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She walked for hours, until the sun was fully up and she was thirsty, looking around her all the time for another cave entrance to admit her to the caverns below, where the cold river ran in the darkness. Then, ahead of her, she saw what looked like a spring, bubbling up in a pool and overflowing in a waterfall to the river below. She went to it, smelled the water, noticed the bird droppings at the edge where they had drunk and bathed, and then took a cautious sip. She recognized at once the icy sweetness of the cave water: this was water that hadfiltered through the thick rock, that had dripped from white stone to stone. It was not a spring, welling up from the earth, it was one of the overflows of the underground river that she had been following.
Rowan knelt down to the pond, drank deeply, feeling the coldness of the water in an ache behind her eyes, and the chill of it in her belly, and then sat back on her heels, peering through the leaves to see the height of the sun in the sky, guessing that it was nearly midday.
She turned and looked more carefully at the pool. It bubbled up in a bowl of the white rock; behind it was a rubble of tumbled overgrown rocks, and behind them, hidden, was a wide dry cave. Rowan clambered cautiously over the rocks and found herself in a cleft, tall enough for her to stand. A fissure in the rock admitted her to a cave deeper in the cliff. Behind that was a low tunnel leading to another cave, and a tunnel leading from that. The farther she went from the entrance, the darker it became until she did not dare to go any farther in case the ground fell away beneath her feet in a cliff inside the cliff. She had a sense of a series of galleries and caves and the river running through some of them and falling away to leave them dry.
She turned and found her way back to the cave, and then the crack to the cleft in the rock and then the entrance cave behind the spring. She squatted behind the spring watching the water bubble up, scenting the air, very sure that no white man with his tobacco smoke, his sweat, and his stinking woolen clothes had ever been here.
She squatted on her heels. She had not been so happy since before the war and before her capture. She knew that she had found another entrance to the cave system and she was confident, given the scanty flow of water in the spring, that there were other streams, perhaps many others, draining into and flowing from the great underground river. This would be her refuge and her new home. She felt entirely free. She curled up at the back of the cave, and she was asleep in seconds.
She woke as the sun was going down and stretched out her aching muscles before getting to her feet. She was ravenously hungry, but she ignored the ache in her belly, pushed her sore feet into her shoes, and started the arduous climb up to the top of the creek, noting the way by every outcrop of rock, and occasionally twisting a twig or breakinga leaf to mark her path. No white man would have even seen the little pointers that Rowan laid down as she walked, but she was confident that no white man would try to get down here to the creek.
It was nearly two hours before she emerged into the Peabody cane field, and again she looked around her carefully so that she would know the way when she returned. Then she set off with her steady lope towards the plantation, ignoring the growling hunger in her empty belly and the pain of her bleeding feet.
Caskwadadas was awake at the first sound of a barred owl, the owl of her homeland that she had never heard in Barbados. Quietly, she slipped away from her sleeping son and ducked below the low doorway of the women’s hut. The night sky was speckled with thousands of stars, so many and their light so bright that she could make out Rowan against the wall of the hut, half-hidden by the shadow from the overhanging reed roof.
“Tow wow?Sister?” she asked.
Rowan answered, low voiced, in their own language. “I have found a cave, it has two entrances at least, it has fresh water and good air. It’s well hidden. I’m not coming back here again, except for you and Wómpatuck. I will come back for you when you want—or we can leave now.”
Caskwadadas did not hesitate. “Now,” she said. “I’ll wake Wómpatuck.”
She turned and went back inside. Rowan waited motionless in the shadow of the hut.
In a moment, Caskwadadas and her son were beside her, dressed in their work clothes—a ragged shirt and breeches for the boy, a tattered dress and a cloth turban for his mother. She wore broken-down boots on her feet, the child was barefoot.
Rowan nodded and led the way; they fell in behind her in single file, the boy then his mother, pacing themselves so that nobody walked in step. Even the child, Wómpatuck, walked in Rowan’s footprintsbut at a different pace. It made their passing almost silent, a single track of blurred footprints. Rowan felt her heart lift that she should be walking once more, as her people walked, that she was going into the forest where she belonged—even though it was a strange forest in her enemies’ land; still she felt that she was going home.
FOULMIRE, SUSSEX, AUTUMN 1686
Julia Reekie was not impressed by the bumpy road from Chichester to Sealsea Island, and she was horrified by the Sealsea ferry. The tide was in, and the Broad Rife filled with swirling brown water as the water draining from the harbors was pushed back inland by the incoming tides from both sides of the island.
“This was my uncle Ned’s house and ferry,” Rob said, amused by her dismay. “And his father’s before him.”
“Surely it isn’t safe?”
“Safe enough. They’ll take the horses out of their traces and take them over first, then they’ll take the carriage. It’s no worse than the Lambeth ferry. You can sit in the carriage, you’ll hardly know it’s on the water. It’s all over in minutes.”
“Can’t we go round?”
“It’s an island. You have to cross the water to get on it.”
“There should be a bridge.”
“So everyone has said since the Saxons. I did warn you, my dear.”
“But how was I to know!” She looked despairingly at him. “It’s not safe for Hester.”
“It’s perfectly safe for us all,” he ruled. To Hester, he said: “Come and watch them loading the horses on the ferry, and I will show you the harbor.”
Hester glanced at her mother for permission and climbed down the steps. Rob tucked her hand under his arm and led her around the carriage and showed her the track to the tide mill, the bell to call the ferryman, the ferryman coming to load them, hauling the ferry hand over hand on the overhead rope across the rife, and his little house on the far side. “That was where my uncle Ned lived,” he told her.
“And where was your mama’s house? My grandmother’s home?”
He gestured farther down the bank of the Broad Rife. “Down there, tumbled down, I think.”
“Poor Papa,” she said sympathetically.
He laughed. “Yes, I was poor, but very carefree.”
