Page 120 of Dawnlands

She smiled, quite untroubled by his bad temper. “Yes, you will,” she said. “Papa always said that a good planter checks the slave quarters twice a night. You should be doing it yourself every night anyway.”

Mr. Peabody turned to Rowan. “Here—” He handed her the key to the gun cupboard. “And if you see any black man off his plantation, you arrest him and bring him in here.”

“Cook will give you some meat to tempt little doggie,” Dora said. “And he comes to call. Make sure you call ‘Troy-Troy-Troy,’ like that. He always comes when he’s called.”

“Not this afternoon, he didn’t,” Mr. Peabody said disagreeably. “Actually, I’ve never seen him come when he’s called…”

Rowan went out of the dining room to the back hall, opened the gun cupboard and took out the musket, filled her pockets with balls and a powder horn, locked it up again, and took the key back to Mr. Peabody.

“Back by dawn,” Mr. Peabody said. “And take a torch and light it if you’re on the road after dark, so no one shoots you. Don’t go wandering onto anyone else’s plantation, or talking to anyone’s slaves or they’ll slit your tongue for a troublemaker, white or not.”

Rowan nodded, hiding her contempt, and went out of the room, leaving Bonny to finish serving dinner.

The sun was low in the sky, sinking golden in rosy clouds; the burning heat of the day had gone off a little, but it was still hot. Rowan went at a steady pace, away from the main road between cane fields, where the slashed crop was already springing up, past the cane holes, where the new canes were growing—proof that there would be another harvest, the cane would grow and be cut and replanted every year, the slaves would die and new ones would be bought. The cycle of sugar and death would go on as long as it showed a profit, and sooner or later Caskwadadas and her son would go down to death, unnoticed, among the millions of others.

Rowan loped on until she could see the top of the nearby forest, half a mile from the house. It seemed incredible that their little creek might lead to a greater river and caves buried among other plantations, unknown to the planters; but Mr. Peabody had no curiosity about anything other than growing sugar and selling it in Bridge, and Dora Peabody had been taught from childhood that the sun would turn her skin an ugly brown, and that the fields were no place for a lady. She never went beyond the garden unless it was in a carriage to Bridge for shopping, church services, or parties. She never went out but under a parasol and a hat. She visited neighboring planters on special occasions, but their plantations were all beside the main road, far from the creeks that wound through the island. The valleys in thecenter of the island and the many steep tributaries were an untouched ribbon of wildness on an island where all the flat land had been carved up between white owners, and arduously cleared by their slaves.

Rowan called “Troy-Troy-Troy” as she trotted down the road, the musket slung over one shoulder and a candlewood torch on the other, until she was so far from the house that Dora Peabody would not hear. Then she stopped calling and increased her pace until she reached the end of the cane fields and the track ended abruptly in a rough turning circle for the cane carts, and before her was a tumble of rocks, dumped after filling potholes in the track, and beyond them the ground fell away so steeply that the tops of the trees growing far below showed their heads beside the cane. Rowan went cautiously to the edge and peered down. Branches and creepers hid the valley floor, but from the distant sound of water she thought this creek must be hundreds of feet below. There was no way down, the cliffs were sheer, and though there were creepers and weeping figs trailing across the rock face and rooting in every crevice, there was no way of telling if they would hold her weight. Rowan went along the edge of the field, sometimes pushing her way through sugarcanes, which were planted up to the very brink of the cliff, until she found a tiny trace of a path, almost lost to sight, which the wild hogs once followed to get down to the water in the bottom of the creek, and which the monkeys might scamper up, single file, to raid the sugarcane.

It was no more than one footstep wide, hardly visible. Setting one foot before another, Rowan traced her way, tracking the path as it wound its way down, past the rock face, around thick roots, so close to the edge of the cliff that a pebble slipping under her foot rattled hundreds of feet down into the valley below, making her hug the stone of the cliff wall even tighter. She trailed her hand along the wall for the sense of safety, and then suddenly, she stumbled, as her hand felt nothing. There was a deep gap behind the creepers; she had nearly fallen into it. Her heart pounded with fear that she was balanced on a concealed stone bridge, a void on her right, a deadly drop masked by creepers on her left. Cautiously, she balanced herself and parted the leaves of the ropelike vines. A shallow gap was hidden behind the vegetation, a hollow in the rock. Rowan slipped between the strong cords of the roots but found the backwall only a yard or two from the entrance. She turned in disappointment to go back to the path when she heard—only she could have heard it—the tiniest noise of a drip of water falling into standing water, and an echo. It came from behind the rock wall.

The setting sun shone on the opposite side of the creek, Rowan and the cave were in shadow. She realized that the cave faced east; anyone facing out would be the first to see the dawn. She stepped into the hollow, crouching low, and felt her way all around the back wall. At the farthest point, low on the wall, no bigger than the burrow of a rabbit, was a hole in the soil, and as Rowan bent to look, she could smell the cold scent of water on a cool breath of air coming from inside. Tentatively, she brushed her hands against the hole. The sandy soil collapsed upon itself, making the mouth wider. Rowan pushed some more and heard the earth falling away inside, falling into another cave, hidden beyond this one. Now she was digging with her hands, dragging soil outwards, widening the hole until she could get her head and shoulders into the opening and look inside.

She had to blink until her eyes could make out anything. She was on the brink of a huge opening, below her a lake of dark water, so black that she could see nothing but a dim halo—the light from behind her head reflecting off still waters. The little drips of water all around the cavern only accentuated the deep silence. It was cold, blissfully cold after the sweaty heat of the sunset. Rowan felt as if she had plunged into the river at her home, into darkness, into memory, into a new life.

She wriggled her way back out of the hole, feeling the rock scrape against her back, and picked up her musket and the torch of candlewood. She rammed the rod down to make sure it was unloaded, and then blew on the flashpan to clear it of any black powder. She put a scrap of char cloth in the pan and, holding the gun at arm’s length, pulled the trigger. The flint dropped and scraped and planted a tiny glowing spark on the char cloth. Patiently, Rowan breathed on it and then put the tip of the candlewood in it. The wood glowed and caught light. Holding it before her, Rowan once again pushed herself into the hole and looked around. The flame flickered and then burned, telling Rowan that there was good air in the cave. She watched it for a moment, seeing that it was favoring one side: there was an air current inthe cave, blowing towards her. So, there was another entrance somewhere to her right, somewhere in the darkness.

Immediately below her was a little ledge, just wide enough for her to crawl, and beneath the ledge a cascade of silver white rocks, which caught the yellow flicker of torchlight and threw it back, as mirror-bright as ice, luminous in the darkness. Someone, years ago, centuries ago, had cut steps into the white rock, and the constant seep of water had trickled over them for hundreds of years until now they were almost-invisible footholds for tiny feet. Rowan reached down to touch, almost expecting the cascade of stone to be cold as snow, as if this were a winter world of darkness and ice inside the island of heat. Her fingertips felt a wet slippery surface, smooth as marble, wet, but not icy. She cupped her hand into the first indentation; it could serve as a step for anyone with small bare feet, anyone brave enough to climb down to the darkness of the lagoon.

She pulled the musket through the hole and slung it over her back; she took the shaft of the flickering torch in her teeth, pulled off her ill-fitting shoes, and left them on the ledge as she lowered herself gingerly over the side. The light of the torch on the rocks was dazzling, so near to her face, but below the blaze, her feet scrabbled for foothold in total darkness. She found the first step and rested, the toes of her right foot gripping as hard as she could, while she lowered herself down and ran her bare left foot over the smoothness of the rock until she found another half-smooth step below, and then another and another. Rowan crept down, poised like a lizard, on the sheer white cliff, peering into the darkness below.

The wet white wall thickened like an old tree trunk as she reached the floor of the cave, and Rowan stepped off the last step into a shallow lagoon of cold water over silky white sand. The water came to her knees and Rowan bent down, holding the torch aloft, and took a handful and tasted it. It was cold and clean, with the sharp refreshing taste of water filtered through miles of stone. Now the torch reflected off walls of white stone that surrounded the cave. There were two arched tunnels that led off into the darkness, one to her right, where she could see the clear water gently flowing out of the white sand lagoon, and one where the water was flowing in, from the back of thecave. She went to take a step, to paddle towards the exit, following the water, when her foot sunk deep in the silky sand and she gave a sudden gasp of fear.

She was in quicksand: both feet had been sinking imperceptibly as she had stood still, but as soon as she lifted one foot to take a step, her weight had driven the other deep into the soft silt and she was knee-deep, and then thigh-deep, falling forward. Instinctively, she plunged the torch down to support herself and the flame went out at once, the complete darkness like a thunderclap. She levered herself back towards the cliff and the hidden steps, one hand outstretched in the darkness to where the cliff had been. Her fingers scrabbled over the invisible rock to find the tiniest indentation where she could get a grip and haul herself out of the steady suction which was holding her legs and dragging her down.

She fastened on a tiny crevice with the fingertips of her outstretched hand and, pushing off the sinking torch with her other hand, managed to get one foot out of the water and onto the rock and then drag the other from the suction of the sand. It was like fighting with an invisible being; she forced herself not to thrash and kick. Steadily, Rowan strained against the quicksand, and with a sickening noise of yielding, her foot was free. In total darkness, clinging to the rock, Rowan trembled with exhaustion and shock.

She drew a breath, she tightened her fingers and toes in their holds, she took a sobbing breath, and then—despite her fear—she laughed out loud. Her laughter echoed eerily off the walls, off the vaulting ceiling of the cave. She laughed at herself, at her predicament, she laughed at herself, a child of the wild places, stepping into deadly quicksand like a fool, extinguishing her only torch and leaving herself in total darkness, stuck at the bottom of a cliff which she would have to climb blind; but more than anything, she laughed for joy at being, at last, in deadly danger caused by herself—her own actions, not a victim of a man’s malice, but in danger on her own account, by her own doing. She thought that if she died here, in the darkness, unable to find her way up the cliff, unable to climb it with her bleeding fingers and feet softened and blistered by shoes, that she would die a freewoman, and the water would drip over her and make her a woman of stone; a woman of unyielding stone.

HATTON GARDEN, LONDON, AUTUMN 1686

Reluctantly, Mrs. Julia Reekie agreed to take Hester for a visit to her cousins at Foulmire Priory, driven by curiosity to see what sort of inheritance the Reekies’ poor foster boy Matthew had managed to secure. Her husband, Rob, had been infuriatingly vague about his former home, saying only that when he was a boy his mother, Alinor, had sent him to study at the big house with the squire’s son. Rob claimed he could remember nothing about the house and grounds.

“Oh, you know,” he said to his wife as they sat together in the parlor one evening, waiting for the tea tray to be brought in, “just a rambling sort of place. It was once a priory, rebuilt, I suppose, a hundred years ago. Walter and I spent most of our time in the library with our tutor—not that there were many books, the squire was a sporting man.”

“Why didn’t you go with the son to university?” Julia asked.

“I was a study companion for the country, only for that summer,” Rob explained. “They paid me well, and then they paid for my apprenticeship to the Chichester apothecary. I was never of his world, I was a hired companion.”

She was always offended by the poverty of his early life; her gesture with her fan told him to avoid the Chichester shop, or any mention of a wage.

“But how is it that Matthew, your sister’s foster son, inherited it? That’s what I don’t understand.”

He laughed shortly. “Nobody understands that! It was his mother, the Nobildonna. She got him to do some great favor for the queen—you know how these things work.”

She did not know, she longed to know. But she kept her face quite impassive.

“I think Matthew took the queen’s goods into safekeeping at the warehouse, during the Argyll riots, something like that.”

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