pesthole berths,” he told me privately. “If they got coupled in there to start wi’, we’d never pry them out. And the thought of takin’ a maidenhead in a hammock—”
“Quite,” I said. I poured more vinegar on his head, smiling to myself. “Very thoughtful of you.”
Now Jamie stood by me on the beach, smelling rather strongly of vinegar, but handsome and dignified in blue coat, clean stock and linen, and gray serge breeks, with his hair clubbed back and ribboned. The wild red beard was a bit incongruous above his otherwise sober garb, but it had been neatly trimmed and fine-combed with vinegar, and stockinged feet notwithstanding, he made a fine picture as father of the bride.
Murphy, as one chief witness, and Maitland, as the other, were somewhat less prepossessing, though Murphy had washed his hands and Maitland his face. Fergus would have preferred Lawrence Stern as a witness, and Marsali had asked for me, but both were dissuaded; first on grounds that Stern was not a Christian, let alone a Catholic, and then, by consideration that while I was religiously qualified, that fact was unlikely to weigh heavily with Laoghaire, once she found out about it.
“I’ve told Marsali she must write to her mother to say she’s wed,” Jamie murmured to me as we watched the preparations on the beach go forward. “But perhaps I shall suggest she doesna say much more about it than that.”
I saw his point; Laoghaire was not going to be pleased at hearing that her eldest daughter had eloped with a one-handed ex-pickpocket twice her age. Her maternal feelings were unlikely to be assuaged by hearing that the marriage had been performed in the middle of the night on a West Indian beach by a disgraced—if not actually defrocked—priest, witnessed by twenty-five seamen, ten French horses, a small flock of sheep—all gaily beribboned in honor of the occasion—and a King Charles spaniel, who added to the generally festive feeling by attempting to copulate with Murphy’s wooden leg at every opportunity. The only thing that could make things worse, in Laoghaire’s view, would be to hear that I had participated in the ceremony.
Several torches were lit, bound to stakes pounded into the sand, and the flames streamed seaward in tails of red and orange, bright against the black velvet night. The brilliant stars of the Caribbean shone overhead like the lights of heaven. While it was not a church, few brides had had a more beautiful setting for their nuptials.
I didn’t know what prodigies of persuasion had been required on Lawrence’s part, but Father Fogden was there, frail and insubstantial as a ghost, the blue sparks of his eyes the only real signs of life. His skin was gray as his robe, and his hands trembled on the worn leather of his prayer book.
Jamie glanced sharply at him, and appeared to be about to say something, but then merely muttered under his breath in Gaelic and pressed his lips tightly together. The spicy scent of sangria wafted from Father Fogden’s vicinity, but at least he had reached the beach under his own power. He stood swaying between two torches, laboriously trying to turn the pages of his book as the light offshore wind jerked them fluttering from his fingers.
At last he gave up, and dropped the book on the sand with a little plop!
“Um,” he said, and belched. He looked about and gave us a small, saint-like smile. “Dearly beloved of God.”
It was several moments before the throng of shuffling, murmuring spectators realized that the ceremony had started, and began to poke each other and straighten to attention.
“Wilt thou take this woman?” Father Fogden demanded, suddenly rounding ferociously on Murphy.
“No!” said the cook, startled. “I don’t hold wi’ women. Messy things.”
“You don’t?” Father Fogden closed one eye, the remaining orb bright and accusing. He looked at Maitland.
“Do you take this woman?”
“Not me, sir, no. Not that anyone wouldn’t be pleased,” he added hastily. “Him, please.” Maitland pointed at Fergus, who stood next to the cabin boy, glowering at the priest.
“Him? You’re sure? He hasn’t a hand,” Father Fogden said doubtfully. “Won’t she mind?”
“I will not!” Marsali, imperious in one of Ermenegilda’s gowns, blue silk encrusted with gold embroidery along the low, square neckline and puffed sleeves, stood beside Fergus. She looked lovely, with her hair clean and bright as fresh straw, brushed to a gloss and floating loose round her shoulders, as became a maiden. She also looked angry.
“Go on!” She stamped her foot, which made no noise on the sand, but seemed to startle the priest.
“Oh, yes,” he said nervously, taking one step back. “Well, I don’t suppose it’s an impt—impeddy—impediment, after all. Not as though he’d lost his cock, I mean. He hasn’t, has he?” the priest inquired anxiously, as the possibility occurred to him. “I can’t marry you if he has. It’s not allowed.”
Marsali’s face was already bathed in red by torchlight. The expression on it at this point reminded me strongly of how her mother had looked upon finding me at Lallybroch. A visible tremor ran through Fergus’s shoulders, whether of rage or laughter, I couldn’t tell.
Jamie quelled the incipient riot by striding firmly into the middle of the wedding and placing a hand on the shoulders of Fergus and Marsali.
“This man,” he said, with a nod toward Fergus, “and this woman,” with another toward Marsali. “Marry them, Father. Now. Please,” he added, as an obvious afterthought, and stood back a pace, restoring order among the audience by dint of dark glances from side to side.
“Oh, quite. Quite,” Father Fogden repeated, swaying gently. “Quite, quite.” A long pause followed, during which the priest squinted at Marsali.
“Name,” he said abruptly. “I have to have a name. Can’t get married without a name. Just like a cock. Can’t get married without a name; can’t get married without a c—”
“Marsali Jane MacKimmie Joyce!” Marsali spoke up loudly, drowning him out.
“Yes, yes,” he said hurriedly. “Of course it is. Marsali. Mar-sa-lee. Just so. Well, then, do you Mar-sa-lee take this man—even though he’s missing a hand and possibly other parts not visible—to be your lawful husband? To have and to hold, from this day forward, forsaking…” At this point he trailed off, his attention fixed on one of the sheep that had wandered into the light and was chewing industriously on a discarded stocking of striped wool.
“I do!”
Father Fogden blinked, brought back to attention. He made an unsuccessful attempt to stifle another belch, and transferred his bright blue gaze to Fergus.
“You have a name, too? And a cock?”
“Yes,” said Fergus, wisely choosing not to be more specific. “Fergus.”
The priest frowned slightly at this. “Fergus?” he said. “Fergus. Fergus. Yes, Fergus, got that. That’s all? No more name? Need more names, surely.”
“Fergus,” Fergus repeated, with a note of strain in his voice. Fergus was the only name he had ever had—bar his original French name of Claudel. Jamie had given him the name Fergus in Paris, when they had met, twenty years before. But naturally a brothel-born bastard would have no last name to give a wife.
“Fraser,” said a deep, sure voice beside me. Fergus and Marsali both glanced back in surprise, and Jamie nodded. His eyes met Fergus’s, and he smiled faintly.
“Fergus Claudel Fraser,” he said, slowly and clearly. One eyebrow lifted as he looked at Fergus.
Fergus himself looked transfixed. His mouth hung open, eyes wide black pools in the dim light. Then he nodded slightly, and a glow rose in his face, as though he contained a candle that had just been lit.
“Fraser,” he said to the priest. His voice was husky, and he cleared his throat. “Fergus Claudel Fraser.”
Father Fogden had his head tilted back, watching the sky, where a crescent of light floated over the trees, holding the black orb of the moon in its cup. He lowered his head to face Fergus, looking dreamy.
“Well, that’s good,” he said. “Isn’t it?”
A small poke in the ribs from Maitland brought h
im back to an awareness of his responsibilities.
“Oh! Um. Well. Man and wife. Yes, I pronounce you man—no, that’s not right, you haven’t said whether you’d take her. She has both hands,” he added helpfully.
“I will,” Fergus said. He had been holding Marsali’s hand; now he let go and dug hastily in his pocket, coming out with a small gold ring. He must have bought it in Scotland, I realized, and kept it ever since, not wanting to make the marriage official until it had been blessed. Not by a priest—by Jamie.
The beach was silent as he slid the ring on her finger, all eyes fixed on the small gold circle and the two heads bent close together over it, one bright, one dark.
So she had done it. One fifteen-year-old girl, with nothing but stubbornness as a weapon. “I want him,” she had said. And kept saying it, through her mother’s objections and Jamie’s arguments, through Fergus’s scruples and her own fears, through three thousand miles of homesickness, hardship, ocean storm, and shipwreck.
She raised her face, shining, and found her mirror in Fergus’s eyes. I saw them look at each other, and felt the tears prickle behind my lids.
“I want him.” I had not said that to Jamie at our marriage; I had not wanted him, then. But I had said it since, three times; in two moments of choice at Craigh na Dun, and once again at Lallybroch.
“I want him.” I wanted him still, and nothing whatever could stand between us.
He was looking down at me; I could feel the weight of his gaze, dark blue and tender as the sea at dawn.
“What are ye thinking, mo chridhe?” he asked softly.
I blinked back the tears and smiled at him. His hands were large and warm on mine.
“What I tell you three times is true,” I said. And standing on tiptoe, I kissed him as the sailor’s cheer went up.
PART NINE
Worlds Unknown
53
BAT GUANO
Bat guano is a slimy blackish green when fresh, a powdery light brown when dried. In both states, it emits an eye-watering reek of musk, ammonia, and decay.
“How much of this stuff did you say we’re taking?” I asked, through the cloth I had wrapped about my lower face.
“Ten tons,” Jamie replied, his words similarly muffled. We were standing on the upper deck, watching as the slaves trundled barrowloads of the reeking stuff down the gangplank and over to the open hatchway of the after hold.
Tiny particles of the dried guano blew from the barrows and filled the air around us with a deceptively beautiful cloud of gold, that sparked and glimmered in the late afternoon sun. The men’s bodies were coated with the stuff as well; the runnels of sweat carved dark channels in the dust on their bare torsos, and the constant tears ran down their faces and chests, so that they were striped in black and gold like exotic zebras.
Jamie dabbed at his own streaming eyes as the wind veered slightly toward us. “D’ye ken how to keelhaul someone, Sassenach?”
“No, but if it’s Fergus you have in mind as a candidate, I’m with you. How far is it to Jamaica?” It was Fergus, making inquiries in the marketplace on King’s Street in Bridgetown, who had gained the Artemis her first commission as a trading and hauling vessel; the shipment of ten cubic tons of bat guano from Barbados to Jamaica, for use as fertilizer on the sugar plantation of one Mr. Grey, planter.
Fergus himself was rather self-consciously overseeing the loading of the huge quarried blocks of dried guano, which were tipped from their barrows and handed down one by one into the hold. Marsali, never far from his side, had in this case moved as far as the forecastle, where she sat on a barrel filled with oranges, the lovely new shawl Fergus had bought her in the market wrapped over her face.
“We are meant to be traders, no?” Fergus had argued. “We have an empty hold to fill. Besides,” he had added logically, clinching the argument, “Monsieur Grey will pay us more than adequately.”
“How far, Sassenach?” Jamie squinted at the horizon, as though hoping to see land rising from the sparkling waves. Mr. Willoughby’s magic needles rendered him seaworthy, but he submitted to the process with no real enthusiasm. “Three or four days’ sail, Warren says,” he admitted with a sigh, “and the weather holds fair.”
“Maybe the smell will be better at sea,” I said.
“Oh, yes, milady,” Fergus assured me, overhearing as he passed. “The owner tells me that the stench dissipates itself significantly, once the dried material is removed from the caves where it accumulates.” He leapt into the rigging and went up, climbing like a monkey despite his hook. Reaching the top rigging, Fergus tied the red kerchief that was the signal to hands on shore to come aboard, and slid down again, pausing to say something rude to Ping An, who was perched on the lowest crosstrees, keeping a bright yellow eye on the proceedings below.
“Fergus seems to be taking quite a proprietary interest in this cargo,” I observed.
“Aye, well, he’s a partner,” Jamie said. “I told him if he’d a wife to support, he must think of how to do it. And as it may be some time before we’re in the printing business again, he must turn his hand to what offers. He and Marsali have half the profit on this cargo—against the dowry I promised her,” he added wryly, and I laughed.
“You know,” I said, “I really would like to read the letter Marsali’s sending to her mother. First Fergus, I mean, then Father Fogden and Mamacita, and now a dowry of ten tons of bat shit.”
“I shall never be able to set foot in Scotland again, once Laoghaire reads it,” said Jamie, but he smiled nonetheless. “Have ye thought yet what to do wi’ your new acquisition?”
“Don’t remind me,” I said, a little grimly. “Where is he?”
“Somewhere below,” Jamie said, his attention distracted by a man coming down the wharf toward us. “Murphy’s fed him, and Innes will find a place for him. Your pardon, Sassenach; I think this will be someone looking for me.” He swung down from the rail and went down the gangplank, neatly skipping around a slave coming up with a barrowload of guano.
I watched with interest as he greeted the man, a tall colonial in the dress of a prosperous planter, with a weathered red face that spoke of long years in the islands. He extended a hand toward Jamie, who took it in a firm clasp. Jamie said something, and the man replied, his expression of wariness changing to an instant cordiality.
This must be the result of Jamie’s visit to the Masonic lodge in Bridgetown, where he had gone immediately upon landing the day before, mindful of Jared’s suggestion. He had identified himself as a member of the brotherhood, and spoken to the Master of the lodge, describing Young Ian and asking for any news of either the boy or the ship Bruja. The Master had promised to spread the word among such Freemasons as might have occasion to frequent the slave market and the shipping docks. With luck, this was the fruit of that promise.
I watched eagerly as the planter reached into his coat and withdrew a paper, which he unfolded and showed to Jamie, apparently explaining something. Jamie’s face was intent, his ruddy brows drawn together with concentration, but showed neither exultation nor disappointment. Maybe it was not news of Ian at all. After our visit to the slave market the day before, I was half-inclined to hope not.
* * *
Lawrence, Fergus, Marsali, and I had gone to the slave market under the cranky chaperonage of Murphy, while Jamie called on the Masonic Master. The slave market was near the docks, down a dusty road lined with sellers of fruit and coffee, dried fish and coconuts, yams and red cochineal bugs, sold for dye in small, corked glass bottles.
Murphy, with his passion for order and propriety, had insisted that Marsali and I must each have a parasol, and had forced Fergus to buy two from a roadside vendor.
“All the white women in Bridgetown carry parasols,” he said firmly, trying to hand me one.
“I don’t need a parasol,” I said, impatient at talk of something so inconsequential as my complexion, when we might be near to finding Ian at last. “The sun isn’t that hot. Let’s go!”
Murphy glowered at me, scandalized.
“Ye don’t want folk to think ye ain’t respectable, that ye don’t care enough to keep yer skin fine!”
“I wasn’t planning to take up residence here,” I said tartly. “I don’t care what they think.” Not pausing to argue further, I began walking down the road, toward a distant murmur of noise that I took to be the slave market.
“Yer face will…get…red!” Murphy said, huffing indignantly alongside me, attempting to open the parasol as he stumped along.
“Oh, a fate worse than death, I’m sure!” I snapped. My nerves were strung tight, in anticipation of what we might find. “All right, then, give me the bloody thing!” I snatched it from him, snapped it open, and set it over my shoulder with an irritable twirl.
As it was, within minutes I was grateful for Murphy’s intransigence. While the road was shaded by tall palms and cecropia trees, the slave market itself was held in a large, stone-paved space without the grace of any shade, save that provided by ramshackle open booths roofed with sheets of tin or palm fronds, in which the slave-dealers and auctioneers sought occasional refuge from the sun. The slaves themselves were mostly held in large pens at the side of the square, open to the elements.
The sun was fierce in the open, and the light bouncing off the pale stones was blinding after the green shade of the road. I blinked, eyes watering, and hastily adjusted my parasol over my head.
So shaded, I could see a bewildering array of bodies, naked or nearly so, gleaming in every shade from pale café au lait to a deep blue-black. Bouquets of color blossomed in front of the auction blocks, where the plantation owners and their servants gathered to inspect the wares, vivid amid the stark blacks and whites.
The stink of the place was staggering, even to one accustomed to the stenches of Edinburgh and the reeking tween-decks of the Porpoise. Heaps of wet human excrement lay in the corners of the slave pens, buzzing with flies, and a thick oily reek floated on the air, but the major component of the smell was the unpleasantly intimate scent of acres of hot bare flesh, baking in the sun.
“Jesu,” Fergus muttered next to me. His dark eyes flicked right and left in shocked disapproval. “It’s worse than the slums in Montmartre.” Marsali didn’t say a word, but drew closer to his side, her nostrils pinched.
Lawrence was more matter-of-fact; I supposed he must have seen slave markets before during his explorations of the islands.
“The whites are at that end,” he said, gesturing toward the far side of the square. “Come; we’ll ask for news of any young men sold recently.” He placed a large square hand in the center of my back and urged me gently forward through the crowd.
Near the edge of the market, an old black woman squatted on the ground, feeding charcoal to a small brazier. As we drew near, a little group of people approached her: a planter, accompanied by two black men dressed in rough cotton shirts and trousers, evidently his servants. One of them was holding the arm of a newly purchased female slave; two other girls, naked but for small strips of cloth wrapped about their middles, were led by ropes around their necks.
The planter bent and handed the old woman a coin. She turned and drew several short brass rods from the ground behind her, holding them up for the man’s inspection. He studied them for a moment, picked out two, and straightened up. He handed the branding irons to one of his servants, who thrust the ends into the old woman’s brazier.
The other servant stepped behind the girl and pinioned her arms. The first man then pulled the irons from the fire and planted both together on the upper slope of her right breast. She shrieked, a high steam-whistle sound loud enough to turn a few heads nearby. The irons pulled away, leaving the letters HB in raw pink flesh.
I had stopped dead at the sight of this. Not realizing that I was no longer with them, the others had gone on. I turned round and round, looking vainly for any trace of Lawrence or Fergus. I never had any difficulty finding Jamie in crowds; his bright head was always visible above everyone else’s. But Fergus was a small man, Murphy, no taller, and Lawrence, no more than middle height; even Marsali’s yellow parasol was lost among the many others in the square.
I turned away from the brazier with a shudder, hearing screams and whimpers behind me, but not wanting to look back. I hurried past several auction blocks, eyes averted, but then was slowed and finally stopped by a thickening of the crowd around me.
The men and women blocking my way were listening to an auctioneer who was touting the virtues of a one-armed slave who stood naked on the block for inspection. He was a short man, but broadly built, with massive thighs and a strong chest. The missing arm had been crudely amputated above the elbow; sweat dripped from the end of the stump.
“No good for field work, that’s true,” the auctioneer was admitting. “But a sound investment for breeding. Look at those legs!” He carried a long rattan cane, which he flicked against the slave’s calves, then grinned fatly at the crowd.
“Will you give a guarantee of virility?” the man standing behind me said, with a distinct tone of skepticism. “I had a buck three year past, big as a mule, and not a foal dropped on his account; couldn’t do a thing, the juba-girls said.”
The crowd tittered at that, and the auctioneer pretended to be offended.
“Guarantee?” he said. He wiped a hand theatrically over his jowls, gathering oily sweat on the palm. “See for yourselves, O ye of little faith!” Bending slightly, he grasped the slave’s penis and began to massage it vigorously.
The man grunted in surprise and tried to draw back, but was prevented by the auctioneer’s assistant, who clutched him firmly by his single arm. There was an outburst of laughter from the crowd, and a few scattered cheers as the soft black flesh hardened and began to swell.
Some small thing inside me suddenly snapped; I heard it, distinctly. Outraged
Voyager Page 78
