Crossed Bones (45 page)

Marshall had gone several shades paler. ‘No, Sidi, I beg you. Forget the captives: they are not an important part of this bargain. The four cannon you shall have, and all the shot and powder you require. They are of the finest quality, as you shall see: you have my word on that. And their provenance is most interesting: I think you will appreciate the irony extremely, for they were founded for the Cornish coast’s defence at the Crown’s expense, lord. They were destined for the rearming of Pendennis Castle and St Michael’s Mount. Sir John Killigrew commends them to you and says your corsairs are welcome to them and to the wretched Cornish too.’

Sidi Mohammed al-Ayyachi nodded graciously. ‘An irony indeed. Sir John has my thanks.’ He touched his breast. Then he leaned forward and picked up the pouch Rob had cast on the table and weighed it thoughtfully in his hand. ‘This feels to me very like the price of one Christian soul. Let us make our deal, Master Marshall.’ He threw the pouch towards the Londoner with the speed and force of a striking cobra.

Surprised, Marshall fumbled the catch: gold spilled out across the room, gleaming in the rays of sun that slanted into the room from its high window.

‘Four cannon; all the shot and powder we require; and this fine young man for our galleys.’

Rob felt his bones turn to water. ‘What? No!’

He stared at Marshall, his eyes round with horror, but the Londoner was already down on his knees, scrabbling up the coins.

Robert Bolitho had never suffered a day’s sickness in all his twenty-three years. He had evaded the pox, the plague, the scarlet fever. Years of farm labour had toughened his sinews and rounded out a lanky frame into useful brawn. At six foot five, he towered over other men, and with his sky-blue eyes, fair skin and straw-yellow hair presented as fine a specimen of God’s Adam as could ever be imagined.

As a Barbary slave, this boon was soon to prove a curse.

Rob was stripped naked, inspected minutely, even down to the state of his teeth, and given a bundle containing a blanket, a short hooded jacket, a collarless shirt and a pair of wide-legged cotton breeches. A clerk wrote down an approximation of his name and entered it into a register. He was then taken down into one of the slave dungeons, the mazmorra, wherein he found a hundred and more other wretches likewise jammed into dark and stinking close quarters wherein men moaned and whimpered, or crouched wordless and broken on the ground; or cursed and railed in a dozen different languages. In the middle of the night he and the other new prisoners were awoken and taken to have great iron rings fitted about their right legs by a smith who cared not one whit whether he struck iron or bone with his heavy hammer. At this last indignity, one of the men broke into loud and racking sobs: the fetter was the final confirmation of the loss of his humanity.

In the register, did he but know it, Robert Bolitho’s name had been written in the section designated for future galley-rowers; but, it not being yet the raiding season, he was meanwhile selected for rock-breaking, the grimmest of ordeals requiring the strongest of the captives. His captors marked him out even as they urged him blinking out into the harsh first light.

‘He could last three months, this one,’ one of the overseers declared.

‘If he does, I’ll give you a chicken.’

The first overseer stared at him coldly. ‘The Qur’an forbids gambling, Ismael. Watch your step, or you’ll be joining them.’

Over four months after Robert Bolitho was set to work in the quarry, hewing out by hand tool and sheer brute force massive stones and hoisting them two miles to the coast via sledge and ropes, he was still alive, against all the odds.

Rob had seen men fail and die by the dozen – dropping from exhaustion and malnutrition, whipped bloody or driven mad by the sun. One man had gone berserk and tried to murder a guard: he had been summarily executed, his head struck without ceremony from his body, which had taken two steps grotesque and headless before collapsing. The head had bounced off down the hill. No one had bothered to retrieve it. Other men had died from contaminated water; others still of shame and despair.

Throughout it all, as the hemp ropes embedded themselves in his flesh, leaving weeping welts, as the iron fetter dug into the infected sores around his ankle, as his back was striped with whip marks, as his muscles wailed in protest as he swung the mallet at the unforgiving rock, as vermin bred in his hair and feasted on his skin, Rob kept on surviving. When he thought he could not go on, he remembered Cat, seated on her ancient throne on Castle an Dinas, her fox-red hair blowing in the wind, and willed himself to live.

There were days when he forgot what the view from Kenegie, which he had loved so dearly, looked like; days when he forgot his own name. But he never forgot the precise shade of Catherine Anne Tregenna’s eyes, or the curve of her mouth as she smiled.

I put the letter down, appalled, and looked up at Idriss. ‘Were the captives really kept in such atrocious conditions?’

‘I expect so. There were so many slaves they probably feared an uprising if they kept them strong and above the ground.’

‘Such cruel times; such barbarous people.’

‘And of course no one would ever treat prisoners so badly today, contravening their human rights so shockingly. I won’t mention Guantánamo Bay. Or the ferocious slaving of Africans by the British, the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Americans…’ He counted them off one by one on his fingers.

‘I take your point,’ I said, forcing a smile.

We were sitting in the ante-room of a beautiful courtyard restaurant owned by friends of Idriss, where we had feasted on pigeon pastilla and fish brochettes and been complicit in the sharing of a bottle of fine local rosé – either that, or the contents of the foolscap pages had rendered us both a little tipsy.

‘Khaled will just love this,’ Idriss said suddenly. ‘He’s been researching the Sidi al-Ayyachi for years, but I don’t think he ever found a source that described him personally or, I suspect, so accurately.’

‘He seems like a complete monster.’

‘Heroes and villains: they’re all monsters really,’ Idriss said, smiling. He tapped one of his ubiquitous Marlboros out into his hand, then sat there looking at it. After some seconds of this, he replaced the cigarette, closed the box with a gesture of finality and pushed it away. ‘Time to give up one bad habit,’ he said.

‘Just like that?’

‘Just like that.’

‘You seem very sure about it.’

‘There are some things in life I am very sure about.’ He looked at me so intently that I felt dizzy.

Just at that moment one of the waiting staff, who had all evening been both courteous and unobtrusive, knocked over a small vase in the courtyard, and there was a burst of activity as someone saved the scattered roses, someone else mopped up the water, and yet another ran for the dustpan and brush. ‘We should go,’ I said, looking at my watch. Past eleven, though it felt like three in the morning to my exhausted head.

‘Don’t you want to finish going through the papers?’

‘I’m very tired. We can finish them tomorrow. Or the next day – if you don’t mind my staying a little longer.’ And I wanted some time to myself, to reflect on what had been a rather extraordinary day. A lot had happened in a very short space of time. Not least the kiss in the alley.

Idriss beamed. ‘I was very much hoping you’d say that. Our house is your house for as long as you like.’

We walked back through the deserted medina, the waxing crescent moon casting its silvery light down upon us as we went. Thin cats scurried at the sound of our footsteps. We disturbed a pack of feral dogs worrying at the rubbish left by the day’s market; they did not growl at us but simply melted away into the darkness until we had gone. Somewhere a bird sang, its chant hanging plaintive and melancholy in the still air. ‘
Andaleeb
,’ Idriss said. ‘I don’t know the English name for it, I think it’s a sort of lark or something. Our tradition has it that they sing with the voices of lost lovers. If the stars are smiling on them you will hear its mate call back in a moment. Listen.’

So there in the shadow of the ancient Almohad wall we stood and waited, and seconds passed like an eternity. ‘She’s not coming,’ I joked, but Idriss put a finger to his lips. ‘Wait.’

Sure enough the silence gave way to another song, above and to our left.

‘She’s up on the minaret.’ Idriss smiled. ‘Now they will be together.’

Alone later in his room, I sat on the edge of the bed and took the envelope out of my bag. Inside lay the truth about two other parted lovers. I had promised Idriss I would not finish reading their story without him, yet I could not help but steal a glance at the pages to come.

Fettered hand & foote in cowlde iron
, I read, and
beaten oft & savagelye till wee bledde
. My eye skipped down the page and lighted on
alas
,
poore Jack Kellynch
,
so goode a man never deserved so crewel a fate
,
hys was a verie meane & crewel deth
. Poor Matty Pengelly, I thought then, and wondered what had become of the girl. Had she known what had happened to Jack, or was she already sold to a master who worked her hard in his kitchen or, worse, in his bed? I got up, removed the djellaba and the veil, and brushed out my flattened hair. I took a brief and chilly shower in the little room next door and climbed into my narrow bed. I meant to stow the papers away, I really did, but even as I laid my hand on them my eye scanned
Oure shippe put into Plymouth on the twentie third daie of July 1626 & never was I so gladde to see the shores of England
. So there it was. It had taken Robert Bolitho the best part of a year, but he had, despite all his terrible experiences, finally prevailed and brought his Catherine safely home. I wondered how he had escaped the slave prison and made away with Cat, but I would simply have to wait to find out. I should sleep, I told myself.

But I did not. I tossed and turned and could not get comfortable. I could have sworn I heard an owl hoot outside my window, but that was ridiculous: I was in the heart of an African city and not the wilds of Cornwall. Even so, when I finally fell asleep, it was of Catherine I dreamed.

To Cat’s great surprise, her days passed quickly, and before she knew it a month had gone and the end of the year too. Here, though, no one talked of Christmas. There were no squalls of snow blowing in from the north-west, no holly and ivy wreathed about the fireplace – indeed, there was no fireplace – no hot possets laced with cloves and brandy, no midnight mass at the church at Gulval with everyone stamping their feet to keep warm and surreptitiously blowing on their hands in the middle of the prayers. January gave way to February and the first intimations of spring. Did she miss Kenegie? She tried not to think of her former life, but every so often a memory stole up on her when she was engaged in something else: when the women were bent over their embroidery frames and their chatter sounded just like the chatter of the dairy maids in the cowsheds gossiping about who was taking whom to the village dance; when she walked with Leila up to the gun emplacement at the top of the hill and watched the sea battering against the rocks below, just as it did on the foreshore at Market-Jew; when she peeled a turnip or woke in the morning disorientated and not sure of who she was, or where.

Her life was not at all what she had expected it to be in this foreign place. It was simple but not austere; occasionally hard but never cruel. Although much time was given over to the daily prayers, at least as much was taken by the preparation and serving of tea throughout the day, when the women would break from their work and sit about gossiping in a way that would not have been allowed at Kenegie. Bathing at the hammam was a revelation, and had gone from being a trial to be dreaded to a pleasure to be savoured. Food was never purely filling and functional but inventively spiced and elegantly arranged: as much of a joy to the eye as to the tongue, as Habiba chided her, half in charade, half in words, when she threw her vegetables willy-nilly into a tajine. Hasna showed her how to prepare her own kohl from a stone with a soft-blue metallic sheen like the flash of a magpie’s wing that they had bought together in the souk; how to grind it to powder and make a paste; how to fill the pretty bottle with the fine rod of silver attached to its stopper and apply it just so, without making your eyes water so that it fell in runnels down your cheek.

As her facility with the language improved, so did her knowledge of her situation. The man to whom the women referred as the Sidi Qasem bin Hamed bin Moussa Dib was indeed the same man she had known as Al-Andalusi, the captain of the corsair vessel; but the women seemed to regard him not with fear but with respect and affection. He was a great benefactor, a merchant and a righteous man, they told her. That he traded in foreign slaves, including herself, seemed to them entirely normal, as if he traded in horses or prize camels; and after a while even Cat found that her own parameters were shifting. In fact, it was hard to think herself a slave, or even truly a servant, for her master was rarely present, and the few chores she had other than the overseeing of the embroidery workshop were hardly onerous. She also had more time to herself than she had enjoyed in Cornwall, and she found to her surprise that, rather than this chafing at her, she looked forward to the serenity of sweeping the courtyard or tending to its flowers, even though no one had asked her to, and discovered in herself a still, quiet centre she had never suspected to exist.