Crossed Bones

by Jane Johnson

  But what if, a small voice insinuated, what if the corsairs made another raid? She said as much to Leila, who laughed. ‘No one puts out of Salé at this time of the year: strong winds blow in and make it impossible to re-enter the port. There’ll be no more raids till May.’

  Even so, Cat could not forget the image of the man who stood just like her cousin stood, with his head held just so, his wide shoulders half a foot higher than those of other men. Although she had not properly seen his face, she grew increasingly convinced of what she had seen. The image of Rob shackled and beaten haunted her nights and her days.

  A week later, when the raïs came to the house again, Cat sought him out. ‘Might I speak with you?’ she asked, keeping her gaze on the floor.

  He led her into the salon, and she told him what she had seen in the souk. When he said nothing, she had the sudden impression that he already knew what she was going to say. She looked up to find that his lips were pressed to a hard, flat line, and his eyes were like flint. He looked once more like the man who had ordered a cross branded into Preacher Truran’s foot.

  ‘I just wondered if you could find out for me,’ she went on quickly before her courage deserted her, ‘if there is a captive by the name of Robert Bolitho among the English slaves.’

  He was very still. At last he said slowly, ‘Why should I do this thing? What is he to you?’

  ‘He is my cousin,’ Cat said firmly.

  The Sidi Qasem leaned back against the wall, his eyes as slitted as a drowsing cat’s. Then he waved his hand, dismissive. ‘I do not meddle in affairs of others.’ He reached down, took up his chicha pipe, and made a great to-do of cleaning and filling and lighting it.

  ‘Please,’ Cat said again. Her heart beat so hard she could hardly get the word out.

  He would not even look at her, so at last she turned and left.

  Several days passed in a haze of work and chatter, and the raïs did not return. Orders came, brought by one of his slaves from the house on the other side of the river. Cat had the sense the raïs was avoiding her, and was curt with the boy, sending him away again without refreshment. There was a handsome sleeveless tunic to be embellished from neck to floor, a once-gorgeous bed hanging in need of refurbishment and a commission for a wedding veil with instructions that only the finest lawn and silk be used for the purpose. Was it for his cousin Khadija, Cat wondered, and had to fight the memory of Leila’s words away.

  She set three of her best students to the tunic, gave the bed hanging to Habiba, Latifa and Yasmina, and took the veil herself. Leila went to the souk to seek out a length of soft white lawn, while Cat sat with Hasna and two of the older women and made sketches for the design. ‘Pomegranates,’ suggested Hasna, her eyes shining. ‘Imagine, the gold and red against the white!’

  But the widow Latifa clucked her tongue. ‘Pomegranates are for the first child: everyone knows that! Do you want the bride to go to her wedding covered in shame?’

  Hasna blushed, but everyone laughed uproariously; and it was at that moment that the Sidi Qasem chose to enter the room, followed by another man. Cat had her back to the door, so it was only the sudden hush that fell and the way the women covered themselves with their veils that alerted her to the presence of visitors. She drew her own veil across her face and turned.

  Robert Bolitho stared at the scene before him: a dozen native women in the midst of some kind of sewing circle, all with their veils drawn up so that only their shining midnight eyes were visible. Except for one, whose pale hand dropped away to reveal the face he had beheld in his dreams, the face which had compelled him across an ocean, the face he had conjured in his imagination to give himself the strength to survive the travails which had since befallen him. It was her face; and yet it was not. Those were her eyes, a pale and startling blue, but they were not the eyes of the girl he had left outside the church in Penzance all those months ago. It was not just the exotic black cosmetic outlining them which made her a stranger to him, but something deeper and more disturbing in their expression. All at once he was more afraid than he had ever been in his life.

  Cat gazed at the ragged, bony figure which towered over the Sidi Qasem. The man’s face was gaunt and burned brown, his cheeks fallen in on themselves, his nose oddly crooked and his shock of yellow hair gone, leaving only a rough growth like the stubble of a wheatfield once the crop had been taken in. But his eyes were the same cornflower-blue they had always been, wide and guileless, the eyes of the boy around whom she had run such wicked circles in Cornwall.

  ‘Rob, oh, Rob – what have they done to you?’ She got to her feet. ‘Did they take you too?’

  He laughed then, bitterly. ‘Aye, you might say that, though it did not happen as you would imagine, for I was taken not there but here. I even raised a bit of money for your redemption – Mistress Harris gave me some, and the Countess bought your altar cloth, I am sorry to have given it to her, Cat, and it unfinished and all, but it was all I could think to do – but they took the money from me, and the ring too –’ His voice was cracked from lack of use.

  The raïs cut in. ‘He speak true, Cat’rin. He made his way here on English ship to bargain for you, but was himself betrayed. The English are a faithless race.’ His voice was harsh, toneless, the voice of a man holding his emotions hard in check. He paused, looking between the two of them. ‘I found him in slave pens, but he is slave no longer. I have bought him his freedom, and I now make you gift of your own. You are slave – my slave – no more but free, free to leave with him if you wish. You must make choice.’

  Cat felt his gaze burning into her, but she could not look at him. It was all too much, too strange. She felt dizzy, displaced, as if she had suddenly been lifted out of herself and was staring down at the tableau from some other part of the room. The great corsair captain, so cruel and confident, reduced to tense silence; the raw-boned Englishman twisting his hands in that old, familiar way; the girl she had once been so cunningly disguised, outlandish in her foreign kaftan and kohl – all three bound together by fate’s invisible web.

  She was no longer herself, no longer standing in the embroidery workroom, in this merchant’s house, in this fortress town, in this foreign country.

  The Tree of Knowledge reared up before her then, its roots buried deep in the earth, its vast trunk blocking out the light, its boughs stretching to the heavens, where a crescent moon hung in its branches and constellations wheeled in stately harmony. She could not see them, but she knew that Adam and Eve and the serpent were now part of this tableau, faceless, timeless and infinitely mutable. She felt their presence, enormous and catastrophic, inside her and at the same time beyond her. She sensed in flashes flesh and blood and bark, heat and cold, the vast and the massive, the smooth and the sinuous, and soon she could not tell where she ended and the other began. Was she Eve, or Adam, or the serpent, or the tree? She felt knowledge rising in her like a sap, a great rush of blood that set her heart thudding and her head pounding, and then she crashed to the floor, and the roar of noise inside her was abruptly stilled.

  It was the corsair who moved first. He cried out in Arabic, a great oath or exclamation, then bore Cat’s prone body up and away. Habiba and Hasna went pattering in his wake, leaving Rob in a sea of babbling women who snatched glances at him with their foreign eyes and laughed behind their veils. He looked away from them. On the floor where it had fallen lay an object he recognized. He bent and picked it up, remembering as he did so how it had felt in his hands the last time he had held it, just before he had given it to Cat on her birthday last year.

  He turned to the frontispiece and there, sure as life, was his inscription: For my cozen Cat, 27th Maie 1625. Less than a year. It felt as if a century had passed since then. Tears pricked his eyes like hot needles. It must mean something that she had kept it with her through everything that had happened. He turned its pages, amazed to find Cat’s writing everywhere, and far neater and smaller than he would ever have expected from his headstrong, difficult cous
in. He mused over the diagrams and sketches, turning the book this way and that, and here and there a phrase caught his eye, his name leaping out at him: Rob has made mee sware to say nothyng of Pyrats… trappd for ever here at Kenegy… He skimmed further and found wed to my dull cozen Robert living in a hovel behynd the cow-sheds, large with childe year after year, rasyng a pack of brattes & dying in obscuritee. I must away from heere… She could not mean it… He began to sweat. My mother ailes, & there is no thyng I can do for her. We have no comforte of light or clene aire… This at least seemed like more familiar ground, similar to his own experiences. He wondered if Jane Tregenna had survived, but found no other reference to her fate in the vicinity of the first quote. Then he came upon: How I wishe I had took old Annie Badcock’s advyse & gone home with Rob to Kenegy… At this his breathing slowed a little. It would be all right after all. Seeking for further reassurance, he flicked back a little, until he came upon: I lye here in the pyrat captaines cabin…

  He shut the book with a snap and stowed it inside his shirt. No one must see this, he thought, wild with horror. When I take her from here we will burn it, or throw it overboard the ship, and we will never speak of it again once we are married. He strode to the door, thrusting Latifa out of his way as she chattered at him.

  ‘Drink this.’

  Cool water touched her mouth. Her eyes fluttered open. There was a face very close to her, features blurred with proximity, but a dark face with eyes as black as coals. Gentle fingers brushed her forehead, patted her cheeks.

  ‘Cat’rin, Cat’rin, come back to me.’

  Where had she been? Where was she going? Strange images crowded inside her head, images of a ship at sea bound for a green land, her cousin Rob at the helm. Taking her away…

  She struggled to sit up, catching at the hand which touched her face, her fingers closing on it galvanically. ‘Don’t make me go. I don’t want to go.’ She sounded like her six-year-old self, plaintive and whining, pleading not to be made to visit her aunt and uncle. She did not like the sound of her own voice.

  The hand gripped her tight. Someone kissed her fingers.

  ‘Oh.’ She turned her head towards the source of the kiss and, before she could form the least rational thought, returned it, lip to lip.

  The kiss that followed was not at all like the one that had been forced upon her by Sir John Killigrew, all whiskers and tongue and the stink of tobacco and beer. This kiss tasted of herbs and mint, and she did not want it to stop.

  Eventually the raïs pulled away, holding her at arm’s length. ‘What you saying, Cat’rin? Are you in right mind, or wandering still?’

  Back in focus now, he looked anxious. Cat folded her hands in her lap and looked down at them for a while, considering. Silence hung between them like a veil. Thoughts came thick and fast now. She had never willingly kissed a man in all her life. She had not expected it to feel so momentous: it felt as though her skin – her whole skin – was alive with his touch. At last, forcing herself to concentrate, she said, ‘And I am no longer your slave?’

  ‘I have freed you, you are own woman, and you must make own choice.’ He paused. ‘In truth, I think I now your slave,’ he added softly.

  She looked down again, trying to suppress a smile. Then she stilled. ‘If I stay, must I convert to Islam?’

  ‘If you be my wife, Cat’rin, yes. But you may stay as free woman and live under my roof and continue your work, make own money and I never touch you, if you prefer.’

  ‘You would make me your wife?’

  Qasem nodded. ‘With all my heart.’

  ‘Your only wife?’

  ‘One is quite sufficient.’

  ‘I thought you were going to marry your cousin Khadija.’

  He laughed. ‘I think that a story begun by Khadija herself.’ He pressed her hand against his chest so that she felt the deep, strong pulse that beat there. ‘Will you wed me, Cat’rin Tregenna?’

  Her eyes went wide. If she did, she must take his faith and be damned for all time according to the tenets of her own religion; she would become apostate, heretic, infidel. The choice felt unreal. She did not even know if she was a Christian still in her heart, for she had lost something on the voyage and later in the slave pens. She knew that in order to make a considered decision she should take all that had been given to her this day – Rob, her freedom, the heart and hand of this foreign man, a future as a master embroiderer – and spend a long day and night deliberating over the great choice before her.

  She knew she should, but she could not: too much thought would drive her mad. She took a deep breath and said, very fast, before the words failed her: ‘I will stay here and wed you, Qasem.’

  It was at this moment that Robert Bolitho walked into the courtyard. He missed hearing Catherine’s words, but the attitude of the two figures kneeling together beside the fountain was unmistakable: he felt himself intruding upon an intimacy he could not bear to witness. The dull pain that spread through him rooted him to the ground; by the time he spoke it seemed the entire world had changed shape.

  ‘Catherine!’

  He watched his cousin start away from the corsair captain and turn towards him, and he saw that her eyes were stark and her cheeks flaming, so that she looked like the fallen woman she had become.

  ‘Catherine – let me save you, come home with me. You are not bound to him, whatever he may say.’

  Now she was on her feet and the veil had fallen from her hair, which billowed about her like a fire. ‘I do not need to be saved, Robert Bolitho. I make my choice freely – so when you return to Kenegie you can tell them all that I chose to remain here of my own free will, and for many good reasons that you would never understand.’

  ‘Oh, I understand well enough,’ he said bitterly. When he next spoke his voice was loud and uncouth as Cat had never heard it before. ‘I do not know whether I shall see Kenegie again, or, if I do, whether I will find I still have a job when I get there. I left without Sir Arthur’s permission and took the first passage that was offered me, knowing even as I did it was with rogues who might simply rob me and cast my nameless body overboard into the deeps. They might as well have, for all the good surviving has done me! And with me I brought my grandmother’s ring. I told myself that when next I saw you I would place it on your finger, as a promise that no danger would ever befall you again, but’ – his voice broke – ‘they robbed me of that, just as surely as they robbed me of the money and my freedom. Cat, I have loved you all my life, and I know you love me too. I do not care that you are ruined, I will take you as you are. I will wed you and still cherish you; and if a child comes and it is dark of skin and eye, then it will be our cross and we will bear it. You see, I have thought of everything, and I say it out: I have no pride left to me. No matter what he has done to you, no matter what has happened, I forgive you.’

  Cat’s hands balled into fists. ‘How dare you offer me a charity wedding, Robert Bolitho? I do not need your forgiveness – for anything! I have done nothing that I need be ashamed of. You look at me as if I have betrayed you, but I have never loved you – save as my dear cousin. It is hard to tell you this in such bitter circumstances, Rob, but it is best you know.’

  Silence fell between them, heavy with misunderstanding and recrimination. At last, Rob cried, ‘How can you stand there without your heart breaking to see me thus? You are as brazen as the temptress Nell called you; and now you have beguiled a richer man than me, and a heathen, to boot. You have lost your mind, Catherine Anne Tregenna, as well as your soul!’

  At this the corsair captain sprang to his feet.

  ‘Qasem, no.’

  The way she laid a hand on the corsair’s arm, and the way the other looked at her and then gave way, was too much for Rob. The anger that had buoyed him up now ebbed away, leaving him unmanned. A great sob welled up and broke from him in a sort of strangled bellow.

  Eyes welling, Cat addressed him gently. ‘I can see that you think me cruel and heartless, Rob. I know what
you have done for me, the enormity of it, the risk, the horror. I am so sorry for what has happened to you. I would never have asked that you come after me. It was immensely brave of you…’

  He waved a hand at her: he did not want her sympathy.

  ‘It does not matter, I did not do it just for you, there are others to be saved.’ A patent lie, the first large falsehood he had deliberately told in his life. ‘I hope you will make a good life for yourself here, Catherine,’ he said – and that was the second. He watched her face change. Was it surprise he read there, relief or disappointment? She looked nothing at all like the girl he had crossed an ocean to find. That girl was dead to him now. He dragged his gaze from her and fixed it on the man instead.

  ‘Sidi Qasem, I would ask a boon of you.’

  ‘Ask.’

  ‘There is another I would save, if it can be contrived. The gold the Sidi Mohammed took from me should surely cover her ransom.’

  The corsair looked surprised. ‘Who you wish me to seek?’

  ‘Her name is Matty Pengelly, taken in the same raid on Penzance. She is a simple, decent girl who deserves better than to be a slave in this place.’

  Sidi Qasem inclined his head. ‘If is possible to do this thing for you, I do it. You have my word. I will also find you place on ship bound for England and write letter that ensure your safety if you have misfortune to fall into hands of other… traders. Is anything else you would ask of me?’

  It was as if the corsair was glowing from within, Rob thought, as if a sun burned inside him, his triumph was that tangible. He turned away, for it hurt to look upon the man who had taken his dreams from him. ‘No,’ he said dully. ‘There is nothing left in the world worth asking for.’