Deluded Your Sailors (25 page)

I ran from Michael Farr the second chance I got, as much because of blood as gold.

We'd just delivered a sack to a woman of about twenty. She'd risen up from the high grass and held out her arms. She did not take the sack; Farr placed it in her hands. Then she calmly walked towards the high rocks. I asked Farr how long he had lived on Benvolio. ‘Too long. Better to answer this: how shall I get away from here? Policy. Interests. It rests on this, Kit: who will own this island, England or France? And meanwhile, how do I please the locals enough to get away?'

We met a goatherd and his companion a few weeks afterward.

By then Farr could no longer hide his emotions from me. His disgust and fear in the goatherd's cottage – all in the neck with Farr. I hoped that neck would get wrecked in a noose some cold morning, joint by tingling joint. The goatherd embraced and kissed Farr, who was slow to return the greeting. When Farr hesitated, the goatherd pointed at me as if to say,
Am I the only man bearing
new faces?
The second man looked like he might be the goatherd's brother. He kept his large eyes fixed a way off, as though he spied demons over your shoulder but could not say. He made the request, or gave the order; Farr and the goatherd scratched maps in the dust. I figured it out. Farr must kill a man. A murder. For money. Disguised as a bad debt, or revenge. Farr agreed, and policy rose off him in a stink. The goatherd turned to his flock. The second man departed into the darkness, invisible after three steps, silent after four.

Farr said to me, ‘Test by fire, salamander.'

I slept next to him, as I often did, and soon he rubbed at me, and I smelled animal blood and dirt off his nails. I let him do what he wished, for he'd long since found out. Handily, though, he carved me a sort of open pipe from wood, wider at one end, so I could safely piss standing up, provided no one looked too close. He kept me warm. By then I'd gone two months bloodless. I woke up sick. Then I bled heavily, and it hurt very much. Farr struck me twice across the face for it, and I knew I must run. Yet Runciman said I could trust Farr. The much-safer Owl. Me and him walking in Portsmouth in our guise, gentleman and trusted servant. I'd carry Runciman's heavy leather bag, and he would say, ‘Farr may be trusted. You'll be safer with him than many, but watch yourself, as always. And come back. More tasks await, and I much value you, my
rara avis
.'

As we travelled, delayed by my bleeding, I asked Farr directly, ‘Whom were you asked to kill? What if you get caught? Do you not fear a trial?'

And he answered, ‘Aye, as I fear I'll go to hell for stealing, so I shrive. Christ, I'll need join the Franciscans after this. I fear a trial as I fear the menhir. I have as much chance of actually going on trial in Benvolio as I have of growing wings and a cunt. I'd claim vendetta if caught, but I'll not be caught. Know you how the accused are decided in Benvolio, Finn? Tis near as humane as English policy.
Ex informata conscience
. The judge's conscience informs him. Angels whisper to him in his sleep, tickle his ears with their godly tongues. Bribery, idiot. The judge might interrupt a trial gone on weeks after an imprisonment of months, and cry
O,
ex informata conscience
! Me, the foreigner? The judge's conscience would inform him of my shining innocence. Then I'd be released into the open arms of the men who wished me dead in the first place. Vendetta is more efficient. These people have no government but foreign meddlers, Venice, France, England and Spain, of which I am one cracked and dirty finger. But I like the cash. I still carry some of the Owl's gold. The goatherd promised coins and rings, all of it likely stolen. Cash, not promises: with gold I might escape.

Reach the coast and secure passage as far as France. I can make my way from France, work my passage, haul lines again. By Christ, Finn, I could do it.
How many miles to Babylon,
did you ever play that?
Marlow Marlow Marlow bright, how many miles to Babylon?

And one stands over there, and one stands over here, and there needs be a third standing blinded in the middle.
Threescore and ten.

Can I get there by candlelight? Aye, if your legs be as long as the light,
but take care of the old grey witch at the roadside.
'

I prayed to God: make my legs as long as the light.

Farr kept fingering the string of the nunny bag and looking at me. Absent-minded sometimes, he'd call me Melitta as we travelled to kill. We got stuck in soft ground. Thought I'd drown, or worse, die trapped in mud past my hips, the earth sucking at me, washing away the old blood. Farr hauled me out. We rested on dryer ground, and when I brushed off mud, I brushed off old blood with it.

Brain-rotting gold. Farr whispered in my ear as though reciting prayers, steady in memory if uncertain of meaning. ‘Gold. I expect the abbot has already written to Runciman, and that, Finn, is why we need the gold. Only gold will stop men's mouths, and then only till they swallow it. It warms to the touch. Flamed, it becomes more malleable than flesh. Come with me. Owl will hunt my glittering trail, but this time he will not find me. Be good to have you along.

But naught without its price. Before we see a glint of the gold, the gold, the one way off this weird rock before we harden into menhir – my knees feel already stiff – we've got a simple transaction.'

All part of learning the trade, this learning to kill on demand.

Runciman intended I study such a lesson from the start, because Michael Farr, rogue or loyal, would teach it.

We walked for days, finally reaching a house Farr knew well. A girl flitted from a back window and descended to open the door, beckoning us up a stairway. She held no candle. The walls felt cool and bumpy. The girl locked us in a high room.

Farr worked his whispering on me. ‘Be silent. Not one thump, not one whimper.' Hearing that threat again, my belly got cold.

Farr kept whispering, explained in quiet detail and with much repetition just how to kill a man. Like a beating, only with words, always striking the same spot. ‘The setting first,' Farr said. ‘He shall come walking past this house tonight. He is slow and weak, very thin, hardly living. Another man will call out a window and distract him. The distraction is essential. Then you shall pull a dagger from the boot and stab him in the heart. The simplest thing. The heart, the heart, it must be quick and it must be the heart, dagger's sharp enough, stab these sacks of seed, the heart here, here, here, stab here, it must be the heart. It will seem the work of a faction, a cadre, local policy. Some youth none's seen before and none shall see after, ghost in the night, that shall be your part. Run quickly to the back of this house and come up to this attic, where I shall be waiting. And I shall be watching. Set time, distraction, the heart.

All rests on you so we might earn the gold coins and chains and dust and race to the western shore to meet the ship. The gold is essential. Buy passage, work passage, stop men's mouths.'

Thin light pried past the roof, and it made us look like shades.

I shook. I cried. Farr kept telling me all his useless experience, his easy kills. He set up boxes and a sack of flour, marked the heart, and politely bade me practice. I stared at the sack of flour. Farr struck my face. I stabbed the flour sack. Again and again, until I stained myself white.

I dropped the dagger. ‘Why? Why can't you do this, your own God damned work?'

Farr struck me again and asked would I not kill if attacked, and what did this matter, for, this being not our feud, the specifics of it touched not our souls? Indeed, this transaction would service a greater need. I cringed at his ‘indeed.' Any time he used that word, I'd best bring the discourse to quick end with obedience and rightful awe. But he sniffed out my hidden thoughts and little promises to myself to run away. He darted behind me and jerked my jaw up and back, saying, ‘Recall how easily I might slit your throat. As quick as that, and in silence. Did you hear Johnson cry out?' He let me go, and I turned quickly to face him. He took the dagger from the floor and pricked his fingertips with it. And he said, ‘I could not let you live, not knowing what you know. And why have you do the work? Because it pleases me.'

I'd not felt so cold since Coltman broke my finger.

I wore Farr's boots. I kept the dagger by my right calf, and I waited in the dark, outside the house. The wheeze, the pace: I recognized the noise of the target. My heart slowed, and my sight sharpened. No torch tonight. All emotion and memory dried up, and – who, who? – Kit Finn stabbed a stranger. Hard shove, clothing and skin rasped. The wet dagger slipped easily back into the boot. The man collapsed, thin and weak, just as promised, and I ran back to the house. Got to the high room and retched at the door. Heavier steps plodded behind me, and their owner reached around to unlock the door and hand a quantity of gold coins and figurines and dust to Farr.

We descended once more and slipped out the front door. I kept spitting because my mouth felt polluted, and we mounted the same horse. The girl who'd first let us in spoke quietly to the man who'd paid Farr, and this man turned on us with ferocious words. Farr jabbed his bare heels into the horse and grimly translated. ‘You stabbed him in the arm.'

I'd failed. Useless. And now Farr would kill me. I'd no doubt of that.

Once the houses were behind us, Farr shouted curses at me over his shoulder. ‘Galloping like this,' he said, ‘we'll need to water the horse as soon as we're at the river. I will give you a fine reckoning there.'

Oh, he reckoned me at the river. I screamed my little pleas, and he pounded my head and mouth, kicked my ribs and hips. The horse drank noisily. But then my heart slowed again, and Farr suddenly restrained his hand in mid-air as we both recalled just who walked barefoot and just who still had the dagger. Crouching away from the blows, I slipped Farr's dagger from the boot and attacked low, cutting his Achilles tendon. A trick he'd learnt me himself, but I never thought it would work. I stabbed him next. Thigh and upper arm. Then I slashed his face as though roughmarking a map.

Almost justice. I loved it. ‘A scar-ruint spy,' I said. ‘Earn your bread now, dog-fucker.'

Those marks would never heal. Each man setting eyes on Farr would learn and remember that face.

I cut and yanked the nunny bag from Farr chest and got his blood all over it. I tucked the dagger back into the borrowed boot, and rode hard for the abbey and the western shore to rendezvous with the Benvolian trading ship. Farr screamed after me, voice fraying: ‘I shall hunt you. Hunt! Seven days, seven years, I shall hunt you.' And some more about slicing off my tits and ripping my womb straight out my cunt, til he choked on dust and his own tears. Dread? Not this time. I laughed. Being of no parentage to speak of, only Runciman, Johnson, and Farr – dangerous names I must discard – I held on to the more useful bits of my stories and worked a passage to Massachusetts colony as Matthew Finn. One name given me, the other I stole, some little memorial so I'd not forget the dangers and needs of gold and spymasters. I enjoyed the joke.

17) ‘IF YOUR LEGS BE AS LONG AS THE LIGHT'
C
ANNARD
'
S LEDGER
.

Aurelius Jackman asked me many troublesome questions.

Lacey discouraged young Aurelius from speaking much in the time he lived with us, after his widowed mother traded her son's labour for extra food for the younger siblings. So, after Lacey's death, Aurelius spewed questions at me like a stogged river just freed. A particularly vexing one: ‘What are the correct forms of prayer?' I had just unwisely confessed my time at Cambridge for Holy Orders, and now we careened towards a pit of heresy. Some papists had always lived in Port au Mal, Irish of course, indebted somehow to Lacey. Jackman did not care about this. He said. ‘Speak to me of the best forms of prayer. Please.'

I smiled, recalling how it had been Lacey's task to tend to the souls of Port au Mal, when he felt like it. ‘I am no minister, Aurelius, not like the man in Harbour Grace.'

Aurelius always sought even a whiff of a clergyman when we voyaged to Harbour Grace on business. Once, accompanying Lacey, he found one preaching in the street. ‘Tall and blond and voice on him deep as the water out the bay, speaking of pilgrims.'

Then that slyness came to his eyes again as he said, ‘Did not Admiral Lacey keep a Bible here someplace?'

I doubt Aurelius remembered the day Lacey read a lesson; perhaps his mother told him of it. That lean spring, just gone 1721, around the time Lacey's ketch
Boyne
should have come due. I slept badly, waiting for a voice to cry sight of
Boyne
's sail. Hunger clawed. Sleet had been falling for days, coating the trees until they bent double, crowns frozen to the ground; and then the sleet would melt and the trees slowly rise until the sleet would storm again. All that summer the trees would struggle to straighten; some never did. Ground treacherous as grease, yet sometime in the night a man had come, slipping and falling, wet and cold and thin. Water flew from his hand when he struck me. The door to the Hall blew open, its warped edge caught by the wind and pried back to slam against the outside wall, and our wet intruder leapt inside, breathing hard. I lay on my bed dreaming all this until I knew the step at my side was no trick, and I woke and rolled over. Only the absence of light. Out of that came a fist. Then weak daylight, pain, and Lacey shaking my shoulder: the stores had been upended,