Now Face to Face (87 page)

He went to sleep to the sweet sound of the sea, dreamed of the sugar harvest, dreamed he was cutting cane, running beside the wagon that brought it to the mill, then standing in the boiling house. Everyone was moving, the pace set by the overseers. The boiling house was a hell, the heat unmerciful, the fires under the copper kettles terrible beasts to be fed constantly, the sugar constantly stirred and ladled, slaves moving at all times to the shouts and blows of overseers—feed the fires, turn the stone wheel that crushed the cane, ladle sugar from pot to pot. Everywhere he looked slaves were stirring, muscles in their arms bunched, perspiration pouring from them; they were witches, he dreamed, demons sentenced to die over caldrons. The treasure, thick, ropy, dark brown sugar, lapped in its great pots, hissed warningly at him. Scalded sugar stuck to skin, ate it away in a matter of moments; in his dream, slave after slave fell into the caldrons, became one with the sugar. You! shouted an overseer. Into the pot, too. And then he was in the chamber in which the sugar was cooling in hundreds of clay pots. Madame sat upon a stone mill wheel.

Come home, she said to him, eyebrows drawn together, impatient. I need you.

Hyacinthe woke to see several men standing in the surf, pointing. The clear of yesterday was heavier, as if a weight lay upon it. It was hot, still. Hyacinthe waded out to them, his dream heavy like the day.

“Trouble,” one of them said, “a storm is coming. Go and wake the brothers and sisters.”

The men went to the overseers, told them what they saw. Back in the village, everyone worked to move the sugar pots to better shelter. Only when that was done were they allowed to go to their houses, to look to their roofs, to bring in cattle, to tie up dogs.

“W
E MUST
leave here. The sea is angry.”

Hyacinthe stood near the men chosen to speak to the overseers after the first day of rain. Wind had begun, strong wind. The overseers, drinking rum, sated by their favorite slave women, shook their heads.

The rain did not stop. Hyacinthe watched as turtles, snakes, deer moved among the huts, unafraid of people, moving inland in the face of the driving rain, the hard wind. Village dogs had begun to howl. The overseers came, shouted. Everyone had to leave, but they must take the sugar.

They labored to load the wagons in wind fiercer than they were. The rain fell in such driving sheets it hurt. The donkeys snorted and kicked at harnesses and would not be buckled to wagons. Water lapped above their ankles. A huge gust of wind picked up a wagon and turned it over, spilling clay pots everywhere, crushing slaves nearby. The rain fell and the wind rose and water from the sea and sky came, inching higher and higher, after a time, rising so fast that everywhere one looked there was only it.

There was nowhere to run.

The water was too high, the wind too strong. Hyacinthe saw dear friends die, drown before his eyes. He saw everything around him, the mill house, the boiling house, the huts, the cabins of the overseers, destroyed. There was a lull, in which those remaining thought it was over, but then, like some dreadful jest, it began again, even fiercer. Monstrous circles of dark devoured whatever was in their path. Overseers died. And the priest.

He survived, how he did not know, for the storm, he would learn, was called a hurricane, and there was nothing more feared in all the Caribbean. Belonging to no one now, his own again, he determined to journey to the port, a wild port, he’d heard, a nest for pirates. A port meant ships, and ships meant passage, and passage meant a way to Madame and Thérèse, guardians of his heart.

He walked to the sea, calm now. In his mind was the memory of the celebration only a few days before. In his mind was the sight of the destruction he’d walked through, trees uprooted, buildings nothing but boards, bodies of men, women, and animals lying bloated in the sun, survivors sitting stunned and silent amid the dead. He looked to the left. He looked to the right. His stomach gave a growl of hunger.

Which way?

That was the question, wasn’t it? Which way? For a moment, a terrible futility filled him, and he wanted to shake his fist at the sky, curse God, but then into his mind came the memory of sitting before the fire at Tamworth, listening breathlessly as Madame read the story of Robinson Crusoe. His boy’s heart lifted a fraction. Then more. Well, yes. Of course.

What would Crusoe do?

Fall

And now abideth faith, hope…

Chapter Fifty-two

S
EPTEMBER
…

Perryman ordered Tamworth fowls fattened on rice boiled in milk. They’d be sent to Saylor House for Michaelmas Day. The Duchess was there because Lord Russel had been arrested. Off she and Annie and Tim and Bathsheba went to London once the news was known. In the Duchess’s woods, children hunted for double nuts, two on a stalk, said to ward off rheumatism, toothache, the spells of witches. Evenings were cool enough for a cloak, and the trees under which the children scampered wore the colors of autumn: gold, russet, red sunset, amber.

In London there were rumbles, whispers, seethings as others were arrested, high nobles: Lord Orrery, Lord North, the Duke of Norfolk. And a man no one had heard of, Christopher Layer. Broadsheets appeared: A reward was offered for any word of Lucius, Viscount Duncannon, a Jacobite spy. People locked their doors at night, afraid of spies, afraid of an uprising by all the secret Jacobites said to be in London, Jacobites who would storm the Tower, release the imprisoned, kill anyone who did not cross himself and swear allegiance to King James.

September, said the almanac, wife, into thy garden and set me a plot, with strawberry roots, of the best be got. Slane looked at the body at his feet. It lay in the mud on Privy stairs, near to St. Stephen’s, where the House of Commons met, where the ruined palace of Whitehall reigned, home of His Majesty’s Treasury. Robert Walpole was Lord of the Treasury, lord of Whitehall.

A King’s messenger stood guard against the curious crowd who’d gathered around the body. What were you doing in this part of London? wondered Slane. No good, his middle told him. The man, Philip Neyoe, was one of their agents, a courier and scribe under Gussy. Slane hadn’t heard word of him since Gussy’s arrest, had been searching London for him.

Someone ought to cut Lord Russel’s throat for giving out your name, said Louisa.

He will give out no more. Slane had accomplished that, made Charles believe he had more to fear from him than he had from Walpole. No guard will keep me from you, he’d told Charles. All Walpole had was the name. It must be driving him mad not to have more.

Slane had sent Walpole another gosling, roasted this time, with a white rose in its mouth. Anything to distract him, to threaten him, to make him uncertain.

“He was living in that house there,” a man near Slane said, pointing out a house that backed onto the river. “I saw him.”

An official had arrived, told the King’s messenger to keep the crowd back. The official touched Neyoe with the toe of his shoe, his face showing disgust at the white, doughy look of the body. At his signal a pushcart was wheeled forward and the body was heaved into it, like garden fodder or trash, carted away.

Slane followed the cart and official through archways and a garden to a back court of Whitehall. The official disappeared into a doorway. The carter walked away from the cart; Slane stepped forward, rifled through sodden pockets, and took a piece of paper just as the official and other men came through the doorway. Slane was walking out the courtyard entrance as the official began to shout. He tossed his hat over a fence and unfastened his cloak and folded it under his arm.

On the street, busy with people, Slane took his time to sift through the apples in an apple woman’s basket.

“Picked only yesterday off trees in Chelsea, and sweet as your sweetheart’s lips,” she told him.

Slane bit into an apple.

“Not sweet enough,” he said, and winked.

The apple woman laughed. “I like a man of passion.”

The official and the carter appeared in the narrow arch of the courtyard, looked from one direction to another. The official barked something at the carter, and the carter, hesitantly, pointed toward Slane.

“These don’t feel as if they were picked yesterday,” said Slane. “They feel older. I want to buy at least a dozen, but I want good ones.”

“You.”

Slane looked up from his searching, his expression pleasant, unruffled.

The official, red-faced, angry, was glaring at him. Slane could sense his uncertainty. Slane smiled at the carter, offered him an apple.

“You look like a man of discretion,” he said. “Are these as fresh as she claims?”

“Did you see a man come from that courtyard there? It could only have been a few moments ago.” The official was impatient. Slane offered him an apple, but he shook his head.

“A man? In great haste? Why, yes, I did. That way?” Slane pointed toward a narrow opening leading to a side street.

“Or was it that way?” Asking the apple woman, who shrugged, Slane pointed in the other direction.

The official heading one way, the carter the other, Slane bought a dozen apples.

“It was you came out of that courtyard,” said the apple woman.

“Was it?” asked Slane. “Why didn’t you say so?”

“Didn’t want to.”

He pinched the apple woman’s cheek, asked her if she wanted a cloak, gave her the one folded under his arm, and then began to eat apples as he walked down Whitehall Street. In the broad expanse of the park by St. James’s Palace, tossing an apple core over his shoulder, he leaned into a tree and pulled the sodden paper from his pocket.

The ink was smeared, not legible in many places, but what was legible made him swear out loud. Code names for Rochester, for Gussy, for Lords Orrery and North. Details about Ormonde’s expedition, questions as to number of troops, commanders, ships. Names of lesser agents. Did Walpole have this information yet?

Leaving the park, Slane headed west along the river, back to the stairs where the body had been found. He went to the house that had been spoken of as Neyoe’s and knocked on the door to see what he could learn. A woman answered.

“I’m looking for a lodging,” he said, smiling at her charmingly, “and was told you had chambers to let.”

She frowned and called someone; Slane saw the King’s messenger who’d been with the body.

At once, he put his hand to his face and backed away, so that the man might not see him clearly. At the bottom of the steps, he walked quickly away, even though the messenger called him to come back.

Later, disguised—it was easy to borrow wigs and clothes from the theater—he watched the house. It took a day to determine that the house belonged to the King’s messenger, a man named Modest Welsh, that the woman who’d answered the door was Mrs. Welsh.

Several days later, he finally saw the man who said he’d seen Neyoe at the house.

“Oh yes,” the man answered, surprised at Slane’s accosting him. “A carriage would come for him, and he’d go off for hours. I saw him in the going and in the coming.”

“Did he often come and go?”

“Often enough,” said the man. “Now, if I may be so bold, why is it you ask?”

But by then Slane was walking away. So. Neyoe had been in the custody of a King’s messenger, been taken somewhere for questioning, brought back to stay under lock and key. Slane stood at the back garden wall of the house, examining it. The wall was higher than a man, and its side gate was locked.

Had Neyoe tried to escape? Any man who managed to climb that wall would look down into the Thames. Had he tried to escape and drowned? Or had he been killed?

Neyoe, thought Slane, Walpole found you first. You knew enough to convict Rochester. It was the Jacobites’ hope that Walpole would be unable to go to trial. It meant dismissal if he could not take Rochester to trial; all Slane’s sources of information told him that. Barbara told him that, offering the information with a dazzling smile.

Did Walpole have the information upon the note found in Neyoe’s pocket? Or had Neyoe for some reason—let there be a reason—not yet given it to him? What did you tell Walpole, Neyoe? Slane thought. Everything? Nothing? Or something in between?