And she was ravenously hungry. After she finished off a handful of figs with a bowl of custard made of cassava fruit brought by Tenneh, she asked if there were any of the small biscuits left that the cook had made with ground nuts.
When she asked about Mrs Chelly, a shadow of pain passed across her student’s face.
“What’s wrong? Has something happened to Mrs Chelly? The memories of what had happened were only gradually seeping back into Rachel’s mind.
“She tried to poison you.” The blunt answer from Tenneh made Rachel lose her appetite mid-spoonful of custard.
And then everything flooded back. A woman they’d trusted for many years, who was a good friend of her adoptive mother - she’d betrayed all of them. She’d tried to sell Tenneh off into slavery…and she’d tried to poison her. Rachel lost her appetite.
Chris helda spyglass to his eye and felt the rough texture of the ring Rachel had given him rubbing against the cylindrical glass. Leaving her looking so ill and vulnerable had nearly gutted him, but his first duty was to the squadron.
The flag of the ship they were following was American, but their treaty with England brooked no boarding by the Royal Navy on the high seas to search for slave cargo. However, the Spanish ship less than a mile ahead of them was fair game, and he would bet anything they were headed to the island to pick up slaves from a trader. He gave an order to Lieutenant Matthias to have the sails set for a tack back out to sea. He’d make them think he wasn’t interested, and then he’d circle back at nightfall.
Rachel satcross-legged beneath an orange tree in the orchard and tried to piece together the gaps in her memory. She sucked on her birth mother’s river stone, and the one Christopher had given her hung inside a pouch attached to a chain around her neck.
Her father had explained how Lieutenant Bourne had kept Tenneh from being taken from the market. Later, the young woman had produced a note from Mrs Chelly that had lured her to the market where only the Marine’s intervention had saved her.
When Rachel had gone to Mrs Chelly’s cottage to tell her they no longer needed her services, their former cook had slipped a poison into her tea. Her memory after that was scattered, with bits and pieces gradually surfacing.
She now knew she’d nearly died of a fever brought on by the poison. And Christopher had never left her side until the fever had broken. And then he’d been ordered to join the rest of his squadron off Sherbro Island.
There was still something just beyond her reach that she knew she should remember, but couldn’t. She was fairly certain, though, that the wraith-like woman who had appeared and disappeared serendipitously was actually her aunt.
She was trying hard to remember exactly what she’d told her the last time she’d seen her while she was dreaming during the fever. Abruptly, an entirely different memory assailed her - the words Mrs Chelly had thrown at her after she’d drunk the poisoned tea. Her mother was from the Ibi tribe, and she’d been married off to her father as part of a business pact with her grandfather. When her grandfather broke faith and traded with another slaver, he’d sold her and her mother in an act of revenge.
In that moment, her aunt appeared again in the orchard, hovering in the morning mist. Rachel raised her eyes and asked, “Is it true?”
The woman said nothing but shook her head in assent before dissipating when the sun burned off the morning fog.
Warring emotions passed through Rachel’s mind, and her heart raced as if cleaving in two and tumbling out of her chest would negate the awful truth that had now been confirmed. But she was still determined to meet her mother’s people. And then she’d confront her father and force him to explain why he’d committed such an evil act.
By the timeChris sailed back close to Sherbro Island under the cover of darkness, the ship flying the Spanish flag had disappeared entirely. Perhaps they’d sailed on past and carried legal cargo, but his sixth sense said otherwise.
He decided to keep theThistlepatrolling offshore as usual, but he was going to accompany two shore boats in to investigate where the Spanish ship was hiding and what her crew was up to. He left the ship in Lieutenant Mathias’s capable hands and went in with the Marines to flush out the ship wherever she might be hiding. A full moon painted the island marshes with slashes of reflected light and gave them plenty of illumination for the search.
After hours of searching the marshes, they came upon the hulk of the ship. Her crew had poled her in to a shallow marsh pond and had taken off her masts to keep the squadron patrols from sighting her from out at sea.
The ship seemed abandoned, but a nearby shack on solid ground contained some loaded muskets and slave shackles. Chris and his men attempted to warp the ship out of the creek with no success and so decided to blow her up with powder and fuses they carried.
At the loud boom and fierce fire which followed, a line of men came slowly out of the bush. Their leader said he was a slave and with twenty others had been taken into captivity to await sale to the Spaniards. He added that additional slaves had been taken as well, but they were still being kept at the trader chief’s town, three miles away.
Chris called out to his Bo’sun. “Load these men onto one of the boats and take them back to the ship. Then return for the rest we’ll be bringing out.” They had a system of lanterns which they used for messaging theThistle’screw from the outer shore of the island to come back in to meet the shore boats.
Chris had no doubt he’d return with the remaining slaves. He’d dealt with this particular chief before. The man didn’t care which nation’s flag he worked for, as long as he was paid well.
Not bad for a night’s work. And now that he had freed slaves to deliver back to the mission at Freetown, he had an excuse to return and see for himself that Rachel had healed from her bout with near-death by poisoning.
Rachel knewwhere Port Loko lay, up at the very end of one of the creeks shooting off the Sierra Leone River. Her only problem was finding a fisherman willing to risk his own freedom by taking her that far up into the bush. The village was a huge center of slave trading and the base for a slave caravan which traveled north to the savannas, and on through the desert.
The caravan’s supposed purpose was to deliver beef from cattle farmers in the savannas, but everyone knew they still dealt in slaves as well as the beef. There remained a few countries who provided a good market for what they sold, especially the Spaniards and the Americans.
She’d considered asking Dr Peregrine to help her find a boatman, but she was fairly certain he’d try to talk her out of such a trip so soon after her long fight to survive Mrs Chelly’s poisoned tea. She still felt a bit weak but was regaining more of her strength each day. She missed Chris but knew if he were there, he’d try to talk her out of searching for her family as well.
Although she still had to rest each day, Rachel felt as though she was on fire to find out the final truth. Were her father and grandfather as evil as her aunt had warned? And what would they do if she suddenly showed up demanding an explanation?
The solution suddenly popped into her mind while she was working on a needlework sampler for one of the empty spaces on a wall in the parlor. Mingo and Eli. They could help her find a boat, and one of them could help her pole as far as a mile or two from Port Loko. She could get herself the rest of the way on her own.
There was a tap at the door, and when she went to see who was there, it was her father, the vicar, balancing a tray with tea, a bowl of figs, and a plate of biscuits made from ground nut flour. Since their cook, Mrs Chelly, had disappeared, they’d been training a student to help Tenneh take over her duties. Tenneh was trying hard, but somehow, Rachel feared cooking was not going to be one of her strong talents.
