Too shocked to resist, Thomas mounted the smaller pony and was led by Gibbes on the other, not knowing where they were going or how long it would take. The ropes were still around his neck and wrists, and his throat was burning. His eyes would not focus. It was a struggle to stay on the pony. They rode around the harbour, passing a line of low timber-built houses, a few others built of a pale-coloured stone and all the paraphernalia of a busy trading port. He vaguely noticed a harbour master’s house, timber warehouses and, judging by the number of women sitting outside it, what could only be a brothel. Oistins was a midden of a place, a dung heap where drunkards and whores and thieves washed up in the hope of easy pickings. Its smells, aggravated by the heat, were the smells of the sea, cooking fires and toiling men, mixed with others that Thomas did not recognize. These were heady, thick smells – of strange spices, perhaps, or sugar and rum. They made him retch again.
They soon left the ramshackle town behind and rode slowly along a rutted road with the sea on their left. Except where the land had been roughly cleared for planting, unfamiliar trees and bushes, so dense that Thomas could see no more than a yard into them, lined the route. A mile or two from Oistins the road swung inland and they crossed a narrow stream running down from the hills before dropping down to the coast again. Blue and yellow flowers grew unchecked by the roadside and some of the trees were crowned with crimson blossoms. Apart from an occasional cluster of mean shacks and a few other travellers, there was little sign of life.
The further north they rode, the more the forest had been cut back and the land put to use. Thomas recognized tobacco plants, and cotton, but most of all sugar cane. Sugar – the island’s gold. The reason men of every class came here to make their fortune, the reason for ships loaded with miserable human cargo. The reason he was here.
An hour later, as the light was beginning to fade, they turned off the road and rode up a hill to their right. About half a mile on they followed a rough path through tall trees until they finally came to a halt. This, it seemed, was it. Thomas stared in astonishment. Whatever he had been expecting, it was not this hovel. He was wondering whether such a place could possibly be a planter’s house when another large, bearded man, this time with red hair and beard, came out to meet them.
‘Is this him, then?’ The voice was loud and coarse.
‘It is, John. Thomas Hill by name. He doesn’t look much but he can cook, so we’re told, and he can read and figure.’
‘How old are you, Hill?’ asked John.
‘I am thirty-three. And I am innocent of any crime. I demand to be taken immediately to the authorities.’
‘Demand, eh? Here’s what we think of your demand, Hill,’ growled John Gibbes. He cuffed Thomas hard on the head and knocked him to the ground.
‘He doesn’t look much at all,’ said Samuel Gibbes. ‘Skin and bone, a feeble-looking thing.’
‘I’ll put him in the hut and we’ll see to him later. There’s chicken and bread if you’re hungry, brother.’
And with that, John Gibbes hauled Thomas to his feet and led him by the rope to his hut. He untied the rope around Thomas’s wrists and left him there. ‘The last one who tried to run got as far as the road,’ warned Gibbes. ‘A month in the boiling house and a taste of the whip did for him.’
Thomas slipped the rope over his head, rubbed his neck and inspected the hut. Not that there was much to inspect – just eight or so feet square of horizontal rough timbers nailed together with uprights on each side, a roof thatched with something that was not straw and one small, shuttered window. The door flapped on its hinges.
Inside, he had a narrow cot, a woollen blanket, a small table and a chair. On the table stood a silver inkwell, quite out of place yet somehow reassuring. He picked it up, rubbed it on his sleeve and squinted at his reflection. The face he saw, distorted by the curve of the well, was wide-eyed, hollow-cheeked and wretched. Its chin and cheeks were covered in a straggly beard and its thin hair was long and matted. He put the inkwell down quickly.
‘God alone knows what’s coming next,’ he said aloud, ‘but despite appearances I’m alive and I’d better try to stay that way. I will not allow this place or these revolting animals to break my spirit. I will find a way to get home and I will discover who has done this to me.’
Too exhausted to do anything else, Thomas lay down on the cot and closed his eyes. For the first time in weeks he was alone.
Chapter 6
THOMAS SOON LEARNED, however, that at night in such a place a man was never alone. Outside the hut, dogs barked and unknown creatures whistled and croaked. For company inside he had buzzing insects and tiny lizards which scampered over his chest and legs. At first he leapt up at the feel of their feet on his skin, frantically waving his arms about to frighten the things off, and only abandoning this when he realized that, just like their cousins on the Hampshire heathland, they were harmless.
The insects were another matter. Very soon he was scratching at bites on his ankles and wrists and wondering what God’s purpose could possibly have been in putting on the earth creatures whose only function was to inflict torment. And there were armies of them. Squash one and ten more would take its place.
Trapped in an airless hut, biting insects, reptiles, heat, dirt, neither food nor water, far from home, no idea what the next day would bring – Thomas Hill, scholar and philosopher, who had once broken the unbreakable Vigenère cipher and had been presented to both the king and the queen of England, might as well have been a slave dragged from his home in chains and doomed to nothing but pain, misery and death. He turned his face to the wall and howled until eventually, shattered in mind and body, he fell into a fitful sleep.
When dawn broke, Thomas rose shakily from the bed, scratched at the red weals all over his body, decided against examining his face in the inkwell and tentatively opened the door of the hut. It would do no harm to explore his prison. As soon as he set foot outside there were shrill calls of alarm from birds in the trees behind the hut and an ancient dog which had been sleeping nearby sloped off towards the Gibbes’s house. A large, round, stone-built structure stood no more than twenty yards away and beside it what looked like a well. Thomas went to inspect it and was relieved to find that it was indeed a well, with a rope attached to a ring set into the stone surround. He pulled on the rope and raised a bucket of water. Not knowing what to expect, he peered into the bucket. To his surprise, the water was clear and clean. He took a sip and, finding it pure, gulped down half the bucket. The other half he tipped over his head. It was cool and refreshing and eased the bites on his skin. He lowered the bucket and did it again. That was something. A well full of good water close to his hut.
From the opposite direction to the house, he could see smoke and hear voices and set off towards them. Down a narrow path which opened into fields of what Thomas thought must be sugar cane, he came to a cluster of wooden shacks, with fires set outside and the smells of cooking in the air. A pang of hunger gripped his stomach and saliva filled his mouth. He called out a greeting and the shacks immediately emptied of their occupants. Men, women and children, all with black skins, emerged from the doorways in ones and twos and stared at him. Slaves from Africa. Might they share their breakfast with him?
Before he could find out, from behind him came bellows of fury, followed by Samuel and John Gibbes. Thomas turned in alarm. The bearded brothers were striding towards him, both brandishing whips.