by Dudley Pope
“All the provisions and water are on board, sir; we’re just getting the powder and musket and pistol shot loaded now. That leaves only the sugar – we’ll be carrying that until long after dark.”
Yorke nodded. “We have to sail earlier than I intended. We need to be clear of here an hour after sunrise.”
“You ran into trouble,” Saxby said in a comment rather than a question.
Yorke quickly outlined what had happened, making sure that it was far from clear to Saxby who actually stuck the knife in Wilson’s back.
“Pity it didn’t kill him,” Saxby commented, adding seriously as an afterthought: “If we’re quitting the island, we could go back and finish him off. It’d be doing a lot of people a good turn, sir.”
“Yes, but we’d be known through the Caribbee islands as murderers.”
Saxby shrugged his shoulders. “Traitors…Royalists…bolted apprentices… We have six murderers among our indentured servants and twice as many burglars, pickpockets and sheep stealers.”
“You’re their foreman,” Yorke said ironically. “Still, we’ll leave Mr Wilson in peace now. If he was dead he could not worry…”
“Aye, there’s that to it,” Saxby said, understanding at once. “As it is, he’s never going to be sure now that one of us won’t creep up on a dark night and stick a bigger knife on the correct side.”
“Anyway, go down to the jetty and make the lads hurry: you can tell them there’s an emergency. Don’t say any more, though.”
With that he walked up the stone staircase into the house, calling for Aurelia. She was in his bedroom being helped by Mary, who was holding up the sheet of polished brass he used as a mirror so that Aurelia could see to tidy her hair. Mary tactfully excused herself, put down the mirror and left the room.
Almost at once, Aurelia buried her head in his arms, weeping uncontrollably. Like most men, Ned had no idea what to do. All he could think of was that he had a great deal of work to finish before sailing at sunrise.
For a minute or two he felt like a kidnapper and was prepared to leave any arguing until later, but at the same time he was embarrassed that Aurelia should be trying to make do with his spartan quarters. His bed was unmade – not that it entailed more than straightening the linen sheet on the leather straps criss-crossing the low wooden frame – but the dressing table had only a comb in addition to the mirror, and on the floor beside it was a pewter basin with his shaving brush, razor and a jug of soapberry juice.
“You do not use a hammaco,” Aurelia sobbed inconsequentially.
“No, they’re too uncomfortable. You can’t turn over.”
“That is a bed for a married couple,” she murmured.
“Yes,” Ned said, and she blushed.
Suddenly she stood up, obviously having reached a decision about something.
“Edouard – I must go home: this is madness!”
Ned was startled and felt fear, not knowing how to deal with a woman whose sense of duty was overcoming all logic or reason. Suddenly, and for the first time since he had known her, he lost his temper.
“You can’t go back,” he said harshly. “He’ll kill you. If he didn’t strangle you and say it was done by the same person that stabbed him, he would thrash you every day for the rest of his life. Or your life.”
He gripped her shoulders, shaking her in an attempt to make the words sink in, and lapsing into French. “He has everything. He has all your money and the plantation is in his name; he’ll have Kingsnorth within a month. What does he want you for? He hates you. To begin with, you were simply a source of money: that was why he married you. Now you get in his way.”
He continued shaking her as words poured from his mouth. “He never loved you: that is what you cannot accept. You think – you have to think, because of your pride – that he married you because you are beautiful and he loved you.
“He married you because when your father fled from France after the Edict of Nantes, he brought a lot of money with him. Your family are wealthy. When he died you inherited a fortune, and Wilson knew it.
“He married you and has used all your money. What have you today? Not a penny piece. Not a ha’porth of love from that man; in fact you have his hatred – because you are still alive and prevent him replacing you with other women at the estate house. But you know better than anyone else what he has done – he keeps women elsewhere.
“But what has he got? A great plantation bought with your money and which he would have lost at least a couple of times if the remainder of your money had not saved him from bankruptcy. And soon he’ll have this place. Then he’ll be by far the biggest landowner on this island, and be a powerful man in the Assembly.
“Yet you want to go back to him.”
A sudden thought struck Ned, one that even as he began speaking he knew was despicable, but his pride, too, was hurt and he was lashing out blindly.
“You don’t want to take your chance with me, who loves you and has always loved you from the first day. I have nothing. If my father and brother died tomorrow they could not leave me anything but the memory of the estates in Kent and Sussex; within a day or so Kingsnorth will be gone and my only kingdom will be the deck of the Griffin. I have nothing to offer you but myself; if I am killed, you will be alone – as alone as you are now. But I cannot blame you; he may whip you o’nights, but at least he gives you a name: Madame Wilson, the legal wife of the greatest scoundrel I have ever met.”
She broke loose from his grip but remained standing in front of him. Her face was white, the skin taut with emotion, she had stopped crying. He saw she was not angry, but whatever deep emotion now gripped her he had never seen before.
“Edouard, you must listen. Do you really think I want to go back to him because you have nothing to offer me – because you have lost everything?”
“What else can I think?” he answered uncomfortably.
“So you think I want to go back because he will soon own both estates, and has my money?”
“Well, he will, won’t he?” Ned said lamely.
“Oh, how little you know me. You say you love me – yet you think I can do these things: leave you because you have lost everything, stay with him because he has everything.”
“If you loved me, you would sail with us tonight.”
“But Edouard – I am only staying now because I know this man: he is hateful, he will raise the hue and cry, he will persuade the island secretary and the governor to send this man Penn and his fleet to hunt you down and hang you. But if I stay, perhaps I can persuade him…slowly I can show him he has everything he wants, and that revenge is not necessary.”
Suddenly he understood and felt ashamed.
“Darling heart – there’s nothing you can achieve for either of us by staying. The governor would never send Penn after us – the fleet will have far more important things to do.”
But Aurelia had not finished. “Today he challenged you to a duel, and you refused, and he said you did not think I was worth risking your life for.”
“Skin. He said ‘skin’, not life.”
“Well, whatever it was. Did he speak the truth?”
Ned sat down on the stool, leaving Aurelia standing and looking down at him. It had all seemed comparatively simple when he left home to go to the Wilson estate this morning: he had only to persuade Aurelia to leave the island with him. Now…
“He was drunk, so I could not duel with him. One does not fight with a drunken man, either with pistols or swords.”
“But in time he would become sober.”
“Yes, but I am short of time; I am needed here, to make sure the Griffin can sail.”
“So he was right.”
Startled by both the words and the quiet voice, Ned looked up and realized he was losing a game in which he held all the high cards.
“Would you live – I mean live as a wife – with the man who killed your first husband?” he asked quietly.
“Well, I cannot see –“
“Think about it,” Ned asked harshly, looking down at the worn planks of the floor. “Just think about it. Let us suppose we wait for your husband to sober up. We decide on weapons. We duel. We would have time to send for seconds to ensure fair play. And when it is all over, what do you do?”
“Obviously it would depend on –“
“It depends on nothing: I should have killed him. I am, my dear Aurelia, what my fencing master regarded as the finest swordsman he had ever seen; my lessons stopped because he had nothing more to teach me. But supposing we used pistols, eh? You know your husband is a very bad shot. Ask Saxby about me. I am fortunate: I have a quick eye and unusually good balance. Sword or pistol – it makes no difference.”
“Would you,” he repeated, “live with the man who killed your husband?”
“But…but he would have told everyone that you were a coward for refusing his challenge; your name would have been dishonoured. Everyone in the island would have ignored you.”
Ned shrugged. “I am leaving the island, but anyway I have never been interested in what the islanders do, say or think. Most of them have the minds, attitudes and drinking habits of peasants.”
“That is true,” she murmured.
“You still have not answered my question.”
“You are trying to trap me!”
“Trap you? How, in God’s name?”
“If I say I would never live with the man who killed my husband, you will ask me to live with you because you did not kill him.”
Ned jumped to his feet, unable to believe his ears. “I don’t steal your money, I don’t whip you, I don’t come home drunk and punch you, I don’t call you a French slut: Aurelia, I just love you. I am not trying to trap you, so right now, this minute, you can choose.”
She was sobbing again, twisting a ringlet of hair with one hand, dabbing at her eyes with one of his linen handkerchiefs that had been lying folded on the dressing table.
“Choose what?”
Ned gave a deep sigh; he seemed to be sinking into a quicksand of emotions, words, decisions, contradictions and, he suspected, misunderstandings.
“Choose what you want to do. Either you return to Wilson, and I’ll provide a horse and a groom to escort you, or you stay with me and we sail in the Griffin.”
“But…but…oh, he will kill me; I know he will. Then he will have everything –”
Again Ned sighed. “That settles it. No more talking. We leave Wilson to his mulatto – the one you know about, but there are several more. Now, in that trunk over there are the rest of my clothes. Sort them out and keep only the ones that are worth having. Remember we may have to adapt some for you – it might be more comfortable on board a ship wearing breeches and hose than a skirt and petticoat.”
“That other trunk contains cloth. It is good cloth and they use it to make my clothes. Look through that – I imagine we will take it all. And behind that curtain are my boots and shoes. I will take them all.”
“Your hats,” she asked, “where are they?”
“I have only that beaver,” he said pointing to the one he had been wearing. “I wear a hat only to visit you.”
“But the sun! It will kill you with the heat.”
“Do not worry; it has already sent me mad.”
Her eyes widened in alarm until he said: “That’s why I love you. From what you’ve been saying up to now, only a madman would love you –”
“Edouard,” she said, her voice serious.
Ned turned to her, alarmed by the tone.
“There is one other thing. Walter is still my husband.”
“I know! But what does that mean to us?”
“While I am married to another man, you and I cannot share a marriage bed.”
“Any bed,” he said lightly. “Even a hammaco.”
She shook her head. “I made my vows in church before God: they last while he and I live, or the marriage is annulled.”
“Start packing those clothes,” Ned said, “and we’ll discuss it later. There are no beds, marriage or otherwise, in the Griffin. I hope you like sleeping in a hammaco.”
Chapter Five
The sugar sacks slid down into the blackness of the hold and as soon as there was a shout, the four men hauled on the rope going up to the stay. Saxby, standing by the coaming beside Yorke, gave a satisfied grunt. “That’s the lot, sir; fifty-eight tons of sweetness, and the Dutch will give us a penny a pound for it.”
Yorke looked along the jetty and could see three or four men approaching, each with a knapsack on his shoulder. “Are these the last?”
“Yes sir, but with your permission I’d like to light a lantern and read out the names, just to make sure.”
Yorke laughed and clapped the foreman on the back. “A ship of scoundrels, eh Saxby? A would-be murderess and her two accomplices, for all of whom a hue and cry will soon be raised, a Royalist for whom the Assembly will soon be offering a reward, and thirty-one indentured servants who the Assembly would claim are breaking the terms of their agreement and escaping. You and your assistant and our nine time-expired men are the only ones on the right side of the law. And even you are leaving the island without paying the tax.”
“Aye,” Saxby said grimly, “but we could stay and seize the ship and the lot of you lawbreakers, and make ourselves rich men on the reward.”
“Aye,” Yorke said, mimicking the foreman’s Lincolnshire accent, “and may the Good Lord and the militia protect you from Mrs Judd and Mrs Bullock!”
“I hear tell that the Spanish still call Sir Francis Drake ‘El Draco’, sir; before we’ve finished they’ll be shivering at the thought of ‘El Juddo’.”
“La Judda,” Yorke corrected. “We’ll establish her fame as the ruthless woman pirate, along with Mrs Bullock, once she is sure which side a man’s heart beats.”
Mrs Bullock’s mistake over Wilson had, within an hour, become a legend in Kingsnorth and “Where is Bullock’s heart?” a rallying cry for everyone sailing in the Griffin and a source of acute embarrassment for her husband.
Yorke slapped at the mosquitoes which were attacking his face, wrist and hands, delighted at finding a meal at this time of night without having to fly through clouds of tobacco smoke. “Get your lantern and read out those names, Saxby, the offshore breeze should set in any minute.”
Saxby hurried aft and a few moments later Yorke saw the series of flashes as he struck steel against flint to kindle some tinder and light the lamp.
Twenty minutes, he decided; in twenty minutes they would be leaving Barbados. In many ways he felt more excited than when he first left England four years ago, bound for the Caribbee islands to take charge of the family plantation. His father and his brother had been wounded only a few months before and the Royalist cause was collapsing in England. It had been the beginning of one great adventure – and the end of an old one. The old one had taught him the bitterness of being on the losing side in two battles and the art of escaping. He was not yet sure what he would learn from the new.
The Griffin was to sail by the light of a half moon. Down here in the tropics it was lying on its back like a slice of melon on a plate, instead of standing vertical as in the northern latitudes. It would light the Griffin’s way – to where?
In many ways it was a good thing that he had been too busy in the last few hours to think of destinations. Barbados stood out alone in the Atlantic like a sentry box in front of a row of tents extending more or less north and south, the island of La Grenade at the bottom and St Martin at the top, and a dozen islands in between.
He shivered in the darkness although it was hot and the air was loud with the chatter of
tree frogs. Until now he had always enjoyed a tropical night: the stars were brighter than he could ever describe in letters to George and even now he could not get used to seeing the Plough so low on the northern horizon, the north star only thirteen or fourteen degrees above the horizon, little more than a hand’s span. And the night was never quite dark; one rarely needed a lantern to find one’s way.
Now, for the first time, the night seemed to be the edge of the world; very soon he was going to jump over it, like a madman walking along a clifftop. Round him were enemies. Here in Barbados there were the Roundheads, a majority but still biding their time for Penn and Venables to come. They were enemies because he was a Royalist, but chief among them now was Wilson. Stubborn with all the inflexibility of the weak-willed, he hated Ned because of Kingsnorth, and a man always hated the one he intended to wrong. Wilson would say that Ned had stolen his wife – that was how Wilson would see it now: Aurelia was the perfect wife upon whom he had always lavished love and gifts. He would forget the whippings that woke servants and were, Yorke now realized, the only way the wretched man could get any sexual gratification. Yorke had all the normal man’s horror of strange sexual habits and the desperate lengths to which they could drive their victims.
Yet they were no excuse for the rest of it, he thought savagely. Any penniless man marrying an heiress was obviously wise to use her money to improve their life together – but Wilson had everything transferred to his name and put in his power before revealing his impotence and vicious habits. Then he could throw Aurelia out of the house at any time, penniless and for that matter naked if he chose to claim the clothes on her back.
Yet Wilson apart, the enemies were not only in Barbados, they were in England, too, and among the men sailing out with Penn and Venables. Enemies…in his childhood “enemies” had always meant the French or the Spanish. “Enemies” fought great wars against you, fierce battles like Agincourt and Crecy, or they launched armadas against England. “Enemies” had never, until 1642, meant your own people. He knew of cases, after that date, of a son fighting on the opposite side to his father, of brother fighting brother…