Making Waves (6 page)

“Oooh!” I teased. “That’s no way to greet your heavenly rescuer!”

Brice gave me a strange look. “Do I seem as if I need rescuing?”

“Well duh! Obviously you don’t! But we didn’t know that, since you never actually bothered to phone home! Angel HQ wanted to call off the whole mission, can you believe! But I said to leave you exactly where you are, because you were a big angel now and you’d handle it.”

I was grinning like a loon but to my dismay Brice was not grinning back.

“You should not be walking out of doors at this time of day,” he said in the same disapproving tone. “You may have a brain fever.”

“OK, drop the act, angel boy!” I sighed. “I want to hear the game plan - I assume you guys do have a game plan?”

But Brice seemed determined to kid around. “Didn’t Aunt Sarah tell you that you must never walk outdoors without your parasol? Particularly in the middle of the day?”

“Oh ha ha ha! Like I’d be seen dead with a stupid para—”

I broke off. The chilling truth finally dawned on me.

Brice wasn’t kidding.

Stay calm, angel girl, I told myself. Better find out exactly how bad this is.

My heart was banging around in my chest, but I managed to fake a ditzy giggle. “Silly me! I can’t seem to remember what they call you! My memory is just all over the place.”

Brice gave a curt nod. “It is to be expected after such a severe fever. I am your cousin Beau.”

Please tell me this isn’t happening
, I prayed.

“You’ve turned pale, little cousin,” he said gallantly. “You had better lean on me in case you feel faint.”

I felt faint all right! My deluded angel buddy seemed to think he really
was
the human in his Agency story line. What in the world was I going to do?

Slipping his arm through mine, Beau/Brice began to steer me back firmly towards the house.

“Wait!” I said desperately. “I absolutely
don’t
have brain fever. I feel fine, truly. And I was just teasing about the angel thing, honestly.” I faked peals of laughter. “You should have seen your face!”

Brice dropped my arm abruptly. “You have an unusual sense of humour, cousin,” he said coldly.

I giggled nervously. “Everyone says that. But I truly meant no harm. I was just, um, amusing myself talking nonsense!”

I thought this sounded convincingly seventeenth century, but Brice frowned. “I have no time to talk nonsense to young ladies. My uncle had to stay over at our plantation in Savannah la Mar. I have to take care of business in his absence. I was on my way to the mill when I saw you.”

“Can’t I come?” I coaxed. “I’ve been stuck indoors for days.”

“The mill is no place for a young English lady,” said Brice stiffly.

I clasped my hands. “Please! I’ll just watch. I won’t get in the way.”

He sighed. “Very well. But fetch your parasol.”

“I’ll be back in two ticks! Don’t move!”

I picked up my skirts and went skipping back to the house, doing my best to seem like an innocent little orphan. But inside I was in turmoil.

It wasn’t safe for Brice to be here in his current state. An angel with this level of cosmic amnesia was a sitting target for the PODS. I had to get him home.

And how exactly do you plan to do that, Melanie? I asked myself in despair. Communications are down or had you forgotten?

We’d managed to get Reuben back to Heaven that time in Elizabethan England, I remembered, but Lola had been with me then. Two angels can send much stronger angelic signals than one.

There’s your answer, Mel, I thought. Now stop making mountains out of molehills. Together Lola and I will easily be able to generate enough angel power to get an SOS to Heaven.

Sorted!

All I had to do was find her.

Chapter Five

T
hose are called trumpet trees.” Brice pointed to a grove of immensely tall, very slender trees. I’m not sure why they were called trumpet trees. Their leaves looked more like huge fans.

We were walking along a shady track, walking very slowly actually. I know it was hot, but I have to say Beau/Brice didn’t seem that keen to reach our uncle’s sugar mill. He kept stopping to show me tropical plants along the way.

I dutifully repeated their names to show I was paying attention: rose apple, soursop, guango trees. All the time I was trying to think of a way to drop Lola casually into the conversation. Asking if he’d run into any nice angels recently was obviously out. I could try asking if he had any other female cousins living nearby? The Agency had made me and Brice relations, so chances were they’d made Lola some kind of rellie too.

If ONLY I’d read my friend’s bio…

Or even your own, babe
, my inner angel commented.

I heard scuffling sounds. A little girl came stumbling down the track in her bare feet, struggling to balance a basket on her head. Her dress was so old and tattered it was virtually hanging off one shoulder. When she saw us, she immediately lowered her eyes, mumbling, “Morning Massa. Morning miss,” as she staggered past.

“Morning, Bright Eyes,” Brice called after her.

The little girl made me think of my little sister Jade. “Bright Eyes is a sweet name,” I said wistfully. “And she does have lovely eyes.”

“She’s very light-skinned, did you notice?” Brice sounded edgy.

“Not really,” I said. “People come in all colours, don’t they?”

He sighed. “I keep forgetting you’ve just come from England. In a few months you’ll be like all the other white people on this island. It’s their curse. They can’t escape.”

“You’re a white person too,” I pointed out. “Will you escape?”

He gave a bitter laugh. “I think I was born an outlaw.”

Babe, you have no idea, I thought.

A cool whirr of wings fanned my face. A magical little bird appeared in front of us, hovering over a bush of vivid pink blossoms. Its wings were vibrating so fast they were literally a blur. The tiny bird plunged a long, needle-like beak into a blossom, to drink the invisible liquid inside then whirred away again.

“Was that actually a humming bird?” I breathed.

Brice nodded. “They’re as common as blackbirds here. The best time to see them is at sunrise, or just after the rain.”

I explained that humming birds were on my personal list of Caribbean “must-sees”, along with fireflies.

He gave me a sad half-smile. “Do you think you will like Jamaica?”

“It’s very beautiful,” I said cautiously. “But I haven’t really been here long enough to know if I’ll like it.”

We were walking past large rhubarb-type plants which Brice said were cocoa plants. They had leaves like heart-shaped umbrellas, easily as big as dinner plates.

“Jamaica is a place you either love or hate!” he said. “I love it, but I hate what we have done to it in a few short years.”

“Have you been living here long?” I asked slyly. I was kind of interested to hear what he’d come up with. But it’s like he didn’t hear.

“Have you heard of the Taino?” Brice asked out of the blue.

“Not really, I don’t know much about Jamaica at all.” I blushed. “The Taino IS a Jamaican thing, right?”

“Taino means ‘good and noble people’. It’s what the indigenous Indians of this island called themselves; the people who lived here before the Europeans came.”

“I had no idea anyone lived here,” I said guiltily.

“There were many such tribes, all with different names, scattered throughout the Caribbean, but white people prefer to forget about them. They like to pretend the New World was empty when Columbus got here. Though they are extremely interested in the cities the original inhabitants are supposed to have left behind.” Brice had a sudden edge to his voice.

“These Indians actually built cities?” I’d imagined them living in tepees and whatever.

“They lived simply, in complete harmony with the Earth. But they were also wonderfully skilled craftsmen. For instance, the Taino knew how to use seashells so cleverly that they looked like precious gemstones.”

“So what was that you said about a city?”

Brice explained that the first Europeans to arrive in the New World had heard tantalising rumours of an ancient city buried deep in a jungle in the Americas. The details varied. Generally the city had been abandoned owing to some horrific natural disaster. In some stories, the city was in Venezuela, sometimes Mexico or Surinam. But the crucial element of the story never changed. There were always fabulous quantities of Indian gold.

He gave a painful laugh. “Many white explorers have died attempting to find this city. You could see it as poetic justice.”

I sensed that there was something he wasn’t telling me. “But what happened to the Taino themselves?”

“Sometimes I think I see their spirits in the woods,” he said in a low voice.

The blue sky was cloudless yet I shivered as if a shadow had slipped between us and the sun. “They’re dead? ALL the Taino?”

“Almost all. A few tribesmen survive in the hills.”

“But why would anyone…?”

Brice swallowed. “They got in our way.”

By ‘our’, he meant white people.

After that we just walked on without speaking. But the sound of our shoes rustling through dead and dying leaves suddenly seemed abnormally loud. The idea that ghostly tribesmen might be watching us from between the trees suddenly felt disturbingly real.

I was becoming aware of an overpowering pong, sickly-sweet and unbelievably foul. Eventually I had to cover my nose.

“You can smell the molasses,” Brice explained. “Take my handkerchief.”

Shortly afterwards we crossed into the mill yard. This wasn’t some picturesque windmill, like mills in picture books. It was powered by six sweating oxen, urged on by drivers with curses and thumps. Instead of mill stones, the sugar mill had three gigantic vertical rollers, as fat as tree trunks and as tall as your average seventeenth-century adult male.

The rollers revolved with hollow rumbling sounds that echoed through the cobbled yard. You could feel it vibrating in your bones and the roots of your teeth. Men were working frantically to keep this monster fed, unloading harvested cane from the carts, stripping away the useless cane trash with knives. The dust and little loose fibres from the trash got everywhere, drifting around our feet, blowing in the workers’ eyes.

“The original Taino word for Jamaica was
Xaymaca
,” Brice said into my ear. “It means Land of Wood and Water. Wonder what they’d think of it now?”

He was angry. Why wouldn’t he be? He was seeing the world through an angel’s eyes. As I looked around at this hellish scene, I felt angry too.

The mill workers were all half-naked except for filthy loincloths. Many had ugly scars on their sweating backs and legs. Some had fingers, or parts of fingers, missing. All of them were black.

Brice kept up his grim commentary as we made our way through rising clouds of dust.

“Our last mill-feeder, Mingo, got so tired he fell asleep on his feet and lost his hand in the press. He was lucky.”

I stared at him. “He was lucky?”

“Mingo’s brother got dragged in through the rollers last year.”

We watched the new mill-feeder deftly hand-feeding cane stalks through the rollers, risking his life with every stalk. Treacly brown liquid spurted into a trough at his feet. I tried not to picture Mingo’s brother’s body being crushed like sugar cane, his red blood mixing with the molasses.

I followed Brice into the boiling house. It was like being inside an oven. I could literally feel the moisture being drawn from my body. The combination of the tremendous heat and molasses fumes, made it next to impossible to breathe.

Five giant copper kettles were suspended over a blazing furnace. Inside the kettles, the boiling molasses blipped and bubbled like an evil magician’s brew.

A half-naked boy, of eight or nine years old, was keeping the furnace going with bundles of cane trash. He’d reached the zombie stage of exhaustion, running mechanically from the trash pile to the boiling kettles, from the kettles to the trash pile.

What are the Bexfords thinking, I fumed, making people work in these horrific conditions? Suppose some of that scalding sludge got splashed on to the little boy’s skin? Suppose he stumbled and knocked a kettle flying? The blistering-hot molasses would stick like boiling glue.

Brice had to talk business to the overseer, a sandy-haired Scot and the only white worker in the yard. I grabbed the chance to beam loving vibes to the exhausted little boy then I went outside and beamed heaps more to the mill-feeder. (Reuben always says it’s WAY better to light one tiny candle than to whinge about the dark.)

I can’t say, obviously, if beaming vibes helped to dispel any cosmic darkness for those humans, but it had a huge effect on me.

I found myself taking a hard look at the overseer. When Brice emerged, mopping his perspiring face, my question just burst out.

“Why does that man have a whip?”

An alarmed ripple went round the yard. Brice hurried me out of earshot. “Where have you been hiding, cousin?” he hissed furiously. “Why do you think that man has a whip? To show my uncle’s slaves who has the power. To stop them rising up and killing their owners in their beds - shall I go on?”