My Name is Resolute (2 page)

For me a land called England was but a magical tale of far away and long ago. My own ma and pa would tell me fancy tales they must have fashioned in their own minds about some kingdom of gold and crowns and cold such as I could never imagine, a land without mountains, without snakes or cane fields. I did not believe in those things. To me, it was make-believe just like the fairy folk, brownies, and selkies. For myself, I believe in God and a few saints and of course duppies, the sprites that live here. Pa would laugh and say treacle ran in my veins.

Uncle Rafe stood, his back to the hearth and hellfire as big as mine in his eyes. Pa looked to Patience and said, “Daughter, fetch Uncle a new plate. Son,” he said to August, “bring the tobacco box.”

“But, sir,” August said, and Pa raised his hand. He sat and opened his hands toward Rafe. Rough, broad hands that knew work. As if that were his only apology for a wayward bairn like me. After that Pa offered Rafe his new pipe and filled it himself with his best tobacco. Pa sent me to bed. As I left the room I made note that Uncle’s wig was askew and smelled bad. Pa wore no periwig, just tied his hair in a lock at the back of his neck. Boiling-sugarcane odors clung to Pa like a coat. I had thought I loathed the smell of cane, but any horse in the barn smelled better than Uncle Rafe and I knew I loved the smell of Pa.

“Pa?” I whispered.

Pa made a squint sidelong at me. A string of thought came unspoken from his face, saying, “Try to obey this time,” and, “I will explain later,” mixed with, “You are two shakes away from getting a well-deserved walloping, girl.” So I climbed the stairs to my room and listened from the doorway.

Rafe’s voice grew loud as if he meant me to hear, saying, “Cocky little oyster. That’n needs to feel a boot. I’d give her a taste of Rafe MacAlister’s hobnails.”

“She is not grown. We will discipline her, sir,” Ma said.

The air grew tight with silence and their voices lowered so I could not hear as well. I tiptoed down five steps. The sixth one always had a squeak so I stayed five from the top. I heard Rafe laughing and he said, “So, maybe you won’t have to. I’ve waited all I’m about to wait. You’ve sworn a bargain. Be she ready?”

I stretched one leg as far as I could, stepping over the noisy stair to the one below.

“By no means,” Pa’s voice said. “Patience is still a child. And she’s recently had smallpox and quinsy. You should have sent word you were coming.”

“A delicate child,” Ma added.

“I sent word before and you’d sent her on an errand to the parish convent. Our deal was your safekeeping on this island in return for a wife. You’ve no dowry for her, no legacy except for the boy, there. Two wenches who’ll be nothing but a drain on Her Majesty’s profits for the length of their lives. You’ve put me off long enough. I’ll see her home.”

“Mistress Talbot,” said Pa, in a voice he used during their most formal balls when something more needed saying, “will you speak to Miss Patience? Explain the situation.”

I knew then that more danger was afoot. When slaves had come from Benderidge Plantation, carrying forks and fence posts and wanting food, Pa had said we had a “situation.” When two boys waylaid August in Kingston, that was a situation, too, and it took him two weeks to get up from his bed. Ma nearly bumped me over in the stairway, rushing with her hand on Patience’s arm, their faces dreadful, their eyes gleaming, even in the darkness of the staircase.

I heard Rafe saying, “I’ll take the two of them off your hands. There’s room enough for the second one and you’ll be freed of both.”

“Where is August?” I began, but I said no more. Ma grabbed my shoulder so tightly it hurt, and bustled me along with them. In Patience’s room, Ma let go of me and took Patey by both shoulders, frowning.

“Move the armoire,” she said. “Help me, lasses.” Ma pushed the heavy furniture from its nook. Patience took hold, too.

I started to ask why we were moving it, but the moving cabinet came toward me as if Ma had grown the strength of five men. Instead, I asked, “Ma, why do you let that awful Uncle into our parlor if all he wants is to steal Patey?”

“Sometimes you have to befriend those you do not like, my bairny, to keep away others you like even less. Rafe is a powerful man.”

“He hates Pa,” I said. “I can see it in his eyes. I think he loves
you.
”

“It’s not love you see in him, lass, but something else not so grand. Now, help us push. You’ll be safe in here.”

Patience’s room overlooked the bay. From my windows I could see only cane fields. There had been work done in Patience’s room, part of fixing the house for a new waterwheel system besides the one that crushed cane all day. We had kept out of the way for nine long weeks as men tore through the wall to add the wheel and its gears, pounding, banging from morning until night. I remember because Patience slept in my bed with me and the nights had passed intolerably crowded. She tossed around, she smelled like a grown-up, and she constantly put my counterpane off the end of the bed though I asked for it. She said girls should not sleep so warm at night but did not tell me why. After they restored her room and Ma put back the bedding there seemed not a speck of difference except that the stones in the niche were a newly cut color and the armoire stood taller.

The armoire rolled on cannonball legs away from the wall where they had bolted the side of it with a door hinge of worked iron. A passageway as narrow as one stone opened behind it. Patience and I looked at each other, astonished that it was there, and I was doubly puzzled that she had not inspected her own room. From the dark opening we heard a soft whistling like a garden bird. “Go,” Ma said, and pushed Patience to the opening. “Down the stairs inside, and when you get to the bottom, hide.”

To my horror I was next, pressed through the slot in the wall by hands from which I had never felt pain, shoved in like a sack. The armoire swung into place, crushing my protest in the thump of the tight-fitting frame. My hand lay at the corner. If one finger had lain in the spot where the hinge slammed, that finger could have been crushed and Ma would not have known. I whimpered, not from pain but from the possibility of it. “Oh, la, Patience. What are we to do? It is so dark.”

“Shush,” whispered Patience. “You had n’a cry out now. Reach for my hand. I am below you on the steps.” The bird called again. “That is August,” Patience said. “My hand is before you. Take it and feel the side for the rope.”

A palpable, clinging blackness enveloped me and for a moment it cut out all sounds, too. I found my sister’s hand as I touched the walls, wet as if rain had fallen upon them, and felt with my feet for the steep stairs. “If Rafe MacAlister is pretending to be our uncle, why would he want to marry you?”

“He doesn’t. Not really. His family fought against our pa though they were but yeomen on our estate back in England. They were devious to the last, stealing, poaching. He thinks Ma and Pa owe him a woman, for his wife died. It was none of our doing, but she died. He pretends to court me, but I’d not have him if I had to hang myself first.”

“Patey! But if they were only farmers, why have we aught to do with him now?”

“He sallies with every picaroon in the Carribbean Sea, and keeps them from our door. Stop talking and come this way.” The stairway of short, narrow stone took us down into night that grew ever darker with air so damp it pushed against our every movement. A ship’s mooring rope, latched to the wall on one side, hung loose in its channel bolts. Slipping off a stair I fell upon Patience. The rope gave with my weight like a loose stitch in a fabric of stone. I hung from it by one hand, flailing for her lost grip until I found her hands. She whispered, “Be caresome, Ressie.”

Each step took us closer to the noise of the new waterwheel. At one point the wall opened and there was nothing to hold to but the rope. Patience dropped my hand as we passed the open hub. Though we could not see it, the vibration and the splatter of the waterwheel made a wall of sound where stone had been. Where the stone wall shielded us from the danger of the open gears, I felt the pattern of the steps, the breadth of them being more equal than not. We were lost in a clock ticking; each step, every drop of water adding up to hours. “Patience?” I called softly. I felt I must hold on to her just as a baby creature holds its mother’s hair. I called again, this time with a whine, “Patey?”

Her voice came muffled, as if her shadow spoke to me. “The bird you hear is August.”

August opened the window on a tin candleholder he carried. The light that came from the little light house seemed not to go beyond his sleeve but I knew his sleeve and the sight of it calmed my heart. “Come with me, lassies,” he whispered.

We came to the bottom landing and there was no door, just the open side of the house hidden by drooping vines and a fat, scratchy tree trunk. “Where shall we hide?” I asked. I also wanted to ask why I had not known this place. I loved a good hidey-hole, a place to haunt, for there was little to do and no one to play with in this great stone house since Allsy died. I used to spend hours in the attic amongst the old chests and dusty trunks, pretending I had found treasures from a kingdom far away. Now that we stood at the foot of the steps, they did not seem near so black and menacing. When the sun was up, I wagered it would be a sight to see.

“To the kitchen,” August said, and took one of my hands and Patience took the other, to run down the sandy path toward the kitchen, which was separate from the house. The path actually wound past the kitchen and went to the sugar mill. A puckish wind caught my clothes and hair. Only then did I realize how the mist in the passageway had soaked me to the skin. As we reached the coral outcropping where the path widened, he stopped short. He dropped my hand and closed the door on the candlelight. We had little need of it now, for the moon overhead had just risen over the hump of land on the far side of Meager Bay and glimmered across the quiet water.

A galleon under full sheets left a clear wake coming this way. From where I stood the still-golden moon glinted off something on the port bow as the ship swung its side toward us. “Black sails,” I said. “She looks a phantom a-crossing under the moonlight.” No sooner had the words escaped my lips than the top- and mainsails collapsed, rolled by men we could not see. The shine that I had seen before now became clear. Someone watched our shore with a long glass. Six ports on the side opened and the unmistakable rounds of a cannon’s mouth filled each of them. We saw longboats. Three of them already lay aground on the sand and men moved upland toward the house with one left beside each boat.

“Saint Agnes, save us,” said Patience. “We have to warn Ma and Pa.”

“Five, nine, now sixteen, maybe twenty, or twenty-two men,” August said. “And six cannon on the port bow.
I
shall go back to the house. You girls stay in the kitchen.”

I pictured myself running up the loft steps to the cribs over the kitchen to hide, and August charging home, when Patience said, “I am coming with you, too. Ressie—you—you run to the well house. Tell Joseph to warn the slaves to hide in the fields. You stay there.”

“I cannot,” I said. I wanted to hide in the kitchen. “They always turn the pigs out when there is a
situation.
” I had seen pigs kill a man little more than a year before. My worst dreams held no suspense, no surprise, just the horror of being eaten alive by pigs.

August was but fifteen and taller than Patience, though his voice had not yet a man’s depth. It slipped fully back to boyhood as he stomped and waved his fists in the air. “No arguing! I am the man, here. Both of you go to the fields and I shall tell Pa,” he shouted. He pushed the tin light into my hands and took off at a run down the path straight toward the front door. For a moment I marveled at the moonlight, and how I could see his satin coat gleaming as it had not in the passageway.

Patience and I made our way to the well house, the white rock pathway lit by the moon. It was MacPherson’s lantern tonight, a full moon so bright and close and gleaming that the notorious highwayman Jamie MacPherson could have had his way with travelers as well as in broad day. The crashing of an ocean wave and soft voices that I knew made the whole scene seem tranquil and for just a moment I felt safe there.

Our man Joseph was supposed to sleep in the well house. Lucy, a kitchen helper, must have come for water after dark. They murmured to each other, low, laughing, not aware of our coming until we stepped through the open door.

“Pirates!” I said, bursting the cushion of night air with the word. Their two faces, one round, one narrow, looked toward me and smiled with puzzlement.

Joseph said, “Missy Talbot? What you doing tonight? What you say?”

Patience said, “Tell everyone they best hide in the fields. We saw a ship in the bay that looks to be—” but her words dropped off the end of the world as a cannon boomed from close by.

The
bum-bum
sounds repeated thrice more. Something splashed in the bay, a larger noise than a dolphin. Joseph’s and Lucy’s eyes looked the same, bright white and shining in their dark skin. I hoped they would take hold of our hands and help us get to a safe place in the fields, and keep us from the pigs, but they ran away, leaving us in the well house! As they ran their voices rang across the clearing, echoing against the circled wooden shacks, and people poured from every door. Dogs, naked children, partly clothed and even naked full-grown men and women slaves emerged and ran to the cane. The pigs squealed somewhere distant. All of life in the huts vanished into the black and rustling cane fields except two dogs. The dogs danced and barked as if they had been waiting for this night: a full moon and a frolic.

“Let us hide,” Patience said. “Come, now.”

“I am going home. I am not scared o’ Rafe MacAlister,” I said.

“Resolute! I said no.”

I started toward home. Over my shoulder I shouted, “You had best hide here with Lucy. You are not marrying Rafe and pirates do not want a
little
girl.”

Out of the shadows Patience screamed with a shriek of terror and it caught my feet sure as any trap. She stood at the edge of the wagon road cut between two fields. One crop brake stood almost four feet tall, the other over five feet. Slave men stood at the edge of the field, a quivering naked army of plant men waving their great sugarcane knives, threatening to hack anyone who came nearer.