Dark Tides

by Philippa Gregory

  She shook her head with silent conviction.

  “Ah, you think you are like the old grandma—that you would know by magic?”

  “We never speak of magic,” she said quickly. “But my grandma would have said prayers for her son’s soul if she had felt his death in her heart.”

  His dark eyes were filled with sympathy. “Cara, perhaps you should tell her to pray.”

  “Could we write to him? And see if he’s still alive?”

  “Yes, we could write to him. But anything you write would be read by the governor of the lazaretto. They would probably not allow him to reply—and any reply would be passed through smoke or dipped in vinegar to clean it before it could come to you. It would take days, weeks. If he’s alive at all.”

  “But we could get him a message?”

  He shrugged. “If you wish it. But what is there to say to a man condemned to death, and waking each day knowing death is coming? What is there to tell him? He’ll know by now that his wife denounced him and left Venice.”

  “He doesn’t know she went to London and is stealing from my mother!” Sarah said sharply.

  He looked at her with compassion. “Why torture him?” he asked. “He can do nothing to help his sister or punish his wife.”

  She turned to the window and looked down at the busy canal below. He saw her shoulders slump in defeat. “You’re right,” she said. “You’re right. It would be to torture him. I won’t tell him that. I will write only to say that we have not forgotten him, and that his mother loves him, that we all miss him. That’s all she asked me to do—to see that he was not dead. I can go home and tell her that at least.”

  “Nobody could ask for more,” he assured her. “Nobody could do more. And you are right not to fight against a certainty. Just write to say good-bye.”

  She nodded, her face grave. “If I write a farewell, can you promise me that you will get it to him?”

  “I can try,” he said. “Don’t write anything that would incriminate me. And remember that it has to be left open—anyone can read it, everyone will read it.”

  He turned to the sideboard, pushed the map aside, and gave her a quill and a bottle of ink.

  DECEMBER 1670, LONDON

  Sir James sent Livia home to the warehouse escorted by Glib. Silently, the two of them took a skiff to the Horsleydown Stairs, and sulkily he walked her to the warehouse door.

  “When does she leave?” she demanded.

  “Who?” he asked, pretending to ignorance.

  “The old crone. The aunt.”

  He shook his head. “She stays in the house till we all go north.”

  “He listens to her? She advises him?”

  He hesitated.

  “Servants know everything,” Livia said to him sharply. “Don’t dream of lying to me now.”

  “He listens to her,” he agreed. “And Lord! She’s a tyrant! We all jump to her bidding.”

  “Tell them that they will have an easier mistress with me,” Livia said rapidly, pressing a silver sixpence into his palm. “Tell them that it would be better for us all if she went to her Dower House now—and left him alone in London. Promise them that I will be a new mistress, generous with leftovers for those in the kitchen, and with my old clothes to the maids. Everyone will be bettered when I come to Northside Manor and Avery House. You, especially.”

  “I’ll try,” he said, unconvinced. “But she’s well liked in Yorkshire.”

  “Pffft!” Livia waved away the objection. “She is nobody. I am the new mistress of Northside Manor. Tell them they had better think about me and pleasing me!”

  “And when’s the wedding?” Glib asked as they parted at the warehouse door.

  She looked sharply at him as if she suspected him of insolence, as if she feared that the servants knew all about this too. “Before Lent,” she swore. “And you remember that!”

  DECEMBER 1670, VENICE

  Dear Uncle Robert,

  I am your niece, Sarah Stoney, come toVenice on the ship Sweet Hope with a message from your mother. She sends her blessing—she says you always found your own way widdershins on the ebb at the full.

  This is a letter to say farewell, but your ma, my grandma, knows best and she is certain we will meet on a celestial shore.

  Sarah

  She handed the letter to Felipe.

  “These English words!” he said. “How can you even write them?”

  “My grandma is a countrywoman,” Sarah said carelessly. “I thought Rob would like to hear her, as she speaks. Can you get it to him?”

  “They have food and drink delivered every day,” he said. “I’ll take this to the Fondamente Nuove, and get one of the boats to take it.”

  “And send this,” Sarah said. From her placket she drew out an old worn purse, which had once been red, but was now rusty brown.

  “The porters will steal any money,” he warned. He hefted it in his hand. “Light,” he said at once, though he heard the coins chink.

  “It’s not money. It’s valueless to anyone but my grandma,” Sarah said. “She used to collect little tokens and clippings of old coins. As soon as he sees them, he’ll know I am who I say. It’ll give him comfort.”

  Felipe tossed the purse in the air and caught it. “You are the strangest of families,” he told her. “Are all English people quite mad?”

  She laughed. “That’s nothing,” she said. “You should see my grandma with a sick baby, you would think she was breathing life into it.”

  He crossed himself. “I’ll send this now,” he said. “And we have to pack the last of the Nobildonna’s treasures.”

  “You’re going to send her all that she asked for?” Sarah asked curiously. “You’re still doing her bidding?”

  “Of course. Business is business, she can sell them, and give me my share,” he said. “And besides, they are on the cargo manifest. You forget how we Venetians are about reports. Captain Shore would rather sink to the bottom of the lagoon than go into the Custom House and change his cargo declaration.”

  Sarah laughed and folded up the map. “May I keep this?”

  “If you wish.”

  “I’d just like to know the island as we go past it,” she said. “To say good-bye.”

  DECEMBER 1670, HADLEY, NEW ENGLAND

  Ned went out through the kitchen door to give the dried fruit to Mrs. Rose. She was stewing a pot of succotash in the fireplace, native food in an English kettle.

  “I brought you these.” Ned put the woven basket of fruit on the table.

  “I’m grateful,” she said, and tipped them into the storage jar and gave him back the basket. He could see her hands were shaking with fear.

  “You’ll have heard the news?” he asked.

  She looked strained. “I was in the room when the minister read the letter from Plymouth to the guests,” she said. “It’s just as I feared. Only worse. It’s war, isn’t it? Between us and the Indians?”

  “They’ve ordered me into town,” he said. “I’ll have to leave my home and my land and my ferry as soon as it thaws.”

  “We’ll have no chance against them out here,” she said. She tried to put a cork into the top of the storage jar and she fumbled with shaking hands.

  Ned took it from her and corked the jar. “It may come to nothing,” he told her. “We’ve had scares before, and it’s come to nothing. We’ve marched out before and…”

  “We’ve done more than march, we’ve wiped them out,” she said fiercely. “Over and over again. Last time, against the Pequot, we burned their village and them inside it. Those children that weren’t roasted alive, we sent into slavery. We told them to forget their families, to never say their tribal name. We wiped them out, ended their line. But they just melt into the forest and then they come back. They keep coming, from the west, from the south, and the more we kill, the more spring up. And they never learn, they go on refusing us, blocking our way.”

  “No, no, they are just like us,” Ned protested. “They
just want to keep their own lands and us on ours, they want to live at peace.”

  She shook her head. “I can’t bear it,” she told him flatly. “When my time is up I’m going to ask the minister to find me a servant’s place in Boston rather than a plot here. I want to be among my own. I want to be in a town with a stone wall around it. I want to be somewhere that the savages are ordered to come to answer, where they are hanged on the green, where they are enslaved, not somewhere that they can stroll up the street whenever they like, or pitch one of their houses on our common, as if it was shared land.”

  “Leave here?”

  “You could come too!” she said boldly. “You could get a post as a servant, a footman, or a groom or something. Or perhaps you could be an agent to a slave trader? Shipping men into slavery in the Sugar Islands and sugar and rum on the return voyage? That’s a good business! You could get a job with a factor, we could go together? We could find work together?” Her color rose as she tried to persuade him, her face strained with anxiety. “It’d be hard work but better work than stuck out here waiting to be scalped. If you don’t want to fight for settlers, you don’t have to! You don’t have to command the militia if you have no stomach for it. We could be safe in Boston.”

  “I’m not afraid to fight!” Ned was stung into objection. “It’s not that I won’t serve! It’s that they’re not my enemies. I won’t kill men who are not my enemies.”

  “They’re not now,” she pointed out. “But they will be in the spring. You won’t open your door to your friend then. You’ll open your door and get an arrow through your gut and feel a tomahawk cleave your forehead.”

  DECEMBER 1670, LONDON

  Alys was lighting Alinor’s fire, on her knees before the fireplace, carefully placing the pieces of coal on the kindling, then sitting back with satisfaction when the little blaze licked its way along the sticks and then caught.

  “At least the evenings are getting lighter,” she said. “The year has turned.”

  “And who knows what this new year might bring,” Alinor said.

  “Ma, you’re not thinking that Sarah will bring Rob home, are you? Because you know that’s really…”

  “Really?”

  “It’s not possible, Ma. Whatever we might wish. Whatever you might feel. I just pray to God that she comes back safe.”

  “Captain Shore will guard her.”

  “I know he will. But for you to send her all that way!”

  “She’s got a good head on her shoulders, I trust her.”

  “You could say all the same for Rob; and he never came home.”

  “I believe he’s coming home now. I dreamed of him. I’m sure.”

  “I know it,” Alys cut across her mother. “I know you’re sure. But I’m waiting and waiting for her and I don’t have your certainty, and I don’t have your dreams. I am too earthly to have your visions. I just want my little girl home again.”

  Alinor heard the tremor in her daughter’s voice. “Be brave,” she said quietly. “Be patient. And trust her.”

  There was silence in the little room.

  “Where’s Livia today?” Alinor changed the subject. “Does she still go to the house, though she has nothing to sell?”

  “Not every day,” Alys replied. “There’s nothing for her to do here, until her antiquities arrive.”

  “And then she will sell them again? As she did before?”

  “Aye, and repay us for the voyage and storage again.”

  “And then again, and again?”

  “Yes, that’s the plan. And move to a warehouse where she can show her goods to customers and sell them there. You know this, Ma. Why ask me?”

  “She puzzles me now, as she’s always done. She leaves her child with us: you have him most mornings, and his nursemaid brings him to me in the afternoon. What’s she doing all day? How come she’s Rob’s widow, and yet lives off us, making you pay for her shipping even when she’s got money at the goldsmith’s? She complains that we’re poor, that Tabs isn’t a proper maid, that the food is badly cooked; but we’ve seen nothing of her sale money? She says she wants us to get another warehouse to ship her goods; but not how much she’ll put into it? She asks you to borrow for it. She’s young and might look for another husband, and so I wonder if that’s what she’s doing when she’s out every day?”

  Alys flushed. “She is a perfectly good mother. She loves Matteo.”

  “When she’s with him.”

  “She brings in more money to this family than she costs! She’s repaid for the first shipping and storage and she’ll repay for the second when it arrives. And she’s going to buy the new warehouse with us?”

  “A gift? Her gift to us?”

  Alys bit her lip.

  “And she will remain here with us, and not remarry?”

  Alys turned to her mother. “Ma, she’s such good company for me. It’s such a pleasure for me to have her here, and little Matteo. It’s like we have a beautiful bird in the house. I want her to walk out freely and come back to us, without being questioned. I want her to make her home here with us. I love her as a sister, I don’t want her to think about remarrying and leaving. I don’t want her to think she has to pay rent, or provide for us. I want her to live off us, and live with us. I want her to stay forever. I am happy to provide for her.”

  “My dear, d’you really think she won’t remarry?”

  “You never did! I didn’t!”

  Alinor nodded, her eyes on the flames. “I don’t think Livia is a woman like us,” was all she said.

  DECEMBER 1670, VENICE

  The Sweet Hope was to sail on the ebb tide of the evening, lit by a huge cold moon, which sat, bright as a gleaming globe, on the horizon, making the canal into glassy black and turning the brightly colored houses into shades of gray. The canal was busy with workers going home for the night, and with merrymakers starting to go out; all the gondolas carried bobbing lanterns on their prows and lights gleamed on the waters from the open water gates of the great houses.

  Captain Shore, on the quayside before the Custom House, blazing with flambeaux, had a brusque nod for Felipe and a smile for Sarah as they waited to have their papers checked at the gangplank, but he did not speak to either of them until the officials had released them and they were ready to board.

  “All well?” he asked shortly. “For we sail as soon as the pedotti says so, we’re taking on fresh stores at Sant’ Erasmo, and we can’t be delayed.”

  “All well,” Felipe said. Sarah nodded.

  “Stow your things,” the Captain commanded. To Sarah he said: “You can have your old cabin, my dear.” He turned to Felipe: “You’ll have to share with the first mate, unless you want to pay extra for a private cabin?”

  Felipe bowed his head. “I’ll pay, Captain,” he said smoothly.

  The Custom House official came with a sheaf of papers and seals. Captain Shore checked them meticulously, signed, and exchanged documents, paid his mooring fees and the duty on the goods he was shipping, and then stepped up the gangplank. Behind him followed the pedotti, who unsheathed his knife. He cut off the official seals from the wheel of the ship and nodded to the Captain that they were ready to leave. Captain Shore shouted the order to cast off for’ard, the gangplank was shipped aboard, the fore line was thrown, caught, and taken in. The current swung the ship so that it nosed out into the channel, as Sarah came out of her cabin to see the little barges fix their lines on the ship and draw her forward. The pedotti shouted for the stern line to be released and the barges guided the ship out into the main channel where the ebbing tide drew them smoothly down the Grand Canal, past palaces, the glimpse of St. Mark’s Square, past the Doge’s Palace: every window lighted bright, as justice never sleeps, and then out into the lagoon. They passed the island of Vignole on the port side, and saw ahead the flicker of the torches burning on the end of the pier of Sant’ Erasmo. As the pedotti shouted commands, the barges drew the galleon to the pier, and the farmers started carrying their
baskets of produce towards the ship.

  Felipe joined Sarah on deck as she stared out into the gathering darkness. “You are looking for your uncle’s prison?”

  She nodded. “Is that it?” She pointed north over the flat farmland, dark against the dark water, to the rooftop of the great building, which gleamed in the moonlight like a huge granary, one story with a huge barn door, bigger even than the Venice Custom House, pale in the moonlight. “The place that looks like a castle?”

  “That’s it,” he said. “But those are chimneys, not castellations. Every cell has its own fire and chimney so those who are quarantined don’t mess together. Your uncle Rob will have lived in the doctor’s house, under guard. The big doors open to a double warehouse for the goods.”

  “Lived?” She picked him up on the word. “You believe he is dead?”

  He spread his hands. “Cara mia, neither of us knows, and the people who know don’t care. If he is not dead now, he will be soon. Ahimè, alas, if not now then later. Say a prayer for him, say good-bye to him.”

  The order came to run the gangplank on board, cast off, and raise the sails as the barges released the ship and she moved into the deep-water channel south of Sant’ Erasmo. One by one, the barges took in their lines, and peeled off back to Venice. Sarah waited till the barges had left, and then went to the companionway and called up for permission to come on the quarterdeck.

  “Aye, you can come up,” Captain Shore said; he was standing behind the pedotti, who still had command of the ship. The Captain was looking skywards, at his unfurling sails stretching to take the light wind. The moonlight was so bright it was like a silvery dawn, with mist rolling along the dark water.