Angelique Rising

by Lorain O'Neil

  The rioters and prisoners hushed, all wondering in sickening horror whether Forni would fight or surrender. From the north the East Florida began crossing the bar toward them. The Juno waited outside with grim efficiency.

  The Balmer was blockaded.

  “We’ve got to get out of here!” a berserk voice shouted as thirty-five of the rioters’ leadership hurled themselves overboard onto a small boat.

  The East Florida fired one cannon ball at the Balmer intentionally missing. Panic exploded on deck and two Greek gun crews grabbed swivels to fire back.

  “NO! NO!” Forni screamed insanely, his black eyes flaming. The Greeks paid him no mind and fired one round each at the East Florida.

  It was enough.

  The recoil of the weapons caused the stolen schooner to run aground backward onto the bar.

  “I’m hung,” Forni muttered in madness as he watched his escaping friends in the rowboat disappear southward and the Juno glide off after them.

  The Balmer struck, and when the rising tide lifted her off the bar the East Florida forced her back up the harbor. The women and children were freed and seventy-five of the three hundred rioters were taken prisoners by the British.

  Toria ran from the boat to the tiny palmetto hut that was her home. She was nine years old and amazed to still be alive.

  CHAPTER ONE

  1775

  Seven years later Toria was still alive, though her parents were not. Dragged awake from exhausted sleep she blinked uncomprehendingly, unwilling to accept dawn. Rising from the sandy ground she flicked off ants and crawling bugs that infested all the plantation’s palmetto huts. She stared at her sister, still asleep beside her. I will lose you today Cathay, she thought angrily, and to a man who’ll never deserve you.

  At seventeen years old Cathay looked like their Minorcan mother. Even in starvation, fragile as gossamer, she exuded a Mediterranean voluptuousness of which she was totally unaware. Her eyes were deep brown, her hair midnight black. But like so many of the devoutly Catholic women of New Smyrna, she harbored within her such intense yearnings that only rigid prayer could bury. Wherever Cathay walked men’s eyes lingered, all wondering what would happen if she forgot her God for just one night. Despite Cathay’s most determined willpower, too often she looked back, wondering the same.

  “So the day is here,” Cathay said sleepily in the darkness of the hut. “Tonight Father Camps will pronounce me the master blacksmith’s wife,” and with the extra food I’ll get and the real house to live in maybe I won’t die with the sicknesses like so many others. But what will I do when his cold hard hands touch me? And how will Toria survive sent to the orphans’ hut? “You’ve been dealing with African Hunter again,” she said apprehensively, eyeing the venison Toria was carefully unwrapping for this, her wedding breakfast, “it’s too risky.”

  “I’m almost sixteen years old,” Toria snapped back but knowing the danger was real, “and I know how to choose my risks.”

  “Little sister,” Cathay blinked cheerlessly, “how you survive here at all is a mystery to me.”

  Though sisters, Cathay and Toria were as different from each other as their English father had been from their Minorcan mother. While Cathay smoldered in suffocating Catholic ritual, Toria blithely danced, always irritating, always daring. Toria’s eyes were flashing green, her hair a glowing auburn. While Cathay staggered under unrelenting modesty, Toria wore a perpetual smirk of unwarranted confidence. Where Cathay was frail, Toria was strong; what Cathay feared, Toria taunted, and while Cathay’s existence was precarious from one day to the next, Toria thrived.

  “Forgive me Toria, but you can survive on your own and we both know I can’t,” Cathay shivered. “I’m thin and sick and need a real house and better food. I need a man to protect me, and that’s the truth and you know it. I have a right to try and save myself. And you, little sister, are far too reckless and far too incomprehensible,” and I’ve had to save you too many times and you’re doomed to die an early death here at New Smyrna if you don’t accept what is, is, which you’ll never do. I love you Toria, but I will not die with you, not foolishly anyway, not if I can help it.

  Toria said nothing. They ate their breakfast in silence, each thinking how it would be their last together and wondering which of them would live another month. They dressed for their day of drudgery working at an indigo house, tying their robazilla veils about their heads as tightly as possible, a futile attempt to look plump as was fashionable.

  Toria opened the door of the hut to let in the dryer outside air and peered out at the row of huts, instantly angered at how the morning light gave even New Smyrna a patina of beauty. She unconsciously scanned for danger or overseers, which were the same.

  No overseers were in sight but a group of Minorcans approaching hurriedly from the south was.

  “What is it?” Cathay demanded, automatically afraid.

  “Come, come,” a woman with pale, waxy skin answered urgently. “Everyone to the wharf. Overseers. Anyone not there by full light will be whipped. A rider came ’round. Hurry.”

  Cathay automatically clutched at Toria, knowing such a meeting, cutting into work time, could have been called only by Dr. Andrew J. Turnbull himself, the great master and founder of New Smyrna.

  “God’s blood!” Cathay hiccupped in terror knowing that only disaster could be waiting for them at the wharf.

  “Come on,” Toria ordered, her eyes fierce and piercing, “let’s see what the bastard wants.”

  Toria moved quickly, almost eagerly. Like a moth to the flame, Cathay thought sourly. Where do you think you are going Toria? Why do you not see?

  They joined the crowd, swelling as it moved quickly along the riverbank to the hub of New Smyrna, its port.

  “I’m so scared,” Cathay whispered gulping for air as they hurried along the river to Mosquitto Inlet. “What if they do what they did to Momma?”

  “No! You’re going to get married tonight, stay alive, someday leave this place.”

  “We’ll never get out.”

  “I’ll get you out, Cathay, I swear. You and everybody else. And I’ll make Turnbull pay. He’ll pay for Momma, for everything.”

  “Don’t talk like that! You’ll get us killed.”

  “I’m going to destroy this plantation.”

  “Toria!”

  Toria smiled wickedly, her voice relaxed and shrewd.

  “I have a wedding present for you, Cathay. I hid it in Levy’s hut. It’s a petticoat I made out of different colored cloth. Only wear it for your husband, no one else. There’s green stockings, too.”

  “Curse on that!” Cathay nearly toppled, shattered at the knowledge of where such a gift had to have come from. “Where’d you get the cloth, eh?”

  “The mansion of course. I steal it from Mrs. Turnbull’s sewing room on the days I get sent up there.”

  Cathay crumpled. “No, Toria,” she sobbed. “I can’t lose you too. Momma, Poppa, you’re all that’s left now. Don’t do these things!”

  Toria put her arm around Cathay gently. “I hate it all,” she stated quietly. “I hate every day getting up and walking to the fields, processing the indigo, watching for overseers. I hate being hungry, tired and filthy all the time. I hate Florida, hate New Smyrna, and above all else, I hate Turnbull.”

  “What if he’s at the wharf right now waiting for you?”

  “He’s waiting for someone, but not me. I’m careful.”

  “Like the time you made that opuntia cactus juice and left it out where he would drink it? When his piss turned red he went to bed for a week! Thought he was dying.” She fought to keep from smiling. “That wasn’t careful! If Turnbull had found out it was you, you’d be dead right now.”

  “Everyone thought it was pretty funny.”

  “Christ!” Cathay exploded, using her most displeased voice, knowing the number of Hail Marys it would cost her but not caring. She turned and looked at the anxious faces in the moving crowd. “Turnbull’s not after u
s,” she started chanting softly to herself in forced calm, “not us.”

  “You’re praying again,” Toria said. “Never had one single prayer answered in the whole seven years we’ve been trapped here, but still you pray. Amazing.”

  The uneasy crowd scrambled on, on to the coquina wharves. As the crowd saw what awaited them there, panicked murmurs rumbled throughout, mothers hugged their panting children tighter and husbands with dripping faces looked at their wives knowing they could not protect them. Some in the crowd tried to fall back but it was too late. Overseers on horseback herded the crowd to the settlement’s main square where over three hundred people, half the settlement’s surviving population, was assembled.

  Once these people had been proud pioneers. Recruited to Florida from Europe to build a visionary new town, only to learn upon arrival they’d been tricked into white slavery. Now they cowered, starved and dying in tattered rags, an ocean away from their homes.

  The salt air blew fresh off Mosquitto Inlet while seagulls screamed above. The crowd huddled closer, trying not to see what they were meant to see. Before them, African Hunter stood tied to a post with Father Camps standing silently beside. African Hunter was a coal black man of intense proportions, bulging muscles incongruous to a gentle face and sad brown eyes. He was a slave freed by the Spanish twelve years before when, after hundreds of years of nurture and ownership, Spain had been forced to trade beloved La Florida to the British, in return for Havana, lost to the British in war. African Hunter now lived occasionally with a wife and children near the St. John’s River, but always, on his way to St. Augustine he stopped at New Smyrna and gave meat to the starving settlers. He was one of Toria’s few friends.

  Father Camps was a priest who’d been allowed to accompany the settlers from Minorca to New Smyrna, the British winking at the transgression of England’s Protestants-only settlement policy. The Catholic Minorcans were, after all, British subjects now, albeit unwilling ones, ever since the relentless British had captured their homeland, Minorca.

  In the bright sunshine Father Camps’ thin, wan face and tired gnarled hands betrayed too many of his hardships at New Smyrna, too many sacrifices in vain attempts to protect his emaciated flock. Standing beside African Hunter, his torn robe no longer reaching his moccasin covered feet, Father Camps looked almost as doomed as the tied man beside him. The priest’s eyes were red rimmed and glassy, as if long worn out by a lifetime of pain.

  Next to them both, Dr. Andrew J. Turnbull sat astride his horse, towering and haughty, with a relentless fixed stare. Turnbull was a middle-aged Scotsman, impeccably dressed in a jet black riding coat glittering with gold buttons and trim, with a dazzling white silk collar wound tightly about his neck. His face was hard and square, totally devoid of emotion, with eyes fixed on grandiose far goals only he could see. He was a volcanic arrogant despot, dealing ruthlessly with those who obstructed him. A cruel, confident, imaginative dreamer, Turnbull was the stuff of those who dared to build empires.

  Toria stared at Turnbull, the constant subject of her grim fantasies. In each, Turnbull died a long horrid death, a death that came only when she, in her mercy, granted it. “I hate you Turnbull, I hate you to Hell and beyond,” she glowered, her flesh quivering for the day she would kill him. Slowly.

  “I warned you not to give them food,” Turnbull pronounced tonelessly to the glistening black man tied to the post. “I want the names of each person who got anything from you.”

  Toria saw several faces in the crowd pale as the translation was whispered. “Plague on your pig fornicating daughters,” Toria spat into the ground. “How many do you think have African Hunter’s venison hidden in their huts right now?” she whispered to Cathay.

  “We finished ours this morning, didn’t we? Didn’t we?”

  “Yes, yes! I’ll swear he’s lying if he names us.” Poor African Hunter, my poor friend. Don’t kill us.

  “Nobody got none, Senor,” African Hunter boomed out too loudly, too strong. “Nobody. You tol’ me not to give ’em no more, an’ Senor, not me.”

  “Dr. Turnbull, your people here are good British subjects--” Father Camps interjected hopelessly.

  “British!” Turnbull roared, the word slamming through the priest and ricocheting into the crowd.

  Father Camps tensed knowing once again Turnbull was accusing him of plotting with the Spaniards in their unceasing attempts to regain Florida. Father Camps spoke again, cautiously.

  “Sir, African Hunter is a good--”

  At that moment Turnbull spit on the priest, kicked him squarely in the mouth, and sent him sprawling into the sand before the crowd.

  “You do not talk back to me, Papist! Not ever!” Turnbull yelled, hurling his whip at Flynt, the chief overseer of New Smyrna.

  CRACK!

  Flynt opened a deep red slash across African Hunter’s back.

  “Names,” Flynt sniffed, enjoying the inevitability of what was to come.

  “Senor,” African Hunter shrieked, “no one!”

  Turnbull nodded to Flynt, turned his horse, and rode away. The crowd of Minorcans stood transfixed in the balmy Florida morning, watching as Flynt’s whip methodically cut African Hunter into bloody agonized shreds. And with each strike of Flynt’s whip and each wail of pain from African Hunter, they all prayed he would die before telling Flynt what he wanted to know.

  They’re going to kill you, African Hunter, Toria wanted to shout at him. Don’t tell! Don’t kill us, too! You know it won’t save you, you disobeyed them, they’re going to kill you anyway! She glared at Father Camps kneeling silently, saying prayers. How can any priest just stand by while a good man is hacked into pieces, she thought in miserable disgust.

  How can I?

  How can all of us, when as a group we could overrun them and save you, African Hunter. We won’t though, not with that British garrison of soldiers stationed here ever since the riot. We’ll let you die because the truth is, in the end, we can’t save you any more than we’ve been able to save ourselves. Forgive me my friend. Forgive us all.

  It took African Hunter over an hour to die. When it was over Flynt threw his whip at one of the black slaves standing nearby, ordering the blood washed off. Father Camps continued to pray over the now dead, fly-covered body. Silently the Minorcans walked away to their workstations. African Hunter had died without revealing any of their names, saving twenty people, including Toria Brighton, from the same death as his.

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