Crossed Bones

by Jane Johnson

  ‘Do what you want.’ It was rude, but I didn’t feel much like making the effort. I was still angry at her for encouraging Michael to come down here.

  By the time I got back to the living room, Michael was on his third box.

  ‘Anything interesting?’

  He shook his head, looking grim. ‘A load of old rubbish.’

  ‘All you deserve,’ I said under my breath and marched out of the door.

  I wandered off to find myself a suitably quiet and sunny spot in which to sit and read, but I had not gone more than a few yards before a tiny old woman beckoned to me. As I got closer, I realized that she was suffering from some kind of strabismus, which had caused her left eye to be directed in a different direction to her right one. Feeling embarrassed, as if I had mistakenly reacted to her call when she was in fact hailing someone else, I turned, but there was no one else on the street. ‘Hello,’ I said cautiously.

  She came down the hill towards me. ‘You’re searching for something, my dear.’

  ‘No – just wandering around, taking in the sights.’

  Her smiling face was as softly wrinkled as the leather of an old Chesterfield sofa, one eye looking over my shoulder, the other unnervingly focused on my chin. I had no idea which one to respond to. She leaned in closer. ‘I can tell you are searching,’ she insisted. She patted my hand. ‘It will be all right, you’ll see.’

  She was obviously a bit mad. I smiled. ‘Thank you, that’s nice to know. You live in a lovely village, and I’m going to have a jolly good look around it now.’ I stepped away, but her grip tightened.

  ‘What you are searching for you will have to travel to discover,’ she urged me. ‘And what you find will not be the thing you thought you went to find. It will be’ – and here she beamed at me as if bestowing the blessing of all the angels – ‘far more wonderful than anything you have imagined, it will remake your life. But if you stay here fate will catch up with you. Annie Badcock never lies.’ A cloud drifted over the sun, and she broke the connection between us suddenly. ‘They were here.’ She winked at me. ‘They came across the ocean and took them away. People have forgotten; they have forgotten all the important things. But the past is stronger than they know. It is a great black tide which will sweep us all under in the end.’

  And with that she was off, limping away down the hill without a goodbye or even a backwards glance. I stood there, staring after her, nonplussed. Had she read my mind or was she just crazy? But perhaps, that irritating little voice at the back of my mind prompted, perhaps she really knows something. Annie Badcock. The name was vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t remember where I’d come across it.

  ∗

  ‘If you took down the internal wall between the old scullery and the breakfast room, you could open up the kitchen and make it a lot brighter.’

  There was light in Alison’s eye. She looked as if she might burst into hysterical laughter or tears at any moment. Perhaps poking around the old cottage had reminded her too much of renovating the farmhouse with Andrew. But there was a determined thrust to her jaw: she needed a project, for the money as much as for the distraction. We were sitting out on the terrace at the Old Coastguard Hotel, finishing a bottle of rose after eating local fish and Cornish cheeses, and as soon as the waiter had cleared our plates away, Alison had covered the table with sketches and notes.

  Michael was in her thrall, nodding and asking questions. ‘And you think all this could be done for how much?’

  ‘Sixteen, seventeen thousand. I know some good local craftsmen, and you could use me as project manager. I’d be happy to oversee it.’

  ‘I’ll talk to Anna, see what she thinks. It makes sense, though, I can see that. No one’s going to buy the cottage in the state it’s in at the moment.’

  ‘Not full of old rubbish,’ I added helpfully.

  He pursed his mouth, which made him look prissy and mean; I could see the old man he could soon become if he allowed the negative side of his personality to hold sway. When he turned back to Alison again it was with his left shoulder held higher, as if to block me out of the conversation. Pain lanced through me, but I said as blithely as I could manage: ‘I’m going to take the bus into Penzance. I’ll see you later, Alison. I’ll get a taxi or something.’

  ‘Oh, OK.’ She frowned, as if expecting an explanation.

  ‘Some things I need to buy,’ I said, not wanting her to see that I was feeling territorial and upset. I got up and slung my bag over my shoulder.

  ‘Aren’t you going to say goodbye to me?’ Michael said, looking put out.

  ‘I was under the impression we’d said goodbye some time ago,’ I said coolly. I felt his eyes on me as I walked away.

  Half an hour later I was tucked away on the first floor of the local library with an ancient PC and a dodgy internet connection. I Googled ‘barbary pirates Cornwall’ and waited. Seconds after I clicked ‘search’ I was offered the choice of over twelve thousand entries containing this unlikely combination of words. I picked a few at random and in a very short space of time had begun to feel as if I were inhabiting a sort of alternative universe in which an entire buried history existed under the surface of the world I knew.

  According to various sources – academics, amateur historians, official state papers, the occasional survivor’s account – over a million Europeans had been abducted and enslaved by North African pirates between the early sixteenth and late eighteenth centuries. A fraction of the estimated twelve million Africans taken and sold in slavery in the Americas, but still a hugely significant number. Between the 1610s and the 1630s Cornwall and Devon lost a fifth of their shipping to corsairs, and in 1625 over a thousand sailors and fishermen from Plymouth and the Cornish and Devon coasts were taken and sold into slavery. The Mayor of Bristol reported that a Barbary fleet had captured Lundy Island and there raised the standard of Islam, and that this little island in the Bristol Channel then became a fortified base from which they launched raids on the unprotected villages of north Cornwall and Devon. The raiders came to be known as the Sallee Rovers, since they operated out of the Muslim stronghold of Salé, just across the river from Rabat in Morocco, and included a ragtag collection of disaffected privateers from various seafaring European nations who had ensconced themselves there alongside the remarkably mixed population of the area, which already contained native Berbers, Arabs, Jews and ‘Moriscos’ – Muslims expelled from Catholic Spain, where many of their families had lived for generations. In the Barbary states these Europeans found men eager for revenge on the Christian world which had persecuted them, men with the resources, the wit and the will to carry a seaborne war to the very shores of the enemy; a war, moreover, sanctioned and blessed by the ruling powers and driven not only by the greed for wealth but also by the fervour of religion.

  One of the most effective raiders had apparently been an Englishman by the name of John Ward, who had turned renegade shortly after King James I signed a peace treaty with Spain, thus cutting off Ward’s legal opportunities to attack the Spanish treasure fleet. He made for North Africa, converted to Islam, taking the name of Yussuf Raïs, and started training up the locals in the knowledge of navigation and in the use of sailing swift vessels. He became the admiral of the Sale fleet, vowing to ‘become a foe to all Christians, bee a persecutor to their trafficke, & an impoverisher of their wealth’. One particularly intrepid corsair chief, Jan Jansz – a Dutchman going by the adopted Muslim name of Murad Raïs – apparently sailed all the way to Iceland from Salé and stole four hundred captives out of the harbour-city of Reykjavik to sell at a premium, with their milk-pale skin and white-blond hair, in the Barbary slave markets.

  I found mention of a letter from the Mayor of Plymouth in April of 1625, warning the Privy Council that he had spoken with an eyewitness to a fleet of ships (‘thirtie saile’) about to set out from Sale in Morocco bound for our shores bent on the capture of slaves; clearly, the authorities of the time had not acted on the information.

 
; It was the final entry I followed up that sent shivers running down my spine. Quoting the state papers of the time, a Lebanese expert on the period described how in the summer of 1625 Salé corsairs took out of a church in Mount’s Bay ‘about 60 men, women and children, and carried them away captives’. For several moments I sat there, trembling. I read and reread the entry to make sure I had not misunderstood it. Then I took out the little book Michael had given me, laid it on the table and stared at it, feeling the synchronicities wreathing around me like ghostly threads. Here I sat in a library in Penzance, Mount’s Bay, with my left hand on the soft calfskin cover of an extraordinary seventeenth-century memoir and with my right on the hard, smooth plastic of a computer mouse, old technology and new connected by a human bridge spanning four centuries of history. And now my head knew what my heart had already accepted: that Catherine Anne Tregenna had indeed been snatched from Sunday service by ruthless pirates, to be sold in white-slave markets two thousand miles and two continents away.

  Just at that moment, as if the electricity of that connection had somehow arced across another emotional gulf, my mobile phone rang. It was Michael.

  I should have switched it off and let him stew; but the disapproving faces around me panicked me, and I ran outside to take the call.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Why did you run off like that? And what about that parting shot – “I thought we’d said goodbye some time ago”? That was hurtful.’

  I almost laughed. ‘You’re hurt? What about me? It was you who ditched me, not the other way round. You’ve no right to feel hurt.’

  ‘I know, I know; and I was wrong. I should never have done it.’

  ‘Never have done what?’

  ‘I should never have walked away from you. I can’t do this, Julia. I can’t not have you in my life. I miss you.’

  Every dumped woman dreams of having a man say such a thing to her. Every dumped woman practises a number of killer lines with which to squash the insect that crawls back thus. Unfortunately I couldn’t think of any of them. Instead, what came out was ‘Do you?’ in a horrible, yearning whine.

  ‘Meet me tonight. Come and have dinner with me at the hotel. You could stay, if you wanted to.’ And then he made a sexual suggestion that sent a shock of electricity through my entire body.

  ‘I really don’t think that’s a very good idea…’ I said.

  ‘It may not be a good idea, but it’s an idea that always works for us. Come on, you know you want to. And afterwards you can read me to sleep with embroidery hints from your little book.’

  It was like having a bucket of cold water upended over me. ‘I can’t,’ I said firmly. ‘It’s too soon, you hurt me too much. I need to think about what I want, what’s good for me. And I don’t think spending the night with you tonight is good for me at all. Go take a long walk and a cold shower. I’ll see you tomorrow.’

  Shaking, I rang off, then switched off the phone for good measure. When I got back to my seat in the library, I found that the internet connection had crashed.

  14

  Catherine

  1625

  Wee have beene at sea now for the best parte of two weekes, but yf wee reach Sallee alive it will surely bee a miracle, caughte as wee are between wyld seas, starvation, disease & the violent conduct of oure captors. All ready wee have lost some of oure original number, viz. three children & two of the men taken captive before us, who bore woundes from their capture off Plymouthe. This verie mornyng old Mrs Ellys expired at last from weaknesse & shocks of losyng her poore husbande, but no one has taken her bodie, she lyes in the ordure & addes to the stink. My mother ailes, & there is no thyng I can do for her. We have no comforte of light or clene aire & are plagued by flyes & maggots & I have heard the scuttle of rattes along the timbers of the shippe. It ys as well they do not feede us moore, or the mire & vermine would bee worse. No one seeyng us now would ever knoe that wee are not all of the same estate for wee appeare all as poor wanderyng ragged beggars herded together like in a pygges stye…

  There were days when Cat simply wanted to lay her head down against her companion and die, days when she could no longer bear the stench and the captivity, the pangs of her gut or the terrible, suffocating miasma of hopelessness that had stolen over the whole miserable human cargo. At the beginning, outraged by their treatment, there had been talk of insurrection, of overcoming those who came to feed them – holding them down and drowning them in the shit and piss that made a second sea within the ship, of stealing the keys to their shackles, arming themselves with whatever they could find and storming the ship. They embellished the fantasy of this revolt with loving detail: how they would take the raïs and put out his eyes with the same brand that had burned the preacher’s feet; how they would strip him bare and throw him overboard for the sharks and laugh as he was ripped limb from limb; how they would hang the renegade Englishman now known as Ashab Ibrahim from the yardarm, but not before removing the male appendage he must have submitted to heathen circumcision when he first turned Turk; how they would take captive the remaining crew and confine them in this very stinking pit of a hold, then sail for a home port and hand them over to the authorities as hostages against those unfortunate Englishmen still held in the port of Sallee.

  Captain Goodridge told how he had heard of a successful insurrection by captives aboard an Algerian vessel. The prisoners had managed by some means or another to bribe one of the Europeans in the crew to release them and furnish them with weapons, and they had killed the captain of the slavers and run the ship back to Plymouth with all speed and honour – whereupon they had roasted a pig on the quayside and paraded it in front of the Mahometan picaroons, threatening to force them to eat it till they wept in abhorrence.

  Privately, Cat thought the captain had most likely confected it himself to raise their spirits and his own. In the end, it had not worked. At the very mention of pork, many of the captives had groaned and salivated, reminded afresh of their hunger, while others had retched and added to the noisome liquids that swilled around their feet.

  It had not taken long for such rebellious talk to evaporate: a few more days of discomfort, some foul weather which left them bruised and shaken, and the sudden death of the first of the children, a little boy, who had been overcome by fever and flux, and their spirits, such as they were, were broken. The boy’s mother wailed over the tiny body until the raiders came down and took it away. Then she shrieked hysterically that they would eat it, and none could comfort her or assure her they would do nothing of the sort: for no one was entirely sure that such was not the case. The sound of her howling haunted their hours, waking and asleep.

  After that, one by one, they fell ill. Two more children succumbed to the fever: a girl of three and a boy of eight. Cat had known the little boy – he came to the manor with his mother on feast days, and she had played Club Kayles with him in the garden. He suffered for several days, but by the time he died Cat found she could neither cry nor pray. She wondered if the first inability was because there was some lack of feeling within her; or whether it was simply that she could produce no more tears for a want of water. As to the second: she knew that her faith had failed her. It was hard to believe that a god who cared sufficiently for his flock could allow children to die in such a terrible manner.

  Within a week, nineteen had been taken by the flux or other ailments: strong men, young men, sturdy women, lively children. Thom Samuels, whose wound suppurated until his arm went black; Captain Goodridge, whose ship had been taken in the British Channel; Nell’s husband, William Chigwine; and little Jordie Kellynch, who had been coughing for days before being taken from the church; Annie Hoskens of Market-Jew and old Henry Johns of Lescudjack. Her own youngest nephew, little Jack Coode.

  Walter Truran healed with remarkable speed, despite the conditions. There were those who believed the symbol of the brand itself protected him; others whispered of a miracle. But the women who had lost children shot him sidelong looks which clearly showed
their inner feelings: they wished God had spared their own at the preacher’s expense.

  At last, with the spectre of losing the entire precious cargo before him, the ship’s chirurgeon made an appearance, rather against his will. A tall thin man with a long grey beard and hooded eyes barely illuminated by the lantern he carried, he was accompanied by two of the raiders, one of them Ashab Ibrahim, a cloth clamped to his nose and mouth with one hand. The other hand firmly propelled the doctor into the hold.

  ‘Who here is sick?’ Ibrahim called.

  His question was met by a great wave of noise, and the chirurgeon looked aghast. He said something in rapid Arabic to the renegade, who shook his head. ‘Well, do what you can, then.’

  The chirurgeon made his way gingerly between the benches, examining a tongue here, the white of an eye there. Some he shied away from touching: they were obviously beyond saving. When he came to a woman two rows in front of Cat, he recoiled. The woman turned her head, moaning, and with a shock Cat recognized her as Nell Chigwine. Thin strings of vomit fell from her lolling chin to her filthy dress; sweat beaded her forehead, and her breathing was shallow. The doctor shook his head and backed swiftly away, gesticulating. He stood in front of the renegade and talked with such vehemence it seemed he was in a fury. He pointed at the sick woman, then indicated the filth on the floor. He waved his arms, shouting. At last, Ibrahim shrugged and bent to unlock the bar which held the shackles in place.

  ‘Get up!’ Ibrahim said, and kicked at the man on the end of the row when he did not respond. ‘Stand up!’

  The man lumbered to his feet, his face a mask of agony as unused muscles protested, and stood there swaying with the rocking of the ship. A fisherman, then, Cat thought, watching as he moved automatically with the motion of the vessel. Nell staggered and collapsed. ‘Get up!’ the fisherman hissed. ‘Your life depends on it.’ He caught her under the arms and hauled, and she clutched at him. It looked as if she would fall again, but some inner force of will exerted itself, and she drew herself upright, looking more corpse than breathing woman.