Dark Tides

by Philippa Gregory

  There was a silence, as if Wussausmon could not bear to say yes.

  “You know you were afraid of the forest and I told you to take every step with knowledge? Knowing where you were and what was all around you?”

  “Yes?”

  “I feel like I have lost my knowledge,” Wussausmon said very quietly. “Sometimes when I am walking alone I feel that someone is watching me. Sometimes at night I wake in the darkness and I think someone is looking down on me. I feel as if someone is behind me.”

  “Who?” Ned asked. “Maybe an Indian? Maybe an English spy?”

  “A ghost,” Wussausmon whispered. “Perhaps Death himself is walking beside me these days, following in my tracks like a friend.”

  Ned shivered. “The times are bad, but you’ll pull through,” he said heartily. He poured another small cup of cider. “These are midwinter fears. Too much cold and darkness!”

  Wussausmon did not argue. He sipped his drink, his eyes on the red embers of the fire. “I’ll tell you something strange about those two,” he said.

  “What two?”

  “Squanto and Hobbamok. Something no Coatman knows—unless they know our language well. Squanto had been kidnapped when he was a boy, poor child. He was taken to Spain to be sold as a slave, and then to London; he lived among you Englishmen, he knew all about you. He found a ship that was sailing for here and he got himself on board, he knew what he was doing, he was determined to come back to his home. The Englishmen on board used him as a guide and he directed them to his own village, hoping to get back to his own people. But when he found his village it was empty, completely silent.”

  “Why?” Ned asked uneasily.

  “It was the killing disease that the Coatmen first brought. All his people were dead, all his friends and family were gone, died of the Coatmen’s illnesses, the Coatmen’s curse. He guided the ship onwards to where they met with some people who were still alive. He told them he was a child of the dead and his name was Squanto.”

  “Yes?” Ned said cautiously.

  “His name was not Squanto.”

  “It was not?”

  “No. Never. That was the name he used when he came back to his own people, and found them dead, when he brought the Coatmen to his fields where they would release their own dirty animals. He took a new name that the Coatmen would not understand, and he went to his own people under that name. He spoke to his people under a name that they would understand. As a warning, so they knew what he was, and that he was false to them.”

  “Squanto?”

  “Squanto is the name of a bad god: a devil, you would call him. One that brings mischief and despair.”

  Ned shivered though the fire was warm. “We were guided here by a man who called himself a devil?” he asked.

  “And Hobbamok.”

  “What does that name mean?”

  Wussausmon shrugged. “It’s almost the same. Hobbamok is another of our gods: a trickster god, one who loves wickedness and cruel play.”

  “The guides who brought us here were devils? Roaming the world to set us against one another?”

  Wussausmon nodded as the men sat in silence, as if they were listening for a ghost to answer them.

  “It makes me think, Ferryman. What did they know, those men who crossed from one world to another, who tried to live between two worlds? What did they know that they both named themselves for the bringers of grief, of trouble, of death? Did they know more than you and me? Do you think they knew that if you go from one world to another you are bound to destroy them both? Do you think they were saying that a go-between is always a translator from one hell to another?”

  “Have you told anyone this?” Ned asked. “Does Roger Williams have these names in his great dictionary of your language?”

  “I’ve told no one but you,” Wussausmon said quietly. “Who would listen but another man who goes from one world to another doing the devil’s work?”

  “I’m not doing the devil’s work,” Ned said staunchly.

  “How do you know?”

  DECEMBER 1670, VENICE

  Sarah walked briskly to the quay where Captain Shore’s ship, Sweet Hope, sat before the wide warehouse door loading goods for the return voyage, scheduled to leave within two days. As she had expected, Captain Shore was on the quayside, negotiating with much hand waving and miming to overcome the language difficulties, with a merchant who was sending Venetian glass to London. Sarah waited at a distance while the two men haggled. When they finally shook hands and the merchant turned away into the Custom House to declare his goods and get his permit, Sarah stepped forwards.

  “Eh?” Captain Shore remarked. “You here, Bathsheba? All going well? Found your antiquities?” He lowered his voice. “Where’s the husband?”

  “No,” she said awkwardly. “There is no husband. I’m sorry, but I lied to you, Captain Shore. And my name’s not Bathsheba Jolly either.”

  He was horrified. “Never mind me, child! You lied to the port officers? The papers you signed?”

  “I never mentioned a husband. They know nothing of him. But I lied about my name.”

  He turned on his heel and then came back to her. “It’s not safe! It’s not safe!” he exclaimed. “Venice is not a city for amateur deceivers! They burn people in public for forging coin, behead them for forging letters—this is a merchant city, your word has got to be good. Your name has to be known for straight dealing. If you lie—you must never be caught. And now my paperwork is wrong too. Fool that you are—I’ll have to report you. I’ve got no choice, but I’ll have to report you. What’s your real name?”

  “Sarah Stoney,” she told him, and saw him slowly realize what she had said.

  “Not Mrs. Stoney’s girl, of Reekie Warehouse at Savoury Dock?”

  She nodded.

  “Christ’s teeth! Does your ma know you’re here?”

  “No. My grandma does. She sent me.”

  “Good God! Have you run away from home? And I helped you? God spare me! I’d do anything not to offend your ma!”

  “No, no. My grandma asked me to come, and she’ll have told my mother by now. She asked me to come and find my uncle Rob. He was reported drowned, you see, but my grandma is sure… she felt…” Sarah trailed off.

  “Your grandma—the healer?”

  Sarah nodded.

  “And she wanted you to find her son?”

  Sarah nodded again.

  “The drowned one!” he exclaimed.

  “Yes, she doesn’t think he drowned.”

  “But why not send your brother? Or Mrs. Stoney herself? I’d have been proud to carry her. She could have had a cabin for free!”

  She had no answer. “It was only my grandma who wanted me to come. She was certain, she felt she just knew.”

  “Does she have the sight?” he lowered his voice to ask. “The sailors who buy her teas against fever say she has a gift. Do you have it?”

  “I don’t know,” Sarah said cautiously. “It depends who’s asking.”

  He laughed unwillingly at that. “You’re your mother’s daughter,” he said. “No fool. But—Lord—you’ve got us into trouble here. How will you set about finding him?”

  “That’s why I came to see you,” she said. “Someone told me that my uncle was not drowned, but in the well. D’you know what that means?”

  The Captain’s anxious face was suddenly as grave as if she had told him of a death. “Of course, I know what it means. They make sure that everyone knows. It means he is lost to you, child. The well is the stone cellars of the Doge’s Palace, the worst of prisons. Nobody comes out from there, but to the scaffold.”

  “There must be people who are released! People who prove their innocence?”

  He looked at her. “Maid, I’m sorry for you. This isn’t England. They’re denounced, they’re taken up, they’re tried, and then they’re gone. If they ever come out at all it’s to be hanged in the square, but mostly they just disappear, no one ever speaks of them again. If t
hey’re in the piombi—the cells under the lead roof—they die of the heat in summer. In winter, they die of cold. If they’re in the well, they get sick from the mists and the damp of the canal. And if they’re accused of heresy or treason, they put them in a cage and dangle them over the canal and let them starve to death in public.”

  “He won’t have been a heretic,” Sarah said firmly. “None of us would die for our beliefs. We’re a family that wants to live. But what could he have done that someone would denounce him? He was a doctor, a physician. He made people better and saved lives! I spoke to someone who knew him—he was trying to find a cure for quatrain fever. Who would denounce a man like that?”

  Captain Shore shrugged. “That’s what the Bocca are for. Anyone could have denounced him for anything. An unhappy patient? A rival physician? A woman? Someone who thought he was a spy because he was English? Probably, we’ll never know. Did he make enemies?”

  “I know nothing about him but that he married the Nobildonna, on the death of her first husband!” she exclaimed.

  “Nobildonna da Ricci, or Peachey, or whatever she calls herself today?” he asked. “Her that has more furniture than any woman on God’s earth?”

  “You call her da Peachey?” Sarah confirmed.

  He shrugged. “I call her what she tells me to call her. That’s the name she had put on the cargo manifest.”

  She nodded. “I’m staying with her steward. He doesn’t know I’m her niece. I gave him my false name.”

  “Signor Russo?” he asked, looking at her under his sandy eyebrows. “Handsome as a devil and charming as a snake?”

  Sarah blinked at the critical description of her only friend in Venice. “That’s him,” she agreed uncertainly.

  “Not a good place for you,” he said flatly.

  She drew closer. “Captain Shore, why not?”

  “Not my place to say,” he hesitated.

  “You wouldn’t want me to be in danger…”

  “I don’t want you to be here at all!” he said, goaded.

  “My ma would want you to protect me if you could.”

  “I know! I know!” he said miserably.

  “When we get home, I will tell her how kind you have been to me.”

  “If we ever get home at all!”

  “Help me,” Sarah urged him. “It’s my mother’s brother.”

  “Step over here.” He led her to the prow of the ship and they faced out over the water, so that no one on the quay could see their faces or guess what they were saying from the movement of their lips. “That Russo—he’s not just a collector of antiquities.”

  She waited. “He was my aunt’s steward,” she volunteered, and saw him quickly shake his head.

  “He’s an ambidexter, a cheat. He’s got more statues than could ever have come from one house. I’ve shipped hundreds of big crates for him, stones, friezes, figures, statues, one so big that it had to lie on deck and we had to clamber round it.”

  Sarah looked down the deck of the galleon, trying to imagine a statue as big as he described.

  “He sells a lot?”

  “That’s what I’m saying, he’s a trader, the biggest trader. He handles them in their hundreds.”

  “But surely, that’s not illegal?”

  “Not illegal if he buys them, and doesn’t steal them,” he confirmed. “Not illegal if he has the paperwork to export them. Not illegal if he doesn’t falsify the paperwork, saying he’s sending one thing when really he’s sending something else. Not illegal if he’s not forging them: copying and then chipping them and darkening them to pass them off as old. Not illegal if he’s not putting lots of different parts together and then saying it’s a rarity—a whole figure.”

  “Are all these crimes?”

  “The Venetians don’t want all their statues and old goods flying away to the new houses of France and Germany and England,” he said. “You’re only allowed to ship so much. You have to have a permit, and you can only get a permit if you’re an ambassador. Didn’t your mother herself tell me it was the Lady’s furniture—not antiquities but furniture?”

  Sarah nodded fearfully. “I thought that was so the Nobildonna could avoid paying duty in England.”

  “She should have paid in both countries,” he said dourly. “She’s committing a crime in two countries. And so is anyone who ships and stores for her. She’s got your mother smuggling for her.”

  “My mother! You didn’t warn her?”

  He scowled at her. “She wouldn’t hear a word against the widow.”

  Sarah checked at the thought of the trust her mother had put in Livia. “They’re sisters-in-law,” she said.

  “Not very sisterly to get your mother into a crime that could ruin her and her warehouse. The fines would bankrupt her.”

  Sarah was white. “But all this is nothing to do with my uncle. Why was he denounced?”

  Captain Shore shrugged. “Look, maid: Lord knows what she and that steward of hers were doing. Your uncle was in a nest of thieves, if not a thief himself.”

  “Then why was he denounced but not the two of them?! Livia and Signor Russo! They’re both free! She in London, living as Rob’s widow, and he is here in Venice, with no blame at all! Why is it my uncle is under arrest in the well and they are free? How can I find him? And how can I get him out?”

  He shook his head. “That you can’t do,” he said with finality. “I’m sorry for you, maid, coming all this way on a wild-goose chase. But you’ll never get him out. There’s no appeal against the Doge. Not in Venice. Once a man goes in, he never comes out.”

  * * *

  Sarah waited in the red-and-white checkered hall of the Palazzo Russo as Felipe’s mother came down the stairs and unlocked the inner door to the warehouse of statues without a word, without a smile, dour as her daughter. Guiltily Sarah wondered if they had discovered her identity, or seen her talking to Mordecai.

  “Grazie,” Sarah said awkwardly from the statue-lined hall. The woman nodded and labored back up the stairs. From the first floor her daughter stared down at Sarah, and then followed her mother out of sight.

  Alone in the warehouse, Sarah did not set to work at once but looked with fresh eyes at the shelves and shelves of statues, some of them wrapped, some of them polished and ready for sale, some of them chipped and dirty. Now that she looked carefully she could see that they were in very different styles, and some of them older and more worn than others. Now it was obvious to her that they were not all from the same collection, they must have come from many different sources. Irritated by her earlier naivety she walked down the line of the shelves on the back wall, seeing that there was no attempt at order—as there would have been if they had been properly collected and arranged for show; they were tumbled in, pell-mell, just as they had arrived. They looked as if they had been found, dug up, shipped at random, and heaped together, all waiting for sorting and cleaning and polishing. There were stains from different-colored earth, dark silt, red clay. A market of figures, like the market of feathers: a jumble brought together only to make money, severed, dirty, thrown into one place for the convenience of a buyer looking for profit, not for beauty. This was material newly found, with mud still drying on it.

  Only on one side of the warehouse, where Sarah had been invited to make her choice, were the sculptures ready for examination. Here was a selection of statues of matching colors, cleaned and polished; here was a harmony of style that looked as if it could have come from the collection of a famous connoisseur.

  The shelves of the warehouse ran the length of the house, beneath the high windows that overlooked the canal. The other side was shelved from floor to ceiling, piled with fragments of statues and some big single pieces. Sarah went all the way along, looking at the beautiful old stones, some of them chipped and dirty, some of them hacked from their bases, but all of them newly delivered to the warehouse, the dusty stone floor marked with tracks where they had been dragged in on cloths, or wheeled in on barrows. At the end of the
row Sarah realized that some tracks led, not from the inner door to the house, but to a curtain of sacking at the far end of the warehouse. Sarah followed the trail to the curtain, and when she lifted it, she saw behind it another double door set into a circular stone tower, like a stair.

  “Signora?”

  Sarah dropped the curtain with a gasp and turned around to find old Signora Russo looking in from the door to the hall.

  “Sí, sí!” she said, coming swiftly forwards, into view. She had been hidden, she thought, by the projecting statues, the old woman would not have known she was at the doorway at the far end of the warehouse. But she would certainly have seen that Sarah was at the opposite end from her workbench, in an area of the storehouse where she had no business to be.

  The woman mimed eating, pointing at her mouth and at the ceiling above her head.

  “It is time for dinner upstairs? I’ll come at once!” Sarah nodded, came quickly to the door to the hall and followed the signora up the stairs.

  “I should wash,” she said, showing her dusty hands. She ducked into her bedroom, poured water from the jug into the ewer, and washed her hands, drying them on a piece of fine old linen. When she entered the dining room Felipe was not there. There was a place set for one and a glass of wine beside the bowl of soup.

  “Just me?” She pointed at herself and the older woman nodded.

  Awkwardly, Sarah sat at the table and spooned her soup in silence. Behind her the old woman left the room and came back with a bowl of pasta and a plate of freshly washed fruit. She put both down and left Sarah to eat alone. Clearly, Signor Russo was not coming home tonight, and in his absence the women ate in the kitchen and did not bother to entertain the visitor. Sarah wondered if she were in disgrace for going out so early in the morning, or if they suspected her of spying on them. But there was nothing in the silent service of the mother or the sulky behavior of the girl to tell her either way. The warm friendliness of the first two nights had disappeared; Sarah felt uneasily as if they were watching her.

  As darkness fell, the old woman came with an ancient gold candelabra staked with wax candles, but Sarah did not want to sit in the echoing dining room with the statues like frozen companions around the walls.