Nightsong

by Valerie Sherwood

  She turned restlessly and swung her gaze past High Street, where the bell tower of St Paul’s church dominated the skyline, to the stocks and the market bell and the goldsmith’s shop. She let her eyes wander restlessly on down this long jagged sandspit that housed some eight thousand souls, to the low mangrove swamp on Gallows Point where pirates were hanged, and on across the clear blue and aqua water to the distant line of aptly named hills, the Blue Mountains, hazy in Jamaica’s near noontime heat. From those hills the Cobre River flowed past Spanish Town, and along that river Kells had sought a plantation. She sighed again. Plainly it was not to be . . .

  She remembered with bitter regret the day the Sea Wolf and the Sea Wench had made their stately way out of the harbour, picking up speed as they ran before the wind. She had had no chance to make up with Kells, for he had not returned home before sailing. That she had sent him away from her in anger had worried Carolina more with each passing day.

  But somehow the weeks had fled by, and now it was June. Carolina had refused to attend the governor’s ball, given in honour of his departing cousin. Let her depart and good riddance! had been her comment, muttered to herself. Louis Deauville had sent her a note, gracefully expressing his regret that due to his wound he would be unable to squire her - just as he had penned her a note regretting his inability to dine with her on Wednesday as invited. Carolina had torn up both notes and sent her own regrets to the governor.

  Although Louis Deauville had for a time been laid up with his wounded leg, he had made a remarkably fast recovery. And now that he was up and about, he obviously expected Carolina to invite him again to dinner. But she did not. Even though the handsome Frenchman managed to turn up whenever she strolled abroad - closely guarded by Hawks - even though she still found him witty and droll, even though her tingling sense of guilt that she had encouraged him out of caprice forced her to be polite to him, now that Kells was well and truly gone, she could not find it in her heart to invite Deauville to share her table. Some half-forgotten loyalty of the heart prevented her. It was one thing to dally in Kells’s plain sight - and quite another to betray him when his back was turned. Carolina had her own code of flirtation - and it was very strict. It did not allow treachery.

  She had had word of Kells only once - and that was by happenstance. The captain of a merchant ship that had come into Port Royal had noised it about that he had sailed by a sea battle somewhere off Trinidad. A ship that looked like the Sea Wolf was being attacked by a pair of great golden galleons. The Sea Wench had been nowhere in sight. No, he had not stayed to watch the outcome of the battle. He had piled on all the canvas his vessel would carry and taken himself away from there!

  Carolina winced when she heard it, for it had not told her whether her valiant buccaneer was alive or dead.

  That had been three weeks ago, and Carolina had lived in torment ever since.

  She had expected him home by now - she had kept telling herself bravely that Kells was invincible, he could surmount all odds - but she knew it was not so. And last week when a hurricane had roared out of the Caribbean and all but swept Port Royal away, she had listened to the tiles of the roofs blowing off and crashing like thunder against the torn-off debris in the littered street below and shuddered. For he was doubtless out somewhere in that storm as well, fighting the seas in a gallant vessel that might have had half her hull already ripped away as a result of Spanish shot . . . The thought terrified her.

  But the hurricane had come and gone and left a littered beach and a massive clean-up job for the city. Port Royal shrugged. It was an island port and used to terrible blows. Now but a week later, with work crews busy, the hanging signs were all up again, broken shutters mended, most of the roof tiles put back, the beach swept clean by the tide - the taverns and hostelries had rid themselves of their broken crockery that had crashed down when the storm had blown the shutters from the windows, and it was business as usual in this bustling buccaneer port.

  May had brought floods, then had come the hurricane, and now June had brought this depressing spell in which no wind stirred. The suffocating heat wave had lasted all week and brought forth grim forecasts from some of the older townsfolk, who muttered uneasily that for forty years past, indeed ever since England had taken this island from Spain, every earthquake - and there were tremors almost every year - had been preceded by storms followed by a period of sweltering calm such as they were just now experiencing.

  Carolina, a comparatively recent arrival, had paid no attention and had scoffed at the foolish old drunk in a nightshirt who two nights ago had run through the town wild-eyed, crying, ‘First a storm, and now a calm! Take to your heels! This miserable pesthole is going to sink, mark my words!’

  But who would pay any attention to that? So many people - including, indeed, one clergyman’s wife - were constantly predicting the destruction of wicked Port Royal for its sins!

  There was a sound of breaking glass below and Carolina looked down to see a crowd of swaggering sailors passing by in the street, coming from Sea Lane. One of them had dropped a bottle of rum and its contents ran into the sandy street. As she watched, another of their number lurched into a passing fish cart and a loud argument ensued. Now she watched them swagger on up Queen’s Street towards High Street, their rolling gait proclaiming them for what they were. One of them carried a large red and green parrot which squawked incessantly.

  Now she saw that Louis Deauville had come out of his house and was gazing about. He looked up and saw her and bowed. Carolina inclined her head to him. She knew he was hoping that she would come down and chat, for he was loitering there aimlessly, but she had no intention of doing that.

  It was a pensive face she turned towards the mirror-like shimmer of the glassy sea.

  Below her, had she known it, Gilly was taking advantage of her absence to slip into Carolina’s bedroom.

  The past weeks had been frustrating for Gilly, too - frustrating for two reasons:

  For one, Jarvis was pressing her. Idling here in Port Royal, he was growing impatient with his doxy.

  For the other, she had lost Carolina’s favour.

  It had come about the day after Kells had sailed, and it had come about because all her life Gilly had hated cats. When she had first moved into the house, she had been standing idly in the kitchen, waiting her chance to snatch some of the hot fritters Cook was just taking from the fire, when Moonbeam had wandered in and strolled past Gilly.

  Gilly had kicked the cat away from her.

  Cook had turned just then and had seen Moonbeam going end over end to rise spitting and upset. ‘You do that again, Gilly,’ she warned, ‘and I’ll tell the mistress.’

  ‘Cat’s got no business in kitchens,’ mumbled Gilly.

  ‘This one has. She has the run of the whole house. And’ - Cook’s voice rose - ‘if I see you touch her again, I'll take a stick to you!’

  Gilly had beat a speedy retreat, and Moonbeam had avoided her ever since - until the morning after Kells had sailed away on the Sea Wolf.

  Carolina had been sitting disconsolately at her dressing table, combing her long hair and wishing herself dead, when Moonbeam, dashing up from downstairs, and Gilly, coming down from the attic, had both come to a halt just outside her door. Gilly had just asked, ‘Are you goin’ to the market today?’ and Carolina was about to answer her when Moonbeam had come flying up and, seeing Gilly standing there, had stopped short and backed away.

  Gilly, concentrating on the cat, had thought herself unobserved, for Carolina’s back was to her - but Carolina could see in the mirror how Gilly’s expression turned ugly and how, as Moonbeam tried to stand her ground - for the cat knew she had every right to enter Carolina’s bedroom and jump on her mistress’s lap - Gilly drew back her foot to kick her.

  ‘Gilly!’ The face Carolina swung to confront Gilly held an expression Gilly had not seen before, and her level tone held a cold warning. ‘If you kick that cat, I will personally tear those clothes from your back and set yo
u out in the street.’

  Gilly drew back. ‘I wasn’t about to - ’ she began to protest.

  ‘You were, don’t deny it!’ snapped Carolina. Her eyes narrowed. ‘I may have been wrong about you, Gilly. Perhaps you aren’t worth saving. But just so you don’t take revenge on Moonbeam when my back is turned, let me tell you if anything happens to that cat, if I find her hurt or limping or cowering somewhere, I will have you whipped and returned to those women whose clothes you stole.’ She studied Gilly who was shuffling her feet and looking scared. ‘Do we understand each other, Gilly?’

  Gilly mumbled something which might have been ‘yes.’

  ‘In the future,’ added Carolina, ‘you will assist Cook in the kitchen, unless Betts asks you to help her. You will no longer need to spend so much time on the second floor. Come here, Moonbeam.’

  Moonbeam darted past Gilly and jumped on to Carolina’s lap while Gilly retreated in stony fury. Gave herself airs, did this buccaneer’s woman! she was thinking. And all this commotion over a worthless cat! The next time she saw Moonbeam in the kitchen and when Cook’s back was turned, Gilly picked up a heavy pot, intending to hurl it at the cat and then claim she’d dropped it, but the sudden memory of Carolina’s warning deterred her: ‘If I find her hurt . . .’ Gilly had no desire to be returned to Sadie’s brothel where she’d stolen the clothes - those ugly bawds would have her hide, they would!

  Reluctantly she had put down the pot, and Moonbeam glided warily past her to look expectantly up at Cook, who laughed and gave the cat a morsel.

  With a scornful look at the two of them, Gilly had flounced away.

  She had, she told herself, needed time to think. For weeks now Jarvis had been after her to ‘get the necklace and be done with it.’ Indeed that had been his refrain every time she had managed to slip away to see him - and that wasn’t easy now. She had to pretend a headache or a stomachache and slink away to her own room before the house was locked up, then scuttle downstairs and get outside somehow, and, to avoid suspicion, she had to time her return so that she would appear to have wandered outdoors just after the doors were unlocked ‘to get a breath of fresh air after such awful pains all night long!’ If the two sturdy buccaneers who, along with Hawks, guarded the place, knew about Gilly’s nocturnal wanderings, they kept that knowledge to themselves. After all, to their minds she was but a saucy slip of a girl with a predatory smile, kept off-limits to them by a vigilant Hawks, who saw in Gilly dangers that the soft-hearted Carolina had not perceived.

  Gilly kept putting Jarvis off, insisting that the house was ‘too strict guarded’ for her to get the necklace. In reality she was searching for some sailor who would take her off the island with no knowledge of the necklace. So she told Jarvis, ‘I’m locked in nights so tight I can’t get out often like I used to. You’ll be seeing less of me until I can get my hands on the necklace.’

  Jarvis had growled because having Gilly in his bed was something he had grown used to on New Providence. ‘If tis too hard for ye, give it up and we’ll get us back to Nassau.’

  Gilly remembered all too well the helter-skelter life of New Providence Island. ‘Just be patient - I’ll think of something,’ she told Jarvis hastily.

  But two nights ago, slipping out, Gilly had strolled the waterfront and found the sailor of her dreams. Jack was young, fresh-faced, just off the sloop Prudence, and eager to believe anything Gilly told him. After one night of tossing on damp sheets in a waterfront dive, he would have done anything for her. It was easy for Gilly to talk Jack into persuading his captain to take her with him when he left ‘as soon as this cursed calm breaks and we get a wind,’ for she had promised to marry him on shipboard and sail with him back to the far-off Yankee port of Boston, where he promised her he’d leave the sea and help his brother till their little farm until he could build Gilly a house of her own.

  Gilly had given Jack a hypocritical smile. Boston wasn’t where she wanted to go but at least it was far away, and once there she could break enough gold off the necklace to pay for passage to England. And once in London she’d sell the stones and forget she ever knew ‘trash’ like Jarvis and the ardent young sailor who at that moment would have given his life for her. She’d become a ‘lady’!

  But she must get the necklace before the wind came up, before the Prudence sailed! She had been watching for her chance all morning long. And now at last, with Carolina gone to the captain’s walk above, she had it!

  ‘Where is Gilly?’ Cook wailed as Betts came into the kitchen. ‘She’s supposed to be helping me!’

  Betts shrugged. ‘She was carrying out the slops last I saw and not making a very good job of it.’

  ‘Sit you down here, Betts.’ Cook wiped the moisture from her perspiring brow and waved a long iron spoon at a wooden bench. Betts sat down. ‘We got to have a talk with the mistress about Gilly. She’s always whining she’s sick and running off to her room and we don’t see hide nor hair of her until the next morning when she comes in from outside, looking bleary-eyed. Half the time she claims she passed me on her way out, that I was woolgathering and didn’t see her - and you know that ain’t true!’

  ‘I think Gilly’s slipping out to meet someone,’ said Betts, who had had the same experience with Gilly. ‘Leastways, she moons around like she’s in love.’

  Cook snorted. ‘In love? Gilly? Not likely! To her kind one man is as good as another, so long as they give her trinkets!’

  Betts thought that might be so. ‘What’s that cooking?’ she asked Cook, sniffing the savoury odour that came from the big copper pot that hung from a chain in the fireplace.

  ‘Hawksbill and loggerhead stew,’ replied Cook, going back to stir desultorily the contents of the steaming pot. ‘With some bits of beef thrown in.’

  ‘Bits’ of beef would be right, thought Betts, fanning her hot face with her hand. For she suspected Cook of spiriting away the big cuts of beef that came to the house and selling them surreptitiously down at the market. Turtle, which was plentiful, was their main dish around here. And the mistress was so preoccupied these days she did not seem to notice what she was eating! She gave Cook a resentful look.

  ‘It’s too hot in here,’ she complained, rising. ‘I’ve got to get me to some other part of the house before I’m clear melted down!’

  ‘Wait, I’ll go with you,’ said Cook. ‘We can sit in the dining room. The mistress will be out on the roof, studying the sea for ships this time o’ day.’

  She followed Betts into the comparative coolness of the dining room where the green-painted walls seemed to speak of cool meadows far away.

  The two women seated themselves on two of the straight chairs that lined the walls, ready for extra guests.

  ‘D’you think we’ll all end up on a plantation up the Cobre?’ asked Cook, for like everybody else she had heard garbled gossip about Kells’s intentions.

  ‘I don’t know.’ Betts shook her head vigorously. ‘But Spanish Town can’t be half so hot as here!’ She kept on fanning her face.

  ‘Where’s Hawks?’ demanded Cook. ‘I haven’t laid eyes on him since breakfast and he usually comes into the kitchen for a mid-morning bite o’ whatever’s cookin’.’

  ‘Hawks has gone t’other side of town. Probably to see a woman!' Betts winked.

  Cook sighed. She’d had hopes of Hawks for herself - she liked big silent men. Unfortunately Hawks seemed to like slimmer, younger women. Men! She took out her vengeful thoughts on other men. ‘Those two buccaneers Captain Kells left to guard the place are just sittin’ on their haunches outside waitin’ to be fed, I’ll be bound - don’t never occur to either of them to do nothin’ to help us!'

  Betts nodded emphatically. She agreed with Cook that the extra guards were ‘lazy louts’ - especially since neither of them had seemed to notice the new green petticoat she had worn to attract their attention.

  They sat together and gossiped in the dining room, glad of the coolness, entirely unaware that instead of ‘carrying out the sl
ops’, Gilly was upstairs slipping into Carolina’s bedroom.

  Gilly’s bright eyes lit upon the curved-top trunk, which Carolina, her thoughts preoccupied with going up to the captain’s walk to scan the sea, had carelessly left unlocked.

  Overjoyed at being alone in Carolina’s bedroom at last, Gilly ran on tiptoe across the floor, flung the trunk open, and began rummaging inside. Beneath the lacy chemises, beneath the scarves and fans and gloves, beneath the petticoats and rosettes and ribands, she found what she was looking for: a silver-encrusted box of teakwood.

  She lifted the box out to the light, opened it and pulled out its contents excitedly from the dark red interior of the box. She held the necklace up, marvelling at the weight of its gold - for it was the first time she had touched it. Her avid gaze devoured the blood-red brilliance of the rubies, the white glitter of the diamonds. She ran caressing fingers over the necklace and licked her lips. Her breath came shallowly and her heart beat fast.

  She sat there staring at it, lost to the world.

  This was her future she was holding in her hands - a future that would let her shuck off men like Jarvis and that mewling boy. Jack, so humbly desperate for her favours. This would let her sneer at men - as all her life she had longed to do. This would let her kick them out of her bed! And more: This would buy her a fine town house and a coach and six! And servants! Her eyes glittered. If ever her servants forgot even once to call her ‘my lady’, she'd stripe their insolent backs with a whip! She’d do it with her own hands and have the satisfaction of hearing them wail! She ran her tongue over her lips, and her brown eyes held an unholy gleam. Transfixed by the wealth she was running through her fingers, she sat there on her haunches. Entranced, spinning daydreams - half evil, half-wonderful - of what she would do when she sold the necklace.