‘Captain? Do we have enough water? Three more mouths – and gullets.’
‘Those are your orders. It’ll be two, three days, at most. Then we’ll be rid of her and her brood.’
‘Captain?’
‘I’m putting them ashore as soon as it can be achieved safely – for us. That means Feltimye.’ He struck the map.
‘I’d be pleased to conduct them ashore, when the time comes.’
The captain’s attention was caught, since Strugwell’s character did not lean to chivalry.
‘I couldn’t help hear what His Nibbs was saying.’
‘Sir Giles, to you.’
‘Sir Giles said she was valuable. You know what I mean. If you let me take the longboat alone with them, I . . . we . . . could bring back some provisions of a better class and quality than what’s on board.’
‘What?’
Strugwell had sailed that shore before. He’d even spent time in a jail there, once, after an eventful night, before the consul got him out.
‘She’d be no worse off than she was and better off than she might be – we could be boarded by lesser fry among the brethren any day and there’s no telling what’d happen to her then. Massacre of the Innocents. You know, captain, what I mean. They’ve got palates for tender flesh, and cooks not like me, who’d not blench at . . . As for a young woman like that, they’d be in her plackets, excuse me, soon as look at her. Not that she has any plackets.’
‘Strugwell.’
‘Yes, captain?’
‘Enough! Back to the galley you go. Not a word more.’
‘But you’ll consider my request, captain.’
‘You’re dismissed.’
Strugwell glanced at him as he saluted, shamblingly, and left the cabin. He heard the friendly knell of hypocrisy, not outrage, in the captain’s order.
2
A Cheval Glass
There was someone else there when Sir Giles Skipwith conducted the stowaway into his cabin, on the second day after she and her children were discovered.
She took in this third figure out of the corner of her eye. He was standing back, in a corner by a washbasin on a stand, a grim, gaunt silhouette compared to Skipwith himself, whose elegant limbs and languid flesh seemed to flow around his quarters like a bale of silk velvet displayed by a merchant. Her eyes swivelled towards their silent witness and then back to Sir Giles, who offered no explanation.
She was very tense; ordered to follow her captor – and benefactor – to his quarters and to leave the children up above, she’d quailed and protested and pleaded, but Skipwith had mocked her:
‘You’re not plants, you know, grafted together at the trunk. They’re in safe hands – Teal is going to keep an eye on them, aren’t you, my boy?’
Teal was indeed with the twins. They even appeared to be talking together.
‘You see, the universal language of the race – the young know it. It’s called play-acting or make-believe,’ said Sir Giles, genially, and pointed his peculiar prize in her breeches and bare feet down the companionway to his quarters below.
This room offered for a brief respite greater comfort than she could have imagined on board a boat, but Skipwith’s intentions towards her were hard to grasp. The bed stood in a wooden boxframe, with heavy green curtains, a table with writing materials, notebooks, a lamp and several books set into racks, more books in a crate, a portrait on the wall of a lady in a huge hat with black plumes streaming sideways while behind her, a mountain was gusting smoke like a cauldron on the boil on laundry day in the Convent.
A mountain on fire – it must be . . . Skipwith followed her look.
‘Parthenopolis. And my esteemed mother, Fidelia, neé Ormonde, Lady Skipwith. A mettlesome temperament,’ he made a pass in the air as if with a fencing foil, ‘and a clever woman, interested in education . . . of the deprived, of the barbarous.’
She was watching him. His insouciance was frightening to her, as if the encounter he was planning was to be nothing but a cold and calculated frolic – with the silent third as audience, as assistant . . . or, even, participant?
Fear of this long, pale man did not turn her insides molten, as Cunmar’s embrace had when he first seized her. But the thought of what Giles Skipwith could do shrivelled her will. She had the children to defend, and she desperately wanted him not to hurt them, nor use them to have power over her. Long past hoping for any reciprocal understanding with her fellow man, she was wholly bent on circumventing this new danger.
‘You’re trembling,’ he said. ‘Sit down.’ He pushed her on to the chair by the desk and leant over her. She saw the other figure in the corner withdraw, suddenly.
Clutching at his full white sleeve, she began, beseechingly, ‘What do you want?’
‘Oh stop that whining!’ he answered, shaking her off. ‘Really. I’ve no designs on you – you’re about as appealing as a plague rat, quite honestly. Not my style to force anyone, either. I brought you down here because I want you to trust me. I’d like us to . . . converse – I’m curious about you.’ He pushed a book open towards her. It was a notebook, with a sketch of one of the tombs where she had sheltered, inscribed with invocations to the gods to ward off demons.
‘Does this make any sense?’
The figure in the corner remained very silent. Was this a test? Would she place herself in greater jeopardy if she showed she could puzzle out the glyphs he’d traced?
Leto gestured to the corner, where the other figure was hidden behind her.
‘No, I want you to concentrate. If you can play the wit with me and write down your name is “No one” in Greek, you must be able to decipher something of this.’
She pushed the notebook away; her eyes seeking out the figure crouched near the wall.
‘What are you frightened of? That?’ Sir Giles got up, moved towards the mute figure. ‘That’s my psyché,’ he said. ‘As the French call it. Latest thing, acquired in the elegant salerooms of the Palais Marly. Expensive. Best crystal, silvered. Come, you’ll certainly never have seen one before. It’s an innovation.’
He pulled the stowaway up and led her across the room. As she drew nearer, the dark dwarfish figure that had been skulking in the shadows twitched and cringed at her approach.
‘Ha!’ exclaimed Skipwith, ‘you’re starting at your own shadow! And mine. Look.’ He paused, his lips curled up over his teeth. ‘So, Lettice, there you are. You’ve never seen yourself in a glass before?’
He took her up to the cheval glass on its pivoting mahogany stand and moved so that he materialised in its narrow glass; she saw his likeness appear behind her and above her as he took her hand – she tensed still tighter – and held it out towards the doubles in the glass, and the figure from the corner reciprocated and her fingers touched his, except they were behind the smooth plane that was cool and hard.
She shook her head. In the Keep, she had used a small silver hand mirror, chased with cupids and dolphins, with a naked Venus for a handle, and she remembered how she could see her face in Cunmar’s bright armour, when the breeze lifted his surcoat. But the glassware they blew in the Turquoise Quarter took the form of beads, vessels, flasks, phials and alembics, not this shining sheet of water turned solid.
Sir Giles Skipwith believed she was shaking her head because she did not know. He pulled her nearer to its surface, and traced the contours of her face in the mirror.
‘You,’ he said. ‘That’s you. Take in your image, look at yourself, it’ll be interesting to know what you find there, what you see. Tell me.’
‘That’s not me,’ she said, again shaking her head. ‘That’s not anyone I know.’
Skipwith placed his hands on her shoulders from behind her. His long face appeared in front of her.
‘Do you feel me holding you?’
A nod.
Under his hands, she was quivering. Like one of the songbirds that, when flying south, roosted in the orange and lemon trees in the courtyard in Parthenopolis at his grandparents
’. Every year, from one generation to the other, the migrants always found the small, enclosed garden of the Ormonde studio, in the heart of the higgledy-piggledy city, unerringly, even though the cool dark tall house shut its ochre face against the street and nobody could know, unless invited in, that such a paradise even existed within its walls. One summer before his grandparents died, the gardener’s boy and he had played together at trapping the birds, in nets they strung through the branches, not to kill and eat them as delicacies, but to keep them in cages, to sing in the house. He had marvelled then as one fluttered in his hand that the tiny head with its rolling eye could contain the map of such vastness and the coordinates of a journey for which he now would need a hatch full of charts.
He said, making sure his voice did not show his sense of her poignancy: ‘And you see that – in the mirror – I’m holding this person you don’t know?’
Another nod.
‘Don’t you see then, that it’s you?’
She stayed mute, her face unresponsive, a dull shock in her eyes, as she turned her back to the glass.
There was a silence between them.
Looking at the stowaway in her boy’s rig as she took in her reflection in such perplexity and dismay, he could feel her body as she stood stock still in tension next to him. Although its sour ill health repelled him, as might an animal dragging a festering limb, he was also gripped. Sea voyages – and he had made many – were not exactly monotonous, since the dangers were lively (and not from the elements alone), but they were wearisome to a spirit as restless as his. He was happier on land, making new encounters, acquiring smatterings of new languages and crates of new treasures. When he was on board, especially on the return home, he often felt dull; he craved stimulation that games of piquet with Winwalloe could not satisfy, nor working on his notes and inventory under Teal’s baffled gaze. Moving by sea often gave him the impression that the world moved past the boat, and that those on board were fastened to the same spot while it sailed by. There were some islanders, he’d read, who made maps on which the land moved, not the traveller. They charted their crossings by showing the numerous islands of their archipelago moving past the boats they sailed. They draw accurately, thought Giles, this suspended animation of a sea passage: we are stuck in our time, after all, a mere tick in the clockwork of time; whereas the land has been there almost for eternity, growing, heaving, splitting, spilling, declining, in a constant slow frenzy of change. At times, excavating the past opened up a vision for Giles of such revolving, spinning universes, speeding through time and space and hurtling into the void so fast that he felt like writing his name on everything to hand, putting his stamp on anything he came into contact with so that he should leave a mark for the thousands coming after who might never ever know that he – and his kind, his world, his culture – had even existed. Nothing but defaced rocks, worn inscriptions remained – from all that tumult and excitement and splendour that had been the past.
The idea of a stowaway already was a source of pleasant interest; but the mystery of this fugitive with her twins delighted him more.
She was spellbound, it seemed, by the image in the glass.
Giles thought of the story of the wild brother whom Valentine catches just so, by showing Orson his reflection. There were twins in that old story, which his grandfather Ormonde used to tell: one twin was brought up in town as a prince, but the other stolen away by a she-bear in the forest when his mother was asleep. Skipwith could not recall exactly what had happened, except that Valentine did not know that the wild man who was terrorising wayfarers was his long-lost brother. He wanted to capture him alive – so he didn’t hunt to kill, but trapped him instead in a net and then took up a mirror and showed him his savage visage – and Orson the bear-boy was rooted to the spot at the horrific picture he presented. Just like this wild creature, he thought, whom we’ve found on board . . . ‘And thus the wild boy was taken to the city and his brother’s palace and learned the ways of civilisation’, he wrote in his journal, concluding, ‘this is a promise that the print of nurture can take, as my mother believes so strongly.’
Leto saw in the glass that the girl whose father had staked her in a trade deal, whom Doris had chivvied and Abbess Cecily had moulded and Cunmar had held so tight, was now dead. Another had replaced her: a burned, weather-beaten scarecrow, a beggar with a thin, set mouth and hair in stiff clumps and a panicky look in eyes and forehead.
‘I’ve something for you, Lettice,’ said Sir Giles. He wanted to reward her for what she had done, for the strangeness of the scene he had just witnessed. ‘I keep some of these treasures in my cabin, but you shall have one.’
He held out an orange.
Seeing the dilation of her eyes, he laughed: ‘You can have it – and others like it. Not now – later. You’ll see – we’ll be friends.’
3
Some Oranges
As oranges go, this one was withered. But Leto had not seen one since her days in the citadel: there, orange trees grew below the walls, in orchards mixed with vines and almonds, the lemon trees’ trunks standing ankle-deep in puddly loam linked by runnels cut with a sharp spade into the red-gold earth. Before dawn, when the citadel’s gates were first opened for the nightsoil carts to leave (as she knew), the farmhands and fruit pickers would gather and wave their passes, shouting at the gatekeepers to let them through; then, their documents checked, they’d rattle out with their donkeys and carts and tools and move through the groves lifting the sluices here and there in the irrigation channels to water the roots in the cool freshness of the new day and plump the fruit; they’d gather the ripest to bring to market later that morning, where Doris would bargain for one or two of the best to bring to Leto for her breakfast in bed. In the days when Leto was living in the Keep.
In the convent, the fruit sometimes appeared, too, on feast days, after supper.
Cadenate oranges were smaller than the one Skipwith gave Leto as a reward for sitting still during that first lesson when he showed her, alongside the inscriptions from the tombs, their approximate equivalents in his native alphabet. The fruit fitted neatly to Skipwith’s hand, round and hard like a soup stone heated in the fire, whereas Leto remembered them small enough for her to cover with her child’s palm when she took one from the kitchen without asking. Skipwith’s gift had shed its leaves, some dirt had caught in its navel and the skin was pitted with pores; after a few weeks’ store in Skipwith’s baggage, the fruit had aged like a human face over decades.
The sun is very, very old, she thought as she held the fruit, but everything moves within its own timescale, so that although the sun is older than the brightest planets, its glowing orange sphere looks each morning as if it has burst into new life, swollen with shining sap that it shakes off in flakes and beams to light up and fill thousands of its reflections – oranges and melons and apples and figs – as it climbs. Its bright flow does not dim or dry up: it goes down in a ripe, juicy welter and bursts out again undiminished the next morning. By contrast even her children changed daily, and as for herself . . .
However shrivelled, Skipwith’s orange was scented: there was precious juice trapped inside and its sharp sweetness pierced through the drying rind and wrinkles. She hid the fruit against her ribs and stole under the sail that Teal had rigged outside the crate to give them shade.
The twins were lying on their stomachs, each of them tied by the ankle with a rope to a capstan. They were practising seeing stars by banging their heads together.
‘Stop that!’ Leto pulled them apart and showed them the fruit.
When Leto bit into it, using her front teeth like a rodent – for she had no knife and her nails were torn and blunt – the perfume of the peel pricked the air, and the children blinked at the sudden fragrance. They had never seen an orange before, for the tombs were too exposed and the ground too dry in the mountains to support the trees. Leto began pulling off the rind in sections with her fingers, but in its thinning, dry condition, it stuck to the endo
dermis more tightly than in the case of a riper fruit; below, there was a bandage of yellow pith but the juice ran and the fruit’s lively, sweet pungency rose from its flow over her fingers as she parted piece from piece and gave them to the children to suck. They both looked wary at the taste; the bitterness of the skin lingered. She persevered, picking at the tough rind. Inside, the orange’s segments lay, a little shrunken, in transparent chemises of pale membrane; she pulled away the pith and prised out the first piece of the fruit’s luminous iris, where the filaments were packed tight, clinging together, and runny; the juice spurted into her palm as she parted one from another. With one hand she fed the segments to the twins, with the other she crammed a larger piece and then another chunk into her mouth. Now that she had broken into the orange, she no longer split off the pieces carefully, following the fruit’s inner structure, but tore into it so that her children, their initial suspicion melted away, could take the pieces in their fists and push them blissfully into their own mouths.
When the orange had all gone and they were licking their fingers and their lips for the last stickiness, Leto became aware that Teal was watching them, like a dog who’s been well trained to sit and not to beg as its owners dine, but who seems to howl his hunger from every mute limb of his body and silent gesture. When he saw that she had noticed him, he turned away and bent again to the sail which he had been patching, pushing through the thick canvas a thick needle and even thicker thread.
‘She’s our greatest find,’ Skipwith was joyous as he joined Winwalloe, who was leaning over the navigation charts and drawing the rhomb of their progress against a ruler. ‘She demonstrates that self-consciousness doesn’t exist in the mind unless it’s taught. She didn’t recognise herself in the glass – imagine! She’s a marvel, a fabulous piece of living evidence for the thinking of our ancestors. A primitive, who knows some things and is completely innocent of others. She seems to read and write – I can’t find out how much. Astounding, no? You know, bear-children, wolf-children can be captured with a mirror because the sight of their own features gives them such a shock they lose all their defensive instincts and turn docile. I reckon that’s what happened – all unwittingly I brought her face to face with a self she’d never seen, and she reeled from it! Imagine not even knowing what you look like!
The Leto Bundle Page 22
