Secret Harbor

Secret Harbor

Barbara
C
artland

Author’s Note

The slaves’ revolution in Grenada under Julius Fedor ended in April 1796. In the Parish of St. George’s there was no fighting.

Martinque, which was first colonized by the French in 1635, was recaptured from the British in 1802.

I visited Martinque in 1976 and found it fascinating, with every good French characteristic including delicious food. I wrote a novel about it called
The Magic of Love.

In 1981 I paid my first visit to Grenada. “The Isle of Spice” is as lovely as the guide books describe it, and although in 1980 it became a Communist state, the only signs of it were the large posters exhorting the population to support the revolution. This I learnt had been completely bloodless, and the charming, smiling Grenadians are delighted to welcome visitors.

The tropical forests, the golden beaches, and the plantations of nutmegs, cocoa beans, and bananas are all as I have described them in this novel.

The sun shines, the shrubs are vivid patches of brilliant color, and the palm trees wave in the breeze from a blue and emerald sea.

What more could we ask?

Chapter One

1795

G
rania walked quickly
up the stairs and stood at the top listening.

The house was dark, but it was not only the darkness that made her feel frightened.

She was frightened as she listened to the voices coming from the Dining-Room, and frightened by an atmosphere that she sensed was tense, if not evil.

In the last month, she had been looking forward with an almost childish excitement to being back in Grenada, feeling that she was coming home and that everything would be as it had been three years ago when she left.

Instead of which, once they had reached the green islands which had always seemed to her to resemble emeralds set in a sea of blue, everything began to go wrong.

She had been so sure when her father said he was taking her home that she would be happy again with the same happiness which had been hers in the years when she had lived in what had always seemed a magical island.

It had been inhabited not only by smiling people but also, she felt, by gods and goddesses who dwelt on the top of the mountains, and fairies and gnomes who moved so swiftly amongst the nutmeg and cocoa trees that she only had a fleeting glimpse of them.

“It will be so exciting to be back at Secret Harbour,” Grania had said to her father when they had passed through the storms of the Atlantic.

The sea smooth and clear glittered in the sunshine and the sailors as they climbed the masts sang songs that Grania remembered were part of her childhood.

Her father did not answer and after a moment she looked at him questioningly.

“Is something worrying you, Papa?”

He had not been drinking as much during the last few days as he had at the beginning of the voyage, and despite what her mother had called his “dissipated life”, he still looked amazingly handsome.

“I want to talk to you sometime, Grania,” he replied, “about your future.”

“My future, Papa?”

Her father did not answer, and after a moment she said as a sudden fear struck her like a streak of lightning: “What are you
...
saying? My future is with
...
you. I am going to
...
look after you as Mama did
...
and I am sure we will be very happy ... together.”

“I have different plans for you.”

Grania stared at him incredulously.

Then one of the officers of the ship had come up to speak to them and he moved away from Grania in a way which told her that he had no wish to continue the conversation.

What he meant and what he had intended to say worried her all through the day.

She had wanted to discuss it with him later in the evening, but they had dined with the Captain and after dinner her father was incapable of having a coherent conversation with anybody.

It was the same the next day and the next, and only when the ship was actually within sight of the high mountains that she knew so well did Grania manage to find her father alone at the ship’s rail and say to him insistently:

“You must tell me, Papa, what you are planning before we reach home.”

“We are not going straight home,” the Earl of Kilkerry replied.

“Not going home?”

“No. I have arranged that we shall stay for a night or two with Roderick Maigrin.”

“Why?”

The question was sharp, and it seemed almost to burst from
G
rania’s lips.

“He wants to see you, Grania, in fact he is very anxious to do so.”

“Why?” Grania asked again, and now the sound that came from her seemed to tremble on the air.

She felt as if her father braced himself before he answered. Then he spoke in a gruff tone which told her he was embarrassed.

“You are eighteen. It is time you were married.”

For a moment it was impossible for Grania to reply; impossible even to draw in her breath.

Then she said in a voice which did not sound like her own:

“Are you
...
saying, Papa
...
that Mr. Maigrin
...
wishes to
...
marry me?”

Even as she asked the question she thought it was too incredible to even contemplate.

She remembered Roderick Maigrin. He was a neighbour of whom her mother had never approved, and whom she had always discouraged from visiting Secret Harbour.

A thick-set, hard-drinking, rough-speaking man who was suspected, Grania remembered, of being a cruel task-master on his plantation.

He was old, almost as old as her father, and to think of marrying him was so absurd that if she had not been frightened she would have laughed at the very idea.

“Maigrin is a good chap,” her father was saying, “and a very rich one.”

That was not Grania thought later, the whole answer.

Roderick Maigrin was rich, and her father as usual was in a state of penury when he had to rely even for the rum he drank on the generosity of his friends.

It was her father’s propensity for drinking, gambling and neglecting his plantations which had made her mother run away three years earlier.

“What hope have you, darling, of getting any education in this place?” she had said to her daughter. “We see nobody but those dissolute friends of your father’s who encourage him to drink and gamble away on the cards every penny of his income?”

“Papa is always sorry that he makes you angry, Mama,” Grania had replied.

For a moment her mother’s eyes had softened. Then she said:

“Yes, he is sorry, and I forgive him and I have gone on forgiving him. But now I have to think about you.”

Grania had not understood, and her mother had continued:

“You are very lovely, my darling, and it is only right that you should have the chance that I had of meeting your social equals and going to the Balls and parties to which your position entitles you.”

Again Grania had not understood for there were no parties in Grenada unless her father and mother went to stay with friends at St. George’s or Charlotte Town.

But she was very happy at Secret Harbour playing with the children of the slaves, although those of her own age were already working.

Almost before she realised what was happening her mother had taken her away, leaving very early one morning while her father was still sleeping off the excesses of the night before.

In the beautiful harbour of St. George’s overlooked by the Fort there was a large ship, and almost as soon as they were aboard, it moved out into the open sea and away from the island that had been her home ever since she had been six years old.

It was only when they reached London and her mother got in touch with several old friends that Grania learned how adventurous her mother had been when she was only eighteen in marrying the handsome Earl of Kilkerry, and six years later going out with him to start a strange new life on an island in the Caribbean.

“Your mother was so beautiful,” one of her mother’s friends had said to Grania, “and we felt when she left us, as if London lost a shining jewel. Now she is back to shine as she did in the old days and we are very thrilled to see her again.”

But things were not the same, Grania soon learned, because her mother’s father was now dead, her other relations had grown old and no longer lived in London, and they had not enough money to make a mark in the gay social life which centred around the young Prince of Wales.

The Countess of Kilkerry, however, made her curtsy to the King and Queen and promised that as soon as Grania was old enough she should do the same.

“In the meantime, my dearest,” she said, “you will have to work hard to catch up with all the education you have missed.”

Grania did in fact work very hard because she wanted to please her mother, and she also wanted to learn.

There was a School she attended daily, and there were extra teachers who came to the small house her mother had rented in Mayfair.

There was little time for anything but her lessons, but she did realise that her mother had a number of friends whom she was continually visiting for luncheon and dinner and who took her to the Italian Opera House and Vauxhall Gardens.

It seemed to Grania that without the insistent worry over her father’s drinking and gaming her mother looked very much younger, and certainly more beautiful.

Besides which the new gowns she had bought immediately on reaching London were very becoming.

The full muslin skirts, the satin sashes, the fichus which framed her mother’s shoulders were very different from the gowns they had made for themselves in Grenada.

There was little choice of material in St. George’s and Grania had worn the same bright coarse cottons which were the pride and joy of the native woman.

In London she developed her taste not only for gowns but for furniture, pictures and people.

Then, when she was nearly eighteen and her mother was planning to present her to the King and Queen, the Countess became ill.

Perhaps it was the fogs and cold of winter that she felt more acutely than her friends because she had lived in a warm climate for so long, perhaps it was the treacherous fevers which were always prevalent in London.

Whatever it was, the Countess grew weaker and weaker until despairingly she said to Grania:

“I think you should write to your father and ask him to come to us at once. There must be somebody to look after you, if I die.”

Grania gave a cry of horror.

“Do not think of dying, Mama! You will get better as soon as the winter is over. It is only the cold which makes you cough and feel so ill.”

But her mother had insisted, and because she felt it was only right that her father should know how ill she was, Grania had written to him.

She was well aware that it would take some time for her letter to be answered, just as during the years they had been away they had heard from him only spasmodically.

Sometimes letters must have been lost at sea, but others arrived which were long and full of information about the house, the plantations, the prices he had got for the nutmeg crop or the cocoa beans, and whether it was a good season for bananas.

At other times, after months, there would be just a scrawl, written with a hand that was too unsteady to hold the pen.

When these letters came Grania knew by the way her mother’s lips tightened and the expression on her face that she was thinking how right she had been to come away.

She knew that if they had been at home there would have been the same repeated scenes over her father’s drinking, the same apologies, the same act of forgiveness after the reiteration of the same promises he would not keep.

Once Grania had said to her mother:

“As we are spending your money, Mama, here in England, how is Papa managing at home?”

For a moment she thought her mother would not answer. Then the Countess had replied:

“What little money I have is now being spent on you, Grania. Your father must learn to stand on his own feet. It will be the best thing that could happen if he learns to depend on himself rather than on me.”

Grania had not said anything, but she had a feeling that her father would always find somebody on whom he could depend, and if it was not her mother, it would be one of his friends who drank and gambled with him.

However badly he behaved, however much he drank, however much her mother complained of his neglect of his property and of her, the Earl had an Irish charm and fascination that everybody who knew him found hard to resist.

When he was not drinking Grania knew that he was more fun to be with and a more exciting companion than anybody she had ever known.

It was his laughter that was infectious, and the way he could find a story and a joke in everything.

“Give your father two potatoes and a wooden box, and he will mesmerise you into believing it is a carriage and pair that will carry you to a King’s Palace!” one of her father’s friends had said to Grania when she was a little girl, and she had never forgotten.

It was true.

Her father found life an amusing adventure which he could never take seriously, and it was difficult for anybody who was in his company to think otherwise.

But now Grania knew the three years they had been apart had changed him.

He could still laugh, could still make the tales he told have a magical quality about them that was irresistible, but at the same time, she had known all the way across the Atlantic that he was keeping something from her, and when they actually arrived at Grenada she learnt what it was.

She had taken it for granted after the tragedy of her mother’s death that he would want her to be with him and try to create a happy home together.

Instead, incredibly, he wished to marry her off to a man whom she had disliked when she was a child and knew that her mother despised.

The ship in which they were travelling, and which was to dock in the harbour at St. George’s, had in the obliging manner which was usual in the Caribbean sailed a little way off course to set them down where her father wished.

Roderick Maigrin’s plantation was in the adjoining Parish to St. George’s that had been named by the British “St. David”.

It was the only Parish on the island without a town and was in the south of the island adjoining St. George’s and very similar in respect of the beauty of its landscape and the people who lived there.

At Westerhall Point, which was a small peninsula, covered with flowering trees and shrubs, Roderick Maigrin had built himself a large house somewhat pretentious in aspect which to Grania had all the characteristics of its owner, so that instinctively she disliked it.

She could never remember visiting it as a child, but now as they were rowed ashore in Mr. Maigrin’s boat which came out to the ship to collect them, she had the terrifying feeling that she was entering a prison.