by JoAnn Wendt
“You didn’t stop to think of the trouble it could cause my plantation! No. Did you stop to think that my uncle could use this trouble to take my plantation? No. You didn’t even stop to think about the consequences your actions may have brought down upon the head of every English man, woman, and child on this island.”
He became acutely alert. “What consequences?”
“You didn’t stop to consider that by freeing the runaway you might have encouraged other slaves on the island to revolt, to rise up against their masters and murder them— English men, English women, English children. It happens, you know! Not often, thank God. But it can happen. And the slave revolt does not stop there. The blacks go on to murder their own kind. They slaughter their tribal enemies —every man, woman, and child of them.”
The skin on the back of his neck crawled. Though she was probably exaggerating, there was enough truth in what she said to give him pause. He stared at her in quiet, intense thought.
“I didn’t know,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
Edwinna had opened her mouth to say more, but she was taken aback by his quiet confession. She gazed at him, bewilderment filling her. She was unused to honesty in handsome men. She didn’t know what to say. His hair, clean and wet from the bathhouse, glistened like fine black oil. She liked the plain way he wore it, combed straight back and tied with a black ribbon at the nape of his darkly tanned neck.
He added a caveat. “But if I had known, I am not sure I would have acted differently. Nor can I guarantee I will act differently in the future if the occasion—damn it to hell!” Leaping to his feet, his chair crashing, he clutched his shin. Priscilla bounded into Edwinna’s lap, cowering there, chittering at him.
“You needn’t have scared her!”
“Scared her! She bit me.”
“She only does that because she likes you. Though why she likes you I cannot fathom.”
Drake swore under his breath and rubbed his shin. If ever he managed to get off this island and out of this woman’s house, he would be the happiest man on earth. He would celebrate by never eating another grain of sugar for as long as he lived.
Alerted by the noise, Marigold and Kena came rushing in. They saw the situation at once, and Kena ran to get him a cold, wet napkin for his ankle while Marigold mopped up the spilled water from the ant saucers. When he curtly demanded they cage the beast or he’d kill it, Marigold gently took Priscilla and ran to the kitchen with her. This won him daggers from Edwinna.
“You don’t mind if I have your beast caged while I eat, do you?” he asked caustically.
“No. If you are afraid of a tiny monkey, by all means do it.”
“Thank you!”
They settled down to finish their supper, silent, wary, eyeing each other, thinking separate thoughts. Drake was keenly aware this was their wedding night. He wondered what she would be like in bed. She was so dominating, she would probably mount him. He wondered if Priscilla shared her bed. If so, the wretched creature would probably bite him on the balls and put him out of commission for good.
Edwinna grew uneasy at the gleam in Drake’s eyes. Maybe it wasn’t a gleam at all, but a trick of candlelight. Still, he made her uncomfortable, and she grew stiff. As a consequence, what she said next came out stiff. She hadn’t meant it to be. She’d meant it to be nice, conciliatory.
“It is my wish that you will be happy here on Crawford Plantation.”
“You jest.” He went on eating in his picky way. “Everything that makes me happy is out there.” He pointed with the handle of his spoon. “Out there beyond that savage sea. Back home in England.”
“Nevertheless, if there is anything you need...”
“Money,” he said flatly. “The loan of it, if you will. I’ve written my sister Verity to send money. Until it arrives, I would appreciate a loan.”
“You don’t need money in Barbados. We pay for everything with sugar. You simply go into a shop and the shopkeeper tells you the price of the item in pounds of sugar, and he puts it on Crawford Plantation’s account. When the account reaches thirty pounds, he sends me the bill and I send the sugar down to him.”
Sugar again. Drake looked at her in frustration.
“Nevertheless, I want money in my pocket. I’m accustomed.”
“That is foolish. You will only lose it in the cane fields.”
Drake raked a hand through his hair. He couldn’t believe her. She had Verity beaten in spades.
“What do you want it for?” she went on, tactlessly. “What do you wish to purchase?”
“Clothing, for one!”
“There are plenty of clothes in the storehouse. You have only to ask my overseer, Matthew Plum. As to a suit of dress clothes, there are my father’s good suits upstairs in a trunk. They should fit tolerably well. Except—” She looked at him uneasily. “Except in the shoulders. But Marigold can alter them for you. The child is clever with a needle.”
Drake squinted at her. He could hardly believe his ears. She expected him to wear bondservant clothes and hand-me-downs? He had to bite his tongue to keep his reply halfway civil.
“I do not wear bondslave clothes or hand-me-downs.”
“Clothes are clothes.”
His glance raked over her, taking in her shirt, her breeches.
“To you, perhaps. Not to me.”
Edwinna flushed. She was woman enough to feel the sting. She knew she wasn’t pretty. Most of the time she didn’t care, but once in a while, she did care. Sometimes she even wished she could be like Dinny Fraser, so outrageous and charming and bawdy that every male on the island from the age of six to sixty adored her. Well, she wasn’t Dinny, and that was that. She lifted her chin.
“It is vanity caring about clothing.”
“Some people could use a little vanity.”
They ate in silence, wary of each other.
“If you wish to purchase clothing,” Edwinna said after a few moments, relenting, breaking the silence, “the tailor shops are in Bridgetown. Matthew Plum will be going there soon to buy slaves. You can go with him.”
“Thank you,” he said frostily. Even when she conceded a point she rubbed him the wrong way. She had a damned bossy way of putting things. “As for the cost of the clothes, I will repay you.”
“It isn’t necessary.”
“It is to me. I pay my debts.”
They ate, thinking their separate thoughts—Drake’s hopeful, Edwinna’s disheartened. Bridgetown, she thought, discouraged. Ships come and go in its harbor every day. He will escape. He will flee to England. He won’t keep his word and stay.
Bridgetown, Drake thought, hope surging. If I could work out some arrangement with a ship captain...His conscience stabbed him. I pay my debts. Steel, you hypocrite. You owe her your life. You gave her your word you would stay a year and damn you, you will stay. He gritted his teeth and wondered for the hundredth time if this was to be a conjugal marriage.
Supper mercifully came to an end. The house was hot, the climate wilting. After supper he went outside to cool himself in the blowing trade winds. He stood in the darkness, inhaling the fragrant wind, hands thrust deep into his pockets, head back, eyes on the stars. It struck him that this was his first truly private moment in half a year, and he used it to mourn for Anne. He ached for her.
When he went back into the house, the servants were shuffling about, preparing for bed. He could hear the commotion in the kitchen as they strung hammocks and hauled out pallets. He could hear Tutu giggling as his mother bedded him down. It was a sweet sound. It reminded him of Katherine.
He watched the lockup process. An elderly black called Scipio went out and locked the front gate and stuck a lighted pitch torch in its sconce on the high coral wall, then shuffled back in, locked the doors, and closed and bolted the wooden shutters on the first floor. The house instantly grew as hot as an oven.
“You had best bring a candle,” Edwinna said.
He looked at her. Did she mean they were going to bed? She
’d tossed her hair when she had said it. He was surprised at how his groin sprang to life. He was a sexually starving man. He took a candlestick from the sideboard, lighted it from the dining room candle. Edwinna led the way, striding along in her breeches, hips switching. A deep, wide hall stretched across the front of the house. It was big enough to hold a banquet in. To the rear of it, a wooden staircase fed to the second floor, presumably the family sleeping floor. He followed her up.
Upstairs, she strode briskly down the hall and turned into a bedchamber. Drake was just two steps behind her when, to his amazement, her door closed in his face. He stood there dumbfounded. Was he a bridegroom, or merely a boarder?
He took a breath. Well, find out, Steel. He rapped on her door. Several moments passed. The door opened one wary inch.
“Yes?”
“Am I to sleep here...or where?”
Her fine eyes filled with such shock that he was thrown off balance. Lord, what was wrong with the woman? Hadn’t she ever heard of the marriage bed? The look passed so swiftly he was unsure if he’d truly seen it, for when she spoke she was her usual self—stiff.
“Honor did not give you your room?”
“Honor has given me nothing but a sugar headache.”
“Your room is there.” She pointed at the room at the top of the stairs, the one farthest from hers, said good night, and shut her door. He heard the bolt shoot across.
He frowned, perplexed. That answered his question.
He found his room and went in. Wilting in the tropical heat, sweating, he left door and window shutters wide open, but it did little good. The house had been built with no regard for the climate. With its front facing south and its back facing north in the traditional fashion of English houses, it failed to catch the cooling east trade winds. He wondered briefly about the nature of Edwinna’s father, Peter Crawford, who could ignore so basic a factor. Then, weariness overtaking him, he forgot the late plantation owner.
Stripping nude, he got into bed, loosed the mosquito netting, and pulled the sheet to his waist. Drifting to sleep, he thought of Edwinna. What was wrong with the woman? Had the island sun driven her mad? He could half believe it. He fell asleep puzzling.
The gate bell clanging woke him in the middle of the night. He sat up in the darkness and saw Edwinna steal past his room in the shadows and go silently down the stairs. A few seconds later he heard the front door open. He reached for his timepiece and peered at it. Two of the clock. Where in hell was she going? Curious, he pushed the mosquito netting aside, got out of bed, and went to the window.
The torch still burned in its sconce in the locked gate. Two blacks waited there. Edwinna spoke briefly to them, unlocked the gate, and vanished into darkness. Drake’s scalp prickled. Was she crazy, trotting off into the night with slaves? He had the urge to throw on his clothes and go after her. His sense of responsibility demanded it. But which way had she gone? He’d likely end up lost in a cane field. He went back to bed and slept uneasily.
The sound of the gate opening woke him. He grabbed his timepiece. Half past three of the clock. He pulled sheet to waist, waited, and when she came stealing up the stairs, he called out, “What’s wrong? Trouble?”
She started at his voice. Either she’d forgotten he was in the house or she’d hoped he was deep in sleep. The latter, he deduced, for she was carrying her shoes as if to make no noise. She halted at his door.
“No trouble,” she answered. “Something quite wonderful—a birth.”
“Why did they come for you?”
“My slaves consider it a good omen if the mistress of the plantation witnesses the birth and is first to hold the baby and name it.”
Drake propped himself on one elbow, intrigued. “All Barbados Englishwomen trot off in the middle of the night to attend slave births?”
He sensed her smile and wished he could see it. He had yet to see her smile, but her voice in the darkness was soft and gentle. He liked it. Evidently, holding a newborn gentled her.
“No, but I want to, for the child’s sake. Africans are superstitious, and omens mean much to them.”
Drake quietly absorbed it. It was dawning on him that she was as devoted to her plantation as he was to his wine business—a business that had been handed down in the Steel family for six generations. To him, wine wasn’t just a business—it was a sacred trust. He hoped with all his heart that his son William would feel the same zeal when he inherited it.
“Nevertheless, it must be difficult, seeing women in their travail.”
“I’ve seen worse—boiling house accidents. Grinding mill accidents. They are the worst. During harvest I live in dread of accidents. Once harvest begins, we make sugar twenty-four hours a day. The slaves work in shifts. Once the cane is cut, we must grind it within forty-eight hours or it spoils.”
“I see.” She seemed inclined to talk in a friendly, normal manner—a surprise. He credited it to the darkness and to his being flat in bed, a disembodied voice in the dark. “Nevertheless, you should have awakened me. I would have escorted you safely there and back.”
“That would have been the very worst omen—a man coming to the birth hut.”
He had to smile. “Ah. I see men have the same importance in the birth process the world over: none.”
“None,” she agreed good-humoredly. Then she sighed. “Tomorrow I will record the birth in the plantation books, and likely, a month from now, I will have to record it as a death. So few of the babies live.”
“It’s like that everywhere,” he assured her. “In England, too.”
“Is it?” she said with interest. “I didn’t know that.”
“Even in England a man can father a dozen children and not be assured that even two will survive to adulthood.” Drake lay back on his pillow, lost in memory for a moment. He laced his hands under his head. “My wife and I lost a four-month-old son. He was born between William and Katherine.”
“I’m so sorry. One could never forget a thing like that.”
Drake glanced at her shadowy outline in surprise. “I never forget,” he admitted. “Even now I stop and I think, ‘He would be four years old this year, if he’d lived.’ Or, I will think, ‘He would be just the right age to enjoy coming to the wine shop and play hide-and-seek among the wine barrels in the cellar.”
“Yes. I imagine it would be just that way.”
He gave her a grateful look. He wouldn’t have guessed she was a sympathetic person. He lay back, thinking about his son’s death, thinking about Anne.
Edwinna’s thoughts were spinning around as well. “My wife,” he’d said, that magnificent full-timbered voice tender, reverent. His wife had been greatly loved. What would it be like to be loved by a man like Drake Steel? She swallowed tensely.
She gazed at him in the darkness, knowing she should go, but wanting to linger and talk. She was starved for talk, for friendship. Surrounded by slaves and bond slaves, she was lonely. She had no one to really talk to on the plantation— no one except Kena and Matthew Plum.
Her eyes adjusted to the dark room and she saw his big-shouldered figure delineated behind the mosquito net. He politely kept the sheet pulled to his waist, but she presumed he slept naked. The climate was too warm for him. She’d noticed his discomfort, his sweat. As for nakedness, she was used to it. She’d lived her life among naked slaves and bondslaves toiling in loincloths in the fields, but somehow the thought of Drake Steel’s nakedness stirred strong feelings, some pleasant, others not pleasant.
“Good night,” she said hastily. In the safety of her room, she shut the door and locked it. She pressed her forehead hard against the door, pressing out the old, dark memory, casting it out.
Drake gazed at the empty doorway, startled. Good night? He’d thought they were having a conversation, and a good one at that. He shook his head, then lay back, tantalized, remembering the glow of her hair in the darkness. She stirred him.
* * * *
“Mr. Steel? I am Matthew Plum, Edwinna’s overse
er. Edwinna thought you might like to accompany me on my rounds today, to see the plantation.”
Already hot and sweating in a bright tropical morning, Drake unsmiling, descended the front steps of Crawford Hall, and went to the man who waited below. He’d already had an irritating start to his day. He’d awakened to find Priscilla perched on his pillow, pawing through his hair, grooming him. With a yell that was part shock and part curse, he’d scooped her up, shoved her outside his door, and slammed it. She’d stayed in the hall, chittering and scolding.
The corners of his lips twitched. In retrospect it had been funny. Lord, she’d adopted him for her mate.
The morning’s second irritation had been Edwinna herself. He’d come downstairs to find her long gone, God knows where. She hadn’t done him the courtesy of breaking her fast with him. Further, she’d left a purse of coins at his place at the table, as if he were a salaried lackey or a schoolboy being given his allowance. He wanted to wring-her neck.
He scrutinized Plum. Prepared to dislike the man, he was taken aback. Here stood a pleasant, middle-sized, slope-shouldered man of about fifty who had brown, leathery skin and twinkling, good-humored eyes. To the overseer’s credit, Plum gave Drake the better of the two horses that waited at the gate, taking the swaybacked mare for himself—a sign that he respected Drake’s position as Edwinna’s husband.
“You’ll not find much good horseflesh here in Barbados, Mr. Steel,” he apologized. ‘Tis the climate. Horses do not fare well here.”
“Nor do I.” Drake swung up into the creaking saddle, drew off his hat, and mopped his brow with his sleeve. His arm pits were already wet with sweat, and his shirt clung damply to the small of his back, whereas Plum looked dry as toast.
Plum’s eyes twinkled. “You will acclimate, Mr. Steel.”
“That I doubt.” Further, he didn’t want to acclimate. He wanted to be gone.
Tall mahogany trees lined the dirt path, granting merciful shade for a few hundred feet as the horses plodded down toward the millworks. As they rode along, Drake couldn’t help but be aware of Plum’s intelligent eyes assessing him. Did Plum think him a pirate, too? Overhead, the leaves in the trees whipped about and he cringed, spotting Priscilla’s raisin brown eyes and tiny white face.