The Lost Duchess

by Jenny Barden

  ‘Yes, but they’re not.’ She pointed ahead and blurted out what she’d seen. ‘Give them water.’

  He rushed on with his band of mariners following, all carrying water. There would be enough to help those who’d eaten the fruit. She began to slow. Kit would make sure they only drank what was clean. She took deep breaths. All would be well; she had to believe it. She sensed someone else was coming up behind her and turned round.

  Master Ferdinando strode towards her with a look of bemusement on his face.

  ‘I gather some of the Planters have been foolish.’

  She scowled at him, disgusted by his apparent lack of concern. ‘No one told them the fruit could be harmful.’

  Ferdinando shrugged and raised his voice so that Governor White and everyone else gathered by the pool could hear as he approached.

  ‘I cannot be expected to know the qualities of every plant in the Americas. You should have been more prudent.’

  Kit paid him no attention but continued to minister to the suffering colonists, helping them flush out their mouths and drink from the heavy waterskins, though their tongues were so swollen that many could barely swallow or speak.

  Emme rushed to assist, and Governor White also did his best to give support, kneeling to prop up Mistress Harvie who had slumped down on the grass, holding her head while Kit steadied the spout of the waterskin at her lips.

  Ferdinando looked on, arms folded. ‘I am surprised Governor White did not advise you to test first before consuming anything unfamiliar.’

  White glowered at him. ‘You assured us of safety here.’

  The response was a sardonic smile. ‘You have not been attacked.’

  Kit eyed Ferdinando soberly. ‘We need fresh water and there’s none to be found here that can be easily collected. This water came from a peak several miles away. It won’t be enough for everyone and it’ll be difficult to collect more. I know of river mouths on other islands that would serve us much better. I’m sure you do too, Master Ferdinando.’

  ‘Of course, but they are guarded by the Spanish.’ Ferdinando stared back at Kit and narrowed his eyes. ‘Or have you forgotten, Master Bo’sun?’

  ‘I have not forgotten.’ Kit moved to another of the afflicted colonists, a lanky, red-faced youth with ginger hair. ‘Drink, Tom,’ Kit said gently, pouring water over the lad’s swollen lips.

  Ferdinando raised his chin, speaking to Kit as if he deserved admonition.

  ‘You’re not with Drake now, able to strike fear in the hearts of any Spaniards you meet. We’ve got to hide. If the Spaniards find this gaggle,’ he swept his hand to encompass the colonists, ‘they’ll send every one of them to the bottom of the sea, or clap them in irons to face the Inquisition.’ He looked around at everyone listening and seemed to relish their expressions of shock.

  Kit moved to the next colonist in need of succour and worked calmly to offer help. When he was ready he spoke to Ferdinando.

  ‘There are savages on this island. We saw about a dozen close to dwelling places in the hills to the west.’ He gestured towards green peaks. ‘I think we shouldn’t stay here any longer.’

  ‘Savages!’ White seized on the word, jabbing his finger accusingly at Ferdinando. ‘You told us this island was uninhabited.’

  Ferdinando raised his eyebrows and turned his back. ‘I thought it was.’ He stalked away. ‘Savages come and go. They generally don’t inform me first.’

  Emme looked from Governor White, who was plainly seething, to Master Kit, who appeared unperturbed, though the sorry sight of the suffering colonists was enough to melt her heart. A few of them had tried to ease their discomfort by rinsing their mouths and faces with water from the pool. They had eyes so inflamed that they could hardly see, and faces so bloated that they resembled pink puffballs. She knelt down to do her best to help, taking a half empty skin from another mariner and dribbling water on raw skin.

  Kit crouched down beside her. ‘You should drink as well. You must be thirsty.’

  She shook her head. She had almost forgotten her thirst. ‘Let me see to these people first.’

  She moved on amongst the Planters in need of relief; then, to her horror, she saw Mistress Dare in their midst. The lady must have followed the others up from the beach. She didn’t seem as badly affected as Mistress Harvie and those who had sampled the fruit, but her lips and cheeks were plainly swollen, and she was dabbing at them and moaning like a cat about to be sick.

  Emme went to her mistress next, offering her the water despite the way that she glared as she gulped to ease her pain. Then a tirade from her began between mouthfuls, one made almost incoherent by the distension of her tongue.

  ‘Where were you, wench? You should have been by my shide when I needed you, not off on a fanchy of your own.’

  Emme stopped pouring in amazement. Who was Mistress Dare to call her a wench? And how could the lady blame her when she had been doing her best to warn everyone about the pool, and had left the woman dozing in the company of her own father?

  Governor White turned to face Emme as well, along with a growing number of those she had tended. The Governor wagged his finger at her.

  ‘You left my daughter in her parlous condition to fend for herself in this alien place? You should be ashamed of yourself.’

  Emme gasped with indignation, and shoved the water-skin against her mistress’s ample bosom so forcefully that it spurted and soaked the lady’s bodice and shift.

  ‘Take it yourself if you do not wish for my help.’

  She stood abruptly, intent on walking away just as Kit sprang gallantly to the lady’s aid, stripping off his shirt to wipe down her clothes, and giving Emme a steely look of reproach.

  ‘Have some consideration,’ he murmured under his breath as she passed him, leaving her stunned with a glimpse of the athletic beauty of his naked chest.

  Tears welled in her eyes. Her tongue was parched with unslaked thirst. Her pride smarted from unjust accusations, and she hated everyone at that moment but most of all she hated herself.

  She strode on until she was out of view, kicked at a stone and stubbed her toe.

  *

  They would not stay on Santa Cruz for much longer, Emme felt sure. Captain Stafford had already been despatched to another island, but Master Ferdinando had seen fit to order that the Lion remain at anchor while it was cleaned and repaired. So now she had a third night of frustration to look forward to, running errands for Mistress Dare while trying to minimise the discomfort of living under a tent on a beach in sweltering heat, when not being drenched by torrential rain. The work might have been tolerable if she’d received some gratitude for her pains, but no, her mistress was determined to exact retribution for what she’d described as ‘behaviour ill-becoming a maid’, by which she meant the soaking she’d taken after the incident with the waterskin, and the affront to her dignity compounded by Emme speaking her mind. The woman was a fool to have drunk where the water was not known to be potable, especially in her gravid state, but Emme was not going to be forgiven for having reacted contrarily. She was being punished, she knew, and she was being put in her place, and if she was to preserve her guise as a maidservant then she could not complain. She would have to air her mistress’s pallet, and relinquish her own dry blankets in return for her mistress’s that were wet, and bring her mistress cooled boiled water and griddled tortoise steaks, and shake sand from her mistress’s clothes, and tighten the guy ropes of the flimsy tent whenever the wind got up at night, and fan her mistress with palm leaves in the suffocating heat of the day. When she saw Kit Doonan walking towards her, she threw down the apron she’d been wringing out, not caring that it missed the wash bucket and landed in wet sand. What did he want? Kit had been critical when her composure had failed, and his muttered admonition to ‘have some consideration’ still rankled. Did he have any consideration for her?

  ‘I am busy,’ she said, putting her hands on her hips and feeling a twinge in her back as she straightened. She looked d
own at the dirty apron and sighed. She should pick it up and try to wash it again in sea water but it was all so much effort. She flicked back a strand of lank hair from her forehead and scowled at him. He should not even have been looking at her in such a state.

  His expression slid from concern to the kind of stern gravitas she associated with being told off. It did not please her.

  He retrieved the apron and tossed it into the bucket.

  ‘I am glad to see you are working hard, Mistress Emme. I hope that will help repair your relationship with Mistress Dare. I could see that the lady was upset by your treatment of her earlier; it was ignoble of you to be insensitive to her distress, uncharacteristically so, if I may say. I would have expected better of you. Mistress Dare is pregnant and lacks your acumen; she is also your superior, given the role you have assumed for yourself on this voyage. No maid should be intemperate with her mistress. I trust that, in future while we are all together, you will show more discretion. I counsel this with your own interests at heart.’

  She glared at him agape. Who was he to accuse her of being ignoble? She could barely believe what she’d just heard. Did he mean to insult her?

  She raised her chin and resisted the urge to walk away.

  ‘May I remind you that I am a baron’s daughter and one of the Queen’s ladies, and I do not consider it meet for you, a common mariner, to give me advice on my conduct. You forget yourself, Master Doonan. You are, by your own admission, little more than a pirate who has lived as an outlaw with renegade slaves.’

  That struck home, she could tell. His eyes blazed like blue fire. She pressed the advantage.

  ‘What makes you think that you are fit to be my judge? How dare you?’

  He took a step towards her and spoke again, lowering his voice.

  ‘I dare because I care for your welfare, and I am as good a judge as any man who recognises rash conduct when it stares him in the face. If you wish to be deferred to, then you cannot expect to be believed as a maid, and there is more to being a lady than enjoying the courtesy of others; tact and delicacy are other attributes I would expect.’

  She felt a prickling down the back of her neck.

  ‘Do you mean to imply that I lack those virtues?’

  ‘Did you show them to your mistress when she was suffering after being poisoned?’

  She took a sharp intake of breath, feeling rage rise up within her to the point at which she could have slapped him. But she would not. She was a lady.

  ‘I will not be berated by you, Master Boatswain. If you wish to give a lecture then lecture your page who is too much in awe of you to do other than dumbly obey. I am not.’

  At that, she turned her back on him and walked off, though she only managed a few steps before he strode in front of her. He raised his hands and she sprang back, shuddering at the thought that he might have been about to seize hold of her.

  ‘Get away from me,’ she hissed.

  ‘I only wish for your wellbeing,’ he said, though she felt the heat of his anger in each clipped word.

  His lips tightened.

  ‘It will benefit none of us now for your true identity to be revealed. If the Spaniards discover it, the results could be disastrous, most of all for you. At the least it would cause anxiety and division amongst the Planters …’

  Was he threatening her? He didn’t mean to unmask her, surely?

  ‘You wouldn’t …?’

  ‘Of course not,’ he gestured dismissively. ‘I have sworn to tell no one, and I won’t give you away. But you must learn some humility or you’ll give away yourself.’

  ‘Pah!’

  She stepped aside to move past him.

  ‘I’ll not humble myself to you. If you truly wish for my wellbeing then I beg you to leave me alone.’

  She walked on along the beach, past the place where the Harvies had set up their tent, and she determined to scream if he followed her, but he did not.

  She carried on. He was nothing but a knave trying to dominate her, just as every man she had ever known had tried to dominate her, and she wanted no more to do with him.

  Once she reached the end of the encampment she turned and retraced her steps. He was nowhere to be seen, thank God.

  Henceforth she would avoid him if she possibly could.

  *

  ‘Did you see that?’

  Kit stared down into the river, past the luminous ripples around the boat and the glowing clouds stirred up by the oars, seeing the depthless black beneath touched by a ghostly light with every movement, and the trails of fish-like streaming sparks, and the bluish yellow gleam fading to a disc under the surface where something had come close to them. Something alive. It had been shining.

  He kept to his stroke, pulling hard and steadily. The current was swift and they were rowing upstream. They couldn’t afford to ease or take time to marvel.

  ‘As long as it doesn’t come up under the boat,’ he said.

  ‘Could have been a sea cow,’ James Lacy ventured. ‘One grown monstrous. I’ve seen them before around St John’s.’

  ‘Keep rowing.’

  It could have been a sea cow. What he had seen had seemed to swell up like an enormous mushroom from the deep, trailing bubbles and cold light: a phantasmal leviathan.

  ‘Aren’t you worried?’ Lacy asked.

  ‘I’m worried about not finding enough water.’

  ‘Aye, that’s a bother for sure.’

  Lacy’s thick Irish accent made the concern seem quite homely.

  ‘We should have more barrels and boats,’ he observed.

  ‘I’d like to know how General Lane managed. You were with him, weren’t you?’

  Kit kept rowing without trying to look over his shoulder; he wouldn’t be able to see Lacy anyway, but he was sure he remembered the man as one of those whom Drake had brought back from Virginia the year before. Ferdinando had said that they would follow Lane’s route, and this was where he’d taken on water: at Muskito Bay in St John’s, as they called the island of Puerto Rico.

  ‘Aye, I served with Lane, was pressed by him in Ireland and stayed with him when he took Sir Richard Grenville’s commission to set up the garrison in Virginia. Same with Denis and Darby back there.’

  Kit couldn’t see either man, but he knew Lacy meant the Irish soldiers who were in one of the boats behind.

  ‘We all signed up together,’ Lacy said. ‘Been together ever since. Jack was with Lane too.’

  Kit thought of John Wright, the Virginia veteran he’d selected for another boat, along with a seasoned mariner he considered strong enough for the work.

  ‘I know; that’s why I picked you for this.’

  The four soldiers were the only men from the last expedition to join White’s voyage, and he’d tasked them all with helping him get in water. They knew what to do, and it was an opportunity to talk to them. He was keen on finding out more about Lane’s expedition.

  ‘Tell me how Lane faired here.’

  ‘Lane had Muskito Bay run like a militia camp,’ Lacy went on. ‘Got a moated fort and great breastworks built within a week. Those defences could have held off an army and lasted ten years if Lane hadn’t torn them down.’

  ‘Why did he?’

  ‘Because we had to leave to go to Virginia, for the love of St Patrick, and Lane didn’t want to offer the Spaniards a fortress on a plate that could have been used against us if ever we came back.’

  ‘Like we are now,’ Kit said, keeping his strokes deep and steady, thinking that collecting water would have been easy with a fort to offer protection, instead of having to creep upriver under cover of darkness against the constant threat of being spotted and attacked.

  ‘We had more men, of course,’ Lacy added. ‘Hundreds to help dig the defences, fell trees and suchlike. No one had too much to do; not like now,’ he muttered.

  Lacy cleared his throat and an eerie low cry rippled birdlike over the water above the honking and plinking of the hundreds of frogs hidden in the mang
roves.

  Kit heard the cry answered and knew that Lacy’s friends weren’t far away. He stared downstream and thought he saw the faint gleam of their progress.

  Lacy gave a grunt of acknowledgement. ‘Look at us: six men collecting water for nearly two hundred and as much beer drunk in the meantime by those Planters making merry.’ He hauled on the creaking oars and spoke again. ‘We’re leaving tomorrow, and there’ll probably be less water aboard the Lion than there was when we arrived.’

  ‘At least the Planters are refreshed,’ Kit said, thinking of Mistress Emme’s glowing face as she’d watched the sun going down behind the trees that had invaded the earthworks. He could tell she was relieved simply to have set foot again on land, despite the oppressive heat and tormenting insects. He didn’t begrudge the Planters a little celebration. If she’d been more civil he would have offered to share a cup with her, but she’d already made it plain she preferred to keep her own company, and his earlier attempt to caution her with well-meant advice had met with the kind of rebuff he should have expected. He wouldn’t intervene with her again. It hurt to be shunned by a woman he found attractive, a woman who plainly considered herself above him, but there it was; best to forget her if he could. She was much too haughty for her own good. Why she had come on the voyage was a puzzle; perhaps Raleigh had put her up to it, or possibly the Queen on a whim, or, more likely, the two of them together, thinking that it would be entertaining to hear what one of their own ladies thought of Virginia. But Emme would never make a settler, not with her prickly temperament and skittish behaviour. She’d probably dip her toe in the waters off Chesapeake, watch the Planters beginning the struggle to build their homes, turn up her nose and then sail back, and that would be the last he’d see of her. He wouldn’t grieve. But he still cared that she came to no harm.

  ‘I wish them no ill,’ he said to Lacy.

  The Irishman responded with singsong conviction. ‘They’ll go hungry afore long. This is no place to find game. The hunting was poor when Lane was here, just the same, the difference being …’ He kept his voice low. ‘We hadn’t lost all our supplies.’