After her daughter Livia was born and weaned, the Bratchet used the last of her prize money to set up a pickle factory in Kingston. It was a long way from Coppleston’s but Jamaica’s main town was where the glass bottles she needed were manufactured.
She was lucky that in this colonial society women setting up in business on their own were not unusual. Several successful planters were widows who’d inherited their husband’s estates, there were women traders and shop-owners in Kingston and, most successful of all, a large black lady known as Mother Sarah who operated the biggest whorehouse in town, restricting her clientele exclusively to white men.
As things turned out, Bratchet’s factory didn’t have time to be a success, but it showed every sign of becoming one. She’d thought originally that she would export to England, but the fast sale of her relishes and preserves in the town alone taught her that, from a very small beginning – her workforce was five free Negroes – with luck and hard work, she could build a pickle empire in the West Indies.
She enjoyed discovering that she was a born businesswoman. What she didn’t enjoy was the enforced absences from Livia. For the child’s sake, neither she nor Kilsyth wanted to move house to Kingston; it had too many diseases. And Livia flourished at Coppleston’s under Kilsyth’s doting eye and the care of Sarcy, who was proving herself a better nursemaid than she had a house servant.
If it occurred to Bratchet that she and Kilsyth were being slowly dropped by the social circle of the Liguanea Plain, it was only to feel relief that she didn’t have to entertain so much and that therefore Sarcy could devote herself to Livia. Mr and Mrs Chantry were now the only couple who invited the Kilsyths to their house, and vice versa. Kilsyth minded their social isolation, but as the disease increased in his bones he was glad of inactivity.
The Bratchet, in any case, had become something of a liability in planters’ company; her independence as an entrepreneur gave her confidence and she was more and more outspoken in her disapproval of slavery.
The one conversion she made to the planters’ thinking, if they’d known it, was to join them in hating piracy. Her first attempt at export was a consignment of lime and tomato chutney to Barbados. The barque carrying it and other goods was boarded by pirates on the high seas, and her master killed in defending its cargo. Bratchet had met the master while overseeing the loading of her precious jars; with her workers she had endured the appalling heat while the contents of those very jars – concocted from a recipe of Mrs Chantry’s – were chopped, cooked and stirred, she had written out each label herself.
‘And now some throat-slitting swab’s sitting down to spread my chutney on his biscuit,’ she raved at Kilsyth when she got home, ‘I hope he chokes on it. May he swing alive till his eyes drop out.’
‘And what if it’s your friend Sam, or Nobby?’ he asked.
It brought her up short. She hadn’t thought of that but now she did it didn’t make any difference. ‘They killed Captain Perry,’ she said, ‘It’s a bastard trade.’
One afternoon in early spring Bratchet left the factory early so that she could celebrate Livia’s birthday in the evening. ‘Home, Pompey, and quick.’
He was slow helping her into the trap. He looked disturbed. ‘You been summoned, missy.’
‘What do you mean? Who by?’
His head turned and raised until he was looking up towards the Blue Mountains. ‘We’s to meet a guide at Gordon Town.’
‘Bugger.’ She’d waited a long time for this summons; in a sense, she’d come thousands of miles for it. Now all she wanted to do was get back to Livia. If she didn’t return from the Blue Mountains, who would look after her baby? The child was crying for her this minute. Had fallen ill. Who cared what’d happened to Anne Bonny and Mary Read? Not her any more. She had more important people to love.
‘All right,’ she said. She was being irrational. And if she didn’t go, she’d spend the rest of her life wondering.
Before they left Kingston, she called in at Johnny Faa’s town house and gave one of his servants a note to take to Kilsyth saying she’d be delayed at the factory and wouldn’t be home. They took the road north, following the Hope River which cut its way out of the mountains through a deep, narrow ravine.
There were few people on the road. Ferns and plantains were utterly still in the moist air. Cedars, tamarinds and gum trees had struck their roots in the clefts of the crags and hung out over the falls below them. Above the track the limestone cliffs stood out in relief. Bratchet hardly noticed. Her fingers drummed on the edge of the trap. She was getting further and further away from Livia. Well, she still had Porritt’s pistol in her holdall. If anybody tried to stop her return to her child, she’d use it.
It was nearly dusk by the time they reached the outskirts of Gordon Town. There were no white people in sight. A black man holding the reins of two mules stepped out into the road in front of them and waved them down.
Pompey helped Bratchet out of the trap and on to one of the mules, then made as if to mount the other one. The man stopped him. ‘Stay here. She go alone. With me.’ He wore a slave’s iron collar but his manner was peremptory.
‘How long’ll I be away?’ Bratchet asked him.
‘Day and half a day.’
She turned to Pompey. ‘Go back home. Say I’m staying at the Chantrys’ Kingston house. I’ll explain when I get back. Meet me here the day after tomorrow.’ He nodded, then addressed the man in a burst of Creole patois which Bratchet hoped amounted to ‘Take damn good care of her.’
With Bratchet’s mule’s reins in his hand, the man kicked his bare heels into his mount’s sides and they jogged away from the road between some slave huts and along a track in the hills. When it became too dark to see where they were going, the mules were halted and tethered, the man threw a rough sheepskin cape at Bratchet, lay down and went to sleep.
The Maroon, Bratchet was sure he was a Maroon, was youngish, thin as whipcord, carried a knife in the back of his belt – she saw its shape under his dirty shirt – and hostile. He disapproved of taking her wherever he was taking her.
Ain’t overjoyed myself.
‘Asantewa and your ohene and I are good friends,’ she said clearly at the recumbent figure. She didn’t want a mistake about it. She lay down at a respectable distance away and put her holdall under her hand, taking care she could reach inside for the pistol at a second’s notice, and went to sleep surprisingly quickly.
There were coffee plantations up here where the slopes were less precipitous, but the way she and the Maroon went the next day didn’t impinge on any of them. She wasn’t surprised. Goats would have had trouble with it.
She kept her eyes open as her mule edged along the first precipice, watching eagles soar above the abyss below on the same level as she was, then looking down to see if her mule’s forefeet could fit on the flange of rock that was the path. It was a matter of inches. ‘Don’t sneeze,’ she begged it. She didn’t even want to think about the return journey. The next time they emerged from forest to find their noses over a thousand-foot drop she shut her eyes. And the next. And the next.
They stopped at mountain pools so that they and the animals could drink, but she was given no food. She supposed they were avoiding bridges which, this close to Maroon country, would be guarded by English soldiers. There was an army camp up here meant to contain them. Better if it bloody well had.
When they passed up through the clouds, the Maroon turned round and gestured for her to put on the sheepskin, the first solicitude he’d shown. Human beings had worn it a deal longer than the sheep and it smelled, especially as the cloud vapour moistened it, but she was glad of it. Above the clouds the air was keen.
They were in primeval forest now, the thick, looping greenery that from far away looked mauvy-blue and gave the mountains their name. Under its canopy it was dark as the sun began to go down again. Bratchet’s temper became scratchy with fatigue and hunger. ‘How much longer? I’m getting tired.’
He didn’t answer. A bit further on, he slid off his mule and pointed up a thin, almost vertical path that squeezed between two outcrops of limestone. She was to go on alone.
Bratchet went up on all fours, stones shifting under her feet and starting avalanches of pebbles behind her. A smell of cooking came from somewhere above. She stumbled out on to a bare plateau of rock where a solitary figure sat by a fire stirring something in a pot. The higgler.
There was no greeting. Bratchet was too puffed to make one and there seemed to be a Maroon law against saying hello. Asantewa handed her a gourdful of stew from the pot and a smaller gourd to scoop it up with. It was disgusting; dog, probably, with a soupçon of lizard, but she was starving and ate it.
Asantewa still wore her military hat and bandolier, though both had gained more fetishes and feathers since Bratchet saw them last. She wore an enormous hide cloak and thong sandals on her feet. Apart from that, she hadn’t altered a jot since her little boat had grounded on to the pirates’ Bahamian beach.
‘How’s Licky?’ asked Bratchet, giving her back the gourd.
‘Want to change ever’thing,’ grumbled Asantewa, ‘All dat rain I make, and he grateful?’ She shook her head. ‘Dat one ungratitudinous ohene.’
Bratchet looked around at the verdant forest. ‘And you doing such a good job,’ she said.
Asantewa was not amused. ‘Why ain’t you git?’
‘You ain’t told me what I want to know.’
The higgler’s eyes rolled up, showing only the brown-threaded whites. She moaned. It was alarming. Her pupils came back and regarded Bratchet. ‘You goin’ git soon,’ she said, ‘Spirits tell me.’
‘I ain’t.’
‘You is. Navy took the Brilliana. Two days back.’
‘Oh no.’ Bratchet covered her face and rocked back and forth. Gone was her loathing of piracy; Sam, Nobby, Chadwell, men she’d served with on that crazy voyage, facing a terrible death. She smeared the tears off her face and looked up to see Asantewa watching her, unmoved.
The higgler nodded. ‘Now you goin’ to git.’
Bratchet cursed the messenger: ‘You old besom. All the way up here to tell me bad news? Why didn’t you send a message like normal people? I got a child, you know.’
Asantewa nodded again. ‘I had a chil’ once,’ she said, ‘Called it Joshua. Want to know what they did to it?’
‘No.’ Bratchet began to edge away on her backside. ‘Please.’
‘You listen. That what you come here for, so’s I tell you.’
Asantewa was remorseless.
‘Navy catched Calico Jack’s boat same as they catch de Brilliana. Took Jack and them two girls and my Joshua and the rest to Spanish Town. Hanged Jack and the crew.’
‘I know.’
‘Din’t hang the girls.’
‘I know.’
‘Din’t hang my Joshua neither. He slave. He bad runaway. The court say don’t hang him, give him to whitey owners, give him to Vinner’s brother.’
‘Please,’ pleaded Bratchet.
‘He din’ die easy like bubby fever or flangin’,’ Asantewa said, ‘He rebel. He die rebel slave dyin’. They broke he arms and he legs. They tie him to the ground. Den dey burn him, slow. Start at he feet. He don’ die till the fire reach he chest. Took three hours.’
The Bratchet hitched herself round away from Asantewa’s face. She found herself looking out over Jamaica. From here, over 7,000 feet up, the rest of the Blue range rolled away below her, purple hill succeeding purple hill in gradual descent until they reached the plain and rolled rosily west into a crimson sunset.
The most beautiful abattoir in the world.
Asantewa’s voice came from behind her, interested. ‘What you do, if they kill your chil’ like dat?’
Oh, Livia.
‘Die,’ she said, ‘I’d kill them. Then I’d die.’
‘Dat very weak,’ said Asantewa as if she was marking an essay, ‘Dyin’ and killin’. That one weak revenge.’
‘What did you do then?’ asked Bratchet, wearily.
‘I send them another chil’.’
Bratchet stayed where she was, hugging her knees and watching the plain darken. The cluster of lights to the south was Kingston. Somewhere beyond it, too small to be seen, the candles of Coppleston’s would be lit. Kilsyth would be crooning Scottish lullabies to her baby as he always did to send her to sleep. We’re strangers here.
‘It’s cold,’ she said.
‘I seen ice on this peak,’ Asantewa said, ‘Highest there is.’
So are you. A stranger. She thought how wonderful Asantewa was, and her people. Wrenched from wherever they came from, they had freed themselves, watching their captors from the cold mountain tops like wolves, waiting. And how terrible.
She shook herself briskly, wrapped the sheepskin more closely about her, got up and helped herself to more of the awful stew. It was going to be a long night.
‘Tell me,’ she said.
‘Drink dis.’ Asantewa was holding another gourd. The firelight shone on dark liquid. Bratchet looked from it to Asantewa, then drank it. If the woman wanted her dead, the Maroon who’d brought her up here could have killed her on the journey.
‘Now what?’
‘We wait.’
They waited. Asantewa built up the fire. Beyond the circle of its light was total blackness, and silence except for the breeze rustling the forest canopy below them. ‘Look in de flames.’
She looked in the flames. Asantewa began to sing the same three-note chant that she’d sung in her boat before the waterspout came. Bratchet had no sense of fear, if anything she became bored, although the flesh on her arms and back was tingling. Asantewa began to speak in her limited Creole English but it had become supplemented with description that made pictures in Bratchet’s mind.
At first she didn’t understand. Asantewa was talking about two women called Ananse and Nassuna, one of whom she’d brought to Maroon country herself, the other arriving later.
Anne and Mary stepped into the fire. Anne was still wearing the velvet skirt in which Bratchet had last seen her in Puddle Court, but it was worn and old. They were standing on a high rock. It was this one but in the fire picture it was surrounded by black women.
‘Dey got to be baptized, ain’t they?’ said a voice, ‘Can’t have two whiteys in Maroon country, kin we?’
Bratchet nodded. ‘Got to be baptized.’
There was a huge cauldron and women prancing round it with human-skull rattles. And drums. A lot of drumming. Bracket’s foot beat in time with it. Though the cauldron steamed, the two white women, now naked, climbed into it and climbed out again, unharmed.
‘Dey blacks now, ain’t they?’
Bratchet nodded. ‘Ananse and Nassuna.’
They went away. She saw them on a ship’s deck against blue sky but each of them was attached to a thin string that led back to, this peak where Asantewa watched them, its end in her lap.
It was evening, one of the soft blue Caribbean evenings, and Ananse and Nassuna were lying down, each with a man on top of them, coupling.
‘Getting bubbas. They need a bubba before dey too old, don’t they?’
Bratchet nodded. They couldn’t impregnate each other. It was the sensible thing to do.
They were fighting against boarders now, using cutlasses They were in wide canvas trousers, their hair streaming, in hand-to-hand combat with men in uniform. Their comrades had given up and were being herded for’ard but Ananse and Nassuna fought on, shouting, until Ananse was wounded in the arm and dropped her cutlass. Nassuna dropped hers and ran to her.
There was Pompey. How nice to see him. Holding a candle up in the birthing cell at Spanish Town courthouse. The string from Asantewa on her mountain top that was attached to Ananse faded into invisibility as the younger died. Asantewa twitched the other one and Nassuna flew out of the cell and landed beside her. They talked. Nassuna kissed Asantewa, bowed, and picked up a baby.
Carrying the child under one arm, like a parcel, she walked off the Blue Mountain peak into mid-air and strode towards the sunset, her string still attached to Asantewa’s hand. A thicker string ran between Asantewa and the baby, from the old black woman’s navel to the child’s white one.
‘You git now,’ said Asantewa and Bratchet woke up. Her head ached so badly she could hardly see. She was freezing cold. The fire was grey ashes, the same colour as the sky. Asantewa was holding out another drink to her, this time water. She drank it and Asantewa massaged her neck so that some of the ache went.
They walked together to the top of the steep track between the rocks. As they stood there, the sky above the dead fire was splintered with light. They turned to watch the sun rise over the eastern sea. It was like being washed in gold.
‘Hope,’ said Bratchet.
‘Vengeance,’ said Asantewa.
‘How do you know I won’t tell?’
Asantewa smiled for the first time. ‘You black,’ she said, ‘No need baptize you. You always a black.’
Bratchet sat down and wriggled down the incline on her bottom. The Maroon was waiting for her, with the mules.
Pompey clicked his tongue when he saw her, helped her into the trap and tucked a rug round her. She slept most of the way, her head lolling on his shoulder.
She woke up when the trap swerved. Pompey was swearing. He’d rounded a corner to find a line of men walking in the middle of the road beyond it and was now having to drive the horses along the edge of them, taking care a trap wheel didn’t foul the storm drain alongside.
Bratchet stretched. They were approaching Spanish Town through the trees that turned the road into an avenue. She paid little attention to the limping line of men as they went past it in the same direction. Her mind was in the Blue Mountains.
Pompey reined in while the slave overseer, who wore uniform, cracked his whip to get the front of his line out of the trap’s path. It took a few moments because the men were in leg-irons and the chain that connected the ankle of one to that of the man behind caused a few to stumble.
Another overseer at the head of the line turned, saw her and waved. It was the gaoler from the courthouse who’d shown them the birthing cell. She waved back and saw that his prisoners, some of them at any rate, were white. The shadow of leaves and the dirt on their faces had made it difficult to distinguish their colour.
One of them, shorter than the rest, turned to see who the gaoler was waving at and she recognized Nobby.
Wait. Wait until I can cope with this. I can’t manage.
Pompey shook the reins to urge on the horses, and the trap was past the line in seconds, adding its dust to the prisoners’ filth.
She had to cope. She was back in white Jamaica.
‘Pull up,’ she told Pompey. ‘That gaoler, what’s his name?’
‘Dat Master Stubb.’
‘Talk to him. When he comes up I want you to talk to him.’
‘What ’bout?’
‘Just talk to him, for God’s sake.’
She turned in the trap, waiting until the shuffling line was nearly abreast of her.
She shouldn’t be doing this. She should drive on. She couldn’t. The gaoler, leading the procession, was pleased to see her. She greeted him and he stopped. Behind him, shoulders slumped as the men could stand still for a moment. There were manacles on each set of hands.
She heard Pompey begin a stilted ‘How you doin’, Master Stubb?’ and scanned the faces.
Sweetman. Partridge – with an open wound on his cheek that flies clustered on. They had beards and every one of them was the same colour from the dust of the march from Kingston, as if they had started the process towards becoming corpses. Chadwell, so brave on the night of the storm, who’d voted to sell the captured slaves. Some she didn’t recognize.
The gaoler was addressing her. ‘Crew of the Brilliana, ma’am. Feared through the seven seas for rapine and murder and plunder…’ He’d been reading the reward notices. ‘Fine upstanding gentlemen now, eh? Not so brave now, eh?’
She nodded. I knew them when they were brave. They still were. If she were facing what these men were, she’d be crawling, not walking. Grimes, Freebie.
‘Taking ’em to my cells…’ the gaoler was saying.
Johnson. Oh, God, poor Johnson.
‘…await trial…’
Guienne. Their eyes were blank. She supposed she must look very different, just another lady nob taking a prurient interest in men about to hang. What could she do for them? Nothing. Water. She could get them some water. She was looking for Sam Rogers, stretching her neck to try and see the end of the column.
‘…give ’em hempen collars at Gallows Point…’
He wasn’t there. Nobby. Blessed Nobby. They hadn’t broken Nobby, he was shouting something at the trees. ‘I ain’ going dunghill.’
There was a cough from the prisoner nearest the trap. She glanced down at a grey-bearded old man looking intently at her. His legs looked too frail for the shackles.
Sam. Oh, Sam. How did you become so small? You were our colossus.
His eyes were the same, they willed hers to stay on them. Very slowly, he shook his head. She was to do nothing, there was nothing to be done. Understand me. Nothing.
Equally slowly, she nodded. ‘Drive on, Pompey.’
They went back home another way. She couldn’t bear to hear the jeers and abuse that would accompany the prisoners into the main square. Planter society hated pirates – justly, as she’d come to know – for raising insurance costs sky-high. She’d thought she did too.
But the line now shuffling towards its trial didn’t consist of faceless villains but of Sam and Nobby, Johnson and Chadwell, men who hadn’t started out as pirates, men she’d served with, whose tangled, helpless histories she knew. Who at their trial would bother about why they were in the dock, any more than anyone had bothered to discover the long path that had led Anne and Mary to the same place?
My lads, whatever they’ve done since. She had a sudden spurt of pride. ‘I ain’t goin’ dunghill,’ Nobby had shouted.
‘To go dunghill’ in Nobby’s world – it had been hers – was to mount the gallows begging for mercy. Then it occurred to her. It hadn’t been aimless defiance Nobby had been shouting. It had been reassurance; they’d never know from Nobby her part as mutineer and purser of pirates.
She’d never thought they would.
Of Rosier, the Frenchman, she didn’t think at all. She hadn’t seen him in the line. He’d been there though… and recognized her.
Two days later, Bratchet answered a knock on her door. Kilsyth was still upstairs in bed. Sarcy and Livia were round the back of the house in the garden. On the porch steps was a black female slave, who curtseyed.
‘Hello,’ said Bratchet.
The woman curtseyed again. ‘Juno, missy.’
She was thirtyish, and wore a turban and a good dress with a linen apron, showing that she was a house servant, which Bratchet had already guessed; field women lost their looks early. This one was still handsome.
‘Good morning, Juno. What can I do for you?’ Bratchet waited for the woman to deliver her master’s invitation to a breakfast or some other message, though usually they were brought by men.
‘Trouble, missy. We… my missy got trouble. You help her.’ Juno nodded to a figure that was sitting at the bottom of the steps. It was Mary Waller.
Bratchet hurried down the steps and helped the girl into the parlour, Juno behind her. The jalousies were down, only allowing in thin white stripes of sun across the floor. The deep hum of slave chant and the rumble of barrels came from the distilling house up the hill. What air entered the room was high proofed with the smell of rum.
Mary Waller broke away from her and sat on a corner stool, not the central couch, as if she were trying to back into the walls. She was staring straight in front of her.
‘Mary!’ Afraid the girl had been injured in some way, Bratchet knelt down beside her ready to proffer nursing, but one look at her face showed this wasn’t physical suffering. ‘What is it?’
‘I’m in trouble, Mrs Livingstone.’ It was said quite normally but Mary’s eyes didn’t move from a point somewhere over Bratchet’s head. Her face stood out white in the shade of the room.
It was the first time Bratchet had ever heard her speak and her voice was a shock, a contralto in Creole which made her seem older than her sixteen years.
But, oh dear, there was only one trouble spoken like that. And Mary, the most chaperoned female on the plain; Waller saw to it. Boasted about it. Helyar would kill her. In that moment Bratchet wanted nothing so much as to protect her. She’d been there.
‘My poor baby. Don’t look like that. I’ll help. I’ll do anything to help.’
The girl slumped suddenly, either in relief that she’d been understood or because, in being understood, her situation had become more real to her. Juno, standing still in the doorway, said: ‘I tol’ you, child. Missy help us.’
Juno was the mother then. This was the woman on whom, if the story was true, Helyar Waller had begotten this white daughter. There was little physical resemblance, but the bond of horror between her and the girl was an almost visible cord stretching from one to the other.
Bratchet stood up so that she could put her arms round the girl. Mary flinched away and Bratchet let her go. ‘It’s not as bad as all that. Come on, chuck, bear up. No harm’s going to come to you, I promise. Oh, dear.’
The girl had vomited. She went on staring into space while they cleaned her up, as if somebody else had done it.
Calling Sarcy to stay with Mary, Bratchet took Juno with her and Livia into the kitchen house out in the garden to fetch some lemonade. ‘Who’s the father?’ She looked up when the woman didn’t answer her. Oh, God, he’s black. That was the reason for the fear; Mary had consented to one of her mother’s race. Or perhaps she hadn’t consented to anybody. ‘Was it rape?’ The poor little one; however it happened, Helyar would kill her.
‘You help her, missy.’
‘I want to. I just don’t know what to do.’
With Livia holding one of her hands and a glass of lemonade in the other, they went back into the house. Mary was still staring across the room. Bratchet held the glass while she sipped, Juno kneaded her daughter’s hands. Livia got her doll from under a chair and nursed it.
Mary pushed them away. Her words were stilted: ‘I came to you, Mrs Livingstone, because you’re a woman of the world.’
Am I? She supposed that in Mary’s eyes she was the most raffish woman on the plain. She wanted Bratchet’s help with an abortion.
Automatically, Bratchet said again, ‘It’s not as bad as all that.’ I can’t. I won’t. She’s not going to suffer what I did. Anyway, if that’s what the girl wanted of her, she’d have done better to ask her mother or one of the other black women; they were known for performing operations on themselves or each other to avoid bearing a child into slavery. Poor, poor Mary.
She said, ‘You shall stay here for a while. My husband and I will go to your… your uncle and explain about the baby. He’ll come round. He loves you, I know, and—’
Mary Waller screamed, ‘You’re not a woman of the world.’ She got up and rushed at Juno and began batting at her with her hands. ‘You stupid slave. It’s only happened to me. I told you. Nobody else. I’m the only person. It’s me, it’s me.’
Bratchet watched the black hands enfold the clawing, scratching white ones, watched the black mother gather the white daughter to her, heard her croon nursery sounds until the girl collapsed against her and let herself be rocked into quiet. Now she understood.
Oh, my God. Oh, my dear God.
Livia, upset, began to grizzle. Bratchet picked her up. She said, ‘Is she pregnant?’
Juno shrugged. She began leading her daughter to the couch. ‘He been goin’ into her room a week.’
Bratchet went to the window and pushed open the jalousies to breathe air. She could only smell the stifling sweetness of sugar. Even with the shutter propped to its fullest extent, her view took in merely the ant-ridden boarding of the cellar trap and the roots of the cotton tree like black and white snakes in the strongly defined light and shadows.
She rubbed her cheek against her child’s light, fine hair. I hate this country. There was too much sun. Too much that was beautiful, ugly, inexplicable, too much fecundity of growth and flowing water, too-naked black flesh, too-overdressed white. It was too… unexpurgated.
She said, ‘It isn’t you. You mustn’t think that. It happens.’ Jimmy Groves and his daughter in Puddle Court. And his granddaughter, the old bastard. In manor houses, castles, perhaps palaces.
Mary’s voice behind her said, ‘I shan’t go back. I’ll kill myself first. I’m staying here. When you go I’ll come with you. I’ve got relatives in New England.’
‘When we go?’
‘He’s going to drive you out. He doesn’t like you. Nobody does.’ Desperation had done away with shyness, even manners.
Bratchet didn’t blame her. She thought she’d known horror enough, but she’d been spared the particular atrocity of incest. ‘Does he know you’ve come here?’
Juno answered. ‘We said we gine shoppin’ in Kingston.’
‘Good. I’ll get your room prepared.’
She and Sarcy got bedding from the linen cupboard, carried it upstairs and made up the spare-room bed, then she took Livia in to Kilsyth, plonked her next to him on the bed and told him.
He wouldn’t believe her. ‘The lassie’s hysterical. There’s no father would do that to his own bairn. Nor uncle neither. I know ye don’t like Waller but, ach, it’s against nature.’ He looked at the small girl beside him. ‘Who’d do that to his daughter?’
‘You’ve led a sheltered life. And she says he’s going to drive us out.’
‘There y’are then, the girl’s havering. She canna stay here.’
But when he came down into the parlour his natural courtesy prevailed. ‘Ye’re welcome to stay a while. Miss Mary, till ye’ve settled your spirits. Later, mebbe, I’ll send a wee note to your… to your folk to tell them where you are.’ When she began screaming, he relented again. ‘Weel, weel, whisht now, lassie. Nothing will be done until you’re more composed.’ He looked at Bratchet. ‘Well, put her in the spare room.’
By the time they got her upstairs, the girl’s eyes were beginning to close. Bratchet left Juno sitting beside her on the bed and went downstairs to find Kilsyth still worrying. ‘We canna leave the man to think she’s mebbe had an accident.’
‘He’s the accident, the bastard.’ She went out to the kitchen to get some lunch. She sent Sarcy upstairs with food for Mary and Juno, then settled Livia in a pinafore at the table. As they ate, she told Kilsyth of her encounter with the Brilliana’s crew.
‘I’m sorry for it,’ he said, ‘but they knew the danger. And the court has exonerated us.’
While Livia took her nap, Bratchet had to do the washing up. Sarcy was nowhere to be found. Upstairs, Mary Waller was asleep, her hand in Juno’s, her body shuddering every now and then.
In the heat of the afternoon, Bratchet played chequers with Kilsyth, watching his clawed fingers move the pieces by the knuckle, rubbed them with liniment and went back to the kitchen to experiment with pickling while he looked after Livia. Sarcy was still missing.
She went to bed early, exhausted and worried. After an hour’s sleep she woke up, gasping and in a sweat. ‘Sarcy!’
‘Don’t fash yersel’ about the besom,’ Kilsyth said sleepily, ‘She’ll be back.’
‘No. She won’t. Oh, God, Kilsyth. She’s gone to Waller to trade Mary for Dinnah.’
He yawned. ‘We’ve no’ kept her that hungry.’
‘Dinnah. Her daughter. She’ll get him to give Dinnah her freedom in return for telling him where Mary is.’
There was nothing to be done. In any case, it was too late. Helyar Waller was already coming up the track at the head of twenty planters with guns and a warrant for Bratchet’s arrest on a charge of piracy.