And then Bianca speaks, quietly but to devastating effect.
‘But what if she didn’t drown?’
Cecil and Spenser stare at her as though she has just uttered some Delphic prophecy.
‘The mantilla,’ Nicholas says softly.
Then he remembers the injured boy he had treated in Cork, and his tale of how the woman whom Henshawe’s men hanged had cursed them, warning them that the Virgin Mary had walked out of the sea to bring deliverance to Ireland. A wild fantasy born of fear and hatred or a piece of distorted gossip based on a kernel of truth?
‘I found a black lace mantilla caught amongst some wreckage in the cove adjacent to the one in which the vessel was cast ashore,’ Bianca continues carefully, as if a single wrong word might make the airy spirit she has conjured in her mind vanish before it can take on a more substantial form. ‘We assumed it must have been part of a wedding trousseau – cargo perhaps.’ She looks to her husband, a hint of triumph on her lips. ‘But it could mean that Constanza survived the wreck. What if she walked out of the ocean – exactly like the Merrow? What if she’s alive?’
PART 2
Our English Caesar
18
There are parts of the shipwreck of which Cachorra has no memory. Those that do remain are seared into her mind. They play out in her dreams. Never in plainsong, always with an accompaniment: shrieking wind, waves slamming against rocks with the roar of a battery of cannon firing simultaneously. A cacophony of terror.
Sometimes when she wakes she can taste salt water in her throat. Then, if she clenches her fingers, she can feel the icy slide of rough wet rope as she struggles to free Constanza from the Devil’s fishing net that had ensnared her. And above that din she can hear the voice of Don Rodriquez, the fear for his daughter turning his usually elegant Castilian into an animalistic howl of desperation. But as for the moment when the wave dragged the wreckage over the side – taking her and Constanza with it – that is an empty hole in her recollection, as deep and as dark as the ocean itself.
That she fought like a lioness to live, of that there is no doubt. And she has an impression – it must have been when she surfaced briefly – of being… thrilled?
Looking back, she understands that the imminent danger of dying triggered a much earlier memory: a memory of herself as a child, running out across the hot Hispaniola sand and into the breaking surf to help her fisherman father land his catch. That memory belongs to a child who was not then called Cachorra. That name had been taken from her when the Conquistadores came.
To her surprise, the heavy mat of rope and broken timber that carried them both overboard had proved their saviour. Buoyant, spread out on the water, it had become their life raft, carrying them on the surging current away from the San Juan de Berrocal.
When, at last, she had managed to drag Constanza and herself above the surface of the water, using every ounce of her strength to get them both at least partly onto the mat, she had time only to register the distant anguished face of Don Rodriquez staring at them from the quarterdeck of the wallowing, dismasted wreck before a new danger loomed: the prospect of being dashed to pieces against the knife-edged cliff that jutted out into the sea between two coves.
Again, the mat had saved them. It had acted in the manner of a sea anchor, slowing their progress, letting the heavy swell break through the lattice of debris as it charged towards the rocks, but also catching the return surge and keeping them from being dashed to pulp.
And then, somehow, Cachorra had known they were going to live.
If anyone had asked her in the strange days since then, she would have been unable to say exactly when she had felt a change in the motion of the sea. It could have been a few minutes or a few hours after they went over the side. But at some point she had become conscious that its power was no longer coming up from the depths, implacable and vast. It had slowed, become more languorous. It reminded her of one of the great fishes her father had struggled to land, his hands bleeding from his unshakeable grip on the line. It was as though the fight had gone out of it, and it wanted nothing more than to close its fishy eyes and sleep.
Eventually the mat had drifted onto a steep, shelving bank of rock that looked to her like a jumble of giant pewter plates. By that time the San Juan was lost from her sight. Mercifully, the thunder of the waves had drowned out its wrecking, along with the cries of those who had so temporarily survived. But it would be many days before Cachorra learned of their fate.
Letting go of the hemp, she had dragged Constanza onto the rim of the first level of rock, about an arm’s length above the water. It had not been easy. Her shins and arms still bear the scars. But she had done it. She had saved them both.
It had taken her an age to calm Constanza’s hysterical sobbing, but she had managed it. She had soothed her, sung lullabies to her, reminded her of the times they had giggled together at the more preposterous courtiers they had seen at the Escorial, like the old Duque de Navalpino, who had a wine-soaked nose the shape of a berenjena, and Conde Alejandro de Mandresa, whose leather hose squeaked when he strutted, making everyone think he was passing wind. Eventually Constanza’s plump cheeks, gleaming with brine, had sagged into an expression that seemed to suggest acceptance, though Cachorra had judged it far too early to raise the matter of her father’s likely survival. For a moment she had thought that a grateful Constanza was about to embrace her, to thank her for saving them both. But she had been wrong.
‘Where is my mantilla?’ Constanza had demanded petulantly. ‘A lady of my quality cannot possibly go to the altar unveiled! My husband will consider me little better than a whore. How could you have let me lose it, you foolish girl?’
Exhaustion had made impossible the idea of wading to the safety of the beach. The water here was too deep, the rocks on either side still a danger until the tide dropped. Besides, the beach itself was some considerable way off, little more than a narrow strand of sand at the foot of a gorse-covered bluff rising steeply into a narrow defile. Cachorra had seen, halfway between their perch and the beach, a place where the floor of the inlet shelved up towards the surface, a line of white foam marking the spot. But beyond it the water was darker, deeper. She could remember enough of her childhood in Hispaniola to know the foolishness of second-guessing shifting sands, or underestimating riptides in shallow water.
She had looked upwards, hoping there might be a way to climb to the top of the headland. But her stomach had rebelled at the vertiginous rock face and the gulls wheeling in the sky high above. The salt water she had swallowed spewed itself over her already soaked needle-lace smock that Don Rodriquez had fetched from Venice for a price that would have bought an entire village in the Carib.
In the end she had decided there was no option other than to stay where she was. She would have to endure Constanza’s blubbering and her own misery until the tide went out and she could safely wade ashore.
And that is what Cachorra had done. Shivering, dozing sporadically when the fatigue overwhelmed her, she had sought relief from Constanza’s utterly pointless objections to their plight by listening to the crashing of the waves and trying to catch a distant echo of the breakers rolling onto a beach in the Hispaniola of her childhood.
It had been during one of these wide-awake dreams that she had seen, quite clearly, her older brother standing on the distant bluff, a horse grazing peacefully beside him. He had been staring out at her, as though he wasn’t sure it was her, which was understandable – because Cachorra had been only six when she’d last seen him. She had wondered how he had managed to find his way to Ireland, and on a horse too. Cachorra had never seen a horse until the Spanish had come to her village, but she was sure they could not swim across an entire ocean. It had been that impossibility that had convinced her that what she was seeing was an illusion. It must have been conjured out of her mind by exhaustion, or some mischievous demon.