obvious in the next few days that she was keeping the food for Jaime. I tried to steal a little of it before it grew mouldy in the damp which clung to the stone walls of the cell, but my mother caught me and made me put it back.
‘The food is not yours,’ she said. ‘If Senhora Francesca chooses not to eat it, that does not mean it is yours to steal.’
I complained bitterly, for I was hungry and could not bear to see the food rotting away, but my mother would not relent.
It is strange how need will drive a creature. I would swear that the gap under the door was no more than half an inch, but before the week was out the rats had smelled the food and found their way somehow into the cell. Whenever she was awake, Francesca mounted guard over the food, though the rats became bold in their hunger and bit her. When at last she fell asleep they ran about the cell, squeaking for joy over their booty, or fighting each other viciously over a fragment of ham. I sat pressed against the wall, my knees drawn up and my arms about them in an attempt to make myself as small as possible so they would not come near me. Before three days had passed, the rats had devoured every crumb, but I still wore Jaime’s clothes, which clung to me with the dead boy’s smell.
Chapter Five
English Fleet, 1589
F or two days, out in mid Channel, our ships had fought against cross-winds that blew us first back east, up towards Dover, then down, out past Cornwall, as if determined to blast us all the way to Virginia. By the time we had finally reached the tip of Cornwall and then the Atlantic, the fleet was scattered over several miles of sea, unable to keep together, the driving rain and mist so thick the Victory might have been alone on the deserted ocean. Our rag-tail army spent the time hanging over the side of the ship, emptying into the sea the little they had been given to eat. I felt queasy myself, as much from the sight of them as from the motion of the ship, but I managed to keep on my feet and attend to the occasional patient, although my nights were wretched, huddled in my corner between the water cask and the ropes, under a piece of patched sail I had found and draped over the top of my hideaway to provide some protection against the rain. Dr Lopez – and even, to my disappointment, Dr Nuñez – had metamorphosed into Portuguese aristocrats, and were too busy discussing affairs of state with Dom Antonio to exercise their medical skills. Besides, tending the men kept my mind off what lay ahead.
I had other more immediate concerns. Living with my father but otherwise keeping myself at a distance from others, even those in Phelippes’s office, I had not found it difficult to hide my sex. I was still slender and flat-chested, I was still young enough to be beardless, even had I been a young man, and the thick padded doublet I wore, sometimes further covered by my physician’s gown, helped to disguise my shape. When I had travelled abroad with Nicholas Berden to the Low Countries, we sometimes shared a room, but slept in what we wore by day, all but our boots. However, in the close proximity of the ship, it was far more difficult to conceal my personal and private needs, so during those first days at sea I hardly slept, snatching brief moments of rest sitting in my partially sheltered corner of the deck. I began to grow frightened at what would happen to me if it should be discovered that I was a girl. I had known this before ever we set out, but I had pushed this particular difficulty to the back of my mind. Now it confronted me every day. Would it be possible even for my father’s friends to protect me, if my deceit became known? They might turn against me, horrified that they had been tricked all these years.
On the fourth day out from Plymouth, the rain eased off, the wind swung round to a steady north-east, and the scattered fleet started to draw together. We sailed on, rounding the Brest peninsula, the westernmost tip of