It was more difficult to stop being a pirate than to become one. Article 3 of the Brilliana’s code insisted on the Brotherhood’s agreement to any man’s – or woman’s – leaving of it.
The argument began with the sun still high and we sat in pools of shadow at the foot of palm trees. It was still going on by the time the sun went down and the shadows spread over the sand in duplication of the trees.
The Brilliana lay in the creek, propped to one side on stays with an occasional milky green wave stroking her stern. Farther out in the small bay, where the sea was the same turquoise as the sky, the Beginning stood at anchor, on watch for unfriendly shipping.
In the conference on the beach, the Frenchman Rosier sat and pounded on the sand, making trouble. ‘I say again, we do not let them go. Maybe they go straight to the authorities and send against us.’
I wondered where he found the energy to be angry; everybody else had given way to the lassitude of the evening, tired from a hard day’s careening. Sam had kept us all at it, uneasy at having his ship out of commission. Our hands were blistered and cut from limpet shells like tiny extinct volcanoes under the weed of the ship’s keel.
We’d eaten well. Licky had lifted conch from the tide edge where they lumbered along under their heavy, curious shells between blades of turtle grass and made us potfuls of what he called ‘chowder’.
Kilsyth said patiently, ‘Ye’ve got our word, mannie.’ He was propped on one elbow, but he’d begun whistling a dirge he called ‘The Mucking of Geordie’s Byre’, a sign he was losing his temper.
Rosy turned on him. ‘And when some person ask how you arrive, what you say? We flew like damn bird? No, you say we come on a ship. Which ship, they say. Ship that turn pirate, you say. You tell or they put you in pokey. I say you keep with us.’
As well as dining on chowder, we’d had chicken. The chickens had sailed in that afternoon. A strange business. There’d been a signal from the Beginning out in the bay, ‘Vessel approaching’, and everybody primed their weapons while Nobby prepared two of the cannon we’d run ashore from the Brilliana.
The vessel proved to be a small single-masted dinghy, no more than ten feet long. Sam sent one of the men up a palm tree and he shouted down that the said craft held only one person, a female. Guns were put away, jackets brushed, hair slicked down to await this Aphrodite from the foam.
The little boat scudded up the creek, keel grounding on the sand, sail collapsing, in one expert procedure. A dozen pairs of hands pulled it up on to the beach. We could hear hens cackling in a crate tucked into the boat’s fish well.
Out of the boat clambered a black woman. The willing hands dropped nervelessly away from the gunwales. She was large, very large, her skirt and jacket – once of military persuasion – bounced in various directions when she moved as if covering bubbling lava. A bandana tied at the back hid her hair and on top of that was a battered, brimmed hat which had led an exciting life, again some of it military. It was crammed so far down her forehead it was difficult to see anything more of her face than that it was of indeterminate age and wasn’t going to tolerate liberties. A bandolier, the sort they used in Cromwell’s Model Army, hung across her chest but, instead of powder bottles, it carried two sheathed knives and a vast collection of ribboned, feathered and beaded objects – one of them a monkey skull, or what we all hoped was a monkey skull.
She said nothing, didn’t even look around her, but began unloading her boat, passing the crate of chickens, baskets of fruit and vegetables and lines of fish to her staring audience, as if she’d landed at a market instead of a cay in the remoter Bahamas inhabited only by strange men.
‘How did she know we were here?’ I asked Licky.
He shrugged. ‘She a higgler. They smell trade on de wind.’ He shouted at the higgler in patois and was answered by a grunt or two. ‘Yip. Higgler.’ He shrugged again. ‘Wutless.’
Worthless? Witless? Whatever he meant, the higgler established herself as part of the scenery within half an hour, sitting with her knees wide apart, scraping conch from their shells. Nobby tried to pinch her arse and got a cackle of laughter and a blow from a forearm that knocked him backwards.
The rest of us left her alone. Even the black men avoided her, while Licky treated her with an indifference, almost contempt, which wasn’t like him. It was all very odd. I said so to Sam.
‘A black witch, do ee think?’ he said, making the sign of the horns, ‘Her kniffed us out p’raps.’
She could have sniffed Nobby. He was the only one of us who refused to bathe in the deep-water pool we’d found in the centre of the island. But it wasn’t likely.
However, the argument from the circle on the beach was heating up so I turned my attention to it and forgot the higgler, like everybody else. Rosier was saying, ‘Over my corpse they leave,’ and I had to stop Kilsyth reaching for his sword to arrange it.
The crew weren’t really afraid we’d betray them, they just didn’t want us to go. Kilsyth was a favourite, his bravado encouraged them, his accent made them laugh. My appeal was considerably less, although I’d become a sort of unofficial first lieutenant to Sam Rogers.
It was Bratchet they couldn’t bear to lose; their good-luck piece, something between sweetheart, sister and figurehead, the spirit of the ship. They’d miss her; she’d miss them. But it was time to go.
Earlier they’d taken a vote whether to continue with piracy or not. Everybody had their say, some for, some against. Sam asked what I thought, so I spoke up. ‘There’s two things you can do. Give up or go on. I say, give up. Sell the Beginning and her cargo in Nassau. It ain’t a fortune but it’s tidy, more gelt than most of us have seen before. After all, what’ve you done? Mutinied against a Jacobite bastard and taken an enemy ship. The government’s not going to come after you for that. Sail the Brilliana on to Jamaica, bung the governor a few pearls and we’ll all go our own way. That’s my advice.’
They didn’t take it. Their success against the Spanish ship had whetted their appetite for greater things; they told each other stories of Morgan, Sawkins, of the moidores and gold to be had for the taking in the Pacific. Sam and a few others might welcome retirement but their home countries had warrants out for their arrest and they would be happy nowhere else. Now there would be another vote on whether they allowed Kilsyth, Bratchet, Licky and me to leave the Brotherhood.
I don’t think the crew realized that their reluctance to let us all go was also because Licky had declared his wish to go with us. ‘Time I’s gwine home,’ he told them. And home was Jamaica. None of them knew how important their black sea-cook was to them or how clever.
But Bratchet knew. ‘He engineered the mutiny,’ she told me, ‘And he brought us here, all the way from Le Havre. He’s the one who’s really driven the ship.’
And now he’d driven it to this island. Where a higgler had suddenly turned up. Very odd. Licky was the only one who’d known we’d be here. He’d navigated us past bigger islands and the lights they showed which, he said, were trying to draw us on to the reefs, the inhabitants making their living by wrecking honest and dishonest sailormen alike. He’d made us pass hundreds of smaller, low, white-fringed, uninhabited islands, until we’d reached this one. He said the water was fresh here, ‘a blue hole’, he said.
Certainly, the lake in its centre was a wonder, worth the struggle through mangroves and thorn undergrowth to reach it. Sunlight filtered down through a canopy of leaves into its shallows where translucent shoals of tiny fish flashed silver one moment, dark the next. But I reckoned there must be blue holes on other islands we’d passed. Why had he chosen this one?
The higgler was baiting hooks on a line, a silhouette against a mother-of-pearl sky of masculine hat on feminine body. Her bare feet were the same indistinguishable colour from dust and sand as the crabs which formed a wider circle around us, hundreds of pairs of eyes on stalks, like miniature boot-buttons; they, the island’s only natives, watched and waited for us to go away so that they could get on with scuttling and burrowing and whatever else it was crabs did by night.
Nearby, Bratchet had curled up on the sand with Kilsyth’s jacket over her. She was asleep. I jerked my thumb towards her. ‘So you go on. It’s your choice, you know the risk. But do you want her to take it? Want her on the gallows with you? Think about it.’
The silence was filled by frogs – Licky said they were frogs – with their maddening, bell-like, night-long chanting. Sam called for a vote. It was a close one again. Sam had to count twice. ‘The ayes have it,’ he said, heavily. ‘They go.’
Officially, the Bahamas were granted to six English noblemen known as the Lords Proprietors by Charles II, though neither he nor the Lords Proprietors had bothered much about the islands, leaving them to the care of governors who, without soldiers or ships, couldn’t do much to enforce English rule and gave up trying.
In effect, the islands were lawless. Those settlers who’d tried to make an honest living were harassed by French and Spanish to the point that luring ships on to their coral reefs proved not only a main source of income, but a form of national defence.
Then came the pirates, happy to find hidden inlets and cays they could sail out from against ships taking the Florida and Windward passages. Successive governors hanged the weaker ones and on the if-you-can’t-beat-’em-join-’em principle co-operated with the stronger.
By the time the Brilliana sailed in to sell her prize and its cargo, Nassau, the natural harbour on New Providence, was one of the most thriving ports in the West Indies for the disposal of stolen goods. It was there we said goodbye. It was hard saying it to Sam Rogers, Nobby and some of the others (both Nobby and Bratchet were in tears), but most of the crew were already gone ashore, leaping into the longboats, a few diving over the side and swimming, heading for the brothels of the town like iron filings for a magnet.
We four reckoned it was wiser not to be seen in Nassau – our story was going to be that we’d been cast away – so we said our farewells on the Brilliana and then got into the higgler’s dinghy and she sailed us across the harbour to the vessel which Licky had chosen to take us on to Jamaica.
I studied it as we approached. ‘I ain’t usually choosy,’ I said, ‘but is that the best you could do?’
Licky rolled his eyes. ‘’F you cast off by pirate, this de sort of boat pirate cast you off in. What you want? Arrive at Port Royal in a galleon with trumpets? Mighty noticeable. Higher the blackbird fly, de more he show he tail.’
‘It’s no the flying high, it’s the getting there,’ said Kilsyth, ‘What the De’il is she?’
She was a dowdy fifty-foot schooner. The smell was her cargo – sponges that had been dragged from their beds to rot in shallow water and were now drying on every part of the lofty rigging as if the boat had been attacked by a swarm of dandelion clocks.
But there are worse sleeping surfaces than mattresses of sponge. There wasn’t much space and there was less privacy but Kilsyth and I, at least, spent much of our time catching up on sleep that had been disturbed for months by work and watches. We left the sailing to the two mulattos, Christopher and Samson, who made up the crew.
By day we lazed under a canvas awning in the cockpit, drinking rum, eating meals of grits, lobster and something called ‘journey cake’ that Licky cooked with charcoal in the stern on a waist-high wooden box filled with sand. We watched the flying fish and, once or twice, the spout of whales playing, while the boat with its wide expanse of sail went through the water as if the sea was opening inches in front of her prow.
Behind us, in her dinghy with its painter attached to our stern, we dragged the higgler, her hat down over her eyes, fishing for green turtles.
As we hopped from island to island, other higglers came aboard with their baskets, sometimes taking a lift to the next cay. They were the nomads of the Caribbean, always women, always black and always accepted by the mulattos as if they were no more than seagulls alighting and taking off again.
They fascinated Bratchet. ‘Who are they?’ she asked Licky, ‘Where do they come from?’
He shrugged. ‘That last one, she one-time Bantu; this one one-time Guinea.’
‘Where’s Bantu? Where’s Guinea?’
‘Africa.’
It hadn’t occurred to us until then that Africa consisted of differing peoples; it had always seemed inhabited by a genus known as ‘slaves’. The higglers, even though they all seemed to be called ‘Nanny’, had individual histories, traditions, homes, languages. ‘How did they get here?’
‘Slave ship. Maybe dey’s mother, maybe grandmother.’
‘But how here? How’d they get free?’
‘Massa got no use for them. Maybe he dead. Maybe dey give him baby an’ he grateful.’ His grin indicated he’d made a joke.
Bratchet pointed to the dinghy bobbing behind us. ‘What about her? Where’d she come from?’
Licky’s face changed. ‘She Ashanti Coromantin,’ he said reluctantly.
‘And you?’ I asked him, ‘Where’d you come from?’
He said, ‘Don’ ask me where I bin, ask me where I’m gwine.’
Her name, inevitably, was Nanny. I could see why Bratchet was intrigued with the higgler. She should have seemed lonely and wasn’t; there was purpose to her. I decided she was a black Kit Ross without Mother Ross’s appeal. She ignored us. Every so often she chanted a three-note warble, more like a prayer than song. Licky and the mulattos paid her no attention. After a while, Kilsyth and I didn’t either.
Until the water spout came.
It was the last passage of the voyage and for almost the first time we were out of sight of land. Behind us were the Caymans, ahead Jamaica, and around us nothing but sea acting strangely; catspaws of wind shivered across it and billowed the sails before letting them flap. The sun changed; it was still shining but gained the colour of copper. Christopher and Samson were nervous and chattering to each other; after a bit they began taking down the mainsail, then two of the three headsails, leaving just a foresail.
I looked around for the storm they must be expecting and saw nothing. And then I did.
‘God help us,’ said Kilsyth beside me.
Impossible to judge how far off it was. A thin, evil, wavering column of darkness, a snake that reared up from sea to sky, dancing by itself. It saw us; I could have sworn it saw us. It headed towards us.
Everything was darkening, I pushed Bratchet’s head down but, myself, I couldn’t look away. It wouldn’t matter anyway. If it decided on us, we’d splatter like a squashed frog, bits of the boat and bodies exploding into splinters under the pressure.
It came on. We could hear it now, roaring, and see debris tossing in it, a mast, trees, rags. The mulattos fell down on their faces as if worshipping. I didn’t blame them. The fear was not so much what it would do to us as of the thing itself; it was too big, cathedrals high, nothing I’d ever seen was so gigantic. It was naked, untamed power, it would annihilate us. And it kept bloody twirling.
Licky scrambled past me and screamed something at the higgler. The boat was bucking like a horse trying to get away. It went on bucking, and on, then less.
‘Christ,’ I said, ‘It’s going.’
And it was. Dancing off as if it found us an unsuitable partner. The wind blew us around like straw but it was a relief to feel my body solid enough to be battered; I thought it had turned liquid.
Bratchet looked up at me, keeping her eyes away from the sea and the dreadful thing still twirling across it. ‘What happened?’
‘She sent it away,’ I said. I still didn’t believe it. Kilsyth had seen it too. He was pale and looking behind, at the higgler. ‘She stood,’ he shouted, ‘she stood up and pointed a knife at it.’
Licky was triumphant. He shouted back, ‘It was de Devil’s tail. She told he she cut it if he din’t go.’
The higgler was standing, holding on to her rocking mast, still pointing a knife in the direction the waterspout had gone. Her hat had blown off and was fluttering in the well of the dinghy.
Later, in the evening, when the wind had become a mere sprightly breeze, the Bratchet got us to haul in on the painter so that she could step into the dinghy. From the sponge boat we couldn’t hear what they said to each other. The higgler got on with cleaning fish, slitting their bellies with the knife that had threatened to cut the Devil’s tail, scooping out their entrails and throwing them to hovering, screaming gulls. Bratchet sat on a thwart, facing her.
Kilsyth watched the two women, then ushered me forward to the privacy of the prow. ‘I’d favour a conversation wi’ ye, my man.’
‘I’m listening.’ We settled ourselves on the coping.
Kilsyth coughed. ‘It’s Mistress Bratchet. I’m seekin’ your permission to approach her, you being in loco parentis.’
‘I’m what?’
The Scotsman coughed again. ‘This is verra difficult. Her having been your serving maid an’ all, ye are the nearest thing to a guardian the lassie has and I would be correct. I wish to approach her. Wi’ your permission.’
‘You want to marry her?’
Kilsyth shook his head, unabashed. ‘Tha’s no possible. My chief has an arrangement that I’m to wed his cousin’s daughter when the lass is old enough.’
I tried to consider. ‘Let me understand. You want my permission to ask Bratchet to be your mistress. Is that it?’
Kilsyth blinked. ‘Ye’re an unco’ bold speaker.’ He stopped being ridiculous. ‘Martin, I love the woman. It’s been coming on me these past weeks she’s the bravest, loveliest female I’ve aye met with. Her past is unfortunate, mebbe, but…’
‘You’re a fool,’ I told him.
‘I am that. But I care for her.’ He became formal again. ‘And I have reason to think that she’ll look kindly on my addresses.’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘she probably will.’
‘I’ll ask when we arrive in Jamaica and take her straight home. She’ll want for no comfort, nor affection. The puir wee thing’s had little enough of both. I’ll set her up in a manner that’ll do her the justice she deserves. Do I have your permission?’
Jesus Christ, the man was a fool. I said, ‘You don’t see it, do you? How many women have we met since we started out? Haven’t you learned anything? Nobody owns ’em. We think we can, but we can’t. No, you bloody can’t have my permission. If you want to fuck the girl, ask her, not me. She’s not a bloody present. I’m not giving her to you; she ain’t mine to give. Now sod off.’
Kilsyth got up. He stood for a while holding on to a halyard, looking down at me. ‘I didna realize,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry.’
I said, ‘And while we’re on the subject, where is Kilsyth?’
‘A speck north o’ Glasgae. Why?’
‘Glasgow. That’s south, ain’t it? Lowlands. You’re not a bloody Highlander at all.’
‘My heart’s in the Highlands, along wi’ my chief,’ said Kilsyth, stolidly. ‘D’ye want a fight over it?’
‘No.’
‘Will we shake hands then?’
We shook hands.
There was a hail from the dinghy. Bratchet was shouting: ‘Pull us in. You should hear this.’
We pulled on the painter and helped the two women into the sponge boat.
Bratchet was pale. ‘She knew Anne and Mary.’
Shit, I thought. Isn’t there anybody those two bloody harpies didn’t know? The last thing we needed was to get involved again in the search for them. It had cost us too much already.
Bratchet was shaking. She arranged her cloak on a thwart so that the higgler could sit down on it. She was treating the woman as if she were royalty, but she was also afraid – not of the higgler herself but of the aura around her. She introduced her reverently: ‘This is Asantewa. You address her as great-grandmother.’
Asantewa seated herself and stared impassively for’ard where Christopher had lit a lantern. The sun was going down with the colour of fire, washing all of us in red. Licky, I noticed, was busying himself with the stove in the stern. Kilsyth, Bratchet and I sat down opposite the higgler. Her eyes were shut against the glare of the sunset.
‘Tell them, great-grandmother,’ said Bratchet.
The higgler said, ‘I tell you things, girl, ’cos my forces bring you half across de worl’ to fin’ out. I tell these here what good for them and no more, you hear?’
Bratchet nodded.
Asantewa began. ‘One time I is slave to a whitey call hisself Vinner. He run big, big plantation in foothills of Blue Mountains in Jamaica. That Vinner, he one wicked whitey.’ She dragged out the word ‘whitey’ until it scraped nerves. ‘He don’ feed he slaves. They get spoon and plate disease. But they still get bull-whip for if they don’ work hard. Pretty lady slaves, they get picked for his haireem, but he don’ pick me ’cos I is ugly.’ A faint smile crossed her face. ‘Ugly women, they give you yo’ meals on time. I get promoted from fiel’ work to housekeeper.’
Until then the higgler had been speaking with her eyes closed. Now she opened them. The effect was extraordinary. With the last flash of the sun, they glowed blood red. I heard Kilsyth gasp.
The higgler smiled again. She was ugly, but the force in her overrode her outward appearance so that what you saw was power, intelligent power. I could almost have believed that the waterspout had indeed turned and fled from her. I wanted to myself.
She went on talking in what I came to know as the Creole slave accent. But as the light faded, her eyes turned from red to a deep brown which had bled in tiny veins into the yellowish white surround and they dragged us all into them, away from the boat and the sea and sky, into a place of heated, human darkness. We saw images in them produced by her words as if she was creating moving paintings.
One day, she said, Vinner brought a white girl back from the quayside auctions. She was very pretty, intelligent and extremely angry at being sold into service. Her name, she told Asantewa, was Anne Bonny. She’d been stolen from a London quayside, taken to Jamaica and sold at auction to Asantewa’s owner.
‘Vinner, he always puttin’ he whanga where it not wanted, but Anne, she ain’t havin’ it. She fight so hard when he try puttin’ it in her, he have to put it right back in he trousers.’ The eyes moved to regard Bratchet. ‘Mighty brave, that Anne,’ said Asantewa. ‘She whitey skinned, but she black in she soul. Like you. You black underneath.’
Anne and Asantewa had become allied in their hatred of Vinner. Anne tried running away but had been caught and brought back and an extra three years added to her indenture. The physical punishment for her escape had been visited not on Anne, but on Asantewa, her friend, for assisting her. ‘He strip me to the waist, tie me to a post and give me twenty-five lashes. He make all he slaves watch so they see what happen if they disobey whitey.’
Bratchet was now sitting in the well of the boat, hugging her knees. ‘A red-lace jacket,’ she muttered.
The higgler shrugged. ‘If it don’t kill yuh, yuh ain’ dead.’
Instead of discouraging, the effect of the public whipping had been to increase Asantewa’s and Anne’s hatred of Vinner and they’d begun to foment rebellion.
‘We make they other slaves rise up one night,’ Asantewa said, ‘me an’ Anne an’ my Joshua. He my son. We burn Vinner’s house and lead the slaves up into the mountains to join the Maroons.’
‘What’s Maroons?’ I asked.
The higgler looked at me with disgust. ‘Dat ignorance, fella. Seems studiation ent eddication.’ But she went on to explain.
Of all England’s slave colonies in the West Indies, Asantewa said, Jamaica’s blacks were the most prone to rebellion. For one thing the island had more of them in proportion to the white population than anywhere else.
For another, Jamaica’s white masters, ‘they so stupid they can’ piss straight’, still allowed their slaves to die rather than fostering them in conditions that would encourage the breeding of generations used to slavery, and had to keep importing others direct from Africa who still retained an unquelled spirit.
Then there was Jamaica’s geography, perhaps the most varied in the Caribbean, which contained mountains so difficult of access they remained wild and unplanted. It was here the Maroons lived, descendants of blacks who’d come to the island with the Spanish and been left behind when England finally drove the Spanish out in the last century. They had established camps, even towns, in the mountains and every expedition sent against them had been beaten back.
And there they still were. Thorns in the flesh of the colonists. Examples of freedom to every slave on the island. And Anne Bonny, Asantewa and Joshua had joined them.
‘What happened to Vinner?’ asked Kilsyth.
A smile flickered over the higgler’s face. ‘He whanga don’t worry no girl no more.’
The alliance between Asantewa and Anne had been based on admiration of each other’s spirit. But the next example of a she-whitey’s courage had, said the higgler, ‘near blowed my hat off’.
Into their camp one day had marched a Maroon with a gun held on his back. Holding it had been a white woman, threatening to blow away his spine if he didn’t take her to her friend.
‘She call herself Mary Read,’ said Asantewa.
Christ almighty. Following in the steps of Mary Read had taken more than two years of our lives and bloody near ended them. It must have done no less to her, following in the steps of Anne, and she’d been alone. But when Mary had got this far she’d still had to track her friend down and follow her up into mountains and a hostile, suspicious bunch of renegades. I couldn’t have done it, I tell you.
I wondered what sort of woman it was who’d enlisted in the army for the sole reason, as far as I could see, of approaching near enough to France to cross the border and get herself to St-Germain so that she could ask Francesca’s help to get her to the West Indies, where Anne had been taken. And then gone there and found her.
‘Christ almighty,’ I said aloud.
The higgler nodded. ‘That Mary, she one determin’ lady. If she hol’ the light for the Devil, she blow it out in he face.’
‘Mary loved Anne very much,’ Bratchet said.
‘She must have.’
The Maroons, according to Asantewa, were not homogeneous; only their determination to stay free of whitey held them together. Their society had states within a state; there had been disagreement about the presence in it of two white women. In any case, Anne and Mary decided to leave it.
‘They women wid they home always in de next port of call,’ said the higgler, and added sadly, ‘And my Joshua, he de same breed.’
The two white girls and the black man had made their way to Negril Bay on the westerly tip of the island in the hope of finding a ship – the bay being sufficiently remote to give shelter to the occasional pirate and allow the unloading of goods from vessels as didn’t want to pay duty.
‘They fin’ ship all right,’ said Asantewa, shaking her head. ‘They fin’ Calico Jack. He big, big pirate. He take them on.’
Asantewa was at the time pursuing her own career among the Maroons. We gathered it mostly involved pitting her brand of witchcraft against the indigenous variety – and winning. ‘I is their ohemmaa,’ she told us. ‘It like to your queen, only big, big.’
Occasionally news came to her of Anne and Mary and Joshua. Calico Jack was causing havoc on the high seas. In a profession famous for its eccentric captains, he was gaining an especial place in its folklore because of the two wild women who boarded prizes alongside him and fought with even more ferocity than the men.
I looked at Kilsyth. He was pained, but not as distraught as he was when he’d first heard of the two women’s piracy. He’d buried his Anne then. I turned back to Asantewa. ‘They were caught, though.’
She nodded. ‘They caught. All the crew. Calico Jack. My Joshua. Anne, Mary. They taken to St Jago. The judge, he hang Calico Jack and de rest of de men. Mary and Anne, they plead their bellies. Their hangin’ delayed till the babies be born.’
‘And?’ I asked.
The dark eyes looked straight into Bratchet’s, not mine. ‘Ain’t no “and”. They die in prison, Mary, Anne, babies. All die.’
I waited for the Bratchet to say her usual, ‘They ain’t dead.’
She didn’t. But as if she had, Asantewa emphasized the point, still watching her. ‘Dead women don’t walk from dey coffin, girl. Dey dead and dere’s an end to it.’
There was silence. The sun was well gone by now and the moon hadn’t yet come up. The boat’s lantern might have been the only light in the universe, an insignificant pinprick in the blackness of night.
Asantewa yawned and stretched up her arms, sending out a strong smell of sweat and herbs. ‘I go back now.’ We helped her back into her dinghy, offered her a light of her own, which she refused. Once the painter had been paid out, she was beyond the circle cast by our lantern, bobbing along behind us somewhere in the dark of the sea.
We ate Licky’s meal in silence. Even the usually talkative mulattos were quiet. It was as if the higgler had hurt us. And in some way I suppose she had. For Kilsyth and Bratchet there’d be pain that women they’d loved had been brought to such an end. As for me, I wished I felt more relief than I did. I’d chased Mary and Anne for so long I’d begun to feel the bond that is formed by the hunter with the hunted; I’d followed their spoor, only to find that somebody else had brought them down. And I was sorry. Two high-spirited creatures had deserved better. They hadn’t asked to become quarry.
No, it wasn’t even that which caused my unease. The higgler’s story was unfulfilling. I had no reason to doubt it; in essence it was what the former pirates aboard the Brilliana had told us. The girls had died in prison. I just wished I could be certain that the Bratchet believed it. Before we settled down for the night, I told her I was sorry that her friends had come to such an end.
‘“They dead,”’ she said, quoting the higgler. ‘“They dead and there’s an end of it.” Odd, ain’t it? That’s what Effie used to say.’
It occurred to me later in the night that the higgler hadn’t said what had happened to her son, Joshua, who’d gone pirating with the girls and Calico Jack. Presumably he’d hanged with the rest of the men. I thought it strange, though, that she hadn’t mentioned it.
But then, she was a very strange woman.
Back in 1692 a great earthquake deposited half of Jamaica’s Port Royal and its population into the sea. I remember my father rejoicing about it when the news came to England. ‘Another Sodom has received the Lord’s punishment for wickedness,’ he said. As far as he was concerned, a city of buccaneers, privateers, prostitutes and gamblers had got its just deserts.
I suppose there had been plenty of sinners living in the streets and houses that were suddenly thrown into the sea; there’d also been pastrycooks, sailors and soldiers, cabinet-makers, silversmiths, buildings, shops, a merchants’ exchange which was envied even in London, where grandees strolled in the shade of a colonnaded gallery, with liveried Negro servants to proffer them Madeira and canary and rum punches.
Sam Rogers had known it in its great days. He’d told me it had been a free-wheeling, crowded, turbulent, beautiful city where Catholics, Anglicans, Presbyterians, Jews and atheists had managed to live side by side without too much animosity and where buccaneers and English colonial administration had reached an uneasy accommodation.
Then came 7 June 1692. Judgement Day. Two of Port Royal’s four forts, most of the bigger shops and houses, churches and the exchange went under thirty feet of water. Half the population went with them. The other half contracted the fever caused by so many floating corpses and, finally, ten years later, a fire wiped out what was left of the town. Old Port Royal had gone for ever. So had the buccaneers. They made their bases elsewhere and Jamaica was left to the one god. Sugar.
Now what faced us as we sailed into it in our sponge boat was one of the world’s greatest harbours, bigger than any in England. The survivors of the earthquake had built a new town across the harbour from the one that had once stood on what was now just a sand spit, and called it Kingston.
It was as beautiful as Port Royal must have been in its way – wide, symmetrical streets in a gridiron pattern, low houses with balconies, arcaded passageways keeping the sun from pedestrians – and definitely more respectable. Regiments drafted in from England kept order, despite the fact that half the soldiers died almost immediately from yellow fever. The colonial population often resented the rule and taxes of its home government in peacetime but in wartime, as now, depended on it for protection from the French. Behind the town, piling up against the horizon to a height of 7,500 thousand feet, was a huge mountain range.
‘Home,’ Licky told us as we leaned over the sponge boat’s gunwale. ‘Them’s my Blue Mountains.’
They looked purple, an effect of distance and the evening light, and imposed a sort of savagery over the ordered, busy scene below them.
Ships of all kinds were in harbour, big cargo vessels receiving huge 1,000 lb hogsheads of sugar into their hold, some having barrels of rum rolled up their gangplanks. Others were unloading goods from England – we saw a harpsichord lowered to the quay in a net, followed by a billiard table.
Then Licky, Bratchet and I smelled a stench we’d met before. It reached us from a quay on the long spit of land leading into the main harbour as we sailed by it. One ship was already unloading and two others were uncovering their hatches ready. Unlike any other vessels they had nets round their decks – to stop their cargo jumping overboard. The slaves were being lined up on the quay and a long chain that passed from one’s ankle to another’s clanked as they moved. A barrow was going back and forth on another gangplank, bringing down those that hadn’t survived the voyage and tipping them into a heap.
Bratchet closed her eyes. ‘It looked a beautiful place when we sailed in,’ she said. I knew how she felt.
A white clergyman was greeting the slaves. His voice came over the water in a clear monotone. ‘Give thanks, my children. You have been delivered from the dark continent to a land where you may be baptized by the pure water of Christianity.’
‘Alleluia,’ muttered Licky, ‘They lucky.’
His attention, though, was not on the slaves but the harbour. ‘It gone got civilized,’ he said, indignantly. ‘Patrol boats. Customs. I better get ashore secret.’ He turned to Bratchet. ‘They’ll be questions so you tell ’em. You was took an’ couldn’t help yusself. Tell true and shame de Devil. An’ then you get de fuss boat home. Don’ you stay.’
He turned to me. ‘Don’ let her stay, Marty. She kill her. She kill you all.’
‘Who?’
‘Jamaica. She got sickness you ain’t even heard of. She kill you.’
‘I’m going to this St Jago first,’ Bratchet said.
‘You ain’t.’
‘I am.’
Licky shook his head. ‘Shoulda let you jump,’ he said.
‘But you didn’t.’ She added, ‘Your Majesty.’
He looked carefully at her. ‘What else she tell you?’
‘That she summoned you back.’ Bratchet frowned. ‘How did she summon you back?’
‘Us get around,’ he said.
He said his goodbyes quickly and then stepped into the dinghy with the higgler, shifted a basket of paddling, helpless green turtles, and nodded to her to row. Immediately they blended into the rowdy, busy traffic of the harbour where other higglers plied between the ships, boats carrying hogsheads of fresh water went back and forth and white customs men in smart uniforms were rowed from vessel to vessel by black men in rags.
‘What was all that about?’ I asked Bratchet.
‘The higgler’s his mother,’ was all she said then. She was crying.
We daren’t wave for fear of drawing attention to him but we watched the dinghy until we lost sight of it in the waterborne crowd. Kilsyth became brisk. ‘He says we’ll not be able to transfer ourselves to another ship without questions, so here’s my plan. The governor’s a Hamilton, Licky tells me, and if he’s the Hamilton I ken he is he’s my cousin’s brother-in-law. I’ll go ashore, bruit his name and satisfy their questions and book us a passage as quick as lickit.’
‘I’m going to St Jago first,’ Bratchet said.
Kilsyth turned on her. ‘That’s inland, woman. Ye’ll not.’
‘They were sentenced there,’ she told him, ‘Anne and Mary. I’m going to find out what happened.’
‘We know what happened.’
‘I want to find out for myself.’
‘Och, we’ll argy-bargy later,’ he said. ‘I’m off to procure us a passage.’ He leaned over the side and shouted, and five or more skiffs came racing towards us, each one offering to row him ashore at a bargain price.
‘Why’d you call Licky “Your Majesty”?’ I asked Bratchet when he’d gone.
‘Asantewa’s his mother, she’s Queen of the Maroons. She appoints their king. She summoned him back so that he can be the king, their ohene.’
‘And I’m to be Queen of the May,’ I told her. ‘Bratchie, that higgler’s a fat, crafty old woman. That’s all she is. Stop talking like she’s some miracle-monger.’
Bratchet shook her head. ‘She sends out magic. She saved us from the waterspout thing. She summoned Licky to come to her from thousands of miles away.’
I hated to see her in thrall to superstition. It offended the Puritanism in me. Everything was explicable. The waterspout business’d had me on my heels for a while, but they’re chancy things and veer where the weather takes them.
As for summoning Licky… as he himself had said, ‘Us get around.’ And now I came to think of it, they do. They thread the streets of London, amiable black faces under turbans, bright livery, black hands holding a parasol over a fashionable female head, arms folded on the back of carriages. Noticeable yet unnoticed.
They’d been at Marly, little ones treated like pet monkeys, grey-haired ones polishing boots. There’d been two at St-Germain-en-Laye.
Maybe the links of the chains on the slaves shuffling along the quay back there were connected to the less-visibly fettered black servants all over the world, I thought. Maybe they were an international conduit of information, black telling black what they needed to know. A Negro secret service through which a woman had summoned her son from 3,000 miles away.
But when I explained this to the Bratchet she wouldn’t have it. ‘She summoned me.’
‘Witchdoctor stuff,’ I told her, ‘Licky told her you were on the trail of Anne and Mary. She happened to know them, so she made her knowledge look like magic. There’s no denying it was a coincidence you met, but coincidences happen. It’s a small community, piracy; if you’re connected with it, you only have to arrive in the West Indies to find somebody knows somebody you know.’
Around us, the trade of the harbour was slackening as the sun set. The mulattos had gone off to a tavern and we sat looking out on a quay that was emptied of everything except sponges. I lost my patience with the Bratchet. ‘If you believe everything that old ebony says, why don’t you take her word that Anne and Mary are dead? Going to this St Jago place, it’s madness.’
She stayed obstinate. To Bratchet, the higgler was Effie Sly come back, same physical hugeness, same certainty and aggression. And just as daunting. But Bratchet hadn’t believed Effie when she’d said Anne and Mary were dead, and she wasn’t going to believe the higgler either.
‘I wonder where Kilsyth is,’ she said, and put her head back against the coping and fell asleep.
Long after dark, Kilsyth came back with an old acquaintance. ‘I’d have ye meet Johnny Faa. And a wonderful lucky case to encounter him on a Jamaican waterfront, having last met wi’ him poaching woodcock in the Highlands.’ He clapped the man on the shoulder. ‘We’re well met by moonlight, Johnny.’
‘We air that, Maister Livingstone,’ said Johnny Faa, ‘An unco’ small world it is. But it’s Maister Faa noo.’ He smiled to show he was neither giving nor taking offence.
‘I’ve met with fortune sin syne an’ am a respectable body if ye please, wi’ a tidy house in Laws Street and a bonny estate out by St Andrew.’ He swept off his hat. ‘And the both at ye’re disposal as lang as ye gang.’
He was a thin man, well dressed, and he smiled a lot. He’d obviously come up in the world. Something about his eyes and teeth gave me the impression he’d eaten whoever owned his clothes before. Still, Kilsyth seemed pleased at finding a fellow Scot and it would have been churlish to gang anywhere else after his invitation, even if we’d had anywhere else to gang.
He’d employed a black linkboy to light our way and we followed him through the streets. Kilsyth was having trouble adjusting to the ex-poacher’s new status and kept addressing him as ‘Johnny’ and having to be reminded that it was ‘Maister Faa noo’.
When we got to his house, he insisted on showing us over it, but we were too tired to notice much more than it was overfurnished and hot. A black woman led us to our rooms and beds that were covered by a tent of muslin. To ward off ‘gallinippers’, she said. I didn’t care if they were there to ward off the French cavalry; underneath mine was the first real bed I’d seen since we were taken at Le Havre.
It came as a shock to realize that it had been more than twelve months ago. Johnny Faa had been out late in Kingston because he had been celebrating Hogmanay Night with fellow-Scots. The year was 1710. Bratchet, Kilsyth and I had left England in the autumn of 1707.
By the time we gathered in the dining room next morning, our host had already gone out to the harbour to investigate such ships as might take us to England. We settled down over a breakfast of bacon and kidneys to flesh out the story that Kilsyth had given in brief to Johnny Faa the night before.
It was a watered-down version of the truth. The ship bringing us to Jamaica had been taken over by mutineers who turned pirate and, once arrived in the Bahamas, had cast us ashore. A passing, friendly sponge boat had brought us to Kingston.
We hoped we’d be on our way home before we had to face questioning on the pirates’ names and, just as difficult to answer, what we’d been doing on the Holy Innocent, a ship belonging to Louis XIV, in the first place. Kilsyth and I still had Sam’s certificates of exoneration and could show them if necessary. But I hoped it wouldn’t be necessary.
Nor did I want to go into why we’d been in France; that could wait until I got home and met Defoe or Harley. They knew I hadn’t gone over to the enemy, had sent back all the information I could, but Kilsyth was in a more irregular position.
It was Kilsyth who pointed out that, while we were here, so was the Bratchet. Johnny Faa, he said, had looked at him askance that a young woman had undergone capture and had, in any case, been travelling with two men, neither of them her husband.
‘So I told him she was your sister, Martin.’
‘My what?’
‘Will ye wheesht? I told him the lassie here was your sister. Else he would have thought her the leman of us both. We’re back in respectable society the now.’
Bratchet grinned. ‘Miss Millet,’ she said, ‘good name. Very respectable.’
‘Oh, thank you,’ I said, ‘thank you very much.’
When Johnny Faa came back he reported that the only ships in port destined for England at the moment were sugar boats and naval vessels. Sugar boats were too slow and uncomfortable, he said. ‘And as for the navy…’ he winked and tapped his nose at Kilsyth with a beringed finger, one Jacobite to another ‘…I spier ye’d prefer a voyage without question.’
He promised that in a week or two the Laird o’ Kirkaldy would be arriving to take on a cargo of his muscavady sugar. ‘And she’ll tak’ you back to our ane land swift as blackcock to the heather.’
Until then, he suggested, we repair with him to his estate in the hills – ‘awa’ frae the worst o’ the heat. I mun go back there, for the Negro’s apt to be negligent if I’m no there to tickle him up. And I’ll no part wi’ ye yet. Na, na, I dinna meet such friends as you in Jamaiky every night.’
Bratchet said, ‘Is your estate near St Jago something or other, Master Faa?’
‘St Jago de la Vega,’ he supplied. ‘A step, Mistress Millet, if ane’s fresh and sober, though we call it Spanish Town the now.’
‘Then I am sure that Master Livingstone, my brother and myself would be delighted.’
Our delight was nothing to his, which was effusive. ‘In the meantime, mistress, ye’ll mebbe wish to trick yesel’ wi’ a new gown or two an’ I’m thinkin’ the gentlemen’ll want to avail thesselves of a fresh collar.’
We realized what we looked like to outsiders. Even our patches were salt-stained. Kilsyth had lain aside his kilt for breeks while aboard ship – to the disappointment of Nobby, who’d wanted to see him go up rigging in it – but, donned again, it still looked as if it had known suffering.
The irony was that, while our prize shares had put our finances in good order, they weren’t in negotiable form. ‘We’ll discuss the matter,’ said Kilsyth with grandeur and added, after a wait, ‘With your permission, Master Faa.’
‘Oh. Weel then,’ said Johnny Faa reluctantly, ‘I’ll leave ye the whiles.’
When he’d gone I said, ‘Catch me offering a shopkeeper pearls and a silver pig. We’d get new collars all right, a bloody rope.’
‘Aye, we need a banker.’
‘Same applies. What’s the use of us telling the authorities we’re poor victims of piracy if we’re walking around with pirate loot?’
‘We’ll hae to confide in Johnny Faa. He’s a leal Jacobite like myself. He’ll no betray us.’
‘Well, I don’t trust the bugger.’
Bratchet breathed out in relief. ‘I don’t, either.’
Kilsyth wouldn’t have it, though, that Johnny was anything but ‘leal’ and, since there was little alternative, we had to let him call the man back and explain the situation.
‘Weel, weel,’ said Johnny, craftily, ‘Ye fell in wi’ kindlier pirates than the usual shake-rags, I’m thinking. I’d no mention pearls and siller to the magister when ye face him. Still and all, the governor will mebbe swallow its witters, him bein’ a cousin and no long in office.’
He advanced us money, promising to exchange pearls and pig with his own banker who was ‘unco’ discreet’.
Then we went shopping. Bratchet, I realized, had never done any. By God, did she take to it. She was a hummingbird in a nectar forest, a hen-raised duckling sliding into water. She wanted to buy everything. And Kingston was the place to do it. We went down shaded arcades where fair-skinned ladies tempted her into shops in soft, Creole voices. Black boys wafted her with a feathered fan while the ladies opened louvred cupboard doors as if they were parting the Red Sea to let her through to the Promised Land.
Her fellow shoppers were as exotic as the merchandise and as multi-coloured; beautiful, slim and very young black girls under the command of white gentlemen ordering gowns cut low; yellow and equally beautiful young women with a sneer and elaborate top-knots; anxious red-faced English matrons wondering what to wear for the governor’s ball.
Bratchet was all for lemon bombazine, but I’d been making a survey of the female clientele’s dress sense in the better emporia and worked out a compromise between over-warm respectability (the English wives) and the outrageous (the others). So I steered her towards pastel sprigged muslin and Indian cottons and suggested lace be sewn over what the shop ladies called ‘fashionable décolletage’. (How Kingston women don’t get sunburned muffins beats me.)
‘But I must have a hat like this,’ Bratchet protested, ‘Look at hers,’ pointing at a flat straw plate tilted almost to its wearer’s very pretty nose.
‘We’re avoiding the pirate moll look this year. We’ve got to report to the authorities this afternoon, for God’s sake. What about this one? Keeps the sun off and won’t scare the horses.’ This was a cartwheel with nice ribbons but Bratchet clung mutinously to the plate. ‘We want to look like somebody’s sister, not somebody’s kept woman.’
But it was the plate we went out with.
‘We don’t want to look like Mrs Defoe, either,’ she said.
I left my own attire to Kilsyth, who was showing an unsuspected enthusiasm for clothes-buying generally and ruffled shirts in particular, but who needed keeping an eye on.
‘What’s he at now?’ I asked, as Bratchet and I waited outside yet another outfitter’s. Bratchet looked at the name on the warehouse sign and saw a Mac in it. ‘Oh my God, a kilt. He’s trying to find another kilt.’
We sprinted inside, took an arm each and marched Kilsyth off; he was shouting over his shoulder, ‘Call yeself a Scotsman and ye’ve nae philibegs in your stock?’ To us, he complained, ‘The manny bare spoke English, let alone the Gaelic.’
‘Creole,’ explained Johnny Faa when we joined him at an inn on Harbour Street, ‘MacGregor was born here to braw Scots but he’s no their tongue, mair’s the pity. An’ I doot there’s a kilt this side o’ the Grampians.’
‘I hope there ain’t,’ I said to Kilsyth, ‘Look at your legs. Bloody near need careening.’
It was true. Kilsyth hadn’t yet got round to buying shoes or stockings and his bare legs were covered in lumps topped by weeping craters. He regarded them dolefully. ‘They’re powerful midges here, worse nor Scotland’s.’
‘Tha’s no midges,’ Faa said, ‘Tha’s gallinippers, Jamaican special. It’s to be hoped ye no wandered west in your travels afore I found ye last nicht. That’s swampland where blacks live wi’ foul vapours and an unchancy breed of insect.’
Kilsyth didn’t know where he’d wandered. He was persuaded, however, that trews were de rigueur for the tropics and, having drunk a glass or two of Madeira, which Faa assured us was a specific against the heat, we went to find them.
It had been pleasant on the verandah of the inn, which overlooked a quay where ferrymen took passengers and barrels of fresh water to other parts of the immense harbour. There was a breeze from the sea – Johnny Faa said it was healthy and known as ‘the Doctor’, as opposed to the hot wind that came down from the hills in the evening which was called ‘the Undertaker’. Changes of sentries were rowed out to the forts that guarded its entrances. Skiffs came in carrying smart officers from the naval vessels.
Best of all was the unofficial market just below the verandah where black women hustled passers-by to baskets full of yams, eddoes, corn, fruits and berries. Most of the women had a baby strapped to their hip and laughed and chaffed with each other.
Bratchet pointed at them. ‘Are they slaves?’ she asked Faa.
‘Oh aye. Frae the estates. An’ content to be so as your ee can tell.’
It wasn’t so pleasant in the streets now. Despite the breeze and Madeira, the heat was wearing. My leg was aching and I could see Bratchet being more bothered by things that had escaped her notice in the thrill of shopping.
Outside one warehouse which we entered in the search for Kilsyth’s trews was a large billboard stuck with notices. ‘£2 is Offered for the lodgement in the cages of the negro wench Phibba. She speaks Good English and may pass as Free. Guilty of petit maroonage before and carries stripes on breast and back.’
Another asked for the return to the Newton Estate of ‘the runaway Assey, a yellow skin girl about 16 years old, with a Negro freckle under one of her eyes and an Aperture in her top front Teeth. Being a good seamstress. 10s. reward for her recapture.’
There were a few advertisements… ‘James Evans who made shoes for the Fashionable of St James’s in England now plies his Trade in King Street, next to Beeston House…’ etc., but most of the notices demanded the return of escaped slaves.
‘Not all content, then,’ Bratchet said. Faa didn’t answer.
There was a contrast between the story of servitude told by the notices, by Licky and the higgler, by what we’d seen with our own eyes, and the democracy of the culture that had been built on it. There was nowhere in Britain, and certainly not in France, where someone with a background like Johnny Faa’s, a herd from the Highlands, could have been accepted by the nobs as he was here, however many acres he owned – and we later discovered that he owned none, being merely the manager of an absentee landlord’s estate.
However, we had to keep pausing in the street to be introduced by him to Master Graham, ‘third son to Sir William of Dalrymple, ye ken’, or to Master Ferrars, ‘second cousin to Lord Plunkett’, or to Captain Courteen, ‘one of our biggest lairds’.
Everybody knew Johnny Faa – as he was pleased to point out all the time, with sidelong what-about-that glances at Kilsyth. Nobility entertained him in their houses, as he did them in his, and welcomed us, his guests, to their society. Invitations to ‘breakfast’ on various estates were given, and accepted – even from a gentleman Johnny Faa introduced as ‘Master Teague Macdoe’, whose Irish name was belied by his dark complexion, flat nose and crinkled hair.
‘Aye, a mulatto,’ said Faa as we left this last encounter, ‘A dingy Christian wi’ black blood only a generation back but the acres in Guanaboa Vale his father left him are fair enough.’
This was still a frontier society, poised over an outnumbering and potentially threatening black population; obviously, it was unwise to despise a neighbour who might have to help you keep it down.
‘And noo,’ said Johnny Faa, ‘ye must be explaining yesselves to Magister Thomas. I’ve done well for ye and told him ye’re kin to the governor and were took agin’ your will by scaff-raffs, for the rest ye must stand by your ane.’
I decided to leave that to Kilsyth, who was more likely to impress than I was. Bratchet was beginning to sag in the heat. I said I’d escort her back to Faa’s house, with her permission and his.
We could have done without Johnny Faa accompanying us, and his questions; how long had we known Maister Livingstone, why had he come here when he had been ‘so blythe in his ane land’, etc. I gave him vague answers, saying I’d come to seek a fortune in the colonies. ‘You’ll be no the worse of it,’ Faa assured me. ‘A man can live like a laird here, foreby he works hard.’
We found out what the ‘cages’ were that Phibba, the runaway, was to be lodged in when she was caught. We passed them in a marketplace, and Johnny Faa paused to peer in ‘to see if any o’ my ane blackbirds are singin’ within’. They were Kingston’s central repository for recaptured slaves, large hen coops, not tall enough for a person to stand up in, made of rectangular hardwood bars within which, in their own ordure, crouched a few black men and women.
‘The trick’s to leave them here a nicht or three to teach them they’re no worse at hame,’ Faa said.
He was disappointed at not finding his own two runaways, a man and a woman, who’d been missing for several weeks. ‘It might be so they’re wi’ the Maroons by noo, the De’il be in them,’ he said disgustedly. ‘Aweel, aweel, the branding iron’ll be kept heated for their return.’ He was quick to see that Bratchet had gone pale. ‘Dinna ye fash yersel’, mistress. Ye’ll soon see the sense o’ it.’
I saw her look up to the Blue Mountains which dominated Kingston’s skyline and knew she was wondering whether Licky and his mother had got to them safely. She pleaded a headache – a condition taken seriously in Jamaica – went to bed as soon as she got back and stayed there.
Kilsyth returned to say that Magistrate Thomas had been impressed sufficiently by his connections to swallow our story. ‘But he says we’ve to be examined by a Vice-Admiralty Court judge when we get to Spanish Town. A formality, he says. But the Vice-Admiralty’ll want to know the names of Sam Rogers and the others.’
‘Bugger.’
‘Martin, what else can we do?’
It was true. We had to explain our presence in Jamaica. A Vice-Admiralty Court would have all shipping lists; we couldn’t make up a non-existent ship. They’d check.
‘Och, it’ll all come right somehow, no doubt,’ Kilsyth said, ‘Let’s cross that bridge when we meet it.’
He’d caught up on the news at home while he’d been out. The Pretender, it appeared, had tried his invasion of Scotland soon after our departure from France and hadn’t even managed to land, but had been chased back home by the English navy.
We spent the evening drowning Scotland’s sorrows in rum. At least, Kilsyth and Faa did. I had other sorrows to drown. By the end of it they got maudlin, bewailing their country’s union with England.
‘’Tis the end of an auld song, an auld, auld song,’ Kilsyth was shouting. They began to sing it:
‘For Scotland’s Royal, Loyal, Joyal,
Jemmy’s our joy, the Whigs we defy all,
We mighted him, righted him
When England flighted him.
Tan ta ra ra ra, boys, now we’ll delight him.’
‘Go down well in a Vice-Admiralty Court that will,’ I said and staggered off to bed. Brachet hadn’t left hers.
Her headache had gone next morning but Kilsyth, not surprisingly, had gained one. As he and I mounted the horses waiting in the street to take us inland, he was unusually silent. Johnny Faa appeared unaffected and handed Bratchet into a smart equipage with a fringed calico roof to keep the sun off, and settled himself into the driver’s seat beside her. Our boxes of new clothes were loaded into a cart by a Negro servant who followed us with it through the town, heading west into the Liguanea Plain.
We travelled in our own personal dust-cloud thrown up by the horses’ hooves. But from what I could glimpse of it, the view was worth seeing. There were always hills and mountains on our right and a breeze from the sea coming from our left. We crossed bridges over fast-running streams, once on a causeway through a mangrove swamp where, Johnny Faa said, there were alligators, along ridges where orchids grew under enormous cottonwood trees, back to the plain and palms, into shade so deep and out again into sun so bright that our eyes watered with the constant adjustment.
We met mule trains pulling long carts loaded with sugar hogsheads and the occasional overseer on a horse, but the most constant traffic was black women heading for the markets with estate produce, one arm up to support the burden on their head, a crate of chickens, a basket of vegetables, with the other arm crooked round a piglet or a turkey.
The younger women walked with long equable strides, the older limped along on legs that were bandy from malnutrition, some with flies clustered on their sores. Once or twice we came across a gaggle of them sitting down to rest under a mango tree. Johnny Faa flicked his horsewhip at them and told them to move on. ‘There’s nae good comes of their clack,’ he said, ‘just idleness and plotting.’
That was the trouble with the place. It looked like paradise, but you caught the fear. The women might have been discussing the weather, but, though they obeyed the crack of the whip docilely enough, their togetherness disturbed Johnny.
It even disturbed me. It was the way they looked at us. Suddenly I was a representative of a dominant race being weighed and found wanting by underdogs. For a straw, I’d have got down and explained, ‘We’re not with him.’
But we were. We were well dressed, well fed and white, therefore the enemy. No wonder Johnny Faa talked about the blacks like a bee-keeper afraid of a swarm. He kept shouting his methods at us as we rode along beside the trap. ‘Keep ’em mixed of origin, d’ye see? Ye don’t want all Coromantins who are strong but unco’ proud and rebellious. They’re better diluted by Papaws who’re docile and agreeable, or Ibos who’re timorous an’ despondent.’
We had to listen to his pride in his dogs who were trained to hunt runaways and attack. ‘They fear neathing wi’ a black skin on’t. Aye, they’re fell chields at the ebonies.’
I heard Bratchet change the subject. ‘Did you ever hear of two white women pirates who stood trial at St Jago de la Vega a few years back?’
He hadn’t. ‘But it might be so and there’d have been a need to keep the thing verra quiet. Lord save us, she-blacks are beldams enough wi’out such a white example afore their eyes.’
This wasn’t a country that’d want to publicize two women like Anne and Mary. Theirs was a dangerous example anywhere; here it was incendiary. Besides, Johnny said, he’d only been in Jamaica a year or two. Nor did he intend to stay – ‘The fient a bit o’ that. I’ll fill my pot o’ gold and it’s back to my ane country in amber silk, wi’ my ane piper marchin’ before me. Aye, they’ll fear Johnny Faa then.’ Jamaica was a piece of meat he’d sunk his teeth into. He was going to eat his bit of it and go home.
We crossed a sizeable body of water which cascaded down rapids to swirl in pools at the bottom, and sent up wafts of cool air which unstuck our clothes from the sweat of our bodies. ‘Rio Cobre,’ Johnny called out. We were nearing Spanish Town, which had been St Jago de la Vega when Spain became Jamaica’s first conqueror.
It still retained its Spanishness in a cathedral and buildings that had an elegance Kingston lacked. The courthouse, House of Assembly and governor’s residence were of coral limestone and stood in a square round a plaza shaded by feathery tamarinds. Parapets kept the sun off verandahs, while rattan jalousies at the windows were propped up a few inches to allow air into the dark interiors.
‘Which is the courthouse?’ Bratchet asked at once. Johnny pointed to the most Spanish and impressive of all the buildings.
It had an exterior stone staircase fourteen feet long leading to a portico and great mahogany doors. I’d imagined Anne and Mary standing trial in some dingy dock; as it was, they’d made their last public appearance in surroundings of some magnificence.
Johnny Faa watched Bratchet as she stared at it. ‘Ye’re rare interested in the fate o’ two trollops, mistress. Weel, yon’s the cells tha’ would have held ’em.’ He nodded to the arches of the courthouse’s lower storey, an arcade of wooden gates hiding whatever lay inside.
Johnny wanted to show off his acquaintanceship with a laird of Kilsyth to the governor, and his acquaintanceship with the governor to a laird of Kilsyth. So, at his insistence, we were received at the residency by Lord Archibald Hamilton, a former naval captain.
He greeted Kilsyth with the enthusiasm of a kinsman and offered us sympathy at being taken by pirates. ‘We’ll catch them, never fear. When we’ve swept the seas of Froggies and Dagos, the navy’ll have at those debauched rogues.’
We got another breakfast, though it was well past noon, a meal consisting of various roast meats swimming in oil. They like breakfast big and often, do the Jamaicans.
Considering that we needed every friend of Lord Archibald’s class, it was a pity Kilsyth wasn’t on top form. Hamilton wanted to discuss mutual friends and relations with him but, for once, our Livingstone was reticent. I put it down to hangover.
Bratchet and I made the conversational running and, of course, she had to ask if he’d heard of the women pirates who’d once stood trial in the courthouse opposite. She was disappointed again. ‘Can’t say I have, m’dear, though it’d not surprise me, times being topsy-turvy as they are. May I ask your interest, mistress?’
I struck in. I didn’t want her becoming allied in these people’s minds with pirates. I made a shot at an upper-class accent. ‘My sister enquires on my account, my lord. Thought of writing a monograph. Wonderful encounters on me travels, sort of thing.’
‘You’ve had strange and wonderful encounters enough, I’d have thought, Master Millet, without advertising a couple of unnatural hussies. It’s best left, best left. The gentle sex don’t need encouraging to put on trousers. Look at the court back home; bedchamber women runnin’ the country like appointed ministers.’ However, he promised that he would ask among his staff, ‘though the longest-serving of ’em haven’t been here above a few years’.
‘Nobody seems to have been here above a few years,’ complained Bratchet.
‘How right y’are, m’dear.’ The governor tapped the back of her hand in approval at her perspicacity. ‘That’s Jamaica for ye. Quick fortunes, quick deaths. Grab and get out, that’s the policy. Have ye seen aged patriarchs since your arrival? Nor will you. By fifty-five Jamaica has ’em in their graves. I tell ye, we have assistant judges that are minors. Minors. A boy here jumps off his hobby horse straightway to colonel of a troop.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Is Master Kilsyth unwell?’
‘An over-indulgence in rum,’ I said.
Lord Archibald shook his head. ‘Keep him off it, that’s my advice. Young blades grow thirsty in this climate and play the good fellow, but too much liquor aggravates choler. Only last week one of our young planters expired after downing eight quarts of Madeira in a night.’
The governor was the healthiest looking man we’d seen since arriving in Jamaica; his advice was worth having. It occurred to me that Kilsyth’s despondency was lasting longer than the usual hangover.
Lord Archibald accompanied us to the residency steps. ‘By the way, Faa. The churchwarden will be wanting y’hounds. The parish has decided to go after the Maroons again and I’m sendin’ a troop with ‘em. There’s been too many runaways to the hills.’ He turned to us. ‘Principle of gamekeeping, m’dears. Hang a few blackbirds along the route to warn the others.’
He gave us an invitation to the ball he was giving in a week or two’s time, and said our interrogation would have to await the Vice-Admiralty judges’ return from Barbados where they’d been assisting at the trial of ‘a parcel of scurvy pirates’.
I made Kilsyth join Bratchet and Faa in the trap rather than ride any further in the sun. Ominously, he didn’t protest. He admitted to a headache that was affecting his ability to see.
‘We’ll have ye to bed in the minute,’ said Johnny Faa and touched the horses into a trot.
It was a long bloody minute – nearly as far again as the thirteen miles we’d already travelled from Kingston to Spanish Town. And it was dreary. For the first time we saw no variety. Here was what the English planters were making of the Jamaican plain, a rolling, treeless, unchanging, monotone of sugar cane, like a sea but without a sea’s horizon. Even with the advantage of height given by horseback, my eye was stopped from seeing anything but a blazing white sky and the canes themselves, acres, miles of them, hemming in the track ahead like an advancing army of mutant grass.
Where there were trees, black men with saws and mules in traces were chopping them down and dragging them off to make way for the bent-backed black women planting seedlings so that the grove could become as featureless as everywhere else. Not a face looked up to see us go by.
Johnny Faa waved his whip. ‘Here’s my land noo.’
How in hell do you know? There wasn’t a hedge, no fence, nothing to demarcate one hot, unmoving stretch from another. He began expounding on acreage and prices, but Bratchet stopped him. ‘Can’t you go faster?’ Kilsyth had begun to shiver. A little further along the trap had to pull up while he vomited.
‘God save us, I dread it may be the yellow fever,’ Faa said.
I leaned down and felt his head. It was burning. He focused on me. ‘I’m dying, Martin.’ It was the first and only time I ever saw him afraid.
‘You’re not,’ I told him and wished I was sure. Bratchet put her arms round him to save him from being shaken about as Johnny Faa whipped up the horses.
It seemed to take for ever, but at last we arrived at a large house with peacocks on the lawn in front of it. Faa drove round the side of it to a long, low, one-storey building surrounded by a verandah.
‘Ye’ll understand,’ he said to me, ‘it’d no be wise to have him in the Big House. He’ll be well enough here.’
A couple of black servants helped me carry him inside and put him on a bed. Bratchet and I undressed him while they fetched a bowl of water and a cloth to bathe his face and neck. His colour was terrible. For that matter, so was Bratchet’s. ‘Don’t let him die, Martin,’ she kept saying, ‘Don’t let him die.’
A doctor came that evening and peered at Kilsyth without touching him. He took me outside the room. ‘Yellowjack, right enough. He’ll be dead within the week.’
The building was the manager’s house and Johnny Faa had lived in it while the estate owner was still in residence at the Big House before he returned to England. It was clean enough, pine-panelled and devoid of all but essential furniture. There was a master bedroom, which became the sickroom, then a large sitting room, and, at the end of the passage, a smaller bedroom.
Johnny Faa only came near it in the mornings, to stand outside the living-room window and enquire for the patient and our wants. He urged us to leave Kilsyth’s care to the servants but we did the nursing ourselves. One of them always stayed outside in the garden within call, but all of them refused to come into the house itself and Faa didn’t insist, I suppose because he was afraid they’d carry the infection. I couldn’t blame any of ’em. Yellowjack carried off as large a proportion of Jamaica’s population as the Great Plague had London’s.
That first day we stayed on either side of his bed for twenty-four hours. He wanted his bonnet and when we put the thing in his hands he smiled and carried it to his cheek. Its feather had been reduced to skeleton spines on the stump of a quill.
Later that night in the height of the fever he gabbled about Scotland. He tried to sing ‘Royal, Loyal, Joyal’, and shouted ‘Fareweel to a’ our Scottish fame.’ But he was too weak to be martial; mostly he seemed to have returned to his childhood, muttering comfort to himself. ‘The brow of the brae at Both Bridge’, ‘Barley mills’, ‘Ivy on the mullions’; on and on about his home until, sitting either side of his bed in the stifling night, Bratchet and I could almost see the moorland streams where shiny-headed otter swam after salmon.
Once that night, he clung to her in panic. ‘You’ll not let them take me. I love ye so. Keep me back.’
‘They’ll never take you away,’ she said.
He went unconscious.
She wrung out a cloth in water and bathed his head, sobbing. ‘Now’s a bloody fine time to tell me you love me.’
‘He told me,’ I said.
‘Did he?’ She bathed and sobbed some more. ‘Ain’t it good of him? I don’t deserve it.’
His need for her seemed to be a revelation that brought something like guilt with it. She was indebted to him for loving her; his helplessness merely increased her gratitude, like receiving the unsought love of a child.
Later, when she’d left the room to fetch more water, he was aware of her absence. When she came back, he felt for her hand and said, ‘It’s an ill day for me, Mother, when you’re away.’
Johnny Faa had called in his neighbour, Dr Hopkins, a typical bloody quack, all rant and liquor. If the patient lived it was the doctor’s cure, if the patient died it was his own damn fault. I never saw him sober. Bratchet was in thrall to the old tope and would have poured all his remedies down Kilsyth’s throat, disgusting as they were.
I ordered him not to bleed his patient, at least, though he tried to do it when my back was turned. I came into the room and caught him. I yanked the snuffy fingers from Kilsyth’s arm and chucked his box of leeches out of the window. ‘You touch the poor bugger again and you follow the fucking leeches,’ I promised him.
He swore at me and staggered out, with Bratchet pleading for him to come back. I took her shoulders and turned her round. ‘Look at him, will you? Does he look like he can afford to lose blood?’
Kilsyth’s eyes were sightless. His face was yellow-white.
‘They sent the Twenty-third to the West Indies five years ago,’ I told her. ‘Half the poor sods never came back, but the ones that did knew a hell of a lot about yellowjack. We don’t bleed him, we’ve got to make him piss.’
‘You’re so crude,’ she shrieked, ‘You want him to die.’
‘I’m not going to let him die. Now tell ’em to bring water from the well. Crude or not, we’re going to make him piss.’
For the rest of that night we took turns forcing water into Kilsyth. When it dribbled back, we wiped the drips from his mouth and forced in more.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said suddenly. ‘I’m so frightened.’
‘I know.’
‘I owe him, you see.’
She puzzled me. In the last years the lives of the three of us had become so intertwined that it was no longer a matter of who owed who what. If it was a question of that, both Kilsyth and I owed Bratchet more than we could repay. But all of us had rescued each other from one situation or another; the bond between us went too deep for any of us to keep score.
We organized ourselves, twelve hours on, twelve hours off. While Bratchet was on duty in the sickroom, I slept in one of the cots in the small bedroom at the end of the corridor with the door open in case she called. When it was my turn on duty, she went into the little bedroom’s other cot.
We agreed he’d be in a worse case if exhaustion brought either of us down, but she’d have attended Kilsyth all the time if she could. Gradually I realized what it was she thought she owed him. Deep beneath the mature woman was still the raped girl from Puddle Court whom nobody had loved. Or, for that matter, needed. She was grateful, overflowing with gratitude that the love she’d nurtured for this admirable man was returned. Because she loved him, the little skivvy from Puddle Court was under an obligation to him for loving her back.
But I needed her too, dammit. And loved her a bloody sight more. How much I loved her was a revelation. I suppose I’d tamped down what I felt, knowing it was Kilsyth she was attracted to. But, Christ, I wished I’d told her. Here’s Martin Millet, Bratchie, a common soldier with a limp. A poor catch. As an object of romance, pitiful. But he happens to think you’re the sun and the moon and the stars. He just wants you to know that. No obligation.
It would have spoiled things, of course. I was her best friend, we were closer in understanding than she was with Kilsyth. But it was Kilsyth she loved. She’d never be comfortable with me again.
And I still wished I’d told her.
Too late now. You don’t make declarations of love over the bed of a dying man.
We made him drink, cleaned him up, rubbed him down, fanned him until the one that was coming off duty staggered past the one going on without a word and fell asleep, though in the off-duty hours we had to fetch meals from the Big House’s kitchens, scour the pot, answer Faa’s enquiries, take and collect the laundry, pound and seethe the herbs we put in the patient’s drinks.
The Vice-Admiralty judges came back from Barbados and sent for us, but Johnny Faa went into Spanish Town to explain the situation and get us an adjournment until another sitting.
I don’t remember how long it lasted, probably not more than a week, but it seemed endless. The days’ heat gave way to nights so humid you woke up sweating and gasping. And the damn peacocks in the gardens didn’t sleep and kept up that eerie cry they have so that you couldn’t, either. I was tempted to twist their necks for them.
It ended on the night when I went to take over from Bratchet to find she’d fallen asleep in her chair, her head on the edge of the bed. She was breathing regularly. And so was Kilsyth. I touched his hand, then his face. He was cool.
I shook Bratchet’s shoulder. ‘I think we’ve done it.’
She started up. ‘Is he worse?’ She put her hand on Kilsyth’s forehead. ‘Oh God. Thank you, God.’
‘Go and get some rest, now.’ She stayed where she was, looking at him, so I raised her up and took her outside to the verandah into the cool. There was a Negro asleep on the steps. I woke him and asked him to fetch some brandy and two glasses. When he came back with them, I told him to go to bed. Yawning, he stumbled off towards the slaves’ quarters.
I poured us both brandy. She kept glancing towards the sickroom. I propped the door open so that we could hear if the patient woke up. He was still asleep, breathing lightly.
Bratchet was holding on to the verandah post like a woman who’d fall down if she didn’t. I put a glass of brandy in her hand. ‘Here’s to Scotland,’ I said, ‘We did it.’
We drank.
‘You did it,’ she said.
‘We both did it.’
‘No,’ she said, ‘it was you.’
Moths fluttered across the verandah and into the sickroom to singe themselves on the candle by Kilsyth’s bed. The night smelled of raffia and jasmine and chimed with frogs. A huge Jamaican moon was up, casting shadows across the garden. In the slaves’ quarters a woman was chanting. I slid down against the post opposite Bratchet and sat on the steps, looking out over the gardens, sipping the brandy.
‘I’m grateful, Martin,’ she said.
‘For God’s sake,’ I said irritably, ‘what was I going to do? Sit back and eat grapes? He’s my friend. Stop being so bloody grateful to everybody – me, him. You don’t have to be grateful to a living soul. You’re one of the wonders of the modern world, Bratchie. Of course he damn well loves you. So do I. Now go to bed.’
I hadn’t meant to say it. I was tired. Anyway, the record had to be set straight. Sod it, I thought.
She didn’t move. ‘It’s always been you, hasn’t it?’ she said. ‘I was safe the moment you came back to Puddle Court. I knew it. I was… warmer. I thought it was him for a long while. But it wasn’t, it was you.’
I got up. She was looking away from me, towards the Big House with its walls white in the moonlight and its shutters dark. She’d tied her hair into a top-knot; damp strands of it had fallen down against her neck and cheeks and stuck to them.
She said, ‘I couldn’t have borne it if he’d died. For not loving him when he needed me. That’s why I’m grateful.’
We stood opposite each other, my shirt plastered to my body, her dress sticking to hers. She turned to look at me. I’d waited a long time for that look, a long time.
Her hands groped like a blind woman’s to touch my face. ‘It was always you,’ she said.
I picked her up and took her to bed.
The yellow fever left Kilsyth but something else came in its wake and affected his joints, which became inflamed and swollen. He bore it cheerfully enough, though sometimes he was in agony. We poulticed his knees and hands and fed him bone marrow but, after two desperate nights, Johnny Faa rode over to Hopkins’s place and bought laudanum so that the patient could get some sleep.
I wondered if Bratchet would show some sort of guilt that virtually every minute we weren’t attending on Kilsyth we were making love. She didn’t, which should have warned me. But, to be honest, I couldn’t think of much else except when I could next get her back in my bed.
The first time, after we’d surfaced, she said, ‘You might have told me earlier, you oyster.’
‘It may have escaped your notice, but we’ve been surrounded by people these last two years. Pirates, royalty, riff-raff like that. There wasn’t room to go down on one knee.’
‘At least I’d have known,’ she said.
‘I didn’t think you saw me.’
‘I’m seeing you now.’ It was a small, uncomfortable bed that one, but we didn’t notice. ‘When did you know?’
‘I suppose it was on the boat crossing the Channel,’ I said, ‘It was Mrs Defoe’s grey woollen that did it.’
‘Fetching, weren’t it? I remember. I called for my mother, and you said you’d lost yours too. “If it helps, Bratchet, I lost mine too,” you said.’
I hadn’t thought she’d remember.
‘It did help,’ she said, ‘You always helped.’
‘No, I didn’t. I should never’ve left you at Effie’s.’ I held her close, rubbing my cheek against her ear. ‘I’m sorry, Bratchie, I’m so sorry. I’d cut off my arm to have that time again.’
I felt her pat my bare back. ‘You’re better off with two.’
With the scare of yellow fever gone, we were able to call on one of Faa’s servants to sit with Kilsyth at night now and then so that we could take some air. We used to walk in the garden until the strain of not touching each other drove us back to bed.
We did most of our talking in those times under a Jamaican moon like a pumpkin, with the peacocks trailing their tails and crying under the trees. I told her about my father, the search for my mother and finding her, the Dragoons, how scared I’d been before a battle, things I’d never told anybody.
‘Know what I regret, Bratchie?’
‘Not taking me away from Effie Sly.’
‘Rosinante. What a horse. That bloody innkeeper at Le Havre better look after him.’
‘Sensitive, was he?’
‘Easily hurt,’ I said, ‘Mouth like a bloody angel.’ As I hadn’t kissed hers for a bit, we went back to bed.
In those times in the garden I hoped she’d tell me what she knew about Effie Sly’s death. She wouldn’t.
‘A higher loyalty than to me?’ I grumbled.
‘Not higher. Different.’ She looked up at me. ‘You hate Anne and Mary, don’t you?’
‘I don’t hate them,’ I told her, ‘I never met ’em. But it’s been like tracking cats through a forest, watching them get wilder and wilder. Seeing where they made their kill.’
She sighed. ‘Sometimes I think they’d never’ve fitted in. Even if they hadn’t been kidnapped. They were too… I don’t know… the way they saw things was too wide. It’s like Kit Ross said, women’s world is too small. Men want all women to be Mrs Defoes. And they ain’t. Look at Effie Sly. What she could have done if they’d given her enough slack, if she hadn’t gone into the trade. Ruled the world most like.’
She was right. I hadn’t thought about it before. I said, ‘She didn’t start out a monster. Father threw her on to the streets like a good righteous brother when she was seventeen because he caught her kissing the apprentice. Perhaps she survived the only way she knew how.’
Sadly she said again, ‘They’d like us all to be Mrs Defoes.’
Another night she asked, ‘Do you still think I’m in danger?’
I considered it. ‘Maybe not. You’ve been got out of the way. The danger’ll start when we get back. One thing, I’ll be with you day and night. When are we going to tell him, Bratchie?’
‘We’ll see about all that when he’s well,’ she said.
Kilsyth wasn’t getting well. He was improving; the burning in his joints eased. But his hands and knees remained swollen and he experienced difficulty moving. He refused to let me help him walk and it was painful to watch his first foray out into the gardens and see what had become of the old, big, noisy Kilsyth.
He was the sweetest-tempered invalid I’ve ever come across. He made me chase after one of Johnny Faa’s peacocks to pull a feather to replace the one in his bonnet – ‘A symbol that I’ll be striding the Highland braes afore Yuletide.’ But, looking back, I think it was then he made up his mind not to see Scotland again.
His face lit up whenever Bratchet walked into the room. He said to both of us, ‘It was yon woman who’d not let me go down. She said she’d keep me back from hell. And she did. And she shall.’ He assumed from the first that there was a contract between them. He never suspected.
‘For Christ’s sake tell him,’ I said when we were alone.
‘When he’s better.’
What haunted me, for him, for us, was that he wouldn’t ever get better. There was a desperation to Bratchet’s lovemaking now. We didn’t laugh any more.
We planned Kilsyth’s first excursion to Spanish Town, where Bratchet wanted to make enquiries about Anne and Mary at the courthouse, but when the morning came he didn’t feel up to it, though he insisted that we go. ‘Ye’ve been grand nurses and deserve a day in the fleshpots. No, no, you’re looking peakit, lassie. Where’ll I be if you break down?’
We borrowed Faa’s trap. The Bratchet was unusually quiet on the drive in. I put it down to uneasiness at what she’d find. A note to the governor from Kilsyth and a note from the governor to the courthouse gave us the services of a young clerk who, like all the court staff, was recently out from England and, judging from his sulkiness, wished he wasn’t.
‘I’ll need the date of the trial,’ he said.
I told him we didn’t know it. Mary had still been in Europe in 1703. Some time after that she’d made for St-Germain and been given money by Francesca Bard for her rescue of Anne. Then she’d had to find her way to Jamaica, discover Anne’s whereabouts, make her way into the country of the Maroons, become a pirate… ‘Try 1705,’ I told him. The trial couldn’t have been before then.
It had been a good year for trials, had 1705. The clerk unrolled what seemed like a thousand transcripts, then allowed them to whirr themselves back over their wooden roller with a carelessness that began to get on my nerves. The Bratchet stood at the window, staring down into Spanish Town’s square, unmoving.
The clerk’s puffing and sighing got louder as he went through 1705’s August’s transcripts, then September’s, then October’s. November’s whirred themselves up. The room smelled of parchment mouldering in the humidity.
‘Ain’t here,’ the clerk said.
‘Start on 1706.’
I was being chopped up at Ramillies in the May of 1706. In the July Aunt Effie was being murdered. Defoe stood in the pillory later the same month. The attempts began on Bratchet’s life. I walked over to join her at the window. ‘I bet the only one came out of that year the same as he went in was old Daniel Defoe.’ She didn’t answer.
‘Here it is,’ said the clerk, disgustedly.
Somehow I hadn’t expected it to be found. Anne Bonny and Mary Read belonged in people’s heads, not on paper. But there it was: 6 January 1706.
I snatched it from the clerk’s hand and took it to the window and read it out loud to the Brachet. The two women had been formally accused of ‘evil designs in that they did, off the coast of Haiti, piratically, feloniously and in a hostile manner, attack, engage and take two merchant Sloops along with Apparel and Tackle valued at £1,000’. Later the same month they took a schooner, owner Thomas Spenlow near Harbour Bay, and a merchant sloop of which Thomas Dillon was master.
Specimen charges. From what we’d learned from other pirates and the higgler, they’d done a damn sight more pirating than that. Like Rackham and the others had done, Anne and Mary pleaded not guilty, but the evidence against them was damning.
Thomas Spenlow swore that when he was taken, the women were aboard Rackham’s sloop. Two Frenchmen who’d been impressed into Rackham’s service said the women were ‘very active on board’ and that when Rackham gave chase or attacked, Bonny and Read wore ‘men’s cloaths, and at other Times they wore Women’s Cloaths’. Thomas Dillon stated that, when Rackham’s crew boarded his vessel, Anne Bonny ‘had a Gun in her Hand. That they were both very profligate, cursing and swearing much, and very ready and willing to do any Thing on Board.’
It was a bare account and the two women’s voices were silent in it. I put my arm round Bratchet’s shoulder for a moment, then turned to the clerk. ‘There’s no record of the defence.’
He was leaning against a wall, arms folded, eyes closed. He yawned. ‘If the whores said anything they’d have said it at their interrogation before the trial.’
‘Very well. Where’s the record of the interrogation?’
He shrugged. ‘Missing.’
I made him look through the rest of January and, for good measure, February, but he was right.
Bratchet nudged me. ‘You haven’t finished reading the trial.’
‘It’s the sentence.’
‘Read it.’
I read it. ‘“You, Mary Read, and Anne Bonny, are to go from hence to the Place from whence you came, and from thence to the Place of Execution; where you shall be severally hang’d by the Neck till you are severally Dead. And God of His infinite Mercy be merciful to both of your Souls.”’
‘Merciful,’ said Bratchet, ‘Merciful. Oh, God. They were pregnant.’
‘“After Judgement was pronounced, as aforesaid, both the Prisoners informed the Court that they were both quick with Child, one by Jack Rackham and the other by his First Mate, and prayed that Execution of the Sentence might be stayed. Whereupon the Court ordered that Execution of the said Sentence should be respited, and that an Inspection should be made.”’
I finished reading and turned to the clerk. ‘Was it?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘For God’s sake, there must be a record of what happened to them.’
‘No, there ain’t,’ snapped the clerk, ‘or it would’ve been put on the bottom of the transcript.’
I told him to find me the trial of Calico Jack. He opened his mouth to protest, then looked at me, shut it and turned back to the cupboard.
The trial of Anne’s and Mary’s captain had taken place ten days before their own. He and his crew had been executed the following day. There were ten of them: Captain John Rackham, known as Calico Jack, George Fetherton, Richard Corner, Noah Harwood, James Dobbin… The names of the crew could have been found in any country English parish register. Nobody’d asked how or why they came to be pirates on a sloop in the West Indies. I noticed that Joshua, the higgler’s son, wasn’t among them.
The young clerk had shown no interest even as I’d read out the transcript of the women’s trial, as if English girls turned pirate every day. I wondered if finding himself in this bizarre country left him with no amazement to spare for anything else.
Bratchet said desperately, ‘There must be some record somewhere.’
The clerk said, ‘Ask the gaoler.’
He showed us a flight of stairs but didn’t follow us down. We descended from a hallway smelling of beeswax polish and pomanders down flights so steep we had to spread our hands against the wall to keep our balance – and found them sticky.
At the bottom we came into a stench caused by too many bodies kept too long without sanitation in too small a space. Further along the passage there was a high-pitched screaming coming from cells and I had to shout over it for the gaoler. He turned up with a lantern and a friendlier welcome than the clerk upstairs. ‘Don’t see many gentry down here.’
He was another newcomer to Jamaica, a sailor whose naval days had ended with a musket ball in the leg during the Battle of Vigo Bay. ‘Luckier than most poor canvas-climbers, I was,’ he told me, ‘Recommended to the Vice-Admiralty for duties by Hoppson hissel.’ He seemed happy enough in his job; when it came to darkness, stink and overcrowding there isn’t much difference between prison cells and below decks on a man o’war. He took us to his ‘locker’, a cubby-hole where a small, barred window let in the sun, fetched down a ledger, turning back its pages until he found the reference. ‘Here we are, lady and gentleman. “Paid to Daisy the midwife…” Now I remember her, beamy old besom and black as coal. Used to attend all the births, “…2s. for the lying-in of two female pirates.” Don’t get many of them to the dozen.’
‘What happened to the babies?’ asked Bratchet.
The gaoler scanned the page and shook his head. ‘Mostly they go to the midwife till they’re old enough for the orphanage.’
Christ, how many children had been born here? I said, ‘What happened to the women pirates? Upstairs they can’t find any record.’
‘Can’t they now, can’t they? What was their names again? Let’s see.’ He leafed through more pages; he didn’t seem to hear the screams coming from the passage. ‘Well, here’s one of ’em dead. “For the interment of the female pirate, Mary Read… 6s.”’
It was Mary who was dead then. ‘And the other? Anne Bonny?’
More leafing. Another shake of the head. ‘Ain’t here. Could be she died like her shipmate, could be she didn’t. Mind you, they didn’t keep records ship-shape till I come. Anyways, female or no, pirates is accounted along o’ bilgewater round here, and serve ‘em right.’
I suggested there might be graves, which amused him. He led us into a bare, hot courtyard. Half its ground was baked concrete by the sun, the other half was dug-over earth. ‘Less’n they hang in chains, that’s where they go.’ He pointed to the disturbed section, ‘Quicklime.’
Bratchet stood there a long time. Maybe she still clung to the belief that Anne and Mary were alive. She knew more than I did.
If she didn’t, if she was saying goodbye, she’d come thousands of miles to find nothing to say goodbye to. No tree – quicklime would kill it – no plaque. There wasn’t a flowering weed, any weed – our tidy gaoler had whitewashed the stones of the walls – not a butterfly, not a bird, no scent except sour earth; a space of sun-bleached nothing.
She said quietly, ‘Shall I be Queen of England, Bratchet?’ She turned on the gaoler. ‘I want to meet this midwife, Daisy.’
‘Dead, miss. Died two year ago. We use another un now.’
‘Then I want to see where they had their babies.’
He was pleased, ‘Got a special cell for trollops’ lying-in. Big, see, and plenty of straw and a course I keeps it clean.’
The passage narrowed as it passed between the cell fronts of open bars. Black-skinned and white-skinned hands stretched out as we went by, not so much to touch us as salute the passing of the gaoler’s lantern, the only light. The madman redoubled his screams and kicked his bars. Bratchet kept her eyes straight ahead. From one cell a woman’s voice shouted for water. Not unkindly, the gaoler called, ‘Dipper’s hoisted, chuck. Give you some tonight.’ He explained to us, ‘Water’s rationed.’
The birthing cell was at the end, double the size of the others. It was empty just now; only a taper and a grizzle-headed Negro sweeping out by the light of it, ready for the next delivery. I wondered why he bothered to keep it clean, the smell from the other cells was enough to snuff out new life the moment it took breath.
I asked the old black man his name. It was the gaoler who answered. ‘That’s Pompey. He’s the one to ask about your pirates. Been here years, ain’t you, Pompey?’
Pompey said nothing.
‘Do you remember an Anne Bonny and Mary Read who gave birth in this place?’ I got a grunt for an answer. The gaoler spun a finger round his temple to indicate idiocy.
Bratchet stayed where she was. ‘I’d like to talk to you sometime,’ she said, quietly, to Pompey. ‘What’s your address?’
His amusement told us slaves didn’t have addresses and that this one wasn’t an idiot.
‘He sleeps in an empty cell, when he can find it,’ said the gaoler. ‘He don’t have to. The magistrates freed un, but he duddn’ have nowhere else to go.’
Outside in the glare of the plaza, I said, ‘I wonder which of them had Rackham’s baby and which had the First Mate’s.’
Bratchet said nothing. She looked very small.
‘It’s over, Bratchie,’ I said. ‘Time to go home.’
On the way back, I had to rein in the horses and hold her for a long time while she cried. I didn’t know then that some of the grief was for her and me.
We told Kilsyth what we’d discovered. ‘So she’s dead,’ he said to Bratchet, reaching for her hand. ‘The Lady Anne is dead. They couldna even bother to record it.’
‘Yes.’
‘Thrown in a hole like a clout into a stank.’
‘Yes.’
He nodded. ‘Better she’d died long since, with the piper playing a piobaireachd for her and the wind fluttering the ribands on his drones and the women clapping their hands and crying the coronach.’
That night was our last in the little, uncomfortable bed. The next day, when we walked in the garden, she told me Kilsyth had asked her to marry him.
I stood still.
‘And I’m going to, Martin.’
After a while, I said, ‘What for?’
She put her arm through mine and led me under a fig tree where we couldn’t be seen, then she stood back, took a deep breath and folded her hands, like a child trying to remember its catechism.
‘He’s lost everything,’ she said, ‘All this long way and he dreamed he’d find Anne at the end of it. All he’s found is she wasn’t the woman he dreamed about. It’s wrecked him. The yellowjack, this thing in his bones, they’re grief really. He’ll never be the same again. He knows it. He won’t go back to Scotland, he says he couldn’t bear his folk to see him like he is now. He hasn’t got anything left.’
‘That’s no bloody reason why he should have you,’ I said.
‘Exactly why he should have me. I can be useful to him.’
‘You’re not a fucking walking stick,’ I shouted, ‘I’m-feeling-a-bit-shaky-today-will-you-marry-me? These last years ain’t been a bed of roses for any of us. All right, he was disappointed in his Anne. So what? He hasn’t seen her since she was a child.’
‘Don’t get cross.’
‘I’m bloody furious. You’re not a damn consolation prize.’
And then she said what I’d been afraid of all along. She said, ‘I can’t give you any children.’
‘You can’t give him any, either.’ Cruel maybe, but I was desperate.
‘There’s got to be some use for a barren life. A purpose. He needs me, you don’t.’
‘Wrong again,’ I told her.
The irritating thing was, she was calm. ‘Martin,’ she said, ‘I love you like I didn’t think was possible. Till the end of my days I’ll wish I was in bed with you. But you’re complete. You get things right. You’re the one who guards people’s backs. You even take care when you’re tying your shoelaces. I want you to find somebody who’s whole, like you are, and marry them. Have complete children. I’d waste you. I owe you my life, but I’m giving it to somebody who needs it more. I’m Kilsyth’s woman.’
‘I can’t stand it, Bratchie,’ I said.
‘You can stand anything.’
‘Fuck you.’
She tried smiling. ‘You did. But I’m still Kilsyth’s woman.’
I can see her now, stood under that fig tree. Odd it was a fig. A long time ago, at the beginning, Daniel Defoe and I saw a woman under a fig tree, higher-class than mine, perhaps more beautiful. But the one in Jamaica was all I wanted, and couldn’t get.
Kilsyth and I attended the Vice-Admiralty Court together before I went. We told the judge we’d originally been journeying from The Hague to England in a Dutch boat. (We reckoned the Vice-Admiralty might have the English shipping list but they wouldn’t have the Hollanders’.)
We said we’d been captured in the Channel by the Holy Innocent, taken on board and kept prisoner, freed by mutiny and forced to assist the crew, had witnessed the taking of the Spanish cargo ship and eventually been set free in the Bahamas. Easy as kiss my hand. It was no skin off the Vice-Admiral’s nose if some loyal English lads liberated Spanish cargo. Not as long as they didn’t start liberating anybody else’s on their own account.
The judge questioned us closely on the mutineer/pirates’ names. As it was inconceivable we’d spent time in their company without learning them, we had to tell him and hope to Christ the lads stayed clear of capture. I don’t think the judge would have been as understanding if Kilsyth hadn’t been related to the governor. As it was, both he and I left the court with handshakes and no stain on our characters.
After that, Johnny Faa’s coachman drove me and Kilsyth and the Bratchet to Bridgetown harbour where the Laird o’ Kirkaldy was waiting to set sail for Bristol.
Kilsyth spent most of the way begging me at least to stay for the wedding the following day in Spanish Town cathedral. ‘Who has the better right to stand up for me than you have, my lad? It’ll be sad festivity without ye.’
I said the tide waited for no man. ‘And you can stand up for yourself now.’
He was better, though his hands had become clawed. Bratchet held them between hers as she leaned over the trap side to give my cheek a brief kiss. She wanted to leave immediately but Kilsyth insisted the trap stay on the quayside until we cast off. He was crying.
I’d spent nights wondering whether they’d be safe without me to look after them, and decided they would. There weren’t likely to be more questions from the Vice-Admiral. And whoever’d killed Aunt Effie had achieved their purpose and sent Bratchet to where she could do no harm, so there’d be no trouble from that quarter.
They’ll be all right, I thought, me and my shoelaces, as the gap of water between the quay and the ship widened, and the two figures in the trap grew smaller.
At the last moment, Bratchet waved.
I didn’t wave back.