would be sick.
“Jamie!” I called.
He didn’t answer, but I heard a deep, racking cough from the heart of the fire. Several long minutes later, the veil of smoke parted, and he staggered out, choking.
He made his way down the platform and stood bent over, coughing his lungs out. He was covered with an oily soot, his hands and clothes smeared with pitch. He was blind with the smoke; tears poured down his cheeks, making runnels in the soot.
I threw several coins to the keeper of the pyre, and taking Jamie by the arm, led him, blind and choking, out of the valley of death. Under the palms, he sank to his knees and threw up.
“Don’t touch me,” he gasped, when I tried to help him. He retched over and over again, but finally stopped, swaying on his knees. Then he slowly staggered to his feet.
“Don’t touch me,” he said again. His voice, roughened by smoke and sickness, was that of a stranger.
He walked to the edge of the dock, removed his coat and shoes, and dived into the water, fully clothed. I waited for a moment, then stooped and picked up the coat and shoes, holding them gingerly at arm’s length. I could see in the inner pocket the faint rectangular bulge of Brianna’s pictures.
I waited until he came back and hoisted himself out of the water, dripping. The pitch smears were still there, but most of the soot and the smell of the fire were gone. He sat on the wharf, head on his knees, breathing hard. A row of curious faces edged the
Not knowing what else to do, I leaned down and laid a hand on his shoulder. Without raising his head, he reached up a hand and grasped mine.
“He wasn’t there,” he said, in his muffled, rasping stranger’s voice.
The breeze was freshening; it stirred the tendrils of wet hair that lay across his shoulders. I looked back, to see that the plume of smoke rising from the little valley had changed to black. It flattened and began to drift out over the sea, the ashes of the dead slaves fleeing on the wind, back toward Africa.
54
“THE IMPETUOUS PIRATE”
“I can’t own anyone, Jamie,” I said, looking in dismay at the papers spread out in the lamplight before me. “I just
“Well, I’m inclined to agree wi’ ye, Sassenach. But what are we to do with the fellow?” Jamie sat on the berth next to me, close enough to see the ownership documents over my shoulder. He rubbed a hand through his hair frowning.
“We could set him free—that would seem the right thing—and yet, if we do—what will happen to him then?” He hunched forward, squinting down his nose to read the papers. “He’s no more than a bit of French and English; no skills to speak of. If we were to set him free, or even give him a bit of money—can he manage to live, on his own?”
I nibbled thoughtfully on one of Murphy’s cheese rolls. It was good, but the smell of the burning oil in the lamp blended oddly with the aromatic cheese, underlaid—as everything was—with the insidious scent of bat guano that permeated the ship.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Lawrence told me there are a lot of free blacks on Hispaniola. Lots of Creoles and mixed-race people, and a good many who own their own businesses. Is it like that on Jamaica, too?”
He shook his head, and reached for a roll from the tray.
“I dinna think so. It’s true, there are some free blacks who earn a living for themselves, but those are the ones who have some skill—sempstresses and fishers and such. I spoke to this Temeraire a bit. He was a cane-cutter until he lost his arm, and doesna ken how to do anything else much.”
I laid the roll down, barely tasted, and frowned unhappily at the papers. The mere idea of owning a slave frightened and disgusted me, but it was beginning to dawn on me that it might not be so simple to divest myself of the responsibility.
The man had been taken from a barracoon on the Guinea coast, five years before. My original impulse, to return him to his home, was clearly impossible; even had it been possible to find a ship headed for Africa that would agree to take him as a passenger, the overwhelming likelihood was that he would be immediately enslaved again, either by the ship that accepted him, or by another slaver in the West African ports.
Traveling alone, one-armed and ignorant, he would have no protection at all. And even if he should by some miracle reach Africa safely and keep himself out of the hands of both European and African slavers, there was virtually no chance of his ever finding his way back to his village. Should he do so, Lawrence had kindly explained, he would likely be killed or driven away, as his own people would regard him now as a ghost, and a danger to them.
“I dinna suppose ye would consider selling him?” Jamie put the question delicately, raising one eyebrow. “To someone we could be sure would treat him kindly?”
I rubbed two fingers between my brows, trying to soothe the growing headache.
“I can’t see that that’s any better than owning him ourselves,” I protested. “Worse, probably, because we couldn’t be sure what the new owners would do with him.”
Jamie sighed. He had spent most of the day climbing through the dark, reeking cargo holds with Fergus, making up inventories against our arrival in Jamaica, and he was tired.
“Aye, I see that,” he said. “But it’s no kindness to free him to starve, that I can see.”
“No.” I fought back the uncharitable wish that I had never seen the one-armed slave. It would have been a great deal easier for me if I had not—but possibly not for him.
Jamie rose from the berth and stretched himself, leaning on the desk and flexing his shoulders to ease them.
