“With this, Beebee,” she said, showing me the jewel, “your slave will send a message to Mr George, desiring him to meet her in some retired spot. She cured his aged father of an ague some time since, so that he won’t refuse her. Then she’ll demand an asylum in his house for you, Beebee.”
“But how shall we cheat the vigilance of the soldiers, Misery? They are perpetually on the deck, quarrelling and gaming, and must know that I have never offered to show myself. Are they also to be bribed, or how am I to slip past them?”
“No, Beebee. They would not accept of a bribe, for their business here is well known, and they would pay with their lives to the Nabob for their slackness. We must deceive ’em. They must think you dead.”
I felt myself grow pale. “But how shall we manage that, Misery?”
“Why, Beebee, they have heard so much of your fever and weakness that it won’t surprise ’em, and they can’t be held to blame for it.”
“But would you convey me to land in the night, Misery?”
“No, Beebee, for they would desire to know what was happened to your body. Your slave has a better plan than that. With a drug that she will administer to you, she’ll make you resemble a corpse, so that you’re carried out in broad daylight to be buried.”
“In a coffin, Misery? And what of the physician, and the grave-diggers?” with an increasing horror, for, my dear, your foolish Sylvia’s mind had flown back to the days when she read “Romeo and Juliet” by stealth with her Amelia, and she seemed to anticipate for herself the calamities that attended the personages of our great poet’s tenderest tragedy.
“The Moors don’t use coffins, Beebee. You would have your head wrapped in a cloth, and be carried on a bier. Nor do physicians prescribe remedies for women among the Moors, except very rarely. As for gravediggers, there won’t be no need of ’em. A Christian would not receive here the burial of a believer, and ’twill be due to the piety of your poor attendant that your corpse en’t tossed ashore on some sand-bank, but carried into the jungul,” this is what they call a wood, “to be covered with branches. You see how easy it will be to practise for your recovery.”
“Misery,” I said, “I’ll consent to this frightful plan, since your life is at stake as well as mine, except in one particular. I won’t be drugged. I have resolution enough to remain motionless while I am carried on the bier, but I can’t endure to be deprived of my senses.”