The testimony puzzle. Thirty-one of you found all three contradictions. Hands lied about the dates of the Charleston blockade, about whether there were prisoners aboard, and about never having seen his captain fire on his own men, which took some nerve given the captain had put a pistol ball through his knee.
Five copies went out early, drawn at random from the correct answers. Diana Cornwell, Tiffany Manley, Lydia Carollo, Mary Myhre and Barbara Worthington.
Which did you prefer?
I made the September 25th game more challenging than the cipher, and I am still not sure where the balance sits. Thirty-one of you solved it. The cipher had two hundred and seventy-six.
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The King’s Pardon
In September 1717 George I issued a proclamation. Any pirate who surrendered himself to a colonial governor by a set date would receive a full pardon for everything he had done before it. No trial. No conditions beyond the deadline.
It worked, in the sense that hundreds of men took it. Woodes Rogers arrived at New Providence the following year to find pirates queuing up to swear the oath.
Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard, took it at Bath, North Carolina, in June 1718. He surrendered to Governor Charles Eden, swore the oath, and by the letter of the thing he was a free man with no record.
He was dead in November.
The number who went back to sea is the part that interests me. Not all of them, but a great many, and quickly. Some had nothing else to do. Some found that the pardon did not come with a living attached. And some, by every account we have, simply could not stop.
What I keep thinking about is the moment in between. A man standing in a governor’s office in Bath, hearing that everything is forgiven, and having to decide whether he believes it. Whether he wants it. Whether the man who walks out of that room is the same one who walked in.
The record tells us what they did afterward. It does not tell us what any of them thought, standing there.
That is the gap I write into.
One Legend, One Fact
In 1587 a hundred and fifteen English colonists landed on Roanoke Island off the coast of what is now North Carolina. Among them was Eleanor Dare, daughter of the governor, who gave birth there to the first English child born in America. Her father sailed for supplies. When he finally got back three years later, every one of them was gone.
The Legend
Eleanor Dare carved her daughter’s fate into stone. The stones surfaced in the 1930s, dozens of them, telling the whole story of what became of the colony.
The Fact
Most of them were fakes, and the fakery was traced.
But not all of it. The first one, the stone that started the whole thing, has never been cleanly resolved either way. It has been re-examined more than once, by people with no stake in it being real, and it has not been disposed of.
That is the honest state of it. A pile of forgeries with one stone at the bottom that nobody has managed to explain away.
I find that harder to live with than a clean fake would be.
From the Trail
A reader wrote to ask what happens during the down time. A book goes out to alpha readers, then a developmental editor, then betas, then the final edit, and each of those is weeks of waiting. What do you do with that?
Write the next one.
Cozumel was written entirely inside the two years Knights took. So was The Death of Blackbeard. I did not plan it that way, it is just what the waiting is for.
The routine is unglamorous. Forty-five minutes on the treadmill, then ninety minutes writing, every day. Reading and outlining when Lynn is at work, or when the weather rules out the boat and the trails.
I also go to the places. Walk the ground, read the local histories, find out what the light does there in August. Most of that never appears on the page. It changes how I write the scene anyway.
Right now: Obsidian Covenant is drafted and in editing, and the second Lost Voices novella, The Lost Colony, is with beta readers. There is also an outline for another Echoes book and one for a standalone thriller. When I come back to those I will find out whether they hold up. Some will. Some get shelved until I can make them worth reading, and some go to the great shredder in the sky.
Braddock took two years. Knights took two years. The difference is that the second two years produced three books, and that is down to better beta readers and an editor who is worth every hour he costs me.
OUT TUESDAY
Lost Voices: The Death of Blackbeard publishes on 13 October.
Israel Hands was quartermaster aboard the Queen Anne’s Revenge. He was there for the eight days Blackbeard held Charleston hostage at the mouth of its own harbor, and he was ashore at Bath with a ruined knee when they took Teach’s head for the reward. To save his own neck he later gave a Williamsburg court the story it wanted, and disappeared into it.
What he never said aloud, he wrote down.
A note on what this is. Lost Voices is a separate line from the Echoes of Fortune thrillers. Standalone historical novellas, quieter and more literary. There is no chase and no clock running down. This one runs about sixteen thousand words, a single sitting, told by a man looking back at what he saw and what he chose to say about it.
Some histories do not threaten. They simply wait to be heard.
Free to read on Kindle Unlimited from launch day.
Twenty-four pieces
Tap one piece, then tap another, and they swap. It is the cover, so you have already seen it, which should help.
No prize on this one. The next puzzle, on the 23rd, has one.
Out October 13.
Another jigsaw sometime?
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Send this to someone
If you know somebody who would enjoy a king’s pardon that nobody kept, or a stone that will not resolve either way, this page is public and needs no signup.
Someone forward this to you?
Shadows Over Cozumel is a complete novella and it is free. A Confederate blockade runner that vanished in 1865, found on the seafloor off Mexico by people who should have left it alone. The dispatches come with it, every few weeks, and you can leave whenever you like.
From Other Authors
Two this month. I read the opening of one of them, and say so below where I did not. The descriptions are factual rather than recommendations, so decide for yourself.
Sirma by Reni Stankova
A woman disguises herself as a man and takes up arms in the nineteenth-century Balkans, based on a real person who did exactly that. The author’s own line for it is Mulan meets the nineteenth-century Balkans, which is about right.
I have not read this one. That description comes from the author rather than from me.
Dead Cat, Run by Annabelle Lewis
A high school student whose premonitions have made her a local curiosity. A professor who reads the past through his hands and cannot touch anything without seeing it. A woman who follows her own dreams without understanding why. Something older is drawing all three toward the same place.
The opening is Greek, the three Fates and a cursed oracle, but what is actually on the page is a contemporary thriller set in Boston. The best of what I read is a man in a sensory deprivation tank who has been waiting a very long time.
Darker than what I write. There is sexual violence in it, handled seriously rather than gratuitously, but it is there.
Until next time, keep hunting.
David R Leng
Echoes of Fortune. The Past Refuses to Stay Buried… It Echoes into the Present.