Crossed Bones

by Jane Johnson

  He paused to draw breath and was about to go on, when Rob said quickly, hoping to bring the subject to a close, ‘Truly, they sound a most savage people.’

  ‘They are that. For the most part they are barbarous and intemperate, given to violent humours and monstrous appetites.’

  Rob turned to find that another man had come to join their conversation and now leaned on the gunwale, cutting off any chance of escape he thought he had had. It was someone he had met, briefly, at the offices of Hardwicke & Buckle, though when this man and Killigrew had begun their more serious discussions Rob had been ushered away into another room. Even in that short time, the man had created an unfavourable impression. Rob couldn’t put his finger on it, for the man was bluff and pleasant enough; yet there was something calculating in his regard. His name was William Marshall, and Rob wondered if he were in some distant way related to Killigrew, for they shared the same narrow features and the same chill blue eyes. But Marshall was an older man than the other, although it might just have been that long exposure to sun and sea had hardened his flesh and burned lines into him which his compatriot lacked.

  ‘You have travelled extensively among them, sir?’ Rob asked, curious, and keen to draw the conversation along less lurid lines.

  ‘I have made four or five visits to Barbary and swear each shall be my last,’ the other said, tugging at a knot in his grey beard. ‘The climate is foul and the inhabitants fouler still. But there is money to be made there, and I’d fain make my fortune sooner than later, and have some years left to enjoy it. Aye, even among the scum of Africa, as good Marlowe would have it.’

  ‘Marlowe?’

  Marshall exchanged a mocking glance with the mariner. ‘Can he really know nothing of Kit Marlowe, the finest playwright that ever graced our shores?’

  The mariner shrugged. ‘The lad’s young,’ he said fairly, ‘and Marlowe’s been dead and buried longer than he’s lived.’

  Marshall sighed. ‘So much for immortality. Give me a pot of gold and the here and now, I say.’ He turned back to Rob, an instructive light in his eye. ‘“The cruel pirates of Argier, that damned train, the scum of Africa” – he had the right of it, did Marlowe. You should make an effort to see one of his pieces when it comes around your way.’ He struck a swashbuckling pose and declaimed in ringing tones:

  In vain I see men worship Mahomet

  My sword hath sent millions of Turks to Hell,

  Slew all his priests, his kinsmen, and his friends,

  And yet I live untouch’d by Mahomet…

  And with a flourish he skewered Rob upon the point of his invisible blade. ‘Ah, ’twas a fair few seasons past I was on the stage,’ he sighed. ‘Great times; fine times. Oh, how they cheered when Tamburlaine burned the Mahometans’ sacred book and danced upon its ashes!’

  ‘We don’t have much opportunity for seeing plays down in Cornwall,’ Rob said stiffly. ‘And I’d hope we’d have more respect than to burn a sacred text, even if it were not our own.’

  ‘Lord save me from ever being consigned to the provinces! No wonder John spends so much of his time up in town. If the women of Cornwall are as self-righteous as you, there can be nothing down there to keep him entertained.’

  ‘I always heard Will Shakespeare was more favoured than Kit Marlowe,’ the mariner said, eager not to be shut out of the conversation.

  Marshall pulled a face. ‘Old Shake-a-stick was as soft as butter: always conniving with whichever faction was in power, and wordy as the day is long. God, some of those monologues. I could never remember my bloody lines, always made my parts up as I went along and tried to get a laugh or two.’

  ‘There was that there Titus Andronicus, though,’ the mariner mused. ‘I enjoyed that mightily.’

  ‘That was just him trying to catch the general temper of things. He never did it very well,’ Marshall said disparagingly. ‘No, Kit had the right of it when it came to brutality. There’s no touching his Tamburlaine, or the Jew. Though I’ll give Tourneur his due, he had a proper feel for violence; and Kyd had his moments.’

  ‘Aye, I loved that Spanish Tragedy of his,’ said the mariner with relish. ‘But I went to see The Renegado last year and left after an hour, it were so dull.’

  ‘That was Massinger, not Kyd,’ Marshall chided him with all the world-weariness of the connoisseur.

  Rob was beginning to feel ever more at sea, in all senses of the term. But he must try to get along with these new comrades, so, ‘I’ve heard there’s a Moor in Othello.’

  ‘Aye,’ said the mariner cheerfully. ‘Black as soot, but he marries a white girl: stands to reason that’s against nature. He gets tricked into believing she’s made the two-backed beast with another man, so he strangles her.’

  ‘But the poor lass,’ cried Rob; ‘that hardly seems very fair!’

  ‘Fair?’ Marshall clapped him on the shoulder. ‘Life’s not fair, lad: surely you’ve learned that much in your – what? Twenty years?’

  ‘Twenty-three,’ Rob corrected.

  ‘Aye, you’re young enough yet; but old enough too, not to lose your head over a maid.’

  Rob’s chin came up dangerously. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘John mentioned you have joined our expedition with a mad scheme to save some poor drab taken by the Sallee Rovers?’

  ‘She’s no drab,’ Rob said hotly.

  Now the mariner was agog. ‘Tell on, lad,’ he cried eagerly, ‘for that sounds like a story worth ten of these play-makers’ tales.’

  Marshall watched Rob go red to the tips of his ears. ‘Go about your duties, man,’ he told the sailor shortly. ‘This is a subject for the attention of gentlemen alone.’

  The mariner cast him a knowing squint. ‘En’t nothing refined about the doings of men and women – that much I know. Women are bitches on heat for all their silks and satins; and men but dogs with their pricks up, and there’s an end to it. But if my presence makes ye feel less like gentlemen, I’ll leave ye to it.’

  Marshall watched the man retreat, then he leaned in towards Rob. ‘I’d give it up, lad, if you’ve any sense. These Turks have rampant appetites, especially where there’s sweet white meat to be had; and they’ll take a boy as hungrily as a girl. The wench’ll be long ruined, and then where’s the point in a gallant gesture? Come along for the ride, that’s fair enough, and if we get lucky and catch a Spanish prize on the way home, you’ll be entitled to your share of the spoils. We sail under the King’s letter of marque: it’ll even be legal. Then you can buy yourself no end of fine fillies and go home a hero.’

  ‘She’s my fiancée,’ Rob said steadily, gritting his teeth with the effort not to smash the man’s nose flat. ‘I’ve sworn to bring her back or die in the attempt.’

  Marshall shrugged. ‘That’s the more likely outcome of the two.’

  ‘You will take me with you as Sir John agreed?’

  ‘John has his own reasons, as usual, no doubt in consigning you to me. You can tag along: but don’t expect me to risk my neck for you. It’ll be hazardous enough without having to nursemaid a simpleton.’

  Rob frowned. ‘If you’re trading with these people, can’t we just sail into their port?’

  The elder man smiled, but the expression didn’t touch his eyes. ‘Nay, lad, far too risky. There are too many factions involved, all at each other’s throats, and a fine British vessel bearing a valuable cargo is a great temptation to every one of them. Since Mansell’s stupid bloody assault on Argier any British ship in these waters is fair game. John Harrison had to put in as far away as Tétouan when he came on his mission earlier this summer and walked five hundred miles across rough country disguised as a Mahometan pilgrim, crazy bastard!’

  Rob had no idea who either Mansell or Harrison was, but he nodded as if such things were public knowledge. ‘He made it, then, Harrison?’

  ‘Oh, aye. He always does. Neck of the devil, that man. Went with the King’s blessing to try to trade free some of the thousand or so English captives hel
d in Sallee, came away, though, with nary a one.’

  ‘A thousand prisoners?’

  Marshall looked at him askance. ‘The Turks have been stealing the poor bastards off merchant ships and fishing vessels for years, and no one’s done a damn thing about it. Not enough money in the Treasury to pay for a decent navy after King James’s extravagances, and his son’s no better with the purse-strings, and of course now we’re at war with Spain again and there’s bigger fish to fry. Harrison’s a bit of a lone adventurer, in it for the glory, though I dare say he’s making a pretty penny on the side with bribes and “fees” and whatnot. But war opens up opportunities for the canny, that’s what I always say.’ And he winked, then took himself off to the galley for a sup, as he put it.

  That night Rob tossed and turned. If the King’s agent had been unable to bring the captives away, what chance did he have? It sounded as if he were about to set foot in some region of Hell populated by a legion of monsters and fiends. The prospect frightened him: it was so far removed from his own life at Kenegie, where the worst you were likely to encounter was some poor desperate sheep-thief trying to make off with one of the flock or some travelling mountebank trying to con you out of your wages down at the Dolphin. He had never even learned to wield a sword, though he’d brought one with him; such a skill was rarely called for in rural Cornwall. He could, though, he told himself fiercely, defend himself well enough with fists or a cudgel. And perhaps this man Marshall – who seemed both wily and experienced – might help him to succeed where others had failed. From the little pouch he wore about his neck, Rob took out his grandmother’s ring, the one Cat had pressed back into his hand with the instruction to give it to her again at a better time. And what better time might there be than when he had saved her from the pirates? An eternal optimist, Rob closed his hand around the ring and made himself fall asleep on that thought.

  The next day they slipped past Salé in the dark and ran some way up the coast till all the lights of human habitation were passed. Then the ship dropped anchor, and Marshall came and shook Rob awake in his berth. ‘Rub this on your face, wrap your great, pale head in this turban cloth and keep your sword in its scabbard,’ he advised, passing Rob a pot of some acrid-smelling stuff. ‘We need no glint of light betraying us. The area we go into is alive with desperadoes. Take only the barest essentials in a pack you can carry on your back: we will move fast and light.’

  And with that he was gone, leaving Rob to do as he was told, his stomach tight. The ash paste felt gritty as he rubbed it into his skin, and the length of turban cloth was stubbornly uncooperative in his clumsy hands, but at last he made his way up on to deck. The first mate and another hand awaited them there and accompanied them in the skiff they lowered, rowing as hard as they could towards a long line of surf running on to a flat black shore. Rob could sense their fear at sculling in towards a land full of devils.

  Marshall’s teeth were white in the moonlight as he grimaced at Rob. ‘Putting in is always the worst thing. I hate to get wet.’

  The keel crunched on pebbles then, and they were out and running, the water shockingly cold as it penetrated every layer of clothing. Glancing over his shoulder a moment later, Rob saw that the sailors had already turned the skiff hard about and were pulling swiftly away towards the black outline of the ship. There was no going back now. He looked towards the shore of Morocco, a fabled land he had heard of only in the drunken tales of broken-down old sailors in the Penzance inns, who spat and cursed and talked of pirates and heathens.

  Marshall was a good distance ahead now, ploughing through the rolling breakers with his head down, his breath soughing as loudly as a pole-axed bull’s. Rob ploughed after him through the white water, blundering from thigh-deep to knee-deep, until he hit harmless rills that barely covered his boots. Then he was on dry land and crunching up the pebble beach behind Marshall, every step a loud advertisement to any murderous fiend who might be waiting for them, just out of sight, among the rocks or distant trees.

  A long bar of stones gave way suddenly again to water. ‘God’s body!’ Marshall swore. ‘They’ve put us down on the wrong bloody side of the river! This wretched coastline all looks the same from the sea, not that any of those want-wits could read a chart if they tried. Now we’re as like to bloody drown inland as if they’d thrown us overboard.’

  The lagoon, however, was shallow, and they waded across without further mishap. On the other side it gave way to marsh and reed beds, where a chorus of outraged frogs and a pair of disturbed plovers broke the night silence with a lively racket. Now the Londoner was apoplectic. ‘That’s right,’ he growled, ‘tell everyone we’re here. Christ’s blood, I hate these natural places! Fill ’em up with sand and brick ’em over, I say. What use is God’s good land if a man can’t even walk upon it without filling his damn boots and having a legion of foul, inedible beasts complain of his presence?’

  Rob had spent much of his childhood exploring the reed beds and marshes just outside Market-Jew. He knew there were worse environments – the back alleys of Westminster, for one. He availed himself of a stave of driftwood and, prodding ahead with this makeshift staff, led them through the marsh on to ground that alternated between stinking algae-filled pools with spongy stands of vegetation and reed thickets. Some while later a small, sharp pain announced itself in his calf; minutes later another on the back of his thigh. He knew at once their cause: leeches. He thought longingly of the flint he had so carefully stowed in his pack. They would have to be burned off, but not here in the open. After that with every step he imagined a plague of them fastening their little jaws in his flesh.

  For an hour or more they toiled through this hellish landscape, and then stomped across a dreary salt flat, which finally gave way to rock and scrub and a steep incline just as the first rays of dawn lanced red as a burst boil over the sea.

  ‘God’s bollocks!’ Marshall swore. ‘We’d better be in the shelter of those trees before sun-up or we’re sitting ducks. Marmora Forest is swarming with outcasts and escaped slaves who’d slit your throat as soon as look at you.’

  Uphill they staggered, thighs and calves protesting at this rough treatment after weeks of doing very little on the rolling sea. Rob could feel how his muscles had wasted from lack of nutriment and use in the few short weeks of the passage. Marshall began to pull away from him, and so Rob shut his mind to his pain, to the pack heavy on his back and the unaccustomed sword banging the backs of his legs, and struggled after him, for if he lost Marshall every chance of life – let alone success – was gone. Soon he found a child’s verse going round and round in his head, until his feet were pounding the rocks and scrub to its rhythms:

  When I am dead and in my grave

  And all my bones are rotten

  By this may I remembered be

  When I should be forgotten.

  Its grim rhymes drove him up the rise. It was only much later, sitting with his back to a tree as Marshall scanned the oil-cloth paper of his rudimentary map, after he had removed his leeches (seven: for luck) and his boots (emptied of water, weed and one crushed frog), that he realized whence the verse had come: a sampler Cat had sewn as a girl, revelling in its macabre tone. It now hung in the dark corridor outside her door in the servants’ quarters at Kenegie. How many times had he stood there, gazing blindly at its childish stitching, as he gathered his thoughts before knocking at that door? The scene was so painfully clear in his head that he almost wept.

  ‘Might I ask what our business is with these people?’ he asked Marshall at last.

  ‘No,’ the other said shortly. ‘The details of that matter lie between the company and our trading partners, and have nothing to do with you.’

  ‘Am I not now a part of that company, given that my task is to guard you and the papers you carry?’

  ‘You are neither one thing nor the other, lad. Quite why John thought I needed a lumpen oaf as a bodyguard, I cannot for the life of me imagine. As far as I am concerned, you are here on suf
ferance, and if you keep on asking me damnfool questions, I will skewer you myself and save the brigands the trouble.’

  Rob sat there, watching his boots steam as the sun hit them. At last he could bear it no longer. ‘Then perhaps I might ask just one more question: how will we leave Salé, if we ever arrive in one piece?’

  Marshall sighed. ‘In five days the Rose will be off Salé awaiting my sign. Once they receive it they’ll sail in as close as they may to take us off.’

  And Rob had to be satisfied with this very little piece of information. At last Marshall folded the map away in his sack and told him to get his boots on.

  ‘We’ll have to move quietly through this wretched forest. No talking: and watch your feet. There are trips and holes and spikes and all manner of traps for the unwary. Unsavoury folk inhabit this region. Some live here, some take refuge here, and some, like us, are just passing through. But they all have a reason for hiding themselves, and that reason generally has a criminal root: there’s no law in the forest, except the law of survival.’

  ‘It seems to me’, Rob said, taking this in, ‘that we’d still have been better off sailing into the port under full sail and with our guns at the ready, factions or no factions.’

  ‘You are an extremely naive young man, Robert Bolitho. I will spell it out for you. We could not be seen to enter the pirates’ nest for a variety of reasons, but the most important reason of all is that if anyone carries word back to England of our dealings – and there are many in that place who come and go as they please and have a host of connections all across Europe – we are all likely to hang. Is that reason enough for you?’