The Devil on Her Tongue

Also by Linda Holeman

THE LINNET BIRD

THE MOONLIT CAGE

IN A FAR COUNTRY

THE SAFFRON GATE

THE LOST SOULS OF ANGELKOV

PUBLISHED BY RANDOM HOUSE CANADA

Copyright © 2014 Linda Holeman

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2014 by Random House Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited.

www.randomhouse.ca

Random House Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

Interior image credits:
this page
, From W.H. Koebel’s
Madeira: Old and New
, illus. Mildred Cossart. (London: Francis Griffiths, 1909);
this page
, Credit: DEA Picture Library/De Agostini/Getty Images;
this page
, © British Library Board/Robana;
this page
,
Vue De L’Ile De Madère Prise De La Rade
, drawn by E. Goury, engraved by Alès (1841);
this page
,
Vista y prospettiva del palacio del Rey de Portugal en Lisbona
, G.G Winckler (1750), courtesy of the National Library of Portugal; borders © Nadezda Kostina/
Dreamstime.com

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Holeman, Linda,
The devil on her tongue / Linda Holeman.

ISBN 978-0-307-36162-2
eBook ISBN 978-0-307-36164-6

I. Title.

PS8565.O6225D478 2014       C813′.54       C2013-906397-8

Cover design by Terri Nimmo

Cover images: (woman) © Yolande De Kort / Trevillion Images;
(beach) © Luisafonso, (border) © Nadezda Kostina, both
Dreamstime.com

v3.1

For Martin

ESTRA WALKED THE DESERTED STRIP OF CALHETA BEACH EVERY
morning as the sun rose, searching for limpets and treasures. The curve of fine yellow sand was protected by the rocky islet of Baixo, creating a small natural bay that collected what the sea spewed up during the night. The stretch of Atlantic between the Madeira archipelago and North Africa regularly washed up the salvage from ships. During the worst of the storms, caravels and galleons, brigantines, doggers and corvettes went down as they attempted to sail west to the colony of Brazil or east, around the Horn of Africa, and the remnants ended up here, on the beach of the small island of Porto Santo.

Under a sky washed with pink streaks, Estra poked her stout pole into the hard, wet sand between the algae-covered stones that emerged as the tide went out. She had already been beyond the wind-buffeted rocks above the dunes to collect vegetation for her potions, and now she adjusted the sling, brimming with kelp and sea rocket, knotweed, purge and milk thistle, across her chest.

She didn’t see Arie until she was almost upon him. He was lying on his stomach in the surf, foamy water swirling around him. His face rested on one bent arm, and his hair, caked with sand, was almost white, but not the white of an old man. It was white-gold. A knotted piece of leather was around his neck. Estra pushed back her crown—the circle of tough seagrass wound with bits of glass and shot she had fashioned for herself—and poked his back with her pole. He didn’t move.

She leaned over, thinking him a dead pirate. It wouldn’t be the first time she had found a dead man, usually a bloated mound with trailing strips of cloth and fingers stiffened into claws. She always left them where they lay, and eventually the fishermen of the beach tied stones around them and disposed of them far out to sea.

A tiny sea crab scurried through that odd-coloured hair, dropping onto the sand below. The man was attached to a swollen wooden cask stamped with the letters
VOC
by a chain looped around his narrow hips. Ragged rope encircled both wrists. The barefoot body, in loose black trousers and a torn shirt of coarse bleached cotton, held no secrets. There was no salvage near him, nothing but long knotted seaweed and stinking kelp, so he wasn’t from a caravel that had gone down. No, he must have fallen overboard. She knew it happened: young men, new to the rise and fall of the ship’s rhythm, sometimes fell from the crow’s nest or the high riggings. She touched the barrel with her foot; it rolled, watertight and empty. But why was he attached to an empty barrel?

She knelt beside him and bent to get a glimpse of the side of his face. There was a small oblong piece of silver attached to the leather thong around his neck. She picked it up and tugged, hoping to tear it free. With unexpected, shocking swiftness, the man’s hand grabbed her wrist. She cried out as she yanked free and leapt back, holding her pole in front of her.

The man slowly rolled over. His straw-coloured eyelashes fluttered as he looked up at her, blinking sand. His face was burned and flaking, crusted with salt, his lips puffy and cracked. He croaked out a sentence—it sounded like a question—but she couldn’t understand. As he painfully sat up, Estra backed farther away.

She had never seen hair like this, nor eyes such a clear, pale blue. She drew a deep breath.

It was him. He was here.

Arie ten Brink thought Estra was an apparition, perhaps the Black Madonna he had heard about, whose plaster image could be viewed at the monastery of Montserrat near Barcelona. Or maybe a dusky angel with her nimbus askew, the sun glinting off it and casting prisms onto her face.

The last face he had looked into had belonged to Broos, his executioner. Broos had led Arie to the prow of the Indiaman
Slot ter Hooge
, his hands tied in front of him with thick, tar-smeared rope. Broos was instructed to run Arie through with a sword—no point in wasting ammunition—and throw him overboard. But Broos was from Arie’s home of Middelburg in Zeeland; they had been childhood friends and had joined the Dutch East India Company at the same time. They had crewed together before, and on this voyage, aboard the ship bound for the strongholds of the Dutch East India Company in Batavia, Broos had the bunk below Arie’s. They often passed the dark hour before sleep sharing memories of their lives in Middelburg. On their steady sea diet of maggoty salt pork and weevil-ridden hard tack, fusty water and warm, sour beer, they fantasized about their mothers’ spring vegetable soup with meatballs, or the pots of cooked red cabbage and apples always on the stove, or Sunday breakfasts of
stroopwafels
, syrup waffles so sweet they gave toothache. They compared the girls they remembered, and talked of the autumn air, cool and fresh, blowing in off the Zuider Zee.

But less than a month into the eight-month voyage, Arie had killed the bosun Falco, a heartless, meat-handed man who found pleasure in taking the youngest cabin boys in the most bestial of ways. When Arie came upon Falco brutalizing little Jansie, ten years old and on his first sea voyage, he tried to pull Falco away. Falco, laughing, wouldn’t be stopped. Arie saw Jansie’s face with its panic and pain, and suddenly the years fell away and it was his own face he saw. He picked up the nearest object—the heavy breech lock of a broken cannon—and struck Falco. Meaning only to stop the child’s torture, he broke Falco’s neck.

While the commander did not approve of the coarser pastimes of some of his sailors, he could not let the rest of the crew think he condoned killing. Falco had already been wrapped in a winding sheet and tipped over the ship’s edge with small formality; now it was Arie’s turn.

While they had all hated Falco, Arie was a friend to many of them. Fearing mutiny over the condemning of Arie, the commander kept the crew below deck, pouring extra rations of kill-devil, a foul-tasting, fermented sugar-cane concoction that passed as rum. He allowed no one to follow Broos as he led Arie away.

Alone on the deck, Broos asked Arie why he had been so foolhardy as to try to protect Jansie. Jansie would have survived. Broos said, “Arie, we survived.”

Arie said nothing. In that moment of picking up the breech lock, he’d thought of Jansie growing into a man with memories that still woke him at night, sweating, the taste of fear in his mouth. A man like him. He didn’t wish that on the child.

Before Broos lifted the sword, he apologized, and Arie closed his eyes and took a deep breath as the blade whistled through the air. But Broos only sliced through the ropes around Arie’s wrists, and said, “I can’t kill you, old friend. But … what am I to do?”

“Tell my parents I died an honourable death,” Arie said, then climbed over the side and dropped into the water. As he bobbed to the surface, Broos threw an empty water cask, wrapped with a chain, into the waves. Holding on to the barrel, Arie watched the ship until it disappeared into the heavy swells.

He managed to wrap the chain around his waist and attach himself to the barrel. He pulled the cork from it, but there was only the stink of the algae that spoiled so much of the stored water. He banged the cork back in and held on, floating with the cask, through darkness and light and darkness again. By the time he felt the hard push of sand under him, he was incapable of forming a rational thought. As his body scraped in and out against the shelf of sand with each push of the water, he imagined himself a piece of glass, his rough edges smoothing in the tumble of sand and salt and sea.

And then he knew nothing more until he was awakened by a pull on the thong around his neck.

He met the girl’s unblinking green eyes under thick, arched black eyebrows. “Am I in Heaven?” he asked in Dutch.

The apparition reached up and scratched her cheek. He saw the dirt under her broken fingernails, and with that knew she wasn’t an angel. He looked from her face to her white blouse, patched and yellowing, to the ragged brown skirt and finally to her bare ankles, delicate yet strong. A cloth sling across her chest was stuffed with kelp and plant life. He couldn’t imagine how long he’d been in the water, nor how far the tides had carried him. He only knew he was alive. He silently thanked the God of his Calvinist beliefs, the God who arbitrarily chose to damn some men and allowed others to live.

He brought his silver amulet containing the fragment of his own birth caul to his lips and kissed it. His mother had been right to keep it, and give him the sailor’s talisman when he first went to sea. With God’s hand, it had saved him from drowning.

“Azores?” he asked.

“Porto Santo,” the young woman replied.

It was another miracle. Had he been carried farther south, he might have been dashed to death against the rocky shoreline of the neighbouring island of Madeira. More luck had been with him that the current hadn’t pulled him to the tiny chain of Ilhas Desertas, with no fresh water or flora, the only inhabitants monk seals and bird colonies. He would have perished, with no hope of rescue.

He slowly got to his feet, leaning heavily on the barrel for support, but his legs felt filled with sea water. He fell. The girl, whose face had changed from suspicious to something else, something almost welcoming, handed him her pole. He took it, grateful, and was able to haul himself up. The trembling in his legs abated, and he took one hesitant step. She tipped her head, gesturing for him to follow her. Arie leaned heavily on the pole as he followed, dragging the barrel, over a berm of seagrass and flat cacti to a rough shelter in a hollow of rocks. A dented, blackened pot sat on a pile of glowing embers in the sand.

She pointed to a broad, flat stone. He lowered himself onto it and the girl handed him a wooden bowl of warm broth filled with chunks of fish and pungent greens.

“Obrigata,”
he said, fighting tears of exhaustion and gratitude, and then drank, his hands shaking. “Excuse me,” he said when the bowl was empty. For all he was a sailor, and had for the last seven years lived at sea in the roughest of conditions, he still had the manners his mother had instilled in him. The young woman took his bowl and filled it again, and this time, his hands a little steadier and his stomach calmed, he was able to sip.

When he had finished the second bowl, she produced a small earthen pot of ointment, cool and musty-smelling. She lightly brushed the sand and salt from his burns and smoothed the ointment, with barely discernible strokes, over his skin and lips.

When she stepped away, he stood and said, in halting, clear Portuguese, “I am a Dutchman. I was employed by the Dutch East India Trading Company, on a merchant ship run by the Verenighde Oostindische Compangnie.”

The girl lifted a section of his chain, tugging lightly on two of the links as if to test them.

He bowed slightly. “My name, senhorita,” he said, straightening his torn shirt, “is Arie ten Brink.” He watched her hands on the chain. “And if you can help me unburden myself of this barrel and direct me to the nearest town, I will not trouble you again.”