Seven Stones to Stand or Fall (Outlander)(223)
“Well, me lord,” Tom squared his shoulders, “it’s just what Rodrigo told me this afternoon—after you left.” He glanced at Rodrigo, who nodded again.
“See, he’s been a-wanting to tell you, ever since you come back from the plantations, but he didn’t want his wife or Inocencia to hear it. But he got Jacinto to come translate for him, so he could tell me.”
“Tell you what?” Grey was discovering the stirrings of hunger and was rummaging through the larder, pulling out sausages and cheese and a jar of some kind of fruit preserve.
“Well, he told me about what happened when you talked to the slaves in the tobacco shed and when the one man told him to leave because he’s a zombie.” Tom looked protectively at Rodrigo; he’d quite lost any sense of fear about it.
“So he didn’t want to stay too near—he says sometimes people gets very upset about him—and he walked down toward the plantation house.”
Approaching the house, Rodrigo had come upon the woman Alejandra—Inocencia’s cousin, the one who had revealed the slave revolt, in hopes that Inocencia’s English lover might be able to do something before anything dreadful could happen.
“She was worried, you could see, Rodrigo says, and talked a lot about her lover—that’s Hamid, what he says you met—and how she didn’t want him or the others to die, and they would if…well, anyway, they got summat close to the big hacienda, and she stopped sudden.”
Alejandra had stood there in the darkness, her white dress seeming to float in the air beside Rodrigo like a ghost. He stood with her, quiet, waiting to see what she would say next. But she hadn’t spoken, only stood frozen for what seemed a long time but probably wasn’t, the night wind rising and stirring her skirts.
“Then she took his arm and said they should go back, and they did. But…” Tom coughed, his round face troubled, and looked at Rodrigo again.
“Rodrigo said Azeel told him on the way back to Havana what happened in the shed. What you said to that man, Cano, and what he said to you—about the people what owned the plantation.”
“Yes?” Grey paused in the act of buttering a chunk of bread.
Rodrigo said something quiet, and Tom nodded.
“He said something didn’t seem right while they were looking at the house. There were servants going in and out, but it just didn’t feel right to him. And when he heard what this Cano said to you—”
“No los mataremos,” Grey said, suddenly uneasy. “?‘We will not kill them’?”
Rodrigo nodded, and Tom cleared his throat.
“You can’t kill somebody what’s already dead, can you, me lord?”
“Already…no. No, you can’t mean that the slaves had already…No.” But a worm of doubt was taking up residence in his stomach, and he put the bread down.
“The…wind,” Rodrigo said, with his usual agonizing pause to find an English word. “Muerto.”
He lifted his hand, a beautiful, slender hand, and drew his knuckles gently beneath his nose.
“I…know…the smell…of death.”
COULD IT BE TRUE? Grey was too exhausted to feel more than a distant sense of cold horror at the notion, but he couldn’t dismiss it. Cano had not struck him as a patient man. He could easily imagine that the slave had grown frustrated when Malcolm didn’t appear soon enough and had decided to carry out his original plan. But then when Grey did come—Christ, he must have arrived on the heels of the…the massacre…
He remembered his sight of the hacienda: lights burning inside but so quiet. No sense of movement within; only the silent passage of the house-slaves outside. And the stink of anger in the tobacco shed. He shuddered.
He took his leave of Tom and Rodrigo but, too tired and shocked to sleep, then sought refuge in the sala, which seemed always to have light. One of the kitchen maids, undoubtedly roused by Tom, came in with a pitcher of wine and a plate of cheese; she smiled sleepily at him, murmured, “Buenas noches, se?or,” and stumbled back toward her bed.
He couldn’t eat, or even sit down, and after a moment’s hesitation went out again, into the deserted patio. He stood there for some time, looking up into the black velvet sky. What time was it? The moon had set and surely dawn could not be far off, but there was no trace of light save the distant stars.
What should he do? Was there anything he could do? He thought not. There was no way of telling whether Rodrigo was right—and even if he was (a small, cold feeling at the back of Grey’s neck was inclined to believe it)…there was nothing to be done, no one to tell who could investigate, let alone try to find the murderers, if murderers they were.
The city lay suspended between the Spanish and the British invaders; there was no telling when the siege would be successful—though he thought it would. The spiking of El Morro’s guns would help, but the navy must be informed, so as to take advantage of it.
Come dawn, he would try to leave the city with his mother and the children and his servants. He thought it could be managed easily enough; he had brought as much gold from Jamaica as he could, and there was more than enough left to bribe their way past the guard at the city gate.
What then? Exhausted as he was, he wasn’t even thinking, just watching dimly as the future unrolled in small, disjointed pictures: a carriage for his mother and the children and Azeel, himself on the stubborn white mule, two more animals for Tom and Rodrigo.