She who is half darkness

Chapter Twenty-Six

‘Ah, Matthew, this is Captain Larkin, she is handling some of my nautical affairs.’ Elody sounds irritated to be interrupted, though Mariner was sent to St Paul’s for ink for her sake. The city outside the Lime Street ward has become an even more hostile place to walk with dark skin. Some booksellers threw her dirty looks, some beggar children threw rocks. Filthy Spaniard, they shout, pebbles and insults catching the edge of her cloak as she pulls it close around her. Now, returned to Lime Street with shaking hands and her hard-won goods, Elody is busy entertaining yet another guest. The person turns to face her and Mariner stares. Skirts over her legs, a doublet over her chest with a knitted shawl protecting her and a felt sailor’s cap, which her hair, long and honey coloured, is braided away under.

‘A pleasure, Master Blackwater,’ the Captain says, and she doffs her cap rather than curtseys. There is an amused creasing around her flat mouth and blue eyes as Mariner simply stares back.

‘Matthew,’ Elody prompts, her voice sharp.

‘Aye, a pleasure too, Captain Larkin,’ Mariner stammers out, taking off her own cap and holding it to her chest as she bows, just as she was taught to do for the quarter master.

‘Ah, you have a sailor’s heart then.’ Captain Larkin laughs with a musical, Irish lilt and Mariner knows she has done wrong. That is not how a lordly young man of court receives those in service to him.

‘Forgive my cousin, he has quite a romance with all things nautical,’ Elody says, rolling up a map on her desk. ‘Matthew, let the Captain be on her way.’

Mariner watches the Captain sweep the felt cap off her head in a farewell and tries to find her voice.

‘Your vessel, Captain?’ she asks. ‘Its name?’

The Captain looks at her as if she is a callow youth and Mariner can feel Elody’s displeasure, but Mariner has to know.

‘The Seahorse, we are at Billingsgate,’ she says. ‘Farewell.’

Then she is gone.

‘My ink,’ Elody says. Mariner dazedly steps forward and sets it on the desk but turns to listen to the sound of the front door closing. The Seahorse, at Billingsgate, she thinks.

‘Gentlemen are rarely sailors,’ says Elody. Mariner knows it is a warning, that the cracks in her façade are splitting open with her blatant hunger, but she does not care. Captain Larkin is a mirage, a miracle, and she cannot let it slip through her fingers so soon.

*

Mariner generally tries to avoid Billingsgate. The London dock is filled with the great tall ships bringing lumber and wool and cotton and wine in from Denmark and Spain and the Indies, but also stuffed to the gills with sailors. Mariner always worries about seeing someone she sailed with, but nevertheless, three days later, she finds herself walking the dock, staring at the painted names and dodging sailors, searching for The Seahorse. She knows she looks out of place, a young lordly gentleman out for a stroll when he should be comfortably tucked away in the city, but then she hears a familiar voice.

‘Master Blackwater!’

Captain Larkin is standing by a gangplank lank as barrels are rolled off a vessel. She looks much the same as she did three days ago, wrapped in a warm cloak and hair tidily tucked away. She raises a hand in greeting.

‘Does your cousin have a message for me?’

‘No.’ Mariner stares up at the ship. She is not like The Golden Hinde with her blackened pitch hull, her red-and golden-painted decor, the Tudor roses carved into the stern. The Seahorse is a plain dark-wooded Caravel, the paint of her name flaking, but she is beautiful. ‘What man has the ownership of her?’

‘None,’ Captain Larkin says, smiling as if Mariner is simple.

‘But you are a woman?’ Mariner’s voice becomes desperate. ‘It is not a costume?’

‘If so, a good one!’ Captain Larkin laughs. ‘Your cousin Blackwater buys a flock of sheep, a new house, my time, no one asks if she is a woman.’

‘She does not herd the sheep nor build the house nor plot a course to the Azures.’ Mariner’s hands are shaking and she wraps her cloak around her shoulders, against stinging wind and the heavy sky threatening snow. ‘Are you a piratess? Like the ones from the Indies?’

‘I sailed under one. Grace O’ Malley. Fought the English for her. A good lady.’

Mariner has no presence of mind to consider that a young English gentleman would take this as fair warning not to probe the Irish sea captain but Mariner has lost the thread of Matthew Blackwater, for the first time in months. She is Mariner Elgin of The Golden Riall and The Foresight; she is a sailor and a woman again and she has to know.

‘I don’t understand, who let you do this? Who gave a woman a commission?’

‘I need no commission, like your cousin I have my funds and how I spend them is my choosing.’ Captain Larkin looks up at The Seahorse with a deep tenderness that Mariner feels burrowing through her, from her throat to the soles of her feet. ‘That I bought a vessel and hired men with mine is my own business.’

Mariner tries to speak but words are impossible. Money, she thinks, this is what money can buy a woman. True and complete freedom.

‘Will I show you aboard?’ Captain Larkin jerks her head. ‘You look like a lad who would enjoy the view.’

Mariner shakes her head, not daring herself to speak, terrified that if she steps foot aboard something inside her will break entirely. She will strap herself to the mast, Odysseus before the siren, and die there, happily.

‘Then I hope I have satisfied your curiosity, Master Blackwater.’ Captain Larkin tips her hat. ‘Good day to you.’

‘Wait.’ Mariner cannot stop herself from grabbing Captain Larkin’s sleeve as she tries to move away. In a flash, her wrist is clamped over with Captain Larkin’s other hand, squeezing painfully tight, a warning to let go but Mariner can’t not yet. Her chest is heaving with the effort of forcing out the words. ‘Are you not afraid?’

‘Of you?’ Captain Larkin raises a sceptical eyebrow. Mariner shakes her head, tries to force her questions past her lips but they will not come: are you not afraid to be caught? Are you not afraid to be shamed? Are you not afraid of what will happen to you if you step so far away from the feminine role intended by God?

‘Are you not afraid?’ she repeats. The Captain’s long, assessing glare has all the severity of the hard-eyed preacher. Mariner guesses she has used it to send many men squealing and bumbling backwards, spitting apologies, but Mariner will not be cowed. She has to know. Then the Captain slowly lifts their cumbrous bundle of hands and wrists towards her face. For a second the breeze stills and Mariner thinks the Captain is going to kiss the back of her hand, but instead, she feels the nip of sharp, angry teeth and a slobbery lick, like a dog. She lets go of the Captain’s wrist with a hiss of surprise.

‘Set that against your fear, Master Blackwater, I am of a rougher breed than you think.’ The Captain laughs, rubbing the back of her hand against her mouth. ‘I’ll take good care of you and your cousin, when time comes.’

Captain Larkin climbs aboard and Mariner watches her go. There is a woman, commanding a ship, who can set her blue eyes to the horizon and feel salt against her cheeks and go anywhere and Mariner is no one. She is less than no one to be noticed, she has become Matthew Blackwater, his skin grows over her own and there is no horizon in sight. Envy and desperation are so heavy in her stomach she wonders if she will turn and vomit into the harbour. She walks numbly away, the songs of sailors and melodies of gulls pulling memories of Elgin quoting his favourite scripture to her mind: For what thing is your life? It is even a vapour that appeareth for a little time and vanisheth away. I am vanishing, Mariner thinks. She is an amorphous indent of shadow, eyeless and faceless. She does not know how to get herself back.

‘What if we married?’ Mariner whispers that night as she lies in bed, untouched beside Elody. ‘Many ladies marry their cousins, even Queens do it. Then we could be together.’

‘We are together.’ Elody does not even roll over to look at her. ‘If we were married my estate would be yours.’

‘But if I had it, it would be yours, and maybe they would watch less if you were married.’

The death threat in her pocket is greying, the creases cut deep. She thinks of the shouts of ‘Spanish fucker’ called out to her on the streets of London, of the sidelong glances and gossip of court around Elody that follow them still. If she is married to Elody, she will be an English Lord and Elody will no longer be a woman alone. There is safety in those lies.

‘Lord Isherwood will always be watching and if I married again, the court would watch more. They will expect heirs. I will not endure it again, the years of sliding looks, the comments on my womb and its contents. You are young and virile; they would call me barren.’ Elody’s voice is threaded with such bitterness that it shimmers. Mariner imagines it floating above their heads, silver embroidering the damask bed curtains.

‘If we were married, I could serve you better as your husband,’ Mariner whispers. ‘Handle your business.’

‘What do you know of business?’

‘Sea ports. Sailing. Your business with Captain Larkin.’

It is such a deep longing now; if she were hung drawn and quartered it would be baked into every part of her, visible like rings on a tree. The open water, the chance to feel the rocking deck beneath her feet. Perhaps there is a way to be both Matthew Blackwater and be happy. Elody kisses Mariner’s neck, breathing in deeply.

‘What would be the point of sending my love away?’ Her whispers make Mariner’s skin pucker. ‘As it will not make us safer, what need have we of matrimony?’

Mariner doesn’t answer. She doesn’t say she needs it because it would make her happy, because she is not sure that happiness should feel this fraught, but she does need the lie to be sealed. Lady Blackwater would have a husband and he could not be so lightly tossed aside. She will inhabit his skin, she will live in his life until she believes it more than the bible and maybe she could sail and maybe, just maybe, it would be enough. But Matthew Blackwater is no sailor and she surrenders to Elody’s kisses, responds frantically, hoping her own passion will rise up and drown out her doubts. Still she dreams of open oceans and golden-braided hair and a lilting Irish laugh. When she wakes, gasping, not from nightmares but full of longing, she wishes it was Kit’s arms she was folding back into. That they were in their little stable room under their cold stars and she could mumble her dreams without shame. But Kit is tucked away with Lazarus night after night, the two of them laughing and sharing a bed once more and his cruellest words cut her, over and over: you are her Daisy, that is all. So instead, she finds herself wishing not for him but for the past; for Mariner Elgin of Southwark, who would have robbed Matthew Blackwater for all he had.

The next day, Mariner thinks her wishes have gone awry when Pyncher tells her, face unusually disgusted, that she has a caller in the hall. Daisy is standing there, gazing at a portrait of Elody and Lord Blackwater. She looks so out of place, her best dress so tatty and too obviously revealing, and her blonde hair so uncombed and ragged down her back.

‘Jesus Christ,’ Daisy blurts out, looking up as Mariner enters, her eyes wide. ‘Sailor—’

‘How good to see you,’ she says quickly, seizing Daisy’s hand and pulling her into the study. ‘I am Matthew Blackwater, Lady Elody’s cousin.’

‘Matthew Blackwater,’ Daisy repeats. Mariner nods and leans against the door, palms flat, as Daisy looks her slowly up and down. Mariner can feel every inch of the expensive, dark-purple fabric that has become so normal to her, the gilded feather in her cap. ‘Well, Matthew. I see I was right.’

Daisy’s bitter smile is knowing; at least victorious in this, that Mariner did forget her, mostly, just as she promised to do. When she tries to test the range of her feelings for Daisy, it is like poking a bruise through a thick cloak. She knows there should be more pain, but she cannot quite feel it.

‘Why have you come?’ she asks.

Daisy’s eyes fill with glistening tears. She always was a beautiful weeper.

‘I heard you are alchemists now. Will says Kit is. His face, it’s been horrible to heal.’ Daisy shakes her head. ‘He says he’d kill Kit Skevy for ambushing him like that if he didn’t have such a powerful Mistress.’

Mariner can infer that Kit has gone to Southwark, like a fucking idiot, and had a brawl with Twentyman. She opens her mouth but she doesn’t want to ask, doesn’t want to admit to Daisy how far apart she has drifted from her closest friend. There is a tug, deep inside her, a sea anchor weighing down her soul: the loss of Kit in her life. She swallows hard, tries to hide it by folding her arms and nodding thoughtfully.

‘I doubt Kit will give cures for Twentyman,’ she says.

‘It’s not for Will.’

Daisy’s hand drifts unconsciously to her stomach. Mariner sees the hint of the bump there, the way that the bodice of Daisy’s gowns always flowed flat from her stomacher, but now her roundness is showing, a shelf on which her skirts sit. There is a tedious weariness to this realisation – how many other women has she seen this happen to? – yet this is different; a vinegary satisfaction barely distinguishable from spiteful disappointment.

‘You’re with child.’

‘And I cannot be. If I go to the Cunning Woman Mother Plenty uses, he’ll find out, he’ll beat me dead for it, but I cannot have his child.’ Daisy’s eyes are a sparkling, watery blue. ‘He’ll not want me anymore and he’ll have the babe for an urchin. I’ll be nothing or worse…’

Mariner does not say it is not true. The Grave Eorl has homegrown many bastard thieves in the city. The women who bear them often don’t last a year, destitute and impoverished, no longer fit for work at the Hat, which prides itself on selling the youngest, tightest flesh south of the river. Other stews pay pittance, not enough to feed two hungry mouths.

‘It is dangerous,’ Mariner says, hating how cold her own voice has become. In her mind, she hears Lady Catherine’s ungodly, bovine roar. ‘It can be deadly.’

‘I don’t care!’ Those familiar blue eyes are the most panicked Mariner has ever seen. ‘Please help me, please, he’ll kill me either way.’

Daisy grips the fabric across her stomach as if she wishes she could wrench out what grows there. It’s that digging in of her fingernails, so firm and desperate, that cracks something open inside of Mariner. She turns away from the tears, moving behind Elody’s desk to the drawer where the walnut box sits. What is the point of living under Venefica’s shadow if she cannot do this? She lifts the box up, holding it carefully, just as the door opens.

‘Excuse me, I did not know we had visitors.’

Mariner’s ribs tighten with the feeling of being caught, intention obvious, as Elody stands in the doorway, looking every inch the courtier. Mariner does not believe she did not know. Pyncher has clearly told her.

‘Milady,’ Daisy mumbles, dropping into a terrible curtsey. Mariner cringes at Daisy’s clumsiness, her common voice and terrified, deferential eyes.

‘Cousin, this is Daisy,’ Mariner says.

‘You are welcome to our home,’ Elody says, and Daisy blushes. Mariner suddenly sees her through Daisy’s eyes, as rich and fine as imported Spanish purple satin, smooth and unblemished and gentle. She wonders when exactly she stopped being able to see Elody this way. She cannot call it back, the same pure admiration she had when first they met, too bemired now by other things.

‘Daisy, can you wait outside?’ Mariner asks. Daisy nods obediently, eyes fixed on Elody’s golden skirt hem as she backs out. Mariner stares at Elody, who folds her arms and leans against the door. Despite the casual posture, Mariner sees the slight, furious pursing of her bottom lip.

‘Daisy,’ Elody repeats slowly. ‘Pretty girl.’

‘She needs help.’ Mariner sets a hand on the walnut box, the implied contents inside. Elody raises her eyebrows.

‘There are Cunning Women she can go to south of the river for cures. Let her seek their remedies. Mine are expensive.’

‘Please, I am only asking for this just once. For my friend, a childhood friend, someone who matters to me. I have kept all of your secrets; I just ask for you to keep this one of mine.’ Mariner is surprised by how much she can feel her heart in her throat, a moment of simple theft turned into a test of affection. ‘If you love me. Please.’

Mariner breathes heavily. Love me, she finds herself chanting wildly inside her mind. Love me as I need to be loved, love me enough to make it all worth it. Elody stares at her and then moves forward, cupping Mariner’s face, pressing her thumbs too hard under the hinge of Mariner’s jaw.

‘If I love you,’ she says. ‘You are a liar.’

‘What?’ Mariner is baffled, chest tight for air.

‘When you came to me you said there was no girl,’ Elody’s voice has become a low hiss against her lips. ‘Do not deny it, the eyes you have for her. Like you wish she would do this.’

Her kiss is ravenous, a shipwreck. The pressure of her thumbs increases against Mariner’s soft windpipe; a caught, squashed swallow.

‘Did you love her?’ Elody demands.

‘No.’ Mariner tries to shake her head, but Elody’s grip is too strong. ‘I admired her, yes, but she never wanted me, never saw me as you do, it is only you. I only love you.’

There is blood on her bottom lip from the ferocity of Elody’s kiss but it does not hurt her; it is a balm. How she loves me, Mariner thinks, her mind ablaze with it. Enough to be jealous, enough to want to keep me, it must be enough. Elody kisses her again, sucks the blood from her, and though Mariner can barely breathe, she doesn’t want it to stop.

‘The blue bottle with the opal set in the stopper.’

Suddenly, the pressure is off her neck, Elody is walking away from her, and Mariner is a jumble of airy relief and the sharp sting of rejection. She does not know whether to be grateful she has not been struck or desolate she is being left. Here they come, the creeping doubts that start to wriggle back in whenever they are not touching.

‘Thank you.’

Elody pauses at the door, her fingers drumming an impatient beat on the wood.

‘It is no crime until she is quickened, for there is no soul.’ Elody’s jaw is rigid, pushing her chin pointedly forward. ‘Do not ask if she has quickened.’

It is such a kindness, an unexpected way to save her conscience from the worst of it, that Mariner’s feet are numb with gratitude. She blinks furiously against the sting in her eyelids. Being loved by Elody is a tumultuous thing and, right now, Mariner has a flash of a traitorous thought: I am not sure I will survive it.

She sends Daisy on her way with the glass bottle tucked inside her palm and puts herself to bed for the next two days. Pulling the blankets up over her head helps her hide from her sin, from the watchful many eyes of God above. Elody tells everyone in the household it is merely the change in the weather, bringing her dear cousin low. She certainly feels brought low, pressed low by shame, and when the blankets no longer seem like enough protection from the eternal reproach, she takes refuge under the bed itself, slotting herself neatly between the dusty boards with their mouse droppings and the slats above her. Not quickened, she tells herself. No soul.

‘Get up,’ Elody says on the third day. She reaches under the bed like a snake charmer and pulls Mariner out by her bare ankle. ‘Your whore is dead.’

Mariner sits in a pile of limbs, her cold feet rucked up against the rug on the floor and burns under the sting of heaven’s glare. She imagines Daisy like Lady Catherine, drinking down the medicine, bleeding and screaming and beastly groaning but with no one to cling to, no one to burn her clothes. She begins to shake.

‘I killed her,’ Mariner whispers.

‘Yes, you did.’ Elody throws an embroidered cushion at her, the firm nobbles of French knotted roses catching her eyelid, making it sting. ‘She died instantly, they found the bottle in her hand! It’s all over Southwark that there’s a poisoner on the loose, that a Cunning Woman has gone too far. The constables are rounding some of them up on the Long Southwark road. I told you to give her the blue opal bottle.’

‘No, you told me the blue bottle with the opal!’ Mariner wonders if hearts can shrink with shame. Hers certainly is, the back of her neck sweating, the fires of damnation warming her, just out of sight. She clutches the little pillow to her chest as panic rises, wanting it not to be true, and with it come useless prayers: God, let it not be true. ‘Why did you not tell me there were two opal bottles?’

‘I thought you could follow instruction!’ Elody grips both of her hands across the back of her own neck, elbows wide, revealing the dark stain of her underarms to the ceiling as she looks up, taking in a deep breath of frustration. Mariner waits, looks tentatively around at what else might be thrown. Then Elody sighs, huffing air out of her nose. ‘Well, she is dead. At least she can tell no one.’

The cruelty of these words washes over Mariner until the simple rolling force of them gently pushes her back under the bed. She lies in the darkness and lets the tears come, silent and pooling in the shells of her ears. She remembers the first time she met Daisy, how the wind whipped her wispy blonde hair across her face, catching in the perfect corner of her rosy lips. My name is Daisy Gale, she had said, and Mariner had thought it was the most perfect name for this tempest of a girl, whirling through her life with a smile. Mariner’s chest feels as if it will cave in and she cannot stop the sobs. She tries to eat the noise of them, bites her lips raw, stuffs the firm stitched corner of the pillow into her mouth but it is no good. Her mouth is stretched wide, her eyes tightly closed, her tears dampening her hair and drowning her.

‘I am sure I told you it was the blue opal bottle,’ Elody says, over the sound. Mariner rolls on her side, wishing that Elody would crawl under the bed with her, lie by her side and give her a breast and a ribcage to scream into, scream for Daisy Gale who will now never be forgotten. Elody stands in the same spot, unmoved. So Mariner stares at her shoes through her tears, a finely embroidered pair with an Edenic scene stitched on them: Adam, Eve, the apple, the first sin. No, you did not, Mariner thinks, too afraid to pray. God help me, you did not.