Andrew Pepper - Kill-Devil and Water

Something in Webb’s face softened. ‘How old is he?’

‘Ten.’

Webb nodded once, half closing his eyes. ‘My boy’s five.’

‘I’m going to saddle up one of Malvern’s horses and then you’re going to point me in the direction of Kingston.’

‘And Mary?’

Pyke took his time; he wanted Webb to think he was seriously considering his question. ‘Like you just said, she’s dead and nothing is going to bring her back.’

He walked up the path to the stables and emerged, a few minutes later, leading a black-and-white mare by the reins. Webb was waiting for him.

‘Far as Harper thinks, you dead. Means you don’t go nowhere near Falmouth.’

So he’d been right after all: the big man had wanted him dead. Perhaps it didn’t mean very much; perhaps it was just a question of tying up loose ends. As if reading his thoughts, Webb shrugged and added, ‘It weren’t nothing personal.’ It was as forthcoming as he was prepared to be.

Nodding, Pyke mounted the mare and took the reins. He didn’t tell Webb that he was heading for Accompong or that he knew about Mary’s mother, and briefly he wondered whether Josephine would own up to what she’d perhaps inadvertently revealed. What might Webb do if he knew Pyke wasn’t planning to go home after all?

‘Enough folk been killed.’ Webb’s eyes wrinkled at the corners. ‘You follow the track down past the boiling house and the old stone bridge and keep going straight. It bring you to the village. From there, ask for Ulster Spring or Albert Town and then Mand’ville. You get to Mand’ville, Kingston’s another day riding farther east. The whole thing take about three days.’

As he rode off, Pyke still half expected the shot, and it was only when he’d crossed the river and passed the boiling house that he started to relax.

The ride to Accompong took him all of that day and most of the next one; the silver dollars he’d taken from Malvern meant he had money to pay for food and shelter, for him and the horse, and the weather remained fair throughout. Currents of warm air carried John-crows effortlessly above the harsh, mountainous landscape and the lush, tropical valleys that plunged hundreds of feet down into fast-flowing rivers. The track, at times cut into the side of the mountain, took him higher and farther into unknown terrain. He kept to a slow pace, surprised to find that the damage from the storm lessened the farther inland he went, and when he stopped at tiny makeshift villages to ask for directions to Accompong, he was treated both as an oddity and with caution and respect. Along the way, he learned some of the history of his eventual destination. Together with a thousand acres of Cockpit country, Accompong had been ceded by the Crown some time in the previous century to the Maroons — runaway slaves who’d taken refuge in the mountains — after British soldiers had been ambushed and overpowered at a mountain pass. The terms of the treaty agreed at the time were still binding and as such Accompong and the surrounding land did not recognise British rule. ‘Your laws don’t mean nothing up dere,’ one man had told Pyke, sniffing the air. ‘Up dere, everyone free.’

The woman could have been sixty or she could have been a hundred. She greeted him with a limp handshake and without getting to her feet. She sat in an old rocking chair in the shade of a mammoth cotton tree at the top of the village, her tiny wattle-and-daub hut with its straw-thatched roof and small garden just a few yards farther back down the hill. She listened carefully while Pyke explained who he was and why he’d come to see her but showed no emotion, even when he told her that her daughter, Mary, had been killed in London.

For a while, after he’d said his piece, they sat across from one another, neither of them speaking. Some children had gathered nearby to inspect him and were giggling and pointing.

‘In our religion, we believe that when someone dies, their spirit returns to their homeland. But you see, we’ve been away from Africa too long now.’ She spoke, Pyke was surprised to find out, without even the slightest trace of an accent.

‘So you already knew your daughter was dead?’ Pyke waited. He had been told by one of the village elders that she was a renowned myalist and hence was to be treated with the utmost reverence.

Bertha nodded. ‘Mary’s spirit has come home to me.’

‘Do you know how she died?’

‘I know men killed her.’

‘Men? As in plural?’

She shrugged, as though the distinction wasn’t an important one.

‘She was strangled.’ Pyke studied her wrinkled, beatific face and felt an irrational anger swelling within him. ‘Her eyeballs were cut from her head.’

This time Bertha’s expression did register dismay, and for a moment Pyke was pleased that he had been able to puncture her seemingly implacable facade. But then he remembered who he was talking to and felt a sharp rush of shame; this was the woman who had brought Mary into the world and he had knowingly rubbed her face in the horror of her daughter’s death.

Finally the old woman shuffled forward in the rocking chair, her legs dangling down like a child’s. ‘Why did you come all this way?’

‘To Jamaica or Accompong?’

‘Both.’

‘I came to Jamaica because I thought your daughter’s killer had fled here from London.’

‘And were you right?’

‘No.’ Pyke hesitated.

‘Go on.’

‘Charles Malvern is now dead; so are his attorney, Pemberton, and a sugar trader from England called Alefounder. I believe it was part of a plot organised by a newspaperman, John Harper, and Mary’s former lover, a man called Isaac Webb, to take control of the Ginger Hill estate. I found one of Malvern’s servants, a woman called Josephine, weeping over his dead body. I think Malvern was murdered and his death blamed on the violent storms that passed across the island a few nights ago. When I asked her for an explanation, she just told me to come here and talk to you.’ Pyke looked up at the old woman. ‘Why would she say a thing like that?’

But the woman didn’t seem unduly surprised by anything Pyke had said. ‘Josephine always did love that boy too much,’ she said, as though this were a mistake.

‘You know her?’

Until this point Pyke hadn’t taken seriously the idea that there might have been some communication between Falmouth, Ginger Hill and Accompong — the distances were too vast and the arduous travelling conditions necessarily precluded Bertha’s involvement in the affairs at Ginger Hill — but suddenly he had to reassess this view; and as such, he wondered how safe he really was.

Bertha nodded. ‘A long time ago, I used to work up at the great house at Ginger Hill as well. It’s how I learned to speak the King’s English.’ She smiled sweetly. ‘That’s right; there was a king on the throne at the time.’

‘What made you leave?’

Bertha sat back in her rocking chair and closed her eyes. ‘You’re a very impatient man. Impatient and troubled.’

‘I’ve been shot at, chased, betrayed and almost killed again. I think I’ve earned the right to be impatient.’

‘Very well. Since you’ve come all this way, and since you’re trying to find the man or men who murdered my daughter, and since I sense you’re a good man, I’ll do my best to answer your questions.’

Pyke smiled, pleased by this sudden change of attitude. ‘What made you leave?’

She nodded politely. ‘Perhaps it would be better, or rather easier for me, if you weren’t so blunt.’

Pyke acknowledged her point with a nod. ‘Did you know Charles’s father, Silas.’

She nodded and smiled. ‘Yes, I did.’

‘And did you like him?’

‘Did I like him?’ She seemed amused by the question. ‘That’s rather like asking a mouse whether he likes the eagle that’s eating him.’