Chiswicks had been slave-owners once and his brother Governour Chiswick was still fervidly in favour of the practice. 'I've a dozen Black hands in my crew, some of them, ah…
'Well, good for you!' Burgess told him. 'Horrid thing, that.'
' 'Tis one thing to
'You rather surprise me, Burgess,' Lewrie had to confess.
'Well, times change… people change,' Chiswick shrugged off. 'You remember at Yorktown, those runaway slaves who served with us to earn their freedom, should we have defeated the Rebels? They served your artillery, and stood with us ready to march and volley, though I doubt they knew the first
'Aye, I do recall them,' Lewrie agreed. 'Though, at the end, we abandoned 'em, and made our own escape.'
'And, God forgive us for not even thinking of taking a single one with us,' Burgess spat, turning soberly stern, after all his previous
'Serving under your father, Alan, in the Nineteenth Native Infantry, commanding
'Governour's going t'dislike you as much as he does me,' Lewrie told him with a chuckle, and a sigh of relief.
'Well, he never had that great a love for you, anyway,' Burgess teased him. 'The subject comes up, I expect Mother will go off into a fit of the 'vapours,' and Governour will puff up like an adder and spit fire. Don't know what Caroline will think of me. Don't signify to me, really, for I've come to believe that real chattel slavery's a degrading evil which Britons should expunge wherever we hold sway, not just in Great Britain, and
'God bless you for that, Burgess, and, aye, I shall…' Lewrie began to promise, almost ready to confess that he'd
'What the Devil…?' Burgess Chiswick wondered aloud, removing his napkin from his collar and tossing it into his empty plate as he got to his feet.
There came the usual sounds of
Lewrie joined Burgess by the railing of the deep veranda facing the street, up above the sidewalk and the strollers who had stopped in their tracks to witness this oddity.
'Aha!' Lewrie cried. 'The circus is back in town! The 'mighty Nimrods' are back from a successful hunt!'
'Someone been on
'To bring them back alive, aye,' Lewrie told him, chuckling.
For there was Mr. Daniel Wigmore, mounted on a decent mare, in the lead. He sat his saddle like a sack of heart-broken turnips, head down and grumbling to himself, it looked like. Next came a local Boer on a much better horse, but a man with as poor a 'seat' as Wigmore, a lanky, heavily-bearded, and thoroughly dispreputable-looking bean-pole of a man who looked so filthy it might be possible to shake him hard, and reclaim ten pounds of topsoil. He bristled with weapons: a musket laid crosswise of his saddle before him, two
'Van der Merwe… gobble-gobble!' in Dutch Lewrie heard some of them cry out; he couldn't follow anything past the fellow's name, but was sure that he was clapping eyes on the very idiot whom his guide, Piet duToit, had disparaged. After seeing the fellow, he could see the why.
Then, up came Arslan Durschenko on an even better horse, riding stiff-backed, erect, and easy, as a proper Cossack should. He looked a bit worse for wear, too, but when he caught sight of Lewrie, he scowled with fresh anger, his eyes brightening, and his long whip cracking.
Then came the waggons, ox teams driven by near-naked Blacks with goads or lance-long thin wood poles which bore short whips at the ends. Some were the fabled little Hottentots, some stouter and taller. Some between waggons bore crates on their shoulders, or atop their heads.
'Well, I'm damned!' Burgess cried. 'Look at that!'
Behind the second waggon was a menagerie. There were two baby African elephants, at least half a dozen
There were four ostriches leashed together into a kicking and outraged coffle. There was a middling-sized crocodile in a cage, and other cages borne by Black bearers contained a half-dozen wee baboons; a brace of spotted panthers, and some young wildebeests, or
'Looks as if they were successful,' Burgess commented.
'But not very happy about it,' Lewrie pointed out the many who looked utterly exhausted and hang-dog, the many who sported bandages, or limped on make-shift crutches.
Lewrie had been scanning each face of the new arrivals, looking for his runaway sailors, Groome and Rodney. He expected them to be on horseback, if they'd been promised freedman's treatment by the circus, but could not spot them. Finally…!
He recognised little Rodney, standing inside the last waggon of the train, clinging to the sideboards and the wood hoops that held up the partially-furled canvas cover… barely, for Rodney was swathed in blood-spotted bandages bound round his left shoulder and chest, and another set wound about his scalp.
'Hoy, there!' Lewrie yelled, agilely springing over the railing of the inn's veranda to the sidewalk, and jostling his way through those jeering spectators. He trotted up to the waggon, and scrambled up on the lowered tail-board