The Lost Duchess (17 page)

‘I am busy,’ she said, putting her hands on her hips and feeling a twinge in her back as she straightened. She looked down at the dirty apron and sighed. She should pick it up and try to wash it again in sea water but it was all so much effort. She flicked back a strand of lank hair from her forehead and scowled at him. He should not even have been looking at her in such a state.

His expression slid from concern to the kind of stern gravitas she associated with being told off. It did not please her.

He retrieved the apron and tossed it into the bucket.

‘I am glad to see you are working hard, Mistress Emme. I hope that will help repair your relationship with Mistress Dare. I could see that the lady was upset by your treatment of her earlier; it was ignoble of you to be insensitive to her distress, uncharacteristically so, if I may say. I would have expected better of you. Mistress Dare is pregnant and lacks your acumen; she is also your superior, given the role you have assumed for yourself on this voyage. No maid should be intemperate with her mistress. I trust that, in future while
we are all together, you will show more discretion. I counsel this with your own interests at heart.’

She glared at him agape. Who was he to accuse her of being ignoble? She could barely believe what she’d just heard. Did he mean to insult her?

She raised her chin and resisted the urge to walk away.

‘May I remind you that I am a baron’s daughter and one of the Queen’s ladies, and I do not consider it meet for you, a common mariner, to give me advice on my conduct. You forget yourself, Master Doonan. You are, by your own admission, little more than a pirate who has lived as an outlaw with renegade slaves.’

That struck home, she could tell. His eyes blazed like blue fire. She pressed the advantage.

‘What makes you think that you are fit to be my judge? How
dare
you?’

He took a step towards her and spoke again, lowering his voice.

‘I dare because I care for your welfare, and I am as good a judge as any man who recognises rash conduct when it stares him in the face. If you wish to be deferred to, then you cannot expect to be believed as a maid, and there is more to being a lady than enjoying the courtesy of others; tact and delicacy are other attributes I would expect.’

She felt a prickling down the back of her neck.

‘Do you mean to imply that I lack those virtues?’

‘Did you show them to your mistress when she was suffering after being poisoned?’

She took a sharp intake of breath, feeling rage rise up within her to the point at which she could have slapped him. But she would not. She was a lady.

‘I will not be berated by you, Master Boatswain. If you wish to
give a lecture then lecture your page who is too much in awe of you to do other than dumbly obey. I am not.’

At that, she turned her back on him and walked off, though she only managed a few steps before he strode in front of her. He raised his hands and she sprang back, shuddering at the thought that he might have been about to seize hold of her.

‘Get away from me,’ she hissed.

‘I only wish for your wellbeing,’ he said, though she felt the heat of his anger in each clipped word.

His lips tightened.

‘It will benefit none of us now for your true identity to be revealed. If the Spaniards discover it, the results could be disastrous, most of all for you. At the least it would cause anxiety and division amongst the Planters …’

Was he threatening her? He didn’t mean to unmask her, surely?

‘You wouldn’t …?’

‘Of course not,’ he gestured dismissively. ‘I have sworn to tell no one, and I won’t give you away. But you must learn some humility or you’ll give away yourself.’

‘Pah!’

She stepped aside to move past him.

‘I’ll not humble myself to
you
. If you truly wish for my wellbeing then I beg you to leave me alone.’

She walked on along the beach, past the place where the Harvies had set up their tent, and she determined to scream if he followed her, but he did not.

She carried on. He was nothing but a knave trying to dominate her, just as every man she had ever known had tried to dominate her, and she wanted no more to do with him.

Once she reached the end of the encampment she turned and retraced her steps. He was nowhere to be seen, thank God.

Henceforth she would avoid him if she possibly could.

*

‘Did you see that?’

Kit stared down into the river, past the luminous ripples around the boat and the glowing clouds stirred up by the oars, seeing the depthless black beneath touched by a ghostly light with every movement, and the trails of fish-like streaming sparks, and the bluish yellow gleam fading to a disc under the surface where something had come close to them. Something alive. It had been shining.

He kept to his stroke, pulling hard and steadily. The current was swift and they were rowing upstream. They couldn’t afford to ease or take time to marvel.

‘As long as it doesn’t come up under the boat,’ he said.

‘Could have been a sea cow,’ James Lacy ventured. ‘One grown monstrous. I’ve seen them before around St John’s.’

‘Keep rowing.’

It could have been a sea cow. What he had seen had seemed to swell up like an enormous mushroom from the deep, trailing bubbles and cold light: a phantasmal leviathan.

‘Aren’t you worried?’ Lacy asked.

‘I’m worried about not finding enough water.’

‘Aye, that’s a bother for sure.’

Lacy’s thick Irish accent made the concern seem quite homely.

‘We should have more barrels and boats,’ he observed.

‘I’d like to know how General Lane managed. You were with him, weren’t you?’

Kit kept rowing without trying to look over his shoulder; he
wouldn’t be able to see Lacy anyway, but he was sure he remembered the man as one of those whom Drake had brought back from Virginia the year before. Ferdinando had said that they would follow Lane’s route, and this was where he’d taken on water: at Muskito Bay in St John’s, as they called the island of Puerto Rico.

‘Aye, I served with Lane, was pressed by him in Ireland and stayed with him when he took Sir Richard Grenville’s commission to set up the garrison in Virginia. Same with Denis and Darby back there.’

Kit couldn’t see either man, but he knew Lacy meant the Irish soldiers who were in one of the boats behind.

‘We all signed up together,’ Lacy said. ‘Been together ever since. Jack was with Lane too.’

Kit thought of John Wright, the Virginia veteran he’d selected for another boat, along with a seasoned mariner he considered strong enough for the work.

‘I know; that’s why I picked you for this.’

The four soldiers were the only men from the last expedition to join White’s voyage, and he’d tasked them all with helping him get in water. They knew what to do, and it was an opportunity to talk to them. He was keen on finding out more about Lane’s expedition.

‘Tell me how Lane faired here.’

‘Lane had Muskito Bay run like a militia camp,’ Lacy went on. ‘Got a moated fort and great breastworks built within a week. Those defences could have held off an army and lasted ten years if Lane hadn’t torn them down.’

‘Why did he?’

‘Because we had to leave to go to Virginia, for the love of St Patrick, and Lane didn’t want to offer the Spaniards a fortress on a plate that could have been used against us if ever we came back.’

‘Like we are now,’ Kit said, keeping his strokes deep and steady, thinking that collecting water would have been easy with a fort to offer protection, instead of having to creep upriver under cover of darkness against the constant threat of being spotted and attacked.

‘We had more men, of course,’ Lacy added. ‘Hundreds to help dig the defences, fell trees and suchlike. No one had too much to do; not like now,’ he muttered.

Lacy cleared his throat and an eerie low cry rippled birdlike over the water above the honking and plinking of the hundreds of frogs hidden in the mangroves.

Kit heard the cry answered and knew that Lacy’s friends weren’t far away. He stared downstream and thought he saw the faint gleam of their progress.

Lacy gave a grunt of acknowledgement. ‘Look at us: six men collecting water for nearly two hundred and as much beer drunk in the meantime by those Planters making merry.’ He hauled on the creaking oars and spoke again. ‘We’re leaving tomorrow, and there’ll probably be less water aboard the
Lion
than there was when we arrived.’

‘At least the Planters are refreshed,’ Kit said, thinking of Mistress Emme’s glowing face as she’d watched the sun going down behind the trees that had invaded the earthworks. He could tell she was relieved simply to have set foot again on land, despite the oppressive heat and tormenting insects. He didn’t begrudge the Planters a little celebration. If she’d been more civil he would have offered to share a cup with her, but she’d already made it plain she preferred to keep her own company, and his earlier attempt to caution her with well-meant advice had met with the kind of rebuff he should have expected. He wouldn’t intervene with her again. It hurt to be
shunned by a woman he found attractive, a woman who plainly considered herself above him, but there it was; best to forget her if he could. She was much too haughty for her own good. Why she had come on the voyage was a puzzle; perhaps Raleigh had put her up to it, or possibly the Queen on a whim, or, more likely, the two of them together, thinking that it would be entertaining to hear what one of their own ladies thought of Virginia. But Emme would never make a settler, not with her prickly temperament and skittish behaviour. She’d probably dip her toe in the waters off Chesapeake, watch the Planters beginning the struggle to build their homes, turn up her nose and then sail back, and that would be the last he’d see of her. He wouldn’t grieve. But he still cared that she came to no harm.

‘I wish them no ill,’ he said to Lacy.

The Irishman responded with singsong conviction. ‘They’ll go hungry afore long. This is no place to find game. The hunting was poor when Lane was here, just the same, the difference being …’ He kept his voice low. ‘We hadn’t lost all our supplies.’

‘Captain Spicer may yet find us,’ Kit said, picking up on Lacy’s concern. The colony would struggle without supplies; it was a worry he’d heard before, but fretting about it would achieve nothing.

‘It’s a pity Captain Stafford didn’t bring back any sheep as the Portugee said he would.’

‘You mean Master Ferdinando.’

‘The very one, the Portugee whoreson: our Pilot whose assurances I wouldn’t trust as far as spit.’

Kit heard the plop of phlegm hitting the water.

‘I’d keep that opinion to yourself,’ he advised.

‘Too late.’ Lacy snorted. ‘It’s already shared. Ask Denis and Darby. No man who served with Lane at Roanoke has any respect for the
swine. He’s not led us well so far, has he? Abandoned the flyboat with our victuals, set us on an island with savages and foul water, and thus far failed to find anywhere fit for taking on fresh food.’

‘There could have been sheep where he sent Stafford. The evidence was there …’

‘Old droppings,’ Lacy cut in. ‘He sent Stafford to capture sheep, and all the Captain found was shit.’

Kit pulled up his oars and dipped his hand into the water, watching a hint of light shimmer around his fingers like the palest gauze. The brilliance was gone. The bloom had faded. The water felt cooler, almost cold. It was time to test the river’s freshness. Above his head trailed vegetation hanging from branches in ragged arches: trees that weren’t mangroves; he couldn’t tell exactly what. He felt as if he was floating in a watery maze, a branching gully almost completely overgrown, where the only visible elements were the sheen of the river on which he was drifting, and a strip of starry sky directly above him, crisscrossed by creepers as if in a bower. Had they gone far enough? He scooped up the water and drank.

It tasted clean, not brackish, a bit earthy but that was no surprise, and if he used his teeth as a filter it was really quite good.

‘This will serve us,’ he said, then plunged in his leather water bottle and drank deeply.

Lacy did the same.

‘Let’s tie up and get the barrel in. Over there,’ Kit whispered, pointing, seeing a place where the shine of the river met a shelving bank in a still line. They needed somewhere to ground the boat so the barrel, once filled, could be hauled aboard safely. But the little river beach was exposed and unfamiliar. Had he been here before? He couldn’t recall seeing anything like it during the past two nights
of scouting for water. The river channels were a network of convoluted streams, gushing down ravines from steep limestone hills and tunnelling around mangrove islets near the sea in a matrix without clear banks. Would they be able to find the way back? Getting lost was an unspoken fear, greater than ever this night since it would be their last at Muskito Bay. Ferdinando had announced that they would weigh anchor at daybreak, and for once Kit was inclined to agree with his decision. Every day they lingered increased the chance of their discovery; the Spaniards knew the bay had been used by English seafarers before. They could easily be trapped. The water-boats should get back early so the
Lion
could leave undetected. They must be quick.

He looked round for any sign of being watched but there was none, no glimmer of light, or snapping twigs, or tell-tale smell of smouldering matchcord from a musket. Even the frogs had quietened. He beckoned Lacy on and in silence they set to work.

Not until they’d filled the barrel and stowed it, pushed off and got back under the trees did they begin to talk again, and then only in snatches. They put all their energy into rowing hard and getting into the flow, taking advantage of the current to race back downstream. Between strokes Kit listened, straining to hear the sloosh of the other boats amidst the clinking of the frogs, scouring the sheen over the water behind the black curtains of foliage but seeing no trace of movement beyond the shimmering ripples in their wake.

Lacy eased on his oars. ‘Should we wait for the others?’