Island of a Thousand Springs

by Sarah Lark

  Nora was shocked, but Julie had told the story flatly. She clearly had no tears left for the matter. And certainly no sympathy for the needs of a white woman.

  In the end, it was Mansah who helped Nora by asking Nanny for an ointment for a minor injury. Máanu still often spent time in the company of the queen, and so, Mansah also saw her frequently, even though it was clear that neither of them liked it. Nanny disapproved of Mansah’s continued mourning and crying. She accused Máanu of coddling her sister.

  “Send the girl out to the field, she should work, then she’ll stop her whining!” she said, harshly.

  Among her people, men and women were brought up to proudly and stoically endure their troubles. Máanu, in contrast, grew up with the division of field and house slaves. To her, sending Mansah to the fields meant humiliating the girl. Nonetheless, she eventually gave into the queen and Mansah wept bitter tears — even though the fieldwork in Nanny Town was not even remotely comparable to the drudgery of the sugar cane fields on the plantations. If you were not the despised, ill-treated white slave, the planting and harvesting of vegetables and grains could even be fun. The women sang and told stories in the process, frequently taking breaks and chatting with each other. Most of the children on the settlement participated voluntarily, helped a bit, played among the beds, or fashioned toys out of wood and garden waste.

  Despite her despair, Mansah purposefully swung the hoe. The little girl had never been a carefree child, but was a slave from an early age and only tolerated when she made herself useful. Nora felt sorry for her. Up until then, she had never considered the little house slaves, just as she thought equally little about the kitchen maids in England. But now it was clear to her how different everything had been for Mansah, Sally, and Máanu in the past. If English kitchen assistants didn’t obey, the worst case would be for them to lose their jobs. Mansah and the other slave children were always under the threat of being disposed of onto the fields.

  In the end, the girl brought Nora the ointment from Queen Nanny.

  “They have no baarm maddas here,” she reported, unhappily. “Only Nanny.”

  Nora sniffed suspiciously at the jar of ointment. The mixture smelled peculiar, and the brown color and clay-like consistency also didn’t seem familiar or reassuring. And Mansah’s next words cast even more doubt upon Nanny’s competence as a herbal healer.

  “But don’t know if is good medicine. Last night in hut next to us—”

  “In the hut next to us.” Nora corrected.

  “Yesterday, in the hut next to us woman died,” Mansah continued, and Nora was too frightened to correct her. “Pretty. She pregnant … uh … was pregnant and yesterday child came. Her husband get Nanny and she …”

  Mansah twisted up her face, as she always did when she tried to speak properly, but Nora couldn’t enjoy it on this day. She remembered Pretty, a beautiful, young woman who did her name credit.

  “But couldn’t help. Máanu—”

  “What did Máanu have to do with it?” Nora asked, alarmed.

  “Máanu tried to turn child inside Pretty,” Mansah informed her. “Like Missis do. But didn’t work.”

  The grip to turn a child from an incorrect position was not actually difficult. The baarm madda at the Keensleys’ had shown Nora, and Máanu watched. She helped with the nursing, but had no ambitions about becoming the baarm madda. And now Pretty had died at her hands.

  “Your sister didn’t think of coming to get me?” Nora asked, bitterly.

  Mansah shook her head. “She felt sorry after. She said she should have done. But didn’t want … didn’t want … very confusing word, Missis, something with show. She didn’t want to show off Nanny.”

  “Show up, Mansah,” Nora corrected her, tired. “She probably didn’t want to show up Nanny. That has nothing to do with showing off — it’s more that she didn’t want to make her angry. And it certainly was not about letting the queen know that the white slave is useful for anything. For Pretty to die for that … Máanu will eventually choke on her hatred.”

  CHAPTER 5

  “You will get over it.”

  Doug Fortnam had been told those words over and over again — from the reverend, his friends, and neighbors, even from the slaves at Cascarilla Gardens.

  The ladies in Kingston and Spanish Town, particularly, expressed their concerns about his continued mourning — and also about his residence when the opportunity arose, if they visited him. They did it often — after all, there were daughters, younger sisters, and cousins that they would gladly marry off to the heir of a large plantation. And Doug almost never spent any time in society since “misfortune had fallen upon his house” — an expression that the ladies liked to use for the Maroons’ attack, probably because it seemed less threatening to them and put their own safety less into question. After all, the governor made no arrangements to find and remove the Maroons’ nests in the Blue Mountains. He had been defeated there often enough between 1729 and 1734. Now, he was more interested in negotiations and tried to ignore setbacks like the raid at Cascarilla Gardens as much as possible.

  “When will you finally rebuild your house?” Lady Hollister asked, reproachfully. She had dropped by to invite Doug to the spring ball. Now, she was visibly nervous, sitting on one of the simple chairs in the former overseer house where Doug now lived. The proximity of the slave quarters clearly made her uncomfortable. “Your misfortune was now over a year ago, you have to move on with your life.”

  Doug tried to force a smile. “One doesn’t get over some things so easily,” he muttered, but then pulled himself together. “But I will really get down to building the house now. I’m planning a new construction, less in the style of an English country house than your house in Kingston.”

  Lady Hollister beamed. “That’s a good idea!” she said, pleased.

  After all, her niece, who had just returned to Jamaica from an English boarding school had just expressed that she absolutely did not want to live in a stone box. Lucille liked the playful style of the colonial architecture much better. “We could recommend you an architect.”

  Doug nodded, smiled, and let the lady go on. He ultimately had very little interest in a new building, but realized that he had to make concessions in the long run. He couldn’t stay completely outside of the society of Kingston, especially since it would be financially unwise. Cascarilla Gardens had turned a good profit in the previous year, but the other planters made it clear to him that they absolutely did not appreciate his unconventional management of the plantation.

  A planter living hardly more comfortably than the blacks; a plantation without an overseer, but with slaves who were free to attend Sunday services, and who were permitted to marry by jumping over a broom together — a custom from Virginia that Doug had heard of and taken for his people. A marriage would also mean a boisterous feast for the entire slave settlement.

  Up until then, the eccentricities of the Fortnam heir had been overlooked. But now the mourning period was over and he would need to return to more conventional behavior. If not, he risked being ostracized. The planters would no longer consult him in the price negotiations and no longer charter any ships with him to bring goods to England.

  So, Doug was left with no choice, but to hire an overseer. Ian McCloud was an impoverished Scottish nobleman; his story reminded Doug of Nora’s beloved Simon. In any case, he was also a similar sort of dreamer. Mister Ian, as he let the slaves call him, was very strict about saying it properly and did not allow the misappropriation of Backra Ian. The young man made the rule — that redheads in general, and Scots in particular, were lively and quick-tempered — seem completely absurd. Instead, he was predisposed to brooding and spent the day reading under a palm tree while the slaves organized their work in the established manner themselves. It would never occur to Ian McCloud to whip somebody, and he listened to the Sunday services with the emotions of a true Christian, rather than counting the heads of the slaves present.

  His wife P
riscilla came with him, a medium by trade, as she let Doug know at their first meeting. Without being asked, she contacted the spirits of Elias and Nora Fortnam and passed greetings onto the young man from beyond the grave. Doug didn’t know if he should laugh or reproach her — and struggled with the completely unrealistic dream of letting her summon Nora’s spirit. Doug chalked Priscilla’s visions up to eccentricities and avoided the young woman.

  That would, of course, be easier if the manor house were up again. Doug sighed. Nora would have liked a new house in the colonial style. He decided to have the house painted in her favorite colors. He would ask her father about it. Ever since Doug had fulfilled his sad duty of informing Thomas Reed of his daughter’s death, the young planter and the merchant maintained a lively correspondence. It seemed to offer them both comfort to discuss Nora. Doug told Thomas Reed about the black women who took care of her grave, while Reed wrote about Nora’s childhood in London. If he suspected that Doug and Nora had had more of a connection than is usual between in-laws, he never broached the subject. In return, Doug said very little about Nora’s unhappy marriage.

  CHAPTER 6

  After a year of captivity in Nanny Town, Nora was close to complete despair. In the beginning, she had hoped that Doug, the governor, and his men would attack — all the more so, when she noticed Nanny and Quao’s efforts to increase their defenses. The siblings were expecting retaliation — and one that was far more serious than the usual expeditions from the planters. Nora realized that they sent out more watchmen, raised the fence around the settlement, and sent warriors to protect the women and children working on the fields. And they did not neglect to have the new residents trained. Akwasi and the other field slaves from Cascarilla Gardens eagerly learned to aim and shoot with firearms, and to throw spears, and use their knives and sticks as skillfully in close combat as their ancestors in Africa had done. Akwasi, strong and intelligent as he was, excelled in all of these disciplines. He was summoned by Nanny and Quao, and proved to them that he could read and write. They held the young man in high regard — and even Máanu was almost idolized because of her minor knowledge of written English.

  Nora wondered why the two were not assigned to teach their skills to the others — it would have surely been easier to start a school than to give two members of the tribe preferential treatment as if they were miracle workers. Here, however, Nanny’s otherwise broad foresight failed. It probably didn’t cross her mind that reading and writing were just as easy to learn and teach as fieldwork and warfare. She also still spoke of books and contracts as if they were talking pieces of paper. It would never occur to her to acquire reading skills herself.

  Nora fought with herself. When she was slaving away on the fields, she more than once considered offering herself as a teacher to Nanny. She didn’t want to fraternize with the enemy, but on the other hand, it would be much more pleasant to work in a school than be bullied by the women on the field. The former slaves were still forcing her to do the most strenuous work. While her skin was now tanned, and the scarf protected her hair from getting entirely bleached by the sun, the heat continued to take a lot out of her. She now understood the planters’ arguments against using white workers on the sugar cane fields. They never would have held out through the arduous labor as long as the blacks, especially not for ten hours a day and without a single free morning during the week.

  But Nora became increasingly more skilled with the machetes and hoes, and even her feet and hands were no longer sore. Nanny’s ointment had worked wonders — although it was more of a healing mud than the type of paste she was accustomed to, with a base made of fat. However, it helped very little with Nora’s most pressing problem — the painful rape that occurred almost every day.

  Nora’s wish — that Akwasi would eventually get bored by a woman who didn’t encourage him, but just lay stiff and frightened beneath him — had not been fulfilled.

  In fact, Akwasi seemed to be having all his dreams come true. And Máanu didn’t stop hating Nora for it.

  Week after week passed, as such, and Nora’s hopes of an attack by the English dwindled. Doug Fortnam seemed to be making no efforts to do anything about her rescue. At first, she excused him on account of his shock after the attack — he surely felt guilty for having left Nora alone with his father. Then she assumed he would have exercised his influence over the governor. She trusted her lover not to organize a rash expedition, but instead to forcefully intervene in the right way. Maybe even negotiations were possible. Meanwhile, Nora had learned a bit more about the relationship between the governor and the Maroons and could judge from Nanny’s behavior — the queen most definitely would not have risked a war or a mutiny among her own people to allow Akwasi to have his white slave!

  Actually, it seemed that they had forgotten all about Nora in Kingston. And even for Doug, she was probably not important enough to start a private rescue mission. The Fortnams were rich — he could have, for example, rewarded one of the white traders royally for a kidnapping. They often came to Nanny Town and Nora felt a glimmer of hope every time she saw horses and mule teams in front of Nanny’s hut. However, she was always disappointed, and her own attempts to possibly communicate with any of the traders were thwarted by Akwasi’s vigilance. Nora didn’t get anywhere near the white peddlers.

  Eventually, she began to doubt Doug’s love for her. Maybe it had just been an infatuation for him, especially since he was now the heir to the plantation and could marry any girl between Kingston and Montego Bay. Nora tried to push her thoughts of Doug aside and instead summon Simon’s spirit once again. He had never betrayed her, but he also didn’t come to her now. Nora had no comforting daydreams. The thoughts of the beach and the sea had faded. The dream had turned into a nightmare and the sun that Nora had always loved now threatened to burn her.

  And then something happened that made the whole thing worse. For a while, her breasts felt sore and swollen, she felt queasy after waking up, and her feet were as heavy as lead when she dragged herself to work. When she briefly felt a dizziness that led her to faint while burning away a field, she could no longer deny the truth. She was pregnant — there could be no other reason for all of these symptoms. She had hoped that it might not happen. After all, she had never conceived with Elias, and the joyful night she spent with Doug had also had no consequences. Nora had believed that she was infertile. But now …

  The young woman wearily pulled herself together and got herself safely away from the fire, which devoured the bushes on the new field. The smell from the smoke had probably triggered the nausea, or even the sight of the fire, which reminded her of the flames engulfing Cascarilla Gardens.

  But ultimately, she was happy for the fire. Nora was alone on that side of the field and the other women had probably not noticed her brief fainting. Nora tried to breathe deeply and quell her panic. Someone here had to know how to remove the child from her. Nora knew in a heartbeat that she could not bear Akawsi’s child.

  Mansah did not immediately understand what Nora was trying to express in a roundabout way.

  “You child, Missis? From who? Backra Doug?”

  Apparently, the budding relationship between the missis and the young backra had not escaped the slaves at Cascarilla Gardens. Nora blushed and gave into the daydream for a moment. Why couldn’t she be carrying a child of love instead of the product of pain and fear? But that was not possible, of course. Her night of love with Doug had been over a year ago.

  “That is not the point!” she told the little girl. “In any case, I need a baarm madda. And not Granny Nanny.”

  “But I don’t know one, there is none.”

  The medical care of the Maroons lay solely in the hands of the queen and Nanny was not training any successor. Among the former slaves, there were also no healers. Mostly only young slaves went to the Blue Mountains, while the baarm maddas usually worked in their masters’ houses and were older. Maybe Granny Nanny also wouldn’t have tolerated them beside her. When Nora t
hought back on the impressive personalities of the baarm maddas on the Keensley and Hollister plantations, they now also seemed like smaller and less powerful versions of the queen. They might challenge Nanny’s influence over her people if they gained respect in freedom.

  “There must be a woman who gets rid of babies,” Nora said, bluntly. “And I need her.”

  Mansah did not ask any more questions. As young as she still was, the slave girl did not find this desire strange.

  Nora waited and waited for the little girl to report back. The young woman was impatient, since she knew from her former patients that it would be easier and less dangerous for this to happen as early as possible. Nora wondered if it might be possible to bring about a miscarriage through working even harder. So, she chopped roots to the point of exhaustion, and tried to eat nothing and drink as little as possible. Sometimes, she was so exhausted afterwards, that her heart raced. She was bony and struggled with dizziness and shortness of breath — but her breasts continued to swell and her blood flow did not occur. The child in her womb also survived Akwasi’s continued nightly assaults, even though Nora’s insides seared with pain, and sometimes thought she would die. In the past few months, she had come up with a few crude recipes to help a bit. She pressed oils from herbs and rubbed herself with them or crushed aloe vera. But in recent weeks, she gave up on all of that. Maybe the pain and anger would kill the child — or Akwasi would kill it by punishing Nora when she fought against him with the courage of despair.

  Nora only ended up with more bruises and pain. One night she was relieved to see that she was finally bleeding, but she quickly realized it was only from external injuries. No cramping came, and while Nora felt mentally and physically ill, she remained pregnant. She eventually began to feel a sort of respect for this being that had fought with such perseverance for its existence.