“That's right,” she said and sat down next to me. She reached out and gently brushed a lock of hair off my forehead. “Because of the wrongs done to you, he knew I would accept you as one of mine—” She turned and gave Samdi a hard look. “—despite the color of your skin or where you were born.” Something fierce flashed in her eyes and my fear of Samdi dissipated. He might be lewd and vulgar, but Manman Danto would protect me from him.
“Who is he?” I asked, nodding to Samdi, who was puffing away at another cigar he'd produced from one of the pockets in his coat.
“He is Bawon Samdi. He meets the dead at the crossroads and helps them into their graves. That is why he is here.”
“I'm dead?” She nodded with a gentle smile, and tears filled my eyes, spilling over hotly to streak down my cheeks. “I can't be dead. He said I have more to do.” I pointed at Papa Legba and Ezili Danto turned and looked at him. Papa Legba gave her a slightly sheepish look and shrugged.
She turned back to me. “It is true. You have a destiny that you must fulfill. I have seen it.”
“Destiny? What is it?”
“I cannot tell you. Bondye does not allow it. But if you would stay alive, you must fight. Your gwo bònanj, your big guardian angel, has left your body. It's gone back to le Gran Met. To live again, you must call your gwo bònanj back to you. It must join with your ti bònanj, and heal your soul.”
“How do I do that?”
“Remember what it is like to live.” She stood and Papa Legba took her hand. They left the hut, arm in arm, and Samdi followed in their wake. He paused by the door and turned back to me. He tipped his hat, gave me a wide and flirtatious smile, and stepped out. The door shut behind him, sealing me into the dim room, leaving me utterly alone.
Remember what it is like to live. What did that mean? I'd never thought about living. I'd just... lived. The most logical place to start was with the differences between a living body and a dead corpse: the flow of blood in my veins, the steady thumping of my heart, inhaling and exhaling, the pull of muscles as I climbed the rigging to the crow's nest. The scratchiness of a dry throat. The grumbling pain of an empty stomach.
There was more, of course. There was the cold air freezing my nostrils in an English winter, and the hot, wet weight of the air in the Caribbean. The taste of pineapple, and of wine on Sebastian's lips. The smell of star jasmine and salt air. The feel of sea spray on my face. The texture of silk against my skin. The smoky-green smudge on the horizon after the watch has cried out, “Land ho!” The feathered riot of colors in the bird cages at Earthly Delights.
There was the sharp pang of grief when my family died and when I lost Tansy. The excitement of finding new books from Sebastian on my bed or in my cabin. The pride when Ben learned to write his name. The terror of nights with Graves and being found in the hold of the Neptune. The safety I found in Sebastian's embrace. The peace I felt during prayer.
These things were the differences between living and death. These things—and so many more—were what it was like to live. Sights and sounds, scents, emotions, the inner workings of my body. The perfect marriage of mind, body, and soul. This is what I wanted, more than anything. I wanted to live again.
A rush of breath inflated my lungs and my eyes snapped open. Harsh sunlight made me squint and I turned my head, seeing Sebastian kneeling in the dirt next to me. His head was bowed, his face covered by his hands, and his shoulders shaking with the strength of his silent grief.
“Sebastian?” My voice was raw and I could only whisper.
Sebastian's head jerked up and the sight of his face squeezed my heart with grief. He looked wretched, as though he hadn't slept in days. The lines at the corners of his eyes and around his mouth were etched deeply, and his skin was haggard and ashen gray. He stared at me, his expression blank, his eyes wet with tears. Then he blinked and the smile that settled on his lips was like the sun coming out from behind storm clouds. “Oh, thank you, God,” he said, reaching for my hand and clinging to it.
* * *
Manman Vivienne gave me more of the honey-rose water and I drank it down greedily. My throat was parched and it felt like no matter how much of the water I drank, it would never be wet again. Vivienne tried to tell me to go easy, to sip slowly, but I ignored her advice and promptly vomited up everything I'd just drunk. She quirked an eyebrow and I gave her a sheepish look. “I'm sorry,” I said. “I'll go slowly this time. I promise.”
She nodded and handed the bottle back to me. I took very slow sips. She smiled kindly and stood, turning to Ben and Sebastian, and said, “Don't upset her. She still weak.” She gave them stern looks and left the hut.
Sebastian slowly knelt in the dirt next to my bedside, moving as though he was stiff with pain and clinging to my hand with both of his. Ben sat in the room's only chair, slowly stroking my forehead. Ben looked as awful as Sebastian did; it was plain that neither man had slept nor eaten much since leaving me with Vivienne.
“Was I really dead?” I asked, looking back and forth between the two of them.
“Manman said you was,” Ben answered, his tones soft and reverent. “Manman said you heart was still and you didn't breathe. She said you bònanj left you body.”
“Then how... How am I here? How am I alive again?”
“It's a miracle, Loreley,” Sebastian answered, his grip tightening around my hand. “God brought you back to me. To us,” he added hastily, catching a glower from Ben.
I closed my eyes, my brow wrinkled in thought. A miracle, Sebastian said. My bònanj returning to my body, Vivienne and the lwa claimed. It was too much to think about right now. Was my dream real? I put it away until I was more rested and clear-headed.
I opened my eyes and looked at the men. “How long have you been gone?” I asked.
“A month,” Ben said. “We went to sea after Captain's trial and took a ship. When we come back to Le Cap to sell off cargo, there was word you died.” I watched his Adam's apple bob in his throat as he swallowed with difficulty.
I looked at Sebastian, my eyes tracing his face, lingering on his eyes and his lips. “What happened at your trial?”
The men exchanged a look and Sebastian took a deep breath before turning back to me. “I was found guilty of misleading the crew. They wanted to maroon me, but Ben spoke up. He reminded everyone that since I took over for Graves, our profits have increased tenfold and we've only lost a handful of crew members. If they marooned me, they'd lose my spy network.” He shrugged a little. “They saw the error in their decision and welcomed me back.”
“Were you punished?”
“Forty lashes,” he said. I nodded, my brow furrowed with sympathy. The lashes explained why he was holding himself strangely and moving with exaggerated care.
“You be welcome back, too,” Ben added. “You be who come up with the idea for the spies. You the reason we all fat and happy now.”
“They don't care that I'm... That I'm a woman?”
“They've seen you fight,” Sebastian said. “You've proven that you're capable of keeping up with them. They want you back, demanded it in fact. They don't care you're a woman.”
I sighed softly and turned to look at the ceiling for a moment. “What about Hamilton?” I asked. The sight of Sebastian battering Hamilton's face and leaving him bloody flashed before me. He didn't seem the sort to forget that Sebastian had lied for so long and that I'd been complicit in those lies. I knew there would be trouble between us and his presence on board might eventually poison some of the crew against me.
“Mr. Hamilton has elected to leave the Jezebel and seek employment with another crew.”
I turned back to Sebastian. “He left or he was forced out?”
“He left,” he replied. Something in his eyes told me not to push him on the subject.
I returned to my study of the ceiling. I was silent for a long moment, thinking about returning to the sea and the Jezebel. It was my home and the crew was my family. I wanted to go back but at the same time, I
was terrified of returning to that life. I'd almost died once. I wasn't keen on doing it again.
Ben smoothed his hand over the crown of my head and stood. “We give you time to think it over.” He tugged at Sebastian's sleeve and the captain carefully got to his feet. He leaned forward gingerly, and pressed his lips against my forehead and whispered, “I love you,” before turning to go to the door.
“Wait,” I said. “If Hamilton left, who is quartermaster now?”
“Me,” Ben said simply. “And I still be ship's master, too. But only until you come back. Then I just be ship's master.”
I stared at him, slack-jawed with dull incomprehension. “I'm... I'm to be quartermaster?”
Sebastian nodded. “You were elected in absentia. The men insisted.”
I swallowed with difficulty, an up-welling of emotions clogging my throat and making it nearly impossible to speak. I turned back to Sebastian and coughed a bit, wincing at the pain in my belly. “Do they know about the—”
“We'll talk more in the morning,” Sebastian said, cutting off my question before I could ask it. “You heard Vivienne; she said you need your rest.” He herded Ben out of the room and closed the door with a soft thump behind him.
He must have known I was going to ask about the Jacobite money. The quickness with which he cut me off made me think the crew didn't know anything about it. Somehow Hamilton had kept the secret, even after leaving the ship. Did Sebastian expect me to keep up the ruse and continue embezzling from the crew? I would have to, or they would hang him. There would be no getting out of it this time. Greed was the sole motivation for most of the men and they would treat the loss of their shares—no matter how small—as a grave insult.
But that was something to think about and deal with at a later time. I was alive. I was whole. I was safe. I had my family and my home back and I no longer had to live as Luke Jones, master's mate. I could be Loreley Jones, quartermaster of the most feared, most successful ship in the entire Caribbean. The corner of my mouth lifted in a smirk and I wondered if my uncle would ever receive word of my exploits. What would he think of me if he did?
I sighed heavily and closed my eyes. I listened to the thump of my heart and imagined I could feel my blood flowing through my veins. I flexed all the muscles from my toes up to my brow, reveling in having muscles to feel again. I inhaled deeply, smelling woodsmoke and the lingering scent of sickness and death. The first thing I needed to do in the morning was bathe. My stomach grumbled with hunger. The second thing was to eat something.
XXVII
Bwa Kayiman, Saint-Domingue
August, 1717
The next morning, Vivienne helped me bathe. I was weak and my stomach hurt with every movement. Just getting off the cot to my feet exhausted me. I moved like an old woman, and I had to take frequent rests as we trundled across the yard outside Vivienne’s hut. She was endlessly patient with me, even when the pain in my belly made me snappish and grumpy.
As Vivienne washed my hair, I examined my wound. It no longer wept thick, foul-smelling pus, but neither was it completely healed. It was an angry red slash, just below and to the left of my navel. From my vantage, I could also see just how much I had wasted away during my illness. I could feel each of my ribs and my hip bones jutted out alarmingly.
“Don't worry about that,” Manman Vivienne told me when she saw the look of dismay on my face. “I get you fat again. You stay here for another month, and when the rains come again, you be ready to leave.”
I was clean and had eaten a few bites of gruel and banana before Ben and Sebastian came back. Vivienne had stationed me outside the door of the hut, sitting on the one chair she owned, helping the young girls shell beans while the sun warmed my bones. A man who had been introduced as Jacques, Vivienne's husband, drew Sebastian aside and Ben came to sit in the dirt at my side. His right eye was swollen and there was a raw spot on his cheekbone. I reached out to touch it and he hissed in pain and pulled away.
“Who hit you?” I asked.
“Captain did.”
“What? Why?”
“He tell me I be asking too many questions,” Ben answered sullenly.
“Questions about what?”
Ben shrugged and the stubborn set of his jaw told me that I would get no more answers or explanations from him. I frowned and shot Sebastian a withering glare, which he missed entirely. His attention was solely on Vivienne's husband and he was wearing a frown of his own. I nodded to them and asked Ben, “What's that about?”
“Jacques be wanting some money for his wife taking care of you. He be telling Captain there be talk about you, worrying that you tell the other blan where the maroons be. The plantation owners be looking for them. They find them, they come haul the maroons away.”
“Maroons?”
“Escaped slaves,” he explained. “They all be that here.”
“I would never do that,” I said vehemently, the strength of feeling making my stomach hurt. “You know that, right?”
“I do. They don't be so sure.”
I sighed heavily and went back to shelling beans. The girls who had been helping me had melted away when Ben sat down, making themselves scarce. I nudged the bowls of beans closer to Ben, who smirked at me and grabbed a handful, expertly shelling them. We worked in silence for a moment and then I said tentatively, “I saw Ezili Danto.”
Ben's hands froze and he slowly turned to look at me. “You saw her? Where?”
I finished shelling the last handful of beans before answering his question. “I think it was when I was dead. She came to me, in a vision or maybe a dream. Maybe it was real. I don't know. She and Papa Legba and Bawon Samdi were all here, in Vivienne's house.”
Ben's eyes grew wide and he stared at me. “What did they say to you?”
“They argued. Samdi said he was there because he'd dug my grave, but Papa Legba and Ezili Danto said he couldn't take me yet, there was still something I had to do. They said I had a destiny that I had to fulfill before I could die.”
Ben made a thoughtful face and glanced towards Sebastian and Jacques. “You tell Manman you be seeing the lwa. Maybe she tell you what your destiny is, how you fill it.”
“I'm—” I swallowed hard and reached for the water bottle at my feet. After taking a deep draught, I licked my lips and tried again. “I don't think humans are meant to know that. Only God can.”
“Nonsense.” He settled into the cross-legged position that I had come to associate with his story-telling. “There be a griot man—a story-teller—near Ocho Rios, who say he can read destinies. He tell me once that I be destined to protect one of Manman Danto's favorites. He say, 'Ben, you do your best, keep this girl safe. She be important to Manman Danto. You take good care of her. You treat her like she be your sister.' And I do.” He shrugged and glanced up at me out of the corner of his eye.
“And you think he was talking about me?”
“Who else? I never take care of no other girl. I don't have no blood sister.”
I sighed softly and stared off into the canes that surrounded Vivienne's family compound. Was it possible that some man I had never met, in some town I've never been to, could know something so startling about me? The Bible taught that humans had been created with the ability to make choices, to alter our destinies, and that we are responsible for the consequences of our choices. What Ben described was fatalism, that our destinies are set in stone, that no matter what choices we make, no matter we actions we take, nothing would alter the course of our futures. I was not comfortable with that concept and pushed it away, out of my thoughts. I was in control of my life, not some mystical, magical force that I could not see or touch or speak with. If I followed God's path, if I did what I knew in my heart to be right according to what Jesus taught, then I would be allowed into Heaven after I died.
But I had died, at least according to Ben and Vivienne. And I had seen pagan spirits, not God or Jesus or angels or saints. Those pagan spirits—some might even call them demons or
devils—were the ones who had met me at death's door. They were the ones who explained that I needed to come back because I had left things unfinished. Because I had an important destiny that was still unfulfilled.
“Do you believe in God, Ben?” I asked after another long silence.
“Yes. I call him Bondye, the Good God. But He be too busy to talk to us, so the spirits—the lwa—they talk to Him for us. He be the same god you worship in your church, you know. He be the same god Sebastian worship in his cathedrals.”
“The lwa were doing God's work when they came to me?”
“I think so, yes. God have so much to do, see. The spirits make His job easier. He see you be in pain, you be hurting in your soul. He send the lwa to you, help you heal, help you bring you bònanj back together.”
I nodded and fell into another thoughtful silence. Ben broke it moments later and asked, “How long Manman say you stay here?”
“Another month. Until the rains come. Will you be go out roving soon?”
He nodded. “Next few days. Captain need the distraction. He worry too much. He want to be here all the time. Manman chase him off, tell him go to sea.” He chuckled softly and stood, picking up the bowl of bean shells and tucking it beneath his arm. “You rest now, think about Bondye and the lwa, and you God and the saints. Maybe you see they be all the same.” He gave me a gentle smile and then strode off in the direction of the pigpen.
Later that afternoon, Ben went back to where the ship was anchored just off the coast of Le Cap, but Sebastian stayed with me. Vivienne's family group slowly came to accept that we would not betray them to their erstwhile owners and welcomed us—however grudgingly—into their homes and lives. We shared a meal with them that night, and sat around the fire afterward, listening to stories of life in Africa before the elders of the group were stolen away to the new world.
At one point, Jacques stood up and banged his walking stick three times on a flat rock next to the fire. The others fell silent almost immediately. Sebastian, too, settled in and drew me closer to him, tucking my body against his side and wrapping his arm around my shoulders. I laid my head against his chest, right above his heart, and watched the others gathered around the fire. Something important was about to happen; it was in the eager, earnest lines of the children's faces and bodies, and the excitement that shone brightly in the adults' eyes.
The Jezebel's Daughter Page 21
