The Posy Ring Episode 15

Calum wanders over to the windows facing the sea. “What a beautiful situation this place is in!” he remarks.

“I know. It’s amazing.”

“Is that the back door, or the front door?” “I don’t know. I took that, where I came in, to be the front door, but now I’m not so sure.”

“Can we open it?”

“I was just going to do it. I was investigating the bedrooms. I’m booked into the hotel for another night, but after that, I was wondering if I should stay here till the end of the week.”

He pulls a face. “And will you?” “Maybe. I found my mum’s old bedroom. I could sleep in that. It’s OK up there. Not damp. I haven’t been up as far as the attics. I might leave that for another day.” “What about the tower?”

Now it’s her turn to pull a face. “Not yet.” “Will we open this door then?” He’s there, suiting the action to the words. “Do you have the key?”

“I have keys galore,” she says. “These are the keys of the castle.”

It is one of her dad’s favourite tonguetwisters. “These are the keys of the castle, and the castle belongs to Theophilus Thistle. Theophilus Thistle is a thistle sifter by trade...” She remembers them chanting it together: her dad, her grandma Nancy, herself, all joining in.

“Wow. You certainly do have keys.” There is a heavy bolt on the back door. He slides it across and the noise of it echoes around the room. She’s sorting through the bunch of keys, finding the substantial labelled key that she had hooked onto the rest for safekeeping. It fits. She turns it in the lock and it opens with a satisfying click.

“Well,” he says, grinning, “you’ll be very secure from the sea side of this house. No pirates or Spanish sailors are going to make it through this door, anyway!”

1588

Mateo paused on the shore, waiting, as always, for Francisco to catch up, and gazed at the house. It seemed grim and forbidding, although he noticed two or three small and expensively glazed upper windows with their lower wooden shutters firmly closed against the weather. So there was a modicum of wealth here. It struck him that the young woman did not have the air of a peasant.

There had been a certain confidence about the way she stood still, watching them for a while, the decisive way she strode off towards the house. She would have gone to raise the alarm, even though she hadn’t looked as if the sight of them had worried her very much.

But then, he thought, with a wry smile, who would be thrown into any kind of panic by such warriors as they had become? Two more wretched, beaten souls it would be hard to imagine. No threat to anyone. Inadvertently, he found his hand reaching for the spot where the dagger still lay concealed at his breast, beneath the filthy linen shirt, the padded doublet and the battered jerkin, stiff with salt, noxious with the smell of damp leather and sweat.

He found himself patting the spot gently. Perhaps some threat after all, if the need arose. He would not go quietly. But perhaps the need would not arise. He hoped not.

Mateo wondered, not for the first time, if he would be able to make himself understood sufficiently to explain their situation. He had managed it with Mcallister, but he knew enough to realise that seasoned sailors often spoke foreign tongues. He himself spoke fluent English, better than Francisco certainly. Scots was difficult but not beyond him.

That being the case, he thought in passing, why were they here? Why had he allowed his sof t- hear ted cousin to accompany him in such an enterprise? He had had some inkling of what lay ahead, but Francisco? None at all. He should not be here. They had been persuaded by Mateo’s father, who thought that Francisco needed “toughening up”.

“It will make a man of him,” he had said. Instead, it had very nearly killed them both, and might yet prove fatal.

While Mateo was still very young, his father had engaged a tutor for him, a religious man of some learning who, displaced from the only life he had known in the monastery where he had lived for some 20 years, had fled England in 1540.

He had then travelled bravely but perilously through France and Spain over many years, a pilgrim, and ultimately washed up like a piece of holy flotsam, on the Guimar coast of Tenerife at Candelaria.

The man had taught him Latin and Greek, English, a little French and more besides; something of philosophy and much more of his own great love: mathematics.

He had inspired the same joy of numbers in Mateo. Following that, there had been the rudiments of navigation too, which Mateo had learned as much from a fascination with the underlying principles as from any great love of the sea.

He had sailed between the islands many times with his uncle and his father, to La Gomera, where they had property, and to La Palma, where they had family. It had given him, he thought now, a false sense of his own capabilities. His father had taught him all he knew of warfare and fighting, not sparing him at all. He still had the scars to prove it.

But he had been too inexperienced to know how little he really knew. What had seemed like an adventure in prospect had become a nightmare in reality. He wondered all the time if he had been responsible for persuading Francisco, who admired him enormously, to join in too.

For all that his father had wished it, Mateo had exerted no real pressure, but he feared that his own restlessness may have infected his younger cousin. Francisco – Paco, they called him at home – had always followed him.

And it would be true to say that Mateo had not deterred him. Had it been because he selfishly wanted company? A friend? Because he himself had not really wanted to go at all? The responsibility of that weighed heavily on him now.

In Ireland they had scarcely interacted with anyone, afraid of the inevitable consequences. The widow who had afforded them the convenience of her byre for a little while had spoken a mixture of Irish and the odd English word. It had struck him that it was much easier to make yourself understood when a tongue was foreign to both parties to the conversation.

His father had taught him all he knew of warfare and fighting, not sparing him at all. He still had the scars to prove it

More on Monday.

The Posy Ring, first in the series The Annals of Flowerfield, is written by Catherine Czerkawska and published by Saraband. It is priced at £8.99.