Tenth Gift by Johnson Jane

Author:Johnson, Jane
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing
Published: 2009-09-21T04:00:00+00:00

20 Catherine

August 1625

Cat laid aside the pen and sighed. In truth, she had no hopes that her former master would even receive the letter she had just drafted, let alone be minded to act on her entreaties. Three thousand, four hundred and ninety-five pounds, of which she knew a full eight hundred to be her own redemption price. It was a fortune: at Kenegie she had been paid just eight pounds a year, from which was deducted her bed and board; Matty earned barely four. Cornwall was a poor county: there was never enough money to go around. Taxes and tithes had to be scraped together; doctors’ fees were a luxury – many a child had sickened and died because its parents could not find a shilling for the chirurgeon. The cost of a decent burial forced many families to cast themselves on the mercy of the parish for the price of the simplest service. Cat had witnessed the use of sackcloth as a winding sheet; even once a body blessed by a mendicant priest for a bowl of gruel and taken by night by one of the local fishermen to be consigned to Davy Jones’s locker.

‘Done?’ The large, rough-faced, rough-handed woman into whose care Cat had been thrust now stood before her, hands on ample hips, waiting impatiently.

Cat nodded reluctantly. ‘It’s finished.’

‘Give.’

She handed over the sheet of paper and the woman took it and stared at it suspiciously, turning it around and around in her callused fingers. Cat could tell that the woman could not read a word of what she had written, but she made a satisfied noise and rolled the paper into a scroll.

‘I take to the Djinn.’

Cat frowned. ‘Al-Andalusi?’

In response, the woman hissed at her and bustled off into the shadows. Cat sank back into the cushions and tilted her face up to the sunlight, which streamed down through the twining jasmine, releasing its confectionery scent into the still air. She was sitting at a table set within a recess to one side of a tiled courtyard. Overhead, in the vines that climbed the intricate trellis to the balcony that ran around the whole inside square of an elegant two-storeyed house, tiny reddish-brown birds sang. An orange tree spread its limbs across one corner of the courtyard; in the opposite corner a small patterned rug had been set, its once-bright colours faded by the sun, and in the centre of it all a fountain splashed into a raised marble bowl scattered with pale-pink rose petals. The light and scent and exquisite artistry of this tranquil place were so far removed from the vile mazmorra, the pitch-dark and stinking of shit and piss holding-pen in which she and the rest of the captives had been thrown, that all she wished for now was to be allowed to remain here, even if it meant writing the wretched letter a thousand times over.

She had spent only three days in the mazmorra (reckoned by the cries of the muezzin, for

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