Assassin's creed : Black flag - Bowden Oliver (библиотека книг .txt) 📗

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.

TEN

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.