The Devil on Her Tongue Read online

  I went to the mantel and took my father’s pipe and the box of dominoes he’d made and put them on my pallet. “The books and charts, and these things of Vader’s, are mine now,” I told my mother. “You can’t take them away from me.” I was still angry with her because I had chosen to stay with her.

  “Come here,” she said. The bowl no longer smoked, but a heavy, unfamiliar odour permeated the air. It was a sad smell, a smell of disappointment and decay, of the mealy fungi that grows under the ground. She dipped two fingers into the dark black-red mixture and rubbed it across her forehead, down the bridge of her nose and across her lips.

  “Now I will do the same to you,” she said, picking up the bowl. “Come.”

  “No,” I said, and brusquely shoved away her hand. The bowl crashed onto the floor, breaking into shards.

  My mother cried out. I thought she was upset about the bowl, her favourite, used to burn all her mixtures, but she was staring at my feet. The dark substance was spattered over them.

  She dropped to her knees. “Diamantina,” she said, her voice low, trembling. “Not the feet. The spell is for the head.” Her hands were shaking as well as her voice. “You’ve changed it. It’s all changed now.”

  Frightened anew by her reaction, I took a step back. “Changed what?”

  She slowly pushed herself up, then sat at the table, her face in her hands. “Your future,” she whispered. “You’ve changed your future.” She looked up then, and there was a hollowness in her eyes I recognized as grief. “The spell was to free you of your father’s hold on you. But now … on your feet … now you will never be free of him. He will hold you down. He will haunt you forever.”

  I stood as if made of wood. “Your spell isn’t powerful enough to drive my father from me anyway. I will always be the Dutchman’s daughter. Always.” I went to the fireplace and took out the shoes my mother had thrown there. I put them on, smearing the paste on my feet into my flesh. The shoes were too loose and hurt the bottom of my cut foot. I clomped around the hut nonetheless, staring at my mother until she rose and came to me.

  She slapped my face. She had never before struck me. Although my cheek stung, I didn’t move or make a sound. I simply stared back at her. She turned and went outside.

  After a while, I removed the uncomfortable shoes; the pressure of the leather on the black paste had stained my skin with whorls and prints like the little plovers made as they ran along the sand. I took a rag and scrubbed at the marks, but they remained. I smelled the rag, and realized that she’d burned the sticky red blood from the dragon tree with the rest of her ingredients. She normally didn’t use the dragon tree; she said it contained its own power, and needed to be treated with great care and respect.

  She didn’t return that night. In the past she had regularly left the hut for days, searching the island for herbs and roots and berries. I had never cared; I had my father then.

  This night I was alone for the first time. Our small hut was like others on the beach: the walls and even the roof were made of the clay and sand and soil of Porto Santo, with a tiny wash house and latrina to one side. From a distance it became part of the island, undetectable where it backed into the dunes. It was at the very end of Porto Santo’s southern beach, Ponta da Calheta. Here the sand came to an abrupt halt in a semicircle of craggy rocks and crashing, white-crested waves. It was close to where my mother had found my father. And it was here, in the past, that pirates from Algiers had landed and taken many inhabitants of Porto Santo to sell as slaves. From there, on a clear day, I could see the misty outline of Madeira, the biggest island of our archipelago.

  My home was bright and hot when the door and shutters were open, dim and cool when shut against that light and heat. My mother gathered baskets of needles from the pines and tamarisks on the hills and sprinkled them over the dirt floor, replacing them every few weeks so that there was always a fresh earthy smell, mingled with the bitter and yet fragrant aroma of wormwood and the fainter scents of the herbs hanging from the ceiling on lengths of rope. On a long table against one wall she kept her collection of bowls and glass jars and vials filled with knobby brown roots and bright pods and petals and tiny seeds waiting to be crushed in her stone mortar. There were dried twists of kelp, holding ground powders that couldn’t abide the light. And rosemary, always sweet rosemary. My mother made herself a perfume of it, and anointed her hair and neck.

  I breathed in the fragrances my mother brought to our home as I fell asleep each night. It was like sleeping in a forest, on a beach, in a meadow: all of these sensations usually combined to bring me a sense of peace. But tonight there was no peace. I cried for my father, but I had made my choice, and as he had told me, once a decision is made, you cannot go back. Just before the flame sputtered out in its dish of tallow, I stared again at the marks on my feet.

  If you do not come home to me, I will go to you, Vader. I will find you. I had never known a prayer, but this was to become the last thing I whispered to myself every night for a long, long time.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I woke frequently through the night, staring at my parents’ empty pallet, willing them both to be there, willing yesterday to have been a terrible dream. Before day broke, I got out of bed, angry with both my mother and my father. I took my wracking pole and started up the beach, jabbing my stick between the rocks where the curling foam broke on the beach. It felt good to thrust and stab.

  As soon as I was old enough to walk, my mother had tied a long piece of braided twine around my waist and attached it to her own, so I wouldn’t stray into the sea while her attention was turned to the shore. She encouraged me to dig with a short stick. When I was small, it was only a game. As I grew old enough to wander the beach alone, I found rusted cauldrons and broken belt buckles, barnacle-encrusted brass pins, the bases of thick, broken green goblets, tin pans, and misshapen lead shot. I ran my fingers over their surfaces, trying to imagine where they’d come from. I made necklaces of strange, wonderful coins with holes in their centres, stringing them on tough seagrass, and wove broken bits of colourful glass and the tear-shaped, dimpled lead shot into more seagrass to create my own crown. I always wore my flowered shawl around my waist. I had found it tangled in a nest of seaweed; the colours brightened my dull brown skirt, and I loved watching the fringes dance in the warm breeze.

  The waves and tide tossed up the detritus of sea life: twirled whelks, fish skeletons, dead sea urchins smelling of rot, whorled tritons, carcasses of monk seals from the Ilhas Desertas, and graceful lengths of seaweed and kelp fanned out on the sand like a mermaid’s hair. Occasionally I found something of value, and gave it to my father to sell in Vila Baleira. I always accompanied him as he set my found objects on the counter of the shop. He told me that gold or silver artifacts not too corroded by time in the salt water—a bracelet or necklace, an urn, a goblet, a jewel box—would be purchased by the few wealthier families living in Vila Baleira, or by sailors stopping in port looking for a gift for a sweetheart. Occasionally a merchant from Madeira came to buy items to sell to the wealthy English who had settled in the capital, Funchal Town, to prosper in the growing wine trade. The English, he said, loved unique old artifacts and collectibles from foreign pirate ships to decorate the fancy quintas they had built on the verdant hills around Funchal.

  Today I went farther down the beach than usual, passing other huts, limping slightly on my sore foot. I saw Marco patching his roof with Abílio. Abílio had two older brothers, but they had left the island to escape their father’s fists when they were only a little older than I was now. As Abílio climbed down the ladder with his bucket, he waved to me, and at the same time my pole hit something under the sand. The next small wave exposed a gleaming corner. I knelt and dug with my hands, then pulled the object out of the sucking sand and wiped it with my skirt. It was a small gold snuff box. Clearly, it hadn’t been in the water long, as it hadn’t been ruined by salt or dulled and scratched by lengthy tossing against sand and rocks. There were no barna
cles. It would bring in more réis than anything I had ever found.

  “Can I see it?” Abílio had come to me. He stepped closer and held out his hand. “Please?” He smiled.

  I put it in his hand. He opened the lid of the snuff box, let it close, opened it and let it close. He brushed off more of the wet sand, then smiled at me again. “A good find, little bruxa.”

  I made a sound in my throat. “I told you not to call me that.” I held out my hand for the box.

  “It was in front of my hut,” he said, still smiling.

  “I found it. Give it to me.”

  His smile hadn’t changed. “Of course.” He put it into my hand but still held on to it. “If you want me to, I could sell it and give you the réis. The shopkeepers will give me more for it than they would you. You know that. They’ll try to cheat you. They won’t cheat me. Nobody cheats me. Or maybe I’ll trade it for you, and get you something pretty. Something pretty for a pretty girl.”

  I hesitated, both of us holding the box.

  “I’ll take it into town right now and bring you something special later. Come on, pretty girl.” He was relaxed, his hold on the snuff box loose. I wanted him to keep saying I was pretty.

  “Abílio! Get back here,” his father shouted, and as Abílio turned to look at him, I pulled the snuff box from his hand.

  “I’ll sell it and buy myself something special,” I said.

  He looked back at me, shrugging. “As you like.”

  I walked back towards my own hut, my pole in one hand and the snuff box firmly gripped in the other.

  When I went into Vila Baleira with the snuff box later that day, it was clear by the way everyone studied me that the whole town knew of my father’s departure.

  It was the only town on Porto Santo, a quiet port where news of the outside world came in snatches and rumours. On three sides of the main square were fish and meat shops, with their dark smells of blood and bone. There were also the shops selling everything from cloth and thread to tin dishes and pots and pans, twine, spices, and presses for olive oil. The market, where the local women sold eggs, cheese, fruits and vegetables and all manner of seasonal items, was set up on sagging wooden tables and blankets under the shade of the palms and dragon trees that formed a canopy over the square. Nossa Senhora da Piedade, with its piscina for holy water at the entrance, dominated the fourth side of the square.

  On scattered benches under the trees, farmers in their wide straw hats who crossed the island to bring their grain to market met with fishermen for wine and idle talk. As the shadows lengthened and the day progressed, more men came. In the evening they played quoits or games of sueca with thick cards.

  A wide street ran from the square down to the long, narrow wharf that led into the sea. Skiffs were used locally around the island or to row out to the ships dropping anchor in the deeper waters of the Atlantic, a safe distance from the shallows near the beach. There were always packet ships from Madeira, carrying mail and the Gazeta de Lisboa and foodstuffs and wine and an occasional passenger, as well as the bigger caravels and brigantines from afar. The sailors who came to Vila Baleira might have been at sea a few weeks or a few months. They always went to Rooi’s, the inn closest to the wharf.

  The rest of the islanders lived scattered between the high cliffs and pebbly beaches of the north and my own flat southern beach. Although Porto Santo had a history of violence, attacked by the French, the Moors and Algerian pirates, the last major invasion had been long before I was born, and the island had relaxed into a sleepy routine, with only local gossip to stir the imagination.

  As I crossed the square, Hermínia, the wife of a shopkeeper, took a loaf of bread from her basket and held it towards me. “Take it, dear,” she said, but in the next instant her friend Maria grabbed her arm.

  “Don’t give her any charity,” she said, looking at me. “They’re heathens, the witch and the Dutchman living in sin, and this odd girl a creation of that immoral life.”

  My father told me that he had his own God, and that it was not the same one those on Porto Santo worshipped. My mother believed in no god, and refused to enter a church for fear of diluting her powers. Since it had been impossible for Father da Chagos to marry them, the islanders considered that I was born of an unholy union. Did I care? No. When I was small, I had sometimes peeked through the doorway of the church. It was always dark, with a few candles burning here and there, and usually one or two old women on their knees, praying. I’d told myself it didn’t look like a place I would like to be on a brilliantly sunny day anyway. The only thing I liked about the church was its smell of incense, spicy and strong.

  I narrowed my eyes at Maria and leaned closer, sniffing. She smelled of a rotting tooth, and I knew she was in pain. I could have told her to boil the bark of the ironwood tree and drink the resulting tea, but I had no intention of helping her. “You call my mother a witch, but you use her as a healer,” I said. “Didn’t you send your servant to our door for a remedy for the itch under your skirt?”

  Maria had the decency to flush and look away from me. She made the sign of the cross and pulled on Hermínia’s arm.

  “How is that nasty itch, Maria?” I called after them, but they didn’t turn back.

  My mother knew about the powers of everything that grew under and above the earth, and how roots and seeds and bark and leaves and flower petals could be pounded and ground or cooked and mashed to heal the body and to influence the mind. Her potions gave off a rich, feral smell, like the fur of an animal, or the earth when upturned.

  We had a garden, partially shaded by the outcropping of a cliff and protected from the sea wind that coated everything with salt; my father had carted soil down from the highland pastures. My mother grew herbs procured from Madeira: caraway and licorice root, camomile and rue, cardoon and rosemary, sweet yarrow and stock. She had me trudge daily with two goatskins to fetch fresh water to keep the garden moist in the heat of summer.

  She taught me about the smells emitting from the body through the skin itself, and what those odours predicted. I learned how to tell what a person had last eaten, or if they had an upset stomach or a fever, but also if they were angry or upset, hiding it with a smile.

  You’re like a little animal, my father had told me, a fox, always sniffing the air. There were no foxes on Porto Santo, but my father described them to me. Little fox, he called me, patting my cheek. Klein vos.

  My earliest memories were of watching my mother make her medicines, and of seeing her pull babies—pink, blue, chalky, bloody—from the hidden part of a woman’s body. She taught me how to bring down the swelling of sprains and relieve the pain of bruises, how to set a broken bone, soothe a fever, or rid the body of the venom from a spider bite. She also studied the smoke of the wormwood and the small blaze of candles she dipped into a powder she made from sea water and herbs so that their flames flickered blue and green. She spoke Portuguese with a heavy tongue, but the secret language she chanted while the fragrant smoke whirled about our heads flowed from her lips in a beautiful, lilting melody. I learned these chants even though I didn’t understand what they meant. Sometimes she would stop in mid-sentence, gazing at something I could never see, and I knew she was having a vision, or listening to the voices that surrounded her. The smoke and the visions and voices told her the future.

  While other girls were playing with bits of yarn and little wooden figures made by their grandfathers, I was learning my mother’s secrets. I felt her recipes and spells sewing themselves under my skin with tiny, careful stitches.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I sold the snuff box and bought myself a square hand mirror edged in bone, and a little book of poetry. I knew I should have used the réis for food, but I still burned from Maria’s insult. I stared into the glass, willing myself to be the pretty girl Abílio had seen.

  I hoped my mother would scold me for spending the money recklessly, so that I could fight back. I would berate her for not being an ordinary woman like the others on
Porto Santo. Maybe then my father would have stayed.

  But before I went back to my hut on the beach, I went to Rooi’s inn. Rooi Eikenboom was Dutch, like my father, and also like my father, he had once had a life at sea. Now he served sailors the local rum made with sugar cane, or wine delivered from Funchal every week during the good weather. In the storm season, when wild, howling winds blew the ships off course, away from the Madeira archipelago, Rooi closed his inn and went to the Canary Islands, returning when the winds calmed. My father said he had a family there, but I didn’t understand why they didn’t come live with him in Vila Baleira.

  The inn was empty, but Rooi had already drunk a number of cups of wine. I could smell the sourness on his breath as soon as I drew near him. He looked at me sadly, holding his cup towards me.

  “What am I drinking, Diamantina?” he asked. “Where on Madeira do these grapes grow?”

  I didn’t have the heart for our game today. “Did my father say anything to you about coming back?”

  “Poor meisje,” he murmured—“little girl” in Dutch—which made me miss my father all the more. “Ach, it’s a hard life for us all,” he said, setting his cup on the table. “Your father stayed on Porto Santo because he couldn’t show his face at the docks in Madeira or Lisboa. He was supposed to be dead.” His florid face, surrounded by long, thick white hair, was wide and flat. “I was the one who cut him from his chains after your mother found him. She came to me because she recognized that Arie and I shared a language. He stayed with me at first, waiting, he said, until it was safe for him to go to the ships again. But before that time came, he found that he was pulled by your mother’s beauty, and her spells. And so he stayed.”