Poor Banished Children: A Novel

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

There are many people I need to thank for sharing their advice and expertise so generously over the past two years. Firstly, John Ash for his information on piracy, ships, and life at sea, but most of all for inspiring me to write the novel in the first place; Paul Lunde and Caroline Stone for their information on slavery in North Africa and for introducing me to so many lines of enquiry; Rev. Timothy Finigan for his patience in answering my many questions about the Catholic priesthood and religious life; and my father for providing much of the material on Maltese folklore and medicine. For any mistakes in the text, I have no one but myself to thank.

Note

The events recorded in this book are fictional, but I have drawn as closely as possible on historical accounts of slavery and piracy in re-creating the world of the Barbary slave trade, through which hundreds of thousands of Christians and Muslims lost their freedom. Pierre Dan really existed, though I have taken some liberties with his actions and personality. Ibrahim Reis is based on the real-life pirate Murat Reis.

PART I

Dreams of the Dead

Death has come for me again. The others are already lost. I heard their screams as I was cast into the night; I heard them cursing as they burned or drowned before the roar of the explosion stopped up my ears and I fell into a world of silence. I am burnt by fire and stifled by the black, icy waters that drag me down. There is merciless darkness everywhere, which even the flames tearing the ship cannot pierce. I spin and struggle, raising my head for air as my blood freezes, and I know the sea will take me in the end.

The ship is gone now, and all that remains are burning fragments scattered like votive candles in the night. And I remain—the fragment of a human life, drifting to its close. I am not afraid to die, even though I will die unabsolved, but I am afraid to be alone. I fear the loneliness of the last journey down to the depths of the sea, where I will take my place among the dead, and no one will know that I came to such a pass. There will be no Requiem for me and no resting place, only a troublesome memory in the minds of a few old friends who believe that I died long ago, at the hands of another aggressor.

There are faces all around me; the spectral images of those I have loved dance around my head, taking their leave of me, whilst those I have lost gaze at me in silent accusation. I will die with so many lives to account for, so much blood I never meant to spill, but it cries out for vengeance nonetheless.

Death is so slow in coming that I find myself fighting. If I had desired death as I yearned for it once, I would not have run onto the deck when I knew the end was truly coming; I would not cling now to splintering driftwood, praying that it will hold me. The very motion of lifting my head to take a breath is an act of defiance. I feel no pain, the chill takes away all sense, and I feel only the weariness of death as it reaches out to me. I have died so many times and been returned to the land of the living that I could almost believe I am not meant to go down with the ship—but I am cold. I am cold and weary and cannot draw breath any longer. In the gloom above my head a single star shines. Stella . . . Stella Maris. I am lost. Stella Maris. I call out to the Star of the Sea but cannot hear my own voice ringing out across the murderous water. Perhaps this is death, then—cruel death from which I can never awaken. I cannot hold onto the driftwood any longer. My hands grow limp and numb with the cold, so that I cannot feel my own fingers as they uncurl.

Mother? Mother, I am dying!

Hush, says a voice I can hear. I am holding you.

Dreams again, the dreams of the dead.

1640—The Devonshire Coast

A group of fishermen found her body at first light. She lay on the beach—her hands still curled around the driftwood that had carried her there, her hair covering her face so that they thought at first she must surely be dead. However, when they turned her over they saw colour in her face, and they were so struck by the sight of her that they carried her into the town to see if she could be saved.

She was unusually small and of such delicate build that Tom carried her in his arms with the ease he might have used to carry a child. She must have been on that boat, he said, when they reached the tavern and Mary was prevailed upon to come down and let them in. She’s hurt.

They had been woken up in the night by the sound of a distant explosion and seen flames on the horizon when they hurried to their windows to look, but when they had made a search at daybreak she was all they had found. They placed her over a barrel and began striking her back to release the water from her lungs. A lady passenger? asked Jonathan, his brother. She is clothed as a man. Look at her.

Her shirt and breeches had been burnt and torn in many places, but she was very definitely wearing a boy’s garb. Perhaps she was a stowaway? Tom suggested, but there was no time to consider the puzzle any further. The tiny body began choking and moving; then quite suddenly she lifted her head, opened a pair of huge, piercing black eyes, and shouted in a barbarous tongue they did not understand. You have nothing to fear, said Tom, reaching out to place a reassuring hand on her head, but she could not hear him and thought that she had fallen into hostile hands again. There now, we are trying to help you.

But she would not be comforted, struggling and shouting so violently that they almost feared her and Tom could have been convinced that she was not a human being at all. A nymph of the sea perhaps or some other fantastical creature, she was so wild and so perfectly made—except that she was wounded and only a real woman could bruise and bleed as she had done. What are we to do with her? he asked when she lost consciousness again, much to their relief. We cannot keep her.

Mary backed away. Do not look to me for help; she cannot stay here.

You have room.

Ay, for paying guests, not sickly strangers. I am not a nursemaid.

Oh, Mary, where’s your woman’s heart?

Buried with my husband, she snapped. She took her shawl from around her own plump shoulders and covered the girl, who was shivering in a feverish sleep. You should take her to Branton Hall. Lady Alice is a good woman, if a Papist. She will take care of her. Who knows, she may even understand the nonsense she speaks.

+

Would it be impertinent of me to ask how this woman came to your house, my lady? asked Mr. Forbes, when she had dismissed the servant from the sickroom and they were at liberty to talk. As a physician and fellow Catholic, he had attended the family for many years and was Lady Alice’s most trusted confidant, but never had she called him on so strange an errand.

Some men carried her here this morning, she said, seating herself by the window. They said a ship had gone down in the night—they heard an explosion—and that she had been found on the beach, half-drowned. Naturally I took her in and ordered the servants to care for her, but when they tried to undress her they discovered she was horribly injured and were afraid to do her any further harm. I did not know whom to trust. Since she was evidently in need of help, I sent for you.

And you have no notion of who she might be?

None at all. Her dress was so strange; if she had been a man I would have thought she were a pirate, but of course that cannot be. And she is clearly not from these parts; look how dark she is. Forbes moved away and knelt at the girl’s bedside. The servants had eventually been prevailed upon to strip off her tattered, damp clothes and had dressed her in a nightgown before putting her to bed. She lay now, senseless and trembling, entirely unaware of their presence. My dear Mr. Forbes, I have hardly considered where she has come from; I have been so worried she might not live.

He turned to look at her. Lady Alice, you have reason to fear. This woman has been tormented almost to the point of death. I am quite astonished that she is alive and cannot say with any certainty that she will live much longer. Look. He would never have shown her what he had found if he had not known how strong she was, but he knew that Lady Alice had been a prison visitor as a young woman in London and there was very little she had not seen, including dead bodies. If you will forgive me, my lady— He pulled back the covering and turned the girl onto her front, then slipped the vast, ill-fitting gown off her shoulder to reveal fresh dressings. She must have had her back to the explosion if she was on the ship, but she is quite badly burnt. And there are older injuries I do not like. Here. He pointed at the exposed side of her face, where a livid patch had spread across her cheek. That was a hefty blow some days ago, powerful enough to break the cheekbone. Then there are these thin scars all over her body—

He was cut off by the patient beginning to move; he quickly turned her onto her back again so that he could look at her face more clearly. Her eyes were open and she looked at him in undisguised terror. Hush now, do not be afraid, he said, but knew he was wasting his time. She clearly could not understand a word he said.

What about French? suggested Lady Alice, but she simply shook her head when it was tried. Latin?

To Lady Alice’s surprise, a look of recognition came into the girl’s face. Puella sum, she whispered, pressing her wrists together. Puella.

A slave? Lady Alice knelt by her side to hear her better. Where are you from?

Her breathing was becoming laboured again. She struggled to form the word. Malta.

And your name? Do you have a name?

The girl’s mouth opened and closed as though she could not remember her own name or could not decide whether to trust them with it; then her eyes filled with tears and she shook her head. Leave her, ordered Forbes, placing a hand on the girl’s forehead. It cannot matter now. She has not had a peaceful life; she deserves a peaceful death. Ask your servant to bring me more water.

Lady Alice turned to leave but stopped in her tracks, hearing the unmistakable gasping and grunting of a dying body attempting to speak again. Do not speak if it troubles you, said Forbes, placing a finger on her lips to hush her, but she pushed his hand away, hissing between her teeth. Finally, they both heard one barely distinguishable word: Sacerdos.

Forbes let out a long sigh. Quite without knowing it, she had made the most dangerous final request she could possibly have articulated.

Into the World of Dreams

When I was a slave, my dreams took me back to the world of the free. I dreamed that I was back in the land of my birth again, wandering the streets of the Gozitan town I had once imagined I would never leave. My masters could not stop me from walking where I pleased then, and I could run and laugh and drink deeply. Cool, clear water, heady wine. And the voices of friends returned to me like a love poem, whispering in my dreams to give me comfort before the morning and its terrors began.

But now the world of dreams and waking have changed places. By day I find myself in a place without a name, among a courteous people who care for me though they do not know who I am. A gentlewoman comes often to my chamber and sits by my bedside with her needlework, keeping watch over me. I am warm and safe; my wounds heal behind dressings I could not have made better myself. I lack nothing except peace, but I know it can never be mine, even when death comes.

In dreams I cross the sea and find myself in Barbary again. I see him, a white-haired Frank being led out to die. All those people seemed like angels to me, so white and gold and delicate, so very unlike any person I had ever seen before. This one seems unconcerned for his fate and makes no attempt to struggle, as though despair or fear have worked their wicked magic on him and he has no will left to put up a fight. Perhaps it is just as well; he could not possibly release himself. His hands are bound, and they hang him by his ankles so that his head is some distance from the ground. Only at that moment, when there is not the slightest hope of escape, does he seem to come to life, and he calls out in his language so pitifully that we all know he is pleading to be released. But this is a place without hope, without mercy, and they drop him down so that his head batters against the ground.

I have heard so many people screaming and crying that my nightmares do not distinguish one from another; I simply hear a cry of anguish coming from the mouth of this tormented man that might belong to him or to the child some paces in front of me, screaming at the sight of a man being dashed time and time again against the earth until his bloodied head cracks open and he dies. Or it might be my own cries, since no injury I attended when I learnt the physician’s art was ever so horrible as that sight. They cut down his body as though it were a mere carcass, the broken head so disfigured, so utterly destroyed that in death the man barely looked human. Yet I thought, He is some poor woman’s son. Perhaps he is himself a father of children. But then I wake trembling and weeping with the smell of blood all around me and the sight of his face just before they let him go . . . and he is only a ghostly memory sent to torment my rest.

There were so many of them, poor souls, more than I could ever count, taken from any country I could think to name: French, Spanish, Greek, English, Venetians, Genoese, Blacks, and my own people—a people no one ever recognised. To our fellow Christians we must have seemed neither one race nor another, with our dusky looks and Arab tongue, a stiff-necked Christian people who called God Allah and worshipped Christ, whose eyes looked always toward Rome. To our captors we must have seemed like renegades of a kind, too like them for comfort and yet too unlike them to be worthy of any respect. Poor souls indeed, the most unfortunate of all the children of Christendom, snatched from families who could never hope to pay the demanded ransom, a people whom none would call their neighbour—poor banished children of a suffering God.

I can hear again. The blast ringing through my head as I was thrown overboard stopped up my ears for just a few hours, thank God, before sounds began to return to me. I feared, to begin with, that I was trapped in a silent world from which I could not escape nor hear the comfort of another human voice, where the only noises would be those I was condemned to remember.

When I first heard the lady of the house speak, I recognised her language, though I did not understand a single word. I knew that I had heard it once before, coming from that man’s mouth as he pleaded for his life. He was an Englishman then, the man they killed in that bloody manner. I never even knew what it was he was supposed to have done—made repeated attempts at escape, perhaps, or helped others to flee. I suppose I remember him so clearly because I cannot help imagining how easily I might have been put to death myself or caused another to suffer in my place. Dear God, let no one have suffered in my absence. Let no one else have suffered. I never meant anyone to take the blame in my place, but I can never know what the true cost of my escape was. And I see him still in my most chilling dream visions, dying over and over again when he himself is at peace now. I see him or those who were good to me hanging in his place, and I will always see them because I cannot know what harm I may have caused on the long, perilous road to freedom. I can never know.

A Most Extraordinary Confession (1)

Are you a priest? I ask the man who sits near my head. The lady of the house told me he was a priest before she left the room, but he is not clothed as priests were in my motherland.

Yes, he promises; you called for me. Will you let me hear your confession?

You do not look like a priest.

He smiles. He is an old man with grey hair that must have been almost black once and a face lined with anxiety, yet he seems quite at peace. It is far safer than it was when I was a young man, but I am used to caution and do not dress as a priest here, he explains, reaching into his bag and taking out a purple stole. It hangs around his neck like a silken rope. I find it impossible not to flinch. There now, do not fear to trust me. God has spared your life and brought me to your side in your darkest hour.

Father, it has been so long; I hardly know what to do. Where I have been—

Where have you been?

Hell. I am a voyager from hell.

Poor man. He looks a little startled by my demeanour; perhaps he thinks me a little mad, and I declare that I may be mad, but not without cause. I defy him to call me a liar. I have been burnt by fire and tormented by infernal creatures; I have been dragged, screaming with terror, from the land of the living. I have known pain fit to drive a strong man to madness, which is why I say that perhaps I am a little mad. I have known shame and I have known despair. I have seen men and women beaten, starved, confined like condemned criminals until they begged for death to claim them. I have stood helplessly by and watched innocent children snatched from the arms of their parents. I have seen the devil himself at work in the bagnos and slave markets of Barbary, and I have stared him in the face.

Father, I have been delivered from the hands of my enemies, though I have not deserved it, and now I ask you to deliver me from the greatest peril of all. I do not wish to return to hell.

You need not go to hell, he tells me; be of good courage. You must hold nothing back.

It is like hanging helplessly at the brink of a fall, with a man I do not know promising to catch me if I let go. I swear before Almighty God that this is a true account of my life. May I forget nothing; may I withhold nothing and come at last to peace.

I am afraid, wearily afraid. I must know that I will not be lost before darkness falls again. Yet it is the priest who should be of good courage, if he only knew the journey he is embarking upon. I will begin long ago, with a death I did not cause but which shames me still.

1629—Two Deaths

He had died as though struck down by the hand of God. Ursula had been barely five years old when her mother had sent her to the fields to take him water, and she had still been a little way off when she had seen him tumble to the ground. It was the suddenness of it that she never forgot. One moment her father was turning to exchange a word with one of his companions; the next he was dead, and that was the end of it. No time to give him his water, no time to take care of him nor bid him farewell—no time even to call a priest.

Her father’s unexpected death marked a kind of death for her too, though she did not know it as she watched them lifting his limp body out of the dust and carrying him home. Many years later, as she confessed the sins of her life, Ursula recalled that her journey into darkness had begun on that day, the day her father was struck dead, when she sat in the tiny room where they had laid him in preparation for his burial.

Perhaps she should not have been left alone with him, but as she kept her lonely vigil she became frightened by the darkness of the room. At that time she was still a fanciful child by nature, and in the gloom of the death chamber she began to imagine that her father’s ghost was creeping about her, unable to escape because the few ways out were covered in black and it was too dark for him to find his way. A lost soul. Invisible hands brushed against the back of her neck, making her jump up and turn herself about to shake them off. A lost soul. She had heard the expression before somewhere and thought him lost, trapped, only because she felt lost and trapped herself.

In her panic, she pulled down the black cloth that covered the window, unable to bear the darkness any longer. This was the first unforgivable mistake. The room was filled with weary, forbidden light, and she saw him laid out as though asleep, cleaner and more precise than she had ever known him, dressed in his best clothes, but peacefully asleep. With the sudden invasion of sunlight her fears melted away, and she knew he was not floating around her or touching her anymore. She could almost believe, seeing him so clearly, that he was not even dead. Her pulse began to slow again, and she made her second unforgivable mistake. She did what any other child in search of comfort might have thought to do and could see no wrong in the action. She curled up next to him and fell fast asleep, her arm wrapped affectionately around his neck.

If she had not disturbed his eternal rest, her family would not have turned against her; she would not have fallen into the hands of Father Antonin nor been condemned to wander so far from her native land. So much rested upon those few childish blunders or on the failure of her family to forgive her, but Father Antonin had said that regret for events that could not be altered was folly. It had been ordained that her father would leave the world on that day—and in the flurry of fists and raised voices that greeted her when she woke, it was determined that she too would leave the world of her birth.

Yet she still wished he could have come to life and saved her from them. Years later, she could still see him, white and serene in death, lying unperturbed by the angry scene taking place on his behalf. Or perhaps she had felt a little grateful that he was dead or he might have turned on her as well, but the dead could do no harm. The dead could do no harm . . .

A Mother’s Lament

God forgive me, I never loved her. Even as a tiny baby, she seemed to me an unnatural creature sent to mock