The Guineaman

  ‘Pray do not trouble yourself,’ she said, smoothing her skirt.

  ‘She speaks…’ Helen flushed and burst into a renewed flood of tears. ‘Oh, William… Who is she?’

  ‘Come Helen,’ Kite said laughing, ‘Puella is… we are betrothed. She is to become my wife. She speaks perfect English. She is an African princess…’

  ‘And you,’ Helen looked up, her dark eyes sodden with apparent misery, ‘by all appearances, you are a gentleman.’

  ‘He is Captain Kite,’ Puella said insistently.

  ‘Captain Kite? I don’t understand…’ Helen’s confusion mounted, but Kite, suffering waves of relief at the sight of Susie Hebblewhite in the land of the living if not quite of the wholly sane, yet still perplexed, sought to calm and question her.

  ‘Helen, calm yourself, I beg. I shall explain everything but first tell me about Susie. I had supposed her to be dead… Did you ever get my letter? No, of course you didn’t, Mulgrave died…’

  ‘Yes, I did receive your letter. I recall it was brought me by a Midshipman Hope who took the trouble to bring it all the way from Portsmouth.’

  ‘Good Lord.’

  ‘He was a pleasant man and we still correspond… Upon occasion,’ Helen added wistfully.

  ‘But you did not correspond with me,’ Kite said reproachfully.

  Helen shook her head and finally dried her eyes, pulling herself together with a muttered apology. ‘Father would not let me. We knew you thought Susie was dead, but Father said that if you thought that, and that you had killed her, you would make your own way in the world and, since he knew no other way in which you would be stirred to do so, he would not stop you.’

  ‘But I was innocent… I had no hand in her murder… I mean her injuries…’

  Helen raised her hand to her lips as Susie came into the room with a tray of tea. ‘Thank you Susie,’ Helen said. ‘Will you wait up until the master comes home.’

  ‘Of course, Missee Helen, I always does.’

  ‘Helen, I have a carriage and four along with a coachman outside. Would you have room for him?’

  ‘Mrs Ostlethwaite’ll have a room, Missee Helen,’ Susie said. She seemed calmer now and willing to help. ‘An’ I’ll send him up to the farm to stable the horses.’

  ‘That would be kind of you, Susie,’ Kite said, but Susie never took her eyes off Helen and she nodded. ‘If you would be so kind Susie.’

  ‘I’ll walk up with him then,’ Susie said, throwing a quick glance at Puella. Kite heard her muttering as she left, and could hear her uttering imprecations as the eighth stair creaked under her weight.

  ‘She doesn’t appear to recognise me, or affects not to,’ Kite said.

  ‘You are much changed, Will. I hardly knew you, but for your voice; your skin is so burnt…’ Helen looked nervously at Puella.

  Kite expelled his breath and Helen, colouring, poured the tea. ‘You know I never touched Susie, Helen,’ Kite said. ‘I came across her in the barn where she lay screaming and covered in blood.’

  Helen nodded. ‘She gave birth to a monster,’ she said matter-of-factly, handing a cup to Puella. ‘Philip Hebblewhite wanted people to believe you were the father and that that was why you had run away. Father was called to dress her wounds. He destroyed the still-born infant and heard her admit that she had never lain with you. ’Twas said that the child was sired by one or other of her brothers. Susie has been with us ever since but sadly the balance of her mind was disturbed and she will not recognise you now you have changed so much.’ Helen shook her head and smiled. For the first time he properly recognised his sister.

  ‘I see,’ he said, returning her smile. ‘But she was terribly wounded, Helen. Forgive me, but there was blood everywhere… The pitchfork… and,’ Kite frowned, ‘the child was not still born… I am sure that the creature was living when I came upon her.’

  Helen shook her head vehemently. ‘Father would not lie,’ she protested, ‘he said the child was dead…’

  ‘The child was dead, Helen, when I got there… But I did not tell you everything. It was not still born.’

  Kite turned and leapt to his feet. ‘Father!’

  His father stood in the doorway, his old green coat about his thin shoulders, his face stubbled with his unshaven beard and furrowed with his careworn existence. ‘So the prodigal returns, eh? I met his coach and four seeking lodgings at the very farm this tragedy took place in.’

  ‘Father!’ Kite repeated, non-plussed.

  Mr Kite sighed. ‘According to the scripture, I am supposed to welcome the prodigal,’ he said in his dry, remote tone.

  ‘Will you not do so?’ Kite asked, his voice thick with emotion as with a delicate sussuration of her grey silk dress, Puella rose with quiet dignity, her hands outstretched towards Kite.

  ‘Who is that black woman in my house? Is she your whore?’

  Kite shook his head. ‘No, Father, she is neither my whore, nor my slave. In fact, she is shortly to become my wife.’

  Mr Kite’s face registered no emotion. ‘And what manner of man are you now, William? You look prosperous enough, but how do I know that your carriage and four is not hired?’

  ‘If it pleases you, it is not mine. It was lent to me, Father, in order that I might come and see you…’

  ‘That was good of you.’ Mr Kite’s voice was richly sarcastic. ‘Five years is a long time…’

  ‘For both of us, father,’ Kite broke in, and Kite saw his father wince at the interruption.

  ‘Well, you are here now. It is late. We shall talk of this again. I don’t know where you are going to sleep, but your old room is still empty. Good night.’

  ‘He doesn’t mean it, William,’ Helen pleaded as Kite turned back to his sister, his face angry and hurt.

  ‘He has no idea,’ Kite said through clenched teeth. ‘Good God, he has absolutely no idea!’

  ‘He knows, Kite. But he cannot say.’

  Kite rounded on Puella. ‘Oh, and I suppose you can see his familiar spirits,’ he said, his voice bitter with a vehement sarcasm that matched his father’s.

  ‘No,’ Puella said. ‘He has no spirit. He has given it all away to the woman who is having her baby.’

  Kite woke in the badly made bed to a howling gale and sheets of rain flinging themselves against the window. A pallid grey daylight filtered through the small window and he rolled over to stare up at the ceiling. The same old cracks rambled across the plaster, making a rough map of an imaginary countryside which he had once peopled with warring kings and their armies, their castles and their cities. Mountain ranges and rivers and lakes intersected this chimerical landscape.

  So, he thought as a gust struck the window and Puella stirred beside him, Susie was not dead. He had lived for five years with a fear as groundless yet as real as the kings and soldiers who had warred across his ceiling in their upside down and fantastic world. How cruel fate was, he thought; how like the cold rain that drummed upon the square of glass.

  Slipping from the bed he tip-toed out into the passage and then descended the stairs, remembering to step over the creaking boards, only to discover that there were more now that gave under his weight in the silence of the night.

  His father was in the warm kitchen, sitting at the old square table with its rough, scrubbed surface and the three rings burnt into its surface long ago by hot pots. Kite could remember the nights his distressed and recently widowed father struggled to cook for himself and his family at the end of a long day. The older man set down a steaming tankard and rose as Kite entered the low room and, for a moment, Kite thought he was about to withdraw, but instead he leaned over and lifted the kettle off the banked fire. Kite sat on the far side of the table watching his father fill a second tankard and push it towards him. It was filled with hot toddy.

  ‘Thank you.’ Kite said as his father resumed his seat and stared into the glowing embers of the fire.

  ‘We said the child was still-born,’ he said after a long silence, ‘to stil
l any rumours. Old Hebblewhite knew you hadn’t done it, though he had seen you enter the barn. He beat his louts when they returned after chasing you and thrashed the truth out of them. I think I think it was Philip who gave the thing its quietus and Philip, I think, who felt he had fathered it, but who knows? It was an unpleasant business.’

  ‘But she was…’

  Mr Kite shook his head. ‘Unconscious and badly injured… Very badly injured. The pitchfork… You can imagine the filth… We drew stuff from her wounds… well, it was a nauseating business, but Old Mother Dole knew a few specifics and I was not entirely useless.’ A faint smile passed over the older man’s face as he looked at his son. ‘She was no badly punctured than had she been opened up for a Caesarean birth, for the pitch fork did not pass through her body. I think Philip was mad with fury; he was trying to stab the cretinous thing he had brought into the world and struck poor Susan. It was a foul affair.’

  There was a long silence, as Kite digested this information. Then he said, ‘Helen told me that you thought it better that I should be left to think that I had killed Susie… That even when I wrote you refused to let her reply…’

  ‘What was the point? I could not afford to keep you.’ Kite’s father looked across the table. ‘Well, Will, are you not twice the man now that you were then?’ he asked.

  ‘But…’ Kite wanted to protest the cruelty of leaving him ignorant.

  ‘Besides,’ his father went on, ‘you had run away. I assumed you were prompted by some guilt of your own.’

  Kite flushed. ‘Father, I never…’

  ‘It is of no matter now. Tell me, that black woman you have brought with you. She is with child, is she not?’

  Kite nodded. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is this the first child?’

  ‘No. We had a son, but he died of some form of infantile asphyxia.’

  ‘And where did this infantile asphyxia take place?’

  ‘In Antigua.’

  ‘Is that in the West Indies?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And is she a slave, this black woman who is to become my daughter-in-law?’

  ‘No. She was brought aboard the Guineaman in which I was serving, but I had her released and made free by an instrument of manumission.’

  ‘After taking her to your bed?’

  ‘Father, do not think of me in the same way that you think of Philip Hebblewhite. Such an irony would be too much for me.’

  ‘But you wish me to take her into my house…’

  ‘Only until our child is born and I have made provision for her.’

  ‘And where will this provision be made?’

  ‘In Liverpool, where I conduct my business?’

  ‘In slaves and sugar, I suppose.’

  ‘I have become a ship-master and a ship-owner, Father.’

  ‘Like Brocklebank of Whitehaven, eh? Well, well.’

  ‘I can much ease the circumstances of both you and Helen, Father. I can provide for your old age…’

  ‘Do you love this black woman, Will?’ Kite’s father had turned towards him and Kite saw that the older man’s reserve had cracked.

  ‘I do, Father.’

  ‘And it is not simply lust?’

  ‘No,’ Kite shook his head. Lust had inflamed him at Newport, but love for Puella had triumphed over that madness.

  ‘And you lost a child, you said?’ The import of the event seemed at last to strike his father. ‘I had a grandchild without knowing it.’

  ‘Yes, a boy,’ Kite repeated, ‘named Charles.’

  ‘And what is your woman’s name?’

  Kite explained, prompting his father to emit a low chuckle. ‘Puella, eh? Well, well. What a strange fancy… Girl, eh?’

  ‘It seemed not so strange at the time.’ Kite paused, feeling the ice between them melting away. ‘Now I never think of the word as anything other than her name.’

  His father nodded and slowly rose to his feet. ‘I am growing old, Will, but I am glad to see you hale and well.’ He nodded. ‘Your Puella may stay here as you wish. Let us hope she and Helen tolerate each other and that she bears you another son.’ Mr Kite extended his hand and his son took it. ‘So, you call yourself Captain Kite, no doubt. What a conceit. Well, well.’

  His father went out in the direction of the latrine but paused in the doorway and turned round. His eyes twinkled and a mischievous smile played with the corners of his mouth.

  ‘Puella, eh? Well, well. What on earth are you going to call your son?’

  Kite followed his father as far as the doorway and leaned there, staring out at the dawn. The far ridge of the distant mountain’s flank was as sharp as a sword-blade against the hard yellow light of the dawn. Long ago he had toiled up that steep and unforgiving slope of scree, in fear of his life with the Hebblewhite brothers in hot pursuit.

  What a strange destiny had led him back. He stretched and yawned, shivering in the cold morning, the air tingling in his nostrils. The light was stronger now, sparkling on the frost riming the outbuildings, the wall and the fields beyond, yet throwing the fell into deeper shadow, its slopes, rocks, gullies and fissures hidden to him.

  The freezing air invigorated him: suddenly the world seemed full of possibilities.

  Will Kite emerge a hero or will fate deal him one last decisive blow?

  Fear and fighting with sea-faring William Kite. On the High Seas from 18th century Liverpool to the Gold Coast and the American War of Independence, this thrilling historical series is breathlessly action-packed.

  The epic William Kite Naval Adventures are perfect for fans of Hornblower and Sharpe!

  Buy now…

  First published in the United Kingdom in 2000 by Severn House Publishers

  This edition published in the United Kingdom in 2018 by

  Canelo Digital Publishing Limited

  57 Shepherds Lane

  Beaconsfield, Bucks HP9 2DU

  United Kingdom

  Copyright © Richard Woodman, 2000

  The moral right of Richard Woodman to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 9781788632171

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

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