‘What the devil are you doing here, Hill?’ shouted Samuel. ‘Get back to your hut or you’ll feel my whip on your back.’ His whip was a vicious-looking thing with a leather strap and a tongue like a viper’s.
‘I was finding my way around,’ replied Thomas unsteadily.
The other one, John, stuck his face into Thomas’s and spat. ‘We’ll tell you when to find your way around, you little turd. Get back to the hut now.’
‘I have no business being here. I was wrongly arrested and I demand to see a magistrate.’
John Gibbes roared. ‘Demand to see a magistrate, eh? What do you think of that, brother?’
‘I think Master Hill needs a lesson,’ snarled Samuel, raising his whip. Its tongue flicked across Thomas’s cheek, slicing the skin, and Thomas cried out in pain. He put his hand to his face and felt blood. ‘Now get back to your hut, Hill, or you’ll be sorry.’
There was nothing to be gained by arguing. Thomas walked slowly back to the hut, gingerly feeling his cheek and trying not to stumble. God have pity, he thought, what a pair. Vicious, repulsive, barely human. The red one is the ugliest man I’ve ever seen. More warts and carbuncles than Cromwell. The black one’s no better. A pair of brutes. Red brute and black brute. How in the name of heaven did they come to buy me? And how do I escape from them?
The Gibbes soon followed him back up the path. ‘Next time we find you sniffing about the slaves, you’ll get what they get. A proper taste of the whip and a day on the boiling house ring,’ growled Samuel, pointing with his whip to a rusty iron ring set at head height into the wall of the round building. ‘Understand?’ Thomas understood. These men were dangerous. ‘Now get down to the kitchen and get us our breakfast. There’s work to be done.’ Without waiting for him, they strode off to the house. Thomas followed them.
Outside the hovel, where they evidently did their eating and drinking, there were four rickety chairs and a battered table. Samuel kicked aside another mangy dog asleep in the morning sun and climbed two steps to a patched-up door. John told Thomas to follow his brother and sat down.
Thomas climbed the steps and went inside. There were two rooms. One with a wooden bed on either side, a heap of sacking, a stack of tools and a barrel in the middle of the floor. The other, reached by a door between the beds, was a kitchen. A roasting spit stood over a smoking hearth, there was another barrel in one corner and a heap of filthy platters, knives, spoons, glasses and wooden cups, all piled up on a small table. On a shelf were hunks of meat, loaves of bread and huge jars of sugar. Joints of mutton and pork hung on hooks attached to a roof beam. Around and under the table and on either side of the fire were dozens and dozens of bottles. The dog wandered in through a back door and began licking the earth floor.
‘Meat and bread,’ ordered Samuel, ‘and wine. Enough for two.’ And went to join his brother.
He would not get home any sooner by refusing so Thomas inspected the bottles and found one that contained a thin red liquid that might once have been claret. He took it out to the brutes with two glasses and returned to fetch meat and bread. From the shelf he took a dusty loaf and a slab of half-eaten mutton and took them out on wooden platters. The brutes appeared content and were soon tearing at the meat and bread with their hands and drinking the wine from the bottle. The glasses had been tossed aside. Revolting as the food looked and smelt, Thomas was starving and needed to eat. He found a piece of cooked chicken, sniffed it, wiped it on his breeches and took a tentative bite. It was old and tough but it was food. Water from the well would wash it down. He stuffed the chicken under his shirt and awaited further instructions.
They came almost immediately. ‘More wine, damn you, and be quick about it,’ shouted one of the brothers. Astonished, Thomas took out another bottle. Two bottles of claret for breakfast. How many might there be for dinner?
‘Put it there and get back to the hut. We’ll be up there when we’re done.’ Clutching the chicken under his shirt, Thomas did as he was told. The lines of battle had been drawn. The brutes would shout and curse and he would hold his tongue and do their bidding. But only until he could escape and get home.
When the brutes appeared at the hut they were carrying two large ledgers, quills and a pot of ink. ‘There you are, Hill,’ said Samuel, ‘books of account. We need records of what we buy and sell and a tally of the slaves.’ He jabbed a filthy finger at Thomas. ‘You can write and figure, can’t you?’
Thomas nodded. ‘I can.’
‘Just as well. When our partner visits, he’ll want to see the books. Make sure they’re right.’ So the brutes had a partner. A man who did not care much what company he kept. John produced scraps of paper from a pocket. ‘Start on those.’ Thomas put the papers, the ledgers, the ink and the quills on his table. It would be better than working in that hellish kitchen. ‘When you’re done go to the kitchen and get our dinner ready.’
Dear God, the kitchen again. ‘What do you wish to eat?’
‘Meat.’ And with that, the brutes departed, leaving Thomas to the ledgers.
Might as well get started, he thought, testing the point of a quill on his finger. It was sharp enough but too flexible – certainly not from a duck or a swan. He tipped a little of the ink into the silver inkwell. It was thin stuff, nothing like his own writing ink made from good English oak apples. The ledgers, however, were surprisingly good. The paper was thick and they were well bound in red leather. The scraps of paper turned out to be bills of sale from suppliers of tools, barrels, wheels, pots and the many other things needed for the production and sale of sugar, and barely intelligible scribbles recording monies received for the sugar sold.
Indifferent quills, watery ink, but it was the sort of work to which Thomas was accustomed and there was some pleasure in writing in the ledgers and creating an orderly set of accounts. Two hours later when he had completed the work, he closed the ledgers, made a neat pile of the bills, got up and stretched his back. He was astonished by the figures he had entered. The brothers Gibbes, brutish, evil, probably illiterate, were amassing a huge fortune. Where had they got the capital to buy the land and the equipment? Had they stolen it? And how had they learned about sugar? Where had they come from and when? If they were typical of planters on the island, it was a strange place indeed, where ignorant brutes could master a complicated process and rapidly become exceedingly wealthy.
If they were out in the fields somewhere there would be another chance to explore his prison before having to go back to the kitchen. The more he knew about the place, the better. If he was going to run, he had best know where to run to. The well yielded another bucket of good water – he made a mental note to find out why it was altogether better than the brown stuff produced by the Romsey wells – and then he ducked through a narrow entrance into the circular building beside it. In the middle was a large stone furnace over which had been erected a steel frame, with broken pots strewn around it on the earth floor. John Gibbes had called it the boiling house although it was obvious that nothing had been boiled in it for years. Even empty, it was an unpleasant place, dark and threatening, and Thomas quickly retreated back through the entrance.
Keeping an ear open for the sound of the returning Gibbes, he walked cautiously down the narrow path towards the fields. The ground was free of stones but, here and there, heavily rutted. On either side grew the same tall trees which he had noticed on the way from the harbour. High in their branches, a family of monkeys screeched a warning at his approach.
When he reached the place where the path opened up, he stood quietly behind a tree and listened. Far off, he could hear voices singing to a steady rhythm and he knew without looking that they were the voices of slaves cutting sugar cane and loading it on to carts. He peered round the tree. No sign of the Gibbes.