by Bill Napier
'How could they possibly have known about Jamaica?' I asked.
We were spread around a circular jacuzzi, its water warm and bubbling. We had tall glasses with pink rum punches on a ledge. At this altitude the air was cool. Kingston was mapped out by a million twinkling lights far below us, and the dark Caribbean lay beyond. The moon broke through cloud and I could just make out the silhouette of mountains around us, with fingers of cloud glowing gently between them. Underwater lights lit up the jacuzzi, the inverted illumination making faces look mysterious, even unnatural. An elderly couple, Americans, were enjoying the pool some yards away.
'I wasn't followed, if that's what you mean.' Debbie was wearing the skimpiest of blue bikinis. 'Picardy House can't be seen from the road and nobody would know who was coming or going.'
'Harry and me likewise,' Zola told her. 'We took precautions.'
I nodded my agreement. Dalton said, 'And they don't even know I exist. At least, I hope they don't.'
'Did you tell anyone you were heading for Jamaica, Debbie?'
She looked at me sharply. 'Of course not. Do you think I'm an idiot?' Then she added, 'Only Uncle Robert. We had a flaming row about it. He thinks you're a trickster after my money in some way.'
So that was it. Uncle Robert.
Debbie looked suddenly aghast.
Zola asked, 'What can you tell us about your Uncle Robert?'
Debbie waved a dismissive hand. 'I know what you're thinking and it's just silly. Why would Uncle Robert give anything away? How could he even know these people?'
Zola exerted a gentle pressure. 'Tell us anyway. About your uncle. How did he get on with your father, for instance?'
Debbie made a face. She was beginning to sound a bit distressed. 'They had rows every time Uncle Robert came to the house. I wasn't supposed to hear them, but I did and I know what they were about.'
'Top up your drinks, people?' The pool attendant had appeared out of the dark. He was carrying something like a long fishing net. We shook our heads and the man disappeared into the blackness like a ship in the night.
Debbie continued, 'It was about money. Uncle Robert owned horses. He kept racing them, and he kept betting on horses, and he kept losing money and he kept getting into trouble. I think Daddy bailed him out for years. With my money,' she said, 'or at least money that would have come to me.'
Zola said, 'That makes your uncle an idiot, nothing more.'
I didn't know how to raise the next bit. The question of inheritance.
'You have inherited Picardy House, I suppose?' Dalton asked the question casually.
'I expect so. So what?'
I was beginning to feel like a lobster. 'Debbie, if you fell under a bus, who would inherit?'
'This is so stupid.'
I waited. Then Debbie was saying, 'Uncle Robert, of course. Daddy had no other brothers or sisters.' She started to cry.
Dalton said, 'We're all exhausted, jet-lagged and everything else. I'm for sleep. What about you, Debbie?'
Debbie nodded tearfully. When they had gone, Zola said angrily, 'Did it occur to you that Uncle Robert may be the only family Debbie has? And you're suggesting he's trying to grab the icon. Maybe even wants her bumped off?'
'Why else is he so hostile? Am I the only person with sense hereabouts?'
'Sense? She's a child who's just lost her father, and you, Harry Blake, are the most insensitive idiot I've ever come across.'
CHAPTER 24
George the Third by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, King and Lord Defender of the Faith. To my trusty and well-beloved Patrick Smith and William Farrell, esquires, know ye that we have constituted, authorised and appointed and by these presents do constitute, authorise and appoint each or either of ye to administer an oath unto Thomas Higgins and William Middleton, gentlemen, that they shall well and truly, according to the best of their judgments and consciences, inventory and appraise all and sundry of the goods, chattels, rights and credits of Edward StClair, late of the parish of Trelawney, landowner, general practitioner and physical surgeon, deceased . . .
(signed) on behalf of his Grace William Duke of Gloucester, captain general and governor of our said island, and lieutenant of Iago de la Vega. This 11th day of November anno domini 1815 and the 56th year of our reign.
George Clayton, secretary.
'Hey!' Debbie hissed excitedly in my ear. 'StClair!'
We were in the air conditioned coolness of the National Archives, sitting at a heavy circular teak table. Next to us was a trolley filled with bound volumes, each about three inches thick and eighteen inches tall. The volume opened in front of us had a distinct spicy smell. The paper was brown with age and the ink was faded; here and there it was almost illegible.
I said, without really believing it, 'Could be a coincidence, Debbie. Let's look at the inventory.' We read on:
Inventory and appraisal totalling £13,110, the bulk being the sum of various slaves as follows:
59 female slaves named and valued as follows:
Nancy £100, Phoebe £150, Nefertiti £75, Agnes £75,...
97 male slaves named and valued as follows:
Tom £100, Old Howe £30, Billy £100...
Total value of slaves £11.600.
One bull at £30
12 cows at £15 each = £180
5 cows at £12 each = £60
Five bull calves and three cow calves at £5 each = £40
Total value of cattle £250.
44 hogsheads of sugar, as shipped by William Baker on the Kingston consignment to Robert Message and sold by him as appears by the account of January for the sum of £2303.11s.2d.
Several pages were devoted to 'sundry items':
Portion of rum £20.
Medical instruments £30.
A gold watch with gold chain £10.
Sundry books £10 each = £160.
Ship's compass £30.
Navigation device £2.
Two journals £1 each = £2.
Two mahogany tables = £13 4s.
24 chairs, 4 mirrors, 4 wardrobes, 4 beds, assorted bedding and clothing, two portraits, three Bibles, assorted kitchen utensils and pots = £50.
And so on.
For some reason there were a few more slaves in the list of 'sundries', but that wasn't what was suddenly holding my attention.
'Do you see it?' Zola asked. There was a feverish gleam in her eye. She pointed to an entry. 'Two journals.'
'And a navigation device, Zola. What possible use could a GP cum plantation owner have for a navigation device?'
Debbie was bubbling over. She was having difficulty keeping her voice quiet. 'These are my ancestors! We're on the trail, we're on the trail! How far back can we go?'
I flicked the pages back. 'We need a lot more than this for your genealogy, Debbie. And let's keep our eye on the ball here. What we want to know about is the other journal. The one that could lead us to' — I lowered my voice — 'you know what.'
'I'm hiring you, remember?'
'There are nasty people on our trail, remember? We can't hang about here longer than necessary.'
'How could they possibly find us here?'
'The lawyer?'
'But how could they know about the lawyer?'
'Your Uncle Robert?'
'You know, Harry, I hate you so much.'
'I know.'
Zola broke into the tense silence. 'There are slave registration returns.'
'The Sinclairs weren't slaves,' Debbie said. 'They were slave owners.'
'But the returns will show the owners,' Zola pointed out. 'Let's ask the archivist.'
The archivist was about thirty, with a round face, heavy spectacles and shiny black hair to match her skin. 'Are you with the other people?' she asked.
'The other people?' I suddenly had a sinking feeling in my stomach.
'The people who were here yesterday. They been asking the same question.'
! 'That's a rival academic g
roup,' I said. 'Yes, we are in competition. I'm sorry if we're making you duplicate your work.'
'That's okay,' she said. 'What can I get you?'
Over the next hour we gave the archivist a hard time. The table began to pile up with slave registration returns, electoral office records, tax rules, jury lists, baptismal registers and more plantation inventories. We skipped lunch. We forgot that Dalton was outside the register office, keeping an eye out for Cassandra and friends. We forgot about the clock until, in the late afternoon, the archivist politely cleared her throat. 'We close at four thirty,' she said.
Damn.
At four fifteen, we made our second crucial discovery. It was on a platt record, a map showing the boundaries of a plantation. The ink was almost gone and we could make very little sense of it. But one name stood out amongst the others.
Plantation map drawn to a scale of 5 chains in an inch... Charles Atkinson Esq & Company.
... Martin Tebbit.
1250 acres no. 247, St Ann's, Jamaica.
There was a map showing some irregularly shaped property bounded to the south by a river and to the north by coastline. The compass points were marked. We could hardly make out the text below:
... to which an Order unto me directed by the Hon. Charles Thomas Lynch, Kent,
... his lieutenant governor and commander in chief of the island of Jamaica...
... and laid out unto Martin Tebbit senior...
... a mountain and land situated in the precincts above and in the form and manner described by the platt and council and .. .
... on the site thereof as performed April 10 1674.
Cyned John Horn.
Tebbit.
The archivist was clearing her throat again. Zola leaned forwards. I got a whiff of perfume. 'We need more time,' she said in an urgent whisper.
'What can we do? It'll have to be tomorrow.'
'Harry,' she hissed. 'Are you forgetting the bad guys? They're a full day ahead of us.'
Debbie pulled her chair back and walked over to the archivist. There was a lot of animated muttering and shaking of heads, and then they approached an older, grey-haired woman. Zola and I watched, mystified, while the archivist left the room and the grey-haired woman lifted a telephone. Debbie gave me a mischievous wink. Then there was more chat, and now heads were nodding, and Debbie was telephoning, then writing something. She joined us again. 'We'll grab a snack and come back at six o'clock. They're opening up for us until midnight. The security desk are prepared to work overtime and the archivist will stay on to keep an eye on us.'
I gaped at her. She gave a triumphant smile: 'I just donated twelve thousand US dollars to their Repair and Binding Section. It's Sir Joseph's money, of course. Fancy a McDonald's?'
Outside, in the quiet street, Dalton was sitting in the car next to a couple of cannon flanking a bower made of white Italian marble and shading a statue of some admiral underneath it. Dalton's face was wet with sweat. We headed downtown, past a cathedral and a grim, walled prison. Men waved at us through a big grill. 'About fifteen men waiting to die in there,' Dalton volunteered, and I wondered how he knew.
We found a McDonald's in a busy shopping mall. Dalton excused himself and made for the toilets. I gave it a couple of minutes and left the queue, heading in the same direction. As I turned a corner he was about thirty yards ahead of me, speaking into a mobile phone in businesslike fashion. He turned, saw me, and dropped the phone into his back pocket with a smile. There was something odd about the action, but I couldn't have said what.
After a quick snack, Dalton joined us in the National Archives: since we were working past its official closing time, Cassandra and friends would not expect us to be there. We were now buying time at two thousand dollars an hour. Gradually, as the archivist wheeled hefty volumes back and forth, a Sinclair family tree emerged. There was no Ogilvie, no clue as to how he had reached Jamaica, nothing to lead us to the True Cross, if it even existed any more. But running like a thread through the plantation records had been a single constant theme: two journals, handed down from generation to generation. Winston Sinclair had given us one of them. I needed the other one like a man in the desert needs water.
'I've been reading up on this,' Debbie said. 'It was the British who introduced the plantation system and they didn't conquer the island until 1655. They won't have anything earlier than that.'
'It's not quite like that, miss.' The archivist was holding about twenty kilos of records in her arms. 'It's true the British invaded in 1655 and they destroyed Iago de la Vega, which we now call Spanish Town. But the Spaniards had time to clear out and they took their valuables with them, and probably a lot of records too. They held out on the north of the island for another five years, round about Ocho Rios.'
'You mean...?'
'Chances are some documents survived and were carted to the north side of the island, and from there to Cuba. It seems a lot of the Spaniards thought it was only a matter of time before Spain reconquered Jamaica. So they buried their valuables and money. There are rumours of tunnels right under your feet. Anyway, an official list of the hiding places was drawn up. In the nineteenth century a historian by the name of Edward Long was told that the official list still existed and was somewhere in Cuba. Nobody knows where.'
'But the Spaniards never came back...'
The archivist smiled. 'Meaning that there's treasure buried all over Jamaica.'
Debbie said, 'Wow!'
'You people aren't looking for buried treasure, by any chance?' The archivist tried to make it sound like a joke.
'Of course not.' Debbie carried off the lie with total conviction.
206
Zola said, 'You mean you have no records going back earlier than the British conquest?'
'That's about it. But so far you people have just been looking at the public and ecclesiastical records. You could try the private ones. We have letters and accounts written in Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch and even Latin. It happens we have some stuff donated from Cuba recently, from Santiago de Cuba, just across the water.'
We hit it an hour before midnight.
While Debbie and Dalton had moved back in time through the centuries, Zola and I had moved forwards, tracing the journals as they were handed on through the generations. My throat was parched in the dry air and the centuries-old dust of the records. Debbie was pencilling in gaps in her family tree. The archivist, bleary-eyed, had wheeled in a tea chest of documents recently donated by the Eldridge rum factory.
The StClairs had built a rum factory on the grounds of their plantation. Winston Sinclair, the last of Debbie's Jamaican line, had drunk the products and gone bankrupt, dying in Trench Town poverty. The new owners of the rum factory had handed over the paperwork to the National Archives. It was the end of the line for the journal, if it still existed.
I bent over the tea chest. Why I don't know, but my eye was caught by a thin heap of quarto-sized papers tied together by a pink ribbon. I thought I recognised the writing. I lifted the bundle out and undid the ribbon. My hands were beginning to shake. I flicked through a few of the faded, browned sheets. I felt as if an electric current was trickling through me.
I said, 'Hello, old friend.' I'd said it quietly, but my voice seemed to penetrate every corner of the building. The others froze.
Pure Caribbean gold.
Ogilvie's second journal.
CHAPTER 25
'We'll never copy this before midnight.'
'I have a camera in the car,' Dalton said.
'No photographs,' said the archivist. 'We're quite strict about that.'
I flicked carefully through the fragile sheets. 'With four of us on it, we could get through this in two or three hours.'
'The deal is we close at midnight, sir. That's in fifty minutes.'
Debbie said, 'Pity. I'd have loved to donate another two thousand dollars to your Repair and Binding Section.'
The archivist said, 'Since you put it that way, I'll speak to the security gir
l.'
'So will I,' said Debbie. 'What's her name?'
'Ruth.'
I split the pile into four. Dalton, Zola and I got busy copying as quickly as possible. Debbie came back a minute later. 'Ruth's mother is looking after the baby, but she was staying the night anyway. Ruth's not allowed to accept a personal gift but the double time suits her nicely. And there was nothing in the rules to stop me donating something to Grandma.'
Around two in the morning, we thanked the weary archivist and Ruth at the security desk, and emerged from the building into a blustery wind. Debbie took the wheel as before: she seemed to enjoy driving. The early hours Kingston traffic was light but anarchic; Debbie drove swiftly through it. I was beginning to get the hang of this exuberant city and I used a map to navigate us up the Old Hope Road to Matilda's Corner before turning right and taking the road skirting the University of the West Indies. By the time we were starting on the mountain pass the wind was gusting strongly and I began to worry about falling trees, not to mention the prospect of being blown over the edge. We reached our 'hideaway' safely at about three o'clock in the morning. Subdued lighting lit up the steep, bush-lined driveway; the pool and the jacuzzi were still illuminated. The insect noises had gone; instead we had the rushing of a powerful wind through the trees.
Our 'chalet' - actually a substantial villa - was one of half a dozen scattered over a few acres of ground cleared from the rain forest, with a deep gorge to its rear and the swimming pool out the front. Debbie spread her notes on the big dining-room table. Dalton disappeared into the kitchen and Zola emerged from her bedroom in the same pyjamas and dressing gown she had worn in her Greenwich flat.
We'd reached that state of exhaustion where we couldn't stop. We sipped at tea while Debbie, lost in concentration, started to sketch out her family tree, the occasional Wow! or Yes! disturbing the peace. After an hour of that, she came through the door and said, 'Come and see.'
