CHAPTER 1

FROM THE FRYING PAN TO THE FIRE

I was stolen off the streets of Plymouth in the year of our Lord sixteen hundred and nine, by Master William Thatcher, better known as Scratcher, whose name and nickname I came to know in due course. It was the second of June, upon a Friday noontide, and the weather was waxing hot. The wind blew salt across the town. A multitude of holes in my hose allowed the damp breeze to reach through and cool my body. Scratcher had his sleeves rolled up above his elbows. We collided at the intersection of New Street and a small alley, where I was knocked on the head by Scratcher’s wooden chest, which he carried on his shoulder and which travelled, at least in part, ahead of him. I fell down, stunned by the blow.

“Where do you live, boy?” Scratcher demanded. He dropped his chest and pulled me up by the ear.

“Nowhere, sir,” I said. And this, for the moment at least, was true.

“Who are your parents?”

“None, sir.” I felt a single tear drip down my cheek.

“Any who care?”

“No.” This was true enough also. I sniffed.

He let go of my ear. “What is your name, boy?”

“Forgotten,” I said. In fact, my name was Noah Vaile. I was more than glad to lose it because it sounded like “No Avail.” Widow Oldham always made nasty cracks about it. If any of the other students asked me to do anything, she’d cackle and say: “Don’t you see? It’s hopeless. It is to Noah Vaile that you speak.” It made me feel like a failure before I was even out of the starting gate. Returning to the present, I rubbed my forehead, which I was certain must be dented by the chest.

“Hmm. I will name you anew when the mood strikes me.”

I threw him my best questioning look.

“I am in need of a servant: to fetch, to carry, to sharpen my quills.” He was in need of a servant with no family connections; that was clear enough. “Pick up my chest.”

“Well,” said I, thinking as fast as I could while rubbing my head again.

“Stop that rubbing at once. Pick up my chest and be sharp about it.”

I didn’t like him. He was thin as a snake and looked horribly nasty, with two deep dark lines that ran from his eyes to his chin. And he kept scratching himself; he went at the scratching something furious. Besides, I was still weighing him and his intentions up. Who is easier to dispose of, after all, than a boy with no family? I could, in fact, see the tip of a knife hilt in his belt. It boded ill. But without him my prospects were dim, my next stop almost certainly the alms house. He had arrived, true it is, straight from Fortune, without turning left on the way.

My parents had vanished in a dense fog — the haze of the past, and also the very real smokiness of Plymouth town. Mistress Oldham, the schoolkeeper, had taken me in out of a confused blend of pity and laziness — she needed a slave — but had recently ejected me for setting rats free in the schoolhouse on Saturdays, and myself free during the week. I should have been studying and doing the housework, but was a certified truant who preferred pilfering to lessons and skivvying duties. The week she threw me out I pinched a chicken leg, a mound of apples, and a pigeon pie, all from St. Nick’s market. There is a streak of wickedness in me, I’ll willingly admit, but I’ve learned to live with myself as I am. There is no fixing wickedness: it arrives with a whoosh and a flash of its own accord. It makes no prior announcements. Sometimes my actions surprise even me.

“General truancy, is it? I can’t abide general truancy even more than I can’t abide rats,” Oldham had screeched two weeks ago, pinching my ear just as Scratcher had just now. Adults seem to be overly fond of ear gripping, pulling, and pinching. In my case, it is their easiest hook to hang on to, the rest of me being too thin and slippery to grab a good handful of. Oldham knew nothing of my stealing, happily, or she’d have turned me over to the judge, and I’d now be hanged by the neck — boots dangling — until dead. I’d seen hangings enough in Plymouth, the convicted giving me a penny once or twice to pull hard on their legs after the drop and help their departure along.

I didn’t want any young cozener pulling on my legs, thank you very much. I learned to run fast, really fast, so that I could outstrip the barrow boys whose stalls I nicked from. So if Oldham ever did find out my crimes, which, God knows, were hang-worthy, and decided to haul me to the judge, likely she wouldn’t be able to catch me. In any case, her corns and carbuncles slowed her down. So did her enormous belly, which, when she so much as shifted from one foot to the other, quivered like a bowl of blancmange under her gown.

“Careful, boy. Stop daydreaming. There’s treasure inside,” Scratcher scolded now. I turned my attention back from Oldham’s fat gizzard to his fat chest. His chest of the wooden, not the fleshly sort, I hasten to add. His fleshly chest looked more like a mine that had misfortunately suffered a cave-in.

“I haven’t so much as touched the chest yet, sir.” But my pulse twitched a couple of times. Spanish dollars were already glittering, big and round as silver plates, in my imagination. Treasure, was it? Scratcher could prove really valuable to me. My eyes must have lit up like candles on Sunday.

“Not that kind of treasure, you ignoramus. Intellectual gold. Poems and maps.” His knotty face slanted sideways, and his loose neck skin creased into a wattle.

“Oh,” said I, trying to ignore the fact that he looked like a demented cockerel and concentrate instead on his words. I’d spent two years in school trying to avoid poems and maps. But though I say so myself, I was sharp as a rapier, and much learning had rubbed off on me. What kind of poems and maps might these be? They were certainly not like those in the writing and cosmography lessons given by old dry-as-dead-bones Oldham. They would be treasure maps. With an X marking the spot. Ho ho. A shard of excitement flew up my arms, piercing my heart.

“Are you coming or not, sirrah? The hour is at hand.” Scratcher managed to sound pompous and religious at the same time.

“What hour is that, sir?”

“You’ll find out soon enough.”

I chewed on the inside of my cheek loudly. I gestured into the northwest wind. But everything was performance, with him as spectator, because my mind was already made up. I had nowhere else to go, and there was also that treasureful mystery that had just cut deep into my heart and now tickled my brain. He cuffed me on the head. I jerked the chest skyward. He jumped back in momentary alarm, and I laughed in my mind. Then he nodded, turned, and veered along the cobblestone alley. I followed.