“Holy Michael defend us,” muttered Jamie. He ran a hand hard through his hair, making fiery wisps stand out in the flickering light. The fire was dying fast, with no one left to tend it.
“D’ye ken this place, Sassenach? Where Geillis has gone wi’ Ian?”
“No, all I know is that it’s somewhere up in the far hills on Hispaniola, and that a stream runs through it.”
“Then we must take Stern,” he said with decision. “Come on; the lads are by the river wi’ the boat.”
I turned to follow him, but paused on the edge of the cane field to look back.
“Jamie! Look!” Behind us lay the embers of the egungun’s fire, and the shadowy ring of slave huts. Farther away, the bulk of Rose Hall made a light patch against the hillside. But farther still, beyond the shoulder of the hill, the sky glowed faintly red.
“That will be Howe’s place, burning,” he said. He sounded oddly calm, without emotion. He pointed to the left, toward the flank of the mountain, where a small orange dot glowed, no more at this distance than a pinprick of light. “And that will be Twelvetrees, I expect.”
The drum-voice whispered through the night, up and down the river. What had Ishmael said? The drum callin’ them down from the hills—those strong enough to go.
A small line of slaves was coming down from the huts, women carrying babies and bundles, cooking pots slung over their shoulders, heads turbaned in white. Next to one young woman, who held her arm with careful respect, walked Margaret Campbell, likewise turbaned.
Jamie saw her, and stepped forward.
“Miss Campbell!” he said sharply. “Margaret!”
Margaret and her attendant stopped; the young woman moved as though to step between her charge and Jamie, but he held up both hands as he came, to show he meant no harm, and she reluctantly stepped back.
“Margaret,” he said. “Margaret, do ye not know me?”
She stared vacantly at him. Very slowly, he touched her, holding her face between his hands.
“Margaret,” he said to her, low-voiced, urgent. “Margaret, hear me! D’ye ken me, Margaret?”
She blinked once, then twice, and the smooth round face melted and thawed into life. It was not like the sudden possession of the loas; this was a slow, tentative coming, of something shy and fearful.
“Aye, I ken ye, Jamie,” she said at last. Her voice was rich and pure, a young girl’s voice. Her lips curled up, and her eyes came alive once more, her face still held in the hollow of his hands.
“It’s been lang since I saw ye, Jamie,” she said, looking up into his eyes. “Will ye have word of Ewan, then? Is he well?”
He stood very still for a minute, his face that careful blank mask that hid strong feeling.
“He is well,” he whispered at last. “Verra well, Margaret. He gave me this, to keep until I saw ye.” He bent his head and kissed her gently.
Several of the women had stopped, standing silently by to watch. At this, they moved and began to murmur, glancing uneasily at each other. When he released Margaret Campbell and stepped back, they closed in around her, protective and wary, nodding him back.
Margaret seemed oblivious; her eyes were still on Jamie’s face, the smile on her lips.
“I thank ye, Jamie!” she called, as her attendant took her arm and began to urge her away. “Tell Ewan I’ll be with him soon!” The little band of white-clothed women moved away, disappearing like ghosts into the darkness by the cane field.
Jamie made an impulsive move in their direction, but I stopped him with a hand on his arm.
“Let her go,” I whispered, mindful of what lay on the floor in the salon of the plantation house. “Jamie, let her go. You can’t stop her; she’s better with them.”
He closed his eyes briefly, then nodded.
“Aye, you’re right.” He turned, then stopped suddenly, and I whirled about to see what he had seen. There were lights in Rose Hall now. Torchlight, flickering behind the windows, upstairs and down. As we watched, a surly glow began to swell in the windows of the secret workroom on the second floor.
“It’s past time to go,” Jamie said. He seized my hand and we went quickly, diving into the dark rustle of the canes, fleeing through air suddenly thick with the smell of burning sugar.
62
ABANDAWE
“You can take the Governor’s pinnace; that’s small, but it’s seaworthy.” Grey fumbled through the drawer of his desk. “I’ll write an order for the dockers to hand it over to you.”
“Aye, we’ll need the boat—I canna risk the Artemis; as she’s Jared’s—but I think we’d best steal it, John.” Jamie’s brows were drawn together in a frown. “I wouldna have ye be involved wi’ me in any visible way, aye? You’ll be having trouble enough with things, without that.”
Grey smiled unhappily. “Trouble? Yes, you might call it trouble, with four plantation houses burnt, and over two hundred slaves gone—God knows where! But I vastly doubt that anyone will take notice of my social acquaintance, under the circumstances. Between fear of the Maroons and fear of the Chinaman, the whole island is in such a panic that a mere smuggler is the most negligible of trivialities.”
“It’s a great relief to me to be thought trivial,” Jamie said, very dryly. “Still, we’ll steal the boat. And if we’re taken, ye’ve never heard my name or seen my face, aye?”
Grey stared at him, a welter of emotions fighting for mastery of his features, amusement, fear, and anger among them.
“Is that right?” he said at last. “Let you be taken, watch them hang you, and keep quiet about it—for fear of smirching my reputation? For God’s sake, Jamie, what do you take me for?”
Jamie’s mouth twitched slightly.
“For a friend, John,” he said. “And if I’ll take your friendship—and your damned boat!—then you’ll take mine, and keep quiet. Aye?”
The Governor glared at him for a moment, lips pressed tight, but then his shoulders sagged in defeat.
“I will,” he said shortly. “But I should regard it as a great personal favor if you would endeavor not to be captured.”
Jamie rubbed a knuckle across his mouth, hiding a smile.
“I’ll try verra hard, John.”
The Governor sat down, wearily. There were deep circles under his eyes, and his impeccable linen was wilted; obviously he had not changed his clothes from the day before.
“All right. I don’t know where you’re going, and it’s likely better I don’t. But if you can, keep out of the sealanes north of Antigua. I sent a boat this morning, to ask for as many men as the barracks there can supply, marines and sailors both. They’ll be heading this way by the day after tomorrow at the latest, to guard the town and harbor against the escaped Maroons in case of an outright rebellion.”
I caught Jamie’s eye, and raised one brow in question, but he shook his head, almost imperceptibly. We had told the Governor of the uprising on the Yallahs River, and the escape of the slaves—something he had heard about from other sources, anyway. We had not told him what we had seen later that night, lying to under cover of a tiny cove, sails taken down to hide their whiteness.
The river was dark as onyx, but with a fugitive gleam from the broad expanse of water. We had heard them coming, and had time to hide before the ship came down upon us; the beating of drums and a savage exultation of many voices echoing through the river valley as the Bruja sailed past us, carried by the downward current. The bodies of the pirates no doubt lay somewhere upriver, left to rot peacefully among the frangipani and cedar.
The escaped slaves of the Yallahs River had not gone into the mountains of Jamaica, but out to sea, presumably to join Bouassa’s followers on Hispaniola. The townsfolk of Kingston had nothing to fear from the escaped slaves—but it was a good deal better that the Royal Navy should concentrate their attention here than on Hispaniola, where we were bound.
Jamie rose to take our leave, but Grey stopped him.
“Wait. Will you not require a safe place fo
r your—for Mrs. Fraser?” He didn’t look at me, but at Jamie, eyes steady. “I should be honored if you would entrust her to my protection. She could stay here, in the Residence, until you return. No one would trouble her—or even need to know she was here.”
Jamie hesitated, but there was no gentle way to phrase it.
“She must go with me, John,” he said. “There is no choice about it; she must.”
Grey’s glance flickered to me, then away, but not before I had seen the look of jealousy in his eyes. I felt sorry for him, but there was nothing I could say; no way to tell him the truth.
“Yes,” he said, and swallowed noticeably. “I see. Quite.”
Jamie held out a hand to him. He hesitated for a moment, but then took it.
“Good luck, Jamie,” he said, voice a little husky. “God go with you.”
* * *
Fergus had been somewhat more difficult to deal with. He had insisted absolutely on accompanying us, offering argument after argument, and arguing the more vehemently when he found that the Scottish smugglers would sail with us.
“You take them, but you will go without me?” Fergus’s face was alive with indignation.
“I will,” Jamie said firmly. “The smugglers are widowers or bachelors, all, but you’re a marrit man.” He glanced pointedly at Marsali, who stood watching the discussion, her face drawn with anxiety. “I thought she was oweryoung to be wed, and I was wrong; but I know she’s oweryoung to be widowed. You’ll stay.” And he turned aside, the matter settled.
* * *
It was full dark when we set sail in Grey’s pinnace, a thirty-foot, single-decked sloop, leaving two docksmen bound and gagged in the boathouse behind us. It was a small, single-masted ship, bigger than the fishing boat in which we had traveled up the Yallahs River, but barely large enough to qualify for the designation “ship.”
Nonetheless, she seemed seaworthy enough, and we were soon out of Kingston Harbor, heeling over in a brisk evening breeze, on our way toward Hispaniola.
The smugglers handled the sailing among them, leaving Jamie, Lawrence and I to sit on one of the long benches along the rail. We chatted desultorily of this and that, but after a time, fell silent, absorbed in our own thoughts.
Jamie yawned repeatedly, and finally, at my urging, consented to lie down upon the bench, his head resting in my lap. I was myself strung too tightly to want to sleep.
Lawrence too was wakeful, staring upward into the sky, hands folded behind his head.
“There is moisture in the air tonight,” he said, nodding upward toward the silver sliver of the crescent moon. “See the haze about the moon? It may rain before dawn; unusual for this time of year.”
Talk about the weather seemed sufficiently boring to soothe my jangled nerves. I stroked Jamie’s hair, thick and soft under my hand.
“Is that so?” I said. “You and Jamie both seem able to read the weather from the sky. All I know is the old bit about ‘Red sky at night, sailor’s delight; red sky at morning, sailor take warning.’ I didn’t notice what color the sky was tonight, did you?”
Lawrence laughed comfortably. “Rather a light purple,” he said. “I cannot say whether it will be red in the morning, but it is surprising how frequently such signs are reliable. But of course there is a scientific principle involved—the refraction of light from the moisture in the air, just as I observed presently of the moon.”
I lifted my chin, enjoying the breeze that lifted the heavy hair that fell on my neck.
“But what about odd phenomena? Supernatural things?” I asked him. “What about things where the rules of science seem not to apply?” I am a scientist, I heard him say in memory, his slight accent seeming only to reinforce his matter-of-factness. I don’t believe in ghosts.
“Such as what, these phenomena?”
“Well—” I groped for a moment, then fell back on Geilie’s own examples. “People who have bleeding stigmata, for example? Astral travel? Visions, supernatural manifestations … odd things, that can’t be explained rationally.”
Lawrence grunted, and settled his bulk more comfortably on the bench beside me.
“Well, I say it is the place of science only to observe,” he said. “To seek cause where it may be found, but to realize that there are many things in the world for which no cause shall be found; not because it does not exist, but because we know too little to find it. It is not the place of science to insist on explanation—but only to observe, in hopes that the explanation will manifest itself.”
“That may be science, but it isn’t human nature,” I objected. “People go on wanting explanations.”
“They do.” He was becoming interested in the discussion; he leaned back, folding his hands across his slight paunch, in a lecturer’s attitude. “It is for this reason that a scientist constructs hypotheses—suggestions for the cause of an observation. But a hypothesis must never be confused with an explanation—with proof.
“I have seen a great many things which might be described as peculiar. Fish-falls, for instance, where a great many fish—all of the same species, mind you, all the same size—fall suddenly from a clear sky, over dry land. There would appear to be no rational cause for this—and yet, is it therefore suitable to attribute the phenomenon to supernatural interference? On the face of it, does it seem more likely that some celestial intelligence should amuse itself by flinging shoals of fish at us from the sky, or that there is some meteorological phenomenon—a waterspout, a tornado, something of the kind?—that while not visible to us, is still in operation? And yet”—his voice became more pensive—“why—and how!—might a natural phenomenon such as a waterspout remove the heads—and only the heads—of all the fish?”
“Have you seen such a thing yourself?” I asked, interested, and he laughed.
“There speaks a scientific mind!” he said, chuckling. “The first thing a scientist asks—how do you know? Who has seen it? Can I see it myself? Yes, I have seen such a thing—three times, in fact, though in one case the precipitation was of frogs, rather than fish.
“Were you near a seashore or a lake?”
“Once near a shore, once near a lake—that was the frogs—but the third time, it took place far inland; some twenty miles from the nearest body of water. And yet the fish were of a kind I have seen only in the deep ocean. In none of the cases did I see any sort of disturbance of the upper air—no clouds, no great wind, none of the fabled spouts of water that rise from the sea into the sky, assuredly. And yet the fish fell; so much is a fact, for I have seen them.”
“And it isn’t a fact if you haven’t seen it?” I asked dryly.
He laughed in delight, and Jamie stirred, murmuring against my thigh. I smoothed his hair, and he relaxed into sleep again.
“It may be so; it may not. But a scientist could not say, could he? What is it the Christian Bible says—‘Blest are they who have not seen, but have believed’?”
“That’s what it says, yes.”
“Some things must be accepted as fact without provable cause.” He laughed again, this time without much humor. “As a scientist who is also a Jew, I have perhaps a different perspective on such phenomena as stigmata—and the idea of resurrection of the dead, which a very great proportion of the civilized world accepts as fact beyond question. And yet, this skeptical view is not one I could even breathe, to anyone save yourself, without grave danger of personal harm.”
“Doubting Thomas was a Jew, after all,” I said, smiling. “To begin with.”
“Yes; and only when he ceased to doubt, did he become a Christian—and a martyr. One could argue that it was surety that killed him, no?” His voice was heavy with irony. “There is a great difference between those phenomena which are accepted on faith, and those which are proved by objective determination, though the cause of both may be equally ‘rational’ once known. And the chief difference is this: that people will treat with disdain such phenomena as are proved by the evidence of the senses, and commonly experienced�
�while they will defend to the death the reality of a phenomenon which they have neither seen nor experienced.
“Faith is as powerful a force as science,” he concluded, voice soft in the darkness, “—but far more dangerous.”
We sat quietly for a time, looking over the bow of the tiny ship, toward the thin slice of darkness that divided the night, darker than the purple glow of the sky, or the silver-gray sea. The black island of Hispaniola, drawing inexorably closer.
“Where did you see the headless fish?” I asked suddenly, and was not surprised to see the faint inclination of his head toward the bow.
“There,” he said. “I have seen a good many odd things among these islands—but perhaps more there than anywhere else. Some places are like that.”
I didn’t speak for several minutes, pondering what might lie ahead—and hoping that Ishmael had been right in saying that it was Ian whom Geillis had taken with her to Abandawe. A thought occurred to me—one that had been lost or pushed aside during the events of the last twenty-four hours.
“Lawrence—the other Scottish boys. Ishmael told us he saw twelve of them, including Ian. When you were searching the plantation … did you find any trace of the others?”
He drew in his breath sharply, but did not answer at once. I could feel him, turning over words in his mind, trying to decide how to say what the chill in my bones had already told me.
The answer, when it came, was not from Lawrence, but from Jamie.
“We found them,” he said softly, from the darkness. His hand rested on my knee, and squeezed gently. “Dinna ask more, Sassenach—for I willna tell ye.”
I understood. Ishmael had to have been right; it must be Ian with Geilie, for Jamie could bear no other possibility. I laid a hand on his head, and he stirred slightly, turning so that his breath touched my hand.
“Blest are they who have not seen,” I whispered under my breath, “but have believed.”
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