Malvern greeted him red faced and out of breath. His thinning blond hair was matted to his pale scalp.
‘Squires?’ Malvern took his hand and shook it warmly, though the handshake itself was limp, like pressing a dead fish.
‘Call me Monty.’
‘Charles.’ Malvern let his hand go. He was flustered. ‘I’m afraid I wasn’t expecting you for another week.’
‘I know. I hope you don’t mind the intrusion. I left a little earlier than expected and my ship made better time than I could have hoped. I called in to see your attorney and he assured me you wouldn’t mind me calling on you unannounced.’ Pyke led the way down the hall, even though he didn’t know where he was going. It was important to establish his mastery from the start. The hall led to a large reception room furnished with sofas, chairs, an ottoman, stools, a mahogany bookcase and a matching side cabinet displaying fine china.
‘A bit scruffy but it’ll do, I suppose,’ he said, apparently to himself but loud enough so that Malvern could hear.
‘You’ll stay for a few nights, of course,’ Malvern said, trying to come to terms with this change of plan. ‘I’ll send someone down to Falmouth to pick up your luggage.’
Pyke thanked him and gave him the name of Mrs McAlister’s guest house; Harper had promised to furnish Pyke’s suitcase with apparel appropriate for a West Indian planter.
Malvern stood, hands on hips, muttering ‘Very good’ over and over to himself. He was a slight, insubstantial man with hunched shoulders, pinched cheeks and a pale, almost ghostly complexion. He had very little presence or charisma, and Pyke wondered about his dealings with Pemberton - which one of them really made the decisions. But the most remarkable thing about him was his lips, which were plump and almost purple in colour, as though he’d just eaten a bowlful of ripe blackberries. If Pyke had passed him in the street, he wouldn’t have paid him any attention, and Pyke wondered just how much of a disappointment he’d been to the father and grandfather who between them, according to Harper, had built the Ginger Hill estate into what it was.
The details regarding the Malvern family dynasty which Harper had furnished him with were, at best, sketchy. Pyke knew that Charles Malvern’s grandfather, Amos, had arrived on the island some time in the early 1770s, penniless but ambitious, but he had little idea how the man had risen from the position of bookkeeper and overseer to plantation owner in just a few years. According to Harper, Amos Malvern had been a cruel and greedy man; someone capable of doing whatever was necessary in order to further his own position. Amos found that the title of planter suited him and, although he didn’t have a particularly acute business mind, in those days it was difficult not to make money. Slaves from Africa were cheap and plentiful, the price of sugar was kept artificially high and demand was buoyant. But from the stories that Harper had told, it seemed that Amos’s limitations as a planter were more than compensated for by his insatiable sexual appetite. In wedlock, he sired two children, Silas and Phillip, before his wife died from yellow fever. But though he never remarried, he’d had countless other children with numerous mistresses, white and black, and even in old age, he remained an incorrigible goat. When he’d finally passed away, fittingly from the ravages of syphilis, it was rumoured that as many as twenty of his progeny, nearly all mulattos apart from Silas and Phillip, had attended the funeral.
Silas had taken over the plantation shortly after the turn of the century and as a serious, cautious young man, entirely different from his irascible father, he was the one who’d turned it into a serious commercial prospect. Under Amos’s elder son the yield of raw sugar per acre trebled, as did the profits. And while Amos had, by all accounts, acted in a highly capricious manner with his slaves, fawning over them when the mood took him and then savagely whipping them if he felt they weren’t displaying sufficient devotion, Silas treated them as workers first and slaves second. Realising that a contented workforce was also a productive one, he built a new hospital on the grounds of the estate, doubled their rations of salt fish, gave them better provision grounds and allowed them additional time to work their own patches. He also instituted a system of redress whereby his slaves had a forum in which to complain to him personally about excessively harsh treatment meted out by the estate’s overseers.
Silas had married well, wedding the daughter of a neighbouring estate owner, and when his father-in-law passed away, this estate and another that he had bought for cash were swallowed up into the Ginger Hill empire, making him the largest and wealthiest slave-owner in the western part of the island. His wife had given him two children; Charles, the eldest, and Elizabeth, who was, by all accounts, his favourite. Indeed, until tragedy struck, many believed that Silas, and for that matter the whole Malvern family, had been blessed by God himself.
Harper didn’t know the exact details of the tragedy that had ended the life of Silas’s wife. The incident had taken place some twenty years earlier and the coroner at the time had recorded the death as ‘accidental’. According to his report, Bonella Malvern had fallen to her death, either down the great house’s staircase or directly over the first-floor banisters. Charles and Elizabeth would have been young children at the time. Afterwards, no one, not even the house servants, talked about the tragedy, and the funeral had been a small, very private affair. According to those who knew him, Silas had never really recovered from losing his wife but took solace in his daughter’s companionship. Harper didn’t know what Silas thought about Charles Malvern but speculated that their relationship hadn’t been a good one. Ginger Hill had been spared from the violence that had swept through much of the western part of the island following the Christmas slave uprising in 1831, but by this time Silas had already decided to sell up and make a new home in England. Harper told Pyke that many blacks believed the great house was haunted; that Bonella’s spirit lived on and roamed about the rooms and corridors. Some even believed that the whole family had been cursed. Harper didn’t know where or how these rumours had started but he did know people, black people, who refused to go anywhere near the great house or its grounds.
Silas had eventually sold four of the five estates that made up his total holdings on the island and shortly afterwards had left for England, together with Elizabeth, to begin a new life in London. Apparently Charles had wanted to remain in Jamaica and had persuaded his father to retain Ginger Hill, but in recent times something had happened to change Charles’s mind, and for almost a year he had been trying to find a buyer for the great house and five hundred acres of land, so he could follow his father and sister to London. Harper told Pyke that Charles lacked his father’s intelligence and drive and that the estate had been running at a loss for the three years since Silas’s departure. Apparently there had been numerous potential buyers, some serious prospects, but no one had yet made Malvern a ‘reasonable’ offer. This, Harper said with a grin, meant that he was now desperate to sell. Harper also explained that one of the prospective buyers had narrowly avoided being killed - he didn’t know the exact details - and another had left the estate, and the island, apparently too traumatised to speak about his experiences.
‘I was born in this house, Mr Squires, and to be perfectly honest, I never believed I’d leave it, at least not of my own volition.’
They were sitting in wicker chairs on the large covered veranda that overlooked the garden below and beyond, to the cane fields and thick forest of trees that covered the low conical hills in the distance. The smell was that of a garden gone to seed; the sickly sweetness of dead flowers combined with the perfumed scent of wild jasmine and honeysuckle. The light had faded, seemingly in a matter of minutes, and now wave after wave of fireflies, brilliant purple in colour, swept down into the valley beneath them. Pyke sat, quietly taking in the view. From where they were sitting, it was difficult to believe there was another human being on the island.
‘Call me Monty, please,’ Pyke repeated, loosening his collar. He had bathed and was wearing a white linen shirt he’d borrowed from hi
s host. ‘Why do you want to leave, if you don’t mind me asking?’
Malvern appeared not to have heard Pyke’s question. ‘I always used to believe there were two types of people on the island, if you didn’t count the blacks,’ he said, staring out into the inky blackness. ‘Those of us who were born here and who love this place with a passion, and those who come here to make as much money as possible in the shortest time and never even come close to regarding it as their home.’ His mood was wistful, even melancholic.
‘If you love this place as you claim to, why do you want to sell it and move on?’
‘Ah, the all-important question.’ Malvern’s expression was hidden by the darkness. ‘You like to get straight to the point, don’t you? It’s a skill my father always tells me I don’t possess.’ He appeared momentarily upset by this criticism. ‘To tell you the truth I’m engaged to be married. And since my beloved fiancée has declared that she wants to marry and live in London - in fact, she has already departed these shores to plan our wedding - I’m afraid my time here is coming to an end.’
‘Congratulations, sir.’ Pyke stared out across the valley. ‘You must love her very much, if you’re prepared to give up all of this.’
So Malvern didn’t yet know what had happened to his fiancée, which meant that his sister, Elizabeth, hadn’t arrived on the island. Briefly Pyke wondered where she was and how long it would be before she arrived and broke the news to Malvern.
Pyke had expected to dislike Charles Malvern but now, sitting in the man’s company, he found himself warming to his affable manner. As a result, his knowledge of what had taken place in London sat heavily on his conscience.
‘I shall be sorry to part with this place, of course, but if one truly loves another person, one must be willing to make a sacrifice.’
‘You mentioned just now that your fiancée has gone ahead to London to plan your nuptials?’ Pyke hesitated. ‘I know very little about that city but what little I do know tells me I’d want to be certain my fiancée was well looked after.’ He smiled awkwardly. ‘But I’m sure you know this, sir, and will have made all the necessary arrangements to ensure her safety. A chaperone, perhaps?’ He was thinking about Arthur Sobers.
‘A chaperone?’ The colour had risen in Malvern’s cheeks. ‘I made arrangements, of course, but didn’t insist upon a chaperone. Do you think me neglectful?’
‘Of course not,’ Pyke said quickly. ‘I’m certain your fiancée is safe and looking forward to you joining her soon.’
‘Indeed so.’ Malvern stood up, apparently mollified, and stretched his legs. ‘I hope you don’t mind. There will be others joining us for dinner. Pemberton, whom you’ve already met, and his wife, Hermione, and Billy Dalling, who’s one of the bookkeepers here at Ginger Hill. It’ll be a merry little gathering, I hope, but if you’ll excuse me I need just a few minutes to prepare myself.’
As Pyke watched Malvern amble into the house, he tried to imagine how such a placid, unassuming man could satisfy a woman as beautiful as Mary Edgar. But he was rich and white and that was perhaps sufficient to explain the attraction. Earlier in the conversation, Malvern had tried to paint himself as one of a new breed of men forever altered by their exposure to the lush, tropical environment and by the rigours of establishing their dominance over it, but in actuality he came across as peculiarly English, belonging to a particular class of expats determined to recreate a version of ‘England’ in whichever environment they found themselves.
Dinner was a stiff, awkward affair in which Pemberton dominated the conversation, to the point where Pyke almost forgot that Malvern was in the room. In fact, Malvern said very little throughout the three courses; as did Dalling, the bookkeeper, who contented himself with a number of furtive glances across the table at Pemberton’s young wife, Hermione. It didn’t take much imagination to guess why Dalling might be interested in Hermione Pemberton; there were two very apparent and sizeable reasons staring back at him across the table and the lady didn’t appear to be shy about showing them off. For his part, Dalling was attractive in a swarthy, roguish way - certainly more so than Michael Pemberton - and Pyke could easily see how the two younger members of the dining party might fall into each other’s arms.
Sweating from having eaten too much of the roast pork and imbibed too much of the Madeira, Pemberton seemed oblivious to the sexual tension that sparked between Dalling and his young wife. Instead he spent the best part of the evening interrogating Pyke on the best way to make rum; whether to slake the cane juice with fresh lime in order to make it granulate. He also wanted to pick Pyke’s brain about the most appropriate way to treat former slaves and how to manage the rotation of cane fields. Hermione Pemberton asked a seemingly innocuous question about the parties and society events in Antigua; to which Pyke replied that he didn’t have time to socialise. That drew an approving nod from Pemberton, but across the table Dalling raised his eyebrows. ‘I’d always heard that Monty Squires was the last to leave any party.’ The bookkeeper waited for Pyke to look at him and then smiled. ‘But people get older and change their ways, don’t they?’
Pyke didn’t think anything of it until a little later in the meal when the subject turned to the role of the British army in keeping the peace, and Dalling, who, as far as Pyke could tell, had once served in the army himself, asked which regiment he’d belonged to. This time he studied the bookkeeper’s face more carefully. Dalling was younger than Pyke but with the same muscular build, olive skin and dark-coloured hair. But as far as Pyke was concerned that was where the similarities ended; Dalling’s nose was pointy and thin, his eyes were too far apart, his forehead protruded too far over his eyebrows and his eyes were almost translucent in colour, reminding Pyke of staring into a basin of water.
The first time he asked, Pyke ignored the question and asked Pemberton how he kept order on the estate - which produced a lengthy monologue about reward and punishment, with the emphasis on the latter rather than the former.
‘I’m quite sure I know a fellow in the Fourteenth Dragoons. That was your regiment, wasn’t it?’ Dalling ran his finger down a scar that cut his left cheek diagonally in two.
They were seated opposite one another, with Pemberton just to Dalling’s right, and this time he too took an interest in the bookkeeper’s question. Pyke’s expression remained composed but he could feel the perspiration dripping down his back. Dalling knew something; that much was beyond doubt.
‘Perhaps you do, sir, but I have a terrible memory for names and an even worse one for faces.’ He looked towards Pemberton and Malvern. ‘And I do find reminiscences about the old regiment terribly dull.’
After that, Hermione intervened and persuaded Dalling to join her for some air on the veranda, leaving Pyke, Pemberton and Malvern to smoke their cigars and drink the rest of the brandy. More tedious conversation about the ‘nigger problem’ ensued, dominated by Pemberton, and it was only after he’d risen from the table and announced he had to ‘attend to’ his wife that Pyke could steer the conversation back to the subject of Mary Edgar.
‘When we talked before dinner, I didn’t mean to imply that London was, by definition, a dangerous city. I hope I didn’t cause offence. I’m sure that living here carries just as many risks ...’
Malvern’s hollow cheeks were flush from the Madeira and brandy he’d drunk at dinner. ‘Never a truer word spoken, sir,’ he muttered, before realising he’d perhaps said too much.
‘Do you mean to say it is dangerous here?’
‘Dangerous is maybe the wrong word. But please, sir, credit me with more intelligence than to believe you are entirely unaware of our current difficulties.’
‘I’ve heard, of course, that some of the workers are striking over rates of pay.’
Malvern nodded glumly. ‘It’s not all the blacks’ fault, of course. Some planters have been demanding extortionate rents, almost as much as they offer to pay in wages, and a few have even forced those that can’t or won’t pay from their homes and their pro
vision grounds. It’s poisoned the whole atmosphere and driven the blacks up into the mountains, and also these damned free villages that missionaries like Knibb have been establishing with money donated by congregations in England. In his dotage, I’m told my father has corresponded with Knibb and is on good terms with him so I wouldn’t want to disparage the man, but he’s certainly given the blacks ideas above their station. Owning their own homes and gardens? The idea is absurd. Let them have their freedom, that’s what I say, but they need to work, too.’ He paused. ‘Most of our workforce is refusing to harvest the cane, and unless an agreement is reached in the next few days, the whole crop will be ruined. You know, I offered them almost two and a half shillings a day but they still turned me down, demanded three. Three shillings per day? I’d be ruined within a week.’
‘Give them three and they’d demand four.’ The voice came from somewhere behind them. Startled, they both turned around and saw Pemberton standing there. He had been listening to their conversation.
‘But why not compromise at two and three-quarters and at least make sure the cane is harvested?’ Pyke looked at Malvern rather than Pemberton. ‘Can you afford for the whole crop to be lost?’
This perception seemed to upset Malvern. He stood up quickly - too quickly perhaps, because the sudden exercise after a heavy dinner seemed to make him dizzy - and said he was going to retire and that Pemberton could answer any questions about the management of the estate. But when Pyke looked behind him for the attorney, he too had gone, and for a few moments Pyke sat there at the empty table, contemplating the scene he had just witnessed and what it suggested about the health, or otherwise, of the estate.
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