The Jamaica sky was bright blue, the air hot and humid as the coach carrying Isaac Bull rolled out of Kingston into the green countryside. Perspiration trickled down his skin beneath his clothes, soaking into his linen shirt to the very ruffles that hung limply from the wide sleeves of his full-skirted coat. He took off the coat, folded it, and laid it on the seat beside him. Even his cravat, stylishly twisted with its ends stuck through a buttonhole of his embroidered waistcoat, felt damp and heavy. He shed the waistcoat and then fumbled through the pockets of his folded coat and found a lace handkerchief and wiped his face. His periwig was like a stifling blanket. It would take time to become accustomed to this new climate. There was never a May so hot as this in England.
Isaac settled back and closed his eyes, exhausted from his long sea journey. He had expected to spend this night in Kingston waiting for his cousin to receive notification of his arrival and send a coach for him. But he had barely set foot on land when a helpful stranger, impressed at meeting a kinsman of Theophilus Swade, offered his own coach and driver to take him straightway to Swade Hall. The man had even sent a messenger ahead by fast horse to alert Swade of his arrival. Isaac might be far from the land of his birth, but at least here in this place he would have the connections he needed to reestablish his position in life. Though who could ever have imagined that the time would come when a kinsman by marriage would have greater regard for his interests than did the brother of his own blood.
Isaac’s thoughts grew dim, and he slept in the heavy heat. When he awoke again, daylight was fading and the air had cooled a little. Looking out the window of the coach, he saw green fields of cane turning golden in the Jamaican twilight. Mountains loomed ahead like a towering wall, their slopes dark green with the lushness of forest. The high peaks, visible only when Isaac craned his neck almost out of the window, were fading from blue to purple. The cooler air was a welcome relief.
Sitting on the edge of his seat, Isaac gave his attention to the world outside and tried to absorb all that was new to him. He especially watched the slaves in the fields, men and women naked to the waist, their faces lost in the fading light so that all he saw was their bodies, starkly black against the golden cane, and the slicing of their long knives, a continuous motion, never pausing, like some bizarre machine. In all his life until this day, Isaac Bull had seen perhaps five slaves, liveried black men in exotic turbans ornamenting wealthy drawing rooms in London. He had never seen anything like this slavery in Jamaica and he studied it closely.
As the coach rounded a curve in the road, the coachman called out to him that Swade Hall lay ahead. Then his cousin’s estate came into view, and Isaac smiled slightly and sat back, shaking his head at the size of the house. Its corner towers made it look like a castle. Stretching between the towers were arched balconies atop arched terraces, like double-tiered aqueducts. Here was what a modest investment and good management could earn in the Indies. A man could right his fortune in a place like this and reclaim lost advantages.
The coach pulled up in front of Swade Hall, and Theophilus Swade came out to meet it, his paunch and his periwig bouncing with his buoyant stride as he called out a welcome to Isaac and threw open the door of the coach to draw him into his rummy embrace.
“Look at you, you’re a full-grown man,” laughed Swade, holding Isaac by his shoulders and pushing him out to arms length. “But then, every boy who lives long enough turns into one.”
Isaac laughed. This was the Swade he remembered, the jocular, affectionate husband of his mother’s favorite cousin.
“I’d hoped you’d not forgotten me,” he said.
“Forgotten you?” said Swade, turning to walk to the house with his arm about Isaac’s shoulder. “I only wish Anne were alive to see you. I can hear her now going on about Molly’s younger boy. She never thought that much of Robert, you know. She could smell the devil in him.”
“We were grieved at her death,” said Isaac, sidestepping the subject of his brother for the moment. “She was like a sister to Mother. We mourned her that way.”
“I’ve not married again,” said Swade as he ushered Isaac into the great hall of his house where dozens of chairs lined the walls beneath rich hangings. A liveried footman stood by, a middle-aged black man. “It’s all too hard to hold a wife in the Indies. Death stalks them. But I have a few good women in the quarters. Black as the devil and sweet as molasses.”
Isaac nodded, only half paying attention. This hall alone was almost as large as the entire townhouse Swade had owned in London. To think that his fortune had grown so large.
“I am impressed, Cousin Swade.”
“With my women or my house?”
“Your house. I expected it to be more like the one you had in London.”
“That little mouse-hole,” Swade laughed, waving his hand. “Rude beginnings, Cousin Isaac. Are you hungry? We can have our supper now, or if you’d rather, you can settle in a bit first. Whichever you choose, we’ll do it with a bowl of punch.”
“Then I’ll take food,” said Isaac. “Settle my stomach first.”
Swade looked over at the footman. “Tell the kitchen we’re ready, Apollo.”
The black man nodded and left the hall at a pace that was almost, but not quite, leisurely.
“Apollo?” Isaac said with a smile.
Swade laughed. “Named for the god himself. Can’t you see him sipping nectar with Zeus? Well, perhaps not nectar, but he could gnaw a ham bone with Zeus and give the other gods a laugh or two.” He steered Isaac toward the long dining table in the center of the hall. “I apologize for not having other guests to keep you company tonight. Tomorrow I’ll fill the hall. But tonight there is too much to talk about. England, friends, and family. Your own position and your future. And your voyage—my God! Let’s not forget you’ve just come off the perilous seas.”
“I’ve certainly not forgotten,” said Isaac, exaggerating the rolling gait he had brought with him from the ship. “I still have my sea legs.”
“What about privateers? Those Frenchmen are a plague upon us. It takes the grace of God to get about the seas these days.”
Two slave boys entered to stand behind the chairs of two places already set at one end of the long table. Swade seated himself at the head of the table and Isaac sat at his right, while Apollo brought in a silver bowl of punch—rum mixed with water, lime juice, sugar, and nutmeg. Two silver cups were filled and Swade proposed a toast.
“To you, my dear cousin, and your new life in the colonies.”
Isaac smiled, nodded, and took a sip from his cup, while Swade drank down a hearty draught. Then Isaac toasted Swade’s health and long life, and Swade drained his cup and refilled it from the bowl.
“Tell me about your adventures with the privateers,” said Swade as they settled back in their chairs.
“There were none,” said Isaac. “The French were napping, or off chasing some bigger prize. We met no enemy but the weather, and God sided with us in that engagement and brought us through.”
“With masts intact?”
“We came through sound.”
“Then that was no storm,” said Swade. “That was just a little wind and rain. You’ve not known fear, Cousin Isaac, until you’ve seen your main and mizzen masts break away. Dear Jesus, you’ve not prayed until the ship rolls over and the piss runs down your legs before it rights again. God above, I hate ships.” He made a motion with his hand to Apollo, and the footman went out and returned immediately with a heavily-laden tray and began setting out the food—roast duck, a roast of fresh pork, pickled peppers, minced meat pie, orange slices, olives, salted fish, a dish of cut pieces of a pale yellow fruit that Isaac could not identify, custard, and candied sweetmeats of still another strange fruit.
“I hope this is enough,” said Swade, rising to his feet and taking up a knife to carve the meat. “If not, I’ll send to the kitchen for more.”
“No, this is quite enough,” said Isaac. “More than I can do justice to. Tell me about these fruits, Cousin. Some of them are new to me.”
“Try this one,” said Swade, pointing with his knife to the yellow fruit. “I’ll wager you’ve had it in England in sweetmeats.”
Isaac reached out and picked up a piece and put it in his mouth, a smile breaking over his face. “Pineapple.” He chewed it slowly, savoring the sweet flavor, his memory drifting to the shops of London. But in that return to days past, his mood clouded. “I remember it from the days when I could still afford sweetmeats,” he said grimly.
Swade had finished his artful carving of the duck and pushed the platter toward Isaac before turning his attention to the pork. “So Robert managed to take everything,” said Swade. “It would be of interest to know how he did it.”
“He did it first by being the oldest and second by being a thief.”
“You have no doubt that your mother left a will?”
“None whatsoever,” Isaac said bitterly. He put down the piece of duck he had been lifting to his mouth and felt again the injustice, the wound still raw after more than a year. “She told me of it. She never showed me the will itself, but she showed me the chest, the small blue one in which she kept her papers. She patted it with her hand and told me the will was inside and that it finished the plan that she and Father had for us. When Father died, his estate went to Robert, of course. As first-born, he was the legitimate heir, and I never begrudged him his birthright. My own annuity was but a hundred pounds because I was to inherit Mother’s patrimony. Not that her estate would measure up to what Robert had, but at least with that I would have the means to live according to the station in which I was raised. It was all in the little blue chest, she said, and she held it in her lap and patted it.”
“But when they opened the chest, the will was not to be found?” asked Swade, pushing the pork toward Isaac and sitting down.
“There was no chest,” said Isaac, his voice rising at the outrage, as if it were new again. “I was in London when she died. Two days passed before I reached home. Everything was in order, Robert told me. She had some few papers in her desk, he said, but no will. They had turned the house over looking for one. They had contacted friends and attorneys.
“The blue chest, I told him. Look in her blue chest.
“What blue chest? he said.” Isaac banged his hand on the table, sitting forward in a fury. “He looked me squarely in the eye and asked, What blue chest? As if he had never seen it, as if we two had not grown up sharing our place at her knee with that blue chest. It was always in her chamber, and when she traveled she never failed to take it with her. And yet he looked into my eyes, my own brother, and said, What blue chest?” Isaac sat back in his chair, silenced by his anger and pain.
“May he rot in hell,” said Swade, reaching for the custard. “And undoubtedly he will. So in the absence of a will, you received only half your due, and you were left to survive on that and your modest annuity.”
“Which was scarcely possible. As soon as my creditors heard about the settlement, they called in all my debts, some of them considerable, and refused to advance me any others. It seems that my entire position was based upon two assumptions that had suddenly been proven false—namely, that I would inherit the whole of my mother’s estate, and that my brother would back me in a pinch. So there I was, cut off. The woman I was to marry would not see me anymore. I had to lie in my bed at night and worry whether my scant possessions could be sold for enough to keep me out of debtors’ prison. I, who had been raised in comfort on my father’s estate, was reduced to a single suit of clothing and a chest of books. A friend, God bless him in heaven, for he’s dead now, paid for my passage to Jamaica. If there be a chance in the world to repair my fortunes, he told me, it will be in a place like this.”
“But perhaps not in this very place,” said Swade, looking at him over his cup of rum. “I would, however, like to see your brother come here to settle.”
Isaac gave him a startled look.
“Do you know why I say that?” Swade asked.
“No, I do not,” said Isaac, anger in his voice.
“Because Jamaica is a pesthouse,” said Swade, leaning forward. “If Robert came here, he could very well be dead in a year, or in five years. Ten years at the most. We have a hundred ways to kill him. A fever would be most likely, chills that would shake him to pieces, sweats that would damn near drown him. Perhaps he’d get the bloody flux, a pretty way to die, blood gushing out both ends. If he lived through that, by God, we’d have other snares for him, and we’d get him before long. Like as not, he’d drink himself to death with the worry of it. We bury them every day, twenty-five, thirty years old, all of them rich, young, and dead. Christ’s blood, Cousin, when they get to be twenty, we call them middle-aged and make them judges. I’m forty-one, and they say I’m an old man.”
Isaac helped himself to the minced meat pie and then to the custard, relieved that Swade at least was on his side. “People die in England,” he said.
“But not like they do here,” said Swade, emptying the punch bowl and handing it to the serving boy to be refilled. “I don’t want you to settle here, Cousin Isaac. You were a favorite of Anne’s and mine. I don’t want to take you under my wing and smother away your life.”
“I have no means to go elsewhere,” said Isaac, sitting back uneasily in his chair. “I will never return to England. It may be I must live as a poor man, but I shan’t do it in the land where I once was rich.”
“Don’t mistake me, Cousin, I do mean to help you. Your hundred pounds a year, well managed, is a sound enough base to build upon. But I think Carolina would be the place for you. It’s not the most healthful colony in America, but it’s a great improvement over the islands. And it’s newly planted, that’s the thing. Barely thirty years. Long enough to be established, but not so long that the best opportunities have all been taken up. There’s room there for a man in your position.”
“Carolina,” said Isaac, his brow furrowing as he tried to recall what he knew about the place. “Do they grow sugar there?”
“The climate’s not so well-suited for it as here,” said Swade. He picked a sweetmeat from the dish and ate it, licking his fingers. “They’ve not been able to compete with the islands in that. Nor with Virginia in tobacco. It seems that rice will be the crop for Carolina. They ship out more and more of it every year.”
“I’d not know where to start,” said Isaac. “Here I could learn from you. I have no connections in Carolina.”
“But I do. A fellow named Hawkins, a merchant friend. That’s the way for you to start—in trade. Improve your capital. You can’t get into rice until you have the means to buy the slaves.”
“You think this Hawkins will take me on?”
“He will if he can. If he has no place for you, he’ll find someone who does. I’ve done business with John Hawkins for ten years. If I give you a letter, he’ll take it to heart.”
Isaac stared across the room and let his mind circle, like a sea bird, slowly descending until it came to rest on this new idea—Carolina. He smiled a little. “Would that I had known to pay attention when I heard the name Carolina spoken in England. I never had the least notion of living there. Does Spain not press against the place?”
“Carolina presses Spain,” said Swade. “There’s recent news on that. Came in on one of Hawkins’ ships, from Boston by way of Carolina, Captain Pitts.” He turned to Apollo. “Fetch me my Boston News. You’ll find it on the table in my chamber.” The slave left the hall. “You’ve not come to the ends of the earth, Cousin. We have a newspaper in the colonies now. Out of Boston. Brand new. Captain Pitts brought me the first two copies.”
“I’ll be interested to see it,” said Isaac.
They let the conversation lapse and watched the punch in their cups until Apollo returned and handed Swade several printed sheets. Swade leafed through them.
“Here we are. Not a month old. Printed April 24, 1704. The headline reads, An Account of the Command of Colonel Moore in his Expedition Last Winter Against the Spaniards and Spanish Indians. In a Letter From him to the Governor of Carolina.” Swade looked at Isaac. “Would you wish to hear it read?”
“By all means,” said Isaac, settling back in his chair.
“Very well, then. This is what it says.” Swade cleared his throat. “May it please your honor to accept of this short narrative of what I with the army under my command have been doing since my departure from the Ocmulgee on the nineteenth December. On the fourteenth January we came to a town and strong and almost regular fort, about sun rising, called Ayubale. At our first approach the Indians fired guns and shot arrows at us briskly, from which we sheltered ourselves under the side of a great mud-walled house till we could take a view of the fort and consider the best way of assaulting it—which we concluded to be by breaking down the church door, which made a part of the fort, with axes. …”
Isaac closed his eyes to listen. While Swade read the report with growing drama in his voice, Isaac pictured in his mind the storming and taking of Ayubale, the ensuing surrender of Ivitachuco, and the destruction of almost the entire province of Apalachee.
“… Apalachee is now reduced to such a feeble and low condition, that it can neither support Saint Augustine with provision or disturb, endamage or frighten us or our Indians living between us and Apalachee and the French. In short, we have made Carolina as safe as the conquest of Apalachee can make it. If I had not so many men wounded in our storming of Ayubale, I would have assaulted Saint Lewis Fort.
“On Sabbath the 23d instant, I came out of Apalachee and am now about thirty miles on my way home. The number of free Apalachee Indians which are now under my protection and bound with me to Carolina are thirteen hundred. And one hundred for slaves. Dated in the woods fifty miles north of Apalachee.”
Swade put the paper on the table and looked up at Isaac. “I would say that Carolina is far more of a problem to Spain than Spain is to Carolina.”
Isaac smiled. “It certainly seems so.”
Swade ladled more punch into the silver cups. Then he sent Apollo to fetch tobacco pipes.
“Captain Pitt brought me three of those Apalachee slaves in his cargo,” he said, settling back in his chair.
“I’ve heard it said that Indians make poor slaves,” said Isaac.
“They do. They die like children. Too melancholic.” Swade took the pipe Apollo offered and let his serving boy light it with a hot coal held in smoking tongs. “Niggers are bad enough at getting sick and dying, but Indians are worse. Yet they’re cheap, you see. Only half the price of a nigger. So you get a year’s work from an Indian and he’s dead. But your new nigger might be dead, too, and that nigger’s grave will cost you twice as much. Forty pounds to twenty. It’s worth the risk, I say. I take an Indian when I can get one. God knows, you must bow to economy where you can. A planter’s greatest cost is his slaves. To keep a hundred slaves, you have to buy six new ones every year. Now figure that. What is it? Every sixteen, seventeen years, you replace them all. They live no longer than that on the average, sixteen or seventeen years.” He shook his head.
“I would have thought it the opposite,” said Isaac. “If a man had a herd of cattle as large, he’d soon have a great many more through natural increase.”
“Niggers don’t have the hardiness of other brutes. Far more pickaninnies die then ever live to take up a hoe.”
“But at least they die in a Christian land with a chance of seeing God.”
“Niggers don’t go to God,” said Swade, pushing back his chair to make room to stretch out his legs. He folded his hands over his round belly and eyed Isaac narrowly. “They’re not Christians.”
Isaac reached for a sweetmeat as he considered his response. He knew this debate from the coffee houses of London, but it was different now at the table of a sugar planter whose help he desperately needed. He glanced at Apollo, well-dressed in matching coat and breeches, silk stockings and buckled shoes. Obviously he was a man, the same workmanship of God in slave as in master. Conscience demanded an acknowledgement.
“Surely with the benefit of instruction they could become Christians,” he said, keeping his tone carefully dispassionate. “Surely God would be pleased by it.”
Swade laughed. “If you knew slaves, you’d know better what you’re saying.” He sat up suddenly. “Come with me. We’ll take a walk, stir up our blood a bit. I’ll show you a sugar plantation.”
“In the dark?” asked Isaac.
Swade got to his feet. “Fetch us a lantern, Apollo.”
The night air was cool and refreshing. The moonlight spread wide across the heavens, blotting out the stars and spilling down upon the landscape in a silvery half-light beyond the golden glow of the lantern. Black forms slipped silently through the far edge of the lantern light. Isaac found it eerie to be in the midst of so many dark and silent people. He felt himself an intruder among them with his white skin and powdered periwig. But master, too. His skin, his civility, his superior birth, placed him above these dark men and women.
“This is one of my mills,” said Swade, holding the lantern higher in a vain attempt to throw light on the large building before them. The open door and windows were dimly illuminated, and the steady noise of machinery, which earlier had been vague and distant, was now concentrated and insistent.
“It’s water-powered,” said Swade, leading Isaac to the doorway.
The two men stood for a moment in silence while Isaac looked in at the strange scene: machinery and black men and piles of cut cane, all poorly illuminated by a bright straw fire in a great fireplace on one side of the room. The fire tender was a naked black boy, perhaps ten years old, his body glistening with sweat in the yellow light.
“We keep it running around the clock,” said Swade. “It’s only a matter of hours, you see, before the juice spoils in the cane. Every piece of cane cut today will be milled by morning. The juice crushed out here runs into a pipe that carries it out of this building and into the boiling house. I’d give you a closer look, but I don’t want to disturb my niggers. Feeding the mill is a tricky business, especially at night. Catch a finger in those rollers and there’s no stopping it until the whole man is crushed through like a stick of cane.”
“My God,” said Isaac. He watched the black forms of the workers stooping in the dim light to take up the cane, rising to feed it into the rollers, stooping again, rhythmic, like the cutting in the fields, never pausing, like the unrelenting machine.
Swade withdrew his light, and Isaac turned and followed him out through the moonlight to the adjacent boiling house, lit as the mill-house had been by firelight. Swade led the way inside. Here it was incredibly hot and stinking. Isaac took out his handkerchief to mop his brow, wishing he could be rid of his periwig. The noise from the mill in the other building faded, like wind in the trees, almost the same as silence. The sounds of the boiling house were quieter and more varied, the plopping sound of thick boiling syrup, the dull metallic rap of a ladle against the lip of a copper cauldron, the humming voices of the two black men who sweated before the row of steaming coppers in the weirdly flickering firelight. Isaac was not sure if the voices were singing or speaking. At times they seemed almost to moan.
“There are four coppers, you see,” said Swade, holding up his lantern to throw more light. “The juice comes into the cistern there from the mill-house. Quashee ladles it into the largest copper. They boil it down, moving it from one copper to another until it reaches that small one where Sam is working. He’s the one who has to know when to strike it, when to damp the fire and let it cool to crystals. There’s no sure way to tell when the time is right to strike. He just has to know. These boys are some of the best niggers I own. But I’ll tell you, Cousin, it’s like training horses. You can teach them tricks, but you can’t raise them from their brutish state and make them Christians. It would be a mockery of Jesus Christ to say he died for creatures like this.”
Isaac felt his pulse rise. He had argued this issue in London and felt strongly about it. Christ died for all men, and these were men, however low their station.
“I cannot help but think they have souls,” he said tightly. The scene was affecting him, the heat and the stench, the darkness and the firelight, the sweat-drenched black men, the humming, and that moaning sound, strange, not like speech or song.
“They are incapable of understanding Christian precepts,” Swade insisted. “You have some things to learn. You’d best be careful where you speak your London views. They’ll not be well received in Carolina. A slaveholder must protect his property. There’s a question whether the law will ultimately sustain the enslavement of Christians. We all know that. But niggers are heathens, you see, and lack the faculties for conversion. I will never argue from any other position, and if you intend to join the planting class, you’d best start trying it out yourself.”
Isaac said nothing, knowing he should not disagree. The silence lengthened as Swade waited for a response. “I understand,” Isaac said at last.
“But you don’t agree,” said Swade. He turned to leave, and as the lantern light swept the boiling house, an image of a man, dark and grotesque, appeared in one corner and then fell back into darkness as the light passed by. Isaac was stunned by the sight and looked hard at the dark form, still faintly visible, a man with his arms strung up above his head. The moaning came from him.
“What is that?” he said, putting a hand on Swade’s arm to draw back the lantern light. Swade held the lamp toward the corner, illuminating a black man hanging from his thumbs bound together, his toes barely touching the packed earth floor. He was naked. His back, turned toward them, was raw and bleeding from his neck to his feet, the flesh lashed open into a single wound. His low moaning was almost beyond hearing.
“Mingo,” said Swade. “Damn his black hide. Tried to take to the mountains.” He drew the lantern away and moved on toward the door. Isaac followed, looking back in horrified fascination.
The air outside was cool and sweet. Isaac breathed deeply and tried to forget what he had seen. Such punishment was as necessary to slavery, he told himself, as the stocks and pillory were necessary to government. He would learn this in time, grow accustomed to it. These things were not so cruel as they might seem to someone unused to them.
“You see those mountains there?” said Swade, raising his hand to the dark wall that blocked out the stars above the horizon. “The whole interior of the island is filled with them. A vast area empty of Englishmen. If a runaway escapes the dogs and gets free of us, we never see him again. There are whole towns of escaped slaves up there. Maroons we call them. Savage people. It’s not safe for a white man to venture up there with anything less than an army around him. They’re the bane of the island, those mountains.”
“So Mingo was caught by the dogs,” said Isaac.
“They chased him all night, treed him this morning. And a pity it is. He’s trained as a carpenter, but now I’ll have to put him in the fields. Such a beating takes twenty pounds off his value, but in the fields we can watch him. He’ll wear chains on his legs from now on.” Swade shook his head. “He couldn’t appreciate the good life he had.”
Isaac said nothing. The slaves were pitiful. It was hard for him to believe their lot was beyond improvement.
“I think you are ready for a glass of madeira,” said Swade. “Tomorrow I want you to walk about the place. Inquire freely of the niggers anything you wish to know. I’ll send a boy with you to help you talk to them. Most of them speak gibberish. Incomprehensible to an Englishman.”
Isaac turned with relief to follow Swade back along the road to the house. The night air now seemed stifling. He wished to sit still in a comfortable chair, to take off his periwig and stretch out his legs. But Swade was diverging from the route they had followed before, taking a different way.
“I have one more stop for you,” said Swade. “You’ll not be sorry.”
Isaac followed wearily along, wishing for an end to the lessons. A cluster of small houses appeared before them in the darkness, neat cabins of wood with thatched roofs.
“It’s here I keep my house niggers and my women,” said Swade. “Mulatto women. Lovely creatures. There’s one I want to show you, for your own pleasure.”
Isaac’s interest began to rise. He looked around, noting his whereabouts more carefully. They passed by two cabins and stopped at the third one. The door was open and it was dark inside until Swade entered with his lantern. On a rude bedstead built against a wall, a young woman stirred, rustling the straw mattress beneath her slender brown body, which was half covered by a linen sheet. She opened her eyes, squinting and holding up her hand against the light. Her breasts were plump and firm with wide, dark nipples. She was little more than a girl, perhaps sixteen.
“Evening, Master,” she said sleepily, smiling up at Swade and then glancing at Isaac.
Swade reached out and lifted back the sheet to reveal the whole of her naked body. She turned onto her side, propping herself up on one elbow and running her fingers over the curve of her raised hip. Swade looked at Isaac and smiled, then dropped the sheet back over her.
Isaac felt himself aroused and glanced about the room for distraction, noticing the neatness of it. It was furnished with a table and stool, a wooden cup and bowl. The floor was cleanly swept. She lived in luxury compared to the rude straw huts of the field slaves that he had seen from the window of the coach.
“Her name is Penelope,” said Swade. “Visit her whenever you please. She’s free of disease. I guarantee it.”
Isaac nodded, somewhat embarrassed but not displeased.
“Mr. Bull may return later tonight,” Swade said to Penelope as he turned and started toward the door.
Isaac followed.
“I’d like that, Master Swade,” Penelope said softly as they went out the door into the night.
The parlor of Swade Hall was furnished with finely crafted chairs, chests, and small tables, all imported from England. But most sumptuous of all the furnishings was the parlor bed with its rich brocade hangings drawn closed. Swade had had Isaac’s chest brought to this room, along with a decanter of madeira wine and two cut-crystal goblets. Now he filled the goblets and handed one of them to Isaac and took up the other for himself.
“A toast, Cousin Isaac,” he said grandly, holding up his glass. “My heart is full tonight and I fain would give words to it. I am alone in Jamaica, without kith or kin. My wife is dead. My son and daughter I’ve sent to England so they might live long enough to inherit my fortune. And I live with the knowledge that when they do inherit it, some coarse overseer will move his creole wife and brats into Swade Hall and drive my estate into ruin by his larcenous management. I know not why I stay here all alone, except that I fear the sea. And I love what I have built here. I would not rest easy in London knowing it was falling into neglect. So I am resigned to my loneliness, taking refuge in the friends I have around me. But now a kinsman comes, seeking me out above all others in his distress.”
Isaac nodded.
“A kinsman,” Swade repeated, savoring the word. “With a kinsman comes all the links of blood and marriage, all the memories of days and faces passed away. Those lovely summers in England on your father’s estate, your mother and my wife linked in happy cousinhood, and you, companionable boy that you were, accompanying your father and me on a hunt or on business about the place. I feared all my links of kin were broken by the wide ocean. But here you’ve come, remembering those days, turning in your desperate hour to your Cousin Theophilus. I am moved. If only I loved you less, I would keep you with me. But I’ll take comfort in the nearness of Carolina. I have a scheme for you, dear Cousin. Let us drink first to kinship.”
“May it always be held dear,” said Isaac, raising his glass.
They seated themselves then in two of the parlor chairs, and Swade leaned back, his elbows on the arms of his chair, his wine goblet enclosed in both hands before his chin.
“I’m going to outfit a ship. I normally stay away from shipping and work instead through agents in Kingston. Pay them to take the risks. But this war with France has driven the risks so high, and the fees in proportion, that there’s scarcely any profit left when I’m done with shipping costs. So I propose to outfit my own ship, fill the hold with rum and sugar, put you aboard as my agent, and send you to Charles Town in Carolina. You’ve shown luck in evading privateers. Perhaps it will hold. In Charles Town you can work with John Hawkins to gather a return cargo for me. You collect the commission on my outgoing shipment and on a share of my incoming, and there you have something to start with in Carolina.”
“Well,” said Isaac, looking into his wine glass and searching for appropriate words. “God bless you, Cousin. I never expected such kindness.”
“Kindness? You may very well be hauled into Martinico by a Frenchman. I’m employing you to share my risk. You risk your life and I risk my money. This is a business venture.”
“Very well,” said Isaac, looking up and raising his glass. “To business.”
Swade drained his goblet and set it down in a gesture of satisfaction. “Shall we spend the night drinking toasts, or retire for a bit of sleep before morning comes?”
“You’ve given me much to lie abed and think about,” said Isaac.
“Not the least of which is Penelope,” said Swade, bending toward him with a chuckle as he rose to his feet.
“She is lovely,” said Isaac, rising after him. He went with Swade to the door of the parlor and stood for a moment watching him walk away across the dimly lit hall. Then he turned back to the curtained parlor bed, which was more splendidly furnished than any other in which he had ever slept.
Isaac made his way in silence through the darkness of Swade Hall. He shrouded his lantern with his coat so that he could barely see beyond each step. He was ashamed of his stealth. He knew he should go boldly with the lantern fully bright, unabashed at his passion. The last woman he had was a chambermaid in England. Yet he was not desperate. He felt he was in control of himself. It was only that the memory of Penelope was so fresh, the sheet turned back, her naked body long and brown, her fingers moving tantalizingly along her flesh.
He uncovered the lantern by degrees, gaining boldness as he moved through the entryway toward the outer door. He opened the door soundlessly and slipped out into the night. Combining passion with stealth was too old a habit to shed in a single night.
A dog came out from beneath the house and greeted him with wagging tail, then moved before him down the road, checking over his shoulder from time to time to make sure his man-friend was following. Isaac watched him as he trotted in the furthest light of the lantern, and he wondered if this were one of the same dogs who only last night had gone crashing through the forest in pursuit of Mingo. The image of that other naked body he had seen that night intruded into his mind, the black man hanging by up-stretched arms in the boiling house, his open back raw and glistening in the firelight. Even now he was hanging there.
And Penelope. Was she not a slave like Mingo? Might she someday be hung by her thumbs? Isaac’s passion began to fade. He tried to forget the dismal scene in the boiling house, but it would not be pushed away. Could he lose himself with Penelope after all he had seen this day? Knowing she was less free than the dog that trotted before him? He stopped and stood for a long time in the warm, humid night, undecided. Then, with a weary sigh, he turned around and went back to the bed in the parlor.