The Ghost Ship by Kate Mosse: Featured Excerpt

Prologue

Las Palmas de Gran Canaria

Friday, 8 October 1621

Today I am sentenced to swing. Before the sun rises, I will be taken from here to a place of execution and there, hanged by the neck until I am dead.

My pretty white neck.

Friends, I am innocent of the charge set against me. My other crimes, I do not deny. My actions were measured, they were just. I can still feel the slip of blood between my fingers, still smell the fear. Later, the hate down below deck and the stench of men confined at sea for month upon month. Their disbelief, too, that a woman could be so cruel. So, yes, I confess I have killed, but only ever in self-defence or to protect those I love. Never for gain. Never without due cause.

Those were the words I spoke at my trial, but the men of the Spanish court did not listen. The judges – hypocrites all – gasping for details. They could not believe a woman capable of such devilry, yet they pronounced me guilty all the same.

Outside my window, the sky is growing white, giving shape back to the scaffold and to my cell: the rough bunk affixed to the floor; a blanket lousy with fleas; my trencher and tankard; a night pot. I have scratched my initials upon the bricks so future pris- oners will know that, for nigh-on six weeks in the year of Our Lord 1621, a woman was here confined: LRJ, captain and commander, innocent of the crime for which she was condemned.

I can hear the bells of the cathedral of Santa Ana marking the start of another day. At the port, the fishermen will be mending their nets, their wives gutting the morning’s catch and their children curing seaweed with smoke on the sand. In the harbour, the wind will be whispering in the shrouds and snap- ping at the rigging of the tall ships as they prepare to journey south to the Cape of Good Hope where two oceans meet.

How I miss the lilt and sway of the waves beneath my feet, the buck and the tilt. The solitude of the night-watch and the black sky scattered silver with stars. The endless, treacherous, beautiful shifting water.

Such freedom, such liberty.

In the Casas Consistoriales, the Town Hall, scribes will be preparing their paper and ink. The priest will be sharpening his prayers and preparing to hear my confession, expecting repent- ance and a desire for absolution. I shall not give him that satisfaction.

Friends, it was my grandmother who taught me the impor- tance of telling one’s own story, of not allowing the words of others to stand for us. Lies that snare and trap. So, in these last moments, I have a final question to put before you, a question I find I still cannot answer for myself.

Is a murderer born, or is she made?

The Bible says that God put his mark on Cain and condemned him to be a restless wanderer. Do I have such a mark? Is there such a thing as bad blood?

Some are born to evil. That is what the prosecutor said as he pronounced sentence. And how could I – the daughter of a murderer, the granddaughter of a murderer – refute that? Were the seeds already sown in my childhood spent among the wooden masts of the fluyts and flat-bottomed barges of Amsterdam? In that boarding house in Kalverstraat when I became what I am? In La Rochelle sailing with the Old Moon into harbour on that late October tide one year ago? Or the instant I realised I was in love, and so had everything to lose? Even at this eleventh hour, I still believe my lover will save me. After everything we have seen, all we have been to one another, I have faith.

The sky is now the palest of blues. I believed myself composed, but I see how my hand is shaking as I write these final words. I have paid the guard well to smuggle away these papers, and I have to pray that he will be honest.

It is quiet in the gaol. I’m told it is always so on a day of execution. Can you hear it, the silence? No banging on the bars, no shouting or pleas for clemency, tobacco or water, no imagined malady come on during the hours of darkness. Even the rats are still. There is only the clink of keys and boots as the gaoler makes his way, flanked by four soldiers, for they think I am wild.

Outside the prison walls, it is different. I can hear the growing roar and clamour of the populace gathering at the gate. Armed with their needlework and their lace, flasks full of Canarian wine and parasols to shelter them from the rising sun. Until today, this has been the hottest autumn on record.

It is nearly time.

I have rejected the hood. I want to see the burguesía and the common people alike, all who have come on this dull morning in October to witness the execution of the hellion, the notorious she-captain of the seas. I will give them a spectacle, make no mistake. They will get their entertainment, even though they have dressed me in women’s weeds and I can barely breathe. I petitioned to be allowed my own clothes, but they forced on me this last indignation of petticoats and stays. I came into this world as a woman, and I am condemned to leave it as one.

I have heard the guards say that it will be the largest crowd ever for a hanging and that, I admit, also pleases me. They have seen corsairs swing before, at this meeting point of the Atlantic Ocean and the Barbary Coast where piracy is a fact of life, but it is only right that I should be such a draw. I am, indeed, notorious, feared over sea and land. I am the one they did not believe could exist.

I am the commander of the Ghost Ship.

Copyright © 2023 by Kate Mosse. All rights reserved.

About The Ghost Ship by Kate Mosse:

The Barbary Coast, 1621. A mysterious vessel floats silently on the water. It is known only as the Ghost Ship. For months it has hunted pirates to liberate those enslaved by corsairs, manned by a courageous crew of mariners from Italy and France, Holland and the Canary Islands.

But the bravest men on board are not who they seem. And the stakes could not be higher. If arrested, they will be hanged for their crimes. Can they survive the journey and escape their fate?

A sweeping and epic love story, ranging from France in 1610 to Amsterdam and the Canary Islands in the 1620s, The Ghost Ship is a thrilling novel of adventure and buccaneering, love and revenge, stolen fortunes and hidden secrets on the high seas.