Page 114 of Dawnlands

“I do too,” Mia said quickly, and her sister glanced at her.

“We both do,” Gabrielle assured him.

“I’m sure Mother Alinor would be glad to see us,” Matthew said.

“Why would she not want us?” Mia demanded. “We’re very charming.”

“You are!” He smiled.

The footman opened the door, and the girls turned to go in. Matthew looked up and saw Hester, waiting at the window. He waved to her.

“I wish Hester could come too,” Gabrielle remarked.

“She’d never be allowed,” Mia said quickly.

“It’s a pity,” he remarked. As he walked away he glanced back. Hester was at the window watching him go. She raised her hand.

PEABODY PLANTATION, BARBADOS, SUMMER 1686

Rowan, now better fed and better housed than the other white servants who worked in the garden and stables, and far better treated than the slaves, was still exhausted at the end of every day, and aching with weariness at dawn. She slept in snatches through the night, cross-legged on the floor of the hall, as Mrs. Peabody would not allowher on the chairs, as if she were a dog with fleas. She dozed with a musket laid across her lap, getting up every so often to walk the outside perimeter of the gardens, looking into the outbuildings, into the eerily silent mill standing over the cold boiling house, and then walking down the white stone track to the slave quarters, looking for any light, or any disturbance, any thieves or rebels. She could feel the grief in the hot still air of the night; sometimes she heard sobbing.

At dawn, her watch was over, and before she rang the bell to turn the slaves out of their quarters, Rowan went through the cane fields to the creek that cut through the fields on the east side. This was the only place in the plantation that she ever felt that she could breathe. The steep craggy sides of the cliff that fell down to the river were too sheer for any crop; not even the English could drive slaves down the rock face and make them hoe. Here, the old thick jungle of the island could not be cleared; the water trickled out of the side of the rock and dripped down in little waterfalls to the river below. Rowan scrambled down to where clear water trickled into a little pool, stripped naked and paddled into the water, faced east and looked at the lightening sky through the canopy of trees.

“Great Spirit, Mother Earth, Grandmother Moon, Grandfather Sun, I thank you. I pray to the four directions.” Carefully, she bowed to the rising sun and then in all directions. “I thank you for all my relations: the winged nation, the creeping and crawling nation, the four-legged nation, the green and growing nation, and all things living in the water. Honoring the clans: the deer—ahtuk, the bear—mosq, the wolf—mukquoshim, the turtle—tunnuppasog, the snipe—sasaso. Keihtanit taubot neanawayean.”

She knew there were no bear here, no wolf, that the turtles were overturned and scooped out of their shells while alive, the snipe shot for amusement, but she whispered their names and honored them and saw the sun filter through the ceiling of leaves. She heard the monkeys chatter high in the treetops and the insistent calling of the doves. For a moment, her bare feet in the stream, the patter of cold water on her head, running down her face and neck, Rowan was one of the People, and when the sun rose over the side of the creek she knew she was once again in Dawnlands.

“You go all that way to wash in a stream?” Cook asked, as Rowancame into the house servants’ hut, in a damp shirt with wet hair, smelling of clean water.

Rowan nodded.

“Why you don’ wash in the washhouse?”

“I like the spring water.”

“At dawn? You say prayers?”

Rowan nodded. “I’m baptized,” she said hastily. “I’m Christian.” Passing for Christian, like passing as white, was a slim guarantee of safety against abuse. Being Christian and white was to claim the master status—one of the owners of everything: a servant, not a slave.

Cook hunched an irritable shoulder. “You think I care? I don’ care. I jus’ going to tell you that there’s a slave woman who comes out of her hut at dawn and faces the sun and washes and prays too.”

“Is there?” Rowan was suddenly attentive. “Prays and washes in the morning?”

“So—you want to know now?”

“Does she wash in the creek?”

“How she going to get to the creek? She’s a slave. Can’t go nowhere but from hut to cane field and back again. She wash outside her hut sayin’ things. I seen her.”

“Where is she?”

Cook pulled on her skirt, thrust her feet into painful clogs. “She’ll be goin’ to the fields now,” she said. “Workin’ all day. Comin’ back at dusk. Growin’ her own food. Feedin’ her child. Sleepin’ if she can. Cryin’. Like all of us.”

Rowan was already out of the door, striding towards the slave huts. She knew her way around them, as she searched them with Mr. Peabody once a week and patrolled them every night. She had never seen anyone who looked like one of the People; but she had been too ashamed to raise her eyes from her own ill-fitting boots except to rake over some poor stores, or poke the end of a whip into a bed of corn cobs.

She hesitated outside the women’s quarters. There were well-tended gardens growing cassava for bread, plantain, papaya, and pigeon peas in straight rows, scratched into the earth, to make weeding and watering easier. But one garden was a tumble of plants grown together, corntall and straight, the bean plants scrambling up the stems of the corn, fat pumpkins throwing their vines across the soil and blocking weeds. Thousands of ants that were everywhere on Barbados swarmed across the leaves of the pumpkin but did not climb the stalk of the corn to spoil the cobs nor the beans that twisted around the stalk. Rowan stared disbelievingly. It was her mother’s garden, her grandmother’s garden, the garden they made in the woods in a clearing every spring: the garden of the three sisters. A garden of three plants based on the three stars that came out to tell the People when the ground was ready for planting. The three sisters were the stars in the sky, the three sisters were the plants in the garden: corn, beans, and pumpkins, that gave a complete meal from one garden, that supported each other and even fed the soil. Only one of the People would make a garden like this, the three sisters’ constellation only shone on the Dawnlands, only the People had been taught to see the stars and plant the gardens.

“Whose is this?” she called out to a passing black man.