Galleon (2 page)

He gestured at the deep rectangular pit across which was placed the thick trunk of a mahogany tree. One perspiring sawyer stood astride on top with his mate in the pit below as they pulled and pushed the great two-handed saw, slowly slicing off yet another plank, and sneezing from time to time with the sawdust.

“Just listen,” Ned said, pointing towards a small, circular pit, like a pond except that it glowed red with charcoal, the Trade wind making bellows unnecessary. A couple of men fished out a strip of red-hot iron with long tongs and took it to a small anvil. They hammered it into shape with strokes which sounded curiously flat out in the open, Ned noted; presumably because his ear was expecting to hear the echo inside a blacksmith’s forge.

Several long strips of blackened, forged metal were already scattered in an untidy pile near the charcoal pit. Each had a scroll-like twist at one end and they were window, shutter and door hinges beaten into shape during the last few days. Nearby and covered with palm fronds to keep off the sun – the heat would otherwise split the unseasoned planks – were piles of sawn wood: mahogany for the most part, but there were shorter planks and beams of bullet wood, light red now it was freshly cut, but it would turn dark brown as it seasoned. It was enormously hard (and hated by the sawyers, who had to sharpen the teeth of their saw after only a few strokes across the fine, straight grain). Yet its very name showed why it was used for shutters over the windows: gun loops would be cut out later, like giant keyholes, once the shutters were hung and the carpenters could be sure of the size and positions, because the sole purpose of the gun loops was to allow defenders inside the house to aim their muskets at attackers.

Further inland, muffled by a clump of trees, there was a regular clinking from a newly opened quarry as a dozen men with picks, crowbars and hammers cut and levered stone for others to shape into blocks.

Already a flat space of land just beyond Aurelia was marked out with wooden pegs and pieces of marline linking them, to reveal a shape similar to the drawing on the parchment, the foundations of a large house.

“You know, Ned,” she said, pressing a finger on the parchment as she tried to hold it flat against the tug of the wind, “I think I’d sooner have the kitchen at the other end. It’ll be easy enough to change, won’t it? Saxby and Simpson can move the pegs and restring the marline.”

Ned took the plan from her and rolled it up. “Darling, it took us a week to agree on
this
plan, so let’s leave it as it is.”

“But the kitchen: surely we can–”

“The kitchen is fine where we’ve put it!”

“Yes, but I want to have a room on the west side, just there, where we can sit in the evening and watch the sun setting…”

“
Chérie
,” Ned said drily, “do you want to sit and watch the sun set with the stink of boiling vegetables and cooking meat and smouldering charcoal in your nostrils?”

“Of course not!”

“Well, that’s what you’re proposing. Remember, the wind usually blows from east to west” – he gestured up at the clouds and down at the gently swaying bushes, – “so we decided to put the kitchen on the west side of the house, then all the cooking smells blow clear, and we have the sitting and drawing rooms on the south side, which begins to cool as the sun goes round…”

She bit her lip, angry with herself for not thinking before turning a sudden whim into words: she had lived in the Tropics long enough to know elementary things like that. She realized that standing up here on the cliff had suddenly given her the idea of watching glorious sunsets from the drawing room of her own house…

As though reading her thoughts, Ned said: “Darling, it’s going to be your house – your first real home – so you can have exactly what you want. But remember, we have balconies on three sides, and you can always lie in a hamaca…”

“And get eaten alive by mosquitoes and sandflies!”

“Yes,” he protested, “but they come into the rooms to bite you just as much. We beat them simply by having tobacco leaf smouldering outside. The smoke will keep them away just the same as it does inside.”

Aurelia laughed and took his arm. “Yes, you’re right as usual: I’ve been living in a ship so long that I’ve forgotten about itching insects. When will the house be finished? I want to start planning the beds and chairs and tables, and mosquito nets, and the cooking pots for the kitchen, and the china and cutlery, and–”

“Concentrate on the bed,” he said, and as she blushed he added: “Large, and with a mosquito net as big as a tent hanging over it. A
square
bed,” he added as an afterthought. “I want some compensation for all the time we’ve been squeezed up in a bunk.”

“You can explain that to Saxby,” she said. “I shall be too embarrassed.” A
square
bed. The more she thought about it though, the more attractive the idea became: she admitted that and was startled when Ned muttered: “I wish we had one now, this minute!”

“
Chéri
, we have a long ride back to the ship, so concentrate on that.”

“That dam’ bunk is so narrow.”

“This is the first time you’ve complained about it,” she reminded him. “You always say how snug it is.”

He grinned at her. “Yes, but that was when we couldn’t even consider a real bed – a big
square
bed.”

She sighed and she seemed content, and yet he thought he detected a certain nostalgia too, and perhaps uncertainty.

“You are sure that you really want to come on shore and live in a house?”

“Oh, Ned, I don’t know what I do want. Well, yes, I know I want to be with you, but do I want to sail off somewhere in the
Griffin
or be the mistress of this house? Arranging beds of flowers, arranging a
square
bed for us,” she said with an impish smile. “Do I want to look down at the sea from our own house, or cross the sea in our own ship? I don’t know.

“Ask me now, and I say the ship. In a few hours’ time, when we are on board again, I shall crave for the house and the smell of the herbs and the flowers, and the booming of the rollers down there. In fact,” she admitted, “sit me down in Port Royal and I’ll change my mind every ten minutes.” She shook her head and the blonde hair, seeming almost white in the bright sun, the colour of an ash twig stripped of its bark, streamed out in the wind gusting over the edge of the cliff. “Oh, Ned! I’m spoiling it for you just as your dreams are coming true.”

He shook his head and took her hand. “I feel the same,” he admitted. “Ever since Cromwell and his Roundheads drove us out of Barbados and we had to leave the Kingsnorth plantation, I’ve dreamed of saving enough money to start a new plantation. Well,” he said ruefully, “thanks to the Brethren of the Coast we have plenty of money, and now we have two thousand acres here in Jamaica.”

“And we’ve started building a house with a kitchen at the western end,” she added. “Cromwell is dead, the King is back on the throne, and the new Governor has just arrived. We should be content!”

“Yes,” Ned said gloomily, “but instead we may find that our troubles are just beginning.” He caught sight of two riders approaching in the distance. “Ah, here come Diana and Thomas: they’ve been looking over their acres, too.”

“Diana feels the same as me,” Aurelia said. “Changing with the wind. Women are weathercocks.”

The woman slid off her horse into Ned’s arms. She was the only woman he had ever seen ride astride – she wore men’s breeches and riding boots that were very new. Port Royal now had a good bootmaker who, Ned realized, must have the finest selection of leather at his disposal. Certainly Diana’s boots were made of leather as soft as cloth and at this very moment the cobbler should be busy at his last, making a similar pair for Aurelia.

If Nature had wanted to find an opposite to Aurelia, the search would end with Diana. Lady Diana Gilbert-Manners had black hair and deep brown eyes, a wide, sensuous mouth and a body where everything – breasts, thighs, slim legs – seemed emphasized without her appearing to notice it. She was, Aurelia had once commented (sympathetically, not maliciously), someone who would, like a succulent rose just before it bloomed fully, have to watch her weight in a few years’ time.

Now, tanned, flashing-eyed, high-spirited, it was obvious she was deeply in love with Thomas and again Aurelia had summed it up: they loved each other in bed and out.

The contrast with Aurelia, Ned saw, was only a physical one: Aurelia was as lively (but quicker-witted?) and as loving and loved, but in contrast to Diana’s her hair was so blonde that from a distance in bright sun it seemed white. She was slim; her bosoms were firm and high, the nipples small and pink, compared with the big-bosomed Diana, who had large, dark nipples, Ned’s knowledge of them being gained because the four of them, refusing to accept the usual warning about the sun, had screened areas on board their ships where they could lie in the sun and become tanned all over, and then never had to worry about being sunburned.

Aurelia’s deep tan emphasized her blonde hair and blue eyes, but the same tan on Diana emphasized her body. Why? Was it more intriguing speculating about Diana’s tanned breasts? Ned neither knew nor cared; he loved Aurelia and Diana was attractive, and he knew the reverse was true for Thomas, and that was how it should be.

“Darling Ned, being in your arms – even for a few moments – is ecstasy!” Diana looked across at Aurelia and winked. “I won’t tell him that being in anyone’s arms is ecstasy after sitting on that damned horse for hours. It’s like being astride the barrel of a cannon.”

By now she was kissing Aurelia in an affectionate greeting and Sir Thomas Whetstone, a burly man with a thick square beard, flowing moustaches and long black curly hair, had dismounted, kissed Aurelia’s hand with a flourish and slapped Ned on the back.

“Diana’s taken against horses,” he explained. “She prefers to sit in a boat and be rowed everywhere. Give her a barge and she’ll be the Cleopatra of the Caribbee.”

“I
haven’t
taken against horses,” Diana protested, “it’s just this Spanish saddle. No wonder portraits always make
hidalgos
on horseback look so haughty; the poor fellows have been battered into capons…”

Whetstone was looking across at the wooden pegs driven into the ground with the lines indicating where the foundations of the new house would be. “Yours looks bigger than the drawing, Ned – and that’s a relief, because ours seems enormous. I was beginning to think we’d made a mistake in the scale on the plan.”

“Aurelia, do tell him (because he won’t listen to me) that a house can’t be too big,” Diana said. She had a surprisingly deep and rich voice, a complete contrast to Aurelia’s lighter tones and slight French accent.

“The Devil take the house, what about the bed?” Thomas boomed. “I’ve had enough of ships’ narrow bunks.”

“I think Ned feels the same way,” Aurelia said. “In fact he is designing a special one for us.”

“A
square
bed,” Ned said.

“I should think so,” Whetstone said in a tone which took it for granted that anything else was unthinkable. “By the way, Ned, this isn’t a social visit. The new Governor has finally decided to introduce himself to the peasants tomorrow. We’re bidden to the presence of m’lud Luce, along with Heffer and probably half a dozen others, mostly tradesmen no doubt. Is your land grant confirmed?”

The question sounded casual, but Ned understood Thomas well enough to know that he was avoiding alarming the women.

“Yes. Heffer signed and sealed the papers last week. Yours?”

“Same, thank goodness.”

However, the casual tone had not fooled Aurelia. “Why do you ask, Thomas?”

“I gather the new Governor has either some fancy ideas or special orders from the Privy Council. Either way, from what I hear, he thinks he’s going to announce the beginning of Jamaica’s ‘Golden Age’. Still, gold or dross, I think we’d better start back to Port Royal…”

Sir Harold Neil Luce, for the past few months a knight, was an ageing survivor; one of a small group of crafty politicians who had managed to back the political horse both ways by dividing their stake. They had lost half with the collapse of the Protectorate in the first race; but they had won handsomely on the second with the Restoration, switching allegiances with that facility limited to politicians and whores.

Small and sandy-haired, narrow-faced and thin, he looked like a ferret; he had a high-pitched voice that became shrill, particularly when challenged about something of which he was uncertain. Luce had been appointed Jamaica’s first Governor because the King, the Duke of Albemarle, the Secretary of State and members of the Privy Council’s Committee for Trade and Foreign Plantations could no longer stand the sight of his face nor the whine of his northern accent. Like a tout for a brothel, he had seemed to be everywhere, accosting, begging for preferment, pleading, making new offers.

There was now a powerful group of men at Court, those who had always been Royalist and who had followed the King into exile, who resented the way that Luce (and others like him) fawned, bribed and lied into being tolerated, if not accepted, at Court once the King had been restored.

As soon as the Civil War had started, Luce had vanished from his estates, hiding his silver and sacking his servants. In fact he had gone into hiding – not because he thought the Roundheads would fail to win a complete victory and make the country a Puritan republic (which meant an ascetic, bloodless, laughterless one) but because he was waiting to see who in the new republic emerged with the power.

Once he had identified the man beyond all doubt as Oliver Cromwell, he swiftly decided to pay the price for his tardy allegiance and he compounded, the euphemism for paying the Roundheads a large sum of money for forgetting that during the actual fighting he had sat not on, but behind the fence (Royalists paid much more), and was allowed part of his estate back. For the next ten years “Mr Luce” had lived as close to Cromwell as he could, currying favour and sniffing out Royalists with revolutionary zeal.

When the Protector died he tried to transfer his allegiance to the son Richard, who was not interested in the succession. Then suddenly (or so it seemed to Luce, who was trying to see where and how much he could benefit from the Army’s discontent with Richard, although it was nearer two years) General Monck, one of the late Oliver Cromwell’s great generals, had gone across the Channel, brought back the King and put him on the throne. While almost everyone was hailing the Restoration, devout Roundheads hid under their beds and prayed even more fervently than they had under the rule of the Lord Protector.