how he expects me to manage without servants on the voyage, I’m sure I don’t know.’ She glared balefully at her husband who was anxiously examining some cargo tallies, oblivious to his wife’s distress.
The young man who had spoken to me before squeezed past me again. ‘Careful you don’t find yourself pressed into service as her slave.’ He smiled at me and his hand brushed mine so lightly that I could not be sure if he intended it or not.
A trumpet sounded, and the matron looked up eagerly. ‘Food? Make haste, husband.’
She waded through the chaos of bundles and bedding towards the steps that led up through the hatch, elbowing the other passengers aside in her haste to be first to set her foot upon them. But when we followed her up the creaking steps, we found that the trumpet blast had not been sounded to summon us to a meal.
All the sailors were assembled on the deck and a priest stood up on the poop deck in the stern, the highest deck on the ship, a young altar boy at his side dangling a censer of burning incense from its chain in one hand and clutching a silver bowl with hyssop in the other. The sailors one by one removed their caps, and the priest began his blessing of the ship. He was mumbling away in Latin, his voice drowned by the clamour of the voices on the quayside. The boy swung the censer vigorously back and forth, but the incense smoke blew away before it could reach our nostrils. The priest dipped the hyssop twigs in the silver bowl and flung the drops of holy water over the ship, but they too were snatched by the salt breeze before they could touch the timbers.
The altar boy began to sing the hymn to the Virgin Mary in a clear sharp treble, Salve Regina, Hail Queen of Heaven. The ship’s boys joined in and the men’s deep voices plodded after them. Each of the weatherbeaten faces relaxed for a few moments into expressions of certainty and devotion.
I felt suddenly afraid. All my life I had known what I believed. Known that the Holy Virgin and her saints were watching over me, as my mother had always told me they were. I had looked up at that shrine in the corner of the kitchen and seen them smiling serenely down at me. When the thunder echoed round the valley so deafeningly that I was sure the great boulders in the mountains were rolling down to crush me, I would run to the shrine and pray with all the fervency of a nun, in the knowledge that the Virgin would protect me.
But whenever I was naughty as a child, I had guiltily avoided the unblinking stares of the statues, knowing that they had seen me steal a fingerful of honeycomb from the jar or watched me as I tried to hide the plate I had broken. I was always convinced they would tell my mother what I’d done. Yet even then, I had known beyond any doubt that when I lay down to sleep in my little cot, if I did not wake I would be carried by the angels up to heaven.
Now, for the first time in my life, I did not know where I would go when I died. If there was a storm and the ship foundered, would any saint bear me up in the waves, knowing what I was, who I was? Would the Virgin Mary Misericordia open wide her cloak and shelter me beneath it? The Holy Church and my own mother had declared the Marranos heretics, and Mary did not spread her cloak to comfort those who were to burn in hell. I was alone, cast out from all the protection that once had surrounded me. My own God had rejected me as a heretic. Yet if there was a God of the Marranos, I did not know him or where to find him.
The agent who had accepted my money and negotiated my passage had asked no questions of me save one – ‘Are you an Old Christian?’ I assured him I was. The lie came as easily to my lips as it had to my mother’s. Indeed, like her, I had for a moment found myself still believing it was true, until I remembered. He had insisted on hearing me recite the Creed and the Ave in Latin. But though I had known the words