A RAVEN EMBOSSED IN GOLD
2. A World of Water
We were a family no more, it had been our mother who had been the thread that bound us together and without her we dispersed, scattered like leaves on the wind when autumn comes and tears them from the tree. At first we tried to carry on without her but it was impossible, we had not realised how much she had done for us until she was gone. Of course we could still steal, but we could not sell. We didn't have the contacts she had, we didn't know who to bribe and who to avoid. When we sold our goods at all we got a fraction of their worth and the rest of the time they just took what we had and laughed in our faces. We couldn't survive. Some just vanished, some affiliated themselves with other gangs and other gang masters, some signed onto ships or took jobs labouring at the docks and the girls were gathered up by the kind of men who prey on the homeless and hungry.
I just wanted to escape and for me, as for many boys, the sea beckoned, offering the wide, wild vistas of the unknown. I could have signed onto one of the whalers, there were enough of them there in the great dock1 with their cargoes of bone, blubber and precious ambergris. But I had seen their crews; grim, hard men prowling the taverns and the alleys after months or years hunting their mighty prey upon the frozen arctic seas. Their exploits were legendary, their reputation fearsome; they scared me. They scared grown men, and I was just a boy.
I signed on with a merchant vessel that traded round the coast of Britain and the ports of Europe. She was a three masted barque called 'The Ruby' and by the time I was done I knew every inch of her. I scrubbed her decks until every knot in her planks was as familiar to me as the lines upon my own hand, I climbed the labyrinth of her rigging to sway in the sunlight far above her deck and the silver sea below and I stood for hours and days in the humid stink of the bilges manning her pumps during storms that tossed and threw her, when I was sure I would die. I learned to tie knots and furl sails, I learned to stitch a wound and mend a shirt, I learned to steer by the stars and predict the weather from the wind and the clouds. I found that I was a quick learner, that I could master anything to which I put my mind.
It was the captain himself who taught me my most important lessons, he taught me my letters. On the good voyages when the elements were kind, when the sun was warm and the soft wind blew upon the gentle waves he would sit with me in his cabin and teach me to read. Listening patiently whilst I sounded out the words from his bible and the names from his charts, correcting me as I learned to cut and hold a quill and as I made my first faltering attempts to form the words I wished to write. He was a religious man, he made us pray on Sundays and when storms were predicted, he gave thanks when they had passed and enforced the Ten Commandments with the lash. Perhaps he thought it was his Christian duty to educate me but I didn’t care whether he was doing it for Christ or the Devil; I was willing to learn it all. I suppose, when all was said and done, he was a good captain and a good enough man and the years I spent sailing on The Ruby were made better by his presence. But he didn't know the half of what went on below the decks of his ship, or if he did he turned a blind eye.
It was on The Ruby that I first saw the Marseilles cards2. They belonged to a Frenchman who sailed with us for a time and from the moment I saw them I was enthralled. I begged him to show me and I begged him to teach me. He refused at first but he was a good-natured man and I think he was amused when this beardless boy dipped the cards from his pocket and hid beneath the decks to pore over them. They were as fascinating as I had hoped and as I let my mind wander across the mysterious images it reached out for meanings that seemed to be there, at the tips of my fingers but just a little too far to grasp. I didn't steal them; we would both have had the skin whipped from our backs for that, he for bringing them onto The Ruby, and myself for breaking the eighth commandment3. I only borrowed them and eventually he seemed to decide that the only way to stop me plaguing him was to show me what he knew, so he taught me the meanings as he understood them and did not contradict me when my growing skill allowed me to invent my own. He also taught me his language, though he never ceased to laugh at my accent and pronunciation and I think I could understand more of his speech than he could of mine.
After about five years on The Ruby I left the sea. I was tired of foreign shores and strange tongues, tired of living on a tiny wooden island stranded in a world of water. I missed the solidity and familiarity of the earth beneath my feet. I missed England, and when we docked in Hull I took my leave, a very different person to the small and frightened boy who had left there. At first I tried to discover what had happened to my Mother, but none knew for sure. She had been taken, they said, first to the justice, then to gaol, and then to the Hull assizes4 where she pled her belly5. No Tansy and Pennyroyal for her there, a child would have been a blessing if she had told the truth, but my heart tells me that she lied. No one knew what happened to her after that, some said she was sent to York Castle to hang, others told me she was transported to a far country on the other side6 of the world6, and yet more said she had escaped the noose by dying of fever in the gaol. One man swore she had seduced a guard and had escaped with his help, taking ship to the new world and the fabled freedom of the Americas. Whatever the truth, she was gone and there were few enough who even remembered her.
I didn't stay, there was nothing there for me but memories and
I went North, up the coast to Scarborough, Whitby and the River Tee7
taking whatever work came my way, sometimes I allowed my wandering feet
to take me west onto the high, bleak moors where I lived off whatever I
could catch or find and slept beneath the stars. In Whitby I stayed for
a time beneath the glowering presence of the old abbey finding
occasional employment at the alum works8
or on the docks, loading and
unloading cargoes or processing the blubber that the whalers brought
in, boiling it down until I thought I would never be free of the stink
of it9.
In my memory Whitby is memorable for two things only; the
terrible stench that clung to the town like the shroud upon a corpse
and the doomed sailor who leant me his cards and allowed me to copy
them. Finally I had my own deck of Marseilles cards, and they were mine
and mine alone, neither borrowed or stolen but the work of my own hands
and, rough as they were, I spent night after night by rush light
reading and rereading my fate, seeing worlds, lives and possibilities
pass in the turn of the cards.
After a time I grew sick of the sound of the gulls and the salt of the
sea wind blowing, I grew sick of the stench and the bustle of the ports
and determined to leave. It was as though I could settle nowhere, as
though I was that card in my tarot deck called Le Mat, the wanderer,
forever leaving. But before I went I crossed the river and climbed the
famed 199 steps to the ruins of the abbey and there, in it’s mighty,
decaying splendour I saw a great black raven perched upon a crumbling
wall and said, for the first time in years, the words of the game, 'I
greet thee, Lord, and bid thee welcome to my heart'. With a great rough
caw the raven took flight, suddenly silhouetted against the pale sky
before soaring away to the west, inland. I followed.
1. The dock in Hull, built between 1775 and 1778, was at the time of its opening the largest dock in Britain. Its creation was, in part, intended to break the power of the smugglers using the landing docks on the River Hull and enable the customs officers to collect their revenue.
2. The Marseilles Tarot; a deck of 78 cards used for telling fortunes. The Marseilles pattern was one amongst many made in Europe between 1500 and the present day.
3. The eighth commandment; Thou shalt not steal.
4. The assizes were held quarterly in Hull until 1794; after this date prisoners committed to the assizes were tried at York.
5. Pled her belly; a term denoting the practice of women who claimed pregnancy to delay the sentence of hanging in the hope of a reprieve.
6. In the 1790’s many convicted criminals were transported to Sydney, Australia for a variety of crimes.
7. The River Tee; the course of this river marks the northern border of Yorkshire.
8. Whitby was a centre of Alum manufacture from 1600 to the early 19th century.
9. Whale blubber was brought into Whitby and rendered down to make oil. The smell of decomposing and boiling whale fat was said to be enough to make a grown man weep.
