She could not puzzle it out, so day by day she carried on doggedly with her exercises. She did not seriously think she would ever see combat; she was still convinced that as soon as she landed in Genova she would find Richard and somehow take him home. As far as she was concerned her exercises served purely to make her more male. She could already feel the changes in her body. Her soldier’s coat began to strain over her shoulders – she thought that once on land she must pick the seams. Her arms were harder, less rounded, and her grip stronger.
Cleanliness was required aboard ship, and the soldiers bathed in freezing buckets of seawater on deck. Some stripped to the waist, and some hardy souls stripped entirely and poured the entire contents of the bucket over their gooseflesh. Luckily, there were many who elected to do what Kit must; to wash face and hands, and duck the head in the bucket. At such times Kit was to learn what a variety of shapes the male form could assume. Some were burly and muscled, some as skinny as she, some had run to fat. And their man’s parts differed likewise. She had only seen Richard without clothes, and at the sight of her first naked soldier looked modestly away; but thereafter she forced herself to look. She needed to know how men were constructed – such sights had to become familiar to her, even commonplace. But how could she become used to a part of a man that seemed different on every sighting? Some were plumbed with a skinny long pipe, some had shorter, fatter appendages, some were generously proportioned. And the size of the members seemed to bear no relation to the size of the man himself; it was most confusing. Kit was struck by how immodest the men were, and how close was the relationship between a man and his member. They handled themselves, they handled each other, they twitted each other about their pricks, they stood naked with no trace of modesty. In the space of a fortnight she heard a man’s appendage named as prick, cock, pouting stick, honey pipe, pretty rogue, and stiff and stout. She envied men this ease, remembering how, that last night in Dublin, she’d stood peeled and naked before the window. She had foreseen then, in that moment of premonition, that she would not be in that most natural and naked state for a long time.
Her clothes became her shell. She never removed them – she lived in them all day and slept in them all night. They were spattered with seawater and vomit and piss from the storm, and spilled rations of food and grog from the calm. Even in tranquil waters she had not yet acquired the skill to eat and drink at sea without spills. She had soaked the jerkin and shirt with the acid sweat of fear. They had become hardened and greasy and fitted to her body now like a skin. The uncomfortable, heavy woollen felting had moulded to her, she was used to the twin buttons digging into her back as she lay in her hammock, the lacings and facings and buttons and ties that prodded and poked and pressed their impressions into their flesh had become part of her. She had some company in her clothes, as head lice fed daily on her scalp and their cousins feasted upon her delicate flesh. She begged some tar oil from the carpenter and washed her hair in it, but the lice soon came back.
Her women’s courses were to be another problem. She had bled just after Richard had gone, and now she was bleeding again. But because there was no privacy she must suffer the cramps and the discomfort in secret. Regretfully she tore one of her good Holland shirts into rags and stuffed them into her money belt to stem the flow. She wondered how to conceal the bloody hanks of rag, until she watched, once, the Dutchman’s log being tossed overboard – the master cast a piece of wood into the waves from the bow and gauged the ship’s speed by noting how long the stick took to pay out a reel of knotted thread over the keel. The process provided Kit with an easy solution – each day she dumped the bloody rags down the head and the rolling sea took them. She watched them rush to the bow and out of sight with relief. But at night the shrewd rats scampered below her hammock, tempted by the smell of her secret female blood. There was no possibility of laundering the uniform, and there were no spare shirts to be had nor undergarments to be bought. The regular crew wore short ‘slop’ trousers and could purchase spare slops from the purser; but there were no uniforms to be had and Kit must live in her own stains until Genova. But, however much the spicy, salty smell of her own body offended her, it was nothing to the general stench of three score men in the same state.
Of all the lessons Kit learned aboard The Truth and Daylight the most surprising was the whole new language she added to her lexicon – not Dutch nor French nor even Spanish: but the language of Filth.
The night when the regiment had descended on Kavanagh’s was, she now realised, a taste of what was to come. The word ‘fuck’, which she had never heard uttered once before the regiment drank in her bar, punctuated every sentence that was spoken, by soldiers and crew alike. This useful word could be used to precede all other words, in an endless and imaginative stream of obscenity. The men called each other cunt-bitten crawdons, turdy-guts, shite-a-bed-scoundrels, lickerous gluttons, ruffian rogues, idle lusks, fondling fops, scurvy sneaksbies, gnat-snappers, gaping changelings, shitten shepherds, cozening foxes, codsheads, loobies and mangy rascals. And the words were not absolutes, but had a confusing usage; close friends spoke to each other in these dreadful terms, with something approaching affection, without giving a jot of offence. But now and again a fight would break out and the selfsame words would be used, but with spite and vitriol and intent to injure, and then the words lost their comic sense and assumed their full power. One Friday she saw a man flogged, the man who had started just such a fight, and heard, as the cat-o’-nine-tails bit into his shoulders, these same terrible curses leak from his mouth, some strange panacea for the pain.
Curse words, it seemed, always had a target; always to be thrown like poniards at someone or other. Women, she noted, came off badly; the men spoke of women as if they were afraid of them, not as if they loved them. Women were whores, damned abandoned jades, Jezebels. She once heard a soldier speak of his lover as a ‘salt swol’n cunt’. The only creatures below women, she discovered, were the Rome-runners, buggers and Jesuits. These, she divined after much careful eavesdropping, were men who loved men. She had never heard of such a thing, and no wonder; this was a particularly foreign sin, which seemed to be a particular province of the popish Romans, and peculiarly connected with the Catholic Church. She was sure no one in Ireland, though sharing that religion, practised such a perversion – then she remembered the cooper on the cart, and his hand on her leg.
Now, at night, she repeated the words she’d learned like a prayer, a rosary of knobbly, guttural curses threaded on a string of obscenity – an unending, secular cycle keeping time with the rock of the hammock until she fell into a swinging sleep, to dreams soaked in swear words.
Kit’s education ended abruptly when the lookout spotted landfall. The benevolent Madonna della Fortuna had led them safely into her haven. Kit crammed her belongings in her pack like the rest, and left her hellish hammock without a backward glance. Upon deck a thousand white gulls greeted them in the shallows, the fellow with the squeezebox played a merry shanty, and everyone was handed a jigger of rum. The recruits crammed eagerly to the larboard bulwark. Kit had half-expected to see a city afire, to hear a boom of cannon from the hillsides and the screams of women and children. Instead she saw a blue sea and a green hill, a sunny whitewashed town and a lofty lighthouse painted with a red cross. It was sixty-two days without Richard, and she was in Genova.
The wrong Mr Walsh sat on the bowsprit with his ever-present list, ticking the recruits off as their boots hit the jetty. When Kit landed she stumbled, suddenly sick. The wrong Mr Walsh jumped down, picked her up by the scruff of her neck and set her on her feet. ‘It is the land,’ he said. ‘It will confound you with its stillness. You’ll feel like a newborn foal for a few hours.’
She steadied herself. ‘Are you coming with us?’
‘No – back to Dublin for the next new hatchlings.’
She would be sorry to see him go, for he seemed her only ally. ‘Then thank you, sir,’ she said, low voiced, ‘for your many kindnesses.’
He peered at her closely, and seemed to hesitate. ‘You’re not really from Kerry, are you?’
Kit met his gaze. ‘No.’
He narrowed his eyes. ‘Are you even called Walsh?’
‘Yes,’ she said fervently. ‘Christian Walsh as I live and breathe.’
‘Hmm.’ He smiled half a smile. ‘Well, Christian Walsh. Keep living and breathing for as long as you can.’
Chapter 5
And a soldier he always is decent and clean …
‘Arthur McBride’ (trad.)
They were a shambling, sorry set of soldiers that landed in Genova, with no formation or pride. Kit followed her fellows, her red back heating uncomfortably in the sun. The whitewashed buildings of the docks gave way to tall palaces and churches, so crammed together as to form shadowy alleys which the keen sun could not penetrate. Everything here seemed black or white; a pied city. The only stroke of colour seemed to be the slash of the red cross on the lighthouse. The marble was very white, the shadows very black; the plaster houses bright, their inhabitants dark as Romanies. Underfoot there were black and white chequered pavings, which gave Kit the uncomfortable feeling that she was a counter in a game of which she did not know the rules.
Within a furlong she saw more grand, lofty marble houses than she’d seen in the whole of Dublin, and they all seemed impossibly tall, with many storeys piled one on top of the other, with ornate pillars and decorative windows. The local Spaniards, a swarthy sort of people, jeered at them from the dark doorways and threw cabbage leaves. One offending leaf sat on Kit’s shoulder for a few steps of the march like a malodorous epaulette. She brushed it off, perplexed. She’d understood that they were to be fighting the French, so the Spanish were presumably their allies. Why, then, were they not greeted as conquering heroes? Perhaps it was a consequence of their shabby appearance. The officers, at the front of the procession, gave better face – they at least had shining buckles and brushed hats, and their boots showed at least some acquaintance with polish. The Marquis de Pisare, who made the head of the snake, led his men to a great white house deep in the heart of the city – such a place must be the home of a mighty man indeed, some local grandee. The dwelling had great double doors with a tiny door set within. The marquis knocked imperiously at the eye of the needle and a wizened priest appeared. It was only when Kit followed the others inside to a hushed candlelit interior, heavy with incense, that she realised that the house was God’s. The foot soldiers hung back while the marquis knelt at the shrine; a lifesize plaster figure crowded about with all manner of ex-voto objects – helmets and shields of days past, shredded banners, seashells, driftwood, planks from the clinkers of ships, a baby’s rattle, even a set of wooden teeth.
The priest came down the line of shabby soldiers, dousing them with holy water shaken from an olive branch. After her personal rain shower Kit tugged at the black sleeve of the priest. She pointed to the shrine and shrugged expressively. He understood. ‘La Madonna della Fortuna,’ he whispered.
Kit’s dry lips parted. The Madonna della Fortuna. The Marquis de Pisare was clearly determined that they should thank their saviour, and so she was to meet, face to face, the heavenly lady who had saved her from the waves. Yes, the Madonna had saved all these others too, but Kit felt that it was her personal salvation. She shuffled forward in the velvet, scented dark, and at length it was her turn to kneel. Instead of looking down in penitent thanks she looked up into the figure’s eyes, the orbs painted crudely in the black and white of the city. Kit could see, from this distance, that the Madonna was not a plaster saint. She was made of wood. She was a ship’s figurehead.
Kit gazed up at the Madonna, a Madonna who had also been saved from the sea. She had been crowned with gold and clothed in a cerulean blue cape. She had been given a coral rose to hold in her pinched fingers, and handed a child that wasn’t hers to hold in her crooked arms.
Kit felt comforted. This was not the Virgin. She was in disguise too. Kit felt a kinship with the wooden impostor and wondered what her story was. What had her ship been called? Who was she really? She might have been a Jezebel, a wooden whore.
It was a salutary lesson. She realised how different the male Kit she had created was from the female. As a woman, she had been confident, funny, talkative, brave, courageous. As a man she was a mouse. What she had to be was Kit, the essence of herself, but as a man; Kit as if she had been born a boy. She had to talk and laugh, and hold forth, and run down hills, just as she had as a woman. If she retreated into herself, the men would try to draw her forth. And once they started looking, they would most likely find her out. She could not risk discovery now, now that she walked on the same foreign soil as Richard.
As she straightened up from her kneeling position, the next fellow jostled her as she rose, impatient to take his place. ‘Mary’s tits,’ he said, ‘did you tell her your whole history? There’s others a-waiting.’
Kit took him firmly by the arm and looked in his eyes – the first time she’d looked directly at anyone since she’d donned her disguise. ‘Step back, sir,’ she said, gruff and low. ‘And mind your tongue. You are in God’s house.’ She saw the fellow take a pace backward to let her by, and as she walked down the aisle, she noted the Marquis de Pisare regarding her with approval for the second time in her short career.
They marched forth to a ruined marble palazzo near the cathedral where they were to be billeted for one night. Kit had never seen a place so grand, nor so shabby. The place presented its own problems; there were flea-bitten straw pallets strewn on the floor and the dragoons must sleep as close as maggots crowding cheese. The necessary house was no more than a bucket in the corner which stank strongly of nightsoil.
Lieutenant Gardiner, in his peremptory tones, answered her unspoken questions. ‘Tomorrow we march to meet Tichborne’s regiment of foot. Your evening is your own, but we meet at dawn in the square before the cathedral in full uniform. No man shall be tardy nor jug-bitten.’
As the men scattered, cheering faintly, Kit stood rooted. A march to meet Tichborne – and Richard. Joy and fear fought in her breast – she would see him soon, but how long would the march be, and to where? She looked at the little necessary bucket in the corner, covered with a stained cloth. An idea had formed in her head on that long voyage, and now she must be a man for a little longer, the idea must become a reality.
While the others set out to drink their pay in the dockside taverns, Kit went her own way into the black and white town. As the citizens gabbled around her pointing at her clothes, she memorised her route back to the large square where the soldiers were billeted. She felt entirely alone in this odd place where churches looked like houses and houses looked like churches. Perhaps everything was in disguise. The cathedral, guarded at its steps by roaring stone lions, was rendered in black and white marble in crazy stripes. Kit did not enter, but walked into the tiny alleys behind the duomo; here, cheek by jowl with Genova’s greatest church, she was sure she would find what she was looking for.
And she did indeed. She paused outside the door and looked up at the universal sign for a silversmith; three splayed silver arrows, just the same as the smiths on Dame Street in Dublin. Here, as there, there was a burly guard to watch the door – this one a hairless giant bristling with weapons. But he nodded benignly enough at Kit as she laid her hand on the door and went inside.
She was almost blinded by the glaring constellation that awaited her within. Everything was rendered in silver: goblets, coin chests, spoons, daggers, bracelets, even an arquebus with silver shot. Here too she looked into the countenance of the counterfeit Virgin; the Madonna della Fortuna was rendered over and over again, in miniature no bigger than a silver egg, on a huge canvas in an ornate silver frame that sprouted leaves and curlicues, in silver statuary; her face reflected a thousand times in the silver-backed looking glasses that hung about.
In all the glory Kit did not at once see that there was a living figure among the glory. A woman stepped forth.
Kit, remembering just in time, doffed her tricorn. She wondered, as she bowed, how she would possibly explain what she wanted to buy. ‘Can you understand me?’ she asked tentatively.
The woman shrugged. ‘Certainly.’ She spoke English with a strange accent, making a ‘Sh’ sound on the C.
‘Are you English?’
‘I am a Hollander. But I speak a little of most languages and more of a few. In trade one must be able to speak to all nations.’ The woman had a pale face, tidy ash-blond hair and a fringe cut across her brows, not unlike Kit’s own style. She held her hands before her, clasped not above a full skirt but over a leather apron. Her hands were her strangest feature, for they were as green as holly, stained by some nameless compound; fingers, palms and all.
‘Is the silversmith within?’ asked Kit.
‘I am the silversmith,’ said the lady, ‘my name is Maria van Lommen.’ She held out a green hand.
Kit took it. ‘Christian Walsh. You made … all this?’ Kit’s gesture embraced the glory about her.
‘Of course. This is my business. My father makes silver in Amsterdam. I make silver here.’
Kit was impressed that a woman owned all these riches, let alone crafted them. A woman, moreover, who seemed not much older than herself. But for now, Maria’s sex made Kit’s task more difficult. It would be harder to explain what she wanted to a female.
Kit Page 5
