He dove out.
Leonard Legge stumbled toward the companionway through the litter of empty hammocks and bed rolls. He had slunk away from the pandemonium on deck and rushed back down to rescue the gambling winnings he had left with his gear. He’d grabbed the money, but now he had to get out. His eyes were stinging in the smoke, and by the time he reached the stairs again the top two were on fire. He looked around for something to smother the flames, and saw, in the gloom at the gunports, a shape—a man?—dive out.
It was only a glimpse, and between the fog of drink in his head and the thickening smoke all around he wasn’t exactly sure what he had seen. The heat behind him snapped him back to the danger. He snatched up a blanket and beat at the flames on the stairwell. Men above were sloshing buckets of water on it too, and soon the blaze died. Legge started up the dripping steps, then looked back to the spot where he had seen the figure. Curiosity reclaimed him. He hurried down again.
He stuck his head out the gunport. He could see nothing in the black water below. A flaming spar from the deck plunged by his head and he ducked back in. As he did, eyes down, he noticed that water was pooled on the floor at his feet. His own boots from the stairs weren’t that wet. He saw that the pool was at the end of a trail of water. His eyes followed it to the companionway that led down to the hold. He hesitated. The fire was bad; he should get out. But if there was something down there . . .
He grabbed a lantern from above a hammock and rushed down to the hold. In the darkness he had to crouch to see the wet footprints, but he was able to follow them up the ramp. He tripped over a stray hatch. Cursing, he fell forward. One leg slipped into a hole. He stopped himself just before he toppled all the way in. He lowered the lantern partway down the hole. From the depths, the feeble gleam of a golden, embossed cross glinted up at him. A Bible.
Honor’s eyelids twitched open. She saw only gloom. Not an oppressive gloom. More like the inside of the tithe barn near Nettlecombe where she had played as a child, where the golden dust of winnowed grain floated in the air. From the softness where she lay she turned her head. The room wasn’t large. The high, single window was shuttered, its edges leaking golden light. She was aware of a smell, a comforting blend of leather and fresh-sawn wood and sweat. She sat up with a start. She was in Thornleigh’s berth in his cabin on the Speedwell.
From the jolt of sitting, a hammer pounded in her head. She had to drop her forehead onto her drawn-up knees to ease the blows. The curled posture took her back inside a hideous, indefinable nightmare. To break free of it she hauled her legs over the side of the bed. She sat hunched, her breathing shallow, and tried to stitch together the dark fragments that lay shredded in her mind. She remembered . . . dying? Yet how could that be if she was here? Her memory was a blur, and each fragment dissolved when she tried to grasp it, like night-time shadows that slink away at the rising sun. Only one thing was certain: she was not dead.
Suddenly, she was overwhelmed by a hunger for the sight of the world. She pushed herself from the bed. As she stood, her legs buckled and she clutched the table for support. She shuffled toward the closed door. As she reached for the handle her sleeve drooped over her hand. She looked down at herself. She was dressed only in a man’s linen shirt. She knew she should not show herself this way, for although the shirt was far too large for her its hem came only to her knees. But the craving to be outside blotted modesty. She pulled the door open. Light poured over her. The Speedwell, at anchor off Yarmouth, was basking under a sunset of molten gold in a red and limitless sky.
“M’lady!” Jinner lurched from his post on a stool near her door. But halfway to his feet he halted in amazement at the sight of her bare legs and he dropped the hunk of elm he was whittling. Honor ignored this crouch in which she had locked him like some fairy spell. Squinting, she shambled forward to the edge of the sterncastle deck.
Jinner snapped from his trance and sheathed his knife. “Cloak,” he said, and hobbled off behind her into the cabin.
Honor stood blinking at the bold brightness all around her. Radiant sunset. Blue sea. And everywhere, heady sparkles of white. White gulls wheeled overhead. White-bronze stars of light snapped off the water. Sun-bleached linen gleamed on her own body. And beyond this bedazzle of white lay mile-wide ribbons of gold, unfurled across the red vault of sky. She shut her eyes and saw the red-gold glory still, dyed crimson on her eyelids.
The sun-warmed plank beneath her feet infused its heat into her. She felt its energy, the original fire of sun in living oak, an energy that raced up every vein, through every tendon, until it reached her arms and seemed to lift them without her volition. She spread them wide, eyes still closed, and felt the soft fabric of the shirt sleeves slide like tepid water off her forearms, exposing more skin to sun. A breeze rose to hug her, caressing the curves of thigh, belly, breast and shoulder, and luffing gently through her hair. She inhaled the salt tang, then let out a huge and grateful sigh. It was good to be alive!
Her eyes sprang open and she saw Thornleigh. He stood high on the forecastle directly across the length of open deck. He was leaning over the railing, watching her with a smile.
She slowly waved her arm to hail him. The sun kissed the vein at her wrist. Thornleigh’s hand went up in a matching silent salute.
A flash of green swamped her vision. Jinner was bundling her cloak around her. Memory exploded: the cloak, Edward, the hold. She whirled on Jinner.
“Where’s Sydenham?” she asked, afraid to hear what danger Edward might have exposed them to.
“Safe away,” Jinner assured her. Honor relaxed.
Jinner shook his head. “Though why your first word should be for a lousel with cold porridge for guts,” he grumbled, “I’m sure I don’t know.”
She laughed, lightheaded with the happiness of waking up alive. Even the tug of bruised stomach muscles felt delightful. “Having just experienced what he declined, Sam, I’d say he showed great judgment.”
Jinner’s familiar, morose shrug enchanted her. She flung her arms around his scrawny neck and kissed him hard on the mouth. He wavered, dumbstruck.
She heard Thornleigh’s laugh roll across the deck.
Suddenly, in the middle of laughter herself, her lightheadedness spun into dizziness. Her legs softened into willow saplings. Her hands slipped down Jinner’s skinny chest and she slid to the deck and landed, loose as a puppet, on her backside.
Jinner sprang to fetch his stool. Laughing again, Honor let him help her onto it. “Why, you’re as weak as a kitten,” he said, chastising her. “Now, you sit here, and I’ll fetch vittles. It’s bread and grog you need.”
She felt for his hand to stop him. “No, Sam, it’s a friend beside me I need. And some answers.” Questions were bubbling up inside her. It was clear everyone was safe, yet how had it been managed?
Jinner grunted happily and lowered himself to sit cross-legged at her feet. He picked up the hunk of elm and unsheathed his knife. Somewhere across the deck, a sailor’s tabor tweedled a jig. “I’m carving you an angel,” he said, gouging a chip of wood. “I reckon it’s the one who watched over you. ’Course, once we had you aboard I knew you’d make it through.”
“We?”
“Me and the master.” Jinner twitched a horny thumb in the direction of the forecastle, and they both looked across the deck.
Thornleigh was frowning. Jinner made an exaggerated nod to assure him of Honor’s safety after her tumble. Apparently satisfied, Thornleigh turned to his pilot who was waiting at his elbow, obviously wanting his attention. Both of them stepped back to resume work at a table where various brass instruments of navigation lay among scrolls and charts.
Jinner cocked an eye up at Honor. “He did the swimming, for I never did learn the art of it. But it were lucky for you both that I fought to keep the poxy skiff in line. And who d’ye think’s been ladling broth into you for the last two days?”
Her eyes widened, and she waited to hear the story. Jinner obliged. He told her how, in the sma
ll hours of yesterday morning, he and Thornleigh had fired the Dorothy Beale.
“What? You set fire to her while I was in the hold?”
“Aye. A right beautiful blaze, too. Worked like a charm. But after we had you safe out and back aboard Speedwell— Pelle was watching the house, you see—well, then the master was in as foul a mood as ever I’ve beheld him. For when we looked back, damned if Pelle’s men hadn’t doused that fire.”
“Why should that make him angry?”
“Well, in getting you out seems he’d left the hatch off the hiding place. He was afeared they’d find it—open, when it was closed in their searching, see?—and there’d be questions.”
Honor was struggling to remember something of the rescue, some glimmer, but it was still all blackness.
“He stalked this deck till dawn,” Jinner continued. “Then he decided to strike.”
“Strike?”
Jinner closed his eyes as if to savor the recollection. “You’ll hardly credit it, m’lady. He’s done some fool things before, and I’ve seen most of ’em, but this beats all. He barged into Pelle’s own house—I was right behind him—and shook his fist in Pelle’s poxy face, and demanded an apology!”
“What?”
“Aye! For impounding his ship unlawfully, and letting her burn while in his custody! Oh, it was rare. Master stomped and fumed and swore, and Pelle had to listen, all the while twiddling his thumbs like a grubby priest who’d been caught with his hand in the alms box. And what d’ye think? Master not only got the Dorothy Beale released, he demanded payment for damages. And what’s more, he got it! So that’s the upshot of the whole blessed foofaraw, m’lady. Which is to say, nothing at all.”
Honor’s wondering gaze was drawn to Thornleigh on the forecastle. What a gamble he’d taken! She had to smile, for she could well imagine his performance with Pelle, a fine display of ruffled Thornleigh feathers with much noise and fury. Yet all the while he must have been wondering if the manacles would be clamped on him before he got the last oath out. A gamble, indeed!
She watched him at his calculations as he checked a steering compass, unfurled a chart. He wore a loose white shirt and coppery breeches, and the ruddy-gold sun burnished his auburn hair. He was the incarnation of this very light.
He stepped aside to put away the chart, revealing the table’s far end, and Honor was startled to see there a child—a well-dressed boy, perhaps nine years old. He stood over the table and pushed a tangle of brown hair from his eyes as he worked a pair of dividers over a map.
“Who’s the boy, Sam?” she asked.
Jinner glanced up. “Master’s son.” He went back to his whittling.
She had known of the boy’s existence. He lived, though, at Thornleigh’s manor of Great Ashwold near Norwich, and Honor’s work on the missions had brought her only to Thornleigh’s townhouse in Yarmouth. This was the first she had seen of his son. A handsome lad, she thought, watching him. Tall and straight and easy-moving, like his father. But there was also a shyness in the face, a doe-eyed quality that made her curious about what other strains made up the mettle of such a fine-looking young creature.
No, she thought, it was more than curiosity. She had never imagined Thornleigh’s wife as being attractive. Stately, perhaps, and dourly conscious of the wealth and status she had brought her husband; a haughty woman who might well drive a warm-blooded man into other, kinder, arms. That was the picture that had made sense to Honor. But the boy’s face spoke of gentleness, not pride. Honor felt a stab of jealousy. Was there more to keep Thornleigh at home than she had believed?
“Tell me Sam, what’s the boy’s mother like?”
Jinner frowned down at the angel’s face emerging from his chunk of wood. “Master doesn’t speak of her. Bade me not as well.”
An odd answer, Honor thought. She drew up her dignity. “Perhaps not to other, common ears,” she said, “but surely you may to me.” Her voice was tinged with authority, as she had intended, and she winced to hear the hardness in it. It was a craven ruse. Yet her curiosity burned.
Jinner nodded, accepting her command like fate. “Mistress Ellen. A simple lass. Oh, she be my better, I do mind, being a great knight’s daughter, and me bred out of the lead mines of Swaledale. But she be of a simple nature, if you catch my meaning. Quiet-like. Sometimes singing all to herself. I’ve known the lass many a year.”
No stone-faced matron, clearly enough. Here was a startling new picture. “But why does he not speak of her?” Honor asked. The question was hardly out of her mouth when a companion question hovered in her mind: was Thornleigh so fond of his wife that he hated even to bandy her name? Hesitantly, she added, “Does he love her so very much?” She wanted with all her heart to hear it was not so. She knew she had no right; knew that, after refusing him herself, the wish was petty. Still, she longed to hear Jinner contradict her.
He shrugged. “Love? That I couldn’t say. They don’t talk much. She sometimes seems more child than wife.”
“Then why his silence? Tell me, Sam.”
Jinner was mute a moment, and kept whittling. Then: “A while back the master was called to the Bishop’s bawdy court. His lady was being held there.”
Stranger and stranger. “What was the charge?”
“No charge. A whispering neighbor had led the ’paritor to suspect her of reading heretical tracts.” He shook the wood chips from his sleeves. “Oh, she be no madwoman, no raving witch like some I’ve seen. The suspicion were all nothing. It seems a trifle now. She’d got a bit of writing at a scribbler’s stall, and the neighbor who saw it thought it strange she should be meddling with books.”
“But it is a trifle. They don’t usually harass for so little cause. Especially a knight’s daughter with a respectable clothier husband.”
“But the father was dead and the husband was not about, m’lady. And, like I said, she be a simple soul. Felt the shame of being called to court right keenly, poor thing. Well, the master went and argued there, for they had no right to keep her. She was let go, and went home with him, and all was well again.”
Honor nodded. But the explanation unsettled her. Thornleigh, she now saw, had his own grievance against the Church, his own private reason for involving himself in these dangerous missions. It meant he was not acting just for the payment she was promising to make one day. The realization surprised her, as did her own reaction: she felt it like a kind of loss.
Still, she thought, his wife’s incident at the Church court did not seem so dreadful. She sensed that there was more behind Jinner’s reticence. “Sam,” she said sternly, “what else?”
“Oftimes,” he said, “Mistress Ellen sinks into a powerful sadness.”
Honor shrugged. “So do we all, sometimes.”
“Not like her,” Jinner said darkly. “A demon sometimes steals inside her and sucks her happiness away. I’ve known her since before the master married her, and that cursed demon’s always been with her. But one day . . . one day was the worst.” His gaze drifted up to the furled sails above their heads. The angel carving lay forgotten in his lap. “All Saints Day if I recall aright—’twas four year gone, for I recall the lad yonder was just turned six—the master and me rode home to his manor hard by Norwich. We’d just sailed back from Flanders on Vixen. Her hold was fairly bursting with damask and oranges and spice. I can still smell that cinnamy-bark if I close my eyes tight.”
He did so, and Honor smiled indulgently, waiting.
“We rode into the master’s courtyard, and all was quiet as the grave. Master said to me then and there he wondered if his lady’d been taken by one of her strange, sad fits. But then he thought it couldn’t be so, for his lady was then nursing a baby daughter, and the wee ones always made her merry. Well, the grooms in the courtyard said not a word, but slunk away into the stable. Master caught up with a maid and asked her what was what. At first she wouldn’t speak. And then, when the master shook her, then she couldn’t speak for weeping. But soon it all came out.
Honor’s mouth opened, but no sound came.
“The master came before the coffin, his face as white as the babe’s winding sheet. And when the mistress, weeping there, saw him, she shrieked as if she was in pain, a terrible sound, like a marten I saw once strangling in a snare. Mistress Ellen jumped up and ran for a knife and sliced at her wrists, one after the other, till the blood fairly gushed. The master slapped her face to stop her. He had the maids bandage her wounds. Then Mistress Ellen slept and slept and slept.”
“Merciful Jesus,” Honor whispered.
“Amen to that,” was Jinner’s low reply.
Overhead, the pipe tune twined with the screeling of gulls. The sky’s radiance was fading. The sun was a sinking red ball.
“Master took it hard,” Jinner summed up. “For a long while after, I thought he was goading the Devil to take him. Gone to seed, he was, with drinking and dicing and carousing. Once, he got into an evil scrape at the King’s palace, no less.”
“Brawling on the tennis court,” Honor murmured, piecing together the past.
“Aye, and almost got his hand chopped off at the King’s command.”
Honor was recalling the glimpses she had caught in days past of Thornleigh’s self-destructive bent. Had grief driven him to act that way?
“And this much more I can tell you,” Jinner said. “When he found that babe dead, ’twas himself he blamed. Said if he’d got home sooner he could have stopped it.” He spat on the deck. “Aye, that were an evil time.”
Vigorously, as though to dispel such unwelcome reminiscences, Jinner attacked his carving afresh. “He’s better these days, though,” he said. “And I credit it to the good work you’ve snagged him into, m’lady. Less of drink and dice, and a lot less wenching.” He caught himself and looked away with a blush. “Lord, now I’ve said too much.”
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