Chapter 31
Chapter
McGann wakes in the middle of the night and feels the heat of a fever rising within him.
Or maybe the heat comes from outside himself.
He can’t tell. Nor can he feel any difference from the movements of the ship, except for a few quiet moments there in the dark when he thinks their forward progression has gentled.
Perhaps he has made it to port after all.
Or perhaps he’s dying. He closes his eyes and thinks of Catherine, flipping through his catalog of her smiles in his mind: the sweet one, the mischievous one, the one that’s soaked through with heat and desire.
If he is dying, his last dream might as well be a good one.
The next morning, when James brings him a worm-ridden biscuit, he can tell definitively that something has changed.
He’s no longer cold; no longer shivering until his teeth clack together inside his head.
And there’s humidity, too, the kind of wet blanket feel to the air he generally abhors but is more than grateful for right now because it means the heat comes from outside himself.
He isn’t dying of fever, despite the greenish, foul-smelling discharge that stains his trousers around his thigh wound.
“Get up.” A voice rouses him from his stupor. He wearily opens his eyes to find James lingering outside the brig.
“Nay,” McGann says.
“Aye. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll get your lazy arse up. We’ve put in.”
“Where?”
“You know where.” That’s from Barclay. “It doesn’t become you to play dumb, brother.”
McGann pushes himself to his feet, and pain ratchets up his wounded leg and then explodes into the rest of his body. He limps forward to the bars of his little prison.
“Get me a doctor, Barclay,” he says.
“That’s ‘Your Grace’ to you, and I won’t remind you again. James, get him ashore. I’ve business to attend to.”
McGann grips the bars and holds on as best he can. Any movement makes the small enclosure spin around him, and he’s dismayed to find he needs those bars to hold himself upright.
He breathes in deeply and closes his eyes, commanding himself to stay on his feet. To balance.
“I need a doctor, Your Grace,” he says, swallowing back the sarcasm he’d like to imbue that address with. Barclay is the furthest thing from grace he can imagine. “You’ll never know where that key is if you let me die here.”
“Don’t be overly dramatic, brother. You’re not dying. Although,” he wrinkles his nose, “you do smell.”
McGann grips the bars until his knuckles are white. His brother is either an idiot or especially adept at believing whatever story he tells himself to make his actions more palatable. He wonders what story makes kidnapping his own brother and bankrupting his sister seem acceptable.
“What’s in it for you anyway?” McGann asks. “There’s nothing in that box to concern you.”
“Money,” Barclay says shortly. “The only thing that has ever been in it for anyone. And the only reason I would ever deign to spend my time with men of commerce. Perhaps you weren’t playing dumb after all. Perhaps you really are a twit.”
“Men of commerce?” McGann tries to hide his surprise. That isn’t what he’d been expecting his brother to say. But then he understands. “Do you work for the East India Company? Doing what? I never saw hide nor hair of you there.”
Barclay shrugs. “Let’s say I am employed in a rather informal manner. Dukes don’t work, but we do need a ready cash flow. It can be quite a predicament.”
McGann stares at his brother. If Barclay really is in the Company’s pocket, there’s no reason he wouldn’t have just handed over the box and let them deal with the key.
Or, he’d have killed McGann outright.
So why hasn’t he done either of those things?
“What do you do for them?” he asks.
“This and that. A vote in their favor when it’s needed.
A whisper in the right ear at the right time.
And I keep tabs on you, setting up shop with Crawford of all people,” Barclay sneers.
“A marquess’s second son. You might as well have picked a baronet and been done with it if you were going to scrape the bottom of the peerage ranks.
Although I suppose any member of the aristocracy that would partner with you wouldn’t be the sterling sort. ”
“Enough,” McGann says.
He knows what his brother is about to say; the insults he’ll hurl are the same he’s been flinging at him for the last seventeen years. McGann has no need to hear them.
“Given you’re a by-blow,” Barclay continues, ignoring him. “I ought not to even call you brother. You’re an embarrassment and nothing more.” He turns to leave. “But you’ll have a doctor when you’ve given me what I want. No matter what you might think, I am not a monster.”
And then he leaves.
McGann keeps where he is for a few more moments, clutching the prison bars with white knuckles to steady himself for whatever’s coming next.
“Let’s get this shite over with,” he growls at James.
James only smirks back and McGann wonders if he has the physical fortitude to bring the man down. Perhaps. He tries to move his weight to his toes and unhooks his hands from the bars to prepare himself for a fight. He nearly tips over instead.
Bloody hell.
He has to grasp at the bars again to keep from hitting the deck with his face. Now isn’t the time.
But it will come, he reminds himself. It always comes.
“I wouldn’t if I were you,” is all James says as he unlocks and pushes open the door. “If you take a swing at me, I’ll have to kill you, and His Grace would be unhappy with me if I did that.”
“I am his brother,” McGann says, but James only snorts.
“Not because you’re related, you clod. Because he needs the payout from whatever’s in that box and he can’t open it without the key. The key you have.”
“I don’t have it,” McGann says, and then, “last I heard, the dukedom had plenty of coin. Why does Barclay need funds so badly?”
James only stares at him and shakes his head. “Everybody needs funds. The clearances have emptied us out. There are hardly any Scots left in Scotland anymore. And those that did stay are bloody desperate.”
McGann knows of the clearances, of course; everyone knows of them.
That there are more sheep than Scots up North these days.
That the British have well and truly broken the clan system and the result has been disastrous.
No one to farm or work the land. No chiefs to hold to tradition and purpose.
Families and communities broken, everything derelict.
He knows how hard life is in the North right now.
But Barclay has a dukedom, for fuck’s sakes. He isn’t a laborer.
“He’s double-crossed them, hasn’t he?” McGann says. “Barclay found the box and wants to use whatever’s in it to his advantage. Thinks he can sell its contents to the highest bidder, the East India Company be damned. But not without the key.”
It’s the only reason that makes sense.
Jesus wept, his brother’s an arsehole.
James doesn’t bother to answer him, just pulls McGann out of the brig and up the schooner’s ladders. But McGann doesn’t need him to answer. The stillness of the man’s face and the aversion of his eyes say quite enough. McGann’s right about this and he knows it.
James leads him out onto the deck, and he stares at the sky, lit up with that peachy-orange glow he loves.
He tries to enjoy it; it’s the first sunset he’s seen in a week.
And it might be his last if he doesn’t give his brother the key to the box.
Which he can’t do because he doesn’t have it. Catherine does.
He shakes his head and thinks of her, as he does when he feels his spirits flag. He remembers the way they ate their dinners together aboard The Elphame. Recalls how the sunset highlighted her face in this same golden, peachy light.
He holds that memory in his mind, letting it wash over him and fill him with something that feels like hope, while James pushes him to the gangway leading to the pier.
They walk with McGann in front and James behind. James doesn’t even bother with restraints—it takes all the energy McGann has to put one foot in front of the other in a limping, dragging walk. He can’t run, much less escape, and both men know it.
The pier, when they finally reach it, is empty and hot, and it smells like fish guts. McGann breathes in deeply, loving the wretched scent. There’s nothing like the sour smell of rotting fish and sea brine to remind a man that he’s not dead.
He grins to himself and lifts his head to assess their position. Kingston is ahead of them, up a dusty, twisting road. And north of that is Spanish Town, where the government is housed. He wonders where they’re headed, probably to neither place if he had to guess.
And he wonders about his gran, especially what Barclay said to her, or paid her, to give up his lockbox. The one she’d given him that holds the only things he has from his mother.
He wonders about Esmee and her new beau, a former Bow Street Runner of all people, and how she’s faring back in London. And he thinks of Catherine, always Catherine, who must have reached Boston by now.
James pushes him toward a dilapidated carriage that awaits them at the end of the pier, and he groans as he steps onto the stair mount.
His leg nearly gives out from under him as soon as he puts weight on it, but James catches him from behind and, with the help of the coachman, heaves him the rest of the way up and into the conveyance.
McGann sinks back onto the dirty squabs and waits, letting the heat of Jamaica seep into his bones.
It’s December but hot enough that he’s soon covered in sweat. Even as daylight fades, the temperature holds, and he feels himself marinating in dirt and grime and stink. The worst of it is the rank smell of infection coming off his wound. His leg is definitely getting worse.
“Should I even bother to ask where we’re going?” he mutters to James, who climbs into the carriage beside him. James doesn’t answer, just knocks on the roof for the coachman to begin their journey.
They head for the interior of the island.
The road is dusty and bumpy and made worse by the unsprung state of the carriage.
Each sharp jolt sends a bolt of nausea from McGann’s stomach to his throat.
He palms the seat beside him and wipes his brow, grateful he’d not bothered to force down the hard biscuit this morning.
Although, the thought of casting up his accounts on James’s shoes does bring a smile to his face. It’s short-lived though, as another set of divots and bumps in the road makes his head swim and his stomach churn. He grips his fists into balls at his sides to keep himself steady.
Eventually, they turn off onto a long, winding road that does nothing to help McGann’s queasiness, although this one is better kept than the main road. Less bumpy, more private.
Lush greenery springs up on either side of them, and suddenly they’re enveloped in the landscape of McGann’s memories.
This is the Jamaica he saw the day he found his gran, and the one he’s dreamt of returning to these past four years.
The smell of flowers embroiders the air, and the day’s final golden rays of sunlight reflect off the leaves that surround them, highlighting every shade of green imaginable.
He loves how many colors Jamaica has and how different they are from Scotland’s.
Here, they feel brighter and bolder, made in shades he wouldn’t have thought possible if he wasn’t seeing them with his own eyes.
The creamy pinks and yellow of plumeria, the bright fuchsia of hibiscus.
So many different greens, it boggles his mind.
One day, he thinks, he’ll catalog them and store them in his head next to his volume of Catherine’s smiles. A directory for the things he loves.
He startles momentarily at the thought, but not for long.
Of course he loves her. Loving his Menace comes as naturally as breathing, once he lets it.
She’s his wild windstorm of a woman. Chaos to his order.
Passion to his placidity. Not that he’s ever placid around her.
No one makes him lose his temper like she does.
No one gets under his skin and lifts his spirits and makes him smile like her.
Apart, they’re loose ends, but together, they fit. They make something whole.
He pictures her walking the streets of Boston, pint-sized warrior that she is, head held high. She’ll be running the place soon enough, he has no doubt. The Americans have no idea who they just let loose within their borders, Elphame help them all.
He smiles to himself and leans slightly to his side to peer out the carriage window. Through the vegetation, he can just make out the edges of a looming manor house up the road, but the conveyance stops well away from it.
James alights first with the coachman. Together, they drag McGann out of the carriage and force him through the underbrush to a dark, grated hole in the ground.
“What’s this?” McGann asks.
“Root cellar,” James says.
McGann stares at the dark pit in front of him.
He’s just got out of one prison cell and has no desire to be in another.
He wonders briefly if begging would do any good—he knows he’s in no shape to fight his way out—but one look at James’s face tells him it won’t, so he doesn’t bother.
Just holds his breath while James opens the grate, and he and the coachman shove him into the dark, stone hole at their feet.
From prison to prison, he thinks just as he hits the bottom with a hard thwack.
He exhales and bends his knees to take the impact but feels his ankle twist beneath him nonetheless.
He perceives only the shock of his landing first, the moment of disorientation when all the air leaves his body.
And then he registers the pain. An unbidden howl escapes his lips as James pulls up the ladder he hadn’t bothered to use and flings the grate back down.
It isn’t locked. Or McGann thinks it isn’t, because it doesn’t need to be. The root cellar is too deep for him to climb his way out, especially with a twisted, possibly broken, ankle. And a knife wound in his thigh.
He glances around the dim shadows for anything of use. There isn’t much—no boxes or tables or shelves for him to stand on, just the remains of moldy carrots and parsnips scattered around the ground.
Bloody hell.
He hates parsnips. But he’ll eat them if he has to; he needs every ounce of strength he can muster. For now, he reaches for a carrot and eats it for supper before he curls himself into a ball to sleep. Tomorrow, he’ll figure out how to escape.