Pirates! (6 page)

‘You can use a sword?’

‘Tolerably. I learned to fence with my brother.’

‘I see.’ He rubbed his smooth-shaved chin. ‘I’m glad that we are on the same side, then. What a surprising young lady you are, Miss Kington.’

A watch was kept at all times, but although we saw ships on the horizon, none approached us. No black hoist bore down upon us. We had fair winds and good weather. We began to pass small islands surrounded by crescent-shaped reefs. They were uninhabited, but we stopped to take on water if they offered it, and whatever else they could provide by way of fresh produce.

I felt none of Broom’s predicted excitement when we sighted the northern coast of Hispaniola. Neither did I share in the celebrations of the other passengers. Great bowls of punch were prepared and endless toasts drunk, chiefly to friendship, as is often the way on voyages, vows of undying affection made between men who will likely never set eyes on each other again. I thought them fools and kept separate. Instead of joy and hope, I felt a great weight descending. Journey’s end was nearing. The next island would be Jamaica.

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It was unto the West Indies
our gallant ship did steer ...

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Chapter 9

The town of Port Royal lay at the end of a narrow spit that arced from the land like an arm flung as a defence from the sun. The bay that lay on the inside of it was deep, the water clear as crystal. The anchor ran straight down, scattering shoals of bright fish, sending them feinting and glittering like shards of falling mirror, until the flukes came to rest, catching on the fat lumps of coral that studded the white sand fathoms below.

The scene on shore was as busy as the Welsh Backs in Bristol. Ships stood at the docks. Wharves and warehouses lined the quays, but the men and women toiling to load and unload the cargoes were slaves. Sweat glistened on black skin. The female slaves laboured alongside the men, heaving sacks and rolling barrels, or moving with slow and stately grace, one hand held high to balance the great burdens which they carried on their brightly turbaned heads.

Behind them, the town spread away from the waterfront, mounting the hill in a tumbled pattern of wooden huts and red-roofed, white-painted houses crowded one upon another.

There was a carriage waiting for us.

‘Thomas, this is my sister, Miss Nancy,’ my brother said as he handed me into the seat behind the driver. ‘You are to take her to Fountainhead directly. I have business here in town.’

He left us with a slap to the nearside horse’s flank. The animal was nervous and skittered sideways, knocking against its pair.

‘You all right, Miss Nancy? Horses didn’t jar you?’

‘I’m perfectly fine, thank you, Thomas.’

He nodded, satisfied that no harm had come to me, and called a boy to hold the horses as he got down to load the luggage. Thomas was a tall man and powerfully built. He lifted with ease trunks that it had taken two men to carry off the boat. He said little, just swung himself back into his seat, and we were away.

We were traversing the narrow spit that led to the mainland. The ground dropped away sharply on either side of the road, shelving down to strips of white sand. On one side, the pale green Caribbean curled in long low lines of surf; on the other, the waters of the lagoon lay blue and still. The horses pulling our carriage were high-stepping and skittish. Suddenly, one shied, swerving from something that lay in our path, causing the other to rear. The carriage lurched and we veered perilously close to the crumbling edge of the road. I clung to my seat, fearing that we might end up in the ditch, while Thomas fought to right us and to control the panicked animals. I peered over the edge of the carriage, wondering what had caused us to come so close to mishap. At first, I thought that a twisted pile of wood had fallen from a passing cart. Then I saw that the sticks were moving, jerking in a strange random way. There must have been some dreadful accident. I started up in horror, marvelling at the cruelty of anyone who could just drive on and leave a living creature broken in the road.

The creature lying there was so coated in sand and dust, the shape so contorted that I could not see exactly what it might be. Too large for a dog, but too small for a donkey. I shouted to Thomas that we must stop. He showed no signs of hearing, so I tugged his sleeve. When he still did not respond, I tapped him sharply on the back. He winced and turned round, pulling the horses to a halt.

‘What is it, Miss?’

‘It’s still alive,’ I indicated the heap by the side of the road. ‘We must stop and help.’

He shook his head.

‘No, Miss.’

He raised his whip while I stared back. What I’d taken at first for a thing inanimate, and then for an injured animal, was a human being. What I’d seen as hanks of twine, or a halter, or collar, were scraps and rags of clothing. This was a woman. Half skeleton already. Her skin dull, greyish under a powdering of fine white sand.

I was fumbling to open the door of the carriage, wondering if she were still alive, if we might help her, but Thomas reached back and pulled it closed.

‘She’s old. She’ll die soon,’ he said with a shrug, indicating that any efforts we might make on her behalf would be wasted. ‘Refuse slaves, they’re good for nothing.’

He pointed with his whip to where others lay tumbled in the ditch, then past the narrow fringe of grass and scrub to the margins of the lagoon. Dark shapes littered the beach like flotsam cast up by the sea. I could detect no movement. They lay like driftwood logs drying in the sun. He shrugged again and shook his head, his dark eyes bleak and empty. What was the point of saving one, when there were so many?

He turned away from me and whipped up the horses. This was my first sight of the cruelty that lay at the heart of this place that Broom called paradise, eating away at it, day by day, with a voracious appetite that would never be sated, like some hideous worm. The effect on me was profound. I stared back at the woman until she was just a tiny mound, a speck of black on the bone-white ground. I stared until my eyes ached and the heat shimmering up from the sun-baked track took her away.

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Chapter 10

Thomas drove the horses at a good pace along mile after mile of dusty red road. To the right was forest, with moss and vines draping it, and beyond that lay the sea. To the left the land was cultivated.

‘All this here? Belongs to your father,’ Thomas remarked, waving his whip in a great arc that took in a vast plain that sloped up from the road to the distant mist-shrouded mountains.

The land had been divided into fields of chequer-board exactness. The cane was being cut and rough stubble stretched away, just as it might in England at harvest time, except the stalks were knee high and thicker than a man’s arm. The effect was strange, as if these were the acres of some farming giant. The uncut cane stood much taller than a man, dwarfing the figures swarming among the stalks. They worked like an army of ants, diligently and methodically, cutting, binding, pitching bundles into the waiting wagons.

The cultivated land was not fenced or walled along the road. The entrance to the estate was marked by a pair of impressive stone pillars standing alone. An overarching curve of wrought-iron letters announced that we were entering
Fountainhead.
The letters were surmounted by twin gushing springs frozen in silvery metal. Before, I had always seen the sign as a weeping willow. It was only as I went underneath that I could see what it was really meant to be. There were no weeping willows in this country. The long straight drive was bordered either side by tall palm trees, their leaves flopping down, the fronds spread wide in leathery fingers, like cormorants’ wings drying in the sun. Thomas whipped the horses into a smart high-stepping trot and we drove on towards the house.

It stood alone on a small promontory, shaded by tall pine trees, set apart from the other buildings. White smoke and steam billowed from the direction of the mill and boiling house, obscuring a collection of roughly-thatched hovels. Behind the plantation, the land ascended in giant steps to form the foothills of a high mountain range of individual peaks and serrated ridges, the tops of which were lost in torn cloud and trailing mist.

The house was not grand in the style of some plantation houses, and was considered old-fashioned, being made of white painted wood with only two storeys, but it was artfully constructed and carefully situated to catch every breath of wind. I could sense my father’s preferences in the design of it; he was not a man to put fashion before comfort. At home, in England, he had hated a draught and had liked the old house because it was packed in with others, easy to keep warm. He had complained about the new house, saying that it was like living in a barn. Here, he would have wanted to keep cool. The windows were large, with bright painted shutters folded back and thin muslin curtains billowing with the constant breeze blowing through the rooms. A wide veranda threw shade on all sides, so no part was directly in sunlight. My eyes pricked at the thought of him. I could almost see him sitting out there as the heat of the day faded, comfortable in an old sagging armchair, sipping a rum punch and smoking his pipe.

Wide double doors stood open at the top of a flight of stone steps. A man stood in front of them, obviously waiting for me. Mr Duke, the overseer, was a small man of stoutish build. He stood splay-legged with his chest puffed out and his head thrust forward, belligerent as a bantam cock. He was pale, as if he always kept his face shaded from the fierce sun, and smooth-skinned with a little mouth, his upper lip protruding over his teeth in a parrot pout. He held a whip under his right arm. A black plaited thing, rolled in a snakelike coil with a handle as thick as my wrist. As he waited, he allowed its iron tip to fall from his grip before flipping it back into his palm.

Thomas helped me out of the carriage and, as I mounted the steps, Duke came forward to meet me. He removed his sweat-banded broad-brimmed tricorn hat to reveal a cap of shiny brown hair, greased by some rancid oil, straggling down to his shoulders. His dark eyes were flecked with grey and oddly opaque, like gun flints. He was near-sighted, I was to learn, and growing more so by the day.

‘Miss Kington!’ He held out his hand to me before I had reached the top of the steps. His palm was soft and moist. His shirt was marked with sweat, fresh patches ringing the yellowed armpits, soaking the stiffened fabric. ‘Welcome to Fountainhead! I hope your journey here was not too arduous, but you must be fatigued. You will need to rest and refresh yourself.’

He took my elbow, propelling me towards the house. Two women had appeared, standing either side of the doorway, as still as caryatids. One was old, the other young, and both were dressed in shapeless shifts of some faded blue stuff. They looked like mother and daughter. The girl was lighter skinned, but the resemblance between them was strong. They were tall, long-limbed and, in the way they stood, in their carriage, they exactly mirrored each other.

‘Phillis, Minerva.’ Duke addressed the older, then the younger. ‘This is your new mistress.’ He let more of the whip down, cracking it back on itself with a flick of the wrist. They curtsied to me and sprang forwards. ‘Look after her well, or it will be your skin.’

‘Yes, Master,’ the women said together. The whip cracked softly, a mere caress of leather on leather. They did not look at either of us, but focused on spots on the ground.

‘Get those trunks into the house!’ Duke roared down the steps to Thomas, who was unloading them from the back of the carriage. ‘And look sharp about it, you lazy, good-for-nothing black bastard! Excuse me, Miss.’ He turned back to me with exaggerated politeness, touching the brim of his greasy tricorn hat. ‘I have duties to attend to, but after that, it will be my pleasure to show you around.’

With that, he stepped past me. His clothes might have been sweat-stained and reeking, but in boots he rivalled Beau Nash of Bath. They were as polished as mirrors and his high heels rang on the stone as he tripped down the steps.

I was left in the charge of the two women, who ushered me into the house. The rooms inside were large and airy, one opening out on to another. Many of the furnishings I recognised as being from our old house in Bristol. To discover familiar objects in such a foreign place was jarring to the senses. A bright green lizard skittered down the white-painted wall and across a portrait of my father. A white marble table that had stood in our hall now held a bowl heaped with oranges, mangoes and guava. It was like walking into a dream.

The older woman, Phillis, showed me upstairs to a cool, wide room under the eaves of the house. The floor was polished wood. A bed stood in the corner, draped in thin white muslin. There was a china bowl of warm water for me to wash with and a tablet of lilac soap. The sharp sweet scent reminded me of home. Phillis stood by with a soft towel to pat me dry. I said that I would like to rest and she stepped forwards to disrobe me, but I told her that I could do that for myself.

She went away and I stripped down to my petticoat, climbing into the muslin drapes as into a tent. I must have slept, for when I awoke the light was softer, the room cooler, and filled with a chirping, chirring sound. Not loud, but persistent and utterly unfamiliar. I thought it was that which had woken me, but I opened my eyes to find the girl, Minerva, looking down at me through the shifting muslin.

She had brought a tray of fruit and fresh-baked bread, and a draught of cold spring water. She laid it down on the table next to the bed without looking at me, or saying a word. When I thanked her, she glanced up, startled. I smiled, but her face stayed impassive as she drew the netting back. While I ate, she went to lay fresh clothes out for me, then stood by the wall, with her head down and her hands clasped behind her back. She sprang back to life as I rose from the bed, and came forwards to help me dress.

‘What’s that noise I can hear?’ I asked her.

She looked at me, surprised at the question.

‘Cicadas,’ she answered. ‘Insects. They rub their wings together.’ She demonstrated with one thin brown hand on the back of the other.

‘They sound like nutmegs on a grater,’ I said, and was rewarded with the faintest trace of a smile.

‘Mr Duke,’ she said, her voice low and musical. ‘He’s waiting downstairs. When you’re ready, Miss.’

The overseer was pacing the veranda with the thick whip clasped tightly behind his back. He wore a long brown coat now, much stained with use.

Outside, a new racket had joined the other. This one much louder. I asked him what it was.

‘Frogs,’ Duke said. ‘Start up about now. Get worse after sundown. Make the devil of a din. Now you’re rested, I’ll show you about.’ He pointed with his curled whip to the windmill set on a small hill. ‘Over there is the grinding house.’

Carts pulled by teams of long-eared mules stood waiting to be unloaded, the cane stacked as high as stooks on a hay wain. A gang of men threw the bundles down and others formed a chain, passing the cane, one to another, until it reached the jaws of the grinders: huge metal rollers which crushed the thick stems like so much grass, squeezing the juice into a wedge-shaped trough which ran down to the boiling room built on lower ground.

‘You there! Look lively!’ Duke’s whip leaped like a live thing, wrapping itself round the back of a slave who had let a bundle drop and scatter. The man showed no reaction, just carried on, even though the iron tip ripped through his shirt. ‘Can’t waste a minute. Cane has to be crushed as soon as possible after cutting, or the sugar won’t crystallise.’ He coiled the whip back. ‘Helps to keep their wits about ’em. Such wits as they’ve got.’ He laughed at his own joke. ‘Need ’em near them things.’ He nodded to the great vertical grinders which dwarfed the men sweating to feed them. ‘Them rollers’ll have your arm off in no time. Which is why we keep that there.’ He pointed to a sharp-bladed machete hanging by the machine. ‘Just in case.’ He laughed again. ‘Even these idle bastards learn to pay attention when they work in here.’

Feeding the grinders went on twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, all through the harvesting season. It was backbreaking work, carried on at a cruel pace set by the slave boss and the prowling Duke.

He took me down the hill to the boiling house.

‘The juice has to be boiled within twenty minutes or it ferments and turns into molasses and will never crystallise. It comes down this channel, a little lime wash is added to help it granulate. Then it is emptied into the copper vats.’

The copper vats were vast, heated by huge blazing furnaces fed with faggots of wood and trash – sugar-cane waste from the crushers. We did not go in, but even outside the heat was searing. Men and women moved like ghosts through clouds of smoking vapour, wielding long-handled copper ladles, skimming scum from the bubbling liquid. These skimmings drained into yet another basin. At each stage, waste molasses was carefully collected to be made into rum.

The boiling went on night and day through the harvest, the furnaces never dying down. Accidents were frequent; the results horrific. Molten sugar sticks to flesh and burns to the bone.

The crystallising sugar drained into vats, Duke explained, and was then packed into hogshead barrels, stamped with the Fountainhead sign, and sent to Bristol.

He stood back, looking at me, as if expecting my admiration, or my approval. I stared at him, shaken to the very seat of my being by what I had seen. All this was here because of us. The Kington family. It shamed me deeply that I’d never before really thought about where the sugar came from. I’d really had no idea how hard the work was, how relentless, or how dangerous.

Duke then took me to see the slave quarters, rows of two-roomed wattle-and-daub thatch cabins. A few children played, naked in the red dust. It was coming towards evening. Gangs of men and women were returning from the fields, while others were leaving to go to the grinding and boiling houses. They all looked equally weary and none of them looked at us. Only the children stared with solemn round eyes, before bolting into their houses as if running from malevolent spirits.

Behind the huts the land was divided up into little plots.

‘We let ’em grow some stuff of their own: Indian corn, yam, beans and such, a little tobacco. Saves on fodder and gives ’em something to barter or sell at market for the kind of bright-coloured cloth and gewgaws they like.’

‘You hold a market here?’

He nodded. ‘
They
do. Over there. That’s the marketplace.’

He indicated a space of red beaten earth shaded by a great forest tree. Immense branches spread out, shading the whole area, as a great oak or chestnut might shelter a village green at home. Judging by its girth, the tree must have been very old. This was no shady chestnut, or English oak. Chains and manacles had been driven into the trunk about two feet above a man’s height from the ground. Over that point the bark was smooth, but from there to the ground, the tree was torn and scarred, mutilated and marked with a complex criss-cross pattern as if someone had taken a knife to it. Great patches had been flayed away. In other places sap oozed, congealing in great crusted resinous clumps, dripping down like gouts of blood. All the bark had been ripped and torn, apart from one central column which branched either side to make the shape of a man in cruciform shadow.

‘Doesn’t do to be sentimental,’ Duke said, as if he divined what I was thinking. ‘God ordained blacks to be for our use and benefit, or else why make ’em in the first place?’ He looked at me with his clouded eyes. ‘Some says they’re like children. Well, they ain’t. Thinking that way brings danger to all of us. They ain’t like us, that’s for certain. I’ve studied ’em for many years now, Miss Kington.’ He leaned forward earnestly. ‘In my opinion, they are like animals, wild and vicious, but possessed of a cunning that makes ’em far more treacherous than any beast you could mention. You can’t tame ’em, and you can’t trust ’em. All they respect is this,’ the whip reared and cracked in the air. ‘Don’t do to be too trusting, or get too familiar. Keep that in mind.’