NaGeira (17 page)

He pressed his hands into the floor and shifted position. Still, he seemed far away and preoccupied.

“You know something,” I said suddenly, “I don’t know your name.”

He met my eyes this time and smiled. “No, you don’t. And I don’t know yours.”

He wiped his palm on his breeches to clean it of straw and grime. For a moment I thought he would come forward and give me his hand. But he just sat there and looked at me.

“You first,” I said.

“Will,” he said. He was about to gaze out of the window again, but thought better of it and gave me a tight smile instead.

“I need to know your whole name,” I insisted. “I need to tell everybody I once knew the celebrated Will … so and so. When you’re celebrated around the world like Dante or our own Sir Philip Sidney, I’ll tell them I once shared a dismal goal cell with you!”

Will laughed and threw his head back so his crown was hard against the wall, then he sighed deeply, put his hands behind his neck, and drew his head back into position. He looked at me seriously. “You will never need to tell people that, I assure you. I am destined for obscurity.”

“Why would you say that?” I demanded. “You write plays that make money, you said so yourself, and you’re about to be let out of prison.”

“That’s just the thing,” he said, looking down and picking at the straw. “In prison, you can nurture extravagant ideas about yourself. You can believe yourself immortal and quite set apart from
the rest of mankind.” He sighed, glanced towards the window once more, then fixed his stare upon his hands like a sculptor examining the tools of his trade. “Once I get out into the world again, I’m just one playwright among many.”

“I see,” I said quietly. “That’s what distracts you.”

“Well, partly,” he says with a sigh. “What about you? What’s your name?”

“Sheila,” I told him. “Sheila MaGella before my mother married my stepfather, and I don’t want his name.”

“You should take whatever name you wish and then live up to it as best as you can,” he said. “Sheila MaGella is a fine name and very like a song I have heard during fairs and at street corners.” He thought for a moment, narrowing his eyes. “Sheila is an old name for Ireland, I think, and MaGella is like NaGeira which, if I am not mistaken, means ‘the beautiful’ in the tongue of your country.” He gave me a warm smile, not unlike the kind I used to receive from my father, and it comforted me to the core.

“My country?” I exclaimed, but my protest was mild and playful. “My country is England. My father was a servant of the Crown.”

“To be English, you must live your life in England. You are a child of the country that mothered you. You breathed Ireland’s air and walked Ireland’s trails. If Spain were to invade England, if they were to send another vast fleet, and if this one were to prove successful, that turn of events would not render me Spanish, would it?”

“No,” I say doubtfully.

“Then you understand we are the land from which we draw our knowledge. No amount of politics and war can change that.”

I didn’t understand him completely, but I wasn’t going to argue now. It was late and our imminent parting was in the air; it made me tingle with uncertainty.

“And being in a French convent will not render you French,” he added sombrely and then paused. “Which is why you must promise to escape as soon as you’re able,” he added with no discernible change in tone. “You must not remain in a nunnery.”

“I’m only just breaking free from one gaol,” I said, laughing. “You’re already plotting my release from another!”

He nodded, but suppressed a smile. “Sheila, there are a hundred ways to make yourself free, and we were not born to be stifled. Life is raging about your ears. You don’t want to wake to the realization one day that it is already half over and you have not yet begun. You must not go to the nunnery.”

“It is a condition of my release,” I said with a sigh. “If I break it they will recapture me and bring me here again, or worse.”

“A contract made under duress is no contract at all,” he replied, “and a young woman of your wit should know how to remould your identity. You can make sure they do not find you.”

I gave a weak laugh. “My life isn’t one of your plays, Will. I don’t think it’s so easy to disappear.”

“There is a new world, Sheila, a place where your stepfather and all the governors of all the gaols in England cannot reach.”

“And how am I to get to such a place?”

Will paused for a moment and stared at the ground. He was so still that for a moment I thought he must have gone to sleep with his eyes open. But then slowly he drew in his breath.

“The guard who comes to us sometimes …”

“Gilbert?”

“Yes. He has a cousin in trade in the New World. In Newfoundland to be exact.”

“So?”

“I think he means to go, and soon.”

“But I hardly know Gilbert,” I said rather feebly, as it was not quite true. What I did know was that Gilbert and I seldom spoke. But that did not mean he was unknown to me, not at all. Through the minutest changes in his stonelike expression, through the myriad tender feelings which I held down in myself, but which rose to the surface anyway each time his stoic presence appeared, I had gotten to know him in ways that required no words. The rhythm of my pulse whispered to me that we were as known to each other as young birds reared in the same nest, as sympathetic in mind and feeling as people who had exchanged a thousand evenings of convivial conversation. It was a familiarity that pulled me to him as a bee is drawn to a flower.

Had I been told I would feel this way for another when the fever for Thomas Ridley was upon me, I would have been horrified. But Thomas Ridley’s sand-like hair and his pale-blue eyes had spoken to a freshness in me, a belief in an evergreen spring, and I had now cast off that layer of youth. Gilbert spoke to me of the world as it really was; he delved into the bleakness of things and emerged with something hopeful and true. He was silent compassion in a world of confinement. He was concern in the midst of torment. He was as solid as a church gargoyle and as permanent too. Thomas was a subtle brush stroke in a battle scene of cannon and flame. In my present inner world, he blew away unnoticed, a pale ghost against the harsh reality of day.

“Well, he knows you,” said Will, attempting to suppress a smile for the second time, this time not so successfully.

“He asked you to speak for him?” I prompted.

“Not exactly, but I felt that he meant to.”

The knowledge made me breathless for a moment. I thought of Gilbert and the New World, and I could hear the crackle of burning and the crash of falling glass. I had made a decision. My nunnery was burning.

———

Sometimes the whole of life seems like an escape gone disastrously wrong. Every time the jaws of imprisonment, death, or religious orders have opened to take me, I have eluded them. And what is my reward? A safe and comfortable home full of laughter and love? A paradisal garden of verdant, plump leaves, warm sunshine, and clean, running water? No. The final consequence of all my amazing luck and agility is an old woman scrambling up a forested hill with the stench of her burning home in her lungs. A woman without husband or child, a crone who will hereafter rely on a malignant child for her survival.

I pause again, weighing all this as a farmer might weigh his last grain after a long drought. Now I am under cover, there is no sense in rushing. These people know nothing of the woods that surround them, and I know everything. A weasel scurries past and a crow flaps its wings in the branches overhead. The sun is sinking and dusk makes me calmer. I recite to myself the words of the green man.
The forest is yours,
he said.
While the woods embrace you, no spirit or beast can harm you, no strangers or neighbours smite
you, no dank ague infect you. When death lies all around you, the leaves and boughs protect you.

The rhythm of the words soothes me as before, but there is an undercurrent of disquiet. For the first time I feel something is missing. I remember how I felt tricked by my father’s death, how it seemed that the man of the forest had misled me when I realized that the words addressed only me and not my family.

Was there some other loophole? Some other omission that might deceive me into believing I am safe? The phrases run through my mind like a breeze through rippling foliage:
No spirit or beast can harm you, no strangers or neighbours smite you …
For the second time in my life it sounds too specific.
Spirit … beast … strangers … neighbours
…

I have no idea why I should be doubting these things now. I feel like a bird who, sensing a change in the wind, prepares for sudden flight without any detailed knowledge of the danger it faces. It is intuition only that ruffles my feathers, yet I have learned to pay attention. Something happened in that schoolroom. Something was said to cause this shift in the breeze. I touch the bark of the nearest tree with my fingertips and hold my head very still. I wait for a recent memory to return.

I hear Emma’s taunting voice as she crouches on the floor beside my chair. They took the baby from the boat, she said, and then … yes, then she said they “set the boat alight as a kind of
offering.”
She had spoken the last word in a deep, portentous voice before breaking into laughter. And what came into my mind when I heard this story?

A vision of scorched driftwood bobbing on the surface of the tide. I knew this was a discovery even while I shrugged it off. And
now as I prepare for the implications to seep in, a rogue thought slips into my mind before I can lower the drawbridge against it:
So I have not been as alone as I thought all this time. I have not been stranded from all my relatives.
This is why the words of the green man no longer make me feel safe!
Spirit … beast … strangers … neighbours
… Simon Rose is none of these. Simon Rose is my grandson.

Easing myself down on the coarse grass, I gaze up at the pines towering above me. They trail old man’s beard like seaweed from their branches.
Nothing is proven! Nothing is proven!
Yet my search for the child, Matthew, comes back into my mind. I scour the beach once more, calling his name. I skirt the rims of the forest until the tree trunks are a blur. I look again under the woodpile. Then I remember what I have so often tried to forget: Katherine ducking from the pirate’s blade, disappearing under the rim of the boat, then pushing herself off from the side and running from the man, her toes skimming the waters. Why was she standing by the boat? The forest would have been safer, I had told her that.
But in a forest,
an answer returns like an echo,
a motherless child would perish. Placed in a boat, under a blanket, there is always the chance of rescue.

Inwardly I watch again as the boats drift out of the bay and the pirate ship sails towards the horizon. The dark branches loom knowingly overhead, sages of the forest.
Is it cruelty that imparts this knowledge to me now? What else can the nature gods and goddesses have in mind?
I remember poor Will’s play, how the ending hinged upon the idea that a man was “not of woman born” if he was taken by surgery before the time. How little I respected the idea, yet how pertinent such trickery has become!

At last I have an answer for John Rose’s behaviour. He knew he had stolen my kin, or, at very least, suspected it. That is why he shuffled so shamefaced at my door when delivering supplies. That is why he filled my grandson with terror regarding the old woman on the hill. Old as I am, I feel a rebel blood stirring, screaming for justice and revenge. What law exists for such cases? And what authority is there to enforce it?

In an instant I know the answer to both questions:
none but myself.

I
t was close to midnight when I was released. The courtyard was empty, as Gilbert said it would be, and my stepfather’s servant, the same white-faced woman who had brought me here, sat in the waiting coach.

Sometimes it is much easier to do what is expected, even when you desperately want to do otherwise. Newgate had been my whipping post and, despite myself, the first crisp taste of the midnight air found me shivering with remorse. I saw the expression on the white-faced woman as she looked at me and nodded; it wavered between censoriousness and approval, as though both emotions normally kept in reserve were ready for unfurling, according to how I behaved. Quite unexpectedly I found this meant something to me. There was still someone in the outside world to whom my actions counted, even if it were only for a half-hour coach ride to the London docks.

I thought of Will, Bess, and Gilbert. What of
their
expectations? I asked myself.

But Will, Bess and Gilbert were not the real world. None of them had a connection to anything I had known outside the walls of Newgate. As I climbed into the coach, I felt that my prison friends might fall away from me like gaol dust and spiral off into the night with the first gust of wind.

I think we all knew this would happen. Breaking away was designed to be hard, so we had left nothing to chance.

The coach jolted into movement and my heart picked up its pace. Shadows obliterated the moonlight as the wheels rumbled us through the courtyard entrance. The white-faced woman didn’t say anything to me, and I was glad; I had so little breath, she would have suspected something had I been forced to speak.

The carriage turned the corner, then stopped. My companion sighed quietly and drummed her fingers on her lap. There was a yell from the driver; the coach rocked once, then twice. It seemed a long time that we waited in silence. I was beginning to worry and the white-faced woman turned and stared directly at me. Was it fear or accusation in her face?

At last the door swung open and a masked man appeared. He grabbed my arm and pulled me from the coach. My feet stumbled on the steps—I was trying not to act like I expected it—and then I was pulled with some force down a section of road, my footsteps clattering through the night. We ducked into a long alleyway, jumping over drunks and vagrants as we ran, then emerged on the other side. Gaining a doorway at last, Gilbert hauled me deep into the shadows and ripped off his mask. We both stood against the wall, breathing hard. Tears of exertion stung in the cool air and I could taste the blood of tiny burst veins in my mouth. I found laughter rising between breaths. It was all too
much; the mad escape, the sudden change in my status from convent girl to fugitive. It was too deranged even for the stage.