Seeking Eden Page 12

  “Those are all African languages?” I felt ashamed of my ignorance. I’d had no idea. I’d assumed the slaves were all the same; all spoke the same tongue.

  “Yes,” he said. “We all learned the English the white slavers spoke to us too. But my master taught me to speak English like the Friends. He said I should also learn to read. But now … I don’t know if he will teach me. My master is not happy. His wife is not happy. Things are wrong in this house. Someone has put a spell on John Crosbie.”

  “No, no.” Now I felt confident, certain of my superior understanding. “He has suffered for his witness against weapons and for teaching Christianity to thee and the other slaves. The authorities have fined him. And there was a bad harvest, I heard, and a fire. These are misfortunes, not witchcraft.”

  He looked at me sombrely, and I saw that my words had had no effect. “An enemy of my master has done these things,” he said. “An enemy has paid a sorceror to make these bad things happen.”

  “That is all darkness and superstition,” I insisted. “Thou should cast away such beliefs. Friends will try to help John Crosbie, and we will hold him and his wife in the light.”

  He agreed with me then. “The Light is good, strong. Maybe stronger than the sorceror’s spell.”

  Fifteen

  “I fear I must neglect thee a little, while we are here,” my master said next morning.

  And when I began to protest that it didn’t matter, he added, “Kate, too. She’s complaining already about being left with Ann Crosbie. The poor woman is in low spirits and wants only to go home to England. She is no company for a young girl.”

  “And will the Crosbies go?” I asked. I felt a lift at the realization that I might be able to spend more time with Kate.

  “I think so. John already has a buyer for the plantation, but there is much to consider and arrange. He needs my advice. So – if thou can keep Kate company now and then in a seemly manner…”

  “I will.” I tried not to look too eager, but I think he knew.

  “John’s plantation manager will take the two of you around the works today,” he said. “Thou ought to learn as much as possible while we are here, and it will do no harm for Kate to know about these things, too. And thou must keep up with thy studies, Jos, and ask questions and stay alert.”

  The tour of the sugar works was much enlivened for me by Kate’s presence, though I found the process – the beating and crushing of the canes, the boiling and extracting, all performed by an army of slaves – horrible and unnatural. I was accustomed to working with machinery in my father’s print shop, but I had never witnessed machinery and labour on this scale. Almost the whole island, it seemed, was given over to the sugar crop. I should never want to be a planter, I told Kate afterwards. It seemed to me a vision of Hell, such as the papists believe in.

  The next day, with the woman of the house a-bed and tended by servants, and George Bainbrigg and John Crosbie deep in prayer and consultation, Kate and I spent the morning on the veranda, which we had been told we could use for our studies. Lucie brought us pineapple juice to drink. It was the colour of sunshine and tasted like nothing I had ever drunk before: fresh and sweet, with a delicate fragrance.

  “Adam and Eve must have drunk this in the Garden of Eden,” I said.

  Kate was struggling, with the aid of a dictionary, to read a book in German, while I was studying a manual on navigation, and making notes. We worked hard for about two hours, before I sighed and stretched, and Kate said, “It’s hot!” and we stopped work and walked up and down the length of the veranda.

  I told Kate about hearing the music from the slaves’ village, and about my meeting with Antony.

  Kate said, “Antony is the one Patience is in love with.”

  “Patience?”

  “The maidservant who cleans the bedchambers.”

  I remembered the soft-footed girl, the flash of dark eyes. So it was she Antony had been meeting that night.

  Patience seemed a strangely English, Protestant name for such a girl. Of course it would not be her own name, any more than Antony’s was his. Ann Crosbie, or some former owner, would have given it to her. And I wondered about those other names the slaves must have, their real names, that were never used.

  “Thou hast talked to Patience, then?” I said.

  “Yes. I knew her because we’d visited before, but we’d never spoken much until now – not about anything important. But this time I saw her with Antony. It was only a glance that passed between them – but I understood. And it made me realize that we were the same. They are like us, Jos, those two, snatching moments together…”

  I took her hand, and we drew closer.

  “So I asked her about him,” Kate continued. “She said she had not met anyone of her tribe – the Kpelle – until he came to this house; and when he spoke to her in her own language she was filled with joy, so happy that she broke down in tears.”

  “This is making thee cry,” I said – and the tears glistening in Kate’s eyes spilled over.

  She brushed them away. “Oh, Jos! She told me how she was captured and brought here! She was working with the women in the rice fields, some way from the village, when raiders came and seized them all – children, too. They screamed and shouted for help but no one came. Patience believes the men had already been taken, but they never found out; never saw them again. The slavers fixed a collar around her neck, and yoked her to another woman, and they were forced to walk like that, in pairs – linked in a line – for several moons, she said; and then they were herded into a compound, a place that stank of fear and death. And she was branded with a red-hot iron. How can anyone endure that?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “And yet Friends have endured torture and branding as punishment. And some have been transported here, to the Caribbean.”

  “But those people chose martyrdom. They had faith in God. And they were not separated from everything they knew. Patience had never seen a ship before. She had lived all her life in the forest. She didn’t understand what was happening to her.”

  The weight of such suffering oppressed us. We leaned on the balustrade and looked out. From here we could see mile after mile of sugar plantations – the destination of so many captive people. And yet this was a place of beauty. In the far distance was a blink of sea, blue as sapphire; and below us lay a garden with palm trees, vivid scarlet and yellow flowers, and walks shaded by rose-covered arcades. Kate told me there was a pool at its centre.

  “Let’s go down there,” I said. “We can study again later.”

  We took the books inside and went out into the garden. It was larger than I had first thought. On one side was a herb garden, and on the other an area of fruit trees and bushes, with some vegetables growing in rows. We encountered a black gardener at work there, weeding. Near the house Kate showed me what she called the “coral drip”.

  “This is how they purify water for drinking. It comes through cooled and clean.”

  I was interested in this. I saw that the coral was porous and the water was filtered through it. All my life, in England, I had drunk small beer because water was not fit to drink. Here, it seemed, the purity of God’s creation had not been spoiled.

  The formal garden stretched across the whole front of the house. There was an English-style lawn made of some springy herb, surrounded on all sides by straight paths and beds full of flowering shrubs; and beyond it were stone steps leading down to a lower level.

  We saw a child’s bat and ball lying on the lawn and played with it for a while. I had the bat and kept Kate running and diving after the ball until she was hot and giggling and complained that it was not fair.

  “Thou can’t catch!” I said.

  “Thou hit it too hard, that’s why.” She wrestled the bat from me. “It’s my turn.”

  But she managed no better, and before long she sent the ball deep into the bushes, and I had to crawl in and find it and emerged covered in earth and twigs.

  “Oh, Jos
!” She brushed at me, laughing.

  “It’s thy fault.” I wanted to grab and kiss her, dirt and all, but we were in view of the house. “Let’s go into the shade, then, and cool down.” I began moving towards the steps. “Shall I dive into the pool?”

  “No!”

  She was laughing as she followed me.

  Down here the garden was shadier, with palms and tall trees ringing with bird calls and alive with their movement. Bushes laden with scarlet or white waxy-petalled flowers gave off a sweet, overpowering scent, and some of the paths were arched-over with trellises entwined with roses. Here we could not be seen from the house, so I put my arm around Kate and we walked close together and several times stopped and kissed.

  The pool lay at the lowest level, but even here sunlight broke through the canopy of leaves and made the water sparkle. A stone edge surrounded it, and at one end stood a statue of a nymph in a wisp of drapery; a surprising ornament for a Friend’s garden, I thought, but I supposed a former owner had chosen it.

  “Look!” Kate touched my arm and pointed.

  A jewel-green lizard was poised on the rim of the pool. We crouched to watch it. I was entranced by the gleaming perfection of its scales, by the tiny splayed feet gripping the stone, the unblinking eye. This garden seemed to me a place of wonder, full of the works of God and yet a place that stirred the senses.

  At the other end of the pool was a stone seat in an arbour, and here Kate and I sat and kissed and embraced each other, hidden from the world. I knew our behaviour was not what my master would consider seemly, but there was no one to see. Kate’s gown was lightweight wool, with a linen kerchief covering the neckline, but under it she wore stays, and under them a shift. As we kissed and my hands found their way to her breasts, despite all the clothing, I thought of the nymph across the pool in her slipping draperies, and imagined Kate in such a garment, how it would slide to the floor and she would step away from it, naked and lissom.

  “These stays…” I teased.

  “Don’t!” she said. “Someone might come.” But she didn’t look as if she minded.

  Suddenly she cried out.

  “What is it?”

  She had a hand to her chest, below the collarbone. “Something stung me!” Tears of pain sprang to her eyes.

  “Let me see.” I moved her hand, and saw a red mark. A wasp, perhaps, or bee? Or some strange Caribbean insect that might do harm?

  The redness was beginning to spread. Clearly our time here together was over.

  “We’d best go back to the house,” I said. “They’ll have some salve or remedy.”

  She was struggling to rearrange her clothing. “I can’t show anyone! It’s low down – below where my kerchief should have been covering me.”

  I chided her, laughing. “No one in the kitchen will care about that!”

  I helped tidy her up and we walked back to the house together.

  In the kitchen the servants were preparing dinner. A woman I hadn’t seen before was frying something over the fire in a skillet; the serving-woman Lucie and the girl called Patience were chopping herbs.

  They must have been surprised by our sudden entrance, but they became instantly attentive and respectful. I found this unsettling. Their total submission made it difficult for me to appeal to them for help. But as we began to explain, I saw a look pass between Lucie and Patience and knew they understood the cause of Kate’s embarrassment and were perhaps amused by it.

  Patience left her work and took Kate along the passage to another room. I followed behind. The two girls were similar in height and build, both curvy, with round bottoms and slim waists. But there were no stays on Patience, and I found myself watching her, wondering whether Kate’s hips, too, would sway in that enticing manner if left unrestrained.

  When we reached the room, which seemed to be a stillroom or pantry, Patience led Kate inside and – with a little smile – closed the door on me. From behind it I heard their soft voices, ripples of stifled laughter. What were they talking about? I felt shut out from their feminine chatter.

  When they emerged, Kate was smiling and smelt of some herbal preparation.

  “Better?” I asked.

  “Yes. They have a stock of salves and other remedies in there that Ann and the maids have made up.”

  I saw that Lucie was preparing glasses of pineapple juice.

  She turned to me. “The young mistress should go and rest on the veranda. Patience will bring some juice.”

  We were being dismissed from their domain. We left obediently and went to our place on the veranda, taking our books and papers with us.

  After dinner, my master and John Crosbie spent time with me, talking to me about the management of plantations and the financial risks, while from outside I heard Kate and Ann Crosbie playing with the little boy. I did not have any time with Kate again until the evening, when we met briefly on the landing.

  The warm night air, the events of the day, and the memory of the garden with its pool and nymph, its arbours and fragrant blossoms, made me bolder than usual; and as I kissed Kate I felt her drawing back a little, startled and perhaps alarmed by my ardour. I released her, and looked down into the shadowy yard beneath the balcony.

  Someone was there, by the bushes. Antony. He stood as if waiting. The high thrum of cicadas filled the air, but beneath their sound I heard a faint click: the back door opening. Patience flitted across the yard and into Antony’s arms.

  Their bodies seemed to blend together. Her arms slid around his neck, his head came down, his hands were on her hips, pressing her against him. Sighs and murmurs escaped them as they withdrew into the darkness of the bushes, out of sight.

  I felt a surge of longing. They were slaves and yet they were free in ways that Kate and I were not. I glanced at Kate and knew she had seen them too.

  I turned away from the balcony. “We should go to our own chambers.”

  “Yes.” Her face was burning.

  The next day my master and John Crosbie drove into Michael’s Town to visit a Friend who was a notary. Once again Kate and I were left to our studies.

  “Patience tried to give me a … thing, an amulet,” she said, as we set out our books.

  “When?”

  “This morning, when she brought my washing water. She said it would keep me safe from the bad magic in this place. She blames the bee sting on magic.”

  “What nonsense!” I said. “It was an accident.”

  “I know. I told her she should not use such things, that it was ungodly, horrible…”

  “What was it like?”

  “Oh … feathers and” – she shuddered – “thou know the sort of thing the Indians wear? Like that. These people are caught in such darkness, Jos, for all they join us for prayers and meetings.”

  “But … didn’t country folk in Yorkshire put faith in similar things?” I asked. “My mother said they did in Shropshire. Rabbits’ feet, and horseshoes on the door, and touching wood and suchlike.”

  “Yes, they did. I hadn’t thought of it like that. But of course Friends don’t do those things. Or shouldn’t.”

  “I suppose,” I said, “the Negroes are much like the Indians in their way of life and their beliefs?” I realized I knew little about them, except what a man was worth in pounds of sugar.

  “We should find out,” said Kate. “We are here to learn, my father says.”

  When Patience came with juice and sweetmeats for us, we detained her, and asked her about Africa, about the place she had come from. She seemed relieved not to be chastised any more about the amulet, and the words spilled out of her as she recalled her family home: the village in a clearing in the forest, the thatched huts, the people working together in the rice fields, her sisters and friends. But soon, as she talked of them, she began to gulp and cry, and great tears rolled down her cheeks as she sobbed, “I don’t know where they are! I was separated from them long before we reached the coast. My littlest sister – she was torn away from me; she reached ou
t her arms and screamed to me not to let them take her… I don’t know if she is alive or dead – if I will ever see her again! I don’t know if I will see any of them again.” And she curled her arms around her body and rocked in grief.

  We watched her, appalled at what we had unleashed. At last Kate put a tentative hand on her shoulder and said, “Don’t cry! We should not have asked thee. We will not speak of it again.”

  “No!” Patience brushed away her tears. “I want to speak of it. It hurts, but I want to remember. One day, I hope, I will go home and my family will come together again – those who are still alive. I am the eldest. My father was – is – an important man in our village. My mother is his first wife and I am her eldest daughter.” She spoke with pride. “I will fetch a high bride-price.”

  “Thy father has other wives?” Kate’s voice did not betray the disapproval she undoubtedly felt.

  “Two. Bindu is young; I like her; she has a nice baby. But the second wife – Koto – hah!” She made a gesture of dismissal.

  “And you all live in the same house?” I asked, thinking of the quarrels that must ensue.

  “No!” She burst out laughing, despite the tears still wet on her cheeks. “Each woman has her own hut, and her children live with her. But we cook and eat together.”

  She began to talk more calmly, reliving her childhood in the forest. She told us about the rainy season which lasted around five months, when the forest steamed and squelched as they waded through deep mud, and everything rotted in the wet; and about the dry months when the hot winds brought dust from the desert and they all suffered from cracked lips. She told how she used to help her mother at home and in the fields, growing rice, yams and beans, looking after the chickens and goats, and caring for the younger children. She regarded the forest as dangerous, full of snakes and scorpions, and spirits who must be given gifts to keep them friendly: rice on a plate of fresh leaves; a chicken or two.

  “But sometimes the men catch monkeys or deer in the forest. They are good eating. And we collect giant snails for the cooking pot.” She showed us their size against her hand and forearm.