Page 104 of Dawnlands

The slave huts were worse built than the servants’ cottages—plank walls and a leaf roof—but better managed. Black couples lived together as husband and wife, in their self-built hut. The single women lived in one larger hut, and the single men lived in another in a compound some distance from the main house. They all grew vegetables and fruit to eat and to sell, and they kept their huts scrupulously clean. They built and managed a hospital hut to nurse a constant stream of sick slaves: dying from overwork or infected with wounds from a beating or a branding. Once a week the slave quarters were searched from roof to floor for weapons or stolen goods; every so often an enslaved girl would disappear from her sleeping hut and come back bloodstained and tearstained and mute, raped by the white men servants, by the overseer, or by Mr. Peabody himself. Occasionally, there would be a public whipping for some offense, or the blacksmith might be ordered to brand someone, or wound them. Rowan realized that the white masters ruled by the constant threat of terrible violence.

If Rowan could have moved in with the women slaves, she would have done so, but by passing as a white male servant at arrival, she was now forced to live with the white men. There was privilege attached to this—as a white servant she could beat a black woman without fear of punishment—but she could not speak to them or eat with them, and she would never be allowed to live with them.

The first day that Mr. Peabody recovered from his drunken bout in Bridge, he sent for Rowan.

“You gotta come to the big house,” the black maid told Rowan, finding her sharpening the blades of the sugarcane billhooks. “Come quick. He don’ like waiting.”

Rowan went as fast as she could, hobbling on sore feet up the stone path from the servants’ cottages to the walled garden. Mr. Peabodywas in the shade of a great tree, its enormous trunk swelling behind him, its canopy casting a welcome shadow over him, a long cool drink of rum punch in his hand.

Rowan stood before him and pulled off her hat.

“You said you can read?” He tossed a newssheet to her. It was an oldLondon Gazette.

She took it up and squinted at the travel-stained paper:

“?‘Right truly and right well-beloved cousin and counselor, right trusty and right well-beloved counselor, right trusty and entirely beloved—’?”

“Skip that bit! Skip it!” Mr. Peabody grunted irritably. “Go down. Read on.”

“?‘We greet you well. Whereas by our letter of the twenty-first day of August last past, we were graciously pleased to inform you of our designs in order to the ease of our Roman Catholic…’?”

“Same as usual then, more comfort for papists. I see you can read. Who taught you?”

“My mistress, Alinor Reekie. I was a clerk at the Reekie warehouse, I noted the goods in and out,” Rowan lied, wondering what service would earn her a bed inside the house, away from the men. “I worked as a house servant too,” she said. “In the kitchen and serving. I helped the cook.”

He laughed abruptly. “You want your feet under my table!” he accused her.

“I’m going to die out here,” she told him frankly. “And you’ll lose the money you paid for me.”

“If you want soft living, you should’ve thought of that before you turned traitor.”

She bowed her head. “I’m not a thief.” She knew they feared theft, second only to rebellion. “And I can fire a musket. I can serve in the militia against the slaves.”

“?’Cause you fired one for that damned traitor, Monmouth!”

“No. Never. I was captured by accident on an errand.”

He thought for a moment. “You’ll work as hard as a slave in the house as you would in the field, don’t think you’ll get off lightly. You’ll clean and wash and wait on me, you’ll run with messages, you’ll writemy letters. You’ll be up at dawn to serve my breakfast and you’ll clear up after I’ve gone to bed.”

Rowan nodded. “Yes, sir.”

“And you’ll guard the house and grounds. Every other night.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Harvest is starting, and I’ll need white men to oversee the gangs. Can you do that?”

Rowan thought that she was about to sink lower than she had ever been: a white man, sharing in white violence. “Yes, sir.”

“Go into the house and tell Cook to find you some half-decent clothes. And get a wash, you stink. You can serve dinner, and if you’re any good, I’ll have you as a servant: a footman.”

Rowan bowed and headed for the house. It was built with the same coral stone as all the other buildings but edged and trimmed with a handsome deep red brick. It was a grand two-story house with a gable over the two upstairs windows, surrounded by formal gardens, standing high above the low-roofed slave huts and outbuildings. It was pretty: neat as a doll’s house, looking over a long green vista of fields. Rowan knew not to enter through the front door but went around the side to find a backyard, and outbuildings: bathhouses, a necessary house, a bakery and a kitchen, shaded by the canopy of a huge broad-trunked tree which slumped, fat and comforting, in the center of the yard.

Behind the house was a working yard: a smithy, the sprawling sugar factory shady and quiet now before the start of harvest, and over them all a squat windmill, with the sails idle. It was like a little English estate transported under burning sun, nightmarishly changed into a place of torture. Through it all, through every sunlit vista, there was the stench of slavery, of fearful sweat, of bruised and bleeding flesh, of grief.

The smell of roasting meat drifted into the yard, making her stomach grip with hunger and her dry mouth water. She followed the haunting scent to the open door of the stone-built building opposite the main house, across the yard. The black woman cook was basting a hog on a spit turned by a tiny black child, his eyes squinted against the unbearable heat of the fire, his hands and arms scarred from earlier burnings from the spitting fat.

“I’m to have half-decent clothes, and wash. I’m to serve dinner,” Rowan said, looking away from the little boy.