Buccaneer (2 page)

Yorke felt drained of energy. He had slept badly, worried about the ship just arrived from England and now at anchor in the bay off Bridgetown. God only knew what letters her master had brought out; what fresh orders, proclamations and proscriptions from the Parliamentarians for the governor. Cromwell and the Council of State sniffed out and harried Royalists with the same tenacity that the Spanish Inquisition rooted out heretics. The only difference, it seemed to Ned, was that the Parliamentarians lacked the rack.

Yorke knew for certain that whatever news or instructions she was carrying, the arrival of the sloop – the
William and Mary
, taken from John Alston last year for some alleged plotting on behalf of the King – could mean only new penal taxes for the Royalists remaining in Barbados and the latest news from their relatives of what more the Lord Protector had confiscated in England.

He paused, watching one of the indentured servants filing at a saw blade to sharpen it before resuming his task of squaring up a block of coral stone, needed to extend a wing of the house. It was extraordinary that the coral block was comparatively soft when dragged from the sea and easily worked with saw, mason’s chisel and maul: yet within a few months the air so hardened it that newcomers would inquire the whereabouts of the local quarry. He had heard of a similar material used in Italy.
Tuffa
, that was the name. It was sawn out of quarries just as a farm labourer would cut hay from a rick, but a few months later became as hard as a good mortar.

He thought for a moment. Was it worth sending for a horse, saddling up and riding into Bridgetown to see what letters the
William and Mary
’s master had brought from brother George in joyless Puritan England?

He would meet fellow planters riding in for the same purpose and three quarters of them, Roundheads to a man, would be sneering, some even viciously pleased, at any orders enforcing new regulations and proscriptions on the Royalists. The few Cavaliers left, harassed by the governor, knowing that nothing short of a miracle could save them from having to sell out their plantations at ridiculous prices to Parliamentarians, would be even more maudlin than usual and, if there had been time, drunk as well. Finally he told himself that the news would be as good or bad tomorrow as today, with the advantage that tomorrow many fewer planters would be at the landing stage and in the taverns. He would be able to collect his mail and hear the news without some drunken neighbour trying to provoke him into drawing his sword – or, for that matter some raddled trull offering to console him.

A man was well advised to bear the label of a coward these days. Being the only Cavalier in a roistering group of a dozen Roundheads, at least one of whom was likely to be a regular duellist, was to invite a fight with three, the other nine ready to swear before the magistrate that the Royalist had drawn first.

Wilson would certainly be in Bridgetown; he would be expecting mail and drafts for the sugar and tobacco that he had sent home in the
William and Mary
. Any orders from London could only be to the advantage of such a staunch Parliamentarian. He would have arrived at the quayside early and drunk – he rarely mounted his horse sober – and would stay in town drinking with his cronies until dusk. By then he would be so sodden that mosquitoes and sandflies made no impression. The indentured servant whose task it was to find him would hoist him on to the horse and, as usual, he would fall off the other side and the servant would have to get help to sling him athwart the horse’s back, with head and arms hanging down one side and legs the other, and the body periodically jerking in spasms as Wilson vomited.

In that fashion, besotted master, perspiring servant and besmeared horse would walk the five miles out to the plantation in St James’s parish. By this time Wilson would have vomited himself into a semblance of sobriety: enough to jog the last mile or two swaying upright in the saddle; enough to abuse Aurelia when he arrived and probably hit her a few times but, Yorke hoped, still too drunk to be potent; more concerned with ordering tankards of rumbullion to be put on the table than ordering Aurelia to bed.

Yorke tried daily to drive this picture from his mind: his body would tauten like a rope under strain; he would see Wilson’s closely-spaced, bloodshot eyes flicking from side to side like a boar inspecting a trough; then that piggish mouth (with the sloping chin jutting from bulging cheeks one realized it lacked only the ring through the nose) would sneer some insult in a strangely high-pitched voice.

Yorke admitted that this was not the man that Aurelia had married. When Wilson had taken the French girl as a bride in England he had been a wide-shouldered and stocky young man, black-haired and passing for handsome, his only slight physical faults the receding chin and closely-spaced eyes. At least, that was what Aurelia said, and if one looked carefully there were still traces, like the puddles left after a thunderstorm.

Four years in the tropics, four years of drinking rumbullion like water, four years of a life when it was unlikely he was sober for a total of seven hours a week, and never two consecutive, had reduced his face to the likeness of a comical model made of unleavened bread and left out in the rain: bloated yet sodden, the features soft and blurred, the eyes like currants stuck in the dough, each with a red rim as though resting in a curl of bacon.

Wilson had made a bad start in the island: one had to make allowances for that. Arriving five years after the King’s trial and execution, he had brought plenty of money and a weakness for hot liquors. Opinionated, wealthy, at first a Parliamentarian among a majority of Royalists, he had listened to no advice, asked no questions, had few guests to the house he rented – and sent most of those home disgusted at the way he belittled and abused his young and shy wife in public, drawing crude and vulgar comparisons with her early life in France – she was from a Huguenot family hounded out of Poitou – and the rough existence of the island.

Then he had bought an estate. He had to buy it from a Royalist who, more farsighted than most and worried at the way events were going in England, had decided to sell up to try his luck in Virginia. And, disliking Wilson’s politics and manners, he had charged him a high price – some said £200 an acre – for what was a large plantation but well known as an unlucky one: a river, one of the few on the island, flooded in the sudden storms, washing away the soil but leaving it a desert for the rest of the year, with no grass or scrub to stop the soil being scattered on the wind. One of the earliest plantations to be cleared of trees, it also taught the more observant planters the need for holding down the soil against the scorching sun and the strong winds so that the crops could take advantage of the rainy season.

At that time Cromwell and Parliament had complete power in England. For Yorke, aged twenty-one, it had been a time when he dreaded the arrival of each ship: every letter from his elder brother seemed to tell him that the Parliamentarians had seized yet another relative or his lands. Looking back on it was like remembering a recurrent nightmare: the King executed, the Prince escaped to France, most of the estates of the Royalists seized and their owners hunted down, churches stripped of ornaments or defaced, Catholic priests hunted like foxes. His own father and brother wounded at the battle of Marston Moor; and escaping only because they were left for dead on the battlefield. And he, the younger son, earlier ordered to look after the family plantation in Barbados, removed by a six-week sea voyage from news.

Then, slowly at the beginning, came the pressure on the island. The Cavaliers had at first been in the majority and the wilder ones tried to force out the Roundheads. The wiser Royalists protested, pointing out that they had to trade with England, and with it in Commonwealth hands the Caribbean islands were simply fruit that would shrivel and fall if the tree decided their time had come. The majority of the Assembly would not listen, and Cromwell’s people, men like Wilson, sat in their homes, besotted with rumbullion – and waited.

The tree analogy had been a good one. The Royalist planters of course soon found they had no market for their produce in England – and England was no longer a source for all the things they needed to run a plantation, be it a horse or saddle, needles and thread, jerkins and hose for owners and servants, boots, spades and linen, silk and lace for the wives. Holland was the next choice – but Cromwell went to war with the Dutch for two years.

Swiftly the balance of power in the Barbados Assembly had changed: the Roundhead planters were bitter and resentful, but backed by renegade Royalists. Reinforced with Parliament’s orders, they set out to break the Royalists. Some of them, like Wilson, saw it as a perfect opportunity to repair at practically no cost early mistakes in the choice of plantations or to buy, for next to nothing, well-run Royalist estates to replace or extend their own.

Now, Yorke thought bitterly, the island was divided: Cavalier and Roundhead clung to what they had. He was still standing in the heat of the sun and the indentured servant was beginning to look uncomfortable, thinking that the master was checking on his work.

He walked back to the house, glancing at the bronze sundial on its plinth in front of the stone steps leading up to the front door. Eight o’clock, and the sun strengthening.

“Henry,” he called, “I’ll have my horse!”

He walked through to his bedroom and went to the pewter handbasin which still held the water he had used for washing and shaving: the present drought made water as precious as imported brandy and it had to be used over and over again, until it stank. He wiped his face and washed his hands with soapberry, the flesh of the fruit sliced into a dish of water and making suds. He felt his chin and cheeks, although he had shaved carefully, as if knowing that eventually he would go into town. Then he straightened his hose, saw that the toes of his shoes were scratched and changed them for a newer pair.

Suddenly in the distance he heard hoofbeats drumming on the parched earth, as though on cobblestones, and Henry called:

“Mist’ Alston sir, on his way from town.”

It was easy to guess: John came along a lane from the south if calling on his return from Bridgetown; he rode along an opposite lane if coming from his own plantation to the north in St Lucy’s Parish, surrounding Six Men Fort.

“Be ready to take his horse,” Yorke said, less as an order than an indication he had heard, and went out to meet him.

His closest friend on the island, John Alston, was hot and angry, sliding off his horse with only a perfunctory nod to Henry. “’Lo Ned, I’ve just come from town.” He waved a worn leather satchel. “A single letter for you. Damned hot, this sun; let’s go inside.”

Alston was a slim, sallow-faced bachelor who seemed never to be affected by the heat. Certainly he was not a man to gallop eight miles unnecessarily on a hot day, having more respect for his horse. The all-too-casual “Let’s go inside” hinted that his news from Bridgetown was private; not to be spoken aloud in front of the servants who would later gossip far into the night, talking in a dozen different accents from Irish to Welsh, Scots to the quick twang of the city of London.

Yorke led the way into the house. It was large but sparsely furnished: back in England it would have been likened to a series of large cells fit for monks, but here in Barbados it was a bachelor’s house, to become a married man’s home with the addition of more chairs, extra shelves, a larger bed and perhaps some additional work in the kitchen.

Apart from that, it was a regular high-ceilinged plantation house with thick outer walls of coral stone, the inner walls being simply light wooden partitions seven feet high and leaving a space above so that a cooling wind from the windows blew through the house and into every room. The heavy double shutters, now clipped back, were made of bullet wood, fine-grained, heavy and tough, proof against musket balls and favoured for fiddle bows. Each half had a loophole cut in it, useful if the house was ever attacked by an enemy, and if it rained a source of a breeze, because the windows were not fitted with glass. The thick coral stone walls, the steeply-pitched roof and the open windows kept the house cool when there was a breeze.

“A drink?” Yorke asked as he gestured to one of the three rattan chairs.

“Lemon juice,” Alston said, sitting down heavily, undoing the top buttons of his brown jerkin and using his wide-brimmed hat to fan himself. “Too hot and too early for rumbullion.”

Yorke called to one of the servants: “Martha – lemon juice for the two of us, please.” Turning back to Alston he took the letter handed to him, sat down and said: “And what do our friends have to say in Bridgetown?”

“We have no friends in Bridgetown
today
,” Alston said bitterly. “We had some yesterday, but today – none.”

“You’re talking in riddles.”

“I’m not, really. The news the ship brought in means some more of our Royalist friends will be quitting the island – but more will be joining Cromwell.”

“Surely it can’t be as bad as that, John.”

“What is the worst news the
William and Mary
could bring.”

Yorke thought a few moments. “That the Commonwealth is sending out ships of war to take control of more of the islands.”

“Exactly. A fleet is preparing at Spithead under Vice-Admiral Penn and General Venables. Or was, when the
William and Mary
sailed. It should be nearly here by now. It is going to strip the island of servants to provide troops, and then go on to capture Hispaniola from the Spanish. Or Trinidad. No one seems sure.”

“So we’ll lose all our men…and the Roundheads will raise taxes yet again.”

“The governor will argue,” Alston said, “but…”

“Now Cromwell’s just signed a peace treaty with the Dutch, he has a large navy with nothing to do. Attacking the Spanish out here seems an obvious move – and from the point of view of the islands, a welcome one. But for the last of us Royalists…”

Alston sighed. “So we’ll lose our men, then we’ll lose our plantations. The Assembly will take everything now, crippling us by taxation.”