‘Are you sure that’s wise?’ he asked Samuel.
‘To hell and back with wise, Hill. We’re harvesting the cane and we need the mill and the boiling house working. Strip off and get inside. You can stoke the furnace. Make sure it stays hot. Get on with it.’
There was no alternative. Thomas took off his shirt and breeches and stepped gingerly into the boiling house. He was barely inside when he felt as if he had run into a stone wall. His hands went to his face and he staggered backwards. The stench was so thick he could almost touch it and the heat from the furnace and the coppers above it was so fierce that it penetrated his skin and his eyes. Had the Gibbes not been standing guard at the open door, Thomas would have turned and run. No punishment could be worse than this. Both of them held their whips ready to strike at bare flesh and both were grinning.
‘You’ll soon get used to it, Hill,’ taunted John. ‘If the slaves can do it, so can you. Stoke the furnace and keep stoking. There’s sugar to be made and plenty of it.’
Thomas tried again. This time the heat was a little less intense and he managed to get to the furnace. He watched the man stoking it lift a heap of dried-up canes and wood and fork them into the mouth of the furnace. With a nod to Thomas he handed over the fork and joined the team transferring the boiling sugar into smaller and smaller coppers until the crystallized mixture was tipped into a cooling vat.
As the coppers hung over the furnace, Thomas would be working below them. A splash from a copper and he could easily lose a hand or an arm. The Gibbes watched him fork in three or four loads and then left. The cane was being cut and they would want to make sure it was cut properly. Thomas wiped the sweat from his eyes and bent his back to the forking, one white body among the black ones.
After an hour he had to rest. His back ached and his arms were shaking. He threw down the fork and went outside. The slaves ignored him and carried on with their tasks. Cartloads of cane were being trundled up from the fields for their juice to be extracted in the mill and gallons of the syrupy mixture were being carried across for boiling. If the boiling men stopped to rest, a backlog would soon build up and the Gibbes would want to know why. The slaves preferred to keep working.
The injured man still lay outside the boiling house, silent and unmoving. Thomas drank from the well by the mill and tipped a bucket of water over his head. He offered some to the stricken man, who ignored him. He wondered at the slaves’ ability to work for long periods in such a place. Could Dante himself have imagined worse?
Keeping an eye out for Gibbes, Thomas sat with his back to the well and breathed deeply. He had quite forgotten his nakedness. In the boiling house it had seemed natural; in there any scrap of clothing would have been unwelcome and would have come out reeking of sugar. The light breeze which was turning the sails of the windmill cooled his skin and eased the tension in his back and neck.
For a moment he closed his eyes and thought of home. In his mind’s eye he was walking by the river with Polly and Lucy. It was a spring day, the oaks were coming into leaf and the girls were picking primroses. He slipped into sleep.
‘On your feet, you shitten little worm,’ roared a voice.
Thomas’s eyes opened in shock. John Gibbes was thundering up the slope, whip in hand. He jumped up and made for the boiling house. He was halfway through the entrance when he felt the sting of the whip on his shoulders. His back arched and he yelped in pain. A second lash drew blood and a third sliced across its mark.
Then it happened. It had not happened when he had thrown himself at Rush – that was the product of blind, unthinking fury. It had not happened when the Gibbes taunted him or when they had threatened to kill him. But now, after long months of lonely misery, it happened. The thing he called ‘the ice’ – an unshakeable calmness and intensity of purpose. The last time had been in the courtyard of Pembroke College, when a cowardly young captain had goaded him once too often. It was as if his mind had left his body and he was watching himself.
Thomas moved so fast that Gibbes had no time to react. In one movement he turned and launched himself. The whip dropped from Gibbes’s hand and he fell on to his back with Thomas on top of him. Thomas was on his feet again in a trice. He planted a foot on the man’s throat and bent to speak. ‘Enough, Gibbes. Take your evil ways back to your pigsty and take your brother with you.’ Before Gibbes could get to his feet, Thomas picked up his clothes and strode off up the path to his hut.
The deed was done and the ice departed as quickly as it had come. By the time Thomas reached the hut, he knew that his Rubicon was behind him. Whatever the consequences, this time he must flee and he must not come back. If he were caught again the Gibbes would flay him to death, Rush or no Rush.
He stopped only long enough to pull on his clothes, then continued on past the brutes’ hovel to the road. John Gibbes would go and fetch his brother before following him so he might just have time to get away. At the junction with the road down the hill he did something he had never done before and turned left. Instinctively he thought that the Gibbes would look for him in Speightstown or Holetown. If they came looking in the middle of the island, they would soon find themselves on rough paths through dense undergrowth until they reached the hills. He knew this from Patrick and he knew that almost no one lived there. They would not go into the forest. They would head down to the coast.
He would go to the Lytes and throw himself on their mercy. He had a good idea where their estate was. He knew it bordered the Gibbes’s on the north-eastern side and that their house was at the northern tip of the land. Where else was there to go?
Thomas could still run. He had always been fast and at Oxford he had outrun all his friends. He found a rhythm and was soon deep in the forest. The road twisted and turned up the hill, wide enough for a cartload of sugar, until he reached a fork where it separated into two narrower paths. He stopped and tried to work out which path to take. This high up, they had both been cut through forest thick enough to obscure any view. He knew that the Atlantic Ocean was in front of him and the Caribbean behind, but that would be so whichever fork he took. The twisting and turning up the hill made it difficult to know exactly where he was. Either path might turn back down the hill or take him deeper into the forest. He might even have already passed the Lytes’ estate. Left fork or right?
While he was deliberating, a troop of monkeys dropped out of a tree and walked slowly up the right path. Abandoning any further pretence at navigation, Thomas followed them. At least the monkeys would know where to find food. He had not eaten all day and his strength was fading. The monkeys were in no hurry and Thomas easily kept up with them, staying far enough back not to frighten them.
Quite soon the forest thinned a little and they came to a line of palm trees. The monkeys made for a tree laden with green coconuts. Thomas picked up a fallen nut and weighed it in his hands. It was heavy with water. He looked about for something with which to break the shell, cursing himself for not thinking to bring a knife with him. With a sharp stone he tried to bore a hole in the nut so that he could drink the water. When that did not work he smashed the stone down on the shell, breaking it open and scattering the monkeys in alarm.
Refreshed by the coconut, he continued up the path. It was not long before he knew that the monkeys had deceived him. The path had been getting narrower and narrower until two men could not have walked along it side by side. Not very clever, Thomas, he said to himself. Chief cryptographer to the king, breaker of the Vigenère cipher, philosopher and now follower of monkeys. No wonder you’re lost. He turned back and retraced his steps down the hill.