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“It’s the queen, God bless her, they say she’s with child. They’re having a day of thanksgiving. January, so we missed that. But we can have our celebration now.”
There was cheering from the Exchange building on the other side of the street, and the church bells of St. Michael’s started to toll.
Ned drew closer. “May I see?”
The lady raised her eyebrows at a shop assistant interrupting her reading, but she handed over the newssheet. “I declare, we shall give a party!” she said to her friends.
“The governor shall give a party,” her husband ruled. “If it’s a boy, then the Stuarts are safe on the throne, and we have our royal charter forever.”
“Won’t we all have to turn Roman Catholic?” his wife asked.
He shrugged. “Who cares about that? If the country’s papist, we’ll have a parish priest for free, paid for by the church, rather than a vicar that we have to pay for ourselves. If the monasteries and convents come back, then we won’t have to keep the poor, the church’ll do it for us. When we go home if the king’s turned into a papist tyrant, there’ll be no parliament, fewer taxes, and no laws against us landlords. What have we lost?”
“The liberties of England?” Ned suggested quietly. “The rights of free men to govern themselves, and to worship as they please?”
The man laughed and clapped him on the back. “You go back to measuring your ells, my man. The king’s going to have a son, and that’ll be the end to free men governing themselves, or shopmen speaking to their betters!”
“What’s this?” Johnnie asked, who usually had a grand dinner sentround from the hotel, when he did not dine with one of the planters at an inn.
“English fare,” Ned said. “To remind us who we are.”
Johnnie laughed. “Am I allowed a rum punch?”
“I’ve got water,” Ned said. “I’m not taking sugar anymore.”
Johnnie sat and ate, one eye on his uncle, who moved quietly around their little galley kitchen, slicing fruits and bringing them to the table.
“You’ll eat pawpaw,” he said.
“It was grown by a free man,” Ned said. “And I bought it from him in the market at a fair price.”
Johnnie sighed. “Uncle Ned—what’s all this? Are you fasting because the king has finally got an heir? Surely, it was always possible?”
“It’s that,” Ned conceded. “I thought the country would rise against him or at the worst endure him till his death, and then there’d be a Protestant princess who respects the liberties of the people. I thought the Stuart tyranny would die out.”
“And sugar?” Johnnie asked.
“I’ve seen how the slaves are worked, worse than the beasts. I can’t abide it. It’s got a bitter taste to me now.”
“I swear to God, Uncle Ned, if you talk like this in public, you will be hanged, and I will be ruined.”
Ned nodded. “I won’t be talking like this. I’m going home,” he said simply.
“You’ve finished your collecting?”
“I’ve seen more than I can stand. I’m going home to fight for freedom in England.”
Johnnie pushed his plate away. “Another defeat will kill you.”
“I’d rather die than be spoiled here,” Ned said. “Mercy dries up here, like the sap in the cane. You said that you’d just open a store to get the cost of your passage and buy Rowan out. But it’s you that have been sold. You were always for a profit, but now you’re trading in men and women, like a cannibal. You’re part of it now. You’re one of them. Like she said—”
“She said? Who said? If you’ve been talking to my shopgirls—”
“They’re not shopgirls. They’re slaves. You’re driving slaves inyour own shop. You’re paid in slavery profits, you’re sending slave goods back to England. You’re part of it.”
“You can’t be here and not be part of it!” Johnnie exclaimed. “I said I’d never be a slave driver, and I never will. But I have to work slaves in the shop! I can’t be the only business in Bridge paying wages! I’d be a fool. I’d go out of business.”
“It was Rowan that said you are a part of it,” Ned said damningly.
