The Ghost Ship, page 1
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About the Author
Copyright Page
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For my beloved Greg & Martha & Felix, as always
And for wonderful Finn and Ollie
‘They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters; These see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep.
For He commandeth, and raiseth the stormy wind, which lifteth up the waves thereof.’
Psalm 107: 23–27 (KJV)
Author’s Note
The Ghost Ship is the third in a series of novels inspired by the Huguenot diaspora, which travels from France in the sixteenth century to the Cape of Good Hope in the nineteenth century by way of Amsterdam and the Canary Islands.
The sequence of religious civil wars between Catholics and Huguenots in France – which began on 1 March 1562 and ended after several million had been murdered or displaced – was brought to an end by the signing of the Edict of Nantes on 13 April 1598 by the previously Protestant King, Henri IV or Henri of Navarre. Henri achieved great things during his reign and his assassination on 14 May 1610 was a catastrophe for France and the Huguenots. Henri’s oldest legitimate son, eight-year-old Louis XIII, ascended the throne and a rolling back of Huguenot rights began immediately. La Rochelle, then the third biggest city in France, became a symbol of resistance against the Catholic crown.
When Louis XIII died in May 1643, his son Louis XIV continued the persecution. He revoked the Edict of Nantes at Fontainebleau on 22 October 1685, precipitating the forced exodus of those few Huguenots still remaining in France. The first Huguenot refugees began to arrive in the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa as early as 1671. The governor, Simon van der Stel, set aside land for Huguenot settlement in the valley of Drakenstein (present-day Paarl) and Oliphants Hoek in which to settle. Renamed le coin Français, the ‘French corner’, it later became known by its Dutch name, Franschhoek.
There are many excellent histories of the Huguenots and the influence of this small community is extraordinary, a diaspora that took them, as skilled immigrants, all over the world. The word ‘refugee’ comes from réfugié, a French word first used to describe the Huguenots. Every country which accepted the refugees – including the Dutch Republic, England and South Africa – was enriched by their presence.
The United East India Company – the VOC (Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie) – was established in March 1602 by the States General of the Netherlands, seven years before the Dutch Republic was formally recognised by Spain in 1609, if for a limited period, granting it a twenty-one-year monopoly to carry out trade activities in the Far East. I have allowed myself a great deal of licence by allowing the Van Raay fleet to be independent within the VOC. I’ve also taken huge liberties with the command structure and the piratical activities of the Old Moon for the purposes of the narrative: for example, there would certainly have been three lieutenants/watchmen beneath the captain, rather than just two. It is not likely that a ‘ghost ship’ such as I have imagined could have existed – least of all commanded by a woman – but, in the tradition of most pirate stories, romance and swagger is what drives the narrative. The Old Moon is based on two Dutch ships of the period – Henry Hudson’s Halve Maen (Half Moon) and William Barentsz’s Witte Swaen (White Swan). The spiegelretourschip the Berg China – referred to in Dutch records simply as the China – arrived in Table Bay from Rotterdam in 1688.
Finally, the love story at the heart of the novel is inspired in part by two real eighteenth-century female pirates, the legendary Anne Bonny and Mary Read; as well as earlier pirate commanders such as the fourteenth-century ‘Lioness of Brittany’, Jeanne de Clisson, and the sixteenth-century Moroccan pirate queen, Sayyida al Hurra. These extraordinary warrior women – and others – appear in my book Warrior Queens & Quiet Revolutionaries: How Women (Also) Built the World.
All the characters in The Ghost Ship, unless otherwise specified, are imagined, though inspired by people who might have lived: ordinary women and men, struggling to love and survive against a backdrop of religious war and displacement.
Then, as now.
Kate Mosse
Chichester
November 2022
Principal Characters
IN PARIS & CARCASSONNE
Louise Reydon-Joubert
Marguerite (Minou) Reydon-Joubert, her grandmother
Piet Reydon, her grandfather
Jean-Jacques Reydon-Joubert, her uncle
IN LA ROCHELLE
Gilles Barenton
Achilles Barenton, Gilles’ uncle
Marie Roux, Gilles’ mother
Hans Janssen, former captain of the Old Moon
IN AMSTERDAM
Alis Joubert, Louise’s great-aunt
Cornelia van Raay, owner of the shipping line & Alis’s companion
Bernarda Gerritsen, Louise’s aunt
Frans Gerritsen, her husband
IN THE ATLANTIC OCEAN
Hendrik Joost, captain of the Old Moon
Jan Roord, first lieutenant
Joris Bleeker, second lieutenant
Dirk Jansz, boatswain
Pieter, a cabin boy
Albert, a cook
Lange, a Dutch mariner
Jorgen, a Dutch mariner
The De Groot brothers, both Dutch mariners
Marco Rossi, an Italian tailor
Tom Smith, an English lieutenant
Ali Al-Bayt, a Morisco mariner
Pierre Rémy, a French gunner
Sanchez, a Canarian mariner
IN LAS PALMAS DE GRAN CANARIA
Willem de Klerk, captain of the North Star
Phillipe Vidal, Lord Evreux
Andries Joost, the father of captain Hendrik Joost
Filipe Arauz, chief prosecutor of Gran Canaria
IN CAPE TOWN
Florence Amiel née Reydon-Joubert, Louise’s cousin
Suzanne Joubert, Florence’s granddaughter
HISTORICAL FIGURES
Henri IV, King of France & Navarre (1553–1610)
François Ravaillac (1578–1610), assassin
PROLOGUE
LAS PALMAS DE GRAN CANARIA
Friday, 8 October 1621
Today I am sentenced to swing. Before the sun rises, I will be taken from here to a place of execution and there, hanged by the neck until I am dead.
My pretty white neck.
Friends, I am innocent of the charge set against me. My other crimes, I do not deny. My actions were measured, they were just. I can still feel the slip of blood between my fingers, still smell the fear. Later, the hate down below deck and the stench of men confined at sea for month upon month. Their disbelief, too, that a woman could be so cruel. So, yes, I confess I have killed, but only ever in self-defence or to protect those I love. Never for gain. Never without due cause.
Those were the words I spoke at my trial, but the men of the Spanish court did not listen. The judges – hypocrites all – gasping for details. They could not believe a woman capable of such devilry, yet they pronounced me guilty all the same.
Outside my window, the sky is growing white, giving shape back to the scaffold and to my cell: the rough bunk affixed to the floor; a blanket lousy with fleas; my trencher and tankard; a night pot. I have scratched my initials upon the bricks so future prisoners will know that, for nigh-on six weeks in the year of Our Lord 1621, a woman was here confined: LRJ, captain and commander, innocent of the crime for which she was condemned.
I can hear the bells of the cathedral of Santa Ana marking the start of another day. At the port, the fishermen will be mending their nets, their wives gutting the morning’s catch and their children curing seaweed with smoke on the sand. In the harbour, the wind will be whispering in the shrouds and snapping at the rigging of the tall ships as they prepare to journey south to the Cape of Good Hope where two oceans meet.
How I miss the lilt and sway of the waves beneath my feet, the buck and the tilt. The solitude of the night-watch and the black sky scattered silver with stars. The endless, treacherous, beautiful shifting water.
Such freedom, such liberty.
In the Casas Consistoriales, the Town Hall, scribes will be preparing their paper and ink. The priest will be sharpening his prayers and preparing to hear my confession, expecting repentance and a desire for absolution. I shall not give him that satisfaction.
Friends, it was my grandmother who taught me the importance of telling one’s own story, of not allowing the words of others to stand for us. Lies that snare and trap. So, in these last moments, I have a final question to put before you, a question I find I still cannot answer for myself.
Is a murderer born, or is she made?
The Bible says that God put his mark on Cain and condemned him to be a restless wanderer. Do I have such a mark? Is t here such a thing as bad blood?
Some are born to evil. That is what the prosecutor said as he pronounced sentence. And how could I – the daughter of a murderer, the granddaughter of a murderer – refute that? Were the seeds already sown in my childhood spent among the wooden masts of the fluyts and flat-bottomed barges of Amsterdam? In that boarding house in Kalverstraat when I became what I am? In La Rochelle sailing with the Old Moon into harbour on that late October tide one year ago? Or the instant I realised I was in love, and so had everything to lose?
Even at this eleventh hour, I still believe my lover will save me. After everything we have seen, all we have been to one another, I have faith.
The sky is now the palest of blues. I believed myself composed, but I see how my hand is shaking as I write these final words. I have paid the guard well to smuggle away these papers, and I have to pray that he will be honest.
It is quiet in the gaol. I’m told it is always so on a day of execution. Can you hear it, the silence? No banging on the bars, no shouting or pleas for clemency, tobacco or water, no imagined malady come on during the hours of darkness. Even the rats are still. There is only the clink of keys and boots as the gaoler makes his way, flanked by four soldiers, for they think I am wild.
Outside the prison walls, it is different. I can hear the growing roar and clamour of the populace gathering at the gate. Armed with their needlework and their lace, flasks full of Canarian wine and parasols to shelter them from the rising sun. Until today, this has been the hottest autumn on record.
It is nearly time.
I have rejected the hood. I want to see the burguesía and the common people alike, all who have come on this dull morning in October to witness the execution of the hellion, the notorious she-captain of the seas. I will give them a spectacle, make no mistake. They will get their entertainment, even though they have dressed me in women’s weeds and I can barely breathe. I petitioned to be allowed my own clothes, but they forced on me this last indignation of petticoats and stays. I came into this world as a woman, and I am condemned to leave it as one.
I have heard the guards say that it will be the largest crowd ever for a hanging and that, I admit, also pleases me. They have seen corsairs swing before, at this meeting point of the Atlantic Ocean and the Barbary Coast where piracy is a fact of life, but it is only right that I should be such a draw. I am, indeed, notorious, feared over sea and land. I am the one they did not believe could exist.
I am the commander of the Ghost Ship.
PART ONE
Eleven Years Earlier
PARIS, LA ROCHELLE & CARCASSONNE
May–July 1610
CHAPTER ONE
PARIS
Wednesday, 12 May 1610
In the gardens of the Palais des Tuileries, a butterfly fluttered in the warm spring air. Soaring, turning, dipping, it flew over the formal lawns and beds of red and yellow tulips, past the elms and the holm oaks, before coming to rest in a haze of lavender.
In the pink of the early morning, the formal box hedges lining the alleyways were already alive with sparrows. A blackbird grumbled at her mate. The first swifts gliding home from wintering on the Barbary Coast, a drift of silky wings skimming the still waters of the ornamental lake. Silk worms, the most recent arrivals in this green oasis at the western edge of the city, were spinning their silent story in the white mulberry trees.
Behind the high stone walls, beyond the tranquillity of the gardens, Paris was stirring. The bells of the city marked the passage from night to day. Hawkers dragged their carts towards Les Halles, wheels rattling over the cobbled streets. Merchants of cloth and preserves, pewter and gloves prepared for another day’s business. In boarding houses and attics, the doxies and cutpurses muttered and cussed, waiting for the night to come around again. Kitchen maids held out jugs for deliveries of milk and scrawny boys were sent to buy fresh fish from the Quai de Bourbon. From north to south, within the old medieval footprint of the capital city, everywhere was life.
The coronation was only a day away. Pennants flew blue, red and gold, geraniums blazed in window boxes. Royalists pinned flags to their balconies and boasted of how they had been invited to be in the congregation at the Basilica of Saint Denis tomorrow. After ten years of marriage to the King of France, Marie de’ Medici was finally to be crowned queen in the presence of her husband and the eight-year-old Dauphin. Though the Italian queen was not popular, in taverns, landlords were offering drinks named in her honour – the ‘Marie Punch’, the ‘Medici Malmsey’ and the ‘grosse banquière’. All along the rue Saint-Honoré, the boulangeries were filled with Florentine biscotti and brioches, pâte feuilletée filled with cream and plaits of bread in the shape of a crown.
And in her family’s temporary lodgings in Place Dauphine, at the western end of the Île de la Cité, slept one who had not been invited. Louise Reydon-Joubert was dreaming of Amsterdam: the twenty-fourth day of April in the year 1596. Of deep waters and wide blue skies that promised adventure, of the glory of ocean-going ships.
Night after night, the same dream.
She was ten years old, tall for her age, and remembering being taken out into the IJ for the first time to inspect the ships anchored in the harbour. Smart in her white bonnet and apron, blue dress and clogs.
In her troubled sleep, Louise shifts. Her long brown hair tangles around her throat like a noose. The dream is disconcerting. It is painful to remember how innocent she was, how proud. Holding her grandfather’s hand as they walked over the canals of Amsterdam, knowing her beloved mother would be home the next day.
A red-letter day, marked on the calendar.
Louise dreams of being handed down from the quayside into the barge on Damrak, like a sack of flour, then feels the dip and pull of the oars and the slap of canal water on the bow as they make their way past the wharfs at the backs of houses on Warmoesstraat. Under the bridges, past the spire of the Oude Kerk, then disembarking. Walking along a wooden pontoon, the struts cracking and lurching beneath her feet. Clambering into the ship’s boot, a large rowing boat which would take them out to where the Old Moon was anchored in the deep, shifting water of the harbour. She sees a forest of wood, masts and sails – the most glorious sight – and the noise is overwhelming, terrifying. Shouting, gusts of wind, the scrape of metal. The whistle blowing instructions.
The images swirl and merge. Looking up in wonder at the sails and masts, the lattice of rigging. Looking down at the sea, choppier now, white waves breaking as the oars carve a path through the water making diamonds of green. Remembering her grandfather wiping the salt spray from her face with his handkerchief.
Then, they are alongside, beneath the smooth hull of the Old Moon. The fluyt is bobbing in the swell. Iron nails bleeding red into the timber of the gunwales. Louise sees the polish and shine of a ship almost ready to sail, the chaos of merchants and goods, sailors and civilians. Animals, for trade or food, are being winched up onto the deck.
Strong arms grasp her around her waist, pass her up from hand to hand on the rope ladder, until she, too, is standing on the deck. Her clogs are unsuitable, but Louise quickly finds her balance. She is a natural, they say. Touching the rigging, the polished taffrail, the comforting thickness of the rope. Her grandfather lifts her up to ring the ship’s bell and she runs the length of the deck, stern to bow, without slipping.
Louise claps with delight as the sailors clamber barefoot up ropes and balance on the cross beams, like the pet monkeys in the bar on Zeedijk; the galley in the fo’c’sle with its belch of smoke and soot, the rattle of the metal cauldron hanging in its brick prison; the beak at the bow and the grille through which the sailors do their private business. Though she is only ten, she understands that every man has his task. A ship is a floating republic, with its own laws, its own customs, its own rules.
Louise loses her heart that day, swept away by the promise of adventure, of freedom. Everyone is charmed by a girl who loves the sea as much as any boy. All the grizzled seamen, who spend their lives away from the civilising company of women and children, clap their hands. Her cheeks are flushed, her hair has come loose, she is happy.
