The King's Exile (Thomas Hill Trilogy 2) (17 page)

‘Excellent,’ said Rush, ‘just about right. Make him suffer but keep him alive. Dead men don’t suffer. Now bring the money. I’ll take it and be off.’

Despite the agony, Thomas hauled himself to his knees and lunged at Rush’s legs. Rush toppled backwards and Thomas was on top of him again. He screwed his thumbs into Rush’s eyes and
would have blinded him as the monster had blinded others if the brutes had not grabbed his arms and pulled him off. Rush got unsteadily to his feet.

‘Another mistake, Hill,’ he spat, ‘for which you will pay. Hold him tightly.’ The Gibbes strengthened their grips on his arms as Rush pulled the thin blade from his stick. ‘You know what this can do, Hill. Struggle and I may miss my target. That would be unfortunate.’ Thomas ignored him and strained to free himself.

‘Very well, have it your own way.’ The point of the blade traced a circle of blood around Thomas’s left eye, then travelled slowly down his cheek. For a moment the blade was still. Then Thomas felt it cut a shape into his skin.

‘I have left you your eyes in order to do your work,’ hissed Rush, ‘but if you ever lay your hands on me again you will lose them. Is that clear?’ Thomas held his gaze. ‘Is that clear, Hill?’ Thomas blinked.

‘I shall assume that means it is. For now, you are marked with the sign of your owner. Me.’

Rush turned to the Gibbes. ‘And if he does it again, you two will pay as well. You’ll be back in a stinking gaol and next time I won’t be there to get you out. Back with your whore of a mother who’s probably still spreading her legs for that wall-eyed gaoler. Now get him out of my sight. I have work to do.’ They dragged Thomas to his hut and threw him inside. Unable even to wipe the blood from his face, he lay on the earth floor and passed out.

It was dark when he came to and struggled on to the cot. He knew he had been foolish and that Rush might easily have killed him. His face was caked in blood and one eye had closed. His back was on fire and he craved water. He seethed with hatred and
frustration. Tobias Rush. Executed, burned and still alive. Tentatively, he put a finger to his face and traced the line cut in his cheek. It was in the shape of the letter ‘R’. Rush had branded him with his initial. God in heaven.

THE BRUTES, THE
whip, and now Tobias Rush and a face scarred by the monster’s sword. Yet if Rush was telling the truth, Margaret and the girls were in more pain and more danger than he was. And he was helpless to do anything about it. He went through the motions of cooking and bookkeeping because he had to but his mind was in Romsey. He cursed Rush with every waking hour. The traitor who had murdered and tortured, had tried to kill him and had cheated death by bribing his executioner. The gloating monster who had bided his time and then exacted cruel revenge by having Thomas indentured to two brutes as evil as he and by forcing his sister and nieces to do his bidding. One day Rush would answer for what he had done. One day.

He was in his hut when he heard a scream. It was like no other he had ever heard. It came from the direction of the boiling house and was followed by another and then another, each one exploding with agony. The screams of slaves with their fingers mangled by the rollers were not uncommon, but even at Newbury when he
had watched two armies blasting and hacking each other to pieces Thomas had never heard screams like these. They were filled as much with fury and despair as with pain. He put down the bucket and listened. The screams went on and on, each as terrible as the last. He could not ignore them. He ran down the path and up the slope to the boiling house.

Outside the house a handful of naked slaves stood around a man sitting on the ground. By the time Thomas reached them, the injured man’s screams had turned to whimpers. He pushed his way through the circle of onlookers. From shoulder to wrist, the man’s left arm was covered in scalding brown sugar which had stuck to his skin like glue. Not knowing what else to do, Thomas knelt beside the man and examined his arm. The sugar had burned through the skin of his upper arm and was sticking to raw flesh. Below his elbow, where the heat had been a little less intense, the skin was torn and blistered. His right hand was streaked with sugar and skin from his arm. The man’s eyes closed and he lay down. Not one of the other slaves made any attempt to help him. Thomas looked up to see both Gibbes lumbering up from the cane fields.

‘Get back to work, you black bastards, or I’ll take the skin from your heathen backs,’ yelled Samuel, waving his whip at them. They left the man on the ground and went silently back into the boiling house. Thomas stood up and waited for the brutes to reach him.

‘What the devil are you doing here, Hill?’ demanded John, panting from the climb.

‘I heard screams and came to help,’ replied Thomas more calmly than he felt.

The Gibbes ignored him. Samuel nudged the injured slave
with a boot. His eyes opened but there was no life in them. ‘Finished,’ he said. ‘Leave him there. He’ll be dead by tonight.’

‘That makes us one short for the boiling,’ said his brother. ‘I’ll fetch one from the cutting.’

‘I have a better idea. Hill came to help. Let him help. Strip off and take his place, Hill. And mind the sugar. Tobias won’t be pleased if we have to pay Sprot to take your arm off.’

Thomas stared at him. They were going to put him in the boiling house, the most dangerous place on the whole estate. They were mad. If Rush wanted Thomas kept alive, this was no way to do it. An accident with one of the copper kettles which held the boiling mixture or a nudge into the furnace and he was dead or crippled, just like the poor wretch on the ground in front of them. What indeed would Rush have to say about that?

‘Are you sure that’s wise?’ he asked Samuel.

‘To hell and back with wise, Hill. We’re harvesting the cane and we need the mill and the boiling house working. Strip off and get inside. You can stoke the furnace. Make sure it stays hot. Get on with it.’

There was no alternative. Thomas took off his shirt and breeches and stepped gingerly into the boiling house. He was barely inside when he felt as if he had run into a stone wall. His hands went to his face and he staggered backwards. The stench was so thick he could almost touch it and the heat from the furnace and the coppers above it was so fierce that it penetrated his skin and his eyes. Had the Gibbes not been standing guard at the open door, Thomas would have turned and run. No punishment could be worse than this. Both of them held their whips ready to strike at bare flesh and both were grinning.

‘You’ll soon get used to it, Hill,’ taunted John. ‘If the slaves
can do it, so can you. Stoke the furnace and keep stoking. There’s sugar to be made and plenty of it.’

Thomas tried again. This time the heat was a little less intense and he managed to get to the furnace. He watched the man stoking it lift a heap of dried-up canes and wood and fork them into the mouth of the furnace. With a nod to Thomas he handed over the fork and joined the team transferring the boiling sugar into smaller and smaller coppers until the crystallized mixture was tipped into a cooling vat.

As the coppers hung over the furnace, Thomas would be working below them. A splash from a copper and he could easily lose a hand or an arm. The Gibbes watched him fork in three or four loads and then left. The cane was being cut and they would want to make sure it was cut properly. Thomas wiped the sweat from his eyes and bent his back to the forking, one white body among the black ones.

After an hour he had to rest. His back ached and his arms were shaking. He threw down the fork and went outside. The slaves ignored him and carried on with their tasks. Cartloads of cane were being trundled up from the fields for their juice to be extracted in the mill and gallons of the syrupy mixture were being carried across for boiling. If the boiling men stopped to rest, a backlog would soon build up and the Gibbes would want to know why. The slaves preferred to keep working.

The injured man still lay outside the boiling house, silent and unmoving. Thomas drank from the well by the mill and tipped a bucket of water over his head. He offered some to the stricken man, who ignored him. He wondered at the slaves’ ability to work for long periods in such a place. Could Dante himself have imagined worse?

Keeping an eye out for Gibbes, Thomas sat with his back to the well and breathed deeply. He had quite forgotten his nakedness. In the boiling house it had seemed natural; in there any scrap of clothing would have been unwelcome and would have come out reeking of sugar. The light breeze which was turning the sails of the windmill cooled his skin and eased the tension in his back and neck.

For a moment he closed his eyes and thought of home. In his mind’s eye he was walking by the river with Polly and Lucy. It was a spring day, the oaks were coming into leaf and the girls were picking primroses. He slipped into sleep.

‘On your feet, you shitten little worm,’ roared a voice.

Thomas’s eyes opened in shock. John Gibbes was thundering up the slope, whip in hand. He jumped up and made for the boiling house. He was halfway through the entrance when he felt the sting of the whip on his shoulders. His back arched and he yelped in pain. A second lash drew blood and a third sliced across its mark.

Then it happened. It had not happened when he had thrown himself at Rush – that was the product of blind, unthinking fury. It had not happened when the Gibbes taunted him or when they had threatened to kill him. But now, after long months of lonely misery, it happened. The thing he called ‘the ice’ – an unshakeable calmness and intensity of purpose. The last time had been in the courtyard of Pembroke College, when a cowardly young captain had goaded him once too often. It was as if his mind had left his body and he was watching himself.

Thomas moved so fast that Gibbes had no time to react. In one movement he turned and launched himself. The whip dropped from Gibbes’s hand and he fell on to his back with Thomas on top of him. Thomas was on his feet again in a trice. He
planted a foot on the man’s throat and bent to speak. ‘Enough, Gibbes. Take your evil ways back to your pigsty and take your brother with you.’ Before Gibbes could get to his feet, Thomas picked up his clothes and strode off up the path to his hut.

The deed was done and the ice departed as quickly as it had come. By the time Thomas reached the hut, he knew that his Rubicon was behind him. Whatever the consequences, this time he must flee and he must not come back. If he were caught again the Gibbes would flay him to death, Rush or no Rush.

He stopped only long enough to pull on his clothes, then continued on past the brutes’ hovel to the road. John Gibbes would go and fetch his brother before following him so he might just have time to get away. At the junction with the road down the hill he did something he had never done before and turned left. Instinctively he thought that the Gibbes would look for him in Speightstown or Holetown. If they came looking in the middle of the island, they would soon find themselves on rough paths through dense undergrowth until they reached the hills. He knew this from Patrick and he knew that almost no one lived there. They would not go into the forest. They would head down to the coast.

He would go to the Lytes and throw himself on their mercy. He had a good idea where their estate was. He knew it bordered the Gibbes’s on the north-eastern side and that their house was at the northern tip of the land. Where else was there to go?

Thomas could still run. He had always been fast and at Oxford he had outrun all his friends. He found a rhythm and was soon deep in the forest. The road twisted and turned up the hill, wide enough for a cartload of sugar, until he reached a fork where it separated into two narrower paths. He stopped and tried to work
out which path to take. This high up, they had both been cut through forest thick enough to obscure any view. He knew that the Atlantic Ocean was in front of him and the Caribbean behind, but that would be so whichever fork he took. The twisting and turning up the hill made it difficult to know exactly where he was. Either path might turn back down the hill or take him deeper into the forest. He might even have already passed the Lytes’ estate. Left fork or right?

While he was deliberating, a troop of monkeys dropped out of a tree and walked slowly up the right path. Abandoning any further pretence at navigation, Thomas followed them. At least the monkeys would know where to find food. He had not eaten all day and his strength was fading. The monkeys were in no hurry and Thomas easily kept up with them, staying far enough back not to frighten them.

Quite soon the forest thinned a little and they came to a line of palm trees. The monkeys made for a tree laden with green coconuts. Thomas picked up a fallen nut and weighed it in his hands. It was heavy with water. He looked about for something with which to break the shell, cursing himself for not thinking to bring a knife with him. With a sharp stone he tried to bore a hole in the nut so that he could drink the water. When that did not work he smashed the stone down on the shell, breaking it open and scattering the monkeys in alarm.

Refreshed by the coconut, he continued up the path. It was not long before he knew that the monkeys had deceived him. The path had been getting narrower and narrower until two men could not have walked along it side by side. Not very clever, Thomas, he said to himself. Chief cryptographer to the king, breaker of the Vigenère cipher, philosopher and now follower of monkeys. No
wonder you’re lost. He turned back and retraced his steps down the hill.