The blaze of sudden ferocity in Kite’s expression ignited a responding terror in that of the trembling, crouching negress. She shut her eyes tight, screwing them up against his imminent assault, the only defence she could offer. It stopped Kite dead. He felt the pang of guilt as a physical wrench in his guts. Yes, he wanted the woman, as a young man wanted a woman, but not in this manner! Instead he squatted beside her and slid an arm about her shoulders, a gesture of almost fraternal concern. He felt her shudder, as the captain’s half-strangled whore had shuddered, but he made no further move, sensing that inaction would the quicker console her. After a while he felt her trembling ease, and he bent and kissed the top of her head. At this she looked at him and he gently withdrew, easing himself back against the adjacent bulkhead and placing the tips of the fingers of both hands on his breast said slowly: ‘Kite… I am Kite… Kite…’
She tried to enunciate the word, but her mouth was dry and she had to swallow before she uncertainly formed his name. ‘Kite…’ she said.
He smiled and nodded. Then he extended his hand and without thinking, still looking into her eyes, touched her breast, raised his eyebrows questioningly and made as if to say a word. She frowned and repeated, ‘Kite.’
Kite smiled again and shook his head, touched his own breast, repeated his own name, then her shoulder. She said something which he failed to catch and he quickly cupped his right ear and bent forward. She repeated the word which, if it was her name, he found himself unable to grasp. Instead he sat back on his haunches and said, ‘I shall call you Puella, which is Latin for girl.’ He repeated the name slowly. ‘Puella.’
Since he could not discover her real name, to confer some artificial English substitute seemed but one more imposition; the Latin noun seemed a not inappropriate, expedient and, he hoped, temporary substitute.
Rising, he slipped out of his cabin and reappeared with a handful of biscuits and some water from the gunroom which he offered her. Eagerly she grabbed the carafe of water and upended it, swallowing quickly. When she had finished she gestured at her leg irons and said something which he interpreted as a request that he should remove them.
He shrugged and shook his head. ‘I cannot,’ he said. Then, realising that if he said more, though she would be incapable of understanding it, she might comprehend that the matter was more complicated, he went on.
‘Believe me, Puella, I would willingly remove those confounded irons if it was in my power, but they would only be replaced tomorrow.’ He saw the disappointment in her eyes and it suddenly occurred to Kite that although he, along with every man aboard the Enterprize, knew the fate of the negroes, they themselves would have no idea of what lay in store for them. Thus his kindness, however partial, might seem to her not a temporary amelioration of her confinement, but the end of it. He fervently wished that this was so, but knew that the morning would present him with further problems. What, he asked himself, could he do to mitigate the poor creature’s distress, to show her that although she must remain shackled, he meant no harm? Impulsively, he suddenly scooped her up and laid her out in his cot, pulling a sheet over her. Touching her lightly on the cheek, wished her good night.
Then he spread a blanket on the deck and lay down to sleep.
When he woke it was still early. The faint clink of iron recalled the presence of Puella in his cot and told where she shifted uneasily in her sleep. He sighed, aware that he could do little to preserve Puella’s privacy, yet dreaded her reaction to being returned to the women’s room on the slave deck. He wished that there was someone on board who could translate between them, and express his intention of doing whatever he could to help her, but they had left Golden-Opportunity Plantagenet at York Island. He considered buying her himself; the notion had merit, for it offended no-one and while he might be thought a damned fool, he could stomach that. But he presumed he would have to wait until the slaves were put up for sale, whenever and wherever they were landed. Then another idea struck him; so as not to wake her, he quietly slipped on his shoes and went on deck.
It was still dark and for a moment he stood in the chilly night air, staring at the first flush of the dawn to the east. Gerard had the watch and loomed up like a ghost. ‘Well, Mr Kite, what a surprise, I hear you have feet of mortal clay after all.’
Kite opened his mouth to protest the innocence of his behaviour, but thought better of it, realising his continence would be as misunderstood as his own initial misunderstanding of Molloy’s rectitude. It was preferable to meet his problems at a level others comprehended.
‘I have taken a woman, yes. Is that so very remarkable?’
Gerard chuckled. ‘In your case it’s remarkable, yes. Was she good?’
‘I’ve had better,’ Kite riposted, pleased with the readiness of his glib reply.
‘Have you now? Well, well. And I had you for a cock-virgin.’
‘We all make mistakes, Mr Gerard. Now, perhaps you will tell me something. How do I get her made into an assistant, as the other men’s women have become. She would make a good assistant to Wilson and myself.’
‘Well…’ Gerard appeared to consider the matter.
‘Look, I understand I am entitled to profit from a slave or two. Why cannot I have this one…’’
‘In lieu of payment?’
‘If necessary.’
Gerard laughed. ‘Are you a fool? Have you any idea what a box of problems she’ll bring?’
‘Then I’ll sell her on,’ Kite said with convincing brutality.
‘Captain Makepeace doesn’t favour…’
‘Captain Makepeace thrust her in my face last night.’ As he uttered the words Kite was seized by a sudden suspicion and immediately voiced it: ‘In fact I’m not sure that he didn’t intend to corrupt me by the act and prove my feet were of ordinary clay.’
Gerard chuckled beside him. ‘Well, he seems to have achieved a degree of success. You now possess the zeal of the converted, Mr Kite. Only yesterday you moped about, utterly opposed to the trade and now, here you are, up before the sun to ask me about buying a black whore.’
Kite bit his lip at the insult, then said, ‘I thought perhaps you would approve. It would ease the burden on…’
‘Beg pardon, sir…’
‘What is it?’ Gerard turned as a man approached them in the gloom. ‘It’s Holmes, ain’t it?’ Gerard peered at the figure who appeared bare legged, his shirt tails flapping in the wind. ‘What are you doing on deck?’
‘There’s trouble below, sir…’
‘What the slaves,’ broke in Gerard, suddenly tense.
‘No, no, sir, not them. That’s Mr Kite, ain’t it? It’s more fever, sir. Johnny Good is shaking in his hammock, sir, damn near threw me out, and he’s started to shout about his muvver…’
‘Dear God…’
‘I’ll go down, Mr Gerard,’ Kite said. ‘Take me below Holmes.’
In the next two days eight men were taken ill, including the gunner, Mitchell, the first of the Spitfire’s officers to be infected. The yellow-jack, having lain dormant from its initial appearance among the crew of the Enterprize, had now incubated and struck in all its indiscriminate horror. It was only the beginning; by the end of a week one third of the ship’s company were suffering, some in the preliminary stage, suffering terrible fits of uncontrollable shivering, wracked by pains in the head, the spine and the limbs, some already in the second phase, when an abatement gave the false impression of recovery before the final yellowing of skin and eyes. This was only a brief interlude, for the copious and bloody vomiting that followed was the prelude to the fatal chilling before death.
Like their consort, the Marquis of Lothian, aboard which the epidemic still raged, the work of the ship suffered. The morning exercise of the slaves was curtailed, then abandoned, for there were barely sufficient men fit to work the vessel. Instead a daily burial party mustered. Makepeace, a scented handkerchief held to his face, hurriedly mumbled the Protestant rites over the corpses, which had been sewn into their hammocks and were now sent to the bottom with a cannon shot at their feet.
For Kite the outbreak was not without ironic consequence, for he had succeeded in persuading Makepeace to strike off the leg-irons from a few of the women and these included Puella. They helped nurse the dying with a tender compassion that drew from the commander the observation that, ‘such a thing seems scarcely possible and would doubtless prove so if they knew they were to be sold into a lifetime’s servitude.’
But that, it seemed to Kite, was increasingly unlikely, for the mortality among the crew threatened the continuation of the voyage. This fact formed the core of a shouted debate between Makepeace and Ross at the end of the twentieth day of the passage. Although the ships’ route lay within the compass of the North East Trade Winds which held steady, requiring little sail trimming by day or night, the loss of men seriously hampered the management of the slaves. That morning Molloy and Kerr were struck down.
Having compared the increasingly parlous state of his crew with that of Captain Ross, Makepeace clambered down from the rail to where Gerard and Kite waited. Kite had just reported the incapacity of Molloy, whose large frame shuddered below in the confinement of his cot.
‘You know what is in my mind, Mr Gerard, if things get much worse?’
‘I do, sir.’
Kite looked enquiringly from one to the other, but it was clear that the obscure reference was to be kept from him.
‘How many of the blacks are affected today?’ Makepeace asked.
‘Only five, sir,’ said Kite, ‘the same number as yesterday.’
‘How can this be?’ Makepeace asked frowning, his expression desperate and fearful as he stared at Kite.
‘They are a lower order of being,’ Gerard said, ‘their immunity proves it…’
‘Aye, that may be true,’ said Makepeace, ‘but Kite here is so far unaffected and he has been in constant contact with the sick.’
‘Perhaps I too am of a lower order,’ Kite remarked. Black humour, he had observed, was a common means by which the seamen coped with the dread of their circumstances.
Makepeace smiled thinly. ‘I think that highly possible, Kite.’ He looked up at the foretopsail. ‘If this wind holds we shall sight land within the sennight; it remains to be seen whether we can win this race and keep sufficient men to work the ship into port.’
‘If we run into enemy men-of-war…’ Gerard left the sentence incomplete, but Makepeace merely shrugged.
‘Let us hope,’ he said, ‘we have a man left to strike the ensign.’
‘Kite will do it,’ said Gerard, half smiling.
*I have Little Inclination to Write these Lines. *
Kite dipped his quill and stared across his cabin to the rumpled cot.
We now have over Half the Ship’s Company sick with the Yellow-Fever. I am Deeply Perplex’d to know where this Contagion Arises. That it Comes from the Coast of Guinea is Clear, for the Negroes have grown Accustomed to it and are hardly Affected by it, but by what means, or from what Agent the Infection Comes, the Disease remains a Great Mystery.
He paused again, recalling the Sherbro and the dense jungle that crowded its banks, hemming in the grey-green water and depositing in its stream the detritus of its endless cycle of life and death. Did the slime laden water contain some organism that bore the fatal disease? It was not dissimilar to the fever known in England as the Marsh Ague, endemic, he knew, in low, boggy and foetid areas. Although the deep and flowing Sherbro seemed at first to bear little resemblance to the marshes lying in the estuaries of many English rivers, he recalled the heavy miasma which, after nightfall, would descend upon the river like a thick and steaming fog. Was it this dense mist that, penetrating the opened ports and descending through the open gratings and companionways of the waist, introduced the deadly fever into the Enterprize?
Was it the river water, or the river-borne mist? Or both?
Then Kite remembered something with a start of horror and culpability. He himself had insisted the slaves were washed down with water from the Sherbro; had this sanitary measure actually imported the fever? ‘Oh, God…’ he groaned, burying his head in his hands, shaking with deep sobs at his profound ignorance and the fatal events which had led to this tragedy.
‘Kite… Kite?’
He looked up, wiping the moisture from his eyes. The negress Puella had entered his cabin, barefoot and noiseless. She bore a bowl of steaming rice and he realised he had not eaten for hours. He nodded and expressed his thanks, taking the proffered bowl from her. She drew back to hunker down in the corner of his cabin, folding her arms on her drawn-up knees and staring up at him.
After swallowing a mouthful he said, ‘You are good to me, Puella. I thank you.’ He put the spoon in the bowl and extended his right hand, repeating, ‘thank you.’
She reached out and took his hand. It was the first mutual intimacy they had shared and they both smiled. ‘Kite may die, Puella,’ he said, ‘and God knows what will become of you, but if I live, I shall not abandon you.’ He cleared his throat and shook his head, adding in a firmer voice, ‘no, I shall not, upon my honour.’
He knew she had no idea what he said as he made this compact with providence, but he sensed she derived some satisfaction from the sound of his voice, for she smiled again and he was beguiled by the curve of her full lips and the way a smile made her wide but not uncomely nostrils flare.
Scooping the bowl clear of rice he set it down, whereupon she rose to remove it. Standing close to him, swaying with the movement of the ship, she looked down at him, her breasts prominent, infinitely desirable and appealing. As she took up the bowl she gently touched his cheek. He resisted an impulse to put his arm about her and in the same instant she slid her hand about his head and drew his face to her. He felt the soft firmness of her breast, the erect tissue of her nipple, against his cheek and the soft touch of her lips on the crown of his head.
‘Kite,’ she said slowly. Then she was gone, leaving him sitting like a loon, staring at the closed door of his cabin. He sighed, profoundly touched, then took up his quill again.
The Negresses have greatly Assisted in tending the Sick, among them a Young Woman whom we call Puella and in whom I have an Interest and Regard with Great Affection…
What did it matter what he wrote now? Who would read his journal after his death? He crossed out the dissembling we call and substituted I call.
On the following afternoon Gerard was taken ill, along with two other men who included the gunner, and while Kite almost hourly expected to begin a shuddering fit, he remained strangely unaffected. Upon hearing the news of the first lieutenant’s incapacity Makepeace retired to his own cabin and proceeded to render himself helplessly drunk. It was Ritchie who brought both the news that Gerard had been carried twitching from the quarterdeck to his cabin and that Makepeace had taken to the bottle. Kite was then in the berth deck, binding up the jaw of their most recent fatality, Francis Molloy.
Kite frowned, intent on his task, asking over his shoulder, ‘who has the deck? With Molloy dead, Captain Makepeace has no right getting drunk…’
‘The steward says he’s consigned the ship to the devil, Mr Kite…’
Kite straightened up and looked at Ritchie. ‘I suppose he fears that he’ll be next.’
Ritchie shrugged. ‘that’s a risk we all run,’ he observed with chilling logic, glancing at the pale form of Molloy. Then he confronted Kite with an even colder piece of logic. ‘If the Cap’n goes, you’d be the last officer left. I reckon you’ve a touch of luck, about you, Mr Kite. I’ve seen it before; Makepeace had it for years and maybe it ain’t deserted him yet – we’ll see – but you’ve a winning way, sir and with Mr Kerr gone… Well, sir, looks like you and Jacob Ritchie’ve got a leg up in life, if you know what I mean…’
Kite frowned, then the penny dropped. ‘You mean you’re the next senior man?’
Ritchie nodded. ‘At the moment Mr Kite, it’s Cap’n Makepeace, you and me…’ Ritchie waved his hand at Puella and another negress who were present, tending the sick seamen. ‘Along with all this black ivory.’
Kite saw the end of Ritchie’s train of thought. The system of shares upon which the rewards of the voyage rested, accrued to those holding the various stations at the conclusion of the voyage. ‘Yes,’ he agreed hurriedly, ‘I see.’
‘I’m glad you do, Mr Kite. You and me haven’t always seen eye to eye, but then we can let bye-gones be bye-gones, can’t we? I can work the old Enterprize, sir, but I’ll need you to navigate, like.’
Kite nodded. The additional burden appalled him. ‘I’d better go and see the Captain, just the same. We’d be desperately short-handed without him.’
Ritchie stood aside. ‘Oh yes, sir, quite so, but just tell him that Jake Ritchie’s now his first luff, sir.’
Kite left Ritchie laughing and made for the ladder. Ritchie watched him go, then still smiling, squeezed the buttocks of the nearer negress.
‘I Mister Thomas’ woman…’ she protested as she had been schooled to.
‘Sure you are, sister, just as long as Mr Thomas can stand up and piss.’
Kite went aft and knocked on Makepeace’s door. ‘Go to the devil, whoever you are!’
‘It’s Kite, sir. Pray let me in…’
‘To hell with you Kite.’
Kite hesitated only an instant before forcing the flimsy door. Makepeace rose to his feet. ‘Damn you…!’ Makepeace began, but Kite, seeing the quantity of bottle necks visible in the opened locker under the settee beneath the stern windows, over-rode him.
‘Captain Makepeace, for God’s sake recollect yourself. You are not sick and the ship requires you. If you submit to this meaningless debauch, do you think me capable of bringing the Enterprize into port?’
‘I am in quarantine, Mr Kite,’ Makepeace began portentously, ‘to better preserve myself for precisely the purpose of bringing this brig into port…’
‘And whom do you expect to run the ship in the interval, sir? Are you aware that presently, with Mr Gerard like to die, your first lieutenant is Jacob Ritchie?’
Makepeace stared at Kite, frowned, then waved Kite’s remark aside. ‘Well, you are an officer… haven’t we taught you to take a meridian altitude…’
‘I cannot tend the sick and…’
‘Then give up tending the sick! The sick will die! The fever is fatal! Embrace you new opportunity with enthusiasm, Kite. It may not last long.’
Kite was appalled, he was neither surgeon nor a sea-officer, but Makepeace’s remark gave him a slight opening, for the commander was not yet completely inebriated.
‘D’you want to bring the ship in, sir, because if so then I will willingly stand watch-and-watch with you? We cannot have many more days to run before sighting land…’
Makepeace stared at him, then he refilled his glass. ‘I shall consider your proposal,’ he said and Kite knew he had lost his argument. With a look of absolute contempt for Makepeace, he left the cabin, followed out by a bottle which flew through the air and smashed against the door Kite slammed behind him.
On deck Kite passed word for Ritchie, telling him to take the watch until midnight when he himself would take over. Ritchie grinned and winked at him. ‘I told you, Mr Kite.’
Kite turned away; he was desperate for some sleep. The prospect of even two or three hours away from the stench of vomit, blood and the last venting farts of the dead, seemed to hold the promise of paradise.
Nothing mattered any more; the fell shadow of damnation that had fallen over his life in the Hebblewhite’s barn and against which he had struggled for so long, could no longer be opposed. He reconciled himself to death; it would come sooner or later and sooner now seemed preferable, for he lacked the will to fight the inevitable any more. Makepeace was neither a fool nor a coward, but Kite realised he had already capitulated. Makepeace had always known the enormity of the risks in his adopted trade. Perhaps these risks mitigated the cruelty of it and the mortality among the crews of the Guineamen paid in some part for those of the enslaved negroes. Perhaps the constant presence of death prompted men of high temper and passion, such as Captain Makepeace, to take their pleasure of the black women while they still breathed…
With these dark certainties crowding his mind, Kite entered his cabin, intent only on falling fast asleep. Puella was crouching in the corner, whither she had run to escape Ritchie who, unwilling to antagonise Kite, had not followed her and had then been summoned to the quarterdeck.
‘Puella…’ he said thickly, swaying with fatigue. She stood hurriedly and caught him by the upper arms.
‘Kite…’
Hesitantly, his hands went round her slender waist and ran down over her pert buttocks, slipping the cotton wrap from her. He felt the responsive pressure of her thighs against his and they looked at each other, she half smiling, half fearful as he bent and kissed her, losing himself in the sudden access of tremulous passion. Her nipples rasped against him as he tore at his breeches and then she was laying down before him, on the bare scrubbed planking of the deck, her knees drawn up, shielding the smooth and lovely brown expanse of her flat belly. As he exposed his throbbing and eager member she parted her legs and he tenderly knelt between them, pressing his loins down towards her black triangle of coiling pubic hair.
Woken from a deep sleep, Kite disentangled himself from Puella’s deliciously wanton limbs and clambered wearily up the companionway to the quarterdeck. His mind was a turmoil of contradicting thoughts. Love and desire mixed with self-contempt and despair; hope flowed through him, to be quenched by reality, while rambling and insane thoughts of defying fate and surviving against all the odds, were brought down to sea-level by a dousing of cold spray sweeping across the brig’s rail as he reached the deck.
The fog of sleep cleared and he stared about him, checking the course. The man at the wheel said nothing; the death-rate aboard the Enterprize had so altered everything aboard the brig that it seemed no longer odd that the surgeon was also the officer of the watch. Kite stared to leeward where, just abaft the larboard beam he could see the Marquis of Lothian quite clearly in the starlight, a pale ghost of a ship, her waterline delineated by the faint trace of phosphorescence.
The beauty of the sight struck him, along with the incongruity of the sentimental effect the perception had on him here, on this stinking vessel with its cargo of death and misery. The strange, contradictory thoughts made his whole being tingle, like some late extension of the shuddering orgasm he had enjoyed with Puella. He sensed something of that triumphalism touched upon by Makepeace with his theory of providential defiance; he sensed too a brief connection between the wonder of creation that united the quickening of the life forces of Puella and himself, with the dreadful, bloody death of his friend Molloy.
He was recalled from this introspection by a monosyllabic protest by the man at the wheel. Turning, he saw Puella beside him. ‘What are you doing here?’ he began, stopping when he simultaneously realised she could neither understand him nor comprehend his hypocritical affront at the impropriety of her presence on the quarterdeck. Puella held out a twist of cloth containing something small and hard. Taking the tiny bundle, Kite thought it felt like irregular musket balls.
‘Kola,’ she said, pointing at her mouth. ‘Good.’ She hesitated, then, pointing at his own mouth, added ‘Kite… Good… Eat.’
He opened the cloth, marvelling at her slow but sure acquisition of English words. She had learnt ‘eat’ from the curt commands of Ritchie and his men as they compelled the sea-sick slaves to consume their daily rations of manioc and rice. Kite recognised the nuts which he had seen a few of the slaves eating. Makepeace had drawn his attention to them, explaining that they eased hunger and could drive away fatigue, even, it was claimed, dispel the symptoms of drunkenness and purify water. These, Kite deduced looking down at the handful he held, must have been preserved in the clothing of the blacks during their captivity in the baracoons. There could have been few of these left on board by now, and he assumed Puella had gone to some trouble to obtain them for his easement now. He was touched by her solicitude and gratefully touched her cheek.
The man at the wheel sucked his teeth with whistling disapproval.
‘Thank you,’ he said tenderly to Puella and she, sensing the solitary duty to which he must attend, left him alone. As she went below, the man at the wheel muttered something. When Puella had disappeared, Kite rounded on him. ‘Hold your tongue!’ he snapped.
The man sniffed, but Kite let the insolence pass and, putting one of Puella’s kola nuts into his mouth, he began chewing.
At dawn Kite went below and, crushing another kola nut with a pestle in his mortar, tipped the powder into a tankard and added water from the scuttlebutt. Then he went into Makepeace’s cabin. The captain was in such a drunken stupor that Kite was unable to wake him. No longer tired, thanks to the masticated kola nut, Kite resumed the watch on deck, sending for the captain’s steward and instructing him to give Makepeace the infusion as soon as he could.
But Makepeace made no appearance on deck during the forenoon. Kite, possessing an odd vitality and mental energy, left to his own devices, ordered all hands mustered aft at noon, when the next watch-change was due. Then, nervously giving the helm orders himself, he edged the Enterprize down towards the Marquis of Lothian and hailed Captain Ross. It was Ross’s mate who made his appearance on the rail.
‘Bad news Enterprize! Capt’n Ross is struck with this damned plague!. Where is Captain Makepeace?’
‘Likewise unwell, sir,’ Kite replied, unwilling to explain further with a precise definition of Makepeace’s condition.
‘Our fortunes are on the ebb, sir. Our only hope is that we sight land. Until tomorrow!’
‘Until tomorrow,’ Kite responded.
At noon, the men assembled at the break of the quarterdeck. There were sixteen of them.
‘Mr Ritchie, pray take your station beside me.’ Ritchie swaggered up and stood beside Kite who turned his attention to the crew.
‘Are there any among you who feel unwell?’
The men shuffled awkwardly and looked from one to another, but a negative mumble rose from them and Kite, standing behind the athwartships quarterdeck rail, nodded and cleared his throat. ‘Very well. We are in a desperate plight with Mister Gerard ill and Mr Molloy dead. But we are not yet entirely destitute. Captain Makepeace is unwell but not from the fever…’
The aside provoked a laugh from the men and one shouted, ‘no sign of the yaws yet then, Mr Kite?’
Kite had no idea what the yaws were and merely smiled before resuming his address. ‘As the surgeon and the only officer fit for duty, Mr Ritchie here will assist me…’ Ritchie grinned at his shipmates. ‘From eight bells we will take up new watches of eight men each,’ Kite went on. ‘For the next four hours, I want the slaves exercised and their decks mucked out.’ He saw a grin pass among the men at his use of a farming expression. ‘Now let’s get on with it!’
By sunset Makepeace was sober and, still free of any signs of fever, somewhat contrite. Seeing Ritchie on deck he summoned Kite who reported the events of the day.
‘There’s one other thing, sir.’ Kite said when he had finished, regarding his commander’s dissipated pallor with disgust.
‘Oh?’ Makepeace looked up from the compass in the binnacle as if intent on finding an error in the brig’s navigation greater than that of his own dereliction of duty. ‘Pray what is that?’
‘We have had no new cases of yellow-jack today.’
‘And is that significant?’
‘That is for you to decide,’ said Kite, his voice coldly formal.
Makepeace stiffened and straightened up. ‘Have a care, Mr Kite, that promotion don’t go to your head.’
‘Your solicitude is most thoughtful, Captain Makepeace.’
Makepeace regarded Kite with a jaundiced eye. ‘You may go below, Mr Kite.’
Kite footed a bow and wisely held his tongue.
Later that day, when the watch changed again and Kite came on deck, Makepeace was still pacing the quarterdeck. The captain said with his charming smile, ‘I have more than a reputation to maintain, Mr Kite, I have a name to keep.’
‘I’m sorry, sir, I don’t understand,’ said Kite frowning, still fogged by sleep.
‘My name; I have to live up to it. We are at odds, Mr Kite, and I have to make peace between us. I owe you an apology; you have done an uncommonly fine job and the knowledge that you are not properly a surgeon is set aside. We are quits, Mr Kite.’
Was it that easy? That they were quits, and all dispute between them was set aside? Kite recalled the similarity of Ritchie’s remark about by-gones being by-gones. Kite wanted to feel the weight of responsibility lifted from his shoulders, but this did not happen, though he was not one to maintain an ill-humour, even towards a man whose aberrations had for a while, threatened them all.
‘It is a pity about Gerard, though,’ Makepeace said.
‘Yes, and Molloy.’
‘Indeed yes; Molloy too, but Gerard and I had known each other a long time, and my wife is a relative of his.’
‘I see, sir. I am sorry.’
‘Well, we cannot weep long over the dead. Or the dying… We may yet join them in hell.’
‘That is true, sir.’
‘But if our luck has improved, then we may yet turn this voyage to good account.’
Kite grinned ruefully. ‘I think Mr Ritchie is somewhat sanguine on that score.’
Makepeace frowned. ‘Ritchie…? Oh, yes, I see, rapid promotion and an increased share. Well much of that will be due to you.’ Kite demurred. ‘No, I am sincere,’ Makepeace insisted. ‘Mr Gerard and I had already concerted a plan if mortality had debarred the further passage of this vessel.’
‘I recall hearing you speak of it,’ said Kite, ‘though I took no meaning from your conversation.’
‘We are not yet out of trouble and it is as well if you know of it, Mr Kite. It is not unknown, in extremis, for the master of a slaver to jettison his cargo. The risk of an uprising increases with every death among the crew and it may yet be necessary.’
‘I do not understand, sir. Surely, to jettison means to throw overboard. Do you mean the scrivelloes and the camwood? Surely you cannot mean…’
‘Of course I mean the slaves, Mr Kite.’ Makepeace looked at the young man beside him as Kite’s astonishment changed to horror and outrage. ‘All of them,’ he added, ‘your paramour included.’ Then, with a sudden intensity Makepeace went on, ‘like all intelligent young men, you judge your elders. You disapproved of my whoring and drinking, but when you have survived the yellow-jack, and when you have to make a decision which may account for the deaths of nearly three hundred blackamoors, then you may not view me so harshly, Mr Kite. Life walks in constant companionship with death.’
Kite considered Makepeace’s strange half-apology, half-justification and, just for a second, recovered a fragment of the weird sensation he had felt that morning he had viewed the phosphor running along the waterline of the Marquis of Lothian.
‘…It is the Fates who direct us, Mr Kite,’ Makepeace concluded.
For Kite, the moment of magic vanished. He was again a murderer on the run, a man drawn to the contemplation of drowning almost three hundred blackamoors . ‘Of that I am only too well acquainted, Captain Makepeace.’
‘Aye, sir,’ Makepeace responded, his voice low. ‘You are in too deep now, Mr Kite.’
Five days passed as they ran west and no further infections occurred; cautiously Kite came to believe the yellow-jack had gone as mysteriously as it had arrived.
I can only Conclude, he wrote in his journal as Puella squatted in her corner and watched him, that the Mysterious Agent of Disease Possesses a Finite Life-time and that this is now at an End. I now Believe that the Contagion was brought aboard by the Blacks. The first Infections were Probably caught from our Initial Contact with the Negroes in the Sherbro. The later Outbreak is Likely to have come from the Slaves held on board, which Spread after we had Sailed.
He re-read his words, wondering if he had divined the actual means by which the fever infected white men. One or two of the seamen, he had heard, had voiced the opinion that the fever was caught from the bites of mosquitoes. They argued the mosquitoes lived in the salt-marshes in the Thames Estuary where the Marsh Ague and Dengie Fever were widespread. But although one man claimed the ague killed many women on the coast of Essex, the man’s description of the diseases progress indicated it to be a different sickness, more like the Quotidian Fever of Mr Lorimoor, that the yellow-jack. Moreover, for the life of him, Kite could not see how a mere fly could propagate a malady vicious enough to strike a fit man down so swiftly.
The remission of the fever, coinciding as it did with Kite’s initiative in re-establishing a routine aboard the Enterprize, gave the surviving ship’s company a new lease of life. In turn this compensated for their lack of numbers in the management of the slaves. The experienced Ritchie instituted a savagely oppressive regime over the increasingly resentful male slaves, whose women urged them to rebel as the voyage dragged on and they became more and more apprehensive over their future. Many among them were not as ignorant as Kite had supposed. They understood the vastness of the ocean and that their passage was to the westward where, they had heard, there lived terrible cousins of these white men who walked the earth like great kings.
With such stories the lançados had terrorised them as they had brought them from the stockadoes and the baracoons down the Sherbro to the waiting Guineamen.