The Tenth Gift (41 page)

The old woman added something very distinctly then, repeating it three times so that Idriss understood.

“She says that here in Rabat there was once a woman who was a master embroiderer, and she was known as Zahrat Chamal.”

I looked at him blankly.

“It’s a given name, not a born name,” he said. “It means Flower from the North.”

Had Catherine become Zahrat when she converted and married her raïs? Did
Chamal
mean from the north of Morocco, or from further beyond? Was Zahrat Chamal the Muslim name she adopted when she changed her faith, like Will Martin becoming Ashab Ibrahim? Perhaps the gypsy fortune-teller had told true, that she would never be married as Catherine, after all. I looked at the stitching on the bridal veil: fine and precise, a delicate slanting satin stitch, just like the one on the Countess of Salisbury’s altar frontal. Not that that was any proof—everyone used satin stitch, even me. I pictured Cat wound from head to toe in this lovely veil, like the women in the pictures I had seen, with a silver Berber crown set on her head, its jeweled teardrops framing her pale face, her fiery hair hidden beneath a colored scarf, her blue eyes blazing proudly out at a man clad from head to foot in scarlet and gold. And I saw him take her by the hand and lead her to the throne beneath the spectacular bridal curtains the women of the embroidery class had made as their gift to Sidi Qasem bin Hamed bin Moussa Dib and his foreign wife.

And when I looked back at Lalla Mariam, I found that she, like me, had tears glittering in her blue eyes.

A
LISON TURNED MY HANDS OVER IN HERS, THE BETTER
to examine my palms. “And this?” she asked.

“A rose, I think—an old variety, like a rambling rose— one of the flat-petaled roses. But the plant on the left hand—I don’t know what it is.”

She traced the pattern of leaves like a chain of hearts that ran from the palm to the tip of my forefinger. “So pretty. And what about this—did you buy it in Rabat?” She touched the antique ring I wore on the third finger of my right hand, where Idriss had placed it when he said good-bye to me outside the airport. “It belongs to Jeddah,” he had told me solemnly. “She says it’s a loan and she wanted me to give it to you because it will bring you back to Morocco.” Then he closed my fingers over it and kissed me gravely and thoroughly, hidden from prying official eyes by the sun curtains of his taxi. My knees had still felt weak by the time I reached the security gate. Since then we had spoken every night on the phone, so that a holiday romance had turned into a charming and old-fashioned courtship. In that time we had discussed everything from French poetry to the failings of our respective national football teams, and now I felt I knew more about him than I had ever known about Michael in all the time I’d known him.

“How long will it last?”

I looked up, startled. “Pardon?”

“The tattoo, dope. How long will it last?”

Already the henna had faded from the fiery burnt orange that
had surprised me when the dried paste came away under the shower on the morning of my departure. Now it was the same shade of brown as my freckles, and like them it felt a part of me. I did not want it to fade. “Idriss said about a month.”

“He’s marked you as his property, this Idriss,” she teased.

“He has not! It’s traditional: Women wear henna tattoos as a form of protection against evil influences,” I said hotly, and at that we both fell silent.

I had returned from Morocco two weeks before and the time had passed in a whirl of activity. There were three offers on my flat waiting for me as well as a new and potentially lucrative commission. The neatness and speed with which all this came together had rather astonished me—it was as if fate were pushing me in a specific direction. And I had spent a lot of time with Anna. Together we had visited her friend in the publications department at the V&A, an elegantly turned out and smartly spoken woman in her late fifties, who in turn had taken us to meet someone in English Textiles. Seeing their unalloyed delight at Cat’s work and hearing their gasps of excitement as they viewed the sketches she had made in
The Needle-Woman’s Glorie
was almost reward enough in itself. They asked—of course—whether they might have the book to display alongside the altar frontal, and I told them honestly that I had not yet decided what I was going to do with my book. Their faces fell, but soon they were discussing how to make fine facsimile copies and perhaps having the book on loan for a time, and we all parted in good spirits. Anna looked radiant, and I told her so. “I am just so very happy to be able to do this for the family and, well, posterity, if that doesn’t sound too pompous.” I assured her it did not. “And, thank God, I’ve stopped throwing up, and I’m past the dangerous stage, and the scan was normal….”

“Boy or girl?”

“I didn’t ask. Better not to second-guess fate, I think. I am learning to take life as it comes.”

I smiled. Anna was changing. Perhaps we all were.

“Ready?” said Alison, breaking into my thoughts.

“As ready as I’ll ever be.” I picked up a small flat stone from where I had been sitting and sent it skimming out across the sea toward St. Clement’s Island. It touched the surface six times before sinking beneath the waves. “Damn,” I said. “I was aiming for seven.”

“Six for gold,” Alison laughed. “I don’t think that’s too bad.”

“What, like the magpie verse?”

“It’s what we always used to say. Though there’s a different version Andrew used to quote, came from the Scottish side of his family: ‘One for sorrow, two for mirth, three for a wedding, four for a birth; five for heaven, six for hell, seven you’ll see the De’ill himself—’ Oh dear.”

“Oh, great. Hell,” I said, subdued. “Perhaps this isn’t a very good idea.”

“Well, you certainly don’t have to do it for me,” Alison said firmly. “I’m never setting foot in the place again. Those letters freaked me out completely. Are you quite sure you want to do this?”

“I have to. I feel … responsible, somehow, though I know that sounds mad.”

Fifteen minutes later we were standing outside the farmhouse at Kenegie just as the sun was starting to go down.

“Have you got everything?”

I had: flashlight, lighter, candle, bread, salt, water. And Robert Bolitho’s letters, tied with a band of fine embroidery Lalla Mariam had given to me. The letters were the originals. When I had explained to Anna what I intended to do, she laughed at me, but waived her deal. “Keep copies for me—good ones,” she made me promise. “It’ll only annoy Michael all the more.” The piece of embroidery was by the same hand as the bridal veil: It bore Catherine’s trademark theme. “It was something she would have used to tie back her hair at the hammam,” the old lady had explained to me via Idriss. In poor exchange for this generosity, I had given her my own peacock-feathered
embroidered headsquare, and had promised to complete the fourth corner for her with whatever motif she chose for it.

Leaving Alison sitting on the hood of the car, I went into the house, my footsteps echoing through the empty rooms. I switched on every light switch as I went up. At the foot of the stairs to the attic, I paused.

Then gritted my teeth and climbed the stairs.

The attic light, absolutely typically, was the only one in the house that did not work. I lit the candle and placed it on Andrew’s desk. In its trembling golden circle of light I laid out the bread, a little pile of salt, and a flask of holy water from the font at Gulval Church. Heat and water and sustenance: all the things the dead miss, lacked, and craved, as my mother used to tell me in her ghost stories on All Hallows’ Eve. Then I placed Rob’s letters down beside them.

Taking a deep breath, I said, “Robert Bolitho, if you are here, I hope you will hear me. My name is Julia Lovat. You and I may be very distantly related, I don’t know. That’s probably not very important. What is important is that I’ve brought your letters back. I’m sorry that you’ve been disturbed, and I’m sorry we took your letters away. I know you asked in the postscript that Matty burn them, but I’m afraid she didn’t. I understand that: Women like to hold on to things, even things that are painful to them. It was wrong of her to leave them to be read by others, but you cannot really blame her, or us for reading them. I read your letters, Robert, so I know that you are a decent, brave man. Even so, you should not have done what you did to Andrew Hoskin, and perhaps there were others here, too, others I don’t know about. Maybe you hurt so much you didn’t care who else you caught in your despair. You did a very courageous thing by following your heart and risking your life to try to save Catherine Tregenna— ”

Out of nowhere there came a chill draft and the candle suddenly guttered, sending long, jagged shadows shooting out across the room. I hugged my arms around myself and watched the reflection
of the flame play across the etched silver of the ring Idriss had placed on my hand and tried to still the hammering of my pulse.

“There is nothing so painful in the world as love that has been wasted on someone who doesn’t love you back. But Catherine’s decision to stay in Morocco wasn’t just about not wanting to marry you, and it wasn’t only for love of the corsair captain, either.” I laid my hand on the fragment of embroidery that lay across the letters, so that its silver threads caught the light, the roses and ferns and gorse her eternal theme. “Do you see this, Robert? It is very fine work. Your cousin had a true gift, a rare gift. See these wild roses, this gorse? Do you remember the crown you made for her? She did. She carried Cornwall in her heart all the time she was there, but if she had stayed here in Cornwall, that gift would have been wasted. In Morocco she became what she had always dreamed of becoming: a master embroiderer. Do you really begrudge her that dream, Rob?”

I paused. “I don’t know why I’m rambling on like this. It’s probably pointless. I’m either talking to myself, or you don’t care about anything but your own pain. But I wanted to try to say these things: that I understand, a little, at least, and that what you went through must have been terrible. But, Rob, don’t you see? You saved Matty Pengelly—dear, lovely Matty—who must have thought herself lost forever in that strange country. You saved her and you made a life together, you had sons. It is an extraordinary thing that you did and I am very proud of you.”

I ran out of words and sat there in the darkness, waiting for I don’t know what, and feeling a fool. Through the Velux window I could just glimpse a strip of reddening sky. Soon it would be full dark.

“I am going to leave now. I’ve had my say. I just wanted to bring your letters back and pay my respects,” I said softly, and stood up to go.

I am sure—quite sure—that I did not nudge the desk as I rose. But at that moment the candle fell over and rolled—as if pushed, or
by the forces of gravity—until it came to rest against the letters, which caught the flame in an instant and went up with a whoosh. I cried out then and dropped the flashlight. I watched the fire burn deep red, then orange, then a pale bright gold that was almost white. Two thoughts tugged at me: that I should save Catherine’s embroidery, and that the entire attic, and me in it, was likely to go up in flames. But in the same instant that these thoughts crossed my mind, the fire extinguished itself as quickly as it had caught and I found myself standing in pitch darkness.

With a shaking hand I bent to search for the flashlight, expecting at any moment to feel the chill of some unearthly hand on the back of my neck. But nothing happened. Nothing at all. The air was still, and seemed warmer, and at last my fingers closed around the flashlight and I flicked it on and trained it on the desk, fearing to see the damage that had been done.

The letters were gone, every scrap of them, leaving just a pile of cool, gray ash. In the midst of the ashes Catherine’s embroidered band lay gleaming and unburned. I picked it up gingerly, but despite the metallic threads running through it, it was not even warm. How could that be? My rational mind told me that it was probably a good deal more durable than paper—especially four-hundred-year-old paper—but even so … Trembling now, I sprinkled the flask of water around and stood the candle up again. Then I did my mother proud by throwing a pinch of salt over my left shoulder to keep the Devil at bay.

By the time I got back down outside, my teeth were chattering and I was shaking with adrenaline. Alison took one look at me, took off her jacket, and draped it around my shoulders. “Job done?” she asked.

“I think so.” I smiled wanly. Who could say?

In the garden, with my cousin’s arm around me, I gazed out at the distant sea, striped now by the last dull red streaks of the setting sun. St. Michael’s Mount stood in stark romantic silhouette in the
bay, just as it had that fateful July day in 1625 when, flying their Salé pavilions of crescent moons and crossed bones, Al-Andalusi’s fleet had slipped past its inadequate defenses.

I closed my eyes, remembering. At last I smiled.

In just under three weeks’ time, just as my henna faded to a ghost of itself, I, too, would be going back to Morocco, the Island in the West.

Inch’ allah.

The Tenth Gift
is a work of fiction, though it is based on historical fact.

The Barbary corsair raids on the south coasts of England, which took place intermittently over the course of more than two hundred years during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, have been increasingly well documented over the past few years, although when I grew up in Cornwall they were never mentioned, and most people are still ignorant of this particular bloody chapter in England’s history.

The majority of corsair attacks targeted shipping, both mercantile and fishing vessels, the corsairs often gulling their victims by flying false colors before revealing their true identity only when it was too late for the unfortunate target to flee or defend itself. The violent theft of cargoes and crews, and the concomitant sale of captives into slavery, was a common peril faced by those at sea, and was certainly not confined to attacks on British shipping by Muslims and renegades: Many of England’s finest made fortunes by attacking foreign shipping, whether legally, under official Letter of Marque (announcing the proceeds and splitting the value with the Admiralty in much the same way the Barbary corsairs regulated their own trade), or as pirates, for purely private profit. However, the Barbary corsairs proved bolder than most, raiding as far and wide as Newfoundland, Iceland, Ireland, and southern England as well as Spain, Portugal, and the Mediterranean coasts.

The corsairs of Salé, known in England as the Sallee Rovers, have a particularly fascinating history. Pirating for profit had been a way
of life throughout the Mediterranean, especially once the flourishing of mercantile trade between the East and Europe meant rich pickings and easy targets, but what had been isolated and entrepreneurial soon became ideological and organized after King Philip III set about reunifying Catholic Spain and expelled by edict all Moors from his kingdom. Many lost everything, and found themselves cast up homeless and penniless on the North Moroccan shore, harboring a grudge against the Spanish and, by extension, the Christian West. There, an alliance of Moriscos, Hornacheros, fanatics, and renegade Europeans refortified Salé and Rabat, whence they launched a holy war against their enemies.

Driven by religious fervor, the corsairs plundered far and wide to the extent that one corsair fleet was able to raise its skull-and-crossbones flag over Lundy Island in the Bristol Channel in the early summer of 1625, from which they launched innumerable raids on southwest shipping and coastal towns.

The historical document prefacing this novel, that is, the letter from the Mayor of Plymouth to the new king’s Privy Council in the spring of 1625, warning of the likelihood not only of corsair raids (which had become a regular summer threat to shipping) but for the first time of attacks
on coastal settlements
, does not, in the usual bureaucratic fashion, appear to have resulted in raised security.

The attack I have described on the church in Penzance is based on a reference in the state papers to an event in July 1625 when “sixtie men, women and children were taken from the church of
Munnigesca
in Mounts Bay” (my italics). No one to this day is sure what “Munnigesca” refers to; some have speculated that it is the church on St. Michael’s Mount, but I cannot believe that to be true, because it would have meant that Sir Arthur Harris, who was the Master of the Mount at the time, and his family would have been included in those sixty captives, since only if they had been in residence would a congregation of sixty have been likely, and they never suffered such a fate. Sir Arthur died in 1628 at Kenegie Manor; his last will and testament
is included in the local parish papers. The only two large enough settlements likely to generate a sixty-strong congregation at the time, according to Carew and Leland, would have been Marazion, then known as Market-Jew (a corruption of Marghasewe) or Penzance. I decided on the church at Penzance, which would have stood where St. Mary’s does today—on a promontory overlooking the bay. It would have been clearly seen from the sea, thus presenting a clear and attractive target for attack. It is curious that the Mount did not see and fire upon the corsairs (there is no mention in the CSP of any attempted defense), but Sir Arthur Harris had indeed been lobbying for funds to rearm the Mount for several years.

The smuggling, however, of four cannons destined for the rearmament of Pendennis and St. Michael’s Mount by Sir John Killigrew to the Sidi al-Ayyachi is my own invention, though given the nature of the man and his forebears, it is not a large step of speculation.

While I am no great expert on embroidery, I have researched the methods and styles of the time as thoroughly as I could, and am greatly indebted to the works of Caroline Stone, who knows a great deal more about the embroidery of North Africa, and specifically Morocco, than I shall ever know.

It was a great disappointment to me to discover that no records of the captives taken by the Sallee Rovers in 1625 remain in Morocco. A number of firsthand accounts of English captives’ misfortunes and experiences have, however, survived, although few from as early as 1625 and none by a woman of that time. However, I have read many of those accounts and borrowed details here and there for authenticity, though I’ve taken them with a healthy pinch of salt, since the temptation for captives to embellish their hardships with lurid detail was great, commercial pressures in the seventeenth century being all too similar to those of the twenty-first century.

I have listed below some of the key texts that proved invaluable to me in my research. I must also thank a number of individuals without whom I could never have written this novel. First, my mother, for
reminding me of this long-buried family legend; second, my climbing partner Bruce Kerry, who accompanied me on my first and crucial research visit to Morocco; third, Emma Coode, friend and colleague, who read the text chapter by chapter as I wrote and provided me with both encouragement and the perfect audience. I must also thank my wonderful editors, Venetia Butterfield and Allison McCabe, for their invaluable support and suggestions. Finally, and most important, I want to thank my husband, Abdellatif Bakrim, who has been the most extraordinary source of Berber, Arabic, and Moroccan history, culture, and language. He has helped me with the translation of foreign texts and provided me with a sounding board for all the Moroccan material. He was also, before I knew him well, the inspiration for the raïs. Since I have come to know him, I cannot imagine him making a ruthless corsair captain or zealot, and for that I am profoundly grateful.