The Sea Officer Bentley Thrillers

by Jan Needle

  Godfrey said easily: “It’s thirty-five, sir, depend on that. They say that them as spits do shag the best. She’ll be a marvel once you’ve tamed ’er.”

  “Tek it or leave it, lad,” said Sutton. He drove his stick into the dirt. “Thirty pound and not a farden over. Shake or go, ’tis all the same to me. Thirty-five, for a three-year servant! Bollocks, lad.”

  Godfrey was smiling, as were all the neighbours. Job done, they knew. No one had mentioned three years: Sutton’s escape route.

  “Well, let’s say seven then,” said Godfrey. “Shall we, sir? Thirty-five for seven year. Ar God, you drives a pretty bargain, don’t ’ee?”

  Deb’s head was buzzing. The heat, the flies, the screams and reek that wafted in the throbbing sun towards her, made her think her brain would burst.

  “Seven years?” she gasped. “But I’m not up for seven! I am a five-year one. I signed in… I signed in…”

  “Indentures,” Godfrey finished for her. “Indeed you did, med, proper job. I’ve got ’em in my pocket. Want to read ’em, do ’ee? Oh, I forgot, you cannot read, can you?” He flourished papers. He pointed with a stubby finger. “Seven years, see that? It goes across, then slashes down, and that says seven, don’t it? It’s a proper job, is that. ’Tis legal.”

  Alf Sutton said: “With a tongue on thee like that, lass, tha’ll not last seven, ’appen. I’ll brek thee neck for lip. I winna shag thee, lass; I’ve got better pigs than thee to do it wi’. But I’ve got two sturdy sons who will, eh lads? Right bastards Seth and Little Ammon, innot they? They’ll fuck owt.”

  His bold companions nodded in amused agreement, tinged possibly with civilised regret. Deb knew she’d lost the argument, the fight, the war, and possibly her life. Beyond the harbour she could see the rising hills, clad in verdant, violent green, and shimmering as the sun struck down on them from the cloudless, enormous heavens.

  “Tha may stretch eyes till they do go blind, lass,” said Sutton, with contempt. “Tha’ll get no joy up theer. We’ve got bloodhounds on this island, two legged ones and four. When our niggers run, our other niggers run them down for us. When our women run, we lets the blackhounds keep ’em.”

  In desperation, Deb turned to the ship’s mate.

  “Mr Godfrey. Sir.” Her voice was almost breaking till she mastered it. “This cannot be, sir; this is akin to rape. I have connections, sir. There is a Navy officer. He is in these islands. I give you warning, sir. It is across the law.”

  Alf’s eyes, and those of his planter friends, might have changed at this, but Godfrey, through his master Captain Harding, had been clearly briefed. The young mate threw back his head and laughed.

  “Spithead Nymph!” he said. “Mr Sutton, she knows Navy officers aplenty, and the Jolly Jacks an’ all. She’s a Portsmouth harlot, sir, a prostitute of Point, a Broad Street bitch! Med,” he added, “you should thank providence that you’re a servant now. For you’ll get bed and board and payment, if you shags or no!”

  “Payment!” said Sutton, his sense of humour cut. “Who says payment? Not even whores — ”

  “It is a nothing, sir,” Godfrey interrupted. “It’s in the contract, merely, and the contract shall be yours on payment as agreed. In any way, the harlot cannot read, can her? If it said she had to service horses she’d be bounden, don’t you see? Do you want the horses serviced, sir?”

  Humour was back again.

  “Mules and geldings is all I use,” said Sutton. “Mules do more work, and stallions are too much fratch; they fright the niggers. Too many stallions on our spread, any case. Me and Seth and Little Ammon do the serving, don’t tha know!”

  The men, it seemed, had time to talk forever, but Deb was wilting. She felt — she hoped — that she might fade away. The noise from the slave lots grew ever louder as more were poured in, and washed, and parcelled up for sale. She did not want to watch, but some scenes were so extravagant they could not be ignored. She saw strong men whipped and beaten to their knees, weak men cuffed and kicked, women stripped of their last rags of clothing, then stripped of their children, some stripped of babes in arms. But when the auctioneer clambered into his pulpit, it was time to go, apparently. Sutton had got his bargain for the day. As he told his fellows leeringly, it was time to test it out.

  Alf rode a big black mule, but to her amazement Deb was to walk. What’s more, he tied a rope around her waist, which he jerked at every now and then as if to remind her who was boss and who the servant/slave. Deb had a small parcel with her, containing clothes that she had fashioned on the voyage, a piece of mirror, a brush she’d had off one of the sailors who’d hoped to get a kiss. This she had to carry. She also picked up a piece of stick betimes because the dogs that lurched around the roads and tracks were lean and wild, and most unfriendly. They came up boldly; she struck them boldly off again. And the heat was killing.

  The plantation was some miles away from town, and her interest in the surroundings was quickly worn from her. Lush it was for certain, and green and aromatic, but its very difference from the fields of home made for desperate loneliness. The roads were hard and flinty also, and her feet were soft from too much time on shipboard, and began to cut. As she lagged she dragged, and Sutton, with malicious pleasure, jerked. Once she fell to her knees, and when the mule stopped (human compassion, in a beast?) the human drove his heels into its sides and swore it onwards. The mule, as mules do, ignored instruction and turned its head to stare at Deborah with its dark brown, gleaming eyes, which frightened her and moved her. Her only friend, an animal? However hard Sutton kicked and swore, the mule stood watching her. Then, when she was upright, it turned its head front and plodded on.

  There were other mules with white men on them, and traps with white girls and women in various sorts of finery, who stared at her in fascination. One man on a horse stopped to talk to Sutton, and Deb realised he was a minister of some sort, a reverend, with black tricorn and drab coat of fustian despite the heat, and high black gaiters above his boots. He raised an eyebrow at her and wondered, indirectly, why she was on a halter. Sutton twisted his little mouth into regret and said she was a fallen woman, fresh from England, which he had bought to save her from herself. The minister was mollified.

  “Do you go to church, whore?” he said. “You may come to church with Mr Sutton’s people, if he will be so kind. We have all sorts at the back; you will fit in.”

  “Will I be welcome?” Deb gritted, with hatred in her voice, and the minister ignored her, tutted, tipped his hat to Sutton, and moved off. Sutton chuckled.

  “Th’art red hot, art thou,” he said. “You wait till you meets my Seth and Little Ammon.”

  There were black people on the roads as well as whites, but they were in profusion, not in dribs. That some were working slaves she could perceive, as many were in chains and shackles, driven by thin black men who carried whips and switches of stripped wood. But some blacks seemed to be of different class and wore shirts and britches, although of mainly rag. They were in smaller groups, some on their own, and women were among them, with wicker baskets on their heads. All were barefoot, however, and all but the men with whips looked downwards as they passed, their eyes well hidden, their faces blank. Deb, exhausted, could make nothing out of it; it was just a passing scene.

  It was similar when they reached the man’s plantation, which was marked off from the road by a pair of untrimmed wooden gateposts driven into verges, with neither gates between them nor a fence or hedge on either side. The land was light and sandy, not far from the shore in fact, and almost beach itself, held intact by clumps of grasses and stretching gently upwards to a stand of palmy trees. Deb had seen growing cane by now — there was almost nothing else along the way once the outer town had been passed by — so saw that Sutton’s plantings appeared to start in earnest to the right side of the trees. By looking harder she discerned a house within the clump, white from a distance with a reddish roof, and as they got closer she saw that it was in desuetude, surrounded by ou
thouses, sheds, and barns in all kinds of decay.

  Earlier on their route they had passed the mouth of one broad driveway leading to a grassy crest, topped by a gigantic mansion, apparently of white marble or similar, with pillars and columns in the grandest style. So Alf Sutton was not a successful planter, then, nor yet a gentleman. What a surprise…

  There were servants there to greet them though, or at least to notice their arrival, and their faces held the expression she had seen before. All were clothed, the women with their bosoms covered, and the tallest had a long whip in his hand. This man was black as polished ebony, his thin cheeks marked with patterned scars, his eyes as cold as ice. When Sutton called him over, he came slowly, almost regally, and stood there with his shoulders back, his lips in curled contempt.

  “This is the mistress,” Sutton said to him. “She is a whore, and if you or any of your nigger bastards lay a hand on her, I’ll cut your bollocks off with my own hands and broken glass.” To Deborah he said: “This is my Number One. His name is Fido.”

  Deborah, sweating, blinked. She must have misheard, surely? The heat was killing her.

  “But Fido is a dog’s name,” she said, weakly.

  “And Fido is a dog,” replied his master. “Ain’t thee, Fido? A great big black bullmastiff.”

  Deb stared into the haughty face, and the dark eyes held her own, unreadable, unchanging. Sutton went on, “They’ve all got nigger names as well, tha knows. But not pronounceable by Christians, as fur as ah can tell.”

  The black man was head and shoulders taller than the white, and half his age, built like a marble god. He had a whip; the road was only half a mile away. Why did he stay there, calm, indifferent? Why not cut — then run?

  “Fetch the women,” Sutton ordered him. “Tell Mabel, Mary, Mavis that the new mistress is here.” He threw a smile at Deborah. “We calls ’em all by names that starts the same,” he said. “It meks it easier, sithee? Mabel’s top bitch. Keep her well beat and she’ll look out for thee. She’s got a child of mine so she has hopes, the silly whoresget. Nowt’s what she’ll have. Nowt and the gutter.”

  Within an hour, Deb had “settled in.” Sutton had left her in the care of Mabel, a woman in her twenties, and when Deb spoke to her in English she replied immediately, but in a form of language so debased that it was to all intents incomprehensible. There was English there, undoubtedly, but whole words and phrases were misused and mispronounced. Deb, on leaving Cheshire and the North, had been amazed by the diversity of Englishes she’d heard, but even London’s bitter nasal twang was clearer far than this. And Mabel was not friendly, she was very far from that. Only when Deborah, alone, burst into sudden tears did the temperature move up a little. Mabel returned to the scruffy bedroom where she’d left her and uttered something in a kindly voice; and smiled. Deb’s tears became a flood, and when she sank onto a chair, Mabel moved to stand beside her. She did not touch, but did not move away, for several minutes. Then she gave Deb a piece of cloth from out her apron pocket to wipe her face.

  Later, Deb toured the house and saw some other servants, and met the cook, a fat and solid Irishwoman of maybe forty years. Bridie clearly thought herself the mistress, and made it plain she would not be displaced by some young flighty piece, and stayed suspicious for a good long while. She did, however, brighten up when Deb discussed her prospects of survival, and asked if she could run, and where to run to. Bridie laughed and said, most like, it wouldn’t come to that. When Deb insisted she was serious, the laugh got deeper.

  “Listen, girl, you’re in Jamaica now. Alf and his spailpíns go through cailíns like fire goes through thatch. But most well-brought up ladies are gone before then, unless they’re very strong. Have you not heard about the ague? In ten days, two weeks or so, you will fall ill, and God love you, then you’ll die. I’m sorry for you, mo chroí, but there’s an end to it. And if you live you’ll be a cripple, and Sutton and his sons will kill you with the childbirth anyway.”

  Earnestly though she stated this, the woman’s very fervour gave Deb heart that she’d survive, that in some way it was a sort of testing joke. Bridie’s manner modified, in fact, when she saw Deb was not about to have the vapours, and at last she got the kettle off the hob and made a mash of tea. She had been at Sutton’s place for years, she said, and had seen women come and go, some on their own legs, some in coffins. It was a failing farm — she called it “farm” with an Irish intonation of contempt — which made it feel much like the world she had been thrown out of by the English.

  “I feel like I’m at home,” she laughed. “God love you, Deborah, this place is as cruel and hungry as the west of Connemara, so it is. You have not come to paradise, mo chroí, you’ve come to hell on earth.” Sutton had the Lord alone knew how many slaves, and the farm was sunk in debt.

  “They are all old, you see,” she said. “That’s why it’s failing. That bastard Fido, for to speak. He’s over thirty, mebbe, and lives so long because he does no work. He is a driver; he whips his fellow black-men for reward. He has been here for longer than I have, even, and I first saw him with a whip in hand, so he has never worked. Do nothing and live long, that is his secret.”

  “But he’s not old!” said Deb. The dog name had made her wince again, but Bridie did not notice. “You say he’s thirtyish! That is not so very old in England!”

  “Oh, thirty is a grand old age out here. Not many slavemen make it that far.” Bridie took a mouthful of tea and savoured it. “It depends on the age they start at,” she went on. “The planters don’t like children off the boats because they do not have the strength; they cannot pull their weight. But let’s say most slaves come here in their twenties, some more, some less — you know the picture. Well, they’ll not see thirty, most of ’em. Seven year is roughly what it takes to wear a man out, bit longer for the cailíns, if I may call them that.” She laughed. “Cailíns! Some of them, would you believe, have never worn a garment in their lives when they first get here! They’ve rings in their noses and their earholes you could hang the washin’ on! Their black dugs swing quite shameless in the breeze. Cailíns indeed!”

  Bridie had grown quite merry over this, but Deb could feel her spirits quailing. Without ever meeting these poor people, she could feel an ache for them. She missed her Cheshire land, sometimes she missed it very bad, and she had left by her own choice, however much she might regret it now. As to shame and bosoms, she’d been forced to show hers off, to sell herself.

  “I don’t know what a culleen is,” was all she said, and quietly. “I’m truly sorry. And do they die then? When they’re worn out?”

  “Indeed they do,” said Bridie, crisply. “They die, and Master has to buy some more, and Master doesn’t have the money and so he lives in debt. He swives them because he wants to breed more up, he says, but that don’t work with the cailíns, neither. Cailín is a girl,” she added. “It is the Irish. A cailín is a girl, is all, whatever creed or colour she might be, poor thing. Master rapes them, and Seth rapes them, and Little Ammon does his best, the eejit. And the slaves grow old and die at twenty-five or thirty, and the Master’s debt gets bigger by the year.” She stopped, and grinned hugely into Deborah’s face, displaying strong white teeth. “And it serves him bloody right,” she said. “I can’t wait till he starves, the wicked bastard.”

  They sat there in the silence of the tropics for a while, a silence that was in fact the clamouring of insects and the screech of birds. Then Deb said: “Why does it not work then? If he and his two sons use the slave maidens as their broods, and the slaves as well, I guess, live with each other in the normal way? Even Christian maids get with children, and these are savages, surely? In any way, he told me one of the women had a child by him. It was Mabel, as I think, who I have met, although she did not say a word herself on such a subject.”

  “Aye, Mabel is his latest fancy,” Bridie said, “and Mabel has a little baby boy. But will it live, though? Few of the women have children of the lasting kind, although some
fall pregnant, as you say. Mabel came to term, the baby was alive, and that is not so usual, believe you me. Stillbirth is the African way, out here. They are experts at the art.”

  As Deb digested this, Bridie sat quiet for a while. Then she sighed.

  “Most do not even get with child,” she said. “Leastways, that is how it seems to us white folk. They have spells and hoodoo as they call it, and they know herbs and poisons in profusion. Some babes are born and smothered on the spot. It is quite deliberate. If you had been torn from hearth and home and made to breed with men like Sutton, or Fido even, would you want to give up your babies to be worked to death and murdered? You would not. Best be ugly like me, and suck old bones to make your breath stink vile, and leave the duty to the younger hens. I pity you, mo chroí. It’s not a case of drawing lots with Sutton and his boys; they’ll all have you. And then Fido can feast upon the leavings, can he not? And spit you out for his noble brothers.”

  “Fido,” Deb said, after a pause. “How can men call others ‘Fido?’ And has he many brothers? Are they called dogs’ names also? Alf Sutton is a monster of depravity.”

  “He has no brothers, it is just a word, and they’re not noble either, don’t let your heart be leading you astray,” said Bridie. “If Master is a monster truly — and I don’t say that he ain’t — then he is no worse than the most of them, so to say. One man, Sir Simon Walton, named his best team after his hounds back home in England. Nudger and Whitehawk, Ranter, Flier, Flash. Is it worse or better than giving the females English names that they don’t recognise? I don’t know, but you will get used to it, for sure. And when a slave’s wore out, their name can come in useful down the line, can’t it? It’s easier than thinking up a new.” She smiled at Deb’s expression. “It is not a pretty life,” she said. “Much better would have served you, if you’d stayed at home…”

  Later that evening Deborah, who had had as good a wash as she could manage in a basin without soap, was called down to have her dinner and meet the family. She had assumed the dinner was with the family men, but Bridie called her into the kitchen, where there were places set for the two of them, and three or four more settings for the household women. Deb had met Mabel, who moved her lips at her, and was introduced to Maude and Mollie, who seemed uninterested in her presence, and ate sullenly and quickly, ignoring her. The three black women, when they talked together, did so in the tongue that Deb had heard before, and which struck her, already, as more and more like English. Then Bridie joined in, as fluently as them, and threw a smile at Deborah at one point when they laughed, as if she ought to understand what they were saying. Deb, trying hard, began to pick words out and then discern a pattern. It was a private English, maybe, a tongue all of their own. When the blacks had gone (they ate quickly and with little fuss) Bridie called it Kreyole and said that Deb would pick it up.