Wasp (2 page)

The visitor crouches in front of Beth. A mark colours his right cheek. A picture of a bird, small but perfectly drawn. A river dweller, but the name escapes her.

‘We are going on a coach ride,’ he says, pronouncing each word in an accent that knows no home in any vale or coast of this country. ‘I need you to behave. If you can do that you will be treated fairly. Do you understand?’

‘You’re all dark,’ she whispers.

He nods, his expression not changing. She reckons his face had been hewn out of coal. Then his mouth splits open and two rows of teeth, whiter than snowdrops, leap out at her. She blurts ‘Oooh’ like a child and scrabbles backwards onto her knees. The dark man reaches under her arms and hauls her upright as if she weighs no more than a bag of cobwebs. The girl shrugs free. Perhaps he’s a slave. She’s heard city folk take to dandying up their darkies, though she’s never seen one.

He scours her with those big eyes. ‘Can you walk a short distance, Miss?’

No one has called her ‘Miss’ for what seems a lifetime now. Liar, harlot — those things and more. But ‘Miss’? Any other time Friend would laugh until his breeches split.

The dark man turns. ‘Do you have a coat or cloak?’

Friend snorts. ‘She goes out the same way she came in. I ain’t a parish charity and I don’t earn so much that I can afford to give clothes away.’

‘I have lined your pocket well enough.’

‘Aye, and who am I going to have to bribe in turn to make sure you get away with your trick?’

‘Very well. The blanket in the carriage will have to do.’

The girl touches the dark man’s arm. ‘I’m going home?’

‘Yes,’ he says, no longer smiling. ‘In a manner of speaking.’

A summer aberration whips bitter rain across the back yard. Beth kicks off the broken corpses of her shoes and presses both feet into the gravel. Pinprick sensations run across her soles as the stone chips crack her toes apart. She raises her head to the sky, mouth open, both hands stretched out. When was the last time she had felt rain on her skin? She licks her top lip, her chin, as far as the tip of her tongue will reach. She lets it soak her dirty gown and plaster her hair against her skull. A rain orb hangs pendulously from a strand of hair, reflecting the night world in tiny entirety.

The darkie closes the yard door. Now it’s only the light of Friend’s fire bleeding through the curtains and a wind-bobbed lantern dangling from a carriage waiting in the lane. Beth needs nothing more. From her square window she’d mapped the contours of this pretty, deceitful garden. Her visitor doesn’t push or rebuke, but follows softly along the path as she flits between the flowerbeds. Water trickles from the corner of his tricorne and runs fingers down the front of his coat. His face is unseeable.

Beth plucks a sodden bloom from its stalk and crushes its petals against her cheeks. A peck of muddied earth pressed to her nostrils fetches memories of rutted village lanes, her mother’s vegetable gardens, the meadow behind the church which always flooded in the winter rains. All the evergone things.

The darkie is waiting beside the gate, and here the night has coughed out a new curiosity. A lumpen figure standing by the carriage, in a too-big coat and grasping an oiled whip easily twice his height. Rain threads currents of hair across the brow of his misshapen head.

‘You took thy time, Kingfisher,’ the figure says, voice muffled by his upturned collar.

‘That may be, but I’ve hooked our fish and want to land her before the night is done.’

The dark man,
Kingfisher,
lays a hand on Beth’s arm. Beth’s feet splash in one of the many puddles dotting the lane. She falters at the carriage door, caught in an instant of memory. The grip on her arm tightens.

‘Don’t cause trouble, little one.’

‘Show me the door handles. And the windows. I want to see them working.’

The grip relaxes. ‘You have a terror of coaches? Look,’ he demonstrates, ‘everything is as it should be.’

She snatches a lungful of air and climbs inside. The floor is smothered in rugs which are soothing against her toes. On the wall, a smaller lantern burns with a frail light. Beth slumps against the soft upholstery Kingfisher offers a blanket but Beth pushes it away.

‘You will catch a fever,’ he warns.

‘That pigsty didn’t kill me so I doubt a slap of fresh water on my skin will do so.’

‘As you wish.’ He lays the blanket aside and holds out a pewter flask. After a moment’s thought, Beth takes a sip. A smoky-flavoured brandy spreads fire through her belly. She opens her mouth to speak but he seals her lips with one finger. ‘No, you must rest now. We have a long journey ahead.’

He leans back and raps on the roof with his knuckles. A crack of the reins and the carriage stumbles into motion.

‘What do you want with me?’

A shake of the head. ‘Do as I say for now.’ He pulls the hat down over his eyes, deepening the shadows around his face. His voice is cultured, almost gentlemanly, but he wears it like a coat that doesn’t quite fit.

The coach springs swallow the lumps and bumps of the rain-lashed road. Beth’s eyes grow heavy. She wonders if the brandy is drugged, but makes no fuss as the motion of their passage lulls her into a half-sleep, the deepest she dare allow herself to fall. No dreams visit her. The Comfort Home has knocked even that pleasure out of her head. Instead she grasps the belief that, whatever the dark man’s purpose, at least she is going home.

At the River Mouth

‘This one’s got a smile. Wide and toothy. Say I cut her another one.’ The knife trembled above her throat. ‘How’d you like that, darkie? A big red grin?’

‘Do not touch my wife.’

‘Look here. One that speaks the mother tongue. Thinks he’s civilised.’

Their voices were guttural and flecked with spit. Unlike the singsong English he had learned from the missionaries.

‘Might have a use for you. Ain’t that so, Jack?’

‘Might indeed. Listen, blackie, do what I say if you want your woman to keep breathing. Tom there is a very patient man and he’s got himself comfortable. He can hold that knife at her neck for a long time. Ain’t that so, Tom?’

‘’Tis so,’ Tom said.

‘I shall do what you say.’

Jack spat a yellow gobbet onto the forest floor. ‘Good boy.’ He gathered his people, told them that the danger was coming from the north and they had to go. Now. They followed him down the riverbank to the mouth of the Big Water. Senses dulled with trust, they did not see the slavers’ nets. Three tried to resist and were shot or clubbed. The rest had wrists and ankles chained.

‘You said you would spare us.’

‘And so I have,’ Jack said. ‘You’re both alive, ain’t you?’ He nodded at Nanyanika. ‘Take her to the Captain’s cabin. She can warm his belly for the trip.’

Tom relaxed for a second. Nanyanika looked straight at her husband, caught Tom’s wrist and drew the blade across her throat. Her body slid onto the planking.

Tom grinned. ‘Seems she’s got more balls than you, blackie.’ He nudged her body with his boot. ‘Throw her carcass into the river.’

He lost his woven cloak trimmed with feathers. His headdress and jewellery were gone. The carved boar’s tooth pendant gifted by his father when his boy became a man was torn from his neck, snapping the hide cord. The only thing not taken was the armband made with twists of Nanyanika’s hair. He had sold his people for the sake of his wife and she had been murdered anyway. He had not understood the slavers’ greed. Standing on their dock had taught him the depth of his mistake. He made no complaint as his authority was stripped. He no longer deserved to lead anyone. Even then his people turned to him for help, believing there was something he could do. He would not look at their pleading faces. Some fell to the wooden decking and a great howl went up, a ululation. The slavers laughed and dragged them up by the manacles. Those who persisted were beaten into silence.

Rain poured through the cut in the forest canopy and hissed on the water. The slavers cursed it. These creatures did not live with the land but cut it to their own shape and size. Dozens of trees had been slaughtered to build this landing, the riverbank beneath split to the rock.

‘The world is crying for us,’ one of the tribesmen said, tears sliding down his own face.

The ship sat at the dock in an ugly spider web of timber. At the hold’s open mouth the women squealed and dragged back on their chains. Something bitter had been burned to hide the stink, but it had gone into the wood. Blood, sweat, all the body’s foulness. A thousand sorrows.

Anyone who tried to struggle had his calves whipped. In the semi-dark men and women were bound on their sides to flat wooden boards. The hatch slammed. Sobs and muttered prayers in the gloom. A feeling of the world shifting as the boat cut free from the bank and caught the river’s current.

Day and night fell through the lattice from the deck above. He felt the sores grow on him, the cramps bite his muscles. When he was taken up to exercise on the deck of the great boat he would not look at the water.

In the chained darkness, a woman’s voice, breath soft on the back of his neck. ‘What have you brought upon us? Where is my child? You have to do something.’ He thinking but not saying,
No, I can do nothing.
Hour after hour as the shackles bit deeper into wrists and ankles. Here, there, people died and became still, finding release at last in the embrace of the Spirit. But still she spoke to him. Day after day until he wondered if she too had died, and this was some residual demon inhabiting her husk. Always asking ‘What have you done?
What have you done
?’

Sometimes rain leaked from the deck, cool and sweet on the tongue. Rough weather brought floods of seawater which burned their wounds. A storm tipped and turned their cramped world. Those who had fished from dugout boats had the bellies for it. Others were sick over their neighbours, who were sick in turn.

What they were given to eat tasted of nothing and failed to blunt their hunger. He remembered the fish his father had caught, smoking on a stick over the fire. The sweet things his mother had made from milk and fruit. He willed flavour into the slavers’ lumpy mush, textured it with memories, swallowed it down. He would not die. The Spirit had turned its back on him. He knew he was cursed to live his life seeing his wife collapse again and again, lifeblood streaming from her throat. He should have known that would be Nanyanika’s way. Girlhood saw her practise hunting with the boys, her father’s admonition for tradition’s sake falling on ears that wouldn’t listen. She was fast with a knife, agile as a hunted deer and could fashion jewellery to break the soul. Hers was a life that would not, could not be captured. In the end, though he believed he had betrayed his people for her sake, she had refused to share his guilt.

I did not deserve you.

The rolling sea had no answer.

A Most Peculiar Establishment

Beth jerks upright, mind filled with momentary confusion. Her gaze settles on Kingfisher, who is watching her with that same easy indifference. She peers outside. Nothing to see but her own weak reflection in the glass.

‘Why are you staring out of the window?’ he asks. ‘Have you never seen the night before? There is nothing out there.’

‘You’re taking me the wrong way. I remember my first trip to the Comfort Home. I couldn’t see anything then either but I recall every bump and jounce, the creaking of the trees and the smell of the lilac bushes. Stop the coach and let me out. I don’t know who you are or what your plan is but I want none of it. I’ll run in my bare feet if need be.’

‘And why would you do such a thing?’

‘You said you were taking me home. I thought Lord Russell had relented, that he’d sent you. What new cruelty is this?’

Kingfisher favours her with a smile. ‘For now we go this way.’

She glances at the door handle. The carriage is cracking along. Jumping might send her under a wheel or into the ditch with a broken neck. Her fingers twitch then settle.

Wherever he’s taking me,
Beth thinks,
it can’t be worse, can it?

They travel in shared silence until the splashing of the wheels outside turns into a low rumble. ‘We are in the city now,’ he says.

Outside, buildings hug the roadside in a jumble of roofs and gables. Torches throw off sparks, figures flit between the puddles of light. Carriages pass the other way, outlines softened in what has now become a persistent drizzle.

The road widens. Buildings grow taller and merge into terraces. Wheels clatter over cobbles. On either side, walls of glass-pricked stone slip past. Beth is captured by the clamour, smoke and stench of this terrible, astonishing place.

‘Sit back from the window if it frightens you.’

‘No town can be so big. I’ve seen pictures, but nothing like this.’

Kingfisher smiles. ‘The world is larger than a few tumbledown hovels at the side of a country road.’

‘The noise, the smells. How can anyone live this way?’

He taps a finger on the knee of his breeches. ‘Not everyone favours the ceaseless chatter of the city. Some are brought here by circumstance, others by necessity.’

‘Why have I been brought?’