Assassin's Creed: Black Flag (5 page)

I still couldn’t accept it, though, and I found myself travelling into town the next day, my journey taking me to Hawkins Lane. All I knew was that Matthew Hague planned to pay her a visit in the morning, and as I sidled up the highway and passed the row of houses among which was hers, I wondered if he was in there already, perhaps making his proposal.

One thing I knew of Caroline, she was a brave woman, perhaps the bravest I’d ever known, but even so, she was passing up the opportunity to live the rest of her days in pampered luxury; and, worse, she was going to scandalize her mother and father. I knew only too well the pressures of trying to please a parent, how tempting it was to go down that route. An unfulfilled soul, or a soul troubled with guilt—which was the hardest cross to bear?

With me standing before her—and she loved me, I’m sure of that—perhaps the decision was easier to make. But what about at night, when misgivings made their rounds and doubt came visiting? Perhaps she might simply have changed her mind overnight and she was, at this very moment in time, blushing in her acceptance of Matthew Hague’s proposal and mentally writing a letter to me.

If that happened, well, there was always Dylan Wallace, I supposed.

But then from the corner of my eye I saw the front door open and Wilson appear, quickly followed by the draughtsman and behind them Matthew Hague, who offered his arm for Caroline, Rose taking up the rear as they began their perambulations.

Staying some distance behind, I followed, all the way to the harbour, puzzling over his intentions. Not the harbour, surely? The dirty, smelly, crowded harbour, with its stench of manure and burning pitch and just-caught fish and men who had returned from months away at sea without so much as a bath during that time.

They were making their way towards what looked like a schooner moored at the dock, around which were gathered some men. It was difficult to tell, though, because hanging from the back of the ship was some kind of canvas obscuring the name of the vessel. However, as the group drew closer to it I thought I knew what it was. I thought I knew his plan.

Sure enough, they stopped before it and still out of sight I watched as Caroline’s eyes flicked nervously from Matthew Hague to the schooner, guessing that she too had worked out the purpose of their visit.

Next thing I knew, Hague was down on one knee, and the staff of the schooner, Wilson and the draughtsman, were all standing with their hands behind their backs ready for the round of applause when Matthew Hague popped his question: “My darling, would you do me the honour of becoming my wife?”

Caroline swallowed and stammered, “Matthew, must we do this here?”

He shot her a patronizing look, then, with an expansive gesture of his hand, ordered the canvas come off the rear of the schooner. There etched in a gold leaf was the vessel’s name:
CAROLINE
.

“What better place, my dear?”

If it hadn’t been for the situation I might even have slightly enjoyed the sight of Caroline at a loss. Usually she was nothing if not sure of herself. The doubt and near panic I saw in her eyes, I suspect, was as new to her as it was to me.

“Matthew, I must say, you’re embarrassing me.”

“My dear, dear Caroline, my precious flower . . .” He gave a small gesture to his draughtsman, who immediately began rooting around for his quill in order to record his master’s poetic words.

“But how else would I have unveiled my marital gift to you? Now, I must press you for an answer. Please, with all these people watching . . .”

Yes, I realized looking around, the entire harbour seemed to have halted, everybody hanging on Caroline’s next words, which were . . .

“No, Matthew.”

Hague stood up so sharply that his draughtsman was forced to scurry backwards and almost lost his footing. Hague’s face darkened, and his lips pursed as he fought to retain composure and forced a smile.

“One of your little jokes, perhaps?”

“I fear not, Matthew, I am betrothed to another.”

Hague drew himself up to his full height as though to intimidate Caroline. Standing back in the crowd, I felt my blood rising and began to make my way forward.

“To another,”
he croaked. “Just who is this
other
man?”

“Me, sir,” I announced, having reached the front of the crowd and presented myself to him.

He looked at me with narrowed eyes.
“You.”
He spat.

From behind him Wilson was already moving forward, and in his eyes I could see his fury that I’d failed to heed his warning. And how that became his failure.

With an outstretched arm Hague stopped him. “No, Wilson,” he said, adding pointedly, “not here. Not now. I’m sure my lady may want to reconsider.”

A ripple of surprise and I guess not a little humour had travelled through the crowd and it rose again as Caroline said, “No, Matthew, Edward and I are to be married.”

He rounded on her. “Does your father know about this?”

“Not yet,” she said, then added, “I’ve a feeling he soon will, though.”

For a moment Hague simply stood and trembled with rage, and for the first, but as it would turn out not the last time, I actually felt sympathy for him. In the next instant he was barking at bystanders to get back to their work, then shouting at the schooner crew to replace the canvas, then calling to Wilson and his draughtsman to leave the harbour, turning his back pointedly on Caroline and offering me a look of hate as he exited. At his rear was Wilson and our eyes locked. Slowly, he drew a finger across his throat.

I shouldn’t have done it really, Wilson was not a man to provoke, but I couldn’t help myself and returned his death threat with a cheeky wink.

That was how Bristol came to know that Edward Kenway, a sheep-farmer worth a mere seventy-five pounds a year, was to marry Caroline Scott.

What a scandal it was: Caroline Scott marrying beneath her would have been cause for gossip enough. That she had spurned Matthew Hague in the process constituted quite a stir, and I wonder if that scandal might ultimately have worked in our favour, because while I steeled myself for retribution—and for a while I looked for Wilson round every corner, and my first glance from the window to the yard each morning was filled with trepidation—none came. I saw nothing of Wilson, heard nothing of Matthew Hague.

In the end, the threat to our marriage came not from outside—not from the Cobleighs, Emmett Scott, Matthew Hague or Wilson. It came from the inside. It came from me.

I’ve had plenty of time to think about the reasons why, of course. The problem was that I kept returning to my meeting with Dylan Wallace and his promises of riches in the West Indies. I wanted to go and return to Caroline a rich man. I had begun to see it as my only chance of making a success of myself. My only chance of being worthy of her. For, of course, yes, there was the immediate glory, or perhaps you might say
stature
, of having made Caroline Scott my wife, taking her from beneath the nose of Matthew Hague, but that was soon followed by a kind of . . . well, I can only describe it as
stagnation
.

Emmett Scott had delivered his cutting blow at the wedding. We should have been grateful, I suppose, that he and Caroline’s mother had deigned to attend. Although for my own part I was not at all grateful and I would have preferred it if the pair of them had stayed away. I hated to see my father, cap in hand, bowing and scraping to Emmett Scott, hardly a nobleman after all, just a merchant, separated from us, not by any aristocratic leanings but by money alone.

For Caroline, though, I was glad they came. It wasn’t as if they approved of the marriage, far from it; but at the very least, they weren’t prepared to lose their daughter over it.

I overheard her mother—“We just want you to be happy, Caroline”—and knew that she was speaking for me alone. In the eyes of Emmett Scott I saw no such desire. I saw the look of a man who had been denied his chance to clamber so much higher up the social ladder, a man whose dreams of great influence had been dashed. He came to the wedding under sufferance, or perhaps for the pleasure of delivering his pronouncement in the churchyard after the vows were made.

Emmett Scott had black hair brushed forward, dark, sunken cheeks and a mouth pinched permanently into a shape like a cat’s anus. His face, in fact, wore the permanent expression of a man biting deep into the flesh of a lemon.

Except for this one occasion, when his lips pressed into a thin smile and he said, “There will be no dowry.”

His wife, Caroline’s mother, closed her eyes tightly as though it was a moment she’d dreaded, had hoped might not happen. Words had been exchanged, I could guess, and the last of them had belonged to Emmett Scott.

So we moved into an outhouse on my father’s farm. We had appointed it as best we could, but it was still, at the end of the day, an outhouse: packed mud and sticks for the walls, our roof thatch badly in need of repair.

Our union had begun in the summer, of course, when our home was a cool sanctuary away from the blazing sun, but in winter, in the wet and wind, it was no kind of sanctuary at all. Caroline had been used to a brick-built town house with the life of Bristol all around, servants to boot, her washing, her cooking, every whim attended to. Here she was not rich. She was poor and her husband was poor. With no prospects.

I began visiting the inns once more, but I was not the same man as before, not as I’d been in the days when I was a single man, the cheerful, boisterous drunk, the jester. Sitting there, I had the weight of the world on my shoulders, and I sat with my back to the room, hunched, brooding over my ale, feeling as though they were all talking about me, like they were all saying, “There’s Edward Kenway, who can’t provide for his wife.”

I had suggested it to Caroline, of course. Me becoming a privateer. While she hadn’t said no—she was still my wife, after all—she hadn’t said yes, and in her eyes was the doubt and worry.

“I don’t want to leave you alone, but I can leave here poor and come back rich,” I told her.

Now, if I was to go, I went without her blessing and I left her alone in a farmyard shack. Her father would say I had deserted her, and her mother would despise me for making Caroline unhappy.

I couldn’t win.

“Is it dangerous?” she asked one night, when I spoke about privateering.

“It wouldn’t be so highly paid if it wasn’t,” I told her, and, of course, she reluctantly agreed that I could go. She was my wife, after all, what choice did she have? But I didn’t want to leave her behind with a broken heart.

 • • • 

One morning, I awoke from a drunken stupor, blinking in the morning light, only to find Caroline already dressed for the day ahead.

“I don’t want you to go,” she said, then turned and left the room.

 • • • 

One night I sat in the Livid Brews. I’d like to say I was not my usual self, as I sat with my back to the rest of the tavern hunched over my tankard, taking great big gulps in between dark thoughts and watching the level fall. Always, watching the level of my ale fall.

But the sad fact of the matter was that I
was
my usual self. That younger man, that rogue always ready with a quip and a smile, had disappeared. In his place, still a young man but one who had the cares of the world on his shoulders.

On the farm Caroline helped Mother, who at first had been horrified by the idea, saying Caroline was too much of a lady to work on the farm. Caroline had just laughed and insisted. At first when I watched her stride across the same yard where I had first seen her sitting astride her horse, currently wearing a crisp white bonnet, work boots, a smock and apron, I’d had a proud feeling. But seeing her in work-clothes had come to be a reminder of my own failings as a man.

What made it worse somehow was that Caroline didn’t seem to mind; it was as though she was the only person in the area who did not see her current position as a descent down the social ladder. Everybody else did, and none felt it more keenly than I.

“Can I get you another ale?” I recognized the voice that came from behind me and turned to see him there: Emmett Scott, Caroline’s father. I’d last seen him at the wedding, when he refused his daughter her dowry. But here he was, offering his hated son-in-law a drink. That’s the thing about the drink, though. When you’re into the drink like I was, when you watch the level of your ale fall and wonder where your next one is coming from, you’ll take a fresh mug from anyone. Even Emmett Scott. Your sworn enemy. A man who hated you almost as much as you hated him.

So I accepted his offer of an ale, and he bought his own, pulled up a stool, which scraped on the flag-stones as he sat down.

You remember Emmett Scott’s expression? That of a man sucking a lemon. At that moment, talking to me, the hated Edward Kenway, you’d have to say he looked even more pained. I felt completely at home in the tavern, as it was an environment in which I could lose myself, but it didn’t suit him at all. Every now and then he would glance over one shoulder, then the next, like he was frightened of being attacked suddenly from behind.

“I don’t think we’ve ever had a chance to talk,” he said. I made a short, scoffing laugh in reply.

“Your appearance at the wedding put paid to that, did it not?”

Of course the booze had loosened my tongue, made me brave. That and the fact that in the war to win his daughter I had won. Her heart, after all, belonged to me and there was no greater evidence of her devotion to me than the fact that she had given up so much to be with me. Even he must have seen that.

“We’re both the men of the world, Edward,” he said simply, and you could see he was trying to make himself seem in charge. But I saw through him. I saw what he really was: a frightened, nasty man, browbeaten in business, who kicked downwards, who probably beat his servants and his wife, who assumed the likes of me ought to be bowing and scraping to him, like my mother and father had done (and I had a twinge of rage to remember it) at the wedding.

“How about we do a deal like men of business?”

I took a long slug of my ale and held his eyes. “What did you have in mind, father-in-law of mine?”

His face hardened. “You walk out on her. You throw her out. Whatever you want. You set her free. Send her back to me.”

“And if I do?”

“I’ll make you a rich man.”

I drained the rest of my ale. He nodded towards it with questioning eyes and I said yes, waited while he fetched another one, then drank it down, almost in one go. The room was beginning to spin.

“Well, you know what you can do with your offer, don’t you?”

“Edward,” he said, leaning forward, “you and I both know you can’t provide for my daughter. You and I both know you sit here
in despair
because you can’t provide for my daughter. You love her, I know that, because I was once like you, a man of no qualities.”

I looked at him with my teeth clenched. “No qualities?”

“Oh, it’s true,” he spat, sitting back. “You’re a sheep-farmer, boy.”

“What happened to ‘Edward’? I thought you were talking to me like an equal.”

“An equal? There will never be a day when you will be equal to me and you know it.”

“You’re wrong. I have plans.”

“I’ve heard about your plans. Privateering. Becoming a man of substance on the high seas. You don’t have it in you, Edward Kenway.”

“I do.”

“You don’t have the moral fibre. I am offering you a way out of the hole you have dug for yourself, boy; I suggest you think about it very hard.”

I sank the rest of my ale. “How about I think about it over another drink?”

“As you wish.”

A fresh tankard materialized on the table in front of me and I set to making it a thing of history, my mind reeling at the same time. He was right. This was the most devastating thing about the whole conversation. Emmett Scott was right. I loved Caroline yet could not provide for her, and if I was truly a dutiful husband, then I would accept his offer.

“She doesn’t want me to go away,” I said.

“And you want to?”

“I want for her to support my plans.”

“She never will.”

“I can but hope.”

“If she loves you as she says, she never will.”

Even in my drunken state I could not fault his logic. I knew he was right. He knew he was right.

“You have made enemies, Edward Kenway. Many enemies. Some of them powerful. Why do you think those enemies haven’t taken their revenge on you?”

“They’re frightened?” There was a drunken arrogance in my voice.

He scoffed. “Of course they’re not frightened. They leave you alone because of Caroline.”

“Then if I was to accept your offer, there would be nothing to stop my enemies from attacking me?”

“Nothing but my protection.”

I wasn’t sure about that.

I sank another ale. He sank deeper into despondency. He was still there at the end of the night, his very presence reminding me how far my choices had shrunk.

When I tried to stand to leave, my legs almost gave way and I had to grab the side of the table just to remain on my feet. Caroline’s father, a disgusted look on his face, came to help me and before I knew it he was taking me home, though not because he wanted to see me safe but because he wanted to see to it that Caroline saw me in my drunken state, and indeed she did, as I rolled in, laughing. Emmett Scott puffed up, and told her, “This tosspot is a ruined man, Caroline. Unfit for life on land, much less at sea. If he goes to the West Indies, it’s you who will suffer.”

“Father . . . Father.”

She was sobbing, so upset, and then as I lay on the bed I saw his boots move off and he was gone.

“That old muckworm,” I managed. “He’s wrong about me.”

“I hope it so,” she replied.

I let my drunken imagination carry me away. “You believe me, don’t you? Can you not see me, standing out there on the deck of a ship that is sliding into port? There I am, a man of quality . . . With a thousand doubloons spilling from my pockets like drops of rain. I can see it.”

When I looked at her she was shaking her head. She couldn’t see it.

When I sobered up the next day, neither could I.

It was only a matter of time I suppose. My lack of prospects became like another person in the marriage. I reviewed my options: Emmett Scott offering me money in return for having his daughter back. My dreams of sailing away.

Both of them involved breaking Caroline’s heart.