Which might explain, thought Jean-Philippe, why the girl Violet seemed to be respected in the household, and why Monsieur Wilde would let Ramírez share his room and treat him as though he were any other man despite the colour of his skin. “All right,” he said, and twisted one more apple from its stem, “but why then do they keep a slave?”
“Who, Violet? She is not their slave.”
He frowned. “Then she is free?”
“No, you misunderstand me. She is not their slave,” Pierre explained. “She is the slave of Reuben Wilde, Monsieur Wilde’s older brother.” With a strong arm he pulled one branch down until it nearly cracked and added, “He is not a man, I think, who’ll ever see the gates of heaven. He will go the other way. He is as different from Monsieur Wilde as night is from day.”
There were men who drew their pleasure—and their power—from the suffering of others. Jean-Philippe had met them on the field of battle and as frequently behind it, men who revelled in manipulating lives the way that others, in their idle hours, might set a starved and beaten dog upon an even weaker one for sport.
And when Pierre began describing Monsieur Wilde’s older brother, Jean-Philippe knew he was such a man.
“He lives at Newtown, to the west of here, much closer to New York, and has an orchard there much larger than this one, with slaves to work it. Violet’s mother, Phyllis, she worked in his house,” Pierre said, “from the time that she herself was young. I was not here, of course, in those times, and she was already dead before I came here, but I heard this story, all of it, from Madame Wilde. She told me once that Violet’s mother was the bravest woman she had known. Braver than many men. And so I asked her why, and so she told me, and so now, Marine,” he said, “I will tell you, so you will understand this family.”
Bending one more branch, he stripped the fruit from it with expert movements. “Violet’s mother, Phyllis, kept the house of Reuben Wilde. And one day he complains she’s tried to poison him, and so he has her put into the gaol; but in a week or so the gaoler and the sheriff of that county come to tell him she is very sick, and he must take her back again. Except then he discovers she is sick because she is with child. With Violet. And she will not tell him who the father is. He beats her, very brutally, and still she will not tell him. So he takes her to the garret, to a very small room, very hot, and there he keeps her, and he starves her and he beats her, and forbids the others in his house from helping her at all. She would have surely died, but for a neighbour who could hear her cries and brought her food when none could see. And then one night this neighbour, she sees Monsieur Wilde—our Monsieur Wilde—has come to fetch two sheep, I think it was, that he was owed for work he had done for his brother, and he’s brought his team of horses and the waggon. And so the neighbour, she helps Phyllis leave the house unseen, and helps her to the waggon where the sheep are, and she hides there and stays hidden all the way here to the cove.”
“And then what happened?”
“Well, when Monsieur Wilde has stopped his waggon and comes back to get his sheep, there’s Phyllis facing him, and telling him she won’t be taken back—that he will either have to help her, or she’ll walk straight down that path into the water of the cove and drown herself, because she will not bring a child into the world to be raised at the mercy of his brother, in his brother’s house.” He gave a shrug. “And so they helped her.”
“But his brother surely figured out where she had gone.”
“Of course. They did not try to keep it secret, for in such a place as this it is not possible to keep a secret. First they told his brother they would pay the price of Phyllis and the unborn child, to keep them here, but Reuben Wilde is not a fool, and knowing that they then would turn around and give her freedom, he instead made an arrangement that pleased nobody but him and kept them under his control: he let them hire her, for a large price that they paid him every year—and Monsieur Wilde still pays this price, and more, for Violet. But she is not free of Reuben Wilde, and he can change at any moment this arrangement, and reclaim her. And if he should die, she will be passed to his son, Silas, who from all I hear is just as evil in his heart. So Madame Wilde, she told me even though he’s of the devil, every day she said a prayer that Reuben Wilde would never die. And so do I,” Pierre concluded, grimly.
Jean-Philippe stayed silent for some minutes. Then he asked, “How long ago did Phyllis die?”
“I don’t know. I think Violet had perhaps eleven years, or twelve, so it was maybe seven years ago. She has not had an easy life, that little one. But now at least you know why she is here.”
“Yes,” Jean-Philippe said. “Thank you.”
He felt no need to share the reason why he held the views he did about the wrongfulness of slavery, but it made him glad to know that Monsieur Wilde and his family seemed to share that same opinion. He saw their interactions now with more perceptive eyes. He gained new admiration for the quiet strength of Violet as she went about her daily chores. He paused now with new understanding at the simple gravestone marked with one name: Phyllis, standing neatly kept among the others in the clearing in the forest. And he added to his own prayers in the mornings and the evenings the blunt wish that Reuben Wilde, as undeserving as he was, would never die.
Death had, indeed, seemed very distant to him earlier today.
It had been one of those October mornings when the sky had spread above him like a perfect jewel, bright blue and cloudless, and the air had held a crisply pleasant chill that made it comfortable to work even in sunshine.
He had been a child when he had last made cider. He’d forgotten the sharp rush of smells, the sweetness and the almost-rotten richness and the way it lingered everywhere. He had forgotten, too, the way the cider tasted freshly pressed, before it had fermented. Before time had changed its purity to something stronger. Harder.
“You are like my sons,” Pierre accused him. “You will drink by half more than we put into the barrels.”
“It is thirsty work,” was Jean-Philippe’s defence, but he obligingly put down the wooden cup he’d used to catch the running cider and moved back to turn the handles that would tighten down the press. From that position he had a clear view of Lydia within her garden, working with an admirably single-minded steadiness.
She’d changed her hair. She normally pulled all of it straight back and off her face and bound it simply, letting part of its coiled length hang down beneath the plain white muslin of her cap. But on this morning she had not been so severe with it. He liked the fuller, softer waves of brown about her forehead and her temples.
“So,” he told Pierre, “it would be useful for me, while I’m here, to learn more English, so that in the future I can speak to those I capture.”
“You are maybe over-confident, Marine, to think you will return to war.”
“I’ll be exchanged eventually.” With a shrug he said, “So then in English, tell me, how would you tell someone that it’s nice, the way they wear their hair today?”
Pierre’s glance held amusement. “This is how you deal with men you capture, eh? You compliment their hair? It’s very threatening and very tough, I’m sure it leaves them terrified.”
He hadn’t had much cause for smiling since coming here, but Jean-Philippe felt his features relaxing now into a genuine smile at the other man’s dry remark, and without meaning to, he looked again towards Lydia.
And found her looking straight back at him.
Once he’d been hit an inch under his heart with a bullet—there had been no pain but he’d lost all the wind from his lungs and been knocked right off balance, and what he felt now felt like that. This time, though, despite its swift and sudden strike, the feeling was decidedly more pleasurable. As he sent a nod across the clearing to acknowledge her, his smile of its own volition broadened like a schoolboy’s.