For Tim, Lucy, Rory and Alice.
My crewmates.
Dear Reader,
You can read more about me, or sign up for new releases, giveaways, and other news at www.kate-castle.com. Subscribe to my Readers’ Club today for a gift!
Thanks for reading,
Love,
Kate x
Though based on a true story and real characters, this is a work of fiction and of the author’s imagination.
Text copyright © Kate Castle 2021.
All rights reserved.
No part of this eBook may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the express permission of the publisher.
Published by Dark Horse Publishing LLP
www.darkhorsepublishing.co.uk
eBook ISBN: 978-1-9169031-0-4
First Edition: May 2021
Cover design by Mary O’Brien.
* Cover quotes taken from ARC reader reviews.
Front cover illustration copyright Yuliya Derbisheva © 123RF.com
Back cover illustration copyright Tetiana Syrytsyna © 123RF.com
‘The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.’
-Marcel Proust
Table of Contents
Dedication & Copyright
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Thank You for Reading!
Are you Ready for More?
About the Author
Author’s Note & Acknowledgements
Glossary & Fun Facts
1
My name, in those days, was Anne Bonny.
I’m told I was born in Cork, Ireland, sometime before 1700, but my father never told me the year, nor the day nor month of my birth. I should think he never really cared enough to know. Later, I would imagine I was born at sea in a night tempest; mountainous waves throwing the ship around like a twig in a rolling barrel of grog, my mother spread-eagled on the deck, her hair splayed out, screaming like a wild banshee. The sea has always felt like my true birthplace. It is where I found myself. It is where I found Mary.
I regret that neither my birth nor my early life was quite that romantic, however. I was an illegitimate child of my father – a lawyer – and his housemaid. To escape the scandal, and his wife’s wrath, my father dressed me as a boy and passed me off as a young clerk, opening legal letters and such. That was until my chest started to grow in, and my rosy cheeks and lips likened to those of a lady. Gentlemen and not-so-gentle-men began to pay me attention. Whether or not they knew I was a lass I do not know, but they nevertheless took a liking to me, be it a boy or girl they were after. More than once, I had to fight a fellow off, which was not a problem for me. My father used to tell me I inherited my rage from my mother – we both were crowned with the virago’s tell-tale tangle of fire-red hair – but I reckon he had more than a little to do with it. Eventually, when one particularly over-amorous lawyer made his advances, I stabbed him in the neck with a paperknife. He spent some time in the infirmary and it kicked up a fair old stink with my father. Before long, the truth of both my sex and my parentage was uncovered and my father left Ireland a disgraced man – with my birth mother and me in tow – to start a new life in Charles Town, Carolina.
That first day of our voyage to the colonies sticks clear and sharp in my memory, like the pleasure-pain prick of a hatpin. It is a memory almost as sharp as the first time I saw Mary.
Have you ever crawled up the bowsprit, at the very foremost point of a schooner? The ocean is all you can see. All you can smell and hear. A five-foot scooch backwards and the topsail and fore rigging will surround you. But sit up at the tip of the bowsprit and there is nothing but unsullied water all around.
I remember straddling it on that day, my boots crossed tight underneath at the ankles, watching two dozen gulls dip and swoop above my head, my eyes squinting in the afternoon sun. Looking out over the vast ocean, the wind whipping at my curls, I felt like a bird myself. I felt free. I felt like home.
2
My father practised the law for a while without much success, before finding his fortune in merchandise and buying a plantation in Charles Town. After losing him to his trade and my mother to a fever, my unruly reputation only grew. Increasingly drawn to the sea, I frequented the taverns in Charles Town’s port: drinking, swiving and fighting with the seafaring men I found there. Eventually, I took a shine to a smart sailor by the name of James Bonny, who dragged me from a fight in an alehouse and allowed me to stow away on his voyages, upon my insistence of course.
James was poor, and somewhat dull, but his livelihood fostered my passion for the ocean. Within a month he had proposed, much to my father’s fury. My father tried to straighten me out by matching me with a fine young man with a good reputation and a large inheritance, but I beat that fellow to within the last fingerbreadth of his life when he tried to lay with me against my wishes. I married James in secret soon after. When my father uncovered our marriage, he disowned me. In a blind rage, I set fire to his plantation, and James and I fled Charles Town on a schooner sailing to Nassau, New Providence.
New Providence was a filthy, lawless island, full of ramshackle inns and brothel houses, bursting at its seams with pirates, prostitutes and privateers. All were out for themselves. I fell in love with it immediately. I soon began spending all my time in the alehouses and brothels that lined Nassau Port, much to the annoyance of my new husband who had secured respectable employment helping to clean up
