Prologue: Life Shows Up to Say Goodbye

Why I Stole Your Life

“We are the Tadpole Kings of Guzzle Down, Rat Masters of the Pantry, Grand Under-Tablers of the Blue Anchor.”

Mary and her brother Mark are worried about their mother. They’re eight and nine, and they are preparing for murder. It doesn’t go to plan.

When Mark vanishes, and their mother’s survival demands it, Mary steps into his breeches, his name, and his life. A girl who wants to stay free must look like a boy. A boy, it turns out, can go anywhere.

From the docks of Plymouth to the battlefields of Flanders to the pirate republic of Nassau, Mary Read moves through a man’s world on borrowed identity — soldier, sailor, outlaw — guarding her secret at knife-point. The closer anyone gets, the more it costs her. And the noose doesn’t care what you’re wearing.

In a world built to break women, Mary Read steals the life she wants. The question is whether she can keep it.

Life Shows Up to Say Goodbye

The walk to the gallows is a feast of sensation. Nothing lets you know you’re alive like Death at your shoulder. Prodded up some badly-carpented steps, your wrists bound in sisal, your ankles hobbled with iron cuffs chained together, to a platform where your extinction twirls in the breeze in a loop ahead of you. On the fifth step, the protruding slant of a nailhead knocked in by some fellow not caring too much about the finish. Not caring too much about who’d be going up these steps and not coming down again. That slant nail groans through the grain of a tree chopped down and planked to bear your weight, its wood striped with every year it grew. A tree once slender as a finger. Its whole future contained in a seed you could put in your mouth and swallow.

Life shows up to say goodbye. Last taste! says the brain, that roguish companion who steered you into so many holes. Drink it in! says the old thinker. Meaning eyes and ears and nose and every hair on your body but what you have the most thirst for is air. You suck it deep into your lungs and despite the sun already fierce on your skin, the air comes in cool because the wind is running in strong from the sea. If your eyes are thirsty, nature rises up to satisfy them, willing as that sweet wench at the Fortune. Colours as vivid as they’ve ever been, any day of your life. Last moments! they shout. Nature puts on a show for those about to fertilise it, whether hung in cages over the water or dug into the ground. Nature gives thanks with yellows so yellow they punch you in the throat. Paragreets screeching laughter in the trees, green as limes. Hibiscus flowers red as a whore’s dress. The sky so blue and wide and empty it makes you want to weep for your mother, even if she never much loved you and often wished you unborn. The whole crowd gathered to watch you die ripples like a field of wheat. Behind them, bleached and clustering huts, and behind the huts, the sea shushing you with its ancient song. That old keeper of your history, laying itself over the beach again and again saying miss me, miss me.

The Governor comes out of the low white building where he has been putting on his braids and fakery — the costume required to kill with authority and without penalty.

‘Desperate men all!’ says a woman in the crowd. From what I saw in the wagon from Spanish Town, there’s little in anyone’s face to confirm her pronouncement. Featherstone looked as peaceable as if he were about to lay His Bonyness down to sleep for the night. Davies and Howl, who count laughter their chief rebellion, were grinning like children about to be caned. Absent in thought, Bonny’s head nodded with the ruts of the road like every bump was a yes. Squire Corner held a face as smooth as a lake, his thoughts invisible under the surface.

I could not look at Rackham.

Then we were bundled out and two uniformed men, who besides their uniforms seemed more roguish than any of us, prodded us into an order, wishing the least of us hanged first and the ones deemed the rascaliest rascals last, so that we might die from left to right, as though we are a sentence building to an exclamation mark. So much do they love hierarchy that they must write us into it even at death. So Davies and Howl were prodded up first to be hanged on the left as the crowd sees it, and then Bonny and myself as the fiercest fighters, and then Squire Corner, because he is Quartermaster, and His Bonyness, Featherstone, as Sailing Master, and finally Rackham, the captain who never set himself above any of us.

Gallows Point is a fine place to die, with the Fort that once surrounded it dropped into the sea by a quake many moons ago. Why hang men here, circled in the arms of the sea, and nature pushing up wild through the brick and stone? To show us what we are losing. To remind us what we will decorate when our bodies are caged and displayed, on the approach to Jamaica, until we are skeletons. Which in this rich rotting clime will not be long. The smallest injury will fester hard, as anyone knows.

Every inch of this life is a wonder. Not only the tigerish butterflies broader than your palm, or the flame-feathered birds, but the sand flies that seemingly pop in and out of existence and the small child emptying their bowels by the powder store. Goodness yes, human beings, with all their idiocy and brilliance, constructors and destroyers of the world, masters of engineering and victims of feeling. What perspective I am granted now, as I wait for my hanging. The world made suddenly vivid and jewel-like. Here is the treasure, in our hands all along, that never needed to be raided or robbed.

Is this why I change my mind?

Brother, I swear, I was ready to die. Was determined to go with my crew.

But the body has no desire to be quitted. Filled to overflowing with something whose word I hardly dare say, a word often used narrowly and often abused, so universally longed for, so seemingly hard to come upon, but right at my end it charges fiercely through my body: love. Unending and boundless love. For everything. For everyone. Even that ridiculous Governor climbing up to his separate podium to address the crowd. Love of this life, that is what changes me, riffling through my body. Every pipe and tube vigorous with fluids, wanting me to run, or wanting to run out of me. Every hair on my skin raised up like an army of soldiers stood to attention. There are words that would save my neck. And now it is everything I can do to hold on to them.

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