Crossed Bones

by Jane Johnson

  The next man was older, and his seafaring days were long spent. Cat recognized him as old Thomas Ellys. Arthritis had swollen his joints and age bent his back. His silver thruppenny bit was still in his pocket, ready for the collection, along with a yellowed bone comb. The raïs inspected his hand, which was callused and rough, confirming that he was a worker, and no rich man’s father. He turned to the clerk, and they debated for a few moments; then the pirate called for one of his men, made a curt gesture and indicated the old fisherman. Without a word, the crewman jostled Thomas Ellys away to the ship’s side and without ceremony upended him over the gunwale. There was a pause, a splash, and then silence.

  ‘You barbarian!’ the preacher started. He stared out at the rolling, empty sea. They were already far from land; even a young, fit man had no chance of gaining the shore from here. ‘May the Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on his soul.’

  The raïs shrugged. ‘We short on provisions: cannot waste on useless old man who no one ransom and who fetch nothing in auction. If your Jesus care for his soul, he will arrange miracle.’ He held the preacher’s furious regard coolly. ‘It was Romans first called my people barbari, “the uncultured”; but they ignorant and so are those who use same word after them. My people call ourselves the Imazighen, “the free men”: we are Berber and proud. At home in mountains I speak language of my own people, with business partners in the kasbah I converse in Spanish, with fellow corsairs I speak Arabic and the lingua franca of ports. I speak also some English and a little Dutch. I have read every page of the Qur’an and from curiosity some of your bible. In my collection of books I have copies of Ibn Battuta’s Travels, poetry of Mawlana Rumi, Ibn Khaldun’s Mukaddimah and Al-Hassan ibn Mohammed al-Wazzani’s Cosmographia Dell’Africa; I have read them all. Now, tell me who the barbarian?’

  ‘To steal innocent human beings – women and children – from their homes and sell them into slavery is the act of a barbarian.’

  ‘Then all great nations of world also barbarians – Spanish and French, Portuguese, Sicilians and Venetians. I manned an oar for year on Sicilian galley, have many scars on my back. English also: your great heroes Drake and Hawkins also barbarians. And they far worse than the corsairs of Slâ, which ignorant call Sallee, for they took captives solely for personal profit and treated their cargoes with contempt.’

  ‘And you do not?’

  ‘I am al-ghuzat, warrior of Prophet. My men and I carry jihad – holy war – into seas and on to shores of our enemies, take captive many infidel for sale in our markets. Money we raise from such trade is invested in welfare of our people and glory of God. Is pleasing to Most High that riches of infidels be returned to Allah.’

  ‘Then not only are you a barbarian but also a heretic!’ The preacher’s eyes were flashing now. His beard flapped in the wind. He looked, Cat thought, like one of the Old Testament prophets, like Moses calling down the ice-storm upon Egypt.

  Al-Andalusi leaped to his feet, knocking the pipe over so that smoke and water poured across the deck. ‘You not use that word to me! The Spanish called my father heretic. Inquisition broke his bones on their vile rack, but they never broke his spirit.’ He turned and shouted at three of his sailors, who ran to do his bidding. In no time they had returned. One carried a stave of iron with a flattened end; the other two a small brazier. The latter was set down on the deck beside the raïs, and the first man at once set the end of the stave to the coals in the brazier and held it there till it glowed red, then white. Walter Truran watched it with something approaching fascination, unable to take his eyes from it. Then he started to pray.

  Al-Andalusi shouted an order, and the men tore the boots from the preacher’s feet.

  ‘You have such faith in your crucified prophet, now you for ever honoured by bearing his mark.’

  And with that, he gestured to the men, one of whom held the preacher down while the other applied the iron to the man’s white and wrinkled soles. Cat closed her eyes; but she could not erase from her senses the sound of the brand as it burned through the skin and sizzled in blood, nor the stink of burned meat which rose into the air.

  While the preacher lay moaning on the deck, Ashab Ibrahim rifled his pockets, coming away with an ivory-handled fruit knife, a handful of small coins and a little leather-bound psalter. This last the raïs flicked through with some curiosity, then tossed back to the preacher. ‘If you not give me your name, you go down on manifest as the Imam.’

  ‘Give me no heathen title! My name is Walter Truran, and you can write beside it “Man of God”. But I warn you now, there is no one from whom you can extort a ransom.’

  The raïs shrugged. ‘You have strong spirit and strong back. Perhaps galleys take you. Or perhaps Sultan Moulay Zidane will be amused by your rantings. Your feet will not be bound until all have seen what happen to those who think to defy me. From today know whenever you set foot on ground you tread on symbol of your bastard religion; and that is how it should be.’

  Now Cat was brought before the captain of the pirate ship. So frightened was she by the Reverend Truran’s ordeal that she could hardly bear to look upon his tormentor. She kept her eyes on her feet and prayed silently that he would pass her quickly by. Even the mire, discomfort and darkness of the hold was preferable to this. Her knees shook uncontrollably.

  ‘What your name?’

  ‘Catherine,’ she started. Her voice was the squeak of a mouse. Drawing a breath, she tried again. ‘Catherine Anne Tregenna.’

  ‘You wear green dress, Cat’rin Anne Tregenna. Why?’

  This was such an unexpected remark that her head shot up, and she found herself looking the raïs in the eye. His gaze burned into her. ‘I… ah… it is an old dress, sir.’

  ‘Green is colour of Prophet. Only his descendants may wear it. Are you descended from the Prophet?’

  Horrified, Catherine shook her head, her tongue stuck fast to the roof of her mouth.

  ‘Take off! Is insult to Prophet to wear his colour unless entitled.’

  Cat’s eyes widened. ‘I… can’t… it laces up the back…’

  Al-Andalusi leaned forward. ‘A woman cannot dress herself must be dressed by a slave. Are you rich woman, Cat’rin Anne Tregenna?’

  What was the right answer? Cat searched for inspiration. She reasoned it were best to suggest that keeping her whole and fit for ransom would be worth while; she did not want to be thrown overboard, branded like the preacher or, worse, passed as a worthless bawd to the bestial crew for their pleasure. She squared her shoulders. ‘I am Catherine Tregenna of Kenegie Manor, and I am not without means.’

  The raïs translated this for the scribe, who wrote quickly on his block. ‘Turn around,’ he told her then, taking an ornamented curved dagger from his belt.

  Fearing the worst, Catherine did as she was told, and waited for the cold blade at her throat. Instead, there was a shearing sound and an ease of pressure, and suddenly the green dress lay around her ankles, leaving her shivering in her cotton shift. Instinctively, she crossed her arms over her chest, feeling the eyes of the crew crawling over her pale white skin like the unclean touch of insects.

  Al-Andalusi bent and shook out the fabric. From it fell the little pouch, which at once he snatched up. ‘What this? Is bible or prayers to your god?’ He brandished her little book.

  All at once, she felt a powerful sense of ownership. No one must touch her book; her most secret thoughts lay within. Without thinking, she reached out and took hold of it. For a moment, their eyes locked; then the pirate released his grip on the soft calfskin cover. ‘It is a book on embroidery,’ Cat said in a low voice. ‘See, here –’ She opened it on a page she had not yet written on, showing a spray of stylized flowers which might be reproduced on a cuff or a pair of stockings. ‘It contains patterns to copy. Like this.’ Daring now, she raised her petticoat an inch or two to show him the fine clocking at her ankles.

  He tilted his head to examine it. ‘And you have done this work yourself?’

 
‘Yes.’

  The raïs said something to the scribe, who added something to the list he made. Then he tossed the little pouch back to Cat. ‘Women of Sultan’s court pay much for work like this. Perhaps you teach them new patterns.’ His eyes narrowed. ‘And perhaps Sultan Moulay Zidane pay me well for such addition to his harem, particularly with such white skin and hair colour of sunset. We set price of eight hundred pounds for such rare prize.’

  Eight hundred pounds! It was a huge sum. Cat clutched the pouch to her chest with her heart hammering. Foolish, foolish wench, her head scolded her. Thinking you could outwit a man like that. Now he has set such a price on your head that no one can ever afford to redeem you, and you will end your days in some foreign land, pining away for the sound of an English voice or the touch of Cornish rain, for Rob and kindness and all the ordinary things of the world which you have spurned, and all for vanity. One of the pirate crew threw a thick woollen robe over her head and led her back down to the hold; she stumbled before him as if in a dream, one from which she might never be able to awake.

  13

  Those who have also been taken captive call the pyrats who have taken us the Sallee Rovers & say they come from Moroco on the Barbarie Coast in Afrik, but when the old Ægyptian told my fortune & said I would voyage a very long way & that at the end of my journey I would find a union between Earth & Heaven, I had not thoghte of anny thing so terrible as this. How I wish I had not prayed for such a destiny. If God sees me He ys surely smylyng now at my vanitee…

  It had been hard to sleep after reading these last entries in Catherine’s little book. I had just about got my head around her descriptions of daily life at Kenegie and the petty frustrations and jealousies of living in a small, closed community. I had taken the more unfamiliar words and spellings in my stride, skipping those that continued to evade me; but now she had completely thrown me. I had been enjoying her acid comments about her co-workers, her fierce anguish at being forced to marry her cousin, who struck me as a decent-enough man; I had even been rather looking forward to discovering something of what a seventeenth-century wedding entailed: the domestic details, the dress, the meal arrangements and of course Cat’s reaction to becoming a married woman. I found myself charmed by this long-dead girl, felt caught up in her distant life, her hopes and fears. I wished too to know more about the altar cloth she had started, whether the Countess of Salisbury ever reappeared. I wanted to hear that that fine lady and Cat’s mistress had been suitably astonished by the ambition of her vision and by her skill in executing her grand design when she finally presented them with her Tree of Knowledge. I had – I should admit now – rather hoped to track down this magnificent artefact and make it the subject of a distinguished magazine article, suitably illustrated and as elegantly written as I could manage. I had even – God help me – entertained the idea of asking Anna for a few useful contacts in placing such a piece.

  The brief and bloody encounter with the raiders had astonished me. I had lived in Cornwall for my first eighteen years, and no one in all that time had so much as mentioned the words ‘Barbary’ and ‘pirate’ in the same breath. I did not know what to think: did all the history of the region I had ever been taught rest on a false foundation; or was Cat a fantasist, earthing out her anxiety and boredom by means of some wild fiction? If it were the former, then I had to find out whatever I could on the subject. I decided that after accompanying Alison and Michael to view the cottage at Mousehole, I would make my excuses and visit Penzance Library to trawl the internet and the local history shelves for whatever I could find about Cornwall in the mid 1620s.

  A little voice nagged at the back of my mind: how likely was it that, snatched by slave traders, Catherine could have taken and kept her embroidery book and her writing implement with her and managed to continue her journal in the desperate conditions of such a ship’s hold? And, if she had managed such a feat, then how had the little book ever made it back to this country and, more specifically, to Alison’s house, so close to where Cat had been taken from in the first place? But if Cat had been driven by her own difficulties to take shelter in fantasy, the story she had created would surely make her England’s first writer of prose fiction, predating Daniel Defoe by almost a century. Either possibility rendered the book a valuable object; and, as such, made me even more determined to keep it away from Michael.

  We parked on the outskirts of the village and walked down its winding main road, exclaiming in delight as we rounded the corner and emerged suddenly into a wide, sunlit harbour.

  ‘How extraordinary!’ Michael’s eyes shone as he took in the array of small, brightly coloured craft bobbing within the protective arms of the quay, the tumble of cottages lining the steep hillsides around the cove.

  If you removed the cars and the yachts, the streetlamps and the tourists, it was a scene that had changed very little in a couple of hundred years, I thought wistfully. There were not many places left in the world like this, and most of those had lost a lot of their soul, but Mousehole retained something of the rare conviviality of a village in which a local community lived out their lives and watched the tourists come and go like the tides. Outside the grocer’s a blackboard had been attached to the railings overlooking the harbour; on it someone had chalked in large unsteady letters, ‘Happy birthday, Alan, 73 today!’ A group of elderly women who evidently shared the same hairdresser – one who had perfected a single style of grey-helmet perm – was gathered at the bus stop, gossiping cheerfully. As we passed, I heard one of them say, ‘… and he got up and went off down to the boat, never even noticed she were dead’ – which for some reason merely made her listeners chuckle, as if it was the sort of oversight men here made all the time.

  ‘It’s up here,’ Michael announced after consulting a hand-drawn map. Even from where I stood, I could tell it was Anna who had made it. Anna was just the right person to draw maps: neat, precise, painstakingly accurate. If she’d been charting oceans at the time of Magellan, there would have been no fanciful monsters curling up out of the deeps, no ‘heere be dragons’, no siren mermaids or other unnecessary curlicues, but merely the legend ‘open water’. It was probably this very lack of imagination that had enabled Michael to continue his illicit liaison with me all this time.

  The street he led us up was too narrow for traffic. Instead, people had filled it with effusive containers of flowers and bizarre prehistoric-looking plants like giant, fleshy black rosettes; outside one particularly eccentric dwelling was half of an old rowing boat with terracotta pots of geraniums ranged along its thwarts. Anna’s cottage was limewashed and had shutters of a pretty faded blue. Seagull droppings mired the windows and chickweed grew on the roof, but even so it was exquisite.

  Inside, however, the chocolate-box illusion was dispelled. Dark, dingy and filthy, the cottage exhaled a great gassy breath of mildew and damp as soon as Michael opened the door. The low ceilings were yellowed, not just with age but with nicotine; the old man who’d rented must have been a pipe-smoker. The armchairs were stained and threadbare along the arms, and the back of one had been ripped down to the stuffing where a cat had used it for sharpening its claws.

  ‘Poor thing,’ said Alison. ‘It is in need of some care and attention, isn’t it?’ For a moment I thought she’d spied the resident pet, gone feral since its owner’s demise; then I realized she meant the house.

  Michael smiled wryly. ‘That’s what the estate agent said, but all I thought she meant was that it could do with a lick of paint and some new carpets.’

  ‘Ah, estate agents,’ Alison said. ‘What do they know?’

  Boxes had been stacked against one wall marked ‘Books’ and ‘Crockery’. Michael made immediately for the first of these piles, took down the top box and started emptying it on to the floor, eyeing the contents avidly. Did he suspect there were more antiquities like The Needle-Woman’s Glorie hidden away down here? I crouched beside him to examine what he had brought out of the box. The top layer consisted of paperbacks go
ne brown with age, the sort of fiction that had long since passed out of fashion – Second World War novels and luridly packaged American detective stories. Nothing of interest there.

  ‘How long has this place been in Anna’s family?’ I asked idly.

  Michael frowned. He picked up a plain-jacketed, ex-library hardback, flicked to the title page, scanned it, shook the book in case something had been hidden inside it and then discarded it with the rest. ‘Oh, ages. I don’t know.’

  ‘It seems to have been stuck in a time-warp,’ I persisted. ‘Hasn’t Anna ever been here?’

  He looked up at me unhappily. ‘Not as far as I know. Why would she?’

  ‘Well, I’d want to have a peep at my inheritance. Seems a bit cavalier to take the weekly rent and just let it fall into rack and ruin. I feel quite sorry for the poor old man who lived here.’

  ‘Look, it’s nothing to do with me. I just came down to go through the stuff that’s left, make sure the clearance people didn’t miss anything important.’

  ‘Like the book you gave me?’

  Catherine’s little book was in my shoulder bag. I felt it there, emanating such strong signals I was almost surprised Michael couldn’t sense its presence.

  ‘Stop sniping, both of you,’ Alison snapped. ‘Come on, Julia, let’s have a poke around.’ She took me by the arm and fairly wrestled me out of the living room. We ducked our heads under the lintel and found ourselves in a small dark kitchen.

  ‘Can’t you try to be civilized with one another?’

  I made a face. I was wishing I hadn’t come. It was easier to nurse my righteous hurt away from Michael. Besides, Cat’s story was haunting me: I had a sudden powerful urge to run outside into the sunlight, away into the open with her little book.

  ‘I think I’ll go for a walk,’ I told Alison. ‘I’ve got a bit of a headache.’

  She looked surprised. ‘Oh, OK. Do you mind if I stay for a while?’