Chapter 37: RECKONING

It was far too quiet, unnaturally quiet. Fear descended like twilight over the mountain. There was no hum of activity anywhere on the estate, not in the stock pens, or the cook-house, or the slave cabins. Only the thick, manufactured quiet of held breaths and swallowed words, punctuated now and then by a stray shot, or the riot of passing hooves, or yelping dogs, or some other outcry of violence. Then the ominous quiet again. Like a nightmare.

Without Shadow’s firm footing, Jack had long since lost his way in the dense, darkening wood, maneuvering through the prickly scrub however he might. He could only keep battling his way downward, staying out of the open, and dodging for deeper cover at every sound. He had lost his bearings, his sense of time. He had lost his battle to save Alphonse’s companions.

"This is a military operation, now," he tried to convince them, after Alphonse had gone. "The men who find you here will be soldiers sniffing for blood, not planters and bookkeepers. They won’t negotiate. They won’t give you a hearing. They’ll be looking for targets, scapegoats, and you’re playing right into their hands!"

"I no listen to any more of your prattle!" Paris exploded, at last. "Belair was right, you come to warn us and you should not die for it. But I kill you me own self if you say anoter word." He waved a cutlass toward the door. "Go. Now!"

"Come with me! At least throw down your weapons, and take up your tools while there’s still time." A foolish thing to say, Jack knew. Their only weapons were their tools, cutlasses from the cane fields, axes, pikes. Henry’s musket was their only firearm. Their escape plan had needed no defense, only secrecy and stealth, but that was in shambles now. "They only want proof of a conspiracy to convict you. Don’t give it to them."

"Go, before you make cowards of us all!" cried Paris.

"They will make corpses of you all!" Jack had pleaded. "What will any of you achieve, hung up in a gibbet to die in the sun? What will that tell your people?"

"That we choose to die with honor," hissed Paris. Young Remus and Henry and the handful of others grunted their agreement. "This not your fight, buckra, no more than it was Belair's," Paris told him, his voice softened by fatalism. "Go."

And Jack had gone, slunk off into the scrub with only his bitter frustration for company. He tried to convince himself they might yet elect to save themselves, if there was no white man there to see it. But the first shot from above, some time ago now, told Jack they had been discovered at last, trying to fight or flee. The dogs he’d heard were surely flushing out the ones who had run off. He'd crept past a party of militiamen who had captured one conspirator, and heard the ringing cartwhips of their interrogation for what seemed like hours after. How long before one of these brutalized fellows coughed up Alphonse’s name? Jack could only pray to Christ that Alphonse had gotten off this cursed mountain in time.

Jack had already fallen once and muddied his clothing. If only he had some idea of where he was, and how to get off this mountain. As he felt his way along, he came to a sudden, sharp drop in the scrub, a declension too steep to climb down in the dark, possibly even a ravine. He made his way along this ridge until he came to a place where the brush gave way to a clearing of open, rocky ground. Peeping out, he saw he was on the far perimeter of the slave yard. Past a few plots of kitchen gardens, off to his left, he could make out the dark shapes of the cabins, with a few tentative lights within.

Far across the open yard, sloping up from the right, Jack saw a wall of maturing cane, its feathery tops stirring in the rising night breeze. He knew the lower border of this estate and its neighbors was the Round Road that circled this part of the mountain, the road that would take him back to Charlestown. Back to Tory. If he could make his way into the cane-pieces, he could follow their milder slope down to the road, and get out of here.

He glanced back up toward the cabins, focusing all his senses to try to pierce the eerie stillness. The militia must have a guard posted to watch the cabins, but where were they? The only lights were a few far-off dots inside the cabins, and the glow of a cookfire, hastily abandoned, at the edge of the kitchen gardens nearest him, banked but not yet out. Beneath charred, ashy wood and trash, something still glowed red within. The fire still fed.

Jack could see nothing, hear nothing. But the tension in the yard was alive for all the stillness, a thousand ghosts stirring in the air, waiting, hovering. Loas and jumbies, all the spirits of the dead, watching to see who would join them on this terrible night. A fierce night wind began to whistle now in the cane, an unearthly sound. But Jack would take his chances with the ghosts. He only hoped the militia near the cabins was too far away to notice him.

He started out slowly. Out in the open, he could better hear a distant murmur of harsh soldierly voices and sudden laughter from the direction of the cabins, and he moved more briskly for the cover of the cane. Halfway across the open field, his ear picked out an indistinct drumming of hoofbeats growing louder, shivering the ground under his feet. Jack spun around when something crashed out of the wood, behind him, an eruption of flailing limbs and stomping hooves and cursing and snorting that gradually resolved itself into a horse and rider.

"I said halt, ye damned brute!" bellowed the rider. He flailed some heavy thing across the horse’s nose, yanking so severely on the reins that the snorting, irritated animal hobbled about in two clumsy circles before the rider regained control. Derisive male laughter echoed down to them from the cabins, where the militia kept watch.

"Sodding half-wits—" fumed the rider, but his curses died away as he came about the second time and spied Jack in the darkness, inching toward the cane field.

"Halt there, you!" he cried, spurring his horse to cut off Jack’s progress. And Jack knew that he was trapped in the worst nightmare of his life. It was too dark to see the cold green eyes, but he knew the contemptuous voice of Stephen Raleigh. It made an awful kind of sense, finding him here. Funny, how the bastard kept popping up whenever there was trouble.

"You know you’re forbidden to leave the cabins," Raleigh continued. "What are you up to, hey? Answer me!"

Jack thought he might brazen it out if Raleigh did not recognize him in the dark. But this was not the night to play the part of a slave.

"Why, I’ve lost my way in the dark, officer." Jack tried his most civilized accent. "Be good enough to point me toward the road."

There was a beat of terrible silence. Then Raleigh’s hand clamped down on Jack’s filthy collar. "Oh, you’ve lost your way, all right. Mountebank. D’ye take me for a fool?"

"You’re a long way from Basseterre, Constable," Jack muttered. "Who’s terrorizing the market women while you’re away?"

"I’ve had a run of ill luck in Basseterre." Raleigh was seething, but still in command of his temper. His grip was still strong. Jack could smell the oily rag wrapped round the end of the club he now cradled against his side as he clutched the reins. A torch. His restless fellows in the militia, itching for sport, must have chased him off on patrol before he could light it. "But my fortunes will change once I bring you up on charges."

"What charges? Wandering in a wood is not a crime."

"Sedition is a crime. Collusion with the damned darkies. Threatening an officer of the law in his own rooms is a very serious crime. And so is aiding a rebellion."

"There’s no rebellion here. You fellows are chasing your tails."

"There’s a rebellion, by God, or I wouldn’t find you here. And I’ll have it out of your hide, every detail. We’ll get our proof."

"If I’m you’re only proof, you won’t have much to show for your pains. The entire militia mustered to rout out one paltry white man? This operation will be the laughingstock of the islands."

But this goad had a more violent effect than Jack expected.

"No one will be laughing! Least of all you, Mountebank." His fist knotted more tightly into Jack’s collar. "And how is your colored whore these days?" he needled viciously.

"She is very well indeed. Far away from here."

For an instant, Raleigh’s grip trembled. "You lie!" he hissed. "Getting rid of that insolent wench is the best day’s work I ever did. Sending you to the gallows will make my triumph complete. Your kind are a contagion, infecting the whole of the Indies with your liberality. Conspiring with the damned slaves until they think they’re as good as men—"

"They are men," Jack interrupted. "They have a right to live."

"Not on my watch! I’ll root 'em all out, as I’ve rooted out you and your whore, all the darkies and the damned free coloreds, all the sodding trash with their airs until the pits of Hell overflow—"

Jack could not help staring at this outpouring of bile. Even Raleigh must have realized he was raving and his voice faded.

"Go home, constable," Jack urged quietly. "There’ll be no trouble here tonight unless you start it."

Raleigh stared down at him in mute rage. Then there was a horrible lightening of his demeanor; Jack could feel it in the very air, as dark as it was. "That’s right, by God. Mustn’t let a good rebellion go bad for want of a little proof," Raleigh rasped. "I’ll give 'em proof they’ll never forget!"

He pushed Jack aside, grasped the end of his cold torch and brandished it in the air. A tiny voice of sanity in Jack’s brain told him to dive for the cover of the cane and get away when he had the chance, but he leaped for Raleigh’s arm instead, struggling to wrest the torch out of his grip. But he only succeeded in pulling loose a tail of oiled cloth before Raleigh kicked him in the chest, and rode over to the cookfire, to shove the end of his torch into the glowing embers until it flamed up in the dark. Jack scrambled up to run after him. But by the time Jack got there, Raleigh had come about and was spurring his mount toward the cane field, his flaming torch aloft.

Igniting a cane-piece was the signal for a slave rising, that's what Alphonse had told him. At the first sight of flames the militia would have license to murder at will. There were no rules for quelling a rising; any presumption of innocence would be lost, and no further "proof" needed. The restless militia might proceed directly to the punishment phase, which would be swift and brutal, wreaked upon children and women alike, every family in the yard, because they were slaves at the site of a rising.

Jack could not outrun a horse, he was already wheezing from Raleigh’s kick. With only seconds to act and none to think, he seized a fist-sized stone from the circle beneath the red ashes of the cookfire. He couldn't spare an instant to feel the searing pain as it scorched his hand, but raced a few steps after Raleigh and threw the hot stone with a juggler’s precision and all his strength.

He heard the smack and the hiss against the horse’s rump, and saw the animal rear up with a shriek, prancing backwards on its hind hooves, still some distance from the cane. Raleigh struggled to hold on, lost his grip on the torch, but caught it up again much higher, closer to the flame. It blazed up ferociously in the breeze, and the frightened horse bucked again.

Then a sudden hot, dry wind gusted in fiercely off the cane; from far behind the horse, Jack could feel the heat on his face. He could see the flames blaze backward along the loose strip of oily cloth, engulfing Raleigh’s hand and wrist. The horse finally wrenched itself free of it’s burden, and Raleigh fell backward with a scream, as the wind blew the flames back along his sleeve. He tried to cast the torch away as he fell, but the flames welded it to his grasp. He wasn’t able to roll away under the horse’s stamping hooves, pinned there by the animal’s fury, flailing his burning arm. The maddened animal twisted around and bucked one last time, and Jack saw the hooves crash down on the man underneath. The horse bolted off into the dark, but there was no more shrieking or writhing from the figure on the ground. Other patches of his clothing sparked, smoked, ignited. The toasty scent of burning linen mingled with more sickening odors. Stephen Raleigh was the only thing ablaze in the dark, open field.

Jack found himself racing toward the hellish tableau, with the crazed idea of doing something, anything, but he hadn't any implements for beating off a blaze, and the heat forced him back. The shouting from the cabins was suddenly louder and nearer; sick with horror, Jack could only keep running into the protection of the tall cane, running blindly away from the eerie glow and the crackle of flames, from ghosts and death. There was no appeasing the gods of death, there never would be, not in the Indies. This nightmare was far from over.


(Top: Slave Rebellion handbill; Jamaica, 1832. Image Reference PRO-5, as shown on www.slaveryimages.org, sponsored by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and the University of Virginia Library)

Chapter 21: IN MEDUSA'S WEB

Boisterous laughter, fiddling, and singing erupted out of the waterfront tavern, drawing Tory along through the night shadows. She was near enough to see its fanciful wooden sign, swaying and creaking in the light breeze, a crudely carved figure of a mermaid with a head full of snakes, like the tangle of a spider's web. The Old Medusa Tavern, it was called, hard by the broad beach overlooking the bay. Sailors were notoriously loose talkers; if she was ever to find a ship to take her off this wretched island, it would be here.

It was typical of Tory’s recent fortune to find herself in Basseterre again, the last place on earth she ought to be. But the river had brought her to the southern coast, some little distance west of Basseterre, but considerably east of Old Road Town, and she didn’t think her scavenged food or her luck would last long enough for her to make her way to some friendlier town. Besides, Basseterre in crop time was the busiest port in the Leewards, and she knew the dockside area well, knew it was her best chance get back to the sea. How else would she ever find Jack again?

She had tried to close Jack out of her thoughts during her captivity; she would not conjure him up in that place to share her misery. But during the long nights on the run, and tense waiting days of her journey down the mountain, she had been able to think of nothing else. Not only the comfort of his warm, strong body, which she ached for every hour, but the solace of his companionship. And something much more—she hungered to be known, again, to be recognized for who she was. Not the prisoner, not the slave, not the runaway. So many people knew bits and pieces of her, by the patchwork motley she dressed herself in out of necessity in her erratic journey through life. But only Jack understood the whole of her. Only Jack could tether her to the truth about herself.

It was long dark by the time she'd ventured into the town and made her way through the back streets for the waterfront. She could see masts bobbing out in the open roadstead, their lights winking in the dark, but she dared not present herself to any honest captain, looking as she did, a mud-caked runaway in filthy rags with nothing of value to trade for her passage. But she might stow away aboard a vessel in secret; she’d done it before. Getting out of Basseterre was her first concern, she would worry about the rest later.

It was not impossible that she might work for her passage, female or no, once the ship’s master saw what she could do. A trader between the islands would be best, with stops in Nevis and Antigua, where she might hear news of the pantomime players. But any vessel would do, so long as it got her out of Basseterre and back on the open sea, where she could clear her wits and get a grip on herself. Then she could decide where to head next. Wherever Jack had gone.

She knew Chief Constable Raleigh patrolled the town in the daylight, but the nighttime belonged to the watch. What business would Raleigh have down by the docks in the dead of night? So she'd made her way through the shadows to the noisiest tavern, the Medusa, hoping to find out who was sailing where, and on what ships, and how soon. It should not take long to overhear what she needed to know. Anything worth hearing, she would hear there.

Tory turned down into the alleyway behind the buildings, keeping to the shadows. She felt in her dirty apron pocket for her last strip of salt fish. Remembering Alphonse’s advice about kindly kitchen women, she had gone begging last night to an old Negro woman tending a pot of cook-up at a cluster of slave cabins above the river. Tory said she was going to visit her mama in Basseterre without a ticket-of-leave, and the old cook took pity on her and gave her a small, precious ration of salt fish. It had been an easy lie to tell, and effective, for slaves often wandered off to visit their relations without their master's knowledge. Slaves accomplished a great deal, she was learning, without their masters' knowledge.

The abandoned little hut by the broken bush had grown close and sweltering in the heat of the day, but it kept Tory securely hidden until nightfall. On her second night following the river down the mountain, she found another shelter, a tiny lean-to hidden under a carpet of green moss and climbing jasmine. There were many such places hidden along the river route, if one had the wit to look: here an abandoned watchman’s hut inhabited only by spiders and lizards, there a hand-built shelter hidden behind the huge fan of a traveler’s palm, recently swept clean. She couldn't account for it. In the pirate trade, she would have called it Blesséd Providence.

She crept through the dark to the back of the tavern, where more modulated, businesslike voices hummed beneath the ongoing riot from the front. Some sort of meeting, she supposed, contrabandistas striking their bargains and getting ready to sail on the tide. She came out of the deepest shadows, crept up on the planked wooden porch to position herself closer to the jalousied windows next to the back door, where hushed voices and stripes of soft light filtered out between the slats. But the words were indistinct. She crept closer.

A sudden heavy tread shook the planks under her feet, and the door was flung open. Tory dodged backward into the dark as a cloaked figure stepped outside, but the shock of light behind him blinded her and she lost her footing. She tripped over a chicken in the dark who set up a fearful squawk, and stumbled backward into a cart in the shadows, with a thump and a rattling of traces. The man halted on the wooden porch, still framed in the light of the doorway.

"Who’s that?" he growled.

Tory wedged herself between the cart and the wall, but that damned chicken was still scrabbling about, clucking and complaining. Perhaps he would think that was all he’d heard. Any casual passer-by would let it go, the night was full of noises. But the man came out into the road, following the sound of the chicken, poking purposefully into the shadows. Some smuggler, no doubt, on the lookout for spies. Damnation. Could she possibly have any worse luck?

"You might as well come out of there," sneered a cold voice, and Tory knew her luck had turned worse. She could not run through walls or evaporate into the air. And as a hand closed on her arm and dragged her out into the pale light from the tavern door, she found herself staring into the scowling face of Chief Constable Raleigh.

"You!" gaped the constable, for an instant as shocked as she was. "What are you doing here?"

"I might ask the same of you," Tory snapped back, but the fight was already draining out of her, following the downward plunge of her heart. How could she have come this far, endured so much, only to have her last tiny scrap of hope so rudely ripped from her grasp? Which of the many gods had she so offended to deserve this punishment? But it scarcely mattered any more. Nothing mattered. Fortune had turned her wheel.

Raleigh had recovered from his surprise and was looking her up and down very keenly.

"Ye little bitch, you’ve run off, haven’t ye?" The most genuine smile Tory had ever seen him wear played across his face. "Why, there are very serious legal punishments for runaways, don’t ye know? It might be a hundred lashes. Or a branding. Or you might forfeit a foot, that would slow you down, eh? It’s all at the discretion of your owner," he leered.

Tory saw Rathbourne’s face in her mind’s eye, twisted with glee if he ever got his hands on her again, especially after he found his boots. Her legal owner, itching for his revenge. But she commanded her face to shut out all expression. She would not react.

"How I shall enjoy that particular entertainment when I take you back—" Then Raleigh paused.



Stephen Raleigh knew that damned Harlequin was still afoot, somewhere. And what of it? he argued with himself. The fellow had no legal means whatever of reclaiming his wench. But it was clear he had not found her, yet, for all his bold talk, judging from the state she was in. What could Raleigh himself do to ensure that he never did? Returning her to her owner was beginning to seem like a poor solution. These two were as slippery as shadows; that mountebank might yet help her to escape again and there would be all Raleigh’s effort wasted.

But suppose he could get rid of her for good and all tonight, even make a profit into the bargain? This harpy had humiliated him, ruined his finances, all but destroyed his career, she owed him that much. And suppose he could also guarantee that nigger-loving mountebank would never, ever see her again? Surely, that would break them both, the victory Raleigh craved above all others. That would cure their damned insolence, the pair of them. It was obscene, a white man making such a public display of his appetite for a colored wench, associating in public with Negroes, lowering himself to their level. And proud of it. The degraded fool didn’t seem to care who knew how deep he was in thrall to this...this...by God, just look at her! Covered in dried mud and tattered rags like something that had crawled out of a bog. What would make a man forfeit his dignity and betray his race to dally with such a filthy thing? He ought to give her back to him as she was, that would cure him of his affection. But a separation now, when the beggar thought he had almost recovered her again, that would teach him a lesson. His kind of behavior could not be tolerated in a decent society. Certainly not in any town run by Stephen Raleigh.

"But then, there are other punishments that might suit you better," he continued on, gazing at her again. "Not every slaveholder has a comfortable estate at his disposal. Some situations are far less...genteel. What would you say to a change of scenery? An ocean voyage, perhaps?"

The girl’s eyes rounded at him, filling with such tangible fear that Raleigh was startled—and delighted. So he had cracked her sullen mask at last, probed deeply enough to find her fatal weakness.

"Please sir, no," she gasped, her voice low and husky with terror. "Not the sea, oh please."

"'Sir,' is it? 'Oh please, sir,'" mocked the chief constable. "I’m afraid it’s a little late to be finding your manners."

Her face was growing wild with terror. The coating of mud made the effect all the more grotesque, a banshee, a gargoyle. Raleigh was hypnotized. Never, ever had he dared to hope for such complete despair.

"Send me back, whip me, chop off my foot, I don’t care!" she begged, in an utter frenzy. "But don’t put me on a ship! For the love of God, not the sea!"

His only answer was another grim smile.



Jack could not believe what the fellow had told him. He’d had a new colored wench, all right, calling herself Hecate; his book-keeper had bought her in Basseterre. But less than a month on the place, and she was gone. A damned runaway into the bargain, and he would have what she cost him out of the book-keeper’s wages, if not his hide.

That was the end of the conversation, and Jack turned away and walked back down the broad stone steps that led from the veranda to the road. He could feel the paper from Mr. Greaves inside his shirt, burning a hole in his heart. Here he had a legal document to claim Tory, or at least allow her to claim herself, and she was gone. She was a slave, a possession, how could she be gone? Why would she take such a dangerous step? Could she not have waited for him?

"You’re sure she’s not still about the place somewhere?" he asked Alphonse when they met again, further down the road, near the cook-house. Back beyond the great house, the mills were grumbling and the sugar works steaming away, turning the heavy air dank and sweet. In a little valley far below the road, there was activity in the slave cabins. It was midday, and the field hands were on their dinner hour, cooking and tending their kitchen gardens; a platoon of them had just marched off to their provision grounds. A middle-aged woman of color and a sullen girl came out of the cook-house carrying laundry baskets, to follow the wooden-sided aqueduct away from the road toward some hidden stream. Try as he might, Jack could not feel the spark of Tory’s presence anywhere in this place, yet everywhere he looked, he struggled to will her into existence. "They might be hiding her from me, if they’re so short of labor," he suggested.

"I spoke to several of the household," said Alphonse, shaking his head. "The last anyone saw of her, she had been summoned to the master’s chambers."

"The master?" echoed Jack, halting in his tracks. "That fellow Birney? If he’s lied to me—" and he spun around and took two angry steps back toward the great house.

"She never arrived," Alphonse interrupted, halting Jack again. "It was the young nephew that wanted her. The cook’s mulatto son is his valet. Tory never came to him. No one has seen her since." He shook his head again. "She’s gone, Jack. Gone these five days."

"But she can’t simply disappear," Jack protested. "Runaways... they rarely get very far, do they?" But he broke off the thought. He knew all about the dogs, the lashes, the brandings that were the fate of captured runaways; he could not seriously be hoping she were caught. But if she were not, how would he ever find her?

"Perhaps you should stay here," he told Alphonse, more briskly, trying to weave a scenario that would enclose Tory without harming her, keep her close until he could find her again. "I’ll return to town and stay near the Court House and the square. If she’s caught or taken into custody, perhaps I can intervene before she’s…" he paused, drew breath, "...hurt or punished. If she comes back here, you—"

"She may not come back," Alphonse interjected, with quiet finality. Jack blinked at him. "She may not be caught. There are... ways to get off this mountain. There are even ways to get off this island."

Jack stared at him. Alphonse returned his gaze, but there was something edgy and uncomfortable behind his black eyes.

"And go where?" Jack's voice was scarcely audible.

"Anywhere," murmured Alphonse, lowering his eyes at last, his expression grim. "She could be anywhere, by now."

Jack frowned. "How do you know this?"

Alphonse's eyes rose to his again. "Because I have helped her to escape."


(Top: The Old Medusa, by Lisa Jensen © 2010.)

Chapter 1: BUSKERS

They were a cutpurse's dream, the pair of them. There could be no better diversion than the juggling couple keeping their small audience rapt at the corner across from the square, not if Abel Wylie had conjured them up special. There were beggars aplenty in these islands, raggedy drunkards and runaway slaves, but Wylie had never seen the like of these two.

The fellow was tall, scruffy, dark hair like a Spaniard, but with a patter of fancy English: not flash, but riddled with jests and poetic foolery, juggling like a demon. Old, rubbishy balls, they were, but spinning too fast to count. His wench didn't say much. Comely enough, but a sharp eye could spot the dusky bloodline in her dark hair and eyes. What few pure white women the island of St. Kitts had to offer would never expose their complexions to the tropical sun at midday, let alone display themselves with such vulgarity. She was less skilled than the dark fellow, but more of a draw, the way her bosom rose and fell and her skirts swirled above her ankles as she juggled her three dried gourds. They were no better dressed than field hands, but that wench held all eyes, whatever she was.

Two gentlemen in sober coats and frothy linen had stopped to gawk, joining the circle of Negro boys, and mariners, and colored shopgirls. Gentlemen of means. And Wylie moved in a little closer.

"We play but for your pleasure and we strive to please you every day, as the poet says," cried the tall juggler, concluding his trick with the balls. "You have only to ask and we shall do whatever lies in our poor power to amuse you."

"Show us the dusky wench," Wylie called, from behind a broad-shouldered Negro.

The juggler extended an arm back toward the woman, who came forward a few steps, still spinning her gourds. Her partner tossed her a wooden ball, then another. The objects flew higher and faster between them, the fellow alert but relaxed, the wench bobbing and twirling to keep pace. One of the gents cried, "Jove, indeed!" and tossed a coin into the jugglers' upturned straw hat. A glint of gold. Abel Wylie crept closer still.

Now they were asking the audience for objects to juggle. One of the gents proffered his top hat and a Negro boy produced a bristly coconut. A female voice piped up, "My fan?" And as the fellow in front of him shifted, Wylie saw his prize. A young lady of quality, she was, done up in yellow silk, face and bosom swaddled in veils against the sun. A glimpse of creamy white arm emerged as she stretched out her closed fan to her colored maid; from her gloved wrist dangled a lace reticule on a slender silken cord.

All eyes were on the fan, coconut and topper as the jugglers cut their figures—all eyes but Abel Wylie's. It was going to be so easy; he'd buy himself the friskiest whore in Basseterre, this night. The juggling wench finished by snapping open the fan and dipping into a low curtsy. The onlookers cheered and clapped their hands and the girl in yellow swayed up on her toes to get a better view as her maid left her to retrieve the fan. Wylie coaxed his knife out of his sleeve, cool steel, then the solid haft in his palm, as he closed in. His thin blade was only a wink away when the chit jerked her arm up to fumble with her purse.

"Stop! Thief!"

That sharp mulatto was shrieking, pointing at him. Heads were turning all around as the girl in yellow half-turned, bewildered, her purse twirling on her wrist. Wylie grabbed her round the waist and brandished his blade; such a frail, useless little thing, like all of her class. But good for something. She screamed when his blade looped under the cord to draw the purse off over her gloved hand. It spun by its cord, then settled down over his wrist as he feinted his knife back toward her veiled throat.

"Back away," he growled to the clerks and slaves behind him, but there were too many of 'em back there, a gauntlet, what with his burden. His shield. He jerked the whimpering girl in the other direction, past her maid and the jugglers, toward the cover of a side street round the corner; Abel Wylie knew every forgotten passage and back alley in Basseterre. But that damned juggler took a step to block his path. Wylie pressed his blade into the gauzy veil. The juggler froze.

"Easy friend," he murmured, his dark eyes fixed on Wylie's. Unnerving eyes, cold as steel. "The girl's no use to you. Let her go. You've got what you want."

Wylie tightened his grip on his hostage, dared to glance away for an instant, and saw it there on the ground between them, the straw hat with its contents of coins. Without a grunt of warning, he flung the girl into the juggler, sent him stumbling backwards as Wylie scooped up the hat and raced for the corner. He heard cries and commotion behind him, the wailing of the maid, the spluttering anger of the men, now the danger was past. He'd laugh if he had the breath for it, gulls and fools, the lot of 'em, but he kept pumping along, behind a warehouse and into a deserted back street. But halfway down its length, something hard caught him square in the back, knocking the wind out of him, damn near bowling him over. Staggering to keep his feet, he spotted something rolling in the dirt, nearby. A wooden ball.

Wylie didn't relish a fight with that cold-eyed juggler, a rangy fellow who knew how to move, but he had a better weapon than a ball and no wind left for running. He spun round in a crouch, his blade at the ready—and damn near laughed out loud. It wasn't the juggler coming after him, at all. It was his wench, panting and red-cheeked, her dark eyes on fire. Running straight for him. Alone. By damn, but wasn't this his lucky day?



Tory was so outraged, she was galloping like a racehorse before she even knew it, skirts be damned, while Jack was still tangled up in that swooning girl with her ridiculous veils. She'd seen Jack nudge forward his hat with his foot, gambling the fellow would be greedy enough to trade the girl for their earnings. And the gamble paid off, but that didn't mean Tory had to let him get away with it; the day's profits gone, and all their effort wasted. They would have to make a meal of that coconut and sleep under the stars. Again.

She had noticed him earlier, sulky and pinch-faced with dirty blond hair straggling to his threadbare collar. One of those landless white men who had come out to the West Indies to make their fortune, and failed. She knew by his insolent gaze he took her for a submissive mulatta wench, ripe for the plucking. He thought so still, as he came about to face her, open mouth sneering into a smile.

"Is this what you want, Pet?" He shook the hat, clutched closed and rattling with coins, above his head as Tory circled him, the lacy little purse dangling absurdly from his wrist. As if he thought she was witless enough to dance after it, like a coddled cat. "Is it? Well, just you come and get it!"

He feinted at her playfully and Tory darted aside, but her kick glanced off his thigh. Hooting, he thrust his arm out again, but she watched for the instant he was off-balance to seize his wrist with both hands and bring her knee up hard into his belly. His laughter curdled, his open mouth desperately sucked for air as she shook the hat out of his grasp, its few pitiful coins rattling off in all directions. She yanked the reticule off his wrist, as well, and flung it far across the road, then spun around and kicked his legs out from under him. He toppled over, and she raced away to gather up the coins, before some other enterprising beggar beat her to it. She spied some Spanish gold—not doubloons, she noted sadly—among the misshapen bits, British shillings and twopenny pieces the islanders called "dogs." She and Jack were no more likely to make a fortune in this trade than the last one.

As something growled behind her, she turned to see the thief lunging for her in fury, knife outstretched, with all his weight behind it. She dropped beneath the blade and rolled into his legs; his own momentum carried him over her back to slam into the dirt road. Leaping up again, she stomped on the hand that held the knife; his fingers unclenched, she grabbed the weapon, and slipped it into the waist of her skirt as she danced out of his reach, pausing only to scoop out a dog, and fling it into the dirt near his head.

"Buy yourself a toy you can handle. Pet."

She sprinted off before he got his wind back to retrieve the rest of the coins and Jack’s battered hat; she only just remembered to fetch the yellow silk purse out of the roadway as well as she hurried out of the narrow street. Trying to pat her disheveled clothing into place, she threaded her way back through more populated streets for the square.

Basseterre in crop time was a bustling commercial town of imposing Georgian houses, shops and waterfront warehouses. Ladies swathed in gauze rode by in fine carriages for the shops on the square. Pink-faced gentlemen sweated in their linen and complained about the price of sugar. The place reeked of civilization. But for the tall, rustling palms, the colored hucksters with baskets of wares on their heads and the throngs of Negro slaves, it might have been a Boston street scene in miniature. It made Tory grimace with irony, after all the trouble she'd taken to get away from Boston.

The corner where they had set up their pitch commanded an excellent view of the open roadstead of Basseterre Bay, the finest deepwater bay in the Leewards. Tory paused to watch the bobbing of the ships' masts, smell the brine and fish, listen to the mocking laughter of the gulls. She could feel the tidal pull of the freedom they had lost.

But when she turned back again, a gentleman of some authority was accosting Jack. Dapper and middle-aged, he was too well-dressed for a constable, but he might have been a magistrate. The young lady in yellow was gone.

Tensing for another fight, Tory closed on them, fingers creeping over the haft of the knife. Then Jack smiled, the other man laughed, grasped Jack by the hand, and began to pump as vigorously as a market woman at a dry well. Tory chanced one shallow breath, dumped the contents of Jack's straw hat into their open satchel of props, and hurried toward them, holding the little reticule aloft. Jack turned, and she saw relief flood into his dark eyes.

"Here is my associate, sir, and see what she brings," Jack said to the stranger. "Miss Lightfoot, may I present Mr..."

"Greaves, Amos Greaves Printers," the gentleman spoke up, seizing her hand with the same enthusiasm. "Delighted, my dear!"

Tory wasn't sure if she ought to curtsy again. They were not accustomed to any sort of attention from the first class of white citizens, let alone public displays of goodwill. Then the gentleman glanced up at the trophy she held. "But see here, you don’t mean—"

"Fellow must have...dropped it. In the alley. In his haste to get away." She knew better than to claim any credit, trying on what she hoped was a demure smile as Mr. Greaves pressed her hand with renewed gratitude.

"How fortunate for you, my dear. And for my poor daughter. She told me what happened," he added, nodding to a carriage drawn up in the road, a whisper of yellow silk fluttering out the open door. "Fellow had a knife, they say. Well, ours is a precarious life in these islands, most precarious. Earthquakes, fire, pestilence. We can’t know where the hand of Fate will strike next! But for your intervention, sir, I daren’t think—"

"But I did nothing—" Jack began.

"Stuff!" declared Greaves. "A cool head in a crisis, that’s what counts, sir! I’ve lived on this island, man and boy, for forty years and I’ve seen far too little of it." His eyes strayed again to the carriage and he lowered his voice. "My daughter is most precious to me. I try to keep her safe, but it’s a world of temptation, as I daresay you know, Miss Lightfoot, a world of temptation. And young girls are not always the most sensible of creatures, especially young girls with my Emily’s youthful spirits. Poor thing, she lost her mother when she was still a lass and now she has only her old papa for company and no one to teach her the proper way to behave."

Tory was hardly an authority on proper female behavior, but she knew what it was to lose a mother at a young age.

"I’m sure your love is the best possible company, sir," she told him, handing him the little lacy purse. "And I’m sure she knows it."

Greaves bloomed like a bride and clasped her hand again.

"What a kind thing to say, most kind!" he cried. "See here, I mean to offer my thanks for the kindnesses you have both done."

"No thanks are necessary, Mr. Greaves," Jack assured him.

"Of course they are! My daughter is my life and to show my gratitude, I would be most honored if both of you would join me for dinner at my club this evening."

"But...you’re far too generous," Jack stammered. His furtive glance swept across his own plain shirt and trousers and Tory's outfit, much the worse for wear, scarcely better than slave clothing. "It is you who honors us. But as you can see, we are only buskers who play in the road and hardly dressed for such an occasion."

"Dress?" echoed Mr. Greaves. "Stuff! I came out to the Indies a barefoot lad in rags, ‘prenticed to Mr. Jones, the printer, when he found me scavenging in his dust-heap. I own my own printing office, now, and a controlling interest in Greaves and Henley Mercantile and a sizeable share in the Fairhaven sugar estate on Monkey Hill, to say nothing of my seat in the Assembly. So I ask you," he concluded, drawing breath, "what has dress to do with it?"

"A very enlightened attitude," Jack agreed. Then, voice dropping, he added, "But I’m afraid ladies sometimes see things in a different light."

Mr. Greaves swiveled his eyes again at Tory, who tried not to bristle in irritation that Jack would suggest she was the type of silly female who gave a damn about dress. But she knew enough to drop her eyes. They had very good reasons not to wish to be paraded into the private club of the finest gentlemen in Basseterre, many of them sure to be Assemblymen, or members of the island Council. Their survival in the islands depended upon not being especially noticed, on melting into the margins of society.

"Why...how thoughtless of me," blustered Mr. Greaves. "I have no wish to cause Miss Lightfoot the slightest discomfort, certainly. But look here, if I cannot persuade you to dine with me, please allow me to escort you to the finest lodging house in town, just down the next street, run by the most genteel colored lady. I happen to own a share in the place and I can assure you, the rooms are first-rate. I insist you to stop there tonight as my guests. Assuming, ah, that you have engaged no other lodgings? No? Splendid! I must warn you both, you shall wound me greatly if you refuse."

Tory could not remember the last time she and Jack had slept under a roof. Jack must have been thinking the same thing, the way he was looking at her.

"Mr. Greaves, it’s not in our power to refuse so generous an offer," Jack smiled. "You do us a very great honor."

"Stuff!" chortled Amos Greaves.

Jack raked back his hair, and in the act of clapping his straw hat back on his head, tipped Tory a sidewise look so full of the devil, she felt a tremor like an earthquake. A room. With a bed.



It still astonished Jack that Tory had ever been mistaken for a boy. He knew about the element of surprise, how men at sea, terrified witless by a band of marauders, were not expecting to see a female in their midst, and so failed to recognize one, even when she strode right under their noses. Yet, even disguised in rough, shapeless male clothing, Tory’s body was a symphony of rounded female flesh. How could anyone who called himself a man fail to notice?

But few men had the opportunity to see Tory as Jack saw her now, standing before a porcelain washbasin, arms upraised, taking the pins out of her hair, full breasts rising under her muslin chemise. The last pin came out and Tory’s long, thick, dark hair, kissed with copper in the candlelight, tumbled down her back. Not black silky hair, like her mother’s must have been, but dark, lush, unruly and impudent. Like Tory herself.

Jack smiled and Tory glanced at him, as if she'd heard it.

"What a dainty figure you cut at your toilette," he teased.

"Had you left me more than a thimble-full of water, I should have bathed more heartily."

"I left you half the jug!" Jack protested, applying his towel more vigorously to his wet hair.

"Aye, but we’ll want some in the morning, too."

"They’ll bring another jug in the morning, Rusty."

"Will they?" She sent another covetous glance toward the water pitcher.

What a child she was. Jack wanted to put his arms around her and keep her safe forever from the world she still knew so little about. At the same time, he felt he ought to run out the door and never return. Tory was still so young, only just ripening into her womanhood. She ought to have a wonderful life ahead of her. But all she had was him. And he shifted his eyes away.

After a meal of fried fish cakes, roasted chicken, four varieties of local fruit and the best London Madeira, served in the dining room of the most genteel colored lady, Jack and Tory had been conducted upstairs to this private chamber. It was small, but after all the makeshift accommodations they had experienced on land and sea, it was a dream of luxury. A real iron bedstead with a thick mattress under a snowy satin coverlet stood against one wall, across from a large window with wooden jalousies that overlooked the square. The washstand, with its ewer, basin and glass, occupied a corner near the bed. A braided cotton rug protected the polished wooden floor under two upholstered chairs, and Jack was slouched in one of these, still rubbing the towel through his hair.

He had forgotten how dusty and dirty it was, the vagabond life ashore. He had grown up in that life back in England, following the fairs, but that had been long ago. The rains were late this year and the roads were hot and dry and there were days he prayed for a good squall, even a hurricane, if only to wash the dust away. But Tory never complained.

He glanced at her again, swallowed another smile as she perched on the edge of the bed. Her face lit up like a child’s.

"Feathers, by all the gods!" she grinned. "Not straw."

Her natural complexion was the color of milky tea, but her face and arms were sun-baked, sprinkled here and there with those rusty freckles Jack found so irresistible. Did anyone ever trouble to study her, they might see she was not mulatta, white and African, but what the Spanish called mestiza, white and native; her mother had been a Mohawk Indian from America. There was a proud arch to Tory's nose, and no trace of island, much less African in her speech. But for all the islanders obsessed over shades of color and degrees of dark blood, Jack knew there were only two colors that mattered in the Indies—white and not white. Just as there were only two distinct classes, free and slave. And once Tory was perceived as not white, no one troubled to look any closer.

It suited their purpose to pass her off as a lady of color, since white "buckra" men and their colored mistresses were so common in the islands. But at least Tory was also seen as free colored, that class of mixed-blood islanders descended from slaves whose lighter complexions had helped them obtain their freedom. And Jack knew that freedom was all that had ever mattered to Tory, ever since she'd run away from that fancy Boston girls’ school they’d caged her in after her mother died. She had dressed as a boy, run off to sea, even joined a crew of brigands, to earn her freedom. She would be sailing, still, if not for Jack and his damned fever. That was how they’d fetched up here in the Leewards, without a ship, to make what living they could. The only other living Jack knew was the tumbling trade he’d learned as a boy, a pauper’s trade to be sure, but it kept them alive. As mere buskers, they fell between the cracks of the rigid social strata that governed colonial life. Tory was able to keep a measure of the freedom that was life to her. As she was life to Jack.

Tory had tucked up her legs and was now combing her hair with a little tortoiseshell comb Jack had bought her at the Sunday market. One of the few presents he could afford to give her.

"You made quite a fetching picture with that fan, today," he observed. "Perhaps we ought to get you one."

"What would I do with a fan?" she laughed.

"I don’t know, whatever ladies do with fans. Flutter it about and make sheep’s eyes at all the young men."

"Like that worthy specimen we saw today?" she teased.

"How obliging of him to drop that girl's purse."

Tory shrugged. "Perhaps now he’ll think twice before he tries to rob a woman on a public street."

"Perhaps. But that’s hardly the way a lady behaves in public."

"No? The next time I meet a lady, I’ll let her know." Tory gave the comb a purposeful tug. "Why should I stand idly by and allow some lout to rob us?"

"Because we’re in the civilized world, now," Jack sighed. He knew how feeble it sounded.

"Where women must hide behind their men like children?"

Jack sighed again. How he wished he could give her back the life she craved, the free life on the open sea he had stolen from her when he’d fallen ill with the fever. But they were stranded here now, and the Blessed Providence and her crew were far away.

"You taught me better than that, Danzador, she reminded him.

Jack smiled at the Spanish word for dancer, that’s what their Cuban shipmates had called him for his acrobatics in battle, tumbler’s tricks he'd taught Tory to defend herself. And she'd learned well. He stood up, tossed his towel on the washstand, and stretched. It was a warm night, dry and hushed; even the clacking of the night insects was subdued. There was still no hint of rain. He longed for a fresh breeze off the trades to cool them down, but knew better than to open the shutters, not until they’d turned down the light and gotten under the netting. Night breezes brought with them whole battalions of biting, stinging, flying creatures on dry land. He reached for the yoke buttons of his shirt.

"Is there anything else about life ashore I ought to know?" Tory wondered, behind him.

"Only that it’s not much of a life," Jack mumbled into his buttons. "I wish I could give you a better one."

"I don’t need any better. All I need is you."

"You deserve more," he declared, hauling his shirt off over his head.

"But use every man after his desert and who shall 'scape whipping?" she teased back. It was their old habit, bantering Shakespearean quotes, ever since Jack had been fool enough to admit to her he'd once been a player. But now her voice die away in her throat, and when he saw his shirt in his hand, he realized why. His flogged back was not a sight for the faint-hearted, a lasting souvenir of his early years at sea on less fortunate berths than the Blessed Providence. Tory should be accustomed to it by now, but it was the last thing she'd want to see while making a jest about whipping.

In a heartbeat, Tory's arms came around his waist from behind. Her cheek nestled into the hollow between his shoulders and her warm mouth moved gently against the ridged flesh of one of his old scars. "I’m sorry, hombre," she murmured. "I didn’t—"

"I know, I know," he dismissed her apology, smiling again. "Hellfire, Rusty, you’re the most tender-hearted pirate there ever was. How did you ever survive in the trade?"

"I had you to look after me."

Jack closed his eyes, relaxed into the warmth of her body, and let her comfort him. That was his weakness, letting Tory comfort him, allowing himself to believe they could make a life together. An honorable man would have cut her loose by now, freed her to make her own way in the world. She could be whatever she wished, make a fortunate match with some wealthy planter; there were still plenty of men who had made and kept their fortunes in the Indies. But Jack would never be one of them. He could see nothing in his future but hard labor and small profit and dust and disappointment, and he had no right to drag Tory down with him. But she would not let him go. She had not allowed him to die in peace of the fever when they were marooned together in a damp cave on some Godforsaken rock in the Virgins. When he tried to run away, she tracked him down and had her way with him into the bargain. And that was the end of his feeble attempts to behave like an honorable man.

Sooner or later, Tory must realize how much better off she would be without him. But Jack would not press the issue. He had never expected to survive in the pirate trade, had certainly never expected to love, or be loved. But Tory took him by surprise, breaking all his rules, as she had broken so many others. He might wish he'd come by her love more honestly, that he'd won her on his own merits, not merely through the circumstance of their having been marooned together on that wretched rock. It was only the fear of contagion that caused the captain to put her ashore with Jack at all. But she was his now. And he was still pirate enough to take his prize where he found it, and not trouble overmuch about how he had obtained it.

"Come to bed, Jack," Tory whispered, nuzzling his back.

He turned around in the circle of her arms, lifted her face in both hands, and kissed her soundly. "You’re right, mi vida," he smiled. "Who knows when we’ll ever find another bed? It would be a crime to waste it."

In the dark, the feather mattress was as soft and buoyant as a sigh, like sinking into a cloud. Tory imagined the feathers taking flight, bearing her aloft through a black sea of stars, her hand on a tiller as sure and solid as bone, as inviting as flesh. She didn’t realize she was dreaming until Jack’s hand stroked her breast and her moan of pleasure woke her.

"Are you sleeping, Rusty?" Jack whispered, trying to sound wounded as he lowered his face into the curve of her neck.

"Not any more." She gently squeezed his hip under her hand.

"Have you any of your herbs left?" he murmured into her hair.

"I...think so."

Jack’s hand stilled. He lifted his head. "You’re not sure?"

"I think I do," she repeated firmly. "Where is the moon?"

"On the wane, I believe," Jack sighed, regret creeping into his voice. "Not a good time for planting seeds, I suppose."

"But a fortunate time for me, at the moment," she assured him, sliding her fingertips gently down into the coarse, curly hair below his belly. She had become expert at calculating time by the moon, her woman time. She had to, or Jack would not lie with her, not since she’d told him her mother had died in childbirth. He could be as stubborn as a bull, would do anything, deny himself anything, to keep her safe. No matter what it cost her to deny herself him.

But not tonight. They were safe, tonight, shuttered away in the dark. Jack stirred under her touch, groaned softly, and caressed her again, slowly, rousing her. This was the only advantage there was to being female, creeping into the shelter of Jack’s strong, battered body, feeding his need and her own. Tonight they would deny themselves nothing, adrift on a sea of stars in the dark of the moon.