Of Noble Family (11 page)

“How is it ventilated?” Vincent reached up to touch the low ceiling before ducking back out into the sunlight.

“Oh. I—I am uncertain.…” Mr. Pridmore frowned back into the room. “It must be—er … I, um…”

Jane walked at her husband's side as they left the safe house behind and headed down the hill towards the slave quarters. Louisa stayed close by her, keeping the parasol in place with a diligence that was impressive. In a low voice, Jane asked, “No ventilation, really?”

Frowning, Vincent settled his hat back upon his head. He offered her his arm and glanced back at Mr. Pridmore, who was still looking for ventilation. “There is a gap at the base of the door, so it would be a simple matter to smoke someone out.”

“I should add that many of the preserves are clearly spoilt.”

Vincent gave a little snort. “And the wax seal on the rum barrel has already been cracked.”

“Mr. Hamilton! Wait—the shrubbery is this way.”

Without checking his pace, Vincent said, “I am not interested in the shrubbery.”

“But the ladies—”

“Can see well enough where it is.” Vincent tucked his chin into his cravat. The dark cloth framed his face with even more severity than his usual. “What I am interested in seeing next are the slave quarters. The ones we passed on the way in had significant decay.”

“It's shameful, really, how lazy they are.” Mr. Pridmore took Vincent's arm. “Allow me to show you the gardens, lovely places.”

Vincent looked at Mr. Pridmore's hand on his arm. “Perhaps later.”

“Oh, but the ladies have no wish to see the slave quarters, I am certain. They are vulgar places.”

“Jane?”

Jane smiled at her husband. “I am not afraid of a little dirt. At least it is only dry dust here. You know how my gown gets when I go walking in the shrubbery after a rain.”

“Then we are agreed.” Vincent walked forward, but he dipped his head and murmured to Jane. “You will let me know if you become fatigued?”

“As we have thus far walked no farther than the length of the house, I am in no danger of fatigue.”

“But you will let me know.”

She sighed. “Yes.”

He pressed his hand over hers, where it rested on his arm. “Thank you.”

Mr. and Mrs. Pridmore stayed close on their heels, with Betsy and her parasol providing continual shade. As they passed through the hedge that formed the boundary of the lawn, Mr. Pridmore cleared his throat. “I must say again that this is not a place to take a lady, quite apart from the dirt. They are animals, and frequently engage in carnal acts, quite in public, that a lady should not see.”

“Mr. Pridmore!” His wife fluttered her handkerchief. “It is not genteel to speak of such things, and most especially not in front of Mrs. Hamilton.”

The overseer seemed to come to his senses about the topic he had been discussing. “I beg your pardon, Mrs. Hamilton. We are so unused to being in company that I forget how such things must seem to one who is newly to our island. I do not tend to think of it as any more untoward than discussing the breeding of hounds.”

“And yet, it is quite different.”

“Of course. Of course…” He did not seem as if he quite agreed with her, but he had the grace not to argue the point further. Turning at an angle to the hedge, he gestured along a well-beaten path through the lawn “Well … this way, then, to the slave quarters.”

Vincent frowned. “I recall them being closer to the road.”

“You are thinking of the old buildings you passed by on your way in. These are closer, which would be better for the ladies, do you not agree?”

Vincent inclined his head and gestured for the overseer to lead on. As they walked, Mrs. Pridmore drew even with Jane and engaged her in conversation about fashion and music, to which Jane had very little to offer, as the overseer's wife was more than capable of carrying on nearly the whole of the discussion by herself. Due to the narrowness of the path, Louisa and Betsy were forced to walk in the grass to either side of them in order to keep the parasols overhead.

They rounded the slope of the hill and came upon a set of little white cottages, surely no more than one room apiece. Each had a small garden plot of vegetables in front, and one had pea vines trained on a trellis up the side.

Mr. Pridmore gestured broadly. “There you are. Pretty as a picture, eh?”

Jane counted ten houses and then thought of the number of slaves that Louisa had said were on the estate. There was not enough space to accommodate anywhere near the two hundred slaves she had mentioned. “And where are the others?”

“The others?”

“The other houses. I wonder if they have so pleasant a prospect.”

Vincent narrowed his eyes and strode towards the nearest cottage. “The quarters by the road are still in use, are they not?”

“Yes.…”

“Why are not all of the slaves supplied with cottages such as these?”

Mr. Pridmore laughed, slapping his hands together. “Oh ho! A romantic. My dear sir, once you have an opportunity to go over the accounts you will see that we have too many slaves to make that economical. Given the mild weather here, those are more than sufficient. Cottages such as these are reserved for the house slaves. In general, the coloured slaves are more adept than the blacks, but they are also more delicate in constitution, so cottages such as these are necessary. It comes from the mixing of the bloodlines, I fear. Their rate of births is alarmingly low.”

Vincent humphed as he walked down the row of houses.

Mr. Pridmore appeared to take that as an encouragement to continue. “I have been thinking of starting a breeding catalogue to improve the stock. After all, cattle ranchers do it to great effect. It would be a simple matter, I would think, to breed for a docile temperament. Why, take Betsy here. As calm and steady a maid as you could ask for. Why not breed her with someone like your Frank? It might improve the birth rate as well.”

“Mr. Pridmore! Remember Mrs. Hamilton!”

“I am not concerned for myself.” Jane studied Betsy, who walked behind Mrs. Pridmore with an elegant deportment but two spots of red upon her cheeks. “But a change of subject would be welcome, I think.”

The maid's eyelids fluttered as though she was restraining the impulse to look up. In no other manner did she display that she had even heard the conversation. Jane was accustomed to pretending that servants were not in the room, in part because that social convention made it easier for them to go about their work rather than requiring constant courtesies, but she was not used to, nor comfortable with, the idea of discussing them as if they were not present.

“Ah—yes.” Mr. Pridmore cleared his throat. “My apologies. Should you like to go in one of the cottages?”

“I have seen enough.” Vincent's hands were behind his back, and he had tilted his head down into his cravat. More telling to Jane than his habitual stance was the tension around his eyes and mouth. “The rum distillery should be next, I believe.”

“Of course.” Mr. Pridmore gave a little chuckle. “Though, to that, I really must insist that we not take the ladies. It is not safe.”

“If it is safe enough for you gentlemen, then surely it is safe enough for me.” It might have been Jane's imagination, but she could not help feeling that his reasons for avoiding the distillery had little to do with her safety.

“I am afraid not, Mrs. Hamilton. Should there be an accident with the boiler, or simply a careless movement by a slave, your muslin would be inadequate to protect you.”

Vincent turned from the group and met Jane's gaze. He then glanced from Mrs. Pridmore to Mr. Pridmore. Someone who was not intimately acquainted with him would see no more than that. Jane took it to mean that his next sentence would be for them, not for her. “Perhaps you should return to the house with Mrs. Pridmore. I am afraid we have business to discuss that could not be of any possible interest to ladies.”

He gave a slight tilt of his head towards Mrs. Pridmore with an even smaller head shake. Jane inhaled with understanding. He thought that Mrs. Pridmore did not know about Lord Verbury. Her continued presence meant he could not be direct in his conversation with the overseer. “Of course, but I hope you will tell me all about it when you return.”

He relaxed ever so slightly as he saw that she understood. “You have my word. I am looking forward to seeing what Mr. Pridmore chooses to show me. The tour has been instructive thus far.” Again, beneath his words and in the slight shift of his weight when he said “chooses” lay another message for Jane, which confirmed her own thought.

Mr. Pridmore had been steering the tour very carefully. Given what they had seen, she was certain that the rickety sheds by the road would be far from the worst thing. She did not like letting Vincent bear the burden of this alone, but given Mrs. Pridmore's tendency to chatter, Jane might be able to gain a different perspective of how things lay without them present.

Jane gave her husband an encouraging smile. “I shall find ways to occupy myself while you are busy with men's work.”

“I am certain you will.” His eyes almost twinkled in response. “You have always been accomplished at the womanly arts.”

 

Eight

Customary Restraint

Jane had gathered little of substance from Mrs. Pridmore, other than what she had already suspected. By the lady's occasional lapse, it was clear that she and Mr. Pridmore had become accustomed to thinking of the estate as their own. Vincent, too, had found conditions as he suspected. The distillery's boilers had been poorly repaired and little maintained. He found not only men working in the deplorable heat, but children working among the vats of boiling cane syrup. The whole of it seemed designed for disaster, and, while he had been there, a dropped bucket had scalded a youth across his legs. The boy had been beaten for dropping the bucket and then sent back to work. When Vincent had spoken to Mr. Pridmore about it, the man had brushed his concerns aside and said that he was following Lord Verbury's instructions. He invited Vincent to take it up with his lordship.

That conversation had not gone well.

Monday, their third full day in Antigua, found Jane and Vincent in the counting house. Jane, in a wicker chair by one of the tall windows, was attempting to help him sort out the affairs of the estate and now sat looking through pages of cramped text in the slave registry. It pretended to show the birth and death dates of each slave owned by Lord Verbury, as required by the London Registry, but it had been carelessly kept, and many names were missing. Often a slave was noted without any parentage, even when the dates made it clear that he or she had been born on the estate.

Jane rubbed her eyes and sat back in her chair. The large metal shutters had been thrown back to let in a breeze, which helped somewhat with the afternoon heat.

Across the room, Vincent and Frank were bent over an account book going over the finances of the estate. Seeing them with their heads so close in conversation made the familial resemblance all the stronger. Frank's skin was darker, and his hair had begun to silver at the temples, but their silhouettes were very much alike. Jane sighed and turned back to the ledger again. She had, at least, begun to gather some sense of what Mr. Pridmore had meant by the low birth rate. An alarmingly high number of women lost their babies shortly after birth or never came to term at all. It was not, in her condition, the most comforting of reading.

Still, it gave her an idea for a distinctly feminine way of determining the state of affairs. “Vincent … my family used to do charity work with the people in our village. We would take such supplies as they could not afford and ensure that they had any medicines they might need.”

“You are thinking to do that here.” Vincent nodded slowly, clearly recognising her deeper meaning. “Though I am not certain it can be accounted as charity if they are people who … whom we are so directly responsible for.”

She swallowed. Of course it would not be charity to take better care of your property—even that thought made her ill. She could not shake the English way of thinking that those working on the estate were free. “All the more reason, then. Would that be useful, Frank?”

“It is, in fact, one of the things that your husband and I are attempting to address.” He placed a finger on the account book to hold his place as he gave her his attention. “The slaves are responsible for growing their own food. While the tending of sustenance plots is common on the island, Mr. Pridmore recently cut their salted fish and pork rations. He felt it unnecessary, since the field slaves are raising chickens.”

“That—that is absurd.”

The corner of Frank's mouth twitched. “If
you
were to ask Louisa to arrange for a cut of bacon from Cook, no one could say that was wrong.”

“Thank you.” She sighed, turning back to the ledger. “Meanwhile, would it help if I were to fill in the missing information? If we are supposed to be providing the London Registry with a full accounting of the slaves owned by Lord Verbury, then we are sorely wanting.” Jane drew the book a little closer. “For instance, it has a record for Amey, who has two children, but only Solomon is named. There is a date listed for the birth of the second, but no name, and no death.”

“Eleanor, I believe. Thank you, it would be appreciated if you could sort this out. I can assign one of the older women to go over it with you. They know who everyone is.” He almost smiled. “You know how old women can be.”

“I do. You should meet my mother sometime.” Jane took up a quill and wrote the name of Amey's child in the ledger. “It is really shockingly kept. There is no record of Zeus and Jove at all, for instance. Or you, for that matter.”

“That may be because Zeus and Jove are just what his lordship chooses to call them.” He bent his head back to the account book. “See if there are a Zachary and a John born in 1805.”