The Tenth Gift (12 page)

“Good day, daughter.”

Jane Tregenna had not succumbed to her Puritan brother’s plain ways. She wore a deep blue robe with silver inlay in its bodice and at the wrists, and a collar of fine lace.

“For goodness’ sake, take off that dreadful coif!” And before Cat could unstring the cap, her mother had yanked it from her head. “Your hair is your crowning glory—do not hide it away. And, oh, that threadbare old gown!” she declared, under the disapproving eye of her brother. She tucked her arm through Cat’s and marched her toward the church. “I am not entirely happy about this matter with Master Bolitho, Catherine, but Ned has overruled me. Lady Harris assures me Robert will have a good living at Kenegie and succeed Parsons as the steward, which is not a bad position, I suppose.” She sucked her teeth, so that all the little lines of discontent around her thin lips deepened to crevasses. “But I have to confess myself a little disappointed. I had thought you might catch one of the Harris boys.”

“You make them sound like fish, Mother, there for the taking.”

“They say a cunning fisherman can land a whale, if he’s so minded.”

“Well, even if I were so minded, Margaret Harris is not. She watches me like a hawk and keeps her lads well away from me, all the time throwing Rob in my path. But what’s done is done; this is not a subject I much wish to discuss.”

Her mother pursed her lips. “I’m sure your uncle will have more to say at dinner. He is most delighted that you are to be settled.”

At that moment, the sun struck through the mist and the spire of the chapel gleamed in golden light.

“God is smiling on us.”

This was intoned by a tall, weathered-looking man who had just entered the churchyard. He had an eagle’s beak of a nose, a bald pate, and a froth of white beard. He now continued: “From Heaven the Lord looks down on the Earth and all the nations shall revere His name, and all the kings of Earth His glory.”

He turned his fierce gaze upon the crowd, one by one, and one by one they scuttled inside. At last his glance came to rest on Annie Bad-cock, standing on the other side of the churchyard wall. A curious expression played across a face as wrinkled as a withered apple, an expression made grotesque by the old woman’s mismatched eyes:

The blind one stared right back at him, but the seeing eye looked out over the misty bay.

“Won’t you come in, goodwife, and offer your heart to the Lord?”

Old Annie Badcock raised up her face and grinned her gummy grin, the one that gave small children nightmares. “Nay, bless thee, Preacher. I’ve never been nobody’s wife; nor good, neither! I’ll stay out here like the old sinner I am and save my own soul.”

“None but the Lord can save thy soul, old woman.”

“Be that as it may, I’m off to my cot, Walter Truran.” And now she swiveled her good eye in Cat’s direction. “If thee has the sense the good God gave thee, ye’ll get back in the carriage with thy young man and lay down in his arms. Mark what I say: Ye’ll regret it if ye don’t.”

Some of the listeners laughed at Cat’s discomfiture, but her uncle was furious. “Get away with you, you foul beldame, and stop talking such blather. Shoo! Shoo, now!”

For a long second the old woman held Cat’s eye, then she threw her shawl up over her head and was gone.

Jane Tregenna clicked her tongue. “It really is time Penzance had a madhouse like Bodmin wherein we can sweep up all such leavings.”

“That’s not very Christian of you, Mother,” Cat said crossly. What could the old besom mean? Did she know Rob? Indeed, had he put her up to it? With these thoughts in her head she followed her uncle into the chapel of Our Lady and took her seat on the outside of the family pew.

“I will show you the eight particular properties of a man without Christ!” the preacher roared suddenly, and a hush fell throughout the congregation.

This was what they had come to witness. This was what they wanted, a proper Bible-thumper, all hellfire and damnation.

“Firstly, every man without Jesus Christ is a base man. Though you are born of the blood of nobles, and though you are of the offspring of princes, yet if you have not the royal blood of Jesus Christ running in your veins, you are a base man.”

And he fixed them all with his bright blue eyes, his gaze pinning them like butterflies to a board.

“Secondly, a man without Christ is a bondman. This it says in John 8:36: ‘If the Son shall make you free, then are you free indeed, for if you do not have an interest in Christ to free you from the slavery of sin and Satan, you are slaves: slaves to sin, to the Devil, and to the law!’”

A woman in the middle row began to rock and moan, a raw, ragged sound that went on and on. It was Nell Chigwine. Cat sighed. The Reverend Veale never subjected his congregation to such fierce words: He adjured them to treat one another with Christian charity and took them gently through the parables and the Psalms. She wished she was sitting with the Kenegie household in her usual place in Gulval Church, where she could peruse her little book.…

The preacher’s balled fist hammered on the pulpit and Cat came to herself with a start.

“Fifthly, he is a deformed man. A man without Christ is like a body full of sores and blotches. He is like a dark house without light and a body without a head, and such a man must be a deformed man.”

The preacher’s voice lowered and he gazed out at them sorrowfully as if they were all already lost to hope. “Sixthly, he is a most disconsolate man. Without an interest in Christ, all your comforts are but crosses, and all your mercies are but miseries.

“Seventh, he is a dead man! Take away Christ from a man and you take away his life, and take away life from a man and he is a dead lump of flesh!”

The echo of his words rang around the rafters, and one of the small children in the front row burst into noisy tears and had to be shushed by his mother. Into the small pause caused by this disturbance came a roar and a crash. The heavy wooden door at the back of the chapel rebounded off the stone wall.

Preacher Truran glared at the latecomer. His chest swelled as if he was about to deliver a bellow of outrage at such rudeness. Then his eyes bulged in disbelief and his jaw dropped.

One by one, the congregation turned to see who the intruder might be who had reduced their fire-and-brimstone preacher to such unlikely silence. Cat craned her neck, and at that moment a gang of men burst into the church, howling like banshees. They wore long, dark robes, their heads were shaved, and they brandished curved, wicked-looking swords. Swords just like the one she had glimpsed on the table in Kenegie’s kitchen; like the one discovered in the wood of the abandoned fishing boat
Constance.
The men’s skin was as dark as the gypsy woman’s, the whites of their eyes brilliant by contrast. A dozen of them ran down the nave, crying
“Allah akbar!”

Pirates, thought Cat, barely able to breathe. Her heart hammered against her breastbone like a trapped bird. Turkish pirates.

Alderman Polglaze lurched to his feet. “Who are you?” he demanded of the first man down the aisle. The man laughed, showing an array of white teeth; with his graying beard and his long face, he looked like a wolf. The alderman was used to being listened to and obeyed. He was also rather short-sighted. “How dare you interrupt our worship? If you want alms, you must wait outside until the service is over. Get out of here at once!” He put out a hand as if to draw a meeting to order. The raider felled him with a casually brutal blow. A woman screamed. Mistress Polglaze was on her knees at her husband’s side, shielding him from the scything sword that would surely follow. But the raider merely reversed his blade and struck her with the hilt so that she collapsed on top of the alderman. They lay there in a vast mound of fabric and flesh, unmoving. Their children began to scream, setting off all the other children around them. In the front row, a toddler wailed hysterically, his face purpling.

One of the raiders flourished his blade in front of the child, lips drawn back from his teeth like a snarling dog.
“Skaut!”
The child’s noise subsided abruptly to a terrified snuffle.

More men were arriving all the time, shouting in a strange, guttural language, brandishing swords. Jim Carew, the constable, feeling some doomed sense of duty, caught hold of a raider’s arm and tried
to pry his weapon away from him. The man drew a curved dagger from the belt at his side and buried it in Carew’s neck. Blood spouted in a graceful arc, covering all those in a four-foot radius.

As if they had been in doubt as to the nature of the intrusion until the moment death’s shadow fell over Constable Carew, there was pandemonium as the congregation panicked. “Lord save us!” “Save our souls!”

At the back of the church, Jack Kellynch vaulted over the pew, dragging Matty with him, and headed for the vestry door, only to be cut off by a knot of robed men. “Get back, infidel dog!” one of them grunted. Jack stopped, looking from one to another as if reckoning the odds, but Matty hauled on his arm. “No, Jack,” she urged. “Do what he says.” When it looked as if Jack would keep coming, the first raider said something unintelligible to his fellows, then pushed Jack roughly away with a kick to the midriff so that he cannoned backward into Matty, who in turn took down three people behind her.

Ever more pirates were pouring through the door—twenty, forty, fifty—until it was impossible to count them. Suddenly the little church was crammed with din and the heat of bodies. Fear was tangible in the thick air. Into the midst of the chaos came a tall figure, who pushed through the knot of men at the door and made his way down the nave, kicking out his dark blue robe with every stride, and the pirates fell back and made way for him. His skin was the color of polished walnut, and a length of burgundy cotton had been wound around his head, the fabric falling in folds to his shoulders. He wore a silver belt and heavy silver bracelets on his dark forearms, and his scimitar was richly damascened. The man looked about him, taking in the bodies on the floor, the wailing children, the terrified women, the white-faced men. With his long, straight nose and his keen black eyes he looked like a bird of prey, capable, controlled, and ruthless, Cat thought, and she felt a chill run through her. Her instincts were soon borne out, for the turbaned raider shouted something in his language to the pirates and they ran to obey him, fanning out to ring
the congregation. He, meanwhile, came to a halt in front of Preacher Truran. They stood eye to eye, and then the pirate laughed and in a fluid dancer’s movement leapt behind the minister, who suddenly found the damascened blade at his throat.

“Keep your seats and still your tongues or I kill your imam!” he cried in heavily accented English.

A terrified hush fell and everyone sat down, immediately subdued like children caught at play by a fearsome tutor. The pirate chief looked them over with no small satisfaction.

“You come with us,” he enunciated clearly, “there will be no resistance, no fight. You come with us to our ships and we not hurt you. You try to run or fight, we kill you. You understand? Is very simple.”

Someone started to pray, very fast, very quietly, “From lightning and tempest, from plague, pestilence, and famine, from battle and murder, and from sudden death, Good Lord, deliver us.”

“Save us, Lord, save us.”

“Oh God, oh God, oh God.”

“Jesus, save us.”

“Is good that you pray to God,” the pirate chief said thoughtfully. “For the soul is fragile thing and must be reinforced by prayer. But no more of this man Jesus Christ, for he is mere prophet, flesh and blood like you and me, and no use in saving souls. Now, on your feet and make no struggle. Come now, quiet and good.”

One of the pirates picked up Alderman Polglaze as if he were no more than a sack of turnips and slung him over his shoulder. Another urged a groggy Mistress Polglaze to her feet and pushed her ahead of him up the aisle.

No one struggled—no one dared. Out into the deserted streets of Penzance they stumbled, into bright sunlight and a clear view of three ships moored in the bay: a fine caravel, its furled sails brilliant against a turquoise sea, and two smaller, lighter-built vessels with strange, triangular sails. Cat blinked and stared. Details leapt out at her, perverse and superreal: A seagull side-slipping through the blue sky overhead, as if the world went on as usual. Nan Tippet’s heeled
red slippers clacking on the cobbles like a donkey’s hooves. Henrietta Kellynch sucking her thumb and gazing at the pirate who pushed her brother Jordie along at sword point as if they were part of some elaborate charade, as if the ’obbyoss might at any moment break out of a side street with a pipe band and a colorful crowd of mummers dancing behind it and everyone would laugh. A tortoiseshell cat on the wall of the quay who watched them incuriously and continued washing its face with its paw, its eyes pale gold and inimical. Old Tom Ellys rubbing his mouth with a ringed hand over and over, his wife hanging on his arm asking what was happening, dear, where are they taking us, where are we going?

Where indeed? Cat wondered. Someone pushed her hard in the back, and when she turned it was to find one of the foreign brigands glaring at her and saying something in his harsh, unintelligible tongue. She shook her head, flustered, and he pushed her again and laughed at her incomprehension, showing a wide black gap in his mouth where several teeth were missing. Somehow this was more terrifying than all the rest.

Approaching the quay now and having espied the ships, Mayor Maddern suddenly addressed himself to the leader of the pirate band. “I have money, good sir. Look, I have five angels here, and half a dozen crowns, all fine gold!” He drew a pouch from his belt and rattled it. “Take the money and let us go.”

Someone whistled. It was a lot of money to be carrying. Someone else muttered about embezzling county funds, while behind him another called, “Is that for all of us, John Maddern, or is it just for you and your fat wife?”

The mayor reddened—from shame or fury—and flung himself around to confront the caller. The pirate chief barked out a laugh. He snatched the pouch from Mayor Maddern’s hand and upended it into his palm. Then he turned to his men and said something loud and fast and they all started to laugh uproariously.