When she said, “Thank you,” grateful for their patience, they did not reply. They looked away from her, even when they rested beside her. They were so silent that she thought they did not speak English, but then she heard one say quietly to another, “He’ll not live long,” and she realized that they saw her as a ghost—half dead already.
Every time she rose to her feet after a rest, she thought of the turtle who struggles so hard on land, who will get trapped by a stone and baffled by shifting sand, but in deep water is as smooth and easy as a swimming bird. She called on the spirit of the turtle to walk with her, to loan her his indomitable courage and his blindness to defeat. When they doused her, she thought of the cool water of the morning prayer, and that this land—where the sun was so bright in the afternoon would be cool and beautiful in the dawn—and that perhaps she would be able to rise early, to pray to her Grandfather Sun, perhaps she would be on the east of an easterly island, and a child of the Dawnlands again.
Then the man gently twitched the rope at her sore wrists, and she walked behind him, her eyes on the white road and the pale color of the soles of his bare feet, the scars left by the manacles of his enslavement, and she walked on.
As the road climbed higher, they came to plantations where harvest was starting—weeks of frantic work to cut a year and a half of growth. One cutting gang was working beside the road, and as Rowan and the slaves trudged by, they could see the ripe canes tumbling down, an overseer seated high on a horse, a whip coiled at his side, and men and the strongest women hacking frantically at the cane with broad flat blades, the second gang coming behind them, gathering up the canes, and dragging and carrying them to the cart at a half run. The carter stood on top of the load and caught and stacked canes with desperate haste. They had been working since dawn. Rowan could tell from the dark stains of sweat on turban and gown that they were beyond exhaustion, on the edge of collapse, but the overseer watched them and shouted if anyone seemed to be slowing, cursing them, swearing that this field would be cut and milled in a day, before it dried, or he would see them whipped.
A cart rumbled past them, pulled by oxen, each chewing a leaf-top of cane, with the driver shouting to them to get out of the road, he could not be delayed for a moment! On every hill, rising above the cane, Rowan could see the sails of endless windmills turning and turning, as if even the wind was enslaved. Hanging over every plantation was the haze from the fires in the boiling house, stinging smoke tainted with the sickly sweetness of boiling sugar. To Rowan, stumbling behind a slave, hearing the bitter working chant from the harvesting gang in the deep crop behind her, they were the sounds and smells of hell.
WHITEHALL PALACE, LONDON, WINTER 1686
There was a tremendous scene between the king and queen, when the king’s confessor knelt to him begging him to give up his adulterousaffair, and the queen stood by her oath to leave him if Catherine Sedley was not dismissed from court. Furious at being cornered, torn between love for his mistress and the demands of his marriage vows, the king collapsed into penitent tears and the new Countess of Dorchester, Catherine Sedley, started an interminable process of her long farewell.
The queen and her ladies found that the Sedley woman could not be persuaded to go until a suitable destination was found for her. Firstly, she refused to go to France for fear, she said, of being kidnapped into a convent.
“As if they would want her,” Livia said disdainfully.
Similarly, she could not go to Portugal or Spain. She pointed to the arrival of the Huguenot Protestants from France, terrified refugees, fleeing into exile for their faith. “I can’t go to a papist country!” she told everyone. “It’s to send me to my death.”
“Perfect!” Livia whispered.
Someone suggested Holland, and at once she wanted letters of introduction so that she would be received at the court of William of Orange and his wife, Princess Mary of England.
“As though I would put her in my stepdaughter’s court!” the queen said.
Then the newly minted countess took to her bed and announced that her distress had caused a miscarriage, she had lost the king’s child. It had been a boy, she was certain. God had blessed her with a half-royal prince, and if she had not been cruelly persecuted and separated from the baby’s father, she would have presented him with a son.
Livia came into the queen’s chapel to find Mary Beatrice on her knees. Her pale face was twisted in pain. “Did God give her the king’s child?” she demanded. “Would He do such a cruel thing? Has He turned His countenance from me?”
Ahead of them was the glorious altar, carved in wood and painted in gold. Above them were radiant windows, streaming with colors thatdappled the priceless marble floor with color. Only the queen was pale in the joyous brightness of her chapel. Livia knelt beside her.
“Probably lying,” Livia said cheerfully. “Just refusing to leave, one excuse after another.”
“He’ll never make her leave if she’s ill,” the queen predicted. “And if she goes on saying she has lost a Protestant heir, the whole country will be on her side.”
“A Protestant bastard. And dead, anyway.”
“They’d prefer a Protestant bastard!” the queen exclaimed. “They wanted Monmouth instead of us.”
“Well, he’s dead too,” Livia said ruthlessly.
Catherine Sedley finally left court, in a procession as grand as any royal princess. Four full-sized coaches harnessed with teams of horses drew up outside the palace. Streams of servants with endless bags and baggage loaded the carriages and climbed in themselves. Her entire household, from her chamberlain to her lowliest maid, all had to accompany the royal mistress, all of them had to travel in the grandest of style. Finally, Catherine herself, heavily veiled and wrapped in priceless furs, got into the first carriage. They put up the steps, shut the door, the footmen swung up behind, the coachman cracked his whip, the six bay horses strained at the harness, and at last, with a rumble of wheels as loud as the crack of doom, the woman was gone.
Mary Beatrice did not watch from a window with Livia. She lay in her beautiful bed, the thick embroidered curtains drawn around her, the room in an early dusk because she could not stand the light. The rumble of wheels penetrated the deep silence of her room, and she could hear the shouts of well-wishers calling the countess to come back soon.
“Has she gone?”
Livia came from the window, where she had been spying on the ostentatious farewell. “She’s gone. You’ve won. There’s every reason for you to be happy.”
Mary Beatrice raised herself up on one arm and looked at her only friend at court. Her dark eyes were huge in her pale face, violet shadows from sleeplessness smudged on her cheeks. “Do I look happy?” she asked.
PEABODY PLANTATION, BARBADOS, WINTER 1686
Rowan’s first days at Peabody Plantation were taken up with learning her way around the house and grounds, and identifying who people were, and what threat they posed to her. Most were black enslaved men and women; there were very few children. They watched her out of the corners of their dark eyes, as a new and unknown threat to them. They avoided her as if she were cursed, and never spoke to her, flinching if she spoke to them. Rowan realized that her caramel skin and her dark straight hair identified her as one of the owners, the kidnappers, the killers—to be avoided at all times.
She was housed with other white indentured servants, many of them Irish, captured or shipped from the prisons of Dublin. Their house was nothing more than a one-room cottage, built of rough blocks of coral, quarried from the steep cliffs of the creek, thatched with the leaves of plantains. The floor was tamped-down earth; the men slept on beds of sugarcane leaves and ate from a common pot of loblolly stew made from boiled maize and root vegetables, occasionally enriched with a slice or two of meat from the big house, or fish they had caught. They relieved themselves against the outside wall of the hut, and every now and then ordered a slave to dig a pit for their dirt. They washed rarely, slept almost naked for the heat, and wore broad hats and tattered shirts and breeches to work. They insistedon wearing shoes, however ill fitting, telling Rowan that there were worms that would eat into your feet and leave you lame for life.
After the first night in the fetid cottage with the snoring, exhausted men, Rowan, terrified of them discovering she was a woman, was determined to get away from the stink, the certainty of a fight, and the threat of rape.