Sunset

by Christopher Nicole

  She stood at the foot of the steps, where her father and her grandfather and all the Hiltons before them had each morning held their daily meeting with their staff before setting the machinery of the plantation into motion. The steps had fallen before the verandah, which itself sagged back into the rubble behind it.

  'Meg.' Alan had also dismounted. 'Be careful, Meg.'

  She was already clambering over the rubble, even in the gloom able to pick out the overturned billiards table, the grand piano from which all the keys had sprung like an army of musical ants, to lie around the instrument which had been their home, like so many tiny dead bodies.

  She slipped, and jarred her back, and still sitting, on what she realized had been one of the great iron-bound doors, she stared at Marguerite Hilton. The canvas had been torn from its frame, or the frame had been torn from the canvas, with the result that her face was somewhat bent and the wide, arrogant mouth appeared to be smiling. Oh, my God, she bought. They are all in there as well, all destroyed, all reduced to meaningless rubble. As Marguerite had been, in her own prime. No wonder she was smiling.

  She discovered she was weeping, great silent tears which rolled down her cheeks and dripped onto her torn blouse. Alan knelt beside her, put his arm round her shoulders, and she leaned against him. All gone, she thought. All gone. Everything Hilton gone.

  'Meg,' Alan said. 'We'll start tomorrow, rebuilding Hilltop. I'll get the men from my ship, and we'll...'

  ‘We goin' rebuild Hilltop, Captain,' Washington said. 'I goin' get them boys workin', and we goin'...'

  'Washington,' Meg cried. 'Oh, Washington. What happened!'

  'With Mistress Oriole?' Washington scratched his head. "Them boys did be too angry with she, Miss Meg. Is not only the quake. Is how she did treat you this time, is how ...' He sighed. 'But they didn't mean to kill she, Miss. You got for understand that. If they had mean to kill she, she would be dead.'

  Which was true enough, Meg supposed.

  Them boys only want for to keep Hilltop for you, Miss Meg,' Washington explained. 'Hilltop is our home, and you is our mistress, and so we goin' start rebuildin' this house.'

  'No,' she said.

  'But Meg...' Alan protested.

  'It will cost a fortune to rebuild Hilltop.'

  'But surely there will be government aid ...'

  'Not enough,' Meg said. 'Never enough. Besides ...' Her turn to sigh. 'It is finished. Oriole is right there. The Hiltons are dead.'

  'Meg...' His voice was uneasy.

  'Oh, ‘ am not mad, Alan. But it is a fact, isn't it? The Hiltons were dead long before the earthquake. Perhaps they died with Great-Grandfather. I think we have only been going through the motions, ever since. And now the plantation itself is destroyed ... do you really want to see it rebuilt?'

  ‘

  'I'm concerned with what you want, Meg. Then there's Richard and Aline ...'

  'There is money in the bank,' she said. 'Enough to complete their schooling, at the least.'

  'And what do you want to do, Meg?'

  She took Washington's hands. 'I was never a Hilton,' she said. ‘I was never a real successor to Marguerite and Susan, to Suzanne and Cartarette. I only tried to act the part, and suffered for it. But I'll be a Hilton now, Alan. We have more to do than prop up old buildings. I have my people to see to, to see them settled, to tell them they can split the plantation into smallholdings. Would you help me do that, Washington ? Will you be able to farm this land?'

  'Well, I mus' be able to do that, Miss Meg, if you want me.' He grinned at her. 'Them boys goin' be too happy to have Hilltop for their own. But Miss Meg ...'

  'Meg,' Alan said. 'By the terms of your father's will...'

  'I can never sell Hilltop, Alan. I know that. But I'm not selling it, am I? I'm abandoning it to Washington. Richard will agree. Believe me. He'll be grateful that he won't have to carry the burden of being a Hilton of Hilltop. And when we are finished here, we'll see if we can help in any way with the rebuilding of Kingston.' She squeezed his arm. 'You once said we only took from Jamaica. I'd like to give something back, just for once.'

  'And then?'

  She threw back her head, cleared hair from her forehead, and turned into his arms. 'Then, Captain McAvoy, I am going to be your wife.'

  THE END