‘You mistake the situation, sir. I have decided to stay.’
Kifft’s mouth opens and then closes again. While not the first, she is certainly the most prestigious hostage to have uttered to him these profoundly inexplicable words.
‘That is what I am here to tell you. I have a son, and … and, you know, ties here. I was under the impression I merely had to appear in person as evidence that I am not being held against my will.’
‘Yes indeed, yes indeed, quite correct.’ Kifft blinks. ‘Well, I must say this is a surprise. I can’t pretend I won’t be glad to hold on to the money. As I was saying, my expenses are far in excess of what I expected and I have not been able to afford everyone. But I confess I am somewhat taken aback to hear it, mevrouw, when it’s your own husband who organised the ransom.’
‘My husband? You must be mistaken. He … surely he … years ago …’
Kifft pounces on his papers again. ‘Let me see, let me see.’ He picks out a crinkly sheet, looks it over and taps near the foot of the page with a grubby fingernail.
‘Yes, here we are. “Asta Torstiens, dess Presters frouwe.” The husband is, hmm, the Reverend Olaf, er, Olaf Egg, who first alerted the Danish monarch to the fate of his suffering people in the Barbary. Known to have been tireless in pressing the bishops of Iceland for action and organising the raising of exceptionally large funds, relative to the size of population, in Vest … Vestmanna – good grief, this language – somewhere in Iceland.’
Ásta’s eyes blur with tears. ‘He’s still alive then?’
‘Oh, that I could not say. I believe he was rather old.’
Kifft is becoming restless again. ‘Mevrouw Torstiens, I see you are upset. These are emotional times for any captive. But for the avoidance of doubt I would be grateful if you could confirm your position without ambiguity. Do you wish to be ransomed or not?’
‘I don’t know,’ she says, closing her eyes. ‘I don’t know.’
The Dutchman swipes his spectacles from his nose and deposits them on the table with an irritated clunk. No fee on earth will be enough to compensate him for the trials of this year.
‘Then perhaps, madame, you will be good enough to send word when you have an answer. I sail in one week.’
Pinching his eyes between his thumbs, Wilhelm Kifft sighs long and deep. Only seven more days to go.
30
The thing about thinking, Ásta reflects, crouched over her sewing near the stairwell of the harem gallery in the hope of catching Jón on his way past, is that when every possibility of choice is taken from you, when the children who are your very limbs can be torn off on a whim, there comes to be little point in it. You tire. You get out of the way of it. That kind of captivity is as much about the mind as the shackle. The only kindness you can offer yourself is to forget, and forgetting becomes easier as thinking gets harder.
Then, all of a sudden, choice arrives: a gate appears at your hand. Yet still you cannot think. Helga is gone, and Egill, and Marta. Ólafur, deep in a grave you have dug for him yourself, piling on the clods as the seasons turn, is in no position to beckon you through. All you can see, all that fills your mind, is your boy, your last dancing boy, and the need to be near him. And all the time your limbless body is aching to be distracted from the gate by a man who, one way or another, is responsible for every loss you have had to bear.
Then – see what happens – an irritable Dutchman in yellow hose appears, shuffling his papers and peering through his eye-glasses into a world you used to know. He shakes you into remembering. He shocks you, painfully, so terribly painfully, into thinking about the gate and what might lie on the other side.
She can tell Jón is on his way down from the second floor before she sees him. She knows the way he jumps from step to step when nobody is looking, testing himself with two at a time, trying not to land on a pink streak in the marble.
‘Jón minn,’ she calls as he emerges from the stairwell at a trot.
‘Mamma, I have to work,’ he says in Arabic, affectionate but anxious to be off.
‘I have something to tell you. Listen. A man has come with a ransom.’
His eyes open wide.
‘I’ve been given leave to go home. But not you, minn kaeri.’
‘This is my home, Mamma.’ He says it in Arabic, but using the Icelandic mamma with a slight accent she adores. ‘But I like you to be near me.’
‘I like to be near you too. But you’ll be a man soon, with a life of your own to live here. Your father needs me in Iceland.’
She has not the slightest idea if this is true.
‘And Helga – remember the sister I used to tell you about – she’ll be there somewhere too. So I hope. But my heart is being torn down the middle. I don’t want to leave you.’
Jón takes her hand and solemnly rests on her Ólafur’s brown eyes. Another of her children trying to comfort her. How can she bear this?
‘Then don’t worry about me, Mamma. I have plans. I’m going to be rich one day and I’ll sail to visit you. The master says it’s quite possible that I’ll own my own ship.’
‘He has spoken to you?’
‘I wait at his table. He speaks to me often. He says I’m quick with numbers and will make a good merchant.’
Dear God, what kind of merchant? ‘You won’t take captives, Jón minn, will you? You must never make of other people slaves. Promise me this.’
But he is hopping from foot to foot. ‘I must go, Mamma. I was to fetch the water at once.’
And on he skips down the stairs, without jumping.
This is what comes of thinking. It shreds your heart.
It is a risk, but time is short. She has watched Cilleby go into his chamber and assured herself that he is alone. Seeing her walk in without having received a summons will tell him at once what he needs to know.
He whirls around as she enters, the outrage at a social indiscretion more egregious than anything she has yet perpetrated flushing across his face, tightening his eyes – and just as quickly fading in the second it takes him to grasp why she has come. She nerves herself to walk forward and join him in the centre of the room, where the evening sunshine is throwing the final criss-cross shadows across the flowered rug.
‘I see you’ve changed your mind,’ he remarks casually.
Cilleby has always had an instinct for the moment when a deal is about to break down: that split second when you sense the upper hand slipping and know the time has come to pull out. This with Ásta, his wayward, grey-eyed weaver of tales, has strayed far from business, but he knows the signs. He will not demean himself.
Ásta, armed to resist argument and combat coercion, is at a loss to meet what appears to her not as pride but humility. The formal speech she has prepared flies from her head, and she reaches over and seizes Cilleby’s two hands in hers. It is another breach of etiquette, but this time there is no outrage. His smooth thumb starts to rub her palm, gently, round and round. So sad and stern he looks, she wonders if he even knows he is doing it.
‘It’s Jón,’ she blurts out. ‘There are other things I meant to tell you too, because I started, you know, thinking. But it’s mainly Jón.’
‘But he’ll be with you here,’ Cilleby protests, startled out of the dignified aloofness he had determined on.
‘You wouldn’t understand.’ Is she supposed to explain what it is like to listen for Jón’s thump-thump on the stair, waiting in an agony of dread in case this is the day that a happy business opportunity, or a wife’s spite, or a pasha’s desire means he is gone as suddenly as the others? ‘What can you, who breathe power like the air, know of having someone you love snatched from you?’
He says nothing, only continuing the rhythmic rubbing inside their clasped hands.
‘Let me try to explain, then. My son is happy as he grows away from me in the life he was born into. I see that. But what I must face is that if anything were to happen to stop him being happy, I could not prevent it or protect him in the smallest
degree by being here.’
Cilleby flinches. The stroking stops abruptly, though he does not remove his hands.
‘You see, I don’t think I could bear to have him torn from me one day and to languish here after that, fatally wounded, my imagination full of horrors. Better – this is what I’ve been thinking – to store my child forever in my mind as he is now, skipping up and down the stairs and dreaming of owning his ship. I can visit him in that place. It’s my story. I can protect him inside it and he will never be taken from me.’
Cilleby is looking into her eyes, his expression unreadable. Ásta gazes back, discomfited to realise that, even while thinking about Jón, she is itching to reach up to his face and dribble her fingers down his cheek. The thought is even growing upon her of how lovely it would be, and how restful, and how exciting at the same time, if he were just to lay a finger, one scented finger with its beautifully pared nail, against her lips to silence her, and if he were then to scoop her on to the satin quilt and lay her down on it and instruct her, very softly, to stop thinking, that no good ever came from thinking.
But he does not, and she does not. She battles instead to recover the image of Ólafur that Wilhelm Kifft placed before her.
‘And something else,’ she says, gripping his hands the tighter to secure her own. ‘Ólafur Egilsson knew me. That’s what I had forgotten. He made me feel known. He made me feel beloved.’
A fugitive sob escapes her. Although nothing has equipped Cilleby to sense which man she is weeping for, he feels his own eyes moistening. He could have her in his arms in a second, on the quilt in two: they are both ready and he knows it. Later, when he is dreaming Ásta’s face on to that of every woman he beds, he will look back on his conduct today as the finest thing he has ever done, only excepting having a man killed for her. Already, with the detachment he has been at pains to cultivate since she came into the room and he felt the direction of the wind, he is conscious of a glow of nobility at what he is giving up, even as some distant flicker of a thought is toying with how he might invest the windfall and the noisiest part of his mind is screaming that this is going to hurt.
He resumes the rhythmic rubbing of her palms, while Ásta falters on.
‘Ólafur wanted an old sealwoman to die with a hand stroking her head. He owed her nothing and received nothing from her. Or for her, Cilleby. Do you see?’
Argue with me. Please argue with me. ‘She was the lowest, most ridiculed of people. I don’t expect you to understand why that matters to me – I’m not sure I know myself – but when I went to see the Dutchman I remembered. I began to think about it.’ Don’t let me do this, Cilleby. ‘And it’s why I am going home to him, whether I find him there or not.’
Cilleby swallows. ‘In that case you must go,’ he says equably.
That lone swallow is all that betrays the effort it is costing him not to say what he is suddenly, wildly, thinking: Come to me instead, Ásta. Let me make everything right. I’ll treat your son as my own. I want none but you. Come to the bed of stories where you belong.
For all her long life afterwards Ásta will remember that fragment of time when she thought he was going to plead with her to stay. She will see again the faint quiver in his throat that at the very last seemed to speak of something for which he had never found the words or the right thing to do. She will wonder then what she would have done if he had found them. No, that’s not true. She will never doubt what she would have done. But she will wonder often, being to her very last days more prone to wondering than she would wish, what her life would have become.
‘I will make the arrangements with Kifft,’ he says, and the moment passes.
He raises both her hands briefly to his lips and lets them fall, then reaches past her to open the door.
‘Let me wish you a pleasant journey home.’
On the thirteenth day of June 1636, as the wind fills the sails of a merchant ship bearing thirty-four Icelanders away from the busy port of Algiers, Ali Pitterling Cilleby is at the end of the mole in his cream-white burnous with the hood up to watch it leave. He is alone.
ORANGE
June 1636 – May 1639
I would like to comfort and strengthen the people with my words, but I cannot.
Reverend Ólafur Egilsson
31
Not a word is spoken among the Icelanders strung along the side of the ship bound for Marseilles, as the white city shrinks before them. After all his efforts, Wilhelm Kifft has been able to gather and afford to ransom just thirty-four of the four hundred or so who drooped upon decks much like this one nine summers before. To these he has added another sixteen Danish and Norwegian men, captured on different occasions at sea, giving Kifft a group of fifty to harry back to the northern lands like a gruff shepherd who has tarried at the shieling too long.
All but six of the Icelanders are women, and every arm is empty. Next to Ásta stands Gudrídur Símonardóttir, a sallow, dark-eyed woman in her thirties who in their old island life lived near Anna Jasparsdóttir’s croft at Stakkagerdi. She is clutching the side of the ship as hard as Ásta, for Gudda too has just said farewell to a son.
All who came with children, or had them after, have left them behind. Two women have only lately given birth to the bastard infants of their owners and are in particular agony over what will happen to those babies now. When she hears their stories in the months of journeying to come, Ásta will think of how she ran from the sea-villa with the captain’s unholy seed streaming down her own thighs. She will remember how she imagined for a while, in the numb grieving for Marta when her body’s rhythms went awry, that Cilleby’s child might be growing within her own belly. She will think then, listening to the glazed-eyed laments of the other bereft women, that you can always find sorrows worse than your own.
Staring out at the retreating city with his fierce eyes is Einar Loftsson. He has paid his own ransom by selling his brennivín and the caps he knitted himself. He leaves two grown children, a wife in the cemetery and, as cannot fail to be remarked by anyone who encounters him, his nose and the greater part of his ears. It seems to Ásta that Einar’s mutilated face tells all their stories without the need for words, for they have all left scraps of their torn selves in Algiers. Only Gunnhildur’s spirits have recovered enough to permit a light flirtation with the swarthy French seaman who directed them aboard, there being many ways to survive.
When the coast can be seen no longer, Ásta casts about for a space on deck to fight the familiar nausea. She slumps near the black-clad figure of Mr Kifft, who has organised his papers on the surface of a barrel, precariously secured from the wind by a purloined piece of rigging and one elbow. Perched on a mountain of coiled ropes, he is attempting to mark off names on lists. His testy glance softens to see her head flopping into her knees.
‘Excuse me, mevrouw, are you quite well?’
She looks up. With the sea breeze on his face and the Barbary behind him, the Dutchman looks liberated himself: even the ostrich feather has assumed a perkier posture.
‘Yes, thank you. A little sea-sickness, that’s all. I’ve never been a good sailor.’
Kifft lays down his pen and regards her closely. ‘Mevrouw, this is a hard time for you. I am not so stony of heart that I don’t see what it is for a mother to leave her child. But every day will bring you closer to home. You must dwell on that, as I do.’
Heavens, the woman has a flinty eye. ‘Er, not that I am suggesting I’m in the same position as you at all, of course not.’
He picks up the quill again with some haste and bends over his papers. This Mistress Torstiens is a shrewish character. She snapped at him most rudely yesterday in the free house when he tried – out of a courtesy bearing signs of wear – to congratulate her on making the correct decision.
‘Here, look at this,’ he says before she can think up a retort, happening gratefully on the entry at the top of the ledger. ‘See, here is your name. You read, I believe, madame?’
She pulls herself t
o her feet, laying a hand on the rim of the barrel to steady herself in the swell. ‘What is it?’
‘It is my statement of accounts. Every penny I have spent is noted here. And believe me, there will be much to be added. Heaven knows how many ships I have yet to buy passage on and how many inns will require me to pay for bed and board for fifty people. It brings me out in a sweat to think of it. But where was I? Yes, you will like to see this – the proof that you are bought and safely out of captivity. There!’
She peers around the feather and reads, in Kifft’s close, businesslike hand, the words: ‘Gekofft von Aille Pitterlingk Cilleby: 2 frouwen tho weiter Asta Torstiens dess Presters frouwe vnd Gnudele Hermanns. Costen alle beyde – Rd. 500. Portgellt – Rd. 134.’
Ásta is no scholar of Dutch, but it is not difficult to spot the erratically spelled names of Ásta Thorsteinsdóttir, the priest’s wife, and Gunnhildur Hermannsdóttir. Nor is she long in ascertaining that they have been purchased together, from one Ali Pitterling Cilleby, for 500 Danish rix-dollars plus harbour dues, like a pair of prime cattle.
‘It is quite a sum,’ Kifft says, recalling the thunderous face of the Moor as he more or less snatched the money from his hand. You would think the scoundrel would at least have looked happy to receive his ill-gotten gains.
Kifft reapplies himself to his accounts. ‘Barbarians, every one of them,’ he mutters under his breath.
Kifft shepherds his group northwards. From the port of Marseilles he arranges a boat to carry them up the river Aude to the French town of Narbonne nine miles inland. Then they are jolted as far as Toulouse in ancient, rickety wagons pulled by mules, sleeping in the open air wherever they can find shelter. From Toulouse they sail along the canalways of the Garonne to join the Atlantic at the port of Bordeaux, where a ship with fifteen cannons bears them around the northern tip of France to the south coast of England. There they clamber into an even bigger ship boasting twenty-eight cannons. It is always the first thing the men count, the number of cannons; the women tally the rats. From the island of Texel in the north of Holland, they sail or walk along the river from one village to another, until they arrive at the great trading city of Amsterdam.
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