The King's Exile (Thomas Hill Trilogy 2)

by Andrew Swanston

‘No you won’t,’ growled the auctioneer. ‘Shut your mouth or it’ll be the worse for you.’

  ‘I will be heard. I am the victim of—’ Another blow from the pikeman and Thomas was back on the ground, stunned and helpless. Again he struggled to his feet and tried to focus his eyes. He heard the auctioneer say something about this man having been paid for in advance, and after a certain amount of shouting a big, black-bearded man approached and gave his name as Samuel Gibbes. He tied Thomas’s hands with a short rope, put another around his neck and led him away.

  Thomas smelt drink on Gibbes’s breath, and his stomach heaved. He was trapped. His appeal to be heard had brought only cracks on the head and this man, apparently his new master, looked brutish. There was no possibility of escape. He vomited, steadied himself with several deep breaths, squared his shoulders and followed Gibbes to a nearby inn – the Mermaid Inn, its sign proclaimed it to be – where two threadbare ponies were tethered. Again he took a deep breath and shouted, ‘I am Thomas Hill, an innocent man. I demand to see a magistrate at once.’

  Not one of the Mermaid’s drinkers took the slightest notice, so he tried yet again. ‘My name is Thomas—’ Gibbes yanked the rope around Thomas’s neck. It dug into his throat and cut off his voice. Then he slapped Thomas on the face with the back of his hand and hissed at him. ‘Hold your tongue, shit-eater, or I’ll cut it out and shove it down your gullet. Now get on the pony.’

  Too shocked to resist, Thomas mounted the smaller pony and was led by Gibbes on the other, not knowing where they were going or how long it would take. The ropes were still around his neck and wrists, and his throat was burning. His eyes would not focus. It was a struggle to stay on the pony. They rode around the harbour, passing a line of low timber-built houses, a few others built of a pale-coloured stone and all the paraphernalia of a busy trading port. He vaguely noticed a harbour master’s house, timber warehouses and, judging by the number of women sitting outside it, what could only be a brothel. Oistins was a midden of a place, a dung heap where drunkards and whores and thieves washed up in the hope of easy pickings. Its smells, aggravated by the heat, were the smells of the sea, cooking fires and toiling men, mixed with others that Thomas did not recognize. These were heady, thick smells – of strange spices, perhaps, or sugar and rum. They made him retch again.

  They soon left the ramshackle town behind and rode slowly along a rutted road with the sea on their left. Except where the land had been roughly cleared for planting, unfamiliar trees and bushes, so dense that Thomas could see no more than a yard into them, lined the route. A mile or two from Oistins the road swung inland and they crossed a narrow stream running down from the hills before dropping down to the coast again. Blue and yellow flowers grew unchecked by the roadside and some of the trees were crowned with crimson blossoms. Apart from an occasional cluster of mean shacks and a few other travellers, there was little sign of life.

  The further north they rode, the more the forest had been cut back and the land put to use. Thomas recognized tobacco plants, and cotton, but most of all sugar cane. Sugar – the island’s gold. The reason men of every class came here to make their fortune, the reason for ships loaded with miserable human cargo. The reason he was here.

  An hour later, as the light was beginning to fade, they turned off the road and rode up a hill to their right. About half a mile on they followed a rough path through tall trees until they finally came to a halt. This, it seemed, was it. Thomas stared in astonishment. Whatever he had been expecting, it was not this hovel. He was wondering whether such a place could possibly be a planter’s house when another large, bearded man, this time with red hair and beard, came out to meet them.

  ‘Is this him, then?’ The voice was loud and coarse.

  ‘It is, John. Thomas Hill by name. He doesn’t look much but he can cook, so we’re told, and he can read and figure.’

  ‘How old are you, Hill?’ asked John.

  ‘I am thirty-three. And I am innocent of any crime. I demand to be taken immediately to the authorities.’

  ‘Demand, eh? Here’s what we think of your demand, Hill,’ growled John Gibbes. He cuffed Thomas hard on the head and knocked him to the ground.

  ‘He doesn’t look much at all,’ said Samuel Gibbes. ‘Skin and bone, a feeble-looking thing.’

  ‘I’ll put him in the hut and we’ll see to him later. There’s chicken and bread if you’re hungry, brother.’

  And with that, John Gibbes hauled Thomas to his feet and led him by the rope to his hut. He untied the rope around Thomas’s wrists and left him there. ‘The last one who tried to run got as far as the road,’ warned Gibbes. ‘A month in the boiling house and a taste of the whip did for him.’

  Thomas slipped the rope over his head, rubbed his neck and inspected the hut. Not that there was much to inspect – just eight or so feet square of horizontal rough timbers nailed together with uprights on each side, a roof thatched with something that was not straw and one small, shuttered window. The door flapped on its hinges.

  Inside, he had a narrow cot, a woollen blanket, a small table and a chair. On the table stood a silver inkwell, quite out of place yet somehow reassuring. He picked it up, rubbed it on his sleeve and squinted at his reflection. The face he saw, distorted by the curve of the well, was wide-eyed, hollow-cheeked and wretched. Its chin and cheeks were covered in a straggly beard and its thin hair was long and matted. He put the inkwell down quickly.

  ‘God alone knows what’s coming next,’ he said aloud, ‘but despite appearances I’m alive and I’d better try to stay that way. I will not allow this place or these revolting animals to break my spirit. I will find a way to get home and I will discover who has done this to me.’

  Too exhausted to do anything else, Thomas lay down on the cot and closed his eyes. For the first time in weeks he was alone.

  CHAPTER 6

  THOMAS SOON LEARNED, however, that at night in such a place a man was never alone. Outside the hut, dogs barked and unknown creatures whistled and croaked. For company inside he had buzzing insects and tiny lizards which scampered over his chest and legs. At first he leapt up at the feel of their feet on his skin, frantically waving his arms about to frighten the things off, and only abandoning this when he realized that, just like their cousins on the Hampshire heathland, they were harmless.

  The insects were another matter. Very soon he was scratching at bites on his ankles and wrists and wondering what God’s purpose could possibly have been in putting on the earth creatures whose only function was to inflict torment. And there were armies of them. Squash one and ten more would take its place.

  Trapped in an airless hut, biting insects, reptiles, heat, dirt, neither food nor water, far from home, no idea what the next day would bring – Thomas Hill, scholar and philosopher, who had once broken the unbreakable Vigenère cipher and had been presented to both the king and the queen of England, might as well have been a slave dragged from his home in chains and doomed to nothing but pain, misery and death. He turned his face to the wall and howled until eventually, shattered in mind and body, he fell into a fitful sleep.

  When dawn broke, Thomas rose shakily from the bed, scratched at the red weals all over his body, decided against examining his face in the inkwell and tentatively opened the door of the hut. It would do no harm to explore his prison. As soon as he set foot outside there were shrill calls of alarm from birds in the trees behind the hut and an ancient dog which had been sleeping nearby sloped off towards the Gibbes’s house. A large, round, stone-built structure stood no more than twenty yards away and beside it what looked like a well. Thomas went to inspect it and was relieved to find that it was indeed a well, with a rope attached to a ring set into the stone surround. He pulled on the rope and raised a bucket of water. Not knowing what to expect, he peered into the bucket. To his surprise, the water was clear and clean. He took a sip and, finding it pure, gulped down half the bucket. The other half he tipped over his head. It was cool and refreshing and eased the bites o
n his skin. He lowered the bucket and did it again. That was something. A well full of good water close to his hut.

  From the opposite direction to the house, he could see smoke and hear voices and set off towards them. Down a narrow path which opened into fields of what Thomas thought must be sugar cane, he came to a cluster of wooden shacks, with fires set outside and the smells of cooking in the air. A pang of hunger gripped his stomach and saliva filled his mouth. He called out a greeting and the shacks immediately emptied of their occupants. Men, women and children, all with black skins, emerged from the doorways in ones and twos and stared at him. Slaves from Africa. Might they share their breakfast with him?

  Before he could find out, from behind him came bellows of fury, followed by Samuel and John Gibbes. Thomas turned in alarm. The bearded brothers were striding towards him, both brandishing whips.

  ‘What the devil are you doing here, Hill?’ shouted Samuel. ‘Get back to your hut or you’ll feel my whip on your back.’ His whip was a vicious-looking thing with a leather strap and a tongue like a viper’s.

  ‘I was finding my way around,’ replied Thomas unsteadily.

  The other one, John, stuck his face into Thomas’s and spat. ‘We’ll tell you when to find your way around, you little turd. Get back to the hut now.’

  ‘I have no business being here. I was wrongly arrested and I demand to see a magistrate.’

  John Gibbes roared. ‘Demand to see a magistrate, eh? What do you think of that, brother?’

  ‘I think Master Hill needs a lesson,’ snarled Samuel, raising his whip. Its tongue flicked across Thomas’s cheek, slicing the skin, and Thomas cried out in pain. He put his hand to his face and felt blood. ‘Now get back to your hut, Hill, or you’ll be sorry.’

  There was nothing to be gained by arguing. Thomas walked slowly back to the hut, gingerly feeling his cheek and trying not to stumble. God have pity, he thought, what a pair. Vicious, repulsive, barely human. The red one is the ugliest man I’ve ever seen. More warts and carbuncles than Cromwell. The black one’s no better. A pair of brutes. Red brute and black brute. How in the name of heaven did they come to buy me? And how do I escape from them?

  The Gibbes soon followed him back up the path. ‘Next time we find you sniffing about the slaves, you’ll get what they get. A proper taste of the whip and a day on the boiling house ring,’ growled Samuel, pointing with his whip to a rusty iron ring set at head height into the wall of the round building. ‘Understand?’ Thomas understood. These men were dangerous. ‘Now get down to the kitchen and get us our breakfast. There’s work to be done.’ Without waiting for him, they strode off to the house. Thomas followed them.

  Outside the hovel, where they evidently did their eating and drinking, there were four rickety chairs and a battered table. Samuel kicked aside another mangy dog asleep in the morning sun and climbed two steps to a patched-up door. John told Thomas to follow his brother and sat down.

  Thomas climbed the steps and went inside. There were two rooms. One with a wooden bed on either side, a heap of sacking, a stack of tools and a barrel in the middle of the floor. The other, reached by a door between the beds, was a kitchen. A roasting spit stood over a smoking hearth, there was another barrel in one corner and a heap of filthy platters, knives, spoons, glasses and wooden cups, all piled up on a small table. On a shelf were hunks of meat, loaves of bread and huge jars of sugar. Joints of mutton and pork hung on hooks attached to a roof beam. Around and under the table and on either side of the fire were dozens and dozens of bottles. The dog wandered in through a back door and began licking the earth floor.

  ‘Meat and bread,’ ordered Samuel, ‘and wine. Enough for two.’ And went to join his brother.

  He would not get home any sooner by refusing so Thomas inspected the bottles and found one that contained a thin red liquid that might once have been claret. He took it out to the brutes with two glasses and returned to fetch meat and bread. From the shelf he took a dusty loaf and a slab of half-eaten mutton and took them out on wooden platters. The brutes appeared content and were soon tearing at the meat and bread with their hands and drinking the wine from the bottle. The glasses had been tossed aside. Revolting as the food looked and smelt, Thomas was starving and needed to eat. He found a piece of cooked chicken, sniffed it, wiped it on his breeches and took a tentative bite. It was old and tough but it was food. Water from the well would wash it down. He stuffed the chicken under his shirt and awaited further instructions.

  They came almost immediately. ‘More wine, damn you, and be quick about it,’ shouted one of the brothers. Astonished, Thomas took out another bottle. Two bottles of claret for breakfast. How many might there be for dinner?

  ‘Put it there and get back to the hut. We’ll be up there when we’re done.’ Clutching the chicken under his shirt, Thomas did as he was told. The lines of battle had been drawn. The brutes would shout and curse and he would hold his tongue and do their bidding. But only until he could escape and get home.

  When the brutes appeared at the hut they were carrying two large ledgers, quills and a pot of ink. ‘There you are, Hill,’ said Samuel, ‘books of account. We need records of what we buy and sell and a tally of the slaves.’ He jabbed a filthy finger at Thomas. ‘You can write and figure, can’t you?’

  Thomas nodded. ‘I can.’

  ‘Just as well. When our partner visits, he’ll want to see the books. Make sure they’re right.’ So the brutes had a partner. A man who did not care much what company he kept. John produced scraps of paper from a pocket. ‘Start on those.’ Thomas put the papers, the ledgers, the ink and the quills on his table. It would be better than working in that hellish kitchen. ‘When you’re done go to the kitchen and get our dinner ready.’

  Dear God, the kitchen again. ‘What do you wish to eat?’

  ‘Meat.’ And with that, the brutes departed, leaving Thomas to the ledgers.

  Might as well get started, he thought, testing the point of a quill on his finger. It was sharp enough but too flexible – certainly not from a duck or a swan. He tipped a little of the ink into the silver inkwell. It was thin stuff, nothing like his own writing ink made from good English oak apples. The ledgers, however, were surprisingly good. The paper was thick and they were well bound in red leather. The scraps of paper turned out to be bills of sale from suppliers of tools, barrels, wheels, pots and the many other things needed for the production and sale of sugar, and barely intelligible scribbles recording monies received for the sugar sold.

  Indifferent quills, watery ink, but it was the sort of work to which Thomas was accustomed and there was some pleasure in writing in the ledgers and creating an orderly set of accounts. Two hours later when he had completed the work, he closed the ledgers, made a neat pile of the bills, got up and stretched his back. He was astonished by the figures he had entered. The brothers Gibbes, brutish, evil, probably illiterate, were amassing a huge fortune. Where had they got the capital to buy the land and the equipment? Had they stolen it? And how had they learned about sugar? Where had they come from and when? If they were typical of planters on the island, it was a strange place indeed, where ignorant brutes could master a complicated process and rapidly become exceedingly wealthy.

  If they were out in the fields somewhere there would be another chance to explore his prison before having to go back to the kitchen. The more he knew about the place, the better. If he was going to run, he had best know where to run to. The well yielded another bucket of good water – he made a mental note to find out why it was altogether better than the brown stuff produced by the Romsey wells – and then he ducked through a narrow entrance into the circular building beside it. In the middle was a large stone furnace over which had been erected a steel frame, with broken pots strewn around it on the earth floor. John Gibbes had called it the boiling house although it was obvious that nothing had been boiled in it for years. Even empty, it was an unpleasant place, dark and threatening, and Thomas quickly retreated back through the entrance.
>
  Keeping an ear open for the sound of the returning Gibbes, he walked cautiously down the narrow path towards the fields. The ground was free of stones but, here and there, heavily rutted. On either side grew the same tall trees which he had noticed on the way from the harbour. High in their branches, a family of monkeys screeched a warning at his approach.

  When he reached the place where the path opened up, he stood quietly behind a tree and listened. Far off, he could hear voices singing to a steady rhythm and he knew without looking that they were the voices of slaves cutting sugar cane and loading it on to carts. He peered round the tree. No sign of the Gibbes.

  About fifty yards away to his left he saw another, larger circular building, which he took to be a new boiling house, and beside it a windmill, its sails turning smoothly in the breeze, and a third building whose purpose he did not know. The stone base of the mill was much larger than any mill he had seen in England. The three buildings stood on a rise in the ground where the mill would catch whatever wind there was, and were partially hidden by a stand of thick trees with creepers hanging from their branches. That was why he had not noticed them that morning. Four ragged ponies were grazing in a field beyond the mill. With another look around to be sure he had not been seen, he climbed the slope to the mill.

  He made his way past a line of flat-bedded carts and around a mountain of barrels. The third building was empty but for hundreds of earthenware pots, from which a thick brown liquid was draining on to pans set below them. It must be where the sugar dried out until it was cured.

  It was too hot to stay there for more than a minute or two, so he went over to the mill and peered through a hole in its stone wall. Inside he saw two naked black slaves, their backs gleaming with sweat, feeding cane through three rollers driven by the windmill, and three more stirring copper cisterns into which the cane juice was being squeezed. The work looked back-breaking and dangerous.