"My word and your word will govern in concert or not at all." "And when I'm not present, that word shall be given by my daughter." "They say you are inseparable." "They say he relies upon you more than any other." "I come on a mission of mercy." "I come on behalf of Captain Flint." "But if you insist on making me your villain," "I'll play the part." "From this moment on, any man participating in the act of high seas piracy will be presumed to be one of your men." "I will catch him and I will hang him." "Were I you, I might encourage Governor Rogers not just to send the gold, but the man responsible for stealing it in the first place." "Jack and the cache are to be moved aboard a secret caravan." "If we can intercept that caravan, we can secure both the money to start our war and the partner to help us fight it." "Please, don't touch that." "All these things..." "Porcelain, books..." "All so goddamn fragile." "The energy it must take to maintain it all." "And for what?" "I can understand a woman's desire for domesticity, but a man's?" "That I can't understand." "I can't understand how you cannot understand." "You have no instinct towards earning for yourself a life more comfortable?" "I don't." "And had I that instinct," "I would resist it with every inch of will I could muster." "For that is the single most dangerous weapon they possess, the one they tempt." ""Give us your submission, and we will give you the comfort you need."" "No, I can think of no measure of comfort worth that price." "This is taking too long." "No sign of Featherstone's man." "No word on what route they'll take Jack across the island." "Word was Jack would be underway by noon." "If we wait here any longer, either we're gonna miss him or someone's gonna find us hiding out here." "No one will find us because no one's looking for us." "The war has left the island." "They all saw it happen." "There are at least half a dozen routes that Rogers could choose to send Jack and the cache to meet the transport ship on the south coast." "We can't afford to guess wrong." "Can't afford to guess?" "We can't afford not to guess." "We miss that caravan, you lose, what?" "Money?" "Your war?" "What I got to lose ain't something so easy to recover from." "There is no "your loss," "his loss,""my loss."" "This is not an either/or proposition." "We're all in this for our own reasons." "You want your partner back." "He wants victory." "I want to set my home aright." "But we must hold the line and stand together." "We must." "There's simply no alternative." "There's a rider approaching." "Is it Featherstone's man?" "It is." "Here he comes." "That's for you." "Consider that your share." "For the company." "I suspect I'll be leaving shortly." "Don't despair." "Some other poor bastard'll take my place soon enough." "I wish I could assure you that he would be as generous as I with his scraps." "Either way, you mustn't settle for whatever refuse finds its way into this cell." "There's a whole world out there that every so often rewards ambition." "Mark my words." "Today the crumbs, tomorrow the loaf." "Perhaps someday the whole damn boulangerie." "You're welcome." "Be careful of the ammunition cases." "Anne exchanged the cache for my release." "Yes." "This does not seem like a release." "Spain has demanded I deliver you along with the cache." "I am told that once you and the cache arrive at Havana, my debt to Spain will be repaid." "I did not appreciate having terms altered after the fact in this way, but in this moment I am simply in no position to refuse them." "I see." "Perhaps you were right, that in a place like this there is no progress without awful sacrifice." "Make ready to depart." "Yes, sir!" "If it's any consolation, no harm was done to your partner." "She left the transaction unscathed." "Ready, my lord." "Let's go." "So she's alive?" "Anne?" "Prepare to mount up!" "She is." "You have my word." "Hup!" "Hup!" "Hup!" "So we are able to see the island, but the island cannot see us." "How is this possible?" "Well, Mr. De Groot says that from this position, when viewed from the beach, our hull sits beneath the horizon while our masts are above it." "Now, with the sails furled, the masts are too thin to be seen." "Thus, our lookout has a view of the beach, but the beach has no view of him or us." "It's a neat trick, I must say." "How does one determine this position, one in which we exist and don't exist at the same time?" "One waits for Mr. De Groot to finish speaking, frowns thoughtfully, and then repeats phonetically what he said to the men." "A few months ago, all they let me do on this ship was cook." "I'm learning as fast as I can." "Clearly." "Yes, something less than confidence-inspiring for the men, I would think, were I to admit the depths of my ignorance on the subject." "What the men think of you..." "Your men and my men..." "Would seem to be evolving as we speak." "Ah, yes." "The story about what happened last night has been retold as many times as there are men on this ship." "You expressed your concern to me that to truly partner with your captain, you would need to join him down a dark path." "And that you fear it..." "It might lead you to a place you would not be able to return from." "You're concerned about me." "The alliance between your crew and my people is critical." "Without it, we are all nowhere." "If your mind is not clear and the alliance cannot hold, all will be lost." "So, yes, I am concerned." "Hmm." "Yes." "Last night was not an experience" "I hope to repeat anytime soon." "But my mind is clear." "Mr. Silver, I need to speak with you." "Alone, please." "What the fuck happened?" "In that..." "Camp, they killed Parker." "They killed Louis." "They killed Graves and they killed Simon." "They chose them from among us to be tortured and killed." "And that one was the one doing the choosing." "What is it you're hiding from?" "Excuse me?" "I only meant I know you must be very busy, what with your responsibilities." "But to still be here so late in the morning," "I assume there's something you're avoiding." "For what it's worth," "I believe the madam chose me for you because I am new." "I have no notions about what you once were." "No motive to gossip." "Georgia." "Yes?" "I know the games." "I have played them all." "If you ever wish to be in my bed again, that is the last one you will ever play with me." "Yes?" "Miss Guthrie's downstairs." "She's asking for you." "Yes?" "What happened?" "The cache is in our possession." "It's on its way as we speak to the transport and then to Havana." "With Jack." "Yes." "The governor is seeing to it personally that the transport sets sail with its cargo." "Within a matter of hours, the Spanish issue will be closed and we will be free to move forward." "And Anne?" "The men said she was angered." "When she realized that Jack wasn't there, she let the cache go." "Anne was unharmed." "Unharmed?" "Yes." "I advised the governor to send eight men to the exchange to deter any attempt on her part to fight..." "When did she realize?" "I'm sorry?" "That Jack was not there." "When did Anne realize that she had been lied to?" "Was it before or after they secured the cache?" "Before, I think." "Why?" "When you told me this was to be," "I was upset by the thought of having lied to Anne." "I was devastated by the certainty it would unavoidably lead to her death." "For the moment she realized that Jack was not there, that she had been crossed and that she would likely never see him again, she would attempt to kill anyone she deemed responsible." "Eight?" "You could have sent a thousand men." "It would not have deterred her." "And now you are saying to me that she knew she had been crossed and chose to walk away to save herself?" "Do you speak Spanish?" "Beg pardon?" "RHabla español?" "A little." "You?" "Hardly at all." "If I'm in Havana in a day or two," "I assume I'll be hearing a lot of it..." "Shouted by bitter old women in a crowd, growled by angry officials." "It seems a rotten thing to wish upon anyone, an unflattering eulogy in an unfamiliar town." "It'll be quick, to whatever extent it sets your mind at ease." "The gold is theirs." "The gems are theirs." "They don't need anything from you anymore, and as such they're likely to want to put the entire affair behind them and move on." "I'm sorry. "If"?" "Beg pardon?" "You said, "If I'm in Havana."" "In your mind this outcome is still in doubt." "Well, the odds are certainly in its favor, but it is by no means a certainty." "How so exactly?" "You said Anne is alive, did you not?" "I would argue as long as that is true, there's a chance, however remote, that she will frustrate your efforts to send me off to my death." "Out of curiosity, how would she go about doing that?" "Well, I have no idea." "Everything and anything in her power, I imagine, up to and including walking out in the middle of the road ahead of us to be run over by your horses in the hope of slowing you down for even a moment." "It is fascinating to me how stubbornly you people expect the unlikeliest of outcomes because you prefer them." "You expect the world to become what you want it to be despite all available evidence and experience to the contrary." "This was not the way I'd hoped this affair would play out." "But I can assure you it is most certainly not going to play out the way you hope it will either, because even to stand in the road ahead of us, she would have to know which road to stand in." "You held the route secret." "I held a number of potential routes secret before settling upon this one so that even if the secrets were compromised, anyone intending to hit us would be more than likely in possession of the wrong route." "Let me be sure I have this right." "So the plan to recover the stolen cache of gems..." "Your plan to recover the stolen cache of gems has worked in exactly the manner you suggested it would." "Only now you believe this is a bad thing..." "Evidence of a plan to rescue Mr. Rackham and once again recover the cache of gems." "That is what you're suggesting, yes?" "I can understand why this may be hard to believe, but I know Anne Bonny well enough to know that it is a certainty something here is amiss." "That her behavior should coincide with the presence of Captain Flint on the island only hours before most certainly points to a plot being underway." "I beg your pardon." "So now Captain Flint is somehow involved in this plot despite the fact that his ship left the island hours ago?" "And I am to redeploy men into the interior away from Nassau Town, leaving their positions undefended?" "I'm sorry, are you suggesting there's some ulterior motive here?" "I'm suggesting that simply because the governor decided to put his..." "Trust in you," "I have no intention of doing the same." "The situation is well in hand." "Thank you for your concern." "Well in hand?" "I'm telling you the situation is potentially about to get entirely out of hand." "You're not fucking hearing me." "Even if somebody wanted to move against the governor's caravan, they wouldn't know where to find the governor's caravan." "The route was altered multiple times." "False schedules were distributed." "Nobody knows exactly when they were set to leave." "Nobody knows what route they finally decided upon." "Nobody knows who..." "I know." "I know the route." "A boy in my employ saw scouts on the west trail road late last night." "That is it, is it not?" "I am assuming you did not send men to scout the decoy routes?" "Did you tell anyone what your boy has told you?" "No." "And would your boy sell his information without your knowledge?" "No." "Good." "Then we have nothing to fucking worry about." "Ladies." "Fuck your pride." "If I can swallow mine to be standing here, you'll do the same to listen." "Because if you and I can't figure out a way to work together in this moment, everything may be lost." "How many people know about this?" "No one outside that room." "In less than an hour," "I need to move this ship to the coast to retrieve our captain and a fortune in gems upon which the lives of well over a thousand people depend." "Now that is all going up in smoke because Mr. Dobbs cannot control his anger." "It don't have to." "No." "If we let him leave that room, he's going to tell his men what happened and we're going to have a war on our hands." "I understand that, but the answer is not going to be finishing what Dobbs started and murdering that man." "All right." "Then we put a knife in his hands and we let him even the score." "For reasons passing understanding," "Mr. Dobbs still has a number of friends on this crew." "How do we explain his disappearance to them?" "This story is getting out, and when it does, all hell is going to break loose." "Then what do we do?" "This is the man responsible." "He's the only man responsible." "I suggest you and I address the combined crew together." "This man will be held to account and punished swiftly and severely." "May I have a knife, please?" "Wait a minute." "Hold on." "Until I know what he's going to say," "I can't let anyone walk out of here." "He isn't going to say anything." "He has to say something." "He's going to say that he spoke impertinently to me," "Kofi took offense, and it will not be spoken of again." "Just like that." "Yes." "Now let him go." "If he says a word..." "When I speak, my men listen, and they do as I say." "A secret caravan to move Rackham to a secret transport, and no one knows about this but you." "Me, the governor, his cabinet, eight dragoons, their quartermaster, the carriage driver..." "Plenty of people know about it, just not you." "And you believe there's a plot underway to attack this secret caravan..." "A plot that somehow involves Captain Flint, whom everyone saw sail into open water hours ago." "Jesus!" "Chamberlain can ignore this." "He doesn't know me, he doesn't know Bonny, he doesn't know Flint." "Now, if it turns out that I'm right about this, he'll look like a fool, but at least his ignorance of the players involved will be some defense." "If you choose to ignore me, it will be far harder for you to find an excuse." "I watched it depart, the Walrus." "Had a man with a glass watching her set sail, watching her clear the horizon and disappear..." "Do you know what?" "I don't have time for this." "...except for the glints of light." "What?" "I had my man keep his glass to the spot on the horizon where the Walrus disappeared." "And roughly every 15 minutes, he reported seeing glints of light from her last position." "What the fuck does that mean?" "Oh, it could mean nothing." "Random artifact of sunlight off the water." "Or it could be the reflection of a spyglass upon one of her masts..." "The ship beneath bare poles, waiting silently, invisibly, for a signal to return." "I beat him, and then I watched him return from the dead to negate my victory, to watch his partner murder mine and aggravate the affront." "You and I have our history, but Flint and I have unfinished business of a far more serious sort." "My father was a tailor in Leeds." "As was his father and his father's father." "Time was if a man on the Avondale Road asked where he might find the finest clothes in northern England, he was pointed toward the shop of a man named Rackham." "Then the men who sell wool decide they'd prefer not to compete with the men who imported fine cotton." "And as the men who sell wool have the ears of the men who make laws, an embargo is enacted to increase profits and calico disappears." "And my father's business that he inherited from his father and his father's father begins to wither and die." "And my father suffers the compound shame of financial failure seen through the eyes of his son and descended into drink." "I'd sit beside him as a boy at the Sunday service as he shouted at the pastor, at the altar..." "At anyone who'd listen, really..." "At the injustice of it all." "And I'd put my arm over his shoulder as the insults began, help carry him out of the church." "God, the insults." "At his funeral, our neighbors were kind enough to whisper them rather than call them out loud." "So, I set to work, determined to rebuild what had been taken away." "I was 13 years old." "But I was determined until a man arrived at my door claiming to hold debts belonging to my father." "Debts accumulated as my father drank." "Debts he claimed that now belonged to me." "Debts I could not possibly have hoped to repay." "Debts over which this man would have seen me imprisoned..." "Imprisoned in a place where the debts would have been discharged only through hard labor." "Hard labor with no wages, working at..." "Wait for it..." "The production of textiles." ""You people, incapable of accepting the world as it is,"" "says the man to whom the world handed everything." "If no Anne, if no rescue, if this is defeat for me, then know this." "You and I were neck and neck in this race right till the end." "But, Jesus, did I make up a lot of ground to catch you." "You think the world's been that kind to me?" "That I'm that much softer than you?" "That much more fortunate?" "Wealthy family, inherited Daddy's shipping business, married rich..." "I read your book." "But there are things you leave out of the book." "Things you leave out because if it got around polite society what you're capable of when pushed, they might stop inviting you to their dinner parties." "All you know about me is what I want you to know." "Riders!" "Riders approaching!" "Defend the governor!" "Captain, fall back and engage!" "Defend the left flank!" "Fall back!" "They're gaining, sir!" "Defend the governor!" "Faster!" "Don't spare the horses!" "Pistol!" "Hold your fire." "Wait till they're close." "Sir!" "Pick your targets!" "Ah!" "Aah!" "Yah!" "Yah!" "Aah!" "Ow." "We need to move, now." "Go!" "Go?" "Take the chest to the beach." "We'll be right behind you." "Right behind us?" "Yeah." "I thought you said you and Nassau were through." "Got worried you two'd be lost without me." "Glad to see I was wrong about that." "And Teach?" "How has he taken your change of heart?" "Couldn't say." "If you see him, I suppose you could ask him." "Yah!" "Look." "Can you ride with him?" "Yeah." "Go." "Go!" "Oh, God." "Go!" "Go!" "Go!" "Go!" "Come on!" "Yah!" "Put him down!" "Search for tracks!" "Search the area!" "Hold him!" "See which way they went!" "Thank you." "I've known him since we were children..." "Suffered illness and loss by his side." "Watched him give his loyalty, his sacrifice and his love to my mother, to me." "So you can just imagine what that was like, asking him to accept what was done to him at the hands of men who look so very much like those he watched murder his parents when he was a boy." "You can imagine how tempted I was to take that knife and put it in his hand and let him use it to his liking." "You can imagine the restraint it took for me not to let my people loose." "But where does that leave us?" "So I will fight this thing rising up in me eager to see more blood spilled today, and I will serve them by minding their future and doing the hard thing that will lead to the outcome desired by all of us." "This will not happen again." "It is over, then." "We move forward." "You have my word." "Not a fucking word about it, understand?" "Sails!" "Due west!" "Headed this way!" "I thought you said that no one could see us from here." "They can't." "Get us underway." "Back to the coast to retrieve the shore party." "But there's been no signal yet from the shore party." "That ship will be upon us in two hours, maybe less." "Get us underway." "Make ready the launches!" "Lower the courses." "Lower the courses!" "I see you." "Set a course to intercept her." "Bring us port!" "Bring us to port!" "Six more of them have fallen ill." "There's now a total of 14 reported cases." "Are any of them mortal?" "Not yet, but our forces are dwindling, and it will get worse before it gets better." "Meanwhile, Flint is out there somewhere committed to waging war against us." "And soon news will return to Nassau as to whether Rackham and his money are on their way to Havana." "And if they aren't, if you and I are right, if something happened and Hornigold's cavalry weren't in time to stop it, then in addition to everything else, we will be at war with Spain." "If you and I were right and something went wrong with the governor's caravan," "I fear there is something even more unsettling we are about to face." "What is that?" "You and I will be immune to this disease, for it will only attack those unfamiliar to this place." "You and I know Flint and can fight him." "You and I, though outmatched, at least know what Spain is and can make best efforts to confront whatever they may send our way." "But there is nothing more dangerous than the unfamiliar enemy." "If the governor's caravan was attacked, it means someone knew where to find it." "It means our secrets are no longer ours." "It means there is a spy among us." "Someone help him." "Fetch Dr. Marcus." "Please see to it!" "Where's Vane?" "The militia arrived before he could get away." "We had no choice but to run." "Fuck." "Take him and the cache back to the ship and get out of here." "What?" "You can't stay behind." "I'll go find Vane." "Once he's free, we'll find our own way back to the camp." "Captain..." "Charles Vane swinging over Nassau is a statement we cannot afford to be made." "You cannot stay." "We're about to get the war you wanted and perhaps a credible path towards something resembling victory, but the war is going to follow that chest and you're the only one of us who can marshal it." "He's right." "He's right." "If Charles knew we were even contemplating jeopardizing the grander effort to save him, he'd kill us all." "Give me two men." "I'll go back and address the situation." "How?" "By stirring resentment, finding sympathetic ears, reminding them that Charles Vane was once the best of them..." "Still is the best of them." "My parents were agitators." "If we are to win this war, that may be exactly what we need." "By the time I'm through, the governor won't be able to hang Vane out of fear of losing the street." "Charles is here." "It's a very small consolation given what we lost today." "But you had the foresight to put Captain Hornigold in pursuit of Flint's ship." "It's the only reason we have any prayer at all of recovering the cache and avoiding disaster." "If Hornigold is unable to capture Flint's ship," "Flint is able to dictate the next chapter of this story." "The choices we will likely then face will be of the most awful kind..." "The ones that promise only bad outcomes in every direction." "Eleanor, look at me." "The challenges I see ahead for both you and I are of the gravest sort." "I need to know that I can rely upon you to help me navigate through it." "Of course you can." "You understand..." "My concern about calling you a partner, from the moment I first walked into your cell in London, was whether you'd be able to resist Nassau's temptation, the gravity of your personal history urging you to resume petty rivalries" "and repeat the costliest of your mistakes, preventing you from ever truly moving into the future" "I wanted to build here rather than gravitating back into your past." "And now..." "In the moment I need you the most, need the best of you the most," "I fear the temptation you are feeling is about to be at its strongest." "You're wrong." "No, I'm not wro..." "I am not wrong." "That man sitting in a cell in my fort is the embodiment of that temptation for you." "It is self-evident." "Now, I am asking whether you're able to see past the petty and the personal to remain focused on what is right now of vital importance to both of our futures..." "To our very survival." "If you have any regard for me, any respect at all, then I'm asking you to tell me the truth about what you're capable of right now." "The moment you walked into my cell in London, do you want to know what I first thought?" "I wasn't thinking about the charges against me." "I wasn't thinking about a reprieve from the noose." "I wasn't thinking about piracy, nor pardons, nor Nassau." "In that moment, I was consumed by one thought and one thought only the idea that this may be my opportunity to gain some measure of revenge against my father's murderer, that I might play a role in the execution of Charles Vane." "I know you now." "I trust you now." "I'm devoted to you now." "I love you now." "So I will tell you the absolute truth about how I'm going to react when faced with the thing sitting in that cell in your fort." "I honestly don't know."