Jack refused to move. ‘The child is not sick,’ he said, his face set, ‘and consequently needs no attention. He is to be left with his mother.’

  ‘Mother! Mother!’ the purser mocked. ‘What do they know of motherhood? They’re just cattle.’

  ‘No, sir,’ Jack said hotly. ‘You are wrong. They are human. As you and I are human.’

  The purser roared with delighted horror to hear anything so preposterous. ‘The feller’s mad!’ he said to his audience. ‘I never heard the like. Human! The very idea!’

  They agreed with him, mocking and cat-calling. Whoever heard the like? To call a savage human. The feller was mad. ‘Took the heat, I shouldn’t wonder,’ the bosun said.

  Much encouraged, the purser turned to bullying. ‘Get out of my way, lunatic,’ he shouted, looking back at his audience to enjoy the impression he was making, ‘or I’ll have ’ee sent to Bedlam, damme.’

  Jack pulled the pistol from his belt, cocked it and held it towards the purser’s head. It was done so quickly and with such expertise that Mr Smith missed it altogether while he was looking for admiration, and few of the seamen realised what was happening until the gun was levelled. But none of them could miss the chill of command in his voice.

  ‘I think not, sir,’ he said quietly. ‘Nor will you take this baby.’

  ‘Hell’s teeth!’ the purser said and this time it was no mean oath. ‘I’ll have you in irons, sir.’ And he turned to the nearest sailor and gave his own commands. ‘Seize him!’

  The sailor hesitated. Looked at Jack. And didn’t move.

  ‘Don’t just stand there,’ the purser roared at him. ‘Seize him, you dog! Why do you wait?’

  ‘Well, sir, ’tis like this here, sir,’ the sailor explained, avoiding his master’s eyes but making his point notwithstanding. ‘If we puts the slave master in irons for ’ee, sir, who’ll do his work? ’Tis mortal hard work he’m a-doing.’

  The purser was spitting with anger. ‘Devil take ’ee! Do as I say or I’ll have ’ee flogged, sir.’

  This time, the sailor shifted as though he was about to take a step forward but, as soon as he moved, Jack turned the pistol in his direction. ‘Lay so much as a finger on me, sir,’ he said, ‘and I’ll blow your head off.’

  Flogging was to be preferred to decapitation.

  ‘’Od’s bowels!’ the purser roared. ‘Ain’t there a one of you man enough to take him?’

  Apparently not. ‘Not with that there pistol in his hand, sir.’

  It was impasse and it froze them all into inaction, slave and master alike. They were so still that they could hear the insects buzzing and clicking in the weed, and the little lick, lick of water against the hull.

  The little lick, lick of water! ‘There’s a breeze, me hearties!’ Mr Reuben yelled. ‘We’ve got a breeze!’

  The captain was among them, giving orders. ‘Clear the decks! Get those slaves below! Set the spinnaker, Mr Reuben.’

  The quarrel was forgotten in instant activity, the slaves hustled below, fed or not, sails unfurled and set to catch the least movement in the air. And at last, at long, long, exhausted last they began to move, inch by tantalising inch, timbers groaning. The lull was over.

  Within an hour, they were beginning to pick up a little speed and had left their filth behind. Within two, they were under full sail. By the end of the afternoon, they were back in the bounding force of the trade winds.

  The transformation aboard ship was total, as they relaxed in the triple blessing of fair weather, abundant clean water and a strong slip-stream. Nobody was flogged, the cook didn’t grumble about his poor rations, the crew obeyed orders without demur. Soon the decks had been scrubbed until they were white again and the gunwales were scraped clean. Everybody on board took it in turns to wash and the barber worked all day and every day until there wasn’t an unwanted beard to be seen in any part of the ship and all the male slaves were youthfully clean-shaven. Boils healed and tempers calmed. The infant lay in a cooling breeze and was fed and admired. The blue-eyed boy took to following Jack about, eager for odd jobs, which was sometimes useful and occasionally embarrassing. Best of all, nobody mentioned the stand-to. It was almost as if they’d forgotten all about it.

  Except for the purser himself. He took his complaint to the captain as soon as the ship was comfortably under way.

  Mr Tomson heard him out and then gave his considered judgement. ‘Well now, sir, Mr Smith,’ he said. ‘I takes your point and so forth, but the fact of the matter is this. The man does a good job of work with our cattle, no matter what his lunatic opinion of ’em, and so forth. If we was to put un in irons, who’d look after the cattle an’ feed ’em and doctor ’em and clean ’em up, an’ so forth? I tell you plainly, sir, I’d not do the work for all the tea in China, and I doubt you’d volunteer for it neither. No, sir, the way I looks at it is this. Leave him be to work on for the rest of the voyage. Then when he’m landed and the slaves are sold, you can have him back to England in as many irons as you choose and bring him afore a magistrate and so forth, to your heart’s content.’

  It wasn’t the answer the purser wanted and he argued long and angrily against it, pointing out that the man had pulled a gun on him and wasn’t to be trusted, that he was running mad and a danger to the ship. But the captain was adamant and in the end Jedediah had to accept his decision whether he would or no.

  ‘You want to watch your back,’ Mr Reuben warned, early one morning, when he and Jack were on watch together. ‘You made an enemy with that there pistol of yours.’

  Jack had already faced the fact that there would be consequences to his defiance, so he could afford to be casual about it. ‘What of it?’

  ‘Watch your back, that’s all,’ the bosun repeated. ‘’Tis a mean-minded old swabber and means to have ’ee in irons. Take advice from one what knows.’

  ‘I’ve got his measure, Mr Reuben, don’t ’ee worry. He’ll not get the better of me. Have I not come through the jungle fever and outbid old Wan Four and cleaned the holds more times than I’ve had hot suppers? I’ll not be put down by a purser, no matter how much money he’s got a-jingling in his breeches.’

  ‘What of the boy?’ Mr Reuben asked, looking at the blue-eyed slave, who was sitting at Jack’s feet as he usually did these days. ‘He follows you about like a little pet dog. Shall you keep him?’

  ‘Well, as to that,’ Jack said, patting the child’s woolly head, ‘I shall see.’

  ‘Watch you don’t get bit,’ the bosun warned, alarmed by such contact. ‘I wouldn’t touch narry a one of ’em, if I was you.’

  Jack looked at his slave, who was smiling seraphically, his teeth like ivory between wide dark lips, his face moulded into placatory circles. ‘Not this one,’ he said. ‘He’ll not bite. Will you, sir?’

  Then an extraordinary thing happened. The slave looked up as though he was listening, and suddenly spoke, not with the usual clicking, gonging sounds that they expected but with a single, recognisably English word. ‘Bite?’ he said. ‘Bite?’ The questioning inflection was plain.

  Jack was so surprised that for a moment he couldn’t answer. Did this child understand what was being said? Could he speak English? Or was he mimicking like a poll parrot? If a bird could do such a thing, could a savage?

  The word was repeated, this time with more insistence. ‘Bite?’ There was no doubt about his understanding now.

  ‘Bite,’ Jack explained, and he put his hand to his mouth and mimed, taking his forefinger between his teeth and pretending to snap at it. ‘Bite. Snap, snap.’

  ‘Bite,’ the slave said with satisfaction and smiled his broad smile. ‘Bite. Snap, snap.’

  He’s quick, Jack thought and before he could stop to consider the propriety of what he was doing, he spoke again. ‘Jack,’ he said pointing to himself. ‘I am Jack.’

  The slave seemed to understand that too. ‘Jack,’ he repeated, and beating a hand against his own rib cage, ‘Oleanda.’

  ‘Well blow me down!’ Mr Reuben said. ‘Here’s a thing! Is that his name, d’you reckon?’

  ‘I shall never remember it, if ’tis,’ Jack laughed. ‘Howsomever that’s a matter can be remedied.’ He turned to the slave again ‘I am Jack,’ he repeated. ‘You are Blue. Understand. Blue. You are Blue.’

  ‘Blue,’ the slave said, smiling again. ‘Oleanda Blue.’

  The ship’s bell was ringing the end of the watch. ‘Come with me, Blue,’ Jack said. ‘We’ve work to do.’ He didn’t beckon, because there was no need. He knew he would be understood. ‘I reckon I could teach him to speak like a linguist, Mr Reuben. What do ’ee think to that? He be a trifle more than a pet then.’ The boy worked all morning with the rest of the slaves, swabbing the decks with sea water and brushing vigorously. From time to time, he would look up from the streams of water at his feet, hold his arm to his mouth and say ‘Bite! Bite!’ laughing aloud as though the very idea was an irresistible joke. ‘Bite! Bite!’

  As the days passed the impromptu lessons continued and became more frequent, for as Jack soon discovered the newly named Blue had a thirst for learning and wanted every object named, touching sails, mast and spars with a query on his face, bringing lesser objects to lay at Jack’s feet. ‘Marlin spike’, ‘belaying pin’, ‘spoon’, ‘bowl’, repeating the words until he could pronounce them properly. He learnt fast. By the end of that first free-sailing week, he had accepted his new name and understood the use of the personal pronoun: ‘I Blue, you Jack, she Umumi.’ By the end of a fortnight he understood ‘up’ and ‘down’, ‘here’ and ‘there’, and had begun to use verbs. ‘You thirst?’ ‘I thirst.’ He had even ventured into the complications of the English auxiliary verb. ‘You are thirsty?’

  At the start of the third week, they managed their first conversation.

  The evening meal was over and the tubs and spoons were being collected, when one of the male slaves walked across to the empty stew pot and began to beat a rhythm on its side with his wooden spoon as if it was a drum. It was an infectious sound and since the cook wasn’t on deck to complain and Jack raised no objections, another man walked over and joined in, this time drumming the side of the pot with both hands and in a different rhythm. The sound instantly became faster and more complicated. The stew pot throbbed as both men beat with their hands and stamped with their feet. The slaves gathered, at first hesitantly, then with a happy insistence, until they’d formed a semi-circle before the drummers. A third man drifted to join them, his mouth slightly open as if he was in a trance, and for a moment on-beats and off-beats seemed to be working against each other, nudging and colliding. Then they suddenly came together in a single pounding rhythm and a woman began to dance.

  The effect was electrifying for as she threw herself into the rhythm, arms raised and feet stamping, all the other women began to clap, swaying from side to side like a chorus. More and more hands joined in, and the speed of their syncopated rhythm grew faster and faster as the noise increased. Soon the woman was dancing bent double, with her body thrust forward, and her outstretched arms flailing, and her knees rising almost to her chin with every pounding step. She looked like a huge brown bird, struggling to fly.

  She must stop soon, Jack thought, or she’ll be exhausted. She can’t go on like this for ever. But even as the thought was in his head, she let her arms drop and fell back laughing into the crowd, and another woman took her place, dancing in the same way and with the same total abandon. After that, the women threw themselves into the circle one after the other, some in twos and threes, some on their own, but all dancing in the same way, arms outstretched and feet pounding. Now and then the drummers would stop in mid-beat and pause to rest, and the dancers would be carried by the clapping of the crowd. Sweat poured down their faces, their arms fanned the air, and still the drummers beat and still they danced.

  ‘They are like birds,’ Jack said. And was instantly asked to explain the word to his slave. ‘Bird,’ he said, miming flight. ‘Bird,’ pointing up at the sky. ‘They fly. Up there. Up and away.’

  Blue understood him completely. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘She is bird. She is not here. She is bird. She fly.’

  ‘As I thought to do once,’ Jack told him. ‘I thought I was an eagle.’ He remembered the evening the Bonny Beaufoy had left Bristol and how he’d felt he was flying into the setting sun. ‘’Twas all folly, Blue. I was never an eagle.’ The pistol was heavy against his thigh. ‘A fighting cock perhaps, but not an eagle.’

  Blue had listened without comprehension. ‘What is eagle?’ he asked.

  ‘A great bird,’ Jack told him. ‘And we are but earthbound men. Human. Not birds. For we cannot fly away.’ And it seemed to him that he had said something profoundly true.

  Chapter 23

  It was June and the city of Bath was preening itself for the start of the summer season. The King was in Windsor and the ton were entertaining at their summer retreats, but the slave-owning gentry were assembling in their customary watering place and the city stood ready to receive them. Sunshine filled the welcoming honeycomb of the Pump Room, and slanted in above the King’s Bath to stripe the walls with brightness and make the gilded columns shine. It was June.

  Sir George Bradbury was still in London with Sir Humphrey, supervising the loading of their third cargo for Lisbon, which had been purchased from the profits of the first two and which they hoped would prove even more lucrative. But Lady Bradbury had arrived in South Parade the previous afternoon, and now, having taken the tinny waters for the first disagreeable time, was happily cleansing her palate with tea and Bath buns, while she regaled her dear friend Arabella with news of Ariadne’s conquest.

  Arabella was the most rewarding of friends. As the little orchestra produced its neat patterns of sound behind them and teacups clinked and voices rose in giggling cadences, she expressed her happiness at Ariadne’s good fortune, with every indication that she meant what she said. Hermione felt she had never begun a summer so well.

  ‘Where do you intend to hold the wedding?’ Arabella asked, knowing that this was just what Hermione would want to divulge.

  ‘At the Church of St James, in Piccadilly, at the end of September,’ Hermione said with studied carelessness. She had written to her father to tell him the good news and had received an acknowledgement, which was uncommon gratifying, and the promise that the wedding ‘would be attended’. He hadn’t actually specified who would attend but the promise was enough and might well turn out to be the first step towards the reconciliation she desired so much. ‘The Daventry family are usually married at St James, as you know. We could hardly break with tradition.’ Arabella agreed at once and sipped her tea. ‘I trust we shall see the bride in Bath this summer,’ she said. ‘And Melissa, too, of course. How happy she must be for her dear sister!’

  ‘I left them sleeping,’ Hermione said, assuming a smile of motherly concern. ‘The journey down was most fatiguing. But they have promised on their honour that they will join me here within the hour.’

  She would have been surprised to know that Ariadne was up, dressed, and ready to leave the house and that Hepzie, who had been given strict instructions to accompany her wherever she went, was now being given peremptory and contradicting commands.

  ‘Melissa will be awake directly,’ Ariadne said, prodding her sleeping sister in the ribs. ‘You are to stay here and help her to dress. Be quick about it or she’ll be late for the baths.’

  Hepzie was aggrieved. ‘Your mama wished me to attend upon you,’ she said. ‘How may I do that if I am to dress Miss Melissa?’

  ‘The wet nurse shall accompany me,’ Ariadne said casually. ‘She is to be my personal maid. ’Tis all agreed. Were you not told? She has returned here, has she not?’

  Hepzie professed not to know, although she’d watched the wretched girl walk into the kitchen not five minutes ago. Ain’t that just like her, she thought angrily. Sticking her oar in. ‘I’m the lady’s maid. Her place is in the nursery.’

  In fact, Suki was still in the kitchen and doing her best to wash her son in case milady wanted to see him. It was difficult because he was doing his best to wriggle away from her. He was nearly fourteen months old and a strong plump baby with a lusty voice and great determination. And as he’d been toddling for several weeks, he was irked by all this unnecessarily immobilising hygiene.

  ‘Come along, William,’ Suki coaxed. ‘Have your pretty face washed like a good boy, an’ then you shall have some nice titty to make up for it.’

  ‘He’ll go off bang, one of these days, you keep on feedin’ him the way you do,’ Barnaby rebuked.

  ‘Don’t you pay that Barnaby no mind,’ Cook said, pumping water vigorously. ‘You give the little thing all the titty he can take. Pretty soul! Lor’, what a mess this kitchen is. Don’t they scour nothin’ here in wintertime? That’s a temptation to cockroaches, that is. Now where’s that gel? Bessie! Dawdlin’ again. You’ll miss the pick of the market, you don’t get off direct. And what milady’ll say then, I do not dare to think.’

  Bessie had slept badly after her journey and was drooping with fatigue. ‘I does me best, mum, I’m sure,’ she pleaded. ‘Can’t do no more.’

  ‘We’ll go to market together,’ Suki promised. ‘Many hands make light work.’ It was the chance to slip across to the Captain’s lodgings. If his ship had returned, he might even be at home. Oh she couldn’t wait.

  ‘I’m that grateful, Suki,’ Bessie said, as they pushed their way into the crowds. ‘That market fair sets my head to spinnin’. I can’t get accustomed to a multitude. That I can’t. Not nohow.’

  They’d certainly chosen a squashed moment to set off. The streets were crowded with chairs packed against carriages, and pedestrians, passengers, horses and bearers cramped into strife and confusion because the day’s beasts were being driven past them to be butchered: bewildered lambs with coats like clotted cream; sheep bleating piteously, their fleeces matted and bedraggled; frantic pigs squealing between the greasy legs of their red-faced drovers. Above the animals’ frightened heads, the rich fat faces that were so soon to devour them complained loudly and arrogantly that their presence was a nuisance.