A King's Trade (48 page)

“Probably not,” Lewrie replied, busying himself with knife and fork and plum sauce, secretly relieved that Burgess had no chance with her, even he didn't, either.
Jealous, am I?
he thought;
Whyever?

“A harmless flirtation on her part,” Lewrie dismissively said. “Here's a
thought, though. When you take leave and go up to London, I
am
acquainted with a very rich tradesman's family with a daughter you might wish to meet. The Trenchers, whose daughter Theodora is about as angelic as ever I did see. Elfin and wee, about nineteen or twenty…perhaps
too
young, but she seemed sensible, and comported herself well. Enthusiastic, and outgoing, not your run-of-the-mill languidly-bored and too-elegant-for-words missy. Slews of spirit.”

“Hmmm?” Burgess prompted, sounding intrigued.

“Very dark, curly brown hair, almost black, and the most
amazing
violet eyes,” Lewrie further tempted. “Soberly dressed, when I met her, since the family's on the newly-fashionable ‘respectable' side, but with excellent taste. The hints of a fine form… though I wasn't exactly
looking.
Met her with the Reverend Wilberfforce, Clarkson, and Mistress Hannah More, that crowd….”

“You!” Burgess exclaimed, rather loudly, in point of fact. “In with Wilberfforce and the Clapham Sect…that slavery abolition pack?”

” ‘Twas the reason for our meeting,” Lewrie confessed, turning a touch guarded as he recalled that the Chiswicks had been slave-owners once and his brother Governour Chiswick was still fervidly in favour of the practice. “I've a dozen Black hands in my crew, some of them, ah…
might
be runaway slaves who volunteered aboard on Jamaica….”

“Well, good for you!” Burgess told him. “Horrid thing, that.”

”
You
think so? I'd have thought…”

” ‘Tis one thing to
hire
Hindoo labour and such, and yes, you get a slacker now and then who needs a touch-up with your quirt to keep him on the hop, but actual slavery is just…despicable,” Chiswick swore. “‘Twas my parents in North Carolina who thought slaves necessary for a plantation. Mother Charlotte was born there, and used to it. Father, God rest his soul, adopted it after he emigrated to the Cape Fear, no matter what he really thought of it. And, yes… I suppose I took it for granted, as well, but…”

“You rather surprise me, Burgess,” Lewrie had to confess.

“Well, times change…people change,” Chiswick shrugged off. “You remember at Yorktown, those runaway slaves who served with us to earn their freedom, should we have defeated the Rebels? They served your artillery, and stood with us ready to march and volley, though I doubt they knew the first
thing
of soldiering, and there wasn't enough time for them to learn. God forgive me, but that was the first time I saw slaves as
men,
not useful animals! They'd have gladly
died
under arms than be taken, and returned to lashes, manacles, and slavery.”

“Aye, I do recall them,” Lewrie agreed. “Though, at the end, we abandoned ‘em, and made our own escape.”

“And, God forgive us for not even thinking of taking a single one with us,” Burgess spat, turning soberly stern, after all his previous
bonhomie.
“Met more of them when what was left of our regiment skirmished round New York, before the surrender, and evacuation, and not one of our generals thought to include them in the terms before we sailed away, either. Then, India…

“Serving under your father, Alan, in the Nineteenth Native Infantry, commanding
sepoys
as dark as Negroes, most of them, learning to be the next best thing to a
father
to the ones in my company, on campaign elbow-to-elbow for months on end, well…it changes your way of thinking ‘bout the so-called ‘lesser races.' Makes you see them just as human as
us,
by God. Worry ‘bout their wives and children, just as we do, get into debt, gamble, drink too much, fight like tigers, be as idle or industrious as any White man…'eat our salt' and prove themselves even better soldiers than
British
regiments in India! Now, what is a fellow to make of a lesson like that, but to realise that they're our
equals,
but for their lack of being
like
us.”

“Governour's going t'dislike you as much as he does me,” Lewrie told him with a chuckle, and a sigh of relief.

“Well, he never had that great a love for you, anyway,” Burgess teased him. “The subject comes up, I expect Mother will go off into a fit of the ‘vapours,' and Governour will puff up like an adder and spit fire. Don't know what Caroline will think of me. Don't signify to me, really, for I've come to believe that real chattel slavery's a degrading evil which Britons should expunge wherever we hold sway, not just in Great Britain, and
damn
the Sugar Interest! And yes, Alan…once I've worked out the kinks back home, I'd admire could you arrange me an introduction to some of Reverend Wilberforce's people. Can't buy
all
the tomfoolery they spout, but I
can
side with them on ending slavery. And,” he added with a droll expression, “being introduced to the girl you mentioned wouldn't go amiss, either.”

“God bless you for that, Burgess, and, aye, I shall…” Lewrie began to promise, almost ready to confess that he'd
stolen
his Black “volunteers,” warn him that the subject of emancipation
would
come up about five minutes after the welcoming hugs and kisses, but was stopped by a sudden rising commotion in the dusty street beyond, a din that got all their attention.

“What the Devil…?” Burgess Chiswick wondered aloud, removing his napkin from his collar and tossing it into his empty plate as he got to his feet.

There came the usual sounds of
trekboer
waggons, the lowing and grunting of huge oxen, and the steady clop of unshod hooves. Mingled with that were the squeals of ungreased axles, the timber-on-timber thuds of unsprung waggon bodies, and the squeak of jostled joinery, as a train of pink-ended waggons
slowly rumbled into town. Under all the expected sounds, though, was the hum-um of pedestrians and shoppers on the sidewalks, taken by the novelty, some even tittering laughter, as the waggon train heaved into sight. And, there were unusual sounds as well…some squealing “meows,” hisses, and growls, some loon-like and silly brays, some nasal…trumpeting?

Lewrie joined Burgess by the railing of the deep veranda facing the street, up above the sidewalk and the strollers who had stopped in their tracks to witness this oddity.

“Aha!” Lewrie cried. “The circus is back in town! The ‘mighty Nimrods' are back from a successful hunt!”

“Someone been on
shikar?”
Burgess had to ask.

“To bring them back alive, aye,” Lewrie told him, chuckling.

For there was Mr. Daniel Wigmore, mounted on a decent mare, in the lead. He sat his saddle like a sack of heart-broken turnips, head down and grumbling to himself, it looked like. Next came a local Boer on a much better horse, but a man with as poor a “seat” as Wigmore, a lanky, heavily-bearded, and thoroughly dispreputable-looking bean-pole of a man who looked so filthy it might be possible to shake him hard, and reclaim ten pounds of topsoil. He bristled with weapons: a musket laid crosswise of his saddle before him, two
more
in scabbards hung on either side, and a brace of fowling pieces bound behind him. One arm hung in a sling, and fresh, bright-red scratches crisscrossed his bare arms and what one could see of his craggy face. As soon as he came in view, people on the street began to hoot, point, and laugh out loud.

“Van der Merwe…gobble-gobble!” in Dutch Lewrie heard some of them cry out; he couldn't follow anything past the fellow's name, but was sure that he was clapping eyes on the very idiot whom his guide, Piet du Toit, had disparaged. After seeing the fellow, he could see the why.

Then, up came Arslan Durschenko on an even better horse, riding stiff-backed, erect, and easy, as a proper Cossack should. He looked a bit worse for wear, too, but when he caught sight of Lewrie, he scowled with fresh anger, his eyes brightening, and his long whip cracking.

Then came the waggons, ox teams driven by near-naked Blacks with goads or lance-long thin wood poles which bore short whips at the ends. Some were the fabled little Hottentots, some stouter and taller. Some between waggons bore crates on their shoulders, or atop their heads.

“Well, I'm damned!” Burgess cried. “Look at that!”

Behind the second waggon was a menagerie. There were two baby African elephants, at least half a dozen
actual
zebras, the source for those inane brays they'd heard earlier. The next huge waggon carried a stout wooden cage containing a
pair of cheetahs, who didn't look very happy to be Cape Town's latest Nine-Day Wonder, either. Atop the next waggon's pile of camp gear and tentage stood a smaller cage filled with three
lion
cubs, who hissed and spat, and uttered raspy little growls of displeasure at each jounce, though tumbling all over each other as clumsily as domestic kittens to take in all the strangeness of a town.

There were four ostriches leashed together into a kicking and outraged coffle. There was a middling-sized crocodile in a cage, and other cages borne by Black bearers contained a half-dozen wee baboons; a brace of spotted panthers, and some young wildebeests, or
gnus!

“Looks as if they were successful,” Burgess commented.

“But not very happy about it,” Lewrie pointed out the many who looked utterly exhausted and hang-dog, the many who sported bandages, or limped on make-shift crutches.

Lewrie had been scanning each face of the new arrivals, looking for his runaway sailors, Groome and Rodney. He expected them to be on horseback, if they'd been promised freedman's treatment by the circus, but could not spot them. Finally… !

He recognised little Rodney, standing inside the last waggon of the train, clinging to the sideboards and the wood hoops that held up the partially-furled canvas cover… barely, for Rodney was swathed in blood-spotted bandages bound round his left shoulder and chest, and another set wound about his scalp.

“Hoy, there!” Lewrie yelled, agilely springing over the railing of the inn's veranda to the sidewalk, and jostling his way through those jeering spectators. He trotted up to the waggon, and scrambled up on the lowered tail-board to ‘front his deserter. Rodney had turned grey-skinned with shock to see Lewrie, and shrank back as if the cat-o'-nine-tails was already cutting the air as Lewrie got to his feet before him.

“Damn your eyes, Rodney! You deserted!” Lewrie accused. “You'll come with me, lad!”

“S…sorry, suh!” Rodney cringed. “Ah
know
ah done bad, suh, runnin' off, but please
God,
suh, don' whip me! I
paid
for it, surely t'God I did! Oh, Law, but ah done paid!”

“Where's Groome?” Lewrie snapped, grabbing hold of the waggon's hoops to stay upright.

“He
daid,
suh!” Rodney stammered, tears running from his eyes. “Dot damnfool Dutch feller git ‘im kilt, got a whole
bunch
o' fellers kilt, an' dey woz gon' leave
me
art there t'die, too, I didn' git on mah feets, aftah de lion maul me. Groome, he daid, suh, ain' lyin' ‘bout dot. Damnfool Dutch feller say we take
some o' dem buffaloes wif de
big
horns, an'
dey
kill ‘im. Chase ‘im up a tree, but it warn't tall ‘nough, dey butt it down an' tromple Groome to a puddin'. Nuttin' we could do ‘bout it, neither, Cap'm suh.”

“Cape
buffalo?” Lewrie asked, gawping at the very idea. He had been warned by his guide, du Toit, that they were probably the most dangerous beasts in the wilds, and almost impossible to shoot and kill if one hit the boss of their massive horns.

“Lick de skin raght orf ‘is feets, ‘fo' dey knock de tree down, suh, ‘coz Groome couldn' shin up no higher,” Rodney told him in misery. “God A'mighty, but ya shoulda heard ‘is screams, when …” Rodney could not go on, but broke down into blubbing, wiping fresh tears with the back of his hand.

“Stop this waggon!” Lewrie shouted to the ox-tenders. “Now!”

They turned their heads to look at him, but could only shrug in confusion, for they knew no English, only their tribal tongues, or the
pidgin
of local Dutchmen. “Can somebody tell these bastards to stop this damned waggon?” Lewrie cried to the onlookers.

It was a lounging Piet du Toit who sprang off a hitching rail to the street and waved a hand at the drovers, grunting out commands that thankfully brought the ox team to a plodding halt.

“A problem,
Kaptein
Lewrie?” the young man asked, looking up at him with his hands on his hips, and a smile on his face. “What I tell you about Jan van der Merwe? A fool,
ja!
You wish help down?”

“Down, aye. I've a hurt man in this waggon,” Lewrie told him.

“A
kaffir?”
du Toit scoffed, espying Rodney and his bandages.

“One of my sailors,” Lewrie answered. “Got mauled by a lion, he says. Van der Merwe's fault, I'd imagine.”

“Hah,” was du Toit's dismissive sneer; what care he for a Sambo.

“A deserter from my ship,” Lewrie added, thinking that would be more to the Boer's liking. It was, for du Toit came round to the tail-board and actually laid hands on Rodney to help Lewrie lower him to the dusty street. Burgess Chiswick was there, too, of a sudden, offering to assist the hobbling and wincing sailor to the sidewalk in front of the inn, into a bit of shade, for once Rodney was on his own feet, the young Dutch hunting guide lost all interest in him, loath to touch him any more than he had to. Surreptitiously, du Toit wiped his hands along the sides of his canvas trousers.