The previous evening, before we slept, I heard my father telling my mother what our plans should be. It would not be wise to travel on from England to Antwerp, as he had originally intended, for the Spanish King had turned his attention to his possessions in the Low Countries. Antwerp would not be safe for us. We would settle in England, where there was already a sizeable Marrano community, who would welcome us. I could not imagine what this place ‘England’ would be like, but I was beginning to feel hopeful. If only my sister Isabel were with us, I would almost feel happy.
After a time, the wind got up and a storm began to heave the seas about. Not a great storm, but enough to make me uncertain on my legs, so I went back down to the cabin.
I found a scene of chaos. My father’s medicines were scattered about, phials overturned and smashed, powders strewn over the small table. My mother was lying on the floor, writhing like a creature in agony. I cried out in horror and flung myself down beside her.
‘Mama! Mama!’ I cradled her in my arms. ‘What has happened?’
She looked at me with feverish eyes, and gasped. A little blood and saliva trickled from the corner of her mouth.
‘I took,’ she whispered, ‘I took . . . things to kill the baby.’
I picked up the bottles lying near her hand. Seeds of flos pavonis. Leaf of leonurus cardiaca. Root of the rare American cimicifuga racemosa. Tincture of stachys officinalis. All the bottles were empty. Even then, I knew what they signified.
She could speak no more, for her body arched and heaved, and suddenly a great bloody mass burst out between her legs. She screamed and retched.
Terror swept over me. I did not know what to do. I did not know what to do. I seized a bolster from the bunk and wedged it under her head, then ran for my father. I seemed to hunt for hours, running up and down companionways, along the decks, until I found him at last in the captain’s cabin.
‘Come,’ I gasped. ‘You must come. Mama.’ The words froze on my tongue.
I clutched my father’s sleeve in both hands. If I could hold on to him, perhaps the horror would stop. Time would slip back. Everything would be as it had been, only a few hours before.
When we reached my mother she was breathing still, but the floor was awash with blood and she could not speak.
‘What did she take, Caterina?’ My father took me by the shoulders and shook me so I could not speak.
‘Abortifacients,’ I managed to say at last, breaking away from his grasp and pointing at the empty bottles. Tears were running down my face and soaking the front of my tunic. Jaime’s tunic, ragged and filthy.
‘But why?’ His cry was terrible to hear. ‘Why?’
I hung my head. I could not meet his eyes. ‘She was raped,’ I whispered. ‘Over and over, they raped her in the prison. She told me she was with child. While we were still in the prison. And now, she said . . . now all she could say to me, was that she wanted to kill the baby.’
‘She has killed herself as well!’ he wailed, taking my mother in his arms.
We made her as comfortable as we could, but the blood flowed and flowed. My father helped her to drink an infusion of capsella bursa pastoris, which is believed to stop haemorrhage, but I guessed from his face that there was no hope. I know now that she had taken far too much of the drugs. A lethal dose. She was so desperate to kill that child which made her feel defiled.
By the next morning she was too weak even to lift her head to sip water. She asked our forgiveness, and died before noon. They slid her overboard, my mother who had disguised me as a boy and kept me safe all those months, in the prison of the Inquisition. Kept me safe by enduring all that they had made her suffer, to protect me. The sailors had wrapped a shroud about her, but not sewed it as close as they should, so that those cruel waves plucked it away and I saw her pale face looking up at me before her heavy skirts dragged her down and she was gone for ever.
Chapter Nineteen
On Board the Victory, 1589
The present storm lasted three days and three nights, and by the time it died away the Victory was off the Pointe de St. Mathieu in the west of Brittany. More men had died during the storm, but none of us had the strength any longer to heave them up on deck and tip them overboard, so they lay and rotted where they were. Towards the end of the next day, the ninth day since we had left Cascais – or was it the tenth? – I dragged myself up the companionway, one rung at a time. The last of the pewter-grey storm clouds lingered over France, but the Channel lay ahead of us, clear under the July sun, a kinder sun than we had known in Portugal.
The ship was making its way slowly northeast, slowly because we were under half sail, since many of the sailors lay dying of starvation and disease like the soldiers, and those who were still on their feet had barely strength to trim the sails. There were four men at the whipstaff to control the rudder, two on each side. One man alone had not the power left in his arms to move it an inch. Behind us, the remaining ships of our broken fleet straggled, unkempt, their sails sagging untrimmed, their yardarms kilted over at careless angles. Captain Oliver was on the forecastle deck, and I made my way slowly towards him, holding the rail, for I was unsteady on my feet.
‘Where are we now?’ I asked.
Without answering, he pointed to some jagged white rocks thrusting up out of the sea ahead, amidst a churning maelstrom of waves, while the ship, groaning as if her timbers had been wrenched in the tempest, began to turn gradually to starboard.
I shook my head. ‘I’m no seaman. What are those?’
‘The Needles,’ he said, and his voice creaked as though the lack of water had caused rust to set in. ‘Off the tip of Cornwall. Did you not see them on our way out? Nay perhaps not. I remember, the rain was as thick as a heavy mist.’
He coughed, a dry hacking sound.
‘The men are too weary to sail as far as Plymouth tonight,’ he said, when he could speak again. ‘We’ll heave to when it gets dark, and reach port in the morning.’
I carried the good news to the soldiers down below, that we were in sight of the tip of England, but they looked at me with lacklustre eyes and made no response. When I found Dr Nuñez in his cabin, he was little better.
‘Plymouth?’ he said. ‘Well, at least let us hope there will be food in Plymouth.’
His face was pinched and grey, and his eyes sunk in dark hollows below his tangled eyebrows. Like all the men, he had neither shaved nor trimmed his beard for weeks. Apart from the young cabin boys, I was the only beardless person aboard. As for all our hair, it was matted and lice-ridden, and lately frosted with salt from the spray. And filthy, as our bodies were filthy. I sank down on a joint stool opposite him, where he sat on his bunk, slumped in despair. I was so tired I could not keep on my feet any longer.
‘Though there are few enough of us left to eat it,’ he said, picking up his thought again. ‘Any food. In Plymouth. And then the reckoning comes.’
‘What will happen to the men?’
He shrugged. ‘Given a meal and turned ashore, I suppose.’
‘Without pay?’ I stared at him. ‘After all they have suffered?’
‘Who has the wherewithal to pay them?’ He lifted his eyes to mine. They were full of despair. ‘The investors have sunk everything in this expedition, with nothing to show for it. None of the Dom’s glorious promises made good. I shall be near ruined myself. The men were to have been paid with the booty seized from the sack of Lisbon.’