For Her Love (7 page)

“Oh. Well.” Her eyes shifted from Giles to her father to Matu and back again. “If it wouldn’t be too improper. That is—the two of us walking for so long without a chaperone.”

Giles would have preferred to have a bit of time alone with her, but he did his best not to show his disappointment. “I have no objection to having your maid join us,” he lied.

Matu shook her head and smiled regretfully, gesturing to the teacups and plates.

“True enough, Matu,” Edmund said. “You’ve your hands more than full here, and Iolanthe and I have a small matter to discuss. I shall have to trust you to be a gentleman with my daughter, Captain.”

“How could a man be anything else in the presence of such a lady?” Giles returned, and he was stunned by Mistress Welbourne’s snide giggle.

“Such a
lady
, indeed,” she said. “I hope you will not be too disappointed to discover that Grace is probably far more suited to plantation life than the sea. Is that not so, Grace?”

Grace’s eyes narrowed almost imperceptibly. “I really do not know. I have never been to sea.” Sheer spite propelled her hand from the door latch to the crook of Giles’s arm. “We have a bit of a walk ahead of us, and I want to hear all about your adventures, Captain. You must have seen so many things.”

They paused long enough to shut the door behind them, and Giles looked about him at the outbuildings. At the mill, to the rhythmically incessant crack of a white guard’s whip, four Blacks pushed two stout, crossed wooden beams in a perpetual circle. Sweat ran freely down their raw backs, and Giles could only imagine the pain as the salt irritated their wounds. Their actions caused three grinding wheels to rotate in the center while three other slaves fed sugar cane through them, pressing out the juices to boil in the sugar house.

“Wouldn’t oxen be more efficient?” Giles asked.

“They are expensive and hard to obtain,” Grace replied. “And they eat a great deal. Father finds slaves to be more economical. He can buy several Africans for the price of an ox.”

“But they cannot be as hardy.”

“They’re not. A single slave’s life is worth about a half a ton of sugar, Captain. They are a rather cheap commodity.” She watched his face carefully, gratified to see his eyes widen a little in shock, then his brow furrow and his lips turn down in distaste.

A small trail broke through the leaves and trees, and Grace pointed to it. “We’ll follow that path. It leads past the slaves’ quarters, though there will be only the old ones and very small children about. Those who must still be nursed are carried into the cane fields by their mothers. When they are old enough to wander off, yet not old enough to work, they stay here with the aged and weak.”

“I’ve little experience with children, but I remember my sisters at that age. I cannot imagine the old ones have the energy to keep up with them.”

Grace shook her head sadly. “They are not well-fed, happy children, Captain. They do not bounce and frolic. Africans do not breed well in captivity, and over half of those conceived by slaves die before their first birthdays. By the age of six, they are put to work with domestic chores, hauling heavy buckets of water the mile from the river to the house, building up their strength to join their parents in the fields, mill, or sugar house in a few years. And the discipline is as harsh for the children as it is for the adults. Mistress Welbourne and the overseer are fond of the lash.”

“Mistress Welbourne?”

Grace paused and seemed to search for something in the leafy canopy above them. “My mother and I do not get on well together.”

“I gathered that.”

“We do not hide it well, I fear.”

“And so you have your Matu.”

“Matu is not mine,” Grace replied harshly. “If she were a White, and her name were Mary, would you call her my Mary?”

Giles’s face flushed, and he bristled, but then he thought of how he might feel if his mother had come from such a cruel life. He was sure that ‘twas her love of her maid, not any personal animosity toward him that had made Grace snap. He shrugged. “I might. The two of you seem to belong to each other. Much as a mother and daughter should.” He was pleased to see Grace’s tense shoulders relax.

“Aye. I may have been robbed of my mother, but I love Matu with all my heart, just as she loves me.”

As far as Giles could tell, Grace’s mother was no great loss. “She doesn’t say much, Matu,” he said.

“Father had her tongue cut out over twenty years ago,” Grace replied, without missing a step, as though it were the most common thing in the world to say.

Giles stopped dead in his tracks. “Good God! Whatever for?”

Grace paused, and for just a heartbeat of time, her green eyes darkened with anguish, seemed to look through him at some ghost in the shadows of the jungle surrounding them. Then she focused on him, and he felt an ache that pierced him through.

“It is a common practice, Captain Courtney. Matu is not the only slave on Welbourne Plantation without a tongue. The penalty may be inflicted for stealing a morsel of food that is intended for the overseer’s dogs or for knowing a secret that the master wishes to be kept at all cost.”

Giles didn’t have to ask which was the case for Matu. “What does she know that would cause your father to silence her forever?”

And again, that cynical, enigmatic smile. “If I told you, he might cut mine out.” She turned her back and resumed walking, leaving him behind to wonder what in God’s name he was getting himself into.

Ahead of him, Grace fought back the niggling sense of regret that plagued her. He had been shocked, of course. She had known he would be. She had forced herself to speak of these realities coldly, when in truth, they still had the power to shock her, too. What might Captain Courtney have done if she had told him these things with all of the sadness they made her feel? Might there be some comfort in sharing her pain with a kindred soul? Mayhap she should have allowed herself to find out.

He ran to catch up, and they came to a pair of neat little cottages among the trees. “We’ve four white guards who live here,” Grace said. “That one over there,” she pointed to a smaller cottage with a kennel and five barking dogs in back, “belongs to the overseer. The dogs are let loose at night. They make sure that none of the workers leave their huts after dark. They are also used to track and sometimes kill runaways.”

“Why track them only to kill them?”

“It is a rather unforgettable and therefore intimidating spectacle for the rest.”

Giles shuddered, and again, Grace found some solace in his reaction.

Several yards deeper into the forest, the foliage gave way to a clearing and the slaves’ quarters, tumbledown huts with dirt floors and thatched roofs in need of repair. The doorways and windows were wide open with no means of keeping out insects or rain and providing no privacy for the occupants. The place seemed like a small village, with ten or twelve of the structures. A dozen dark, naked children between two and five years old sat or chased each other unenthusiastically in the dirt. Their limbs were thin and their stomachs distended, the product of a diet comprised entirely of grain and cassava. Some chewed on bits of sugar cane, several were crying. Six older slaves, probably not much older than Giles, but weak and decrepit, and seemingly only alive by the grace of some miracle, sat on the ground with them. One woman, her crippled fingers shaking, mended a tattered garment hardly worth her efforts.

A man with leathery black skin and wiry gray hair looked out of one of the doorways and gestured to Grace. “Missy!” he called. “Missy!” Then he said something else, his words rapid and staccato, almost English and yet not. Grace moved toward him, through the squalor and despair.

“What’s he saying?” Giles asked.

“I don’t know. They speak a sort of combination of African languages, mixed with a smattering of English.”

Giles wondered if she should be entering the hut, but since that did indeed seem to be her intention, he followed her. Instinctively, he placed himself between the black man and Grace. As he would in any situation with the potential for danger, he assumed a stance and demeanor that challenged the other man to cross him. The slave cringed in fear, and Giles found himself ashamed. A frail slave, old before his time, was no threat to Grace.

Grace watched the exchange intently, unsure which touched her more deeply, the captain’s desire to protect her or his obvious remorse for having frightened the slave.

The black man moved aside and gestured to a mat on the floor. It was one of ten mats in the crowded space, but while the others were empty, this one held a little girl of perhaps four years. The child was doubled over and whimpering softly. She was so little that it hardly mattered, but it struck Giles that she ought to have some garment to cover her from strangers’ eyes.

“Does your father provide these people with nothing?” he asked.

Grace shook her head. “These slaves are too old or too young to be of any real value to him.” She knelt next to the girl and placed her hand on her forehead. “She’s burning up. What have you given her?” she asked the old man. “Herbs?” she pantomimed brewing something, then pouring and drinking it.

The man hobbled outside and returned with a handful of leaves and bark. Grace nodded. “These are good for fever. What else is wrong with her?”

The man knelt and tried to pull the girl’s arm away from where she had it tucked against her swollen stomach.

“Her stomach?” Grace asked. “Is she vomiting?” She acted it out, but the old man shook his head. He pulled again at the girl’s arm, and she let out a tortured wail.

“Help me,” Grace commanded Giles. “I need to see her hand.”

Now, he knelt next to the girl. Gritting his teeth and steeling himself against her cries, he pulled the hand out where Grace could see it. She gasped in horror.

“Oh, God,” she whispered.

“What?” Giles asked, loosening his grip and trying to see more clearly.

“No, keep it out. I need to look…Oh, God.”

He caught a trace of the scent of something rotting and looked closely. The index finger on the little girl’s hand was smashed. It was angry red and oozing greenish pus. The rest of the hand was swollen to twice the proper size and was also bright red under her black skin. The redness traveled all the way up her sticklike arm to her swollen armpit.

Grace and the old man exchanged looks. Woeful, helpless looks.

“What—what do we do?” Giles asked.

“Tell my father that I will be here for the night,” Grace replied.

“All right. What can I bring back? Surely you have some medicine at home, something besides these leaves.”

She studied him for a moment. The lines around his gray eyes seemed somehow deeper, and she had to stop herself from reaching out and trying to smooth the lines away.

“How long have you been a sailor, Captain?” she asked softly.

“Just over a score of years.”

“Have you ever seen a wound do this?”

He looked back down at the child. Aye, he had. Battle wounds. He nodded gravely, unable to speak. The child would die. There was nothing to be done but try to comfort her to the end. “Because of a smashed finger?” he choked. It was so senseless. If the wound had been treated properly long before, she would have healed by now.

Grace shook her head sadly. “The overseer would never waste his time seeing to the treatment of a useless African child, Captain Courtney. Many of the children may die from easily preventable problems, but they are replaceable, so it is of no consequence. My father would explain that it is a matter of financial expedience. A ‘necessary evil,’ I believe you once called it.”

“I didn’t mean this,” he said, his voice filled with horror.

She placed a gentle hand on his arm. “I know you didn’t. I’m sorry that you had to see this, but I can’t leave her now. Can you understand?”

“I’ll be back,” Giles promised. “I’ll let your father know, and then I’ll return to sit with you.”

“‘Tis not a pretty thing, Captain.”

The look he gave her was hard and determined. “I’ve held men down while the surgeon has cut off putrefying limbs. I once held a shipmate’s hand while his tongue swelled and he turned black in the face and died of lockjaw. ‘Twas a flesh wound inflicted by a rusty cutlass. I’m not the sort to leave another human being to die alone and in pain.”

What he did not add was that he had never sat and watched a little girl suffer and gasp her last breath, and that the thought made him want to sink to the floor and weep like a woman. Instead, he turned on his heel and headed back to the house.

Grace watched him go.
Another human being
. She looked at the child who was once again cradling her arm against her stomach. The captain would come back. She knew that as surely as she knew that she would not leave this child’s side. What manner of man was he? He was brave and compassionate, strong, but willing to bend. He hadn’t wanted Matu to come with them on their walk, she had sensed that, but he was willing to let her. He hadn’t wanted Grace to come inside the hut. She had been well aware of that, too, but he had merely followed her and sought to protect her.

He could have retreated. No one would have faulted him for staying with Iolanthe and her father at the house. Now, instead of joining her for a lovely walk and perhaps a bit of wooing, he was probably in for one of the worst nights of his life. She hadn’t missed the convulsive clenching of the muscle in his jaw or the mist of tears in his eyes. If he had seen all that he had said, it would take a great deal to make the eyes of a man with his experience tear.

The little girl began to keen softly, each thin wail ending with a series of sobs. Unable to hold back, Grace let her own tears fall unimpeded onto her rich, red skirts. She set her hand to slowly stroking the child’s burning brow and coarse hair, and through her tight throat she hummed one of Matu’s African lullabies. This was not the first time that she had offered what comfort she could to a dying slave. It would, however, be the first time that anyone would be there to comfort her afterward.

*

“So help me, Iolanthe,” Edmund growled as soon as he estimated that Grace and Giles were well beyond hearing, “if you stand in the way of this…”