"Without knowledge of the trigger, of which there could be several, I may not be able to help these people. If I knew it, I might be able to reverse it, but there is no way to know."
Anne cocked her head and brow, confused. "What about the bell? Isn't that the trigger?"
"Perhaps, and perhaps not. We do not know if it is meant to trigger a deeper state of trance, if it is some type of control should the citizens not comply, or if it serves some other purpose." Alexandre glanced over his shoulder in the direction of the bell tower, though the bell itself was shrouded by the walls of the general store. "It would be dangerous to ring the bell not knowing what it does."
Anne nodded. "Agreed. We leave the bell alone for now." She turned to William. "Send a few crewmates back to the ship and let them know we'll be staying the night here. Perhaps with that time, we may be able to reclaim one of the citizens." Anne eyed Alexandre, then glanced over her shoulder at Jules, who was just returning from the storage room.
"Terribly sorry, miss, no more in the back. Here, your money," he said while holding out his hand.
"My thanks," Anne replied, following the act.
With her newfound knowledge, instead of the same unease she had been feeling before, she felt a profound sense of pity for the men and women of this island. Pity, and a wave of rising anger boiling up.
…
"You must have your rest, Captain," Alexandre chided. "If we are to have you leading our troops, you must be of sound mind."
Anne stifled a yawn, cursing the Frenchman for talking of rest at the late hour it was. Alexandre, Victoria, Anne, and William had huddled themselves in the storage room of the general store. Soft lamplight illuminated the windowless room, casting shifting shadows and bounding bands of light against the barrels, boxes, and bags of supplies in the crowded room.
Their charge, Jules the shopkeeper, sat slumped in a chair in the middle of the four. If an onlooker caught a glimpse of the half-shadowed face of the man between them all, they might think he was asleep, but he was not. He was under a trance, this time of Alexandre's doing.
Anne knew nothing of the practice and had thought not long ago it was superstitious nonsense, and so thought it equally odd that to remove one from a trance, they must again force them into the same experience. That lack of knowledge, and thus an inability to truly help, and the stifling yawn, made Alexandre's words sound like honey. The only thing keeping her awake now was a vague sense of duty and curiosity over the entire strange matter.
"And what of you?" she eventually asked.
Alexandre smiled in his usual, civil way, and though Anne couldn't be sure, it seemed warmer to her somehow. "I rarely sleep, and Victoria, for entirely different circumstances, is plagued by a similar affliction as I. We will see you in the morning, and perhaps you will then be able to talk with the real Jules."
Anne didn't need much convincing, and with a dull nod and heavy eyes, she headed up the stairs in the storage room to the second floor of the general store.
There, a few crewmates who weren't out on watch were sleeping on cots, leaving two beds on the left side of the room for William and Anne. With a few words, Anne ordered William to rest as well and refused to lie down until she saw him do so first. He was reluctant, but he too had had a long and tiring day from the early morning sailing until now, and she could tell that he fell asleep soon after his head hit the pillow.
Anne laid her head down to rest, tossing and turning as she ran through the events of the day in her head once more until eventually sleep took her. Her sleep was short-lived when a sound forced her from her bed to full alertness.
It was the cutting crack of a pistol fired outside.
6. By These Copper Legs o' Mine
Edward's whole body ached in a painful expression of his own stupidity. Bruises blotched his face, back, arms, and legs from the beating Grace's crewmates had given him. True to their captain's word, they'd managed not to break any bones, but Edward wasn't sure how much better off he was for it.
The worst was his back, as they had opened the wound given by his father, which had been only a week old at the time. Edward did his best to protect the injury without making it seem as though he were guarding it as per the rules of the engagement, but it had been unavoidable. After that point, he focussed simply on not crying out in pain over the ordeal.
And after it all, he had to man a ship that was not his own, taking orders from a captain he had to act amicably towards.
As his arms shook, he secured coarse rigging; as his legs wobbled, he ran the length of the ship to perform increasingly menial tasks, tasks meant to break him and have him regret his decision. And as he bled on the deck from his forehead and back, he kept going. Despite the pain, the weakness, and the not-so-subtle slights from the crewmates tripping him up, he did the work of three men—just as he had been told to do, just as he had agreed he would.
To Edward's dismay, this only served to infuriate several members of the crew. The more he pushed on despite his injuries, the more contempt he could feel in their gazes; the heat against the back of his neck told him those gazes were measuring him and finding him wanting no matter how well he performed.
The primary source of the contempt came from the first man they had spoken to before boarding the Black Blood: the pock-marked, sour crewmate named Nigel. He had an inner circle of other crewmates Edward learned about over the day's work, and they were the ones trying to trip or knock him over at each corner when the captain wasn't looking.
Despite this, some in the crew seemed to warm up to Edward after his stubborn refusal to submit to his injuries. As the day progressed and his sweat and blood poured out of him, he noticed a few go out of their way to aid him. When he fumbled with a knot his numb fingers just couldn't manage, one man finished the loop for him. When he snuck in a few laboured breaths behind the mast and away from prying eyes, another crewmate secretly handed him a tin full of water. It wasn't much, but it helped.
"I've been where you were before," the man with the cup said. "It'll get easier as soon as Grace trusts you're capable."
Edward took the cup with a shaking hand and downed the water in one enormous gulp. "If I don't die before then," he sputtered through his laboured breaths. He glanced over his shoulder and around the foremast towards where Nigel and his friends were talking amongst themselves.
The crewmate who gave him the water followed Edward's gaze. "Just ignore Nigel. He'll tire of you eventually. This is just his way." The man turned back to face Edward, and he smiled. "I'm John, by the way."
The name made Edward's eyes widen, and his pounding heart skipped a beat. John was a common name, but nonetheless, it still brought to mind the old crewmate Edward had had aboard his ship before he had become a pirate and stayed on afterwards. The same crewmate whose neck had been sliced open right in front of him by the same man who had tortured Edward for days before leaving him for dead. The thought brought with it the same unpleasant ache of a different kind.
His throat seized, and he couldn't move. He breathed deep through his nose, desperately trying to quell the raging squall in his mind. He reached for his flask, popped off the stopper, and tried to drink, but it was empty.
"Anything stronger than that swill?" Edward eked out, referring to the lightly rum-laced water he had been given. The rum kept the water from forming a scum on a long voyage with little fresh water but did little else for one looking to ease a particular pain.
John smiled and took the cup from Edward before filling it from a secret flask of his own. After getting it back, Edward downed it in one gulp just as he had the water before it. Edward knew and was hoping that with all the activity, the blood loss, and the sweat, it would hit him harder than it usually did. He wanted the numbness of a different kind.
"My thanks," he said after a moment.
The thought of Edward's former crewmate brought old memories of the man. The way he'd looked with his salt-and-pepper hair, his typically nervous disposition outsid
e of battle, and his relationship with his father. Before John had been killed, when his tired eyes had showed Edward the look of an old man's soul stretched thin as smoke and ready to let the wind take it off, he had confirmed that Edward's father was still alive. Had John been aware of what Edward's father had become? Had he been aware of the things his father had done to him, or would do to him, or had he merely been trying to tighten Edward's resolve to live by telling him a sweet lie he'd had no way of knowing was accurate?
Edward's eyes shot up as the flood of memories came back to him. No, he thought, John knew. He was given the keys to my ship before I received it. He met Benjamin Hornigold, he said as much himself. He met my father and kept the lie to take me to the trials where I nearly died. How much did he know? How deep did this plot run?
Edward pondered the question for another moment, but it only served to heat his cheeks and his core with fresh anger over the lies he had been fed and embarrassment over his falling for them. He shook his head to cast away the demons he called the past and looked over the young man in front of him right now.
The John in front of him had little in common with Edward's old John. He was younger than Edward by quite the degree, in his early twenties if he wasn't in his teens still, and it was clear that he was new to the crew, or new to battle. He had a few small scars, one on his face and another few Edward could see snaking their way out of his shirt towards his neck, but he was far from the battle-hardened sailors aboard the Black Blood. His black hair was cropped short, too short for the youth's narrow features. In his mind, it was easy to separate this John from his John, but far harder for his body to.
"Strange for one on a crew such as this to show me a kindness," Edward commented as he turned his gaze to the horizon.
Being at the front of the ship meant getting the full force of each smash against the waves. Each time the ship lurched below the line of the ocean in front of them, seawater misted Edward and John. The mist was refreshing on Edward's hot, tired, aching body.
"You know much of Calico Jack's crew, I see," John said, his mouth a line. "Perhaps if this were Calico Jack or Lance Nhil's ships, your words may ring a bit truer. Grace doesn't use fear or magic to control the crew as they do. She just follows a simple rule: her word is law. Break that law, you're off at the next port if you even make it that far."
Edward took stock of the young man's choice of words, specifically the bit about magic. Did he mean Nhil? Silver Eyes? Or was his father implicated here as well? Edward had seen inexplicable things over the years—metal unlike any other, islands that would take far too long for human hands to construct—not to mention the visions his crew had seen in the Devil's Triangle.
Edward suddenly had a sickening feeling that he and Herbert were in over their heads. If his father had some unknown magic, how could they defend against it?
He noticed John looking at him, and he remembered where he was. Now was all that mattered. He would have to worry about the future when it was on them.
"Doesn't sound much different from intimidation to me."
John shook his head and placed a hand on Edward's shoulder. "Trust me," he said, his eyes serious, "I know."
This first kind hand, after so many seeking to trip Edward up or to stab him in the back, served as a calm wind to his sails, a buoyant driftwood in a treacherous ocean on all sides.
The elation he felt turned to bile in his mouth. How many times must his father's minions betray Edward until he learned his lesson? This John may look nothing like the John that had been his crewmate and confidant for years, but Edward could trust this one no more than he should have trusted the first.
Nigel didn't strike Edward as bright, but it didn't take a bright man to recognize that a gentle hand can lure one closer to a hidden knife. It is especially so when the gentle hand comes after so many harsh ones. John might be in league with Nigel in secret.
He could no more trust John than he could Nigel, or any of the crew aboard the Black Blood. Edward decided he would always have to keep one hand near a blade and sleep with one eye open. Thankfully for him, Edward thought as he eyed Herbert on the quarterdeck, he had a second pair he could rely on.
…
"That was foolish," Herbert said from behind Edward as he did his best to close the stab wound in Edward's back.
Edward winced as the needle passed through his skin for the third time. After so much pain over so many years, the pain of the needle came to him like an old friend whispering jibes and slapping him on the back. If he were mad, he might even say he enjoyed the delicate pain the needle provided, but he wasn't mad, and he jerked as the needle pierced his skin again.
"We're here, aren't we?" Edward said, peering over his shoulder at Herbert's face buried in the task of sewing him up.
Edward was sitting on a box in the hold of the Black Blood, surrounded by shoulder-high stacks of watertight barrels and other boxes of pungent spices. On the side of every barrel and box, Edward noticed the label of a shipping company that operated in the West Indies. He wasn't sure exactly which company it belonged to, but he knew it was one of the larger ones. It spoke to how prolific Calico Jack and the crew aboard this ship were, given the audacity to target one of the companies able to defend against pirates.
"Sit still," Herbert ordered, his tone harsh. As soon as Edward readjusted and complied, he finished the stitch in his back and covered it with a cloth before wrapping a strip around it. "It won't be nearly as good as Alexandre would have done, but it'll hold if you keep the weight off."
"My thanks," Edward said, trying to crane his neck to see the wound and stitching.
"You're lucky it had healed a bit before that incident. It could have been worse. If I didn't know any better, I'd say your father knew what he was doing. The wound was meant to bleed you, and the cut was clean and precise."
Edward spat. "If he wanted to kill me, he could have, easily. That's the point. I think he means for me, for us, to bleed." Edward shook his head. "He had so many chances to make things so bad for us we couldn't recover. When he attacked Bodden Town, he could have stayed behind and attacked again after we anchored. In the tavern, everyone was under his control, but they let us go."
Herbert's mouth was a line, as straight as the horizon at dusk, betraying no curve of emotion. "Any ideas as to why?"
"None," Edward replied.
For a moment, the two sat in silence as Edward donned his blood-stained shirt and coat. He thought it over, recalling everything that they knew about his father.
With his recent remembrance that John had been part of the plot, it wasn't unreasonable to think that John had been sending letters to his father. He'd had the means. He had been the person in charge of selling cargo; he could easily have sent a letter here or there. From there, it was reasonable to think that his father knew his pirate name of Blackbeard and more.
It made sense now why Calico Jack had never retaliated for the killing of one of his commanders, Gregory Dunn, until Edward had finished the task of unlocking the ship. His father was the one who'd given him the ship, and had wanted him to face those trials first.
The thoughts and the rumination itched Edward to the point that he needed to move. He couldn't sit still for a moment longer. He rose to his feet but had to remain bent slightly due to the low ceiling of the hold.
Edward kept his voice low despite being in the hold farthest from where crewmates in the deck above would most likely be. "My father gave me the ship as Benjamin Hornigold with the intent to go about unlocking pieces of it. If I survive, then I become stronger as the ship itself becomes mine. Once that happens, why attack and provoke us? Would he have done it even if we hadn't killed Gregory Dunn? I don't see the purpose."
Herbert shrugged and gestured towards Edward. "Perhaps this is the final test then? Perhaps this would have happened regardless of us attacking Gregory Dunn. I loathe to take advice from him, but Alexandre once said to me, 'People always tell more than they wish to. You need but to listen.'" H
erbert tried a French accent but butchered it in the best way possible.
Edward laughed at Herbert for a moment before addressing the quote. "And what am I to listen to, exactly?"
"What did your father say to you in that tavern?"
Edward only needed a few seconds to recall it. "'Try again when you grow a spine.'"
Herbert cocked his brow. His eyes and the crook of his neck as he stared at Edward was the look of a man who didn't want to say something out loud that should have been obvious at that point.
Edward sighed. "So, you're saying that my father planned all this from the beginning, and he wants me to kill him?"
Herbert's brow lowered, then he spread his hands as though he were unveiling a bountiful feast, a feast of evidence towards the conclusion Edward had spelled out.
Edward's earlier frustration and itch faded away and left a hole so deep it could take the very light of the sun with it. He fell to the box he had been sitting on before, sinking into it like the light into the emptiness inside him.
"My father wants me to kill him."
…
Edward and Herbert headed back to the deck above the hold where the crew's quarters were. All that separated the hold from the crew's quarters were the maze of barrels and boxes on one end of the ship, thinning out near the other, and a short ladder.
The narrow space between the cargo was barely enough for Edward to walk through, let alone Herbert in his wooden wheelchair, but he managed with only a few snags. Edward had his own issues with his height in the cramped part of the ship. He had to remain bent over as they walked through the hold towards the ladder.
Edward climbed up the ladder, one hand carrying Herbert's wheelchair and the other gripping the rungs. Each step was a labour in balance and delicacy, and Edward needed to take his time. After a few heaves, and a tenuous leverage over the lip of the other deck's edge, the wheelchair was up, and Edward himself wasn't far behind.
Blackbeard's Family Page 8
