I must drink a double health, Kit said, for the Prince of Wales a double health.
He began to go round the tables again.
Mr Baptiste, give us a catch.
And the Negro musicians that were assembled by the fountain began to play a melody upon their rude instruments that they had made themselves from driftwood and wire. It was an old Spanish air that they call Calypso, but they had artfully composed the words to celebrate the royal birth, so that each chorus ended God bless our lovely boy.
At each of the ten tables, Kit drank a second bumper. Then at the great table that was 250 feet in length and had 500 gentlemen at it, he drank a health in the middle and one at each end. Then he came to the ladies’ table and he would have it that he must drink the health of each lady by name, if he could remember it, and if not he drank to the beauty of her eyes.
By the time he came back to his place, he could scarcely walk.
My legs, oh my legs, was all he could say. His face was flushed a yellow-purple and his eyes were inflamed as though they would burst with blood.
We took him, Dr Sloane and I, nay, half carried him to a little room that served him for his office and as he sat down, a great haemorrhage came from his mouth and would not be staunched so that it covered all the papers on his desk and flowed over on to the ground.
His speech became incoherent and distracted. My will, it must be done, oh it must be done, where is the gold, the gold must be in the box, oh Mother, do not let them – Then he spoke again of his mother and of some treasure that was to be protected from I know not who. And I remembered how Nan at the last had been much occupied with her jewels.
The Duchess could not be prevented from embracing him, halffallen in his chair though he was, and pressing his swollen face to hers though the blood was still spurting from his gums, so that her pale gown of saffron silk was splashed with red.
Then we put him to bed where he lay in a violent delirium.
Too hot, ah too hot, he said.
I opened the window and let in the noise of the guns firing out in the harbour, and the sound of music in the town, and then the fireworks being discharged along the Palisades.
Now Kit seemed to think he was in a sea-battle with the Dutch. Or was it his father he was thinking of? I couldn’t tell, his speech was so distracted.
Outside his room, the doctors were quarrelling.
More bird pepper, Dr Trapham said. Then, as soon as the delirium has passed, he must exercise his legs that the swelling in them may decrease.
I can’t agree, said Dr Sloane, in such cases exercise will but incite the hydropic humours to flow downwards and make his legs swell again.
I have never known exercise to fail, exercise and a proper diet.
I fear there will be no improvement in his condition until the moon’s aspect changes.
The moon? Dr Trapham gasped.
His Grace is much afflicted by the phases of the moon, Dr Sloane said.
The moon has nothing to do with the case. We’re doctors of medicine, Dr Sloane, not ignorant astrologers.
I promise you, sir, that my diagnosis is based upon frequent observations in England.
Well, sir, in Jamaica we count such talk as mere idle superstition.
On 6 October Kit died, without ceremony, as though he wished to cause us no more trouble.
I went in to view his corpse. The colour had gone from his cheeks, and he looked much like his father, but smaller, much smaller.
There, you see, the moon’s aspect had not changed.
If he had but exercised when his condition was improved, the second crisis would not have come.
Dr Trapham, will you assist me to preserve his body, for he must be carried back to England to be buried?
I fear that other business detains me on the west of the island.
But it is the Governor’s body.
Well then, Dr Sloane, I will be plain with you. I don’t care to work with a man who credits such nonsense.
l am happy to hear it, sir, for I would rather not co-operate with a Jamaica quack.
Then good-day to you, sir, said Dr Trapham.
And good-day to you, sir, returned Dr Sloane, whereat Trapham flounced off but could not find a carriage and must go down to Port Royal on the cart that brought up the casks.
Well then, Jeremiah, I must call upon your assistance.
I, I, I have no experience of such work, I stammered.
Don’t fear, I will give you close direction, but first we must allow Her Grace to take leave of her lord. I’ll fetch her.
As she came in, we withdrew to an outer room that she might express her grief in solitude, but she would not close the door and we watched her like spectators at a play as she threw herself upon his funeral bier (in truth a small lacquer commode where the Duke kept his fowling pieces and powder).
It was not till her pale form covered his little body and her lips were upon his that I saw she was still wearing the saffron dress she had worn at the celebration for the Prince of Wales, which was splashed with the blood from his gum-haemorrhage.
Oh my lord, oh my love, she moaned, what shall I do without you?
She must take off that dress, Dr Sloane whispered, or she’ll be infected.
She will not, I said.
I hadn’t thought she loved him so much.
This is for our benefit, Hans (I had never called him so before, but if I was to be his co-operator we must be intimates). She wishes us to report that she is much stricken.
You’re a cynic, Jeremiah. She’s mad.
Mad, yes, but it is a cunning madness and there is method in it.
Before the day was out, it was noised all round the island that the Duchess was distraught, disconsolate – and defenceless. She must be protected, she and her treasure, from the cut-throat Biscayans that thronged the harbour. Though they had hated her before, the Assembly – themselves being a piratical quarrelsome crew – rallied as one man to her defence. The militia abandoned all their other duties and ran to her aid, posting a guard on the King’s House and the Treasure House night and day. And when she and her goods moved from the King’s House to Guanaboa for her health, for she was very weak, they had the whole regiment for escort. I saw them go off, the militia in their red coats on the little horses of the island, ducking under the palm trees as they rode alongside the four closed carriages that contained the duchess and her treasure, with the birds fluttering in their path, and the creak of the axles, for the carriages were heavy laden. Then the procession turned the corner and were gone, though we could still hear the noise of the axles.
Now, to work. Dr Sloane was brisk and cheerful at the prospect. I was less so.
Together we pulled Kit’s nightshirt over his head and left his body naked on the commode. Already the flies were buzzing about the body.
We’ve no time to lose, Dr Sloane said.
I was still contemplating my old charge’s swollen body and sadly shrunken cods (like empty gourds) and the shrivelled nut that had been his prick, but Dr Sloane had already sharpened his great surgeon’s knife and was making a long incision, nearly two feet in length.
First the bowels.
In a minute he had delved into the stomach and brought out the tripes. Two snips and they were flopping into the strong cedar box he had had built for them.
Now the quicklime.
With a small trowel, I sprinkled a quantity of quicklime upon the oily tripes.
Meanwhile, Dr Sloane had taken out a little saw and was cutting a hole in the head of the corpse that he might remove the brain, for that too was to be put in the box with quicklime and taken down for burial at St Jaco de la Vega, for it could not be preserved long enough to be brought back to England.
I marvelled at how easily the brain came away from the head, like a sponge being prised out from a rock. How gross and vile were these substances that furnished the seat of our reason and the wellspring of our imagination (though in Kit’s case only a trickle had ever flo
wed therefrom).
Close the box and seal it. That was the easy part.
Now Dr Sloane took the powder he had mixed earlier from cinnamon, myrrh and aloes together with an equal quantity of quicklime. Then he began to cut the skin, first down the arms and legs, then turned him over with my assistance (how stiff and heavy he was) and performed the same office on the back. When the skin had separated, he gashed all the muscles to the bone, like a butcher filleting a joint and together, using the Duchess’s soup spoons, we filled the cavities with the powder. I thought he had mixed too much powder, but three-quarters of it was consumed.
Then he set to sewing up the cavities. This was work too delicate for me, for I am no seamster. And I could not but marvel at the dexterity with which all the limbs resumed their shape so that I could scarce see the seam. Already we had taken nearly two hours, but the business was far from done.
Now, the hot mixture.
This was a very different composition, being made of heated pitch, wax, rosin and tallow. When the ingredients were all melted into one another, we cut three old linen sheets into long pieces and dipped them in the hot mixture, then rolled them around the several limbs and filled the head and the stomach with the mixture.
I forgot to say that we were now wearing militiamen’s gauntlets that we might not burn our hands.
You take the feet, Dr Sloane said, and when I give the word, we lift him together. One-two-three.
So we lifted him into his coffin, a stiff and dripping effigy, our nostrils full of the fragrance of the myrrh and the stink of the pitch. At first his arms would not go into the coffin, but together we pushed them in so hard that there came a loud cracking; we must have broken the bone.
More wax, quick. His cuticles are discoloured. We haven’t much time.
So we poured in more wax till all but his nose was covered, so that he seemed to be floating in a black pond.
Then we let it stand till it was cold, which took the best part of a day, before we came to nail him up.
In the interim, that night, we took the cedar box that contained the bowels and the brains down to St Jaco de la Vega. It was a strange ride we had under the stars and the bearded fig trees brushing against the open carriage. Dr Sloane sat with the little box between his knees and discoursed of his patients (for like my old friend Mr Pierce he had none of that privacy that distinguished Hippocrates). At the church the parson was waiting for us and took us to the place where they had dug up the paving and there he conducted the burial rite as rapidly as though it was not lawful. Then we put a little cement over the poor fuddled brains and swollen tripes of my late master and put the stone back and went home.
So far so good, Dr Sloane said as we bade each other good-night. But the next day, as we began to hammer in the nails, several bubbles began to arise from the parts which lay uppermost, the hands and the face, so that his breath seemed to be disturbing the surface of the mixture. So we put in some fresh ingredients to quench the bubbles (which were gaseous emanations from the bloating of the body). Then we nailed him up again.
After it was closed, this coffin (of cedar) was placed for protection during the voyage in another coffin of lead, and the interstices filled with pitch.
There, that should do it, the doctor said, let’s go and take a glass of wine.
The next day Dr Sloane called me back to the room where Kit lay.
I fear the joiners are bad workmen and the plumbers too.
The moment we came into the room, I could scarcely breathe for the extreme cadaverous smell.
We went out again and tied cloths dipped in vinegar round our faces, while the coffin-maker brought up another cedar coffin that he swore was snug. And we undid the lead coffin and then the inner one and took out the body again and put it in the new coffin and filled the interstices with the mixture again and caulked all the seams with waxed linen and then covered the whole with black cloth.
Do you still detect . . . ?
Yes, I think, but only a trace . . .
It will have to do. The lead will contain the mischief.
Once more we placed the cedar coffin inside the lead and nailed it down.
That was the last I saw of my master, yet after the trouble he had put us to I could not rid myself of the superstition that his unquiet spirit had escaped through the gaseous bubbles and was walking the island, hovering in the trees with the humming-birds and parrots or diving through the seas to rest on a bed of coral.
The disconsolate Princess came back from Guanaboa with her treasure and lived once more in the King’s House with the guards all about her.
I must go to England, Dr Sloane, she said (me she again would not address by name). I have no place here.
Your Grace has a place in every Jamaican’s heart.
They have been very kind. I have written to the Council. But I must go home, when the yacht is repaired.
It will be a month yet before Captain Monck is returned from Boston.
It was two months. And before he came we had more extraordinary news from England: Prince William of Orange was landed at Torbay. We knew it was true because it was proclaimed by the King himself. But what it meant, we knew not. Was William to become King or his wife the Princess Mary to be Queen (she had the better claim being King James’s daughter), or both or neither? Were they perhaps King James’s prisoners? Had they signed a treaty – or fought a battle? Was one of them dead, perhaps, or all of them?
In this delirious uncertainty we passed our time. Dr Sloane took notes of the parrots and the butterflies and the humming-birds, and we wandered along the beaches where the sand was of a curious whiteness, as though the sun had bleached it.
At length Captain Monck came back from Boston, the yacht being all fresh painted and varnished. Meanwhile Captain Wright had the frigate Assistance newly fitted up, and extra cabins built.
It was at darkest night, so as not to attract attention, that the sorrowing Duchess came aboard the Assistance with her treasure and her plate and 500 tons of furnishings (though much of that was to go in the thirteen merchantmen that were to come with us), and Dr Sloane and his collections which now took up six cabinets, and the servants and myself. Dr Sloane brought also some living animals to divert the Fellows of the Royal Society, viz. a large yellow snake seven feet long, an iguana or great lizard and a crocodile or alligator. He had the snake tamed by an Indian whom it would follow as a dog would follow its master, but after it was delivered to the doctor he kept it in a large earthen water-jar. He fed it on rats and the guts and garbage of fowl, etc., from the kitchen. The crocodile he put in a tub of sea-water towards the foc’s’le and fed it with the same sort of food. The Duke’s corpse was lodged in separate state in his yacht, with but Captain Monck and a dozen seamen for company.
Thus this convoy of the living and the dead, of men and women and wild beasts – surely never was there a stranger one since Noah put forth his Ark – set sail for England, knowing nothing of what we might find there. Nor did we dare come too close to any ship we might espy on the voyage, for we knew not if England or Holland be at war with France, or Spain or any other power. And as the dark form of the island slipped from our sight, with its sweet smell of molasses and its gaily coloured birds, we forgot the misery of Kit’s last days and feared lest we were leaving a safe and pleasant home for wilder waters.
Yet there were pleasant days too on the homeward voyage as the doctor’s iguana ran up and down the deck and we fed the snake and the crocodile from the kitchen garbage. We were glad to see the flying fish again and the dolphins. But none of us could put out of our mind that we knew nothing of what lay in wait for us in England.
Dr Sloane, we must know what the Captain intends. Bring him to me.
Thus we sat round the table in her cabin, the four of us. Captain Wright seemed uneasy. He was a ruddy fellow, yet with a skulking mien (I fancy he had something of a squint, which was no shame to him). He had showed great punctilio towards us, but little affection, although we had
sailed with him for many weeks. He was a firm man for the House of Stuart and told us that each 30 January he would wear his colours half-mast in memory of the horrid murder of our blessed sovereign Charles I (I quote him verbatim, for he was solemn).
Well, said the Duchess, I must confess I’m partial to the Prince of Orange. He was my late lord’s friend. We sent him venison and a pair of greyhounds when he came to London. I have his diamond ring still.
We don’t know whether he is in London now, Dr Sloane said. Perhaps they’ve made a treaty and he is returned to Holland. Or they may be at war.
I can’t fight any ship whose captain holds his Commission from King James, from whom I received mine, the Captain said.
My husband had no cause to love King James, the Duchess said, he had scurvy treatment from him after he had beaten the Duke of Monmouth.
If we come to England and find the King gone to France, then it is my duty to make all speed to France and place myself and my ship at His Majesty’s disposal.
Oh no, shrieked the Duchess, her face white as a ghost. You can’t mean it, you can’t be so cruel, Captain.
That is my duty, madam.
But I can’t land in France with my husband yet unburied and all my things, and among a foreign people.
That is my duty, ma’am.
It is not so, Captain, I said. Your first duty is to protect Her Grace in her distress.
And that I will surely do, sir, as best I can, but I have my Commission from the King. This is his ship.
The great blockhead would not budge from this sentiment. We went on at him, but he was quite deaf. Then the Duchess, who had been silent, rose and said with piercing dignity:
Very well, Captain. You have your duty and I have mine. And you have your ship and we have ours. Dr Sloane, pray remove all my goods into the yacht. I shall sail home with my husband in his ship.
But, madam, the yacht will not carry it all.
Jem (and Sam) Page 36