In the finest of clothing he’s constantly seen …
‘Arthur McBride’ (trad.)
Venice was a place that had to be seen to be believed. It shone in the setting sun; a cluster of fantastic palaces crafted from stone as delicate as lace, domed churches like upturned grails and bell towers like jade-topped spears. All this booty was huddled on islands split by silver canals, to be reached only by a looking-glass lagoon. Venice was as beautiful and insubstantial as a dream.
But Kit was bound for the less salubrious harbour at the Arsenal, a crenellated haven guarded by stone lions, their gape-jawed faces gilded by the dying light. By the time the ferry made landfall the sun was low in the sky, a great red ball sinking into the lagoon.
As Kit guided Flint on the slippery planks of the wharf, the city turned from rose-gold through bronze and copper to the base metals of night; the last act of the alchemist sun. The harbour was abuzz with activity: soldiers, tradesmen, whores, rope-makers, caulkers, carpenters, mudlarkers. Here too she saw ostlers and horse traders, buying and selling. Flint followed her obediently but with shaking legs, glad to be on firm ground at last. Kit paid a lad to mind the mare.
Venice, as she knew from Ross, was a neutral power, so she’d expected ships of all colours in the haven; but the cross-trees seemed to be flying the standards of France. Undaunted, she switched to her mother tongue and enquired about a passage at a schooner called the Banc D’Arguin. The ship sat low in the water but looked sturdy enough. It was tricked out in the blue and gold of the French colours, and had a mermaid for a figurehead. She talked to a shipman hanging on a rope like a monkey.
‘Where are you bound?’
‘Plymouth,’ he said briefly.
It would do. ‘Have you a berth to spare?’
‘If you’ve cash to spare.’
She swallowed. ‘How much?’
‘Fifty francs, thirty schillings or two guineas.’
Her face fell. ‘Merci bien.’
‘De rien, madame.’
In the hours that followed she walked up and down among the skeps and nets as the light fell and the tar torches were lit, the acrid smell poisoning the air. Desperate to distance herself from the painted jades, she made proper enquiries to each shoreman and boatswain; but the gravity of her situation soon became clear. Passages from this golden city were as costly as the city itself. Even the quality were anxious to leave the war-torn region; on one jetty she saw a whole family in jewel-coloured silks, standing patiently on the dock in size order like nesting dolls. They had enough money, clearly, to go wherever they wanted; the passages Kit could afford went only as far as the next port.
With a sick feeling she faced the fact that she did not have nearly enough in her money belt to take her home, let alone to buy a berth in the hold for a horse. She sat on the seawall, watching the ships unfurling their sails for the evening tide, the great hulls moving out on to the red water until their giant forms became tiny specks in the sun’s scarlet path. The wealthy family processed past her and up the gangplank of the White Hind, a caravel bound for England. Kit watched as the walkway was taken up and she was left behind.
She sat on, the stone still warm under her skirts, and rued the money she’d lost. Those coins that clustered in a warm metallic jumble in her waistcoat or in the money belt which had jingled between her thighs where her balls should have been. She regretted now, bitterly, that she had not asked Richard for a purse. She cursed that she had spent her family’s treasure on this year-long fool’s errand. For a moment, watching the red coin of the sun disappear into the lagoon, she even rued the purse from Marlborough that she’d given to Bianca for Christiana’s keep. Five pistoles could have bought her a passage to Dublin in style – she could have bought her own sloop – but she could not set her own comfort against the life of a child.
Men had beggared her. She had spent a fortune seeking Richard, and she had taken on Taylor’s child. She vowed there and then, in the port of Venice, never to be the dupe of a man again. She was strong, she was resourceful, she was a trained soldier. She was still Kit.
The transaction was difficult and protracted; but after much wrangling she had a good price for Flint from the Venetian ostler. The trader was as hard as stone – eyes like jet and a bristle on his cheek like filings of iron. Her efforts were hampered by her scant knowledge of the Veneto dialect and more so by her deep reluctance to let Flint go – her last link with the army, with Ross, and her constant companion. Kit did not kiss Flint, or stroke her velvet nose; she turned away, and could not look back.
As she blinked back the bitter tears, she felt a pricking at her nape. She had felt, ever since she donned a gown again, that she was somehow more noticeable than when she hid under an anonymous uniform. But this was different.
She stood still at the centre of the bustling wharf and then turned on the heel of her boots. Could someone have followed her? Sergeant Taylor vowing revenge? Or the pale spectre of Atticus Lambe? She shook her head to dislodge her fears. She would take the money from Flint to the schooner she had applied to first, and beg to make up the cost of the passage aboard by doing needlework or cooking or cleaning. But as she turned to go, she caught a white flash out of the corner of her eye.
In the crazy shadows of the torchlight was a golden carriage, its gilded paint alive with reflected flame, curlicues and carvings vital and animated, cherubs seeming to puff their cheeks and move their wings. Four black horses, steaming and stamping, stood obediently in the traces. But it was the passenger who held her gaze.
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. She was back at Killcommadan Hill, back fourteen years, back to a time when adventure meant a roll down a green hill and a sovereign proffered by a white hand. As if in a dream she walked forward; to see the same face under a different wig, a wig in the latest fashion. And something else was different too. The fancy gentleman addressed her in French.
‘You need money, Bess?’
Here was a man offering her money; a man who had changed her life for the better once before.
‘I am a respectable woman.’
‘Respectable women need money too.’
Warily Kit dropped her hand to where her sword should have hung, but he tucked the coin away, folded his white hand over the door, and regarded her with great interest.
‘Are you leaving or arriving?’ he asked, still in perfect French.
She answered him in kind. ‘Leaving. As fast as I may.’
‘Pity. I myself have just arrived. My work here has just begun.’
‘And mine is ended.’
‘You need a passage?’
She nodded.
‘Where to?’
‘Plymouth.’
‘You’re English?’ he said, in that language.
She was stung. ‘Irish,’ she said, very Dublin.
‘I too! Better and better.’ He leaned a little farther out of the window. ‘I will tell you a secret; I hate the English almost as much as I hate the French; and I love the Irish, naturally, for they are my countrymen. Don’t tell.’
‘Who would I be likely to tell?’
‘The Queen of England.’
Kit snorted. ‘You are trifling with me.’
‘I am in earnest, I assure you. She and I are closely acquainted.’
She looked at him doubtfully.
‘Shall we be friends? Why don’t you sit in my carriage, and then we may take our ease.’
She raised her chin a little. ‘We cannot be friends when we are not properly introduced.’
He clapped his hands. ‘Quite right.’
Kit considered. She did not want to go by the name Walsh any more – let Richard’s widow use it. She decided to try the gentleman’s memory. ‘Kit Kavanagh.’
He did not display a flicker of recognition. ‘You looked as if you were choo
sing your name.’
‘I was.’
‘You have many names, Bess?’
Kit Kavanagh. Christian Walsh. Kit Walsh. ‘Three to date. Four with your addition of Bess.’
‘I too. I am James Fitzjames Butler, 2nd Duke of Ormonde, 13th Earl of Ormonde, 7th Earl of Ossory, 2nd Earl of Butler.’
She inclined her head.
‘So, we are introduced. Now will you sit in my carriage?’
The four black stallions were buckled to the traces, ready to go; the reins were taut, the drivers, in full livery, ready on the box. ‘Uncouple the horses first,’ Kit said.
‘Now, why would I do that?’
‘Because you might be a slaver, or worse. I only have your word that you are a nobleman. If you want to talk, let’s talk. But uncouple the horses first.’
She expected him to be angry, but he spoke again, although not to her. ‘Pietro. Stand the horses aside.’
His man climbed down from the box. ‘What shall I do with them, Your Grace?’
‘I don’t know, man,’ said the Duke of Ormonde testily. ‘What does one do with horses? Give them some oats or something. Then hand this lady in.’
Kit watched as the horses were released and wooden chocks placed behind the gilded wheels. If she’d still had pockets she would have put her hands in them. The silent coachman handed her into the carriage. The interior was another riot of gilt, and the cushions saffron yellow, like the yolk of an egg. She settled herself. ‘What do you want of me?’
‘I want you to have dinner with me.’
‘Why?’
He waved one gloved finger from side to side. ‘I will tell you at dinner.’
She set her chin. ‘I need a reason first.’
‘The best reason for taking dinner is that one is hungry. Are you not hungry?’
She was. All she had eaten along the road was a meal a day in the taverns where she’d stayed, always keeping some coin back for oats, always mindful of the passage to be bought at Venice.
He smiled. ‘I’ll tell you what. You come to dinner with me, in the finest palazzo in Venice. You hear my proposal. If you don’t like my proposal, I will bring you here in the morning and buy you a passage directly to Dublin myself. What do you say?’
She considered. He had once given her a coin and asked little in return. He had let her go in peace then, might he not do so again? He had not molested a fresh girl of sixteen, and with her new instinct for these kinds of things she sensed that, with Ormonde, it was as it had been with Lambe. Whatever the duke wanted from her, it was not her body.
‘I have a condition,’ said Kit.
His smile widened. ‘You have a condition?’
‘I amuse you?’ she asked.
‘You have no money for your passage nor a place to stay. You are in a two-shilling dress that’s three weeks on. You are sitting in a golden coach with a duke of the realm and yet you have a condition. Yes, you amuse me; I like you more and more.’
‘I had to sell my horse. I want her back.’
He knocked his cane on the roof. A face topped by a tricorn appeared at the window. ‘Get Miss Kavanagh’s horse back,’ he said.
‘She’s the grey at the ostler’s by the French schooner,’ began Kit, but the duke stopped her with a wave. ‘He knows. He’s been pursuing you for the better part of the afternoon. You can no more clip him from your heels than your own shadow when he’s been ordered to follow. Give a fair price,’ he told his man. The tricorn bobbed and disappeared. ‘Oh, and Pietro,’ called the duke, as an afterthought. ‘Meet Madame Berland off the Paris ship and tell her to get back on board and go home.’
Then the Duke of Ormonde held out his hand for her to shake just as the horse dealer had an hour past. As Kit took it she understood; Ormonde was a horse dealer too.
Chapter 26
As we went a walkin’ down by the seaside …
‘Arthur McBride’ (trad.)
The carriage rolled forth along a broad thoroughfare by the lagoon, Flint trotting happily on a leading rein behind. Kit’s eyes followed the White Hind sailing to England, now a mere speck on the horizon. This time she watched without a qualm. She could own it now; she had never really wanted to go home.
She was torn between the vista at each window and the intriguing character opposite. Ormonde regarded her openly, so she had no qualms about scrutinising him. He was of middle years, perhaps the age that Sean Kavanagh might be now, had he lived. He had a smooth, florid complexion, and plump cheeks; his eyes were so deep set that Kit could not determine, nor could she say with any certainly many years after, what their colour was. His wig, in the latest fashion, was piled high at the crown and flowed long to his breast. He wore a coat of the finest velvet, the colour of ox blood, and breeches of moleskin tucked into boiled leather boots. The cut of his clothes was faintly military, but each one of his diamond buttons would pay the entire regiment of the Scots Greys for a year. He stood her gaze with amusement, but said, after a little, ‘There are better vistas to be had,’ and nodded to the window. They were passing a beautiful palace as white as flummery. It was ornamented with a delicate filigree crown of stone, and a hundred windows shaped like little roundels and staring like eyes. And beyond this confection of a city, hanging in silver swags and ruffles like a backdrop at the playhouse, hung the distant mountains, their peaks burnished in rose-gold. The mountains where she’d been just days ago, where Richard dwelt with his new wife and where Ross slept in his officer’s billet. Whatever Ormonde had to offer, at least she was still in the same country as Ross and the same sun set on the captain too. She wondered whether Bianca had given him her sword, and what he’d thought of the gift. Did he carry it? Or did he cast it away? Did he mourn the loss of his beloved companion Kit Walsh, or did he think Sergeant Walsh a coward and a deserter, a milksop who had turned his coat and run rather than face the lash?
The carriage passed between two pillars into a vast paved square, scattering a flock of leaden pigeons. Pietro opened the door.
‘We must leave the horses here,’ the duke said.
‘Why?’
‘You’ll see.’
Stepping down from the carriage with the aid of Pietro’s cold hand, she did see. There was no more road to travel, only water. At the marble quayside, a black boat, curved like a Saracen’s blade and low-slung in the water, waited for them. She stepped in and settled on the scarlet cushions opposite the duke. Pietro doffed his tricorn and the boatman, with the aid of a long skinny pole, pushed off from the mooring.
They sailed silently into the mouth of a vast channel, flanked by a domed church on one side, and another palace on the other. The boat slid silently, but there was noise everywhere, chatter, singing, even music as fiddlers and pipers played in the other boats. The boatman slid expertly between all the other traffic on the canal, and Kit marvelled at the other passengers – dressed in silks and velvets, loaded with jewels, most of them were masked, their eyes glittering, watching her. It seemed as if the fabulously opulent palaces that ranked the canal watched her from their glass roundels, too, the windows now lit from behind by candles and glittering chandeliers.
At length, at a breathtaking curve of the canal, they came to the most beautiful palace of all, a rose-pink façade with pillars and capitals of snowy marble. The boat sailed directly into the bowels of the palace, between ornate wrought-iron gates that opened at their approach as if by magic.
Kit, slightly unsteady on her feet, followed Ormonde into a vast marble atrium, across a pied and polished floor and up a wide marble staircase. Halfway up the stair she was confronted by a full-length mirror, and by some trick of another mirror set in the landing behind her met a multitude of her own reflections, diminishing into infinity, like the ranks of a female army.
She had not seen her likeness since the polished silver looking glass at Maria van Lommen’s house in Genova, and the image she had seen there had been set like amber in her mind’s eye for over a year. She still expected to see a sol
dier when she looked in the mirror. The reality was different.
She looked like a ragged whore. The dress, made and over-mended by an innkeeper’s wife, had been in fashion when the frau was a young bride, before her spreading flesh had split the seams and her workaday tasks had scuffed the muslin. Above the faded cloth Kit was paler than she remembered, and thinner–her collarbones jutted forth and the ridges of the top of her ribcage showed at her chest above the swellings of her bosom. Her waist seemed painfully thin in the gown compared to how it had appeared in the bulk of the uniform, but her arms, by contrast, were strong and well muscled.
Her face, though, was the revelation: so thin, so pale; violet shadows beneath the eyes. Her lips were still full, and now too full for her sunken face, as if she had been struck about the mouth. Only her eyes were the same, green as the Liffey, determined, fringed by glossy dark lashes, and framed by dark brows. ‘You’re lucky,’ Aunt Maura had once said. ‘Redheads’ lashes are usually as pale as straw.’ She did not look lucky. Her skin looked pinched and thin across the bridge of her nose, but the same scattering of freckles sprinkled her cheeks as they had since childhood. She could see the blue of her veins, as if the blood ran cold and too near the surface of her skin. Her hair was dark auburn with grease and grime, the candle fat she had used to smooth it back into a queue sticking to each strand, the careful braids and buns Bianca had made on the top of her head now sitting muddled and tangled like a bird’s nest. She saw no promise in the face – nothing that excited her in the way it had evidently excited Ormonde. The duke appeared in the mirror behind her. ‘Don’t get used to her,’ he said enigmatically. He did not spare his own reflection a glance; she knew then that he had been raised with mirrors, that they clothed the walls of his house like tapestries. More than that; he inhabited his own skin perfectly, like a well-fitting suit of clothes.
They continued up the stair and into a great salon on the first floor lit by a hundred candles, reflected in a quintet of crystal windows. The canal outside was now black and gilded like a slick of oil, and the perfect palaces opposite watched them with candlelit eyes. But inside was a far finer sight, a table set for two by the window, groaning with fowl and fishes and sweetmeats.
Kit Page 23