Beyond the Savage Sea by JoAnn Wendt

Author:JoAnn Wendt [Wendt, JoAnn]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Romance
ISBN: 9781610845564
Publisher: Belgrave House
Published: 2011-07-14T04:00:00+00:00

‘As for Mistress Crawford, dear brother, she is in love with you, of course. It shows in her drawings. You have ever been a handsome man, but never so handsome nor so noble as rendered by Mistress Crawford’s pen.’

Taken aback, he glanced at Edwinna. In love with him? He returned to his letter.

As to the nature of your feelings for Mistress Crawford, I can only speculate. You are a vexingly private man, brother mine. Your letters reveal precisely what you wish them to reveal and not one iota more. You never have welcomed my advice in the past, nor will you welcome it now. Nevertheless, I give it. You will do well to cherish your Mistress Crawford. She sounds like a sensible woman who would never give you problems or grief.’

His mouth tightened. The last was an unsubtle echo of Verity’s dislike for Anne that even Anne’s death had tempered.

“Bad news?” Edwinna asked.

“No. It is only that my sister can be a vexing woman.” Engrossed in receiving his own letters, he’d given no thought to Edwinna’s. “Any letters from Thomas and Harry?”

“No. Next month. They will surely write next month.”

“Surely,” he agreed, but he wanted to knock Thomas and Harry’s ungrateful young heads together.

* * * *

Still worried about a possible bondslave insurrection, the planters kept in touch with one another by letter. Believing Drake’s story about what Drake had seen and heard, Mr. Drax had alerted the governor.

At the Planters Council, the planters had devised a means of rapid communication. If an insurrection seemed imminent on any plantation, that planter immediately would write to his three nearest neighbors; those three immediately would write to their three nearest neighbors, and so forth, until all the plantations on the island were covered.

Meanwhile, disquieting reports came in. There had been a fire in Dinny’s boiling house that had had no explicable cause. A grinder on a St. Lucy’s Parish plantation had been chopped to pieces. Worse, a bondslave had been found mysteriously slain in a St. Michael’s Parish cane field, an X carved in his chest.

The insurrection worry heightened. At Crawford Plantation the house pistols were kept loaded but locked in drawers safely away from Tutu, Priscilla, and Jocko. Meanwhile, the hard work of harvest ground steadily on. The mill rumbled night and day. Drake learned to deal with calamities, great and small, on a daily basis. The gate bell clanged every night. Some of the calamities were humorous. To spare Edwinna her sleep, Drake went down to answer the gate bell one night. He returned upstairs and whispered, to her inquiry, that the problem was nothing. Macaw’s wife had given birth to twins.

She sprang up as if shot from a cannon. “Drake! If an African’s wife gives birth to twins, he will hang her. He views twins as a sure sign that she has slept with some other men of the village.”

“You jest.”

“No!”

Edwinna threw on her clothes, and they ran through the dark, starry night to the slave village. Plum was already there, trying to reason with the big, ebony-skinned slave, but Macaw stood adamant.

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