“I be wantin’ that one-arm nigger.” He stared boldly at Jamie as he spoke, but there was a diffidence under the confident facade.
“Temeraire?” I blurted out in astonishment. “Why?”
Ishmael flicked a glance at me, but addressed his words to Jamie, half-bold, half-cajoling.
“He ain’t no good to you, mon; can’t be doin’ field work or ship work neither, ain’t got but one arm.”
Jamie didn’t reply directly, but stared at Ishmael for a moment. Then he turned and called for Fergus to bring up the one-armed slave.
Temeraire, brought up on deck, stood expressionless as a block of wood, barely blinking in the sun. He too had been provided with seaman’s clothes, but he lacked Ishmael’s raffish elegance in them. He looked like a stump upon which someone had spread out washing to dry.
“This man wants you to go with him, to the island there,” Jamie said to Temeraire, in slow, careful French. “Do you want to do this thing?”
Temeraire did blink at that, and a brief look of startlement widened his eyes. I supposed that no one had asked him what he wanted in many years—if ever. He glanced warily from Jamie to Ishmael and back again, but didn’t say anything.
Jamie tried again.
“You do not have to go with this man,” he assured the slave. “You may come with us, and we will take care of you. No one will hurt you. But you can go with him, if you like.”
Still the slave hesitated, eyes flicking right and left, clearly startled and disturbed by the unexpected choice. It was Ishmael who decided the matter. He said something, in a strange tongue full of liquid vowels and syllables that repeated like a drumbeat.
Temeraire let out a gasp, fell to his knees, and pressed his forehead to the deck at Ishmael’s feet. Everyone on deck stared at him, then looked at Ishmael, who stood with arms folded with a sort of wary defiance.
“He be goin’ with me,” he said.
And so it was. Picard rowed the two blacks ashore in the dinghy, and left them on the rocks at the edge of the jungle, supplied with a small bag of provisions, each equipped with a knife.
“Why there?” I wondered aloud, watching the two small figures make their way slowly up the wooded slope. “There aren’t any towns nearby, are there? Or any plantations?” To the eye, the shore presented an unbroken expanse of jungle.
“Oh, there are plantations,” Lawrence assured me. “Far up in the hills; that’s where they grow the coffee and indigo—the sugarcane grows better near the coast.” He squinted toward the shore, where the two dark figures had disappeared. “It is more likely that they have gone to join a band of Maroons, though,” he said.
“There are Maroons on Jamaica as well as on Hispaniola?” Fergus asked, interested.
Lawrence smiled, a little grimly.
“There are Maroons wherever there are slaves, my friend,” he said. “There are always men who prefer to take the chance of dying like animals, rather than live as captives.”
Jamie turned his head sharply to look at Lawrence, but said nothing.
Jared’s plantation at Sugar Bay was called Blue Mountain House, presumably for the sake of the low, hazy peak that rose inland a mile behind it, blue with pines and distance. The house itself was set near the shore, in the shallow curve of the bay. In fact, the veranda that ran along one side of the house overhung a small lagoon, the building set on sturdy silvered-wood pilings that rose from the water, crusted with a spongy growth of tunicates and mussels and the fine green seaweed called mermaid’s hair.
We were expected; Jared had sent a letter by a ship that left Le Havre a week before the
“I thought surely the winter storms had got ye,” Kenneth MacIver said for the fourth time, shaking his head. He was bald, the top of his head scaly and freckled from long years’ exposure to the tropic sun. His wife was a plump, genial, grandmotherly soul—who, I realized to my shock, was roughly five years younger than myself. She herded Marsali and me off for a quick wash, brush, and nap before supper, while Fergus and Jamie went with Mr. MacIver to direct the partial unloading of the
I was more than willing to go; while my arm had healed sufficiently to need no more than a light bandage, it had prevented me from bathing in the sea as was my usual habit. After a week aboard the
I had no landlegs yet; the worn wooden floorboards of the plantation house gave the disconcerting illusion of seeming to rise and fall beneath my feet, and I staggered down the hallway after Mrs. MacIver, bumping into walls.
