Meanwhile I was a prisoner, and she had found a way to visit with me, and we now were constant lovers, with a rich and powerful lodestone force pulling our bodies together in a vehement and most ecstatic way. It seemed more than natural, that ceaseless yearning of the flesh.
And indeed it was, for she said one day, “Do you still have by you the little talisman I gave you?”
“I do. I keep it on a cord, around my waist, sometimes, to remind me of you, and when I sleep it is against me, or beneath my head.”
“And you had such scorn for it, when I gave it!”
“Well, but it is from you, and so I have grown fond of it.”
“I did lie to you concerning it,” said she, with a wanton grin.
“In what way?”
“That it was an amulet of protection. It is not that.”
“What is it, then?”
She laughed playfully. “An amulet of love,” said she. “To bind you to me, to make you crave me. For I did crave you, but you never looked upon me with desire, so that I thought I must have recourse to some greater power. Was that not wicked of me?”
“Ah,” said I, amused and uneasy both at once: for this was witchcraft, and I feared witchcraft. Yet did I tell myself that it was not the amulet that inspired this lust, but simply her beauty; although I felt some doubt of that in the depth of my soul, and some fear, that in keeping it close I was exposing myself to deviltry.
She brought me wine. She brought me little cakes. She bathed me with her sponge when prison filth grew too deep on me. She opened her body to me joyously and freely, and we developed vast skills at the sport of love, so that prison was less of a torment to me than prison is generally thought to be. Yet was I still a prisoner.
“The new governor will be here in a few weeks’ time,” she told me. “Then shall I intercede with him, by means of Don João de Mendoça, and have you set free from this hole.”
“And shall I still see you, when I am free?”
“We shall have to go about it secretly. But we shall go about it, I pledge you that!”
“And if your fine Portugal friends discover us, what shall become of me? Back to the dungeon? Or worse?”
“They shall not discover us.”
“Aye, you are practiced in these crafts, I know. If you were a man, I think you would be governor of this place before you were thirty.”
“If I were a man,” she said. “But I shall be the governor’s governor instead, and have the rewards without the burdens. Is that not better? Considering that I am not a man, and am by that disqualified from holding office. Why is that, d’ye think, that women may not hold office?”
“In England they may,” I pointed out.
“In England, aye! But these Portugals think otherwise. They think a woman good for only two things, both of them done in bed, and the second one being childbearing.”
“The other is not done in bed, Dona Teresa.”
“Not by you and me in this bedless cell, perhaps. But customarily—”
“Nay, I mean cookery,” I said, “for is that not the other thing women do, when they are not with child?”
She laughed heartily at that, and gave me a broad nudge.
Then, more serious, she said, “What offices may women hold in England?”
“Forsooth, Dona Teresa, the very highest! Surely you know we have a Queen, and had another Queen before her!”
That did not awe her. “So I am aware,” she said. “Your Elizabeth, and your Mary that was half a Spaniard. But queening is only an accident of birth. If there is no son, then the daughter must have the throne, or the power will be lost to the royal family, is that not so? Even the Spaniards, to whom a woman is nothing, have had queens, I think.”
“Aye, Isabella of Castile, for one, and mayhap others.”
“But what other offices in England do women hold? Do they sit in your courts and go to your councils?”
I thought a moment. “Nay, it is impossible.”
“Impossible, or only unthinkable?”
“There are no women in our Parliament. We choose none for our Judiciary.”
“And as your priests? Any women?”
“Nay, not that, either.”
“But you have a Queen. She is supreme, and has heads stricken off as it pleases her, and looses the forces of war. Below her, nothing. Eh, Andres?”
“It is so. Save for the Queen, our women are subject to their fathers and husbands in all things.”
“So it is the same for all you Europeans. A clever woman must rule by ruling her rulers, unless she be a queen. Do you regard me as clever, Andres?”
“You are the most clever woman that ever I knew, though it may be that our Elizabeth is more than your match. But perhaps no one else.”
“Then I shall gain what I crave,” she said, “which is majesty and might, or at the very least some strength of place. Fie, a woman has more privilege among the blackamoors of Kongo than they grant her in Europe. The blacks have had queens, too. And their women may own property. Yours are property.”
“You speak of the Kongo folk as ‘they’ and ‘blackamoors.’ You speak of the Portugals as ‘these Portugals.’ Do you stand outside both peoples, then, and look upon them all as strangers?”
Her face grew downcast. “In some degree I do.”
“Outside both, a member of neither? Is that not painful to you, to have no true nation, Teresa?”
“That was not of my choosing.”
“Who were your parents?”
“My father was a Portugal in the court of Don Alvaro, the Manikongo, that is, the black king. He was an adviser on military matters, and served the Manikongo bravely when the Jaqqas invaded his kingdom and drove the king into sanctuary on the Hippopotamus Island. He was Don Rodrigo da Costa, a very great man. He is dead now, of a fever taken while in battle.”
“And your mother?”
“Dona Beatriz, whose father was Duarte Mendes, the viceroy at São Tomé. They say that she was beautiful, that she resembled me much, but was darker, having more African blood than I. I never knew her. She died when I was a babe.”
“That grieves me. I also lost my mother early.”
“The Jaqqas took her, and I suppose used her in their feasts.” For a moment her eyes showed pain, and anger. Then she looked to me and said, “If she had lived, she would have been a great woman. I will be great in her stead. I will find the place where power is in this land, and I will seize possession of it. Unless”— and she smiled wantonly—”unless you bring me forth from here when you escape, and take me to England. In England I would also be famous and great. Tell me of England, Andres.”
“What would you know?”
“Is it cold there?”
“Nay, not very. The land is green. The rain falls all the year long, and the grass is thick.”
“I hear of a thing called snow.”
“There is not much of that,” I said.
“Tell me what it is.”
“Snow is rain, that freezes in the winter and falls from the sky, and covers the countryside like a white blanket, but not often for very long.”
“Freezes? That word is unknown to me.”
I groped and fumbled for explanations. “On the highest mountains of Africa the air is cold, is it not?”
“Yes.”
“And are those mountains not covered at their crests by a whiteness?”
“So I have heard. But I have not seen it.”
“The whiteness is water, that has been turned hard by the coldness, and made into snow, and also into ice, which is snow pressed tight. But why talk so much of snow? England has little snow. It is a mild cool land with sweet air, and fine fleecy clouds, and sometimes the sky is gray with dampness and fog, but we have come to love even that.”
“You scorn the Pope there.”