‘I’ll pay you. Enough to buy Cinnamon. More.’
‘There is a point through which a man journeys from which there is no path to return. Much like the Middle Passage. We are past that now.’
‘They will know when they find my body. They’ll know Drake wasn’t the killer. My wife will demand answers. They’ll come searching for you.’
‘No, they will expect you to be burned.’
I shrank from him, but there was nowhere left to go. He pressed the iron against my chest. I heard hissing, smelled my flesh burning. Then a pain so pure, so white, there was nothing else in the world. I heard myself screaming. I bucked against my chains. Scipio repeated his question calmly, and when I did not respond, he pressed the rod against my upper arm. I screamed again.
‘There are other places we can try. The pit of the arm, the testicles. It is an art, knowing how much pain a man will take. On the plantations, the first time they made me torture a brother African, I killed him without meaning to. I lit a fire under him, as I did to Moses Graham. Only I burned him too much, and his heart gave out. I was flogged for destroying my master’s property. After that, I learned fast.’
I heard these words distantly. Every part of me was fixed upon the task of not telling him where Cinnamon was. Even if I couldn’t save my own life, I could deny him what he wanted. I forced my mind to Tad. Conversations we’d had, songs we’d sung. I sang them again now, shouting them in my mind, to drown out his questions, to drown out the pain.
‘Very well,’ Scipio said eventually, returning the iron to the coals. ‘We begin again.’
Agony scrambled my thoughts. But my anger was pure too, and it brought me back to myself. ‘You could have helped Cinnamon escape at any time. You could have left Stokes’s employ and lived together in London. You could have let me take her there, and then joined her yourself. Why didn’t you?’
I knew the answer, but Scipio chose to maintain the fiction he’d written for himself.
‘Stokes is a vindictive man. He’d have blackened my reputation, so I could never find another post. We would have been just another pair of poor, unhappy Negroes, tilling London’s soil for scraps. In another year, I’ll have enough money to buy her. I already have a small house in Deptford. We will raise our children there.’
‘You would condemn her to another year of Lucius Stokes?’
A spasm contorted his features. ‘She only needs discipline, patience. What is a year, compared to a lifetime? If I could endure it, then so can she.’
‘And when you’ve bought her? Will you free her then?’
I saw the answer written on his face. Perhaps if I angered him enough, he would lose control and kill me before he made me talk.
‘You don’t think she’ll stay with you willingly, given the choice. What’s more, I think you’re right. That’s why she doesn’t want you to know where she is. She doesn’t love you, whatever lies she might have told you in the past. Every chance she got, she tried to get away from you.’
Every blow I landed felt like a small victory. ‘You would be as much her keeper as is Stokes. That isn’t love, it is possession. Your embrace is a slave collar, your kisses a brand.’
He snatched the rod from the coals and thrust the iron against my shoulder. I screamed again. He stroked the tip against my stomach, a caress of agony so intense I shouted mangled words of profanity that made no sense. I don’t know how long I lasted. It might have been a minute or an hour. But at some point the words bubbled out of me, and I found myself telling him about the contracts in Zephyrus’s saddle, about Caesar John and the Children of Liberty, about the sponging house and Southwark and the tannery I’d smelled nearby, about the runaway slaves and the stolen goods and Bronze and the African coachman and anything else I could think of, only stop the blessed pain. Make it stop.
CHAPTER SIXTY
I was alone. Head slumped against my chest, chains biting into my wrists. My burns singing with agony. My body exuding heat, a pulsing pain. My ribs were an afterthought now. A sharp pain in my left thigh barely registered at all. The only thing more powerful than the pain was my sense of shame. The one task left to me had been to protect Cinnamon from this madman, the next in her line of masters. Yet I had failed.
I raised my head with difficulty, wondering where Scipio had gone. My eye fell on my pistol, over on the dresser, before I remembered that it was useless. Yet if I could reach the lockpicks …
I moved a little, trying to see what slack there was in my chains. Very little. I hadn’t a hope of reaching the lockpicks. The stabbing in my thigh intensified with each movement. Something was digging into my leg, something in my breeches pocket. Suddenly I remembered the pick I’d used to unlock the padlock on the hatch to the lower slave hold. I swung my thigh round to meet my hands, trying desperately to reach it. Sweat ran into the scalded flesh, bringing fresh agonies.
Eventually I managed to wedge the tip of my middle finger into my breeches pocket. I moved my thigh up and down, hoping to manoeuvre the pick upwards, trying to work another finger in so I could pull it out. A fraction at a time, until I could pinch it. Carefully, so carefully – convinced that at any moment it would fall from my fingers – I slid it into my palm.
The manacles around my wrists each had a standard barrel lock. Manoeuvring the pick between my fingers, I managed to push it into one of the keyholes, trying to ignore the rocking of the ship and the pain from my burns. I slid the pick this way and that, trying to find the point of ingress as Caesar John’s men had shown me. How much harder it was without being able to see what I was doing. My hands were slippery, and I was terrified I would drop it.
I could smell burning. Smoke was drifting into the cabin. What had Scipio said? They will expect you to be burned. Sweet Jesu, he was setting fire to the ship. I jiggled the pick furiously, inhaling smoke, coughing. I had to force myself to slow down, to keep a cool head. Yet how could I? Thinking of the gunpowder in the hold, I jabbed again and again with the pick.
When it happened, I was entirely unprepared for it. The cuff slipped suddenly from my wrist, and I tried to catch it, only succeeding in dropping the lockpick. Yet I had one hand free, and though the other was still attached to the manacles, it meant I could unthread my hands from the back of the chair. My feet were still shackled to it. I couldn’t go anywhere. Yet I had greater movement now, and I tried leaning backwards to find the lockpick.
I was still groping about in this way when I heard footsteps in the corridor again. I pulled myself upright, resisting the urge to cry out, thrusting my hands behind me, dropping my head to my chest, a broken man. I prayed he wouldn’t notice the manacle dangling freely to the floor.
Scipio smelled powerfully of lamp-oil. The cabin was filling up with smoke. He lifted my chin, and I kept my eyes closed. Through narrowed lids, I watched him take my cravat from the dresser. He wrapped the ends around his hands to make a ligature.
I moved faster than I ever had before. Rising from the chair, I jerked my arm around his throat, taking him by surprise. I pulled sharply backwards, swinging my manacled hand towards him, catching the chain with my other hand, pulling it taut.
The chain bit into his neck. I pulled and pulled. He tried to use his strength and weight to throw me, but here my shackles were my friend. Fettered to the chair, which was secured to the floor by iron bolts, I had nowhere to go. His arms flailed, trying to reach me, but the angle was all wrong for him. His fingers sought my face, then clawed at the chain sunk into his neck. My burns were hell’s torment. My muscles corded, my strength weakening. Still I pulled.
What felt like several lifetimes later, his legs suddenly went from under him. His weight jerked me forward, and I pulled him back. His heels drummed against the floor. Then he lay still.
I was choking on the smoke, my eyes streaming. Dizziness overcame me. I was too weary to move, but I must. I hauled Scipio’s body towards me, and searched his pockets. The smoke was very much thicker, and I struggled to see. Eventually, I fo
und a ring of keys, and – oh, Jesu, yes! – one of them unlocked the fetters around my ankles, another the manacle around my wrist. I staggered into the corridor, so dense with smoke now that I couldn’t see my hands in front of me. Disoriented, I spun, hit a wall, and then edged my way along it.
My vision was coming and going in jagged waves. I saw someone ahead of me, a figure in the smoke. I called out to him.
‘Tad. Wait!’
I collided with a door. My senses were slipping. My lungs burning. I looked around for Tad, but I couldn’t see him. My fingers found the handle and it turned. The door didn’t open. I hit it with my burned shoulder – crying out, as I fell forward into the rain.
I drew long breaths, down on my knees, out there on deck. Smoke belched from the forecastle, as well as from the quarterdeck. The rain was coming down hard, but it wasn’t going to put the fire out. I needed to get off this ship.
I crawled across the deck, eventually reaching the point where I’d climbed aboard. I eased my legs over the side, onto the rope ladder, gazing down at my boat, tossing and turning on the waves below. It seemed unimaginably far. Too far. The smoke and the river blurred. I turned back towards Deptford. Lights spilled out of the dockside taverns.
I looked down at the water again, preparing myself for the jump, thinking of the drowning slaves, the crying children, the obeah-woman’s curse. I tensed my knees, sprang forward, felt a rush of cold air against my face.
Then the world turned to fire around me.
CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE
I was standing on the banks of the Cherwell, lifting the sack of sugar. Beside me Tad clapped his hands, shouting encouragement. I tipped the sack and Tad danced upon the grass. White grains rippled the surface of the water.
I was lying beneath the water, watching slave sugar sink towards me. I could see Tad on the bank, a watery blur. He kept dissolving in pools of coloured light. I kicked out, trying to swim back to him, but the pain fractured the pool of light into a thousand splinters of glass. The pull of the water was too strong. It tugged me down. Then I realized he was swimming there beside me.
He somersaulted, a fish, swimming down into the black depths. Towards a place I could never reach him, unless I followed. My chest was bursting, everything fading in and out. I swam after him.
Then I was jerked upwards, violently. I struggled, and took in lungfuls of brackish water. My head broke the surface and I vomited. Rain assailed the river, and I was lifted on the swell. Slave sugar drifted towards me. It tasted of ash. On the surface of the river were ten thousand pieces of wood and rigging and sail. I could no longer see The Dark Angel amidst the serried ranks of Guineamen. Lights flashed on the Deptford bank. A bell was ringing.
I went under again, and again I was yanked back. Something dug into my spine, pulling at me. My head struck something hard, and I cried out. Hands gripped my body, and I struggled to free myself. Someone hit me on the side of the skull. ‘Try, damn you,’ a familiar voice said.
My senses returning, I endeavoured to cooperate. With a lot of heaving and pulling, I managed to get one leg over the side of the small wherry riding the waves beside me. Another heave and I collapsed into it, rocking it alarmingly. I lay there shivering, looking up at the rolling black sky.
Jamaica Mary’s face filled my vision. ‘Damn near blew up Deptford. Mary had a customer on the quay – he thought the French had come.’
She rowed us to the shore, to the point where Deptford Creek flowed into the Thames. I helped her haul the boat up beyond the gravelly beach. My burns hurt more in the air than the water, and she grew irritated by my stumbling clumsiness. I left her to it, my attention caught by something down on the beach.
A dark shape. A body. I turned it over, and saw that it was Scipio. Part of his skull was missing and he had lost an arm and part of his leg in the explosion. Rain pounded his blood into the mud and the gravel.
Jamaica Mary appeared at my elbow. ‘That Negro dead.’
She asked no questions about the conjunction of events that had brought us here, but led me across the bank, through a copse of trees. We were on the outskirts of Deptford Strand, where run-down cottages and makeshift shacks sprouted on the mud like mushrooms.
Mary’s shack was a one-room affair, with no glass in the windows and a roof plugged with rags. Buckets and chamberpots were positioned to catch the worst of the leaks. The trickling of water distracted me a little from the pain. She sat me on a stool, and then knelt to build a fire from a few meagre sticks of kindling. I was shivering furiously. She frowned at my burns. ‘Want Mary to fetch a sawbones?’
Pain washed over me in waves. I could hardly find the words. ‘I just need some dry clothes. Can you get me some? I’ll pay you.’
She nodded and went out, leaving me to steam by the fire. The heat was unbearable against my burns, already stinging from the salt of the creek. I wanted to move away, but I was so cold.
I thought about Scipio, remembering those men I’d known in America, whose minds had been so eaten by the darkness they were no longer capable of seeing the light. Their reasoning had been destroyed by war, just as Scipio’s had been destroyed by slavery. Perhaps he’d known it. Perhaps he’d thought his love for Cinnamon could heal him. Only it had dragged him down still further, into a hell he could not escape.
*
The lamp was sputtering, and I walked over to lower the flame. A number of letters were stacked on the shelf behind it. Surprised that Mary should be literate, I picked one up and stared at the address. Then, fearing I might fall down, I replaced it and went again to sit by the fire. I was still sitting there, thinking, when Mary returned.
She’d brought a baggy brown suit for me to wear and some linen for bandages. The suit smelled of must, and I wondered if it had come from the bathhouse. She sat scowling at me as I bound my burns as best I could. It did nothing to ease the pain, but at least it stopped my burns chafing against the coarse cloth.
‘I lost my purse in the river,’ I said, once I was dressed. ‘But I’ll send you money to cover the cost. If you write it down, I’ll sign a promissory note.’ I nodded at the inkwell on the shelf. ‘Who taught you to write?’
Her eyes followed my gaze. ‘Mary’s old master.’
I spoke gently, because she’d helped me, and I did not wish to frighten her. I didn’t want her punished, I wanted only to understand. ‘That night Mrs Grimshaw caught you at the Noah’s Ark. She thought you were skulking around, acting suspiciously. I put it down to prejudice, but she wasn’t altogether wrong. She thought you were there for the obeah, but it wasn’t that, was it?’
Her eyes slid to the door. I smiled to reassure her.
‘I received two letters whilst I was staying there. Mr Archer received three from the same author. I think you wrote them.’
Her nostrils flared. ‘Mary wanted you to leave Deptford, didn’t she?’
‘Why? What did you have to fear from me?’
She scratched her arm, scuffing the floor with her dirty pink slipper. ‘You and your friend were the same. Always asking questions. Trying to get people into trouble.’ She glared at me. ‘People here always looking for someone to blame.’
‘To blame for what? I’ll tell no one that you told me, I swear.’
Despite my efforts not to scare her, her pupils were little black tunnels of fear. Her voice dropped to a whisper: ‘Evan Vaughan.’
CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO
It was a little after five in the morning. My burns throbbed, my brow glistened with fever. The streets of Deptford Broadway were quiet, but in John Monday’s house they had already been up for some time. I could tell by the sleepless eyes of the maidservant who came to the door, and the general air of disturbance that pervaded the house.
The maidservant was uncertain about letting me in at that hour, and I was in too much pain to press the point forcefully. Yet Monday must have heard our conversation on the doorstep, for he barked an order to let me come inside. The mulatto boy was playing with a spinni
ng top in the hall, and he watched me as I limped into his father’s study.
Monday looked up from his papers. ‘The Dark Angel burned in the dock last night. I was just attending to my insurance documents.’ His eyes travelled over my old suit of clothes, my wigless state, my bandaged hand. ‘But perhaps you already know this?’
‘Mr Stokes’s secretary, Scipio, destroyed the vessel deliberately,’ I told him. ‘He tried to kill me, just as he killed Archer and Moses Graham and the two other Africans in London, Jupiter and Proudlock.’
‘Then it wasn’t Frank Drake?’
‘No, Scipio killed Drake too.’
The door opened, and Mrs Monday walked into the room. She looked pale and drawn. ‘Is there any news, John? Oh—’
I guessed I looked as terrible as I felt.
‘Madam.’ I was hurting too much to bow, but under the circumstances, civility be damned. ‘I was just telling your husband that the murderer is dead.’ I repeated my explanation about Scipio. ‘Perhaps this will ease the burden of your conscience. Your husband was not involved in Archer’s murder.’
Monday turned to her. ‘You thought that, Eleanor?’
She flushed. ‘I didn’t know. After Mr Brabazon came and you went out …’
‘Who was it you were trying to protect when you summoned the mayor and the magistrate here that night?’ I asked. ‘Archer? Your husband? Or someone else?’
She didn’t answer.
Monday looked grave. ‘How could you have believed that, Eleanor? I made it plain to Mr Brabazon. Nobody was to touch Archer. There had been too much killing, too much disregard for God’s laws.’
I was unsteady on my feet, my head spinning, still so cold. Yet I pressed on. ‘That wasn’t the only reason, though, was it?’ I said. ‘After all, Brabazon was wrong. He thought Vaughan was on the ship, and he thought if you knew Archer was heading there, you’d kill him to prevent their meeting. Perhaps you would have done so in other circumstances. Only you knew Vaughan wasn’t on that ship. He never was.’
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