29

The Great Hall . . . and everything in it is superbly fine. . . . The front has the sea, shipping, town and a great part of the island in prospect, and the constant sea-breeze renders it most agreeable.

Janet Schaw, St. Olives Plantation, St. Kitts, 1774

Montego Bay, Jamaica

At first glance, the warm turquoise waters and lush, lyrical landscape were all Magnus saw. When his head cleared, other things tugged at his attention. The comingling of cocoa and coffee, sugarcane and spirits, a potent blend in the sultry sea air. The mishmash of languages and shades of skin, from coal black to cinnamon to tobacco. Slavers lay at anchor in the bustling harbor, their contents a great many stoop-shouldered, emaciated men, women, and children bought and sold before his eyes. His gut churned as his wary gaze landed on raucous parrots and agile monkeys in cages. Odd yellow and orange fruits. Coconuts. Plantains.

Hawkers shouted their wares as he inhaled meat-tinged smoke. The captain’s pointed finger and explanations were so plentiful they failed to find anchor in Magnus’s swirling brain.

Relief filled him as the wagon sent from Trelawny Hall to collect him left behind the colorful melee. His sole trunk had been thrown in back with a dull thud. The rutted road raised a fine red dust as it hugged the coastline. White sand glittered like diamonds. Other islands had black sand, even pink, but this creamy coastline stretched on as far as he could see, full of picturesque inlets and coves and beaches.

The Jamaican driver was mostly silent, his few words nonsensical to Magnus’s untrained ear. Pidgin or Patois, Osbourne had called it. How would he as Trelawny Hall’s factor expect to communicate here?

Osbourne had told him the former factor had died. Being hated by the indentures and slaves who often broke tools and equipment in retaliation, who shirked work by developing a system that let them avoid detection by those in charge, had surely lent to his demise. Trelawny Hall had tumbled from its standing as king of the sugar island plantations in terms of exports under the former factor’s tenure. Magnus’s charge was to regain its standing.

Was Osbourne’s placement of him here a slur on their friendship? Or more a demonstration of faith in Magnus’s abilities? Owing Osbourne a great debt for extracting him and Lark from tolbooth, he’d not shirk his duties, whatever they might be.

Even before they’d rolled past the plantation’s wrought-iron gates, his spirit grew more troubled as the facts he’d been told resurfaced. Slave uprisings were commonplace. Overseers must always watch their backs. Some had been poisoned by their own household staff, others ambushed in the fields as they made their rounds. This was always followed by a swift hanging, but the unrest still roiled. Or so he’d been told by the Bonaventure’s crew while coming here.

Osbourne had told him the worst offenders among the Ashanti, the Africans known for their superior strength who formed the bulk of the plantation’s labor. On the stormy ship’s passage, he’d committed the unique names to memory. Kwasi. Gaddo. Kenu. Okoto. Manu.

Osbourne’s longtime housekeeper and her husband, both Jamaicans by the names of Naria and Rojay, met him on the long, palm-fronted porch. Would he truly live in this place with its sweeping view of both the mist-shrouded Blue Mountains and a sheltered cove?

He’d expected a thatched roof hut, not this. The house was built on a foundation of solid stone, and the upper floors were timber, able to withstand both hurricanes and earthquakes. Window shutters and wide shades blocked the sun. The colonnaded loggia ran the length of the house on all sides.

“You, sir, are don dada, the chief of Trelawny Hall,” Naria said with a wide, flashing smile, her flamboyant dress as bright as the parrot he spied on a near sea grape tree. “Your overseers live in the huts.”

His bedchamber sat at the end of a cool, shadowed hall, a Spartan bower of mosquito netting and shuttered windows. His office was gained through a connecting door that reminded him of Lark’s quarters and the stillroom at Royal Hundred. The territorial view gave him pause. The dwelling overlooked cane fields and the mill Osbourne had described in detail, made of imported British stone.

Field hands, much like those in Virginia, toiled in the two o’clock sun, their skin a-glisten. He didn’t know their language, their customs. Their hearts.

If he’d ever missed Scotland before, he missed it fiercely now. Here he was naught but an outlander. A foreigner. Another factor to be despised and feared.

When a sudden shower snuffed the sun and drummed on the tiled roof, he wondered at the fickle weather. Ignorant as a schoolboy he was, and at the helm of a sprawling sugar empire he was expected to resurrect and return to its former glory.

Lord, help Thou me.

Within a fortnight Magnus grew used to Trelawny Hall’s house servants moving about on whispering feet, the sudden tropical squalls, the rhythmic speech of the people around him. The damp linen of his garments seemed a second skin in the steamy heat as he rode his gelding mile after mile, familiarizing himself with Osbourne’s overseers and operations.

At night, by the light of two tapers, the whine of insects outside the netting around him, he penned Lark a letter.

Dearest Lark,

I write this to you in a midnight room no less cool than midday. Though the calendar says we have been parted but a month, it seems an age. You and wee Larkin hover in my thoughts. When I left he was on the verge of crawling out of his box bed. Soon he will walk or run away from you and you’ll be hard-pressed to catch him. I wonder with some pains if he’ll remember me.

I covet your prayers. The enslaved here are of a warlike tribe, startlingly strong people from Africa’s Ivory Coast. They live in squalor made worse by careless, cruel overseers.

Tomorrow I meet with the foremost troublemakers of the Ashanti themselves, whom I confess to liking better than their white masters. I would sooner whip an overseer than a slave.

I do not mean to weary you with plantation talk. Just pray.

How goes it with the bees? Your colonial garden? Mistress Flowerdew? What new words does Larkin ken?

I beseech you to write as often as you are able.

Yours entire,
Magnus

Lark broke the indigo seal. ’Twas her first letter from Magnus on this side of the Atlantic. She brought the fine vellum to her nose, imagining it carried a hint of exotic spices and trade winds.

“Slow ye doon.”

Granny’s cautionary words echoed in her thoughts. Savor the letter she would. It seemed he’d been gone an age. Time and distance did strange things.

She purposed to answer his penned questions one by one. By day’s end, she’d fashioned a reply in her head, so tired by the time she inked her quill that she misspelled letters only to cross them out and try again.

All the hives are harvested. Mistress Flowerdew had a spell of the gout but found some relief with the elm leaf tea I gave her. Larkin calls me Mim. He says “ball” and “cat.” I keep your locket near at hand . . .

She folded the letter. Pondered all she kept tamped down like a hogshead of turmoil but could not pen.

I have survived my first fever. Larkin swallowed a button, and I was beside myself till it came out. Mr. Granger chides me for visiting the quarters too often and taking remedies and small conveniences there, which he says will spoil the Africans and make them unfit for work. I spoke back and said that so long as he allows them to live lowly as beggars, I will try to allay their miseries when I can. Sally cautions me and tells me he may complain to Osbourne to have me sent elsewhere, but secretly she supports me and says the people are glad of my coming.

The heat continues to be my greatest foe. Often I feel too weak for the work and long for a bracing headwind and Scottish sunset. For you.

But it is not to be.

He felt a wee bit like the biblical Joseph. Sold into slavery by his kinsmen, then placed in a position of authority in a strange land. But ’twas the prophet Isaiah who held him captive and gave him courage.

And if thou draw out thy soul to the hungry, and satisfy the afflicted soul; then shall thy light rise in obscurity, and thy darkness be as the noon day: And the LORD shall guide thee continually, and satisfy thy soul in drought, and make fat thy bones: and thou shalt be like a watered garden, and like a spring of water, whose waters fail not.

His mindset as a laird did not alter though he’d lost his Scottish holdings. Though Jamaica was more like Hades to him—affliction and hunger abounding in this strange land in far more profound, soul-tearing ways than on Kerrera—he grappled with what could be done.

He assembled Osbourne’s overseers, a hardened trio who made the excise men in Alba seem like saints. One had his whip at his thigh, which prompted Magnus to say, “There’ll be no more use of the whip until any quarrels are brought to me straightaway. If I hear of ye breaking the new mandate, ’twill be yer own back that’s striped.” He paused to let the words find purchase, unsurprised by the flare of ire and indignation in their eyes. “Any incident of insubordination is to be brought to me first for a fair hearing, aye?”

Their grudging grunts were belated.

He plunged ahead regardless. “There are two matters that need mending. The first concerns the weekly ration of the workers.” He refused to call them slaves. “A peck of corn, a pint of salt, and a pound of meat is akin to starvation. ’Tis an outright disgrace. Ye’ll oversee a tripling of the rations and assign a rotation where a number of workers have days to cook for their fellows in the fields, each getting a turn. The fare will be supplemented with ample quantity of fresh produce sold in Montego Bay.”

“Triple rations? Are you daft, sir?” the oldest of the three said. “You’ll bankrupt Osbourne—”

“Nay. ’Twill simply ensure the laborers are fit for the work and reduce the sick and infirm, thus helping quell the ongoing threat of uprising.” He went to a window and lowered a shade where the afternoon sun slanted blindingly across the ledgers on his desk. “Ye’ll also set about repairing their dwellings, many of which are in poor condition, and ye’ll spare no expense doing so.”

“But there are countless huts. Will you have us refurbish them all?” said the youngest, a florid-faced Dutchman with a thick accent.

“Every one of them, aye, beginning today. Enlist those whom ye will to assist ye. I’ll keep a close tally of expenses. D’ye have questions?”

A sore silence. Hats in hand, they eyed each other, and then the eldest spoke again. “I say it cannot be done—should not be done. Our tasks are many, yet you heap more on our backs, all for an ungrateful, shiftless lot of slaves who require the whip to do the slightest task. What if we refuse you? Object to do as you bid?”

“Refuse?” Magnus looked toward the open door where three Negro men waited. “Then ye’ll be replaced by the Ashanti themselves—Kwasi, Gaddo, and Yaw.”

A curse split the stunned silence.

Magnus stared at the offender. “And ye’ll keep a clean tongue in yer head, at least in my company. Good day to ye.”

Where had Osbourne gotten these men? Granted, the work of an overseer was arduous and unenviable, but would their lot not be made better by improving the lots of the workers?

The overseers trudged out. The three Ashanti took their places, their dark eyes never settling as they assessed a place they’d never been—this inner sanctum, a chamber considered too grand for slaves.

Rojay, Magnus’s manservant, stood to his left, facing the Africans. All were understandably wary. Their dealings with Europeans had been dark from their first point of capture on the Ivory Coast. Their ingrained, justified guardedness might never lessen. But he would stay true to Scripture and attempt to satisfy the afflicted souls in his keeping, no matter the cost or consequence.

“How do you say ‘welcome’ in Ashanti Twi?” he asked Rojay.

The older man hesitated, his sweat-dampened features lined with surprise. “Akwaaba.”

“Akwaaba,” Magnus repeated, wanting to meet the men’s eyes though they would not look at him. Would they ever? “Today I call ye here to tell ye of coming changes. From this day forward ye will have more to eat. Better huts to lodge in.”

He paused to allow Rojay to translate. The words were oddly melodic.

He continued slowly. “Today is the day we find other ways to benefit yer people and this plantation. Every sennight we will meet here and ye’ll bring word of what is happening in the homes ye live in and the fields where ye labor—any and all injustices, sickness, and unrest. Anything that might be made better by coming to me. If I do not know of these things I cannot fix them. Yer to be my eyes and ears since I cannot be everywhere at once all the time. Only Almighty God has that power.”

Rojay translated in short bursts, sometimes grappling for a word not easily had in Twi. Listening, Magnus felt at sea. Mightn’t it be better if he tried to learn their language? Could he? No doubt he’d be among the first white men in Jamaica to do so. Or even want to.

He trod carefully, saying little else. No need to overwhelm them with too many words. Too many changes. They spoke among themselves, their gestures and intonations fascinating and wholly unfamiliar.

’Twas said there were ten Africans for every white man in Jamaica. Yet he felt more comfortable in the presence of these men than he had the overseers.

The Ashanti filed out, backs straight, their tall, underfed frames a wonder of muscle and sinew, their faces masks of composure. Magnus’s gaze lingered longest on Kwasi’s back, crisscrossed with a horror of scars from a whipping scarcely healed. They’d all been branded with Osbourne’s mark.

How would it be to own a man? A fellow human being? A body, if not a soul? To embed one’s name in another’s skin till death? That side of Osbourne was unknown to him.

At the end of the veranda, the tallest of the Africans turned back and gave Magnus a lingering look before disappearing from sight. He had said something to Rojay at the last. Something that escaped Magnus completely.

The slight smile touching the translator’s mouth was mirrored in his eyes. “They call you Adofo.”

“Adofo?” Magnus echoed.

Rojay nodded slowly. “In Ashanti, it means ‘the special one from God.’”