Caribbee Part 19

"I didn't exactly make an announcement about it."

"And that low-cut bodice and pretty smile? Is that just part of your negotiations?"

"I thought it mightn't hurt." She looked him squarely in the eye.

"G.o.d Almighty. What you'd do for this place! I pity Cromwell and his Roundheads." He sobered. "I don't mind telling you I'm glad at least one person here realizes this island can't defend itself as things stand now. You'd d.a.m.ned sure better start trying to do something." He examined her, puzzled. "But why come to me?"

She knew the answer. Hugh Winston was the only person she knew who hated England enough to declare independence. He already had. "You seem to know a lot about guns and gunnery." She moved closer and noticed absently that he smelled strongly of seawater, leather, and sweat. "Did I hear you say you had an idea where we could get more cannon, to help strengthen our breastworks?"

"So we're back to business. I might have expected." He rubbed petulantly at his scar. "No, I didn't say, though we both know where you might. From those Dutchmen in the harbor. Every merchantman in Carlisle Bay has guns. You could offer to buy them. Or just take them.

But whatever you do, don't dally too long. One sighting of English sail and they'll put to sea like those flying fish around the island."

"How about the cannon on the _Defiance_? How many do you have?"

"I have a few." He laughed, then reflected with pride on his first- cla.s.s gun deck. Twenty-two demi-culverin, nine-pounders and all bra.s.s so they wouldn't overheat. He'd trained his gunners personally, every man, and he'd shot his way out of more than one harbor over the past five years. His ordnance could be run out in a matter of minutes, primed and ready. "Naturally you're welcome to them. All you'll have to do is kill me first."

"I hope it doesn't come to that."

"So do I." He studied the position of the waning sun for a moment, then yelled forward for the men to hoist the staysail. Next he gestured toward Mewes. "John, take the whipstaff a while and tell me what you think of the feel of her. I'd guess the best we can do is six points off the wind, the way I said."

"Aye." Mewes hadn't understood what all the talk had

been about, but he hoped the captain was getting the best of the doxy.

"I can tell you right now this new rigging of yours makes a handy little frigate work like a d.a.m.n'd five-hundred-ton galleon."

"Just try taking her about." He glanced at the sh.o.r.eline. They were coming in sight of Speightstown, the settlement at the north tip of the island. "Let's see if we can tack around back south and make it into the bay."

"But would you at least help us if we were blockaded?" She realized she was praying he would say yes.

"Katherine, what's this island ever done for me? Besides, right now I've got all I can manage just trying to get the h.e.l.l out of here. I can't afford to get caught up in your little quarrel with the Commonwealth." He looked at her. "Every time I've done an errand for Barbados, it's always come back to plague me."

"So you don't care what happens here." She felt her disappointment surge. It had all been for nothing, and d.a.m.ned to him. "I suppose I had a somewhat higher opinion of you, Captain Winston. I see I was wrong."

"I've got my own plan for the Caribbean. And that means a lot more to me than who rules Barbados and its slaves."

"Then I'm sorry I bothered asking at all."

"I've got a suggestion for you though." Winston's voice suddenly flooded with anger. "Why don't you ask your gentleman fiance, Anthony Walrond, to help? From what I hear, he was the royalist hero of the Civil War."

"He doesn't have a gun deck full of cannon." She wanted to spit in Winston's smug face.

"But he's got you, Katherine, doesn't he?" He felt an unwanted pang at the realization. He was beginning to like this woman more than he wanted to. She had bra.s.s. "Though as long as you're here anyway, why don't we at least toast the sunset? And the free Americas that're about to vanish into history." He abruptly kissed heron the cheek, watched as she flushed in anger, then turned and yelled to a seaman just entering the companionway aft, "Fetch up another flask of sack."

Benjamin Briggs stood in the open doorway of the curing-house, listening to the "sweee" call of the long-tailed flycatchers as they flitted through the groves of macaw palms. The long silence of dusk was settling over the sugarworks as the indentures and the slaves trudged wearily toward their thatched huts for the evening dish of loblolly mush. Down the hill, toward the sh.o.r.e, vagrant bats had begun to dart through the shadows.

In the west the setting sun had become a fiery disk at the edge of the sea's far horizon. He watched with interest as a single sail cut across the sun's lower rim. It was Hugh Winston's _Defiance_, rigged in a curious new mode. He studied it a moment, puzzling, then turned back to examine the darkening interior of the curing house.

Long racks, holding wooden cones of curing sugar, extended the length of one wall. He thought about the cones for a time, watching the slow drip of mola.s.ses into the tray beneath and wondering if it mightn't pay to start making them from clay, which would be cheaper and easier to shape. Though the Africans seemed to understand working clay--they'd been using it for their huts--he knew that only whites could be allowed to make the cones. The skilled trades on Barbados must always be forbidden to blacks, whose tasks had to be forever kept repet.i.tive, mind-numbing. The Africans could never be allowed to perfect a craft.

It could well lead to economic leverage and, potentially, resistance to slavery and the end of cheap labor.

He glanced back toward the darkening horizon, but now Winston's frigate had pa.s.sed from view, behind the trees. Winston was no better than a thieving rogue, bred for gallows-bait, but you had to admire him a trifle nonetheless. He was one of the few men around who truly understood the need for risk here in the Americas. The man who never chanced what he had gained in order to realize more would never prosper. In the Americas a natural aristocracy was rising up, one not of birth but of boldness.

Boldness would be called for tonight, but he was ready. He had done what had to be done all his life.

The first time was when he was thirty-one, a tobacco importer in Bristol with an auburn-haired wife named Mary and two blue-eyed daughters, a man pleased with himself and with life. Then one chance- filled afternoon he had discovered, in a quick succession of surprise and confession, that Mary had a lover. The matter of another man would not have vexed him unduly, but the fact that her gallant was his own business partner did.

The next day he sold his share of the firm, settled with his creditors, and hired a coach for London. He had never seen Bristol again. Or Mary and his daughters.

In London there was talk that a syndicate of investors led by Sir William Courteen was recruiting a band of pioneers to try and establish a new settlement on an empty island in the Caribbees, for which they had just received a proprietary patent from the king. Though Benjamin Briggs had never heard of Barbados, he joined the expedition. He had no family connections, no position, and only a few hundred pounds. But he had the boldness to go where no Englishman had ever ventured.

Eighty of them arrived in the spring of 1627, on the William and John, with scarcely any tools, only to discover that the entire island was a rain forest, thick and overgrown. Nor had anyone expected the harsh suns.h.i.+ne, day in and day out. They all would have starved from inexperience had not the Dutch helped them procure a band of Arawak Indians from Surinam, who brought along seeds to grow plantains and corn, and ca.s.sava root for bread. The Indians also taught the cultivation of cotton and tobacco, cash crops. Perhaps just as importantly, they showed the new adventurers from London how to make a suspended bed they called a hammock, in order to sleep up above the island's biting ants, and how to use smoky fires to drive off the swarms of mosquitoes that appeared each night. Yet, help notwithstanding, many of those first English settlers died from exposure and disease by the end of the year. Benjamin Briggs was one of the survivors. Later, he had vowed never to forget those years, and never to taste defeat.

The sun was almost gone now, throwing its last, long shadows through the open thatchwork of the curing-house walls, laying a pattern against the hard earthen floor. He looked down at his calloused hands, the speckle of light and shade against the weathered skin, and thought of all the labors he had set them to.

The first three years those hands had wielded an axe, clearing land, and then they had shaped themselves to the handle of a hoe, as he and his five new indentures set about planting indigo. And those hands had stayed penniless when his indigo crops were washed away two years running by the autumn storms the Carib Indians called _huracan_. Next he had set them to cotton. In five years he had recouped the losses from the indigo and acquired more land, but he was still at the edge of starvation, in a cabin of split logs almost a decade after coming out to the Caribbees.

He looked again at his hands, thinking how they had borrowed heavily from lenders in London, the money just enough to finance a switch from cotton to tobacco. It fared a trifle better, but still scarcely recovered its costs.

Though he had managed to acc.u.mulate more and more acres of island land over the years, from neighbors less prudent, he now had only a moderate fortune to show for all his labor. He'd actually considered giving up on the Americas and returning to London, to resume the import trade.

But always he remembered his vow, so instead he borrowed again, this time from the Dutchmen, and risked it all one last time. On sugar.

He sc.r.a.ped a layer from the top of one of the molds and rubbed the tan granules between his fingers, telling himself that now, at last, his hands had something to show for the two long decades of callouses, blisters, emptiness.

He tasted the rich sweetness on a horned thumb and its savor was that of the Americas. The New World where every man started as an equal.

Now a new spirit had swept England. The king was dethroned, the hereditary House of Lords abolished. The people had risen up . . . and, though you'd never have expected it, new risk had risen up with them.

The American settlements were suddenly flooded with the men England had repudiated. Banished aristocrats like the Walronds, who'd bought their way into Barbados and who would doubtless like nothing better than to reforge the chains of cla.s.s privilege in the New World.

Most ironic of all, these men had at their disposal the new democratic inst.i.tutions of the Americas. They would clamor in the a.s.sembly of Barbados for the island to reject the governance of the English Parliament, hoping thereby to hasten its downfall and lead to the restoration of the monarchy. Worse, the a.s.sembly, that reed in the winds of rhetoric, would doubtless acquiesce.

Regardless of what you thought of Cromwell, to resist Parliament now would be to swim against the tide. And to invite war. The needful business of consolidating the small tracts on Barbados and setting the island wholesale to sugar would be disrupted and forestalled, perhaps forever.

Why had it come down to this, he asked himself again. Now, of all times. When the fruits of long labor seemed almost in hand. When you could finally taste the comforts of life--a proper house, rich food, a woman to ease the nights.

He had never considered taking another wife. Once had been enough. But he had always arranged to have a comely Irish girl about the house, to save the trouble and expense of visiting Bridgetown for an evening.

A prudent man bought an indentured wench with the same careful eye hed acquire a breeding mare. A l.u.s.ty-looking one might cost a few s.h.i.+llings more, but it was money well invested, your one compensation for all the misery.

The first was years ago, when he bought a red-headed one straight off a s.h.i.+p from London, not guessing till he got her home that he'd been swindled; she had a sure case of the pox, the French disease. Her previous career, it then came out, included Bridewell Prison and the taverns of Turnbull Street. He sent her straight to the fields and three months later carefully bought another, this one Irish and seventeen. She had served out her time, five years, and then gone to work at a tavern in Bridgetown. He had never seen her since, and didn't care to, but after that he always kept one about, sending her on to the fields and buying a replacement when he wearied of her.

That was before the voyage down to Pernambuco. Brazil had been an education, in more ways than one. You had to grant the Papists knew a thing or so about the good life. They had bred up a sensuous Latin creation: the _mulata_. He tried one at a tavern, and immediately decided the time had come to acquire the best. He had worked hard, he told himself; he had earned it.

There was no such thing as a _mulata _indenture in Pernambuco, so he'd paid the extra cost for a slave. And he was still cursing himself for his poor judgment. Haughtiness in a servant was nothing new. In the past he'd learned you could easily thrash it out of them, even the Irish ones. This _mulata_, though, somehow had the idea she was gifted by G.o.d to a special station, complete with high-born Latin airs. The plan to be finally rid of her was already in motion.

She had come from Pernambuco with the first cane, and she would be sold in Bridgetown with the first sugar. He already had a prospective buyer, with an opening offer of eighty pounds.

He'd even hinted to Hugh Winston that she could be taken