Island Queen

by Vanessa Riley

  “Go on, my love,” he said, but I undid the rope. We caught the next big wind, and I steered away.

  “Now why’d you do that, Doll? I pictured just sitting here at the dock in my boat, watching you and the family walk away. You ruined it.”

  “I’m a lousy first mate.” I snuggled against him and pulled his cold face into my bosom. “Not letting you be alone in this. You’re going to go from my arms.”

  “Well, you do have nice arms. Leave me out here in the Mary. Let my partners get the insurance money when the waves destroy her. It’s the least I could do for Garraway et al.”

  That was my man. Always thinking and doing for others. “How long have you known?”

  “Since Dr. Hay told me.”

  That was six weeks ago. Six weeks, I could’ve told him how much he meant to me, how much he touched everything in my life and made it good. “You sure he’s not fixed you like Edward?”

  “Doll.”

  “I know. I just want to laugh, anything to not think about you not being here.”

  “I told you I was going to haunt you, woman.”

  I settled a blanket on us, hoping its warmth would push back into his limbs. Trying not to sob, I held on to Thomas. He was my air. “I love you. I don’t know when I learned to trust us again, but I can say it now.”

  “I knew. There are no words for what’s between us.”

  He nuzzled my cheek, then slipped his chin into the crook of my neck. “Listen, there’s paperwork in my desk for you and the children to leave here. I don’t know if it’s safe to remain. The government could again impose new restrictions. With me gone . . . Don’t let the family we built be destroyed.”

  “I’m going to try.”

  “I want to die in the sea. Then I’d kiss you every time you crossed the waters.”

  Thomas, beautiful Joseph Thomas, was the one man who loved me and my dreams together at the same time. I didn’t have to choose.

  “Starting over is hard. Where would I go? How do I even say the words without you?”

  “I wrote to Coxall. His name and influence can secure your leaving here and joining the British Colony of Demerara.”

  Lizzy and Charlotte and even Catharina were there.

  “It’s the perfect place. And I know there’s a man there who’ll protect you.”

  Cells? I didn’t need anyone Thomas. “No.”

  “Promise me when you see the world again. Take our family.”

  “You can tell me all this. I should tell you not to die.”

  He laughed and wheezed. His hand settled on my thigh, ruffling one of Mamaí’s old jump skirts, this one with red and gold prints of palm fronds.

  “No petticoat, my queen?”

  “No, and not a queen.”

  “Maybe the island for you is England. You know people there. There are other queens there. You wouldn’t be lonely.”

  “Don’t be setting up my next bedmate. It’s not funny. Can’t think of ever replacing you.”

  “Where was all this ego-building talk when I could take advantage of such praise?”

  “We have a lot of children birthed between us. You took plenty. And you gave plenty.”

  “All of them, any one you bore, all Thomases in my heart, Doll.”

  He smiled at me, one that seared wounds in my soul. “Get off the boat, woman. Don’t let our last memory be of me dying. None of that death mask talk.”

  “I’ll stay till the end, then I can take you with me.”

  An hour or so passed. He was silent looking off at the distance. “Not afraid anymore. You . . . the family . . . fine—”

  His head tipped forward and rested against mine. I kissed him as his ghost went to sleep.

  Like he loved me one last time, I felt his magnificent spirit surge deep inside me, rattling and filling the deep empty spaces in my chest.

  When the shades of evening started to fall and all the warmth had left Thomas, I slipped away, stripped off my short boots and stood on the edge of the Mary. Feet flat on the waxed deck, I took a final glance of my short boots next to his dusty ones, then dove headfirst into the choppy waters.

  Part Six

  The Legacy

  The truest threat to freedom is a bunch of old men.

  Demerara 1800: The Return

  Dawn broke through the dark sky. The sun rose casting orange and red light across the bow. I couldn’t sleep in the cramped sloop’s hatch with Josephy’s snore. Neither could Crissy.

  She stood beside me on the boat deck, but I had a tight hold on her arm. The curious four-year-old would fidget and launch over the side if I took my eyes off her.

  It was sort of sweet, to think of my youngest having no cares. I’d secured a fhortún of twenty-two thousand pounds. I wanted more, wanted to be able to set my boys’ future with not only the finest education across the sea, but their professions. Crissy and Eliza would continue to have the best tutors, like Ann and Frances.

  At fifteen, Frances was the head of the family that stayed in Grenada. She convinced Ann, Mamaí, Sally, and Ella, along with my grandniece, to stay in that colony. That girl was so persuasive, I relented.

  She meant to keep expanding there as I’d done when I retained my business in Dominica. My Thomas network would include the two islands and now Demerara.

  Splitting up the family that Thomas and I built was horrid, but Frances’s dreams, her arguments, were too strong for a heart missing my husband and my Charlotte. The hope to finally know Catharina pushed me forward.

  “Mama. Look at the water. I want to touch it. Papa loved it. It’s green like turtles.”

  “It is green, like young snapping ones or the big frogs we called mountain chickens in Montserrat.”

  “Big frogs. Grrr. How awful. I like the water. Not frogs.”

  Filling my nose with the sweet clean air, I, too, marveled at how the water had changed from the dark blues of Grenada to the sky blues in Trinidad to pale green the farther south we traveled. Soon it would change from green to white and brown as we approached the Demerari River that my boat captain said the British now called the Demerara River.

  Odd picky change, but I supposed it was important what the main waterway was called.

  Eliza came from below. Yawning, she gripped the side. “Mama, you and Aunt Kitty used to live here?”

  “Yes. When we were young.” In silence, I bowed my head—praying, grieving, missing my swallow.

  Noises drummed below. Heavy earth-shaking footsteps sounded.

  My boys.

  Josephy and Harry had awakened and crawled from the cabin. They wrestled for a spot along the deck.

  “Boys. Stop that,” I said.

  They did, waggling fingers and whispering to continue their battle tomorrow.

  Josephy had his father’s build—I could see him captaining a wheel—but Harry, my Harry, had Thomas’s smile.

  “I see land, Mama.” Harry started jumping and skipping.

  “The rooftops aren’t as pretty as in Grenada, but some are taller,” Eliza said, leaning more over the side.

  I tugged on her tunic and made her come back. “Neither you nor Crissy are going into the sea.”

  Josephy took Eliza’s hand. “Is Demerara the same, Mama?”

  “I don’t know. It’s been years.”

  The first time I approached this colony, Kitty and I crouched low in Cells’s Dolus waiting for Polk to say it was safe.

  Running from Nicholas, enslaved, carrying only a sack of clothes and scarves for our hair was how we set foot on the dock thirty years ago. At forty-four, I would walk onto the soil a freewoman, a woman in a bright yellow hat in the company of her free children.

  My captain, John Gloster Garraway, a nicely tanned young man, the son of Thomas’s partner, navigated the sloop as if he were born behind the steering tiller. I noted how settled he was, how he took after his calm mulatto mother, Franny, not his risk-taking father.

  “Just a few more minutes, Mrs. Thomas,” Garraway called ou
t.

  Like he’d done it a hundred times, he steered to the westward side of the Essequiba River to avoid sandbars, guiding the sloop to the mouth of the Demerara. I couldn’t wait to step my boots on the red mud of the colony.

  The captain and my boys unloaded our portmanteaus, big brown leather trunks, and stacked them on the dock.

  The heat baked my face as it did that first day. I loved the dry heat. Half the books Thomas had bought, I’d brought. The dryness meant they’d not suffer the green dust.

  “Mrs. Dolly!”

  I adjusted my hat and turned.

  Lizzy and Coxall. They ran to us waving and shouting.

  I hugged each one.

  “Mama, we’re happy you’ve come.”

  “You two look good.”

  A little thicker, but still handsome with a head of dark hair, Coxall beamed with pride. “Is that Joseph Jr. and Harry? I’ll help them gather your things. We have a dray to take you to our house.”

  “Thank you,” I said, half watching them, half watching Crissy.

  Eliza came near, her fingers clasping my youngest’s wrist. “Look. Charlotte has come, too.”

  That was all it took for Eliza to leave my youngest and run past me and Lizzy to get to her other older sister.

  There was no stopping her. I caught Crissy’s wrist and watched Eliza cling to Charlotte’s waist. Soon they both stood in front of me, but my second born remained draped in black, all but her hat, a white confection with a feather.

  “I’ve missed you,” I said with a whisper of a voice. I gripped my daughter, then reached out and grabbed Lizzy, too. Now, I had the first two girls of my heart and my last. Then I dragged in Eliza; she couldn’t miss any of my love.

  “Ma’am.”

  A young man had called to me. The nerve of him thinking I’d release children to greet him.

  Hmmmph. That almost-important cough.

  “Miss Dolly?”

  The fool wasn’t going away. I looked to the left. “Yes.”

  “I don’t know if you remember me.”

  I wiped my eyes with my handkerchief, then squinted at the well-dressed fellow in a wide-collared coat and knee breeches.

  “It’s D.P. Simon, ma’am.”

  I glanced at him again as he stood behind my Charlotte. It was him. Amazing, the boy who was in love with her all those years ago.

  But Charlotte was dressed in widow’s black, five years since the loss of Jean-Joseph.

  “D.P. Simon. It is you.” Before I made a foolish comment about him and Charlotte, a young woman, a short one, looped her arm about his.

  She was stylish in a linen print round gown. A matching bonnet covered her jet black hair and shadowed the small cleft in her chin.

  “Miss Dolly, this is my wife, Catharina, your daughter.”

  I didn’t know what to react to first. My daughter? His wife?

  Catharina, now seventeen years of age, the child I hadn’t seen since her birth was here.

  I didn’t move. I stared at her. I was happy and confused. Simon had been a decent boy, a good neighbor. But wasn’t he twice her age?

  “Newlyweds? Congrat—”

  They looked at each other like a secret or conspiracy passed between them.

  Catharina tightened her hold on D.P. “No, Mama Kirwan—”

  “Mama Thomas.” I was gentle in my correction. Who knows what Cells had said, but at least he told her the truth. I was the one to give birth to her.

  She smiled, her pert mouth forming a pout. “Sorry. Mama Thomas, if that is what you wish to be called. Simon and I have been together for five years. We have a daughter. Henrietta.”

  His voice became squeaky. “She’s four. You must meet her.”

  Did my face look numb? It surely had to with my child knowing a man since she was twelve or thirteen. Had I passed the curse of growing up too fast to Catharina?

  She launched into my arms. “Oh, Mama Thomas, I’m pleased to meet you.”

  I held her, I think. My head ached a little too much to know. I blinked a few times, thinking of how best to kill this Nicholas-type man who preyed upon my young daughter.

  Yet another man had to die before D.P. Simon. John Coseveldt Cells. He wasn’t on the dock. Where was he?

  Oh, Holy Father, let at least Coxall and Lizzy’s house be well. There was too much to fix in Charlotte’s and Catharina’s lives. I’d returned to Demerara none too soon.

  Demerara 1800: The Relatives

  I sat on the rear patio of Lizzy and Coxall’s house. No stilts like Pa’s owl house but sprawling in size. Coxall did well, expanding his father’s business for shipping goods throughout the Caribbean. That would come in handy for the store and the hotel I had dreamed up in my head.

  Plenty of servants, plenty of head-scarfed maids fluttered. These fine servants dressed in baize and cotton fabrics with strips of silk kente of yellows and red. I didn’t ask their status, free or enslaved. I wasn’t ready to poke into their business, not with Catharina weighing on my mind.

  Charlotte sat beside me, Lizzy across in a chair.

  My eldest filled my cup from her shiny silver tea service. The filigree on the pot reminded me of Mr. Foden’s. “Eliza’s found our books, Mama,” Lizzy said. “She’s in a corner reading.”

  The dryness of Demerara kept paper from mildewing; I would need to build shelves for Eliza in our new house and import as many books as I could. “She loves to read, Lizzy. Thank you again for your hospitality.”

  Harry and Josephy ran past rolling barrel hoops with Lizzy’s brood. Crissy gave chase but her little chubby legs couldn’t keep up.

  This was peace, but I’d come for the storm. “Tell me now, why Cells allowed Catharina to marry this young.”

  “Don’t be mad at Papa Cells,” Charlotte said. “He had to travel back to Europe. Some holdings needed his attention. He left Catharina in my charge. She hated being here, hated finding out . . .”

  “Finding out she was my daughter. Finding out that she was Black because of her true mother.”

  I hadn’t realized how it would sound saying it aloud or how my heart hurt. My first daughter born of love hated me, while my two born of violence were proud of me. How was this right?

  Charlotte gripped my hand. “I failed her. I was too caught up in my own misery to notice how she misbehaved.”

  “This can’t be your fault, dear. You never—”

  “It is, Mama. D.P. came over to visit me, but Catharina loved him instantly. Or wanted his attention, instantly. She’s a force to be reckoned with. Very persuasive.”

  A flash in my head of that little baby grabbing the world with both arms fell upon me. “Of course she’d be.” Catharina was Cells’s daughter as much as mine. “But a man, a grown one, should know better than to deal with a child. Twelve is a child.”

  “D.P. was a widower. His wife and child had died of cholera a year earlier. He resisted Catharina’s flirtation, but she made him laugh. The man loves her very much now.”

  Lizzy sipped from her cup then set it down. “Five years married, he’s completely devoted to her, but he spends too much money to keep her happy. Our sister is very used to getting what she wants.”

  That was Cells, persuasive and powerful. Might even be a bit of me.

  “I tried to convince her to be cautious, but she didn’t heed. Even taunting me like I’d never loved. Papa Cells chose not to tell her of Jean-Joseph. He didn’t trust she’d be discreet.”

  The girl I’d longed to love sounded horrible. I dropped two cubes of sugar into my tea. “Is there no good in Catharina?”

  The following silence was damning.

  “She apologized later, Mama. Our sister doesn’t take kindly to anyone questioning her plans.”

  Lizzy picked up the teapot like it was a stew pot with one hand on the handle the other palm flat on its belly.

  The distraction was good. There was something I could teach her after all these years.

  “Catharina uses you to guil
t Cells.” Lizzy’s eyes sparkled like bits of glass. “I tried to show her how wrong that was. She didn’t listen.”

  My heart swelled. We’d come far, Lizzy and I. Getting to be with her all over again was a treasure.

  “When Papa Cells returned, he was so angry. He didn’t write up a marriage contract. He left and hasn’t been back.”

  “No contract? She and D.P. could’ve married. They are both mixed race.”

  “It did not matter. D.P. is a Sephardic Jew. He won’t convert to Anglican. That’s the one thing he hasn’t done for Catharina. She’s a proud Anglican.”

  Anglican? Raised in Europe, what was I to expect with Cells’s shifting faith? Sitting back, watching the children play, lurching from side to side on the lawn chasing barrel hoops. Everything should be as easy as this.

  I picked up the pot, holding it strong with my wrist. Then I showed her and Charlotte a proper pour. Not a drop spilled. “I learned this at the Hermitage, then again in London.”

  A servant came to Lizzy carrying a folded paper. The squiggles seemed tight like Prince William’s. The paper was fancy like his, too.

  “Oh,” Charlotte said, “a note from the Simons.”

  Nodding to the servant, Lizzy took it and popped the wax seal. “Mama. You’ve been asked to dinner tomorrow by Catharina and D.P.”

  Charlotte sipped her tea. “I’ll come, too. When Catharina gets fussy, I can help.”

  It hurt that my daughter with Cells was spoiled. Could I have fixed that if I’d fought harder to keep her?

  Lizzy poured another cup, but this time correctly, arching her wrist. A glance at her and the lovely brood on the lawn and I decided I hadn’t done badly.

  “I’ll go to Chance Hall alone and face what I must. Lizzy came to understand my choices. Maybe Catharina will too.”

  No matter what had happened, all my children would have the love and strength they were due. That was my vow. I lumped it on my pile of unfinished dreams.

  Chance Hall was a magnificent estate, one built of stone and wood, not just boards. My sandals pattered on the stone tile floor of the entry.