The Turtle Run (24 page)

She half-rose from her chair wondering whether she should accompany him.

‘You don't have to come in,' said the nurse, regarding her without any warmth, then she turned to Pitcher and ushered him into the treatment room with a pleasant smile. Pitcher beamed back at her.

Becky sank back on to the plastic chair. She wasn't offended by the rebuttal but she was puzzled by the nurse's unfriendliness towards her. Maybe Pitcher was going all out for the sympathy vote by telling the nurse Becky regularly beat him with garden implements?

Maureen appeared after fifteen minutes and promptly picked up a health leaflet with which to fan herself.

‘Long walk?' said Becky, sympathetically.

Maureen rolled her eyes and nodded.

Less than five minutes later Pitcher re-emerged, a gleaming white bandage on his shin. The nurse didn't come out this time. Poor Maureen had barely had time to sit down and enjoy the relative coolness of the waiting room before she had to go off again and fetch the car.

‘I got to come back next week,' Pitcher said as they waited outside. Becky noticed he was still holding the note. Or maybe it was a different piece of paper; either way he was holding it as tightly as a love note. He made a scissors action.

‘To have the stitches out?' asked Becky.

‘Yes.'

Becky felt the back of her neck burning in the sun and tried to pull up the neckline of her blouse to cover the skin.

‘Is England cold?' asked Pitcher.

Becky felt a little surge of energy; had Pitcher been thinking about their previous conversation? ‘In winter it can be very cold.'

‘That's what I heard. Have you met the Queen?'

Becky laughed. ‘Afraid not. Not for the likes of us.' She frowned. She'd just parroted a typical phrase from her grandmother's vocabulary. She could see Maureen's car approaching in the distance. She wouldn't have long but Pitcher seemed more ‘present' than usual and it was worth a try.

‘Have you ever heard of a Sarah Thomas?' she asked him.

‘Sarah Thomas.' He paused then grinned. ‘Yes.'

‘
Really
? What do you know about her?'

‘I came on a boat and I was all alone, then I met a man and we mek a home. Then my poor love died, and …' He stopped, as if he knew he'd once known the words but now couldn't retrieve them.

Was it a song? It certainly sounded like a rhyme. She prompted him. ‘Then my poor love died and –?'

Pitcher seemed to go into a trance. ‘What does this Becky want from me? Will she leave me in peace?'

Maureen's car pulled up and she got out to help Becky get Pitcher settled in the back. Becky greeted her cheerfully but her heart was thumping as if she'd just walked over the grave of someone who resented it.

Becky found Clara's handwritten ‘first chapter' and spent the afternoon typing it up. However her thoughts kept turning back to Sarah Thomas. She realised (with self-mocking amusement) that she was rather projecting her own situation on to Sarah for, although Sarah could have lived in this house from her teens to her sixties, in Becky's mind Sarah was the same age as her – a twenty-three-year-old moving in the same space and not quite fitting into the fabric of the household.

The more Becky thought about it, the more she suspected she had misinterpreted Pitcher's little display of spiritualism. Maybe he had some little rhyme lodged in his head, which he would have recited whatever name she'd mentioned. Next time she saw him she would ask if he'd ever heard of Nicole Kidman and see what he came out with.

But when darkness fell Becky had to admit that Pitcher's words had stirred up some rather odd feelings. When she had first learned that Sarah Thomas had married into the Darnley family, Becky had willed herself to try and sense Sarah's presence as she moved through the house; she'd tried to imagine what Sarah would have seen when she walked into the kitchen or dining room, what she'd have seen when she looked out of a window or stood on the veranda. But since Pitcher's little outburst Becky didn't have to try so hard. She almost felt the presence of a young woman, fleeing from room to room ahead of her as if to escape her. Several times that evening Becky sensed movement in her peripheral vision; she switched the light on in the dining room and thought she saw the leaves on the potted plants tremble, as if someone had just walked by. Becky was a little unsettled: one English teacher at school – while being encouraging – would urge her to ‘let go' and try and let her imagination run free. Now she would surely get full marks for imagination. Unless of course she wasn't imagining things at all.

That evening Becky took the laptop up to Clara's room to show her how the notes were progressing and go through the first chapter. It started with the Battle of Sedgemoor in Somerset and descriptions of the Royal and Monmouth armies; the Monmouth armies being the larger but worse equipped.

Becky didn't know where Clara had sourced her information from but her own research confirmed what was in Clara's first chapter: that portion of the Monmouth army who were armed with more than scythes used old-fashioned matchlock muskets, which always had to have a match burning, so revealing the fighter's presence. The Royal army, by contrast, would have used the more efficient flintlock rifles, whose spark came from the striking of flint against steel. It was never going to be an even battle.

Becky wished she could travel back in time to discover what it had really been like. She could find all the technical detail she needed but neither her research nor Clara's notes gave even a hint of what the experience must have been like for a poor young Monmouth rebel on a battlefield. Ironically Joe's morbid interest and gory imagination would probably have helped here.

Maybe Clara would have some ideas about how to bring more vitality and individuality to the descriptions.

Unfortunately Clara's technophobia extended to reading from a screen so Becky had to read the first chapter to her.

When she had finished Clara frowned. ‘Can you read it again please?'

Becky began to read aloud once more but Clara stopped her after a few paragraphs. ‘It sounds more like some parish council's dull annual report than a battle, don't you think?'

Becky didn't want to upset Clara so she chose her words carefully. ‘It's quite technical.'

‘Technical? It's leaden. Do you think we should remove all the information about weapons?'

‘No,' said Becky. ‘I think you need to compare the weapons of the two armies and I thought some of the details were quite interesting. I've always wondered where the expression “flash in the pan” comes from. Now I know it's a reference to flintlock guns.'

‘Yes, but something's wrong with the way it's written.'

‘I think the problem,' said Becky, ‘is that there is no emotional involvement. People need to follow a character on the battlefield, to understand how he came to be there and then to care enough to know what happened to him.'

Ah,' said Clara. ‘You mean: one death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic.'

‘Exactly,' said Becky. ‘But our problem is finding one person to follow. I know the names of some of the men who were sentenced to death or exile for fighting, but the trail runs pretty cold when they reach Barbados. I know when they died. I know they were worked into the ground as they weren't a long-term investment and the plantation owners had no incentive to ensure their survival for longer than ten years.'

‘You've found out a lot,' said Clara, with admiration.

‘But it's still dry facts.'

Clara thought. ‘Yes. Yes, I see. And do none of my notes give a hint of individual lives?'

‘Not unless your notes in French reveal something. I still have some of your notes in English to read but so far they seem to be snippets from the nineteenth century. The nearest we have to a continuous line is the Pitchers. The original Pitcher was called Daniel and he was a woolcomber, which makes sense, as south-west England was – and is – sheep-farming country. He was sentenced for transportation and arrived in Barbados in January 1686 to work for this plantation.'

‘So he definitely is an ancestor of our Mr Pitcher?' said Clara.

‘Seems likely. And here is Pitcher – three hundred and thirty years later – working the same land. Isn't that incredible?'

‘Not working it,' said Clara, with an exasperated sigh.

‘Whatever. But the point is that I don't know what happened in between.'

‘Becky, I'm ashamed to say I have never even asked him what he knows,' said Clara. ‘I can't imagine that he knows anything.'

‘I have asked him.'

Clara leaned forward. ‘And?'

‘He does have some notion that his ancestors came from England and why. But I suspect that's it.' Becky chose not to share Pitcher's outburst on Sarah Thomas – at least not until she had tried the ‘Nicole Kidman' experiment.

Clara leaned back again, wearily. ‘We're asking too much, aren't we? No one records the lives of servants or slaves.'

‘Unfortunately not.'

‘I really thought I'd collected more,' said Clara. ‘My mind playing tricks, obviously.'

‘But the person who intrigues me the most is the one I mentioned before: Sarah Thomas, the only woman to get off a ship with the rebels. You know, she was probably Matthew's great-times-nine grandmother.'

Clara looked confused. ‘That would be interesting but I'm afraid I'd never heard of her before you mentioned it.'

‘But she married a Darnley. She would have lived in this very house. She could have slept in this very room.'

‘Oh. I didn't realise the house was that old. But actually I have no idea how old it is.' Clara yawned. ‘I think I've had enough Monmouth rebels tonight.'

Becky felt quite deflated. She now seemed to be far more fired up about the fate of the exiles than Clara was. Clara must have seen her face fall because she added quickly. ‘Becky, I am interested, really. I'm a bit tired now but maybe you could leave me what you've typed up so far.'

‘I'll leave you the French notes but I'm afraid that for the first chapter I'll have to leave you the laptop,' said Becky.

‘Oh no,' said Clara. ‘Becky, I'm sorry, my dear – you're going to have to print this off.'

Becky didn't manage to catch Alex the next morning before he had to dash off to the hotel. He had religiously locked up the office when he left so she would have to wait until he was back before going in with her memory stick. Alex was unfailingly pleasant and accommodating but she baulked at having to disturb him with a request to print off something when he was clearly so busy. In the meantime she carried on scouring the internet for any clue as to what happened to the rebels who remained in Barbados.

She was looking after Zena when Alex finally returned and had to wait until the three-year-old's mother had collected her before she could speak to him. He had looked shattered when he drove in so she made him some coffee and took it to the office. There were no sounds of activity as she pushed open the door and she felt a flash of irritation with Matthew when she saw Alex literally asleep on the keyboard. There was a faint smell of alcohol. He woke with a start as she put the coffee cup down and rubbed his red eyes.

‘Why doesn't Matthew get someone to help you?' she demanded.

‘He doesn't trust anyone else.' Alex grinned ruefully. ‘We were at school together.'

‘That sounds rather sweet.' Becky held out the memory stick. ‘Would you mind if I printed off a few pages?'

As they were waiting for the printer to finish, a thought occurred to Becky. ‘How did Matthew know Chris Harris?'

‘Chris? He was at school with us before he moved to Britain. Poor old Chris, nice guy, but I don't think he was ever really cut out for the hotel business.'

‘You mean Matthew just appoints people because he was friends at school with them?' Becky regretted saying it instantly; she hadn't meant to imply that Alex wasn't up to the job. Fortunately he didn't interpret it as a personal slight. In fact he chuckled, though somewhat bitterly. ‘Us poor boys have to help each other.'

Becky suspected that he was maudlin with drink.

Becky had not needed to follow the doctor's instructions to hide the gardening tools as Clara barely had enough energy to come downstairs let alone go outside. Her chest did not seem to be as painful though so Becky trusted the antibiotics were working.

On Tuesday morning Pitcher turned up at the bottom of the veranda steps, the floppy Fedora hat on his head and the note from the nurse in his hand. Becky sighed inwardly when she saw him. Maureen was off with family commitments and Alex was at the hotel. Clara had seemed quite tired when Becky took a breakfast tray up so Becky was reluctant to bother her but she was out of ideas regarding getting Pitcher to the clinic.

‘Oh, poor Pitcher. I'd forgotten about him,' said Clara.

‘He seems to be OK,' said Becky. ‘But I think today is when he has his stitches out.'

‘It will have to be our transport man, Mr St John, then,' said Clara. ‘I hope he's got a car free. He's more used to collecting hotel guests from the airport but, well, he'll just have to do it. I'll give you the number. Just explain that I asked.' She gave a mischievous smile. ‘You'll have to say it's hotel business.'

Becky followed Clara's instructions and was relieved when Mr St John said he could provide a car but there would be a delay. She went out to where Pitcher was still waiting and told him Mr St John would take him to the clinic but there would be a wait of several hours. Pitcher nodded stoically and sat calmly on the veranda steps.

Becky returned to her work. Half an hour later she broke off from the computer and went out on the veranda to give her eyes a rest. The sun seemed more relentless than usual and, although Pitcher had positioned himself on a higher step so that his head was in the shade, his sandalled feet were in a sheet of light; he had solved the problem by positioning the Fedora over them.