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The Reekies—Rob and Julia—returned to London on Boxing Day, taking Captain Shore in their carriage. The Captain wanted to refit his ship for its next voyage, and Rob could not be far away from hispatients, who expected him to be on call, especially those ladies who were near their time.
“If only you could attend the queen!” Julia breathed.
Rob shook his head. “To guarantee an heir for England is beyond the skill of any physician, and you’d get no thanks for a girl.”
Hester was allowed to stay at the Priory with her cousins, her aunt Alys, and Matthew until the end of the holidays; but she noticed a difference in her cousins. The sisters now walked side by side, and Hester and Matthew walked together. When they played cards in the evening, Hester partnered Matthew. The four of them sometimes recaptured the old schoolroom camaraderie, but Mia no longer sparkled in conversation. Alys, watching over them all, but distracted by rent day at the Priory and checking the linen cupboard, did not notice Matthew’s reserve towards Mia nor her distance from him. Gabrielle was torn between pleasure at knowing that she would not lose her sister, sorrow for Mia’s evident unhappiness, and a secret joy of her own that Matthew would not marry this year.
PEABODY PLANTATION, BARBADOS, WINTER 1687
“I think I’ll take a visit inland,” Ned said to Johnnie at a breakfast of sugared coffee and sweet cakes in the warehouse galley. “See if there are any trees left in the valleys that I don’t know, see if I can find anything interesting.”
“You don’t need a letter of introduction, you can walk up to any door and you’ll be invited for a week,” Johnnie said. “It’s the friendliest place in the world.”
“Easy to be hospitable when you’re rich from someone else’s labor.”
“Everyone is rich from someone else’s labor,” Johnnie declared. “It’s just here, that you see it.”
“I see laborers worked to death to save the cost of keeping them in old age.”
“Uncle, I’m no slave driver, though I’ve been offered the post of agent over and over. I only came here to rescue Rowan. I only stay here to recoup my costs. Don’t blame me that the only way to make sugar is with slaves.”
“Imagine you’ve recouped your costs? And more than once?”
Johnnie ducked his head and grinned. “All right! I’m making a profit. Like my ma, like my family business, which you work for too.”
“Aye, you’re right. And I eat sugar. Anyway, I’m hiring a horse and going up country. I’ll go and see Rowan’s plantation, since I’ve come so far.”
“They said they’d tell me if they ever found… remains.”
“I know.” Ned hated lying to Johnnie. “I’ll go anyway.”
“They’ll be glad of a visit. You can take Mrs. Peabody some ribbons from the store.”
Ned, on a hired horse with a bottle of rum and water in his pocket and a change of clothes in a saddlebag, rode for a few hours, northwards from the town of Bridge, through fields of unending sugarcane, following the wagon ruts of a road which had been ground down through the earth of the fields, until it hit the bedrock of the pale porous stone of the island. He thought the roads were like the land, like the working people, like this whole island: ground down until they were bleached with pain. He started his journey greeting the children with a smile and the women with “Good day”; but nobody ever replied to him but the white man who sat high on his horse, a long hunter’s whip curled in his hand. He had a servile smile and a tip of his hat for Ned—more slavish than any.
Sugarcane, like a wall of green, pressing against the road and extending for miles, made Ned feel enclosed, as if he too would never be free. When the crest of one of the rolling hills gave him a chance tolook down on the land, all he could see was a plain green-leaved desert of waving fronds, and the ant-like gangs of weeders moving among them, a windmill on every hilltop, its sails stilled until the harvest. He could not see how Rowan could survive here, any more than among the hard streets of London in a land under the tyranny of one favored crop and one favored people.
Ned, borrowing Johnnie’s surname of Stoney and explaining that he was Johnnie’s uncle, come to Barbados to study the Sugar Islands for the new governor, was a welcome novelty on the Peabody Plantation, and they recommended that he ride all around their lands and their neighbors but avoid the creeks that ran between the fields.
“You don’t want to go too deep,” Samuel Peabody warned him. “The ground falls away like a cliff under your feet. If you insist, I’ll loan you a couple of men to go a little way in; but there are no paths, you can’t get through it. Nobody’s ever seen the bottom of the deep gullies. I’ve lost more than one man down there.”
“I’ll borrow a gun if I may, and see if I can pot a dove for skinning.”
“You can borrow my hunting gear,” Samuel said with enthusiasm. “I used to go out for game at one time. But my constitution doesn’t suit the midday heat.”
Ned, forced into Sam Peabody’s huntsman gear of gaiters, boots, breeches, waistcoat, and heavy jacket, topped off with a hunter’s hat, thought that he was not surprised that Samuel’s constitution did not suit the heat. Ned himself thought he would die of it. He managed to rid himself of the two slaves that his host had assured him would find birds for him and beat the bushes to give him an easy shot. The two tall black men, dressed in nothing but cast-off, baggy sailors’ trousers hitched up to their naked chests, left him with silent indifference, without a backward glance. Ned was reminded of the deep loneliness of the slave taker who lives among men and women; but, thinking of them as beasts, loses his only chance of human companionship.
He did not dare go deep into the thick jungle of the river gully.The trails of aerial plants, the web of vines looked identical, every way that he turned. He knew that if he went too far in, he would never find his way out again. No white man would ever find him. He waited half an hour until he was sure the slaves were gone and then he discharged his musket into the air and slumped under one of the great trees, looking up at the strange flowers in its branches. He took off his jacket and wiped his face. The whine of mosquitoes and the constant prick of bites against his tender skin made him scratch and swat at the air. If Rowan came now, he would look like a fool to her: red-faced and sweating, dressed for an English winter under a tropical sky. But he could not believe that she would come now. The forest was too thick for her to find him. He thought he would wait two hours for her to come and then pick some leaves and some of the ferns from the ground to show that he had been collecting, and struggle back to the plantation for dinner. He did not think she could possibly live nearby, or find him from the sound of one musket shot, and then he felt a gentle touch on his elbow, and she was there, beside him.
“Nippe Sannup.”
“I didn’t hear you come.”
She nodded in agreement. He should not be able to hear her come through the forest.
“You live near here? So close to the plantation.”
“I have reason,” she said.
