Beyond the Savage Sea Read online

  “Don’t you do it,” he muttered darkly.

  “I understand Priscilla likes you, Mr. Steel.”

  “If biting me means she likes me, yes.”

  Plum chuckled. “Edwinna found her half-starved and cowering in a cage in Bridgetown. Edwinna tends to rescue all of God’s helpless—animals, children, pirates...”

  The dry way he said pirates told Drake that Plum did not consider him one, and he almost smiled. But he was too frustrated to smile. Plum’s view of Edwinna as a “rescuer” surprised Drake. He slanted a curious glance at Plum. The runaway slave incident had to be uppermost in the overseer’s mind—in any overseer’s mind—but Plum tactfully avoided it and led conversation in more pleasant directions.

  “So, Mr. Steel. Edwinna tells me you are a wine merchant.”

  “Is that so? I thought I was a pirate. At least, in her opinion.”

  Again Plum chuckled. “She believes you, though she will never tell you so. That is her way. She also tells me you have two children—a son, William, who is six, and a daughter, Katherine, who is three.”

  Drake gave him a look of guarded surprise. He hadn’t thought she’d listened that night at Magistral Tarcher’s cottage, let alone remembered details such as names, ages.

  “Yes, I do.”

  “If William is past five, then he’s had his Breeching Day, eh? Ah, it’s a proud day for a father. I’ve a son of my own, grown now and living in England. I well remember his fifth birthday—taking him out of gowns and putting him into his first pair of breeches. A proud day.”

  “Yes, it was.” It had been a proud day. Drake’s thoughts drifted back to it. To celebrate, Drake had given a party in his small house on Thames Street that stood next to his wine shop and warehouse. There’d been friends, relatives, feasting, drinking, merriment. His mouth tightened as a shadow clouded the memory. Midway in the festivity, going out to the privy, he’d found Anne and his best friend, Charles Dare, in the garden, kissing. He’d exploded in a jealous fury while the pair of them, tipsy with wine, had only giggled at him. Charles had accused him of having no sense of humor, and Anne had called him “foolish.” He’d had to clench his fists to keep from knocking Charles’s block off. For the sake of the party he’d curbed his temper and let the incident pass, but it had ruined the day for him.

  Anne had been right, though she couldn’t have known it. He’d been a fool to worry about a drunken kiss in the garden. But that was before he learned how short life can be, how little time there was for kissing.

  He managed to ride out from under the mahogany trees without having Priscilla land on his head. That was one minor blessing at least, he thought tartly.

  From the vantage point of Crawford Hall’s hilltop, he could glimpse the whole plantation. Cane fields undulated in the wind as far as the eye could see. They rolled on—five hundred acres of them, according to Plum—covering the land in all directions. Drake hadn’t realized Edwinna was so rich. A merchant, he couldn’t help but be intrigued by the potential profit the cane represented. He knew the price sugar commanded in the London market.

  He looked out with immense interest. The plantation was laid out like a wheel, with the millworks at the hub and cane paths spoking out from it. The wheel design was deliberate.

  Plum explained- The spoking paths allowed the cut cane to be brought to the mill rapidly, so that it could be processed quickly after cutting.

  Built into the hillside, the millworks consisted of a half dozen buildings that descended down the hill in stair-step fashion so as to use the force of gravity to let the cane juice flow down pipes to the boiling house. The mill rang with noise. Although the main harvest would not begin for two more weeks, according to Plum, a ten-acre field that had ripened early was under harvest now. It was Edwinna’s decision, Plum told him.

  Drake looked at him askance. “You mean it was your decision, but you let her think it was hers.’“

  Plum smiled in amusement. “No, Mr. Steel, I do not mean that. Edwinna was born with a green thumb. She knows more about planting by instinct than I have learned in a lifetime. I’ve learned to trust her judgment. Cane juice runs in her veins.”

  With the small harvest underway, the rumble of the grinder dominated all other noises, and he could see a dainty affingoe coming up a path, loaded with cut cane. At the end of the path she headed up the hill to the millworks, toward the topmost building, the grinding platform. The faithful little creature plodded along without a drover, unerringly knowing the way. Drake smiled. He wished he could take an affingoe home to Katherine.

  He and Plum rode to the mill and walked uphill to the grinder. Its rumble assaulted Drake’s ears, growing louder with every step he took. Plum didn’t seem to notice. The grinding platform was a fifteen-foot-square wooden structure built into the hillside just under a huge stone windmill. Plum explained they sometimes used wind to power the grinder and sometimes oxen. Edwinna preferred oxen. It was safer.

  Drake and Plum mounted the steps to the platform, which shook from the vibration of the grinding. The grinder consisted of four vertical rollers, each as tall and thick as a robust man. Two black slaves worked at the grinder, buck naked. Drake’s scalp prickled when he saw the danger involved. No wonder Edwinna preferred ox power. Oxen could be stopped quickly, wind could not. He watched. One slave fed the cane stalk into the rollers, and the other caught it coming out on the other side and fed it back into the roller to return to the first slave. Cane juice spurted and ran down the rollers into a catch basin beneath the platform. The air smelled sugary.

  “It looks damned dangerous,” Drake shouted to Plum above the noise of the grinder.

  “It is,” Plum shouted back. “That’s why we use our best, most alert slaves at the grinder, and we work them short shifts—only four hours. They work naked lest their clothing get caught in the roller and they be pulled in and crushed before we can stop the grinder.”

  Good lord. Next they went downhill to the boiling house. Drake took out his handkerchief and clamped it to his nose. He’d never smelled anything so vile as boiling cane juice. The stench filled the air, rising from six steaming kettles of graduating size that were set flush in the boiling house floor. The place was hot as Hades. The heat came from the furnace room beneath the boiling house floor, where each kettle had its own oven. Fire feeders kept the fires burning at graduated temperatures.

  Drake watched the boiling process. Sweating like horses, four glistening black staves wielded heavy, gallon-size dippers that had handles as long as their bodies. As the cane juice boiled and thickened, it was transferred from kettle to kettle, each kettle a little smaller and hotter than the last. They also skimmed the boiling juice and cast the skimmings into a cistern. From the cistern the skimmings ran down pipes to the distillery at the bottom of the hill. There the skimmings were distilled into kill-devil rum—a drink so potent that it would burst into flames if a candle were brought anywhere near it.

  Plum introduced Drake to the boiling house overseer, a Cornishman named Alvis Nansellock, and they stood watching as a batch of boiling, thickened juice crystallized into sugar in the final and hottest kettle.

  “Strike,” Nansellock said.

  The boiler swiftly dipped into the kettle, scooped out the sugar, and cast it to the floor, where it steamed and sizzled in a brown heap. A second boiler quickly scooped thickened cane juice into the empty kettle so the kettle wouldn’t burn. It was an exacting, arduous process, and Drake was impressed.

  He and Plum finished their tour of the millworks, peering in at the dark, windowless curing house where the triangular wooden sugar pots would hang drying in their racks for a month as the molasses dripped out of them and the sugar hardened. They took a moment to look in at the knocking house, where cured sugar was knocked out of the pots, sorted for quality, and prepared for shipment.

  Then they rode out to the cane fields, passing through a village of slave huts. He saw slaves everywhere. Edwinna had an empire—a shabby empire, to be sure. />
  “How can she afford to run this place?” he asked Plum.

  “She can’t,” Plum answered frankly. “Crawford Plantation is deeply in debt, Mr. Steel. However, it is not Edwinna’s doing. Her father, Peter Crawford, was, shall we say, a trifle self-indulgent? Edwinna is doing her best, and a very good best it is.” The bitterness that crept into Plum’s voice at mention of Peter Crawford surprised him, and he wondered again about Edwinna’s father.

  By the time he’d spent two hours in Plum’s company, he knew he and the overseer would become friends. Plum reminded him of his own father, a gentle, dry-witted man who’d been astute and intelligent. Plum even handled the runaway slave incident as his father would have, making no mention of it until the guilt weighed so heavily upon Drake that he wanted to clear the air of it.

  “As to the runaway slave, Mr. Plum...”

  “Yes, Mr. Steel.”

  “I won’t deny it. I did what my conscience bade me do, and, given the same set of circumstances tomorrow, I would likely do it again.”

  Plum eyed him sternly as their horses plodded down the cane path side by side. “Plainly spoken, Mr. Steel. Thank you. I shall be plain also. I admire a man who follows the dictates of his conscience. But not if it brings harm to Edwinna or her plantation. My allegiance is first and foremost to her.”

  “And my allegiance is first and foremost to my conscience.”

  “Then we understand each other, Mr. Steel.”

  “We understand each other, Mr. Plum.”

  The air having been cleared between them, the two men rode on, and a feeling of mutual respect flowed between them. He could grow to like Matthew Plum.

  Drake had never seen so many blacks in his life.

  “What keeps them from running away, revolting? God in heaven, they outnumber the whites ten to one.”

  “Seventeen to one,” Plum said dryly. “Planters maintain

  a ratio of one white bond slave for every seventeen slaves. As you can see,” he gestured at an open field where black slaves were trenching the soil and planting cane, guarded by just one bond slave, “the bond slaves serve as overseers and are armed with muskets.”

  “The likes of Jacka and Yates with muskets? Wonderful.” “What choice have we? As for the blacks running away, we do our best to prevent it. We give every black his own wife. The boiling house and grinder slaves are given two wives. This makes them happy, less likely to run away or revolt. Also, we buy only a few blacks of each tribe. The African tribes are natural enemies. They fear each other more than they fear us. They do not even speak the same language, and that is how we control them.”

  “Disgusting.”

  “This is Barbados, Mr. Steel, not Whitehall Palace in London.”

  Plum explained that women did the most important work on the plantation—weeding. This was a tropical island where growth was lush and rapid. Without weeding, a newly planted cane field would be swallowed up by the rain forest in a week. The women weeded each new field until the cane was six months old and the plants so thick and well established that weeds were no longer a danger.

  He took Drake to a young cane field to show him the women weeding, and here Drake began to sweat in earnest, and not from the heat. Caught mopping his brow by Plum, he smiled.

  “All those bare breasts.”

  “You will get used to it, Mr. Steel.”

  “That, Mr. Plum, I doubt.”

  “We give them tunics to wear, but they refuse to cover their breasts. African women consider it shameful to do so. They use the tunics we give them to make head turbans.”

  As they rode on, the women gestured and shouted.

  “Papa—no loblolly, no loblolly...”

  “Are they talking to me?” Drake asked in astonishment. More than twenty women were shouting, gesturing, smiling at him.

  “They are, Mr. Steel. The plantation mistress is ‘Mama.’ That makes you ‘Papa.’ They know you are Edwinna’s husband. There are no secrets on a plantation “

  “Papa.” Drake had to smile. “What are they saying to me?”

  “Loblolly is cornmeal mush. Africans loathe it, but sometimes the provisions ships do not come in and we must feed them loblolly. They are asking you not to.”

  Out in the field the rest of the women took up the chant —even the old ones who, with their flaccid, stretched breasts, looked as if they had six legs as they stooped to their weeding.

  “Papa, no loblolly...”

  “You’d best answer them, Mr. Steel. They put great store in what the master of the plantation says and does.”

  “I’m not master and don’t want to be.”

  Plum smiled indulgently. “You’ve no choice, Mr. Steel. You can go out into the field and talk your antislavery philosophy at them until you are blue in the face, and they won’t understand a word of it. They have always been slaves, here and in Africa. Now, make them happy, Mr. Steel. They ask so little.”

  Drake flushed but waved a hand at the women.

  “No loblolly,” he called. The women cheered.

  Plum’s eyes twinkled. “There you are, Mr. Steel. A proper slave owner.”

  “To hell with you, Plum.”

  Plum chuckled. They spent the morning together, easy in each other’s company. Drake kept looking for Edwinna. Was she avoiding him? Why? He’d thought they’d achieved a rapport of sorts in that middle-of-the-night talk. Was she frightened of him? The thought offended him. How could she still judge him to be a danger?

  Plum found Edwinna’s absence derelict, too, for as they rode along he made up unlikely excuses for her. “Edwinna is probably tied up with her bookkeeper.” Drake didn’t answer, which was answer enough. He didn’t believe it.

  Toward the end of the morning, they stopped at Plum’s cabin, sat on the shady porch, and thirstily drank tankards of cold water from the coral drip, brought to them by Plum’s black slave woman. She also brought them pipes to smoke, which she lighted in her own mouth, sucking at them to get them properly started. Plum took his and smoked with relish. Drake took a puff or two to be courteous to the woman, then set it aside. He disliked Barbados tobacco—it had an acrid, bitter taste.

  As they sat on the porch, three little mulatto children, naked as jaybirds, came shrieking across the yard and threw themselves at Plum, hanging on his neck. Plum kissed and hugged them. Drake watched in astonishment. When he’d sent the tots back to their play, Plum gave him a twinkling look.

  “Yes, Mr. Steel, they’re mine. I won’t deny it—not before God or man. I have grown children in England and a wife there, too, but I’ll be deviled if I’m not fonder of these rascals than of the whole lot back home in Yorkshire.”

  “As for my woman,” Plum sent a fond glance into the house where she’d shyly retired, “I bought her off a slave ship ten years ago, and she was the best thing I ever bought in my life. She makes me happy, Mr. Steel. She fills my home and my heart. Now I ask you, can more be said of any woman, black or white?”

  Drake smiled in bemusement. “I daresay not.” This island and its conventions were as strange to him as if he’d gone to sleep one night in his bed in London and awakened to find himself in another world. He couldn’t imagine siring a child on a black woman. Then, mentally jabbing himself, he had to admit he could easily imagine it. The island was damned beautiful and sensual—bare-breasted maidens, undulating cane, flowers, sun, trade winds. Yes, he could easily picture a lovely black maiden in his arms.

  He nodded at the yard where the children played, running and shrieking happily. “What will happen to them when you return to England? You’ll surely go home someday.”

  Plum didn’t deny it. “I’ve made provision. If I should leave or die, my woman and my children will be freed. Edwinna knows what to do. She keeps a copy of my will in her strongbox. I’ve put money aside for the woman to open a small business in Bridgetown—an inn or drinking house. As for those little rascals...” He glanced at them fondly. “I have purchased a ten-acre farm plot for each of them
. They will able to hold their heads high, knowing they are property owners.”

  “Edwinna sanctions all this?” He couldn’t imagine it.

  Plum smiled indulgently. “You are an Englishman, Mr. Steel, and you think like one. Edwinna is Barbados born, and she thinks like a woman of the island. Plantation life is normal to her, including slavery.” Plum paused, his eyes narrowing, assessing Drake. “You don’t much like her, do you, Mr. Steel?”

  Taken aback, Drake drew a careful breath. “She is...unusual.”

  “Ay, Mr. Steel, unusual in that’s she’s a fine, decent woman. There’s no finer to be found in all Christendom.”

  Drake sat in thought. The noon bell clamored, ending the conversation. Slaves and bond slaves drifted out of the fields, heading to their huts and their food. They stood. According to Plum, midday meal at Crawford Hall was a work session, with Plum’s chief overseers gathering to eat at Edwinna’s table. David Alleyne, the young, fair-haired plantation doctor whom Drake had met earlier, came bounding from the hospital huts, his step jaunty, his face as joyful as if he were going to a feast.

  Plum winked at Drake. “David Alleyne is in love with Kena.”

  “Kena. What will come of it?”

  “Who can say? I only know this. It is true love that shines in that young man’s eyes, not lust, else Edwinna would not permit him in the house.”

  “Edwinna seems to be very fond of Kena, and Kena of her.” Drake had noticed the bond between them at supper as Kena served.

  Plum smiled humorously. “With good reason, Mr. Steel, with good reason.”

  It was a cryptic response, and Drake’s eyebrows lifted in curiosity. But Plum chose to say no more on the subject.

  “Let’s go eat, Mr. Steel.”

  * * *

  Chapter 6

  Evading Priscilla, who waited for him like the plague, perched atop the coral water drip in the front yard, ready to pounce, Drake slipped into the house through a side door.