The Lost Duchess (10 page)

‘But I am Drake’s man, so I bid you good day.’

The pistol had been presented to him by Drake after the sack of Santo Domingo, and it gave Kit even more satisfaction to cock the firing dog and see the veteran flinch at the sound of the click then stumble backward and scurry away.

Kit secured the pistol and sat down, then gave Rob’s thin shoulder a squeeze. He yearned to do more, to put his arms round the boy and tell him he was ten times better than the oaf who’d just left. For a moment his hand rested on Rob’s shoulder, longer than might be expected of a master comforting his page – too long. Should he tell him? The admission was on the tip of his tongue.

‘There is …’
something I should tell you.
But he did not. He could not. ‘There is more to eat, if you would like it,’ he said, and glanced at Rob, conscious that the boy remained tense with hurt.

Rob shook his head.

Kit clasped his hands on the table and listened to John White resume his discourse.

‘… For pleasantness of situation, the territory of the Chesapeake is not to be excelled …’

Kit brought his hands to his brow. He could not do it. Rob was not yet old enough to carry the burden of knowing, far less to maintain a pretence and keep the horror of knowing a secret. How could he begin?
Your mother was beautiful, Ololade was her name: a girl from the Guinea Coast, taken to Panama as a Spanish slave and later freed by runaways – the Cimaroons who freed me. We lived together in the
mountains with the outlaws who gave us liberty. She accepted my love and carried my child, a child I never saw, because English ships arrived with my brother; then I sailed back to England and could not take her with me. She told me to go …

He covered his eyes. The guilt never left him, although, at the time, every step he had taken had seemed part of an inevitable course. When he discovered his brother was with Drake on the ships, there had been no chance to fetch Ololade from the mountains. Even if he had, he could not have brought her to England and expected a black woman to be accepted as his wife. Later he had tried to find her. For years he had searched the Caribbean on every voyage he could make. Then what he finally traced was not her, but their child – his son – and a truth about his mother’s fate too terrible to tell him.

He looked at the boy with his thick curling lashes, just like his mother’s, and his eyes downturned towards the empty cup he cradled, his skin the colour of honey, glowing over his cheekbones as if lit by a sunset, and his mouth as fine as if tooled by a sculptor and edged by a painter with a brush dipped in milk. He looked for Ololade, and saw her in the boy like a reflection in a pool, floating just under the surface. He wanted to reach out and touch him, put his hand to the boy’s chin and feel the shape of his growing bones, ruffle his dark lamb’s-wool hair and kiss him firmly on the cheek, then take him by the shoulders and present him to the world:
This is my son in whom I am most pleased, the brightest and best that a father could wish for.
He longed to shout it out:
This is my son
, and he wanted to weep it in an embrace:
My dear son.

He felt Rob’s warmth next to him and put his hand on the table as heavy as a cudgel beside the boy’s sensitive fingers. So what could
he say? To Rob – Roberto as he had been – Adeolu as his mother had named him.
The woman you thought was your mother is not.
Wouldn’t that upset him deeply? The boy had begged to be taken away, thinking that he was being offered a privilege in the chance to see the world in return for serving as a page. Even that soft lie weighed hard. Kit had never told the boy why the kindly people who had raised him had been persuaded to let him go: because they had known Kit from the time he had been one of them and lived wild as a Cimaroon. They remembered him as their leader, the man marked by the Moon, someone they had trusted. The woman had been a
mestizo
, a half blood who was lighter skinned than the Negroes from the Guinea Coast. Rob had never doubted she was his mother. Suppose Rob was told that the good people who had cared for him were not his real parents; then surely he would ask:
So who was my father?
and next:
Why did you leave me?
and then:
Who was my mother?
and:
Where is she now?
Kit rubbed his brow.
What happened to her?
How could he answer that question without leaving the boy distraught? Suppose that he did, how would he and Rob live together then?

He held his head in his hands and became aware, once again, of John White speaking.

‘… There can be no greater glory than to bring the savage to civility …’

He looked up at the limner and wondered at those words. ‘Civility’ was all that he wanted for Rob. That was why he would go to Virginia and do whatever he could to help Governor White’s colony. He wanted to find a place for his son where he would not have to labour as a servant or slave, a place where he could build his own future and live as any free man.

He patted Rob on the arm, only the lightest touch. ‘Let us get some fresh air.’

Outside, the day was sparkling, but so cold after the inn’s warmth that he clenched his teeth to stop them rattling and his breath streamed in a cloud. For an instant, the ale-brush over the doorway cast a shadow like talons over Rob’s head, then the boy stepped into the street, and Kit looked along it, seeing fresh carcasses steaming and cuts of meat filmed blue on the shop counters either side. The sound of knives sharpening rang around Eastcheap, the squealing of pigs and the bark of jackdaws; butchers cried out their prices and people shouted and haggled; the smell of offal, shit and woodsmoke hung frozen in the air. In his mouth was the taste of blood, and his feet slipped in muddy pink slush.

He walked to the corner with New Fish Street, and looked down the hill towards London Bridge, its overhanging tall houses crammed above a score of high arches, its piers breaking the water like a row of stone barges; the Thames foamed as it surged beneath. Ships were moored downstream prow to stern all along the north bank. Masts and crane towers bristled over jumbled rooftops. The houses were packed so tightly they seemed piled atop one another, their jetties meeting over dingy alleyways, their twisted chimneys dribbling smoke, while above them the spikes of steeples thrust like needles into the eye of the sky. This was London, wonder of the world, in which people streamed through thoroughfares like ants in a maze of tunnels. Rob stood transfixed but Kit beckoned him on; the boy had seen the bridge before. Kit turned his back and made for Bishop’s Gate. Perhaps his years of imprisonment and living wild had made him different from most men, perhaps sailing the high seas had changed him as well, but
he could not spend much time in London without longing for open spaces.

They left the city and still the houses sprawled along the rutted Shoreditch road, some half built, only empty timber frames, some no more than cob with chimney holes in sagging roofs. But gradually the outlook broadened until the wind whistled through stark hedgerows across small frost-hardened fields. Striking west along a narrow lane, Kit noticed windmills on the horizon, their vanes half boarded and creaking round, and he felt relaxed enough to respond cheerfully to a man who hailed him from a bare orchard.

‘God give you good morrow,’ he replied. But when Kit looked more closely he saw the signs of want: a cloak fashioned from sackcloth that afforded scant protection from the cold and wet of flooded, ice-covered fields. A young boy was there too, and it gladdened Kit’s heart to see the child offer Rob a whittled stick in return for which Rob took off his cap and gave the boy one of its parrot feathers.

Kit caught the man’s eye and stretched his hand towards the blighted fields.

‘Would you be interested in a country where you could own land better than this as far as the eye can see?’

‘Aye, I’m interested,’ the countryman answered, and smiled so hard his eyes were lost in deep creases.

George Howe was his name, a widower and a farmer with nineteen acres of sodden land, and Georgie was his only son. By the end of their conversation, Kit had enlisted Master Howe to the colony. Many more would be needed and there was not much time to find them. Kit took Rob back through Moor Gate and walked with him inside the city walls, into Aldermanbury and down as far as Westcheap. John White would need settlers who were resilient and resourceful, who
could make much with little and endure hardship without complaint where better to find them than amongst those who had nothing? He knew about such people; he had been one of them once.

He took Rob towards New Gate where criminals and debtors were kept locked in the towers: ruffians and thieves – and those who didn’t deserve to be there.

Along the way he bought food: knotted biscuits, cheese and cold capon pie, all wrapped up in cheesecloth, which he gave Rob to carry. At the prison he offered alms, and passed some of the victuals between the bars of a hatch into the hands of ragged men: about forty desperate, famished wretches who shared a dark room, slept on the bare floor and who pleaded with him to help them.

‘Have you any more, master?’

‘Please, for pity …’

‘Some for my friend who is sick …’

‘Bless you, kind sir.’

To an able-bodied man who thanked him and asked for nothing else, he promised he would return and pay for his release, if the man was prepared to risk his life and sail with him to the Americas.

The man gripped his hand. ‘My name is Jack Tydway. You won’t forget me?’

‘I won’t forget,’ Kit said, breathing in the stink of damp and ordure, remembering the cell in the City of Mexico in which he had waited for his execution. The smell brought it all back: the dark, the cold, the hunger and the fear. He had been seventeen years old and he had expected to die, held hostage by the Spaniards before the battle of San Juan de Ulúa, imprisoned after their treachery, and marched to the City of Mexico two hundred miles away over mountains and desert. He had been incarcerated, mocked, starved
and beaten; then, instead of being hanged, he had been sold as a slave and toiled until degradation had left him indifferent to life. In all the suffering he had borne and witnessed he was not sure which moment could be singled out as worst, but he had never forgotten the misery of being denied his freedom, waking in darkness, shivering on the floor, and feeling cold walls between himself and the sun. He could offer release from that.

‘I’ll come back for you,’ he murmured. ‘I promise.’

Suddenly Jack Tydway was wrenched away, pulled off balance and punched in the stomach. He stumbled and struck back, but men fell on him, raining blows.

A prisoner slammed against the hatch, reaching out between the bars, his hands like claws.

‘Take me, not ’im!’ He caught at Rob’s sleeve. ‘Gi’me that, darkie.’

Rob recoiled as the man lunged for the remaining food, but Kit was quicker. He drove his fist onto the man’s wrist and slammed his arm onto the hatch sill. With a scream, the man let go.

Rob jumped back clutching the bundle to his chest.

Kit drew the boy aside, leaving Jack Tydway in a brawl that was already petering out, curtailed by famishment and weakness. He gave the gaoler a crown to ensure that Jack Tydway was looked after, with the promise of another if the man was hale when he returned.

Rob followed Kit outside in silence, shoulders hunched, head down. Perhaps the prison had been a shock for him but Kit was glad Rob had seen it. One day he would tell him everything; one day the boy would understand that his father had been locked up in a place far worse, that he was captured as a youth, escaped as a man, and that the experience had shaped him and set him apart. The sound of the door slamming shut sent a shiver down his spine.

He led Rob back into Cheapside, and then across to Christ Church, past the conduit in the marketplace with its broken statues of the Virgin and Child, and its taps wrapped in sackcloth dripping daggers of ice. They passed through the gatehouse of the old Greyfriars’ monastery, and Kit saw the way Rob looked about him, taking in the dilapidated cloisters and the vast edifice of the church with its empty niches and broken corbels, and the blanks in its windows where there’d once been coloured glass. What was going through his mind? What did a church mean to Rob who had been brought up believing in demons? He had been baptised, but what did he really think of the places of worship of his new faith, despoiled by reformation, bearing the marks like open scars? Rob looked up at the spire then away towards the sound of children’s voices echoing through unseen rooms and empty passages. Did he miss his village friends? He must have felt lonely with no one of his own age to talk to.

After finding the sexton, and offering a donation, Kit was shown around the hospital where five hundred of the city’s foundlings and orphans were fed, taught and housed. They walked through a dormitory where boys slept two together in long rows of narrow beds; they saw children at work in classrooms, huddled together on benches, heads bent over hornbooks; and they entered a hall resounding with the clacking of looms at which older boys were being taught how to weave.

‘Would you like to start a new life in Virginia?’ he asked. ‘But consider this before you answer: it will be dangerous and hard and there’s a chance you might never come back.’

‘I’ll go with you,’ answered a tall, broad-shouldered lad with a quiff of gingerish hair and a lopsided smile around broken front teeth. ‘I’ll take the risk.’

‘Thomas Humphrey,’ said the master in charge, and waved his stick at which the boys instantly fell silent and lowered their eyes. ‘Found by Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s residence in Limehouse as a babe,’ he added in a way that made Kit itch to clap his hand over the man’s mouth.

The lad flinched as if slapped then picked at the threads of a tapestry on which he was working.

‘I’ll come back for him,’ Kit said quietly.

Rob tugged at his sleeve and whispered, ‘Can’t he come with us now?’

Kit shook his head and led Rob away. He wanted to explain that they were guests of Sir Walter at Durham Place and could not presume on his generosity to invite anyone else – and if this lad was taken then where would they stop? Yet stop they would have to, and to prefer some over others would sow the seeds of division. But this was no reasoning for a master to give his page; there was not the time to explain and this was not the place.