The Guineaman

  ‘Well, sir, I should like to go home, but for the present I cannot. If, however, I could prevail upon you to undertake one small favour in my interest, that of conveying privately a letter to my sister, matters may yet resolve themselves.’

  ‘That seems a trivial enough request to which I can agree without reservation.’

  ‘It would ease my mind considerably, sir.’

  ‘Consider it done. There is, however, a favour which I must ask of you in return and which is another consideration persuading me to leave you and the schooner here, in the Americas. The present war makes a passage to England hazardous and to sail in this vessel, whether to Liverpool or London, might prove a risky or even a fatal enterprise. I am content, therefore, to take passage under convoy, perhaps in a man-of-war, if one can be found in New York. But I cannot take Dorothea. I am an old man and my health is failing; while the English air may cure my fevers, they will be otherwise to Dorothea who frets during the rains in Antigua and complains constantly that our present northing is proving detrimental to her. Her culture and traditions belong in the tropics, don’t you see Kite, England would, I greatly fear, be fatal to her…’ Mulgrave paused, then admitted frankly, ‘besides, I have the impediment of another woman in England: my wife. She is still alive and I must provide for her old age. Not that I have quite failed to provide for her, despite her infidelities. Moreover, I doubt that I shall live long and leaving Dorothea on her own in England, at the mercy of rapacious relatives as well as the merciless climate, would be a cruelty I cannot contemplate.’

  ‘What would you have me do, sir?’ Kite asked, awed by the confidence and the explanation that, were it known of in St John’s, would stop the speculation of a whole generation.

  ‘Keep always your own counsel, and ally yourself with no party. Find yourself a place, Kite, and build yourself a house from where, with your youth and wealth, you can command your own destiny. There, take Dorothea under your protection, she will be a companion to Puella and an undeniable asset.’ Mulgrave smiled. ‘And thereby please an old man.’

  Two months later, one evening some time after their arrival in New York following a passage of boisterous weather that had kept them at sea, Kite was summoned by way of a note brought by a boy from the tavern where Mulgrave had appointed their rendezvous.

  Come at Once without any Mention of myself. It is a matter of Business, the note read, but if you are Compelled to make known you Absence, say that an Accident has Occurred to me. Kite knew Mulgrave well enough to perceive the man did not want news of the summons getting to Dorothea and could guess its meaning. He was right. Mulgrave sat in a private room; he was dressed in travelling clothes, booted and with a new cloak on the bench beside him. On the floor stood his portmanteau.

  ‘We must say good-bye, Kite, but you have to write a letter for me to carry and I should be obliged if you would attend to it now.’ Mulgrave indicated pen, ink and paper on the table before him. His tone was as cold as when they had first met; this was indeed a business meeting, the abrupt conclusion of their partnership. Only the working of Mulgrave’s face showed the emotion he was under.

  Under the circumstances, Kite had some trouble writing his long-meditated but oft-postponed letter to his sister Helen. Now the time and manner of its doing were forced upon him, he made a poor job of it. Hurriedly he completed and folded it, adding the superscription and handing it to Mulgrave who immediately stood up.

  ‘There is a frigate leaving tonight with dispatches; the captain has kindly undertaken to give me a passage if I serve as a volunteer. I believe,’ Mulgrave added ironically, ‘my status lies somewhere above a midshipman and below a lieutenant. Tell Dorothea that I have off to visit a ship in the harbour and that the boat was upset; she will believe you, having always feared such a thing. Sometimes these women have dreams that they believe to foretell the future…’ Mulgrave smiled sardonically. ‘So, let matters fall out in that wise. She will not argue and there will be no corpse to bury or to grieve over. I am sorry to burden you with this piece of theatre…’

  Kite shook his head. ‘It is the least I can do, though I shall grieve your departure with Dorothea.’

  ‘You have a foolishly kind heart, Kite.’ Mulgrave looked at his watch and held out his hand. ‘If this war goes ill, as it seems it must, you may have to come home yourself, but in the mean time, I wish you well.’

  Just then a young man in naval uniform, the white patches of a midshipman on his lapels, came into the room. ‘Mr Mulgrave? he asked, looking from one to another of them.

  ‘I am he,’ said Mulgrave.

  ‘Henry Hope at your service, sir.’ The midshipman gave a clumsy bow. ‘I have a boat at your disposal, but must urge you to hasten, sir. Captain Lasham is eager to get under weigh.’

  Mulgrave stood up and Kite rose with him. ‘Sir, you will send us word of your whereabouts?’ He asked anxiously. ‘If and when I come home, I should like to pay my respects.’

  Mulgrave smiled and nodded. ‘Of course, Kite. Wentworth is your man. He will know my whereabouts. Recall I still retain an interest in the company.’

  ‘Of course.’ Kite felt stupid; events had moved too fast. How could he tell Dorothea? She would take it extremely ill.

  ‘Goodbye, Kite.’ They shook hands.

  ‘Goodbye, sir…’ And Kite was left alone in the room as Mulgrave followed the midshipman out into the dark wintry night.

  Dorothea was inconsolable and Kite sailed south for the sun and the warmth of the Antilles, bound for Antigua. The Spitfire bore a cargo of manufactured goods, New York gowns made ‘according to the latest London fashions’, wine and, despite the war, a small quantity of brandy. The schooner lay a month in St John’s, a month during which Charlie first called for his mama, Wentworth bought the consignment of gowns, Da Silva bought a second schooner and Kite made plans for building a house. Between them, Kite and Wentworth debated ways of expanding their trade and, in due course, having rented a dwelling for his women and the boy, Kite sailed on the first of several voyages between Antigua, Jamaica and the Carolinas. He refused to make another Guinea voyage himself, partly from fear of contracting yellow-jack and partly out of disgust for the trade, but he transhipped slaves between the islands, and bore cargoes of African manioc, camwood and scrivelloes to the American colonies.

  Although French men-of-war and corsairs were at sea and active among the islands, Kite’s now legendary luck held. They were chased several times, but such was the clean state of Spitfire’s bottom and the skill of her master and crew, that the schooner escaped without having to fire a gun in her defence. Privately Kite grew anxious that when his luck ran out, as he felt sure it would, he would fail to live up to the valorous expectations of others. Moreover he was plagued by fears of being found a coward in the face of the enemy.

  This feeling was encouraged by a stream of tales of French successes, stories which underwrote the creeping conviction of the inevitability of defeat. Ships with which they were familiar were captured by the enemy’s corsairs and carried into French ports as prizes to the privateers now operating out of Guadeloupe and Martinique to the south of them. Meanwhile the main business of the war continued badly for the British. During the succeeding summer the capture of the French naval base of Louisbourg, on Cape Breton Island, though it had been successfully carried out in the last war by a handful of American colonists, was abandoned. The British fleet bound for the Gulf of St Lawrence had been delayed by contrary winds which in turn allowed the French to slip reinforcements across the Atlantic, but this did not excuse the fact that the matter was bungled. The New York Gazette railed that 1757 was ‘a year of the most dishonour to the Crown, of the most detriment to the subject, and of the most disgrace to the nation’.

  But the patient strategies of the remarkable Pitt, now re-established in government and with the conduct of the war in his capable hands, were beginning to tell. A story circulated from the naval ships refitting in English Harbour, told of an admiral who confronte
d Pitt with the impossibility of his instructions. Pitt, it was laughingly recounted, had discomfited the admiral. Standing up to lean on his crutches, Pitt revealed his bandaged feet, grossly swollen by gout. ‘I walk upon impossibilities, sir,’ the minister was reputed to have said, whereupon the humiliated admiral left to obey his orders. Such yarns bolstered morale, coming as they did from sea-officers, of which there were an increasing number in the island. The young lieutenants of the Royal Navy seen at assemblies in St John’s, seemed unaffected by the disasters raining down upon their colleagues in the army. At these same assemblies, local cynics marvelled at, and repeated the accuracy of Voltaire’s alleged comment upon Byng’s execution. ‘The English,’ the Frenchman was said to have remarked, ‘shoot an admiral; from time to time to encourage the others’. Whatever the truth of this reported witticism, reinforcing cruisers augmented the Leeward Islands squadron, and word began to circulate that the French could not long be left in possession of their West Indian Islands. With every man present his own master of strategy and tactics, opinions were voiced as to the best method of wresting from them Guadeloupe, Martinique, St Lucia and Marie Galante.

  ‘By heaven,’ remarked Wentworth rubbing his hands and discussing this matter over chocolate the following morning in the quayside office of Mulgrave, Wentworth and Company with a bunch of cronies, ‘think, gentlemen, what opportunities would be laid open to us with the French trade stopped!’

  Then came news, by a schooner from Barbados which had had a brush with corsairs from St Lucia, that a fleet from England had arrived in the Windward Islands. The war in the West Indies was no longer to be a matter of mosquito bites, of enemy corsairs seizing British and colonial merchant vessels, or of British privateers retaliating by snapping up French inter-island traffic. Though British naval squadrons were maintained in the Antilles to protect trade and offer convoy, a major squadron had not yet made its appearance in the Caribbean Sea. In Antigua the news spread like wildfire.

  Kite heard of it shortly after Spitfire’s anchor was dropped in the clear water of St John’s and warps were run ashore. They had endured a chase for three days and he was dog-tired and wanted only to see Puella and his son before taking to his bed. Dorothea greeted him; tears poured down her cheeks and the exhausted Kite at first unkindly attributed her misery to yet another outburst of grief at the loss of Mulgrave. He had learned that the black and mulatto women set great store by what he thought of as dreams, but which they claimed to be the portentous visitations of spirits. Kite had seen them in trances and knew the contempt many of his fellow whites had for such ‘primitive’ behaviour, but his own intimacy with Dorothea had persuaded him that she did indeed possess powers of perception that passed his own understanding. Now, tired yet eager to see Charlie and Puella, supposing that Dorothea had had one of her spirit-trances, but irritated by her suddenly clinging to him, Kite took her shoulders and pushed her ungently away.

  ‘Dorothea, I beseech you…’

  ‘Mr Kite, oh, Mr Kite, Charlie is dead.’

  Chapter Eleven

  The Attack

  Providence reached out its Cold Hand and Grasped my Very Heart, Kite wrote of the death of Charlie, before he had to return to the affairs of men and could confide only to the blank pages of his journal. The keening and wailing of Puella and Dorothea had been terrible; their unhappiness at the Christian burial given to the little boy only compounding their grief. In his own sense of loss, Kite relived the personal horror of the death of his mother and, more shocking, felt the rebuke of fate at his former indifference to the grief of the blacks aboard the Enterprize. The extent to which the conditions aboard the Guineaman had hardened him, and the detachment he had felt from the negroes as human beings, almost crushed him as he shared Puella’s agony in those first few days. Though he wept when alone at night, after an exhausted Puella had fallen asleep, and though he smudged the pages of his journal with his tears, he was dry-eyed in her presence, a circumstance she failed to understand. It caused the first rift between them, for in grief Kite possessed no superiority over his dead child’s mother and she beat his chest, her anger spilling from her in all the fulsome vituperation of her native tongue.

  She slipped easily into this, abetted by Dorothea who now viewed Kite with suspicion, as a malign influence and not the natural heir of Joseph Mulgrave. Dorothea herself had seen things, and knew things that the white people could neither understand not believe. That her visions and visitations were utterly convincing to Dorothea, only served to underline the gulf that existed between the white man and his black mistress. Kite and Puella could never be happy, and the loss of Charlie only served to emphasise the displeasure of the spirits. Though she was a product of inter-breeding, Dorothea’s strong belief in the spirits had grown from the childhood spent amid the black slaves of a plantation; this had produced instincts that were only distantly comparable with Kite’s vague meanderings about ‘the cold grasp of providence’. Both might have arisen from primeval fears, but the former was deemed primitive while the other had the sanction of the assumption of superiority, and the demonstrable authority of overwhelming power.

  Though Dorothea had submitted to her return to St John’s in the train of her new protector, Captain William Kite, she had lost everything in the disappearance of Mulgrave. Her status, her house, her reason for living, had vanished in the night, caught up in the shadows of Joseph Mulgrave’s cloak. She had seen that cloak only a few times aboard the Spitfire, for Mulgrave had bought it in Annapolis to combat the cooler air of the north, but she had seen its shadow several times since; in fact she knew now that Kite had not told her the truth, though she did not hold him a liar, for he may have himself believed what he had told her.

  For her own part, Dorothea knew, like the disciples of the white man’s Jesus-god, that her master and lover had not died in New York, but still lived. Or so she thought, until the night that little Charlie died. On that evening, as Kite crowded on sail to outrun the French privateer-schooner from Marie Galante, Dorothea had heard the faint but memorable footfall of Mulgrave and, with a cry of joy, had leapt up expecting his embrace. So excited had she been, so certain that at last he was to return to her, that she ran quickly into the hall of the rented house, only to see the shadow of his cloak as he turned the corner of the stairs.

  Dorothea rushed after him, to see the dark shape enter the bedroom in which little Charlie’s cot lay. But it was not the Mulgrave whom Dorothea loved who turned at her intrusion; it was a Mulgrave with the dead white features of a drowned corpse, and he vanished before her eyes, taking with him the last breath of the little boy.

  All this Dorothea told Puella, and all this was held to be the fault of Kite. Kite was a powerful man and Dorothea knew the white men cheated each other in business. Many times Mulgrave had explained to her with a wry smile, the crooked transactions of his fellow traders in the Antilles; always he outwitted them, though she rarely understood how, only that he was invariably successful. Now, she thought, Mulgrave had been in some way outwitted by Kite. She had convinced herself that Kite had managed to abandon Mulgrave in New York. Perhaps, she excitedly argued to the receptive Puella, it had been Kite who had had the house burned; it would have been quite in character for Mulgrave to have said nothing, she claimed. Now Mulgrave, bereft and left far behind without Dorothea’s support, had died. Even Dororthea’s long-held conviction that her benefactor would finally drown, seemed quite reconcilable with this imagined but convincing scenario. The vastness of the ocean and the complex geography of New York had convinced her that drowning was a not improbable fate for a man delirious from a sudden recurrence of his malaria. But such an impressive and convincing fulfilment of her prophetic visions had little impact on Puella.

  For Puella, Kite was revealed as possessing those underlying vices of all white men: an insatiable greed and an indifference to the death of others.

  For a week Kite attempted to comfort the grieving Puella. To him the death was at first a mystery; h
e imperfectly grasped Dorothea’s garbled account, only registering the extent of her ridiculous superstition that Mulgrave had taken the spirit of Charlie out of some misplaced desire for revenge. Dorothea’s references to the burning of the house made no sense, and for a while Kite thought the mulatto woman was deranged. Wrapped in his own distress he was unintentionally unkind and Dorothea noted his contempt; it only fuelled her misconceptions.

  Mrs Robertson, whose attempts at offering consolation were largely motivated by a desire for the handsome young sea-captain at this vulnerable and pliant moment, did explain to him that infantile asphyxia was not unknown. That she added it was particularly so among children of mixed blood, was pure mischief, intended to persuade the object of her scandalous lust, that consolation and a greater satisfaction lay in her own embrace. Her visit failed to reconcile Kite to the loss of his son and only hurt Puella with its sinister suggestion of infidelity, for while Kite knew nothing of either Mrs Robertson’s itch or her reputation, Puella was well aware of both. As for Mrs Robertson, she took back to her tea-time cronies the intelligence that Captain Kite was a most sensitive young man who was still under the spell of ‘that nigger witch’. With this demeaning opprobrium the garrison wives unconsciously acknowledged the universal beauty of the young African woman and Mrs Robertson hid the extent of her private disappointment.

  But Puella’s appearance in some respects justified this contemptuous description. She neglected herself, she went half-naked and unkempt about the house, crouching in dark corners as she had once quailed in Kite’s cabin aboard the Enterprize. Kite had tried to draw her out, but after the first tender and consoling embraces of his return, Dorothea’s words poisoned her against Kite and she shunned him with mounting passion. At first he merely though that Puella’s hostility was a passing manifestation of grief. She could not, Kite reasoned with himself, understand the notion of ‘infantile asphyxia’ and therefore the apparently inexplicable death must, in terms that Puella understood, lie within the malicious province of her pantheistic spirit world. She would come round in due course, Kite felt sure; after all, the blacks lived close to death and had their picaninnies by the dozen.