by Eric Flint
To be fair, those disparate rulers shared another almost universal presupposition. They accepted the burdens of leadership as a solemn duty that was either explicit or implicit in their culture’s holy writ: that their rule was clearly the intent of deity. Because, of course, only the mind of a man would be able to hold converse with the mind of God, would know His will—despite the fact that sermons in all faiths routinely asserted that God’s mind was unknowable. Had the consequences upon her sex been less grim, it would have been quite funny how that implicit contradiction never occurred to, or at least never perturbed, them. Probably because they never saw it. Probably because they were its beneficiaries.
And at that moment, as she realized her two walking companions had begun to frown at her distraction, Anne Cathrine understood—yet again, but as if anew—one of the reasons she had fallen ardently, absolutely, passionately in love with Eddie: he was a man who didn’t require external validations of what he intrinsically knew himself to be. His status as a man was not dependent upon competing with other men, nor blindly protecting the privileges and presumed superiority accorded to his sex by the religious, political, and social shibboleths of this time. Eddie was simply—
“Lady Ann Ca—?”
“I apologize, Admiral,” she interrupted. “I find that, with the reading I have been doing, I see so many things in a new light. I often get lost in those thoughts.” They turned the corner into Oranjestad’s northernmost square. “I can never tell when even a subtle act or remark puts me in mind of—” She stopped, the word slavery frozen behind her lips as she stared at the scene in the square, first confused, then disbelieving.
Tromp and van Walbeeck had stopped in mid-stride as well, the admiral’s frown hardening into a deep scowl. The governor sighed, glanced at Anne Cathrine. “Would this be one of those ‘subtle acts’ you were remarking upon, my lady?”
It took that long for her to sort out the elements in the bizarre tableau that dominated the northern end of the square. And still the meaning—or rather, the purpose—was not entirely clear.
Approximately thirty slaves, almost all African, were lying facedown in the northward road, their numbers extending into the wide intersection it formed with smaller streets. They were arrayed in rows and columns, like some perverse game board made up of dark-skinned humanity. All ages and sexes were represented.
Walking in the narrow longitudinal and latitudinal lanes of the arrangement were four slaveholders and their senior foremen, all carrying whips. Machetes and pistols were stuck through their belts. If any of the slaves moved, even if it was merely to scratch themselves or brush away a fly, one or more of the vigilant men would hasten in that direction, shouting and raising their whips.
Anne Cathrine looked at Tromp, wondering what he would do, would say . . . but started at the look on his face.
Fury such as she had never seen before. Oh, her father was capable of rageful storms, but they were more in the nature of tantrums. But this? Admiral Tromp—kind, wry, gentlemanly Maarten Tromp—did indeed look like a male incarnation of a Fury from Greek myth, poised like fate itself: not simply determined, but devoid of any other human feeling or purpose. Now, there was only an avatar of dispassionate and unstoppable annihilation looking out of his once-mild eyes.
Several of the men paused. One, Hans Musen of the Politieke Raad, gestured toward the admiral and van Walbeeck. “Ah, perhaps these good men can help us,” he cried with histrionic flourishes. “Their voices—the authority of the governor’s office and the Fleet, combined—must surely be able to compel obedience where we have failed.”
The most restless slaveholder—Councilor Jan Haet, if Anne Cathrine remembered correctly—guffawed, throwing his head back and his belly out as if he was a giant rather than five and a half feet tall. “Well, thank God! The authorities are here!”
Cuthbert Pudsey, who had remained a discreet distance behind Anne Cathrine and her two walking companions, came up close behind her.
Tromp’s face had become somewhat human again. His voice was loud, but calm. “Move these people. At once.”
“We’ve tried, Admiral,” Musen explained. “We’ve pleaded and begged and cajoled, but they refuse to move.” The men snickered. “But maybe, just maybe, if a powerful man like you were to ask them . . . ”
The small crowd that had been watching the spectacle was growing. The men’s raucous laughter seemed to bring townspeople from all directions.
“End this foolishness,” Tromp said sharply. “Tell your charges to move.”
Musen did so. When none of the slaves complied, he shook his head sadly. “And so we see the disorder that occurs when lesser beings refuse their Heaven-ordained role: to submit themselves to the authority and orders of better men. Even though those men are—by law—their owners. What are we to do?”
Van Walbeeck’s face was carefully devoid of emotion, feigned or otherwise. “You will not provoke us. You have made your point. Leave. Take your people with you. These matters are to be settled in the council’s chamber, not the street.”
Musen affected sudden understanding. “Ah, you must be referring to the chamber where you hold your weekly puppet shows?” His smile became savage. “Because that’s what it is, no? A parody of participatory government? You summon us, we attend, then you tell us what must be, and we are expected to continue capering and nodding like agreeable puppets.”
“Makes you wonder who are the slaves, after all,” one of the foremen sneered.
The sharpness of Tromp’s voice reminded Anne Cathrine of the report of Eddie’s up-time pistol. “Move them, Musen! Now!”
Musen looked at Haet, who looked back. They shrugged, and then started walking along the rows and columns of slaves, some quaking with fear. “Move! Move, you dogs!” They brandished their whips, ordered the other men to do the same. The slaves quivered but remained rooted to the ground.
Musen turned back to Tromp. “You see? They will not move.” He turned to Haet. “What shall we do?”
“I suppose we will have to whip them, won’t we, Hans?”
“Why I suppose we will, Jan.” Musen swung his wrist so that the tightly coiled whip widened into loose loops. “But what if they still won’t move?”
“Then I suppose we’ll have to keep whipping them,” Haet answered, flicking his wrist. His whip lashed out, snapping testily.
Tromp held up a hand. “Halt this nonsense. Let us talk, instead.” Without missing a beat or turning his head, he muttered sideways at Anne Cathrine: “Lady Anne, please return to the fort at once. Send two squads to us, on my direct orders.”
Musen was rubbing his chin. “I don’t know if we really have time to talk, Admiral. If we wait much longer, the cane growers in town on business will be unable to return to their plantations, just as the paid farmhands coming the other way will be blocked from their homes.”
“Ja,” Haet grinned mirthlessly, “the time for talking is past. It’s far too late for that.” His smile made the double meaning of his comment venomously clear. He snapped his right arm and wrist; his whip cracked less than half a foot above the back of a boy no more than eight years old.
Now Tromp did glance at Anne Cathrine. “Why are you still here?”
“Because—because I am not leaving,” she discovered as the words came out of her mouth.
“Lady Anne Cathrine, I do not have time to argue—”
“You’re right,” she interrupted. “You do not have time to argue. You must fetch your troops, who will follow you immediately and without any debate. So hurry back here to stop this. Before it grows worse.”
“I cannot leave you in the middle of—”
“With respect, sir,” Cuthbert Pudsey muttered, “the first one of that lot what tries to touch the lady will be meeting his Maker—or more’n like Old Scratch—before he can draw another breath.”
“I shall stay also, Maarten,” van Walbeeck said. “These are creatures of my government.”
“Which makes them
more likely to harm you than me!”
Haet grinned as more whips cracked just above the backs of the slaves.
Now it was van Walbeeck whose face wore an expression Anne Cathrine had never seen there before: a complete lack of animation. Pure composure and calculation. “Admiral, if they harm you, not only is our defense compromised, but their violation will be a hanging offense. So you must go, and quickly, if you mean to keep this from becoming a massacre.”
“We will have words on this matter,” Tromp said, glaring at the two of them. Then he turned about, jaw rigid, the crowd parting and closing behind him as he stalked rapidly south toward the fort.
Haet laughed at the admiral’s vanished back, glanced at van Walbeeck. “Heh. I thought you’d be the one who’d be too delicate to stand the sight of blood.”
“I have seen more blood than you can imagine, Jan Haet. That is why I’m staying: to convince you not to do this. Do not take this fateful step.”
“What step? You mean, whipping my slaves? Did you start early on the rum today, Governor? Because what I know of the law is that you do not have the right to tell me what I may or may not do with my own property!”
“In fact,” said Musen, putting a hand on his excitable friend’s shoulder, “it seems like we’re going to have to whip them, in order to obey the law. We’ve been ordered to get them to move. If they will, that is.”
Without warning, and with startling speed, Hans Musen spun and brought his whip down across the back of the eight-year-old boy. A deep red seam opened up, from his shoulder to his buttocks. He screamed. “Are you asking for another, with that noise?”
The boy shook his head, whimpering.
“Well, get up!”
The boy was suddenly still, but Anne Cathrine could hear, even at a distance of almost twenty feet, that his teeth were grinding.
“Well,” Musen sighed with a philosophical shrug and monstrous smile at van Walbeeck, “that didn’t work. Want to try using your gubernatorial authority?”
“Child, rise,” van Walbeeck shouted. “Get up immediately. Do not fear these men. Get up and run behind me.”
But the boy didn’t move, except to bury his face in the dirt, as if it was not merely his body that was in danger of being torn apart, but his mind.
“No?” said Musen. “Well, I guess we’ll have to keep trying it my way. The way a master actually keeps control over slaves.” He reared up, the whip swinging high behind him.
“You are an animal! An animal!” a woman’s voice screamed. A haggard figure in a worn shift broke free of the crowd and ran toward Musen. Who turned, hand on his machete so quickly that the crowd shrank back and the woman stopped.
It was Edel Mund.
Chapter 41
Oranjestad, St. Eustatia
When Musen discovered who it was upbraiding him, he threw back his head and laughed. “‘Animal’? I think you have me confused with my property, Lady Mund. Now, since your delicate feelings are offended by my attempts at getting these dull beasts moving, you should go back home.” His smile became a threat. “It’s safer there.”
Mund circled Musen. Haet tracked her with his eyes. “I am not going anywhere!” she shouted, without the earlier edge of hysteria. “I am going to keep shouting until the whole of Oranjestad is here to witness that you are an animal. No: I correct myself. No animal is so driven by spite and malice to conceive of a charade such as this. This is the work of a monster.”
Musen laughed—and then leaped at her. The crowd gasped and Mund scuttled back, almost into Anne Cathrine . . . but it had only been a feint. Musen laughed again, turned his back on her. “Like I said, go home to your hovel. I’m sure the ridiculous leaded windows in its ugly walls will trick you into believing that you really are in your manor house again, curled up around that grim manikin you used to call a husband. Heh: not much different, now that he’s dead, eh?”
Anne Cathrine almost leaped past Edel Mund’s suddenly sagging shoulders. “How can you be so brutish?” she yelled. “Those windows are her one indulgence!”
The slaveholders and their foremen laughed; Mund’s home was a shack made incongruous by having the only glass windows in Oranjestad. “Yes,” Haet taunted, “those windows are certainly an indulgence—of her pride, of her desire to remind us of her ‘fabulous wealth’!”
“No!” Anne Cathrine shot back angrily. Edel Mund turned curious eyes upon her. “We invited her to come live in Danish House. She refused; she does not want to burden anyone else with her grief.”
“Ja, that and Danish House doesn’t have glass windows!” one of the foremen cackled.
Anne Cathrine suppressed a string of insults that would certainly have shocked her father and might have sparked an attack. “Lady Mund is a private person, but shutters make a house dark. So why should she not have glass if that gives her sunlight, even though her grief keeps her inside?” Edel Mund’s face was not merely surprised, but wondering as Anne Cathrine revealed the unspoken truth behind the widow’s daily life.
“Yes, yes, such poetic excuses,” Haet drawled. “If she is so unhappy, she should get back across the ocean. Or drown herself in it, for all I care. But she has no business remaining here, no business interfering in our community.” He turned toward Edel. “I give you one last warning: go home, you withered crone.”
“How dare you!” shouted Anne Cathrine. “You are speaking to a noblewoman of Denmark—and my friend!”
The entire group of slaveholders and their men became motionless for a minute, staring at Anne Cathrine. Pudsey came up close behind her.
Musen nodded at her slowly. “And you mind your own business, too, ‘king’s daughter.’ You’re no princess, so don’t start thinking you can order us about as if you are.”
Haet took a step toward her. “You should leave with your friend. You’re not welcome here, either.” A surge of disagreeing murmurs among the crowd was the unanticipated response to Haet’s assertion.
“Shut up!” he screamed, rounding on them. “You’re no different from townsfolk back home: always ready to lick the first aristocratic boot that comes in range of your tongue.”
Van Walbeeck folded his hands. “I wonder how much longer you will be able to remain a councilor, Jan Haet, insulting your own neighbors in a public—”
“I wonder how much longer you’ll be aboveground, van Walbeeck,” Haet spat back, moving in the direction of the governor.
Anne Cathrine stepped forward to interpose herself, but three hands stopped her: van Walbeeck’s, Pudsey’s, and Edel Mund’s. The older woman’s eyes smiled even though her mouth did not. Then she moved her hand to Anne Cathrine’s shoulder, squeezed it once, turned and began walking back toward the landowners and their thirty terrified slaves.
But instead of approaching Haet or Musen, she crouched down beside an African woman, not quite as old as she. “Will you move, if I ask you to do so?”
The woman shook her head, trembling.
“Lady Mund . . . ” van Walbeeck called anxiously.
But Mund wasn’t listening. She smiled at the slave. “Because your master told you not to move, yes?”
Before Haet could react, the woman had nodded.
“Bitch!” Haet screamed, charging forward.
“Are you speaking to me?” Mund asked coolly as she straightened.
Haet came to an abrupt halt, managed to smile. “Lady Mund, how could you even think such a thing?”
“I only require you to answer ‘yes’ or ‘no.’”
Musen yawned. “Or you will do what?”
“Oh, I will not need to do anything more. I have already revealed, in the presence of these good people and their governor, that Jan Haet is a liar. Either for denying that he plainly called me a bitch, or for shamelessly maintaining the deceit of this grotesque spectacle: that these slaves remain where they are because you have told them they must, on pain of death. By your hands.”
Anne Cathrine heard van Walbeeck’s breath suck in through his te
eth.
Haet started forward. Reluctantly, so did van Walbeeck.
Mund was simply smiling at Haet, who stopped five feet away from her. Whether that was because of her utter lack of concern at his approach, or van Walbeeck’s advance, was unclear. Mund’s smile was now serene. “And you still have not answered; am I the ‘bitch’ you were addressing?”
Haet’s voice was more like a snarl. “And what if you are? What can you do to me, old woman?”
“Firstly, I suspect I am not much older than you. But as to what I might do to you, well, if you fear I will notify my king, whose subsequent complaint to the Stadtholder would make special mention of your name—No, mijn Heer Haet, I will not do that. I am not a coward like you. I fight my own battles. Indeed, I have fought yours, as well.”
“What raving is this?”
Mund shrugged. “It is not raving; it is common knowledge. Ask those gathered here. Those who saw me in the shallow trenches alongside them. Many of them wanted to know why almost none of the slave owners came to defend the town when the Kalinago attacked last year. Most presumed you were simply cowards. Others speculated that you were traitors. I have wondered since that day: which is it?”
Van Walbeeck emitted a sigh that was almost a groan, and Anne Cathrine suddenly understood his efforts at calling Mund back. He was not just worried for her safety, but that her words were leading toward this point of unresolved contention. Ultimately, the calls for an investigation of the slaveholders’ inaction had foundered on two points: the community’s unspoken need to remain undivided, and the lack of any testimony supporting the assertion that their failure to defend Oranjestad had been intentional. The landowners’ improbable excuses ranged from having believed their own homes were in imminent danger to complete ignorance of the attack until it was over. And of course, no slaves would assert anything to the contrary, particularly since their testimony was neither admissible nor likely to be deemed impartial.
