Bride of the Wilderness

by Charles McCarry

  Oliver, waiting outside for the dead-cart, could hear her through the window, shrieking and sobbing in the final minutes of her life as if she was being whipped.

  Henry was now alone in the plague house. Every day, Oliver brought ale and toast in the morning and cheese and eggs in the afternoon, and stood at the window and talked to his friend.

  At the end of the forty days, Henry was still alive. The guards pulled the nails out of the door and let him out.

  Oliver rowed the two of them to the middle of the river. Fires had been lighted all along the embankment of the Thames, on the theory that smoke would disinfect the air. The stink of the dead rotting in the sun came across the brown water. The friends could hear the voices of the dying in their delirium, sounding like savages going about some horrid ritual. It was high noon and the light was strong.

  “It hurts them to look at the light,” Henry said. “Pamela couldn’t bear even a candle at the last. You know, I don’t think that the Lord Jesus is or ever was.”

  And from that day onward, though he lived in an age when men took it for granted that God arranged the smallest events in their lives and multitudes were slaughtered in the name of Christianity and thousands were burned for heresy, Henry Harding did not believe in God. Oliver knew this secret, and he took it, and an even more dangerous secret about Fanny, to the grave with him.

  After paying for the burial of the six members of his family who had perished in the house in Shoe Lane, Henry still had eight hundred fifty-six pounds nine shillings and eight pence in the leather sack his father had given to him. When cold weather came and most of the dying stopped, he moved back into the house in Shoe Lane. He had no wish to go back to Saint Paul’s: he knew arithmetic and Latin and some Greek, so there was little left to learn that might be useful to him. His father had traded in ships’ cargoes, putting up money with others to finance voyages, and then sharing in the profits when the ships came home. Henry decided that he would make his living in the same way.

  He put on his father’s good suit, which was a size too big for him still, and went down to the Royal Exchange. Inside the hollow stone square filled with bargaining merchants and dickering prostitutes, he found the man his father told him he could trust, Praise God Adkins. He was standing beneath a gallery, watching the bids in an auction by the candle.

  “Yes, I know about your father,” Praise God said. “You are school friends, I hear, with my nephew Oliver. Sympathy, sympathy.”

  Praise God Adkins was an old boy of Saint Paul’s. It was he who had got Oliver in.

  “A great waste,” Praise God said. “Oliver is a good-hearted boy but he’s only good for football. You must have done his Latin for him.”

  Henry did not answer. Praise God was looking him up and down, noting the oversize suit, the baggy stockings, the watchful eyes. Praise God’s own clothes—stained linen, torn trousers, a baggy coat with papers sticking out of every pocket—were very old. He was a plump man, nearly as short as Henry.

  “What do you know about selling by the candle?” he asked.

  “I’ve seen it done,” Henry said.

  By the rules of selling by the candle, an item was put up for bids at the same time that the stub of a candle was lighted. The last bid entered, before the candle went out was the winning one. The trick of winning lay in being able to see the precise moment when the flame would die, and for timing the last bid exactly.

  “Would you like to try? They’re selling a bale of Moroccan leather.”

  Henry looked around the circle of men gathered by the auctioneer, at the strange clothes and manners of the dozen kinds of foreigners who were always mixed in with the Englishmen. Pink-faced or swarthy, English or not, they all wore the same wily look, as if each was sure that he was cleverer than the rest.

  “How high should I go?” Henry asked.

  “How much money do you have?”

  “Eight hundred pounds, more or less. But I don’t have it with me.”

  “That’s all right. If you win, I’ll loan you what you need until you can fetch your money.”

  Praise God whispered a sum into Henry’s ear. Touching an arm here and a shoulder there, Henry moved up to the front of the crowd while Praise God remained in back. The auctioneer described the goods he was offering for sale, then lit the stub of a candle and called for bids. An assistant held up a coat to shield the flame from drafts. Henry moved a little to the left, then a little to the right, adjusting his view of the flame.

  Bids came slowly at first, but when the flame began to waver, the tempo increased and the bidding took on a kind of harmony, like a chant with sums of money for words. Henry made no bid. The candle burned up again, very brightly, and there was a silence. Henry swallowed rapidly two or three times, as if clearing his throat to speak. Another man shouted out a bid, and then there were half a dozen quick bids by those who also saw Henry’s Adam’s apple moving up and down in his throat. Finally, in his clear tenor voice, Henry made his bid, a pound more than the preceding bid and three pounds less than the figure Praise God had whispered in his ear, and as he spoke, the flame went out.

  “Beginner’s luck,” Henry said half an hour later when he and Praise God were seated at a table in an alehouse around the corner.

  “Not luck, I think. How did you know to bid when you did?”

  “By watching the candle and the faces. You can see what they’re going to do.”

  Thereafter, rain or shine, Henry went every day to the Royal Exchange to do business. With Praise God’s help and his own gift for reading faces and choosing the right moment, he prospered. After he left Saint Paul’s at sixteen, Oliver began to go to the Exchange too—at first to play football in the street while he waited for Henry, but later to do business too. Henry loaned him fifty pounds to set him up.

  “Are you sure?” Oliver said, weighing the coins in his hand and preparing to pour them into his pocket.

  “Quite sure,” Henry replied. “It’s only a loan. You must pay it back at two percent by the end of Lent.”

  It was now a week after Shrove Tuesday—Oliver still had open wounds on his face from the football match he had played—so he had more than a month to make good on the loan.

  “That’s very good of you, Henry.”

  He started to pocket the money but Henry held out his hand. “Now give it back,” he said. “I’ll be your banker.”

  At auctions by the candle and by shrewd choices in quick deals for odd lots, Henry increased Oliver’s fifty pounds to seventy-five before Easter. He gave him the whole sum.

  “Thank you, Henry.”

  “What about my fifty-one pounds?”

  “What fifty-one pounds?”

  “The fifty I lent you and one pound in interest at two percent.”

  “Interest? Let’s spend the odd pound on dinner at Locket’s Tavern.”

  “Your pound, yes. I want my pound in the palm of my hand, if you please.”

  Praise God watched this transaction without expression. In a moment Oliver went away and began talking to a pretty whore; he was friends with all the women who hung about at the Exchange. After speaking a sentence or two, Oliver and the girl, who was no older than he was, walked away toward the door that led into Cornhill.

  “Why do you look after Oliver in the way that you do?” Praise God asked. “He has no sense at all, you know.”

  Henry smiled his radiant smile. “Not much sense, anyway. But there’s a great heart inside of him, P.G.”

  As Henry’s fortune grew he conceived the idea of owning a ship. He was never able to find the one he wanted—merchant vessels were so profitable that they were rarely sold. One day a story ran through the Exchange: a Genoese was dying on his ship, which was moored in the Thames. It was thought that he had plague, and there was talk that the ship would be burned with the corpse aboard as soon as the Genoese died.

  “What about the crew?” Henry asked.

  “They’ve all deserted,” said Oliver, who had gathered all the
facts from the whores, who knew everything. “Nobody will ever go aboard her again if she’s a plague ship.”

  The epidemic had been over for four years, but people still died of bubonic plague in London, especially in the rat-infested slums along the river.

  The ship was Swedish-built, a fast new kind of two-masted vessel called a brigantine. Next morning early, while the mist was still rising from the Thames, Henry went down to the river and looked across the water at her deep hull and her strange rigging—a square-rigged foremast and a mainmast that carried a trapezoidal fore-and-aft sail.

  A man stood on the deck, looking back at Henry. His glance was intense, even appealing; Henry had the feeling that their eyes had met despite the fact that they were too far apart for this to have happened. He went into an alehouse and bought a quart of brown ale and some bread and cheese, and then rowed out to the ship.

  The man was still on deck, standing by the rail. Henry shipped his oars and looked up at him. He was only a few years older than Henry, stocky and black-haired with a big Italian nose and a floppy foreign cap on his head.

  “Would you like some breakfast?” Henry asked. “No English,” the man said.

  Henry asked his question again in Latin and the man on deck answered in the same language.

  “There’s sickness on this ship,” he said.

  “So I’ve heard. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have a pint of ale when you wake up. May I come aboard?”

  “Some say it’s plague.”

  “You don’t have plague.”

  “No, it’s my uncle.”

  “Have you ever seen a man who has plague?” “No. You can have a look if you like.”

  Henry climbed the ladder, bringing the ale and bread with him, and followed the other man belowdecks. In the master’s cabin, a little round man with the florid face of a wine lover lay in bed. His throat was dry and he could barely speak. Henry told him his name. The other man, struggling to bring the sound up out of a closing throat, introduced himself.

  “Giacomo Cerruti. Are you a physician?”

  “No, but I have some ale here. Would you like a drink?”

  Henry sat down on the bed and held the tankard to Cerruti’s lips. The sick man drank but he could not swallow. Henry helped him to a sitting position while he coughed. His body was hot to the touch. After a moment he lost consciousness.

  “How long has he had fever?” Henry asked in Latin. “Three days.”

  “Has he vomited? Has he had froth on the lips?” “Both.”

  “Delirium?”

  “It comes and goes.”

  Henry lifted the covers and examined Cerruti for tokens of the plague. The telltale dark nutmeg swellings on the groin were not present, but there was a fresh wound on his thigh that Henry recognized as a dog bite.

  “Can you look at the light?”

  “Yes,” said Cerruti.

  “Then it’s not the plague,” Henry said. “Have you been bitten by a dog?”

  Cerruti was awake now, staring feverishly at Henry. “Last month in the Strand,” he said.

  Henry knew that the man was going to die of his wound.

  At noon, in a corner of the Exchange, Henry told Oliver and Praise God his plan. Cerruti was dying. His ship had no cargo. If he died aboard, the ship would be burned because nobody would be willing to go aboard her. But if Henry bought the ship and then proved that Cerruti had died of rabies instead of the plague, he would have his ship.

  “Why would this dago sell you his ship?” Oliver asked. “He can’t spend the money where he’s going.”

  “I’ll pay the money to his family in Genoa.”

  “You’ll lose everything you have,” Praise God said. “No sane sailor will ever go aboard that vessel.”

  “Then we’ll find madmen to sail her,” Henry said. “Or Italians.”

  That afternoon Henry took all the gold he had with him aboard the ship and made his offer to Cerruti. The Genoese signed the papers that Praise God had drawn up, and then fell into a delirium with the sack of money clutched to his chest.

  Cerruti lived for five more days. Henry and the young Italian stayed with him the whole time, learning that there are worse ways to die than the plague.

  On Henry’s orders the young Italian sewed his uncle’s body up in a sail and rowed it to the Temple Stairs, where Henry awaited him with a physician.

  “Rabies,” the physician said after examining the corpse. He wrote out a certificate, sealed it, and handed it to Henry in return for a guinea.

  “We’ll bury your uncle in Saint Andrew’s churchyard,” Henry said. “I’ve relatives there.”

  “In unconsecrated ground, among Protestants?” said the Italian. “No. He must be buried at sea or he’ll haunt the ship.”

  “But we have no crew.”

  “They’ll come aboard again now. Let me have that certificate to show them.”

  “If they’re all Italians, how can they read it?”

  “They wouldn’t be able to read it in Italian either. They’ll look at the seal and think of Italy; La Purité á is their way home.”

  “I know the ship’s name,” Henry said, “but not yours. What are you called?”

  “Pietro di Gesù.”

  “Jesus? Your name is Jesus?” Henry said. “You’d better call yourself something else in England or you’ll end up with your neck in a pillory.” They decided on Joshua Peters.

  “Joshua was the Lord Jesus’ true name before the Greeks got hold of it,” Henry said. “We’ll nail on the Peters for good measure and make a proper Englishman of you.”

  Not all of the Genoese crew would come back aboard. Some had already sailed in other vessels, and some believed that Cerruti would haunt the ship after dying such a terrible death, no matter where his body was buried.

  Nevertheless, enough men came aboard to sail the ship. Joshua Peters, as he was now known, had been the sailing master of his uncle’s ship, a high position for a man who was barely twenty-one. Henry wondered what would happen when the moment came to take the ship down the river with a skeleton crew. He sailed with her to see for himself.

  Boats were standing by to tug the ship into the Thames channel. Joshua waved them off. He had a weak, almost whispery voice, so he gave orders to the crew through the boatswain, muttering commands that the louder man bawled out to the seamen in the rigging. Sails were rigged. Backing and filling, Joshua moved the ship sideways away from her moorings, slackened the mizzen, spun on the jib, tightened the mizzen, and took her down the river. She moved along as if guided by Joshua’s thoughts.

  Even when there was no wind that Henry could perceive, the ship made headway. Sailing steadily among a dozen becalmed vessels in the Downs, a windbound stretch of water between the mouth of the Thames and Dover, Joshua mustered the crew and slid Cerruti’s body overboard. While whispering the Latin words of the Catholic service, Joshua kept his eyes fixed on the canvas, interrupting a prayer to mutter an order to the boatswain, who shouted it up to helmsman and crew in Italian.

  Finally the body, weighted with a ballast stone, sank into the sea.

  Henry had never been sailing before and even in these glassy waters he was seasick, but he knew what sort of seamanship he was witnessing.

  “Can you sail this ship as master?” he asked Joshua. The two men—boys, really—were still speaking Latin to each other, and would go on doing so until one of them died.

  “Watch me and decide,” Joshua replied. He set a course to the Isle of Wight, and when they reached their destination, where a brisk wind was blowing, he sailed the ship around the island, came about, and then circled the island again—backward this time. The maneuver made the sailors laugh with pleasure, and looking into their faces as they peered down from the rigging at Joshua on the quarterdeck, Henry understood that there would be no fear of ghosts or trouble of any other kind on his ship as long as Joshua Peters was aboard.

  At dinner in the master’s cabin, Henry made his proposition.
<
br />   “I’ll pay you twenty percent of the profits of every voyage of the Pamela,” Henry said.

  “What is the Pamela?” Joshua asked.

  “This ship—new owner, new captain, new name.”

  “Done,” Joshua whispered.

  There were other arrangements. The ship would still sail under the Genoese flag when she wasn’t in English waters, and Joshua would still be Pietro di Gesù everywhere but in England. She was a clean new ship, unknown in foreign ports, and with a Genoese captain and a Catholic crew she could sail into any harbor in the world—even trade directly with the French in time of war for claret and brandy and other French goods.

  “Twenty percent?” Praise God Adkins said. “You treat that dago better than an Englishman.”

  “He is better than an Englishman,” Henry replied. “He can go places no Englishman can go, he can bargain like an Arab, and he’d rather die than do something stupid.”

  Joshua’s first mission, after Henry engaged him, was to deliver the purchase price of the Pamela to the dead owner’s family in Genoa.

  “How can you trust somebody with a name like Pietro di Gesù with everything you own in the world?” Praise God wanted to know.

  “It wasn’t the Italians who nailed me up in a plague house and put guards with halberds outside the door,” Henry replied.

  In years to come, with Joshua in command of a Genoese crew who were mostly his cousins, the Pamela came home to London three times a year with Canary wine and chocolate from Las Palmas, coffee and leather from Tangier, embroidery and preserved oranges from Cadiz, wine from Madeira, lace from Lisbon, claret from Bordeaux, grape brandy from Nantes, apple brandy from Honfleur, as well as more exotic goods, such as uncut jewels and ivory trinkets from India and Chinese silk, for which there was always a market. Once a year Joshua went back to Italy for three months to recreate himself and his crew, returning to England with Venetian glass, forks, musical instruments, and other Italian inventions. It was he who had brought Fanny her viola d’amore; it had been made at Cremona by a distant relation of Joshua’s named Nicolò Amati, and it had the head of a cherub carved at the end of the neck.