Baker, Kage - Dark Mondays by Baker Kage

Author:Baker, Kage
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf

PROLOGUE

Kidd wasn't more than a lad, back then; Teach himself wasn't even a gleam in the Devil's eye, not yet.

Thirty-six captains anchored together at Cape Tiburon, summoned by Harry Morgan, bound on gold and revenge. There never was such an as-sembly of the Brethren before, nor ever afterward until that last wild party Teach held at Okracoke; and that was a sad business, at the end of it all.

But when Morgan was in his prime, a man might muster the ships and men to go looting the Spanish Main, and gentlemen called it privateering. That was, if a man's commission was in order.

That was the trick, you see; for the British ministers of state, off in London, blew hot and cold on the question of peace with Spain. A man might set off on an expedition legal as you please, and come home to find the rules had changed, with some Madrid grandee in Whitehall scream-ing to have him clapped in irons. So it required a fine and careful hand, that game.

Nobody played it better than Harry Morgan.

He came out to Barbados in old Cromwell's time, a young ensign from a family of hard men, mercenaries who'd served with distinction. You mark that; Morgan was no bond-slave boy. Hendrik Smeeks started that story out of spite, and paid dearly for it later, because Morgan sued him. Oh, Ned Teach roared and blazed, and Kidd was a mean hand with a bucket, but a Welshman with an attorney—there's a thing to frighten you!

• • •

What was Morgan doing in Barbados?

It started because Spain had the New World and its gold all to itself, like a boy locked in a room with the biggest fruitcake you ever saw. England and France, and the Dutch too, all knocked on the door politely, asking if they mightn't come in and share a slice or two; but no, Spain kept that door locked, and gobbled away at the rich stuff until it was so sick it was pissing sugar.

Sooner or later there were pinprick outposts of other nations on all the little leeward islands in the Caribbean anyway, looking enviously over at Hispaniola and the mainland where the gold was. Oliver Cromwell planned an expedition to take Hispaniola. Sir Francis Drake had taken it, a long generation before; why shouldn't the New Model Army do it too?

Ah, but Drake hadn't kept it; Drake was out for loot and revenge, not settlements and plantations and careful account-books. He'd come and gone from Hispaniola. Cromwell intended England should invest in the Caribbean. So he sent his generals out to Barbados to muster an expedi-tion. That was in 1655.

Young Harry Morgan went with those generals, and served in their ranks, and watched as they made a hash of the job. And learned from their mistakes.

Having failed to take Hispaniola (and what a failure it was: supplies held up, messages crossed, storms, fever, cowardice, infighting...), the generals looked around for some sop, any sop, to offer Cromwell, so as to keep their heads on their shoulders when they got home.

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