West End, Grand Bahama Island

August 1776

The last time I ever went wrecking was August of my fifteenth year. I was still just a wild girl then, living in West End, not a thought in my head about war yet, nor about spying. My mind was only on Mama.

She’d passed on to heaven only a week earlier, but in my imagination, she was still breathing. Still singing to herself as she stirred the pepper pot soup. Still telling me stories about her girlhood days in España as she worked a comb through my sea-brined hair.

When Sewel came to fetch me to go wrecking—Sewel was Mama’s husband, not my real papa—he found me in the garden pulling weeds and daydreaming of the great castle in Baiona that Mama used to run through barefoot when she was my age.

“Francisca,” he said, in the same gravelly voice he used with the goats and the swine.

I set my spade down and shaded my eyes as I looked up. With the afternoon sun over his shoulders, I couldn’t see his face—only that he was already swaying. “Yes, sir?”

“Storm’s coming in fast, and the currents is swirling round Valparaíso wreck.” He said it Val-prizo. Not how Mama said it, the right way, like our Spanish forebears. “Get your diving trousers on and don’t make me wait, else you’ll be swimming out there, understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

He leaned over and spat tobacco so close to me I could almost taste it. Then he turned down the beach trail, grunting with every step he took on his foot with the missing toes.

I tugged my gardening apron off and hurried home, eagerness and dread tumbling in my stomach. I loved diving wrecks more than anything, but it meant spending time alone with Sewel.

Pushing through the door, I stopped to breathe in the last traces of Mama’s scent—a mix of sweet coconut and the sour sweat that had come when she’d taken to bed for good. My gaze went to the empty mattress, then to the dirty pots stacked by the basin and the sand dusting the planks beneath my feet. I’d always taken pride in this house. It was made of salvaged ship’s timbers, puzzled together with pine logs I’d helped cut down myself. At night, with whisper of the surf drifting in, it felt like living inside a great conch shell. But since losing Mama, nothing felt the same.

Kneeling before the trunk, I found the trousers and shirt I used for diving and changed into them, leaving my jumper and sweaty shift where they fell. Then I sprinted to the beach, my stride long and smooth without petticoats slowing me.

As I came through the trees, I saw thick clouds bunching on the horizon and whispered a quick prayer they’d stay there. In West End, two things that never stayed away long enough were hurricanes and hunger.

Sewel had already gotten the wherry past the breakers. Two other boats bobbed out there as well—our usual wrecking crew. Also every inhabitant on our island. Jonah Baines and his boys were pressed together in their little red skiff, three heads of equal height gleaming like polished copper. Moses Wiggins and his daughter Mercy floated closer to shore, Mercy waving when she saw me.