Leto resolved: Keep your claims very weak, very small, very meek: like that mongrel bitch in Cadenas who was being kicked by a donkey after she came too near the donkey’s feed or something, and you were standing there, and it looked as if the hooves would rip her to pieces, but she rolled over on to her back right under the trampling and the donkey, seeing her adopt this posture of submission, left off thrashing out with its legs and contented himself with butting her out of the way until she limped off dragging her head and tail and belly as near the ground as she could, whimpering.
She could save herself and the twins like that; she knew she mustn’t be proud.
Or they’ll want to break me, she warned herself.
If the twins didn’t exist . . . but she stifled the thought even as it rose. Then, again, it presented itself, insistently: she would have so much more freedom to manoeuvre. There would be things she could do. If they didn’t need her constant vigilance.
‘It’s a miracle that you haven’t fallen ill, my little mites,’ she whispered, clasping them, ‘that, Phoebe, you gurgle when I tickle you as if the things that happened were long ago and have faded.’ She kissed them both, with the sailors still looking on, and the sun and the moon did not seem more beautiful to her than her twins.
After she had finished her attempted wash, Teal handed her some clothes: Skipwith had provided them with shirts and kerchiefs and even a pair of breeches. She wound Phoebe and Phoebus into cloths and turbans against the exposure on deck, where they were now tied by the leg with ropes that delineated a circle of activity and allowed them to crawl under a hammock for shade. On the other side of the boat, two sailors began prising loose one of the sides of a wooden crate with a claw hammer: this was to be her cell, she understood.
She was sitting against the side of the longboat, at the end of the rope, out of the afternoon sun, with Phoebe and Phoebus comfortably sleeping after she’d fed them two ship’s biscuits softened in goat’s milk with a mash of salt cod that Strugwell, his eyes scrunched tight with indignation, had heated through in the galley. The tall ribbon of Skipwith’s shadow fell across her.
‘It’s fortunate that you’re so small, though even so, this box will be somewhat confined.’ Skipwith indicated the crate, now fitted with a door and padlock. ‘Still you and your children will be safe from . . . prying eyes inside it. In due course we’ll be able to introduce you to a little more comfort, I trust.’
The stowaway looked less feral now that she was dressed in one of his spare shirts and had tied, with a piece of ship’s hemp supplied by Teal, a pair of breeches around her waist. Her hair was caught back in a length of twine, too. In her boy’s outfit, she didn’t look much older than Teal; if it weren’t for her twins, you’d take her for a child herself.
She turned over and clasped his feet. He was wearing a kind of soft leather boot.
‘For God’s sake, girl,’ said Skipwith. ‘Don’t grovel. Stand up.’
He was furious as he hoisted her by the elbow, to feel her limpness, her lightness.
‘Nobody’s going to hurt you – or your babies – not on this vessel, not while I’m on it. This isn’t some pirate band of ruffians, but the Royal Navy, do you know what that means, and we’re not engaged in warfare, but archaeology. Treasures of the spirit, not the body—’
He was wasting his words – how could she understand?
‘I wanted to ask you,’ he said, opening his hand where the gold earring lay in his palm. ‘Where did you get this?’ He paused. ‘Say the name of the country, the city, the place. I might understand: say Ophir, or Tirzah, or . . .’
‘No,’ she replied, ‘Cadenas-la-Jolie. The earrings and my necklace were torn from my neck when I was attacked, before the wolf rescued us. Later we went back and I fished the pond for the frogs and slit their throats till I found that piece you have in your hand.’
Skipwith nodded; he understood the name Cadenas and the shake of her head at least, though her words fell scattered in his mind. But he knew the workmanship; he had a fragment, three beads, which may well be its fellows retrieved from the marshland near the tombs. They were lying in one of his specimen boxes, labelled, ‘Lazuli work, circa ? 1125’. Beautiful lost wax casting, the work of skilled goldsmiths – but whose?
‘Cadenas-la-Jolie,’ she amplified. ‘They sought my life for I incurred the emnity of the Procurator’s wife, Porphyria, and of her son, who then came to power in the outpost and overthrew the ruler, Cunmar, whom I was to marry.’ Skipwith was listening intently; he was trying to make out words. ‘Chrysaor imprisoned Lord Cunmar,’ the stowaway told Skipwith. ‘After the celebrations of what was to have been my wedding. I never saw Cunmar again, so I fear that he is dead.’
‘What are you?’ asked Sir Giles. ‘Are you a Lazuli? A Child of Israel? An Ishmaelite? An Ophiri? You’re fleeing some persecution or other, I imagine.’
The boy child was becoming restless, and started climbing up his mother’s body; she put him on her hip. The stowaway stroked his face, unsure how to respond to the tall fair man with the drooping hair who was so curious about her.
All of a sudden, the child mock-growled, ‘I’m a wolf.’ And buried his laughter in his mother’s neck. Skipwith nodded, absently, ignoring him.
‘He is, you know,’ said the girl child, now tugging for attention. ‘And so am I.’
The stowaway pressed their hands in hers to silence them, but Skipwith, having no familiarity with children, simply continued to fix his attention on their mother.
Quickly, Leto made the sign of the cross.
‘Haha!’ exclaimed Skipwith. He thought over the possibilities: was she a converso? Ophiri in origin, or something other, but inducted into the faith? By choice? Or duress? But she could be lying about her allegiance, trying to please him. She had a whiff of Romany about her, but she’d boarded them where he’d never come across gipsies, and besides, they kept together. A snatch of the old song that one of his nurses used to sing ran through his head: ‘What care I for my goose-feather bed? What care I for my money-O? I’m off with the raggle-taggle gipsies, O . . .’ You ran away to join the gipsies; they didn’t run away to join you. And they never expelled their own, but preferred to mete out punishments privately, within the tribe.
Patched up as a kind of Rosalind or Viola in breeches with her hair tied back, this young woman had the making of a nice looking page. Maybe his Mamma would like her? The children could be costumed in jewelled and feathered variations on the turbans she’d wound around their heads, in silks and satin. His mother Fidelia would cut a charming figure with such picturesque attendants. The three of them could indeed be Moors – though they were rather on the fair side. Youngsters did grow darker and hairier as they got older, and there were many fair-skinned even blue-eyed women on the Barbary Coast, not all of them captives. One never can tell. I know that deciphering the signs can’t be done hastily but has to be approached slowly, patiently. And even making the sign of the Cross, she could belong to so many sects. Those territories teemed with variations and the most fustian heresies still had their pockets of adherents. Monophysites, Nestorians, Arians, Monothelites, such refinements of distinctions. Did the son of God have a human memory? How could he know everything and remember only this and that as we do? Was he endowed with free will? And if so, how could he choose when he could see into the future? But a human heart – does he have a human heart? Yes, YES, – and it came to him why his musings were taking this direction: the formulae the stowaway was now uttering took the shape of a doxology, which he could understand, not from the way she was pronouncing them, but as the sounds formed on paper in his mind’s eye.
It struck him that this scarecrow woman with her savage offspring was speaking a kind of Greek.
He spread a paper in front of him and leant on the longboat’s hull behind him to write on it. She looked at the words he’d written: ‘Who are you?’ she read.
She took the pen from his hand, and wrote her name.
‘Outis.
’ No one.
Skipwith laughed. ‘I know that trick. We can’t have that.’ He pressed the paper towards her again.
‘Leto,’ she said aloud.
‘A big name for a little woman. A Titaness!’ Skipwith smiled. So she was called after the cult goddess of the region, appropriately. This custom had never caught on in Albion, to name children after Jesus Christ or Aphrodite or Hercules. He pondered a while, then decided, ‘It’s charming, it’s an improvement on “Nobody”, but it still won’t do, not if we’re going to take you with us to Albion. We need to have you fit in. How about . . . Lettice, instead?’
Captain Winwalloe watched the stowaway from the bridge: preternatural girl-woman with twin children, puny and pallid from the dark where they’d been hidden, but gabbling to each other like much older children. She’d gold on her. Still smelly, even after a wash on the deck, standing in her borrowed clothes, slopped down in seawater from a bucket on a rope wielded by Teal, who whooped as the woman shivered and shuddered. You could see everything through that white lawn gentleman’s hosiery that pretentious Sir Giles Skipwith had given her to wear. No damn point in her pretending to be modest and keeping herself covered. Sharp sticking out bits and dark patches. Too scrawny and too small for his taste; he liked a good croup to grasp as he thrust. She’d shiver into little bits, like porcelain. Even at this distance she made Winwalloe feel stout and bellybound, ungainly and, the long and the short of it, out of sorts.
Strugwell frequently listened in to Skipwith’s exchanges with the captain when they sat dining, spooning the provisions he offered them into their mouths. He understood clearly that that damned clever lord, who was forever jesting, teasing people except where it concerned his marbles in the hold, pooh-poohed the portents and prodigies of the sea that he’d spent a lifetime avoiding, and at times, he’d found a consolation in the gentleman’s confident scepticism:
‘“Here be dragons”? I think not,’ Skipwith would say. ‘A trick of the earth; gas escaping from the rock, followed by spontaneous combustion, takes the appearance of flickering flames such as might be spewed by a fire-breathing dragon of olden times. That monstrous she-devil the Chimaera is nothing but a chimera,’ he laughed. ‘Nature, Geoffrey, nature. Quite magical enough on her own without needing myths or religion to explain it.’ A pagan by imaginative inclination, Giles had a developed sense of the contingencies of religious faith; his archaeological explorations had removed traces of trust in the behaviour of believers.
Captain Winwalloe disliked his clever passenger’s scoffing, and he was sometimes moved to rebuke him aloud for presumptuousness against divine providence; like most naval men, he was highly respectful of fate’s powerful caprices. Strugwell on the other hand learned from Sir Giles’s rationalising and took some comfort from them – his explanations and dismissals could set some order to the jumble in the cook’s soused mind, and blunt some of the many goads that roused his temper and his terrors. The churchyard on the shore where he’d grown up was full of the dead whom the sea had claimed: men who had slipped from the deck out fishing, men who had been lured on to the rocks, men who’d rowed out to help a boat in difficulties in a gale and been engulfed themselves, smugglers and wreckers, too, who worked under the rose in the blackness of moonless nights and mistook the currents along the cliffs. In his granite village on the promontory everyone knew that some of the men who the sea took went of their own will to go with them – the immortal and fatal spirits who live under the sea and rose up to press their cold and fishy flesh against a sailor’s body and interlace their flowing limbs with his less supple, human frame of bone and muscle.
Years of surprising survival at sea and the loss of many sailors who were his comrades-in-arms in a variety of assaults, accidents, punishments and plagues, had made him superstitious. When they talked among themselves, the crew loved swapping tales of bloodshed, hauntings, curses and woes; however familiar they were, however many times they’d been repeated, they still could thrill a sailor with delicious trembling fear of the unknown forces invisibly gathering in the ocean and the sky, watching for their moment like sea hawks hanging on the uplift of air from the lip of a cliff.
Strugwell had made a pact with his hammock partner, the second mate, that if an accident should befall him, his friend would take the surgeon’s needle from the medicine chest and sew up his nose and mouth tightly before winding him into his shroud so that no fishes could swim into him and gnaw his insides before they’d decomposed in the natural way of things. Round his neck, he wore a badger’s penis on a cord: Georgie, the shepherd from home, who’d given it to him when he was a boy, had said it had a bone in it, and that badgers had the only penises in the world to have one, and that it would stiffen his manhood through fair wind and ill.
Whereas his captain was in high dudgeon about the stowaways, he, Strugwell, was more alarmed than annoyed about it: the woman, that mother didn’t seem altogether right in the head, twins were a peculiar lot anyway and these twins were honest-to-god strange: they weren’t like any offspring he’d ever seen, the way they jabbered to each other all the time and that girl, who could walk and talk and jump about and climb all over everything and eat like a horse, still at her mother’s nipple. There was something funny about the way they looked, too – something in their eyes. Something deep down, like looking at a waxwork; in port two years ago, he’d visited the show of Mrs Salmon’s where you could look at the most notorious murderers wearing their own clothes as they were at the time of their topping. They’d glass eyes in their pink, sweaty faces and you could look right into the orb and see all the bits, the filaments of the iris and the dark hole of the pupil and the light passing through the jelly. They looked back at you, too, and it was really hard to believe they couldn’t see you. Those three strangers looked in the same blind way, especially the young ones who stared at everything so frankly; their mother reminded him of the statue of that Sarah Malcolm, the indoor servant who’d murdered her mistress and two of her fellow servants – for what? For gain?
The children’s mother was all skin-and-bones, which Old Ma Malcolm wasn’t. She was more like one of those Jenny Hannivers on display in Mrs Salmon’s as well. Brought up with some catch in a fisherman’s net, with wrinkly black hands and a face like a pear that’s dried up in the store. They said this Jenny was a mermaid, and Strugwell thought he’d have no trouble sailing past this wizened hobgoblin even if she did know songs that no man could hear without tearing off his clothes and leaping into the sea to reach them. Every day in this sea, they saw porpoises. They’d conduct the boat out at the prow in fair weather, glittering arcs slicing out of the water and swooping down again; they’d disappear as suddenly as they appeared and seemed to come for no other reason than the sport of it. Flying fish too, in squadrons. One or two misjudged the leap, and landed, panting, wild-eyed on deck.
Maybe that’s what she was, really? Would the captain chuck her and her brood back into the sea? They’d swim away, Strugwell was sure of it; her legs would turn scaly and finned, and the twins would ride the waves calling out in their godless tongue on either side of her.
Sir Giles was very animated that night, at supper with the captain at his table under the awning by the tiller. The night was fine, the breeze strong enough to swish the heavy boat through the sea’s dark toils, which opened silvered lips as the boat entered them. Skipwith’s voice was always loud, and while many men whom Winwalloe had known sat quietly wrapped in the swinging chords of the sea at night, Sir Giles called out to him:
‘We’ll be putting in to Parthenopolis in a fortnight, you reckon . . . ?’
‘If there’s a following wind, but the bay of Feltimye can be treacherous and the winds are fickle this time of year – it’s late, much later than I hoped, as you know, Sir Giles.’ Winwalloe was bitter: if Sir Giles hadn’t held out to carry more and more rocks down to the shore and load the Shearwater to the gunwhales, they’d have set sail in more clement weather with a lighter burden and made better h
eadway. As it was the Shearwater was groaning like a winded nag.
The captain was decisive: ‘We’ll land them in the next harbour where we can put in safely.’
‘But she’s a woman, Winwalloe – and young. You know what that’ll mean, in these parts.’
‘It’s not our responsibility. My charge is to bring the marbles – and yourself – back to Albion. No more cargo. No livestock. Except the edible variety. Of any kind.’
‘Consider her a prisoner – imagine we’ve captured her in battle. She might be valuable. A bargaining chip. Besides, does Her Majesty’s navy hand over prisoners without ceremony? Marooning – surely this is fit only for stories for boys, the “bloods” I read when I was very young?’
‘She’s a stowaway, sir, and we’re not at war, not with our neighbours here. If she weren’t . . . what? A woman, and a woman with two children, damn it, I’d throw her back in the sea where she came from.’
‘Do you think she came from the sea then?’ asked Sir Giles, amused. ‘A siren? I’ve the reputation for collecting wonders. Maybe she’s a curiosity, a figure from an old map. Shall we ask her to sing?’
Winwalloe flushed. ‘This is a ship in Her Majesty’s navy, sir, and I’ll not let your fiddle-dee-dee attitude deflect me from my duty. Which is to bring you and those rocks we’ve loaded safely to port. That’s my duty, as I say, and we’ll have no women. And no singing. I’ll not vouch for the stability of the ship if you start more of that kind of nonsense.’
Later, Strugwell approached the captain.
‘How long is it we’re to provide for . . . ?’ he jerked an angry head sideways towards the companionway that led down to the lower deck where the stowaway was now locked in the crate with the twins.
The captain stuck out his beard and said, ‘Ask Skipwith to secure the costs, or part with his rations.’
The Leto Bundle Page 21