"I've got a feeling that African thinks he's coming back for the muskets, Katy, but I'll not have it."
"What'll you do?" She reached back and began to loosen the knot on her bodice, sensing a tiny pounding in her chest.
"I plan to see to it he gets a surprise instead." He lit the lamp, then pulled off his sweaty jerkin and tossed it into the corner. "Enough. Let's have a taste of you." He circled his arms around her and pulled her next to him. As he kissed her, he reached back and started unlacing her bodice. Then he whispered in her ear.
"Welcome back aboard."
[Chapter Thirteen]
With every step Jeremy took, the wooded trail leading inland from Oistins Bay felt more perilous, more alien. Why did the rows of stumps, once so familiar, no longer seem right? Why had he forgotten the spots in the path where the puddles never dried between rains, only congealed to turgid glue? He had ridden it horseback many a time, but now as he trudged up the slope, his boots still wet from the surf, he found he could remember almost nothing at all. This dark tangle of palms and bramble could scarcely be the direction home.
But the way home it was. The upland plantation of Anthony Walrond was a wooded, hundred and eighty acre tract that lay one mile inland from the settlement around Oistins Bay— itself a haphazard collection of clapboard taverns and hewn-log tobacco sheds on the southern, windward side of the island. The small harbor at Oistins was host to an occasional Dutch frigate or a small merchant vessel from Virginia or New England, but there was not enough tobacco or cotton to justify a major landing. It was, however, the ideal place to run a small shallop ashore from a ship of the fleet.
He reached a familiar arch of palms and turned right, starting the long climb along the weed-clogged path between the trees that led up to the house. As he gripped his flintlock and listened to the warbling of night birds and the menacing clatter of land crabs, he reflected sadly that he was the only man on Barbados who knew precisely what lay in store. He had received a full briefing from the admiral of the fleet aboard the Rainbowe. What would Anthony do when he heard?
He tried to sort out once more what had happened, beginning with that evening, now only two days past, when Admiral Calvert had passed him the first tankard. . . .
"If I may presume to say, it's a genuine honor to share a cup with you, Master Walrond." Calvert's dark eyes had seemed to burn with determination as he eased back into his sea chair and absently adjusted his long white cuffs. He'd been wearing a black doublet with wide white epaulettes and a pristine bib collar, all fairly crackling with starch. "And to finally have a word with a man of breeding from this infernal settlement."