Now Face to Face (11 page)

S
TAY HERE
,” B
ARBARA TOLD
H
YACINTHE, AND HE, REMAINING
in the dinghy, watched her climb up the rope ladder of a large ship. It was October. They’d been here in Virginia a little over a month.

I hate it here, thought Hyacinthe. The dinghy in which he sat lurched against the hull of the large ship beside which it was anchored.

There was a sound; Hyacinthe, who was sitting on the plank that served as the dinghy’s seat, made a startled movement and immediately stood to look in every direction, but there was nothing to see except the ship and the river and the wild, untamed, distant shore.

He leaned out dangerously over the water that separated the dinghy from the tall slaver. “Slaver” was what the colonials called these ships that appeared in the river; their cargo, their trade, was slaves from Africa. He tried to put his ear against the hull, but the dinghy moved as he leaned, and he nearly fell into the river. Still, he held his breath, listening.

Through the gentle lapping of the water, he heard a groan. The sound again; the inside of the hull was its source. Moving back as far as he could, as fast as he could, to the stern of the dinghy, Hyacinthe fell. The sun beat down strongly and made the ache in his head worse, but he didn’t care. Around his neck was a silver collar, the crest of the Earl Devane engraved in it, and under that was a necklace with a saint’s medal at the end of it. Clutching the medal in one hand, he closed his eyes and prayed the prayers Thérèse had taught him.

“Hurry, madame,” he said between prayers, “hurry. This is not a good thing.”

Barbara was aboard the slaver, on the middle deck. Some ten slaves stood apart from her on deck, naked, their skin shining. They would likely be rubbed with oil, Colonel Perry had warned, a slaver’s trick to make them look their best. Chains looped around the slaves’ legs from one to the next, so that if one fell, all must fall. On other portions of the deck, behind the mizzenmast, near the bowsprit, were more slaves, in smaller groupings, similarly chained, watched by sailors. There were no children among them, and few women.

“Only look here, Lady Devane,” the captain was saying, “here are some fine samples for you, in their prime, young and strong. They will work well for what you desire.” The slaves drew back as the captain and Barbara approached. Their ankle chains scraped the wood of the deck.

“Here, now, this one”—the captain touched his finger to the round arm of a woman—“she’ll make a fine breeder. She had two little ones hanging on her legs in the slave market at El Mina, so I can swear to her fecundity.”

Where are her children now? Barbara thought.

Her mind went to Hyacinthe. He came from the slave market in Paris, was one of the offspring of the market’s stable of French slaves who bore children to be sold. I was reared to be sold, he’d told her once. I always knew it. I always knew I would leave my mother. Other than pity for him, she’d never thought what that had meant to the woman who bore him. She’d never really thought what such, in turn, must mean to him.

“Lady Devane is interested in field slaves,” said Colonel Perry. He had insisted upon accompanying her. He and two other planters had taken an interest in this ship, which meant that besides sharing in the gains or losses, they had sent word to select planters, ones who could be counted upon to be able to pay, that the ship was in the river and might be boarded. Coins were little used here, there being no mint to make them and not enough of them anyway, so the slaver’s captain would be paid in bills of exchange, made good by tobacco merchants in London, or in tobacco itself, or in the promise of tobacco. Colonel Perry had personally vouched for Barbara, who now watched as the captain opened the mouth of a slave by pulling back hard on the man’s hair and wedging the slim end of a wooden club into the man’s mouth.

“I’m an honest man who does not try to sell old slaves for young. Be still, black devil, let the lady look you over,” the captain was saying. “They ought to thank me for not taking them to the West Indies. There we dispose of them by what is called a scramble. We agree on a common price beforehand with the planters, land the slaves, place them in a large yard, and throw open the gates of the yard to those who wish to take them. You’ve never seen such a sight, Lady Devane, as planters seizing anyone they can, the confusion, the shouting. The poor devils are astonished and terrified. No, indeed, you don’t realize my kindness, do you?” he said to the slave in whose mouth the club rested.

There was an interminable moment in which Barbara found herself looking into the slave’s eyes. Then she turned around and walked away. She went to the side of the ship, close to the opening of the hole, which was covered with a crisscross hatch of wood. The crisscrossings made air openings. A smell came from the hole. She took a step or two closer and peered down. It was too dark to see anything, but the smell was too strong to be ignored. It was not a mere smell, but a stench, of death and disease. This was where the slaves were kept when they were not on deck—in the hull, a slaver’s hull, especially built to hold as many as possible, she’d been told.

Barbara gripped the ship’s railing, breathing shallowly to keep herself from retching. She made herself listen to the river, to try to calm herself. The view of shore was lovely: Colonel Perry had been correct. Autumn was beautiful here. Vines as thick as her wrist hung from branches; red-orange berries bunched along the stems of the wild hollies growing under the trees. In the weeks she’d been here, leaves had cleverly turned crimson and gold among the green, like the promise of a coming festival, except that the festival was winter.

Autumn arrives more slowly here than in England, she thought. Anything not to think about where she was, what she was doing. The heat of summer was fiercer and lingered longer. It was hot today. Hyacinthe had complained of the heat as they sailed along the river this morning. He had been complaining for some days…Where she was, what she was doing intruded. Never run away from the truth, because you carry it on your shoulder. And someday it will put its ugly face into yours and say boo.

She turned to face the truth and saw that Colonel Perry had taken command for her; he was examining slaves’ mouths, kneeling down to feel their legs, his seamed, aged face intent, nothing in his expression to indicate that what he did was anything other than ordinary. “Of all to whom I have been introduced,” Barbara had written to her grandmother, “I find a distant neighbor, Colonel Edward Perry, the most kind, the most knowledgeable. He has lived upon this river where I am for almost eight decades, Grandmama, and he is kind enough to treat me as if I were one of his family.”

He’s fond of you, said Mrs. Cox, more than fond. Edward Perry is a friend to nearly everyone, but it’s clear he has a special regard for you. And Barbara had a special regard for him. She felt beloved when she was with him, as beloved as she did in her grandmother’s presence. He might have been her grandfather, or an angel—Yes, she’d said to Hyacinthe, my Virginia angel, sent by Grandmama to watch over me. That would be like her. God, she would say, now I’ve sent Barbara to Virginia, but there is no telling what she will do there, so assign an angel to her, if you please, and not just any angel, either, but a good strong one.

“These two will do,” Perry said. A sound went up from among the slaves as he pointed, a sound that lost itself in the masts and rigging and clear Virginia sky. Barbara’s ears rang with it. It struck her to her soul. It’s too cruel, Jane had said, weeping, about London’s punishment of criminals. Too cruel. Yes, this was.

“They think we buy them to eat them,” the captain said.

Sailors began to unlock the chains on the two Colonel Perry had selected. Fierce movement erupted among their fellow slaves. Some clung to them, others shouted and tried to attack the sailors, who beat at heads and shoulders with wooden clubs, the same kind as that the captain carried.

“I’ve changed my mind,” Barbara said.

“Those are the best among the lot,” Perry said. His tone was reasonable, kind; there was no judgment of any kind in it at her abrupt words. He hadn’t wished her to come aboard this ship, but she wouldn’t listen. Send your overseer Smith, he had told her, for you won’t like it.

“They’ll make good hands in six months. You need slaves to open up new fields of tobacco. Let me handle the buying of the slaves for you. It is not necessary that you have the worry of it. It isn’t a task for you, and it may be easily done without your having any further distress of it. I will have one of my men bring the slaves over later to your overseer, who will know what to do from there. You never have to see these men again until they are field broken, and by then you will have forgotten—”

“No.”

“Does she think I’ll come down on my price?”

The captain had crossed the deck to them, had been listening to Perry with an impatient frown. “This is prime buying time. I can sail up the York River and be done with it in a month.”

“Lady Devane needs more time to make up her mind—”

“You’ve come a distance this morning, Lady Devane,” said the captain, his tone changing when he saw that she was, indeed, leaving. Barbara, skirts bunched in one hand, had nimbly perched on the railing and was now maneuvering herself, skirts and all, down the rope ladder that had been thrown over the side to take her aboard. Below Barbara, one hand clutching the ladder as if it had grown there, Hyacinthe was staring up at her, his face strained and perspiring.

“Pull up the anchor,” she said to Hyacinthe, stepping into the dinghy.

Hearing what sounded like groans, she looked at the tall bulk of the ship.

It is groaning, she thought, her hands on an oar. Sweet Jesus. It was the groans of the ones too ill to show but not yet dead. Terrible fish called sharks followed slavers, Mrs. Cox had told her. Sharks ate flesh, and a slaver gave them good meals as it crossed the ocean, for many a slave would die on the way over.

“Row,” she commanded Hyacinthe, “hard. Keep up with me if you can.”

The wind for sailing was gone. Earlier she and Hyacinthe had sailed in daringly, looking as if they had captured a bright butterfly with a single white wing and were riding it upon the water.

Aboard the slaver, Perry watched her, watched the resolute dip of the oars in and out of the water, the uprightness of her back, of the boy’s, as they rowed away. They rowed as if they were pursued by devils. Edward Perry, onetime member of the Governor’s Council, owner of much land, traveler to other colonies and watcher of the river, found himself quoting softly, in Latin, a phrase that floated up into his mind:

“‘Man is wolf to man.’”

Yes, he’d felt the same—the disgust, the horror—the first time he’d boarded a slaver. Now he was used to it. Is that a good thing? he wondered to himself, to have become used to this, to no longer regard it with horror?

The captain had glanced quizzically at Perry on hearing him speak Latin.

“I’ll purchase the slaves,” Perry said.

That the captain understood.

B
ARBARA AND
Hyacinthe rowed for a long time, Barbara taking comfort in the steady, monotonous movement of the oars, in the lift and strain of the muscles in arms and shoulders, in the growing ache there and in her hands. She did not look back at the slaver once, but rather ahead at some distant point of water, which she rowed toward but never reached. Finally, the pain in her shoulders and hands was enough to force her to stop.

Her gown was wet under the arms and at her neck and bosom. Her hair had fallen from its pins and clung to her perspiring face and neck. Beside her, Hyacinthe breathed in and out, rapidly, shallowly, like a small bellows she’d set to work too hard. The pace of rowing had been too difficult for him, she could see, but he had not complained. He was as damp with their exertions as she was. More so.

Hero, stalwart companion, she thought, gazing at him affectionately. He was with her in all her explorations here; he was master of the left dinghy oar; he was the only one brave enough, other than Klaus Von Rothbach, to go with her while she practiced sailing. Even Colonel Perry said he’d rather stay on shore and watch.

She heard a faint honking and looked up; in the distance was a vast, wavering series of formations, dark dots, birds, geese or ducks, hundreds of them, more than she had ever seen together in her life. Colonel Perry had warned her to be on the lookout for them: A certain sign of autumn, a certain sign of God’s grace to us, he said. How beautiful, she thought. The abundance of them was amazing. There must have been hundreds. The abundance of everything here was amazing. Graceful, winged caravan, she thought, they would never believe your numbers in England, never.

“What did you see there…on the slaver, madame?” Hyacinthe seemed barely able to push the words past his breathing.

The other side of this place and its beauty. “Nothing. I saw nothing.”

They were out of the current of the river, near the bank, a wild, untamed bank, some wildflowers blooming like tiny stars everywhere. Colonel Perry’s daughter, Beth, had showed her some pressed flowers she’d found on the riverbank during the spring; the flowers resembled pansies, with small brown marks on their petals, like the slaves’ scars. Barbara shuddered again, the way she had on the slaver. The sound of the river filled her ears.

Evil, Hyacinthe. I saw the clear shape of evil, and it frightened me to my soul. Never run away from the truth, because it sits always upon your shoulder. What am I going to do?