“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 any
one who came nearer.
A woman’s voice with a strong Dutch-African accent said, “You gone back to the big house and tarry, Missy Talbot. Gone, now. You be safess’ dere. Don’ be laying out here with us. Summa dese folks don’ speak English. Don’ knows what could happen.”
Patience ran from them and followed me. She cried as we ran, and I wondered if they had hurt her feelings, or did she cry from fear of having Rafe for a husband, or from pirates coming, or from the rocks under our thin parlor shoes? I heard a new cannon report, and this time close enough to hear the concussion of the ball against the stone walls of our house. Another cannonball crashed through part of the roof near one of the fireplaces and a great splintering of glowing cinders shot into the air.
Through a shout of men’s voices I heard Ma calling our names, and I saw her silhouetted against fire, standing alone in the front carriageway. “Daughters!” Ma said. “Go! Go, run.” For a moment Ma ran toward us then back to the house, then turned around and came at us again as if she could not make out which way portended better. “I thought you were safely away! Come. I will give you something. Come quickly.” She pulled us inside, where furniture lay tossed about. The curtains at the far wall waved in flames. Wind blew through the gap where the fireplace had stood. Pa came through the room, his arms loaded with two boxes where he kept the pistols. August followed, holding three swords. Rafe had drawn a sword and carried it aloft, and I saw two pistols pushed through the sash at his waist.
We followed Ma through a hallway to her sleeping room. There she flung open a chest and pulled out two blankets with ties fast at each top. I had seen her a-working at them and asked after them but she had not said what the purpose was, for never would we have needed such heavy covers. She shook one and set it in a ring on the floor. The sound of pistols and a crash of metal on metal seemed far away. Were Pa and August holding off twenty-two men? Might Uncle Rafe be fighting, too? If he were to save my pa, I should have to think on him much more kindly in the future.
Ma pushed Patience’s skirts up and said, “Step in this petticoat,” pointing. In less than a moment Ma had pulled it up and fixed it by the ties around Patey’s waist. “Take everything from this,” she said, pulling her fine worked-silver jewelry casket from its shelf. “Put them all in the folds here.” She plied the quilted petticoat and, as if by magic, opened pockets and duckets, pushing in rings and brooches, and in one, a string of fine pearls long as an ell, which she lifted from her own neck. In the shortest order I had ever seen, she pushed at the seams and squeezed forth threaded needles at the waiting, whipping the openings closed. She tied on Patey’s pocket, a small bag that hung at her waist, and in it put the silver-and-jeweled casket itself. It was no bigger than an egg, and disappeared into the folds.
“There. If they be found, produce that and there remains a gold ring in it. Say your mother gave it ye as a wedding ring that had been her grandmother’s and it will buy you freedom. Let no one find any other of these.” We heard shouts. “Bar the door, Patience. Resolute, come here.”
Ma did the same to me as she had done to my sister, dressing me with a second quilted skirt, procuring yet another casket, smaller still than Patey’s, upon which I had never laid eyes ere now. “Quickly, wait still!” she said when I squirmed a bit. Another cannonball landed so closely that dust and rubble fell from the ceiling. “Wear this petticoat and never, never take it off, understand?”
“It is so warm,” I said. “Makes me drain sweat.”
She did not answer but opened the second casket. Though it was merely wood laid about in gold, it held eight gold rings, eleven silver coins, and a ruby necklace. These she pressed into slits in this new heavy skirt. Then, on her knees, she stitched up the folds and tucked the needle back into the seam. “You take care and you will have a needle. Thread can be found but a needle is a treasure. Keep it close by and oft oiled. If you get a chance to move it to a safer spot, do that, but until then, keep it there.”
“I am sorry we did not stay in the kitchen, as you told us,” I whispered. “Uncle Rafe—”
Ma’s face flushed dark. “There’s no fault in ye, bairny,” she said as she laid coins into the casket. She put two new pieces of eight and six shillings in it and closed the lid, fastening the hasp. She tied a brand-new pocket to my waist with the wooden casket in it. That was to buy my safety, too, I expect. That last, the name she had called me as a wee child, brought tears to my eyes. “Rafe MacAlister is no’ the threat what’s comin’ up the beach. Your pa’d have talked him doon like he done before. Now girls, go. Up the priest’s hole by the fireplace.”
Hiding holes and tunnels threaded through our house. Escape was always in our sights. The sounds of battle grew closer, and shouts followed the pistol fire. I heard glass breaking as Patience and I reached the fireplace. We nestled into the shadows. Fallen stones blocked the way up. I turned to see what had happened behind us. The leaded window lay in shards on the floor and from Ma’s raised hands a thundering bang deafened me. A man dressed in short breeches and a torn vest fell to the floor without uttering a sound. Ma turned to stone, her eyes locked on the blunderbuss in her hands. At that moment two men who had been kicking at the door with hard boots accomplished their task and the wooden door hung loose on its hinges.
Two more men clambered through the window opening and reached Ma. She had drawn a dagger, one I had seen lying in the shelf of books she kept in this room. One of the men smiled, his mouth a toothless cavern, his long cutlass waving in front of her. I would have screamed had not Patience’s hand covered my mouth and nose so that I could hardly breathe. Ma stepped backward, rotating the dagger from pointing at the intruder to pointing it at her own chest. I bellowed into Patey’s hand. I fainted, I suppose, for I knew nothing more but Patey crushing me to her bosom.
“Back to the new stairway,” she hissed, “behind the waterwheel.”
The bedroom seemed empty, and we stood in the open fireplace in perfect silence for the span of several heartbeats. “Where’s Ma?” I asked.
“Do not talk. Run.” We hid at the doorway until we were certain no one saw, and then pounded up the stairs. At the landing I looked down to see Uncle Rafe, Pa, and August, all fighting beside each other, holding four men back with their swords. Pa had blood on his shirt but he moved so boldly that I was sure it was not his. Patience pulled my arm nearly out of its roots as she forced me away from that spectacle and toward the armoire. Heavy steps came up the stairs behind us. She tugged the great chest forward and put me into the opening first, climbed through, and pulled at it with the handle.
Again, blackness enveloped us. I stood by my sister, motionless. I leaned toward her and whispered, “Where did Ma go?”
“Out the door.”
“Did she get away from them, then?”
She let out a tiny sob and said, “Be quiet. Shush.”
At first I thought a mouse had whimpered, then I heard the voices, speaking some foreign tongue—I knew not what—and the armoire rattled as its door opened and the drawers were pulled from their frames. Light came through the place where the slats in the back did not meet, and Patience leaned back so far she nearly fell on me. She tapped my shoulder and, when I did not move, tapped again harder. I took three steps down. This was more clumsy and frightful because I was leading. There was no one there to catch me. August was not waiting at the bottom.
When I had gone down a dozen steps or more, the wall opened up to the place that the water splashed in and there I stopped. “Stop,” I said aloud, lest she tumble us both to our deaths. I spoke over the water. “If we go down all the way, we shall be in the midst of ’em.”
“Let me think. We’ll tarry here a while.” Patience put her hands on my shoulders, but since I stood two steps below her, when I tried to return the embrace I could only hug her knees. I felt the heavy quilted petticoat she now wore, and the funny lump of the pocket with the casket in it against my face. She held my back and we each held the rope on the wall. We both began
to weep.
We had seen pirates before, and thieves or renegade slaves, and all manner of situations. But never with such force. Never with cannon. Another cannonball shook the house, yet though it sounded far from us on the steps, people might be in danger in other homes, too, and that was a powerfully troubling thought. I would not mind a great deal if Uncle Rafe were blown to bits, but I wondered where Pa and August were.
With a mighty crashing, splintering sound, the wall where the waterwheel gears threatened and sprayed us fell away. We screamed with all our might and water gushed across the opening from the pipes, which had fed the wheel and now swayed overhead. I would have fallen through had not Patience clutched my clothes, for I felt as if the gears pulled at me. From somewhere in the dark below us, a three-pronged metal claw on the end of a rope came up like the hand of the devil. It reached for me again, closer, and closer yet the third time. It slashed at my skirt, taking a bit of the hem down, and it flew up a fourth time, arching far above our heads, hanging itself on the wall above us. A man scrambled up that rope as if he were a ship’s rat, clutched me around the waist, and tore me from Patey’s arms, swinging him and me down into the spray. We landed with a hard bang and hands pushed me about, wrapped me up with rope, and in a few minutes, Patience stood by me, tied the same as I. I stopped crying, too afeared to make noise.
The men about us wore brushy beards and turbans, some no more than a torn rag about their heads; they smelled of filth and fusty old rum and something far nastier than Uncle Rafe’s wig. Betwixt these ugly fellows, meant to guard us, we stood long enough that my feet began to burn though I chilled from being soaking wet. The men spoke to each other in their strange tongue. Soon, along came a train of our slaves, tied with their hands bound to the neck of the person in front of them, and still naked. They brought children and adults, all tied. At least Patience and I were not tied in a chain, I thought. At least that.