by Eli Easton
I spoke with as much disdain as I could muster, which was considerable. I sounded positively haughty to my own ears. I was taking a chance, though. My eldest brother, Rupert Hastings, was well-known. He was the House Captain of Games, and as heir to the Earldom, he had that sheen of untouchable success that all Etonians, as well as the rest of the world, bowed and scraped to. But he was not the bullied boy’s fag-master, nor mine, and his tea had nothing whatever to do with what was happening in the hall. I hoped these boys didn’t know that.
The chance paid off. The three boys exchanged wary glances, and with a final flick to the boy’s ear, they sauntered off, leaving us alone.
“You didn’t have to do that. Thank you,” the boy said. He sounded British but rough in his speech. He was from the North, I guessed, working class. His hair had fallen forward over his eyes, and with his hands full, he could do nothing about it.
I quelled an urge to brush it back for him. “All in a day’s work,” I said, rather stupidly.
“I suppose the tea isn’t very good,” he admitted sadly. “My fag-master is Wheaton, and he always makes a sort of face when he drinks it. But he’s too polite to say so.”
“Let me see.” I put my own tray on the floor and lifted the lid off his pot. It was the color of piss. “Hmm. Did he ask for it weak?”
“No.” The boy blushed. “My father imports coffee, among other things. We never drink tea at my house. Now if Wheaton liked coffee, I’d be on my game. I make the best you’ve ever tasted.”
I smiled at his boasting. “I’ve never had coffee. I’ll like to take you up on that sometime, see what it’s like. But for now, why don’t I show you how to make a proper tea?”
“Would you?” he looked surprised. “Why?”
“Must do right by poor Wheaton,” I said, though I had no idea who Wheaton was. “I’m Colin, by the way.”
I was rewarded with a huge grin. He had a small gap between his two front teeth that was rather endearing. “I’m Richard. Richard Wesley.”
“Come on then, Richard Wesley. Let’s make some tea.”
London, August 1, 1870
My Dear Colin,
You know how to give a fellow a heart attack, don’t you? Five days have gone by since I received your letter about attending that Obeah ceremony—are you truly mad, old chap? And since then, nothing. You’ve spoiled me with a letter a day since you left, sometimes two, and then, after such an explosive revelation, you leave me hanging?
Right then, you’ve done it now. I’m utterly terrified. I booked my passage. I leave today, and I hope to be there by the beginning of September. I’m sailing on the Libertine II, so if you are not, in fact, dead, please meet me at the docks.
I hate that I’ll have no chance of hearing from you on the journey. If not for the fact that I was praying for a letter, I might have left two days ago. But I can’t wait any longer. I’m sending a telegram to Kingston as well, in case this letter arrives later than I do.
I pray you are soon showing me the sights of Jamaica and we can laugh about this. I may even refrain from punching you, if only you are well and abjectly repentant. Please, Colin. Please be safe.
Your friend always,
Richard
AT THE beginning of August, I received a telegram.
Arriving in Kingston early September on Libertine II. Stop. Letter to follow. Stop.
Richard
I was not surprised that my lack of correspondence would drive my friend to such an extreme, though I was surprised it had only taken five days. In fact, I had not put pen to paper to write to him since the ritual. I was unable to even think about him without my whole being seizing up with indecision. I did not know what I wanted to say to him or how to say it.
I was waging an internal battle.
The bird was winning.
It was the full heat of August. In the evenings I sat in the parlor, doors and windows open to catch a breeze, and indulging myself with scotch, a fanning servant, and chips of ice bound in a cloth for my forehead. I burned inside and out until I was sure I would be consumed. Often Major Pivot would come to play cards and, sometimes, his brother Lester too.
West Falls, the Pivots’ plantation, was managed by Lester Pivot. He was a small man with a compunction to evangelize to the natives and, if the gossip was to be believed, a weakness for his native housekeeper. John Pivot, whom everyone called Major, was the younger brother, in his late forties. He was a small, round man with an impressive mustache. He had apparently lost his wits during his service in the Second Boer War and been sent to Jamaica to be hidden away like a dark family secret. He believed himself to be an actor and would burst into song at the slightest provocation.
At least he provided a distraction and he was a decent tenor—for a madman.
“I have sought, but I seek it vainly, That one lost chord divine,” he sang as he sorted his cards. “Which came from the soul of the organ, And entered into mine.”
“It’s your turn,” I said, having to remind him to draw every single time.
And then there was the bird. I’d had it moved from my bedroom to the parlor, and there it sat in the evenings, watching me. It was hungry, always. The servants fed him crickets and beetles and little fish they bought from the fishmonger. I watched the bird gulp them down by the dozen, its black beak sharp and its gullet bottomless.
And the red eyes—always those red eyes!
Every time I looked at the bird, I thought of the ceremony. Had Tiyah-Erzulie really pulled something from inside me and given it to the bird, or had it all been a trick? Was the bird me? Was I it?
I hated the creature. I feared it. I ordered the servants to give it anything it wanted. I would have gotten rid of the thing, but I was afraid of what might happen to me if I did. No way could I kill the winged monstrosity.
So in the evenings, I drank, and played rummy with genial Major Pivot, and I alternated between ignoring the bird and staring at it.
As for its part, the bird had no such division in its nature. It was always staring at me.
After that night, there had been no laughing remarks or sly looks behind my back amongst the servants as I had feared there would be. It was as if nothing had changed. The young native man I thought had been my lover was gone for about a week, and then he reappeared with the other laborers. He did not approach me, nor I him, though at times my eyes drifted to him of their own accord. Even Tiyah went back to her work and did not try to speak with me again, though I could sometimes feel her watching me, wondering.
No one came to me in the night again. I was both relieved and… disappointed.
As the days passed, my fear and confusion lessened under the dullness of routine. I could pretend nothing had happened, but it had. And I was left alone to sort it out. It was between myself and the bird.
The nights were the worst. Whatever had been done to me, it had changed me physically. I would lie in my bed, my very skin restless and craving, my body slick with the swamping heat of lust. I could not stop the memory of that night, the feeling of that man, or fantasies of Richard in his stead. I imagined Richard’s mouth on me, Richard laying heavily on top of me, his cock hard against my hot flesh. No matter how often I brought myself relief, it was never enough, only a momentary reprieve. It was like an addiction.
Had I really wanted this? To feel passion? Now I was being driven mad by it.
During the day, I drove myself hard in the sun so I didn’t have to think. But in the parlor in the evenings, I could not escape it, especially once I’d received the telegram.
Richard was coming. He was on his way even then.
We’d been the best of friends since the day I’d taught him how to make tea at Eton. We’d spent six years together there and another four at Cambridge, where we had rooms side by side.
He’d been such a good-hearted boy, young Richard. He was the son of a self-made businessman from Manchester, and often had to take sly comments about being lowborn and nouveau riche. It did not
matter one whit to me. His hair was a light brown, the color of a robin’s back, and his cheeks as ruddy as a robin’s breast. He was slender and tall and as hopeless at sports as I was, but he loved to walk. The boy could walk for hours and hours, and we’d often follow the River Cam out of Cambridge until we could see hedgerows. Hedgerows, said Richard, were when you knew you were in the country. And how he loved the country.
I missed his shy smile and his laugh, which was open and bright. I missed his whispered confessions—people he liked and didn’t like, what he really thought of his parents, our professors, our lessons. I remembered a week when I’d been deathly ill with a stomachache and he’d brought me water and biscuits and sat by my side all evening, reading to me to take my mind off the pain.
Together, we didn’t need any other friends, though one would orbit around us from time to time before moving on. We were content just the two of us.
Once when we were fifteen, Richard slipped into my room in the middle of the night. He crawled into my bed, claiming a nightmare. We lay on our sides, facing one another. There was a flush on his cheek and a look in his eyes that was nothing like fear. And after we’d stared at each other for a long time, he leaned forward and pressed his lips to mine, warm and hesitant. Then he lay back and watched me for a response.
My heart had pounded in my chest until I thought I might die. I remembered hating the hope on his face. I’d felt a blind panic. But I merely rolled my eyes and told him to “stop kidding around” and go back to bed. He went pale and left without a word.
But I knew in my heart what he wanted… he wanted us to kiss and touch each other, there in the dark. Maybe I knew, deep inside, that he’d always wanted it, wanted me that way, intimately.
Did he? Or was I wrong? Was he as incapable of conjuring up such a fiery and subversive idea as I was, in the cold and pristine landscape my mind had once been?
Had once been—and was no more.
We’d never spoken of it again. He never kissed me again.
I wouldn’t have let him; I think he knew that. I had a wall around my heart. I loved Richard more than I’d ever loved any other person. He was part of my soul. But… there was no way I could be that. My family… my father… our friends… the very fabric of our society forbade it. They had laws about such things, for God’s sake. I was not an outcast! All I wanted was to be successful, worthy, respectable. I would do well in Jamaica so that I could return to England and take up my rightful place, my place among the best of society, be a credit to the Hastings name.
One night, after Major Pivot had gone home and I’d drank too much, I threw my glass in a rage. Crystal and scotch shattered against the wall just to one side of the birdcage.
“Stop staring at me!” I screamed at the bird.
It flapped its wings in alarm. Its wingtips struck roughly against the sides of the cage, hurting it. I felt bad immediately. After it settled, the bird turned its back on me for the first time and sat huddled on its perch, head down.
Blast it. It only made me feel worse.
~8~
“TIYAH! COME here.”
She and the others were harvesting the cane in our first crop, heavy, back-breaking work. She stood and shielded her eyes, looking over at me. I motioned for her to come closer.
When she stood beside my horse, I looked down at her, utterly composed. “After the day’s work, you will come speak to me at the house, in the study.”
“Yes, Missah,” Tiyah said, betraying no opinion on the matter. She went back to work.
I MADE her wait in the study while I bathed and changed in my room, disgusted by the day’s sweat. I needed all my English armor to deal with her—soap, pomade, and a clean cravat.
I entered the study and ordered Philip bring us cold tea, offering Tiyah a glass as well. Then I dismissed him. I looked at her, trying to find a way to begin.
“I see de bird, he is well,” she said.
I frowned. “Yes.”
“Tis a good ting.” She began to drink from her glass and then drained it in one long draught. She put it on my desk and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “No?”
I stared at her. Her eyes were curious. For a moment, I pictured my hands around her neck. Not a healthy level of aggression, I admit. I cleared my throat and looked away from her. “I want you to remove this… whatever it is you’ve done to me.”
She said nothing.
I looked at her. “I can’t go on this way,” I insisted. “You must take it back.”
She sat forward in her chair, her brow troubled. “Give back a gift from de loa?” She scoffed like she didn’t believe me, like I was playing a prank.
“Yes, damn it! I can’t—” I made myself take a breath. Richard was arriving in a few weeks, and I knew I’d never be able to control myself around him. I couldn’t take this terrible need anymore. I had to finish things here and get back to Elizabeth, and I couldn’t, not with this hunger eating me up. “It’s disturbing my sleep, my mind. I’m engaged to be married, for God’s sake! I don’t want this!”
“I know what tis you want.” Tiyah pinned me with her too-knowing gaze. “You want a man in your bed. But you don want to want it. So you push it deep inside you, swallow it down like poison. But dis who you are, Missah. A frog who try to be a bird—he will end badly, no?”
I was shocked at her words, that she would say it out loud. You want a man in your bed. I was filled with terrible anger made worse by humiliation. I leaned forward on my desk, trying to impress upon her the force of my will.
“I. Saved. Your. Daughter. You take this off me, or I will not be responsible for what I do to you—to the entire village!”
What I meant by the threat, I didn’t know—death and destruction, I suppose. I’d never go through with it, but I was at the end of my rope. I saw disdain flicker across her face before she schooled herself into a cold expression and leaned back in her chair.
She might as well have screamed at me, You’re like all the rest after all. I didn’t care. I hated her, hated myself.
“Maybe I take it away,” she said coldly. “But if you insult Erzulie like so, you never feel passion again, Missah. Not even what you feel before.”
“I don’t care,” I said, straightening my spine.
“So it be. Tomorrow night, I come for you.”
IT WAS like having the same nightmare twice. The drums began, and soon Tiyah stood in my front yard in the dark, dressed all in white and beckoning to me. She led me into the trees with no light to find our way. Her form glowed like a ghost ahead of me.
Only two things were different this time. First, Tiyah had insisted I bring the bird, so I carried the large cage awkwardly at my side. And secondly, I felt less fear of what was to come and more anxiety to simply get it over with.
Erzulie would take my passion from me? I would have none at all?
Good!
I remembered what it had been like before, how the ideas that had skirted around the edges of my brain had been easy to shut out, like a vague itch I could ignore. I remembered how my body had been far less demanding then, so much less… ripe, lush, hungry. I’d been innocent, like a child who doesn’t yet know what it means to be a whore.
Could I get back to that naiveté? And if not to innocence, to numbness at least?
I had to. I had a life waiting for me in English society with Elizabeth, and I refused to be the sort of degenerate who dragged male servants off to dark corners. I refused to be a disgrace.
Yet I wanted so much. And it was addictive to want like that, heady. Once the desire was gone, would I miss it? Or would it be like a man with one leg who learns how to just get on with his life?
The drums—louder and louder—shivered down my spine. The sharp, cloying scent of the smoke filled my nostrils and sank into my brain. Their effect on me was amplified this time, by the heat that already lived under my skin. I struggled to control it and stay true to my purpose.
THE CEREMONY was much like the one be
fore. We arrived at the circle with the center pole. There were fewer people this time, but still enough to fill the clearing. The man who had handled the bird the first time took the cage from me and vanished with it.
Tiyah shook her head, a frown on her face. “I know not if Erzulie come. She not pleased.”
With that, Tiyah moved into the crowd and I was left to my own devices.
What had Tiyah meant by that? Would she refuse to lift this curse from me?
Dancers whirled past me, caught up in the beat of the drums. And now I did feel their looks and their disdain, eyes flashing at me as they went by. Maybe they all knew why I was there, to refuse Erzulie’s gift. Well, I didn’t care. It was not their life being ruined. I would do what I’d come to do. I pushed toward the center pole, wanting to get it over with.
As I moved through the dancers, my heart beat harder and harder. I felt a tingle of dread, and it quickly became a knot of fear, like a fist squeezing my heart.
No passion, ever. Not even what you had before.
Through the beat of the drums, I felt Richard there, like a ghost following right behind me. I even turned to look, the sensation was so strong. But, of course, he wasn’t there.
Except he was. Because what I was doing right now felt like a betrayal of him in a way.
Richard, fifteen years old, leaning forward to kiss me with his soft, dry mouth in my schoolboy’s bed.
He’ll still be my friend. He will always be my friend. We’ll just never have… that.
Never.
But we never would have had it anyway. Even if he did want me like that, it’s not something I ever would have allowed myself to acknowledge. So what difference did it make?
I stood in front of the pole, and Tiyah was there, waiting. Her eyes were rolled back in her head, showing only the whites, and she stood rigid, staring at me. In her hands was a knife.
For a moment I thought she meant me harm, that in refusing her gift, I’d angered her to the point of murder. But she only thrust the knife forward, handle first, urging me to take it.
