He shook his head. “I was standing nowhere near there. Used Herr Scholes’s trick of an inverted Cruikshank’s weave. It only worked because of the dark and the cloth over my mouth.”
Frank and Nkiruka joined them. “We need to move quickly, before he comes out of the safe house and recognises that I have no gun.” Frank held up a broomstick.
Vincent’s approbation of Nkiruka was visible above his mask. “Nicely done.”
She tapped him lightly on the arm. “You haf fu show me that disappearing trick.”
He turned, following Frank towards the side. “At the first opportunity.”
“I saw you working behind Frank, but it was still quite convinc—” A sudden alarming wetness ran down Jane’s thighs. For a moment, she thought she had soiled herself, before the understanding came. “Oh dear.”
“Muse?”
“I believe my water just broke.”
Vincent had Jane in his arms before she was aware of being lifted. “Where is the cart?”
“This way.”
“Wait, wait.” Nkiruka put a hand on Frank’s shoulder. Even with the damp cloth obscuring half her face, her frown was clear. “She need Dr. Jones.”
Frank hesitated, looking at Jane and then Vincent. “There is a fire across the road.”
Nkiruka lifted her chin and stepped closer to Frank, speaking in rapid Igbo. Jane caught the words, “Dr. Jones” and “picknee” but nothing else.
To her surprise, Frank answered in the same tongue, though even to Jane’s ear his diction in that language sounded almost childish. It was a short response.
When he turned back to Jane and Vincent, his expression was guarded and fearful. “You must promise that you will not tell a soul about what I am about to say, not ever. Swear on whatever you hold most dear that you will keep this secret.”
Without hesitation, Vincent said, “I swear on my love for Jane, I will keep your secret.”
“Yes.” Jane did not know what secret they were being asked to keep, but by Frank’s expression it was dire. “And by mine for Vincent, I also swear.”
“We will take you to Dr. Jones, but I must stress that we are about to place hundreds of lives in your hands.” He glanced at the fire again, and gestured for them to follow him towards the slave quarters. “We will not be able to take the cart because the ground is too uneven once we leave the path, but it is not far.”
“Where…?”
“There is a secret village. Picknee Town.” He looked pained as he said it. “Where the map shows the ravine.”
Jane’s jaw dropped open and Vincent looked no less shocked. “The birthrate.”
“With malnutrition, beating, and overwork? It is already low. But … but we want our children to have a better life. When the village was first established, the planters noticed that live births had stopped, so we use a lottery now. Sometimes it is the mother and child, sometimes only the child.”
“Is that—was Amey…?”
“Amey had a daughter and they are both doing quite well.” Though Nkiruka’s voice was still heavily flavoured with an Igbo accent, her speech shifted so it did not sound as though English were a foreign tongue, imperfectly understood. She lifted her dress and tucked the hem into the sash of her robe so she could walk more easily. “I am sorry for that deception.”
It was fortunate that Vincent was carrying Jane, because she was not certain she would have been able to remain standing. Nkiruka had been deliberately making her comprehension of English seem deficient. Nkiruka saw her realisation and winked. “I can sound like you, if I want. But still speak language of the heart with family and dem.”
Jane began to see all the ways in which she had been carefully managed. “And … and the glamural at the Whittens’—all of the slaves who said they were coming to work for us and did not.” They had been using Jane and Vincent as a reason to be absent, to visit their families. And then the women—the women that Nkiruka had suggested Jane bring in to talk about glamour had no doubt done the same. No wonder she had been so keen to continue work on the book because it gave her the opportunity to give more women reasons to leave their estates. Jane suddenly remembered Nkiruka helping Louisa organise the wounded and the lists that they had prepared. “And you can read and write, can you not?”
Nkiruka laughed, shaking her head. “No. Reading is what Frank is for. Don’t need it for me. I came because working on the book made easy excuse for people to travel. See their families. Doc was mad about it, but I set her straight.”
“You used us.”
“Yes.” Nkiruka’s shrug very eloquently pointed out that Jane had no room to be angry about that.
Vincent tightened his grip on Jane. “But why not simply rebel? Why not free everyone?”
“There are forty naval bases on this island,” Frank said.