Jack called out to the lads, who jumped to their feet and stood stiffly in response to the authority in his voice. They both looked guilty, and I suspected their master was a hard taskmaster who would not encourage his crew to stand about idle.
‘We’re looking for your master or your mate,’ Jack said. ‘If either is aboard and willing to see us, we’d be grateful.’
The two boys put their heads together and muttered for a while, then the taller one said warily, ‘Captain’s gone ashore. But the mate’s here, only he’s busy, see.’
‘I’m sure he is,’ Jack said politely. ‘All the same, we wish a few moments of his time.’
The boy, perhaps recognizing that Jack wasn’t going to give up, dipped his head in a sort of bow, and hurried off down the deck towards the five men. Waiting until one of them deigned to notice him, he spoke some urgent words, pointing back at Jack and me. The man who had addressed him – he was short and wiry, with a soft cap pulled down over curly dark hair – studied us for a few moments. Then, muttering something to his companions, he detached himself, strode up the deck and ran nimbly down the plank.
‘Thomas Gournay,’ he said. ‘You wanted to talk to me?’
He was looking intently at us, the deep-set brown eyes flashing from one to the other. But his expression was pleasant; he seemed more curious than hostile.
Jack introduced us – Thomas Gournay gave me a courteous nod as Jack spoke my name – and said, ‘I understand from the master of The Maid of the Marsh that you recently carried a passenger here from Yarmouth? She was a noblewoman, dark-eyed, well-dressed and-’
‘She had a baby with her – a little boy,’ I interrupted. It was the most distinguishing feature about Lady Rosaria.
Thomas Gournay was shaking his head slowly, his expression puzzled. ‘We didn’t pick up anyone in Yarmouth,’ he said. ‘We only stopped to unload some cargo. Wine,’ he added, ‘from Spain, for the lords and ladies up at Norwich Castle.’
‘You’ve come up from Spain?’ I asked. Maybe that was where Lady Rosaria came from! Gurdyman had told me a lot about Spain, and its dark-eyed, olive-skinned inhabitants.
‘Oh, no!’ Thomas said with a short laugh. ‘We don’t venture much further away than northern France, and it’s only very rarely we go down to Bordeaux, although that’s where we’ve just been. We picked up our cargo of wine, as well as a party of pilgrims on their way back from Santiago. But, like I said, no passengers came aboard at Yarmouth.’
I remembered something that the master of The Maid of the Marsh had told us. She’d underpaid the cost of her passage, and one of the crew came after her to collect what she owed. ‘She didn’t pay her full fare,’ I said. ‘One of your crew had to follow her to The Maid of the Marsh and ask her to settle with you.’
Thomas Gournay’s eyes widened in understanding. ‘Her!’ he exclaimed. ‘Oh, yes, I remember her, all right.’ He frowned. ‘She maintained it was a mistake, apparently. Said she didn’t understand the coinage. A likely tale,’ he added in a mutter.
‘Where did she board your ship?’ Jack asked. Although you couldn’t have detected it from his voice, I sensed that he was suddenly very tense.
‘She was with the pilgrims waiting at Bordeaux,’ Thomas replied promptly. ‘There was quite a party of them, all glowing with the joys of Saint James’s shrine, and eager to get back home and tell everyone all about it. And that showed just how impressive the place must be,’ he added thoughtfully, ‘when you consider they had bad weather all the way from Corunna.’
‘Do you recall the lady’s name?’ Jack went on.
Thomas grinned. ‘We don’t usually bother to ask,’ he said. ‘It’s all the same to us as long as they pay, and when people do volunteer a name, very often it’s not the one they were given when they came into this world.’
‘Did she have servants with her?’ I demanded.
But Thomas was shaking his head. ‘Now that I can’t tell you,’ he said. ‘They all came pushing on board, and it was pelting down with rain, so they were shoving each other out of the way so as to get to the best spots. Not that there’s much to choose one place from another,’ he added, glancing up at the exposed deck, ‘especially when there’s a south-west wind blowing hard. You don’t notice the rain so much once the spray hits you!’ He laughed. ‘And then most of them started being sick, which added to the confusion. You’d be amazed how many folk don’t know not to vomit into the wind.’
‘You didn’t notice if-’ Jack began.
But Thomas Gournay, evidently, had just experienced a flash of memory. ‘Seasickness!’ he cried. ‘Now then, that does recall something to mind. She did have a maid with her, that haughty woman, and the maid was poorly. She’d been fine on the run up from Corunna, apparently – and usually, if you can survive those conditions without losing your breakfast, you can survive anything – but she started being sick maybe half a day after we left port, and the lady rigged up some sort of a shelter for the pair of them and the baby. Folk quite often do that; anything that keeps even a part of the wet off them is welcome. It wasn’t much, just a heavy cloak and a bit of blanket fastened to the rail above them and stretched out to the deck so as to make a little private space underneath. Now you’re likely to find rough seas anywhere in the Bay of Biscay, even hugging the shore, and normally the sickness eases once you find calmer water. That poor maid, however, went right on suffering, and her lady was forced to roll up her sleeves and look after her.’
He paused to draw breath. I saw Lady Rosaria in my imagination, all alone with her infant son in an alien world except for one single maid so ravaged by seasickness that she had become a liability rather than a help. I began to feel very sorry for her, and I experienced a sharp stab of guilt at the way I’d judged her so harshly. She-
Jack’s quiet voice broke into my thoughts: ‘What happened to the maid?’
I understood the importance of his question even as my mind raced to catch up. The maid had gone aboard at Bordeaux with Lady Rosaria, but by the time the veiled lady and her baby reached Cambridge, she had been alone. We knew the servant hadn’t boarded The Maid of the Marsh; had she actually left The Good Shepherd, or had something happened to her on the journey up from Bordeaux?
Thomas Gournay was screwing up his face in his efforts to remember. ‘We’d been disembarking passengers all along the coast, and we dropped off a handful here,’ he said, ‘and then there was only a couple left who sailed on with us to Boston, and that was the end of our run. I wouldn’t swear to it, but, as far as I can recall, the lady enlisted the help of two of the other pilgrims to get her maid ashore. Well, I can tell you that two men carried someone on to the quay, and I’m guessing it was the maid, because the lady was fussing about and giving orders. It was raining again, like it had been in Bordeaux, and they all had their hoods up.’
‘Do you recall what the maid looked like?’ Jack asked.
Thomas frowned. ‘I’m trying to remember if I ever noticed,’ he admitted. There was what seemed like a very long silence. ‘Yes,’ he said eventually. ‘She approached me at the start of the run, soon after they’d all boarded and had finished elbowing each other out of the way. She said her lady needed fresh water, and complained because all that was available in the barrel was brackish. I told her it was the best they were going to get, and she sniffed and turned on her heel.’
‘And?’ Jack prompted.
‘And, what?’
Jack gave an almost inaudible sigh, which I thought was remarkably restrained of him. Personally, I felt like screaming with frustration. ‘What did the maid look like?’ he asked again.