Keturah Read online

  Pressing through, Keturah surmised, despite how I must appear. It grated on her pride, being found in such a state. But just as he had, she elected to press on, pretending nothing was amiss.

  “I am Jeffrey Weland, of Morning Star Plantation.” He was of average looks, slender and tan, about Ket’s height, with hair bleached from hours in the sun. “This is my younger sister, Miss Esmerelda Weland, my mother, Mrs. Glorietta Weland, and my younger brother, Mr. Harrison Weland.”

  The women curtsied, and his brother graciously took her hand too. “At your service, Lady Tomlinson,” Harrison said, who wasn’t as good as his brother at disguising his distaste at her unkempt appearance. Rather, his homely face revealed both shock and curiosity.

  “Is it true, Lady Tomlinson?” young Esmerelda crooned in her Creole accent, pressing between her brothers to edge nearer. “Have you and your sisters come all this way with not one man to attend you?”

  Ket smiled. “Well, we did bring some of our servants from England, many of them male. But yes, we came without any male relations.”

  “Quite courageous of you, I’d say,” said Jeffrey, looking her over with renewed interest.

  A glance at his finger told her he was unmarried and judging her as prime Nevisian bride material. She stiffened at the thought.

  “Quite,” added their mother abruptly. “I well remember arriving on-island for the first time myself. See here. We have brought you enough food to hold you for a day or two, and other gifts to soften your … transition. A spot of tea. A few crumpets, which my cook made just this morning.”

  “Oh!” Selah interjected, arriving at last with Verity at her heels. “Crumpets? Can it be true?” she asked dreamily as introductions were made. It wasn’t lost on Keturah how Harrison, the younger brother, seemed to come alive once Selah entered the room. The girls met their new neighbors with all the vivacity and charm they might use at a ball in London, and Ket felt a surge of pride. What might this adventure have felt like, encountering it all without them by her side?

  Overwhelming, she decided, and utterly so. But still, after a night’s sleep, in the light of day and with the promise of a good meal, she felt a sense of hope. An urgency to dispatch these guests and get on with it. To see what their father had truly left them, then begin making plans to make the most of it.

  Cuffee came in quietly and hovered at the edge of their circle in polite hesitation, but it was Brutus’s screeching that made the group turn around.

  “So that is true too!” Esmerelda enthused, clasping her hands and tucking them beneath her chin. “One of you is a falconer!”

  “Indeed,” Verity said, striding forward to take a leather glove from Cuffee, then the bird from him. The falcon was agitated and seemed to be chastising her for his overnight abandonment.

  “He’s been like that all morning, Miss Verity.”

  “’Tis all right, Cuffee. He needs only a moment with me. To know I am here and he will be looked after. And a chance to learn about his new environs.”

  “Yes, Miss Verity.”

  Verity removed Brutus’s tiny hood and tucked it into her waistband. She untied his leg strap and lifted him up, setting him free to fly. The big bird flapped his wings and rose, climbing high and circling around them until he disappeared in the bright sun. Esmerelda laughed in delight, and her brothers hooted.

  Selah’s arm looped through Ket’s. “It feels as if he’s blessing us, and the plantation, circling like that, up into the very sun itself.”

  “Of all the audacious things to say!” Mrs. Weland said, fanning herself.

  But her high color only matched Verity’s, who merely smiled back at her and then looked back to the sky. “Is it not?”

  “Yes, well …” said the older woman, clearly flummoxed by her response. “Would you care to join us for supper tomorrow night? You shall have your hands full this day, heading to Charlestown for supplies and such. But tomorrow eve, come to Morning Star. We shall see that you have a proper island greeting with a small soiree to introduce you to Nevis’s finest.”

  “That would be most kind of you,” Keturah said. After all, it was incumbent on her to learn everything she could about getting Tabletop on schedule for some sort of harvest, and what better place to begin her research than among other planters?

  “Very good,” Mrs. Weland said, obviously pleased. Her slanted brown eyes flicked to each of her sons, then over to the Banning sisters, resting on Keturah the longest.

  It wasn’t until then that Keturah understood. This wasn’t merely a social call; the woman was in the market for daughters-in-law. Keturah glanced at both men again and, upon her first assessment, couldn’t see how either would be a match for any of the sisters. Not that her own heart would be an option. The men seemed affable enough, yet neither appeared to have much in the way of gumption.

  And if there was one thing a Banning girl needed, it was strength and gumption in a man.

  ———

  They spent the day in Charlestown as Mrs. Weland foretold, returning their rented wagons, purchasing another, locating basic dry supplies, arranging to get another wagon on the plantation repaired. Back at Tabletop, every one of the livestock listed had been either stolen or butchered and eaten. So they bought four horses and a mule from the Carolinas, a sow and three piglets, a goat, and a dozen chickens. In addition, Keturah purchased six new pails, twenty blankets, twenty straw-tick sacks, bales of hay to stuff them, cotton gowns for the slave women, and shirts and breeches for their male counterparts.

  They circumvented the slaver platforms, aware that they would need to purchase additional slaves if they were to get Tabletop back on track. Today, however, Keturah and her sisters simply had no stomach for it. They stopped at the milliner for new hats with the broader brims that were understandably fashionable in the islands, and a tailor’s shop to order three new gowns for each of them, as well as shifts, stays and underthings, all of them made out of the lightest cotton and silk the tailor could possibly find. One of the gowns was to be a sturdy work dress, a second a bit fancier, and the third something they could wear to parties. In time, they would need more island-appropriate clothing—much of what they’d brought from England was too formal and too warm to wear—but this was a start.

  It was their good fortune that the tailor had a number of partially completed dress gowns, so he could easily finish one for each of them by the next day, promising to send them in time for the soiree at Morning Star Plantation.

  Within the first hour of being in Charlestown, Keturah became aware that the Misses Banning were the talk of the island. Most of the prominent landowners expected to attend the Morning Star soiree to meet the daughters of Richard Banning, whom many had considered a good friend. One after another they expressed the same sentiment, crossing themselves and muttering “God rest his soul.”

  As she walked about in the sultry heat of the island town, Keturah wondered if her father’s soul was truly at rest. Did God truly offer such a thing? Day by day, night by night, had she not prayed for peace between her and Edward? For rest?

  And would God welcome a sinner such as her father—a man living in open relationship with a slave girl and their child—into heaven?

  She was angry at her father. Furious. For so disrespecting her mother, and his daughters, that he had dared to take up with another woman. A woman he had purchased.

  Shame washed through her. No matter where she stood with the Almighty, surely she did not truly wish for Father’s soul to be in peril, did she? Keturah sighed, well aware that a part of her thought it justice as much as the other part wished for nothing but mercy for her beloved father.

  God rest his soul.

  ———

  Still, she was in no mood to see her father’s mistress and her illegitimate son when they pulled up in the clearing before the dilapidated, grand house of Tabletop Plantation. Mitilda and Abraham were out beside the cottage, working their small plot of land as if they had every right to be there. And wit
h one look at the will her father had left, Keturah knew they did, despite how it grated.

  Mitilda paused, wiped her forehead and upper lip of sweat, glanced at them all, then resumed her work as if they were a passing flock of pelicans, only idly interesting.

  Ket frowned. Why did the woman’s dismissal irritate her so? What was it that she expected of Mitilda? Respect? Surely. The woman could give her that, at least. After all, it was her father who had given her a home, land to work, a future!

  But at what cost to her? Ket wondered. Had her father forced himself on the woman or had she welcomed his attentions? What of the stature it brought her on the plantation? She hadn’t missed the woman’s fine dress, her boots, as well as the boy’s. No other slave on Tabletop had had anything nearly as proper to wear. But at what cost? railed her conscience again.

  She thought of Edward and what his nightly ministrations had cost her. He’d been intent on an heir, and with each passing month in which she failed to turn up pregnant, he became more bitter, more brutal. The thought of her father forcing himself on Mitilda in any similar way … well, it turned her stomach.

  Pushing such distasteful thoughts aside, she set Primus and Gideon upon distributing the clothes to those in need in the slaves’ quarters. Grace and Edwin were tasked with baking bread and some fish for their tardy afternoon meal, and Absalom was sent to spell Bennabe, who had been left to keep an eye on the two new slaves to make sure they didn’t run for the mountain refuge, as some had warned. “Find out their names!” she called after him. “Or give them names, if you must,” she added.

  What did one do with people with whom you had not one word in common? There might be people on Nevis who spoke the African tongue, but from what she had learned, there were many different dialects. Slavers might arrive with human cargo speaking ten versions.

  She shook her head. One limb at a time. First, something to assuage her rumbling belly. Second, a bath and a change out of their filthy gowns. Third, a rest, before they mounted their new horses and surveyed the plantation.

  She had just asked the maids to heat water for a bath when Mimba, the old Tabletop slave, came into the kitchen to ask for some bread. When he heard her, he said, “You ought to go up to the waterfall pool, Lady Ket, to bathe. That’s where your father always favored.”

  She stared at him, wondering if she had heard him correctly. “The waterfall?” She noticed then the long scar that ran down his left cheek.

  “That’s right,” he said with a single nod, his Creole accent and tone making his words affable. “Take that trail yonder past the stables and head up, up, up. ’Bout a mile in, you see another trail to the right, there beside a twin tree. Follow it and you’ll find a lovely pool of fresh water, with enough brush around it for privacy. Your father used to take a bar of soap, a towel, and a fresh shirt, and returned home a new man. Even invited some of us to join him a few times after a long, hard day in the fields.”

  Keturah stared at him blankly. In all her life she could not have imagined her proper, formal father bathing in the wild, let alone with servants. But then she could not have imagined him taking a mistress and making her the lady of the house either. And he’d certainly done that.

  “Thank you, Mimba,” she said crisply, dismissing the thought. “I think I shall take my bath indoors this day,” she said over her shoulder, already leaving the kitchen. She could feel rather than hear his doubt over the wisdom of that, but she knew that if her mother were here, she would never condone any sort of outdoor bathing. The closest they’d come was a swimming hole near Hartwick Manor, where they’d meet other neighbor children for a romp in the water. But that was a public swimming hole, not some hidden pool …

  Gray, she thought wistfully, remembering him as a boy swinging over the swimming hole on an old rope and then falling to the surface, knees tucked, his aim to splash them all. He had been so exuberant. Delirious in the freedom. Somehow she knew he wouldn’t have thought twice about bathing in the pool Mimba had mentioned.

  She wondered how he was faring. In what state had he found his own plantation? He wasn’t far away, and yet after becoming accustomed to their closer proximity during the voyage, it felt as though he were a hundred miles away. She climbed the stairs and went to her room, then to her window, gazing across the remains of sugarcane down to the sea. Had Gray found a home in shambles or in good working order? She hoped, for his sake, that it was in better shape than hers at Tabletop. With any luck there might even be cane in the ground already, an overseer, and slaves hard at work.

  Gray had glimpsed Keturah and her sisters pass through town, through the open window of the mercantile in which he and Philip were buying supplies. The plantation house was nothing grand, only two bedrooms, a small kitchen, and a parlor, but it was all they really needed. It was in relatively good condition, other than a hole in the roof that needed patching. Along with the pile of food supplies, he added a bucket of nails, a roll of tar paper, and asked for a bundle of shingles too.

  He had a hard time not letting his mouth drop open when the shopkeeper totaled his bill. He’d known, of course, that everything was ten times the expense here on the island, but facing it for the first time came as an unwelcome surprise. He was just counting out the coin to pay the shop owner when two men entered, talking about women they’d seen down the street.

  “Banning’s youngest, the blonde—she won’t be alone for long,” said one. He let out a low whistle of admiration. “She’s a beauty.”

  Gray stiffened.

  “None of them will be alone for long,” said the other, slapping the back of his hand against his friend’s chest. “That Keturah has her late husband’s fortune as well as the deed to Tabletop, and she’s fair enough,” he added, lowering his voice as if becoming aware that others might be listening.

  Gray gathered his things and met Philip’s eye. The two moved away from the counter and toward the door.

  “Ahh, who do we have here?” said one of the men, sizing up Gray and Philip and the items in their arms. “More newcomers to the island?”

  “Indeed,” Gray said. “I am Gray Covington. I’ve come to take over Teller’s Landing. And this is my man, Philip.”

  “Welcome, welcome,” said the first man, perhaps five years older than Gray. He was a rotund man with a rounded nose and shadows under his eyes that spoke of a night of drinking. “I am Xavier Armstrong, and this is my cousin, Stanley Lloyd. We hail from Silver Spring, down in Gingerland.”

  “At your service,” Gray said with a polite nod to each.

  “So … Teller’s Landing, you say. That land has been rented out in recent years, has it not?”

  “It has. The Welands of Morning Star worked it. But I’ve come to try my hand at running the plantation now.”

  “I see, I see,” Armstrong said, and it was clear as his brown eyes ran over Gray that he thought he wouldn’t last long. “I hope you know what you are getting into. Many arrive from England with visions of cane leaves dripping with gold florins.”

  “And many more depart having spent their last one,” Stanley said, crossing his arms.

  “So I’ve heard,” Gray said evenly. “I did my share of studying before we set sail. I believe I’m up to the challenge.”

  “Good man, good man.” Armstrong’s words were far more encouraging than his tone. It was as if he’d already judged Gray and found him wanting.

  “Well, we must be off. There is much to do at the plantation.”

  “I can only imagine,” Armstrong said. The two men parted, allowing Gray and Philip to pass.

  “Say,” said Lloyd, “if you arrived on the Restoration, then you had the chance to make the acquaintance of the Misses Banning, did you not?”

  “I did,” Gray said, his hand on the doorknob.

  “Then do us a favor, man. Tell us, are any of them currently … entangled? What I mean to say is … are they as single as is rumored? Open to courting?”

  “Ahh, no. I doubt it,” he said with a
slow shake of his head. Honestly, he believed Keturah wouldn’t consider a man for some time. Verity seemed to take a fancy to Captain McKintrick. And it would be over his dead body that he would allow either of these pompous fools to court sweet Selah, “the blonde” they had so crassly admired upon entering the shop. He hid a smile when their faces drooped. “The Misses Banning and Lady Tomlinson are here for one reason only, gentlemen, and that is to turn Tabletop around. Not to find husbands. Good day.”

  He held back a grin as they departed. Outside, they waited for the shopkeeper’s slave to bring out their goods and load them into the wagon.

  Philip took off his hat and wiped both forehead and face of sweat. He gave Gray a long look. “Think that was your place, Gray? To speak for the ladies?”

  Gray scowled and glanced toward the open window of the shop. “I promised their cousin Cecil I would look after them. If I can keep a few wolves from their door, why should I not?”

  Philip nodded, ever conciliatory, and pursed his lips. “That’s a fine reason. Or is it that you hope to court Lady Keturah yourself?”

  Gray scoffed. “Me?” he said with a frown, even as a hundred different exchanges aboard the Restoration came to mind. “No,” he said emphatically. He raised a hand. “Now, I admit that we’re old friends. And aboard ship, there were a few times I thought …” He paused, staring off toward the sparkling blue-green of the Caribbean. Had he not dreamed of her last night? He sighed and shook his head. “No, ’tis as I said inside the shop—Keturah is only here to turn Tabletop around.”

  Philip nodded again. “What of Verity? Or Selah?”

  Gray cocked his head. “There really is no sense in continuing this conversation. I have nothing to offer a bride. No home. No fortune. Until I turn Teller’s Landing around …”

  Philip moved to slide open the back of the wagon as the slave came outside with their things. “And when you do?” he pressed.

  Gray didn’t answer. Instead, he waved Philip’s nosy inquiry away with a laugh. But inside he thought, It wouldn’t be Verity or Selah I would go after.