It was pointless to expect help from outside; their friends and acquaintances had been told she was ill with grief, unbalanced, and the doctor had ordered complete seclusion and rest. Even her close friends Catherine Page and Laura Steeples had believed her uncle’s lies and obediently kept away. She had seen their letters to him, full of shocked sympathy that she was in such a decline.
And who could she trust, in any case? She had trusted Joshua, and how wrong she had been about him!
Clemence stood and went to the full-length window, its casement open on to the fragrant heat of the night. Her father had insisted that Raven’s Hold was built right on the edge of the cliff, just as the family castle in Northumberland was, and the balcony of her room jutted out into space above the sea.
When she was a child, after her mother’s death, she had run wild with the sons of the local planters, borrowing their clothes, scrambling through the cane fields, hiding in the plantation buildings. Scandalised local matrons had finally persuaded her father that she should become a conformable young lady once her fourteenth birthday was past and so her days of climbing out of the window at night and up the trellis to freedom and adventures were long past.
She leaned on the balcony and smiled, her expression turning into a grimace as the bruises made themselves felt. If only it were so easy to climb away now!
But why not? Clemence straightened, tinglingly alert. If she could get out of the house, down to the harbour, then the Raven Princess would be there, due to sail for England with the morning light. It was the largest of her father’s ships—her ships—now that pirates had captured Raven Duchess, the action that had precipitated her father’s heart stroke and death.
But if she just ran away they would hunt her down like a fugitive slave…Clemence paced into the room, thinking furiously. Her uncle’s sneer came back to her. You would sooner die? Let him think that, then. Somewhere, surely, were the boy’s clothes she had once worn. She pulled open presses, flung up the lids of the trunks, releasing wafts of sandalwood from their interiors. Yes, here at the bottom of one full of rarely used blankets were the loose canvas breeches, the shirt and waistcoat.
She pulled off her gown and tried them on. The bottom of the trousers flapped above her ankle bones now, but the shirt and waistcoat had always been on the large side. After some thought she tore linen strips and bound her chest tightly; her bosom was unimpressive, but even so, it was better to take no chances. Clemence dug out the buckled shoes, tried them on her bare feet, then looked in the mirror. The image of a gangly youth stared back, oddly adorned by the thick braid of hair.
That was going to have to go, there was no room for regret. Clemence found the scissors, gritted her teeth and hacked. The hair went into a cloth, knotted tightly, then wrapped up into a bundle with everything she had been wearing that evening. A thought struck her and she took out the gown again to tear a thin, ragged strip from the hem. Her slippers she flung out of the window and the modest pearls and earrings she buried under the jewellery in her trinket box.
The new figure that looked back at her from the glass had ragged hair around its ears and a dramatically darkening bruise over cheek and eye. Her mind seemed to be running clearly now, as though she had pushed through a forest of fear and desperation into open air. Clemence took the pen from the standish and scrawled I cannot bear it…On a sheet of paper. A drop of water from the washstand was an artistic and convincing teardrop to blur the shaky signature. The ink splashed on to the dressing table, over her fingers. All the better to show agitation.
She looped the bundle on to her belt and set a stool by the balcony before scrambling up on to the rail. Perched there, she snagged the strip from her gown under a splinter, then kicked the stool over. There: the perfect picture of a desperate fall to the crashing waves below. How Uncle Joshua was going to explain that was his problem.
Now all she had to do was to ignore the lethal drop below and pray that the vines and the trellis would still hold her. Clemence reached up, set her shoe on the first, distantly remembered foothold, and swung clear of the rail.
She rapidly realised just how dangerous this was, something the child that she had been had simply not considered. And five years of ladylike behaviour, culminating in weeks spent almost ill with grief and desperation, had weakened her muscles. Her dinner lurched in her stomach and her throat went dry. Teeth gritted she climbed on, trying not to think about centipedes, spiders or any of the other interesting inhabitants of the ornamental vines she was clutching. However venomous they might be, they were not threatening to rape and rob her.
The breath sobbed in her throat, but she reached the ledge that ran around the house just beneath the eaves and began to shuffle along it, clinging to the gutters. All she had to do now was to get around the corner and she could drop on to the roof of the kitchen wing. From there it was an easy slide to the ground.
A shutter banged open just below where her heels jutted out into space. Clemence froze. ‘No, I don’t want her, how many times have I got to tell you?’ It was Lewis, irritated and abrupt. ‘Why would I want that scrawny, cantankerous little bitch? It is simply business.’
There was the sound of a woman’s voice, low and seductive. Marie Luce. Lewis grunted. ‘Get your clothes off, then.’ Such a gallant lover, Clemence thought. Her cousin had left the shutters open, forcing her to move with exaggerated care in case her leather soles gritted on the rough stone. Then she was round, dropping on to the thick palmetto thatch, sliding down to the lean-to shed roof and clambering to the ground.
Old One-Eye, the guard dog, whined and came over stiffly to lick her hand, the links of his chain chinking. There was noise from the kitchens, the hum and chirp of insects, the chatter of a night bird. No one would hear her stealthy exit through the yard gate, despite the creaky hinge that never got oiled.
Clemence took to her heels, the bundle bouncing on her hip. Now all she had to do was to get far enough away to hide the evidence that she was still alive, and steal a horse.
It was a moonless night, the darkness of Kingston harbour thickly sprinkled with the sparks of ships’ riding-lights. Clemence slid from the horse’s back, slapped it on the rump and watched it gallop away, back towards the penn she had taken it from almost three hours before.
The unpaved streets were rough under her stumbling feet but she pushed on, keeping to the shadows, avoiding the clustered drinking houses and brothels that lined the way down to the harbour. It was just her luck that Raven Princess was moored at the furthest end, Clemence thought, dodging behind some stacked barrels to avoid a group of men approaching down the centre of the street.
And when she got there, she was not at all certain that simply marching on board and demanding to be taken to England was a sensible thing to do. Captain Moorcroft could well decide to return her to Uncle Joshua, despite the fact that the ship was hers. The rights of women was not a highly regarded principle, let alone here on Jamaica in the year 1817.
The hot air held the rich mingled odours of refuse and dense vegetation, open drains, rum, wood smoke and horse dung, but Clemence ignored the familiar stench, quickening her pace into a jog trot. The next quay was the Ravenhurst moorings and the Raven Princess… was gone.
She stood staring, mouth open in shock, mind blank, frantically scanning the moored ships for a sight of the black-haired, golden-crowned figurehead. It must be here!
‘What you looking for, boy?’ a voice asked from behind her.
‘The Raven Princess,’ she stammered, her voice husky with shock and disbelief.
‘Sailed this evening, damn them, they finished loading early. What do you want with it?’
Clemence turned, keeping her head down so the roughly chopped hair hid her face. ‘Cabin boy,’ she muttered. ‘Cap’n Moorcroft promised me a berth.’ There were five men, hard to see against the flare of light from a big tavern, its doors wide open on to the street.
‘Is that so? We could do with a cabin boy, couldn’t we, lads?’ the slightly built figure in the centre of the group said, his voice soft. The hairs on Clemence’s nape rose. The others sniggered. ‘You come along with us, lad. We’ll find you a berth all right.’
‘No. No, thank you.’ She began to edge away.
‘That’s “No, thank you, Cap’n”,’ a tall man with a tricorne hat on his head said, stepping round to block her retreat.