The Turtle Run (25 page)

‘Why don't you come and sit on the veranda?' said Becky.

He shook his head.

‘It's cooler up here.'

He turned round and looked at the veranda as if considering the offer but resolutely shook his head again. He seemed to think there was a demarcation line that he couldn't cross, though Becky was certain this was not the result of anything Clara or Matthew had said: they treated Cook more like family and their relationship with Pitcher clearly went back years. She wondered if his self-exile ‘down the steps' owed more to a race memory.

She fetched him a glass of cold water and he raised his Fedora in acknowledgement. It would be nice to think that gesture had been handed down over the generations but it could just as easily be behaviour learnt from seeing an old Hollywood movie; if indeed, Pitcher ever had. That reminded her of something.

‘Have you heard of Nicole Kidman?' she asked him.

Pitcher made a show of thinking about it then shook his head.

‘Have you heard of Sarah Thomas?'

He grinned and tapped his head. ‘I hear she. I see she too.'

‘You
see
her?'

‘At night. I see her here' – he tapped his head – ‘but really she in that other place.' He looked at Becky though, as usual, avoided meeting her eyes. ‘She know you tryna find out about she but her don't like it.'

Becky stared at him. There must be a logical explanation for what he'd said. She just couldn't think of one right now. She went back to the morning room.

It was early afternoon when Mr St John pulled up in a fine saloon, which gleamed in the high sun. He got out and immediately extracted a large white handkerchief from a pocket and dabbed his face.

‘Hi,' called Becky.

Mr St John raised a hand in greeting and then looked at Pitcher on the steps.

‘Is this the patient?'

‘Yes.'

Mr St John put the handkerchief away, removed some plastic sheeting from the saloon's boot and laid it over the back seat.

He turned to Becky. ‘Are you coming too?'

She was tempted by the thought of an excursion out of the quiet house but wasn't confident they would get back in time for Zena; with no Maureen to keep an eye on the three-year-old Becky thought it best to stay to look after her in case Cook fell asleep.

‘No, sorry,' she said to Mr St John and watched them drive off.

The rest of the day slipped by, uselessly. Even Zena seemed subdued by the blazing afternoon heat and was half-asleep when her mother collected her.

Clara did not venture downstairs at all and when Becky took up her dinner she saw the older lady had found a use for the French notes – she was fanning herself with them.

‘I don't suppose you've had a chance to translate them?' Becky asked.

‘Sorry, not really,' said Clara sadly. ‘As soon as I try to read I get a headache.'

Becky wasn't surprised. The day had started without promise and delivered just that at the close. And still no word from Matthew.

The next day seemed even more hot and airless. Becky sat in the morning room feeling quite depressed. She was feeling trapped on the plantation again, wishing she had gone to the clinic with Pitcher yesterday after all.

But at least she had found something promising on the internet: a link to a collection of old wills; she was delighted to discover one for the William Darnley who had died in 1701. Becky called up the transcribed document and read through it, her mood gradually sinking again. William Darnley had left Copper Hall to his wife with separate bequests to his three daughters. There was no mention of Randolph and Sarah.

So they had been disowned. What other reason could there be for excluding them than their society-defying marriage? Sarah Thomas/Darnley had probably never been in this house, which meant that Becky's recent heightened awareness when moving through the rooms had been a fantasy. The realisation brought her a small pang of loss, as her dual awareness had added some depth to her days. Plus she was really annoyed that she had indulged herself in a childish fairy tale: the servant girl who had become lady of the manor.

Most of all Becky was depressed to imagine the fate of Randolph and Sarah Darnley. There was no entry in the Wills section for either of them – because (she suspected) they had nothing to leave anyone. Sarah Darnley née Thomas had not only been exiled from England; she had also been rejected by society in Barbados.

Desperate for escape from the house, Becky found Maureen in the dining room and told her she was going for a walk.

‘A walk? In this heat?'

Becky nodded and smiled when Maureen rolled her eyes and twirled a ‘mad woman' gesture with her finger at her head.

Becky headed out through the yard and on to the mahogany-lined lane. The morning was so hot even the wildlife seemed to have been parched into extinction. The casuarina trees were as still as cacti. Becky felt like she was the only living being outside.

Not quite. There was a rustle and Pitcher appeared on the lane in front of her, probably not deliberately blocking her path but certainly in her way. Ironic that in this heat he was moving with a strange urgency. After her recent discovery Becky didn't want to play the ‘Sarah game' today but she could not get past him without saying something so she picked what she hoped was a safe topic.

‘Your shin's healing really well, Pitcher.'

He looked confused then followed Becky's gaze down his leg, doing a double take as if he'd never seen the bandage before.

‘Have you had the stitches out now?' tried Becky, wincing at how patronising she sounded but keen to keep the conversation in the present.

Pitcher seemed to nod and shake his head simultaneously, as though any answer would do. ‘She get nothing from the Will, she want nothing from the Will. She asks what does this Becky want from me?'

‘Who said this?' said Becky, dreading what she thought the answer would be.

‘Sarah.'

Becky's immediate impulse was to run but she forced herself to stand still as Pitcher went on.

‘She says she take his name, no more, just his name. She marry, she not really marry. She want nothing from the Will, she get nothing from the Will.'

‘She said this to you?'

Pitcher blinked. ‘She take nothing from the Will, she get noth –'

‘Who did she tell this to? She said this to you?'

Becky could see Pitcher's attention fading in and out. ‘Who did she say this to?' she repeated.

‘She marry, but she not really marry.'

‘‘Thank you, Pitcher,' said Becky, deciding she was not going to get anywhere and wanting to cut the conversation short. ‘I'm going for a walk now.'

‘No,' said Pitcher. ‘Go home.'

‘Thank you Pitcher, but no – I want a walk – alone.'

His head started swinging from side to side. ‘Not now. Rain, rain, rain.'

Becky ignored him and walked on, turning around after a few yards to see if he was staring after or, please no, following her. But he had disappeared. She couldn't deny she was somewhat freaked by the encounter. What explanation could there be? She had discussed finding William Darnley's will with no one so how could Pitcher's imagined Sarah choose that as a theme?

Becky had almost walked to the end of the lane, and was wondering if she should continue on to the road, when a warm breeze started as if warning her to turn back. There were a few drops of rain – just enough to make Becky halt – and then it was as though God had moved a weather-control to ‘violent storm'. The rain started pelting down, the causarina trees writhing like souls possessed, shedding twigs, and the mahogany trees' hard nugget seedcases were peppering her like flak.

Becky broke into a run but could barely keep her eyes open for the stabbing rain. A car drove up and Becky made out Maureen beckoning frantically from within. She stumbled into the passenger seat and effusively thanked Maureen as they drove to the end of the lane and turned round in the T-junction. Maureen sucked her teeth when she saw the streams of water running down the sides of the little road.

‘I'll take you back,' she said. ‘Then I'm driving home.'

‘You think this will last?' asked Becky.

‘Yes,' said Maureen. ‘This will last.'

Maureen was right. For the next two days, everyone at Copper Mill was stuck in the house. From the windows Becky could see the crowns of trees bowed so deeply that some snapped, while the rain chanted angrily at anyone who dared to set foot on the veranda. Matthew rang once and said he could hear rain in the background but Becky did not want to worry him by saying how severe the storm was. She was unable to persuade Clara to come downstairs and, as Clara's technophobia extended to using mobile phones, Becky had to relay Clara's answers to Matthew's solicitous questions: yes, she was fine, she was not playing bridge or overdoing things and he was to look after himself rather than fussing about her.

It felt a little bizarre being the conduit for this mother-son conversation but it was endearing to hear Matthew's gruff concern. And not just for his mother.

‘And how about you?' he asked.

She could have said: I feel like a trapped animal and the situation is being exacerbated by Pitcher passing on messages from an ancestor of yours who's been dead for almost three hundred years. But instead she said, ‘I'm fine. Plenty to read.'

‘Are you sure? The rain can get a little claustrophobic.'

‘No problem, really.'

But Becky did feel as if she were in a prison cell with watery walls. In fact everyone seemed trapped in some sense: Clara confined to her room and Cook restricted to the ground floor. Yesterday she had found Cook hovering at the bottom of the stairs and realised with a stab of sympathy that the elderly lady wanted to check on Clara but was daunted by the staircase.

‘I could help you up,' said Becky gently.

The old lady considered this then shook her head. ‘Thank you. I could get up, but I don't think I would come down again.'

She wandered back to the kitchen muttering about her ‘old, old legs'.

Nor did Cook have the pleasure of her granddaughter's company. Cook's daughter-in-law had decided it was better to take time off work to look after Zena at home rather than to risk the drive to the childminder. Becky was surprised at feeling a pang of deprivation; she hadn't realised how much pleasure she got from the little girl's antics.

With Clara ensconced upstairs, neither Alex nor Maureen risking the journey to the house, and no Zena to play with, Becky's world consisted of the laptop – and the seventeenth century. She had decided to widen her research into the people who made up Barbados's population.

It seemed there were few Bajans – black, white or mixed – whose ancestors had come willingly to the island. Redlegs was a generic term which covered the Irish people who had been sent to Barbados by Oliver Cromwell, the Scottish – who were the first to be brought over as indentured labourers – and the West Country folk who had ‘backed the wrong king'. Now she knew why she sometimes heard a hint of Irish in the Bajan accent, at other times, a hint of the West Country. And she learnt that there was even an area nearby called ‘Little Scotland'.

At least one mystery was solved. Becky read that the drystone walls, which had caught her eye when she was out with Matthew collecting errant kites, were probably built by the Redlegs using techniques remembered from ‘home'.

The plantation owners had soon realised the white people they had ‘imported' to work the land were as unsuited as could be and turned their attention to the west African coast for slaves, dragging people from their roots and re-planting them in a tiny island thousands of miles away from home. Ironic that now people were desperate to live on the island and willing to pay millions of dollars for a chunk of real estate.

But it was true, no matter how horrendous the facts, they had to be wrapped around a few individuals to have real impact. She went back to Clara's odd scraps of paper. Some were copied from gravestones, others from rich landowner's wills:

‘To my son I grant 10 head of cattle, 2 horses, my servant Blue-eyed Boy, 2 copper stills …'

Useless, thought Becky. If the landowner had bothered to name ‘Blue-eyed Boy' she might have been able to determine if this was a descendant of a Monmouth rebel but, without a name, he could have been anyone.

Against a soundtrack of near-ceaseless rain she trawled the net for personal stories but caught little. One could get a glimpse of individual tragedies back in Dorset and Somerset: of the widows and wives left behind in poverty (their land and homes often confiscated), of land left untilled because there were insufficient men to work the earth.

But in Barbados, once the prisoners were brought off the ships, little remained. Pitcher was a rarity – very few of the old surnames could be found on the island today.

‘You seem very engrossed, dear.' Clara certainly didn't move around the house as quietly as her son but Becky had been so focused on her reading that she had not heard her approach.

‘I'm sorry, Clara. I was far away.'

‘Oh Becky, I do hope you haven't been working all this time?'

‘It's interesting. Anyway, it's not like I could go outside.'

Clara gave her a funny look. ‘Well, you can now.'

It was only then that Becky noticed there was sunshine streaming through the slats in the window blinds. She hadn't heard the rain stop.

‘Any news of Matthew?' asked Clara.

‘Er, no more than that one phone call,' said Becky, surprised. Clara must have known that if Matthew had rung again it would have been to find out how his mother was doing rather than to have a private conversation with Clara's ‘secretary' (as Francesca would have it). ‘Anyway, Clara, how are you?'

‘Much better. I was just finding the rain so oppressive.' Clara sat down. ‘Do you drive, Becky?'