He gave a slight tilt of his head towards Mrs. Pridmore with an even smaller head shake. Jane inhaled with understanding. He thought that Mrs. Pridmore did not know about Lord Verbury. Her continued presence meant he could not be direct in his conversation with the overseer. “Of course, but I hope you will tell me all about it when you return.”
He relaxed ever so slightly as he saw that she understood. “You have my word. I am looking forward to seeing what Mr. Pridmore chooses to show me. The tour has been instructive thus far.” Again, beneath his words and in the slight shift of his weight when he said “chooses” lay another message for Jane, which confirmed her own thought.
Mr. Pridmore had been steering the tour very carefully. Given what they had seen, she was certain that the rickety sheds by the road would be far from the worst thing. She did not like letting Vincent bear the burden of this alone, but given Mrs. Pridmore’s tendency to chatter, Jane might be able to gain a different perspective of how things lay without them present.
Jane gave her husband an encouraging smile. “I shall find ways to occupy myself while you are busy with men’s work.”
“I am certain you will.” His eyes almost twinkled in response. “You have always been accomplished at the womanly arts.”
Eight
Customary Restraint
Jane had gathered little of substance from Mrs. Pridmore, other than what she had already suspected. By the lady’s occasional lapse, it was clear that she and Mr. Pridmore had become accustomed to thinking of the estate as their own. Vincent, too, had found conditions as he suspected. The distillery’s boilers had been poorly repaired and little maintained. He found not only men working in the deplorable heat, but children working among the vats of boiling cane syrup. The whole of it seemed designed for disaster, and, while he had been there, a dropped bucket had scalded a youth across his legs. The boy had been beaten for dropping the bucket and then sent back to work. When Vincent had spoken to Mr. Pridmore about it, the man had brushed his concerns aside and said that he was following Lord Verbury’s instructions. He invited Vincent to take it up with his lordship.
That conversation had not gone well.
Monday, their third full day in Antigua, found Jane and Vincent in the counting house. Jane, in a wicker chair by one of the tall windows, was attempting to help him sort out the affairs of the estate and now sat looking through pages of cramped text in the slave registry. It pretended to show the birth and death dates of each slave owned by Lord Verbury, as required by the London Registry, but it had been carelessly kept, and many names were missing. Often a slave was noted without any parentage, even when the dates made it clear that he or she had been born on the estate.
Jane rubbed her eyes and sat back in her chair. The large metal shutters had been thrown back to let in a breeze, which helped somewhat with the afternoon heat.
Across the room, Vincent and Frank were bent over an account book going over the finances of the estate. Seeing them with their heads so close in conversation made the familial resemblance all the stronger. Frank’s skin was darker, and his hair had begun to silver at the temples, but their silhouettes were very much alike. Jane sighed and turned back to the ledger again. She had, at least, begun to gather some sense of what Mr. Pridmore had meant by the low birth rate. An alarmingly high number of women lost their babies shortly after birth or never came to term at all. It was not, in her condition, the most comforting of reading.
Still, it gave her an idea for a distinctly feminine way of determining the state of affairs. “Vincent … my family used to do charity work with the people in our village. We would take such supplies as they could not afford and ensure that they had any medicines they might need.”
“You are thinking to do that here.” Vincent nodded slowly, clearly recognising her deeper meaning. “Though I am not certain it can be accounted as charity if they are people who … whom we are so directly responsible for.”
She swallowed. Of course it would not be charity to take better care of your property—even that thought made her ill. She could not shake the English way of thinking that those working on the estate were free. “All the more reason, then. Would that be useful, Frank?”
“It is, in fact, one of the things that your husband and I are attempting to address.” He placed a finger on the account book to hold his place as he gave her his attention. “The slaves are responsible for growing their own food. While the tending of sustenance plots is common on the island, Mr. Pridmore recently cut their salted fish and pork rations. He felt it unnecessary, since the field slaves are raising chickens.”
“That—that is absurd.”