by Celia Rees
10
Thomas drove the horses at a good pace along mile after mile of dusty red road. To the right was forest, with moss and vines draping it, and beyond that lay the sea. To the left the land was cultivated.
'All this here? Belongs to your father,' Thomas remarked, waving his whip in a great arc that took in a vast plain that sloped up from the road to the distant mist-shrouded mountains.
The land had been divided into fields of chequerboard exactness. The cane was being cut and rough stubble stretched away, just as it might in England at harvest time, except the stalks were knee high and thicker than a man's arm. The effect was strange, as if these were the acres of some farming giant. The uncut cane stood much taller than a man, dwarfing the figures swarming among the stalks. They worked like an army of ants, diligently and methodically, cutting, binding, pitching bundles into the waiting wagons.
The cultivated land was not fenced or walled along the road. The entrance to the estate was marked by a pair of impressive stone pillars standing alone. An overarching curve of wrought-iron letters announced that we were entering Fountainhead. The letters were surmounted by twin gushing springs frozen in silvery metal. Before, I had always seen the sign as a weeping willow. It was only as I went underneath that I could see what it wras really meant to be. There were no weeping wallows in this country. The long straight drive was bordered either side by tall palm trees, their leaves flopping down, the fronds spread wide in leathery fingers, like cormorants' wings drying in the sun. Thomas whipped the horses into a smart high-stepping trot and we drove on towards the house.
It stood alone on a small promontory, shaded by tall pine trees, set apart from the other buildings. White smoke and steam billowed from the direction of the mill and boiling house, obscuring a collection of roughly-thatched hovels. Behind the plantation, the land ascended in giant steps to form the foothills of a high mountain range of individual peaks and serrated ridges, the tops of which were lost in torn cloud and trailing mist.
The house was not grand in the style of some plantation houses, and was considered old-fashioned, being made of white painted wrood with only two storeys, but it was artfully constructed and carefully situated to catch every breath of wind. I could sense my father's preferences in the design of it; he was not a man to put fashion before comfort. At home, in England, he had hated a draught and had liked the old house because it was packed in with others, easy to keep warm. He had complained about the new house, saying that it was like living in a barn. Here, he would have wanted to keep cool. The windows were large, with bright painted shutters folded back and thin muslin curtains billowing with the constant breeze blowing through the rooms. A wide veranda threw shade on all sides, so no part was directly in sunlight. My eyes pricked at the thought of him. I could almost see him sitting out there as the heat of the day faded, comfortable in an old sagging armchair, sipping a rum punch and smoking his pipe.
Wide double doors stood open at the top of a flight of stone steps. A man stood in front of them, obviously waiting for me. Mr Duke, the overseer, was a small man of stoutish build. He stood splay-legged with his chest puffed out and his head thrust forward, belligerent as a bantam cock. He was pale, as if he always kept his face shaded from the fierce sun, and smooth-skinned with a little mouth, his upper lip protruding over his teeth in a parrot pout. He held a whip under his right arm. A black plaited thing, rolled in a snakelike coil with a handle as thick as my wrist. As he waited, he allowed its iron tip to fall from his grip before flipping it back into his palm.
Thomas helped me out of the carriage and, as I mounted the steps, Duke came forward to meet me. He removed his sweat-banded broad-brimmed tricorn hat to reveal a cap of shiny brown hair, greased by some rancid oil, straggling down to his shoulders. His dark eyes were flecked with grey and oddly opaque, like gun flints. He was near-sighted, I was to learn, and growing more so by the day.
'Miss Kington!' He held out his hand to me before I had reached the top of the steps. His palm was soft and moist. His shirt was marked with sweat, fresh patches ringing the yellowed armpits, soaking the stiffened fabric. 'Welcome to Fountainhead! I hope your journey here was not too arduous, but you must be fatigued. You will need to rest and refresh yourself.'
He took my elbow, propelling me towards the house. Two women had appeared, standing either side of the doorway, as still as caryatids. One was old, the other young, and both were dressed in shapeless shifts of some faded blue stuff. They looked like mother and daughter. The girl was lighter skinned, but the resemblance between them was strong. They were tall, long-limbed and, in the way they stood, in their carriage, they exactly mirrored each other.
'Phillis, Minerva.' Duke addressed the older, then the younger. 'This is your new mistress.' He let more of the whip down, cracking it back on itself with a flick of the wrist. They curtsied to me and sprang forwards. 'Look after her well, or it will be your skin.'
'Yes, Master,' the women said together. The whip cracked softly, a mere caress of leather on leather. They did not look at either of us, but focused on spots on the ground.
'Get those trunks into the house!' Duke roared down the steps to Thomas, who was unloading them from the back of the carriage. 'And look sharp about it, you lazy, good-for-nothing black bastard! Excuse me, Miss.' He turned back to me with exaggerated politeness, touching the brim of his greasy tricorn hat. 'I have duties to attend to, but after that, it will be my pleasure to show you around.'
With that, he stepped past me. His clothes might have been sweat-stained and reeking, but in boots he rivalled Beau Nash of Bath. They were as polished as mirrors and his high heels rang on the stone as he tripped down the steps.
I was left in the charge of the two women, who ushered me into the house. The rooms inside were large and airy, one opening out on to another. Many of the furnishings I recognised as being from our old house in Bristol. To discover familiar objects in such a foreign place was jarring to the senses. A bright green lizard skittered down the white-painted wall and across a portrait of my father. A white marble table that had stood in our hall now held a bowl heaped with oranges, mangoes and guava. It was like walking into a dream.
The older woman, Phillis, showed me upstairs to a cool, wide room under the eaves of the house. The floor was polished wood. A bed stood in the corner, draped in thin white muslin. There was a china bowl of warm water for me to wash with and a tablet of lilac soap. The sharp sweet scent reminded me of home. Phillis stood by with a soft towel to pat me dry. I said that I would like to rest and she stepped forwards to disrobe me, but I told her that I could do that for myself.
She went away and I stripped down to my petticoat, climbing into the muslin drapes as into a tent. I must have slept, for when I awoke the light was softer, the room cooler, and filled with a chirping, chirring sound. Not loud, but persistent and utterly unfamiliar. I thought it was that which had woken me, but I opened my eyes to find the girl, Minerva, looking down at me through the shifting muslin.
She had brought a tray of fruit and fresh-baked bread, and a draught of cold spring water. She laid it down on the table next to the bed without looking at me, or saying a word. When I thanked her, she glanced up, startled. I smiled, but her face stayed impassive as she drew the netting back. While I ate, she went to lay fresh clothes out for me, then stood by the wall, with her head down and her hands clasped behind her back. She sprang back to life as I rose from the bed, and came forwards to help me dress.
'What's that noise I can hear?' I asked her.
She looked at me, surprised at the question.
'Cicadas,' she answered. 'Insects. They rub their wings together.' She demonstrated with one thin brown hand on the back of the other.
'They sound like nutmegs on a grater,' I said, and was rewarded with the faintest trace of a smile.
'Mr Duke,' she said, her voice low and musical. 'He's waiting downstairs. When you're ready, Miss.'
The overseer was pacing the veranda with the thick whip cl
asped tightly behind his back. He wore a long brown coat now, much stained with use.
Outside, a new racket had joined the other. This one much louder. I asked him what it was.
'Frogs,' Duke said. 'Start up about now. Get worse after sundown. Make the devil of a din. Now you're rested, I'll show you about.' He pointed with his curled whip to the windmill set on a small hill. 'Over there is the grinding house.'
Carts pulled by teams of long-eared mules stood waiting to be unloaded, the cane stacked as high as stooks on a hay wain. A gang of men threw the bundles down and others formed a chain, passing the cane, one to another, until it reached the jaws of the grinders: huge metal rollers which crushed the thick stems like so much grass, squeezing the juice into a wedge-shaped trough which ran down to the boiling room built on lower ground.
'You there! Look lively!' Duke's whip leaped like a live thing, wrapping itself round the back of a slave who had let a bundle drop and scatter. The man showed no reaction, just carried on, even though the iron tip ripped through his shirt. 'Can't waste a minute. Cane has to be crushed as soon as possible after cutting, or the sugar won't crystallise.' He coiled the whip back. 'Flelps to keep their wits about 'em. Such wits as they've got.' He laughed at his own joke. 'Need 'em near them things.' He nodded to the great vertical grinders which dwarfed the men sweating to feed them. 'Them rollers'll have your arm off in no time. Which is why we keep that there.' He pointed to a sharp-bladed machete hanging by the machine. 'Just in case.' He laughed again. 'Even these idle bastards learn to pay attention when they work in here.'
Feeding the grinders went on twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, all through the harvesting season. It was backbreaking work, carried on at a cruel pace set by the slave boss and the prowling Duke.
He took me down the hill to the boiling house.
'The juice has to be boiled within twenty minutes or it ferments and turns into molasses and will never crystallise. It comes down this channel, a little lime wash is added to help it granulate. Then it is emptied into the copper vats.'
The copper vats were vast, heated by huge blazing furnaces fed with faggots of wood and trash – sugarcane waste from the crushers. We did not go in, but even outside the heat was searing. Men and women moved like ghosts through clouds of smoking vapour, wielding long-handled copper ladles, skimming scum from the bubbling liquid. These skimmings drained into yet another basin. At each stage, waste molasses was carefully collected to be made into rum.
The boiling went on night and day through the harvest, the furnaces never dying down. Accidents were frequent; the results horrific. Molten sugar sticks to flesh and burns to the bone.
The crystallising sugar drained into vats, Duke explained, and was then packed into hogshead barrels, stamped with the Fountainhead sign, and sent to Bristol.
He stood back, looking at me, as if expecting my admiration, or my approval. I stared at him, shaken to the very seat of my being by what I had seen. All this was here because of us. The Kington family. It shamed me deeply that I'd never before really thought about where the sugar came from. I'd really had no idea how hard the work was, how relentless, or how dangerous.
Duke then took me to see the slave quarters, rows of two-roomed wattle-and-daub thatch cabins. A few children played, naked in the red dust. It was coming towards evening. Gangs of men and women were returning from the fields, while others were leaving to go to the grinding and boiling houses. They all looked equally weary and none of them looked at us. Only the children stared with solemn round eyes, before bolting into their houses as if running from malevolent spirits.
Behind the huts the land was divided up into little plots.
'We let 'em grow some stuff of their own: Indian corn, yam, beans and such, a little tobacco. Saves on fodder and gives 'em something to barter or sell at market for the kind of bright-coloured cloth and gewgaws they like.'
'You hold a market here?'
He nodded. 'They do. Over there. That's the marketplace.'
He indicated a space of red beaten earth shaded by a great forest tree. Immense branches spread out, shading the whole area, as a great oak or chestnut might shelter a village green at home. Judging by its girth, the tree must have been very old. This was no shady chestnut, or English oak. Chains and manacles had been driven into the trunk about two feet above a man's height from the ground. Over that point the bark was smooth, but from there to the ground, the tree was torn and scarred, mutilated and marked with a complex criss-cross pattern as if someone had taken a knife to it. Great patches had been flayed away. In other places sap oozed, congealing in great crusted resinous clumps, dripping down like gouts of blood. All the bark had been ripped and torn, apart from one central column which branched either side to make the shape of a man in cruciform shadow.
'Doesn't do to be sentimental,' Duke said, as if he divined what I was thinking. 'God ordained blacks to be for our use and benefit, or else why make 'em in the first place?' He looked at me with his clouded eyes. 'Some says they're like children. Well, they ain't. Thinking that way brings danger to all of us. They ain't like us, that's for certain. I've studied 'em for many years now, Miss Kington.' He leaned forward earnestly. 'In my opinion, they are like animals, wild and vicious, but possessed of a cunning that makes 'em far more treacherous than any beast you could mention. You can't tame 'em, and you can't trust 'em. All they respect is this,' the whip reared and cracked in the air. 'Don't do to be too trusting, or get too familiar. Keep that in mind.'
He walked me back to the steps of the house and then excused himself. A new batch of slaves had been delivered the week before and needed seasoning in.
'Get 'em used to the work. Used to the discipline. First of all we brand 'em with this.' He took an implement from his pocket. The end was about as big as a shilling and bore initials surmounted by a fountain, like a seal. It was delicately wrought, more like a brooch than a branding iron. 'We had to have a new one made to reflect the change of ownership.' He turned the face for me to see. N and K reversed. 'Silver, see? Silver makes a sharper scar. Got to rub a little oil on first.' He moved thumb against forefinger. 'To stop the skin sticking to the metal.'
My attention was fixed by the object he held between his fingers. I found it most shocking and hideous in the way it combined prettiness wTith an utter vileness of purpose. I looked at the initials. I'd assumed the N was for Ned, my father. But that would be E ...
The sudden realisation made me light-headed. I felt as though I might faint.
'Change of ownership?' I parroted his words like an idiot. 'Do you mean me?'
'Who else?' He looked at me, owl-eyed, peering close at my expression to see if I were mocking him. 'All this is yours. I've been showing you your own property.'
'I – I didn't know.' I tried to stop my voice from shaking. 'I assure you that I did not know.'
'I have it in a letter by your father's own hand. It's in his will. You are a very rich young lady.' He looked up uneasily. Phillis and Minerva were standing at the top of the steps. 'The old witch, and the young 'un.' He leaned towards me, taking my arm. Another turn about the yard took us out of earshot. 'You keep a close watch on those two. I'd have sold 'em both years ago, not kept 'em together, but your father would not allow it. Now,' he tipped his greasy tricorn hat, 'if you'll excuse me.'
'Should I expect you for dinner?' I did not know if I should invite him to dine with me. I had no idea what the etiquette should be, or even if there was any.
He was clearly surprised by the invitation.
'Very kind, I'm sure,' he said after a moment. 'But I have my own arrangements. Thank you, Miss Kington.'
That evening, I stood on the balcony outside my window, watching the sun go down: a great shimmering ball of red falling through bars of black cloud into the distant sea. The dark came more quickly than I had expected. Suddenly it was night. The air was hot, heavy with the perfume of flowers and full of the beat of wings and the sounds made by small unseen creatures. Birds or mon
keys, I could not tell which, cried from the forest. The sound was almost human, jarring and sudden and utterly foreign. First one call, then another. Each made me start, and gooseflesh crept up my bare arms despite the heat. Below me, a myriad of tiny lights glimmered in spangling pinpoints, littering the earth as though the stars had fallen, so I could no longer tell the sky from the ground.
All this was mine, I told myself, and everything that went with it. These people. I owned them. Their flesh would be burnt with my initials. I went back inside, rubbing my arms as the full chill of it came upon me. How could I ever get used to the strangeness of that? And why had my brothers not told me? They were seeking some way to cheat me out of it, I knew them well enough to see that. I could have told them not to waste their energies, that such deviousness was unnecessary. If they'd asked me, I would have told them. They could have the plantation and welcome. I wanted no part of it.
Light wavered on the walls around me. Minerva had come in on silent feet bearing candles. She came over to the window.
'What are those?' I pointed to the little lights on the ground.
'Fireflies,' she replied. 'You can collect them. Make a lantern. Close the shutters now, Miss.' She reached up to unlatch them. 'Moths and insects will fly in.'
She had brought a tray laden with food and a beautiful stem of papery purple flowers in a little earthen pot.
'Phillis hopes you like your dinner.'
'Am I to dine up here? I thought Mr Duke might dine with me, but I understand he makes other arrangements.'