Kit (7 page)

He narrowed his eyes. ‘Are you even called Walsh?’

‘Yes,’ she said fervently. ‘Christian Walsh as I live and breathe.’

‘Hmm.’ He smiled half a smile. ‘Well, Christian Walsh. Keep living and breathing for as long as you can.’

And a soldier he always is decent and clean …

‘Arthur McBride’ (trad.)

They were a shambling, sorry set of soldiers that landed in Genova, with no formation or pride. Kit followed her fellows, her red back heating uncomfortably in the sun. The whitewashed buildings of the docks gave way to tall palaces and churches, so crammed together as to form shadowy alleys which the keen sun could not penetrate. Everything here seemed black or white; a pied city. The only stroke of colour seemed to be the slash of the red cross on the lighthouse. The marble was very white, the shadows very black; the plaster houses bright, their inhabitants dark as Romanies. Underfoot there were black and white chequered pavings, which gave Kit the uncomfortable feeling that she was a counter in a game of which she did not know the rules.

Within a furlong she saw more grand, lofty marble houses than she’d seen in the whole of Dublin, and they all seemed impossibly tall, with many storeys piled one on top of the other, with ornate pillars and decorative windows. The local Spaniards, a swarthy sort of people, jeered at them from the dark doorways and threw cabbage leaves. One offending leaf sat on Kit’s shoulder for a few steps of the march like a malodorous epaulette. She brushed it off, perplexed. She’d understood that they were to be fighting the French, so the Spanish were presumably their allies. Why, then, were they not greeted as conquering heroes? Perhaps it was a consequence of their shabby appearance. The officers, at the front of the procession, gave better face – they at least had shining buckles and brushed hats, and their boots showed at least some acquaintance with polish. The Marquis de Pisare, who made the head of the snake, led his men to a great white house deep in the heart of the city – such a place must be the home of a mighty man indeed, some local grandee. The dwelling had great double doors with a tiny door set within. The marquis knocked imperiously at the eye of the needle and a wizened priest appeared. It was only when Kit followed the others inside to a hushed candlelit interior, heavy with incense, that she realised that the house was God’s. The foot soldiers hung back while the marquis knelt at the shrine; a lifesize plaster figure crowded about with all manner of ex-voto objects – helmets and shields of days past, shredded banners, seashells, driftwood, planks from the clinkers of ships, a baby’s rattle, even a set of wooden teeth.

The priest came down the line of shabby soldiers, dousing them with holy water shaken from an olive branch. After her personal rain shower Kit tugged at the black sleeve of the priest. She pointed to the shrine and shrugged expressively. He understood. ‘
La Madonna della Fortuna
,’ he whispered.

Kit’s dry lips parted. The Madonna della Fortuna. The Marquis de Pisare was clearly determined that they should thank their saviour, and so she was to meet, face to face, the heavenly lady who had saved her from the waves. Yes, the Madonna had saved all these others too, but Kit felt that it was
her
personal salvation. She shuffled forward in the velvet, scented dark, and at length it was her turn to kneel. Instead of looking down in penitent thanks she looked up into the figure’s eyes, the orbs painted crudely in the black and white of the city. Kit could see, from this distance, that the Madonna was not a plaster saint. She was made of wood. She was a ship’s figurehead.

Kit gazed up at the Madonna, a Madonna who had also been saved from the sea. She had been crowned with gold and clothed in a cerulean blue cape. She had been given a coral rose to hold in her pinched fingers, and handed a child that wasn’t hers to hold in her crooked arms.

Kit felt comforted. This was not the Virgin. She was in disguise too. Kit felt a kinship with the wooden impostor and wondered what her story was. What had her ship been called? Who was she really? She might have been a Jezebel, a wooden whore.

It was a salutary lesson. She realised how different the male Kit she had created was from the female. As a woman, she had been confident, funny, talkative, brave, courageous. As a man she was a mouse. What she had to be was Kit, the essence of herself, but as a man; Kit as if she had been born a boy. She had to talk and laugh, and hold forth, and run down hills, just as she had as a woman. If she retreated into herself, the men would try to draw her forth. And once they started looking, they would most likely find her out. She could not risk discovery now, now that she walked on the same foreign soil as Richard.

As she straightened up from her kneeling position, the next fellow jostled her as she rose, impatient to take his place. ‘Mary’s tits,’ he said, ‘did you tell her your whole history? There’s others a-waiting.’

Kit took him firmly by the arm and looked in his eyes – the first time she’d looked directly at anyone since she’d donned her disguise. ‘Step back, sir,’ she said, gruff and low. ‘And mind your tongue. You are in God’s house.’ She saw the fellow take a pace backward to let her by, and as she walked down the aisle, she noted the Marquis de Pisare regarding her with approval for the second time in her short career.

They marched forth to a ruined marble palazzo near the cathedral where they were to be billeted for one night. Kit had never seen a place so grand, nor so shabby. The place presented its own problems; there were flea-bitten straw pallets strewn on the floor and the dragoons must sleep as close as maggots crowding cheese. The necessary house was no more than a bucket in the corner which stank strongly of nightsoil.

Lieutenant Gardiner, in his peremptory tones, answered her unspoken questions. ‘Tomorrow we march to meet Tichborne’s regiment of foot. Your evening is your own, but we meet at dawn in the square before the cathedral in full uniform. No man shall be tardy nor jug-bitten.’

As the men scattered, cheering faintly, Kit stood rooted. A march to meet Tichborne – and Richard. Joy and fear fought in her breast – she would see him soon, but how long would the march be, and to where? She looked at the little necessary bucket in the corner, covered with a stained cloth. An idea had formed in her head on that long voyage, and now she must be a man for a little longer, the idea must become a reality.

While the others set out to drink their pay in the dockside taverns, Kit went her own way into the black and white town. As the citizens gabbled around her pointing at her clothes, she memorised her route back to the large square where the soldiers were billeted. She felt entirely alone in this odd place where churches looked like houses and houses looked like churches. Perhaps everything was in disguise. The cathedral, guarded at its steps by roaring stone lions, was rendered in black and white marble in crazy stripes. Kit did not enter, but walked into the tiny alleys behind the duomo; here, cheek by jowl with Genova’s greatest church, she was sure she would find what she was looking for.

And she did indeed. She paused outside the door and looked up at the universal sign for a silversmith; three splayed silver arrows, just the same as the smiths on Dame Street in Dublin. Here, as there, there was a burly guard to watch the door – this one a hairless giant bristling with weapons. But he nodded benignly enough at Kit as she laid her hand on the door and went inside.

She was almost blinded by the glaring constellation that awaited her within. Everything was rendered in silver: goblets, coin chests, spoons, daggers, bracelets, even an arquebus with silver shot. Here too she looked into the countenance of the counterfeit Virgin; the Madonna della Fortuna was rendered over and over again, in miniature no bigger than a silver egg, on a huge canvas in an ornate silver frame that sprouted leaves and curlicues, in silver statuary; her face reflected a thousand times in the silver-backed looking glasses that hung about.

In all the glory Kit did not at once see that there was a living figure among the glory. A woman stepped forth.

‘
Mi dica
?’ she said.

Kit, remembering just in time, doffed her tricorn. She wondered, as she bowed, how she would possibly explain what she wanted to buy. ‘Can you understand me?’ she asked tentatively.

The woman shrugged. ‘Certainly.’ She spoke English with a strange accent, making a ‘Sh’ sound on the C.

‘Are you English?’

‘I am a Hollander. But I speak a little of most languages and more of a few. In trade one must be able to speak to all nations.’ The woman had a pale face, tidy ash-blond hair and a fringe cut across her brows, not unlike Kit’s own style. She held her hands before her, clasped not above a full skirt but over a leather apron. Her hands were her strangest feature, for they were as green as holly, stained by some nameless compound; fingers, palms and all.

‘Is the silversmith within?’ asked Kit.

‘I am the silversmith,’ said the lady, ‘my name is Maria van Lommen.’ She held out a green hand.

Kit took it. ‘Christian Walsh. You made … all this?’ Kit’s gesture embraced the glory about her.

‘Of course. This is my business. My father makes silver in Amsterdam. I make silver here.’

Kit was impressed that a woman owned all these riches, let alone crafted them. A woman, moreover, who seemed not much older than herself. But for now, Maria’s sex made Kit’s task more difficult. It would be harder to explain what she wanted to a female.

‘It is of a … personal and delicate nature. I need … an appendage resembling …’ Kit mentally rejected all the shipboard vocabulary she had learned for the male member. ‘A man’s parts.’

Maria van Lommen nodded, her face impassive, as if Kit had asked for a silver spoon. ‘Come into the back. Gennaro!’ she called, and the giant stooped to enter the shop. ‘
Guarda qui.
’

The treasure guarded, Maria swiped back a heavy blood-velvet curtain with one green hand, and led Kit into a little atrium. ‘Is this what you are looking for?’

Ranged around the wall were raked shelves, lined with the same crimson velvet, displaying the strangest objects and contraptions Kit had ever seen.

‘You see anything you like? I got more in the drawers, different sizes, different attachments. You just say, I make bespoke.’

‘May I?’ Kit picked up one of the objects, astonished. As she turned the thing over in her hand seeing her face reflected crazily in its contours, she was flabbergasted. The thing was almost exactly what she’d imagined she needed. It was a long silver tube enclosed at one end and rounded like a male member. Below the tube hung two globes, and complicated soft leather straps were threaded through silver eyelets to attach the thing to the lower body. But surely she must be mistaken – no one could need what she had in mind. ‘What is it?’

‘Here they call it a Venetian finger.’

‘A what?’

‘A staff of love,’ said Maria. ‘A quillety, a faucetin, a dandilolly. It has many names for many nations. It straps on, so you can pleasure your man. That is what you meant, is it not? That is what you came for?’

‘No. That is … No. That is
not
what I wanted at all.’

‘See here,’ said Maria van Lommen, pressing her green hands together as if in prayer. ‘I am not your priest. I am not here to take your confession. You can dress as a soldier-boy and play your bed-games, whatever pleases you. I sell you anything, no judgement. It is good disguise, I grant you. But let us not waste time. I knew you for a woman as soon as you walked through my door.’

Kit smiled shakily at the silversmith. The discovery she most feared had come, and not at all from the quarter she’d imagined.

‘Be at your ease,’ said Maria. ‘I am not going to give you away. Why would I? Come though to the workshop, and explain to me exactly what you need.’

The workshop was a well-lit room with a long workbench littered with alien tools and compounds in small copper dishes. Crucibles and limbecs suspended above the bench connected by crazy pipes, and half-finished lumps of silver twisted into miraculous shapes, as if they were being birthed from the metal. The whole room had an odd, tangy smell, despite the casements being thrust fully open in the warm evening.

Kit talked as Maria drew on some parchment with a piece of charcoal. ‘I need an appendage that gives me the male appearance through my clothes, but I need to piss through it convincingly – as a foot soldier I will be on the road with three score men for a time, with no privacy whatsoever, and must not reveal myself. That is …’ A thought stopped her tongue.

‘That is …?’ prompted Maria gently.

‘That is if I have not revealed myself already.’

‘How could you have?’

‘Well, you knew me at once.’

Maria spread her strange hands. ‘But I am a woman. Believe me, for most men, once a person’s sex is established, that is the end of the matter. Generals of armies, admirals of navies, prime ministers and kings, priests and bishops they may be, but few of them are as perceptive as you might think. Most of them see the moon and call it a shilling.’ She rooted in a little drawer and brought out a handful of silver beads, then turned back to Kit.

‘None of my current models will fit your purpose,’ mused Maria, a pinprick of unquiet, excited fire igniting her tranquil grey eyes for the first time. ‘This will truly be a challenge. For unlike my pleasure pricks you will need a hollow member with a hole in the tip. The thing should have a pipe inside, so your urine can flow, and the pipe should turn up at the tip so that the piss arcs convincingly. But the whole apparatus must be as wide as the span of a hand, to catch your flow like a funnel.’

‘Can you do it?’

‘Yes,’ said Maria without hesitation. ‘Get undressed. There are certain measurements which must be taken. You permit me?’

Kit swallowed. ‘Yes.’

She removed her breeches fully for the first time in two weeks, conscious of the spicy smell of body odour. But Maria seemed unconcerned as she measured the distance between the top of Kit’s thighs and the distance from her buttocks to the front of her treasure pouch. ‘In the normal way the fit is not important, for the woman wears a Venetian finger for the act itself, and then takes it off and lays it by until next time. But in your case you will be wearing it all day, every day. So it must be light and serviceable and comfortable, and must not dig your flesh nor tarnish.’ Then Maria used her fingers, speaking more to herself than Kit. ‘The stream comes from here at the front … Venus hole farther back … anus farther back still.’ Kit, whose anatomy was largely a mystery to her, began to be acquainted with her own body. It seemed a woman had as many holes as a cheesecloth – three to contend with in this design alone.