by JoAnn Wendt
She didn’t understand.
“Well?” Jacka demanded of her. “Are y’ with us or not? You’ll be a pretty thing in me bed...”
She stood there weeping. A soft cry broke from her throat.
“No!”
“She’s had her chance,” Jacka snarled at Yates. “Shove ’er to that other corner. We’ll keep ’er alive until we tire o’ spreadin’ her legs. Then you can kill ‘er.” Brutal and dumb, Yates salivated at the prospect. Fury ignited in Drake as Yates gave Kena such a vicious shove that she fell to her knees, Tutu with her. Tutu screamed and wailed. She clutched him and crawled into the corner, crouching over him, protecting him with her own body.
“Now, Mr. Steel. Rob me of me runaway slave reward, will yer?”
Drake counted his own heartbeats. Jacka slowly cocked his elbow, relishing, preparing to take better aim. Dying a thousand deaths, Drake waited to spring. Suddenly a loud Crack split the air. A pistol shot reverberated through the kitchen like thunder. The sulfuric smell of burnt gunpowder filled the room, thick and gritty. Kena screamed and covered her ears. Jacka’s face froze in utter surprise. He rocked forward for a moment, then fell and crashed to the floor. He lay unmoving, blood welling from the back of his shirt.
Stunned, Yates hadn’t time to react. Drake sprang at him and grabbed the musket with both hands, slamming him into the wall, ramming the length of musket barrel into his Adam’s apple. Yates clawed at the musket, choking, strangling. Honor came rushing, grabbed an iron cook pan from where it hung on the wall among her kitchen utensils, and, putting all of her three hundred pounds behind the blow, bashed it across his face. Blood flew. Yates’s nose moved to the side of his face. He uttered a choking scream. Drake threw him to the floor.
“Sit on him, Honor.”
She didn’t sit—she dropped her weight upon him like an anchor dropped from a ship. A kneecap snapped. Yates screamed in agony.
Drake sprang to Edwinna, who stood in the dark hallway, the pistol barrel still smoking, her face white, her lips an ashen blue. She held a second pistol in her left hand. With a look of primitive fury, she sprang across the room to Yates and leveled a pistol at his head. Drake had to grab her wrist and wrench the pistol out of her strong grip. He set it aside and shook her by the shoulders until sanity flowed back into her wild eyes.
“Edwinna, reload the pistol. Bring the other loaded pistols. We don’t yet know what is happening.”
“Yes.”
“You’re all right?”
Her ashen lips had to work to form the answer. “Yes. What is happening at the mill?”
“I don’t know. Shooting.”
“I must go at once.” She lunged for the door and he had to drag her by the shoulders and swing her around into his arms. “Edwinna! Do as I said. Get all the house pistols.” It was hard to get through to her. She was shocked, numb. Finally, she looked up at him and nodded.
Drake returned to Yates, who moaned under Honor, while Kena wept in relief, rocking Tutu in her arms. Tutu was wailing inconsolably, understanding none of this. Scipio and Augustus still stood at the wall, stunned. Drake grabbed Yates’s left arm and wrenched the sleeve back. Nothing. He grabbed the right and found a scar—an X carved deep into the skin.
“Yates, what does the X mean?”
“Tain’t nothin’. Git this cow off’n me.”
“Honor, bounce on his knees.” She did.
Yates shrieked. “The X is a sign of them what’s takin’ over the island. Me knees are broke. Git ’er off me!”
“How many on this plantation?”
“I dinno.”
He nodded. “Honor?”
“Nay,” Yates shrieked. “ ‘Tis Jacka, Mule, Slay, Hastings ’n me.”
“Who else?” There was too much gunfire in the heavy rain for it to be only three others.
“I dinno.”
“Honor?”
“Nay! I dinno,” Yates begged in a shriek. “Jacka, he kept it secret. We met at night, wi’ hoods over our heads.”
Drake sat back on his heels, inclined to believe him. It corroborated what he’d seen in Bridgetown. “But they will all carry an X on the forearm?” Yates nodded. “What about the other plantations? Are they all linked?” Yates was moaning now, shaking in intense pain. He nodded. “Is it the plan to strike on every plantation tonight?”
“I dinno!”
“Honor?”
“Nay! Git ’er off’n me,” he begged, shrieking. “ ‘Tis the plan t’ strike tomorrow night. But Jacka, he had t’ strike t’night b’cause the boy, Jeremy, he seen the X on Jacka’s arm ‘round midday t’day and he were goin’ t’ tell.”
Drake closed his eyes and drew a ragged breath that shuddered all the way through him. God. “Jeremy and Marigold—where are they, you son-of-a-bitch?”
“I dinno,” Yates screamed. “Jacka took ’em off somewheres. I dinno where—I swear to God. Git her off me! She broke me knees.”
Drake sprang to his feet and grabbed the musket. Yates would not be able to crawl, let alone walk, but he intended to take no chances. “Scipio, Augustus. Spread his hands out on the floor, palms down, and hold his hands.” The scared, shaking old slaves jumped to.
Yates shrieked. “Don’ shoot me! What’re you goin’ to do?”
Drake hefted the musket overhead like an ax and brought it smashing down on Yates’s hand. Bones shattered. Yates screamed in agony and tried to roll away. “Hold his other hand.” Scared to death, Scipio and Augustus jumped to do his bidding. Drake lifted the musket and smashed the second hand. “You can get up now, Honor. He’ll go no where.” She did so heavily, rolling off his knees, and Yates’s screams rent the roof. He rolled away in agony.
Edwinna came running back to the kitchen with the loaded pistols and placed them on the table. White-faced, she averted her eyes from Jacka’s body. It was beginning to dawn on her that she’d killed a man. The blood pooling around the body had formed a small lake. It smelled sweet, sickish.
He took her gently by the shoulders. “Edwinna, you’ll have to be in charge here.”
“I’m going to the mill.”
“No! I’ll go to the mill and help Plum and the others. You stay here, locked in. Guard the others.”
“Yes. All right.” Amid the gripping tension, his frazzled mind strayed. Anne never would have been able to do this. He quickly told her all he’d learned from Yates—the incriminating X scars, the general uprising that was planned for tomorrow.
“You’ll have to gather your wits, sit down, and write the planters at once—the three neighbors who are in our chain to notify. Put the letters in waterproof cases, for they must go tonight, storm or no.”
“Yes.”
He turned to the slaves. “Scipio, you will take the letter to Mr. John Monyford’s plantation. Don’t be afraid. Keep to the edge of the cane path and no one will see you. Augustus, you will carry two letters—one to Lady Dinny Fraser, which you will deliver first, and the second to George Crawford’s plantation. I want them to sign a note that they have received it, and you will bring the note back to me. Do you understand?”
They looked scared to death, but nodded.
His jaw tightened. “If you fail to do any of this—” He glanced at Yates. “I will do to you what I did to him. Do you understand?” They nodded.
He turned back to Edwinna, Unmindful of the servants, he took her face in his hands and gave her a hard kiss on the lips. She’d saved his life again. He felt so much for her at this moment he could scarcely contain it.
“I’ll be back.”
“Yes. I know you will, Drake.”
He stayed off the main path and ran to the mill by a circuitous route that took him first up to the windmill on the hill, then down to the millworks. Rain continued steadily, but the high winds had eased. The shooting had ceased by the time he got to Plum, and he found the competent, unruffled overseer patrolling the mill area with the Valentine brothers, Nansellock, McCarran, and David Alleyne—all of them ar
med with musket and pistol. He quickly told them what had gone on at the house. Covering the grounds by torchlight, they found abandoned weapons on the ground. The convicts had not taken rain into consideration. With the powder wet and useless and the muskets unable to fire, they had panicked. They’d abandoned their shooting pieces and had run away. Some no doubt had fled the plantation, but Drake and Plum thought it likely the others would duck into huts and pretend they had been there all along, totally uninvolved.
Plum immediately ordered torches lighted in the boiling house. He sent his overseers to roust out the bondslaves, hut by hut. They were brought in one at a time, nervous, most of them frightened from the shooting and frightened of Plum. Whenever Drake and Plum and Sean Valentine discovered an X carved into a man’s forearm, they clamped the man in shackles—hand irons, leg irons, and an iron dog collar— and threw him into the furnace cellar beneath the boiling house floor.
Many begged pitifully, claiming Jacka had threatened to kill them if they did not join him. Drake and Plum believed them, but had no pity. Guilt was guilt. The bondslaves had their chance. They could have reported Jacka. In all, the patrollers found thirteen men with X’s gouged into their forearms. The hair on the back of Drake’s neck prickled. Good God, the family had been in even more danger than he and Plum had suspected.
Up at the house, Drake and Plum dragged Jacka’s body out of the kitchen and dumped it in the yard like garbage. Thoughtful of Edwinna, Kena immediately took bucket and brush and scrubbed away every trace of blood, while David Alleyne tended to Yates—not with his usual compassion, but with a savage roughness Drake had never seen in the young doctor. Incensed that Yates had held a loaded musket to Kena’s head, David did nothing to alleviate Yates’s pain and bound the splints to the screaming man’s knees with wrenching jerks that made even Drake wince.
Plum, Alleyne, Edwinna, and Drake sat up the night in the plantation office, drinking Brazilian coffee, waiting tensely for whatever else might happen. Drake held Edwinna’s outstretched hand on the table. Outwardly she seemed composed, sitting erect, her head high, her lips pale but untrembling. Now and then, she threw Drake an acute look to reassure herself he was alive. Her eyes bore a glaze, as if they were made of pottery, as she maintained an artificial calm, containing by force of will the utter shock of having killed someone. He brought her hand to his lips and pressed a kiss to her palm. She scarcely noticed.
Plum and Alleyne and he avoided the subject of Jeremy and Marigold. Edwinna would disintegrate. She’d loved those children. Drake was in anguish himself.
The night passed slowly while they waited for the dawn, and for Scipio and Augustus to return. Plum kept things on an even keel, speaking in his calm voice, suggesting the mill works be closed down until the crisis passed, suggesting that search parties of slaves and bondslaves be sent out at the crack of dawn. Tactfully, he refrained from saying for whom or for what they would search. Drake’s chest tightened.
Scipio returned in the midst of the downpour, and they rushed to the kitchen to hear his report while Kena gave the elderly slave a warming dram of rum. Scipio’s note said Monyford was dispatching word to his nearest three neighbors at once and also to Magistrate Tarcher, who would notify the governor in Bridgetown. According to Scipio, Monyford, his three tall, grown sons, and his overseers had armed themselves at once, then taken torches and shackles and marched for the bondslave huts to search out and chain up any man with an X on his arm.
Augustus returned an hour after Scipio, and they listened to his alarming report in the kitchen while Kena fed him a warming rum. Dinny Fraser’s house had been set afire by three bondslaves, but the rain had put out the blaze, and Dinny’s overseer had caught the bondslaves in the act. Under torture, the bondslaves had confessed and named others involved. They’d been shackled hand and foot and thrown into the pit under the boiling house, but no one could find Dinny.
“Dinny,” Edwinna whispered. “We have to search for her!”
“We will.” Worry knifed through Drake, too. Dinny was outrageous, a bawdy wench, but he liked her. Everyone on the island liked her.
Augustus reported that at George Crawford’s plantation, Clive Crawford had laughed at the note and George Crawford had been so drunk he’d come weaving across the floor as though he were walking in a cane field furrow. He’d taken the note, read it, and torn it up. “Tricks,” he’d shouted. “Another trick by my niece and that pirate. Get out of here, get out!” Augustus had been glad to go. He’d run, scared of George Crawford.
“The blind fool,” Drake said.
“He’s my uncle,” Edwinna said, worried.
“He’s chosen his course, Edwinna,” Plum said firmly. “So has Clive. Let them bear the consequences of it. You have warned them. You owe them nothing more.”
The rain stopped just before dawn. Equipping themselves with pistols and muskets, they went down to the millworks to organize the search for Jeremy and Marigold. Drake and Plum both had urged Edwinna to stay home. She was exhausted. She refused with fire in her eyes and insisted on joining the search. Scared for her—she looked to be at the breaking point—he and Plum conferred and decided it best to let her come along. Concentrating on another problem might push Jacka from her mind.
Search parties of slaves and bondslaves set off at dawn through the wet, dripping cane paths. Drake, Plum, and Edwinna went by horse, riding up to Cherry Point, where they could look down over the rough, white-capped Atlantic. They searched for hours along every likely path. Edwinna would not give up.
At noon they spied the two children, sitting roped to the trunk of a tree. Their arms were wrapped around each other. Their throats were cut. They were dead.
* * *
Chapter 13
Plum and Drake buried the children at the foot of a sunny, flower-covered wall in the yard at Crawford Hall. Edwinna wanted them near her. Drake, fearing for her sanity, agreed. He lifted the bodies into hastily built coffins—young children, once so full of bright, lively promise, they now lay ashen, unmoving.
He glanced at Edwinna with worry. She stood watching every step of the burial process, stiff, white-faced, silent.
When the last shovelful of dirt had been mounded on the graves and when Kena, weeping, had drawn down some of the cerise and purple flowering vines and spread them over the graves, Edwinna said in an unnatural voice: “I want a whip.”
Drake felt the hair on the back of his neck prickle. He looked at Plum, whose expression was grimly flat, leaving the matter to him. Drake leaned his shovel against the garden wall and moved toward her.
“Edwinna,” he said gently.
“I want a whip,” she demanded, fists clenched, expression wild and fiery. “Get me a whip. I’m going to flog every one of them until they’re dead.”
Kena backed away, weeping, her hands clenched to her mouth.
Drake put a hand on Edwinna’s shoulder. She slapped it away.
“I want a whip!”
“Edwinna, the bondslaves will be punished for what they’ve done. They will be sent to Bridgetown in shackles, tried in a court of law, and executed.”
She scorched them all with a look of fury.
“If you won’t get me a whip, I’ll get one myself. My father kept them in the windmill.”
Kena wept. Edwinna whirled and bolted. Drake ran with her, trying to no avail to take her elbow, dissuade her, calm her. He could easily have stopped her, but not without strong measures, and he was afraid that in her fragile state she would shatter if he used force. So he ran beside her as, with the speed of a deer, she took a path uphill through a field of young cane.
When she reached the towering stone windmill, she wrenched the wooden door open and lunged inside. The windmill was a tall cone of solid stones with slits in the stone facing for windows. Enormous beams and pipes lay across the circular dirt floor. Old, dank cupboards and storage chests lined the walls. She searched through them like a madwoman, throwing open doors and sending storage lids crashing. The s
tone walls reverberated with the noise.
“Edwinna...” His heart pounded.
She paid him no heed. Finally, she found what she wanted in a tall, upright cupboard, the door of which she sent crashing into the wall. She reached in and pulled out a whip. It was a cat-o’-nine-tails, a vicious instrument with nine braided leather strips, a pellet of lead embedded in each tip. A shadow fell across the sunshine that streamed in the door. With gratitude, Drake looked and saw that Plum had followed them.
Edwinna held the whip in her hands, panting, looking at it. Then, as though it were a snake, she dropped it with revulsion, and backed away from it, her fists clenched to her mouth.
“Oh my God, I am like my father, I am like my father.”
“No, Edwinna,” Plum said calmly, his voice echoing in the stone chamber. “You are not like him. You are different. The difference is that he would have used the whip while you will not.”
She gave them a frenzied, exhausted look. Drake reached for her, but she pushed past him, ducked out the door, and ran toward Crawford Hall, running more slowly now, wearily. Drake started to go after her. Plum stopped him.
“Let her be, Mr. Steel. She was like this when her father died. Near broke my heart. But let her be. She needs to be alone to grieve.”
“Needs? It’s damned lonely grieving alone. When my wife died...”
“Edwinna is used to being alone.” He tapped his heart. “In here she is alone. She always has been alone.”
Sorrow pierced Drake. He wanted to comfort her. He needed comforting himself. He felt so guilty about Marigold and Jeremy.
“Damn it to hell! You once suggested putting the torture iron to Jacka and getting the truth out of him. If only I’d let you.”
“Nay,” Plum said bluntly. “ ‘Twasn’t just you, ‘twas Edwinna, too. You’ve that in common, the two of you—overmuch respect for human life. As for me? I’ve no respect for it. It’s my experience that most of humanity—black and white—isn’t worth the powder to blow them to hell. Now, uprising or no, Mr. Steel, we’ve a plantation to run.”
