The teasels rebuked Penitence as a foul-mouthed harpy and for that she let them remain undisturbed while another five miles went by before allowing her great-uncle out of them.
At Lower Langford they spent the night with a fellow-preacher of Uncle Martin’s. There couldn’t have been more double-knocking, passwords and general secrecy than if the man been putting up Monmouth himself. Penitence, tired, demanded her bed which turned out to be in the hay loft of the barn but was at least quiet. The next morning she also demanded hot water and repaired with it back to the barn to make up her face and dress herself in her best blue velvet and sapphire earrings. There were still ten miles to go, this time on horseback, but there would be no opportunity to change before Bristol, where she must make a good impression.
She looked carefully into her travelling mirror in the bad November light which was reluctantly seeping into the barn. Stress had caught her up and was showing itself in hollowing cheeks and temples. Old. I’m old. No wonder he doesn’t want me. He’s making jealousy his excuse to marry somebody young enough to give him children.
‘Jezebel,’ said Uncle Martin Hughes without heat, coming into the barn, his invariable response to seeing her regard herself in the looking-glass, to her powders and perfumes on the dressing-table, or when she wore earrings or her hair uncapped.
‘Fop,’ answered Penitence for once. She had provided him with some of Rupert’s clothes altered to fit his shorter frame. The black embroidered coat hanging down to his skinny knees with the lace gorget at his throat, the feathered hat and silver-buckled shoes, wore him rather than he them. She grinned.
He said: ‘Shamed in the sight of the Lord I be.’ But his great-niece detected an interrogative note, as if he wanted to know how he looked.
She put Nevis’s pistol into a saddle-bag: ‘Just in case some highwayman fancies my earrings or your buckles.’
‘By the Lord, let un try.’ He surprised her. For a moment she was warmed by a sense of comradeship which went as she placed the fur-edged, satin-lined hood of her travelling cape over her hair and he called her ‘Jezebel’ again. She supposed it was a compliment of sorts; it meant she had committed the sin of looking pretty.
They were leaving the cart until Penitence returned – the teasels were payment for their night’s accommodation and the risk the preacher had taken in giving it to them. Martin mounted the horse and Penitence got up behind him and they took the road for Bristol.
* * *
Penitence was surprised by the beauty of the houses. Though smaller than London, Bristol ran the capital close in its foreign trade. The shop windows displayed fine hats, silvers and pewters, gilt leather trunks, beaten gold jewellery. Best of all were the cloths: the silks, the various cottons, niccanees, cuttanees, buckshaws, nillias and salempores thrown over chairs and counters glowing like flower gardens behind the dark glass of the shopfronts. ‘Jezebel,’ intoned Uncle Martin, as he peered in with her.
The inn was called the Blackamoor and Elephant, and, so that illiterates wouldn’t miss it, its balcony was decorated by two enormous plaques, one bearing the head of a negro, the other an elephant’s. Inside it consisted of corridors, tiny rooms and doors, a puzzle of black wood, redolent with beeswax and old wine. At the mention of her name, a bowing landlord showed them upstairs to the parlour, where a softly spoken, carefully smiling gentleman and his pretty wife were waiting for them. ‘Mrs Hughes, a pleasure. I am John Spragge, secretary to the Royal African Company. My wife, Henrietta.’
As Penitence was about to introduce Martin, Mr Spragge held up a hand and smiled her back into line. His whisper was one used by reassuring doctors at a death-bed: ‘And this must be Master Smith, for whom we are pleased to be arranging a passage.’
‘It’s kind of you,’ she said humbly. The cost of the passage alone was £500 – the Royal African Company wasn’t being all that kind – but that it was smuggling out at all a man it must suspect to be a rebel against its king was a cause for gratitude due to the intervention of the Earl of Craven and the fact that Rupert had been a prominent shareholder.
‘Not at all, Mrs Hughes.’ Mr Spragge beckoned with his discreetly be-ringed fingers at a lurker in the shadows and ordered it to show Mr Smith to his cabin on the Bonaventura. ‘You shall have time to say your goodbyes later, Mr Smith,’ he confided, ‘but perhaps you would like to settle in for now. You will be sailing on the afternoon tide.’ His soft voice hoped that would be suitable, but Penitence saw that it didn’t matter if it was or wasn’t. He wants Uncle Martin away as quickly as possible. She was impressed.
She accepted a dish of excellent coffee from Henrietta who asked vaguely if she’d come far and told her that she and Mr Spragge had four children and lived in a sugar house in Prince Street.
‘Sugar house?’
Henrietta looked around for help. ‘Mr Spragge says it is a pleasantry to call it so. I think because this is a sugar town built on the sugar trade.’ Henrietta seemed spun from sugar herself with her fair, frizzy hair and light, frosted-blue, absent-minded eyes. The pastel flowers appliquéd on to her dress looked like marzipan roses.
‘On that matter,’ said Mr Spragge, soothingly, returning from the door, ‘I have the Earl of Craven’s permission to try and interest you in investing in our enterprise, Mrs Hughes.’ He sat down and paused. Penitence wondered which smile he was going to use now. He seemed to have a selection. It was admiring. ‘We in the Company know how much trust our late patron, Prince Rupert, put in you, Mrs Hughes.’
She translated ‘put his trust in you’ as ‘left you a lot of money’. Elizabeth of Bohemia’s necklace. Lord Craven hadn’t seen fit to mention to the Royal Africans that it was sold. She inclined her head.
‘Have you ever thought, Mrs Hughes, of how even princes in these troubled times can no longer rest assured of traditional income but, like that dear, modern-thinking man, Prince Rupert, must invest in the life-blood of this great country of ours, trade?’
She hadn’t, but she knew that for the next hour or so she was going to. Well, it was not unrestful to be plied with coffee, cakes and compliments and listen to ways of earning money with what remained of her inheritance. It had been an expensive year.
The Royal Africans not only made money, it appeared, they practically minted it. They couldn’t fail. If one ship in three came in a man… begging her pardon, a woman… sustained no loss. If two came in she was a good gainer. If all three, she was rich for life. And on an average only one ship in five miscarried.
Mr Spragge’s smile bared his soul. ‘Even I, Mrs Hughes, invested my widower’s mite… beg pardon, Henrietta, a little pleasantry… and though the cargo was indifferent and reached the West Indies in poor condition, the profit on the venture was thirty-eight per cent. Thirty. Eight. Per cent. What think you of that?’
He stifled her answer with a benediction from his hand. ‘Wait, Mrs Hughes. There is no need to make a decision at once. Come, bid goodbye to your uncle, look over the Bonaventura – she is the latest addition to our fleet, just commissioned – and then you may wish to meet some other partners of your… of Prince Rupert.’
Like most people, Penitence had always been excited by dock quaysides. On these Bristolian wharves it was like passing through an olfactory rainbow to walk past the barrels of spices, tobaccos, sugars and wines. In a strange way the unimpressed dockers unloading ivories, apes, tea, coffee and peacocks as if they were everyday goods highlighted the exotic, like the grey, English water lapping against the ornamented, foreign hulls.
But it was from these docks that the transports had left for the Atlantic crossing, packed with rebel Englishmen being carried to their ten years’ bondage or, more likely, their death. MacGregor had been among them and his difficult-to-remember face haunted Penitence’s mind’s eye more, not less, as the days went by, as if Dorinda’s ghost were etching it there to remind her of her debt to him.
The Bonaventura, a big ketch, was gleaming new and smelled of wood and lanolin. Uncle Martin H
ughes’s stern cabin was well fitted; she would have thought it a sight too good for him if she hadn’t found, to her consternation, that she was having pangs at the thought of his going.
He, however, was surly: ‘These tarpaulins baint going to the West Indies,’ he said, accusingly. ‘You told me West Indies.’
She turned on Spragge. ‘I paid for the West Indies.’
The smile was understanding but held reproof. ‘Anxious as we are to oblige a protégé of our dear departed prince, Mrs Hughes, you must realize that the Bonaventura has been built to ply between the Guinea Coast and the West Indies. First she must pick up her cargo in Africa before taking it on to Jamaica. It will make but a week or two’s difference to Mr Smith’s arrival.’
She turned back to Martin Hughes, where he had sat himself down on his bunk and got out his Bible. This, then, was the moment of their goodbyes. With thunderous proper feeling, Mr Spragge whispered that he and Henrietta would wait outside while she said them.
Penitence and her great-uncle were left alone. The boat rocked in the wake of some passing ship and she heard the slap of water against the hull. It reminded her of the sound she wished she could forget, of entrails being thrown into the executioner’s bucket. I saved you from that at least. ‘You’ll write and tell me,’ she begged him. ‘MacGregor first and then the Indians. You’ll let me know if you haven’t enough money.’ Irritating to the last, he put his finger on the line he had appeared to reach, looked up and nodded before returning to scripture.
Impulsively she found herself saying, wishing she wasn’t: ‘Won’t you bless me before you go?’ Of all people she had reason to know that water was thicker than blood but, with Martin Hughes’s departure, the last of her mother’s family would be gone from her for ever and she no nearer to understanding them than the day she left Massachusetts.
‘Thee were a colicky babby,’ he said, and because she’d been expecting a rebuff she didn’t hear what he said for a moment.
‘Was I?’
‘On this very quayside I bade thee goodbye before thy grandmother took thee to the Americas and thee did sick bile on my best broadcloth.’
‘Did I?’
‘Admit thy transgression, come to repentance and thee shalt have my blessing.’
All love must be for the Lord; the more affection one saint of the Pure Church felt for another human being, the greater his responsibility to save that soul for the Lord. She supposed he must be admitting some sort of fondness. He’d probably felt the same for her mother. She hadn’t come to repentance either. ‘Goodbye, Uncle Martin,’ she said.
To her chagrin she was blinking back tears as she rejoined the Spragges on deck, where sailors were stowing and lashing casks. Above their heads men with bare feet curling like a monkey’s ran up and down the ratlines. Spragge busied himself to expound the ship’s seaworthiness. It was probably still short of investors. Penitence nodded dumbly as he suggested she might like to see the cargo hold – ‘We pride ourselves it is the most up-to-date in the trade’ – and followed him down a ladder into a hole that smelled of a carpenter’s shop where curls of wood brushed her feet as she stepped down on to planking.
She found herself in a narrow passageway formed by the bulkhead on one side and slatted shelving that took up all the space on the other. If the shelves hadn’t extended back so far she would have thought them built for a library – the height between each would have taken a large book although the uprights occurred, apparently unnecessarily, every sixteen inches and had a ring screwed into them which corresponded to a ring in the slats some six foot further in.
The effect of the cubbyholes and new wood would have been pleasant if it hadn’t reminded her of Flap Alley. My God, in Newgate human beings used to have to sleep in cubicles only a little bigger than that. She nearly said it aloud, but thought that Mr Spragge would be shocked at a potential investor who’d been in Newgate. Or perhaps he wouldn’t. Rebels, criminals – if they had money, the Royal African Company seemed prepared to do business with them.
‘Do note, Mrs Hughes, that on a ship of this size we can carry as many as five hundred and sixteen. Note too the ventilation overhead…’
Five hundred and sixteen? She felt goosebumps go down her arms. ‘What is it you transport?’
Mr Spragge expelled a what-have-we-been-talking-about breath and fixed on a patient smile. ‘Our cargo is slaves, Mrs Hughes. That’s the trade. Slaves to Jamaica. This is where we stack them.’
‘Excuse me,’ she said, ‘I meant the cargo you said you’d be plying from Africa to… oh, my God.’
Mr Spragge’s smile was playfully tolerant of women’s ignorance of what wagged the world. ‘Mrs Hughes, how do you think the sugar grows, is cut, refined?’ He bobbed his raised finger forward, like a schoolmaster. ‘Ships, slaves, sugar. Sugar, ships, slaves, the great triangle of navigation. Since 1680 the Royal African Company has shipped five thousand a year and hopes to…’
As he went on talking his voice faded against the sickness rising in Penitence. This is where we stack them. Unwillingly, she was lifted up and squeezed into her allotted space on the shelves. Her right hand and leg were shackled to someone else’s left hand and leg. She lay in a space smaller than a corpse’s in a coffin. The wood of the shelf above hers almost touched her nose. Her body bucked with the rise and fall of the ship, water poured in through the holes in the cargo cover and ordure from the slave above dripped down on to her stomach and legs…
She was clawing at the ladder, fighting to get into the air, holding on to the canvas on a boom, retching.
When she could next take notice of anything, Henrietta was wafting a handkerchief back and forth in front of her face as if lack of air had been her trouble while Mr Spragge, more astute, was explaining that such over-sensitivity was unnecessary; that discomfort wasn’t the same for blacks as for whites. ‘They don’t feel the same privation. And when they get to the plantations they are so happy. Henrietta, dear one, tell Mrs Hughes of our voyage to the Barbados and how happy the negroes were in their new home.’
Henrietta looked around as if trying to recall the voyage. ‘Yes, indeed,’ she said. ‘They were very happy. Except that I thought it very odd to see the black cooks chained to the fireplaces.’
‘You see, Mrs Hughes, they’re not the same as us…’
‘They are,’ she whispered. ‘They are.’ She could see Peter’s black suffering face as he watched with her over the dying Rupert. She turned on Spragge so that he recoiled and bumped his head on the boom. ‘You would not do this if Prince Rupert were alive.’
He blinked, genuinely puzzled. ‘Why would we not? I don’t think you understand, Mrs Hughes. Slaves, sugar, ships – they are the raison d’être of the Company. Your… His Highness was one of its founders.’
‘No,’ she said, ‘Rupert didn’t know of it.’
As he protested, she pulled herself together, pushed him and Henrietta away, wiped her mouth, tied the ribbons of her hat more firmly under her chin and set off for the gangplank. At the taffrail gate she swayed for a moment. ‘He didn’t know of it. Not Rupert.’
Penitence never remembered finding the livery stable and her horse, though the houses she passed stayed in her memory.
Sugar houses, pretending their roofs were gingerbread and their mullions sticks of barley-sugar when in fact their foundations stood in human blood, like the skeletons of baby-sacrifices found under ancient hearthstones.
Not Rupert.
She stayed a wordless night in the barn at Lower Langford and didn’t remember that either. She hitched the cart to the horse and drove it south, only vaguely aware of what she was doing or the countryside she passed through.
What has happened? Why do I feel like this? It wasn’t as if she had not known of slavery, but it had always been out there, as drawing and quartering had been out there until she had been present at its execution. Now, whatever damned thing it was that had assisted her to become part Indian, or part eagle, the same thing that had
enabled her to become Beatrice and Desdemona, had entombed her. For one moment she had been slid into a living coffin and seen the lid slam.
Matoonas. Awashonks. Forgive me. She should have given up everything to go and find them, left behind child, protector, comfort, house… Nothing she sacrificed would have been too much payment to save them from those human stacks. Blocked into a space of inches when they had run free through a thousand square miles, they would shrivel into dust.
In that moment she knew her Indians were dead.
Rupert always knew. She faced it.
Fifty times he must have told her the story of Peter, when he and his brother Maurice had moored in the bay of a village on the Guinea coast and gone ashore to find the villagers fled and a small, bewildered, black boy scrabbling at his knees. ‘They thought we were slavers, you see, my dear,’ Rupert would always say.
And you were. You took Peter home, Christianized him, you knew he could feel pain, happiness, jealousy, love – above all, love – and you could still join other men in an enterprise to market his brothers and sisters in the same way you would sell cattle or coal.
The cargo was indifferent. Arrived in poor condition.
Rupert rose up before her, stiffly dignified, loving, the most decent man of his generation.
She longed to forgive him but it wasn’t her wrong to forgive. If you can’t see how great a wrong it is, who else will?
Nobody was equipped to see what she saw. She was the freak. It was her peculiarity to have spent a childhood learning that people of one colour could suffer the same pain as those of another. Her adolescence in the Rookery had seen women bought and sold. Forced from one country to another, from one man to another, the struggle she and other women had waged and lost against their rightlessness opened a window on to universal injustice.
Consignments. Profit. Trade. Applied to human beings, the words were ultimate blasphemy. She knew it. Dorinda had known it. Now, if MacGregor was alive still, he would know it. But who else?
The Vizard Mask Page 69