While he sat watching the Zeelander make a starboard tack, coming about to enter the bay, Katherine leaned across the seat and pulled aside the opposite curtain. The hot wind that suddenly stirred past was a sultry harbinger of the coastal breeze now sweeping up the hillside, where field after identical field was lined with rows of tall, leafy stalks, green and iridescent in the sun.
The new Barbados is already here, she thought gloomily. The best thing now is to face it.
Without a word she straightened her tight, sweaty bodice, gathered her wrinkled skirt, and opened the carriage door. She waved aside the straw parasol that James, their Irish servant and footman, tried to urge on her and stepped into the harsh midday sun. Dalby Bedford nodded at the crowd, then climbed down after.
He was tall and, unlike his careless daughter, always groomed to perfection. Today he wore a tan waistcoat trimmed with wide brown lace and a white cravat that matched the heron-feather plume in his wide-brimmed hat. Over the years, the name of Dalby Bedford had become a byword for freedom in the Americas: under his hand Barbados had been made a democracy, and virtually independent of England. First he had convinced the king's proprietor to reduce rents on the island, then he had created an elected Assembly of small freeholders to counter the high-handed rule of the powerful Council. He had won every battle, until this one.
Katherine moved through the crowd of black-hatted planters as it parted before them. Through the shimmering glare of the sand she could just make out the commanding form of Anthony Walrond farther down by the shore, together with his younger brother Jeremy. Like hundreds of other royalists, they had been deported to Barbados in the aftermath of England's Civil War. Now Anthony spotted their carriage and started up the incline toward them, and for an instant she found herself wishing she'd thought to wear a more fashionable bodice.
"Your servant, sir." A gruff greeting, aimed toward Dalby Bedford, disrupted her thoughts. She looked back to see a heavyset planter riding his horse directly through the crowd, with the insistent air of a man who demands deference. Swinging down from his wheezing mount, he tossed the reins to the servant who had ridden with him and began to shove his way forward, fanning his open gray doublet against the heat.
Close to fifty and owner of the largest plantation on the island, Benjamin Briggs was head of the Council, that governing body of original settlers appointed years before by the island's proprietor in London. His sagging, leathery face was formidable testimony to twenty years of hard work and even harder drink. The planters on the Council had presided over Barbados' transformation from a tropical rain forest to a patchwork of tobacco and cotton plantations, and now to what they hoped would soon be a factory producing white gold.
Briggs pushed back his dusty hat and turned to squint approvingly as the frigate began furling its mainsail in preparation to drop anchor. "God be praised, we're almost there. The years of starvation are soon to be over."
Katherine noted that she had not been included in his greeting. She had once spoken her mind to Benjamin Briggs concerning his treatment of his indentures more frankly than he cared to hear. Even now, looking at him, she was still amazed that a man once a small Bristol importer had risen to so much power in the Americas. Part of that success, she knew, derived from his practice of lending money to hard-pressed freeholders at generous rates but short terms, then foreclosing on their lands the moment the sight bills came due.
"It's an evil precedent for the English settlements, mark my word." Bedford gazed back toward the ship. He and Benjamin Briggs had been sworn enemies from the day he first proposed establishing the Assembly. "I tell you again it'll open the way for fear and divisiveness throughout the Americas."