Black Wreath (18 page)

He woke to the harsh voices of the cooper and tailor. He felt drops of the fetid water on his face and moved his arm to wipe the liquid off. His arm seemed to take an age to perform the task.

‘What are you at, boy?’ Reilly asked roughly. ‘Have you a yen to die?’

The other man was holding a crust of bread to his lips. James shook his head. He noticed that the screaming from the stern had stopped. That at least was something.

‘You haven’t been eating, have you?’ The voice was Byrne’s, gentler than the cooper’s, but with an edge of impatience in it.

James didn’t answer. It was too complicated to explain. He heard a sudden commotion from the stern of the ship; voices were raised.

One voice separated itself from the crowd. ‘She’s too heavy to go aloft, and she can’t stay here. She’ll have to go out.’

The voice was met with more arguing and loud wailing. Then silence followed by the sounds of activity.

‘Any strong men here?’

Reilly left James and went towards the stern.

‘What’s happening?’ James asked, his voice not much above a whisper.

‘The woman who was crying out,’ Byrne said. ‘The one who was with child. She died in the night.’

So it was real, James thought. He heard the sound of curses and great effort, and then great blasts of cold air swirled though the hold. In the midst of this the cooper’s voice rang out harshly.

‘Bring the boy over!’

The tailor helped James to his feet and half-carried him in the direction of the voice. A group of men had managed to manoeuvre the dead woman’s body to an upper bunk near the stern and were now pushing it through the porthole.

Reilly, his face dripping with sweat, looked angrily at James.

‘Do you see what happens here?’ he shouted. ‘This woman would have given anything for a chance of life for her and her child, but here she is now on her way to the bottom of the ocean.’

James watched with shock as the woman’s body disappeared through the porthole. There was no report at the other end, or it could not be heard above the labouring of the ship; she seemed to slip silently out of the world, as if she had never been in it. Watching the blank porthole that had marked her last ghostly journey, James began to feel ashamed of his wilful hunger. The support of the tailor was suddenly no longer enough to hold him, and he fell down in a dead faint. When he awoke he asked for bread and water.

Twenty-Five

New Horizons

J
ames lifted the axe and struck again. Then he went around the other side and cut a notch a little higher than the first. He returned to the first notch and cut again as hard he could. He could feel the sweat trickling down his back. The sun poured hot and heavy through the trees, but more than the sun James felt his owner’s eyes boring into him.

‘Put your back into it, can’t ye?’ Mackenzie barked at the boy. ‘Ye’ll get no easy ride here.’

James mopped the sweat from his forehead. His hair clung damply to his face and his rough shirt chafed against his skin. His arms ached, but the ache was duller now than it had been when he first started working for Mackenzie. Mackenzie had come aboard the ship when it docked to see if he could spy a bargain and, sure enough, a ‘fifteen-year-old boy with seven years’ indentured servitude’ was to be had at a good price.

James was weak and ill-nourished from the voyage. He
could hardly keep upright on the deck when the captain summoned the servants and slaves, who were capable of standing, for inspection. Mackenzie had managed to get himself on board with the agents, and ran his shrewd eyes along the line until they fell on James. He looked him up and down, prodding him with his stick.

‘What’s your trade?’ he asked as he prodded.

Gentleman, James wanted to say, but he’d learned enough by now to control his tongue. ‘No trade,’ he said. ‘Common labourer.’

‘You don’t look like a labourer. You don’t look like you’ve done much.’

James didn’t respond. He didn’t care whether Mackenzie wanted him or not. He had seven years of servitude ahead of him, if he survived that long, and one master was sure to be the same as another. His uncle’s mocking words about new horizons went round in his head, as they had done ever since the moment he woke to find himself in the hold of the ship as it laboured across the ocean. James thought bitterly of all the times he had stood on the quayside watching the ships unload, imagining journeys to exotic lands. Now here he was in the dank hold of one of those selfsame ships on his way to a life of slavery in the colonies.

Mackenzie continued his scrutiny.

‘You don’t say much, do you? I though you Irish never stopped gabbing.’

James shrugged.

Mackenzie began to haggle with the captain over the price.
James didn’t listen. He had no control over the transaction; he had lost control over his life the second he was bundled into the black carriage. And his uncle must be pretty confident that the colonies were as good as a coffin for his purposes and that the last thing he needed to do any more was fret about the doings of Lord Bluecoat. There would be no Lord Bluecoat here, just a scrawny Irish labourer to be ordered hither and thither and barely kept alive as reward.

After Mackenzie’s bargain was done and the agents had finished examining the others who had survived the voyage, they were marched down the gangplank onto the quay. Crowds of men, carts and wagons swarmed around, loading and unloading ships. Merchants and buyers examined exhausted groups of servants and slaves from other ships. After so long at sea, James and the others in his group could hardly find their land legs, and they hobbled and wobbled behind the captain along the crowded quay and up the steep riverbank to a big building, where they were registered. It was hot, and James felt faint. Outside, Mackenzie was waiting with a horse and cart. It was all James could do to clamber up onto the cart before his new master drove off on the long journey from the town.

How long ago was that? How long had he been here aiming his axe at Mackenzie’s trees in the blazing sun? How long had Mackenzie been standing behind him, cursing him and complaining at the quality of his labour, reminding James of the
small fortune he had expended on him and raining blows on his back to make the boy work harder? James converted the tree into Mackenzie’s neck in his mind, and it took some of the pain out of the blows and the work itself.

Eventually Mackenzie would tire of standing in the sun and retreat to his house. His absence didn’t allow for any let-up in the work, though. He would come back after his lunch to inspect what work James had done in the meantime, his viciousness renewed by a hearty meal. He was a man quick to anger; indeed, he seemed to live for that emotion.

The evening after James arrived he had been summoned, along with the other servants and slaves, to the apple tree near their quarters. There, a servant called Connolly, who had escaped and been brought back after only a day, was suspended by his hands with a rope thrown over a branch, so that he stood on tiptoes. His back was bare and Mackenzie stood behind him with a cowhide whip. He looked at his audience, his eyes burning.

‘You can see now what happens to any servant or slave who runs away from Robert Mackenzie.’

Then he began to lash the man with all his force until the blood streamed from his back and gathered in pools at his feet. James lost count of the number of lashes, but they told him later it was past fifty. Mackenzie only stopped when his arm was too exhausted to continue. When Mackenzie went back to the house, they brought Connolly into the hut the male servants and slaves shared, and a slave called Amelia came with some salve for his back.

Connolly couldn’t move for a week after that, and James was surprised that he survived his ordeal. His back was a tangled mess of scars and another beating would surely kill him.

James hacked at the wood until he felt his arms would drop, praying for the relief of darkness when he might be allowed to rest and appease his hunger. At least the darkness came quicker here than in Ireland. A bowl of corn mush and a pitcher of water was little enough to look forward to, but the food at least stopped the pain in his belly for a few hours. As he hunched over his bowl, he would allow his mind to drift back to Phoenix Street and the Purcells. He let himself imagine he was walking home from the Bluecoat School with Sylvia, though the happiness the picture gave him was matched by an equal stab of desolation. How could he ever see her again? He might as well try to leap onto the moon. He’d be better forgetting her and all of his life before now. There was only this eternal present of trees and sweat and hunger. As day followed day, he became more and more sure of one thing: he would not make it to the end of his appointed time. He would not be able to endure seven years of Mackenzie’s farm.

In his first weeks at the farm James turned himself into a tree-felling machine and took little notice of his companions. It was as if he didn’t want to be touched by the human world of the farm but preferred to be alone in his private hell. If he admitted that he wasn’t alone, it would mean that the world he was in now was real, and the people in it real people who deserved his attention. He didn’t want to accept that Mackenzie’s farm was his whole world now. But he found he couldn’t
stay blind to those around him. He couldn’t ignore John Connolly, the skinny pockmarked man from the north of Ireland who lay in the bed next to his with his back on fire from Mackenzie’s cowhide. But it was Amelia who began to break through the wall he’d put up around himself.

‘It’s hard to think this is life,’ she said. ‘It’s hard to think this place is the world. And it isn’t, but it’s our world for now, and we have to live in it as best we can. And don’t forget, you’re indentured. That means you can be free one day. We’re not all that lucky.’

‘How did you get to be here, Amelia?’ James asked her, a little ashamed he hadn’t thought to enquire before.

Amelia didn’t look like she wanted to answer him. ‘What’s the use of talking about that?’ she said.

‘Please,’ said James. ‘I’d like to know.’

Amelia looked at him. James knew that if she told him, it would be a sign of trust between them.

‘I was eleven years old,’ she began. ‘My father had a big family in Africa. He even had many slaves.’ She smiled thinly. ‘It seems strange now,’ she said. ‘My father had many sons, and I was the only daughter, and the youngest, which made me a great favourite. One day, when the grown-up people were at their work far away in the fields, I stayed at home with the youngest of my brothers to mind the house. Suddenly, two men and a woman leaped over the walls and grabbed us before we could even think to shout out. They stopped our mouths and ran off with us to the woods nearby. There they tied our hands and led us away as far as they could until night
fell. We reached a small house, where we rested for the night. It went on like that for many days, walking all day and only resting when night came on. And then one morning when we woke they were pulling my brother from my arms …’ Amelia stopped, her eyes red.

‘What happened to him?’ James asked gently.

‘We pleaded with them not to separate us, but they didn’t listen. They sold my brother to some other traders. I never saw him again.’

‘And what about you?’

Amelia hesitated before continuing. ‘Then they took me to the coast and I saw the ship. That filled me with astonishment, to see such a thing, but when they carried me onto it, I thought I would surely die, I thought the light-skinned men with their loose long hair meant to sacrifice me. I thought I had wandered into a world of bad spirits. When I saw everywhere black people chained together, their faces twisted with terror and misery, I fell down in a faint on the deck.’

A look of pain came over Amelia then, and she stopped talking.

‘I cannot speak of it any more,’ she said. ‘The thought of that journey and what came after is unbearable. We can’t look back, James.’

James thought of his own journey in the stinking hold.

‘You and I are alike, Amelia,’ he said. He had already told her his own story.

‘Yes, James, we are alike, and not alike. We’ve left our better lives behind us and now we must make our way
through a world of bad spirits.’

Amelia’s words were often in James’s mind as he laboured on Mackenzie’s farm. But, even if it might make his life easier to bear, he couldn’t accept that the boundaries of this farm were the boundaries of his heart and mind from now on. He talked to Connolly, whose back still burned from Mackenzie’s lashing, as they were digging out the roots of the felled trees. He was only ten years older than James, but he looked like a man twice his age.

‘Was that the first time you ran away?’ James asked.

Connolly didn’t look up from his work, and waited so long to reply that James thought he was ignoring the question. Eventually he spoke, though he didn’t look at James or pause in his work. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I ran away before, and that’s why I was sold to Mackenzie. I got farther that time, near six months before I was turned in. Five pounds they got for me.’

‘Why did you run?’

Connolly shot James a contemptuous look before turning back to his work. ‘I got tired of living in luxury,’ he said with a snarl.

He stopped digging and turned to James. ‘Why are you asking me anyway? What’s it to you?’

‘I’m sorry,’ James said. ‘I didn’t mean anything by it.’ His words seemed only to inflame Connolly.

‘Didn’t mean anything by it? Where did you get your fancy voice from, Blondie?’

‘What does it matter?’ James said wearily. ‘I’m here just as the same as you, chopping down the same trees, cutting out
the same roots, using up the same life’s blood.’

Connolly grunted, but made no more objections.

‘There has to be a way out of this,’ James said, as much to himself as to his companion.

Connolly didn’t reply.

A summer of hard work turned to an autumn of work no easier. James rose with the sun and slept soon after nightfall. In between was tree cutting and clearing, timber to be brought to the sawmill, fenceposts to be readied and driven into the boundaries, animals to be watched and crops to be tended. James learned how to smith a horseshoe, to tan leather and make bricks. He fixed and mended fences, barn walls, even furniture. He moved from field to wagon to house to barn, always busy, with an unending set of tasks that changed with the season.

Always at the back of his mind was the thought of escape, but he knew that escape was very often followed by recapture and worse conditions than before and, cruellest of all, a term added to the years of servitude. The countryside beyond the farm seemed to promise great hope of a new life. It looked like it could hide a man forever, but it was not like a city where you could disappear and never be found. However wide the countryside, it was still full of those who could tell an escaped servant at a hundred paces and if you didn’t have a pass or the papers of a free man you’d be clapped in gaol until the
reward could be claimed. James had seen the advertisements in Mackenzie’s discarded newspapers. Ran away this August a servant man, slender, of middle height, a neat-made impudent Irishman. He had on a large hat, a brown wig, a dark-coloured old coat, a pair of linen breeches and a silver-hilted sword. Whoever shall bring him to me shall have four pounds in gold reward, plus reasonable charges …