Amanda McCabe - High Seas Stowaway

Bianca gazed down at the bustling port, remembering the near-mythic tales she heard whispered of the Calypso and her captain. “He cannot have been a captain for long,” she murmured.

“Nay, he first went to sea near seven years ago, apprentice to the navigator on the Elena Maria, ” Mendoza said. “He bought the Calypso two years ago, and his crew has followed him ever since. With a fair wind, he can see us to Spain in three weeks.”

“Three weeks?” Bianca said, startled. “He must be a magician.”

Mendoza laughed. “So some people say. But it’s only if charts and astrolabes be magic. He can steer a ship through any storm, too. He’s one hell of a sailor, señora. The crew would follow him anywhere.”

“Not everyone, so it would seem. What of that man who tried to kill him in my tavern?”

A dark scowl obliterated Mendoza’s grin. “Diego Escobar.”

“Was that his name, then? Who is he? Why did he want to kill your captain?” Bianca thought of the cloaked man, of the dead darkness in his eyes. Had he, too, lost something precious to the Grattianos? She could well believe that an entire crew of men would follow Balthazar; his charisma had been such in Venice, too. But she could also believe that someone sought revenge for some insult or crime.

“He was a navigating officer, come aboard a year or so ago from Vera Cruz,” Mendoza said, his tone reluctant, as if she forced the tale from him. “He and the captain were friends, until…”

“Until what?” Bianca urged impatiently, taut with suspense.

“’Twas a woman.”

“Oh.” Of course. A woman. Somehow, Bianca was rather disappointed it should be something so sordid, so ordinary. “No doubt some doxy this Diego thought was his, until she transferred her affections to the captain.”

“No, no, señora! It was not like that.”

It was always like that. Bianca saw it in her tavern every week, and cleaned up after it, too. But she gave Mendoza an encouraging smile, hoping he would continue with his tale. “Then how was it, pray tell?”

“Diego had a wife, a native woman he met before he joined the Calypso. Esperanza. We all knew about her, but we didn’t think anything of it. Lots of the men…” His voice trailed away, as if he was embarrassed to speak of such things with a European woman.

“Lots of the men have sex with native women, with their wives back in Spain all unknowing,” Bianca said.

“Yes,” Mendoza answered, still obviously uncomfortable to be gossiping about such things with her. Yet she found she could not let him squirm free. She had to know what happened.

“But Diego married the woman, in the church in Havana,” he went on. “She had been baptised and everything. Afterwards, we put out to sea, heading to Peru for a shipment of silver. That was when it happened, a few days out of Cuba.”

“What happened?” Bianca whispered.

“The captain found that Diego had his wife aboard, in the hold. She was pregnant, and ill.”

Bianca could imagine. The ceaseless pitch and roll of the waves, the dank stink of the hold. It was surely no place for a pregnant woman. “What was he thinking of?” she muttered.

“It was like he’d gone moon-mad, señora, ” Mendoza said. “The captain insisted on setting the woman ashore, but Diego argued. Threatened, even. But Captain Grattiano wouldn’t hear him. He made to turn back to Cuba, even as we lost precious time, and he left her there with a nurse, in a house of her own.”

For once, Bianca thought Balthazar was quite right. “What else could he have done?”

“Naught, of course. But she died anyway, poor soul, and her baby, too. Diego vowed to kill the captain, to have revenge for what he had done.”

“And he happened to catch up with him in my tavern.” Bianca shook her head at the madness of it all. The whole blood-soaked scene had not been for money or position, then, but for love. The greatest insanity of all.

“Captain Grattiano will pay for any damage, señora, ” Mendoza hastened to say. “We’re all very grateful for what you’ve done.”

“You shouldn’t thank me yet,” she said. “Go, see to your captain. I must finish my marketing.”

“Of course, señora. ”

As they parted, Mendoza on his way to the tavern and Bianca turning towards the steps that led down to the plaza, she suddenly called back, “Señor Mendoza!”

“Yes, señora ?”

“Which ship is the Calypso ?”

He pointed towards a vessel in a small, sheltered cove, somewhat apart from the other vessels. “’Tis that one. The repairs are nearly finished, you see. As soon as the captain can travel, we’ll be setting off.”

“Setting off for where?”

Mendoza smiled again. “For home, at last! It’s been an age since we saw Vista Linda.”

Vista Linda. Home. Where would that be? But before she could ask him, the quartermaster set off, whistling a sea chanty into the breeze. Bianca turned again towards the plaza, more puzzled than ever.

Her mother had always dealt in the uncertainties of life, the mysteries. Love, death, changes in fortune—she could glimpse it all. Bianca preferred the realities. Work, companionship, a cosy fire, a goblet of good wine. Things she could see, quantify. Despite all the allure of the vast, wide sea, of adventure and freedom, she knew that such things did not last.

Balthazar Grattiano was like the sea. Changeable, stormy, ever beautiful and intriguing. And, like the sea, he could swallow up all she had, all she was, in a moment. A person had to be tough, cruel even, to survive in this New World, and the Grattianos had never been noted for their gentle benevolence. Why, then, had Balthazar bothered to turn back to Havana for the safety of a woman? And what had he done to make his crew so devoted they would follow him there so willingly?

Well, most of them followed. Bianca shivered as she remembered that man, Diego, and his dead eyes.

Those thoughts all swirled around in her head, indecipherable as a dream and twice as confusing, as she entered the main plaza of Santo Domingo. At one end of the cobbled square rose the cathedral, Santa Maria La Menor. Unfinished, it was still grand and imposing, gleaming a pure white in the harsh morning light. The doors stood open, beckoning the faithful into the cool, shadowy gloom, where they could lay their sins before the gilded altar.

Bianca turned away from the solitary splendour of the church to the bustle and noise of the market. At the centre of the plaza was a raised stone cross, and around this were arrayed the tables and booths of farmers and merchants. Every week they took the long journey from their inner-island estancias and smallholds to ply their wares to town dwellers.

Bianca surveyed the fruits and vegetables: brilliant oranges, lemons and guava, mounds of starchy cassava. There were barrels of sugar, left from what had not been exported from the island’s thirty-four mills, jars of molasses for rum, and small buckets of precious spices. But these were not what she wanted. She examined the beef from the cattle stations, the pork from the wild pigs who ran free all through the mountains. Her patrons liked familiar, Spanish sorts of food, and these would make the hearty stews and roasts she sold so well.

As she paid for her purchases, she remembered Venice, and the tales her mother told of banquets in the grand palazzos. The long, damask-draped tables covered with platters of chicken amarosa, trout and leeks with lemon sauce, capon, plump strawberries, bright Majolica bowls overflowing with sweetmeats, goblets of fine wines. The hundreds of wax candles casting a warm glow over the silver and gold plate, the satins and jewels of the patrician diners. It all sounded like a fairy story to her, as far from their simple home on a back alleyway as the gods on Olympus!