Crossed Bones

by Jane Johnson

  Anna looked radiant, and I told her so. ‘I am just so very happy to be able to do this for the family and, well, posterity, if that doesn’t sound too pompous.’ I assured her it did not. ‘And, thank God, I’ve stopped throwing up, and I’m past the dangerous stage, and the scan was normal.’

  ‘Boy or girl?’

  ‘I didn’t ask. Better not to second-guess fate, I think. I am learning to take life as it comes.’

  I smiled. Anna was changing. Perhaps we all were.

  ∗

  ‘Ready?’ said Alison, breaking into my thoughts.

  ‘As ready as I’ll ever be.’ I picked up a small flat stone from where I had been sitting and sent it skimming out across the sea towards St Clement’s Island. It touched the surface six times before sinking beneath the waves. ‘Damn,’ I said. ‘I was aiming for seven.’

  ‘Six for gold,’ Alison laughed. ‘I don’t think that’s too bad.’

  ‘What, like the magpie verse?’

  ‘It’s what we always used to say. Though there’s a different version Andrew used to quote, which came from the Scottish side of his family: one for sorrow, two for mirth, three for a wedding, four for a birth, five for Heaven, six for Hell, seven you’ll see the De’ill himsell… Oh, dear.’

  ‘Oh, great: Hell,’ I said, subdued. ‘Perhaps this isn’t a very good idea.’

  ‘Well, you certainly don’t have to do it for me,’ Alison said firmly. ‘I’m never setting foot in the place again. Those letters freaked me out completely. Are you quite sure you want to do this?’

  ‘I have to. I feel… responsible, somehow, though I know that sounds mad.’

  Fifteen minutes later we were standing outside the farmhouse at Kenegie just as the sun was starting to go down.

  ‘Have you got everything?’

  I had: torch, lighter, candle, bread, salt, water. And Robert Bolitho’s letters, tied with a band of fine embroidery Lalla Mariam had given to me. The letters were the originals: when I had explained to Anna what I intended to do, she had laughed at me, but waived her deal. ‘Keep copies for me – good ones,’ she made me promise. ‘It’ll only annoy Michael all the more.’ The piece of embroidery was surely by the same hand as the bridal veil: it bore Catherine’s trademark theme. ‘It was something she would have used to tie back her hair at the hammam,’ the old lady had explained to me via Idriss. In poor exchange for this generosity, I had given her my own peacock-feathered embroidered headsquare, and had promised to complete the fourth corner for her with whatever motif she chose for it.

  Leaving Alison sitting on the bonnet of the car, I went into the house, my footsteps echoing through the empty rooms. I switched on every light switch as I went up. At the foot of the stairs to the attic, I paused.

  Then gritted my teeth and climbed the stairs.

  The attic light, absolutely typically, was the only one in the house that did not work. I lit the candle and placed it on Andrew’s desk. In its trembling golden circle of light I laid out the bread, a little pile of salt and a flask of holy water from the font at Gulval Church. Heat and water and sustenance: all the things the dead missed, lacked and craved, as my mother used to tell me in her ghost stories on All-Hallows Eve. Then I placed Rob’s letters down beside them.

  Taking a deep breath, I said, ‘Robert Bolitho, if you are here I hope you will hear me. My name is Julia Lovat: you and I may be very distantly related, I don’t know. That’s probably not very important. What is important is that I’ve brought your letters back. I’m sorry that you’ve been disturbed, and I’m sorry we took your letters away. I know you asked in the postscript that Matty burn them, but I’m afraid she didn’t. I understand that: women like to hold on to things, even things that are painful to them. It was wrong of her to leave them to be read by others, but you cannot really blame her, or us for reading them. I read your letters, Robert, so I know that you are a decent, brave man. Even so, you should not have done what you did to Andrew Hoskin, and perhaps there were others here too, others I don’t know about. Maybe you hurt so much you didn’t care who else you caught in your despair. You did a very courageous thing by following your heart and risking your life to try to save Catherine Tregenna –’

  Out of nowhere there came a chill draught, and the candle suddenly guttered, sending long, jagged shadows shooting out across the room. I hugged my arms around myself and watched the reflection of the flame play across the etched silver of the ring Idriss had placed on my hand and tried to still the hammering of my pulse.

  ‘There is nothing so painful in the world as love that has been wasted on someone who doesn’t love you back. But Catherine’s decision to stay in Morocco wasn’t just about not wanting to marry you, and it wasn’t only for love of the corsair captain either.’ I laid my hand on the fragment of embroidery which lay across the letters so that the silver threads of the roses and ferns and gorse, her eternal theme, caught the light. ‘Do you see this, Robert? It is very fine work: your cousin had a true gift, a rare gift – see these wild roses, this gorse? Do you remember the crown you made for her? She did. She carried Cornwall in her heart all the time she was there; but if she had stayed here in Cornwall, that gift would have been wasted. In Morocco she became what she had always dreamed of becoming: a master embroiderer. Do you really begrudge her that dream, Rob?’

  I paused. ‘I don’t know why I’m rambling on like this. It’s probably pointless. I’m either talking to myself, or you don’t care about anything but your own pain. But I wanted to try to say these things: that I understand, a little, at least, and that what you went through must have been terrible. But, Rob, don’t you see? You saved Matty Pengelly – dear, lovely Matty – who must have thought herself lost for ever in that strange country. You saved her and you made a life together, you had sons: it is an extraordinary thing that you did, and I am very proud of you.’

  I ran out of words and sat there in the darkness, waiting for I don’t know what, and feeling a fool. Through the Velux window I could just glimpse a strip of reddening sky: soon it would be full dark.

  ‘I am going to leave now. I’ve had my say. I just wanted to bring your letters back and pay my respects,’ I said softly, and stood up to go.

  I am sure – quite sure – that I did not nudge the desk as I rose. But at that moment the candle fell over and rolled – as if pushed, or by the forces of gravity – until it came to rest against the letters, which caught the flame in an instant and went up with a whoosh. I cried out then and dropped the torch. I watched the fire burn deep red, then orange, then a pale bright gold that was almost white. Two thoughts tugged at me: I should save Catherine’s embroidery; and that the entire attic, and me in it, was likely to go up in flames. But in the same instant that these thoughts crossed my mind, the fire extinguished itself as quickly as it had caught, and I found myself standing in pitch darkness.

  With a shaking hand I bent to search for the torch, expecting at any moment to feel the chill of some unearthly hand on the back of my neck. But nothing happened. Nothing at all. The air was still, and seemed warmer, and at last my fingers closed around the torch and I flicked it on and trained it on the desk, fearing to see the damage that had been done.

  The letters were gone, every scrap of them, leaving just a pile of cool, grey ash. In the midst of the ashes Catherine’s embroidered band lay gleaming and unburned. I picked it up gingerly, but, despite the metallic threads running through it, it was not even warm. How could that be? My rational mind told me that it was probably a good deal more durable than paper – especially 400-year-old paper – but even so… Trembling now, I sprinkled the flask of water around and stood the candle up again. Then I did my mother proud by throwing a pinch of salt over my left shoulder to keep the Devil at bay.

  By the time I got back down outside my teeth were chattering and I was shaking with adrenalin. Alison took one look at me, took off her jacket and draped it around my shoulders. ‘Job done?’ she asked.

  ‘I think so.’ I smiled wanl
y. Who could say?

  In the garden, with my cousin’s arm around me, I gazed out at the distant sea, striped now by the last dull red streaks of the setting sun. St Michael’s Mount stood in stark romantic silhouette in the bay, just as it had that fateful July day in 1625 when – flying their Salé pavilions of crescent moons and crossed bones, Al-Andalusi’s fleet had slipped past its inadequate defences.

  I closed my eyes, remembering. At last I smiled.

  In just under three weeks’ time, just as my henna faded to a ghost of itself, I too would be going back to Morocco, the Island in the West.

  Inch’allah.

  Author’s Note

  Crossed Bones is a work of fiction, though it is based on historical fact.

  Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Barbary corsair raids on the south coasts of England have been increasingly well documented over the past few years, although when I grew up in Cornwall they were never mentioned, and most people are still ignorant of this particular bloody chapter in England’s history. The corsairs of Salé, known in England as the Sallee Rovers, have a particularly fascinating history. Driven by religious fervour, they plundered far and wide to the extent that one corsair fleet was able to raise its skull-and-crossbones flag over Lundy Island in the Bristol Channel in the early summer of 1625, from which they launched innumerable raids on south-west shipping and coastal towns.

  The historical document prefacing this novel, that is, the letter from the Mayor of Plymouth to the new King’s Privy Council in the spring of 1625, warning of the likelihood not only of corsair raids (which had become a regular summer threat to shipping) but for the first time of attacks on coastal settlements, does not, in the usual bureaucratic fashion, appear to have resulted in raised security.

  The attack I have described on the church in Penzance is based on a reference in the state papers to an event in July 1625 when ‘sixtie men, women and children were taken from the church of Munnigesca in Mounts Bay’ (my italics). No one to this day is sure what ‘Munnigesca’ refers to. Some have speculated that it is the church on St Michael’s Mount, but I cannot believe that to be true, since it would have meant that Sir Arthur Harris, who was the Master of the Mount at the time, and his family would have been among those sixty captives, and they never suffered such a fate. Sir Arthur died at home in 1628 at Kenegie Manor; his last will and testament is included in the local parish papers. The only two large-enough settlements likely to generate such a congregation at the time, according to Carew and Leland, would have been Marazion, then known as Market-Jew (a corruption of Marghasewe), or Penzance. I decided on the church at Penzance, which would have stood where St Mary’s does today – on a promontory overlooking the bay. It would have been clearly seen from sea, thus presenting an attractive target for attack. It is curious that the Mount did not see and fire upon the corsairs (there is no mention in the CSP of any attempted defence); but Sir Arthur Harris had indeed been lobbying for funds to rearm the Mount for several years.

  The smuggling, however, of four cannon destined for the rearmament of Pendennis and St Michael’s Mount by Sir John Killigrew to the Sidi al-Ayyachi is my own invention.

  I am no great expert on embroidery; however, I have researched the methods and styles of the time as well as I can, and am greatly indebted to the works of Caroline Stone, who knows a great deal more about the embroidery of North Africa, and specifically Morocco, than I ever shall.

  It was a great disappointment to me to discover that no records of the captives taken by the Sallee Rovers in 1625 remain in Morocco. A number of first-hand accounts of English captives’ misfortunes and experiences have, however, survived; although few from as early as 1625 and none by a woman of that time. I have read many of these accounts and borrowed details here and there for authenticity; though taken with a healthy pinch of salt, since the temptation for captives to embellish their hardships with lurid detail was great, commercial pressures in the seventeenth century being all too similar to those of the twenty-first.

  I have listed below some of the key texts that proved invaluable to me in my research. I must also thank a number of individuals, without whom I could never have written this novel. First, my mother, for reminding me of this long-buried family legend; secondly, my climbing partner Bruce Kerry, who accompanied me on my first and crucial research visit to Morocco; thirdly, Emma Coode, friend and colleague, who read the text chapter by chapter as I wrote and provided me with both encouragement and the perfect audience. I must also thank my wonderful agents Danny Baror and Russell Galen for their passionate encouragement, my publishers Venetia Butterfield and Allison McCabe for their invaluable support and suggestions, and Jenny Dean and Donna Poppy for their meticulous help in honing and polishing the text. Finally, and most importantly, I want to thank my husband, Abdellatif Bakrim, who has been the most extraordinary source of Berber, Arabic and Moroccan history, culture and language; he has helped me with the translation of foreign texts and provided me with a sounding board for all the Moroccan material. He was also, before I knew him well, the inspiration for the raïs. Since I have come to know him, I cannot imagine him making a ruthless corsair captain or zealot; and for that I am profoundly grateful.

  A Short History of Piracy: The Barbary Corsairs in Context

  I don’t pretend to be a historian, and so my research for this novel has had to be rather more thorough than if I were already an expert. I spent over two years researching the historical background to Crossed Bones before starting to write the story, and it proved to be a fascinating and eye-opening task. I will attempt to skim a little of the cream off the top of that research here, in order to place the Barbary corsairs in some sort of context, but if you are interested in further detail then please come and visit the Crossed Bones website, www.crossedbones.co.uk.

  Ever since men took to the sea in ships there has been piracy. Sea robbers menaced the trade routes of ancient Greece more than two thousand years ago. Phoenician traders armed themselves against pirates; Roman ships were robbed of their cargoes of olive oil, wine and grain. The Vikings perfected the art, pillaging both sea lanes and coastal settlements. Piracy flourished throughout the medieval period, as well as throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, finally peaking in the ‘golden age’ of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Wherever there were trade routes and goods and gold to be plundered, there were pirates. Buccaneers were the scourge of Spanish shipping in the Caribbean; and privateers were granted letters of marque by their governments, that turned them into official state pirates. The coffers of Queen Elizabeth I were regularly swelled by the predations upon Spanish treasure ships of such privateers as Sir Francis Drake.

  However, not all piracy was motivated purely by human greed, either personal or royal. For many, piracy was vindicated by religion, and its practitioners were termed ‘corsairs’, rather than pirates, a word that etymologically derives from the Italian word corso, meaning ‘chase’, a corsair being ‘one who gives chase’. Maltese corsairs were granted licence to attack the ships of the Muslim Turks by the Christian Knights Templar, the Knights of St John. And, conversely, the Barbary corsairs, operating out of the North African states of Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli and Morocco, were in turn authorized by their rulers to attack the ships of Christian countries, to kill the infidels and render their goods unto Islam. Barbary corsairs, therefore, were seen as religious warriors and defenders of their faith; they were referred to as al-ghuzat, which was the term used to denote those who had fought beside the Prophet Mohammad.

  The predations of the corsairs operating out of Rabat-Salé, in northern Morocco, were further fuelled by revenge.

  The Moors – originally Berbers from Morocco – had occupied Spain since their general, Tariq ibn-Ziyad, conquered the Iberian peninsula in AD 711. Over the centuries they had become concentrated in Granada (leaving behind them such exquisite creations as the Alhambra palace and hundreds of mosques and public baths). But the rising tide of Catholicism in the sixteenth century
resulted in a steady exodus of Moors back to their native North Africa, largely as a result of religious persecution. The crux of this pogrom occurred around 1609, when the Catholic King of Spain, Philip III, decided to expel definitively all those of Moorish extraction from Spanish soil, no matter how long they had been established there, no matter whether they had at any stage converted from Islam to Catholicism. The expulsion was both abrupt and violent, involving the worst brutalities of the Spanish Inquisition.

  Over one million Moors were expelled, with many fetching up on the bleak northern coast of North Africa and in the ruined city of Rabat, a desolate place previously abandoned on account of ‘wild beasts’. Some were now reduced to penury; but some had anticipated the expulsion decrees and managed to smuggle their worldly wealth out of Spain with them. These latter were the Hornacheros – from Hornachos in Estremadura – and they also brought with them a fighting spirit, a ruthless instinct for independence and a determination to re-establish their fortunes and wreak vengeance on those who had insulted and maltreated them.

  They refortified the ruined city of Sale (including the beautiful and now-tranquil Kasbah des Oudaias, which bewitched me on my research trips to Rabat), vowing revenge on Christendom, and specifically on Spain. From their new base, they forged alliances with the pirates of Algiers and Tunis, who had been preying on Christian shipping in the Mediterranean for over a century. All manner of brigands and cut-throats – many of them Europeans turned Turk (having expeditiously converted to Islam) – converged upon New Salé to train the Hornacheros and other expelled Moors in the art of piracy. The refugees learned fast, driven by righteous indignation and jihadi fury. In 1617 a Dutch captain wrote ‘a year ago the Moors didn’t have a single vessel; now they own a quarter of the sea: they will become extremely powerful if we do not take care.’ How prescient he was.