How Dark the Night (10 page)

The officer's hesitation suggested that he at least knew of John and Robin Cutler. His tone, nevertheless, remained adamant. “If what you say is true, Captain—and I assure you I do not doubt your word—then we can conclude our business here quickly. But as I have indicated, I must proceed, with or without your cooperation. Sergeant Russell!”

The Marine sergeant snapped to. “Sah!”

“You may carry out your orders.”

“Sah!”

“If you will kindly step aside, Captain Cutler,” Dunbar requested in a low but firm voice, “and let my men through.”

Richard did not step aside. He advanced forward one step, placed his hands on his hips, and was about to offer a further protest when a female voice intervened.

“Just a moment, if you please, Lieutenant Dunbar.”

All eyes shifted to the elegant woman in the ivory dress and wide-brimmed straw hat who was approaching the entry port. Lieutenant Dunbar bowed again, this time with added flair.

“Madam,” he said. “You are . . .?”

“I am Katherine Cutler, the wife of Captain Cutler,” she answered
him. “My maiden name is Hardcastle. Does that name by chance resonate with you?”

Dunbar started. “Why, yes, madam, it does. There was a Captain Hugh Hardcastle attached to the Windward Squadron for many years. He served on the very ship in which I now serve. His name is legendary in these waters. Is he by chance a relative? I believe I do see a family resemblance.”

“Captain Hardcastle is my brother. He is recently retired from the service and is soon to join my husband's company in Boston. I have one other brother. His name is Jeremy Hardcastle and he is currently a senior post captain attached to the Mediterranean Squadron. Both of my brothers were dear friends of Admiral Lord Nelson—as was I. As they both have meaningful connections in Whitehall, it would surprise me indeed if My Lords of the Admiralty would not be disturbed to learn that a British lieutenant attached to the Windward Squadron had unduly inconvenienced a vessel of such heritage and ownership, their order in council notwithstanding. Do you not agree, Lieutenant?” she asked, when silence prevailed.

Dunbar narrowed his eyes. His squint went from Katherine to her husband, then to Frank Bennett and the schooner's crew standing in a cluster amidships, many of them with their arms folded across their chests. Not a single pair of eyes wavered. Then: “Sergeant!”

“Sah!”

“Belay that last order. I have determined that this vessel is as much British as she is American. We have troubled these good people long enough. We shall return to our ship.”

“Sah!”

As the Marines wheeled about and waited for Lieutenant Dunbar to descend first into the cutter, as naval protocol demanded, Dunbar bowed a third and final time, showing a leg and holding his bicorne hat out at his side. “Madam,” he said, straightening, “it has been an honor. Captain Cutler and Captain Bennett, if there is anything I might do for either of you whilst you are here in Barbados, you need only ask. You know my ship, so you know where to find me. I wish you and your crew a most pleasant good day.”

As Dunbar made his way down into the cutter, followed by the Marine sergeant and then the two privates, Richard glanced at his wife. In reply, she gave him a mischievous smile. “And now you know why I have often been referred to as ‘a daughter of the Royal Navy,'” she said before turning about and making for the aft companionway. The crew of nine sailors
quickly made room for her, several of them offering a half-salute as she strode by.

B
RIDGETOWN, THE
colonial capital of Barbados, may have seemed a tropical paradise when viewed from the deck of a vessel entering Carlisle Bay. But as was true of many West Indian ports, Bridgetown's luster and sheen cracked and peeled on closer inspection. The rank odors of rotting fish and animal waste assailed the senses, the putrid stench fortified by the effects of the hot sun and by the pungent odor of the sweat glistening on the faces, arms, and bare torsos of dockers loading hogsheads of sugar, rum, and molasses onto ships or into warehouses. Then there was the assault to the eyes: African slaves dressed in ragged clothing intermingled with the refuse of colonial society on the cobblestone streets, many of them half seas over even at this early hour, eager to pick a fight or a florin from an unsuspecting passer-by. And finally there was the assault to the ears: shouts, curses, and exhortations in several languages seethed along the quays while inland a few feet, along Front Street, garishly dressed and gaudily painted prostitutes brazenly hawked their wares, leaving in their wake no need for the imagination to contemplate the full menu of services they were prepared to provide—either à la carte or as a complete meal.

Bridgetown, to Richard, represented a bizarre and intriguing blend of the best and worst of the human condition. Over the years it had become one of his favorite ports of call, and not just because he had family living on the island. To his surprise, he discovered today that his wife had always found it equally intriguing. She seemed mesmerized as she stood on the docks taking it all in, and it was with some reluctance that she took her husband's arm and walked beside him—trying to walk a straight line on legs more accustomed to the lurch and pitch of a rolling deck—to the waiting coach-and-two, its aft compartment stuffed with baggage and with additional baggage lashed securely to its top.

Richard opened the door to the coach. “Shall we, my lady?” he asked. “Or do you prefer to take a room at a local inn and savor all this”—he swept his arm across the riotous panorama of Bridgetown—“for a day or two. I will understand if you do. A woman with your beauty and elegance fits right in here.”

“Thank you, no. I believe I've had my fill.” She stepped up and inside the coach.

Once he had followed her in and settled himself beside her, Richard thumped twice on the side of the coach. The liveried Negro driver flicked
the reins, and the carriage lurched forward. As the coach rolled slowly past the gleaming white stucco buildings on Front Street and the warrens of shadowy byways and alleyways leading away from it, Katherine stared out the open window on her side, her mind drifting back to earlier occasions when she had traveled these streets. When Richard sailed to Yorktown in 1781 as an American lieutenant serving in a French frigate, she had stayed at the home of John and Cynthia Cutler on the family plantation in the island's interior. And it was in that home, in January 1782, that their first son, Will, was born, several weeks after Richard returned from the war. During the intervening years, busy raising a family in Massachusetts, she had seldom traveled beyond the confines of greater Boston, where the rigid social norms and expectations were very different from those in Bridgetown. She felt a freedom, a lightening of her being, barely remembered from those early years.

Richard sat in silence, leaving her to her thoughts even as the coach veered off Front Street and dove into the island's interior on a well-maintained dirt road. Here the scenery was considerably more cultivated and relaxing, save for the spectacle of black African men and women toiling in the sugarcane fields, severing the ten-foot-high stalks at ground level with machetes or cane knives and dragging them in bunches over to carts drawn by mules. Under the watchful eye of white overseers armed with pistols and whips, the slaves brought the stalks to the mill, boiling house, and curing house complex that defined the core business of a typical plantation. Overall responsibility for the production process fell to the plantation's agent, a man highly trusted by the plantation's owner. The agent's foremost duty, in league with the boatswain who ran the windmills and rolling presses, was to turn a handsome annual profit for the owner, whatever the monthly maintenance costs and daily toll in human suffering.

To his surprise, Richard had been fascinated by the evolution of sugar and rum production from the day he was introduced to the process, and he had joined those welcoming the 1781 innovation in rolling presses that allowed more juice to be squeezed out of the cane in the mill, and thus higher profits to be squeezed out of the end products. Katherine, he realized, was less enthralled, in large part because of her aversion to slavery. A movement afoot in Parliament to abolish the slave trade throughout the British Empire pleased her no end, just as it worried those who saw it as yet another threat to an old order already shaken to its core by the slave rebellion that had established the free and independent nation of Haiti. That the Cutler family treated its Negroes better than most planters on Barbados mattered little to her, despite the open hostility it aroused on
other plantations. Such a policy, to her mind, was based more on economics than on humanitarian concerns. To some extent that was true: John and Robin Cutler had long ago determined that well-fed and well-treated workers were less likely to fall ill, shirk their work, or engage in sabotage. The end result was a higher number of man-hours in the fields and a higher daily output per man-hour, a combination of factors that year after year yielded considerably higher annual profits than the other plantations produced.

While agreeing with his wife in principle on the evils of slavery, Richard saw no practical way to end an institution so embedded in the culture and economy of Barbados. He therefore tended to avoid the subject with her whenever possible.

As the coach gathered speed, Katherine settled back in the cushioned seat, stretched out her legs, and closed her eyes to revel in the clean tropical air streaming in through the open windows and tousling her thick chestnut hair. “This is heavenly,” she murmured. “I daresay it's snowing or sleeting in Boston.”

“You're not going to sleep, are you?” he chided her.

“Heavens, no,” she laughed. “You hardly need worry about that, my love. I'm much too excited to sleep. I was just wondering when we might talk to Joseph. The news about him has been so good, but I want to see for myself that he is really better. And, of course, to offer our proposition.”

The son of John and Cynthia Cutler, now a young man of twenty-two years, had been a silent and withdrawn child, unwilling, or unable, to interact normally with others—even his own family. Seven years ago his parents had taken him to England to consult the best medical minds in the Royal College of Physicians. Neither they nor anyone else had been able to put a name to Joseph's symptoms or to propose a remedy. In recent years, to his parents' infinite relief, he had begun to emerge from his shell.

“I say the sooner the better,” Richard said. “He will need time to consider it. Actually, I'm more interested in how his parents will react. Joseph is their only child, and he has never been apart from them. It will not be easy for them to watch him sail away with us.”

“No indeed,” Katherine had to agree. “We'll speak to them first, of course. Perhaps we should have written them when we first had the idea. Well, too late for that now.”

Thirty minutes later the coach-and-two rumbled down a pebble drive and shivered to a halt inside an oval area that formed the center of a complex of buildings and gardens. As the driver secured the reins, Richard looked about him. He had last visited this inner compound six
years ago, toward the end of the war with France when he was recovering from an injury incurred during the engagement between
Constellation
and the 40-gun frigate
L'Insurgente
. Everything appeared very much as it had back then. Two large one-story houses of brick and coral stone construction anchored the compound, one on the north side of the wide oval, the other directly opposite on its south side. Mahogany, tamarind, and myriad other kinds of trees and flowering shrubs provided abundant shade. Where sunlight was allowed to filter through, and on the periphery of the circle, well-groomed gardens of brightly colored plants pleased the eye. North of the compound sat the considerably smaller but still attractive homes of the plantation's administrators, and beyond those, clusters of wood-and-stone dwellings for Negro and Creole slaves. Each cluster of dwellings was located near fruit and vegetable plots, the produce of which was shared among the slave families living there. Now, in the early afternoon, the able-bodied workers were out in the field; only the very young and very old were present, along with a smattering of teenage girls who were attending to them. Within the compound itself serenity reigned, save for the rustle of wind in the trees, the chirping of birds, and occasional snorts from the two horses that had pulled the carriage from Bridgetown.

Before Richard and Katherine could dismount, the front door of the mansion on the south arc of the circle flew open and a woman's voice cried out, “Oh, thank the Lord you're here! You're really here!”

Katherine pushed open the door on her side of the coach, saw herself out, and flew toward the woman rushing toward her. They came together under the glossy green leaves of a banyan tree, falling into each other's arms, laughing, pulling apart to look at each other, and then clasping each other tightly again. Richard, meanwhile, paid the driver and began arranging the baggage in several piles. Julia Cutler motioned him over with her hand. When he came up to her, grinning hugely, she released Katherine and wrapped her arms around his neck, drawing him in close. As her face touched his, he felt damp tears on her cheek.

“Welcome,” she said, smiling. She swiped at her eyes with her sleeve. “Welcome indeed! You both look absolutely tip-top. My goodness, Katherine, I can't believe that after all these years and all you've been through, you still look the radiant bride!”