“Aye, boy.”
“Why, then, an Englishman can pilot for the Portugals, or for the Dutchmen, or for the Egyptians, if need be. What matters is serving God through properly doing your task. D’ye see that, father? D’ye see that?”
And Rose Ullward I summoned out of the shades, my dark little first wife, whose father had the tavern in Plymouth. She peered at me, squinting in the darkness, and said, “You be Andrew that was my man, be you not?”
“That I be.”
“I knew you so little. Our time was so short. Be I remembered well by you?”
“In faith, not very. But I loved you, that I know.”
“Now you love another.”
“Because you were taken from me by death. God’s breath and eyes, woman, will you be jealous from the grave?”
“I am not jealous. I was betrayed by fortune. When you return from captivity, will you return to her or to me, then?”
“How can I return to you?” I asked.
“We will meet on the farther shore. You and I, and the good Jesus, and Great Harry the old King, and everyone else who ever lived and bled. Will we not? You said you loved me, Andrew.”
“And that I did. And you are the only wife I ever had. But when you went from me, I found another.”
“Aye. The way of the world. I wish you joy of her. But think of me, from time to time?”
“That I pledge,” I said, and sent her back into the realm of shades, for this imagined conversation was leading me into turbulent waters.
After her I summoned my brother? Henry and Thomas and John, and even Edward, who drowned before I was born, and talked long and earnestly with them about their lives and hopes and their skills, their fears, their purposes. I had Sir Francis Drake to lunch and John Hawkins and Sir Walter Ralegh, who was overbearing and shrewd and frighted me some. I spent a few hours discussing matters of state with Her Majesty. I had King Philip to my cell, that dour and bleak old monk of a king, and quizzed him on his creed and made him admit the Papist way was false and a mockery to the Gospels. I roved farther afield, and had the Great Khan and Prester John and the Sultan of the Turks. I got me poets, Kit Marlowe and Tom Kyd and others of the sort, and bade them read me plays, which I made up out of my own head, the play of Queen Mary and the tragedy of Samson and the play of the King of Mexico and the Spaniard conqueror. Oh, and they were such plays as would not have disgraced the Globe in London, I trow, but I can tell you not a line of them today.
In such fanciful ways my months ebbed by. Also did I pace my dungeon and count its paces, and get such other exercise as I could, and breathed as deep as I was able to make myself, despite the stench of the place, to keep my lungs in trim. And I think after my early despair I came to a kind of tranquility, like a friar in the desert: no longer bewailing the discomforts and disappointment of my life, but only taking one day at a time, as God’s decree upon me. I am in my way a fair philosopher, I suppose: I seek not to rail against the unalterable, nor to spend my energies moving the immovable.
One day at last I had a visitor other than my jailers. Dona Teresa it was, like a ray of golden sunlight lancing through the thick mud walls of my prison.
Her dark beauty glimmered and glistened in the shadows. Her eyes had a wondrous gleam and her lips, so full and broad, were shining, moist, heavy with the promise of delights. And I had mistaken this woman for a nun, once, in my sickness!
“I thought you had abandoned me,” I said.
“Poor Andres. I could not get leave to visit you, until a certain friend returned to the city from duty in the north, and by his authority granted me access. Do you suffer?”
“Nay, it is a glorious palace, and the feasts are beyond compare. It is only that I miss the hunt sometimes, and other little pleasures not available to me here, the morris-dancing and the games of bowls on the village green.”
“These words are mysteries to me.”
“What season is it?”
“The rains are upon us.”
“But not the armies of King Ngola?”
“Nay, there is peace. A new governor is coming to us, Don Francisco d’Almeida.”
My heart quickened. “Will you petition him for my freedom?”
“That I will,” she said. “And I will speak with another great man of the colony, Don João de Mendoça, who is known to me. I will bring you out of this place, Andres.”
“I pray it be soon.”
“What will you give me, if I have you set free?”
I could not fathom that. “Give you? What have I to give? You see me in rags, and less than rags. Where is my hidden store of gold, Dona Teresa? Do you know a secret that is secret even from me?”
“I know where your gold is,” she said.
“Then tell me.”
She came to my side and put her hands to my hair, coarse and tangled and foul, but still yellow, still the fair English hair so scarce in these lands.
“This is gold,” she said. She touched my beard. “And here is more of it. Holy Maria, but you are filthy!”
“There is little bathing here, Dona Teresa.”
“I will remedy that,” she said, and stroked my hair again. And looked long and strange at me.
I had not seen such forwardness from her in my hospital days. For certainly there was flowing between us now such currents as I know pass between man and woman, and my long solitude had not deceived me in that: a woman does not toy with a man’s hair, and fondle his beard, to no purpose. In the hospital I lay withered and naked before her, fouled by my own body’s foulnesses, and she seemed no more than a helpful woman of the city, doing a service to a hapless ailing man. But this was something quite other, now, this sly flirting, this playing at the game of coquetry and subtle desire.
As she stood close beside me she reached into her garments and took forth some small object, that she rubbed most lovingly against each of her breasts in turn, and then pressed to her belly and downward to the joining of her legs. After which she took this thing and put it in my hand, and folded my fingers over it, and, smiling secretly, stared most hotly into my eyes.
“Keep this by you,” she said, “and all will be well.”
I opened my hand and looked upon it. It was a wooden carving, cunningly done of some very black wood, that showed a woman with a swollen middle as though with child, and heavy breasts, and a deep slit carved in the place of her sex, and there was hair fastened to the head: five or six strands of dark coarse hair much like Dona Teresa’s own. When I touched this little idol with my thumb it felt warm to me, with the warmth of her own body impressed into it; and it troubled me, for it smelled of witchcraft.
“What is this thing?” I asked.
“A talisman,” said she, “to protect you from harm while you are in this place, and ever after.”
“A devilish little amulet, you mean?”
“An amulet,” said she, “but not devilish.”
“I think any amulet is the Devil’s manufacture.”
“A crucifix, too? Is that not an amulet?”
“Aye,” said I. “I do abhor all that sort of stuff, even the ones claimed by the Papists to be Christian.”
“Well, and abhor not this one,” Dona Teresa said. “For it will guard you, Andres.” She folded my fingers over it again, and, whispering close, said, “Take it. Keep it close by you. Do this for me, will you, in return for the services I have done you, and will in the future do you. Will you, Andres?”
“I will,” said I reluctantly. “But only because it is your gift, and I think fondly of it, that it came from you. For I tell you, I do abhor any amulet of the Devil.”