Dark Tides Read online

  “Captain Shore,” Sarah said quietly.

  “Aye?” he said with a little impatience. He shouted an order to one of the crew who was reefing the sail.

  “I know you have a great regard for my mother.”

  She had caught his attention. “Deepest respect,” he said, embarrassed. “Not that she knows it. Not that I have given her any hint.”

  “I know you would be very glad to tell my mother that you brought me safely home, from the Doge’s Palace, safe home to her.”

  “Aye,” he said more cautiously.

  “So if you were to lose me, in some mishap, I ask you to wait for me.”

  “Eh?”

  Unexpectedly, she reached up and pecked him on his cheek. “Don’t fail me,” she said.

  “What?” he demanded, but she slipped away from him into the waist of the ship and reappeared at Felipe’s elbow.

  “I want you to raise the alarm, two men overboard,” she said to him urgently.

  “Sarah?”

  “I can’t explain. Just give me a moment and then shout, ‘Man overboard—two men!’ ”

  He turned to her and saw that she was undoing the ties of her cape. He stared disbelieving, as she stripped it off and thrust it into his hands. She was wearing nothing underneath but her linen shift, which left her neck and shoulders bare; underneath she had a pair of boy’s breeches.

  “Sarah?” he whispered. “What are…?”

  Before he could say another word, his hands filled with her heavy traveling cape so he could not reach for her. She put two hands on the rail and vaulted, lithe as a boy, over the side of the ship, and he heard the splash down below, as she plunged into the icy water. “Sarah!” he shouted, and leaned out. He could see her head, dark as a seal in the moonlight, and then she disappeared.

  “Sarah!” he shouted again. He raced to the companionway and seized a lantern, leaned out over the water. He could see nothing but a waste of water and the mudbanks and reed banks and sandbanks, a canal, a brackish pool, and then more water.

  “Dio onnipotente,” he groaned. “Sarah!”

  He turned and dashed to the stern of the ship. “Captain Shore?” he called up the companionway.

  “Not now,” the Captain said grimly, and when Felipe put one foot on the stairs, he glared at him from under his impressive eyebrows and said: “Nobody comes on my quarterdeck without invitation.”

  “I beg of you! It’s Sarah! She’s gone!” Felipe burst out. “Into the water.”

  “You let her?”

  “How was I to know?”

  “You saw her?”

  “That way!” Felipe gestured towards the lazaretto where the windows showed a few gleams of light from the different cells.

  “Can she swim?”

  “How should I know? Yes! She was swimming away from the ship.”

  The Captain scowled. “Madness! Madness! And she said to me… what the hell is she doing?”

  “I suppose she has gone to Roberto?”

  “Christ’s wounds!”

  “You must stop the ship and send out a boat!”

  “I can’t! I can’t take her back on board!”

  “You can’t leave her to drown!”

  “God Almighty!”

  “Exactly.”

  The two men stared at each other. “Ah! She told me to wait for her,” Captain Shore finally said. “That’s what she was saying. Wait, for her mother’s sake.”

  Felipe saw the pedotti turn his head from his careful scrutiny of the channel, and glance at them.

  “Man overboard!” Felipe yelled. He sprang up onto the quarterdeck. “Man overboard! Two men! Stop the ship! Uomo in mare! Due uomini!”

  “Avast! Heave to!” Captain Shore shouted.

  At once, the sailors dropped the sails.

  “Let go anchor!”

  The Captain turned to the pedotti for a quick bilingual argument. Felipe stood alongside Captain Shore and explained to the irritated pilot that two crew members had fallen overboard, simultaneously, and the Captain would launch a dinghy to find them.

  “I’m damned if I’ll have it row to the quarantine island,” the Captain swore in an undertone to Felipe.

  “You don’t have to,” Felipe said. “But you do have to launch it, now you’re heaved to. Please God she comes back to us quickly.”

  “What is she doing? Little lass like her into the water on an ebb tide?”

  Felipe was ragged with fear for her. “How would I know? How the hell would I know what she is doing? Get the dinghy out, I’ll row out for her.”

  “I’ll wait for no more than a minute,” the Captain ruled. “And if she doesn’t come, we’ll sail without her.”

  “We can’t leave her!”

  “She left us,” the Captain snarled.

  “Captain, I beg you to lower a boat for her. I’ll go alone, we can’t just let her go!”

  “We don’t know where she is,” the Captain pointed out furiously. “What are you going to do? Row round the reed banks? She could be drowned already.”

  “She can’t be drowned!” Felipe exclaimed in horror. “It’s not possible that she could have drowned!”

  “Just what she said about her uncle!” the Captain crowed. “When your mistress had told everyone he had been caught by the dark tides. Not so funny when it’s someone you love, is it? Not such a clever story when you’re at sea yourself.”

  * * *

  Sarah, swimming north against a strong ebbing current, knew that she was in trouble. The bulk of the ship was behind her, she even heard the loud rattle of the anchor chain, but she was being pushed back to it and away from the island by the tide. Though she swam as strongly as she could, the lights of the Lazzaretto Nuovo were steadily receding. The stone and brick walls, clear in the moonlight, came no closer. Sarah glanced behind her and saw there were sandbanks all around her, some topped with saltwort and sea lavender, so she let the current sweep her towards them, and felt silt and shells under her feet and clambered out of the water. She was on the shoals and sandbars that made up the island of Sant’ Erasmo, she could even see the lights of the Lazzaretto Nuovo, but between her sandbank and the island was a broad stretch of water, more than half a mile wide, with the moonlight dancing on the ripples of the fast-moving tide. She thought that perhaps she might be able to swim across, when the tide turned and it was slack water—but the tide would not turn for hours—and the pedotti on Captain Shore’s ship would never let him wait that long. She started to walk along the shore, trying to get as close to the quarantine island as possible, stepping carefully from one patch of vegetation to another, shying back when her foot sank. Sarah had a terror of quicksands, from childhood stories about the shifting paths of Foulmire. She gritted her teeth, which were chattering for fear and for cold, and went one step at a time, hoping that this sandbank would connect with another and that she might paddle her way towards the Lazzaretto Nuovo and find a shallow crossing of the deadly fast water.

  In her note to Rob she had told him to go “widdershins,” trusting that he would guess that she meant him to come out of the front door of the Lazaretto and turn left, “widdershins” in the old country word, counterclockwise, the witch way. She had told him to go on the ebb tide, by the light of the full moon, the Yule moon which shone above her now. She had told him the name of her ship, the ship that had brought him to Italy ten years ago. She had to hope that the purse of tokens had convinced him to read the hidden meaning to the letter, and that he had been able to get out of the fort. But it was, she knew, a desperate chance, a forlorn hope.

  Carefully she slid her foot forward and saw ahead of her something that looked like a path on the next sandbank. She paddled into the icy water that flowed between the two, and found it came no higher than her knees, and as the silt shifted warningly under her feet she dropped to hands and knees and crawled across. The neighboring sandbank had a well-trodden path. It was narrow—so narrow that she went one foot before another, but it went on firm grou
nd and it led to another reed bank. Sarah, shivering with cold, went a little more quickly on the narrow track, wrapping her arms around herself to try to keep warm, her cold feet bruised and cut by sharp shells and thorns, and then she froze as she heard a whistle, just like that of a reed warbler—but warblers roost at night.

  She squinted into the darkness towards the Lazzaretto Nuovo and saw, in the shadow of the wall, at the southeast corner—just where Rob should have been waiting for her—a single pinprick of a light, come and gone in a moment, like a spark from a tinder box.

  “Rob!” she whispered, her voice echoing across the water.

  In the darkness she could just make out a small craft, a punt for hunting wildfowl, slide into the deep channel and come towards her, a figure pushing it along the shallow channel. The prow grounded on her patch of dry land.

  “Rob Reekie?” she asked.

  “Are you Sarah?”

  “Yes. I feel I should ask… Like a password.”

  “Ask anything.”

  “What’s our name for Wandering Haven?”

  “Foulmire,” he said at once. “Foul for it stinks like a foul thing, and mire for you are trapped in it forever. And God knows why we miss it so much.” He reached out a warm hand and she took it and he pulled her on board. “You must be freezing,” he said. “Take my cape.” He swung it off his shoulders and around her. Sarah clutched it to herself.

  “I’d have known you,” Rob said. “Though you’re grown. I would have known you for little Sarah.”

  She looked at him, trying to trace her memory of him on his thin prison-pale face, her mother’s features on his gauntness.

  “Where to?” Rob asked. “I thought you had a ship?”

  “I hope I’ve got one waiting,” she said. “Off Sant’ Erasmo.”

  “The Captain’ll never take me on, if he knows I’ve come from here.”

  “He will,” she said. “It’s Captain Shore. He’s sweet on my ma.”

  “On Alys?”

  She nodded, still shivering as he pushed them off from the sandbank with the pole, and then started to move the punt, kneeling in the stern so they were low in the water and less visible in the moonlight.

  “How did you get the boat?”

  “Governor’s boat,” he said. “He lends it to me for fishing, and hunting. We don’t get the best food on the island, so he lets me fish in secret.”

  “Could you be infected?” she asked.

  “I think not,” he said. “We’ve only had a few fevers since I was sent there, and no plague at all. Please God, I’m clean. I’ve got no signs.”

  Sarah said nothing more, watching this uncle that she had never known, looking into his square face and his brown hair, tracing the resemblance to her mother as he knelt up and poled the boat along.

  “What will we do, if he doesn’t let us on board?” she asked, sharing her fear.

  “You’ll go on board,” he said. “Back to England. And I’ll ask him to tow me, as far as he will, out of the lagoon, towards the mainland. You’ve given me hope. If I can get out of the lagoon, and out of rule of the Republic of Venice, I’ll get home somehow.”

  They were silent as he poled them into the main channel and Sarah felt the flow of the water take them quickly away from the lazaretto.

  “There it is!” she said as she saw the dark bulk of the ship in the darkness. “He’s waiting for me.”

  Rob let the little craft nudge alongside the waiting ship and looked up. A rope ladder tumbled down to them and Captain Shore peered over the side. They could see the muzzle of a pistol before him.

  “Who’s there?” he said, his voice a low rumble of anger.

  “It’s me,” Sarah said, speaking through chattering teeth. “Captain Shore! It’s me! And I’ve got my uncle Rob. An Englishman, you know, and the brother of my ma—Alys Stoney.”

  “Is he sick?”

  “I’m not,” Rob said, standing in the rocking boat and lifting his face upwards. “See? No marks, no symptoms, and I’ve not been with anyone with plague. That I swear. There’s no disease on the island but a few fevers, and there’s been none since I was sent there. Let me on and I’ll go straight into a cabin and not come out for forty days.”

  “She can come aboard. Not you,” the Captain replied. They heard the clink as he armed his pistol and they saw the black muzzle aimed down into the little craft.

  “I won’t come without him,” Sarah said flatly. “He comes up first. Then me. And if you don’t take us on board I go straight back to the Bocca di Leone and denounce you.”

  “What for?” came the muted roar. “What the hell for, you little bitch?”

  “Smuggling,” Sarah said flatly. “Smuggling antiquities. And you’ve got a forger on board with you. Taking a criminal out of the country, with his forged goods.”

  “Bathsheba!” Felipe reproached her, peering down at the boat.

  “They’re your own damned antiquities!” Captain Shore roared.

  Sarah shook her head. “All his,” she said. “His and his accomplice, the Nobildonna. Forgers, perjurers, and grave robbers. And everyone knows you’ve worked with them before, carried forged papers, and sold to foreign courts without an export license, and you’re aiding his escape from justice now!”

  “You, madam, are a little whore,” the Captain swore. “And keep your voice down.”

  Sarah, knowing she had won, beamed up at Captain Shore and held the ladder for her uncle. “Just a milliner,” she said.

  JANUARY 1671, HADLEY, NEW ENGLAND

  Ned, snowed in at the ferry cabin, not knowing what he thought, not knowing what he felt, not knowing the right thing to do, went from one bitter conclusion to another. He was trapped indoors by a relentless blizzard that made it dangerous even to dig out a path to feed the beasts, who were warm behind a wall of snow. Getting into town to see his old commanders or his minister was impossible. He was in a rage of indecision which seemed to be echoed outside his cabin by the wild storm of the weather.

  He was bitter and isolated but not lonely. He did not miss the company of the townspeople, he felt that he did not care if he never heard another of the hateful words they said. He did not want to see Mrs. Rose with the hot spots of anger on her cheeks and the strain in her face. He did not want to see Quiet Squirrel or hear her steady counsel either. He could not think of her without wondering if the snowsnake path had brought her a message to fall on the people of Hadley the moment that the Massasoit received his summons to go to Plymouth and answer for his actions. The people at Hadley might think that they could order the Massasoit to attend in secret, and that none of the scattered tribes would even know, but Ned knew that he would never obey men he did not regard as his equals, let alone his superiors, and he had friends and allies all around them.

  The hope that other tribes would not know was folly. Ned knew that all the neighboring tribes would know at once. They had been communicating all winter, they had probably agreed a signal. The moment the Massasoit got an insulting summons, the English would find themselves isolated and outnumbered even in the biggest towns. A little place like Hadley could be obliterated in one night.

  There was only one person that Ned wanted to see, there was only one person whose opinion he wanted to hear, there was only one person who was, like him, between the two worlds: John Sassamon, the Christian Indian, minister to the congregation at Natick, and Wussausmon, the same man but in different clothes, the advisor and translator to the Massasoit, the translator and advisor to the English: the go-between in the heart of this crisis.

  Ned was so anxious in the days when dawn did not come till halfway through the morning, and then it was often a sky dark with snow clouds, that he thought he might summon Wussausmon by wishing for him, as if he were the devil, like his brother-translators. Or he might call on John Sassamon through prayer—like a disciple in the Bible stories. But one day, as Ned was pouring a jug of boiling water into the earthenware bowl of ice in the cowpen, he heard a shout from w
here the wicket gate was buried under the snow and saw Wussausmon himself waiting courteously outside the garden where the fence should have been.

  “Come in! Come in!” Ned shouted. “Am I glad to see you!”

  “I can’t stay,” Wussausmon said, gliding towards him on his snowshoes. “But I was going downstream and thought I would come to say good-bye.”

  Ned splashed water on the straw as his hand shook. “Good-bye? Won’t you step inside and get warm?”

  “No, I’m warm as it is. But I would not go past your house, Nippe Sannup, without a greeting.”

  “Don’t go,” Ned said quickly. “You can eat with me? I have some succotash on the fire.”

  Wussausmon dived into a pocket under his cape and brought out a strip of dried meat. “Try this,” he suggested.

  He held it out to Ned and Ned nibbled the end. The rich warm taste of dried moose tongue filled his mouth. “That’s good,” he said ruefully. “Better than my succotash!”

  Generously, Wussausmon tore off a strip. “Put it in the succotash,” he said. “It will flavor the whole pot. And don’t forget to give thanks.”

  “But where are you going in such a hurry?” Ned asked. “Oh—Wussausmon, are you going to Montaup?”

  “There are many gathering there,” Wussausmon said. “You told them? You warned your people?”

  “I did. But it didn’t do any good,” Ned said, looking away from the direct dark gaze and staring instead at the bare black trunks of the trees and the white stripes of snow on their bark, at the delicate lines of ice on every twig. “I am sorry, I said everything that I could—but they are determined that King Philip—Massasoit—shall answer to them. They know of the gatherings, they know he is stockpiling weapons. I told them it all but they’re not going to make peace; they’re going to summon him to answer.”

  “I will have to warn them,” Wussausmon said. “I will go to Plymouth myself. As the Massasoit’s translator I must be believed. I will tell them that he must have his rights under their own law. I know the law, I can read it. I will have to make them listen to me.”