Quintspinner (51 page)

“I have another thing of great value,” Tess countered, tearing open the seam on the side of her bodice and reaching in. She withdrew a flattened, highly polished round plate of glass. “This can be used to show you tiny things that you didn’t know existed. I am certain that there is no other like it here,” and she dropped the microscope’s lens into Mambo’s waiting hand.

The polished disc nestled in the woman’s palm as though it had been waiting all this time to settle into such a perfect fit.

Night was falling quickly as the villagers prepared for a ceremony. A large center pole fashioned from a tree trunk had been erected, its end tamped into a deep and narrow pit dug into the earth. Drums and rattles had been strewn in a wide circle about the pole, and the women were placing offering baskets of fruits and vegetables in strategic places around those.

The ceremony took place as the moon hit her vertex in the sky. Every member of this colony participated, taking turns drumming, singing, and dancing. The drums’ sonorous voices reverberated off the cliffs’ walls and pounded against the participants’ chests, blending with the rhythm of their own life forces coursing through their bodies. The songs were sung in a foreign tongue, but the melodies and harmonies were hypnotically engaging. The shipwreck survivors felt themselves being drawn into the pageantry, compelled to dance and sing as joyously, as fervently and as unfettered as those around them.

“This reminds me of the night I saw you playing your flute on board the
Mary Jane,”
Tess yelled breathlessly and she and William danced around the pole, following the patterned footsteps of the celebrating villagers.

“Me too,” William replied. “I’d always hoped to get another chance at this.”

“At what?” Tess teased.

“Dancing by your side. Only the first time, I was wishing that I was still hurt, so that I could have leaned into your arms, and now I’m wishing that I wasn’t, so that I could take you into mine,” William answered. Tess could feel herself blush at his honest reply, flushing with pleasure at his bluntness. She made a mental note to herself to do a healing session with William’s knee in the morning.

All around them the drums and rattles and chants reached a dizzying pitch. It seemed impossible that the entire island would not be able to hear the festivities. Tess hoped that her grandmother could hear the rhythm, wherever she was.

She is still alive. I know it. I feel it in my heart … and I feel it with my ring.

Tess could not bring herself to consider any other possibility. The scouts would be leaving in a few hours, traveling in the safety of the early morning’s moonlit shadows. They would look, they would inquire among those that they could make safe contact with, and they would search again.
They have to be successful. They just have to.

Several dancers had fallen to the ground, some out of exhaustion and some in apparent trances, and it was then that Tess noticed Cassie crouched at the foot of one of the huts. Her shoulders shook as she buried her face in her hands.

“Cass …?” Tess approached her sister gently. “Cass, what’s wrong?”

Cassie lifted her tear stained face up to Tess. “The baby. I felt it move. Oh my God, I felt it move!” she cried.

“That’s good, Cass. That’s what babies do–they kick and flip and turn,” Tess floundered, not knowing what to say to ease Cassie’s distress. “Feeling your baby move … is a good thing,” she reiterated.

“It just makes it all so real,” Cassie wept. “I am defiled. I carry another man’s child.” She looked at Tess and sobbed, “Who would ever want me now?”

Before Tess could reply, they were startled by a quick movement beside them.

“I would,” Samuel Smith spoke, his voice tender as he stepped out of the depth of the shadows. “With all of my heart.”

The searchers were expected to return within seven days. It was with much surprise then, that the lookouts ballyhooed their return just before noon of the third day. The returning scouts explained, with some annoyance, that they would have arrived even sooner if the found man’s leg had been intact, but with one foot missing, he had had to be carried for much of the trip.

The white woman and man had been easily located. A covert inquiry had been made to a group of sugar mill workers at the nearest plantation situated at the foot of the island’s mountains. Yes, the mill workers had easily confided, a pair matching the description had been recovered from the shoreline directly to the east of the plantation’s edge. The two white people had been brought back to the plantation by the owners in fact, to work as a carpenter and a seamstress in the big house, when they had recovered well enough.

“Did you use the lens–the polished glass–to buy their freedom?” Tess impatiently asked the leader of the returning troupe.

“No,” the long-haired caramel-skinned man replied, shaking his head in either disgust or disbelief–Tess was not sure which–as he looked back at the two new arrivals who were still struggling in their descent down the hillside.

“No, dat woman,” he frowned and snorted, as though unable to believe his own words. “Dat round glass she use to buy dat black goat!”

Word of the shipwreck had spread rapidly among the island’s inhabitants, and news regarding it had been brought back by the scouting party.

“I heard the plantation owner tellin’ his wife not to worry. He told her that one of Carlos Crisanto’s ships had capsized, whilst the other had been blown onto the reef of another island altogether,” Tess’s grandmother informed Tess and the others.

“Which ship sunk?” William pressed her for details.

“Didn’t hear that. Don’t know if they knew themselves. All that I heard after that was that the cargoes of both was probably lost forever. An’ no mention of our poor little Tommy either, bless his soul.” She dabbed at her eyes. “It’s a past wiped clean. Just the six of us left.” She looked at each of them. “We was brought together fer a reason, ya’ know. Always somethin’ comes from somethin’ don’cha know?”

Relief at having found her grandmother soothed Tess’s immediate worries, yet she woke each morning from sweet dreams that filled her head only to have them replaced with the pain of remembered losses, burning like an incision that was being slowly peeled open. She wondered what balm could heal such an ache, as she busied herself with the daily chores, focusing on the exhausting business of tribal health care.

Within the first few weeks, Tess quickly established herself as one whose healing abilities surpassed even Mambo’s. With the aid of the emeralds once again encircling her fourth finger, her advice and treatment were credited with Jacko’s ongoing recovery.

Slowly others sought her out. Wounds and fevers, boils and babies–all were potential life threatening conditions in the tropics–and the Maroons therefore had nothing to lose in seeking Tess’s help. Her knowledge and assessments were a good complement to Mambo’s potions and botanical ingredients.

Cassie assisted with the weeding of the small gardens and tiny fields, while Mrs. Hanley made wonderful broths and mashes out of the measly food supplies available to the village’s inhabitants. Shortly after her liberation from the plantation’s big house, she had mysteriously been able to produce a moderate supply of tasty herbs and spices from numerous pockets sewn within the tattered folds of her skirt.

The three men quickly proved their usefulness as they expertly reinforced the camp’s ramshackle living quarters with pieces of wooden debris recently scavenged from the shoreline. The village’s huts which had been hastily erected to begin with, now boasted sturdy frames upon which heavily camouflaged surfaces, woven with fronds and vines, provided comfortable shelter from the daily tropical downpours as well as from the winds that affected the camp situated so high above the mainland.

Nevertheless, it was plain to all, that accommodating six extra people imposed a new strain on the existing living space.

It was Smith who arrived at an unexpected solution of sorts. He felt, however, a need to confer with William before putting his plan into place.

Tess and Cassie sat side by side, taking a break from tending the meager plants which grew in tidy rows at the side of the camp. Both of them were weary in the midday heat. Cassie seemed resigned to her changing body and even smiled as she held a hand over her expanding girth, feeling her baby’s strengthening kicks.

As Cassie wondered out loud where Smith and William had wandered off to, Tess idly spun her rings, thinking that she should probably remove them if she was going to do daily physical labor with her hands. Both of them nodded a polite greeting when Mambo strolled past and without warning, an absurd thought struck Tess, as clear as any event in her life.