A matter of honor, p.39
A Matter of Honor, page 39
“I’m sure he fared well,” Richard remarked. “He’s an excellent sea officer, from what I’ve heard. Even if he failed to break the blockade, he will try again. England will not yield so vital a base. And the threat of another attack from sea should keep Spanish warships at home, away from these waters.”
“See ’ere, Mr. Cutler,” Tobias grinned. “Yor soundin’ more like a Whitehall admiral every day Aven’t decided t’ switch sides on us, ’ave ye?”
“Hardly that, Mr. Tobias.” Richard was at once afraid he had sounded horribly pompous, since common sense told him there was no offense intended. “I love my country,” he went on, his tone conveying more remorse than resentment, “and if I can help her cause here in the Indies, I assure you I will. But Spain is not an ally of the United States. The Dons refuse to recognize our independence. Nor have they offered us any sort of military assistance. They’re fighting purely for their own interests.”
“That’s why every country goes to war,” his wife pointed out.
“I realize that, Katherine. And so does every man who signed our Declaration. But in an independent United States, not all things will be done the way they always have been. Many people believe that. I, for one.”
“May it come to pass,” Tobias said. “Now if you two fine people will excuse me, I ’ave my duties to attend to. Land’s approaching. Ma’am. Mr. Cutler.” He touched the edge of his tricorne hat.
“Yes, of course,” Katherine said. “And thank you again, Captain, for the use of your cabin. You have been most kind to us.”
“You certainly have,” Richard agreed. “I shall not forget it.”
“My honor, I assure ye,” said Tobias.
When the master was out of earshot, Katherine said, “You needn’t have been so cross with him, Richard. He was just making merry. He meant nothing by it.”
“I know he didn’t. And you’re right, of course. It’s just that… sometimes I feel… sometimes I’m not sure what I should feel,” he confessed.
“Let me see if I can help. You feel sometimes that you should be back at war, doing your duty, whatever that is, since you had no ship to serve on and no prospects of ever finding one. And whatever else might be involved, you sometimes feel guilt for the… pleasures you are enjoying at sea while others suffer on land. Am I correct?”
He shrugged. “Perhaps. Is it possible you understand me too well, Katherine?”
“No, my love, that is not possible. But I do know this and I will say it to you again: you have done your duty, Richard. To your country, to your shipmates, to the memory of Will and Jamie. What more can anyone ask of you? What more can you ask of yourself?”
He stared at her, said nothing.
She cocked her head and smiled back at him.
“Your lady does not please you, then?”
He knew why she had said it: to escape the gravity of the moment and recapture the bliss of their time together. But he could not restrain himself. Emotion had overcome him.
“Katherine,” he said, grasping her by the shoulders, “listen to me. When I came back to Fareham that day and saw you there with Lizzy, I thought I would come undone at the mere sight of you. I thought I could never love anyone more than I loved you at that moment. But I was wrong. I was so terribly wrong. I love you more with each day that passes, each hour. Whatever I may have felt for you back then, I did not know that anything like this existed, that anything could be this so God Almighty wonderful. Whatever truths I may hold in my life, Katherine, my love and need for you will always be first among them. You must believe that.”
She bit her lower lip. “I do, Richard. I do believe that. It’s the same for me.”
“Then you must also understand that what I feel about the war has nothing to do with me and everything to do with us. I want us to live together in a new country, our country, and to build our future and the future of our children in a land free of the abuses of our ancestors. Will spoke those exact words to me, about what he wanted for himself. It’s what I want too, for us.”
“I know, my love. I know. It’s what we both want for us.” She held his gaze, then turned toward Barbados. “Look, darling. We can see land clearly now”
What before had been dull colors and obscure forms had opened up to gray cliffs, clusters of multicolored shrubs, pink-tinged beaches lined with palm trees, and field upon field of rich green stalks waving in the morning breeze. Barbados. Chief among the necklace of Caribbean islands embellishing the British Empire, its stones were not diamonds or rubies or emeralds but something equally precious: sugar crystals. It was here on these gentle slopes of green that outrageous fortunes had been made for the planters whose slaves worked the fields and mills; for the distillers who processed rum; for the merchants who shipped molasses, sugar, and rum to domestic and foreign ports; and for the Exchequer in London, whose steep taxes imposed on sugar profits fueled Britain’s war machine and spread its hegemony around the world.
“Will your cousin be in Bridgetown to greet us?” Katherine asked as Sparrow hauled her wind for the first time in three weeks to round up past the parishes of St. Philip and Christ Church on the southern edge of the island.
“You may rely on it,” Richard replied, cheery now and as captivated as she with the lush tropical scenery passing by them off to starboard. “If John is anything as I remember him, he will have seen to the arrangements long before the first sail was sighted. He’s a man who likes to see things done properly”
“Very much like my husband,” she mused, “so marriage has taught me.”
She said it off-handedly, staring straight out toward land, though she did allow him one quick sideways peek.
☆ ☆ ☆
WIND IN the West Indies carried with it both a blessing and a curse. On these paradise islands of warm sand and swaying palms, of flowers and bushes bursting with unimaginable colors, delicacy, and fragrances, fatal disease could strike a man down without warning. Within hours of first feeling ill, his skin turned a sickly yellow and his body shook with dry heaves, having disgorged every ounce of bile from his belly in a vomit so black and viscous it looked like liquid tar. What caused this horror remained a mystery, though medical evidence was mounting that the lowly mosquito was responsible. Whatever its cause, this much was certain: the higher up one lived and worked on an island, the more exposed to the cleansing southeasterly trades, the less likely he was to be stricken by a disease that concentrated its virulence in the lowlands during the wet summer months, with few cases reported during the drier seasons.
At the same time, the higher the elevation of one’s plantation, the more exposed it was to the risk of being battered to pieces by a hurricane. About every six years or so, one came shrieking in from the Atlantic in late summer or early fall, throwing about windmills and curing stations and three-story houses as though they were children’s toys, causing more damage to an island and its sugar treasure within a twenty-four-hour period than the combined effects of drought, war, shipwrecks, and slave uprisings over many decades. Later, after the raging fury had howled its way westward, it would take several years and immense amounts of money, toil, and endless negotiations for more money to coax sugar production back to prehurricane levels.
Which is why the home of John Cutler, in keeping with architecture now standard on most English plantations on Barbados, was a one-story affair constructed of coral stone and brick, its windward side built in a circular design to resist the effects of strong winds while allowing gentler breezes and flickering sunlight to caress the inner sanctuaries through a series of jalousie windows mounted in the walls with three sets of complex hinges, two vertical and one horizontal.
“Actually, I got the idea for these windows from our slaves,” John Cutler explained to Katherine, when she asked about their origins. “They’ve used them for years in their houses, though we English have tended to stick with what we know. These are far more efficient, as you will observe when I move these levers up and down.” Alternately, as he did so, the room was as light as noon or as dark as evening. “See? You can let in all the air and sun you want, or close everything up tight as a drum in a blow”
“Imagine,” Katherine mused. “A Cutler taking a lesson from a slave.”
John retuned her smile. He had taken immediately to Katherine, a young woman he had not seen since she was a little girl. “Yes, well, I prefer in this instance to think of them not as slaves but as local people with local knowledge. It doesn’t do, does it, to ignore what has been learned over the centuries by others, no matter what their station in life. But we English are famous for doing just that, aren’t we?
“See here,” he said apologetically, after a pause. “You must be exhausted from your trip and I imagine you will want to freshen up before supper. I propose to put you and Richard in what I call the West Room. It’s a selfcontained area. Very private. As you’ll see, there’s a garden just outside, and the windows open up on three sides. Look out to the west and there’s the sea. I trust it will do?”
“It will do just fine, John,” Katherine said.
“Splendid. George here will see to your baggage. If you’d like, his missus will draw you a bath. Just the thing after so long a voyage at sea, what? Now then, supper is at seven o’clock sharp. Be prompt. No dillydallying. I just may have a surprise in store for you.”
As a servant dressed in pure white gathered her baggage and led the way down the polished stone hallway, John turned to his cousin with genuine admiration.
“She’s lovely, Richard. My, how lovely. And what questions she asked on our way up here! Who would have thought anyone but a naturalist would care so much about bloody flowers and birds? I couldn’t answer half the questions she asked, though I’ve lived here for, what, eight years now, since I was sixteen. I’ve never seen a woman—or a man, for that matter—so inquisitive and eager to learn. You must be very proud. And happy”
“I am both, John,” Richard said softly His eyes lingered on the sway of her hips as she followed the servant down the hallway, her sea legs, like his, not yet accustomed to the constancy of land. Incredible, he thought: five weeks confined with her in a small cabin in a small ship, and it pained him so to see her walking away from him. He snapped to, aware that his cousin was waiting.
“So tell me,” he said. “What about you, John? Given your class and those outrageous good looks of yours, you must cut quite the swath around here.”
“Well. Ahem, ha. I wouldn’t know about that, dear cousin,” John flustered. “There just might be a young lady I fancy, we’ll see. Business first, I always say Speaking of which, shall we take a short stroll around? I can give you a brief tour of the grounds. If you’re quite up to it, after so long a sea journey.”
“Lead the way, John. I’d welcome a chance to stretch my legs.”
John Cutler selected a light cotton cloak from a closet and drew it over his shoulders, buckling it at the neck. It was eggshell blue in color, complementing the darker blue and yellow of his breeches and waistcoat. A silk neckstock completed his wardrobe, a jeweled pin securing it to his white linen shirt frilled at the neck and cuffs. He offered Richard a cloak, but Richard declined, feeling wonderfully at ease in the cooling breeze in his plain white breeches and white linen pullover shirt.
Outside, the setting sun cast long shadows from the mahogany and palm trees and other foliage set strategically about the complex to provide maximum shade to rooms in what John called “the great house.” The term was a throwback, he explained, to the days when plantation homes reflected the grandeur of English country mansions: three or four stories high and of wood construction, their white pillars and sculptures out front reflecting the personal taste of the owners, most of whom, in Barbados, actually lived on their plantations. Which, John explained, was not always the case on other British-owned islands in the Indies. On Jamaica, for instance, plantation owners were more apt to live in England.
“Who manages operations there?” Richard asked.
“The owner’s agent, or agents, depending on the size of the plantation. We employ an agent here too. He lives with his family in that cottage you see down the road there, to the right. We’ll pass by it, then loop around for a view of the cane fields.”
“What does he do?”
“The agent? Basically, manages everything day to day He works with the overseer of the slaves and those in charge of various processes. He also represents our interests in trade and shipping matters. Which have become more critical now that we are denied use of your father’s ships. These days we must pay dearly for shipping our sugar. Alas, much of my own time, it seems, is devoted to money matters.”
“Does the agent have assistance? From anyone besides yourself?”
“Yes. He has help from the overseer, of course, and from the bosun, what we call the chap who actually runs the mills. ‘Bosun,’ get it? Everything here runs by the wind, you see, just as on a ship. The agent also has help for the more menial tasks, of course, from slaves he trusts. Those would be Creoles, the lighter-skinned Negroes you see. Most of them were born on Barbados or on nearby islands, and on the whole they’re quite dependable and hardworking. We import few slaves from Africa here. We may sell them in Bridgetown, but they tend to go elsewhere, mainly, before the war, to Charleston, in South Carolina. Now they go mainly to Kingston, though we send a number to Tobago and other islands nearby Good riddance to them, I say In my experience, African slaves are much harder to manage than local Creoles.”
Probably, Richard thought, because Africans have known freedom.
“Ah, here’s just the spot from which to observe,” John said, as they came to rest at the top of a gently sloping rise. Legions of bare-chested slaves were in line-abreast formation, hacking and slashing at the cane with machetes, their thick muscular arms swinging back and forth in pendulum motions through the sea of green. Other Negroes trolled in their wake, picking up the severed stalks and carrying them over to mule-drawn carts reined in along dirt roads. In the center of it all, in a multi-acre area cleared of all vegetation, stood two windmills, each with its four great sails rotating four or five times per minute in the diminishing wind of late afternoon. Slaves carried bundles of slashed cane from carts to inside the mill through one doorway, while from a second doorway other slaves carried what appeared to be flattened stalks outside, stacking them in neat piles along the perimeter of the cleared yard. Richard asked what that was and why they were doing that.
“It’s what we call bagasse,” John explained, “or stalks after they’ve been pressed twice in the mills. We use them as fuel in the furnaces of the boiling house, the building that’s right over there, the one with the open front and smoke coming out the top. In the mills, the cane juice drips from the rollers into a large tank. From the tank, it passes through an underground pipe to the boiling house.”
“What happens in there? Something is boiled, I presume.”
“See how quickly you learn, Cousin! Father said you were a quick study.” John was enjoying himself. “Yes, the juice of the cane is boiled in there, in copper pots. The boiling causes sugar to crystallize into large chunks. Then everything goes to the curing house, that building you see over there.” He pointed to an unassuming stone building that resembled the boiling house and complemented the three other structures within the cleared area. “In there we drain away whatever has not formed into sugar crystals. That’s what you know as molasses. We then load sugar and molasses separately into hogsheads to be shipped out. Sugar goes to any market where we can sell it, while most of the molasses goes to distilleries to make rum. Quite the efficient operation. Though in my estimation it does not go quite far enough.”
“What do you mean, ‘not far enough’?”
“Let’s defer that topic, shall we? Until after you’ve been here awhile and had a chance to learn the ropes, as you sailors like to say You will be here quite a long while, is my understanding?”
“I believe so. Your father also wants us to spend time in Tobago with Robin. But based on what I’ve seen so far on this island, I suppose we’ll stay put until you finally come to your senses and throw us out.”
“Oh no, Cousin, I would never do that,” John said, his words coming quick in protest, as though Richard had meant his words to be taken seriously. “You’re family, Richard. You and Katherine are welcome here as long as you wish to stay. I will say, though, that Tobago is quite a lovely island. A lot like Barbados, except it has much thicker rain forests. A very romantic spot, I might add. And I know Robin and Julia are looking forward to seeing you both. Robin remembers Katherine as fondly as I. By the bye, his is a smaller plantation, about two hundred acres. This one is closer to six hundred, about average for Barbados.”
“Seems big enough to me,” Richard said, as they began strolling back toward the house.
“Actually, it’s not so big. Not when you compare it to plantations on Jamaica or Antigua, for instance. Those can be several thousand acres in size. But as I said, ours is typical of what you find here on Barbados… So what do you think?” he asked, in a way that made it sound as though Richard’s first impressions truly mattered to him.
Richard glanced about, shaking his head. “I’m a sailor,” he said, “not a businessman or planter like you, John. But I promised your father I will do everything I can to leam this business. I owe it to him and to my own father. I owe it to you too, for being so kind in taking us in.”
“Nonsense, Richard. As I said, you are family I remember you and your brother Will quite fondly from your visit here in ’74. He may have been a trick to handle, but Will was so full of life and promise. I greatly missed you both after you sailed for Boston. As for ‘owing,’ if you ask me, what you ‘owe’ is to yourself. And to Katherine and to the children you shall have together. You’ll fashion quite a comfortable living from sugar, once this wretched war is over and we can start making real money again.”
