Kit (6 page)

Kit investigated the heads right away. She saw two round holes, surrounded by simple wooden seats on either side of the bowsprit right at the head of the ship. Peering though one of the holes, she looked down a vertiginous drop right into the pewter sea. Waste would land directly on the lion’s head, a carved wooden visage of a lion, but the creature was cleaned at every moment as the waves, rising to the bowsprit as the vessel cut a course, naturally carried away the mess and waste. As she peered down, a biting wind and a shock of salty water dashed through the hold with each break of a wave. This necessary house would not be comfortable, but at least it would be private; only one seaman could use each room at once, for the timbers narrowed to a pair of tiny triangular chambers. She sat down, alone, with considerable relief.

Still, Kit did not feel entirely safe. Now that the seas were calm and there was nothing to occupy the men, her brothers in arms had the leisure to comment that she was young for a soldier as her cheek had not seen a razor, that she was skinny, that she was quiet – was she a Hottentot, could she not talk the Queen’s English? Kit was, by nature, a sociable animal, and had taken to alehouse life readily after her years with a sullen mother who only spoke to her to bark peremptory orders in French. She was a chatterer, and according to Aunt Maura the gravedigger’s donkey only had three legs because Kit had talked one of them off. She loved to talk and to laugh, but on shipboard she was afraid to do either, lest she give herself away. Instead she became a listener. She used the time to educate herself – not in shipcraft or even soldiery, but in the art of being a man.

She could not be discovered before she was reunited with Richard. So she watched and she listened, and she learned. She learned to plant her feet as if pounding the ground. She learned to shove her thumbs into her pockets or belt to prevent her from holding them delicately before her, as she used to. She abandoned kerchiefs and blew her nose on her sleeve as the others did till her red and gold cuffs were covered in snails’ trails. She noted how men spoke loudly, even when – especially when – they did not have overmuch knowledge of what they said. They talked with their chins thrust forth, their feet apart, their shoulders square. They would punctuate their speech with a jabbing finger to make their point. In her only private moments, while relieving herself at the heads, she would talk to herself in a low gruff voice, trying to perfect her new male tones. But men, she noted, were not always brash. She noted, too, their gentler moments. They would pass the days playing dice or cards, and beneath the bluster and banter she would see little kindnesses – a man pulled his mate’s rotten tooth and gave up his day’s grog to dull the pain. A mountain called O’Connell, who did not look as if he had a note of music in him, had brought a fiddle in his kit and played sweet airs by the mainmast in the starlight. Kit crept among the crowd about him and sat, her knees humped under her chin, as he played those achingly familiar tunes – ‘The Humours of Castlefin’, ‘John Dwyer’s Jig’, ‘The Maids of Mitchelstown’; all the old favourites that the regulars played at Kavanagh’s on their fiddles and squeezeboxes. Songs that were as merry as Yuletide, but had the power to wring tears from Kit, tears she didn’t dare let fall. She steeled herself to hear the inevitable ‘Arthur McBride’, but her father’s ghost let her be for now.

At night, she rolled herself close into her hammock, and the canvas met over her nose. She would screw her eyes tight and try to stop her ears against the snores and sighs and the other noises too, noises both alien and familiar. Shufflings, and rhythmic rubbings and groans just like the groans that Richard sometimes let go when he and Kit were together. But these men were alone – they had no one to lie with. Kit could only imagine that they relived in their dreams the memories of their wives or sweethearts, and tried to curl the biscuit-flat bolster about her head to muffle the sounds.

During the long days on deck some of the fellows, seasoned soldiers on their second or third commission, spent their days honing their swordplay. She watched them at their fencing matches, noting the new styles of thrust and parry, and saw how they challenged themselves to find their balance as the ship lurched and rolled. She did not have the courage to join in, but watched on, and the next day she instituted a regime of her own. She ran back and forth on the foredeck throwing her sword from hand to hand, twirling around the foremast and turning and feinting and parrying with an invisible opponent. She would hang from the ropes and swing, supporting her whole weight, and balance on the stairs of the forecastle, one foot in front of the other, sometimes with eyes closed, sometimes open. Sometimes her acrobatics invited comment, but she merely smiled and carried on. Once two recruits, by the names of Harris and Stone, pushed her over as she balanced on the beakhead. She sprang up at once, resigned to a beating. But the Marquis de Pisare himself, all royal blue facings and gold tassels, emerged from his day cabin at that moment and rebuked the sniggering men. ‘You two should learn a lesson from the boy,’ he said, ‘and practise your swordplay. For you’ll not be picking strawberries in Genova.’ The wrong Mr Walsh, who was at his commander’s elbow, was more explicit. He slapped both men smartly about the face. ‘If you want to knock someone about, save it for the French,’ he said. ‘We do not fight each other.’ Kit paid little heed to the teasing or her rescue for she now had another nugget of information. They were to fight the French. None of it made any sense: France and Spain were at war, that much she knew. Richard had been taken by the English Army, and shipped to Genova. It sounded like a parlour game.

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.’