Crossed Bones (17 page)

The brief and bloody encounter with the raiders had astonished me. I had lived in Cornwall for my first eighteen years, and no one in all that time had so much as mentioned the words ‘Barbary’ and ‘pirate’ in the same breath. I did not know what to think: did all the history of the region I had ever been taught rest on a false foundation; or was Cat a fantasist, earthing out her anxiety and boredom by means of some wild fiction? If it were the former, then I had to find out whatever I could on the subject. I decided that after accompanying Alison and Michael to view the cottage at Mousehole, I would make my excuses and visit Penzance Library to trawl the internet and the local history shelves for whatever I could find about Cornwall in the mid 1620s.

A little voice nagged at the back of my mind: how likely was it that, snatched by slave traders, Catherine could have taken and kept her embroidery book and her writing implement with her and managed to continue her journal in the desperate conditions of such a ship’s hold? And, if she had managed such a feat, then how had the little book ever made it back to this country and, more specifically, to Alison’s house, so close to where Cat had been taken from in the first place? But if Cat
had
been driven by her own difficulties to take shelter in fantasy, the story she had created would surely make her England’s first writer of prose fiction, predating Daniel Defoe by almost a century. Either possibility rendered the book a valuable object; and, as such, made me even more determined to keep it away from Michael.

We parked on the outskirts of the village and walked down its winding main road, exclaiming in delight as we rounded the corner and emerged suddenly into a wide, sunlit harbour.

‘How extraordinary!’ Michael’s eyes shone as he took in the array of small, brightly coloured craft bobbing within the protective arms of the quay, the tumble of cottages lining the steep hillsides around the cove.

If you removed the cars and the yachts, the streetlamps and the tourists, it was a scene that had changed very little in a couple of hundred years, I thought wistfully. There were not many places left in the world like this, and most of those had lost a lot of their soul, but Mousehole retained something of the rare conviviality of a village in which a local community lived out their lives and watched the tourists come and go like the tides. Outside the grocer’s a blackboard had been attached to the railings overlooking the harbour; on it someone had chalked in large unsteady letters, ‘Happy birthday, Alan, 73 today!’ A group of elderly women who evidently shared the same hairdresser – one who had perfected a single style of grey-helmet perm – was gathered at the bus stop, gossiping cheerfully. As we passed, I heard one of them say, ‘… and he got up and went off down to the boat, never even noticed she were dead’ – which for some reason merely made her listeners chuckle, as if it was the sort of oversight men here made all the time.

‘It’s up here,’ Michael announced after consulting a hand-drawn map. Even from where I stood, I could tell it was Anna who had made it. Anna was just the right person to draw maps: neat, precise, painstakingly accurate. If she’d been charting oceans at the time of Magellan, there would have been no fanciful monsters curling up out of the deeps, no ‘heere be dragons’, no siren mermaids or other unnecessary curlicues, but merely the legend ‘open water’. It was probably this very lack of imagination that had enabled Michael to continue his illicit liaison with me all this time.

The street he led us up was too narrow for traffic. Instead, people had filled it with effusive containers of flowers and bizarre prehistoric-looking plants like giant, fleshy black rosettes; outside one particularly eccentric dwelling was half of an old rowing boat with terracotta pots of geraniums ranged along its thwarts. Anna’s cottage was limewashed and had shutters of a pretty faded blue. Seagull droppings mired the windows and chickweed grew on the roof, but even so it was exquisite.

Inside, however, the chocolate-box illusion was dispelled. Dark, dingy and filthy, the cottage exhaled a great gassy breath of mildew and damp as soon as Michael opened the door. The low ceilings were yellowed, not just with age but with nicotine; the old man who’d rented must have been a pipe-smoker. The armchairs were stained and threadbare along the arms, and the back of one had been ripped down to the stuffing where a cat had used it for sharpening its claws.

‘Poor thing,’ said Alison. ‘It is in need of some care and attention, isn’t it?’ For a moment I thought she’d spied the resident pet, gone feral since its owner’s demise; then I realized she meant the house.

Michael smiled wryly. ‘That’s what the estate agent said, but all I thought she meant was that it could do with a lick of paint and some new carpets.’

‘Ah, estate agents,’ Alison said. ‘What do they know?’

Boxes had been stacked against one wall marked ‘Books’ and ‘Crockery’. Michael made immediately for the first of these piles, took down the top box and started emptying it on to the floor, eyeing the contents avidly. Did he suspect there were more antiquities like
The Needle-Woman’s Glorie
hidden away down here? I crouched beside him to examine what he had brought out of the box. The top layer consisted of paperbacks gone brown with age, the sort of fiction that had long since passed out of fashion – Second World War novels and luridly packaged American detective stories. Nothing of interest there.

‘How long has this place been in Anna’s family?’ I asked idly.

Michael frowned. He picked up a plain-jacketed, ex-library hardback, flicked to the title page, scanned it, shook the book in case something had been hidden inside it and then discarded it with the rest. ‘Oh, ages. I don’t know.’

‘It seems to have been stuck in a time-warp,’ I persisted. ‘Hasn’t Anna ever been here?’

He looked up at me unhappily. ‘Not as far as I know. Why would she?’

‘Well, I’d want to have a peep at my inheritance. Seems a bit cavalier to take the weekly rent and just let it fall into rack and ruin. I feel quite sorry for the poor old man who lived here.’

‘Look, it’s nothing to do with me. I just came down to go through the stuff that’s left, make sure the clearance people didn’t miss anything important.’

‘Like the book you gave me?’

Catherine’s little book was in my shoulder bag. I felt it there, emanating such strong signals I was almost surprised Michael couldn’t sense its presence.

‘Stop sniping, both of you,’ Alison snapped. ‘Come on, Julia, let’s have a poke around.’ She took me by the arm and fairly wrestled me out of the living room. We ducked our heads under the lintel and found ourselves in a small dark kitchen.

‘Can’t you try to be civilized with one another?’

I made a face. I was wishing I hadn’t come. It was easier to nurse my righteous hurt away from Michael. Besides, Cat’s story was haunting me: I had a sudden powerful urge to run outside into the sunlight, away into the open with her little book.

‘I think I’ll go for a walk,’ I told Alison. ‘I’ve got a bit of a headache.’

She looked surprised. ‘Oh, OK. Do you mind if I stay for a while?’

‘Do what you want.’ It was rude, but I didn’t feel much like making the effort. I was still angry at her for encouraging Michael to come down here.

By the time I got back to the living room, Michael was on his third box.

‘Anything interesting?’

He shook his head, looking grim. ‘A load of old rubbish.’

‘All you deserve,’ I said under my breath and marched out of the door.

I wandered off to find myself a suitably quiet and sunny spot in which to sit and read, but I had not gone more than a few yards before a tiny old woman beckoned to me. As I got closer, I realized that she was suffering from some kind of strabismus, which had caused her left eye to be directed in a different direction to her right one. Feeling embarrassed, as if I had mistakenly reacted to her call when she was in fact hailing someone else, I turned, but there was no one else on the street. ‘Hello,’ I said cautiously.

She came down the hill towards me. ‘You’re searching for something, my dear.’

‘No – just wandering around, taking in the sights.’

Her smiling face was as softly wrinkled as the leather of an old Chesterfield sofa, one eye looking over my shoulder, the other unnervingly focused on my chin. I had no idea which one to respond to. She leaned in closer. ‘I can tell you are searching,’ she insisted. She patted my hand. ‘It will be all right, you’ll see.’

She was obviously a bit mad. I smiled. ‘Thank you, that’s nice to know. You live in a lovely village, and I’m going to have a jolly good look around it now.’ I stepped away, but her grip tightened.

‘What you are searching for you will have to travel to discover,’ she urged me. ‘And what you find will not be the thing you thought you went to find. It will be’ – and here she beamed at me as if bestowing the blessing of all the angels – ‘far more wonderful than anything you have imagined, it will remake your life. But if you stay here fate will catch up with you. Annie Badcock never lies.’ A cloud drifted over the sun, and she broke the connection between us suddenly. ‘They were here.’ She winked at me. ‘They came across the ocean and took them away. People have forgotten; they have forgotten all the important things. But the past is stronger than they know. It is a great black tide which will sweep us all under in the end.’

And with that she was off, limping away down the hill without a goodbye or even a backwards glance. I stood there, staring after her, nonplussed. Had she read my mind or was she just crazy? But perhaps, that irritating little voice at the back of my mind prompted, perhaps she really knows something.
Annie Badcock
. The name was vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t remember where I’d come across it.

∗

‘If you took down the internal wall between the old scullery and the breakfast room, you could open up the kitchen and make it a lot brighter.’

There was light in Alison’s eye. She looked as if she might burst into hysterical laughter or tears at any moment. Perhaps poking around the old cottage had reminded her too much of renovating the farmhouse with Andrew. But there was a determined thrust to her jaw: she needed a project, for the money as much as for the distraction. We were sitting out on the terrace at the Old Coastguard Hotel, finishing a bottle of rose after eating local fish and Cornish cheeses, and as soon as the waiter had cleared our plates away, Alison had covered the table with sketches and notes.

Michael was in her thrall, nodding and asking questions. ‘And you think all this could be done for how much?’

‘Sixteen, seventeen thousand. I know some good local craftsmen, and you could use me as project manager. I’d be happy to oversee it.’

‘I’ll talk to Anna, see what she thinks. It makes sense, though, I can see that. No one’s going to buy the cottage in the state it’s in at the moment.’

‘Not full of old rubbish,’ I added helpfully.

He pursed his mouth, which made him look prissy and mean; I could see the old man he could soon become if he allowed the negative side of his personality to hold sway. When he turned back to Alison again it was with his left shoulder held higher, as if to block me out of the conversation. Pain lanced through me, but I said as blithely as I could manage: ‘I’m going to take the bus into Penzance. I’ll see you later, Alison. I’ll get a taxi or something.’

‘Oh, OK.’ She frowned, as if expecting an explanation.

‘Some things I need to buy,’ I said, not wanting her to see that I was feeling territorial and upset. I got up and slung my bag over my shoulder.

‘Aren’t you going to say goodbye to me?’ Michael said, looking put out.

‘I was under the impression we’d said goodbye some time ago,’ I said coolly. I felt his eyes on me as I walked away.

Half an hour later I was tucked away on the first floor of the local library with an ancient PC and a dodgy internet connection. I Googled ‘barbary pirates Cornwall’ and waited. Seconds after I clicked ‘search’ I was offered the choice of over twelve thousand entries containing this unlikely combination of words. I picked a few at random and in a very short space of time had begun to feel as if I were inhabiting a sort of alternative universe in which an entire buried history existed under the surface of the world I knew.

According to various sources – academics, amateur historians, official state papers, the occasional survivor’s account – over a million Europeans had been abducted and enslaved by North African pirates between the early sixteenth and late eighteenth centuries. A fraction of the estimated twelve million Africans taken and sold in slavery in the Americas, but still a hugely significant number. Between the 1610s and the 1630s Cornwall and Devon lost a fifth of their shipping to corsairs, and in 1625 over a thousand sailors and fishermen from Plymouth and the Cornish and Devon coasts were taken and sold into slavery. The Mayor of Bristol reported that a Barbary fleet had captured Lundy Island and there raised the standard of Islam, and that this little island in the Bristol Channel then became a fortified base from which they launched raids on the unprotected villages of north Cornwall and Devon. The raiders came to be known as the Sallee Rovers, since they operated out of the Muslim stronghold of Salé, just across the river from Rabat in Morocco, and included a ragtag collection of disaffected privateers from various seafaring European nations who had ensconced themselves there alongside the remarkably mixed population of the area, which already contained native Berbers, Arabs, Jews and ‘Moriscos’ – Muslims expelled from Catholic Spain, where many of their families had lived for generations. In the Barbary states these Europeans found men eager for revenge on the Christian world which had persecuted them, men with the resources, the wit and the will to carry a seaborne war to the very shores of the enemy; a war, moreover, sanctioned and blessed by the ruling powers and driven not only by the greed for wealth but also by the fervour of religion.

One of the most effective raiders had apparently been an Englishman by the name of John Ward, who had turned renegade shortly after King James I signed a peace treaty with Spain, thus cutting off Ward’s legal opportunities to attack the Spanish treasure fleet. He made for North Africa, converted to Islam, taking the name of Yussuf Raïs, and started training up the locals in the knowledge of navigation and in the use of sailing swift vessels. He became the admiral of the Sale fleet, vowing to ‘become a foe to all Christians, bee a persecutor to their trafficke, & an impoverisher of their wealth’. One particularly intrepid corsair chief, Jan Jansz – a Dutchman going by the adopted Muslim name of Murad Raïs – apparently sailed all the way to Iceland from Salé and stole four hundred captives out of the harbour-city of Reykjavik to sell at a premium, with their milk-pale skin and white-blond hair, in the Barbary slave markets.