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A Company of Rogues sees the conclusion of Trudy Morgan-Cole’s trilogy of historical novels based on the settling of Cupid’s Cove, Newfoundland, and surrounding areas in the early seventeenth century. Struck by the absence of women in the recorded history of English Newfoundland, Morgan-Cole wanted to write a book that would fill that gap by imagining women back into the story. With this in mind, Morgan-Cole penned The Cupids Trilogy with a focus on women, their fortitude, and their endurance. These women have dreams of freedom, prosperity, and kinship. They hope to live and thrive alongside one another and be rewarded for their hard work. They encounter obstacles and hardships they hadn’t imagined, working together to pull through and move forward to make this new wild place their home. 

The first is A Roll of the Bones and the second is Such Miracles and Mischiefs.

In the third instalment, Morgan-Cole’s women are eager to learn and adapt to their new environment. In addition to carrying out tasks they know well, like sewing and cooking, they try their hand at things they’ve never done before, like gardening and preserving fish. Furthermore, they form a strong support system that allows them to bring children into this new world, nurture them, and keep them safe. The women are the heart of the settlement: they build it, shape it, and carry it forward. 

“Home” is the focus of this third book of the trilogy. Politically, the landscape has changed – a divide has grown between the men of London and the men of Bristol. The Bristol men break away from Cupid’s Cove to start a new settlement at Harbour Grace, gentlemen and servants working side by side, life in the New Found Land a great equalizer. Together, they must find ways to not only survive, but thrive, in this harsh new land. Where there is hope, there is home. 

The building up of one home, however, might be the undoing of another: a theme Morgan-Cole explores further in A Company of Rogues. With the introduction of Tisquantum — a Patuxet man — as a transient member of the colony, the settlers start questioning their beliefs about the people who lived here before them. The themes of Morgan-Cole’s books are ones that still resonate today: home, belonging, immigration, and colonization. 

 This is not a dry rendering of history – Morgan-Cole creates convincing characters, dialogue-rich prose, and tension in the narrative. Kathryn begins to fill the need for a midwife; Nancy worries she won’t know how to mother her own child; Ned feels the call from the sea; two men must find their way through a blizzard; Tisquantum agrees to act as translator for a chance to sail home; Daisy worries she is a curse on any man who marries her; Kathryn’s passion for stories is re-ignited when books are brought to the colony; a group of men in the next cove turn to piracy, causing trouble for the settlers and threatening to reveal a dark secret. 

The title, A Company of Rogues, alludes to Thomas Willoughby and his cohorts in Carbonear who chose piracy as their vocation. But perhaps it also alludes to the English settlers themselves — knowingly or unknowingly — who have taken ownership of land that is not theirs to take, starting a centuries-long genocide of the Indigenous Peoples of North America. 

Morgan-Cole’s prose is effortless to read, taking the reader on a journey into the past where the coastline is rugged and beautiful, the everyday tasks are brutal but necessary, and the people are adaptable and hopeful and long for a place to call home. 

A Company of Rogues was published by Breakwater Books.