The Nine Lives of Charlotte Taylor

by Sally Armstrong

  The arrival at the dock is similar to their departure from England, save the temperature. There are dock masters shouting orders and a collection of vagabonds looking for wayward parcels that may fall into their hands. Charlotte is amused by the activity and not in the least concerned about the safekeeping of the trunk she packed clandestinely so many weeks ago. All she can focus on now is the solid land that will soon be under her feet, the glorious bath in hot water in which she can scrub the grime from her body and the fresh clothes carefully folded in the trunk that will replace the grimy ones she wears.

  THE SHIP is secured, the gangplank is lowered and without a backward glance Charlotte steps her way to the land she has imagined during the long weeks at sea. The passengers on board are rounded up for a tally in the passengers’ shed. Jake sends a pleading look to Charlotte as if to say, “Find me Master Frye and get me away from these men.” She can’t help him. In fact, her legs are wobbling on the terra firma so much she can hardly help herself. They move to the cargo shed and wait for their belongings, trusting the Captain Skinner to fulfill his final duty. Even though personal possessions are to be off-loaded before the cargo, they wait for hours. The sun that had been so welcome when they first got off the ship is unbearably hot. The shredded roof of the shed where they wait provides no relief. The sweat now mixing with the soiled bodice and skirts she wears is making her garments stink. She can hardly wait to cast them off.

  Pad strikes up a conversation with the overseer in the shed.

  “Is the Willisams family known to you?”

  The overseer, a bearded man of fifty, looks at him without expression. “There are many such families here,” he says. “Which do you seek?”

  Pad hadn’t considered the possibility of a choice.

  “Hire a coach to take you to the governor’s office at the centre of the town,” the overseer finally volunteers. “Ask for Camilla Willisams. She’s acquainted with most persons here.”

  The road to the governor’s office passes no shanties. Charlotte cranes her neck at majestic palms, coconuts gathered overhead like string bags of giant marbles. Crimson bougainvillea bracts burst out of the bushes along the trail and mix their sweet scent with the sea air. As the distance between the couple and the Anton increases, so do their spirits.

  The governor’s office is about to close when they arrive and ask to speak with Camilla Willisams. The woman at the front desk, whose skin is the colour of milky coffee and who projects a bland, detached air, says flatly, “Yes.” Presuming she is Camilla, Pad steps forward.

  “Good day, madam. My wife and I have just arrived from England on the Anton.”

  “Sa ki non’w?” Camilla says. Pad looks perplexed.

  “I think she is asking for our names,” Charlotte says.

  “Willisams, ma’am. You and I share the same family name.”

  “Ki sa ou vlé?” she asks, in a stern tone of voice.

  Captain Skinner had said most people here spoke English as well as Creole, a mixture of English, French and Portuguese, but the woman in front of them doesn’t seem to be speaking any language they can understand. Charlotte wonders if it is possible that she wants nothing to do with them? After several more failed exchanges, it becomes clear that the Willisams name is not the ticket to welcome they had hoped for. Camilla finally condescends to use English, and dispatches them to a village at the edge of town where she says they can find shelter with others who are unsettled.

  The waiting coachman, who seems more inclined to English, suggests that the nearby village really is their best hope for accommodation. With no one to advise them otherwise, Pad and Charlotte agree.

  Fields stretch out on either side of the track. The sun is dropping out of the sky and into the sea with that alarming rapidity they had observed as they’d sailed into tropical waters. It is an orange ball of flame that lights the clutches of families walking arm in arm through the fields toward home and burnishes the smoke that curls from their small houses.

  “We’re likely going to a way station,” Charlotte says. “Some place where arriving passengers stay until they can make proper arrangements.” The land around them becomes brown bog, almost undefined in the fading light.

  “Ow!” Charlotte swats at her neck. A moment later Pad, too, begins swatting. The air is suddenly full of flying insects that bite at every exposed bit of flesh.

  “Mosquitoes,” says the driver. “Better you should cover yourselves.”

  Charlotte pulls her soiled shawl from her bag and Pad lifts the collar of his shirt.

  “Whoever heard of mosquitoes this big?” Charlotte wants to know.

  It is pitch dark when they pull into the village, a crush of thatched shanties, fires burning in pits in front of the huts. The driver stops at what appears to be the only proper dwelling and disembarks. A European man with a drooping moustache and oversized belly stands on the doorstep and the two speak briefly. Charlotte can see the man looking over the driver’s shoulder at her.

  The driver unloads the trunk and accepts his payment in silence, then is gone.

  “Welcome to Jamaica.” The man stifles a yawn. “Hurry in now, before the mossies carry you away.”

  Pad drags the trunk inside and the door closes behind them. Straw mats are strewn about the floor of the main room, and are separated by curtains of cotton that hang from pegs on the beams above them, just like the dreary curtains that hung between bunks on the ship. It seems a dozen others have found their way to this house, though Charlotte recognizes none from the ship. A fire burns in the centre of the room, some smoke escaping through a hole in the roof while the rest fills the room.

  “I’m Lutz,” says the man. “What is it I might do for you?”

  “Sir,” says Pad, “my wife and I have just disembarked from the Anton, out of England.”

  “England? You don’t say. Fancy that then.” Lutz gives them a broad smile that reveals two prominently absent teeth.

  “We need fresh water, baths, food,” Charlotte interrupts.

  “Food.” Lutz rubs the stubble on his chin. “Yes. We have food. And water. But baths”—he lets out a rolling chuckle—“We don’t see too many baths here on the plantation.”

  “Would you be so kind, sir, as to tell us where we are?” asks Pad.

  Lutz frowns. “In what sense do you mean, sir?”

  “We’re entirely new to the island, sir.”

  “Them’s sent you told you, did they not? The Raleigh Plantation is famous enough,” Lutz says. “I’m its manager and this village serves its needs. You’ll find we ain’t got much here, but I can offer you shelter.”

  “Thank you, sir,” says Pad, and he indeed feels a gratitude that almost equals his weariness.

  “We get a lot come from the ships, seeking work and a life on the island. And we get many that are running from another life, one they choose to leave behind.” His eyes convey a knowing twinkle. Charlotte feels a sizzle of indignation.

  “You spoke of food, sir,” she reminds him.

  Lutz produces slices of bread and mugs of tea from a table by the window and suggests they sit on the bench against the wall. When they have eaten he shows them to their straw mats. Charlotte’s heart sinks now, as it had sunk a score of times in the course of that day.

  “Never fear, love,” Pad whispers. “We’re only weary. Tomorrow will be a good day.”

  “What did he mean, ‘those who sent us’?” Charlotte wants to know.

  “In the morning, love. In the morning.”

  They drag their trunk near their pallets and collapse exhausted on the straw.

  THE SKY IS BARELY LIGHT when Lutz begins shouting to waken the household. There is a lineup for the basin of water on the sideboard, but tea is brewing, fresh bread is baking in an outdoor oven and, mercifully, there are heaping plates of mangoes for the house full of refugees. When the others have eaten and left, Lutz takes Charlotte and Pad outside into the yard. “You can stay here if you want to work,” he says. “I need a
man to help the overseer of the plantation. There is a cottage nearby. You can earn your keep with work.” He says he also needs a person to do the accounts and inquires whether either of them can read. A huffy Charlotte tells him, “Of course I can read.” For that, he says he is willing to pay five shillings a month. Both faces must register their dismay, for Lutz tells them flatly, “Your options are not better than this. If you don’t want to stay here, you must go back to town on the cart this morning.”

  With diminishing enthusiasm for the idyllic life they’d envisioned in these islands, they decide to stay at least until they can get their bearings. The pair move into the dingy one-room cottage at the edge of a field of sugar cane. Charlotte opens the trunk that contains their only possessions to find linens for their straw palette. It’s while they are settling into the cottage that Pad first complains of the swell left by the mosquitoes the night before. “They must like your taste,” Charlotte teases, relieved that her own bites are small and few. There isn’t even time to fully unpack the trunk before Lutz returns and directs Pad to the office of the overseer and tells Charlotte to come to his house to work on the account books.

  The next few days are a blur of work, sleep and beating off the pests that crawl over everything in the cottage. There is no possibility to make another plan, much less unpack their belongings. Charlotte pulls a clean frock from the trunk each day and washes the one she’s worn, spreading it to dry on a bush behind the cottage. As for the clothes she sailed away in, she tossed them on the fire the very first night, creating a smudge that she hoped would at least keep the mosquitoes away.

  EACH NIGHT BEFORE DUSK, though the air is stifling, they stoke the fire to ward off the mosquitoes. Mattie Higgs who stays in the hut next door has told them a smoky fire works best. Each morning, they go to their respective jobs. Lutz informs them that the harvest in the far field must be done by week’s end. Agents will collect the cane for export and the ship will depart directly. There is no time to rest.

  ON THEIR FIFTH DAY, another morning where rain streams down ceaselessly, Pad complains that his joints are aching.

  “It’s the working, I should think,” says Charlotte. “We have laid like lumps on that ship these months.”

  Pad’s joints continue to torment him and two days later, he develops a fever. Charlotte presses cold cloths to his head at night. One of the women who lives with Lutz—a concubine, Charlotte assumes—advises her to pack mud on the swollen bites.

  Charlotte’s worry grows to a gnawing fear. Rain continues to fall.

  “No surprise, that,” one of the other women explains. “It’s the rainy season, my girl. It’s gonna rain and rain these five months.”

  The deluge that had soaked the plantation that first day had seemed a welcome relief from the oppressive heat and a good wash for a dirty world. But now every single morning, the rain pelts down on the cottage for an hour or so and turns the fields into swamps and the tropical air into clouds of steam.

  Pad grows worse by the hour. That night he groans in his sleep and then he vomits into the vessel beside the bed. On the ninth morning, his eyes roll in his head and he begins to shake violently. Charlotte runs to the main house.

  “Mr. Lutz! Mr. Lutz!” she calls. “Please come! Pad is sick! You must help me!”

  Lutz sends for a woman who, he assures Charlotte, is known for her cures, a local witch who gathers her medicines in the woods. While they wait for the woman to arrive, he looks at Charlotte with an undertaker’s face.

  “We got yellow fever here,” he says.

  “What is that, sir?”

  “Bad.”

  “Where do you have it?”

  “On this island.”

  “It’s a big island with many people.”

  “Indeed, Mrs. Willisams. And many dying.” He fills his pipe, regarding her as he does so. “Many widows, alone and grieving, are grateful for the support of a proper man.”

  THE MEDICINE WOMAN is remarkably old, wrinkly, toothless and not as high as Charlotte’s shoulder. Her name is Mrs. Sue. When she arrives at the cottage, she ties a kerchief over her face and indicates that Charlotte should do the same. Pad’s fever is raging. Charlotte spends her time running back and forth between the office where she is supposed to be working and the cottage where her man lies close to death.

  She asks the woman if Pad’s sickness is contagious. “It’s the yellow,” Mrs. Sue tells her. “Mosquito.”

  Charlotte lies beside Pad and tries to sooth his delirious mutterings. He’d been her lover for more than a year. She’d turned her back on her own family to run away with him. The voyage had been tough on the pair—instead of being the handsome, affable man who ran the household, he’d been nervous, easily defeated by judgmental glares from the other passengers. But once on shore, she’d assumed his confidence would return and with it, the emotionally powerful bond of their illicit relationship.

  Desperate, she lifts her head to his ear and whispers, “Don’t leave me, Pad. I’m carrying your child.” She watches his face for a response, but there is no sign.

  The medicine woman returns with a concoction of juices and tells a frantic Charlotte to wait outside in the soaking rain and the suffocating heat. There’s no sound from the cottage. The morning rain lets up, the men in the field cleave the cane, the women tend to their children and Charlotte waits and waits. Then the door to the cottage opens; the old woman pulls the kerchief from her face and says, “I regrets to inform ye miss, your man is dead.”

  CHAPTER 2

  The Atlantic Seaboard

  1775

  Two of Lutz’s men bury Pad Willisams the next morning in a pit at considerable distance from the plantation.

  Charlotte picks herself up from the stoop and walks slowly to the house. She can’t stay here. Going home is not an option. She’s unmarried and by her calculation four months’ pregnant. So shocked by the events of the last twenty-four hours, she hasn’t even shed a tear and can hardly put thoughts and actions together. She’d suspected in mid-April that the passionate, furtive nights with Pad has resulted in a child but decided not to think about it until they were far away from her father’s house. She wonders if Lutz will now see her as a potential new addition to his collection of concubines.

  When she gets to the office, he looks up.

  “The accounts for the sugar cane must be made ready. Commodore Walker arrived with the high tide in Kingston four days ago. His cargo is off-loaded, except for what he brings to me.”

  Charlotte says nothing.

  “His business with the governor is conducted, and he intends to collect his new shipment from me personally.”

  She sees through his vanity, his suggestion that the commodore had singled him out as more valuable than other managers.

  Charlotte goes to her table and begins to enter the numbers and description of the cargo to be dispatched to the commodore’s company. She allows her eyes to flick to Lutz and catches him staring at her. The particulars of the shipment suggest a transaction the size of a prize for Lutz.

  THE FIELDS ARE A BUSTLE of workers cutting cane and bundling it with twine, rolling barrels of molasses and rum from the warehouse and lugging sacks of spices to the wagons that will carry the order to the wharf. Bully overseers, whips at the ready, urge them to move faster. In the scant ten days since she has been here, it is clear that there are slaves and indentured servants who work this land. The servants live in this village, but the slaves are kept apart in hovels on the other side of the plantation, marched to the fields in long lineups at dawn and back again at dark. She knows from Pad’s reports that they are beaten, tormented and intimidated for the slightest provocation, but when she commented on their treatment to Lutz he’d told her to mind her own business. She hates the place. The grotty shacks the workers live in, the sooty fires they cook at, the hopelessness and the dawn-to-dusk labour are not what she thought a life in the West Indies would entail. Maybe the sprawling mansions she’d seen above the town when t
hey docked would better suit her.

  But for the moment, she only needs to enter the numbers of bundles and the date they are placed on the wagon. July 17, she writes, but the words that play in front of her eyes are the day after Pad died. She’s caught in a surge of memories. Pad, so exotic in the household that he controlled. Her pathetic mother relied on him for everything. Her father often took him into his study to discuss the business of the day. Had she stayed away from him, none of this would have happened. Pad may have …

  “Have you finished?” Lutz interrupts her meditation.

  “Soon,” she replies.

  “You can stay here and work for me,” he says.

  She decides not to reply.

  “Or you can be a wife to a man in the town. You’re a comely woman, and will attract a gentleman of position.” Charlotte has a flashing thought of another respectable Englishman with concubines and remains silent. The stay in Jamaica has left her feeling powerless and consequently vulnerable, not a condition she is accustomed to. She wants to bolt from this hot, fetid, disease-ridden island and find a place to be anonymous. But where could that be?

  LUTZ ANNOUNCES his intention of going to the dock himself. Three other plantation men—all white—have gathered in his office, waiting for instruction.