Chapter 239: The Free City of Concordia

Some stretches of a life don’t happen one scene at a time. They happen in one lengthy breath, and afterward someone who was there for most of it, and drunk for the rest, tells you what happened.

What follows was nearly four months at Concordia, and there is no forthright way to tell them hour by hour. So we shall do what any reasonable storyteller does and pass over the days when not a soul has done any feat worth losing sleep over.

The world hadn’t yet remembered how badly it liked making trouble.

Word of a free harbor travels faster than any ship, and Concordia’s had been traveling for the better part of some months. By the turn of the year, the docks were more crowded than they had ever been, fenced plots spread back through ground that had been jungle only a few months before, and half the newcomers didn’t even know what the Code was.

They only knew it was better than whatever they had left behind.

Somewhere in that flood came trouble. Every pirate crew that finds easy plunder and loose rules eventually asks itself the same question, if the rules are already loose, why not loosen them a little more?

Most of the trouble ended with some fools getting punched and everybody forgetting about it afterward.

Some did not.

A hard core of settlers, Spanish and English alike, along with a few who would have denied belonging to either if asked politely, had brought their old hatreds across the ocean with the rest of their belongings. They discovered that the Code was much less forgiving of such things than they had expected.

The Assembly had been built to settle arguments over ditches and fence lines, but also to decide what to do with a man who would rather see his neighbor whipped than share a well with him.

The rest of Concordia learned the other half the unpleasant way.

When it finally came to a head, it came to the Code’s, at the same crossroads stone where the whole business had begun.

Four people were hanged over the whole stretch, and each drew a crowd that became a little less horrified and a little more satisfied with every rope. There were more exiles than hangings by a good margin.

Men and women were put back aboard whatever leaking tub had brought them there, given a skin of water, shoved off the beach, and told plainly that the next ship to see their faces again would be the one that sank them.

By spring, Concordia had fewer bigots and considerably more confidence in itself. Most of the town thought that was a fair exchange.

Within this flow of settlers, the engineer arrived, waiting on a wharf with a trunk full of drafting instruments and almost no sense of humor.

His name was Auguste Vallon, a narrow, sour little Frenchman who took one look at the crossroads stone, then another at the crooked old palisade around the storehouse, and proclaimed with genuine sorrow that whoever had laid out the settlement had done it blindfolded and probably drunk.

This was an unusually accurate judgment.

He put his own crew to drive stakes and run lines for a full week before a single spade was permitted to touch the earth. Then he made the labor gangs measure twice before cutting any stone, and he fainted dead away the first time he saw Doyle test a fresh batch of rum by drinking it himself. That was certainly not how any well-taught chemist would go about the business.

By the time the first fortifications on the headland were finished, its guns properly placed to rake the channel while the larger bastion and curtain wall still crawled upward behind it, the town had started calling him Monsieur Misère.

Despite all his stated objections, he eventually stopped correcting them.

The rest of what James’s fortune had purchased came in its own time. The foundry finally became worth calling a forge, with bellows roaring day and night.

Sawyer’s yard began building civilian ships from the keel upward, and molds and keel blocks cut weeks from every hull he laid down.

A schoolhouse was open with slates real horn-books, and a needle went through the whole settlement so the pox stopped to wreck havoc across the population.

The workshop district finished first, exactly as the old vote had promised. The same citizens who had complained loudest about losing that vote were, within a season, the first standing in line for tools and fittings they no longer had to sail all the way to Nassau to purchase.

One will object to almost anything until he discovers it is useful to him.

Esperanza and Milagros finally managed between them to move the Kingston convoy goods. The whole season’s worth of cargo became silver at last, and the silver coming back through that trade put the harbor well past the marsh in every private accounting anyone cared to make, vote or no vote.

Sawyer tore out the old timber piers and replaced them with stone moles. A market square rose where the fish stalls had been sprawling loose across the mud, and a customs house finally stood where months of talk had stood before it.

Concordia’s waterfront looked like it had actually intended to build a town there.

The marsh got its turn once the harvest could no longer feed every soul the harbor kept bringing in. Ditches and dykes cut fresh black ground for cane, corn, and cassava, and the earth finally began to produce the crop it had promised.

The digging went deeper than any farmer had planned, and word came back to the crossroads that whatever ruins slept beneath that swamp was closer to daylight than ever before.

Somewhere in the middle of all that hammering, the Assembly voted to build a house on the stone formation above the bay and named it headquarters for the alliance of captains.

A town founded on equality had no comfortable way to call it a palace, so nobody did.

Not a soul in the room bothered to decide whether the vote was meant as thanks for everything James had bought and built or simply as an act of self-preservation. The town would rather stand in the street drinking than spend another evening in a crowded tavern with three hundred sailors and a goat that had recently learned how to work a latch.

Either reason was sufficient.

The house went up through the whole dry season, stone and timber together.

James settled into it easily enough, with Anne there in everything but title and Milagros coming and going whenever the trade fleet brought her home.

He spent more days as chairman than captain now, sitting through conversations he would never have tolerated a year earlier, offering some piece of knowledge that no other soul in that century had any business possessing, and never explaining where it came from.

The folks haven’t asked him twice, asking once had taught them enough.

The rest of the pirate alliance scattered back to its business, as expected when there is no single fat prize left to hold them together.

Thatch chased trouble as usual, never content to sit long enough for trouble to find him first. Bonnet and Rodrigo stayed close to home between prizes, the old man still charming every soul he met and forgetting most of their names by supper.

Vane came through twice, loud both times, while Jennings and Levasseur called at the bay now and then, the way they’d visit a tavern they liked without ever renting a room there.

They used Concordia’s harbor and wanted nothing to do with its development.

Word reached Concordia, almost as an afterthought, that Black Sam had traded up to a ship of his own, a former slaver he called the Whydah.

James took the Rose out from time to time for no better reason than to keep her guns warm and his own reputation loud.

By spring, his name had traveled considerably farther than he had. El Azote de las Antillas had crossed the ocean by then, spoken in taverns from Havana to London, and mothers in Europe had begun using it on children who would not mind their manners.

It was a peculiar sort of fame for him, who had already drowned once and only meant to spend his second chance in peace.

Then march came.

James was out on the water, the Rose easy under a fair wind with nothing more serious on his mind than the next port worth visiting and whether the mansion had survived the amount of drinking its own crew had already subjected it to.

Whatever the Crown had finally decided to do about a pirate who had sunk its ships in sight of two forts, and then let the better part of Europe hear about it, it had at last made up its mind.

And now it had come looking for him.

It found him three days from home, with nothing between it and the Rose but open water.