Chapter 35
Chapter
Catherine heaves open the root cellar grate, silently thanking the strength she’s cultivated in her arms and back that allows her to move the heavy iron door. She quickly finds the ladder that James flung away and drags it back over to the cellar, lowering it down to McGann.
“Can you climb?” she asks as Andrew slowly and painfully pushes himself to his feet.
“Aye.” He limps toward the ladder.
“I’m coming down to help you.” It’s too hard for her to watch a man who’s usually so graceful in his movements struggle with even a basic step.
“Nay!” She hears the undercurrent of panic in his voice. He never panics.
“Andrew—what’s wrong?”
“Just stay where you are, lass. Please. I need to see you up there.”
“Alright,” she agrees warily. And only because he’s said please. Apparently that word works on her too. If he asks nicely, she thinks, there’s nothing I’ll deny him.
But it’s painful to watch him limp to the ladder and then slowly haul his body up, step by step. She lies on her stomach so her arms can brace the ladder, reaching down to touch him as soon as possible.
“You’re almost there,” she says as he climbs rung after rung. “You’re so close.” She strains her fingertips downward, trying to be as near to him as she can.
He pauses and looks up at her, his emerald eyes a mix of pain and determination. His brown skin has turned gray and slick with sweat.
Damn Barclay, she thinks. Damn that man to hell.
Andrew climbs a few steps higher, swaying on the rungs, and she reaches forward.
She can just barely touch him, but it feels like heaven, having her fingers skim the top of his head, then his cheek, then his shoulder.
He feels hot to her, feverish and unsteady, but also like the most welcome sensation in all the world.
“I’m here,” she whispers as he crests the top of the cellar and pulls himself out, stretching his long body on the ground next to hers.
She lies beside him for only a moment, feeling the hard, solid warmth of him, letting her fingertips run along his shoulder and arm. As if she’s still convincing herself of his solidity. That he’s here, beside her. Alive.
“You’re here,” she whispers.
“Aye.”
“You’re hurt.”
“Nay, lass. All is well.” He grasps her hand and holds it still for a moment over the beating of his heart.
“It’s not, Andrew, or you would have let me help you.” Her relief at finding him is swept away by a sudden rush of panic at what could have happened to him. “Why, you could have fallen. Hit your head! Hurt your leg worse!”
“Menace,” he says slowly, “I’m fine. I just didn’t want you on the ladder.”
“And what is that supposed to mean?”
“That I didn’t want you slapping my arse while I was trying to climb. I know how you get around ladders.”
She doesn’t need to see the smirk to know it’s there. Her anger leaves her in a rush, as swiftly as it came. In its place settles something steadier, softer—relief. Gratitude, even, that he’s well enough to make a joke.
“It’s nothing you wouldn’t have deserved,” she says and begins to push herself to her feet. “But that’s an idea for later. After you’ve had a bath. We need to get you out of here.”
“Are you saying I smell, Menace?”
“I definitely am.” She looks around, realizing she has no idea where to take him.
“To my grandmother’s house,” he says, as if reading her mind. “I know the way.”
“Can you ride?”
“Aye.” But he’s unsteady on his feet again as he stands.
They make their way slowly back through the underbrush to where McNeil left the horses, but there’s still no sign of him—or of Rogers or Childers.
Catherine looks up the main road and then back at Andrew, weighing her options.
Go back for Rogers and send McGann on alone, or accompany him herself to make sure he gets the help he so clearly needs.
The bright sunlight of the road shows her the ravages of his face in a way the shaded underbrush hadn’t. His skin is ashen, his cheeks hollow. His ankle is swollen and an ugly green-yellow-gray color. The wound on his thigh smells. Heavens, she leans in slightly. It smells terribly.
That decides her. The smell of the wound and Violet’s words that replay in her mind: we must be vigilant about infection.
Andrew can’t make the trip alone. He can barely make it onto the horse, and in the end, they only take one—her riding behind him to hold him upright.
Her arms and thighs strain with the effort to keep them both astride, but the horse bears their weight amiably as they follow McGann’s muttered directions to the outskirts of Kingston, where many of the free villages are located.
She will get him to his grandmother’s house, and then she’ll send help back for the others.
She ties the horse in front of a row of tiny, well-kept cabins that Andrew indicates, and helps him descend the mount and limp to the front door.
She’s lost her bonnet somewhere, and the heat blazes down on the top of her head.
She can feel herself soaked through with sweat and her sunburned skin pulls tight across her cheekbones, itchy and raw.
Both of them are filthy, and she hopes that if it is his grandmother who answers the door, she won’t take one look at them and slam it shut.
She needn’t have worried.
The small, wizened woman who swings the door open at her knock is so clearly McGann’s relation it almost takes her breath away.
Their faces have exactly the same shape, as if they’ve been cut from different-sized but identical molds.
His grandmother’s skin is a deep, ebony black, while his is a lighter shade of brown, and Andrew is nearly twice the woman’s size—but otherwise they are the same.
The phrase spit and image comes to her mind.
“I’ve brought—” Catherine starts, but the woman only stands aside and waves them into her home.
“On the bed,” she directs Catherine, who dutifully does as told, helping Andrew limp across the room and down onto the bed. She’s glad it’s only a few steps; he’s too unsteady, and she’s too exhausted for either of them to go any farther.
McGann’s grandmother eyes him up and down. “Ankle and thigh. Anything else?” she asks as she takes hold of Catherine’s elbow and steers her back toward the door.
“A fever, I think,” Catherine says. She wants to stay with him, but his grandmother is already gently but firmly pushing her across the threshold.
“Best leave him with me,” the older woman says. “And aloe vera for that sunburn of yours. It looks angry.”
And then the door is politely but firmly closed in her face.
Catherine stands for a moment on the other side. She wants to hold Andrew’s hand and put a cold cloth over his brow. She wants to hold him close and tell him how much he means to her. But so does his grandmother. And she has more right to the man than Catherine does.
And there’s still Rogers to think about. And a duke to apprehend.
She frowns but leaves him there, riding back to Spanish Town in the intense island heat, trying to figure out exactly what she’s going to say to Mrs. Masters. She’s definitely going to need her help.
McGann wakes in a small, one-room cabin.
His large body has been laid out on the single bed in the corner of the room, the length of which is augmented by bundles of dried grasses stacked high to accommodate his feet.
The bale, slightly elevated from the rest of the bed, gives him a good view of his ankle, which has been cleaned and neatly wrapped.
“Sprained,” says a warm voice from the other side of the room. A voice he knows and has wanted—so very badly—to hear again.
He turns his head to find his grandmother seated at the single table against the far wall.
“Your ankle’s sprained, not broken,” she says. “The rest of you was harder to patch up, though.”
He raises his head slightly to look at the wound on his thigh. It’s been cleaned too, stitched up and bound in linen.
“Took all of my rum and my moonshine to clean that one.” She wrinkles her nose. “Smelled like fish guts.”
“Gran.” He smiles at her, something lifting in his chest. “Thank you.”
“Of course. Now, you best tell me, child, what it is you’ve gotten yourself into. Last time you came, I hoped that would be the end of your trouble, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.”
“The lockbox,” McGann begins, “from my last visit. Did you—”
“That accursed thing? Yes, I did.”
He hasn’t even asked the question yet.
“Did someone come here for it?” he tries again.
“They did. Sent by your brother, no less. And before you ask, I gave it to them.”
He hears the defensiveness in her voice and doesn’t know how to read it.
“I wish you hadn’t,” is all he can think to say.
“What you wish I’d done or not done isn’t my concern. Those men came here and they threatened me—and what’s more, they threatened you. Of course I gave it to them. There’s nothing in it more important than your life, child.”
She sounds more resolute now, less defensive. And her tone brooks no argument from him.
“Now, how does that leg feel?” she asks, changing the subject. “I wasn’t sure that fever was going to break.”
The ache in his leg is a constant, low-lying hum to their conversation, but it’s nothing like the sharp, swollen excruciation he felt before.
“It’s better,” he says. “Thank you.”
“Bitter melon and saltwater rinses. Plus all my rum.”
“You mentioned that already, Gran.”
“I was making sure you heard me. Now, listen to me, child, I understand whatever you were keeping in that box was important to you.”
McGann starts to speak but she holds up a hand for him to stop, and he obeys.
“Best let me say this,” she continues. “I can tell it’s bothering you.
” He stays quiet, while she goes on. “That box held your mother’s things, along with that photograph.
I know you thought it important enough to hide it away out here on the island.
But you believe me when I tell you there is nothing more important than keeping yourself alive.
Nothing. When you get to my age, that’s the only thing you know for certain.
That you can’t take life for granted. Do you understand me? ”
“I do.”
And he does.
What’s done is done, and there’s a part of him that soaks up this conversation like a parched field soaks up rainwater.
His grandmother, he realizes, has tried to protect him—not betray him.
The fact that he hadn’t even considered that as a possibility makes him feel dumber than the worst kind of dolt.
“Now then,” she says. “Tell me about that girl who brought you here. I could tell she wanted to stay, but best to wait until you’ve healed.”
He turns his head. “Did she now?” he asks, and even he can hear the hope in his voice.
“She did. Stubborn like you, I sense. Must be Scottish too. She sunburned like a Scot, in any case. Her face was red as a sorrel leaf.”
McGann grins. “She’s English, not Scottish. And I’m only half-Scottish anyway. Half-Scot, half-Jamaican. Half-Black, half-white.”
Half-subjugator, half-subjugated, the familiar thought rises, unbidden. Half-breed.
His grandmother narrows her eyes. “Have you had a knock on the head, child? You’re not half of anything.”
McGann looks at her, confused. “Of course I am. Only half, never whole. Betwixt and between, as they say.”
She rolls her eyes before she demands of him, “Who says that? You’re not a pie, Andrew. You’ve not been cut up into slices to pass around a dinner table. You’re a whole person. A Jamaican, if you want to be, and a Scot. Both, not half. Double, not less. Did that father of yours teach you nothing?”
“No,” McGann says flatly. “He didn’t.”
She sighs. “He always was weak-willed. I told your mother so, but she wouldn’t hear a word against him.
She loved the fool. And then when she passed and he took you away…
” She shakes her head. “He told me he would love you. Not that it mattered what I thought. I couldn’t have stopped him from taking you any more than I could stop the tide from rising.
He was a duke, and even here, that carries more weight than I’ve got.
But he did say you’d have a better life there than here. It wasn’t true?”
“No. It wasn’t.”
“So I gather.” She sighs again. “Well, Andrew, all the more reason to live now, isn’t it? So you can have that life that should have been yours. One where you’re happy.” She looks pointedly at his leg. “And one that doesn’t take all my rum and moonshine to fix you up.”
She rises slowly and makes her way across the room to him. She’s bent from her age and a lifetime of forced labor. Her hair is a white shock, and her hands are gnarled like the roots of an oak tree. But he can see his own face in hers—the slope of his brow and the shape of his eyes.
He hasn’t known before this moment how much that would mean to him—to see his face in hers. To imagine his mother’s there too. That he might resemble her, even a little bit.
“Did she look like me?” he asks, and he doesn’t care that it makes him sound like a little boy. He feels like a little boy.
He knows he should’ve asked these questions the first time he met his gran, but he’d been short on time. And bravery. He’d been afraid of what he might hear: that his mother hadn’t loved him. That his grandmother had given him away.
Those fears seem absurd now, under her gaze.
“Your mother?” His grandmother lowers herself to the edge of the bed beside him and reaches for his hand.
“Ama looked exactly like you.” She pauses.
“You’ve got her face, child, and I could sit here and stare at you all day if you’d let me.
Ama would have loved you fiercely for your whole life, had she the chance.
Don’t you ever doubt that. Do you hear me? Never.”
“I won’t,” he says, tilting his head away from her to hide the sheen of tears gathering in his eyes.
She grasps his large hand with her fragile one, and he holds on as tightly as he dares.