The Lost Duchess

by Jenny Barden

  Rob shook his head.

  Kit clasped his hands on the table and listened to John White resume his discourse.

  ‘… For pleasantness of situation, the territory of the Chesapeake is not to be excelled …’

  Kit brought his hands to his brow. He could not do it. Rob was not yet old enough to carry the burden of knowing, far less to maintain a pretence and keep the horror of knowing a secret. How could he begin? Your mother was beautiful, Ololade was her name: a girl from the Guinea Coast, taken to Panama as a Spanish slave and later freed by runaways – the Cimaroons who freed me. We lived together in the mountains with the outlaws who gave us liberty. She accepted my love and carried my child, a child I never saw, because English ships arrived with my brother; then I sailed back to England and could not take her with me. She told me to go …

  He covered his eyes. The guilt never left him, although, at the time, every step he had taken had seemed part of an inevitable course. When he discovered his brother was with Drake on the ships, there had been no chance to fetch Ololade from the mountains. Even if he had, he could not have brought her to England and expected a black woman to be accepted as his wife. Later he had tried to find her. For years he had searched the Caribbean on every voyage he could make. Then what he finally traced was not her, but their child – his son – and a truth about his mother’s fate too terrible to tell him.

  He looked at the boy with his thick curling lashes, just like his mother’s, and his eyes downturned towards the empty cup he cradled, his skin the colour of honey, glowing over his cheekbones as if lit by a sunset, and his mouth as fine as if tooled by a sculptor and edged by a painter with a brush dipped in milk. He looked for Ololade, and saw her in the boy like a reflection in a pool, floating just under the surface. He wanted to reach out and touch him, put his hand to the boy’s chin and feel the shape of his growing bones, ruffle his dark lamb’s-wool hair and kiss him firmly on the cheek, then take him by the shoulders and present him to the world: This is my son in whom I am most pleased, the brightest and best that a father could wish for. He longed to shout it out: This is my son, and he wanted to weep it in an embrace: My dear son.

  He felt Rob’s warmth next to him and put his hand on the table as heavy as a cudgel beside the boy’s sensitive fingers. So what could he say? To Rob – Roberto as he had been – Adeolu as his mother had named him. The woman you thought was your mother is not. Wouldn’t that upset him deeply? The boy had begged to be taken away, thinking that he was being offered a privilege in the chance to see the world in return for serving as a page. Even that soft lie weighed hard. Kit had never told the boy why the kindly people who had raised him had been persuaded to let him go: because they had known Kit from the time he had been one of them and lived wild as a Cimaroon. They remembered him as their leader, the man marked by the Moon, someone they had trusted. The woman had been a mestizo, a half blood who was lighter skinned than the Negroes from the Guinea Coast. Rob had never doubted she was his mother. Suppose Rob was told that the good people who had cared for him were not his real parents; then surely he would ask: So who was my father? and next: Why did you leave me? and then: Who was my mother? and: Where is she now? Kit rubbed his brow. What happened to her? How could he answer that question without leaving the boy distraught? Suppose that he did, how would he and Rob live together then?

  He held his head in his hands and became aware, once again, of John White speaking.

  ‘… There can be no greater glory than to bring the savage to civility …’

  He looked up at the limner and wondered at those words. ‘Civility’ was all that he wanted for Rob. That was why he would go to Virginia and do whatever he could to help Governor White’s colony. He wanted to find a place for his son where he would not have to labour as a servant or slave, a place where he could build his own future and live as any free man.

  He patted Rob on the arm, only the lightest touch. ‘Let us get some fresh air.’

  Outside, the day was sparkling, but so cold after the inn’s warmth that he clenched his teeth to stop them rattling and his breath streamed in a cloud. For an instant, the ale-brush over the doorway cast a shadow like talons over Rob’s head, then the boy stepped into the street, and Kit looked along it, seeing fresh carcasses steaming and cuts of meat filmed blue on the shop counters either side. The sound of knives sharpening rang around Eastcheap, the squealing of pigs and the bark of jackdaws; butchers cried out their prices and people shouted and haggled; the smell of offal, shit and woodsmoke hung frozen in the air. In his mouth was the taste of blood, and his feet slipped in muddy pink slush.

  He walked to the corner with New Fish Street, and looked down the hill towards London Bridge, its overhanging tall houses crammed above a score of high arches, its piers breaking the water like a row of stone barges; the Thames foamed as it surged beneath. Ships were moored downstream prow to stern all along the north bank. Masts and crane towers bristled over jumbled rooftops. The houses were packed so tightly they seemed piled atop one another, their jetties meeting over dingy alleyways, their twisted chimneys dribbling smoke, while above them the spikes of steeples thrust like needles into the eye of the sky. This was London, wonder of the world, in which people streamed through thoroughfares like ants in a maze of tunnels. Rob stood transfixed but Kit beckoned him on; the boy had seen the bridge before. Kit turned his back and made for Bishop’s Gate. Perhaps his years of imprisonment and living wild had made him different from most men, perhaps sailing the high seas had changed him as well, but he could not spend much time in London without longing for open spaces.

  They left the city and still the houses sprawled along the rutted Shoreditch road, some half built, only empty timber frames, some no more than cob with chimney holes in sagging roofs. But gradually the outlook broadened until the wind whistled through stark hedgerows across small frost-hardened fields. Striking west along a narrow lane, Kit noticed windmills on the horizon, their vanes half boarded and creaking round, and he felt relaxed enough to respond cheerfully to a man who hailed him from a bare orchard.

  ‘God give you good morrow,’ he replied. But when Kit looked more closely he saw the signs of want: a cloak fashioned from sackcloth that afforded scant protection from the cold and wet of flooded, ice-covered fields. A young boy was there too, and it gladdened Kit’s heart to see the child offer Rob a whittled stick in return for which Rob took off his cap and gave the boy one of its parrot feathers.

  Kit caught the man’s eye and stretched his hand towards the blighted fields.

  ‘Would you be interested in a country where you could own land better than this as far as the eye can see?’

  ‘Aye, I’m interested,’ the countryman answered, and smiled so hard his eyes were lost in deep creases.

  George Howe was his name, a widower and a farmer with nineteen acres of sodden land, and Georgie was his only son. By the end of their conversation, Kit had enlisted Master Howe to the colony. Many more would be needed and there was not much time to find them. Kit took Rob back through Moor Gate and walked with him inside the city walls, into Aldermanbury and down as far as Westcheap. John White would need settlers who were resilient and resourceful, who could make much with little and endure hardship without complaint where better to find them than amongst those who had nothing? He knew about such people; he had been one of them once.

  He took Rob towards New Gate where criminals and debtors were kept locked in the towers: ruffians and thieves – and those who didn’t deserve to be there.

  Along the way he bought food: knotted biscuits, cheese and cold capon pie, all wrapped up in cheesecloth, which he gave Rob to carry. At the prison he offered alms, and passed some of the victuals between the bars of a hatch into the hands of ragged men: about forty desperate, famished wretches who shared a dark room, slept on the bare floor and who pleaded with him to help them.

  ‘Have you any more, master?’

  ‘Please, for pity …’

  ‘Some for my friend
who is sick …’

  ‘Bless you, kind sir.’

  To an able-bodied man who thanked him and asked for nothing else, he promised he would return and pay for his release, if the man was prepared to risk his life and sail with him to the Americas.

  The man gripped his hand. ‘My name is Jack Tydway. You won’t forget me?’

  ‘I won’t forget,’ Kit said, breathing in the stink of damp and ordure, remembering the cell in the City of Mexico in which he had waited for his execution. The smell brought it all back: the dark, the cold, the hunger and the fear. He had been seventeen years old and he had expected to die, held hostage by the Spaniards before the battle of San Juan de Ulúa, imprisoned after their treachery, and marched to the City of Mexico two hundred miles away over mountains and desert. He had been incarcerated, mocked, starved and beaten; then, instead of being hanged, he had been sold as a slave and toiled until degradation had left him indifferent to life. In all the suffering he had borne and witnessed he was not sure which moment could be singled out as worst, but he had never forgotten the misery of being denied his freedom, waking in darkness, shivering on the floor, and feeling cold walls between himself and the sun. He could offer release from that.

  ‘I’ll come back for you,’ he murmured. ‘I promise.’

  Suddenly Jack Tydway was wrenched away, pulled off balance and punched in the stomach. He stumbled and struck back, but men fell on him, raining blows.

  A prisoner slammed against the hatch, reaching out between the bars, his hands like claws.

  ‘Take me, not ’im!’ He caught at Rob’s sleeve. ‘Gi’me that, darkie.’

  Rob recoiled as the man lunged for the remaining food, but Kit was quicker. He drove his fist onto the man’s wrist and slammed his arm onto the hatch sill. With a scream, the man let go.

  Rob jumped back clutching the bundle to his chest.

  Kit drew the boy aside, leaving Jack Tydway in a brawl that was already petering out, curtailed by famishment and weakness. He gave the gaoler a crown to ensure that Jack Tydway was looked after, with the promise of another if the man was hale when he returned.

  Rob followed Kit outside in silence, shoulders hunched, head down. Perhaps the prison had been a shock for him but Kit was glad Rob had seen it. One day he would tell him everything; one day the boy would understand that his father had been locked up in a place far worse, that he was captured as a youth, escaped as a man, and that the experience had shaped him and set him apart. The sound of the door slamming shut sent a shiver down his spine.

  He led Rob back into Cheapside, and then across to Christ Church, past the conduit in the marketplace with its broken statues of the Virgin and Child, and its taps wrapped in sackcloth dripping daggers of ice. They passed through the gatehouse of the old Greyfriars’ monastery, and Kit saw the way Rob looked about him, taking in the dilapidated cloisters and the vast edifice of the church with its empty niches and broken corbels, and the blanks in its windows where there’d once been coloured glass. What was going through his mind? What did a church mean to Rob who had been brought up believing in demons? He had been baptised, but what did he really think of the places of worship of his new faith, despoiled by reformation, bearing the marks like open scars? Rob looked up at the spire then away towards the sound of children’s voices echoing through unseen rooms and empty passages. Did he miss his village friends? He must have felt lonely with no one of his own age to talk to.

  After finding the sexton, and offering a donation, Kit was shown around the hospital where five hundred of the city’s foundlings and orphans were fed, taught and housed. They walked through a dormitory where boys slept two together in long rows of narrow beds; they saw children at work in classrooms, huddled together on benches, heads bent over hornbooks; and they entered a hall resounding with the clacking of looms at which older boys were being taught how to weave.

  ‘Would you like to start a new life in Virginia?’ he asked. ‘But consider this before you answer: it will be dangerous and hard and there’s a chance you might never come back.’

  ‘I’ll go with you,’ answered a tall, broad-shouldered lad with a quiff of gingerish hair and a lopsided smile around broken front teeth. ‘I’ll take the risk.’

  ‘Thomas Humphrey,’ said the master in charge, and waved his stick at which the boys instantly fell silent and lowered their eyes. ‘Found by Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s residence in Limehouse as a babe,’ he added in a way that made Kit itch to clap his hand over the man’s mouth.

  The lad flinched as if slapped then picked at the threads of a tapestry on which he was working.

  ‘I’ll come back for him,’ Kit said quietly.

  Rob tugged at his sleeve and whispered, ‘Can’t he come with us now?’

  Kit shook his head and led Rob away. He wanted to explain that they were guests of Sir Walter at Durham Place and could not presume on his generosity to invite anyone else – and if this lad was taken then where would they stop? Yet stop they would have to, and to prefer some over others would sow the seeds of division. But this was no reasoning for a master to give his page; there was not the time to explain and this was not the place.

  ‘Young Thomas must wait,’ he said.

  Rob’s face fell and, to cheer him up, Kit stopped by an ironmonger’s and bought the boy a fine bone-handled knife. He’d need a good blade in the New World where there’d be no means of procuring another. He also bought two ribbons in soft deep blue silk from a pedlar-woman in the street. They’d be for Mistress Fifield, the maiden whose hand he had reached for when he’d last seen her nearly two months ago, though why he had been so forward he could not rightly understand, and her response had been to flinch from him as if he’d given her a fright. He had not meant that; he had been too hasty. Maybe the fervour of the moment had taken hold – hearing the cheering outside Durham Place that day, knowing the voyage to Virginia had won the Queen’s approval, that it was almost certain to happen and he would be gone in a few months. Perhaps the prospect of another sailing had triggered some impulse to abandon caution, or maybe he had felt sympathy for the maiden alone in that crowded hall – a woman whom everyone else seemed to have forgotten, though her beauty shone like a beacon. The memory of her filled his mind: her sable hair and dark eyes, and cheeks dimpled by smiling, though he sensed that she no longer smiled as easily as she had done once. He had wanted to plant a kiss on her lovely mouth when she had first smiled at him by the Richmond fountain; then, when her smile had faded, he had wanted to say things to bring it back. But he could not kiss a woman freely just because she attracted him as he had done once. Mistress Fifield was beyond his reach. She might want nothing to do with him. She was one of the Queen’s ladies, far above him in station, a lady from whom he would soon be separated by an ocean. So why had he taken her hand? He shouldn’t have been so rash; it must have alarmed her and left her confused. When he saw her again he would try to make amends: give her the ribbons as a token against the day when he left, and perhaps, after he was gone, pretty Mistress Fifield would wear them in her hair before the memory of him faded and she forgot him altogether.

  Without paying much attention he walked out of the city, down to Fleet Street and along the Strand. He only noticed what was around him when he saw the footmen outside Durham Place with the badge of the royal household on their doublets and cloaks.

  He turned to Rob, busy examining his new knife. ‘Better put that away; the Queen is here.’ He strode up the steps and pushed the ribbons into the pocket on his belt.

  At the doors of the hall he handed his pistol to the steward and strode inside while his name was announced. He looked for the Queen, ready to kneel before her; instead he saw Mistress Fifield and stopped in his tracks. His eyes met hers and he could not bring himself to look away. It was as if he’d stumbled upon a deer in a glade, one looking straight back at him, uncertain and wary. He was enthralled by her face, the graceful arch of her brows and her liquid, questioning eyes. He took in the sweet dimples in her ch
eeks, her fragile, nascent smile, and the sensitivity of her mouth with its slightly protruding upper lip that made her seem both vulnerable and striking. He caught his breath; she was even more beautiful than he remembered.

  The voice of the Queen brought him to his senses.

  ‘Mistress Fifield, are you with me?’

  He saw the Queen at the far end of the chamber, resplendent in pearl-studded satin and a stiff lace ruff that framed her impassive face.

  Mistress Emme turned and hurried towards her. ‘Yes, Your Majesty. I am here.’

  ‘Good,’ the Queen replied. ‘I had begun to fear you were lost in another country.’

  A wave of muted laughter followed.

  Kit tightened his jaw, and watched Emme curtsey low and bow her head until fine wisps of hair became visible at the nape of her slender neck. He glanced down feeling that he should not have noticed, hooked his thumbs in his belt, and felt the weightless change in shape caused by the ribbons in his pocket.

  *

  All the way down from the tower on the hill at Greenwich Palace the slope was blanketed white. The Queen and her party had ridden up from the east so the snow was untouched: a soft sparkling coverlet that reflected all the tints of winter light from quartz-pink to gold, while deep blue shadows set off the oaks in lapis filigree and transformed the deer trails to tiny opal-studded chains. The prospect was so inviting Emme wanted to give her mare a kick, gallop down ahead of everyone and be the first to mark the drifts. But she kept the reins tight and sat motionless on her side-saddle. The Queen and Sir Walter Raleigh were together in front, the hawk was still hovering and the other ladies had not caught up.

  The Queen smiled as she glanced from Sir Walter to the hawk which suddenly plummeted from the sky. With a whoop she raced ahead, and Sir Walter spurred his stallion until they charged neck and neck, hurtling down the hill to the place where the hawk had caught a crow. Let them enjoy the sport together, Emme would not intrude; only when the other ladies trotted near did she give her mount her head and relish a moment of freedom, flying downhill through the freezing air with snowflakes stinging her cheeks and nose. She opened her mouth to the snow, let it melt on her tongue – this was the taste of release, the kind of sensation that Emme Murimuth would enjoy, the woman she would become if she ever left for Virginia. She would be brave and bold, free of shame or restriction. She was a Murimuth in blood, she could call herself one truly. The family had settled in her village over two hundred years ago; as a Murimuth she would be fearless and sail across the ocean. In a flurry of white she galloped into the panorama that unfolded before her, with the Thames like a silver snake slithering across from the horizon, and the towers of the palace glowing red in the sun. The lawns of the Privy Garden were a patchwork in white silk, while the fields of the Isle of Dogs lay like starched linen in the distance, and the rooftops and city spires bristled like a teasel clogged with fleece.