Assassin's Creed: Black Flag by Oliver Bowden Read Free Book Online Page A

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.

T EN
    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