Excerpt from The Ballad of Jacquotte Delahaye by Briony Cameron, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Prologue
Hôpital, Saint-Domingue, January 1656

Jacquotte Delahaye was alone. The prison cell was small and dark, and the smell of brine and piss hung heavy in the humid air. It was monsoon season and rain flooded the streets. The prison was close to the sea, so close that it taunted her. Salt water dripped from the cracks in the wall and pooled at her feet, stinging her open wounds. The gash on her leg had gone green and, had she been able, she would have cut it off for fear of mortification. The jagged edges had turned black, and the exposed skin was slick with thick yellow pus. Though she could move it, the feeling had been lost there days ago.

She had no need to worry about sickness any longer. In a way, she was lucky to die a swift death. A death to be remembered. And she wanted to be remembered. For tales of her great deeds to reach the far corners of the earth, for harrowing sea shanties to be sung in her honor, and for green cabin boys to whisper at night, terrified that her ghost haunted them. Now she would live on forever, in infamy.

Jacquotte had expected the French to do away with her quickly. King Louis detested pirates and had taken to decimating all those who threatened his vast lands. She had expected her head on a spike within an hour of setting foot onshore. It would have been wise to kill her sooner, so there was no chance of a great escape back to her beloved Dayana's Revenge. But they had taken their time, and Jacquotte had spent weeks lying on the soiled straw of her cell, forced to shit in a bucket and eat rancid scraps. No one had come to rescue her. She was completely alone, all but for the rats.

Weak light streamed through the single barred window of her cell. Dawn. The bells began to toll. This morning was not the customary clangor, one chime for each hour of the day; instead, the bells pealed and trilled. At her home in Yáquimo they only played the bells so jubilantly for the weddings of Spanish admirals. But these bells were for a much grimmer affair: her execution.

Footsteps echoed down the corridor. Her heart leapt into her throat. She wished she could do something, fight, scream, cry, but when the guard opened the heavy metal door of the cell and clamped irons down on her wrists and ankles, there was no fight left in her. Not since Tortuga. Her capture had left her sore and weak. She was glad her crew could not see her now; Captain Delahaye, scourge of the Caribbean Sea, shackled by a Frenchman.

The guard led her from the cell. The prison was a labyrinthine mess; long corridors with cramped cells stacked on top of each other, filled with prisoners, their skin tarred with blood and dirt.

The men gaped as she was marched past. They had seen the proclamations bearing King Louis's seal. Captain Jacquotte Delahaye. The mulatto who killed the Governor of Yáquimo. The woman pirate captain. The red-haired menace. They knew of her, and they knew of the five- hundred-livre reward for her capture. She was infamous, a living legend. To them, she was a sign of hope, of freedom. But soon she would be nothing more than a corpse dangling from a rope.

The guard shoved her outside. The rain hit like a wave, hot and sharp. The sun was hidden behind the clouds. Jacquotte would not get to see the light of day before it was over. The air washed over her, salty on her tongue. At least she was close to the sea, set out across the horizon like a washerwoman's finest sheet. A knot formed in her stomach. A pang to return to the water. To her ship. Her home.

A chorus of angry voices broke through her reverie. She looked out across the courtyard where a crowd had gathered. There were sailors amongst them, officers of the French Royal Navy, but there were also regular townsfolk, who booed and jeered as she was ushered toward the gallows. They had come to watch her die. Had they heard stories of how she had clawed and scraped her way to her captaincy? Of her fearsome crew, three hundred strong? Or had they simply come to watch a woman hang? It was a rare enough occasion to warrant such a large crowd.

Excerpted from The Ballad of Jacquotte Delahaye by Briony Cameron. Copyright © 2024 by Briony Cameron. Excerpted by permission of Atria Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.