by Karleen Koen
Barbara gripped the ship’s railing, breathing shallowly to keep herself from retching. She made herself listen to the river, to try to calm herself. The view of shore was lovely: Colonel Perry had been correct. Autumn was beautiful here. Vines as thick as her wrist hung from branches; red-orange berries bunched along the stems of the wild hollies growing under the trees. In the weeks she’d been here, leaves had cleverly turned crimson and gold among the green, like the promise of a coming festival, except that the festival was winter.
Autumn arrives more slowly here than in England, she thought. Anything not to think about where she was, what she was doing. The heat of summer was fiercer and lingered longer. It was hot today. Hyacinthe had complained of the heat as they sailed along the river this morning. He had been complaining for some days…Where she was, what she was doing intruded. Never run away from the truth, because you carry it on your shoulder. And someday it will put its ugly face into yours and say boo.
She turned to face the truth and saw that Colonel Perry had taken command for her; he was examining slaves’ mouths, kneeling down to feel their legs, his seamed, aged face intent, nothing in his expression to indicate that what he did was anything other than ordinary. “Of all to whom I have been introduced,” Barbara had written to her grandmother, “I find a distant neighbor, Colonel Edward Perry, the most kind, the most knowledgeable. He has lived upon this river where I am for almost eight decades, Grandmama, and he is kind enough to treat me as if I were one of his family.”
He’s fond of you, said Mrs. Cox, more than fond. Edward Perry is a friend to nearly everyone, but it’s clear he has a special regard for you. And Barbara had a special regard for him. She felt beloved when she was with him, as beloved as she did in her grandmother’s presence. He might have been her grandfather, or an angel—Yes, she’d said to Hyacinthe, my Virginia angel, sent by Grandmama to watch over me. That would be like her. God, she would say, now I’ve sent Barbara to Virginia, but there is no telling what she will do there, so assign an angel to her, if you please, and not just any angel, either, but a good strong one.
“These two will do,” Perry said. A sound went up from among the slaves as he pointed, a sound that lost itself in the masts and rigging and clear Virginia sky. Barbara’s ears rang with it. It struck her to her soul. It’s too cruel, Jane had said, weeping, about London’s punishment of criminals. Too cruel. Yes, this was.
“They think we buy them to eat them,” the captain said.
Sailors began to unlock the chains on the two Colonel Perry had selected. Fierce movement erupted among their fellow slaves. Some clung to them, others shouted and tried to attack the sailors, who beat at heads and shoulders with wooden clubs, the same kind as that the captain carried.
“I’ve changed my mind,” Barbara said.
“Those are the best among the lot,” Perry said. His tone was reasonable, kind; there was no judgment of any kind in it at her abrupt words. He hadn’t wished her to come aboard this ship, but she wouldn’t listen. Send your overseer Smith, he had told her, for you won’t like it.
“They’ll make good hands in six months. You need slaves to open up new fields of tobacco. Let me handle the buying of the slaves for you. It is not necessary that you have the worry of it. It isn’t a task for you, and it may be easily done without your having any further distress of it. I will have one of my men bring the slaves over later to your overseer, who will know what to do from there. You never have to see these men again until they are field broken, and by then you will have forgotten—”
“No.”
“Does she think I’ll come down on my price?”
The captain had crossed the deck to them, had been listening to Perry with an impatient frown. “This is prime buying time. I can sail up the York River and be done with it in a month.”
“Lady Devane needs more time to make up her mind—”
“You’ve come a distance this morning, Lady Devane,” said the captain, his tone changing when he saw that she was, indeed, leaving. Barbara, skirts bunched in one hand, had nimbly perched on the railing and was now maneuvering herself, skirts and all, down the rope ladder that had been thrown over the side to take her aboard. Below Barbara, one hand clutching the ladder as if it had grown there, Hyacinthe was staring up at her, his face strained and perspiring.
“Pull up the anchor,” she said to Hyacinthe, stepping into the dinghy.
Hearing what sounded like groans, she looked at the tall bulk of the ship.
It is groaning, she thought, her hands on an oar. Sweet Jesus. It was the groans of the ones too ill to show but not yet dead. Terrible fish called sharks followed slavers, Mrs. Cox had told her. Sharks ate flesh, and a slaver gave them good meals as it crossed the ocean, for many a slave would die on the way over.
“Row,” she commanded Hyacinthe, “hard. Keep up with me if you can.”
The wind for sailing was gone. Earlier she and Hyacinthe had sailed in daringly, looking as if they had captured a bright butterfly with a single white wing and were riding it upon the water.
Aboard the slaver, Perry watched her, watched the resolute dip of the oars in and out of the water, the uprightness of her back, of the boy’s, as they rowed away. They rowed as if they were pursued by devils. Edward Perry, onetime member of the Governor’s Council, owner of much land, traveler to other colonies and watcher of the river, found himself quoting softly, in Latin, a phrase that floated up into his mind:
“‘Man is wolf to man.’”
Yes, he’d felt the same—the disgust, the horror—the first time he’d boarded a slaver. Now he was used to it. Is that a good thing? he wondered to himself, to have become used to this, to no longer regard it with horror?
The captain had glanced quizzically at Perry on hearing him speak Latin.
“I’ll purchase the slaves,” Perry said.
That the captain understood.
BARBARA AND Hyacinthe rowed for a long time, Barbara taking comfort in the steady, monotonous movement of the oars, in the lift and strain of the muscles in arms and shoulders, in the growing ache there and in her hands. She did not look back at the slaver once, but rather ahead at some distant point of water, which she rowed toward but never reached. Finally, the pain in her shoulders and hands was enough to force her to stop.
Her gown was wet under the arms and at her neck and bosom. Her hair had fallen from its pins and clung to her perspiring face and neck. Beside her, Hyacinthe breathed in and out, rapidly, shallowly, like a small bellows she’d set to work too hard. The pace of rowing had been too difficult for him, she could see, but he had not complained. He was as damp with their exertions as she was. More so.
Hero, stalwart companion, she thought, gazing at him affectionately. He was with her in all her explorations here; he was master of the left dinghy oar; he was the only one brave enough, other than Klaus Von Rothbach, to go with her while she practiced sailing. Even Colonel Perry said he’d rather stay on shore and watch.
She heard a faint honking and looked up; in the distance was a vast, wavering series of formations, dark dots, birds, geese or ducks, hundreds of them, more than she had ever seen together in her life. Colonel Perry had warned her to be on the lookout for them: A certain sign of autumn, a certain sign of God’s grace to us, he said. How beautiful, she thought. The abundance of them was amazing. There must have been hundreds. The abundance of everything here was amazing. Graceful, winged caravan, she thought, they would never believe your numbers in England, never.
“What did you see there…on the slaver, madame?” Hyacinthe seemed barely able to push the words past his breathing.
The other side of this place and its beauty. “Nothing. I saw nothing.”
They were out of the current of the river, near the bank, a wild, untamed bank, some wildflowers blooming like tiny stars everywhere. Colonel Perry’s daughter, Beth, had showed her some pressed flowers she’d found on the riverbank during the spring; the flowers resembled pansies, with small brown ma
rks on their petals, like the slaves’ scars. Barbara shuddered again, the way she had on the slaver. The sound of the river filled her ears.
Evil, Hyacinthe. I saw the clear shape of evil, and it frightened me to my soul. Never run away from the truth, because it sits always upon your shoulder. What am I going to do?
In her mind was the supper she’d given for the slaves. She had worn a black gown of watered silk, and emeralds in her ears. There was ham and rum for the slaves; her coming here was to be the cause for celebration. She had stood on the house steps as Odell Smith introduced the slaves to her one by one. What a sight the scene would have made to anyone looking on; how she had wished that Jane, or her grandmother, or Tony, or even the Prince and Princess of Wales themselves might have seen it—the silent people, the dark night enveloping all: Lanterns and candles were nothing to the darkness. She in her finery, glittering and smiling, they in what could only be described as bits and pieces of clothing. They need little, said Odell. They are used to nothing.
She’d made them a speech, her heart pulsing high in her throat because everything—she, they, the forest clearly seen from the steps of this house that was scarcely larger than a cottage—seemed fantastic to her, out of time and place, as if she had been whirled into the dark night sky and placed upon the moon. One of the slaves had limped forward awkwardly as his name was called, and in the lantern light she saw that toes were missing from his right foot. For a moment, she had felt faint at seeing that which was real put to what had been only words before, the Governor’s, Klaus Von Rothbach’s words, explaining to her certain laws, necessary laws, they said, such as incorrigible runaways have their toes chopped off. And standing beside her in the night had been Hyacinthe, who would not hush, but repeated over and over in French, His foot, madame! Look, see his foot.
“My head aches. It ached when I was waiting for you,” Hyacinthe whispered.
He was trembling. Barbara put her cheek against his forehead. It was burning hot. He had a fever. The ague. Thérèse was only just over it.
“Put your head in my lap.”
She untied her hat and put it over his face as he laid his head on her knees.
“I’ll row us home. We’re nearly there. You’ll feel better once we’re out of this sun. Why did you not tell me? What? You did tell me? Well, I didn’t listen, and I am sorry for that.”
He was worse by the time she’d rowed the dinghy to First Curle.
“Can you walk, my sweet?”
Leaves touched with bronze and yellow floated down around her silently as she pulled the dinghy securely onto the bank. Hyacinthe lay slumped across the plank seat, not answering.
Of course he cannot walk, cannot even push himself up from the plank to stand, or he would have done so, thought Barbara, furious with herself. She picked him up, noticing that his legs dangled past her knees. Children grow so quickly, Jane always said. Hyacinthe had grown in the month they’d been here, she would swear it. She half ran, half walked with him down the path.
There was the house now. Good, for she was beginning to be out of breath. She felt Hyacinthe’s tears, hot with fever, on her neck. In her mind was what he had asked her after they had crossed the river to explore the other quarters of the plantation. Would you beat me? he had asked.
Have I ever beaten you? she had replied, astounded. It was because the overseer, not Odell, but the one who oversaw the quarter they went to see, had asked, in all innocence, if she wished her servant boy locked up for the night with the other slaves in the slave house.
“Thérèse!”
Barbara kicked at the gate of the picket fence with her boot.
The dogs came bounding out of the house, their paws scattering broken pieces of shell from the oyster shell paths, and then there was Thérèse, running down the house steps once she saw Barbara carrying Hyacinthe, the dogs yelping and leaping up, trying to lick his hands.
“What has happened? How is he hurt? Did he fall out of the dinghy? I knew he would.”
“He’s caught the fever. Help me carry him.”
Hyacinthe moaned as they shifted him between them. It was no help that the dogs wove themselves in and out at every footstep, licking at Hyacinthe’s hands whenever they could and barking too much. In the house, she and Thérèse put him in the bed in the downstairs chamber.
“The ague,” said Thérèse, her hand against Hyacinthe’s head. “Shoo, dogs, leave him be.” The dogs had jumped up into the bed to be with him, ignoring her. “What of Williamsburg?”
“I won’t…stay here,” Hyacinthe said.
“It hurts you to speak.” Barbara took his hand. “Hush.”
In two days, the three of them were to go to Williamsburg, where the Governor was holding a fête to introduce her to the gentry of the colony. They were coming in from counties close and far, she was told, as if they had been called for an assembly of their governing body, their House of Burgesses. Except that wives and daughters were coming in, too. It’s a rare thing for us to assemble together so, said Colonel Perry. It’s become the talk of the colony. Some of the women are angry because the Governor did not allow time enough for them to order gowns from England.
“Don’t…leave me, madame—they’ll…eat me. They…groaned, I heard…them…The birds fly too close…they peck my eyes….”
“He does not know what he’s saying,” said Thérèse. She compressed her lips, and Barbara saw how upset she was. Yes, Hyacinthe was child to them both.
Barbara ran up the stairs to fetch the Peruvian bark she had been given for her own fever. She, in turn, had dosed Thérèse with it. Holding the bottle, unevenly blown and colored brown, up to afternoon light, she saw there was only a little left. She stared a moment at a pile of gowns. There was no place to put them save folded back into her trunks, and so Thérèse had laid them out like bodies, one atop another, that they might air.
What fools she and her grandmother had been, to be packing gowns and French chairs, when what was needed here was clothing for the slaves, tools—and remedies, like her grandmother’s aqua mirabilis, a cooling fever water smelling of cloves and nutmeg, balm and red roses, smelling of home.
Barbara had already decided that she would return to England on the first ship of the spring; there was so much to discuss with Grandmama, far more than any letter could hold. If her grandmother wished to make First Curle all Barbara believed it could be, coins needed to be spent, and Barbara had none. Asking another for money, even a grandmother, was something that needed to be done face to face. Just where are you going to put those coins, her grandmother would say, and how is that to my advantage? Everything she thought and saw here went into the notebook.
It would be time to return, anyway, and see what was being done about her own estate. This had been in her mind more and more as she studied First Curle: that she, too, had an estate, even if it was only land and debt now. As she thought about tobacco and fields and overseers, about the foodstuffs, the wood that must be put away to see them all through the winter, she thought about Devane Square. Might it rise again under her hand, rather than Roger’s?
Halfway down the steps, she heard a voice and recognized it at once, that pleasant voice, speaking French.
“Make a large fire and put more blankets on him. The more he perspires with the fever, the better. I know. One or another of my crew always has it. You’ll have to bathe him often, every hour at least, so that the fever doesn’t go too high.”
Barbara put her hand to her hair, which still hung about her face, and sat down at once on a step to pin it into some kind of order. The movement of her arms was entirely graceful, like lilies bending in a garden. Her hands fluttered whitely against the thick red-gold of her hair. Her neck, too, was white, long and sleek, like a swan’s.
Beautiful, Klaus said each time she saw him, the man she’d not yet written of in any letters, the man who came to see her two, even three times a week now, the man whom she was a step away from bedding.
In the chamber, sh
e saw that Klaus stood over the narrow bed, holding Hyacinthe down by the shoulders as Thérèse tried to cover him with blankets he had kicked off.
“Don’t fight the blankets, but lie still if you can. Let the fever take you—Ah, Lady Devane.” He smiled, a light coming into his face and eyes.
“Can you help me give him this Peruvian bark water, Captain?”
“Of course. But you know how bitter it is.”
She sent Thérèse for rum and sugar in the basement under the house, fetched the water herself at the well, pulling up the bucket by a rope.
As Thérèse mixed rum, water, and sugar to give Hyacinthe after he took the bark water, Klaus wrapped Hyacinthe tightly in a blanket, as if in swaddling cloth.
“He will take it better from you,” said Thérèse to Barbara. There were circles under Thérèse’s dark eyes, and she was too thin. She herself was still recovering from the ague—the fever—part of coming to this colony, it seemed, to catch the ague.
“Open your mouth,” said Klaus, “so your mistress may give you your medicine. It will make you well. It will taste bitter, but swallow it all, as bitter as it is…. That’s it, swallow. Good boy. Again. Now drink this, which Mademoiselle Fuseau has mixed for you. Good boy, you’re a brave boy. What do you say? Yes, I know. Your head hurts.”
He laid Hyacinthe down again, deftly pulling out his arms from under the blanket.
“We must cover him with the bearskin,” said Thérèse. “It made my fever break faster.”
“We put it back upstairs,” said Barbara, and Thérèse went off to fetch it.
Barbara found some cloths, wet them, ran them gently over Hyacinthe’s face. Klaus knelt at the fireplace, and put in some dry branches to start a fire.