“It’s where you will meet the guide to our treasure,” George Symons said.
“You want me to go to an unknown place and seek out a guide to help me find hidden treasure. That’s not a plan. That’s a children’s tale.” Mama stood up. “Come on, Eve. Mistress Horstead will be missing us.”
“Madam, please.” George Symons stood too and placed a hand on Mama’s shoulder. Her eyes narrowed and he quickly removed it. “Just hear me out.”
He sat down. I watched to see what Mama would do. The travellers were quiet, watching us too. She lowered herself, slowly, to make sure that he knew she was doing him a favour.
He continued, “When the Mary Rose sank, she took some of the king’s best cannon. There were chests of pewter plate and, some said, gold. Some Venetians were paid to lift her soon after she’d sunk, but the mast snapped and she tipped back into the water. It didn’t stop the men drinking Portsmouth dry. Two years later, another Venetian came – Peter Corsi. He brought with him three black men from Guinea in Africa.”
Mama frowned. “Three black men?”
“Black.” He tapped Mama’s hand. “As coal.”
I had once seen Mama slap a drunk man for doing the same. Mama removed her hand from the table. “What did he bring these black men to do?”
George Symons smiled again. This smile was slower so I was ready for it. “To dive, of course.”
A BOAT AND A CART
George Symons had a plan. I wonder now if his plan was even bigger than I had realized. Perhaps he had seen Mama in London long before we shared a boat with him on the Thames. Perhaps he had been following her, hoping for a chance to talk to her and had paid our fare so we would travel with him. Perhaps he’d made the boat wobble on purpose, so he could test her skill. But then I remembered his voice and the look on his face as the boat rolled in the current and I knew that part wasn’t faked.
That morning in the Tabard, he told us the story of Jacques Francis. He’d been the best of the three black divers, going deeper than any other.
Mama interrupted him. “Are you telling me this because you want me to dive into the harbour for cannon?”
“The Mary Rose sank in Portsmouth,” George Symons said. “But there was another boat that sank close to Southampton a year later. She was called the Sancta Maria and Sanctus Edwardus. She belonged to a Venetian merchant and was carrying a rich cargo. Peter Corsi organized the salvage for this ship too. Jacques Francis dived there again. It didn’t end well.”
I saw the flicker of disappointment cross Mama’s face before her expression went blank. “He died.”
“No.” George Symons smiled, the sort of smile that people often hid behind their hands. “He lived, but the merchants who lost their cargo claimed that Corsi had not given them everything the divers had taken from the ship. I believe that not only did Corsi keep hold of some of the cargo for himself, but that there are still riches waiting to be taken from that boat.”
“Why would you believe that?” asked Mama.
“They were rich merchants, Mistress Cartwright, but they would not have spent all that money on divers if all they had lost was leather and tin. There’s gold down there, Mistress Cartwright. Gold.”
Mama’s face said nothing. “So why didn’t they get it back?”
“There was a court case. The merchants accused Corsi of stealing their cargo. Corsi made Jacques Francis swear before the court that Corsi was an honest man and would do no such thing. The rich merchants didn’t like this. They denounced Jacques as a slave and an infidel and said his testimony wasn’t to be trusted.”
Mama muttered under her breath. It was something about knowing those words well herself.
“Jacques knows where that ship lies,” George Symons continued. “He knows how deep the water is and what treasure waits for us in the wreckage. If we can win his trust, he will be our guide.”
“I feel that we should leave him be,” Mama said.
“Perhaps we should,” George Symons agreed. “Perhaps we should leave the gold to sink into the river bed and never be claimed. Or perhaps, you could be rich?”
A look flickered across Mama’s face. She was always saying to me, Trust no one. As George Symons shoved a wad of bread in his mouth, I wondered how much she was starting to trust him.
“What is expected of me?” she asked.
What was expected of Mama? Well, George Symons explained that there was a man who assisted an elderly apothecary in a shop near Christ’s Hospital in London, and he was sure that this man was Jacques Francis. George Symons had tried to talk with him, but the man had insisted that he had never been a diver. He claimed his name was Anthony and he’d been a gentleman’s servant in Winchester. George Symons had recognized him, though. After the Mary Rose had sunk, he’d spent hours sitting on the wall of Portsmouth harbour watching the men dive and surface. It may have been more than twenty years ago, but George Symons said that he could not forget that face.
The apothecary was called Nicholas Balcombe. When George Symons had made enquiries, he’d found out that Master Balcombe had a second shop in Southampton that had been closed for a while. He’d instructed Jacques Francis to bring the remaining medicines and equipment to London and then wait for a shipment in Southampton before returning to London.
We were to head to Southampton in February when “Anthony” would be there. George Symons would organize lodgings for us with his cousin, a widow with a sick daughter who would welcome our help and company. We were to continue with our usual lives in London until he came to tell us that
