Lady Savage

by Donna Lea Simpson

  Mr. Peter Roxeter, Miss Savina’s father, he had spoken to on occasion, and though he seemed a clever enough gentleman for his position as an official in the colonial government, his was not an original mind in any way.

  That left Miss Savina Roxeter and her pretty maid, Zazu. Zazu, he had learned, was a Maroon, a proud descendent of the original Maroons, the former slaves on the first Spanish-built Jamaican plantations who many years before had escaped to the hills and then fought for their freedom so fiercely. When the British took over Jamaica, the Maroons had managed after a series of wars to negotiate a treaty with the British government that left them free to manage their own destiny up in their settlements in the Blue Mountains. Why Zazu, then, would voluntarily put herself in service and leave her island home was a mystery to Tony, and intriguing. What went on behind those intelligent brown eyes?

  But the most fascinating to him was Miss Savina Roxeter, and he suspected the American captain had seen the same something in her eyes that made him give her the power of their fate over her fellow English passengers. He had, perhaps, wanted to see what she would do when given such command, but he couldn’t have been sure she would retain the authority to make the final decision. Most young ladies in her position would have deferred to their husbands-to-be or their fathers, their future master or past. But Miss Roxeter had accepted the responsibility, taken it seriously, listened to all of their opinions and then decided for herself.

  Interesting. It would not make her life any easier for the time they were mired on the island. No doubt everyone who had been for another choice would remind her every miserable day that they were there by her decree.

  As one by one the watchers on the white sand beach turned away from the horizon where the ship had disappeared, Tony roused himself. There would be much to be done, and they would need to sort things out before nightfall; it was already late afternoon. He joined the others, who were examining the pile of goods that constituted all of their supplies.

  Lady Venture sat down on a barrel of water and said, “I am not going anywhere until we are rescued.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” her brother said with an angry scowl. “It may not be for weeks . . . years! We could live here until we rot and decay into piles of moldering bones.”

  Annie, Lady Venture’s maid, began to cry, huge tears rolling down her pale cheeks and dripping on her clenched hands. She plunked down in the white sand and bawled, fisting her eyes like a child.

  “Now see here, Gaston-Reade, you mustn’t say such things with ladies about.” William Barker leaned over and patted the maid’s slim shoulder awkwardly.

  “That’s not a lady, you idiot, that is my maid,” Lady Venture said with a scathing glance at her fiancé.

  “Still a young lady,” Barker grumbled, but turned away and seemed very interested in a sack of sugar among the supplies.

  “We won’t starve,” Zazu said unexpectedly. “And we won’t die. These islands,” she said, spreading her arms out wide, “supply all that one could need. If there is fresh water . . . that is most important and what we need to find out immediately.”

  Lady Venture turned her back on them all and sat, rigid, staring off into the distance, where the cloud-strewn sky met the indigo ocean.

  “Perhaps we ought to get these things up into the shelter of the wooded area,” Tony suggested. “So it doesn’t get wet if it should happen to whip up in the night.”

  Lord Gaston-Reade gave him a long steady look and said, “Don’t think, Tony, that this hideous situation in which we find ourselves means that the divisions of our various positions will be lowered. We are civilized English people, not natives and not savages.”

  Tony caught a veiled look of contempt from Zazu, aimed at the earl, and an expression of open astonishment from Miss Roxeter.

  “All Mr. Heywood was saying was that we must gather our wits and begin to think of approaching nightfall,” she said. “I hardly think he was challenging the very structure of the British aristocracy.”

  “Savina, you are poorly equipped to understand how important and how fragile is that very fabric of our British civilization,” Gaston-Reade said.

  “Perhaps I don’t have the same idea of civilization that you do. Civilization, to me, means civility. We are desperately lacking that at the moment.”

  “You mustn’t behave this way, Savina, dear,” her father said, drawing off his gray gloves and passing one hand over his perspiration-coated brow. “I know the American captain’s odd decision—putting our fate in your hands—may have filled your head with strange notions, but your moment of ascendancy is over.”

  Savina felt a spurt of anger mixed with exasperation. They were all acting as if their petty concerns of the moment were of import, when she was mostly concerned with the fact that the sun was descending, and they were sitting on an open beach with no shelter. She caught Mr. Heywood’s eyes and bit her lip, trying not to laugh, for he was making a face behind her fiancé’s back. She shouldn’t laugh. She really shouldn’t. Gaston-Reade had a right to her respect, at the very least. He had always been kind to her, so this boorishness was a temporary blot on his character, nothing more. The secretary’s strange behavior—she would never have thought the grave young man the type to make such a face—was no doubt a kind attempt on his part to lend the drama some levity.

  “Zazu,” she said, “why don’t we begin? Mr. Heywood, I concur with your suggestion. We need to get our provisions to some kind of shelter before nightfall.” She took a deep breath and went to her fiancé. If they were going to be man and wife, they needed to find a way to work together in harmony, and this calamity had not proved an auspicious beginning. “Albert,” she said, touching his jacket sleeve, “I don’t mean to supersede your authority, you must know that. But we need to begin to take care of ourselves here.”

  Though she disliked doing it she wanted the group to work together, so she cajoled and courted him into a better mood, and he took command, choosing a temporary spot back in the forested edge above the long white beach. While he, Heywood, Zazu, Barker and Savina transported the supplies—the American captain had been reasonably generous, given that he had absolute command over the vessel and its crew—Lady Venture sat on the barrel and refused to take part, nor would she allow her maid to help, commanding her to attend to her solely. Savina’s father dithered, horrified by his daughter’s turn at manual labor, sure it did not do his own dignity any good to take part, but irresolute, dashing back and forth asking everyone’s opinion whether he ought to help.

  Finally they were done, and even Lady Venture’s barrel seat had been moved.

  Exhausted, Savina sat on the sandy ground above the beach with her back to a wood crate. Her lovely blue and white cotton dress was soiled, her shoes were pinching her feet and her hair was ratted on her sweaty neck. She felt utterly miserable, and in the normal course of things she would have asked Zazu to get her hip bath ready, with her lavender-scented salts.

  But Zazu was curled up asleep, having hauled and toted more than anyone else but Mr. Heywood. That gentleman had murmured something about private business—Savina had blushed, feeling sure she knew why he needed to go off into the bushes beyond their temporary camp, for it reminded her of her own soon-to-be-urgent needs—but now she saw him striding back through the thick brush.

  “I think I have found a source of clean water,” he said as he approached the slumberous group. “There are two tiny connected lakes inland about a half mile. The water is not salty, at any rate; whether it is safe to drink I am not sure, but it will do, I think, for cooking and washing up.”

  His enthusiastic tidings were greeted with sullen silence, and he sat down on the ground a ways away from everyone else.

  “I’m hungry,” Lady Venture said.

  That announcement, too, was greeted with silence. The sky was getting grayer by the minute and a wind began to whip up, blowing cyclones of sand into whirling tempests. From their minimal shelter in the fringe of palms and br
ush above the beach, Savina could see the gusting wind whipping the waves into frothy peaks.

  The grand achievement of working together to get the supplies up off the beach seemed so little now as it occurred to Savina that they should have decided on a camping spot, started a fire, retrieved the boiling pot from among their supplies and begun a ragout of the salt pork the American had allowed them and perhaps some of the yams. And yet it had taken all of their energy to do what they had done.

  As if he had thought the same thoughts, Anthony Heywood set to work gathering wood, while Gaston-Reade, his notebook on his lap, began to make an inventory of their supplies. He repeatedly called his secretary away from his labor to help him, setting him to work opening crates, counting bottles, and repacking the cartons. Savina, trying to mend Gaston-Reade’s damaged opinion of her, did her best to fold her hands together on her lap, as Lady Venture did, and behave in a ladylike manner, even as she longed to be doing something to help, and as much as she wanted to remonstrate with her fiancé that counting supplies was not doing them a great deal of good at the moment.

  But when Zazu awoke and saw what the secretary was trying to accomplish, she set to work to help him, gathering wood and smaller twigs and dried grass into organized piles. Savina couldn’t stay still, not when so much needed to be done, and she finally leaped to her feet and silently began to help.

  Perhaps if the entire group had worked together they would have succeeded, but with just the three of them making any effort at all, they ran out of time. The wind intensified, and their position at the edge of the wooded copse didn’t offer them much protection; with no fire to warm them, nor any light as the sun descended unseen behind a curtain of dark gray clouds, they got a taste of what the night was to be.

  Zazu and Savina huddled together under a shawl as the wind howled around them, the giant palms swaying with ferocious joy at the blow. When she heard Annie, Lady Venture’s maid, whimpering in the dark, Savina called out to her but realized it was too hard to be understood over the wind. She reached out and grabbed the girl’s arm and hauled her down with the two of them in the shelter of the wooden crates and barrels, and for the next hours the three of them tried to offer each other what courage and comfort they could.

  It was far from morning still when the rain began, blowing up from the beach and soaking all of them with needle-sharp precision.

  Five

  When the sun finally rose and cast off the gloomy shroud of clouds that had descended on them at twilight the night before, Tony stood at the edge of the thicket and looked around him. Of his fellow castaways, Mr. William Barker was wandering down along the beach, but at least he was doing something, which could not be said for Lord Gaston-Reade, who sat on a crate in majestic silence, brooding as he stared off into the tangle of undergrowth.

  Zazu, Miss Roxeter’s maid, had disappeared at daybreak; she had whispered something to her mistress, the two had gone off together, and then Miss Roxeter had come back alone.

  Of them all Mr. Peter Roxeter looked the worst for their awful night. The oldest among them had refused to hunker down behind the barricade of supplies and was therefore covered in filth, his day-old scrub of gray beard clogged with sand and his eyes circled by dark rings. His always tidy gray hair was a scruffy mat rising in tufts, and his daughter was near tears as she tried to get him to rouse himself to stand and let her get into the wood crate in which the American captain had packed for them a couple of knives, two cast-iron pots, a firkin or two of lard and some canvas bailing pails. He was foggy and abstracted, but eventually she got through to him and he stood, staggering off into the bushes, presumably to relieve himself.

  Lady Venture was in rare form. Her eyes glittered with fury and her gaze slewed from person to person, looking, no doubt, for an object upon which to vent her fury. When her dark eyes settled on her future sister-in-law, Tony knew what was coming next.

  “This is all your fault, Savina Roxeter,” she exclaimed, dropping each word like poison into the silence. “If you hadn’t thrust yourself forward in a most unbecoming manner, that American captain wouldn’t have left our fate in your incapable hands and we would be . . . we would be—”

  “We would be what?” Savina whirled and stood over her, her grubby hands fisted at her sides. “I’ll tell you where we would be; we would be in the hold of the Prosperous suffering who knows what, prisoners of the United States government. Is that better than this?”

  Lady Venture stood and the two women were face-to-face. “Yes, it would,” she screeched, brushing away an insect from her cheek with an irritated swat. “Someone would be getting me some tea right now, and some breakfast, and I wouldn’t be cold and wet and dirty.”

  “How do you know?”

  “What?”

  “How do you know?” Savina asked. She was silent for a moment, glaring at the other woman. A bird called to another and swooped low over the encampment. “Have you ever been a prisoner on a ship before? Do the Americans dispense tea and comfort like elderly aunts, or would they more likely forget about us, or abuse us, or even if they wanted to treat us well, simply need to keep us in chains because of your idiotic suggestion that we murder them all in their sleep!”

  “Do not ever speak to me in that manner,” Lady Venture started, her whole body quivering with indignation.

  But Miss Roxeter whirled away and stomped three paces, then turned and said, “Don’t worry, I’ll have nothing further to say to you until you speak to me in a sane and calm manner. And if you could get off your nether limbs and help, if you want tea so badly, that would go a very long way to ameliorating our miserable condition.”

  Tony suppressed a grin, then decided not to conceal it at all. He smirked openly, enchanted by the vision of Miss Savina Roxeter, hitherto the very model of ladylike behavior, screeching like a banshee.

  Lady Venture turned to her brother but Lord Gaston-Reade, now hunched over his notebook, held up one hand. “Do not speak to me, Vennie. I am counting and must not be disturbed.”

  Annie timidly stepped forward, twisting her filthy hands around each other over and over. “Miss Roxeter, I could make something to eat, if you like. I’m rather a good cook.”

  “Don’t offer help!” Lady Venture shrieked, plunking back down on her seat, one of the water barrels. “You are my maid, and I need you.”

  “But—”

  “No. Not another word.”

  The atmosphere around the camp descended to a frosty silence, and Tony sighed. He had intended to try to let his employer set the pace for the day; survival demanded that they make camp further away from the shore, clearly, construct some kind of shelter, build a firepit, start a fire, and decide who had what skills and should take what tasks. Lord Gaston-Reade had always been capital at delegating duties on his plantation, but today he seemed mired in the need to ascertain exactly, to the last drop, how much water Captain Verdun had left them, how much food, how much tea, and if there was any wine. Perhaps that was his way of coping with the horrendous situation in which they found themselves, but it was an exercise in uselessness when there were far more important tasks to see to.

  When William Barker came up from his walk on the beach, he looked around and said, “Everyone looks ghastly. Beastly night, eh?” For his efforts he got a timid smile from Annie, frosty silence from his fiancée, a shrug from Miss Roxeter and a grimace from Lord Gaston-Reade, who pointedly began a loud count again, making it plain he was not to be interrupted.

  It was enough. Tony squared his shoulders. “Mr. Barker, would you go with me to scout a new spot to camp? Last night was an indication that we need better shelter if we are to be even moderately comfortable for however long we are here.” Barker nodded, eager to do something, it seemed. Tony turned to Miss Roxeter, who was burrowing in a wood crate and hauling out a cast-iron pot and the flint and tinderbox the captain had given them. It was clearly her intention to help, and he was relieved that he didn’t have to ask her to. “I propose, Miss Roxeter, a t
emporary firepit to put together some tea and food to give us strength for the day’s efforts.”

  “I quite agree, Mr. Heywood,” she said, straightening, with one hand to her back.

  She was as grimy as the rest of them, but he couldn’t help but think she looked adorable, with a smudge of dirt on her cheek.

  “I was contemplating something like that,” she continued. “We are all exhausted, but there is much that needs to be done before tonight. Those of us who intend to work will need some strength.” Her maid came back, laden with more wood and tinder. “Zazu and I can manage, I think. Though I don’t know if I can build a fire—”

  “I can do that,” Zazu said as she tossed the wood to the ground and brushed her hands together. “I was not always a lady’s maid.”

  Tony gazed at the two young women, both pretty, one dark and the other fair, and nodded. If he was Mr. Robinson Crusoe, he would name them Intrepid and Fearless. His respect for them both that moment was boundless. “Mr. Barker and I will scout a new camp, then.”

  “I would suggest, Mr. Heywood,” Zazu said, “that you go to the left beyond the camp. There is a spot a little ways inland that would seem to be adequate.”

  He paused and gazed at her. “In what way?”

  Her expression serious and thoughtful, she replied, “It is on high ground, but clear, and surrounded by sturdy palms suitable for framing some kind of shelter. The freshwater lakes you found last night are just a ways beyond it.”

  Tony smiled at her and nodded again. The young woman was going to be a valuable ally, as was her indomitable mistress. Miss Roxeter was gazing at her maid in astonishment, and as Tony led Barker away, he could hear Miss Roxeter say to her maid, “How do you know so much?”

  It was no mystery to him, though, when one considered the maid’s background. The Maroon settlements in the Blue Mountains were primitive by English standards, but the people had settled into the way of life and learned how to take advantage of the land. Instead of fighting nature, they embraced it, and the result was a coexistence with their surroundings that though harsh was brave. The Maroon people were legendary for their ferocity and much feared by the English, who never ventured into the Maroon settlements. They had fought fiercely, and even against the superior power of the British army had refused to surrender. Proving indomitable, they had won their freedom by treaty. He didn’t know much himself beyond that common knowledge, for they guarded their history zealously, but he had looked upon them with respect rather than fear. Zazu, raised in that atmosphere of independence, couldn’t help but revert given their present circumstances. Much of what came to her was a part of her innate knowledge from a childhood spent with nature.