“You misunderstand.”
“By your leave, let me to finish. I urge you to master your grief and put aside all feeling for Don João; for to mourn him too openly is unwise. It marks you as the enemy of Don Jeronymo, and I know in truth that there are those on board this ship who have been told by Don Jeronymo to watch you closely, lest you prove in some way a traitor to him. Any show of despair over Don João, or continued loyalty to him now, is perilous and rash.”
“I thank you for that warning. But my despair was not for Don João.”
“Not for Don João?” he said, blinking.
“If you can relive in your mind that moment when I sprang upon you, you will know that you had just told me Dona Teresa also had been marked out for death. Do you recall that? I am slow sometimes to calculate consequences, and I had not realized at the first, hearing from you of the plot against Don João, that it did extend to her as well.”
“Ah.”
“And thus when you told it to me—why, something snapped in me, d’ye see?”
“So it is true, then,” said Oliveira.
“What is?”
“That you were the lover of Dona Teresa.” And so saying, he cowered back, expecting me to leap upon him again. But all I did was laugh, in my surprise.
“You knew of that?”
He looked me slyly and, I think, a trifle enviously. “It was rumored in town. She visited you often, both when you were in the fortress and after your release, and we thought perhaps it was not merely to discuss the weather, or to play at dice. We talked much of your good fortune, to come here as a slave and then to find yourself at once in the arms of Dona Teresa.”
“Do you think Don João heard those tales, too?”
“I know not what Don João heard and what he did not, for we were not close companions, after all.”
I closed my eyes and gripped my brandy-wine flask tightly, and took a gulp of it, down deep in a single swallow. It calmed me some, but behind the burning of the brandy in my gut there was another sore fire of anguish, over Dona Teresa and over Don João, too, though that in a different way. It amazed me that I should grieve so keenly for a Portugal and for a halfbreed woman, I who was English and betrothed to fair golden-haired Anne Katherine of fading memory, but so it was, and I saw the depth of the change in me, how fully I had been thrust into this African world. And I saw, too, how frightful a place it was and how many perils loomed on all sides, reefs and bergs and floes, with these plots and counter-plots all unsuspected by me, and even myself the subject of rumor, secret surveillance, and, for all I knew, fatal conspiracy. I thought long on all of this, while Mendes Oliveira stared at me, too frightened of me to speak or to withdraw. At length I corked the bottle and arose and said, “We will talk no more of these things, eh? But I thank you for all you have said, and I beg you once again to pardon me for my madness against you. And I will be grateful for any other guidance you can give me, if I be in further danger. Agreed?”
“Agreed, Piloto.”
And he backed out of the cabin, glad, I suppose, to be gone from there.
8
Very often in the remainder of that voyage to São Tomé did I think of Dona Teresa, and often, too, of Don João de Mendoça, and the knowledge of their fates lay upon my bosom like a cold stone lodged between my ribs, and would not ease. Never did I lose hope of their survival, but my conviction that they were lost was stronger. As the days went by, though, that dull heavy pain of the knowledge of loss moved to a lesser zone of my awareness: it did not diminish, it did not pass, but it no longer was in the forefront of my mind. I think that is a natural process of healing. I had experienced it before, in deaths much closer to my soul, those of my father and brother and early wife Rose. We never forget the dead or cease to lament our losing of them, but the sharp edge of the pain is quickly blunted, and we learn to live with the absence that has entered our lives.
Moreover the work was fearsome hard, this beating against those ill and most contrary winds, and I had no time to give over to sorrow. Some nights I slept not at all, and others only in winks and snatches, for that a dry harsh wind from the north threatened always to turn us about, and set us catercorner to our true direction. I could not abide the risk of losing another ship. And these Portugals of mine were surprising foolish sailors, who knew everything about the sea save how to out-think it, and it was needful that I instruct them at all times what they were next to do. I told myself often that if these men were the sort of mariners who had served in the ships of Prince Henry the Navigator and the other great Portugals of ancient high repute, why, they would have scuttled themselves out of folly ere they had sailed as far as Cadiz. But that was a hundred and fifty years gone, that time when the Portugals discovered the depths of Africa and first rounded the Bona Speranza, and I suppose a hundred and fifty years is duration enough for a race to decay and grow simple, though God grant it happen not to England.
But by one way and another I did bring the pinnace safe into São Tomé, a place of dark repute, for which I bear no love.
This island is the capital of the slaving industry that the Portugals do operate in Africa. It is a small place, oval in shape or almost round, about fifteen leagues in length from north to south, and twelve in breadth from east to west. It stands out from the mainland one hundred eighty miles, right opposite the river called Gabon. The chief port-town of São Tomé lies in the northerly part of the island, directly under the equinoctial line.
The Portugals have owned this place over a hundred years. The climate of it is very unwholesome, and an abundance of men died here in making the early settlement. But when those Jews who would not accept baptism were expelled from Portugal in the year of 1493, thousands of them were exiled to this São Tomé and forced to marry with black women fetched from Angola, producing, in the process and fullness of time, a brood of mulattos that is the present population of the island. Half-Jew and half-blackamoor in ancestry, they yet are Christians now and boast of being true Portugals; but their constitution is by nature much fitter to bear with the malignity of that air than that of Europeans. There are a number of Portugals here, too, making a race so mixed as to be beyond any easy understanding.
I took the Dona Leonor into the harbor of the town, which lies betwixt two rivers in a low flat ground. It is a town of some four hundred houses, most of them two stories high, and all of them flat-roofed, built of a sort of hard ponderous white timber. A rampart of stone protects it on the sea-side, and on a high point above it rises the well-fortified castle of the place, which I remembered well, since its guns did fire most heavily upon us when the ships of Abraham Cocke passed by here in Anno 1589.
We had come in an unkind season; but all seasons are unkind here. There are two rainy and two dry seasons at São Tomé, the rains beginning at each equinox, when the sun, standing straight overhead, draws so much water from the sea that when it drops down again as rain it is like Noah’s deluge. The vapors rising from the black marshes under the violent heat create thick stinking fogs that make the air malignant, and compel the natives to lie at home at such times. But the deep clouds do at least shield the place from the worst furies of the sun, which in the dry seasons is intolerable, as it was when we arrived: the soil we found so burning hot that it was scarce possible to walk upon it without cork-soles to the shoes.
This is a most fertile place. The soil is generally fat, mixed with yellow and white earth, which by the dew of the night and the extreme rain of the wet seasons is rendered very proper to produce many sorts of plants and fruits, and, in swampy grounds, prodigious lofty trees in a short time. They plant ginger here, and manioc that grows as big as a man’s leg, and four sorts of potatoes, and much else. A principal crop is sugar: there are in this island above seventy houses or presses for making of sugar, and every press has many cottages about it as though it were a village, and there may at each be some three hundred persons that are appointed for that kind of work. All together these places make about fifteen hundred tons of brown sugar. The canes grow exceeding tall, but for all that do not give so much juice as they would in Brazil, perhaps because there is too much rain for proper ripening. Another thing they grow is cotton, and also wheat and grapes and such.