From black Jens, the butler, to the third scullery maid, all of them, as they came severally under the notice of this guest, appeared to accord her a reverence hardly distinguishable from acts of worship. In going about the town with her, either walking for early evening exercise or in her father’s barouche to make or return formal calls, the trained and observant eye of the young Scotsman had not failed to notice her effect upon the swarming Negro population of the town.
Obeisances from these marked her passage among them. The gay stridency of their street conversations lulled itself and was still at her passing.
Doffed hats, bows, veritable obeisances in rows and by companies swayed these street loiterers as her moving about among them left them hushed and worshipful in her wake.
Captain McMillin noted the very general respectful attitude of these blacks toward their white overlords, but, his eyes told him plainly, they appeared to regard Camilla Macartney as a kind of divinity.
In the reasonable desire to satisfy his mounting curiosity Captain McMillin had broached the matter to his hostess. A canny Scot, he had approached this matter indirectly. His initial questions had had to do with native manners and customs, always a safe general topic in a colony.
Camilla’s direct answers had at once surprised him with their clarity and the exactitude of their information. It was unusual and – as the subject broadened out between them and Camilla told him more and more about the Negroes, their beliefs, their manner of life, their customs and practises – it began to be plain to Captain McMillin that it was more than unusual; if someone entitled to do so had asked him his opinion on Camilla Macartney’s grasp of this rather esoteric subject, and the captain had answered freely and frankly, he would have been obliged to admit that it seemed to him uncanny.
For behind those social graces of hers which made Camilla Macartney a notable figure in the polite society of this Danish Colonial capital, apart from the distinction of her family connection, her commanding position as the richest heiress in the colony, her acknowledged intellectual attainments, and the distinguished beauty of face and form which lent a pervading graciousness to her every act, Camilla Macartney was almost wholly occupied by two consuming interests.
Of these, the first, generally known by every man, woman and child in St Thomas, was her preoccupation with her cousin, Saul Macartney. The other, unsuspected by any white person in or out of Camilla Macartney’s wide acquaintance, was her knowledge of the magic of the Negroes.
The subject had been virtually an obsession with her since childhood. Upon it she had centered her attention, concentrated her fine mind and using every possible opportunity which her independent position and the enormous amount of material at hand afforded, had mastered it in theory and practise throughout its almost innumerable ramifications.
There was, first, the obeah. This, deriving originally from the Ashantee slaves, had come into the West Indies through the gate of Jamaica. It was a combined system of magical formulas and the use of drugs. Through it a skillful practitioner could obtain extraordinary results. It involved a very complete materia medica, and a background setting for the usage and practise thereof, which reached back through uncounted centuries into rituals that were the very heart of primitive savagery.
The much more greatly extended affair called Voodoo, an extraordinarily complex fabric of ‘black’, ‘white’, and revelatory occultism, had made its way through the islands chiefly through the Haitian doorway from its proximate source, Dahomey, whence the early French colonists of Hispaniola had brought their original quotas of black slaves.
Voodoo, an infinitely broader and more stratified system than the medicinal obeah, involved much that appeared to the average white person mere superficial Negro ‘stupidness’. But in its deeper and more basic aspects it included many very terrible things, which Camilla Macartney had encountered, succeeded in understanding, and appropriated into this terrific fund of black learning which was hers as this fell subject took her through the dim backgrounds of its origin to the unspeakable snake worship of Africa’s blackest and deadliest interior.
The considerable Negro population of the island, from the most fanatical Hougan presiding in the high hills over the dire periodic rites of the ‘baptism’ and the slaughter of goats and bullocks and willingly offered human victims whose blood, mingled with red rum, made that unholy communion out of which grew the unnameable orgies of the deep interior heights, down to the lowliest piccaninny gathering fruits or stealing yams for the sustenance of his emaciated body – every one of these blacks was aware of this singular preoccupation; acknowledged the supremacy of this extraordinarily gifted white lady; paid her reverence; feared her acknowledged powers; would as soon have lopped off a foot as to cross her lightest wish.
Captain the Honorable William McMillin made up his mind that her grasp of these matters was extraordinary. His questionings and Camilla’s informative replies had barely touched upon the edge of what she knew.
And the former captain, her cousin, Saul Macartney, did not know that his heiress cousin cherished any interest except that which she had always demonstrated so plainly in his own direction.
Going in to breakfast, Saul Macartney was nearly knocked off his feet by the physical impact of his uncle’s greeting. Camilla’s father had been spending the morning overlooking a property of his east of the town, in the direction of Smith’s Bay. He had thus missed meeting Saul at Le Coq d’Or, but had learned of his nephew’s arrival on his way home. The town, indeed, was agog with it.
So sustained was his enthusiasm, the more especially after imbibing his share of the unusually large provision of wine for a midday meal which his daughter’s desire to honor the occasion had provided, that he monopolized most of his nephew’s attention throughout breakfast and later in the drawing room after the conclusion of that meal. It was perhaps because of this joviality on his uncle’s part that Saul Macartney failed to observe the totally new expression which had rested like a very small cloud on Camilla Macartney’s face ever since a short time before going into the dining room.
His uncle even insisted upon sending the prodigal home in the English barouche, and in this elegant equipage – with its sleek, Danish coach horses and the liveried Negroes on its box with cockades at the sides of their glistening silk toppers – he made the brief journey down one hill, a short distance through the town, and up another one to his father’s house.
Here, it being well after two o’clock in the afternoon, and siesta hour, he found Fawcett, whom the Old Man had taken under his hospitable wing. The two had no private conversation together. Both were in high spirits and these Old Macartney fostered with his cordials, his French brandy and a carafe of very ancient rum. The three men sat together over their liquor during the siesta hour, and during the session Old Macartney did most of the talking. He did not once refer to his son’s capture by Brenner, the freebooter.
He confined himself in his desire to be entertaining to his son’s benefactor, Captain Fawcett, to a joyous succession of merry tales and ripe, antique quips. Saul Macartney had therefore no reason to suspect, nor did it happen to occur to Fawcett to inform him, that the latter’s account of Macartney’s adventures since the time he had last been heard from until the present was in any wise different from the tale of shipwreck upon which they had agreed and which Macartney had told out in full to his cousin, Camilla.
The three had not finished their jovial session before various strange matters affecting them very nearly, odd rumors, now being discussed avidly in various offices, residences, and gathering places about St Thomas, were gathering headway, taking on various characteristic exaggerations and, indeed, running like wildfire through the town.
In a place like St Thomas, crossroads and clearing house of the vast West Indian trade which came and went through that port and whose prosperity was dependent almost wholly upon shipping, even the town’s riff-raff was accustomed to think and express itself in terms of ships.
It wa
s an unimportant, loquacious Negro youth who started the ball a-rolling. This fellow, a professional diver, came up to one of the wharves in his slab-sided, home-made rowboat where he lounged aft, submitting to the propulsion of his coal-black younger brother, a scrawny lad of twelve. This wharf rat had had himself rowed out to the vessel from which the two notables he had observed had come ashore that morning. It was from the lips of this black ne’er-do-well that various other wharfside loiterers learned that the beautiful clipper vessel lying out there at anchor was provided with eight carronade ports.
Out of the idle curiosity thus initially aroused there proceeded various other harbor excursions in small boats. The black diver had somehow managed to miss the stanchion of the ‘long tom’ which Fawcett, in an interval of prudence, had had dismounted the night before. The fact that the Swallow carried such an armament, however, very soon trickled ashore.
This nucleus of interesting information was soon followed up and almost eclipsed in interest by the various discussions and arguments which were soon running rife among the shipping interests of the town over the extra-ordinary numbers of the Swallow’s crew.
A round dozen, together with the usual pair of mates to supplement the captain, as all these experts on ships were well aware, would ordinarily suffice for a vessel of this tonnage. Accounts and the terms of the various arguments varied between estimates ranging from seventy-five to a hundred men on board the Swallow.
A side issue within this category was also warmly discussed. Crews of vessels with home ports in the islands were commonly Negro crews. This unprecedented gathering of men was a white group. Only two – certain of the debaters held out firmly that they had observed three – Negroes were to be perceived aboard the Swallow, and one of these, a gigantic brown man who wore nothing but earrings and a pair of faded dungaree trousers, was plainly the cook in charge of the Swallow’s galley, and the other, or others, were this fellow’s assistants.
But the town got its real fillip from the quite definite statement of a small-fry worthy, one Jeems Pelman, who really gave them something to wrangle about when he came ashore after a visit of scrutiny and stated flatly that this rakish, shining, black hulled clipper was none other vessel than the Macartneys’ Hope, upon both hull and rigging of which he had worked steadily for three months in his own shipyard when the Hope was built during the winter of 1819.
All these items of easily authenticated information bulked together and indicated to the comparitively unsophisticated, as well as to the wiseacres, only one possible conclusion. This was that the Macartney vessel, in command of which Captain Saul Macartney was known to have cleared from a South American port three months earlier, had in some as yet unexplained fashion been changed over into a free-trading ship and that the harsh-featured seadog in his fine clothes who had accompanied Captain Macartney ashore that morning could very well be none other than its commander.
A certain lapse of time is ordinarily requisite for the loquacious stage of drunkenness to overtake the average hard-headed seafaring man. The crew of Fawcett’s longboat, after three weeks’ continuous duty at sea, had bestowed the boat safely, engaged the services of an elderly Negro to watch it in their absence, and drifted into the low rum shop nearest their landing place; and there not long after their arrival Fawcett’s boatswain, a Dutch island bruiser, had been recognized by several former acquaintances as a sailorman who had gone out of the harbor of St Eustasia in a small trading schooner which had disappeared off the face of the wide Caribbean three years previously.
The rum-induced garrulity of this gentleman, as the report of it went forth and flared through the town, corroborated the as yet tentative conclusion that a fully manned pirate ship lay for the time being at anchor in the peaceful harbor of St Thomas; and that its master, whose identity as a certain Captain Fawcett had spread downward through the social strata from Le Coq d’Or itself, was here ashore, hobnobbing with the town’s high gentry, and actually a guest of the Macartneys.
By three o’clock in the afternoon the town was seething with the news. There had been no such choice morsel to roll on the tongue since Henry Morgan had sacked the city of Panama.
The first corroboration of that vague, distressing, but as yet unformed suspicion which had lodged itself in Camilla Macartney’s mind came to her through Jens Sorensen, the butler. The ‘grapevine route’, so-called – that curious door-to-door and mouth-to-ear method of communication among the Negroes of the community – is very rapid as well as very mysterious. Black Jens had heard this devastating story relayed up to him from the lowest black riff-raff of the town’s waterfront a matter of minutes after the name of their guest, seeping downward from Le Coq d’Or, had met, mingled with, and crowned the damnatory group of successive details from the wharves.
To anyone familiar with the effect of Voodoo upon the Negro mentality there would be nothing surprising in the fact that black Jens proceeded straight to his mistress to whisper the story without any delay. For fear is the dominant note of the Voodooist. The St Thomas Negroes were actuated in their attitude toward Camilla Macartney by something infinitely deeper than that superficial respect which Captain McMillin had noted. They feared her and her proven powers as they feared the dread demigod Damballa, tutelary manifestation of the unnamed Guinea-Snake himself.
For it was not as one who only inquires and studies that Camilla Macartney commanded awe and reverence from the St Thomas Negroes. She had practised this extraordinary art and it was her results as something quite tangible, definite and unmistakable which formed the background of that vast respect, and which had brought black Jens cringing and trembling into her presence on this particular occasion.
And black Jens had not failed to include in his report the drunken sailorman’s leering account of that captive lady’s treatment by Saul Macartney – how an innocent young wife, off Nevis, had been outrageously forced into Saul’s cabin, and when he had tired of her, how he had sent her back to the deck to go across the plank of death.
What desolation penetrated deep and lodged itself there in Camilla Macartney’s soul can hardly be guessed at. From that moment she was convinced of the deep infamy of that entrancing lover-cousin of hers whom she had adored with her whole heart since the remoteness of her early childhood.
But, however poignantly indescribable, however extremely devastating, may have been her private feelings, it is certain that she did not retire as the typical gentlewoman of the period would have done to eat out her heart in solitary desolation.
Within ten minutes, on the contrary, in response to her immediately issued orders, the English barouche with its sleek Danish horses, its cockaded servants on the box, was carrying her down the hill, rapidly along through the town, and then the heavy coach horses were sweating up the other hill toward her uncle’s house. If the seed of hatred, planted by Saul’s duplicity, were already sprouting, nevertheless she would warn him. She dreaded meeting him.
Saul Macartney, summoned away from the somewhat drowsy end of that afternoon’s convivial session with Fawcett and the Old Man, found his cousin awaiting him near the drawing room door. She was standing, and her appearance was calm and collected. She addressed him directly, without preamble.
‘Saul, it is known in the town. I came to warn you. It is running about the streets that this Captain Fawcett of yours is the pirate. One of his men has been recognized. He talked in one of the rum shops. They say that this ship is the Hope, altered into a different appearance. I advise you to go, Saul – go at once, while it is safe!’
Saul Macartney turned his old disarming smile upon his cousin. He could feel the liquor he had drunk warming him, but his hard Irish head was reasonably clear. He was not befuddled. He stepped toward her as though impulsively, his bronzed face flushed from his recent potations, his arms extended and spread in a carefree gesture as though he were about to take her in his embrace.
‘Camilla, allana, ye should not sadden your sweet face over the likes of me. I know well what I�
�m about, me darling. And as for Fawcett – well, as ye’re aware of his identity, ye’ll know that he can care for himself. Very suitably, very suitably indeed.’
He had advanced very close upon her now, but she stood unmoving, the serious expression of her face not changed. She only held up a hand in a slight gesture against him, as though to warn him to pause and think. Again Saul Macartney stepped lightly toward his doom.
‘And may I not be having a kiss, Camilla?’ His smiling face was unperturbed, his self-confidence unimpaired even now. Then, fatally, he added, ‘And now that ye’re here, acushla, why should ye not have me present my friend, the captain? ’Twas he, ye’ll remember, that brought me back to ye. I could be fetching him within the moment.’
But Camilla Macartney merely looked at him with a level gaze.
‘I am going now,’ she said, ignoring his suggestion and the crass insult to her gentility involved in it, and which beneath her calm exterior had outraged her and seared her very soul. The seed was growing apace. ‘I have warned you, Saul.’
She turned and walked out of the room and out of the house; then across the tiled gallery and down the black marble steps, and out to her carriage.
Saul Macartney hastened back to his father and Fawcett. Despite his incurable bravado, motivated as always by his deep seated selfishness, he had simply accepted the warning just given him at its face value. He addressed his drowsing father after a swift, meaningful glance at Fawcett: ‘We shall be needing the carriage, sir, if so be it’s agreeable to ye. We must be getting back on board, it appears, and I’ll be hoping to look in on ye again in the morning, sir.’
Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S Whitehead (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural) Page 68
