unprecedented prize with no warning, no witnesses, and no money." "I'm sorry, I'm not following." "Why did you engage my services, ma'am?" "To monitor a brothel madam intent on stealing information to use for her benefit." "A member of Flint's crew, with knowledge of the whereabouts of the Urca gold, walks into her inn." "He promptly disappears under suspicious circumstances, and less than a day later, news arrives that the Urca gold is no longer to be won, but is safely on its way back to Spain." "You're asking me to believe that Max somehow got the information about the Urca out of this man's head, murdered him and then one of her own girls, and then somehow managed to convince Captain Flint and the rest of his crew" "that the Urca gold had disappeared?" "How the fuck would she do that?" "I don't know." "But this morning, Captain Rackham's ship emptied the entire contents of its hold onto the island, started loading up with fresh water, preparing to set sail." "Wherever he's going, he anticipates bringing something very large back." "I believe Max learned about the prize." "I believe somehow she managed to convince the island it had disappeared." "I believe that right now she and her partners are preparing to retrieve it and bring it back to this place." "Were that to happen, the thieves and their like would flourish here and your plans for this place would be doomed to failure." "I want the Nassau you are trying to build." "But if that Nassau is ever to be, you have to stop her." "Captain?" "Winds are more favorable than we anticipated." "De Groot wants to tack earlier through the wind than you suggested." "Might take some maneuvering." "He'd prefer not to do it in the dark, but he thinks the men are, um... up to it." "So, as long as you're in agreement, he'll make preparations." "Tell him I'm in agreement." "The sooner we get her home, the better." "His name is Billy, in case you were wondering." "I beg your pardon." "He just... seems so out of place here." "Like someone I might have known back home in London." "He may easily have been." "His parents were Levellers in Kensington." "Spoke out against impressment, kidnappings." "Printed pamphlets from their home." "Insisted that Billy was lettered so that he could understand the cause and contribute." "That winter, when the press gangs came through town, they found Billy distributing those pamphlets in the street." "I suppose they found it funny, snatching him and leaving only the pamphlets for his parents to find." "Did he ever see them again, his mother and father?" "When we found Billy, we freed him, and when given the opportunity to confront the man that had taken him from his family, held him in bondage for three years without wages or reprieve, he slew that man." "After that, he said he couldn't face his father again." "Didn't think he'd be able to accept a murderer for a son." "Coming through the wind again, gents." "This one's gonna be tight." "Watch yourselves, eh?" "Tyson, foremast, Howard, mizzen," "Irving, main." "What lies ahead," "I'm afraid I might be wholly unprepared for." "I always thought this journey would end in battle." "A fight to preserve the things we held dear." "I understood that." "I was ready for that." "Now, as it turns out, something else lies at the end of this road." "Judgment." "Not of Nassau, but of me and the man that I've become." "And this entire endeavor hangs in the balance of that judgment." "You can defend that man." "There are good arguments in defense of him." "For some of his deeds, perhaps for most of them." "But there are some things that Captain Flint has done that cannot be defended." "I will make my argument having no sense of my footing with him." "No sense of the things he knows about me, the lower things." "The darker things." "And the moment he reveals that he knows these things may be the moment that this all comes crashing down." "He is going to render judgment." "And it all depends on what he sees standing before him... me or my name." "I just want you to know," "I appreciate the opportunity you gave us." "It's all right." "I'm not stupid." "Neither is he, honestly." "He's torn up inside." "Betraying the other men, it's making him act foolish." "Like you've seen." "That may very well be." "But he won't matter for much if he gets the three of us killed." "I know." "I know." "Sometimes he's just so fucking stubborn." "Always been like that, long as we've sailed together." "It's a goddamn shame, truly." "I wish it were otherwise." "Well, if you can think of something to say to him to get him to fall in line, now would be a good time." "Say to him?" "Ain't we past that now?" "Past it?" "What you asked me to do, wasn't the point to solve the problem for good?" "What the hell are you talking about?" "Nicholas was scheduled for duty on the mainmast." "It seemed the perfect chance to make it look like an accident." " Clear out!" " Who is it?" "Who is it?" "What about this?" "Ahem." "Upon our return, we anchor the ship off the southern coast." "A team of men excavate a trench inland." "We leave the bulk of the coin in the trench, keep the location secret, and rotate men in watches to keep it under guard?" "Your answer as where to secure five million pieces of eight is to dig a hole?" "All right, how about this?" "It is astonishing how much damage a woman can do once you let her in the door." "Is he talking about you?" "He's talking about Miss Bonny." "I'm talking about Miss Guthrie." "We all know what happened up at that fort." "He lets her in, she walks off with a prize worth a fortune, leaving him to swing in the wind for it." "Right now Charles is either fighting to preserve his captaincy and looking for any good argument to win them a fortune, and quickly, or he's dead and some new captain is wrestling with the same question." "What are you saying?" "Where does one store a fortune in gold coins?" "In a goddamn fort." "What, you're just gonna walk up there, knock on the door, and ask whoever answers if they'll let us use your half-demolished fort as a treasury?" "Yes." "Care to join me?" "Please go with him so he doesn't get killed." "Oh, for fuck's sakes." "Ma'am." "It's been a day since Mrs. Mapleton told us of the plot next door." "For the past day, I have watched the crew of the Colonial Dawn loading supplies." "They are now nearly through and likely less than a day away from setting sail." "I've wanted to give you the time you needed to deliberate, but now I'm concerned you may not appreciate how precarious things will be here should that gold reach our shores." "Ma'am, pirates flush with Spanish gold will be encouraged." "They will be empowered." "But what they will never be, under any circumstances, is partners in a plan to reconcile with England." "From where I sit, I think it is clear that we must act to prevent..." "We?" "I'm fairly certain that you aren't suggesting that we do anything." "The only way to truly ensure that the Urca gold doesn't return here is to eliminate everyone with the knowledge of where it is and how to retrieve it." "You are suggesting that I have all of these people killed." "Captain Rackham, his leadership, any of his men who've been made aware of it." "Max." "With all due respect, ma'am, it's not as if you haven't done it before." "I have done what I have done to arrive at this point." "I have done what I've done and I will live with it." "But do not for a moment believe that that defines me." "I will not be that person." "Why?" "I thought you'd made it clear what I was to do." "How the fuck could you have thought that?" "You said he could sink us." "Then you gave me a look." "Let me see if I have this." "Flint gives an order, but to get your men to follow it," "I need to come down here, put on a show, and convince you it's in your interests." "But I give you a look and you're willing to murder a man over it?" "I listen to Flint because you tell me it's in my interests." "I listen to you because I know you give a shit about my interests and I ain't the only one thinks that way." "Nicholas Irving." "From across an ocean, it is hard to know what the New World is." "All I knew were the stories I was told of monsters and valiant men sworn to slay them." "But now that I've nearly traversed the ocean that separates New World from old," "I fear that the stories I've heard may have clouded the truth more than clarified it." "It would seem these monsters are men... sons, brothers, fathers." "And it would seem these men fear their own monsters... an empire... a navy... a king." "My father." "So much I've left behind me..." "London, my youth, and comfortable stories." "So much lies ahead in Charles Town... a future and harder truths." "I feel I must face it honestly, bravely." "I must face it as my father's daughter, and I believe that in order to do that," "I have to tell these people that which I've kept from them." "I have to tell them what I know." "I've told you my father is a reasonable man, and that is true about most things." "At one point, he was even reasonable about the issue of quelling piracy." "Until I received a letter from him years ago in which he recounted to me the story of a ship... headed for Charles Town attacked by pirates." "The ship which was attacked was named the Maria Aleyne." "The ship was set upon by Captain Flint and his men." "And in the midst of the bloody assault, there was one particular victim, a very important man traveling under an assumed name." "His name was Alfred Hamilton." "Given the lengths to which this man had gone to protect himself, the fact that he fell under Captain Flint's sword... suggested he'd been hunted, pursued, and then executed in cold blood and with great malice aforethought." "The motive unclear, but the intent apparently dark and awful, monstrous." "He said the act was completely incompatible with civilized society." "That he would dedicate his life to eradicating it." "And that there would be law in the Americas... the day Captain Flint swung over Charles Town." "I appreciate what you've done for me." "I respect what you hope to accomplish, so I ask you, when you return me to Charles Town, turn around and sail away." "Do you think those patrol ships have clearance to fire?" "Not while we're out of range of that fort." "As long as we don't come any further, they know we're no threat." "I don't want to see a single one of our gun ports open." "I don't want to see a single man on deck with a weapon in his hand." "This only works if we can make it clear that we have absolutely no intention of shooting at anyone today." "What if they start shooting at us?" "Duck." "Prepare to drop anchor!" "I've made arrangements." "You'll be safe here until I return." "What are you talking about?" "I'm going with you." "You heard what she said." "It's too dangerous." "If I'm standing next to you, he's far more likely to see you as the man you were." "He's more likely to see you as a woman abetting a known pirate and hang you alongside me." "I see no reason for you" " to take that risk." " Of course there is reason." " None that I am willing to take." " It was my fault." "I'm the one who learned Alfred Hamilton was a passenger on that ship." "I knew the moment I told you what it would drive you to do." "I knew the danger it would put you in, knew the horrors it would incite." "I told myself to remain silent and spare him, spare you those horrors, and yet I told you anyway." "If you're going to face judgment behind those walls, then so should I, for if anyone is responsible for what happened that day, it's me." "Captain Vane!" "Captain Vane!" "Are you Captain Vane?" "We received your letter and your demands." "We are prepared to pay the sum you requested for Abigail Ashe." "I am not Charles Vane." "I have no demands." "But I do have a request." "Captain James Flint." "You're Captain Flint?" "I am." "And you wish an audience with Lord Ashe?" "I do." "This was a different place before the governor arrived." "Raiders routinely hit our shipping." "All up and down the coast as far north as Mt." "Pleasant, as far south as the Cumberland Sound." "It took him a short while to learn how to deal with it." "But once he committed to fighting the problem, things changed." "You see, he made these people unafraid." "Everyone realized, like just about anything else in this life... the moment you stop fearing it, it loses all its power." "No!" "The governor is a friend!" "The governor gave very specific instructions." " No, don't!" " If we were able to get our hands on Captain Vane, he never leaves this place again." "Stop." "I don't see any reason those instructions don't apply to you, too." " If anything..." " Stop!" "They're telling the truth." "He's an old friend of my father's." "I remember him." "I know him." "And if you strike him again, my father will know you did so after I made this clear to you." "Welcome to Charles Town." "Charles Vane corralled 40 of the hardest men in the New World, brought them in line, brought them across an ocean to this fort and conquered it with no support from the water, no siege engineering, just the will to take it," "and throughout all that time, through danger and peril and blood, the greatest threat he faced, the one enemy who may ultimately have been his undoing, was, you know, someone I once heard him refer to as Lady Honeypot." "Beware the women, Mr. Featherstone." "They bite." "I'm in love with a good woman, sir." "I'm not concerned." "Idelle?" "Yes." "It stands to reason that if those 40 men were mean enough to take this fort under Vane's leadership, were they to ever turn on him, it would be an ugly sight." "May I suggest that whatever is going on in the bowels of this fort, perhaps it's best left alone for now." "Perhaps." "What are you doing?" "I'm wondering why it's so quiet in there." "Because they're occupied plotting some sort of awfulness." "That is one possibility." "The other is that they're no longer in there." "What are you talking about?" "Their ship is still in the bay." "It is, but I'm less intrigued by what's in the bay than what's up there." "This was found pinned onto him." "I was once a slave." "I know too well the pain of the yoke on my shoulders and of the freedom of having cast it off." "So I'm resolved, I will be no slave again." "And as I am free, I hereby claim the same for Nassau." "She is free today, and so long as I draw breath, she shall remain free." "Richard Guthrie was engaged in an effort to see her return to the rule of a king, to see the yoke returned." "He betrayed Nassau, and thus, as always, to traitors." "As far as you and I, I was warned about you, warned you would betray me." "I'd hoped you and I shared a love to make such a thing unthinkable." "I'd hoped those warnings were wrong." "But I know you too well, so I prepared in case they were right." "You removed the girl from my possession, but in turn, the man-of-war moved on from the bay, moved on from a position of heightened security." "Moved on to a place where its attention," "Captain Flint's attention, will be so very occupied on the danger that is Charles Town and in the state of apprehension in which the last thing any of them will be watching is the water." "I made clear the price for the girl." "You should have known me well enough to know, one way or another, I was going to claim it." "And once I do, I'll be returning to Nassau to settle the rest of my accounts."