Two days later they sailed on past the grey Gibraltar rock into the Mediterranean, as wide and endless to the eye as the North sea of Trotternish. But before that they wrapped Patrick Molloy, and the blond sailor, dead from his cannon-shattered leg, in weighted canvas and cast them into the sea.
Marsali stood on the deck, watching, with Ishbel beside her, telling her beads with solemn face. It was the first Ishbel had come onto the deck since the battle with the pirate ship. She came then only on hearing that no priest, no minister, nor even the master of the ship would say the slightest of holy words over the dead.
‘Pagans,’ she said bitterly, and then said, strong for all her fears, ‘Come, girl, we will give them our prayers, ’tis better than none at all.’ And so they did, and Marsali found herself crying, the while. Antoine watched, dimly mystified and said afterwards, why, for were they not strangers to her?
‘They were men,’ she said. ‘They were still men,’ and she heard the echoes of words passed over his own head by herself and her own callous father.
‘Will they not go to heaven, now, and be happier than here on earth?’ he said, impulsively, like a child.
‘How should I know?’ she demanded, through tears.
‘Does not your church so tell you?’
‘My church tells me that all men have a stake in heaven, but only God knows who wins or loses it.’
‘Then they have had their chance, in a fair fight,’ Antoine said sharply. ‘If they have lost, ’tis surely their own affair. I would save my tears for those with no stake at all.’
She kept her back to him, and her eyes on the distant foamy measure of measureless sea, where Patrick Molloy was now, somewhere among sea worms and fishes in the eerie darkness below. She said, peering out into the receding distance, the wind dragging her heavy hair loose over her shoulders, ‘You are not natural, Antoine.’
‘But by your own lights, that is justice, is it not?’
‘You have no heart, surely. No tears, no prayers, no feelings at all.’
‘Nor anger, nor vengeance. Vengeance killed Patrick Molloy; a thirst for vengeance and a taste for war.’
Marsali said suddenly, ‘It was the prince killed Patrick Molloy, just as sure as he killed my brother, and Rory, and the Dear knows how many more … He would not have been here ever, but home in some kind Irish place, were it not for the Cause.’
‘Ah, the Cause, the Cause. Lassie, I have thought that men create kings to have someone to blame when the world goes wrong. Never you mind, in a week we will be in France and another week, Avignon. Then I will take you to bonnie Tearlach, and you can be telling him your grievances. If he will listen.’
She smiled suddenly, bitterly, and without thinking her hand found its way to the carved ivory hilt of the pistol she carried bravely now, in the kirtle of her dress, like a pirate-woman, herself. ‘I am thinking he will listen, Antoine, to what I have to say.’
Chapter Nine
At dawn they reached Marseilles and dropped all sail, but the single fore-aft trysail for guidance through the crowded waters of the Vieux Port. The two guardian forts on either side were black against a dim grey sky, and the air was warm and scented of flowers. Grey against grey, the dim circle of limestone hills gloomed against the morning beyond the city. High above them Notre Dame de la Garde looked on, peaceful from the hill.
When the Sea-Harrower dropped anchor, standing off yet from the shore, her bow came round to face that hill, so Marsali thought the sad-eyed unicorn to be bowing to the Lady of the sanctuary. But a brief obeisance, surely, for before nightfall, the ship, with its homed mythical guardian, would be again away to sea.
Antoine watched her out of sight, from the stern of the longboat that took them and their possessions ashore. He sprawled moodily there, hands clasped, and chin upon them, like a morose poet, and Ishbel said sourly, ‘Look yon, you’d think he was leaving his mother.’
Laughing, Marsali replied, ‘’Tis yon beastie with the shining eyes on her prow he cannot bear to leave. Look now, how he glowers after it, and me thinking he had not the power to love in him at all.’ But Antoine would say nothing at all, nor laugh at their teasing, so in the end they chose to ignore him.
Once on the shore, with the Sea-Harrower only one black forest of rigging among many, he became himself again. He went off at once, through the yet deserted fish markets, in search of ponies and a cart and left them, sitting between grey water and grey houses, in the silent French dawn, alone.
He was gone for more than an hour. They felt like vagabonds sitting there, Ishbel on top of the larger chest with her old legs dangling, and Marsali on the smaller. As the markets came alive with the morning sun, dark-haired, dark-skinned people gathered around them, chattering in quick, dialectal French beyond their ken. But they scattered soon, going about their own business. It was after all a major port and they were used to strange sights, foreign dress and even fair, tall northern girls with pale northern eyes. Ishbel and Marsali were left soon in the midst, flotsam like their luggage, growing weary and hungry, with the scent of cooking foods all about them.
At last Antoine returned, down the narrow street opening onto the harbour, leading a rough white pony hitched to a plain two-wheeled cart of the kind country people of the district used for produce. Behind it, two more ponies, saddled for riding and one with a side-saddle at that, ambled on their tether ropes. He was full of gay cheer now, in the warm sun, the sea and his ship seemingly forgotten. He bowed to Ishbel, perched yet on the brass-locked chest and proclaimed, ‘Your carriage, madame.’
‘’Tis full of hay,’ she said.
‘To cushion your journey, and do not be complaining, or I will ride and yourself can sit on yon bony-backed pony,’ he said. ‘’Twas all I could find, and that by luck alone.’
Ishbel sniffed briefly and slid down from the chest, which Antoine loaded, with the other, onto the cart. Then she climbed up, with the help of his hand, hitching her skirts over her old knees, and settled herself on the small bench at the front. Antoine untied one pony and set Marsali upon it, lifting her easily with his surprising wiry strength.
‘Will you be telling me,’ Ishbel said, ‘is there such a thing as food in this country of yours, or are you all o’er grand for so mundane a thought?’
Antoine smiled and said, kindly enough, that he would find them a tavern beyond the city walls, Then for just an instant he turned back to the harbour, his eyes finding the familiar three masts of his ship above the others. He leaned against the furry flank of Marsali’s pony and rested his dark head against her skirt, a lonely child’s gesture, to which she responded by instinct, lightly touching his hair. Then he turned sharply, as by effort, and mounted his own pony, and led them away, with the blue sea retreating at their backs.
The cart rumbled behind the ponies on its vast wooden wheels out through the chaos of the fish markets and uphill along La Canebiere to the east. When they had left the city behind, the spires of its many churches and the high sanctuary of Notre Dame de la Garde yet gleaming in the morning sun, they turned westward. The city ended abruptly beyond its walls in countryside, low craggy hills brightly splashed with white rock, and small green trees, and plants like Marsali had never seen, fat and fleshy with great thorns. There were flowers everywhere, as Antoine had said, long ago, in her father’s house in Skye.
As he had promised, Antoine found them a tavern, in a small dusty village set amidst the green order of vineyards a few miles beyond the city walls. They were served bread and cheese and strawberries, and wine to drink with it, at a table in a garden of glistening leaved trees. The French maid who served them had thick curls of black hair and a dimply smile which she bent frequently on Antoine, the two chatting the while in the local dialect like a secret language between them. Marsali loosened her own hair from its knot beneath her cap and shook it out in gold-tinged streamers in the sun. The dark little maid looked sourly at that and retreated to her kitchens and left them alone.
Ishbel,
who had complained of hunger at the Vieux Port of Marseilles, found herself not hungry any longer and complained now, gently, of weariness. When she climbed back into the cart, Antoine made as comfortable a place as he could for her, with hay and his own coat. Suddenly small and old, she curled there, and slept.
So Marsali and Antoine were left by themselves, as they rode on up the hilly, westward road, in the sun. The air was sweet-scented, and around them farm people worked quietly in the spring vineyards, and small children appeared with great flocks of geese to stop and watch with dark French eyes. Marsali looked at Antoine, slyly through the falling waves of her loose hair, and thought suddenly that he was very handsome, and the green fields inviting. She wished irreverently that there was no cart, and no old wifie behind them, and no need to be in Avignon. Surely now, there would be quiet places there by the small river beyond those tall thin trees.
But no matter. Ishbel was there, and Antoine was Antoine, inviting like the green fields, and yet somehow beyond her reach. Besides, she had a dark purpose behind her journeying to Avignon, easy to forget in the sweet spring air. The red-headed boy of Glentarvie was there.
It was six years now since she had seen him, and though she was not awed at the thought of meeting him, the prince whose shirt she had mended, she was awed at the prospect of what she must do. She had reason enough for vengeance, more reason by far than Patrick Molloy. But she had not that taste for war that made violence so easy and so necessary. The ivory-handled pistol was packed safely again in the chest, away from Ishbel’s nervous eyes. But for the shock of a cannon shot she had near enough turned it on the men of the Well-Met. Surely Prince Tearlach, that proud fool, would be easier.
But what then? Would he have guards, and friends always about him? She had pictured him always as she had last seen him, a lonely, rough-clad boy, strong but vulnerable. But in Avignon, he was a prince, and princes had men and arms, surely at their command. They would shoot her, then, and kill her, no doubt, when her work was done, and she would go to hell in the company of King James’s son.
But what of Ishbel, and of Antoine? What use saving her father’s life if her poor old nurse must die instead? Surely they would spare her, though, an old woman, unaware of the plottings about her. Antoine, however, was another matter. He was a Frenchman and the Jacobites would be foolish to arouse the wrath of the French, on whom they yet depended as much as on the Pope. But he was young, and strong, and a man of some mystery. If they thought him an accomplice or spy, they would murder him, silently and secretly, and who would know?
Marsali sighed, leaning back against the high back of the saddle, and loosing her left foot from the single stirrup, and replacing it, stiffly; while then stretching her right leg about the pommel. She would prefer to ride astride and bareback, as at home, but Ishbel would not have it, she knew. She glanced over her shoulder and saw the old wife yet sleeping. They had gone fifteen miles, and the sun was falling low.
She looked now to Antoine, riding easily and blithely ahead. She was leading him into danger, and he was, for all his sly cruelty, innocent. It was an evil thing she did.
At a crossroads, in the middle of an emptiness of green corn, there was a small shrine to the Virgin. Marsali halted her pony and got down and stood before it praying, without words, for she knew nothing she could ask that was not in itself a sin. In the end she said softly, in Gaelic, ‘Holy Mother, find me a road that does not lead to Avignon, for once there, we are lost.’
But it was Antoine, waiting now at a distance, respectful and lonely, who was leading them, and he knew too well the road to Avignon.
They stayed the night in a tiny inn whose limestone walls seemed half-crumbled to ruin. But the food was hearty and good, and the garden without her window filled with magical tropical trees and birds, some strange, and some familiar, and all singing in the dawn when she rose. Ishbel had complained of tiredness and gone to her bed early and rose now from it reluctantly.
‘Are you ill, wifie?’ Marsali said, lightly though, for Ishbel had never been ill, and it was not conceivable to Marsali that she could be.
‘No,’ Ishbel said sharply. ‘I am not ill. I am old.’
But she ate nothing but dry bread and would not touch the boiled duck’s egg set before her and climbed with a stiff unsurety again into the cart.
‘The journey is hard on her,’ Antoine said softly, with something approaching concern.
Marsali looked at him carefully, almost reproachfully, and said, ‘No harder than your black ship, I am sure.’ And then when she turned, she thought it strange that the Sea-Harrower had been thus spoken of, for above the low, vine-tangled lintel of the inn was a wooden coat of arms, and in its centre, flanked by orange leaves, was the unicorn, bowing his white, horned head.
‘Look there,’ she said, impulsively, to Antoine. ‘Look who is among us. We were not seeing him, in the night, when we came.’
Antoine looked up and smiled his white beautiful smile and reached, his whole long body stretching, to touch the painted thing, like a talisman. He said, ‘He is bold now, to leave the sea, do you not think?’
She did not know what to make of that, but when he lifted her to her pony’s back she said, ‘I am seeing why you have placed him on your ship, for he is pretty enough there, but why think you he is more natural upon the sea? If ever there was such a beast, surely he was upon the land, with his hoofs like a horse, and horn like the cattle-beasts. There is no sea thing about him.’
‘Och surely,’ said Antoine mildly, as if he would speak no more of it. But once upon his own pony’s back and riding at her side ahead of the clunking, rumbling cart, the lead rein looped easily over his arm, he began again to speak quietly, a strange old tale.
‘There was indeed a time when that was so, when the unicorn was a land beast and bound to the land like all others. But then there was the Flood, and Noah took all the beasts, two and two, upon the ark.’
‘You needn’t be telling me like I was the witless heathen. I am knowing all about Noah and the ark. What I am wondering is how you know so much of all the holy writings if you are so certainly not a Christian and all?’
‘I did not say that. Besides, I might only be practising, in case I become one. Anyhow they are common enough stories, told to all children, Noah and the ark full of animals and the great flooded sea. But you see now, in those days there were beasts upon the ark like none we know today, and my unicorn was one of them.’
‘Nonsense,’ said Ishbel suddenly, snug in her cart and with something of her old querulous strength. She looked up to him with bird-quick eyes and challenged, ‘All on the ark were saved, and all are among us today. Your unicorn was never there, and never anywhere.’
‘But he was,’ Antoine said firmly. ‘And a great sea beast came up out of the great oceans, a Leviathan, like swallowed Jonah, and it came with a great mouth,’ he made with his forearms a great champing jaw-shape, ‘and it gulped them down, there, like so,’ he cried, laughing. And leaning from his pony, he clutched at her grey head, and she smiled, a crinkly, toothless, fond smile.
‘That was the end of them, surely,’ said Marsali, ‘and they are gone forever inside the Leviathan.’
‘Och yes. But it was a magic beast remember, and my unicorn magically escaped. But now he belongs to the realms of the sea.’
‘Indeed,’ said Marsali. ‘You are making it up, all of it; it is nonsense. It is a pretty enough story, and it has passed a mile or two of vineyards, of which I am weary, but I do not believe it. Nor do I believe in your unicorn.’
‘Then why did the innkeeper paint his form over his door?’
‘Because he is bonnie.’
‘And is that why they paint the form of the Lady there?’ he said boldly, for they were passing another of those many roadside shrines to the Virgin that the Catholic southerners honoured there.
‘Of course not,’ Marsali said sharply.
‘But she is also bonnie.’
‘She is holy. And that
is the reason they set her form there, not beauty. It is a question of faith.’
‘So, too, is my unicorn,’ Antoine said softly. ‘And alike all beasties that the world says do not exist. They are a question of faith. And so, too, lassie, is a king with no crown, and the son of such a king, that fair unicorn prince that you seek.’
It was late afternoon of the third day before they reached the papal state of Venaissan, and near evening when they first saw Avignon. For Ishbel’s sake they had stopped early each evening and travelled slowly along the dusty roads, but she was no better. Marsali saw a pinched, tired look come about her face which worried her, and she had longed for the sight of the city and an end to the long empty road. But the sight of Avignon was small comfort.
It was a walled city, surrounded yet from the days of its papal residents by three miles of battlements. In the long shadows of a spring evening, with the many-towered papal palace looming high above the city, it looked awesome and unapproachable.
‘You need not fear it,’ Antoine said to Marsali, seeing the way she looked upon the place. ‘It may look like the home of warriors, but it is but the domain of clerics now and the shelter for every scoundrel fleeing France. Between them, they make squabbles enough to occupy all their time. There’s none left over for defending the walls.’
‘I was not knowing it was so big,’ Marsali said.
‘And what were you expecting? Portree?’
Marsali blushed, feeling foolish and countrified. She said suddenly, ‘But how will we find him, the man MacKay my father said would show us to the prince? Surely it will be like finding a grain of corn on a winnowing floor.’
‘No matter,’ Antoine said easily, slipping his feet loose from his stirrups and stretching stiff legs. ‘For is the place not crawling with Jacobites of every kind, Irish and Scots, and English as well. If not MacKay, then another. If not a friend of James MacKinnon, then one of mine. Perhaps yon Chevalier Cameron I recall there. Any one will know where to find himself, for gossiping of the prince is all they have to occupy their time.
The Sea-Harrower: A Scottish Highlander Historical Romance Page 15