Kit

by Marina Fiorato

  Contents

  Also by Marina Fiorato

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Map

  Prologue

  Part One: The Sword

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Part Two: The Fan

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Historical Note

  Arthur McBride

  Also by Marina Fiorato

  The Glassblower of Murano

  The Madonna of the Almonds

  The Botticelli Secret

  Daughter of Siena

  The Venetian Contract

  Beatrice and Benedrick

  About the Author

  Marina Fiorato is half-Venetian. She was born in Manchester and raised in the Yorkshire Dales. She is a history graduate of Oxford University and the University of Venice, where she specialized in the study of Shakespeare's plays as a historical source. After university she studied art and since worked as an illustrator, actress and film reviewer. Marina was married on the Grand Canal and lives in north London with her husband, son and daughter. She is the author of five novels: THE GLASSBLOWER OF MURANO, THE MADONNA OF THE ALMONDS, THE BOTTICELLI SECRET, DAUGHTER OF SIENA and THE VENETIAN CONTRACT. You can follow Marina on Twitter at @MarinaFiorato and find out more about her and her writing at www.marinafiorato.com.

  KIT

  Marina Fiorato

  www.hodder.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Hodder & Stoughton

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © 2015 Marina Fiorato

  The right of Marina Fiorato to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  Ebook ISBN 978 1 473 61047 7

  Hardback ISBN 978 1 473 61045 3

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  338 Euston Road

  London NW1 3BH

  www.hodder.co.uk

  In memory of Joshua Bennett

  who had his own battles to fight

  Prologue

  Aughrim, Ireland, 1700

  The red-headed girl was the bravest.

  She went higher up the green hill than all her fellows, and rolled down head over heels, breakneck and reckless. There might have been half a dozen girls with her, but it was hard to see the others. She drew the eye like a comet.

  She seemed to have no mind for her modesty. Her petticoats flew anyhow about her bare legs. Nor did she heed her safety; more than once she knocked her head on a tussock or clod, fit to break her crown. And if she did? There would be no king’s horses or men to put her together again. Nine years ago they were plentiful here, for this place had been a battlefield where Jacobite rebels had been put down by the forces of an English king. They had bled into the ground, those renegades, melted away like the Jacobite claim itself, and now Killcommadan Hill was a playground for their daughters.

  The red-headed girl scrambled to the top of the hill, and tumbled again, egged on by her less courageous fellows. As she fell this time, pitching and turning, her universe contracted to a rolling drum of green earth and blue heaven. Snowy clouds flocked in the sky, sheep grazed in the fields. Sheep floated in the sky and the clouds grazed in the fields. No – the sky was the one with the sun; a golden coin, too bright to look at, a coin that left a white round ghost on the back of her eyes when she blinked.

  This time, in that spinning scene, a coach and four drew across the earth-sky. Not Phoebus’s carriage or anything fanciful like that, but something solid and tangible and wooden. She practically rolled into one of the great wheels. The quartet of horses whinnied and stamped, unsettled by this missile.

  A fancy gentleman, plump and bewigged, leaned from the carriage. His beckoning hand wore a glove, and the snowy fingers spun a gilt coin dexterously between them. A little golden sun in a glove as white as cloud. He looked at the redhead, close to. At the top of the hill she had just been a petticoat with a hank of red hair; now he could see her properly she stole the breath. He took an inventory; a slipwillow of a girl with copper curls falling to a handspan waist, bottle-green eyes in a pearl-pale face, full rose lips and a brand-new bosom.

  ‘Well done, Bess,’ said the fancy gentleman.

  The girl frowned as she scrambled to her feet. Her name was not Bess. But the protest clotted in her throat. She was spellbound by the golden coin. He seemed to have plucked the sun from the sky.

  ‘It’s yours,’ said the fancy gentleman. ‘If you roll again; from the very top.’ He leaned farther from the carriage window, lowering his voice, so close that she could feel the breeze of his whisper. ‘And this time, show me your tail.’

  Her frown deepened. She had come to the hill looking for a little excitement. Now this man held adventure in his hand, and his admiration warmed her like the sun. That little coin meant freedom – freedom from a mother who had beaten her every day for nine years, ever since her Da had died on this very field. That little coin meant she could go to Dublin, to live with the aunt she had heard of but never seen.

  Kit turned and climbed the hill, marching higher and higher, with an almost martial step. When she reached the top, with her eye on the distant carriage, she tilted and launched herself. She could feel her skirts rising – the winds rushing between her legs and across her bare rump. The fancy gentleman would get his wish.

  Down at the carriage again she righted herself. She half-expected him to drive away, but he handed down the coin to her. Now it lay in her hand, warm and heavy. It was gold, and it was stamped with the head of William III, the English king who had murdered her father.

  ‘Well earned, Bess,’ called the fancy gentleman at her retreat.

  She turned back. ‘Why do you name me so?’

  He leaned towards her again, the curls of his wig spilling out o
f the carriage window. ‘Bess was a red-headed queen; and when she was by, no one could see anyone but her.’ He nodded to the other girls, specks and smears in the distance. ‘Those others are nothing to you.’

  ‘My name is Kit,’ she said, with a conqueror’s confidence. ‘Kit Kavanagh.’

  ‘That’s your given name?’ The man frowned, his eyebrows appearing below the piled fringe of his wig. ‘But it is a gentleman’s name, surely. Are you not Katherine or Kate?’

  ‘My mother named me Christian. It was my father who called me Kit.’

  He smiled. ‘No love for Mama, eh?’

  ‘I would not care if I never saw her again.’

  He snorted. On another day he would have bundled her into the carriage and then, of course, the redhead would never have had to see her mother again. But he was a man who lived on his whims – it was a whim that had made him stop in the first place and a whim that made him leave again. He knocked his cane on the driver’s box. ‘Kit, then,’ he said. ‘Goodbye, Queen Kit.’

  She did not stay to watch the carriage away but turned for home at once, the coin hidden in her bosom. Six months ago she had been as flat as a board and the coin would have fallen to the ground. Now her new landscape cradled it. She felt powerful as she walked; so drunk with the tumbling and the coin and the prospect of freedom that she forgot the fancy gentleman long before he forgot her.

  And not once did Kit Kavanagh imagine that she would ever meet him again.

  PART ONE

  The Sword

  Chapter 1

  Dublin, Ireland, 1702

  For a soldier he leads a very fine life …

  ‘Arthur McBride’ (trad.)

  There was nothing unusual about the day that Kit Walsh lost her husband.

  There were no dark portents drawn on the sky by the flight of the Dublin sparrows, nothing to be read in the leaves of the tea, nor in the eyes of the little plaster virgin behind the bar who beadily watched the sinners drink. All was as usual in Kavanagh’s alehouse, also known as ‘The Gravediggers’ – set as it was between the teeming lively city and Glasnevin cemetery. ‘Noisy neighbours one side, quiet the other,’ said the locals.

  Kit stood behind the bar in her Friday gown, ready to serve the regulars. Aunt Maura sat at the far end of the bar, smoking a pipe for her health – she suffered with a canker in her breast – taking the beer money in her fingerless gloves. Dermott Shortt and Martin O’Grady sat in the snug laughing the skeletons of the week away, their grave-digging spades propped outside the half-door. Old Eamon Pearce propped up the other end of the bar, telling toothless stories to anyone who’d listen, passing the time until he too would lie under the diggers’ dirt. It was quiet for a Friday, and Kit took a moment to look around her. She loved Kavanagh’s, she loved Aunt Maura for taking her in with the beer barrels two years ago, but most of all she loved her handsome new husband, Richard Walsh.

  She watched Richard fondly, as he rolled the beer barrels into the cellar on a long tilted plank, the muscles bunching under his cambric shirt. He looked up at her, direct green eyes through a nut-brown fall of hair, and smiled. She had been so right to marry Richard. Kit and Aunt Maura had had their first and only quarrel when Kit had announced her intention to marry Richard Walsh, a humble potman who’d worked at Kavanagh’s since he was a boy. ‘I like the lad,’ her aunt had said, ‘Mary and Joseph, I almost raised him – but with your looks and Kavanagh’s to go with it you could have any man in Dublin.’ Maura waved away her niece’s protests and the pipe smoke together. ‘To be sure, he’s a good man and a solid one. But …’ Maura sucked her pipe as she sought the words. ‘He’ll do whatever you expect of him every day of his life. He’s safe.’

  Of all the objections Kit might have expected, she had not foreseen this. Maura, kindly sensible Maura, had seen that seed of adventure in her, had known that Kit was a girl who would always choose to roll down a hill instead of walking. Perhaps she had been a girl who would roll down a hill instead of walking, too.

  A second too late, Kit returned her husband’s smile; but he’d turned away and she found herself smiling fiercely at his back as he rolled the next barrel. The smile froze a little. She could see a long way ahead in that moment; her life with Richard – home-keeping Richard who had lived in the alehouse since he was a boy and would most probably die here. There would be children in between perhaps, and christenings and Communions and weddings, but one day Kit too would move from one side of the bar to the other. She would go from serving customers to counting money at the end of the bar, while her son or daughter took over. She would wear Maura’s fingerless gloves, smoke Maura’s pipe, and mark the days until she too ‘went next door’, as the regulars said, to the cemetery.

  And just for a moment, she wanted something more. The impulse Maura had detected in her, the impulse that had made her roll down Killcommadan Hill, had not left her. She longed, in that instant, for adventure.

  As if in response, from somewhere above the bar came a sound, hardly discernible above the low chatter. She looked up at her father’s sword, hanging horizontally above the ranks of bottles. Her first act as the new taverner had been to hang Sean Kavanagh’s blade over the bar, and there it had stayed, silent and silver from that day to this. But now it was singing in its bracket, vibrating with a barely perceptible ringing timbre, sweet with threat. Kit put a single finger up to still it. It felt alive. As she took her finger away a tiny red line appeared across her fingerprint. Then the line beaded like a rosary and she saw that it was blood. She sucked at her finger and flipped up the wooden top of the bar. ‘Mind the bar, Aunt?’ she mumbled around the finger, moving to the doorway, hitching her gown and repinning the heavy copper coils of her hair as she went.

  Old Eamon said, ‘Expecting company, Kit?’

  ‘Only the King of Spain’s daughter, Eamon, come to ask for your hand,’ replied Kit with a smile.

  She went to the doorway, and looked up at the inn sign, softly swinging – in, out – familiar as breathing. ‘Kavanagh’s’ painted on a red ground, with the family crest of one red lion and two red crescents on a white shield. And the Latin tag below which no one, even Aunt Maura, knew enough to read.

  Kit looked right to Prospect Gate. The sun was setting over Glasnevin cemetery and the cross-shaped shadows lengthened. The stone angels folded their wings and looked down, the stone doves roosted on the headstones, and the dead settled in for another eternal night. All was peaceful in grey-black and green, framed under Prospect Arch. No dead walked, no earth was overturned – but the sound, that regular pulse that shook the very ground, began again from somewhere distant.

  Kit looked the other way towards the city, and that’s when she saw it: a great swathe of red flowed down the Dublin road, red as the blood on her finger. Hundreds of boots struck the cobbles in time, marching nearer. The rhythmic heartbeat of the drum, the martial pipe of the fife. She fled back inside, telling herself the excitement she felt was fear. ‘Best roll the barrels back up,’ she called to Richard. ‘The regiment is coming.’

  It was the most profitable night that Kit could remember. It was also the busiest, sweatiest, bawdiest and loudest. Aunt Maura could barely count the shillings as they slipped like silver fishes through her gnarled hands. Kit, running hither and yon with three tankards in each hand, smiled, nodded, avoided grabbing hands, whirled from one table to the next. She was exhausted but elated; never was there such a hostess as she. There was a kind greeting for each polite officer, a scathing put-down for every drunkard, a witty riposte for every flirtatious ensign, and a smile for the drummer boy. But she was jolted, too, by their presence. She listened to their general chatter but could not make head nor tail of it – there were words she didn’t know, countries she’d never heard of, cities and campaigns that were foreign to her. Fort Maurepas, Kaiserwerth, Cadiz, Klissow. But one snippet she did understand. The king, apparently, was dead.

  The king is dead … now that the king is dead … of course, that’s all chan
ged now that the king’s dead. Kit was confused. The only king she’d known was William, the king who’d killed her father, the king whose head had been on the sovereign she’d been given, and he’d died in the spring, fallen from his horse. There was a queen on England’s throne now, for the shillings Kit took over the bar had gradually changed from William to Anne.

  ‘What king?’ she bawled to Maura over the row. ‘Who died?’

  ‘King of the Spaniards,’ her aunt shouted back. ‘Never fret. He’s nothing to us. But Old Eamon won’t get his daughter, I’m afraid. He died with no child.’ She laughed, showing her pipe-stained teeth.

  Kit turned back to the throng. She was half-frightened, half-excited by these red-coated devils. For they had other words too. She had thought that two years of working in an alehouse had made her deaf to curses, but she heard oaths that she had never heard before, words that made her blush. They seemed larger than life, these soldiers – something more, something extra than other men – their colours vivid like stained glass after rain. Just for a moment she pictured Richard in a red coat, with a guilty thrill of longing. The longing turned to a sick lurch in her stomach, and suddenly they seemed too much, those militaries: their vitality, their gaudiness, their number. They were so male, so … alive. Had her father been this way too, among his fellows? Did they live so loudly because they knew they would die?

  Overwhelmed all of a sudden, Kit escaped down the stairs to the cool cellar and laid her hot cheek on the damp cold stones of the wall. The noise receded to a muffled hubbub. She breathed in the peaty smell of stone, then a warm circle of arms closed around her. A jag of fear – had one of the devils followed her to the underworld? Hot lips pressed to her neck, nuzzling the tumbled curls at her nape.

  ‘Can you serve me now?’ A low-voiced growl, a fair imitation of raucous army tones.

  She didn’t turn, but smiled at the wall. ‘What are you doing down here? Get gone, and be quick about it; my husband is above. He will fight you to the death to protect my honour.’