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

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