Unable to get back to sleep – and half worried that if he does he will dream again of her – he sits on the bed, groggy, and tries to bleach his mind of thought. Eventually, to distract himself, he picks up the journal and begins to read.
THE NEXT TROUBLE to befall the ship is the pestilence. Several of the men, overnight, are overtaken with a terrible illness: bouts of vomiting and delirium. Men – brave men who have fought many a bloody battle – lie on their backs wishing aloud that they might die and be spared the horrors of the sickness. There have been various contagions before that have spread quickly among the men: the sharing of quarters, food and space are no help in such cases. And yet none have spread with such ferocity as this disease. And none of the men, this time, are left in any doubt as to the cause.
The lieutenants meet again. ‘We must find some way of getting her removed from the ship. Without the captain discovering how, of course.’
And so a plan is hatched. The captain’s evening meal will contain several teaspoons of a powerful morphiate from the medical supplies. Then the men will take the woman back to shore in the tender – and leave her there. They will be kind, they decide, they will send her on her way with food, and water, and the clothes on her back. It is a brave plan, because none on board are in any doubt now about the scope of her power. But so long as they treat her well – or at least not ill – they hope to be spared.
It works well. The captain lies in his berth in a drugged stupor. They will tell him, when he wakes, that he must simply have been exhausted. He will, no doubt, be too embarrassed to investigate the matter further.
Under cover of darkness the tender leaves the ship at anchor, makes the short journey to the shore and back again. The woman was surprisingly acquiescent when they explained what they must do: she merely nodded her head and gathered her cloak about her. She looked particularly young then, and – if the men didn’t know otherwise – rather harmless. If they didn’t know that she was something other than what she seems, they might have known something like guilt for leaving a young woman on her own on a deserted shore, vulnerable to men, beasts and nature itself. But none among them allows himself to feel this. And none of them turn to look at the small figure left upon the beach. She is no more to them now than a problem solved.
Only one difficulty remains. How to explain the matter of her disappearance to the captain. They will simply have to pretend that they, too, slept the sleep of the dead and woke to find that she had left. Swum away, perhaps.
But the captain’s reaction, when he wakes and hears that she is gone, is something for which none of them had been prepared. He is like a mad man – or as one lieutenant privately decides, less human than that – more like a wild animal. His eyes shine with a strange, crazed brightness. He stalks the length of the ship, searching everywhere for her, in impossible places: under men’s bedrolls, inside the foodstores, within the arsenal. When one of the lieutenants bravely goes to him and tries reasoning with him, he shrugs the man off with such violence that he is thrown to the floor. It is a sad and terrible thing to watch: that such a great man should be brought to such a low place by mere sexual infatuation.
For a day, they observe him like this, wondering what – if anything – they can do about it. Eventually, it is decided that it would be best to let him sleep on it, in the hope that some vestige of reason will have returned to him in the morning. But when the day dawns, calm and bright, they discover that he has played them at their own game. The tender is gone, and their captain has deserted his ship.
An odd thing seems to have happened. Somehow the remnants of Hal’s dream must have become tangled with the words on the page. Because, as he was reading, the figure of the woman in his mind began to change. Became someone he recognized. Became her.
15
San Fruttuoso
The next day’s destination is San Fruttuoso, a tenth-century abbey set in its own bay.
‘You have seen it in the scene in which the captain goes to pray,’ the Contessa says, ‘to ask advice from God. And several of my ancestors’ remains are interred in the crypt there – though whether any of them are his is unknown.’
Hal makes a quick note of this. It would be an interesting detail for the piece: a nice foil to the modern glamour. Even though, no doubt, it will then be edited out.
‘So he might not have made it to the Americas?’ Aubrey asks.
‘Well,’ the Contessa says, carefully, ‘it isn’t absolutely known. Certainly all mention of his name disappears after a point, from the records kept at the time. So …’ she looks to Gaspari, ‘we thought that it would be an interesting ending to the story.’