Revenant Eve

by Sherwood Smith

  A tall, slender man with black skin and silver hair said, “Three dead, and two ran off into the jungle. We’ve posted a watch. Was that Papillon aflame?”

  “Yes, but we took the schooner, and I’m waiting on Mimba. I hope the felucca is ours. We’ll get something for that, if Saint-Domingue isn’t in flames itself.”

  “How could pirates find our cove?”

  “I overheard talk on the shore, during the fight. It was Ruiz again,” Anne said, her breath hissing as she lowered herself into a chair. “Oh, my back.”

  “Ruiz, le scélérat!” Aurélie exclaimed, running up to her mother’s knee. “Maman, you are hurt!” She gazed in dismay at her mother’s bloody forearm.

  “Some basilicum powder, if it isn’t spoilt, and powder of lead if it is, and I shall be well blooded if fever poisons my veins. It is nothing, child. But bide here, for I mean to talk to you before I retire, in case the fever does come on me.”

  “I thought the pirate Ruiz was locked up,” Aurélie exclaimed.

  “So did we all, but he must have escaped in the trouble at Saint-Domingue. This much we learned just now. He took that Swedish tobacco-ship out there, which is how he got past Port Royal.”

  “But who’s in the other ships?”

  “His new allies,” Anne said, hissing again. “Tie that off, will you, child?”

  Aurélie knelt at her mother’s chair and swiftly tied the bandage, as she said fretfully, “I thought we were finished with pirates.”

  “There will always be pirates, it comes to my mind,” Anne said. “Where there’s gold, there will be pirates to try to take it. I think Ruiz was on Papillon when the magazine blew, but enough of his rats got away that they might come back. We’ll be ready. ’Tis not to trouble you. Another matter lies before us.” She tapped the ribbon-tied paper with her free hand.

  “What is that? A letter? Did someone write to you, Maman?”

  “Indeed yes, a most prodigious letter, which has been waiting in Kingston this half year or more, and I didn’t know, or I would’ve gone into the city earlier. Ah, ’tis prodigious tidings, from no less than our great Kittredge relations in England. It seems that news reached them of your Uncle Thomas’s death and the destruction of Kittredge Plantation, and we are invited to take ship to England and live with your Uncle William Kittredge.”

  “Fie! We do not want them.”

  “Family is one of those treasures it would be foolish to throw away,” Anne said slowly. “I’m thinking of sending you.”

  “Why? I wish to be here with you, and Tante Mimba, and Nanny Hiasinte, and Cousin Fiba. I don’t want these strangers, or their England. I love being René, and having the boat, and exploring the coves and diving into the sunken city.”

  “I know. I thought you might have these things a while longer.” Anne leaned forward, grimacing in the uncertain candlelight, and kissed her daughter smackingly on the forehead. Then her smile vanished. “But as I told you when we first changed you from Aurélie to René, ’tis the way of nature, and one day you must be a girl again. I thought ’twould wait upon our being safely established back here on Jamaica again. But there are legalities tying up the plantation that I hadn’t foreseen. And meanwhile, here’s this letter with its invitation.”

  “To take me away from you? That is an evil letter.”

  “This letter invites me to England as the indigent daughter of James Kittredge. ’Tis kindly meant, child. The Colonial Office received instructions via a land agent to sell the plantation. It seems my cousin William Kittredge is to inherit because my father and brother died without male heirs. I wish I’d gone into Kingston earlier, but ’tis useless to repine. And also,” Anne said with heavy irony, “if I can convince Government House that my brother left the plantation to my husband, what confounds a mere daughter of an exiled son might be encompassed by the rich widow of the Marquis de Mascarenhas. That is going to take time. You, at least, can go to safety and certain comfort.”

  Memory interposed itself. I was sitting in a café with Beka Ridotski, who said, Have you ever looked at Tony’s black eyes and wondered what ancestor is peering back at you? There is some evidence that Aurélie was not the daughter of a Spanish marquis but the illegitimate granddaughter of an exiled Englishman and a runaway slave from the Caribbean.

  “There is no comfort without you, and I do not want safety,” Aurélie cried.

  “Everyone wants safety.” Anne sighed. “As I said, there will always be pirates. However, this discussion must wait upon Mimba’s rejoining us, for we all must decide together. Get a meal into you first.”

  Aurélie shook her head. “Grandmère Marie-Claude will not want me to go to England. She hates the English! She said always, she wished to take me to France.”

  “No one would go to France now,” Anne said. “They would cut off your head the moment you stepped on shore, just as they no doubt have done with your Tascher and de Beauharnais relations.”

  Beauharnais? I wondered. Wasn’t that the name of Josephine’s first husband?

  “What does Nanny Hiasinte say?” Aurélie asked, turning from her mother to her aunt.

  There was a step behind them, and Mimba appeared. She laid her baldric on the side table, then straightened up, wincing. “Nanny has said you must come to the mountain. She has made the obeah, and you are to go.”

  Aurélie sighed. “I will do whatever Nanny says.”

  Anne said, “I smell pumpkin frying. Go eat.”

  FIVE

  IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN HALF AN HOUR LATER, or half a day. Or even half a week in their time, though for me it felt like seconds later. I can only say for certain that it was daylight, and I bobbed along like a balloon on a string following the three figures as they walked up a narrow trail surrounded by spectacular greenery.

  Saving Dobrenica required first getting answers to questions. My hopes were as high as Aurélie’s as she skipped and chattered.

  White birds darted and dove at the worms washed out by the rain. Aurélie ran among the birds, arms high, as they skirled around her. Then she dashed up the narrow path, the vivid red poinciana, the yellow poui, and the extraordinary blue lignum vitae breaking the patterns of green. Aurélie seemed oblivious to the wild, sumptuous color on either side of her, responding only when vivid tiny shapes hummed and darted close to her—dragonflies, and hummingbirds of an amazing variety.

  The two women walked more soberly, Mimba using a gentleman’s stick sword as a cane, and Anne holding her bandaged forearm close. The bright morning sun was a lot kinder to Mimba than to Anne, who looked older than she probably was, her freckled skin was so sun-damaged. But the deep lines on either side of her eyes somehow enhanced the intelligence and good humor that I saw in her expression as she trudged slowly up the trail.

  My hearing was improving. I could make out the quiet chuff chuff of their steps on the trail, the rustle of the greenery, and the hoot and trill of unseen wildlife. The three paid little attention, pausing only when the distinctive high tootle of the Abeng horn sounded ahead or behind them. Someone was signaling as they climbed into the hills above the cove.

  “There’s the Kindah,” Aurélie cried. “We are at Accompong!”

  Accompong, I remembered from my college history course, was one of the main Maroon towns in the mountains of Jamaica. So the kids had been diving off of Fort Charles, over the rooftops of the two-thirds of Port Royal that had sunk in a mighty quake in 1692.

  We entered a cottage with a steeply slanted thatched roof mostly made of palm fronds, set under a tamarind tree. It was open on three sides. The sun was fast sinking when Aurélie dashed inside, crying, “Nanny! Nanny!”

  “Manners,” Anne called hoarsely.

  Aurélie caught herself up short, and politely greeted everyone she saw, who greeted her in return as they paused in decorating the chamber with bright red silk scarves and fresh flowers.

  I looked into faces of varying colors, from Anne’s sun-scorched pale to light brown, reddish bronze, and very
dark. From the skin colors and bone structures of the people gathered I guessed they were Africans and Spaniards as well as northern Europeans, with youngsters of various genetic mixes.

  Most of those faces looked back at Aurélie with love, and some with sadness, though that expression might have been carved in, the silent evidence of the brutal life of slavery: I glimpsed the puckered scars of brands on some, though others’ skin had the smoothness of freedom, or else the scars were hidden under the bright clothes.

  The center of attention was a very old woman whose lined face was darker even than Mimba’s. As Aurélie ran up to kiss her, she smiled and held out gnarled hands.

  “Where is the regal?” Aurélie exclaimed. “Is it time for music?”

  “You will not play tonight. You will dance, for tonight is yours.” The husky old voice was tender, almost reedy.

  The chamber filled with life in a fantasia of hues. Scarves, silks, belts, every type of personal decoration enhanced the effect as people and animals crowded in. There was even a snake curling languorously on a silken cushion.

  Gradually my perceptions widened as the music began. The regal, ancestor of the organ, began an entrancing melody, given a dancy beat by drums. Threading through the melody strummed a lute and a twelve-stringed harp. The musicians began weaving the people together into harmony via dance. The mesmerizing rhythms, with counterpoint singing, and the explosion of scarlet, molten gold, cobalt, and viridian, fulgent with life, intensified exponentially, until it seethed through me, overwhelming me to the point of pain. I sensed others around me, a shifting, blending luminescence of beings, as Aurélie danced happily among the other children.

  Nanny Hiasinte had been sitting in the midst of the celebrants, her eyes closed, as she rocked gently to the rhythms. Now her eyes opened slowly, their expression not vacant, but distant, as if she had been called from a place of equipoise between the past, the now, and the possible future.

  She lifted her gaze and focused on me.

  I knew she saw me: my nerves prickled though my body was miles and years away. Her voice was low and rough, her French accent singsong, and old-fashioned in the way Anne’s English was old-fashioned. “I called upon Ayizan, but you are not one of the lwa, the spirits who serve le bon Dieu. Your body lives. Your soul is bound to Aurélie by blood, and by magic. You are called to walk in the form of a duppy to guard this child, Aurélie.”

  “Duppy?” I tried to say—and she heard me.

  “You both are called away from your homes. It has been and will be. In French we say vous-deux.”

  You two, I translated into English.

  “The future you come from is fog to me,” Nanny Hiasinte said. “My understanding is that the future is not bound as is the past, but I called for one from her future in order to secure her survival if I could.”

  So here was the person who had yanked me out of my life. I could understand her wanting to protect Aurélie by reaching into Aurélie’s future, but a month before my wedding, I didn’t want to be the one. Anyway, I didn’t know anything about kids—I was an only child, and had never even been a babysitter.

  But before I could ask her to pick someone else, she went on, her voice thinned to a thread as if this conversation took the strength out of her. “Much can change, but this I know: You have carried the Navaratna necklace with its stones of great power, as will Aurélie.”

  That caught me totally by surprise. “The what?” I asked. So far, the only famous necklace I’d worn was something Alec had loaned me the night of the masquerade ball, when I was pretending to be Ruli. But he hadn’t mentioned any magical powers.

  “No one else can see it go from me to her.” She closed her eyes.

  Another blink and the light of dawn edged the palms and fruit trees and ferns with goldy-green fire. Nanny Hiasinte sat upright in her chair. Before her knelt Aurélie, her head on the old woman’s lap. Anne and Mimba stood at either side of the old woman’s chair.

  “You are called away from here,” Nanny said to Aurélie, low and tender. “Your fate lies across the sea. But you will have three things to take with you: our love, a gift, and a guide.”

  “What guide?” Aurélie asked tearfully, completely hoarse.

  “I have bound a duppy to you as your guide. You must learn to listen, and she will speak to you, and you to her.”

  “I have a duppy of my own?” Aurélie lifted her head.

  “She is there to protect you as much as she can, but because she is a duppy, she cannot act in the physical world. So you must listen.”

  “But I don’t want to go away.”

  Anne knelt down by her daughter. “Child, it is best. Your father died in one sea battle, your brother in another when he was your age. Your sister died in the hurricane when this plantation was ruined, before you were born. When that letter came, my first thought was, if you go, then one of my children might live.”

  Aurélie wiped teary eyes, and Anne went on. “My father always used to talk about England, how peaceful it is. The ordered virtue of its gardens, which never know the infernal intrusion of pirates or hurricanes. Your life will know prodigious improvement in England. I shall see to that.”

  Mimba laid her hand on Aurélie’s curly head. “Nanny has spoken. What she says, must be.”

  “I want you to go, too,” Aurélie cried to her mother.

  Anne winced, and Mimba pulled her to her feet. They started out of the cottage.

  Nanny stretched out a gnarled hand toward Aurélie. “Bide a moment, child.”

  Anne and Mimba withdrew, leaving Aurélie standing with Nanny, and me hovering invisibly nearby.

  “You must go, Aurélie. It is to be. But it is not to be for your mother,” Nanny said. “Do not make it more painful for her.”

  Aurélie cried, “My Maman, is she in danger? I can feel it, she has the fever.”

  “The fate of this fever I do not see. I see only that your paths must diverge here. I have called to the lwa for aid and guidance, and you have been sent your own duppy to guide you. And now for the gift I promised, which will protect you from harmful spirits and spells.”

  Aurélie fretted. “I do not want them! Harry says the English call our ways heathen, and devil-worship. He even says bad things about my grandmother Marie-Claude’s priests. Why I must go to such a place?”

  “There are good and bad among them. Just as there are good and bad among us.”

  “So these Kittredges are not evil?” Aurélie asked.

  “I do not know them. I do not see them. But people who reach so very far to find their family? That is not an evil action,” Nanny said.

  Aurélie gave a tiny nod.

  “Your mother wishes for you to go live among these Anglais, and it is natural for a mother to wish her child to know the ways of her people. It might come to pass that the Anglais will wish to change your ways, even your name,” Nanny said. “Names can be put off and put on, you will find, like the wealthy change their clothes. You are still you, whatever name you wear. Do you comprehend?”

  The child ducked her head, then gulped on a sob.

  “Then with my gift come three things, as I once heard from my grandmother in Africa.”

  Aurélie bent her head, listening.

  “First, remember that you own yourself. There are many ways to own and be owned, not just on the auction block. Never sell yourself, for a chosen bondage is harder to escape than the chains of the oppressor. I will add, to remind you, that you are connected by blood to the great Boukman, and to Queen Nanny of the Windward Maroons. They are great people.”

  Aurélie assented with the air of one who knows these facts.

  “Second, it might come to pass that your English family will want to baptize you. They will teach you their ways. Take what is good, for that is part of the great Creole. You understand, child?”

  “I know what Creole means,” Aurélie exclaimed as she knuckled tears from her eyes. “It is like the two kinds of French. There is the kind that I must s
peak with Grandmère Marie-Claude and the family on Saint-Domingue, and there is the French that we speak, that Tante Mimba said is made of words from French and Spanish and Akan and Igbo tongues. I like that French best, for it is quick, and pretty, like the doctor bird.”

  “You have a quick ear, the ear of the musician, child,” Nanny said. “The great Creole unites all faiths as one under le bon Dieu.” She pronounced the French for “God” with an accent that sounded more like Bondje. “But you might have to keep your understanding hidden.”

  Aurélie bobbed her head, looking troubled. “I know. Grandmère was so very angry when Cousin Fiba talked of praying to lwa to help le bon Dieu hear us.”

  “Your third thing is the gift itself. It is a secret thing, to keep hidden. It is very old, older even than our family forced here to these islands. It is older than our family brought to Africa, for it is from a woman who traveled out of far Siam to marry an African prince. And her foremothers were from another part of the world altogether, so you will see.”

  Nanny opened her hands. She disclosed a worked chain of gold with bright stones set into it at intervals. Aurélie stared, marveling, for each stone was a different color from the next. “It is called the Navaratna.”

  I stared. I had definitely never seen that necklace before.

  Nanny’s forefinger touched the center stone. “So it was said in the Sanskrit: this ruby represents the sun. It is your center.” She moved on, chanting as she touched each stone. “Red Coral for Mangala, the red star, an emerald for Budah, the green star, son of the moon, a yellow sapphire for Deva-guru, father-star, a diamond for Shukra, the white star, a blue sapphire for Shani, the ring-star, Gomedaka,” she touched a ruddy stone that looked like a garnet, “for Rahu, when the moon is on the rise, and a Cat’s Eye for Ketu, when the moon is descending.” With that, she clasped the necklace around Aurélie’s neck, and tucked it inside her shirt, so that it was completely hidden. “There are those who murder and cause strife to steal and sell such stones, but far more powerful are the charms woven into them, with love, and loyalty, and good will. It surrounds you as the stars surround us, sheltering and protecting the good spirits who watch over those who strive to be pure in heart.”