With the shares her father owned in the sugar estate and the shares that Baret possessed—including the extra shares recently granted him by Earl Nigel—she and Baret would own more of Foxemoore than even her father’s cousin Geneva Harwick Buckington. Geneva had been recently married to Baret’s nefarious uncle, Lord Felix, who considered himself the rightful owner of all the Buckington inheritance. She wondered how the conflicts would eventually work out. Baret was in no mood to submit to Felix, whom he blamed for the imprisonment of his father on the Main.
She remembered Minette and grew sober. She had already packed a pretty new frock for her cousin, with all the essentials, intending to stop at her father’s bungalow on the plantation before they entered the Great House together, so that Minette could bathe and change. They would enter side by side as blood cousins—unless her courage gave way in the end like a wet bag and she was left void of resolve. In which case, she might remain in the bungalow until Baret arrived and escorted her and Minette to the main house to meet with Lady Sophie Harwick. Perhaps it would be better if she waited, so they wouldn’t think her flaunting.
Emerald shivered, thinking about entering through that ominous front door alone. Minette’s presence would undoubtedly anger Lady Sophie. Lord, give me wisdom to behave wisely, she prayed. All this blessing and change in my life is a gift from You. Help me to use it as You would have me do. Not for self-seeking but for the good of us all.
A short time later she and Zeddie prepared to leave her father’s abandoned lookout house. The place resembled the old lighthouse that had once awaited her homecoming with foreboding silence when she left Sir Jasper and the hacienda in Spanish Town. At that time, Emerald had been certain she could feel within its tall narrow walls the harbinger of trials to come. Those dreadful times did come, including her incarceration in Brideswell. The treachery had been intensified by the belief that her father was dead. Now, the sun was shining on her path. Happiness beckoned like a playful child for her to follow.
She looked at Zeddie, who offered her an elegant bow, extending her his arm. His good eye shone. “Coming, your ladyship?”
She smiled and looped her arm through his, and they walked out of the lookout house. The structure’s plank flooring creaked beneath their feet. Her ears—soon for the last time—heard the water slapping against its pilings sunk deep into sand.
And then they were seated in the new buggy, and the mare pranced and shook her mane as Zeddie sat tall and straight-shouldered. He gave a flick to the reins.
Leaving Fishers Row behind, they were soon on the back road leading inland to Foxemoore. The sunlight caught the ruby pendant at her throat, and it glowed warm and crimson. She looked at Zeddie and smiled.
“Ah, Missy, if your father could see you now, he’d be a happy man.”
A pair of seagulls lifted together on white wings and rose above the crystal blue Caribbean.
2
RETURN TO FOXEMOORE
The sultry morning throbbed with birdsong, and green and blue parrots lodged in the branches of the Spanish breadfruit trees as freckled sunlight filtered through. Emerald breathed in the scent of moist warm earth and trumpet vine and tried to digest the awesome fact that if she married Baret she would become a wealthy heiress, not only of Foxemoore but of land and houses in England.
With a wink, Zeddie, whistling a sprightly tune, settled his tall black satin hat and gave a light flick of the reins to the mare, who trotted proudly down the brown roadway bringing them closer to Foxemoore. On the other side of the road, tall cane rustled in the wind like green waves, and Emerald listened to the rushing sound through the stalks. Above the miles of cane stretching toward the lush Blue Mountain Range, the sky was the color of a topaz.
Today she found nothing but pleasure in the familiar sights and smells surrounding her on the estate where she’d been brought as a small child from the notorious pirate stronghold of Tortuga.
Emerald sighed. “Zeddie, I must be dreaming. Just think, all this unexpected happiness and heaven too. Is it possible God could bless me so?” she mused, amazed at her recent circumstances.
He turned the buggy from the road onto the smaller one that led into Foxemoore. “See that weather vane?” He pointed to a wooden rooster that turned toward the unsettled breeze from the Caribbean. “No matter which way the wind blows, God is good. Say, m’gal, we ought to paint those words on the rooster. Then, no matter how he points, in storm or fair weather, he’ll be telling out the truth.” He looked at her. “But I’m still mean enough to dream on till I see old Pitt sent a-packing.”
The very mention of Mr. Pitt brought Emerald a nervous pang. She peered ahead, lifting a hand to shade her eyes, and listened above the sighing green stalks for the sound of the slaves hoeing.
They rode toward the familiar cutoff at the end of the road, which brought them to the main carriageway, lined with fringed palms shaking in the wind. A quarter of a mile ahead, the planter’s Great House stood on a grassy knoll facing windward, renewing both distressing and happy memories. On the far side of the carriageway lay a sweeping view of the green cane fields.
Emerald’s heart swelled painfully. “Pull to the side,” she said quietly. “I want to look at it a moment.”
Zeddie brought the buggy under the dense shade of an overspreading hickory tree. She gazed up to the planter’s Great House. Its white columns and red tile roof stood as she remembered from her childhood, with serene and superior aristocracy. Its magnificence still awed her and threatened her courage until she touched the ruby pendant at her throat. Someone, at least, believed in her—the earl’s grandson!
Foxemoore had belonged to the Harwicks and the Buckingtons since before the days of Oliver Cromwell. During the great Civil War in England, several Harwicks fled to the West Indies, where they had built the sugar estate with money loaned by the great earl Killigrew Buckington. The Buckingtons themselves had gone to France with the exiled King Charles and returned during the Reconstruction to reclaim their title and lands.
Earl Nigel Buckington was now here and, for reasons of his own, was favoring the upcoming betrothal between her and Baret—at least until Lavender and Lord Grayford Thaxton were married. The earl then expected Emerald to return the Buckington ring and melt quietly away into the Jamaican sunset. But when she had told this to Baret, he had laughed, because of his serious intentions to marry her. His confidence bolstered her own, yet she remained uncomfortably uneasy at times.
What would Lady Sophie Harwick say when she walked through the front door, bringing her cousin Minette with her?
“All right, Zeddie, let’s go find Minette,” she said quietly.
He drove the buggy off the carriageway onto the narrow work road that ran for a great length between the cane fields.
Emerald found that the familiar scene brought many unpleasant memories, like clouds of stinging flies. She remembered an emotionally dark day several months ago when she had come down this road to keep her meeting with Mr. Pitt over the arrest of Cousin Ty. She remembered how she had failed to gain his consideration for a reprieve. Pitt had threatened that unless she came up with a bribe—the family jewels from her French cousin Rafael Levasseur—Pitt would haul Ty before the Jamaican magistrate to be branded as a runaway.
Emerald’s eyes narrowed beneath her thick lashes as she relived the frustration of having no one to turn to for help, to have every door she knocked on bolted. Heaven had seemed brass to her prayers, and members of the Harwick family had turned a deaf ear to her pleas. In the end, Ty had indeed been hauled to the town pillory and branded on his handsome forehead like a steer branded by a rancher.
Emerald moved on the learner seat, trying to hold down the eruption of angry tension from bubbling forth like a volcano. Her eyes closed. It would do no good to get angry now. It is too easy to hate Mr. Pitt, she confessed to the Lord. Help me to leave past injustice to You.
What had happened in the past could not be undone. What mattered today was to find Minette a
nd take her from the fields.
There was another reason for going to the manor house first. She wanted to search her father’s trunk to see if she could locate the much-talked-about deed to his shares of Foxemoore sugar.
Whether or not such a deed existed had always been a matter of some question to Emerald. Her father, Sir Karlton, however, had insisted it was so.
“If I do not legally own a large share of the sugar production,” he had said, “then why does Felix not take it to court? He’ll not take the matter to law because the man knows I hold a legal document. And not simply a lease either, but I hold it free—and will forever! It is signed by the deceased Earl Esmond Buckington himself.”
A legal document, mused Emerald, as they drove along the cane, growing tall beside the narrow red-brown road. Did such a mysterious parchment actually exist, locked away in some box, or was it her father’s spurious invention?
One morning he had brought her to his chamber to unlock a small pirated silver treasure box and fish out a folded deed to show her. The paper might have been anything, since Emerald, twelve years old at the time, had been too young to appreciate its validity. Trust in her father and the official-looking gold seal had convinced her that his claim was true.
Until Lord Felix Buckington had married her father’s cousin Geneva Harwick, the Buckingtons had been absentee sugar magnates, living as blooded nobility in England and serving the court of His Majesty King Charles II, while the Harwicks, who were gentry, had run the estate.
But under Felix, all that had changed for the worse. Foxemoore was now doubling as its own merchant, using family ships to haul sugar into the American colonies and Quebec. Felix was also bringing back slaves to work land bought from a neighboring planter. Zeddie learned that the smaller planter had quietly been “encouraged” by Sir Jasper to sell out to Foxemoore against his will.
The knowledge disturbed Emerald. If she married Baret, that would allow them to control what went on in the plantation. Baret told her he would stand by her in making certain changes, especially rebuilding and enlarging the singing school of Great-uncle Mathias. But dare she contest some of the decisions made by Lord Felix? After all, she wasn’t Baret’s wife yet. She was inexperienced in the ways of ruling, and in Baret’s absence, Felix would be sure to point this out on every occasion that proved her wisdom inferior to his.
She would need to move slowly when it came to making decisions that previously had been left to Lady Sophie, Geneva, and now to Felix. Lady Sophie, especially, would resent what she would mistake as “meddling.” Nevertheless, there were some matters hot within her heart that Emerald would not compromise: the future of her cousins Minette and Ty and the translation of the slave chants in order to bring the slaves their own Christian hymns. She must locate her father’s deed, which Baret had asked her about at the governor’s meeting two days ago.
Resentment stirred from slumber as she remembered that Pitt had dared to move into her father’s house and sleep in his bed. No doubt the loathsome brute had searched everything. Not that he knew or would care about the deed. What Mr. Pitt was interested in finding was a map showing the location of the Spanish treasure taken from the Prince Philip.
He would look in vain among her father’s things. Baret had told her aboard the Regale that he had the map and that the treasure was stowed on the Spanish pearl island of Margarita. But Pitt didn’t know that. She wondered if Baret had ever gone to the island. That was doubtful, since he had been fully occupied with a Spanish don he’d taken as prisoner from a galleon. Don Miguel was the son of the planter who had bought Baret’s father as a slave. Though there’d been too much happening recently to ask Baret what he had learned from Don Miguel, she suspected he had managed to gain the information he needed. He appeared confident in his quest of finding his father, planning to sail with Henry Morgan under Governor Modyford’s sanction.
Zeddie slowed the buggy. Emerald shaded her eyes beneath her sun hat and looked ahead across the cane fields where the slaves were busy at work under the watchful eye of an African foreman. Mr. Pitt was nowhere in sight, but she believed him to be somewhere in the area. He often rode his horse through the fields to make certain those in charge of the cane workers also toed the line.
She leaned forward on the seat as the fringe danced on the buggy top, glancing about anxiously for a sign of Minette. Zeddie had been sent to locate her on the evening of the governor’s dinner in Port Royal. He’d reported back yesterday that although he’d been unable to find her, Ngozi had managed to get a message to him telling him that Minette was working in the cookhouse near Mr. Pitt’s stockade for disobedient slaves.
Emerald was quite aware of what the stockade was. There had never been one when her father managed Foxemoore, but Lady Sophie knew little of what was going on, and she trusted Mr. Pitt. Cousin Geneva was ill, and Lord Felix, if he did know, wasn’t likely to be disturbed as long as things on the plantation remained quiet. One uprising several months ago was enough, and Lavender’s mother had died in that brief horror. There was little sympathy for the slaves on Foxemoore right now, as long as Pitt did his job.
The boiling house was working at full capacity when Zeddie brought the buggy to a stop in the work yard. The steam from the huge kettles and the heavy smell of burned sugar and molasses, which would be sold to make Jamaican rum, hung like sticky vapor on the air.
Emerald’s eyes flickered with pain as several African women walked by, carrying pots on their heads. They were unclothed from the waist up, and it infuriated her that the women should be treated with such indignity! Before Great-uncle Mathias had died, she and Minette had worked with him to make certain that clothing was distributed. But beside being cruel, Mr. Pitt was a lustful man. He enjoyed debauchery and kept several women for his selfish use. There will be a quick end to that! thought Emerald.
The slaves were busy at work as Zeddie parked the buggy in the clearing of rust-brown earth near several wooden frame buildings and the cluster of huts used as receiving stations for Mr. Pitt’s paperwork. She was gathering her skirts to climb down when Zeddie laid a hand on her arm, his one eye grave.
“Maybe ye ought to wait and let me bring Minette out.”
She knew why he said this. The scene would not leave a pleasant memory.
“I’ve been here before with Mathias many times. I know full well ‘tis an ugly, brutal sight. But I want to see. The Lord has blessed me far above all I could expect or hope for, and in my blessing I don’t want to become like Sophie and Geneva, aware only of the pleasantness of the sugar estate. We must never forget the cost in human suffering and indignities.”
Zeddie’s pride in her showed, but he looked worried just the same. “Don’t forget, m’gal, you’re but a sweet child compared to clever slavers and businessmen like Lord Felix and Sir Jasper. If you aim to take ’em on where it hurts, you’ll be needing Captain Buckington at your side. And while the betrothal takes place in two weeks, it’s also true he’ll be gone at sea with Morgan for a year or more after that.”
She smiled. “I have you, don’t forget. And I’ve rare plans for Ngozi. And maybe Ty too, if I could get word to him in the Blue Mountains.” She gazed off briefly toward the lush tropical ranges standing against the clear sky. “I wonder if Ngozi would know how to get word to him?”
“If there’s a way, Ngozi be the one, all right. And from the way he treated me the other night, he’s as loyal to you as they come. But Lord Felix is the one I worry about. There’s nothing worse than a roaring lion except a wily serpent hiding in the tall grass. That’s what Lord Felix is, if you don’t mind my saying so. He won’t sit back and let a young woman marry his lordship and meddle where he has stout plans.”
“I’ve no plans to start a hurricane,” she said. “I expect to start out cautiously. But concerning Minette and Ty, there’ll be no compromise—” She stopped, seeing his expression change and feeling his hand tighten on her arm. He was looking past her toward the boiling house office.
“Speak of trouble, m’gal, it’s come to meet us.”
Emerald turned her head and saw not Mr. Pitt but a handsome, muscled African, bare from the waist up. Sempala wore soiled cotton britches cut off at the knees and a hat of dried woven cane leaves. He had apparently come from inside the boiling house. He was followed by two other Africans who served him as law enforcers, which meant that they were big enough and strong enough to crack down on any worker who might decide to rebel under his workload.
Sempala looked toward the new buggy and then at Emerald’s expensive finery. He must have recognized her at once, for he removed his hat in deference. She could tell by his sullen expression that he was not a happy man. He must know she had come for Minette. Sempala was Mr. Pitt’s chief foreman, whose name he had changed to “Big Boy” to show contemptuous authority over his fellow Africans. Though Pitt had chosen him, Emerald knew he had no liking for Sempala. He was merely useful in carrying out Pitt’s orders.
It was unfortunate, thought Emerald, that overseers like Pitt were allowed to choose the slaves they wanted to have authority over the other workers. To guarantee their own better treatment at the hands of an overseer, many were obliged to use whatever tactics necessary to keep order in the fields and at the boiling house. Like Pitt, Sempala carried a short whip, and a machete hung on a leather thong belt.
She recalled that he had once asked to marry Minette. Her cousin had refused him and later told Emerald that Sempala had never forgiven her. That he might now dislike Minette with the same intensity with which he had “loved” her was a frightening thought. He had once called her a “White Heart,” meaning that she had betrayed her own people and was good for little else except humiliation.
Emerald’s throat tightened, and for the first time she entertained the horrid thought that Minette might have been compromised. The thought turned her hands cold. Gathering her skirts, with Zeddie’s help she climbed down from the buggy seat.
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