by JoAnn Wendt
“You see?” Crawford crowed to Monyford. “I told you we’d find nothing. Nothing, that is, but pirate trickery.”
“Ah, Crawford. Be silent,” Monyford said.
Drake held his temper. “Let’s go back.” They strode to city hall, and in the dark council room compared results with the other returning pairs. Nothing had been amiss.
“We represent nine major plantations. Let’s each of us go to our own sugar storehouse and make sure every bondslave we’ve brought along is accounted for,” Drake proposed. “We can report to one another in the morning when Planters Council resumes. If all of our bondslaves are where they should be at this hour of the night, well...” Drake raked a hand through his hair in frustration, “then, I am at error, gentlemen.”
“ ‘Twas trickery from the start,” Crawford charged. “A plot by my niece and this pirate to ingratiate themselves with the governor so that I be deprived of ruling my nephews’ plantation.”
“Stop it, Crawford,” Monyford snapped. “We’re sick of that old song and dance. Let Edwinna be. We are all of us missing weapons on our plantations, and if that don’t worry you, it damn well worries me.”
Another said in the darkness, “I am missing three fifty-foot coils of rope from my supply house. It is worrying. To what purpose would rope be stolen?”
“To hang someone,” Monyford suggested.
“A dead chicken with its throat cut was left at my door,” said another. “The blackguard who killed it took the blood and painted an X on my door.”
“An X?” Drake said. “That might be significant. An African wouldn’t make an X, would he?”
The man shook his head in the darkness. “Africans like to dabble in chicken blood and make their black magic—if they think they can get away with it, which they can’t. I hanged a slave for making black magic last year, for it can turn the whole plantation upside down. Slaves fear magic. But they would not paint an X. It ain’t a African symbol.”
The planters talked a bit longer in frustration, then each headed for his own sugar storehouse to count heads. Drake loped the dark distance to Edwinna’s storehouse, and when he got there, rapped on the bolted door. Two minutes passed, then Sean O’Brien’s rough voice challenged, “Who’s there?”
“Drake Steel, Sean.”
Sean opened up at once. “What is it, sir?”
“I merely want to look about. Don’t bother lighting a candle.” Faint disappointment made Drake’s shoulders droop when he saw the three most likely conspirators-—Jacka, Yates, and Hastings—sound asleep on pallets near the door. It mystified him. He’d been so damned sure! He went farther into the storehouse, past huge, shadowy hogsheads, each capable of holding a ton of sugar. He found everyone accounted for. He went back to the Nancy Belle with a frown on his brow. It had been a wasted night’s work.
The moment Drake Steel left, Jacka opened bright, feral eyes and smiled in satisfaction. George Crawford’s drunken afternoon and loud yapping in the taproom at the Golden Anchor had easily alerted every bondslave in town. Waiting until Sean Valentine’s lusty snores once more echoed through the storehouse, he viciously kicked Yates and Hastings in the leg to wake them.
“ ‘Tis time,” he whispered.
Rising, the three crept to the door. They eased the bolt and slipped out into the darkness, gliding through the shadows to the meeting at the bridge.
* * * *
Dim candlelight spilled out from under Edwinna’s door. Drake tapped softly.
“Yes?” she said warily.
“It’s Drake, Edwinna.”
She opened at once. “What happened?”
He put a finger to his lips and nodded at the youngsters sleeping in happy exhaustion in her room, Marigold in Edwinna’s bed, Jeremy on a pallet on the floor. He gestured toward his room. She came at once, bringing the candle. She was still dressed, alert, ready, but she’d unbound her hair. It cascaded down her back, curly and thick. It gave him an indecisive moment. Did she want him or didn’t she? He never knew what moves to make with her.
He took the candle from her and set it on a tottering, musty-smelling highboy that had seen better days, then motioned her to sit on the bed. She sat, her back stiff as a ramrod, knees together, hands clasped in her lap.
“What happened?”
“Nothing.” He described the night in detail, including her uncle’s interference. He told her about checking the storehouse and finding everyone and everything exactly as it should be. “Along about now, I doubt there’s a planter who believes I saw what I saw last month in Bridgetown,” he concluded.
“I believe you.”
He smiled. “You’re likely the only one.”
“Never mind. What should we do next?”
He told her about the planters’ plan to do the same search tomorrow night. Then he gazed at her.
Edwinna knew the instant his thoughts drifted. His long, swooping black lashes flickered, and he drew a deep breath. She got up from the bed quickly.
“It’s late, and you’re tired. I will go and let you get to sleep.”
“Edwinna…” he said softly.
Her rib cage heaved. She tipped her head back and to the side in an attempt not to look at him, not to see his desire.
“Edwinna...it would not be sin. We are legally wed.”
“Drake—”
“We are two mature people. We are not children. We have a right to seek physical happiness.”
“Drake—”
“Life is short, Edwinna. You of all people, know that. You see it on your plantation daily—birth, death. Life is so brief, the moments of joy so few. Why not take joy together? We respect each other. In these few months we’ve lived in the same house, we’ve learned to like each other.”
He took a step toward her, then halted as she jerked back in fear, her elbow striking the bedpost.
“Edwinna? I would never hurt you.”
“I know that.”
“Then...why? Is there something else?”
Her heart thrashed.
“No!”
“I see.” He drew a deep breath, composing himself, then looked at her.
“Drake, I know I owe you an explanation.”
“Yes, you do, damn it,” he agreed. “I am not a mind reader. My understanding goes only so far. Then it abandons me, and I stand here understanding nothing.” He uttered a husky laugh. “If you want the truth, I feel foolish offering what you do not want.”
“Drake, I’m sorry.”
“Tell me,” he urged. “I am an understanding man, Edwinna. I can understand.”
“I—” She tightened. “There is nothing to tell.”
He drew a breath. If she didn’t wish to speak of it, it was her right. Again, that peripheral thought shimmered. Had she been raped? He thought of the day Clive Crawford had come to the plantation, how Edwinna had defensively held the sugar pot like a weapon.
“Take the candle,” he said. “I’ll see you safely into your room.”
He found Marigold and Jeremy still asleep in their separate beds. Exhausted from their happy day, they’d hardly moved a muscle. Jeremy had flung a hand off the pallet. Drake squatted and tucked it back inside the sheet.
When he left, Edwinna went with him to the door.
“I’m sorry, Drake.”
“So am I. It might have been wonderful, but you needn’t worry. I won’t bother you on that issue again. You have my word.” She looked troubled, sad. He would give anything to know what kept her locked inside her sexual prison. He sighed, reached out, and touched her hair. She stiffened, but did not pull back.
“Braid your hair, Edwinna. Don’t tease me anymore. Bolt the door.”
“I—I will.”
In the darkness of his room Drake pulled off his boots, then his shirt. With his head full of Edwinna and the futile attempt to find a bondslave conspiracy, he couldn’t sleep. He planted a hip on the sill of his open window and let the trade winds cool and calm him. The window looked across th
e alley into an upper hall window of an inn.
As he sat there, a candle flame appeared in the dark hall, popping out of one of the sleeping chambers. Dinny’s blatant red hair accompanied it. Wearing her chamber robe, she stole down the hall, carrying her candle, and disappeared. He supposed she was going out to the privy, but a few moments later she reappeared, tiptoeing down the hall with Jumbo in tow.
Drake’s eyebrows shot up to his hairline. Looking furtively to the right and the left, she took Jumbo into her room. The candlelight disappeared, the candle extinguished. For a moment he couldn’t believe his eyes. He drew a horrified breath. For God’s sake, she was sleeping with her slave!
* * * *
The second day of Planters Council duplicated the first, and Drake grew impatient, bored. Planters swilled rum, argued sugar, drafted letters to London’s Parliament that would never be read, and made lists of demands the governor of Barbados would never grant. Edwinna spoke boldly to every issue, as was her right. George Crawford tried his pirate nonsense again and made fun of last night’s empty search.
Drake clenched his fists but did not raise his voice to argue. A business meeting was no place to air quarrels. He’d not done so in his business, nor would he in Edwinna’s. It was all he could do to hold Edwinna down. She was angry enough to fly at her uncle.
That night Drake and the planters again patrolled Bridgetown. Again, they found nothing. Drake began to feel like a fool. Even the men who believed his story now eyed him askance. But one fact remained, and no one was willing to overlook it. Weapons were missing on every plantation on the island.
Drake, Edwinna, and their group left the next morning, reached Crawford Plantation by noon, and plunged into the round-the-clock work of harvest. For the next month, they labored in sun and after darkness, in fair weather and foul, and even when migrating birds landed so thickly upon the cane fields that one could hardly see the green of the cane, let alone harvest it.
As Drake had expected, his runaway slave died, but at least he’d died in David Alleyne’s kind care. Drake had no reason to be as upset as he was by the death. He’d neither known the slave nor been able to communicate with him. They hadn’t understood each other’s language, but for a few moments on a cane path, they had shared an epiphany. Their eyes had met in brotherhood, and in that instant they’d become part of each other.
Edwinna had done a lovely thing for Drake as the slave lay dying in the hospital, breathing his last. She’d come in and put a sympathetic hand on Drake’s shoulder, and she’d left it there for him to reach up and pat and take comfort from. That evening, they’d gone for a walk together, their first. It was a bizarre walk, with each of them wearing a pistol, alert for bondslave trouble; but they strolled under the enormous starry sky, wandering far, talking gently, peacefully. Drake wondered whether to consider it the start of courtship.
Sitting at supper one night, the candle pulled near, he read Edwinna his latest letter. “Listen to this, from William: ‘Dearest Papa. Send me a slave at once. He shud be like the one in Mistruss Edwinna’s drawing. He shud be very tall and very black so as to put Aunt Verity into a fright. Then she will not make me eat groats nor go to school. I hate school. Papa, come home. Your luving son, William Drake Steel.’ ”
Edwinna laughed.
He read on, from Verity’s letter. “ ‘Your Katherine, dear brother, adores Mistress Crawford’s drawings of Priscilla. She insisted we mount the drawing on the nursery wall, where she kisses Priscilla good night before we put her to bed. Of course, she kisses the drawings of you, too.”
Again Edwinna laughed.
He glanced up and smiled. He returned to his letter, but did not read the next part aloud.
‘As for Mistress Crawford, dear brother, she is in love with you, of course. It shows in her drawings. You have ever been a handsome man, but never so handsome nor so noble as rendered by Mistress Crawford’s pen.’
Taken aback, he glanced at Edwinna. In love with him? He returned to his letter.
As to the nature of your feelings for Mistress Crawford, I can only speculate. You are a vexingly private man, brother mine. Your letters reveal precisely what you wish them to reveal and not one iota more. You never have welcomed my advice in the past, nor will you welcome it now. Nevertheless, I give it. You will do well to cherish your Mistress Crawford. She sounds like a sensible woman who would never give you problems or grief.’
His mouth tightened. The last was an unsubtle echo of Verity’s dislike for Anne that even Anne’s death had tempered.
“Bad news?” Edwinna asked.
“No. It is only that my sister can be a vexing woman.” Engrossed in receiving his own letters, he’d given no thought to Edwinna’s. “Any letters from Thomas and Harry?”
“No. Next month. They will surely write next month.”
“Surely,” he agreed, but he wanted to knock Thomas and Harry’s ungrateful young heads together.
* * * *
Still worried about a possible bondslave insurrection, the planters kept in touch with one another by letter. Believing Drake’s story about what Drake had seen and heard, Mr. Drax had alerted the governor.
At the Planters Council, the planters had devised a means of rapid communication. If an insurrection seemed imminent on any plantation, that planter immediately would write to his three nearest neighbors; those three immediately would write to their three nearest neighbors, and so forth, until all the plantations on the island were covered.
Meanwhile, disquieting reports came in. There had been a fire in Dinny’s boiling house that had had no explicable cause. A grinder on a St. Lucy’s Parish plantation had been chopped to pieces. Worse, a bondslave had been found mysteriously slain in a St. Michael’s Parish cane field, an X carved in his chest.
The insurrection worry heightened. At Crawford Plantation the house pistols were kept loaded but locked in drawers safely away from Tutu, Priscilla, and Jocko. Meanwhile, the hard work of harvest ground steadily on. The mill rumbled night and day. Drake learned to deal with calamities, great and small, on a daily basis. The gate bell clanged every night. Some of the calamities were humorous. To spare Edwinna her sleep, Drake went down to answer the gate bell one night. He returned upstairs and whispered, to her inquiry, that the problem was nothing. Macaw’s wife had given birth to twins.
She sprang up as if shot from a cannon. “Drake! If an African’s wife gives birth to twins, he will hang her. He views twins as a sure sign that she has slept with some other men of the village.”
“You jest.”
“No!”
Edwinna threw on her clothes, and they ran through the dark, starry night to the slave village. Plum was already there, trying to reason with the big, ebony-skinned slave, but Macaw stood adamant. He intended to hang Juba, and that was that. No amount of talk by Plum, Alvis Nansellock, or Edwinna could persuade him she’d been anything but unfaithful.
“If he doesn’t hang her now, he’ll do it later when we’re not around,” Edwinna confided in Drake, worried.
Drake picked up the confiscated rope and gave it to Macaw with an approving nod.
“Go ahead, hang her. Do it.” He turned to Nansellock. “Get another rope. As soon as Macaw hangs Juba, we will hang Macaw.”
Macaw’s eyes grew enormous. He shook his head frantically. “I no hang her.”
On the way back to the house, a sound suspiciously like a giggle came from Edwinna.
Drake slanted a look at her. “You found that funny, did you?”
“Yes.”
“And you’re laughing at me.”
“Yes.”
They strode along in the fresh blowing trade winds, a heaven full of twinkling stars overhead. Now and then he caught a whiff of fragrant jasmine.
“So. How does an African punish his wife for laughing at him?”
“He refuses to sleep with her.”
“That is your punishment, Edwinna. I refuse to sleep with you.” He lifted a hand. “No, don’t get dow
n on your knees and beg. I’m adamant. I absolutely will not sleep with you.”
“Drake!” She smiled. She wasn’t a prude; he knew that. She wasn’t a virgin; he sensed that, too. But the when and who? Lord knew. Whatever had happened had left her emotionally wounded. He smiled gently. They had a pleasant walk to the house.
Upstairs, in the darkness of the hall, he said, “There is one more punishment for laughing.”
“What’s that?”
“A kiss. You must kiss me.”
Edwinna’s heart began to pound. She wanted to kiss him. She suddenly wanted it more than she’d wanted anything, ever, in her whole life. She looked at his strong mouth. She felt as if a herd of affingoes were clattering through her chest. She couldn’t breathe.
“Don’t be afraid.”
He took her hands and drew them to his chest, cradling them there. Her mouth trembled.
“Edwinna...” With a stifled moan, he leaned forward and took her mouth in his own. It was so sweet, so shocking a kiss, she felt helpless to move, didn’t want to move. Her eyes fluttered closed. He lifted his mouth and kissed each eyelid.
With a gentleness that threatened to undo her, he ran his tongue back and forth in an erotic rhythm over her lips. His body pressing along the length of hers, he began to move in the same way. Kissing her, he gently put his hand on the pulse on her neck, then trailed his hand down to her shoulder, down her arm.
“The conjugal bed,” he whispered into her mouth. “Chaste...clean...committed...”
She drew back and shivered violently. The shiver started at the crown of her head and coursed all the way through her body. Trembling as if palsied, she crossed her arms on her chest and rubbed them fiercely.
“We had best get some sleep.”
She rushed down the hall and into her room, shutting the door and bolting it. Drake watched her go, touched again by her distress, yet suffering with his own unmet needs.
* * *
Chapter 12