Prologue

Six Ships

1st May 1586

Six boats sailed into the docks of London on the first day of May in the Year of Our Lord 1586. Six boats, six different origins, six people – but with only one thing in common.

Their destination – the Isle of Dogs in London.

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The sleek Portuguese caravel La Corunna cruised almost casually along the river Thames. Many of the sailors and workers at the docks were letting their eyes follow the colubrine vessel as it sailed up the river Thames.

Obax Rusesabagina leant over the port rail of the caravel as it expertly glided through. Undeterred by the fact that every naval worker mooring the ships was staring at him for the sheer tar-like colour of his skin, he continued to admire London.

The crew of La Corunna were unfazed by his complexion. They had been on enough voyages to the strange, almost unknown land of Africa ‘where the sun burnt skin black’ to mix with black people. But that land of Africa was a strange mystery to the people of England, who could only faintly dream of such places that Obax had been living in for the majority of his life.

He certainly missed the heat as the cold weather, rampant with moisture, set in. He had heard of the traditional fog that set in daily in England. Such phenomena he had never encountered back in Africa, back where his heart had been left behind.

Of course he was prepared for the onslaught of prejudice and resentment that faced him from the moment that he would step off the ship. The comparative backwater of England was unused to the chocolate-skinned.

Of course he was prepared for the ghetto he would have to live in for the rest of his stay here in London. He would be among fellow members of the black population of the known world, if few.

Of course he was prepared for every change he had chosen to undertake to become who he was now. He was prepared for how these choices might affect him. He was simply prepared.

He was prepared for this new life. His new life in London.

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Slowly and almost clumsily, the tacky Irish transport ship Ciaran zigzagged up the river towards the Docks. The dockworkers relaxed again after the previous culture shock and returned to their chores. It was just another ordinary ship – fairly typical. Only the few who did not avert their eyes stared and nudged their fellow sailors.

The young woman letting her icy blonde hair tumble out and over the quarterdeck balcony – she could only be described as beautiful. Dressed in an elegant silver gown – she could only be classed as the aristocracy. She was too beautiful to them to be otherwise.

Feeling feverish, Mary Middleton mopped her alabaster-like skin with an exquisite silk handkerchief. The atmosphere as they drew into London was overwhelming her with a pungent malady.

“Mary, what on earth are you doing out there?” her mother called from inside. “The air outside is terribly unclean – come in at once!”

“Coming, mother,” Mary sighed.

She and her mother, Lady Anne, had journeyed to London because of the legends spun like a cloak of fable around it. Not only were its streets paved with gold – not that they needed any of it anyway, since they were fabulously financially prosperous – but London had been praised for its peace and vibrant religious diversity. A safe haven where they could practise their religion without the disturbance of Protestant brutes.

But in surveying their new home, Mary could find nothing to suggest any kind of peace or diversity. From her vantage point at the rail, she could already see a near-violent brawl breaking out on a nearby street. Soldiers carrying golden cross necklaces in their pudgy fists were patrolling the streets, flanked by stern-looking monks.

“Mary! Come inside, child!”

Mary growled under her breath. Sometimes her mother was the definition of insufferable. She could not know what Fortune or Fate had in store for her now. She could not know if she would survive London’s life of turbulence.

All Mary Middleton could know was that they had made a great mistake.

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The tiniest of the boats tossed and shook as the large rippling expanse of the Thames disturbed its tranquil being. It lay deserted, simply aimlessly drifting around in endless circles. Waiting for its owner to resurface. Certainly nearby pedestrians thought it strange that a boat should be left so carelessly abandoned by its owner in the Thames, where boat-thieves were almost daily routine. And then they saw the knotted rope dangling over the side and plumbing into the murky water.

Tom Brackenbury trod water for a few seconds. He was now deep under the surface of the Thames, scanning through squinted eyes for the thing he was searching for. He craved whatever it was so greatly.

The visiting confessor had told him several times that lust was a grievous sin, one of the seven deadliest in fact. He did not give a damn about what a pretentious priest had to say about his character. In fact, he did not see it as lust. It was simply something he needed. Well – something that he and the other Lost Kids needed, anyway. But mainly him.

He dived deeper, his breathing organs constricting further as he held his breath for even longer. Where was it? He had seen it just moments ago. His rant against the clergyman had obviously addled his thoughts.

He had been told all those years ago that the object that he searched for at present would satisfy his and the other children’s needs – eternally. It was somewhat sinister in voice, but bountiful simultaneously.

Sighing, and realising that once again he had lost his treasure, he let the water’s buoyancy haul him up again to the surface.

Bobbing, he resurfaced entirely and slumped into his rowing boat, almost capsizing it in the process. He shook his fiery red hair dry and forced its wayward style into his velvet cap (quite blatantly stolen off the top of a rich man’s head – one of Tom’s more showy thefts).

He had owned the rowing boat Jane since the age of eleven, and was not about to give up his childhood friend just yet. It was a kind of odd, yet masculine, sentimentality that extended its vine into adulthood. He was nineteen – to be twenty next March. Surely he had entered adulthood by now?

Shivering and draping a cloak over his shoulders, he began to row back to shore, thinking along the undulating journey. What could this mysterious treasure be? Something that could make him fabulously wealthy?

His family certainly needed it. Five children still living at home, one of whom disabled and in urgent need of a surgeon, living off a meagre wage. They said that every person, at least once in their life, experiences a benevolent miracle. That kind of miracle was one that had not happened to the Brackenbury family, at least not yet.

He grimaced.

He did not like to think about his family these days. True, no self-respecting teenager would ever want to dwell upon thoughts of their family – but Tom had outgrown his teens surprisingly quickly. Yet he did not feel ready for manhood either. Too much responsibility for someone like him.

Grunting, he quickened the pace of his oars and rowed back to the shore.

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The unwelcome looming presence of the brooding Spanish galleon Maria then dominated the skyline of London.

Everybody – whether impoverished sailor or wealthy admiral – regarded this new ship with the same equal loathing and suspicion. After all, it was a Spanish galleon. They all remembered the last time a Spaniard shared the English throne, as narrated by their forebears, and they all shuddered from the memory of Spanish garrisons patrolling the streets at night. They regarded the young woman peering down in sheer terror at them from the bowsprit. They regarded her with fear and the amassing hatred of her country.

Elvira de Puebla had no idea why everybody was staring at her. Was it because of her dusky skin, or her straight hair of raven-black? Was it her eye-attracting round brown eyes, or her sheer height? Was it her clumsy bearing or her awkward gait?

No. It was who she was. That was what they narrowed their eyes at.

She had been anticipating something along the lines of this. She had known that Spain and England were never the best of friends, but she had no idea of how terrible this animosity was that any Englishman would stare at her so spitefully.

And besides – she was not at all Spanish. Well, half-Spaniard, if one wished to be particularly detailed about her heritage. But she had always considered herself to be Portuguese. That had been her mother's ancestry, and every person she had known to be a friend had always remarked upon the blatant similarities between her mother and her. So it seemed fitting for her to be like her mother in that sense as well.

Had been.

Everything had changed now, as things always do when left undisturbed for a certain epoch.

Now nothing was left of her old life but the ashes of past fraught with danger and persecution. It seemed that those were the bricks on which her future was to be built. Judging by the facial expressions painted so vividly upon her new peers.

It seemed as if it was long forgotten and far left behind in her past, when she had only set out on this journey a fortnight ago.

She had come to a country where she could not speak a word of the language, save a few basic, everyday phrases. Why? She had come to a place where her religion and nationality were to be persecuted and loathed. Why?

Asylum – a difficult word to define. And she sought this concept, however problematic and varied it could be. Wherever this asylum was, she was still looking.

And from every face that gazed so hatefully up at her, she knew that she would in virtually all probability be looking for this mysterious idea of asylum for a very long period of time.

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The Londoners passing along the docks on their way to their several various destinations were not sure what to make of this new ship, titled as Heloise. The more experienced sailors could identify it as a warship by design and appearance, yet it did not look at all provoking or vicious. They had heard that the Queen was in talks with the Holy Roman Emperor to send over troops for any possible future uprising. They had heard German soldiers were the finest in Europe, perhaps in the entire known world. Its dark hulking presence simply navigated along the Thames without sparing a second thought for the onlookers.

Clinging to the stays a few metres from the crow’s nest was a teenage boy, not yet fourteen. His greasy dark hair had grown long and slightly curly, and his equally dark eyes were nearly invisible behind the extended fringe. The vivid black, meaning that the pupil was indistinguishable from the iris, contrasted to the greatest of extents against the pure white sclera. Clad in blacks, whites and greys, Nicholas Schindler could easily have stepped out of a shadow.

Anybody from a distance would react with suspicion, mistaking his dark figure for a raven perching on the ship. Ravens were associated with all kinds of superstitions, mainly ones including death. Maybe a small panic, with the people thinking that one of their despised demons had decided to manifest itself as a thirteen-year-old boy with a silver knife in his hand.

He did not care. He did not care what anybody else thought of him. He made his own choices now – and he was determined not to be the scared little child cowering in the corner anymore.

Vengeance would be the sweetest, yet the bitterest thing he would have ever been able to taste. So succulent that he could lick it from the knife he would have his vengeance using.

He fingered the knife in his hands.

The handle had a smooth firmness to it as he ran his fingers up and down it. The blade itself was like an icicle. Cold and clammy, yet sharp and satisfying. It certainly gave him pleasure.

He would certainly have the vengeance he craved. Even if his carnal desire for it proved fatal on Judgement Day.

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And the final ship to pull into port that day was an ordinary ship. The sign streaming along the bow read in hastily engraved letters: Bell’avventura.

It was Italian. They knew that for sure.

The people of London were never quite sure where they stood with Italy. True, it was the home of the Pope, Queen Elizabeth’s ardent religious enemy, and where he weaved his web of faith from to stretch across Europe and encase it in a cocoon of spirituality. One thing was known for sure: it had not reached England yet.

Yet Italy was simply a country of disunited states, squabbling and scrapping too much to realise they were being taken over by the military might of France, Spain and the Holy Roman Empire. And then those three power Titans squabbled and scrapped among themselves too much to realise their conquered dominions were rising up again and taking their lands back. And the cycle of irony went on.

The Italians had never really had a particularly large bone to pick with the English. Of course – there was the Pope denouncing England as a heretic country and urging the faithful Catholics to rise up and unseat their supposedly blasphemous monarch. But the Queen never really paid that much attention to the Vicar of Christ.

The passenger on board the Bell’avventura was not paid much attention to. No outstanding dark skin, ravishingly beautiful looks, flagrant red hair, hostile nationality, demonic characteristics, or anything that set her aside physically from the rest.

Corinna Romula sat upon the yardarm, propping her back up against the mast. To anybody who chanced a glance up at her, she was just a small silhouette framed against the glare of the midday sun.

Brushing her rumpled brown hair back over her ear, she resisted the brilliance of the sun’s white light. No matter how much the ship beneath her rocked, she would still remain stable. After all, she had no desire to drop the several metres between the deck and her seat at present.

The shop seemed to shake as the newest customer stepped into the doorway. Beads and bells jingled, as her foster-parents returned to the front of the shop to serve them.

Corinna could hear voices. Angry voices.

She shook herself out of it. She should not remember that now. This was her refuge and new life lying ahead of her. She should not pollute this sanctuary with memories of a past like that.

It was a fact that she could not remember any event before or on her eleventh birthday. That had been six years and nearly four months ago. Even the more aged customers at her family’s shop in Rome could probably remember before their eleventh birthday.

“…eleventh birthday…”

That was one of the things she could catch them saying. Something about her, and her eleventh birthday. She remembered nothing of it.

“You were foolish to hide her from me Guido, and you too Anna,” a woman’s voice hissed.

Guido and Anna – Corinna’s adoptive parents. She could have sworn that she had heard the click of the barrel of a gun then.

“No,” her adoptive mother said in her gravely level tone. “You were foolish to come looking for her. She is not here. Now leave us in peace.”

“You lie,” the woman spat. “You have lied all your life, Anna – I can taste your lying. You know I don’t like lying.”

A gunshot rang out. A scream of terror, a wail of loss, a woman weeping.

Corinna took a sharp intake of breath.

She clutched at her head; trying to fight the persistent headache battering away with every flashback her memory clouded her vision with. They had been orbiting inside her head every night. A wheel of thought, gradually turning as previous thoughts returned to her mind in every full revolution.

Did they mean something? Nightmares. Just nightmares that found their way into the day as well, calling out from the past. But with every time they repeated, they increased in vividness. Soon they would be a fresco spread out in front of her eyes, every fleck of colour painted so precisely and accurately. And she would relive them forever more.

A repetitive nightmare? A retrospective recollection? Neither. An embedded curse, searing through flesh like a permanently burning brand. A red-hot poker of fear and memories best forgotten. Best forgotten forever.

She looked across the skyline of the masses of rooftops, chimneys and thatch that made up the City of London. Occasionally stone towers would elevate suddenly from the collective norm of thatched-roof houses, and the intermittent landmark would loom.

If one looked closely, one could see dark shadows spreading out sporadically, before meeting and joining. Twilight had arrived, and darkness bled soundly from the city’s many nooks and crannies.

Finally, the ship docked, and Corinna felt the juddering motions of the ship’s movements cease finally. Looking down, she watched the crew begin to unload their cargo. She scrambled down the stringent stays sloping down from the yardarm, and dropped down onto the cobblestones of the docks.

At last. Her new life in London.