The Lost Duchess (39 page)

She met his eye. He must understand that she meant what she was about to say. ‘I will come with you.’

A flicker of worry passed over his face.

‘No.
No
,’ he said again, shaking his head. ‘You must stay here to look after Georgie and the Dares’ baby. They will need you if the colony has to move.’

She raised her hands to his shoulders and gripped them firmly. ‘The baby has her parents, and Master Harvie will keep an eye on Georgie. Remember what you told me: “Whatever happens, we will be together.” If I go too, the Choanokes will be assured that you are not leading a war party; the sight of a woman should stay their hostility. If I remain, I could be killed if the city falls while you are gone.’

That point meant much to him, she could tell. He flinched and closed his eyes. ‘Emme. Emme …’

‘I would be safest with you. I have decided, Kit. If I am to die here, I will die with you.’

A look of pain creased his face.

‘You will be in jeopardy either way; that is true …’ He pressed her to him and whispered against her neck, his voice close to breaking. ‘I wish it were not so.’

‘But it is, and I will not leave you.’

He held her tight and she could feel his longing as strong as hers was for him, but a thread of uncertainty kept them apart, perhaps hers alone, but maybe he had doubts as well. They were like two strands of a cable not yet twined fast together.

He released her gradually.

‘If you come then so will Rob.’

‘Very well, he is your son. A woman and a boy together should give the Choanokes cause for reflection before they shoot anyone down.’

He winced and bowed his head, then turned suddenly in response to a commotion at the door.

She had already seen the hats of some of the Assistants passing by the window, and she knew they were arriving for the meeting. She touched Kit’s hand.

‘Now you must say what you will do. They are here.’

He kissed her quickly.

‘I am ready.’

She kissed him back on the cheek.

‘So am I.’

‘… We had taken Menatonon prisoner, and brought his son that he best loved to Roanoke … it made Ensenor’s opinion to be received again with greater respect. For he had often before told them … that we were the servants of God, and that … they amongst them that sought our destruction should find their own, and not be able to work ours, and we being dead men were able to do them more hurt … and many of them hold opinion, that we be dead men returned …’

—From Ralph Lane’s
Narrative of the Settlement of Roanoke Island 1585–6

The wind had dropped and the talking was over. Emme looked from the prow of the pinnace to the six men rowing at the limits of their strength, sweat-streaked faces glowing in the last rays of the sun, expressions dead with exhaustion. The breath whistled from them as they bent to haul again, their oars creaked in the tholes, the water rippled by, but in the lull before the next stroke she heard
something she could not place, a sound that might have been the breeze in the rigging or sighing through forest leaves, except there was no breeze, and the nearest forest was over a bowshot away. The sound was more like singing than anything else, haunting and ethereal, a melancholic wave that endlessly rose and fell, though there was no one to be seen, and the nearest shore was so distant she could only just make out the trees at the water’s edge, rising straight from a haze of river mist, their roots bulging in mounds as if they had grown out from graves, their branches trailing moss like tattered shrouds. How could voices travel so far? Perhaps all she was hearing was some trick of memory, a singularity filling the quietness with noise from inside her head: singing and chanting, prayer and laughter; voices from the past, some recent, some long gone; sounds of all kinds that formed part of her history. But mostly she heard the voices of those who meant much to her, voices from palaces and places she’d once thought of as home. She heard her father and the Queen, and she heard Kit speaking again, just as he’d done that afternoon, when the wind had filled the sails and carried the pinnace effortlessly north and west, and they’d travelled past the drums of the Weapemeocs, almost to the head of the sound, making for the region where two rivers met. Their journey had been fast until the wind had failed, and the need to row had put an end to talk, and the sun started to sink, and they’d begun to doubt whether they’d reach Choanoke before night engulfed them.

‘Tell me about your childhood,’ Kit had asked. ‘I’d like to know everything. You had an older brother, didn’t you, like me?’

‘He was my stepmother’s son by an earlier marriage, not a real brother in blood. I hated him at first for taking away my father’s attention, but I suppose, thinking about him now, it was not his
fault that I felt unwanted. I missed my mother. I was only six years of age when she died; he came to Fifield not long afterwards …’

Emme had spoken freely as Kit had asked. She’d told him about all the inconsequential incidents that had made an impression on her in growing up, about her games and her pets, as much as she could remember about her mother, and her father’s kindness before he grew cold towards her. She spoke about the foal he had given her that he’d allowed her to name.

‘I wanted to call her Quince Jelly Biscuit because those were the nicest things I could think of when I was very small. My father laughed and agreed to Quince as a name, but my pony was always Quince Jelly Biscuit for me. I’d call her that when no one was listening. Her favourite treat was pippin pie.’

Kit had smiled, listening to her, close enough for her to feel him.

‘Not quince jelly or biscuits?’

‘No, I should have called her Apple Pie.’

Kit was the first person she had told about her pony’s name. She told him that as she told him everything that had mattered to her, and much that didn’t, just as he told her his stories, about his father who beat his older brother and was drunk most of the time, about the favouritism that he wished had never been his, the mill that was meant for him, which now belonged to his sisters’ husbands, because everyone had thought him dead after his capture by the Spaniards; his mother who’d died of a broken heart believing him dead; his brother, Will, who had always tried to look after him; and the fall in the forge that had left him with the scar over his palm.

What were they doing in telling these stories? She felt she knew, though neither asked the other why. The stories were a testament to each of their lives, full of the irrelevancies of memory that had
shaped them as people: unique, inconsequential, meaningless to everyone except themselves, but now meaningful, because, for each of them, in the telling was their essence, and in sharing they were giving, becoming part of the other. These were memories known to no one else, memories that would otherwise be lost if they died, leaving their lives to fade like the play of light on a wave. But now Kit’s stories were in her heart, and hers were in his, imprinted for so long as the other would live. They would be with one another always, and if they both should die then, surely, they would be together wherever God placed them next.

‘Remember I love you,’ he had said. ‘The more I learn about you, the more I am with you, the more I love you. No matter what we face, wherever I am, I will never stop loving you. Always remember that.’

‘I will remember,’ she had said, wanting to throw her arms about him and sob out her bitter secret. But there had been others very close, Kit’s son amongst them, and Kit had charge of the tiller, and she had feared to distract him. Her answer had been just a murmur.

‘I will always love you.’

She meant every word, but would he really always love her? Would he love her when he knew the truth?

You have not told him everything.

That was another voice she heard, her own voice deep inside.

You have not told him about your shame.

Could she?
How
could she? She did not know where to begin. All she knew was that he would find out if and when the time came for him to take her as his wife, if there was ever peace, if he meant what he had said. When they were joined in body, then he would discover her secret.

He thinks you are untouched and that is a lie.

She had told him everything except her greatest hurt, but, every time she tried to confess, the words dried up and her tongue would not work. She could not tell him now when she might so easily be overheard; that was her present excuse. But she was also afraid. What man’s love could survive the knowledge that another man had been before him where he should have been first? The single flower that had been hers to offer had already been picked and thrown in the dirt. She should have been a maiden for Kit; he was perfect and she should have been pure, yet she was pure no longer and now never could be. However hard she tried, whatever she did, nothing could bring her maidenhood back.

If you die now he’ll never know.

Perhaps she was destined never to tell him. If she died before he took her she would die a maiden in his eyes. Maybe that was what was meant to happen; if that was so, then even in death she would find sweetness.

She looked towards him where he rowed, now sitting alongside Manteo in the stern of the boat, his face drained by exertion, but still vital and handsome. Her gaze took in everyone, seeing her friends as they might appear to strangers: a curious mixed company, motley, travel-worn and weary. There was Rob and Tom Humphrey, Jim Lacy and Jack Tydway, Manteo and the man she loved – a young Cimaroon and a lanky foundling, a scraggy soldier and a burly gaolbird, an Indian who was a gentleman and a privateer who was betrothed to her; then include herself, erstwhile lady-in-waiting, wearing pantaloons and a plated brigandine. What would savages make of them? Curious, perhaps, but of little consequence. They carried few arms, and little of any value beyond the tools and
trinkets that Kit had brought along as gifts. Yet they also carried the hopes of England, of Sir Walter Raleigh and the Queen. Probably, almost certainly, they were heading for destruction, but she was not afraid. She feared for the Planters in the city, for Georgie and Virginia – prayed for them all to live. But with Kit she felt invulnerable. Nothing could hurt her so long as she could cling to a belief in his love; without that now, for her, life would not be worth living. Merely looking at him gave her sustenance; he was manna for her eyes. She feasted on the sight of him, as much as she could see: from his golden hair swept back from his brow to the strong angles of his short-bearded jaw. Maybe he sensed it. He looked up and smiled at her, and in that instant everything cleared. She heard all the sounds around her: the lapping water and creak of wood, and the singing that seemed to be coming from the mist.

He heard the singing too. From the glance that passed between them, she knew it at the same moment. A shimmer of anxiety troubled his face. She turned to scan the nearest shore, dark below the coals of the sunset in the west, but nothing was visible beyond mist and water and ancient moss-draped trees.

She moved from the prow to the stern, climbing over the benches, and Kit called for the rowing to stop.

‘Do you hear it?’ she whispered to him.

‘Yes.’

The singing wavered through the silence as they drifted slowly back downstream, enigmatic and poignant, unearthly and lonely.

Kit turned to Manteo looking more worried than ever she’d seen him.

‘What kind of singing is that?’

Manteo answered in an undertone.

‘It is a song of welcome.’

Kit’s shoulders relaxed.

‘They won’t attack?’

‘Not yet. They are welcoming us back from the dead.’

From the dead.
What did that mean? She moved closer to Kit.

‘Do they think we are ghosts?’

He held her hand.

‘Yes. But that should help us.’ He gave her hand a squeeze. ‘Ghosts cannot be killed.’

He spoke to everyone as they turned to face him. ‘We’ll anchor mid-river tonight and set a double watch: two hours on, four off. Rob and I first, then Tom and Jim, then Jack and Manteo. In the morning we’ll hear what the Choanokes have got to say beyond singing us lullabies.’

There was a ripple of muted chuckling before the men began to row the pinnace back and away from the shore. The anchor was dropped as darkness closed, leaving only black shadow and the starry sky, and the grey sheen over the wide water. Emme sought some privacy under an old sail thrown over the boom, shared a meal of corn biscuit and dry venison, then settled in the prow where Kit led her to try and sleep.

‘I have this for you,’ he said, pressing something like a small string of beads into her hand.

‘Pearls,’ he explained. ‘But only black. I bartered for them from the Croatans.’

She didn’t ask what he’d given for them, and she didn’t mind that they were black. What did that matter now? They felt as smooth and flawless as any she’d ever seen.

‘Will you help me tie them on?’ she asked, holding the pearls in
place then drawing his hand to her wrist ‘Tie the string fast. I never want to take it off.’

He did, and then she bade him wait while she took the knife from her girdle and cut at the lace of her left cuff. Once it was free, she gave the strip to him.

‘This is for you. I’m sorry I have nothing better.’

He held out his wrist to her. ‘Tie it on for me and make the knot tight.’

She did as he asked and they held one another quietly. The gifts would be their love tokens in pledge of their promises. Nothing more needed to be said.

He kissed her cheek in a tender way that no one else would have noticed under the cloak of the night.

‘Now try and rest.’

‘You know I will not.’

‘Count the pearls until you reach the end.’

She smiled to herself at that, since now there was no end to the loop they had made. But that is what she did, running the pearls through her fingers one after the other, imagining arrows raining down like the shooting stars in the heavens, only to vanish as completely because she had the pearls in her grasp and each was full of the shielding power of his love. Even so, the singing troubled her and sleep would not come, but sometime before dawn she must have sunk into a dreamless doze because she woke with a start to find Kit stroking her shoulder.