HF - 03 - The Devil's Own (21 page)

Kit glanced at his friend. 'I know your meaning, Agrippa. By God, I saved our necks, nothing more. We'll sail no more for that scoundrel Warner.'

'Now there is a word I have been waiting to hear,' Agrippa said. 'So why have us return at all? You'll have heard that Morgan is returned to Jamaica? Sir Henry, by God, and Deputy Governor to boot.'

Kit shook his head. 'I'll not sail for that scoundrel, either. And you'll have heard, old friend, that he is also hanging every one of his old acquaintances he can discover. No, by God, we'll act straight up. You may leave the matter to me. Just find me a horse the moment we anchor.'

The exhilaration was passed, and in its place was growing a deep anger, against himself for firing upon the English flag, against Philip Warner for placing him in this position. But against all the Warners, perhaps, for treating him as an inferior being, for so many things. For an understanding perhaps that Daniel had been right all along, that to Philip he was just a useful piece of humanity, to be enslaved and dominated as if he were, indeed, a slave.

While to Marguerite he did not exist.

The anger sustained him after the anchor was dropped, after he had mounted the hired horse and made his way inland. The last time he had taken these roads it had been with a lilt in his heart. Now it was with grim anger bubbling throughout his system. And once again he was exploring fresh ground, because he had never been to th
e Warner plantation. He had
never been invited, in two months. How all of Daniel's strictures came bubbling back to him in endless outrage.

A replica of Green Grove, although on a smaller scale. No doubt each plantation had been copied from the others, once a suitable design had been discovered. An
d once again a closed gate, with
a man waiting beside it. But this one looked friendly enough. 'Good morning to you, Captain Hilton,' he said. 'What brings you to Goodwood?'

'I'd speak with the Colonel,' Kit said. 'The matter is urgent.'

The man nodded, and released the bolts on the gate. 'He's at the house, Captain. You'll find he has just returned from aback.'

Kit urged his horse up the drive, past die overseer's houses, watched from die little porches by the women and children, the poor whites, prevented from lack of credit and lack of opportunity from sharing the enormous luxury of the planters, doomed to a lifetime of servility and poverty, with only the pleasure of taking out their spite on the even more unfortunate Negroes beneath them.

Was that, then, to be the eventual fate of Kit Hilton? By God, he
would
turn back to piracy, first.

He dismounted at the foot of the steps to the Great House, and a slave immediately ran forward to take his bridle. Philip Warner sat on the verandah, eating the late breakfast in which most of the planters indulged after spending the cool dawn hours in the fields, supervising the day's work plan, before the heat of the sun made such exposure prohibitive for Europeans. With him were his three senior overseers.

'Kit?' Philip asked. 'What brings you to Goodwood? Not trouble, I hope?'

'Trouble,' Kit said. 'We encountered the government frigate from St Kitts.'

'By God,' Philip said. 'And gave her the slip, I see?'

'We exchanged fire to do so.'

'You fired on the man of war?' demanded one of the overseers.

'It was that, Mr Haley, or a rope around our necks.' 'By God,' Philip said. 'But she'll not identify you?' 'I trust not, Colonel Warner. The sloop is in Falmouth now, and I have given orders for her to be unloaded as rapidly as
possible. The warship will not make here before she has repaired the damage.'

'If she bothers to come at all, in the circumstances,' Philip mused. 'You're a man of spirit, Kit. I never doubted that. But we'd best lie low for a while.'

'And find yourself a new captain while you are about it, sir,' Kit said. 'I'll have no more part in this business. I'd not anticipated having to go to war with the Navy.'

'What? What?' Warner demanded, getting up. 'You knew the risks.'

'Maybe I had not weighed them properly. My mind is made up, sir. I shall seek employment elsewhere.' 'Not on this island,' Philip shouted.

'Well, then, I shall leave this island,' Kit said, keeping his temper under control with difficulty. 'By God, sir, I'll tell you what I will do. I'll take myself to Sandy Point, and ask Sir William Stapleton for a position. I
’
ll sail
on
the revenue frigate, sir, not against it. Then we'll see how your smuggling ventures fare.'

'By God,' Warner said. 'A Hilton who is at once a coward and a turncoat. Aye, your family was ever a scurvy lot, you bitch's bastard. And frightened with it. You can see the yellow bubbling through the white.'

'You'll take back those words, sir,' Kit demanded.

'Will I? Or you'll make me?'

'By God, sir, I will, even if I doubt it will be worth wasting time on a cur such as you. You seek to impugn my family, sir? What of your own, with your treacheries and your feuds, and your cannibal brother?'

'Take him,' Philip shouted, and a heavy stick crashed across the back of Kit's head. Yet it did no more than stun him. He found himself on his hands and knees, turned, dragging his sword from its scabbard, and was met by a kick in the face which sent him rolling down the steps. He gazed up at a crowd of black men, all armed with staves, and realized that he had lost his sword and was in some danger of being beaten to death. He threw up his hands to protect himself and was struck a sickening blow on the arm which left it paralysed. He attempted to roll on to his fa
ce to protect his groin and
belly, and felt a succession of blows crashing into his back and legs. Dimly he heard voices shouting, women's voices as well as men's, and the beating stopped. But he could not move, he could feel nothing but the surging pain which ran through his body like a continuous thread, above the blood which kept surging into his mouth. I am dying, he thought. Oh, God, I am dying.

Hands gripped his legs and arms, and he attempted to scream with pain, but only blood ran out of his mouth. Then he was thrown down in another excruciating jolt, on to wood, which immediately commenced a whole series of jolts, each one sending his tortured brain screaming away into the recesses of consciousness, but never so far as to bring merciful oblivion.

Time no longer had
meaning. The jolting was never
ending, he was taking a journey down to hell. Perhaps that was how all men went to hell, bouncing in the back of a cart. Until without warning it stopped, and the hands seized him again. For a moment he hung in the air, then the ground rose up to meet him with another mind-shattering impact, and he rolled, arms and legs flopping helplessly and painfully, until he came to rest. His face and eyes and ears and nose and mouth filled with dust to coagulate the blood, and he coughed and spat, supposing he would choke. Then he lay still, knowing only the pain which gripped him like a living enemy, tearing at his legs, his arms, his bowels, his head. Movement was impossible, nor did he see how it would ever become possible again. He was lost, at the bottom of a pit of agony, an eternity of misfortune which had been his since time began.

And was not yet over. For there was a voice, a voice he had heard before, and movement around him, and hands once again touching his body and bringing moans of agony to his lips. But these hands were strangely gentle and made more so by the insistent voice, commanding and instructing. With a tremendous effort Kit forced open his eyes, gazed at the morning through a welter of blood, at more black men; he could not tell if they were the same as those who had first beaten him into the ground.

And then at a white face, strangely pale, inexpressibly beautiful, set in a framework of straight, long, dark brown hair, undressed save for the bows which secured the strands.

The face which, angry or smiling, had lured him onwards for so long. Marguerite Warner.

5

The Devil's Honeymoon

Now at last did consciousness depart. Or did it? He could never be sure. He seemed to exist in a world of dreams, in which pain dominated, certainly, but in which there was also light and pleasant voices, and occasionally even laughter, and sweet scents and quiet, and acres of softness. He found it confusing, and chose to focus on the essentials, on the pain itself, on one voice more than any other, because of its familiarity, and on one physical object, a vast glow which seemed to hover in the sky, a million miles away.

The bright object gradually came to replace all else, even the soft voice and the gentle hands. He tried to reach it, and watched it take shape, slowly and indefinitely, but with gradually sharpening edges. It hung, at the foot of the bed. The bed? He turned his head, from side to side, amazed at the effort it cost.

And amazed, too, at his surroundings. For he lay in the centre of a vast tent-bed, beneath linen sheets of a whiteness he had not suspected to be possible. The mattress scarce seemed to exist below him; it and his pillows were stuffed with feathers.

The bed occupied the centre of an equally vast room, at once wide and square and high-ceilinged. And the bright object was a chandelier, just visible beneath the roof of the tent, a mass of gleaming facets of light although none of the candles were lit. What miracle was this? But then he saw the windows, huge open doors of glass, through which there drifted at once a cooling breeze and the morning sunlight, playing on the chandelier, having the effect of a flaming signal.

And through the window there came the smell of sweetness.

Or was it all around him? Certainly it seemed to soak the bed on which he lay, the nightshirt in which he was dressed ... the nightshirt? Another magnificent cambric garment, as softly limp as the sheet, and as clean.

The scent made him drowsy. The scent, and the breeze, playing gently on his face, and the silence. A strange silence, because his instincts told him that he was surrounded by sound, that he could even hear it, if he tried hard enough to listen. If he could summon the energy. But why should he do that? Why should he do anything, except lie here, in the softness and the breeze, and the quiet? If he had died, and this was heaven, then he was truly content.

Except that there was no possibility of Kit Hilton, the man who had been at Panama, ever attaining heaven.

The door opened, and he turned his head again, more easily this time. A black face stared at him, smiling, and then came across the room to look more closely. She was a young girl and wore a white dress; her hair was concealed beneath a cap.

'Where am I?' Kit asked. How thin and soft his voice; it seemed no more than a whisper.

'Well, glory be,' she said. 'You's awake. Now you wait so, Captin. I got food for you.'

She disappeared. Kit tried to push himself up, and found that he could not. He raised his right hand, with a tremendous effort, gazed at it in horror. That hand, which had grasped a cutlass or a musket to such terrible effect, which had been feared even when he had been beachcombing in Port Royal, was no more than a mass of bones and veins, held together by a bag of thin skin.

The door was opening again, and now there were several girls, but led on this occasion by a tall and dignified black man, who wore a deep crimson coat over white breeches, and carried himself with an air of authority. The girls each bore a tray, and these in turn were placed on the table next to his bed. Here were morsels of broiled tuna, cups of soft green avocado, broth made from die pulpy okra, and a glowing, dark red liquid in which floated lumps of ice.

The butler bent over the bed. 'You must allow me, Captin.' He raised Kit's shoulders, and one of the girls pushed a mass of pillows under his back, while
another held the cup to his
lips. It seemed to him as the liquid reached his parched throat that he was tasting pure nectar. It reminded him of that first gulp from the stream in Hispaniola, how many centuries ago. He swallowed, and smiled at the girl, and sighed. 'What is it called?'

'Sangaree, Captin,' the butler said. 'Red wine, with some brandy, and fruits, and ice added. Now you must eat. You must put the strength back into those muscles.'

The food tasted scarcely less pleasant than the drink. But Kit was too tired to consume very much, and after a few mouthfuls he sank back on the pillow.

'Enough,' said the butler, and the girls hastily carried the trays from the room. There will be more when you are ready.'

'Where am I?' Kit asked again.

'Plantation Green Grove, Captin.'

'Green Grove. Green Grove? Then where is ...'

'The mistress is aback, Captin. But she will return at eleven of the clock. Now you must rest. I will tell she that you is awake.'