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“Did I ask you? Tell them to row us to shore.”
The white boatman nodded at the black rowers, and they took up their oars. Cautiously, Rowan raised her head and, squinting against the dazzle of the water, looked ahead. She had never seen a sea this color. The depths were nearly indigo, but close to shore, breaking on white rocks, washing on white sand, the water was a deep turquoise. They were headed towards a stone quay built of bright white rock, beyond were wharves and warehouses like a miniature Boston or London, fine buildings with wooden shutters barred against the brightness and the heat. The men,boys, and women arduously rolling barrels of rum and sugar along the stone quay were all black, slaves from Africa, and the terrible stink of a slave hulk blew into the port from the looming ship, anchored outside.
Rowan hunched her shoulders against fear and slumped in her seat. Beyond the warehouses were shops where the shutters were propped open, and goods for sale displayed inside the darkened rooms. Every other house was an inn, or a tippling house. Men sprawled in the gutter, unnoticed by passersby, who stepped over them. In one alley Rowan saw three or four men swaying from side to side locked in a drunken fight.
Some gentlemen had dressed with absurd grandeur, high beaver hats, embroidered silk waistcoats, thick gold-buttoned jackets, clocked stockings, thick breeches, and ornate shoes, red-faced from the heat. A few poor white men had scraps of clothing—a ripped shirt and torn trousers—or clung to a tattered jacket which showed the ghost of frayed embroidery. The black slaves were mostly half-naked except for a few ornately dressed house slaves who waited outside the tavern for their masters, sweating in full suits of livery. One black coachman wore a white curled wig, a tricorn hat, and a gold braided suit, as he held the reins of a pair of matching gray horses before a grand carriage.
There were black women on every corner, selling little goods off trays tied around their necks, or standing tall with towering baskets of fruit and pitchers of rum balanced on their turbaned heads. Others, in tattered finery with gowns pulled down low to show their breasts, were strolling up and down the streets outside the tippling houses, waiting to be called into the darkness within.
The noise was appalling. Barrels were rolled along the stone quay by gangs of slaves, there was a constant screech of the sledges on the slabs of white pavers and the rattle of the wheels of carts drawn by iron-shod oxen harnessed in pairs, mules pulling wagons and horses before carriages. Pairs of running slaves were harnessed to drag carts of sugar from distant farms into town, and behind them rode an overseer on a horse, yelling at them to go faster and cracking his whip. The smell of spice and decay, sugar and sour rum hit Rowan and made her retch. She clamped her fist over her mouth and fought to be silent. The black rowers looked at her without seeing her, their eyes as blank as the dead.
The rowing boat nudged against a step of coarse-stoned white stairs.Rowan’s owner twitched at the rope that bound her hands and she staggered to her feet. To save herself she clutched at the shoulder of one of the black men, and he flinched from her touch, as if from a blow. She straightened up and climbed out of the rocking boat and up the stairs to the top of the quay. Her legs were in spasms of pain by the time she reached the top, where a silent black man was holding the reins of a fine-looking horse. Another man laden with sacks of goods stood beside him.
“You take this lad and start for home,” Mr. Peabody ordered. “I’ll catch you up.” He turned to Rowan. “No tricks, mind, or they’ll tell me at once. I’ll be right behind you, and if I have to chase after you or send the dogs—you’ll be sorry.”
He nodded to the men. “Take him home,” he told them. “I’ll take a drink and then follow you.”
The silent man swallowed down his thirst and handed over the reins. Mr. Peabody led the horse to the doorway of the tippling house, yelled for a slave to hold the horse while he went inside, and paid no more attention to them. Rowan, hardly seeming to look, scanned the quay, the alleyway, the river below her for a way to escape. She glanced up to find the silent black man looking at her.
“There’s no way,” he told her in a deep voice, speaking English. “There’s no way to your home but death.”
ST. JAMES’S PALACE, LONDON, WINTER 1686
Triumphant against the rebels, unchallenged by parliament, the west country studded with gallows, the north thanking God to be spared an invasion of Scots, King James knew his reign to be blessed by God. Confidently, he appointed his favorite Roman Catholics to anystate post they wanted, priests to Protestant colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, papist army officers over the heads of those who had served him loyally against the Duke of Monmouth. The emergency army, wholly under his command, was never to be disbanded: he was free to persecute Protestants at home like the French king attacking the Huguenots, or send his men and arms abroad to support Roman Catholic tyrants against their people. When the parliament reached a sticking point and finally refused him, he closed it down—just as his brother and grandfather had done—and sent the MPs home.
He ordered the opening of monasteries and convents, oratories and chapels in every city in the land, and each new foundation opened a school—the children of England would be taught the king’s faith, not the country’s. He requested a papal nuncio from Rome and the Pope sent him the aristocratic Ferdinand d’Adda, naming him as an English archbishop.
At this, the very pinnacle of his triumph, the king had the woman he loved at his side. Catherine Sedley was at every court function, at every ball, at every gaming table, at every dinner. She might curtsey to the queen—who seemed to grow paler and thinner every day the bawdy, laughing woman strolled into court—but everyone was waiting, on edge, for the day that Catherine would overstep the line and openly insult the younger woman. Why would she not? She was notorious for her quick wit, her coarse humor, her jokes about religion, her sexual innuendo, her free and easy laughter. As the great rooms of the palace echoed to her crack of laughter, and roar of appreciation, the queen grew more and more silent. As Catherine was everywhere, showing her bony shoulders in revealing dresses, laughing in the king’s face, refusing to attend his oratory and still escaping criticism, the queen was less and less seen at her own court.
“You cannot let her take over!” Livia exclaimed in the queen’s privy chamber, all but hiding from the party in the presence chamber, where they could hear Catherine Sedley yelling for candles to light the table as she was—“for once, for the love of God! Any God!”—winning. “You must go out there and call for music, make them move the gambling table, turn them into our rooms again. These are our rooms—not hers!”
“Is the king playing at her table?”
Livia crossed the room, opened the door a crack, and peeredthrough. Catherine Sedley was dancing on a chair in triumph, the king sneaking a glimpse of her calves, and laughing in delight at her irrepressible joy. “For the love of God, deal my cards!” they heard her scream. “I have the luck of the devil tonight!”
“Yes.”
“Then I can’t make them move the table, can I? And if I call for music, he will dance with her.”
Livia closed her eyes, thinking of the romp that Catherine made of any dance. “You have to fight her. I’ll help you. We’ll fight her together. We’ll get her disgraced. There must be something we can do to pull her down. She says herself she’s not beautiful. It’s not possible for him to prefer her to you.”
“She claims to be funny, and he likes that. I was raised to be a queen, not a jester. And anyway, I have nothing to laugh at.”
“He does his duty by you?” Livia asked. “For all that he’s with her every evening? He does his duty when he comes to your bed?”
Mary Beatrice turned her head away from her friend’s anxious scrutiny. “He does it.”
“Does it properly?” Livia pressed.
“I suppose so. It hurts enough.”
“He hurts you?” Livia was shocked.
Mary Beatrice shrugged. “My whole life is pain.”
Livia saw the deathly pallor of the younger woman and the shadows under her eyes like violet bruises. “I know,” she said tenderly. “I know you are living in pain. But it will get better, my dear. The kingdom is at peace, our enemies routed, you will conceive a child—”
A raucous scream of joy and a scatter of applause interrupted her.
