Prologue PROLOGUE
Hôpital, Saint-Domingue, January 1656

JACQUOTTE DELAHAYE was alone. The prison cell was small and dark, and the smell of brine and piss hung heavy in the humid air. It was monsoon season and rain flooded the streets. The prison was close to the sea, so close that it taunted her. Salt water dripped from the cracks in the wall and pooled at her feet, stinging her open wounds. The gash on her leg had gone green and, had she been able, she would have cut it off for fear of mortification. The jagged edges had turned black, and the exposed skin was slick with thick yellow pus. Though she could move it, the feeling had been lost there days ago.

She had no need to worry about sickness any longer. In a way, she was lucky to die a swift death. A death to be remembered. And she wanted to be remembered. For tales of her great deeds to reach the far corners of the earth, for harrowing sea shanties to be sung in her honor, and for green cabin boys to whisper at night, terrified that her ghost haunted them. Now she would live on forever, in infamy.

Jacquotte had expected the French to do away with her quickly. King Louis detested pirates and had taken to decimating all those who threatened his vast lands. She had expected her head on a spike within an hour of setting foot onshore. It would have been wise to kill her sooner, so there was no chance of a great escape back to her beloved Dayana’s Revenge. But they had taken their time, and Jacquotte had spent weeks lying on the soiled straw of her cell, forced to shit in a bucket and eat rancid scraps. No one had come to rescue her. She was completely alone, all but for the rats.

Weak light streamed through the single barred window of her cell. Dawn. The bells began to toll. This morning was not the customary clangor, one chime for each hour of the day; instead, the bells pealed and trilled. At her home in Yáquimo they only played the bells so jubilantly for the weddings of Spanish admirals. But these bells were for a much grimmer affair: her execution.

Footsteps echoed down the corridor. Her heart leapt into her throat. She wished she could do something, fight, scream, cry, but when the guard opened the heavy metal door of the cell and clamped irons down on her wrists and ankles, there was no fight left in her. Not since Tortuga. Her capture had left her sore and weak. She was glad her crew could not see her now; Captain Delahaye, scourge of the Caribbean Sea, shackled by a Frenchman.

The guard led her from the cell. The prison was a labyrinthine mess; long corridors with cramped cells stacked on top of each other, filled with prisoners, their skin tarred with blood and dirt.

The men gaped as she was marched past. They had seen the proclamations bearing King Louis’s seal. Captain Jacquotte Delahaye. The mulatto who killed the Governor of Yáquimo. The woman pirate captain. The red-haired menace. They knew of her, and they knew of the five-hundred-livre reward for her capture. She was infamous, a living legend. To them, she was a sign of hope, of freedom. But soon she would be nothing more than a corpse dangling from a rope.

The guard shoved her outside. The rain hit like a wave, hot and sharp. The sun was hidden behind the clouds. Jacquotte would not get to see the light of day before it was over. The air washed over her, salty on her tongue. At least she was close to the sea, set out across the horizon like a washerwoman’s finest sheet. A knot formed in her stomach. A pang to return to the water. To her ship. Her home.

A chorus of angry voices broke through her reverie. She looked out across the courtyard where a crowd had gathered. There were sailors amongst them, officers of the French Royal Navy, but there were also regular townsfolk, who booed and jeered as she was ushered toward the gallows. They had come to watch her die. Had they heard stories of how she had clawed and scraped her way to her captaincy? Of her fearsome crew, three hundred strong? Or had they simply come to watch a woman hang? It was a rare enough occasion to warrant such a large crowd.

The executions were already underway. The crowd was in a frenzy. They shoved at each other and the guards, fists pumping in the air, their bloodlust still unsated despite the two bodies that already hung from the gallows.

She held her head up high. She would face her death with dignity. Captain Delahaye would stand tall, shake her hair from her face, and smile as the noose was tied around her neck. That would show them she wasn’t afraid. But when she went to shake out her beautiful soft red curls, she found they were grimy and knotted, matted to her head and choked with lice. They’d taken away her gold teeth, and her brown skin was filthy; grime clung to her like a hard shell, and what was left of her clothes hung about her in tatters. Jacquotte looked like a beggar, not a woman to be feared or adored.

The gallows loomed over the courtyard, a huge wooden structure affixed with three nooses, three stools, and three hanging pits. After she was hung, they would gibbet her. The iron cage awaited, and once she danced the hempen jig, they would put her on display. A warning to all pirates that they too would be carrion for the crows one day.

Lightning flashed above, and rain whipped her face. With all her remaining composure, Jacquotte ascended the stairs to the gallows. Her knees were weak as the guard dragged her up onto the stool. She rocked back and forth, trying to keep still. She looked down. Beneath her the floor of the pit was stained with excrement from when those before her had loosed their bowels in fear.

A young man, face scarred by the pox, stood beside the gallows. He was dressed in the finest red and blue French livery.

“Before us stands a woman condemned,” he said, his voice booming across the courtyard. “Jacquotte Delahaye, notorious pirate captain of Dayana’s Revenge. Delahaye has been found guilty of treason against our beloved king, His Most Christian Majesty, the King of France, Louis Dieudonné de Bourbon XIV.”

As the boy spoke, a murmur rose amongst the crowd. Jacquotte looked at them, unable to stand the sight of the pit any longer. Far fewer of them were French than she expected, and the crowd was even larger than she had first thought. Most seemed to be mulattoes like her, and there were maroons and freed slaves amongst them. Many of the French were not fond of their freedom and tensions had been strong between them for as long as Jacquotte could remember.

“The punishment for her crimes most heinous has been decreed thusly,” the crier said. The crowd’s voices had grown so loud that he had to shout to be heard. “Delahaye shall be hanged from the neck until dead.”

The noose was placed over her head. It was thick and heavy and scratched at her skin.

The crowd bellowed. The guards called for silence over the hammering rain, but it was for nought. They moved forward as one, pressing so close to the gallows that the guards had to restrain them. Jacquotte could no longer hear the boy as he decried her various treasons. The crowd shouted and yelled, shoving the guards, and some even threw refuse. Did they want her dead so badly?

The guard put his foot on the stool. Her legs quivered. The pit taunted her.

A crash. A man in the crowd struck a guard over the head. Everything descended into chaos. The crowd threw themselves at the guards. For what reason she could not tell. Rage? Joy?

Jacquotte’s heart pounded. She could have sworn she saw a face she recognized. Long dark hair. Honeyed brown skin. Was it her? Or was Jacquotte merely imagining the face she yearned for more than anything? The face she most wanted to be her last sight on this earth.

A man pulled himself up onto the gallows. In his hand was a machete. He charged the guard beside her and, with one swift motion, cut a notch from his head. While the two men became locked in battle, she strained to get another look at the crowd. She tried searching for the familiar face, but the crowd was unrelenting. Each person blurred into the next. As the mob surged toward her, the guard fell backward into the hanging pit, and knocked the stool out from beneath her.

The noose tightened around Jacquotte’s neck.

Her legs went out from under her.

She fell.