in the form of rum. It was pointless to be critical; grimness ruled the world.
There was also gloomy foreboding. Astiza was in the habit of meditating, and while a frigate has little room, space for what she called a prayer chamber was found on the deep orlop deck, private because it was adjacent to the spirit room and guarded by marines to keep sailors away. There was no natural light in her cubby, but her lamp was deemed sufficiently far from the powder magazine so as not to pose a danger. (That room was covered in felt to prevent any stray sparks, and no lamp or candle was ever allowed inside. The dim lamp that sailors saw by shone through a thick glass window built into the magazine wall, lest some idiot blow the entire warship to hell.)
Astiza got her chamber by insisting she must study away from prying male eyes, a desire the officers were sympathetic to. Sailors tracked her movements like dogs entranced by a squirrel.
So, once out of sight, she quietly set up a secret temple to a democratic pantheon of gods that might have gotten us burned in a different century. I didn’t want my wife accused of being a heathen, so I stood watch while she lit incense, pulled out little bone and stone idols from Egypt that she carried in a velvet bag, and prayed for the future. Good thing, too, because we were admittedly peculiar. Astiza consulted the Christian pantheon but was considerably more ecumenical about religion than the narrow-minded norm. Sailors are a superstitious lot, and I didn’t want us pitched overboard. Her allotted chamber was hardly bigger than a confessional, and it was thick with that ship smell the brain remembers for weeks after disembarking: a musty reek of rope, bilgewater, wet wood, hundreds of inadequately washed men, kitchen coal fire, rancid cheese, moldy bread, and, until it ran out in the first month, beer. An Egyptian tomb would have been a cheerier spot, but Astiza needed solitary contemplation the way I need flirtatious conversation.
I explained to any officer who asked that her meditation tended to bring good luck, and that our own rescue by the British was proof. Just to be safe I threw out some additional nonsense about female modesty, piety, contemplation, and Egyptian eccentricity, and the crew generally swallowed it.
I hoped she’d emerge encouraged, but the idyll made her moody and uncommunicative. She looked at me sadly when coming up for air, and I feared she’d fantasized some supernatural message about the loss of our son.
I left her alone as long as I could stand it, but when she stood by the windward rail that night-by now the climate had warmed, and the sky was thick with stars-I finally approached to talk things through, which I should have done long before.
“Is Harry all right?” I asked.
She was a kind of witch, but a good one, and I’d come to trust in her witchcraft. I believed she could see distant places, and the future, too.
She didn’t answer for a long time, so I touched her elbow, as tentative as a stranger. She twitched.
Finally she turned.
“What if it was a mistake to marry?” Her tone was hollow.
No oath or insult could be more devastating. I recoiled, as if from a blow. “Surely you can’t mean that.” Astiza was all I wanted or needed, and to suggest fate didn’t want us together was like a stab to the heart.
“Not for you, Ethan,” she said sadly. “Not even for us. But for our son.”
“What did you see? Is he sick?”
“No. No…” She sighed. “Is the future fixed?”
“Certainly not! Certainly fixable!” I said so even though I secretly shared her dread about fate. “My God, what is it?”
She shook her head. “Nothing specific. Just a feeling of a severe test ahead, a test that might separate us instead of unite us. Danger when we’re together, as if we draw trouble.”
“But that’s not true. We escape it. You know we have, a dozen times. We must run down this French thief Martel. Once we do, then we have the rest of our lives for quiet happiness. That’s what I took the emerald for. Us.”
“I know that, Ethan. Fate is strange.” She looked over the waves. “I’m so far from home.”
I took her in my arms. “We’re going home. You’ll see.”
Chapter 15
And so we came to the isle of white gold and black labor, air thick with flower scent and rot. The Caribbean was hell, the British promised, but hell with a seductress’s allure. Silken air, dazzling color, and a sweaty leisure supported by slaves in decadence that would do Romans proud, overlain by ominous pestilence.
Coming ashore at English Harbor was our first introduction to what seemed, after a century and a half of slavery, an African isle. There were whites aplenty, looking half suffocated in heavy red military uniforms. They shouted orders amid the clamor of squealing blocks and rasping saws as the base hurried toward war. But fully three-quarters of the men we saw plaiting rope, mending sail, forging iron, coopering barrels, and standing sentry were black. Some were slaves, and others skilled freemen who gleamed in the heat and worked with a cheerful energy the enervated Europeans lacked. They were at home in this climate, and we were not.
The officer who had been sent to conduct Astiza and me to a meeting with the island’s governor was pink of skin and red of coat, a cheerfully talkative army captain named Henry Dinsdale. The potentate we were to meet was Lord Lovington (a planter born Ralph Payne) who would instruct us further in West Indies strategy and politics. Dinsdale, meanwhile, served as the governor’s secretary, liaison with the island’s military, and escort to visitors. He was tall, thin, sardonic, and eager to inform, clearly jolted out of boredom by the chance to be a guide to my lovely wife. He bowed to the gracious architecture of her figure with the reverence of a Muslim to Mecca.
“Lovington resides mostly at the new Government House in Saint-John’s on the other side of the island,” Dinsdale said. “But at the moment he’s checking on his plantation at Carlisle. You’ll dine with him tomorrow there, and learn something of the islands. Smith’s introductory letter got his attention.”
Sir Sidney Smith had given us a letter we could show to any British authority who asked for passage to Saint-Domingue, where our son might be, and to help with forged documents to fool the French.
“There are more dark faces here than Tripoli,” I remarked. “More than in my nation’s new capital between Maryland and Virginia. Even your garrison seems to be made up largely of Negroes.”
“You are perceptive,” Dinsdale said. “There are only three thousand whites on Antigua, and the slaves outnumber us more than ten to one. Most of the trades are occupied by black and mulatto freemen, and even the bulk of our infantry is black. Our fortunes here rest on sugar, but no white man can survive the fieldwork required to cultivate it. So the island is a Congo.”
“You don’t fear revolt?”
“We’ve had half a dozen of them in our history.” He glanced at my wife, hoping, I suppose, to thrill her with shock. “We impale, burn, castrate, pour hot wax on lash wounds, and chop off feet.” He wiped some perspiration with a handkerchief scented with perfume. “We hang, shoot, manacle, and chase escapees with dogs. It’s mercy, because it prevents worse trouble. If you’ll pardon my candor, Mrs. Gage.”
She looked more composed than us, having been raised in hot Egypt with its own castes. “The world could use more candor, Captain, if it is ever to reform. The first step to correcting the worst is to acknowledge it exists.”
He cocked his head, regarding her intelligence as an unexpected and rather alarming curiosity. “No reform is needed. It’s no different than mastering a herd of farm animals. Slave and master have come to a rough understanding of each other. Conveniently, the black regiments keep the peace and defend the island; they’re the only units that withstand yellow fever. Obedient, too. I’d rather lead a black regiment than a white one. Here, I mean.” He fanned himself. “Not in England.”
“So you appreciate their sacrifice?” Astiza asked.
He frowned. “There’s a natural order in the West Indies, Mrs. Gage. Without the whites, there is no market. Without the blacks, there is no product. The French toyed with upsetting this power structure on Saint-Domingue with wild talk of revolutionary freedoms, and the result has been a massacre of planters and a decade of devastating war. Here, all know their place, which is precisely why Britain is fighting the frogs. The goal is to preserve order. We Antiguans represent, I think, the front line of civilization.”
