Daughter of Destiny

by Erica Brown

  ‘As I said, everything reverts to the Strong estate, including the house—’

  ‘But what about me? Where do I go?’ she asked.

  It was the only home she’d ever known. The house and garden were set on a hill with glorious views towards a wine-dark sea in one direction. In the other, fields of pale green sugar cane rolled away to the hills. The cane was tall and hid the toilers; men and women with cut faces, their hands bleeding and made tough by immersion in buckets of urine.

  The solicitor cleared his throat. ‘Now Miss Bianca,’ he began. He was not used to dealing with feisty young women. He’d expected compliance, humility bred into her ancestors over years of subjugation. But then, her grandfather was a sea captain her great grandmother an actress, he thought, so it was only natural. But he was a nervous man by nature, so felt and looked agitated.

  Blanche sprang from her seat, the flimsy muslin of her dress clinging to her bosom and hips as she joined the man at the window. She fixed her eyes on the nerve that twitched beneath Otis Strong’s right eye.

  ‘What am I to you? Tell me, please?’

  ‘Just a girl.’

  ‘And my mother? What was she to you?’

  His mouth seemed to quiver for a moment, as if he were remembering a moment, a touch or a kiss. His answer surprised her. ‘A lady to whom my family owed a great debt and, because of that, I have made arrangements for you.’

  Hope sprang in her breast. ‘Will I live with you?’

  ‘Certainly not!’ He almost sounded frightened.

  Somehow, she’d hoped he’d accept her because her mother was dead. She’d thought his wife might, eventually too. On reflection, it was a vain hope. She was nothing to either of them.

  ‘Then what else is there for me?’

  Otis Strong kept his eyes on the scene outside the window, the street, the buildings and the Caribbean beyond.

  ‘Get on with it, Morgan.’ He said it evenly, almost coldly, and without a sideways glance at her.

  The solicitor sat like a dried twig behind his great mahogany desk, an obvious cast-off from one of the plantation houses on the island. He squeaked, ‘As you have not yet attained the age of majority and because you have no fortune of your own, Letters of Bonding have been authorized. You are to set sail for Bristol where the Strong family have made arrangements to provide for you in the household of Sir Emmanuel Strong, brother of Mr Otis Strong.’

  Blanche’s mouth dropped open. ‘I’m going to England?’ She could barely contain her surprise, let alone her excitement.

  ‘To stay at my brother’s house in Bristol,’ said Otis without turning round.

  Blanche was ecstatic. Bristol was where the sugar and molasses went to, where it was refined and sold. And Nelson was there! Was that the reason he was sending her? Had Nelson mentioned how much they cared for each other and insisted she join him?

  Unable to contain her excitement, Blanche almost laid her hand on Otis Strong’s arm in gratefulness for what he was doing. At the last moment she held back, sensing that he did not want it.

  She decided to play the demurely grateful young lady.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Strong,’ she said. ‘I know that whatever you’ve arranged for me is for my own good.’

  She saw Otis Strong’s eyelids flicker briefly as if he’d been suddenly reminded of a painful memory.

  ‘The Ianthe sails in three days. Betsy and Melville, your servants, have been advised.’

  Although the prospect of travel and seeing Nelson again excited her beyond belief, she did have a care as to what happened to her servants who were also related on her mother’s side. ‘What will happen to them? What will happen to the house?’

  The solicitor glanced at Otis Strong as if seeking guidance. None was forthcoming. He swallowed before taking the initiative.

  ‘The house will be boarded up. The servants will be re-employed on the Strong plantation.’

  A terrible thought occurred to her. ‘Not in the cane fields! They’re too old.’

  The strong voice of Otis Strong boomed through the office. ‘They will join my household.’

  She was greatly relieved. Cutting cane was a job for young men. Even then they were burned out after seven years of it, their hands, faces and bodies a mass of healed scars and hard skin. The cane was as sharp as the knives to cut it down.

  ‘There is just one proviso,’ squeaked the solicitor, ‘and that is you never mention any connection between your mother and Mr Strong to anyone at Marstone Court.’

  Under Blanche’s demanding gaze, he looked embarrassed, cleared his throat and added, ‘Should you mention that Mr Strong is anything other than a philanthropic patron, should you state the existence of any intimate relationship between your mother and Mr Strong, your servants’ lot will deteriorate considerably.’

  She was aware of him rambling on as she digested the facts. In one brief moment, she had imagined herself arriving at Marstone Court as the daughter of Otis Strong. Obviously he was not recognizing her as such, and she dared not voice her views on the matter for the sake of Melville and Betsy.

  The solicitor was saying, ‘Marstone Court is the home of the Strong family. It is situated in the County of Somersetshire, yet close to the city of Bristol.’

  ‘I know.’ Of course she did. Nelson had told her so, and the thought of seeing him again lifted her spirits.

  ‘Do you agree to this?’ the solicitor asked.

  She nodded. ‘Yes. Yes, I agree.’

  When she got back to the white house with its tin roof and shady veranda, Betsy, the housekeeper, who had patchy skin like a piebald horse and breasts that curved over her apron waistband, was already packing a brass-bound wooden sea chest with most of Blanche’s clothes.

  ‘I’ve been given instructions to pack your things in your grandfather’s chest,’ she explained guiltily, as Blanche swept into the room, her eyes flickering between Betsy and the chest. ‘You have to go, they told me.’ She looked crestfallen and worried, then surprised when Blanche flung her bonnet on to the bed and waltzed around the room. ‘I’m going to England to live with the Strongs in a big house with lovely carriages and horses, and I’ll go to beautiful balls and dance until dawn.’

  Betsy eyed her with a mix of disbelief and tenderness. ‘England ain’t Barbados. There ain’t no sun, so I hear, and ’cos of that everyone’s got skin as white as fish meat.’

  ‘They’re always white!’

  ‘No, they ain’t! Out here they’re pink. The sun puts some colour in ’em.’

  ‘I’ll take them some sunshine.’ Blanche thrust her face towards a mirror with cut-glass edging that her mother said had come from France. Blanche was paler than her mother, though dark in the same way that some Spanish are dark, with pale freckles over her nose and the distinctive mole beneath one eye.

  Betsy fastened the trunk with an air of finality and adopted the sort of expression she usually did when Blanche was about to get a lecture. She said, ‘You know that Blanche means white, don’t you, child? Betsy’s eyes held a warning. ‘Just ’cos you’re named white don’t make you white. Just you remember that.’

  ‘I’m going to Bristol, Betsy. I’ll see Nelson and all the places he told me about.’

  ‘They goin’ to keep you like a daughter?’ asked an incredulous Betsy.

  ‘Something like that. Because I’m young I’m going to be bonded.’

  Betsy’s eyebrows shot up. ‘What does that mean? Ain’t that like being a servant?’

  ‘Of course not! It’s to protect me,’ said Blanche, choosing to think it was a good thing rather than let it cloud her excitement of seeing Nelson again.

  Betsy frowned, afraid to voice what she thought being bonded meant. In her heart of hearts she had a worrying suspicion that it wasn’t much better than being a slave.

  The scepticism in Betsy’s expression remained. Turning her head, she spat at a bug-eyed beetle crawling up the frame of the open window. It hit the insect hard, hurling it back out into t
he vinery that straggled in riotous splendour up the iron trelliswork around the windows.

  ‘They’re Strongs,’ she said disdainfully. ‘They only care about sugar. You’d do well to remember that.’

  Chapter Six

  ‘The sins of the fathers are returning to haunt us.’ Jeb Strong’s voice crackled with each painful breath and his eyes rolled as his head fell to one side.

  Emmanuel barely controlled his anger. ‘You and Otis went behind my back. You should have told me.’

  ‘Would you have agreed?’

  Emmanuel avoided answering. ‘What’s done is done.’

  Jeb tried to study his brother’s expression as he took a light from a candle with a long taper. The moment was fleeting. Emmanuel went back to pacing the room, studying the familiar family portraits, the Delft china on the mantelpiece, the French clock, the view from the window. Anything but look at me, thought Jeb, who was sitting in the specially adapted carver chair that had wheels fixed to its legs.

  Emmanuel hated sickness.

  Jeb was adamant. ‘It is our Christian duty to take this child in. She has no one else, and our brother’s wife certainly won’t take her into her household. Perhaps it might have been different if she’d not been barren.’

  Emmanuel held back a curtain so he could look more easily out of the window across the sprawling parkland that surrounded Marstone Court. He’d not failed in his duty to his family, taking Jeb in after he became ill, but sometimes he regretted it. Jeb was like a living, breathing conscience.

  He sighed, smoke spouting from his nostrils. ‘She’ll suit as a nurse. It’s all we can do.’

  ‘Except atone,’ said Jeb.

  Emmanuel was adamant. ‘I feel no guilt. Why should I? Otis took it upon himself to look after the child and her mother. I’ll take on that responsibility purely out of respect for him. I understand his predicament.’

  Unseen by his brother, Jeb tried to shake his head, though he’d been warned not to on account of the fluid seeping from one side of his body to the other. ‘You didn’t murder anyone. I deserve to be in this chair, but I just hope that God forgives me eventually.’

  Emmanuel looked flustered. Jeb made God sound like a real person, not as outlined with thunderous prayers and moral sermons preached from the pulpit.

  ‘I will abide by the promise you gave Otis.’

  ‘He loved her,’ Jeb said simply and a faraway look came to his eyes. His words became strangled as the fluid in his lungs began to choke him.

  Emmanuel started for the door. ‘You need turning. I’ll get Duncan and David.’

  Jeb raised one weak hand, the pale veins prominent through the thin skin. ‘No. You do it.’

  Emmanuel’s face paled at the thought of touching his brother’s ailing body.

  ‘But that’s why we have servants,’ he blustered.

  Jeb’s eyes slid sidelong, anticipating the look on his brother’s face when he said, ‘I’d prefer an act of brotherly love – if you can bare to touch me.’

  Emmanuel steeled himself, his fingers opening and closing into the palms of his hands as he anticipated what it would be like. Was pleurisy contagious? He swallowed the dryness of his mouth and made an instant decision.

  ‘Servants are best suited for physical work.’ He sprang for the bell pull at the side of the fireplace.

  The colour of their skin accentuated by white wigs and gloves and standing at over six feet, Duncan and David, the twin footmen, born in the West Indies of a slave mother and an unknown father, appeared immediately.

  ‘Quickly,’ said Emmanuel, as Jeb turned red in the face.

  Once the task was complete, they left in unison, closing the door softly behind them.

  What’s done is done,’ Emmanuel repeated, choosing to revert to their earlier conversation rather than dwell on Jeb’s illness. ‘She’ll fit in. She’ll have to.’ He went back to the window.

  Jeb was not fooled. He smiled, his mouth lifting to one side of his face. ‘Verity will insist she does.’

  Emmanuel stiffened.

  Jeb guessed that Emmanuel had not told his wife about the paternity of her children’s new nanny.

  ‘She’ll be glad of help when the baby comes,’ said Emmanuel. ‘I’ve given orders for one of the attic rooms to be opened up for her.’ He countered Jeb’s accusing gaze. ‘I know no one’s been up there for years. But it will do.’

  ‘Ah!’ Jeb exclaimed.

  ‘I told her she was from Barbados and my brother’s household. Enough, I think.’

  Jeb noticed Emmanuel’s angry glare, but pretended he didn’t. ‘Pretty,’ he fought for breath, ‘is she?’

  Emmanuel reached for another cigar and grumbled in the affirmative.

  ‘Eighteen… years,’ Jeb murmured thoughtfully.

  ‘That evening…’ said Emmanuel, his eyes glazing as his voice faded. ‘It seems such a long time ago now. I can barely remember being so young and the evening being so balmy, so full of excitement.’

  ‘I remember it well,’ said Jeb, his voice stiff with resentment. ‘You were married to your first wife. And I was young, and full of energy, able to move, to walk…’ He took a deep breath, the sound it made resembling a handful of castanets all clicking at variance with each other. He squeezed his eyes tightly shut as he recalled the butler, Caradoc, and the sickening way the candlestick had come down on his head. ‘We’re all responsible for that girl, Manny.’

  Emmanuel poured himself another brandy. ‘So you say, Jeb, so you say. But I have other more important matters on my mind. The business with Conrad Heinkel. I’m convinced that sugar prices are going to plummet, what with the imports of beet sugar coming in from Europe now. I’m pursuing a partnership arrangement at present, but Heinkel is a widower and it would make life easier if Horatia considered him as a husband. I might try to persuade her.’

  * * *

  While the men smoked and talked in the dining room, Emmanuel’s daughter from his first marriage, Horatia, and her stepmother, Lady Verity, sat drinking coffee from bone china cups in the drawing room.

  ‘Prince Charles is gone,’ Lady Verity wailed into her coffee, her face crumpled with despair.

  ‘Post a reward,’ Horatia suggested dispassionately.

  ‘I have done.’ Verity dabbed at her red-rimmed eyes. ‘Two guineas in fact.’ She got up from her chair, the back of her hand resting against her forehead. ‘I’ve barely slept a wink since he’s been gone. I fear dreadfully not seeing him again.’

  Horatia grimaced. ‘He’s a dog. You make him sound like a lover.’

  Lady Verity threw her a disparaging look. There was little love lost between them.

  ‘Horatia, you are just like your father. You have no compassion.’

  ‘I saw George today, your youngest son.’

  ‘I know who he is,’ snapped Verity.

  Horatia flicked at the corners of her lips with a damask napkin. ‘He’s still wearing a dress. Do you think that’s wise?’ she asked, the apparent innocence of her manner masking a veiled accusation that Verity was not a good mother.

  Choosing retreat rather than attempting to portray herself as anything but the selfish person she was, Verity said, ‘I have a headache. Do forgive me. I must go.’

  ‘Nothing I said, I trust?’ said Horatia with a forced smile.

  ‘My delicate condition.’ Verity rested her square hands on her swollen belly. ‘Children are a blessing, but they are also a great responsibility.’

  Horatia raised her eyes to heaven. Children, pregnancy and complaining about her lot formed the centre of Verity’s conversation and were a handy shield under attack. Horatia sometimes wondered what Verity had talked about when her father was courting her.

  ‘Lucky that you have a nanny, nursemaids and a governess to help you out,’ Horatia said.

  ‘Good staff are not easy to get,’ replied Verity. ‘One has to make do.’

  Horatia hid her smile behind her cup. Verity was not clever. Her father had married
the woman for other attributes, she decided, but could not think what they might be.

  The clock in the hall struck nine. ‘Goodnight, Horatia,’ said Verity.

  ‘Goodnight,’ said Horatia, her jaw aching with the effort of appearing gracious.

  Immediately Verity had gone, Horatia slid her fingers into the small, lace-edged pocket that swung from a silken cord into the folds of her dress. Slowly she slid the cheroot out of the pocket, bent over a candle until the end was glowing and a sliver of smoke curled upwards.

  Closing her eyes, she drew in the sweet humours, expelled rings of powdery grey smoke and thought how good it would be to accompany it with a brandy, which was in the dining room along with her father.

  I want some, she said to herself, and made her way across the marble-floored hallway, a plume of smoke from the burning cheroot wafting out behind her. She thought of the big leather armchair in the library where she could stretch out, her feet on the desk, with a brandy and her cheroot.

  The dining-room door was ajar. She paused, her fingers touching the cut glass of the door handle, just as the last part of Jeb and Emmanuel’s conversation drifted out.

  So far she had resisted the advances of Josiah Benson, a man who, unlike most, appreciated her business brain. Rather than marry a man of her father’s choosing, whoever Conrad Heinkel was, she’d stall him by allowing Josiah to call on her.

  * * *

  By mid-afternoon, the west wing in the vicinity of the Reverend Strong’s room was silent and bereft of servants. The sun slanted in through the high windows along the corridor outside, dust motes floating like crystals in the strong light.

  Nelson strode along the corridor. He paused outside his uncle’s suite and listened. Not a sound. Softly, trusting his uncle was in a drugged and dreamless sleep, he opened the door and stepped into the room.

  The curtains were drawn. They usually were of an afternoon. And Jeb was indeed asleep, his mouth open and his chest rattling.

  Nelson made for the tray of medicines, salves and ointments sitting on a tray at the side of the bed. Carefully, he brought a small bottle out of his pocket and took out the stopper.