Call of the Raven

by Wilbur Smith

  As soon as the construction ceased, Pendleton’s porters lugged dozens of barrels of maize aboard, packing the stores with enough food to sustain the ship’s crew and human cargo during the ten-week voyage to Cuba. Then came the casks of water, rum and cleaning lye. The seamen had to rearrange their hammocks on the berth deck to accommodate the provisions. Pendleton delivered the crates of ivory and containers of palm oil destined for New Orleans. These were jammed into the shell room in the stern, and the ammunition relocated along the ribs of the berth deck and in the forward magazine to distribute the weight.

  Finally, the porters brought up the irons and coppers from the warehouse. The irons were light chains with manacles for wrist and ankle, and the coppers were huge cooking pots in which the maize would be boiled. The carpenters ran the irons along the slave decks and fastened the coppers in place near the hatch beside the capstan.

  A week after they made landfall, the Blackhawk put to sea, sailing from Ambriz on the evening tide. All her sails were set full: to any watching eyes it would seem she was bound for home.

  But in the moonlit hours of the middle watch she turned course and crept back into the Loge River estuary. On this night, all of the sailors were awake. The boat teams were on the water, the rest of the crew at attention on the spar deck, rifles and cutlasses in hand, while Captain Sterling scanned the dark waters with his spyglass. The signal came at half past two, as Alcott Pendleton had promised. A torch burned brightly in the middle of the river, and then disappeared quickly. Sterling lit the binnacle lamp and gave the order to Charles Morgan, who passed it along in a whisper to the crew: ‘Prepare to receive cargo.’

  One by one, the dugout canoes emerged from the shadows and glided quietly towards the ship, guided by the paddles of Pendleton’s porters. The Blackhawk’s boat teams took turns escorting the canoes to the rope ladder hanging from the hooks that secured the gangplank, then held the canoes in place while the Bakongo tribesmen prodded the slaves up the ladder with muskets and spears, and the seamen on deck manhandled the new arrivals through the hatch by the capstan into the warren of decks below. Tippoo’s carpenters checked the slaves for the captain’s brand and lined them up along the planking on their sides, front to back. The carpenters secured the shackles in place by the light of a single oil lamp.

  Despite the weapons all around, the slaves did not go quietly into the hold. They kicked and howled and tried to throw themselves over the side at the top of the ladder. One man succeeded, only to be speared by a porter as he thrashed in the dark water. Another slave, a young woman, tripped as she went over the railing and fell into the half-empty canoe, splitting her skull.

  Tippoo caught the next man who lunged for the rail in his massive hands, lifted him off the deck by the neck, and drew his knife across the man’s stomach, causing his bowels to spill out in a gush of bile and blood. Tippoo held the dying slave aloft until he stopped struggling, then propped his corpse against the capstan as an example to all those coming over the side.

  It was Mungo’s duty to record the cargo in the captain’s logbook. He stood beside the binnacle, counting bodies as they climbed aboard, demarcating men and women and children. It meant he had to look at each one, gazing at their faces to guess their ages. Most lowered their heads, but some returned his gaze with wide, accusing eyes.

  He had almost grown numb to the endless shuffling row of bodies, when he looked up from the ledger to see a face staring out of the line. It was a girl, sixteen or maybe less, for her hair had been shaved off like all the other slaves and it was hard to guess her age. She was pretty – beautiful, even – but that was not what caught Mungo’s attention. She had softly rounded cheeks, bright eyes and flawless red-brown skin with a sheen like polished mahogany. She was almost the perfect mirror of Camilla.

  Mungo stared at her, the pen and the ledger forgotten. He looked into her eyes, seeing her curiosity turn to fear. He wanted to comfort her, but there was nothing he could say.

  Then Lanahan jabbed a musket at her and she vanished into the hold. Angrily, Mungo shook his head, made another note in the ledger, and moved on to the next slave.

  The canoes departed as soon as they had deposited their cargo, returning upriver to gather another load. To Mungo’s astonishment, it took under an hour to board all three hundred and eighty-nine slaves, the total agreed by Sterling and Pendleton, less the three who had died attempting escape. When the last African was stowed below decks, Tippoo’s carpenters secured the hatch with a stout chain and three padlocks. The captain called the crew to muster on the quarterdeck, as the third-quarter moon dipped into the silvered swells, illumining the course they would take to the Indies.

  ‘From now on, the watches will be four hours instead of eight, with double teams, one for the deck and one for the guard. Keep an eye on the hatch and another on the horizon. The only flag with any right to stop us is the Stars and Stripes.’

  Sterling turned towards Lanahan, who was standing beside him.

  ‘Hoist the sails, Mr Lanahan, and take her out to sea. The rest of you, except those on watch, get some sleep. You’re going to need it.’

  The sails flapped from the yards and the ship’s bow came around to the west. Mungo watched her course change on the compass with a grim smile. He had come halfway across the world, but at last he was heading in the right direction again. Back to America, to Chester and his revenge.

  The morning after Chester had caught Camilla in his study, Granville took her out onto the estate. Dozens of hands, some as young as ten or eleven, were already at work, harvesting clumps of white cotton from flaxen stalks, to the rhythm of a bullwhip brandished by a young man on horseback. Granville handed Camilla a reed basket.

  ‘Two hundred pounds by sunset. If you’re short, you’ll taste my whip.’

  She worked the rows as fast as her hands could move, gritting her teeth against the prick of the bolls, wiping her blood in the dirt. By late afternoon she was on the verge of collapse, her throat parched from the heat and the muscles in her back shrieking from the torment of ceaseless labour. But her basket was barely more than half full, while the baskets of the slaves around her were brimming. Hot tears spilled from her eyes and mixed with the sweat on her cheeks. She longed to rest her aching limbs and drink deeply from a flask of water hanging from the overseer’s saddle, but the snap of the young man’s whip kept her moving.

  By the end of the day, she was near despair. Her fingers were lacerated and bloody, and her body more exhausted than she had thought possible. She tried not to think what it must be doing to the baby inside her. When the sky began to lose its light, she left the field with the other hands, wondering if her legs had the strength to carry her wherever they were going. She stumbled and fell, spilling her basket all over the ground. The other field hands filed by, but none stopped to help her up. Chester’s displeasure had branded her just as much as the scars he had left on her arms: she was untouchable.

  She pulled herself to her feet and gathered the cotton back into her basket. The white bolls were now streaked with grey dust. She joined the other slaves in a line that snaked into a cavernous barn, where they waited to hang their baskets on a scale. Granville made notations in a logbook, nodding when a slave met or exceeded the quota, scowling when they did not. On this day only two fell short – an old man whose skin seemed to hang from his bones, and Camilla, whose tally amounted to a mere one hundred and forty-five pounds.

  Granville grabbed Camilla’s arm and breathed into her ear, ‘There’s a price a nigger pays for missing quota.’

  Camilla’s body was numb from fatigue. She did not resist as he led her through the dusk towards the slave cottages that stood beneath the moss-draped oaks. Amid the cottages was a post buried in the earth with a crossbar nailed to it. The old man who had missed his quota was chained to the post and stripped of his shirt. This must have happened to him before, for the knot of scars on his back was almost like a second skin. He barely made a sound.

  The field ha
nds were made to gather around and watch. There was neither pity nor fear in their faces – this was simply a fact of life. Granville gave a brief speech about the perils of indolence, then unleashed a whipping so harsh that Camilla’s skin tingled as if charged by lightning. The old man’s cries rang out in the grove as the shadows deepened and lamps were lit in the big house. Camilla knew it would be her turn next.

  The old man was unchained and taken away into one of the cottages. Granville pushed Camilla to the post. There was a savage hunger in his eyes and Camilla knew what it meant. Twice, he had been denied his chance to have her, and he had not forgotten it. This was his way of getting satisfaction.

  He pulled her dress down to her waist and manacled her hands. He walked around her, ogling her naked breasts and snapping the whip in the air.

  ‘One stroke for every pound you were short,’ he said.

  Camilla gasped. Even the crowd of slaves seemed shocked. Fifty-five lashes with that long, cutting whip was almost a death sentence.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  Chester Marion’s voice rang out around the punishment square. With her face pressed against the post, Camilla had not seen him walking down the path from the big house.

  ‘What was her tally?’ he asked Granville.

  ‘Not even one-fifty.’

  Chester nodded. ‘Stow your whip. I’ll handle her.’

  Disappointment flared in Granville’s eyes, but he knew better than to disobey his employer. He unchained Camilla. Chester took her back to the house and made her undress in his bedroom while a slave fetched a bath of hot water. He never took his eyes off her as she washed the field grime and blood off her skin.

  When she had finished, he said, ‘Stand by the window where I can see you.’

  She did as she was told. He looked her up and down, his grey eyes fixed on her with a savage purpose. She would almost have preferred the touch of Granville’s whip. His gaze seemed to flay her flesh down to the bone. He looked at the taut skin over the swell of her belly as if he could see the child growing inside – as if he would reach in and rip it out. He seemed to be wrestling with some emotion deep in his soul.

  With a sudden flash of insight, Camilla realised what conflicted him. The child in her womb gave her a hold over him. As long as she carried it, he could not hurt her without hurting the baby.

  But in the same moment, she realised it did not make her safe. If anything, it only made her situation more dangerous. He could not stand the thought that she had power over him. If she used it, he would snap and then he might destroy both her and her child.

  With the intuition of someone who had been a slave all her life, she understood that the only way to protect herself was not to show her strength. She must make him feel powerful.

  She went to the bed and laid herself out on it.

  ‘I am yours,’ she said humbly.

  From then on, Camilla spent her days labouring beneath the glare of the sun, picking tufts of cotton from the bolls of Bannerfield and stuffing them into her basket. The Louisiana heat did not relent, even as the days moved towards Thanksgiving. Her delicate fingers, once employed to fasten corsets and mend gowns for Abigail St John, were now calloused; her skin was stained with sweat and cotton dust. Her belly swelled beneath her simple housedress and she could only pray that the child growing inside her womb was not being harmed by her suffering.

  The weeks of autumn became months, and Camilla mastered the ways of the cotton field. She learned how to conserve her energy and endure the hours under the sun; how to cleanse her mind of all distraction and turn her hands into engines; how to strip the plant of the white fibres and fill her basket to the brim. By November, she was one of the most productive pickers at Bannerfield, collecting between two hundred and thirty and two hundred and fifty pounds per day.

  Chester was often away. He spent more and more time in New Orleans, and when he returned his talk was all of brokers and bankers and investors. Camilla did not know what it meant, but she could see the effects. Chester had a map of the county painted floor to ceiling on the wall of his drawing room, with Bannerfield’s boundaries marked out in gilt lines. The estate was visibly the largest in the county, but it did not stop there. Every month, the painter was summoned again to extend the gold borders around more acres that Chester had acquired. The estate grew like a tumour, a malignant presence spreading over the heart of the county.

  As the estate expanded, so did the house. Masons and carpenters came in their dozens to add new wings, porticoes, pediments and fountains. Engineers had to construct great earthworks to extend the hill on which the house stood so there was room enough for the foundations. When the buildings were done, craftsmen were summoned from all over the country to fill them with sumptuous furnishings. Furniture was ordered from France, curtains and upholstery from England, paintings from Italy. A pianoforte was brought up by barge from New Orleans and installed in the drawing room, though no one in the house knew how to play. Every morning when Camilla woke, she found a thin layer of grey-white dust covering her skin.

  A new world took shape around her. Camilla’s body changed. Her belly swelled plump; her breasts grew full. She could feel herself changing inside, too, like a tapestry being unpicked and then stitched back together in a new design.

  Sometimes, out in the fields, she thought of trying to escape. But then the shadow of the overseer’s horse would fall over her, and she would hear the whip slithering through his hands. She would never outrun him now, so heavy with child. And even if she did, where would she go? A lone black woman in Louisiana was effectively a thousand dollars’ worth of lost property waiting to be claimed. Most likely, she would not even make it off the estate. Those golden lines on the map hemmed her in like the walls of a prison.

  The Louisiana heat began to subside after the middle of December. The days turned pleasant and the nights cool, in the way that Camilla remembered from autumns in Virginia. But the fair weather could not ease the stresses of the cotton harvest. The production of cotton – the ginning, the pressing, the baling, and the transportation required to bring it to market – was intensive. Bannerfield’s two hand-powered gins operated non-stop, night as well as day, until the last of the raw cotton was separated from the seeds and ready for pressing. Given the delicacy of Camilla’s health, Chester Marion found her employment in the ginning barn. She spent her days amid a flock of old women and children, picking out by hand the seeds the machines had missed from the fluffy white fibres. It was mind-numbing labour, but it was easier on her fingers than handling the bolls, and at least she could sit down.

  As her pregnancy advanced and her discomfort increased, Camilla worried that Chester would lose interest in her and revert to his abusive ways. To her surprise, he took delight in her ripening belly, running his hands over her distended flesh after intercourse and placing his ear against it to listen for the baby’s movements.

  ‘Isaac,’ he said, lying next to her in the bed one evening. ‘That will be his name.’

  Camilla glanced down the length of her body, past her rounded breasts to her stomach. She ran her hand over the bump in a circular motion, as if polishing a platter in the kitchen. She had no idea whether the child would be a boy, but if Chester wanted to speculate, she would not quibble.

  ‘That’s a good name,’ she said. ‘A strong name.’ She almost added, ‘My great-grandfather was called Isaac,’ but she caught herself. If she had learned anything in the months she had been at Bannerfield, it was Chester’s hatred for her former life. If he could have erased every detail of Windemere and the St Johns from her memory, he would have.

  Chester reached out for her belly and rubbed it possessively, pushing her hand away.

  ‘I’m going to raise him,’ he said. ‘The law may not recognise him as a free man, but here on my land he will be every bit a Marion.’

  Camilla tensed. She imagined how her child would be if he grew up seeking Chester’s approval, seeing the pitiless cruelty of Granville�
��s whip and hearing his snarling dogs hunting down the runaways. She longed to give her child a father with dignity and strength. But that was not possible. Not as long as Chester lived.

  She took his hand from her belly and placed it on her breast.

  ‘How is the harvest progressing?’ she asked.

  She had quickly learned that the one way to distract Chester was to talk to him about business. Early on, it had occasionally helped her deflect his intentions when he was in a particularly vile mood. Now, more and more, she used it to distract him from the baby.

  ‘We’re already at two thousand bales,’ he said with pride, ‘and we’ve still got a barn full of cotton to be pressed. We’re going to fill half a steamship this year, I believe.’

  ‘Where will the bales go once they reach New Orleans?’ she asked.

  After drawing out Chester’s private thoughts for months, she understood the commerce as well as any trader. She knew about the debt every planter carried into the harvest and the fluctuation in price per pound at the exchanges. She understood the way the great river served as an artery for every plantation from Baton Rouge to Arkansas, carrying hundreds of thousands of bales by steamship and barge down to New Orleans. She knew how the export houses acquired the bales from the planters, with floats from the moneylenders, and how the merchant ships then would carry them to the textile mills of the Northern States and England.

  ‘The European market is strengthening,’ Chester replied. ‘The crop will probably go to Britain this year.’

  He seemed to grow bored of the conversation. He moved his hand from her breast over the hump of her stomach and down between her legs. She wanted to cry out and push him away, but she knew how vengeful he could be when his pride was wounded. She buried her face in the pillow and tried to think of the one man who might someday rescue her.