Crossed Bones

by Jane Johnson

  ‘Very nice. Sixteenth, seventeenth century.’ He opened the front cover with infinite care, turned to the title page. ‘1624. Remarkable. The Needle-Woman’s Glorie. Heard of it, of course, but never actually laid my hands on a copy. Very pretty. A little light spotting and some old handling marks, but generally very fine condition.’ He grinned up at Michael, showing teeth as yellow as a rat’s. ‘Should fetch a few quid from a specialist collector. Where did you say you got it from?’

  Michael hadn’t. ‘Oh, a friend. Selling it on behalf of a friend.’ This wasn’t the entire truth, but it wasn’t too shy of it. ‘Look inside, look properly,’ he urged impatiently. ‘It’s a lot more extraordinary than you might think at first glance.’

  He watched avidly as the book-dealer blew on the pages and separated them gently, making faces as he did so. ‘Well, it’s all there,’ he said at last. ‘The patterns and slips and all.’

  Michael looked deflated. ‘Is that all you can say? Come on, man, it’s unique, a… a palimpsest! Can’t you see the secret text, written in the margins and between the patterns? It’s not easy to make out, I’ll admit, but you can’t have missed it!’

  Bywater frowned and reapplied himself to the book. Eventually he closed it and looked at his friend oddly. ‘Well, there’s certainly no palimpsest here, dear boy. This is paper, not vellum: there’s no sign of scraping, no scriptio inferior, nothing that I can see. Marginalia, well, that’s quite a different matter, as you should know. Now marginalia in the author’s own hand, that would add some value, possibly double it – ’

  ‘It’s not in the author’s hand, you idiot: it’s written by some girl. It’s a unique historical document, and it’s probably priceless! You must need glasses – ’

  Michael snatched the book roughly from the dealer’s hand, opening it at random, and flicked through it frantically as if the writing he had seen the previous day might magically reappear.

  After a minute, he put it down again, his face like thunder.

  Then he ran to the phone.

  3

  I knew Anna, Michael’s wife, from university. There, we had been the Three Amigos, me, Anna and my cousin Alison, as unlike from one another as you could imagine. Where Anna was petite and doll-like, Alison and I were of solid Cornish stock, raised on rich dairy products and pasties. When I let it down, I could sit on my blonde hair, while Anna’s was short and black and model-perfect; and Alison’s shoulder-length hair was chestnut brown, then red, then black, then scarlet and back to brown again, depending on whether she was teaching English or Drama. Together we made the perfect symbiotic unit for getting through the trials of university and our first post-degree jobs – Anna in a bookshop, Alison teaching, me in an endless series of cafés and bars.

  Alison and I messed around, took drugs, got drunk, got laid, had fun, but Anna made shapes with her life: she took the threads of her experiences and wove them into something purposeful. She worked hard, and it showed. She was now a successful fashion-magazine editor, earning a small fortune, although ironically she was the only one of us who never really needed the money. Her family were, from what I could gather – though she was quite secretive about her background, and a bit shy around me and Alison and our noisy and frequent financial crises – really rather posh.

  After college it was, I suppose, inevitable that we should drift apart. Alison met and married Andrew, for a start. I have to admit I was never that keen on Andrew. He was one of those ruddy, sweaty, rugby-playing men, hearty and over-confident, with a tendency to grab your knee, or something else, in the middle of a conversation, depending on how drunk he was. But he had a wicked sense of humour and no facility for embarrassment, and he made Alison happy, for a while at least, and so I did my best to make friends with him. They took me in time after time when I got my heart broken by one unsuitable man after another, poured drink down me, and Alison would look on indulgently as Andrew flirted clumsily with me while I laughed and wept and choked on my wine. When he cheated on my cousin and caused her to come running to me in tears, feeling that her life had come apart and could never be put back together again, I was livid with him and did not speak to him for the best part of two years.

  How ironic. For shortly after that I met Michael.

  How well I remember it all. Anna, a little breathless, flushed, embarrassed. ‘Julia, come and have a drink. There’s someone I want you to meet. My fiancé, in fact.’

  Well, she’d kept that quiet. I was astonished, and rather hurt, by the secrecy and suddenness of it all. She’d never even had boyfriends at college. When the rest of us were making the most of our newfound freedom, Anna was writing essays, researching, revising. While I was cheerfully experimenting with sex, Anna stayed focused and celibate. She took life a lot more seriously than the rest of us. After college she had ploughed her energies into her career: she had a plan, she said, and it certainly seemed to be working for her. ‘I’ll marry in my thirties,’ I remember her telling me, ‘once I’m properly established at the magazine and can take time off to have children.’ And I’d scoffed and reminded her that life was what happened to you while you were making plans. So there she was, at thirty, announcing her engagement, the next step in her life-scheme.

  ‘Are you pregnant?’ I’d teased her.

  She was indignant; but went very pink. ‘Of course not,’ she said.

  I wondered if she had even slept with him.

  There had to be a flaw, since there is no such thing as perfection, in life or art or anything else. Perfection tempts fate. I remember reading that ancient Japanese potters always worked a tiny flaw into each pot they created, for fear of angering the gods, and Anna must surely have tempted some impish spirit somewhere in the pantheon, to have been punished for her hubris with Michael. And in having me for a friend.

  Unfortunately for all of us, the attraction between me and Michael was instant. We made electric eye-contact, and, at one point during that first evening at a crammed little bar in Covent Garden, he brushed his hand, quite deliberately and with devastating effect, against my bottom. Three weeks later, after a lot of meaningful looks and some furtive touching, we slept together.

  ‘I can’t tell Anna,’ he said to me that same afternoon, as if it were a foregone conclusion; and I, missing my first and best opportunity to unravel the developing tangle, lay there concussed by sex and guilt, and agreed. After that it became increasingly unthinkable to admit our treachery.

  I was a bridesmaid at the wedding.

  As we lay together on snatched Wednesday afternoons in Michael’s Soho flat when he wasn’t teaching, summer sunlight slipping through the louvred blinds, slicing our bodies into lit and shaded slivers, he would confide to me, ‘She’s not very physical, Anna. I always feel I’m imposing myself on her.’ At the time I felt triumph, but my confidence was misplaced. Anna’s cool distance intrigued and challenged him: she remained an unseized prize, an elusive country he had only fleetingly glimpsed but never claimed as territory. Whereas I had been staked out, explored, tied down – often literally. Sometimes when we made love, Michael would wind my long, pale hair in his hands, using it like reins. Once he tied me to a hotel bedstead with it. To cut me free, we had to use the pair of miniature sewing scissors I kept in my handbag with my embroidery kit, he had made such a mess of the knots.

  I recalled that particular incident now, four years later: it seemed an apt metaphor – an omen perhaps – for how things had turned out. Michael had knotted my life into a vile tangle, and then cut me free. I was angry with him; furious in fact, before admitting to myself that I had to take at least as much of the blame for the situation. Anna was, after all, my friend. I had felt ashamed of the affair, my betrayal of our friendship, from the start. But shame is an uncomfortable emotion, one we don’t much like to confront. The pressures of Anna’s work made this easier than it might otherwise have been, and I had become a master of excuses in avoiding dreaded tête-à-têtes and dinner à trois. Racked by the knowledge of how I was be
traying her, day by day, hour by hour, I found I could not bear her company. She was so happy; and only I knew the truth that would render that happiness rotten and hollow.

  Now that Michael and I had come to an end, I wasn’t sure I could ever endure to see her again.

  The day after our break-up, exhausted by weeping, I took myself out of London to walk the cliffs of the south coast, feeling much of the time like throwing myself over them, but never summoning the courage. I left my mobile phone behind in the Putney flat, to ensure I did not weaken and call him. Instead, in the time when I was not stalking mechanically along footpaths, impervious to the magnificent scenery, I devoted myself to a new embroidery design I had been meaning to start for some weeks.

  It was for a wall hanging, and therefore to be worked on stout linen twill, in coloured wools rather than silks. Ever since the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods this type of work has been known as crewel work, from the old Welsh word for ‘wool’. Which seemed fitting. I spent many bitter hours playing on the unfortunate pun in my head as I stitched. Crewel world, crewel fate, crewel to be kind, crewel and unusual… I had already marked out on the fabric a coiling monochrome pattern of stylized acanthus leaves, with flares of colour where flowers burst through the foliage. Very traditional in style, after the Flemish Verdure tapestries I’d seen in the Victoria & Albert Museum, the delicate infilling of the leaf design inspired by the filigree of Venetian needlepoint lace. It was a large piece, and would easily cover the space where the beautiful, framed black-and-white photograph of Michael had hung in my bedroom. The photo, I had ceremonially burned in the back garden before leaving the flat; but the wall annoyingly retained its ghostly shape, and it would be a constant reminder of the absence of both man and picture.

  Embroidery is an improbable hobby for someone as disordered as me; but it’s the very precision of it that attracts me, the illusion of control it offers. When engaged in stitching a new pattern I can’t think about anything else. Guilt, misery, longing, all flee away, leaving just the beautiful microcosm of the world in my hands, the flash of the needle, the rainbow colours of the thread, the calming exactitude of the discipline. It was the wall hanging that saved my sanity in the days following our break-up.

  I returned to London a week later, somewhat restored to myself, to find my answering machine flashing crazily. You have twenty-three new messages, the digital voice informed me. My heart thumped. Perhaps Michael had had second thoughts about finishing the relationship, perhaps he wanted to see me. I pushed this possibility firmly away. He was a bastard, and I was well rid of him. Before I could backslide, I deleted all the messages. If there had been anything crucial, the caller would phone again, I reasoned. I knew that if I so much as heard Michael’s voice, my resolve would crumble.

  I walked into the bedroom, where all was still in the disarray in which I had left it: the bed unmade, discarded clothes scattered across the room. I cleared everything away, filled the washing machine and came back to make the bed.

  The book Michael had given me lay in the tangle of sheets. It weighed beautifully in my hand, its soft calfskin cover warm, as if it were still alive. I opened it at random, folding the ancient paper back with care, and was confronted by a pattern for a slip: a delicate repeated motif of a twining vine designed to be executed in blackwork, which, the author suggested, would doe beste in a quaife or a caule, or to edge a handcarcheef. The rest of his instructions were obscured beneath a defacing cross-hatch of pencilled markings. Annoyed, I carried the book to the bedside lamp and squinted at it under the round of golden light.

  Someone had written all over the page in a tiny, archaic hand. Long f instead of s, and that sort of thing; it was hard to read and in places blotched and faded, but, from the words I could make out, it had nothing to do with embroidery at all; not unless the author had a taste for samplers themed on blood, and death. I retrieved a magnifying glass from the bureau, fetched a notebook and pencil of my own, turned to the frontispiece and began to make a sort of translation of what I had found.

  This daie 27th of Maie in the yeare of Our Lord 1625 markes the sad deth of oure kyng James, & the 19th yr of the birth of hys servant Catherine Anne Tregenna & I must give thanks for that & for the gifte of this booke & plumbagoe writing sticke from my cozen Robert with which he sayes I may record my own slippes & paterns. That shall I doe but like my mystresse Lady Harrys of Kenegy I wille also keep herein my musings, for she tells mee it ys a goodly dutie & taske for the mynd to thus practiss my letters…

  4

  Catherine

  June 1625

  Matty woke her just after dawn. ‘Come down to the parlour,’ she said. ‘Jack Kellynch is down there, with Thom Samuels and your cousin Rob.’

  ‘Robert?’ Cat blinked, still half asleep, and struggled upright. Pale light was forcing its way past the curtains she had made from an old petticoat to hang over the draughty attic window. ‘What is Rob doing here with those rogues?’

  Matty made a face. ‘Don’t say that, they’re good lads.’

  The Kellynch brothers ran a pilchard boat out of Market-Jew, sometimes joining the seiners and coming back in with the tuck-net full of fish, but more often disappearing for weeks on end, no one knew where, and turning up again much richer, with sly grins and winks for the girls, flashing foreign gold. Matty sighed over Jack; Cat thought him a blackguard and a fool, if a handsome one. Thom Samuels had not even that advantage: he boasted but a single eyebrow, black and lowering, right across his forehead. She laughed. ‘Smugglers and brigands, the pair of them.’

  But Matty was already out of the door. Cat heard her footsteps, heavy on the creaking boards outside, then thundering down the stairs. Sir Arthur and Lady Harris had their quarters in the quiet west wing of the house; the servants were in the east, where the noise from the adjacent farm was loudest: if Matty hadn’t woken her, then the dogs and cockerel would. She slipped out of bed. Her stiff dark-green working dress and corset were arranged over the back of the single chair, her linen stockings lying over them like a pair of empty legs. No time for all that lacing and strapping: she straightened her shift and grabbed up her shawl: a vanity, for it was her best, hand-embroidered with a cross-hatch of briar roses in fine wool.

  Why was Robert here, and at such an hour? She knew that Margaret Harris had a soft spot for her cousin, and encouraged him to come to the house far more than his duties about the farm might require. With his tangled yellow hair and bright blue eyes, Rob towered over the Mistress by a good fifteen inches. He towered over most folk; Lady Harris teased him that he was descended from the giants of Carn Brea, who had dragged their captives up the hill and sacrificed them on the great flat rocks there, before stripping them of their gold and jewels, which they hid deep in the granite caves beneath. But Cat could never imagine her gentle cousin taking anyone captive, let alone beating their brains out on the stones. It was quite strange enough that he should appear in the company of Kellynch and Samuels, and at a time when the Mistress was still abed.

  Curiosity piqued, she slipped her bare feet into her cold boots and headed for the stairs. She found Matty and the dairymaid, Big Grace, peering furtively through the crack in the parlour door. Male voices drifted out into the passageway, along with the sharp smell of small beer and a fug of smoke from the kitchen fire. In low tones, one of the lads said something Cat could not quite catch. The girls listened intently, straining for every word of the hushed conversation within. Grace squeezed Matty’s hand, and the two exchanged a horrified glance. Cat grinned and tiptoed across the flagstones, laying a hand on Matty’s shoulder for balance so that she too could peer into the parlour. Matty made a high-pitched yelp like a rabbit taken by a fox.

  Jack Kellynch wrenched the door open. Small-boned and dark, he had the brown skin and bright eyes of the Spaniard his mother was reputed to be – taken, it was said, off a merchantman wrecked on the Manacles, along with a cargo of fortified wine, a chest of gold and silver plate, and bales of Orient silk bound for t
he old Queen. The silk and most of the plate had made its way to Her Majesty; but the wine had most mysteriously vanished, along with the Spanish merchant’s daughter.

  ‘Well, now, Matty,’ he said, giving her a hard look, ‘you should know no good comes to those who listen where they shouldn’t.’

  Matty flushed a powerful red and looked at her feet, unable to frame a sentence. For her part, Big Grace could do no more than grip Matty’s arm, her eyes round and awed, her mouth hanging open. She was only thirteen, a touch simple, and tiny despite her familiar name.

  Cat strode forward. ‘What are you doing here, Jack Kellynch? Matty and Grace have reason, being honestly employed in this house; but you, as far as I know, are honestly employed by no man and have no business in our parlour at break of day.’

  Kellynch regarded her sardonically. ‘My business is my own and not something that should concern a Danish wench.’

  Cat tossed the tawny hair that had earned her this inaccurate insult and stepped past him into the parlour, ready to berate her cousin Robert for allowing such an invasion of ne’er-do-wells. In the smoky, firelit room beyond, however, were three figures: not only Robert Bolitho and Thomas Samuels, as she had expected, who sat at the table; but also a third man standing in the shadowed corner, leaning against the wall. He wore a dusty travelling cloak, and his boots were muddy. It was only when he took a step forward and the lantern’s light fell upon him that she realized it was the Master, Sir Arthur Harris himself, his expression grim.

  ‘These men are here at my invitation, Catherine, bringing me information.’

  Cat dropped a desperate curtsy, head spinning. ‘I beg your pardon, sir, I thought you were at the Mount – ’

  ‘And that gives you licence to appear half dressed in company?’