Page 121 of Dawnlands

A wave of her fan told him that she did not want to hear about the warehouse.

“Anyway,” he said, keeping a wary eye on the languid movement, “the queen offered a reward, so the Nobildonna asked for a manor house. Matthew thought of the Priory so he could take his foster mothers to their old home—a generous thought.” He glanced at her blank face. “At any rate, the Nobildonna got the Priory for Matthew, and he has invited the girls to stay for the summer. And now they have invited Hester.”

“I don’t know that it won’t be too much for her,” she said.

“She doesn’t need to wear her brace in the day anymore, and her maid can put it on at night, just as well as here.”

“She can’t possibly keep up with those two lumping girls.”

“I’ll ask Alys to make sure she does not get overtired. But I’d recommend exercise. It will strengthen her, and the country air is undoubtedly better for her than town.”

“Certainly, I’d like to see your childhood home.”

“My actual home wasn’t the Priory. It was a very poor cottage by the ferry-house.”

“I don’t want to see that,” she corrected him, trying to smile. “I’d like to see the Priory.”

“Why don’t we all go, and if you are satisfied that Hester will be happy, we can leave her there, till they come back to London?”

“What about Prynne?” she queried.

“She can come, if you wish? But she’s not a very merry companion.”

“To chaperone Hester with the foster boy, and anyone else theymeet. She cannot be allowed to make the acquaintance of anyone… unsuitable.”

“Alys will keep an eye on her,” he said, trying not to bristle at her snobbery, remembering that it had been his own choice to marry an Alderman’s daughter. He had not realized that rising socially with Julia would be so effortful and involve so much separation from his past and from his family. When he had married her, a pretty heiress, he had never dreamed that her careful gentility would come to grate on him quite so much. “Alys knows that Hester is carefully brought up,” he said patiently. “Gabrielle and Mia are clever girls and quite suitable companions.”

“Clever girls!” she repeated with an artificial shudder of horror. “Heaven save us from a clever girl!”

“I hope not!” he exclaimed at last. “Hester has a good brain and should learn how to use it. Her cousins have come to England for the sole purpose of studying. There’s nothing unladylike about it.”

The door opened, and Miss Prynne came into the room followed by the footman with the tea tray before Julia could lower herself to argue with her husband.

“Here you are, so comfortable!” she said inaccurately. “Shall I pour tea for you, dear Mrs. Reekie?”

Julia nodded, as if she were too exhausted to raise the silver teapot herself.

“We were just agreeing that we will take Hester for a stay with her cousins at the Priory,” Rob said, accepting a cup. “So you can take a holiday, Miss Prynne. Hester will not need you in the country.”

“That will be a great pleasure for me, and more importantly an enjoyable holiday for Hester,” Miss Prynne said. “Unless you want me to go with her? To keep her in mind of the little elegancies of life?”

Rob Reekie made a small cough indicating contempt for the small elegancies of life.

“That’s not necessary,” Mrs. Reekie said, frowning at her husband. “You can have a month off, Miss Prynne, and come back to us at the end of September.”

Miss Prynne, looking at Julia’s icy expression, thought if shemight ask to be paid for her holiday time; and then thought that she would not.

DEEP CAVE, BARBADOS, AUTUMN 1686

Rowan climbed with meticulous care up the wet ledges of the cliff, her eyes wide against the darkness. As she neared the top it was only slightly lighter and when she broke through the earth burrow to the outside, she was in darkness, the moon and the stars blotted out by the thick jungle canopy. Grimy and exhausted, her fingers bruised and her feet bleeding from scrabbling on the wet cliff, Rowan collapsed on the floor of the little entrance cave and slept like an exhausted dog.

When she opened her eyes again, the rising sun was shining on her, like a message of hope. She sat up and looked around at the little sheltered spot, bathed now in a warm golden light. “Why, this is Dawnlands,” she said wonderingly. “This is a Dawnlands. Just like my home.”

She turned back and reached into the cave to wet her hands in the water sliding down the cliff edge, and rubbed her face, the back of her neck, and her throat, as a token gesture of the ritual bathing that she would have done at home. She turned north and south, west to the back of the cave and then east to face the sun, and she smiled into the growing light, as it pierced through the canopy of trees to shine on her. “Great Spirit, Mother Earth, Grandmother Moon, Grandfather Sun, I thank you. I pray to the four directions.” Reverently, she bowed. “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 did not know how to make the prayer fit this strange land, where there were neither bear nor wolf, nor even many deer. “I honor the monkey and the hummingbird, the insects that bite and the leaves that heal. The great fish of the ocean, and the many turtles of the sea.”

She finished the prayer and sat under the arch of the cave. Consciously, she rested her strained muscles and her painful feet until she was ready to move again and step into her ill-fitting shoes and pick up her musket. She climbed down to the first level of the cliff, where the ground leveled out before it tumbled in a precipice of rubble and trees down to the river below. She plucked a twig from a tree and broke it so that it formed a Y and then taking two short arms and letting the other long one twist to point upwards or down she imagined the cave beneath her feet and started to make her way through the forest, visualizing the flow of the sapphire blue river underground. It was hard walking, climbing over fallen trees, ducking under vines, the forest floor sometimes soft with fallen leaves or a mass of crumbling stones. The sticks twisted in her hand and the pointer stick turned down showing her the path of the underground river, many feet below her. She went through the tangle, never breaking anything, never tempted to thrust her way through, threading like a needle through fustian, over rocks and under branches, wriggling through gaps in the foliage and stumbling over rough ground, choosing a path that followed wherever the stick strained in her hands and pointed down.