Chapter 2
Thunder rumbled from the west and sheet lightning lit the sky on the night when everything changed forever for the daughter of Dulcina Kildare.
Wide-eyed, eight-year-old Lochranza Kildare gazed at the changing patterns thrown on the wall. With each flash of lightning, her room became a theatre of light and shadows where ordinary things became monsters, unicorns, castles and enchanted islands.
The islands seemed so close; the castles perched high in the air. If she could just touch one…
Her fingers tickled the air, but too late. The shadows changed again, becoming something different in her fanciful mind.
Exhausted by effort, secure in her bed and protected from insects by muslin drapes soaked in vinegar and herbs, she finally fell asleep.
The storm having abated, the castles, unicorns and monsters retreated, leaving whitewashed walls and a floor that smelled of the wood it was fashioned from.
Situated on a cliff in the south-east of the island and just a mile or so from the old approach to Kingston, the house was reached by a narrow track winding through an expanse of twisted trees and knee-high grass.
The cliff overlooked a crescent of beach called Dove Cove, where the sea surged over rocks before hissing back unto itself. Lochranza had listened to and loved that sound for as long as she could remember.
Much to Mama Molly’s consternation, she had often sat on the very edge of that clifftop staring out to where sea and sky merged on a distant horizon, oblivious of the danger posed by either the height or the crashing waves beneath her.
She’d asked Mama Molly what was out there beyond that blending of sea and sky.
‘The world,’ her nurse had replied. ‘The world with all its wonders and also all its woes.’
‘I’d like to see those wonders. One day I will. I know I will,’ the little girl exclaimed, her face bright with enthusiasm.
Regardless of the warnings that such a habit was dangerous, she continued to haunt that clifftop, sometimes with her legs dangling over the edge.
Possessing great respect for both cliffs and sea, Mama Molly threatened all kinds of things, her wide hips swaying indignantly as she cut through the tall grass, grabbing Lochranza by the scruff of her neck.
‘Child! You will be the death of me – or the death of yourself!’
Kicking and screaming ignored, she’d scooped Lochranza from the threat of danger, tucking the wriggling, protesting child beneath her arm as though she were no more than a rolled-up rug.
A cane across her legs or sending to bed with no supper failed to stop her from going to that favourite spot. It was as though the far horizon was calling her, daring her to escape. Some day she would. When she was grown. That was her plan.
Cocooned in her nurse’s loving care and too young to know any better, Lochranza had never questioned her parentage.
She knew her mother had died when she’d been born.
The man Mama Molly said was her father visited on occasion, but not very often.
He stared at her as if in a daze, not saying anything, just passing a purse that jangled with sovereigns before he left.
Lochranza wasn’t sure she liked him, hid behind her nurse, peering out from behind her ample hip.
She was always glad when the man had left and her simple life slipped back into the routine she was accustomed to.
She had Mama Molly and that was enough, big enough for two people to be wrapped in one.
Mama Molly was of indeterminate age and as wide as she was high, her skin a pale mahogany that some folk called maroon.
No matter that she was descended from generations of slaves, she had very definite ideas on how young girls prepared themselves for the time when they became young women.
To that end, she plastered Lochranza’s naked body, face and limbs with coconut oil and rubbed goose grease into the child’s red hair to straighten the curl.
She also cooked strange things in a big black pot, the sort of things people came to buy in the middle of the night.
Things that cure, things that curse. That’s what Mama Molly had told her when Lochranza had persisted in asking.
The child was not easily put off by forbidding frowns or angry warnings.
She was a curious child and confoundedly rebellious.
However, Molly was the mainstay of her young life, the woman whose shoulder she cried on and who listened to her dreams and taught her to draw in the margins of the big book she kept on a shelf.
She referred to it as her recipe book. It had scribbles in the margins, drawings too.
With flame-coloured hair and grey eyes fringed with the most exotically dark lashes, her skin creamy, her cheekbones high, her mouth generous, her father was not the only one to harbour an uneasy wariness by her appearance.
Only the Negro slaves regarded her with what appeared to be indifference, though if anyone had asked them for their honest opinion – something never likely to occur as long as there was a moon in the sky – it might become obvious to the instinctively discerning that their attitude was misinterpreted; anyone with eyes like that and an incisive way of looking at you was to be respected.
In the meantime, it was best to adopt the cloak of indifference, just in case she looked too deeply into your soul and found it not to her liking.
Mama Molly, however, was a different matter.
Her old nurse, descended from generations of slaves from West Africa, commanded respect from white and black alike.
The whites tended to overlook her forthright manner.
The blacks feared her fierce temper and worrying reputation.
Mama Molly knew things, saw things and could do things that no other black woman could do – no other white woman, come to that.
Despite the child’s urgings, she never told tales of white folk, of her mother, of how she had died and why her father seldom came to see her.
It was only by chance she’d found out that her father had other children – her brothers and sisters from his first marriage.
She saw them with him in an open-topped carriage in Kingston. She’d asked Molly who they were.
‘Siblings,’ her nurse had answered. She hadn’t known what the word meant until she’d asked her governess.
The child grew to the age of eight years old in isolation. In time, she learned how to read the sounds beat on drums in the night.
She often asked Molly what they were saying.
Molly interpreted. ‘Old Hector’s dead,’ she would inform her charge, or ‘Sapphire’s given birth. It’s a girl.’
Sometimes Molly mumbled strange words over her black pot at the same time as tipping even stranger things into it.
She used to write down her ‘recipes’ in tiny writing on the fly leaves of a Book of Common Prayer.
Only it wasn’t really writing. If anyone looked closely, they would see the letters were composed of tiny figures that seemed to be dancing across the page.
Not proper writing at all but pictures that told as much as words.
The strange thing was she only wrote her recipes down after returning from a trip to Kingston.
Three times a week, a governess, Miss Frobisher, came to teach reading, writing, drawing and geography. Lochranza learned quickly and took great delight in passing on her skills to her nurse.
Miss Frobisher did not chastise her for doing so.
A victim of unrequited love, Miss Frobisher was one of Molly’s regular customers, the two of them muttering over the kitchen table, where Mama Molly would read the tea leaves or Tarot cards.
All these sessions ended the same way, with Miss Frobisher purchasing a potion to make her appear irresistibly attractive or an aphrodisiac for the object of her affection.
‘Is her lover a nice man?’ Lochranza had asked once Miss Frobisher had packed up her tapestry bag and gone back to town.
The old nurse had rippled with laughter at first but in no time, like a shutter slamming shut, her expression had turned serious, her velvet brown eyes seeming to fill her face to the exclusion of all other features.
‘It don’t matter how the world sees her man. It’s how she sees him that counts.’
‘Does he notice her?’
Mama Molly smiled in a way that didn’t just light up her face, the whole room was lit up too. ‘He might do, though by the time he does, the object of her affection might change.’
On the night her world shattered, the storm suddenly returned as it sometimes did when the air was heavy and unable to find its way over the hills at the eastern end of the island.
The thunder returned with a vengeance and a flash of lightning lifted the darkness.
So loud was the sound, so bright the lightning, Lochranza sat bolt upright.
The bedroom door swung open, creaking on its hinges and banging against the wall.
Mama Molly’s ample figure filled the doorway, the light from the candle she held throwing flickering shadows over her face.
Lochranza saw nobody else until the man’s dark figure emerged from behind her nurse like a dense black cloud.
‘Get her things packed.’
The voice was male and alien to her ears. Not a slave. Not Sir Edward, her father. A deep voice, though, and commanding.
Alarmed, she clambered onto her pillows, drew her legs up under her nightgown and gripped the brass uprights behind her.
Lochranza shook her head. ‘No!’
The word echoed around the room.
Her nurse lumbered forward on slippered feet. ‘Hush, hush!’ She wrapped her arms around her precious charge and hugged the breath out of her.
Lochranza snuggled into the comfortable softness of the old woman’s body, burying her face between the African woman’s pendulous breasts.
‘’Tis all right, child. Come on. Your old nurse is pained with the screws as it is, and you’re not makin’ them bad old screws any better. You just get dressed now and go wiv this man.’
‘Why do I have to go?’