Crossed Bones (5 page)

She gripped his arm. ‘Rob, are you telling me there are Turkish pirates in these waters?’ Her eyes shone. ‘How… exotic. I would dearly love to see one.’

Robert stared at her in disbelief. ‘I am sure you say such things to pain me, Catherine. For myself, I pray to God that I never have the misfortune to encounter such a creature, for they are little more than beasts. Some of the tales I have heard…’ He shook his head at Cat’s avid expression.

‘Come now, the day draws on, and I must take you back. I have the excitement of the cows to attend to and no doubt you have some duties to carry out for Mistress Harris’s return; and we’ll have no more talk of pirates.’

Cat untangled the gorse circlet from her hair. With the next great gust of wind she tossed it seawards, and together they watched it buffeted till it sprang apart and rained its flowers down upon the rocks.

I put the book aside, astonished. I don’t know what I had been expecting, other than notes on the patterns that the book contained, thoughts about the colours of thread and the type of stitch one might use to execute the design, but this sudden window into the past was like a glimpse of treasure.

I found myself wondering whether Michael had read any of Catherine’s cryptic, faded entries, or had merely glimpsed them and seen them as defacements, maybe even beaten down the price with the dealer because they spoiled the edition? I could easily imagine him doing just that, complaining about a small or imagined flaw, always seeking a bargain, a way of saving money. I could not count the number of times I had turned away, embarrassed, as he haggled with some hapless stallholder or car-boot seller. The idea of him trawling through his favourite antiquarian bookshops of Bloomsbury seeking a suitable farewell gift for me made me nauseous. How long had he been preparing for that moment? How long had he and Anna been back on ‘good terms’ – and just exactly what did that mealy-mouthed little phrase mean? I imagined the pair of them, dark-haired and olive-skinned, similar in build, elegantly intertwined… had this rapprochement overlapped with our trysts for days, for weeks or for months? I ran to the bathroom and threw up till my eyes and nose burned with bile.

When I came back to my bed, feeling shaky and void, the book was waiting for me on the lamp table. My notebook lay beside it, filled now with my own scribbled interpretations of Cat Tregenna’s journal entries. I had pored over the strange formations of her letters, the bizarre spelling and the unfamiliar sentence structures of another age for over three hours, filling six pages of my notebook, though my handwriting was in no way as neat as that of the young embroiderer, being marred with crossings out, underlinings, question marks where I could not make sense of a word. Hardly a pretty artefact for someone to discover four hundred years hence. And yet, for all the difference between our times, I felt a strong connection with Catherine Anne Tregenna; and not just for our shared love of embroidery. I too had grown up in Cornwall and, like her, had dreamed of escape.

On a new sheet of paper I wrote her name, then idly sketched a curling vine around the capitals: a simple cross-stitch exercise to work on a sampler, the sort of thing with which a young girl might have begun her needlework education in times past. I wondered if Catherine had done this very thing: picking out her name in a simple, plain colour before embellishing it with leaves and flowers. My knowledge of Jacobean needlework told me that it would have been unlikely that she would have been able to work with anything very fine for her first attempts. If she had come from a poor family, even one that had some social aspirations, she would probably have been limited to practising on hessian or sacking and roughly dyed hanks of homespun wool she had had to colour herself with vegetable dyes culled from the herb garden and hedgerows – woad for blue, madder for red and broom or onion skins for yellow. And most certainly she would have had no access to the pretty skeins of coloured silks, like those that as a child I had kept obsessively in their box arranged according to the spectrum, that glided so smoothly through all those squares of perforated binkercloth we used in sewing classes at school.

I finished my sketch and held it at arm’s length. It was then that I saw what had been right beneath my nose: Catherine Anne Tregenna, with the capitals thus emphasized:
CAT
– Cat. I laughed aloud. I had wondered why she was not Kate or Cath; Cat seemed a remarkably modern sort of moniker for a seventeenth-century girl. I felt a sudden warm affection for this long-dead woman who had imposed her own lively chosen familiar name upon the world. Did she live up to her self-appointed totem animal, I wondered. Was she neat and sly, eyes slightly aslant, ever watchful? Did she move soft-footed around the manor house where she worked and smile quietly to herself at the foolishness of others? I could imagine her, small and dark, curled in a big wooden chair on cushions she had made herself, under the light of a narrow window, picking out the tail feathers of a fabulous bird with needle and bright threads on a length of pale linen – a runner for a dressing table, perhaps, the edging for a bedcover, or even the altar cloth so briefly mentioned. That commission intrigued me. What fun it would be to track down such a treasure and know a little of its provenance, maybe even follow the progress of its creation through the pages of the little book.

I passed my hand affectionately across the age-foxed title page. 1625: the best part of four centuries away. At thirty-six and unmarried, in the seventeenth century I would have elicited both pity and ridicule. A spinster; an old maid: of no use to anyone and with no place in society. Pretty much the same as now, which was not particularly cheering; but what did I really know about the early seventeenth century? For me, it occupied a rather hazy space between the glorious Tudors and the Civil War and Restoration. Before continuing with my translation of Catherine’s journal, I should surely make an effort to set it in a bit more context.

I went to examine my bookcase to see if there was anything there that might educate me further. From college, some poetry and Shakespeare plays with commentaries, Penguin guides to literature, a little gentle philosophy – nothing of much specific use. On the dusty bottom shelf of the bookcase in the spare room I found a set of children’s encyclopedias that probably dated from my grandmother’s schooldays. I hefted them out on to the floor. They gave off a whiff of mildew and face powder, the very smells I associated with being a child in the house my grandmother shared with her crabby older sister, and I wondered whether the scent was real or imagined, a memory that had imposed itself on the object by association. I had loved these encyclopedias and spent hours poring over their neatly engineered pull-out sections with dissections of an apple, a frog and a fly; diagrams of a steam engine and a medieval castle. I flicked through one of the volumes, finding in a short space long, detailed and illustrated articles on the history of art, Greek mythology, human anatomy, the Trojan War and the English feudal system. Two volumes further on (past the discovery of penicillin, wildlife on the savannah, Chaucer and Galileo) I found just what I was looking for.

I put the other five volumes back on the shelf and took the sixth to my living room, settled myself into the leather sofa and started to read.

Forty minutes later I felt replete with information. For what purported to be a children’s compendium of knowledge, the encyclopedia had proved a challenging and frankly spicy read, full of surprising details. I had known that James I was the son of the executed Mary, Queen of Scots; what I had not known was that he had a Danish wife, and flaunted such a succession of male favourites that when he inherited the English throne it was openly voiced that ‘Elizabeth was King; now James is Queen!’ Nor had I known that James had come poor and unpopular to the throne, with a seriously extravagant spending habit which drove the country so deeply into debt that he was forced to sell titles and land and had stopped paying the navy – asserting his divine right to do as he pleased and dissolving Parliament rather than risking criticism. He had attempted to marry off his surviving son, Charles, to the rich Spanish Infanta at a time when England was fiercely Protestant; the Spanish had high-handedly rejected the marriage proposal and a humiliated Charles had eventually married Princess Henrietta Maria of France some months before the death of his father, coming to the English throne in March 1625 at the age of twenty-five. He was just six years older than Catherine Tregenna.

Even more interesting was the fact that King James’s chief adviser had been Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury. Wasn’t the Countess of Salisbury mentioned as the source of Cat’s commission? In a sudden fever of excitement, feeling like an amateur detective, I went back to
The Needle-Woman’s Glorie
.

Cat smoothed a hand across
The Needle-Woman’s Glorie
. Dawn light slanted through the window, illuminating her intent expression and making a bright halo of her red-gold hair. She had woken with an image twining through her mind like a skein of ivy, at once obdurate and fragile: she felt that if she so much as blinked, it might disperse into the air, and she was determined that should not happen. For, even as she surfaced from sleep, she had recognized the image for what it must surely be: the design for the altar cloth, come to her like a divine visitation.

It had been weighing heavy upon her these many weeks, the responsibility for this commission; not just for its aesthetic challenges, but also for the chance of advancement and escape it might represent. Secretly, Cat harboured a dream: that if she created an altar frontal that pleased the Countess of Salisbury sufficiently, then that august personage might decide that Catherine Tregenna was a necessary ornament to her life and home, and bear her away to her grand London house. Given such a possibility, Cat knew that she would leave her position at Kenegie, leave Penwith; leave Cornwall and everyone and everything in it with barely a backward glance. She would gladly exchange the southerly winds and sparkling seas, the gorse-grown hills and lichen-rosetted granite of her homeland, for life in a properly aristocratic house. The gossip and backbiting of Kenegie stifled her; her duties for Lady Harris – no matter how pleasant her mistress might be – bored her; and the likelihood that her cousin Robert might be the best husband she could aspire to made her fair weep with frustration. She was born for greater things: her mother had always told her so, and she believed it with every bone in her body.

She had gone to sleep pondering the altar cloth, its theme, its design, the materials she would use; and a strange alchemy appeared to have taken place during the night, drawing desire and inspiration together into visual form. The vision shimmered in her head: but could she capture that form and set it down before it escaped her? Her whole future might depend on her ability to do so, and the thought of that set her hand to trembling.

She took a deep breath, firmed her resolve and swept the writing stick in a light, curving line from top to bottom of the page. The first mark on the virgin surface broke the spell; and suddenly she was free. The outline of the tree’s trunk was quickly achieved, her hand moving swiftly and decisively, marking in branches here and there, twining in graceful counterpoint to one another; a flourish of leaves, a spray of berries, buds, flowers. The design unfurled itself like a young bracken frond – elegant, curvilinear, iconic – its symmetries both powerful and reassuring. From a base of twisted roots out of which peered tiny creatures – a hare, a frog, a snail – the Tree of Knowledge stretched heavenwards. Adam on one side, Eve on the other, the apple hung above them. In the branches near Eve’s head, the serpent writhed and smiled.

‘Cat, Cat!’ came a voice through the crack of the door. ‘Why have you not come down? Are you sick?’

Sighing, Cat shut the book and pushed it out of sight underneath the bedclothes. The other girls already thought she had ideas above her station; it would not help the ease of her day to have them sniggering about her unnatural aspirations. ‘I am coming,’ she called back. ‘I will be down directly.’

‘Cook won’t have you in the kitchen if you don’t go now: she’s got dinner to prepare for the Master’s guests. You’ll have nought to break your fast, and we’ve already been told there’ll be no noonmeat today, that we must take now what bread and cheese we need to get us through till supper.’ Matty sounded aghast at the idea: she was a chubby girl, and to miss a meal was close to being the worst thing she could imagine.

‘What guests are those?’ Cat asked, her interest piqued.

There was a moment of puzzled silence from the corridor, then: ‘Don’t rightly know. Just some men come to see the Governor. Do hurry up, or there’ll be nothing left.’

Cat rolled her eyes. Trust Matty not even to inquire. ‘In truth, I am not hungry,’ she said, pulling on a clean chemise, then hesitated. If Sir Arthur had guests, perhaps she should make a greater effort. She tossed her plain work dress aside and out of her oak chest drew a dress of scarlet wool that had belonged to her mother. ‘Come, help me with my corset.’ It would do no harm to have two pairs of hands narrow her already small waist.