Kill-Devil and Water

by Andrew Pepper

  The house itself would have to be knocked down and rebuilt from scratch. Entire walls had collapsed, many of the ceilings had fallen in and large sections of the roof were gone; as Pyke wandered from room to room, he kept his sleeve up to his mouth to shield it from the choking residue of plaster and brick dust. He didn’t find Alefounder anywhere on the ground floor and the upper floor had been marooned by the partial collapse of the main staircase. Outside, Pyke continued his search of the grounds, including the counting house and, underneath it, the old slave dungeon, but the sugar trader was nowhere to be found.

  Back up at the great house, he found Josephine hunched over Charles Malvern’s body. When she finally looked at him, her eyes were watery and bloodshot and her face was streaked with tears.

  ‘I knew ’im when he was a babe; I held ’im in my arms and sung to ’im.’ She reached out and brushed some brick dust off his forehead.

  ‘This wasn’t an accident, was it?’

  She wouldn’t answer him and looked away.

  ‘They told you they’d spare him, didn’t they? No one’s going to mourn for Pemberton, are they? Not even his wife, I suspect. But in a strange kind of way, Charles was an innocent.’

  Josephine sat there staring down at Malvern’s face for a while, and when she did finally look up, her expression was as hard as dried wax. ‘If you want answers, ask her. Go to Accompong and ask her.’ She spat out this last word with particular venom.

  ‘Who?’ Pyke tapped her shoulder.

  ‘If you touch me again, you’ll regret it.’

  Pyke’s throat tightened and his jaw clenched. ‘Who do I ask for when I get to this place Accompong?’

  ‘You threaten me?’ This seemed to amuse her. ‘You think I scared of you ’cos you big and white?’

  Pyke looked down at her hunched, frail figure and sighed. ‘I just want a name and then I’ll leave you in peace.’

  But Josephine had started to sing a haunting melody whose words Pyke couldn’t quite grasp and whose meaning lay beyond him.

  He waited until she had finished. ‘Who put the eyeball in my bed?’ She gave him a proud, defiant stare. ‘I don’t know. I’d say one of the servants paid by Busha.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To scare you.’

  ‘Why would he want to scare me, if he’d already decided to kill me?’

  Josephine just shrugged. ‘Maybe they don’t know that. It’s how Busha frighten off all them other buyers.’

  Pyke waited for a moment. ‘Who should I ask for in Accompong?’

  Josephine closed her eyes and shook her head. When she opened her eyes again they were hard and black like pebbles. ‘Ask for Bertha. She Mary’s mother.’

  Isaac Webb was waiting for Pyke at the bottom of the hill, a few hundred yards up the track from the old boiling house, where they had parted ways the previous evening.

  The devastation was not as bad down there; the stable roof was still intact and Pyke could hear the snorting of horses.

  ‘Malvern’s dead. So is Pemberton.’ Pyke looked up into Webb’s eyes. ‘But why am I telling you this? You already know.’

  Webb’s stare drifted over Pyke’s shoulder. ‘Some folk reckon the storm was the worst they ever saw.’

  ‘The last I saw of them, Pemberton was out cold under the veranda and Malvern was wandering around on the lawn muttering to himself. This morning I found their corpses under a pile of plaster and brick rubble at the far end of the house. Someone had moved them there. You could see drag marks in the dust.’ Pyke paused. ‘Why did you have to kill Malvern? I mean, was it really necessary? Don’t you see? Eventually his father will just sell the land to some other buyer and you’ll be back where you started.’

  Webb considered what Pyke had said for a while, his expression fixed in concentration. ‘Can I ask you a question?’

  ‘If you like.’ They regarded each other in awkward silence.

  ‘What will it take for you to go home and forget about everything you seen here, forget about the Malverns, Busha, the storm?’

  ‘And Mary, too?’

  Webb looked at him and shrugged.

  ‘You loved her, didn’t you?’ Pyke took a step towards Webb and prodded him gently in the chest. ‘And yet you’re happy to see whoever killed her walk free?’

  ‘Mary dead and there ain’t nothing gonna bring her back.’ He walked a few yards along the track and motioned for Pyke to accompany him.

  ‘And what about Mary’s family? Her mother? Are they happy to see her murder go unpunished?’

  Webb turned around very slowly. ‘Mary ain’t got family.’

  Pyke nodded, as though he had expected Webb to say this, and casually removed the pistol that he’d tucked into his trousers. ‘This is just to protect myself.’ He registered Webb’s surprise and wondered whether he’d read the situation correctly. ‘You know. In case you have a notion to do to me what you did to Pemberton and Malvern.’

  Webb looked down at the pistol without changing his expression. ‘Those men died in the storm.’

  ‘And Alefounder?’

  ‘The trader?’ Webb hesitated. ‘I found his body in the house. Someone reckon Charles shot him. Don’t know why.’

  Pyke digested this news. Given what Charles Malvern had found out about the trader’s designs on his fiancée, Charles certainly had sufficient reason to kill Alefounder. ‘So where is his body? I didn’t see it when I searched the house this morning.’

  ‘I took care of it,’ Webb said, as though it wasn’t important. ‘Custos come here, see a man’s been shot, gonna be suspicious. Suddenly he might ask questions, wonder if Busha and Malvern really did die in the storm.’

  Pyke searched his eyes. Webb, perhaps under Harper’s direction, was clearing up the mess, making sure that no one could link them with the deaths of two white men. Pyke didn’t believe that they wanted to kill him as well but something in Webb’s manner made him suspicious. It was why he was pointing the pistol in Webb’s general direction.

  Guessing, he said, ‘You can tell Harper what you like. Tell him I escaped, tell him you killed me. But I’m going to take one of the horses and ride for Kingston. You have my word that you won’t ever see me again.’

  Webb looked at the pistol, frowning. ‘Why you think I want to kill you?’

  ‘I don’t know for a fact that you do but I’m not taking any chances.’ Pyke waited and then sighed. ‘Maybe Harper thinks I’ll go back to England and tell Silas Malvern what happened to his son, what really happened to his son, and about your plans for his estate. If it fell into disrepair and a buyer couldn’t be found, there would be nothing to stop people from squatting on the land.’

  ‘Harper knows you ain’t a friend of the old massa.’

  ‘But I’m white.’

  Webb noted this with a nod but didn’t say anything.

  Pyke met his stare. ‘Just now you asked what it would take for me to walk away, not say a word about this to anyone.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I have a young son in London. His mother died a few years ago. If anything were to happen to me, he’ll have no one. I know what that’s like and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.’

  Something in Webb’s face softened. ‘How old is he?’

  ‘Ten.’

  Webb nodded once, half closing his eyes. ‘My boy’s five.’

  ‘I’m going to saddle up one of Malvern’s horses and then you’re going to point me in the direction of Kingston.’

  ‘And Mary?’

  Pyke took his time; he wanted Webb to think he was seriously considering his question. ‘Like you just said, she’s dead and nothing is going to bring her back.’

  He walked up the path to the stables and emerged, a few minutes later, leading a black-and-white mare by the reins. Webb was waiting for him.

  ‘Far as Harper thinks, you dead. Means you don’t go nowhere near Falmouth.’

  So he’d been right after all: the big man had wanted him dead. Perhaps it didn’t mea
n very much; perhaps it was just a question of tying up loose ends. As if reading his thoughts, Webb shrugged and added, ‘It weren’t nothing personal.’ It was as forthcoming as he was prepared to be.

  Nodding, Pyke mounted the mare and took the reins. He didn’t tell Webb that he was heading for Accompong or that he knew about Mary’s mother, and briefly he wondered whether Josephine would own up to what she’d perhaps inadvertently revealed. What might Webb do if he knew Pyke wasn’t planning to go home after all?

  ‘Enough folk been killed.’ Webb’s eyes wrinkled at the corners. ‘You follow the track down past the boiling house and the old stone bridge and keep going straight. It bring you to the village. From there, ask for Ulster Spring or Albert Town and then Mand’ville. You get to Mand’ville, Kingston’s another day riding farther east. The whole thing take about three days.’

  As he rode off, Pyke still half expected the shot, and it was only when he’d crossed the river and passed the boiling house that he started to relax.

  The ride to Accompong took him all of that day and most of the next one; the silver dollars he’d taken from Malvern meant he had money to pay for food and shelter, for him and the horse, and the weather remained fair throughout. Currents of warm air carried John-crows effortlessly above the harsh, mountainous landscape and the lush, tropical valleys that plunged hundreds of feet down into fast-flowing rivers. The track, at times cut into the side of the mountain, took him higher and farther into unknown terrain. He kept to a slow pace, surprised to find that the damage from the storm lessened the farther inland he went, and when he stopped at tiny makeshift villages to ask for directions to Accompong, he was treated both as an oddity and with caution and respect. Along the way, he learned some of the history of his eventual destination. Together with a thousand acres of Cockpit country, Accompong had been ceded by the Crown some time in the previous century to the Maroons - runaway slaves who’d taken refuge in the mountains - after British soldiers had been ambushed and overpowered at a mountain pass. The terms of the treaty agreed at the time were still binding and as such Accompong and the surrounding land did not recognise British rule. ‘Your laws don’t mean nothing up dere,’ one man had told Pyke, sniffing the air. ‘Up dere, everyone free.’

  The woman could have been sixty or she could have been a hundred. She greeted him with a limp handshake and without getting to her feet. She sat in an old rocking chair in the shade of a mammoth cotton tree at the top of the village, her tiny wattle-and-daub hut with its straw-thatched roof and small garden just a few yards farther back down the hill. She listened carefully while Pyke explained who he was and why he’d come to see her but showed no emotion, even when he told her that her daughter, Mary, had been killed in London.

  For a while, after he’d said his piece, they sat across from one another, neither of them speaking. Some children had gathered nearby to inspect him and were giggling and pointing.

  ‘In our religion, we believe that when someone dies, their spirit returns to their homeland. But you see, we’ve been away from Africa too long now.’ She spoke, Pyke was surprised to find out, without even the slightest trace of an accent.

  ‘So you already knew your daughter was dead?’ Pyke waited. He had been told by one of the village elders that she was a renowned myalist and hence was to be treated with the utmost reverence.

  Bertha nodded. ‘Mary’s spirit has come home to me.’

  ‘Do you know how she died?’

  ‘I know men killed her.’

  ‘Men? As in plural?’

  She shrugged, as though the distinction wasn’t an important one.

  ‘She was strangled.’ Pyke studied her wrinkled, beatific face and felt an irrational anger swelling within him. ‘Her eyeballs were cut from her head.’

  This time Bertha’s expression did register dismay, and for a moment Pyke was pleased that he had been able to puncture her seemingly implacable façade. But then he remembered who he was talking to and felt a sharp rush of shame; this was the woman who had brought Mary into the world and he had knowingly rubbed her face in the horror of her daughter’s death.

  Finally the old woman shuffled forward in the rocking chair, her legs dangling down like a child’s. ‘Why did you come all this way?’

  ‘To Jamaica or Accompong?’

  ‘Both.’

  ‘I came to Jamaica because I thought your daughter’s killer had fled here from London.’

  ‘And were you right?’

  ‘No.’ Pyke hesitated.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Charles Malvern is now dead; so are his attorney, Pemberton, and a sugar trader from England called Alefounder. I believe it was part of a plot organised by a newspaperman, John Harper, and Mary’s former lover, a man called Isaac Webb, to take control of the Ginger Hill estate. I found one of Malvern’s servants, a woman called Josephine, weeping over his dead body. I think Malvern was murdered and his death blamed on the violent storms that passed across the island a few nights ago. When I asked her for an explanation, she just told me to come here and talk to you.’ Pyke looked up at the old woman. ‘Why would she say a thing like that?’

  But the woman didn’t seem unduly surprised by anything Pyke had said. ‘Josephine always did love that boy too much,’ she said, as though this were a mistake.

  ‘You know her?’

  Until this point Pyke hadn’t taken seriously the idea that there might have been some communication between Falmouth, Ginger Hill and Accompong - the distances were too vast and the arduous travelling conditions necessarily precluded Bertha’s involvement in the affairs at Ginger Hill - but suddenly he had to reassess this view; and as such, he wondered how safe he really was.

  Bertha nodded. ‘A long time ago, I used to work up at the great house at Ginger Hill as well. It’s how I learned to speak the King’s English.’ She smiled sweetly. ‘That’s right; there was a king on the throne at the time.’

  ‘What made you leave?’

  Bertha sat back in her rocking chair and closed her eyes. ‘You’re a very impatient man. Impatient and troubled.’

  ‘I’ve been shot at, chased, betrayed and almost killed again. I think I’ve earned the right to be impatient.’

  ‘Very well. Since you’ve come all this way, and since you’re trying to find the man or men who murdered my daughter, and since I sense you’re a good man, I’ll do my best to answer your questions.’

  Pyke smiled, pleased by this sudden change of attitude. ‘What made you leave?’

  She nodded politely. ‘Perhaps it would be better, or rather easier for me, if you weren’t so blunt.’

  Pyke acknowledged her point with a nod. ‘Did you know Charles’s father, Silas.’

  She nodded and smiled. ‘Yes, I did.’

  ‘And did you like him?’

  ‘Did I like him?’ She seemed amused by the question. ‘That’s rather like asking a mouse whether he likes the eagle that’s eating him.’

  ‘Was he a good master?’

  ‘I thought so - for a while.’

  ‘What changed your mind?’

  She looked at him, chewing her lips. ‘I assume you already know something about the family’s history. For example, that Silas’s wife, Bonella, apparently fell to her death down the staircase at Ginger Hill.’

  This made him sit up. ‘Are you saying she didn’t fall?’

  ‘That’s precisely what I’m saying.’ She smiled at his reaction. ‘More than that, I’m saying he had something to do with it.’

  ‘Malvern killed his wife?’

  ‘He wasn’t a bad man, as slave-owners go. There were, still are, many far worse planters on the island. But he was a jealous man and he had a temper. He was especially jealous of his brother, Phillip. You see, Phillip was everything he wasn’t: funny, warm, attractive. Phillip was also their father’s favourite. So Silas’s resentment towards his brother had been nurtured since childhood. But Silas was a complicated man; he wanted to do the right thing by his brother; he wanted to
treat him well; and even though Silas took over the estate when their daddy passed away, he made sure there was always a place for Phillip at the great house.’