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A/N: Hey everyone! First, thanks so much for stumbling upon this story of love and tragedy that I've devoted myself to for the past several years. The Bastard Girl has been a piece of me that I've always wanted to share with everyone and I'm so glad I have the chance to present the completed series. I spent about a year and a half researching and rewriting to make sure I was presenting the most accurate and genuine version of this story that I could. The Bastard Girl is not only a romance story but is a tale about heartbreak, poverty, piracy, disabilities, and real family dysfunction. This book has seen a lot of different audiences and has undergone a lot of change. But, I'm thrilled with what I'm able to bring to you today.
While I spent a LOT of time researching and writing these characters as accurately as possible, please remember this is still a work of fiction and some details have been slightly altered to fit the plot.
The Bastard Girl is Book One of a two-part series. Book Two is the sequel to this edition titled The Cabin Boy. I will be posting The Cabin Boy after The Bastard Girl is completely posted.
Feel free to like and leave comments! I love hearing feedback from everyone!
Finally, please enjoy the story of Constantine Every and her cabin boy Edmund Hemingway in The Bastard Girl.
Melody
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Chapter 1~ The Girl of Four Names807Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡAFnUoFGIFD
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November 1694
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Oh, how I wish I could tell you I was still completely sane afterward. But, all I saw was red. Red, slick blood and patches of his flesh littering the floorboards. I shall never forget how golden the cabin boy was or how his grin was as crooked as a thief. And I shall never forget how, using the last remains of his energy, he lifted his head just enough to catch sight of me, Constantine Every, screaming into a muffling hand because I wished so much that it was I who was catching that next lash across the back.
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Darkness and the beclouding smell of salt. Those were all I could understand. I couldn’t see, couldn’t hear. I might as well be haunting some briny afterlife. But, I felt a cold hardness under my hands and knew this couldn’t have been death. My rope-bound hands scuttled across what seemed to be the floor in a hurry, feeling only damp wooden floorboards. That was when the pain came—the throbbing ache in the back of my skull. That wasn’t there before, right? Something had caused all of this. Something that…
I stopped. Why couldn’t I remember anything? Why couldn’t I even remember my own name? My mind reeled, and I could feel the blood rushing behind my eyes. I couldn’t remember my own name.
I sucked in a sharp, jolting breath and screamed as loud as I could. Was that the sound of my own voice? It was silvery and bright in the stagnant air around me. The way I spoke…It was familiar to me. I was English.
Of course. I remember.
My heart skipped a beat as I began to recall more and more. As I did, my fingers fel1 over my eyes. There was a cloth over where my eyes were supposed to be. There was a damp rag bound tightly around my head, blinding me completely. I clawed at it, trying with all my might to yank it off; yet, it refused to budge. Panicked questions swarmed my mind like a hoard of wasps in a nest.
Where am I? Who am I? How did I get here?
But, I was in the dark. All I could remember was being in the Port of Dover in England scribbling furiously in my journal…about my father.
My father! Henry Every! I was Constantine Every!
The smell of salt was intensifying and dulling out the rest of my senses tenfold. A single spot on the back of my skull throbbed. I touched it gently and hissed at the paralyzing sting that made my head feel like a ball of cotton. Someone caused this. Someone attacked me.
I wanted to scream again—to have my father hear me. I needed him to tear off the blindfold and explain everything. I couldn't even picture him anymore, yet I was sure he was alive. More sure of it than anything else.
As I began to move, I noticed something that I didn't before. My ankles were bound together tightly like my wrists, and I was still in the same clothes from my memories—brown boy's trousers and my father's long white blouse. I was barefoot, and wooden splinters dug into the soft heel of my foot. I winced whilst moving and quickly stopped, incapacitated by the swaying in my head caused by any sudden movement. Sweat trickled down my forehead and down my neck. The raw heat of the air and my panic made for an unbearable emotion.
How in the bloody hell am I going to get out? I asked myself.
Then, there was a sound. My breath caught like a rock in my throat. It was the slow creak of a door opening. I propped myself up on my knees and yelled, "Get this goddamn blindfold off this instance, you cowardly swine!”
Whoever had done this to me would pay. My father would make sure of it.
Footsteps thumped across the floorboards, keenly resembling the pounding of death's drum. A low, husky, and malevolent chuckle filled my ears.
"Why that's not very ladylike, now is it, Miss Every?"
With a brutish tug, the blindfold was snapped off and the dim light of the room was revealed at last. It was an empty storage space from the looks of it, cleared of any crates or barrels. There was nothing around for me to fight with but the floorboards themselves. Only a single open door let in the sunlight. My clothes were dirtied and nearly drenched with sweat. Pink scratches ran up my forelegs and arms. I looked as if I’d been romping through the woods.
Standing over me were several bulky men all covered in grime and sweat. Those left with hair had it oiled back in a slick ponytail. All of them were dressed in worn-out clothes and all of them were barefoot, their stench almost as thick as the smell of salt. In the middle of the filthy gang stood someone not much better looking—Thomas Tew. At the mere sight of him, I laughed out loud. I knew this man the same way every God-fearing man knows the devil. Thomas Tew was a pirate—a pirate as foul as they come. But, more than that, he’d been an enemy of my father's for quite some time, for Thomas Tew would scathe his own flesh and blood to get his grubby hands on the information of my father's whereabouts.
"Thomas Tew," I chuckled with a confident air, "I would think someone a bit more intimidating would be after me. Wouldn't you say?"
The man's thin-lipped smirk faded into a malicious growl. It was buried under the long, black horseshoe mustache growing from his face. His gray sunken-in eyes squinted at me as if I was prey being prepped for the kill. He was quick, reaching in his black coat pocket and retrieving a shiny object. Out of his calloused hand flicked a dagger so thin, it nearly missed my eye.
"Watch your tongue, girl, or I'll cut it out. It's Captain Tew to you."
A smile formed on my chapped, dry lips. He thought I was afraid of him. How amusing…
Tew crouched in front of me. I could smell the rum and tobacco smoke on him. Silently, he latched a hand onto my jaw, holding it still as he pointed the dagger underneath my right eye. Every thought disappeared from my mind. My eye darted about, only able to see its reflection on the steel surface of the blade.
"I believe you know as well as I do why you're here, bastard girl," Tew grumbled, letting my fear of going blind silence me. “I’ll send be sure word of your capture gets out to Ol' Long Ben soon wherever he is…But, I’ll need you to cooperate, my girl. He can send the ransom this way along with his head on a platter. Easy enough?”
Hot air passed through my nostrils as I tried inching away from the deadly tip of the dagger nearing my corneas.
His voice darkened, now husky and threatening. “Answer me.”
“Yes,” I said, barely aware of what I was answering.
“Brilliant. I can tell already you’ll put on a jolly good show for me. If you don’t, well…” he mused, prodding my cheek with the dagger and creating a thin trickle of blood that ran down my jaw, “things might get messy.”
I felt the warm blood drip onto my lap. The air in my lungs was choked and uneven.
Be strong, Every, I tried repeating in my mind, Fear is what the beast feeds on. And what a beast…
The man grinned an awful grin, exposing rotten teeth. His rancid breath was enough to haul my stomach up to my throat. After a lifetime of waiting, he finally lowered the dagger and stuffed it back where it belonged. Then, he stood back up and left towards the door, rambling as he went, “Act one will be tonight. Cut her binds and lock the damn door behind me. Only a few hours, Every, and I’ll get you to sing for me.”
At once, he stopped, spun around, and grinned at me. “Oh, where are my manners? Welcome aboard The Amity.”
The Amity?
Another pirate slipped out the small blade, snapped both of my binds in half, and locked the door on his way out, leaving me alone in the silence once again.
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I thought of many things whilst in my own company. I dreaded the approaching hours and wondered if I truly had enough strength to get through whatever Tew had planned for me. I’d been through hell over the past several months. But, at least then I had dry ground and my freedom for comfort. Compared to this place, my father's intimidating palace of a ship was looking mighty favorable at the moment. As the long hours passed, the memory of my mother came back to mind. I was young, maybe the age of six or seven when she’d passed. It seemed I always thought of her when I felt particularly alone. I wished I could say her memory was a safe haven for me, but looking back on her life felt like retelling a Shakespearean tragedy. My mother, Constantine Jacobs, could not marry my father because neither of them had any money or land. Even young and penniless, they loved each other very much and desired marriage. They were whispered about and shunned for their way of life. When I was born, the whispers grew louder and nastier. Indeed, I was the bastard child.
My mother was not a conventional nor respectable woman. She refused corsets. She rarely tamed her hair. I grew up the same way. As the pressures of English society infiltrated my childhood, I grew to loathe dresses so much that I wore only boy's trousers at home. I wasn’t good at the things girls were supposed to be fluent in at my age. My hands weren’t steady enough for needlepoint. And my patience wasn’t strong enough for idle female chatter. “Strange” was what was whispered amongst the townspeople when Mother and I passed by. For these reasons, I was never courted…not even by the age of seventeen—an age where most girls would already have marriage on their minds.
Though it was sometimes a stumbling block in my childhood, I never did mind being looked at differently. Oddly enough, it only increased my self-esteem. I was left to myself more often than not. After Mother died and there was no one left to dress me for respectable society, trousers were all I wore…even to school. Father told everyone I dressed that way because Mother was gone. But, he only ever said it to chase the neighbor's suspicions away. To him, I was not the bastard or the strange one or the pirate's daughter. I was simply his little girl with coal-black curls and eyes as blue as the Caribbean Sea.
A hard yank of my arm pulled me out of my slumber. A meaty hand had clasped over my wrist and shook me awake. I blinked the sleep from my eyes and saw Thomas Tew glaring at me with his skull-like eyes. My heart dropped as I realized what would be happening next.
“Let’s go, Every,” barked Thomas Tew, his orders gruff and impatient, "it's time for some answers."
I propped myself up by the palms of my hands. Alongside Tew were three big, hairy men all staring at me as if I was a long-awaited feast. In their eyes, I saw my fate solidified. There would be no escape. I rammed my back against the wall in an attempt to escape the wretched pirates. But, they merely chuckled and pulled me back. Tew’s meaty hand shoved me to the floor, one of the men contorted my arms behind my back, and the other two men pinned both of my legs onto the floor as I thrashed about. The striking oddness of the entire situation was that Tew had no means of torture…at least not to be seen.
The evil man knelt beside my left foot and slid the dagger out of his pocket once more. At the very sight, my heart jumped and my muscles turned to water.
"You know what I want. I’ve made it simple enough for your little mind, my girl. I’ll ask you just three questions today—only three—and once each of them are answered to my satisfaction or your punishment is done, we'll leave you to your own devices, eh?"
My eyes bore into his thick skull. I wished we were on even ground. I wished more than anything that a dagger would miraculously appear in my pocket as well.
"First question: How much valuable cargo did your father's ship hold last you saw it?" Tew inquired.
I fell quiet, contemplating every option. I could kick. I could scream. I could refuse to say anything at all. But, just how far could I get? Testing my boundaries, I replied, ”Why do you want to know?"
Tew made a tsk tsk sound and shared a malicious smile with the other crew members. "Wrong answer."
The blade came down on the flesh of my ankle, slitting roughly near my foreleg. I cried out at the sudden burn, feeling the warm blood trickle down my foot and puddle on the floor.
"Next question: How many men does your father have on his vessel?"
The fiery feeling stoked itself into a full-on flame in my stomach as I snapped back, ”I'd never betray my father!"
With another amused mutter of masked glee, he made two more long slits in the skin, this time connecting them by a deep slice. I screamed until my voice was searing with dry pain. I could already feel hot tears rise up in my throat like a tsunami.
"Now," Tew said, "hopefully you'll cooperate this time or I might accidentally dig a bit deeper. Perhaps then, we’ll start from the beginning. Last question: Where is your father's ship, the Fancy, located?"
My eyes burned through his, and three words were all I needed to say to send the deadly blade back down upon my flesh once more.
“Never. Telling. You."
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