Magic Lessons (Practical Magic #0.1)(28)

None of the American ships would take her on, for a baby was not welcome on board, and its cries and ailments were said to bring nothing but bad luck. Fortunately there was another possibility. The Jews here had founded the first synagogue in this part of the world, and the first cemetery was founded in 1659, called Beth Haim, “House of Life,” where the tombs were made of coral. Their settlement, the Plantation of Hope, had flourished; still many of their people had taken to the sea, carrying Torah scrolls from synagogues that had been burned to the ground in Spain and Portugal.

Many were merchants and translators and traders, but some of those who were sailors were actually pirates whose targets were Spanish ships; they felt it was their duty to take revenge on the country that had tortured and murdered their people. The Portugals were after gold and goods, but they also were known for transporting books, including outlawed literature that was said to incite slaves. There had been those who boarded their ships to steal their bounty, only to find wooden crates of books, worthless to some, a treasure to others.

There had been Jewish pirates reported by Josephus in the first century, and Jews had often lived at sea, especially when there was no country that would allow them entrance. Sinan, who sailed with the famous Barbarossa, had done his best to smash the Spanish fleet. Yaacov Kuriel had led the fleet, until he was imprisoned during the Inquisition. Many of these men had gold studs in their ears, often to mark a life that had been lost. They often hid their true identities, though there were some who recognized the gold chains they wore with charms imprinted with the Hebrew letter Hey. They made sausage from chicken, so if they were challenged and asked to eat pork to prove they were not of the tribe of Israel, they had their own false meat. These men journeyed to the ends of the earth, with many going as far as the Barbary Coast, where they often threw in with Moorish pirates in North Africa, who lived on a diet of blood rice, made with the blood of the lamprey eel, a creature older than the shark, a living fossil.

The sailors were a rough lot who felt they had little to lose, other than their own lives. Adrie had told Maria to stay away from them, but when Maria was turned down by the other ships, she searched out the captain of a schooner called the Queen Esther, bound for New England. The ship was set to trade in Newport, Rhode Island, where there had been a Jewish community since 1658, but the first port would be Boston, for there was a great market in that city for the rum they carried in the hull, huge barrels that gave off such a fragrant aroma sailors on board were said to grow drunk even when they hadn’t touched a drop.

The captain, Abraham Dias, was about to suggest that Maria go home, keep her daughter safe, and leave the sea to men, when his son Samuel collapsed on the dock. Samuel wore a heavy black coat decorated with buttons made from the backbone of a shark, and beneath that a waistcoat, a heavy linen shirt, and leather breeches. Even though the day was fine, he was so ill that he shivered in the bright sunlight, his olive skin turning ashy, dark hollows beneath his eyes. Still, he was a handsome man, with a tough, lanky body and a sailor’s strong arms and back. His long, densely black hair was slicked back and tied with a leather string. He wore three pieces of gold in the inner flap of his ear, marking the lives of three people he’d loved and lost to the cruelty of the world. He was young, having recently turned twenty-three, a number he’d always considered to be lucky, although he’d begun to wonder about his luck. He’d recently been stricken by dengue, a disease many called breakbone fever, for it caused the afflicted person’s bones to ache as if they were indeed breaking with pain that was unbearable. Frequently, those who had been stricken hemorrhaged and spat blood. In the end many went blind and lost all ability to move. There were those who took their own lives rather than endure the agonies the fever caused. Some who survived vowed that the illness made them feel that they’d been made of glass and a hammer wielded by a thoughtless enemy had been used to shatter them, body and soul. The disease was contracted in swampy mosquito-ridden areas, and the islands nearby were rife with such places, marshy landscapes where clouds of insects rose into the dull illumination of the dusk, turning the sky into a fluttering dark that was more dangerous than most battlegrounds, with casualties initiated by an enemy the combatants had never spied.

Samuel Dias was leaning against the railing of the dock, his eyes glazed with pain. He could be charming or brash, depending on what the occasion called for, and was such an excellent navigator there were those who vowed he used black magic to guide him, when in fact he had a deep knowledge of mathematics and of the constellations that he used to map both the sky and the sea. Abraham Zacuto, a Jewish professor of astronomy and navigation, had created a table of celestial positions that allowed sailors to find their way even when they could not chart by the position of the sun, and most explorers had a tradition of sailing with Jewish navigators and mathematicians on board. Samuel Dias had been born in Spain, escaped to Portugal, then had been raised at sea. He had dark, gold-flecked eyes, and could speak six languages; he would have been more than happy to talk to a beautiful woman such as Maria if he hadn’t been struggling for breath. Samuel could taste blood in his mouth, and when he looked into the sea he spied a black eel turning in its death throes and thought perhaps it was a sign and that he was foreseeing his own demise. He’d vowed right then that if God granted him life he would change his ways. He was wild and young, but that didn’t matter anymore. He was in the hands of the Almighty, and, if he should survive, he would start life anew as a more serious, less arrogant man.