Caribee

by Christopher Nicole

  ‘I think I'd take you with a wooden leg,' Hilton said.

  The salt water burned into Edward's chest; but not half so much as the sudden salt which burned his eyes.

  'So, what is it to be?" Hilton asked. ‘I ask for you to live again, Susan. If you need Edward for that, then I am content. I ask you to have the courage to live with me, with us, Edward. One woman, two men. What I suggest is no more than sensible, in a limited community such as ours.'

  'My father....'

  'Will suspect nothing, Ned, for it would never occur to him that so monstrous an arrangement could exist. In any event, he will not be here over the next year. As for our labourers, neither will they suspect anything, and if they should, it is not in their nature to criticize others, so long as they are not criticized themselves.'

  Susan turned to face Edward. 'And are you still afraid of your father, Edward?' Her voice was low, and still the colour alternated in her cheeks.

  'You .. . you'd agree to such an arrangement?"

  She smiled, and the sunlit morning seemed to overflow with light, and life, and love. 'Am I not entirely the gainer? I have been dead for too long. I have hated for too long. I have wished for love, for too long. I honour and respect Mr Hilton. I would love him, had I the nature. But that I have not. In many ways I despise ye, Edward, and yet ye make me pant within myself, the very thought of ye. So in possessing both of ye at the same time, I fulfil myself as a woman. I am a very eastern potentate, enjoying a role no woman can ever have done more than dream of in the past.' She crossed her arms, lifted her nightdress above her head, and threw it on the sand. 'Catch me if ye can.' She ran down the beach to the water.

  'Alive, by God,' Hilton said. 'Alive.' He threw his sword and breeches on top of the nightdress. 'You'll stay on Windward, Ned. If you do not, you are at once a fool and my enemy.' He ran behind his wife.

  Edward looked down at the dried blood on his chest, and scratched Iris head. Then he laid his sword on top of Hilton's.

  A fortnight later Jefferson's ship dropped anchor off the windward beach, to ferry ashore one of its brass cannon. It took most of the crew as well as all of Hilton's Irishmen, and even Tony and Edward, to unload the huge gun and drag it across the sinking sand to the rocks, and then it took another day's labour to hoist it up the twenty-foot face and embed it in the outward-looking wall of the house, where it nestled behind the wooden logs. It was time, because the roof was ready to be erected, so handsomely had O'Reilly worked his men. By then the ship had raised anchor, and was bearing north, with Tom Warner and his daughter on board. But Tom had not come ashore to say a last goodbye to his son. Nor had Sarah. Edward's exile from his family no less than from Sandy Point was complete.

  'Now there's a pretty sight.' Hilton stood on the beach below the house and gazed up at the ugly barrel which protruded above his head. ‘I'm almost wishing those red-skinned devils would come back. A ball from that beauty would blow a bit of sense into their canoes.'

  Wapisiane. A savage of above average capability. That first expedition, to Windward, had been intended as nothing more than a reconnaissance. Next time his destination would be Sandy Point.

  'Sure, and it'd be better if they'd wait until the roofs on,' O'Reilly said. 'Just in case it starts to rain, like.'

  Hilton clapped him on the shoulder. 'You've a general's mind, Paddy. I see you yet, leading your wild Irish against the King's men, when you get home.'

  'Aye,' O'Reilly said. 'Except that I’ll not be going home.'

  'Not even when your time is up?’ Edward asked in surprise.

  'What, be off to hang? Not me, Ted, lad. I'm staying in these blessed islands.'

  'And so say all of us,' Connor agreed.

  'Think your father would give us land, when we've served our time, Ted?"

  'Now that I really can't say.'

  ' 'Tis a few years off yet, Paddy,' Hilton said. 'And in a few years a lot can happen. Who knows, we'll be having a new governor by then, maybe, eh, Ned?'

  ‘I'll drink to that,' O'Reilly said. 'Now and any time.'

  That's treason,' Edward declared. The Governor acts as the representative of the King, and to wish for his death is as serious as wishing for the death of King Charles himself. I'll hear no more of that.'

  "Why, sir. . . .' O'Reilly began, but was halted by a quick shake of the head from Hilton.

  'We've no politics on Windward,' he declared. 'And we're better off without them. And I'm right happy with the work you lads have put in these last few days. This afternoon is a holiday.'

  They gave him three cheers, and within minutes had fallen to fighting amongst themselves as the wine bottle was passed. Edward left them to it, and sought the encampment on the beach, a hundred yards upwind. Here he would find Susan. It was incredible, that he should be able to think that, with Tony at his heels. Incredible that Tony should be able to think that too, and that they should remain friends. Friends. Now there was an understatement. They were blood brothers. Hardly appropriate. Semen brothers. Brothers in sin and crime, who worshipped at the same shrine.

  But this, surely, was what woman was created for. She sat on the beach in front of her tent, wearing a shift, which remained always her favourite garment, alike for its coolness and the absence of restrictions it placed on her movements, and brushed her hair. She was fond of this, and never tired of the long, exhausting sweeps of her arm. Perhaps she too found her hair exciting. He suddenly wondered what she would look like, bald. What she would feel like, bald. But his brain was always becoming filled with diese devilish, irrelevant, dangerous ideas.

  There was a remarkable thought. As if any idea could ever be dangerous again after the one which Tony had implanted in his brain, and which they now implemented to the full.

  He threw himself full length on the sand beside her, and leaned forward to kiss her toes.

  'They're a good lot,' Hilton said, sitting beside his wife. 'Do you not think so, sweetheart?"

  ‘I'll not argue against my own people.'

  'And yet, how wasted they are, labouring in this hot sun. If ever there was a race created by God to fight and love and drink it is the Irish. Certain it is they are good for nothing else.'

  ‘I'd not argue with that, either,' Susan said, and brought her legs together, for Edward to roll on his back and rest his head across her thighs. 'Why so solemn, today?"

  'Solemn? Not I, sweetheart. Not I.' Hilton pointed, at the sails winch were almost hull down on the horizon. 'There goes Jefferson, and the Governor. And now we are more of a colony than ever before. We are recruited, and he has left us three ships, so that we need never again be cut oil. This place will thrive, from now on. It but remains for us to decide how the thriving will be. Will Merwar's Hope always be no more than an extension of England, as the ancient Greeks would have it, a true colony, or will we seek to make a new nation, here in the Caribbean, with new laws and perhaps a new religion, with a new conception of what our lives, or deaths, or meaning, are all about.'

  Edward's eyes opened. Here, then, was what he had been expecting the past week. Tony had clearly been working up to something, from the very beginning.

  'Ye are uncommonly serious this afternoon,' Susan said. ‘If your wild Irish are indeed holidaying, I shall have to go up the beach to bathe. Will ye gentlemen accompany me?"

  'Stay a while,' Tony said. ‘I wish to speak with Edward, and he will listen while he can touch you at the same time.'

  'You are a vulgar-, blasphemous, traitorous dog, Tony Hilton,' Edward pointed out.

  Hilton smiled. Incredible how winning was that smile, breaking through the loom of the pock-marked features.

  'Because I wish you to think? You may have forgotten that your father himself dreamed of such an outcome to our travels, before he became obsessed with propriety.'

  'No doubt because he discovered that propriety is an essential part of life. There seems to be no more than two choices. Either we preserve our identity as Englishmen, as loyal subjects of King Charle
s, or we descend to the level of savages, or perhaps lower. We have experienced both, Tony, and so we know how true that is.'

  ‘I would scarce agree with you. We knew less of the climate, then, and the people. And ourselves, perhaps. We lacked numbers. And I would hold us three up as examples of how people may make a new life, and lose nothing of their essential beings.' He turned on his hands and knees, to face them. ‘I must speak my mind, Edward. We three, we share too much for us to have secrets from one another. Is that not so?'

  'Aye,' Edward said.

  ‘I understand not a word of what ye are saying. I'm going to battle.' Susan dropped her shift on the sand and walked down the beach. No doubt she expected them to follow her.

  'So listen to me,' Hilton said. 'There is deep unrest in Sandy Point, and not only amongst the Irish. Your father thinks it is a constant difference of outlook between the new arrivals and the old. But he is wrong. He knows nothing of what goes on amongst his people, because he cuts himself off from them, sees them only in church. No doubt he has a lot on his mind. And no doubt he has a lot to do with his spare time, and that red-skinned temptress of his. And no doubt she but nightly increases the burden weighing on his conscience. You'll hear me out, Ned. The fact is, the very newest arrivals are all he can count on for support. The old hands are that discontented with their lot. 'Tis the church that bothers them most. The main left England to escape the constant quarrels between Laud and the Covenanters, the conception that a man should go to gaol or lose all his wealth merely by choosing to worship God in a house not ordained and selected by the Government. And that is why they come here, why they flock to the Virginias and the Massachusetts colony, far more than merely to escape paying a little ship money. So what do they find? Mailing has grown as high church as any archbishop, and he records absentees in that book of his. Your name figures prominently.'

  'O'Reilly has been whispering in your ear.'

  'Not just him. I get word from Sandy Point. 'Tis an explosive situation, boy. And when a situation gets this combustible, 'tis best to light the fuse yourself, before someone else gets careless with a match. Now, there is not a man on this island, myself included, would willingly go against Tom Warner. But Hal Ashton....'

  'You preach mutiny,' Edward said quietly. 'Against my own father, and against your own friend, whether he is here or not. Nor do I understand why you turn to me. You seek to find some resentment within me at being passed over? I would be lying should I pretend that I do not feel some resentment. And yet, this is justice. I am still not twenty-one, not yet a man in the eyes of the law. And in addition, I am regarded as a drunken layabout entirely lacking in backbone by the colonists, as a joke by the Irish. These opinions were shared by yourself, until very recently.'

  ‘I regretted them, and I hoped to be proved wrong. As I think I have been, by your willingness to draw on me. I'll tell you why I turn to you, Ned. There are two reasons, closely connected. Firstly, as you say, Tom is my friend. It was his will drove us to this island, drove us to prosperity. I'd not have the name of Warner dissociated from our future. The second reason is even more important. We must grow. How we do that is our concern, that is what we are speaking about. But for the time being we are yet an infant, like to be choked out of existence by any armed fleet. We must dissemble, and continue our loyal obedience to the English Crown, until we are strong enough to care for our own, until every house on the island sports a cannon like that one over there, until there are enough houses to make it beyond the ability of any Stuart king to assail us. For that, we must continue the grant as it is. Tom has read it to us often enough. It is to Thomas Warner and his heirs. Any successor who does not bear the name of Warner will indeed be a felon and a traitor. But you, Ned. In the eyes of the world you are his natural heir. And let me add this. He has little enough justification for his position, now. He has broken his own laws, and not only in the matter of Yarico. Should the truth of the massacre at Blood River ever come out, be sure that he would he impeached. And returned to occupy that very Tower which was once your home. We can save him that, Ned.'

  Edward got up. Treason,' he said. 'No matter how you dress it up, Tony, it remains treason. Treason by you, against your lawful lord, and treason by me, against my own father.'

  ‘It is a sport of kings, treason. Their only sport, one would suppose, looking over the pages of English history. Aye, and Scots, and Irish. Yet the institution survives, more often than not to the good of the country.'

  Edward faced him. ‘I do not quarrel with much of your reasoning. Father has lost his way. I sometimes wonder if he ever possessed as much certainty of purpose as he pretends, as others suppose in him. Certainly his being in this part of the world at all is much of an accident. Yet he has always followed a dream, to the best of his ability, as do we all. This colony, this island, is his life, and his reason for life. Take that away from him and he will have nothing. Perhaps he is unduly stern at times and perhaps he seeks to re-create aspects of England. It will take the weight of history to determine whether or not he is right or wrong. You and I, we have the time to wait, and see, in the certainty, as you say, that I must succeed him. I would prefer to do it legally, and not while his back is turned.'

  The dutiful son,' Hilton sighed. ‘I'd not want to disturb your spirit, Ned, but you're forgetting that you're not the only Warner left on this island.'

  'Philip? Why....'

  'He is but a boy, to be sure. Scarce fourteen years old. I remember you as a man, at fourteen, Ned. Perhaps you should look more closely on your brother. Study him. You will not find a more industrious, sober, Godfearing youth on this island or any other. The very apple of his father's eye. I can see no certainty that the eldest son must succeed.'

  'Why, you ... it is the law.'

  'Providing there is no impediment. Where the eldest son is a lawbreaker, who will not attend service, who drinks with drunken Irish labourers, who has already been guilty of at least one act of mutiny... for make no mistake, your refusal to take part in the attack on the Carib village was mutiny, Edward. Punishable with death, under any other commander. And when to top it all, it becomes known that the boy lives in open sin with another man's wife. . . .'

  'You scoundrel,' Edward cried. ' Twas your doing.'

  'And 1 bear no grudge. Indeed, I admit it freely. These past few weeks have been the happiest I have known. And Susan also. And you, I'd reckon. Yet we'd be fools to suppose we can continue our arrangement indefinitely, without word creeping back to Sandy Point. What then? I at the least have no governorship to lose.'

  'By God,' Edward said. But of course Tony was right. One could not steal paradise. One entered it boldly, with a clear conscience and the blessings of church and man.

  Or one seized it, sword in hand. Had any man ever succeeded in doing that?

  Hilton was on his knees beside him. 'As we are now speaking openly, Ned, let me say more. You have been the subject of much discussion between your father, and Jefferson, and Mailing, and Ashton. They know you are the obvious rallying point for the discontented. But you are Tom's son, and he would have nothing done against you while he was here. Ashton, now, has been left with instructions to proceed against all wrong-doers in the colony with much severity, being assured of Tom's support when he returns. You'd do well to bear that in mind. Those he has imprisoned are those he would estimate to be your supporters, should it come to a confrontation. It will not be long before you join them. In fact, I would estimate that you are safe only so long as you remain here on Windward.'

  Edward chewed his lip. Certainly there had been no love between himself and his father for too long now. He could not help but blame Tom for Mama's death. And the open flaunting of Yarico was more than his belly could bear. Or had that been nothing more than jealousy? Was he too eager to blame himself and excuse Father? Christ, to know what to do. But he had not needed a glass of wine for several weeks now. Not since coming here to stay. Not since knowing Susan again. Not since being included in the wild dr
eams of Tony Hilton.

  Dreams? Then where was the reality? But the step was irrevocable. Once taken. How easy, then, not to take it. But then, as Tony pointed out, this opportunity, once passed, would not be regained. There would be no room for rebellion once Father returned. Rebellion. Because that was what it would be.

  He watched Susan returning up the beach towards them. She strode the sand like the naked goddess she was. Drops of water sparkled at neck and breast and groin, and her hair lay in a dark crimson mat on her back and shoulders. To lose all that, why, it was impossible.

  What rubbish. Did he possess all that? It was part of a scheme, a gigantic conspiracy which lurked in Hilton's mind. When had the idea been born? When he had marched away into the forest, five years ago, to brood on his own, and develop plans on his own? And now he saw the opportunity to put those plans into practice. Tom away, and his son discontented and unpopular with the established government.

  But suppose he was right? There could be no denying his ambition, but might it not have been brought to a point by the looming disaster he foresaw?

  Susan came up to them. 'Ye've solved the problems of the world, I've no doubt.' She dropped to her knees between them, put an arm around each of their shoulders. 'Now, ye've had enough serious matters. Ye could devote a little time to a poor shipwrecked waif. Ye know what being rolled up in the surf does to me. And for me.'

  Her mouth was loose, and her eyes were liquid. And they were looking at Edward.

  'We'll settle this matter first,' Hilton said. ‘It affects us all'

  A threat, allied to a promise. The girl still gazed at Edward. Oh, they were conspirators, all right. ‘I'll have no bloodshed,' he muttered.

  ‘I'm all for that. But you'll not avoid it by being half-hearted in the matter. We've twenty wild Irishmen over there, and enough arms for every man. There's a force to be reckoned with.'

  'And the arms were given you by my father,' Edward said. 'You've planned this a long time.'

  'Let's say I've seen it coming a long time,' Hilton said.