Page 151 of Dawnlands

“Then how do you get through?”

She gleamed in her pride. “Watch this.” She set down his musket and went to the edge of the water, showed him how her brown foot sank the moment she came to the edge, and then she gave a little jump and a sidestep, and like a child playing hopscotch pattered from one hidden platform to another, reached the beach on the other side, and came back again, hopping and jumping from one sunken pillar of stones to another. She looked as if she were dancing on the water, reminding him of the hidden ways of the tidelands and how his sister could cross the harbor and never get her hem wet.

“Rowan, I see, I see! But you can’t stay here forever!”

She nodded. “I won’t stay here forever. I will go home.Sannup, I need to know something: you came here on a ship and you saw the sky. Do I go to the setting sun to find the Dawnlands? Is it towards the setting sun?”

“It’s a long way,” he warned her. “Barbados is a little island, one of a string of islands.” He drew in the sand the map that he had seen in Christopher Monck’s library. “Your nearest land would be Spanish owned,” he said. “Venezuela. About two days’ sail from here, but these are dangerous waters, Rowan. They have tremendous storms and there are warships and pirates, and you’d be out of sight of land.”

“But the land there is a great land, not a little island?”

“Oh, you’ll make landfall if you can go far enough.” He shook his head. “I can’t bear to think of you in a dinghy, making a journey like this.”

She smiled. “Nippe Sannup, you must think, you must dare to think of me. And I wouldn’t be in a dinghy. I will be in a canoe. A seagoing canoe that can make a long journey in deep waters. Dream for me! Who could dream of freedom like you? Who would think we have come so far? That we could have done all that we have done? It is another adventure for me.”

He shook his head. “Can’t I smuggle you on a ship?”

“Me, maybe. But I am traveling with my sister and her son. You’d never get three of us on board.” She knelt beside him and took his hand. “I brought you here to show you that I am safe. Don’t be anold white man and tell me what you believe, when the opposite is true. I am safe here. This is not your Barbados, filled with loud men and women and their greed—their unending greed. This is our Barbados—beautiful, sacred, secret, hidden from the other one. Aboveground is sugar and slavery. Down here is another world where the land is beautiful and the people are free.”

“We’ll never meet again,” he foresaw. “I belong in the world of sugar and slavery and cruelty. Even if I spend my life fighting against it: that’s my world.”

“And this is mine. I knew you would understand. That’s why I brought you here.”

“To say good-bye?”

She held the back of his hand to her warm cheek. “To say good-bye. My debt to you is paid. You have no debt to me.”

“I wanted to rescue you,” he confessed.

“You rescued me once,” she assured him. “But now I have rescued myself, and now I am free.”

He nodded; he felt himself get to his feet, as if the moment was so important that he had to move slowly and speak with great care. “I never loved a woman before you.”

Her dark eyes were filled with tears, but she was smiling. “I know it.”

“And I am glad, more glad than words can say, that you are free, and with your people, where you should be, like a star in the night sky.”

He got to his feet and shouldered his musket and picked up his game bag. “So there is nothing more to say, because we never needed words?”

She nodded. “I’ll see you to the edge of the creek and sweep the ground of your footprints.”

“Aye.” Ned went ahead of her, through the tight hole of the cliff, wriggling out on the other side like a terrier out of a rat hole. She came out after him, in a swift easy dive, rising to her feet as she came into the forest. Again, she led the way, but this time she went slower on the harder uphill walk, back to the plantation and the world she had left. He watched the scarred leathery skin of her heels, the whipcord muscles of her calves; he followed with a new pain in his chest, which was heartache.

At the clearing, where he could see the top of the cliff, and the green canes of the plantation, she halted.

“This is good-bye?” Ned confirmed.

He put his hand out as if he would shake her hand like a trader closing a deal. But as she put her hand in his, she drew him closer, and lifted her mouth to his.

“I love you,Nippe Sannup,” she said, and she kissed him on the mouth, and the next moment she was gone.

WHITEHALL PALACE, LONDON, WINTER 1687

Julia alighted with self-conscious pride from her new carriage, leaning with excessive weight on the arm of her own footman. At last Rob had been persuaded to set up a carriage for the use of his family, convinced by Julia that she could not visit a royal palace in a hired hack.

The enormous doors of the palace stood open, and Julia was greeted by Livia’s footman in the royal livery, who bowed to her and conducted her to Livia’s private rooms.

A bright fire was burning in the grate, and Livia, dressed in her usual magnificent style, had a fur stole thrown over her naked shoulders for warmth. She rose with a rustle of embroidered silk as Julia entered, and Julia—a goldsmith’s daughter—priced to the nearest shilling the cost of the jewels draped in chains around her neck and in her ears.