Seven Stones to Stand or Fall by Diana Gabaldon (7)

Spanish Town, Jamaica

June 1761

THERE WAS A SNAKE on the drawing-room table. A small snake, but still. Lord John Grey wondered whether to say anything about it.

The governor, appearing quite oblivious of the coiled reptile’s presence, picked up a cut-crystal decanter that stood not six inches from the snake. Perhaps it was a pet, or perhaps the residents of Jamaica were accustomed to keeping a tame snake in residence, to kill rats. Judging from the number of rats Grey had seen since leaving the ship, this was sensible—though this particular snake didn’t appear large enough to take on even your average mouse.

The wine was decent, but served at body heat, and it seemed to pass directly through Grey’s gullet and into his blood. He’d had nothing to eat since before dawn and felt the muscles of his lower back begin to tingle and relax. He put the glass down; he wanted a clear head.

“I cannot tell you, sir, how happy I am to receive you,” said the governor, putting down his own glass, empty. “The position is acute.”

“So you said in your letter to Lord North. The situation has not changed appreciably since then?” It had been nearly three months since that letter was written; a lot could change in three months.

He thought Governor Warren shuddered, despite the temperature in the room.

“It has become worse,” the governor said, picking up the decanter. “Much worse.”

Grey felt his shoulders tense, but spoke calmly.

“In what way? Have there been more—” He hesitated, searching for the right word. “More demonstrations?” It was a mild word to describe the burning of cane fields, the looting of plantations, and the wholesale liberation of slaves.

Warren gave a hollow laugh. His handsome face was beading with sweat. There was a crumpled handkerchief on the arm of his chair, and he picked it up to mop at his skin. He hadn’t shaved this morning—or, quite possibly, yesterday; Grey could hear the faint rasp of his dark whiskers on the cloth.

“Yes. More destruction. They burnt a sugar press last month, though still in the remoter parts of the island. Now, though…” He paused, licking dry lips as he poured more wine. He made a cursory motion toward Grey’s glass, but Grey shook his head.

“They’ve begun to move toward Kingston,” Warren said. “It’s deliberate; you can see it. One plantation after another, in a line coming straight down the mountain.” He sighed. “I shouldn’t say straight. Nothing in this bloody place is straight, starting with the landscape.”

That was true enough; Grey had admired the vivid green peaks that soared up from the centre of the island, a rough backdrop for the amazingly blue lagoon and the white-sand shore.

“People are terrified,” Warren went on, seeming to get a grip on himself, though his face was once again slimy with sweat, and his hand shook on the decanter. It occurred to Grey, with a slight shock, that the governor was terrified. “I have merchants—and their wives—in my office every day, begging, demanding protection from the blacks.”

“Well, you may assure them that protection will be provided them,” Grey said, sounding as reassuring as possible. He had half a battalion with him—three hundred infantry troops and a company of artillery, equipped with small cannon. Enough to defend Kingston, if necessary. But his brief from Lord North was not merely to reassure the merchants and defend the shipping of Kingston and Spanish Town—nor even to provide protection to the larger sugar plantations. He was charged with putting down the slave rebellion entirely. Rounding up the ringleaders and stopping the violence altogether.

The snake on the table moved suddenly, uncoiling itself in a languid manner. It startled Grey, who had begun to think it was a decorative sculpture. It was exquisite: only seven or eight inches long and a beautiful pale yellow marked with brown, a faint iridescence in its scales like the glow of good Rhenish wine.

“It’s gone further now, though,” Warren was going on. “It’s not just burning and property destruction. Now it’s come to murder.”

That brought Grey back with a jerk.

“Who has been murdered?” he demanded.

“A planter named Abernathy. Murdered in his own house, last week. His throat cut.”

“Was the house burnt?”

“No, it wasn’t. The maroons ransacked it but were driven off by Abernathy’s own slaves before they could set fire to the place. His wife survived by submerging herself in a spring behind the house, concealed by a patch of reeds.”

“I see.” He could imagine the scene all too well. “Where is the plantation?”

“About ten miles out of Kingston. Rose Hall, it’s called. Why?” A bloodshot eye swivelled in Grey’s direction, and he realised that the glass of wine the governor had invited him to share had not been his first of the day. Nor, likely, his fifth.

Was the man a natural sot? he wondered. Or was it only the pressure of the current situation that had caused him to take to the bottle in such a blatant manner? He surveyed the governor covertly; the man was perhaps in his late thirties and, while plainly drunk at the moment, showed none of the signs of habitual indulgence. He was well built and attractive; no bloat, no soft belly straining at his silk waistcoat, no broken veins in cheeks or nose…

“Have you a map of the district?” Surely it hadn’t escaped Warren that if indeed the maroons were burning their way straight toward Kingston, it should be possible to predict where their next target lay and to await them with several companies of armed infantry?

Warren drained the glass and sat panting gently for a moment, eyes fixed on the tablecloth, then pulled himself together.

“Map,” he repeated. “Yes, of course. Dawes—my secretary—he’ll…he’ll find you one.”

Motion caught Grey’s eye. Rather to his surprise, the tiny snake, after casting to and fro, tongue tasting the air, had started across the table in what appeared a purposeful, if undulant, manner, headed straight for him. By reflex, he put up a hand to catch the little thing, lest it plunge to the floor.

The governor saw it, uttered a loud shriek, and flung himself back from the table. Grey looked at him in astonishment, the tiny snake curling over his fingers.

“It’s not venomous,” he said, as mildly as he could. At least, he didn’t think so. His friend Oliver Gwynne was a natural philosopher and mad for snakes; Gwynne had shown him all the prizes of his collection during the course of one hair-raising afternoon, and Grey seemed to recall Gwynne telling him that there were no venomous reptiles at all on the island of Jamaica. Besides, the nasty ones all had triangular heads, while the harmless kinds were blunt-headed, like this fellow.

Warren was indisposed to listen to a lecture on the physiognomy of snakes. Shaking with terror, he backed against the wall.

“Where?” he gasped. “Where did it come from?”

“It’s been sitting on the table since I came in. I…um…thought it was…” Well, plainly it wasn’t a pet, let alone an intended part of the table décor. He coughed and got up, meaning to put the snake outside through the French doors that led onto the terrace.

Warren mistook his intent, though, and, seeing Grey come closer, snake writhing through his fingers, he burst through the French doors, crossed the terrace in a mad leap, and pelted down the flagstoned walk, coattails flying as though the devil himself were in pursuit.

Grey was still staring after him in disbelief when a discreet cough from the inner door made him turn.

“Gideon Dawes, sir.” The governor’s secretary was a short, tubby man with a round pink face that probably was rather jolly by nature. At the moment, it bore a look of profound wariness. “You are Lieutenant-Colonel Grey?”

Grey thought it unlikely that there were a plethora of men wearing the uniform and insignia of a lieutenant-colonel on the premises of King’s House at that very moment but nonetheless bowed, murmuring, “Your servant, Mr. Dawes. I’m afraid Mr. Warren has been taken…er…” He nodded toward the open French doors. “Perhaps someone should go after him?”

Mr. Dawes closed his eyes with a look of pain, then sighed and opened them again, shaking his head.

“He’ll be all right,” he said, though his tone lacked any real conviction. “I’ve just been discussing commissary and billeting requirements with your Major Fettes; he wishes you to know that all the arrangements are quite in hand.”

“Oh. Thank you, Mr. Dawes.” In spite of the unnerving nature of the governor’s departure, Grey felt a sense of pleasure. He’d been a major himself for years; it was astonishing how pleasant it was to know that someone else was now burdened with the physical management of troops. All he had to do was give orders.

That being so, he gave one, though it was phrased as a courteous request, and Mr. Dawes promptly led him through the corridors of the rambling house to a small clerk’s hole near the governor’s office, where maps were made available to him.

He could see at once that Warren had been right regarding both the devious nature of the terrain and the trail of attacks. One of the maps was marked with the names of plantations, and small notes indicated where maroon raids had taken place. It was far from being a straight line, but, nonetheless, a distinct sense of direction was obvious.

The room was warm, and he could feel sweat trickling down his back. Still, a cold finger touched the base of his neck lightly when he saw the name Twelvetrees on the map.

“Who owns this plantation?” he asked, keeping his voice level as he pointed at the paper.

“What?” Dawes had fallen into a sort of dreamy trance, looking out the window into the green of the jungle, but blinked and pushed his spectacles up, bending to peer at the map. “Oh, Twelvetrees. It’s owned by Philip Twelvetrees—a young man; inherited the place from a cousin only recently. Killed in a duel, they say—the cousin, I mean,” he amplified helpfully.

“Ah. Too bad.” Grey’s chest tightened unpleasantly. He could have done without that complication. If…“The cousin—was he named Edward Twelvetrees, by chance?”

Dawes looked mildly surprised.

“I do believe that was the name. I didn’t know him, though; no one here did. He was an absentee owner; ran the place through an overseer.”

“I see.” He wanted to ask whether Philip Twelvetrees had come from London to take possession of his inheritance, but didn’t. He didn’t want to draw any attention by singling out the Twelvetrees family. Time enough for that.

He asked a few more questions regarding the timing of the raids, which Mr. Dawes answered promptly, but when it came to an explanation of the inciting causes of the rebellion, the secretary proved suddenly unhelpful—which Grey thought interesting.

“Really, sir, I know almost nothing of such matters,” Mr. Dawes protested, when pressed on the subject. “You would be best advised to speak with Captain Cresswell. He’s the superintendent in charge of the maroons.”

Grey was surprised at this.

“Escaped slaves? They have a superintendent?”

“Oh. No, sir.” Dawes seemed relieved to have a more straightforward question with which to deal. “The maroons are not escaped slaves. Or rather,” he corrected himself, “they are technically escaped slaves, but it is a pointless distinction. These maroons are the descendants of slaves who escaped during the last century and took to the mountain uplands. They have settlements up there. But as there is no way of identifying any current owner…” And as the government lacked any means of finding them and dragging them back, the Crown had wisely settled for installing a white superintendent, as was usual for dealing with native populations. The superintendent’s business was to be in contact with the maroons and deal with any matter that might arise pertaining to them.

Which raised a question, Grey thought: why had this Captain Cresswell not been brought to meet him at once? He had sent word of his arrival as soon as the ship docked at daylight, not wishing to take Derwent Warren unawares.

“Where is Captain Cresswell presently?” he asked, still polite. Mr. Dawes looked unhappy.

“I, um, am afraid I don’t know, sir,” he said, casting down his gaze behind his spectacles.

There was a momentary silence, in which Grey could hear the calling of some bird from the jungle nearby.

“Where is he normally?” Grey asked, with slightly less politesse.

Dawes blinked.

“I don’t know, sir. I believe he has a house near the base of Guthrie’s Defile—there is a small village there. But he would of course go up into the maroon settlements from time to time, to meet with the…” He waved a small, fat hand, unable to find a suitable word. “The headmen. He did buy a new hat in Spanish Town earlier this month,” Dawes added, in the tones of someone offering a helpful observation.

“A hat?”

“Yes. Oh—but of course you would not know. It is customary among the maroons, when some agreement of importance is made, that the persons making the agreement shall exchange hats. So you see—”

“Yes, I do,” Grey said, trying not to let annoyance show in his voice. “Will you be so kind, Mr. Dawes, as to send to Guthrie’s Defile, then—and to any other place in which you think Captain Cresswell might be discovered? Plainly I must speak with him, and as soon as possible.”

Dawes nodded vigorously, but before he could speak, the rich sound of a small gong came from somewhere in the house below. As though it had been signaled, Grey’s stomach emitted a loud gurgle.

“Dinner in half an hour,” Mr. Dawes said, looking happier than Grey had yet seen him. He almost scurried out the door, Grey in his wake.

“Mr. Dawes,” he said, catching up at the head of the stair. “Governor Warren. Do you think—”

“Oh, he will be present at dinner,” Dawes assured him. “I’m sure he is quite recovered now; these small fits of excitement never last very long.”

“What causes them?” A savoury smell, rich with currants, onion, and spice, wafted up the stair, making Grey hasten his step.

“Oh…” Dawes, hastening along as well, glanced sideways at him. “It is nothing. Only that His Excellency has a, um, somewhat morbid fancy concerning reptiles. Did he see a snake in the drawing room or hear something concerning one?”

“He did, yes—though a remarkably small and harmless one.” Vaguely, Grey wondered what had happened to the little yellow snake. He thought he must have dropped it in the excitement of the governor’s abrupt exit and hoped it hadn’t been injured.

Mr. Dawes looked troubled and murmured something that sounded like, “Oh, dear, oh, dear…” but then he merely shook his head and sighed.

GREY MADE HIS way to his room, meaning to freshen himself before dinner; the day was warm, and he smelled strongly of ship’s reek—this composed in equal parts of sweat, seasickness, and sewage, well marinated in salt water—and horse, having ridden up from the harbour to Spanish Town. With any luck, his valet would have clean linen aired for him by now.

King’s House, as all royal governors’ residences were known, was a rambling old wreck of a mansion, perched on a high spot of ground on the edge of Spanish Town. Plans were afoot for an immense new Palladian building, to be erected in the town’s centre, but it would be another year at least before construction could commence. In the meantime, efforts had been made to uphold His Majesty’s dignity by means of beeswax polish, silver, and immaculate linen, but the dingy printed wallpaper peeled from the corners of the rooms, and the dark-stained wood beneath exhaled a mouldy breath that made Grey want to hold his own whenever he walked inside.

One good feature of the house, though, was that it was surrounded on all four sides by a broad terrace and was overhung by large, spreading trees that cast lacy shadows on the flagstones. A number of the rooms opened directly onto this terrace—Grey’s did—and it was therefore possible to step outside and draw a clean breath, scented by the distant sea or the equally distant upland jungles. There was no sign of his valet, but there was a clean shirt on the bed. He shucked his coat, changed his shirt, and then threw the French doors open wide.

He stood for a moment in the centre of the room, mid-afternoon sun spilling through the open doors, and enjoyed the sense of a solid surface under his feet after seven weeks at sea and seven hours on horseback. Enjoyed even more the transitory sense of being alone. Command had its prices, and one of those was a nearly complete loss of solitude. He therefore seized it when he found it, knowing it wouldn’t last for more than a few moments, but valuing it all the more for that.

Sure enough, it didn’t last more than two minutes this time. He called out, “Come,” at a rap on the door frame and, turning, was struck by a visceral sense of attraction such as he had not experienced in months.

The man was young, perhaps twenty, and slender in his blue and gold livery, but with a breadth of shoulder that spoke of strength and a head and neck that would have graced a Greek sculpture. Perhaps because of the heat, he wore no wig, and his tight-curled hair was clipped so close that the finest modelling of his skull was apparent.

“Your servant, sah,” he said to Grey, bowing respectfully. “The governor’s compliments, and dinner will be served in ten minutes. May I see you to the dining room?”

“You may,” Grey said, reaching hastily for his coat. He didn’t doubt that he could find the dining room unassisted, but the chance to watch this young man walk…

“You may,” Tom Byrd corrected, entering with his hands full of grooming implements, “once I’ve put his lordship’s hair to rights.” He fixed Grey with a minatory eye. “You’re not a-going in to dinner like that, me lord, and don’t you think it. You sit down there.” He pointed sternly to a stool, and Lieutenant-Colonel Grey, commander of His Majesty’s forces in Jamaica, meekly obeyed the dictates of his twenty-one-year-old valet. He didn’t always allow Tom free rein but in the current circumstance was just as pleased to have an excuse to sit still in the company of the young black servant.

Tom laid out all his implements neatly on the dressing table, from a pair of silver hairbrushes to a box of powder and a pair of curling tongs, with the care and attention of a surgeon arraying his knives and saws. Selecting a hairbrush, he leaned closer, peering at Grey’s head, then gasped. “Me lord! There’s a big huge spider—walking right up your temple!”

Grey smacked his temple by reflex, and the spider in question—a clearly visible brown thing nearly a half inch long—shot off into the air, striking the looking glass with an audible tap before dropping to the surface of the dressing table and racing for its life.

Tom and the black servant uttered identical cries of horror and lunged for the creature, colliding in front of the dressing table and falling over in a thrashing heap. Grey, strangling an almost irresistible urge to laugh, stepped over them and dispatched the fleeing spider neatly with the back of his other hairbrush.

He pulled Tom to his feet and dusted him off, allowing the black servant to scramble up by himself. He brushed off all apologies, as well, but asked whether the spider had been a deadly one.

“Oh, yes, sah,” the servant assured him fervently. “Should one of those bite you, sah, you would suffer excruciating pain at once. The flesh around the wound would putrefy, you would commence to be fevered within an hour, and, in all likelihood, you would not live past dawn.”

“Oh, I see,” Grey said mildly, his flesh creeping briskly. “Well, then. Perhaps you would not mind looking about the room while Tom is at his work? In case such spiders go about in company?”

Grey sat and let Tom brush and plait his hair, watching the young man as he assiduously searched under the bed and dressing table, pulled out Grey’s trunk, and pulled up the trailing curtains and shook them.

“What is your name?” he asked the young man, noting that Tom’s fingers were trembling badly and hoping to distract him from thoughts of the hostile wildlife with which Jamaica undoubtedly teemed. Tom was fearless in the streets of London and perfectly willing to face down ferocious dogs or foaming horses. Spiders, though, were quite another matter.

“Rodrigo, sah,” said the young man, pausing in his curtain-shaking to bow. “Your servant, sah.”

He seemed quite at ease in company and conversed with them about the town, the weather—he confidently predicted rain in the evening, at about ten o’clock, leading Grey to think that he had likely been employed as a servant in good families for some time. Was the man a slave, he wondered, or a free black?

His admiration for Rodrigo was, he assured himself, the same that he might have for a marvellous piece of sculpture, an elegant painting. And one of his friends did in fact possess a collection of Greek amphorae decorated with scenes that gave him quite the same sort of feeling. He shifted slightly in his seat, crossing his legs. He would be going in to dinner soon. He resolved to think of large, hairy spiders and was making some progress with this subject when something huge and black dropped down the chimney and rushed out of the disused hearth.

All three men shouted and leapt to their feet, stamping madly. This time it was Rodrigo who felled the intruder, crushing it under one sturdy shoe.

“What the devil was that?” Grey asked, bending over to peer at the thing, which was a good three inches long, gleamingly black, and roughly ovoid, with ghastly long, twitching antennae.

“Only a cockroach, sah,” Rodrigo assured him, wiping a hand across a sweating ebony brow. “They will not harm you, but they are most disagreeable. If they come into your bed, they feed upon your eyebrows.”

Tom uttered a small, strangled cry. The cockroach, far from being destroyed, had merely been inconvenienced by Rodrigo’s shoe. It now extended thorny legs, heaved itself up, and was proceeding about its business, though at a somewhat slower pace. Grey, the hairs prickling on his arms, seized the ash shovel from among the fireplace implements and, scooping up the insect on its blade, jerked open the door and flung the nasty creature as far as he could—which, given his state of mind, was some considerable distance.

Tom was pale as custard when Grey came back in, but he picked up his employer’s coat with trembling hands. He dropped it, though, and with a mumbled apology bent to pick it up again, only to utter a strangled shriek, drop it once more, and run backwards, slamming so hard against the wall that Grey heard a crack of laths and plaster.

“What the devil?” He bent, reaching gingerly for the fallen coat.

“Don’t touch it, me lord!” Tom cried, but Grey had seen what the trouble was: a tiny yellow snake slithered out of the crimson-velvet folds, head moving to and fro in slow curiosity.

“Well, hallo, there.” He reached out a hand, and the little snake tasted his skin with a flickering tongue, then wove its way up into the palm of his hand. He stood up, cradling it carefully.

Tom and Rodrigo were standing like men turned to stone, staring at him.

“It’s quite harmless,” he assured them. “At least I think so. It must have fallen into my pocket earlier.”

Rodrigo was regaining a bit of his nerve. He came forward and looked at the snake but declined an offer to touch it, putting both hands firmly behind his back.

“That snake likes you, sah,” he said, glancing curiously from the snake to Grey’s face, as though trying to distinguish a reason for such odd particularity.

“Possibly.” The snake had made its way upwards and was now wrapped round two of Grey’s fingers, squeezing with remarkable strength. “On the other hand, I believe he may be attempting to kill and eat me. Do you know what his natural food might be?”

Rodrigo laughed at that, displaying very beautiful white teeth, and Grey had such a vision of those teeth, those soft mulberry lips, applied to—he coughed, hard, and looked away.

“He would eat anything that did not try to eat him first, sah,” Rodrigo assured him. “It was probably the sound of the cockroach that made him come out. He would hunt those.”

“What a very admirable sort of snake. Could we find him something to eat, do you think? To encourage him to stay, I mean.”

Tom’s face suggested strongly that if the snake was staying, he was not. On the other hand…he glanced toward the door, whence the cockroach had made its exit, and shuddered. With great reluctance, he reached into his pocket and extracted a rather squashed bread roll containing ham and pickle.

The snake was placed on the floor with this object before it. It inspected the roll gingerly, ignored the bread and pickle, but twined itself carefully about a chunk of ham, squeezing it fiercely into limp submission. Then, opening its jaw to an amazing extent, the snake engulfed its prey, to general cheers. Even Tom clapped his hands, and, if not ecstatic at Grey’s suggestion that the snake might be accommodated in the dark space beneath the bed for the sake of preserving Grey’s eyebrows, he uttered no objections to this plan, either. The snake being ceremoniously installed and left to digest its meal, Grey was about to ask Rodrigo further questions regarding the natural fauna of the island but was forestalled by the faint sound of a distant gong.

“Dinner!” he exclaimed, reaching for his now snakeless coat.

“Me lord! Your hair’s not even powdered!”

Grey refused to wear a wig, to Tom’s ongoing dismay, but was obliged in the present instance to submit to powder. This toiletry accomplished in haste, he shrugged into his coat and fled, before Tom could suggest any further refinements to his appearance.

THE GOVERNOR APPEARED, as Mr. Dawes had predicted, calm and dignified at the dinner table. All trace of sweat, hysteria, and drunkenness had vanished, and beyond a brief word of apology for his abrupt disappearance, no reference was made to his earlier departure.

Major Fettes and Grey’s adjutant, Captain Cherry, also appeared at table. A quick glance at them assured Grey that all was well with the troops. Fettes and Cherry couldn’t be more diverse physically—the latter resembling a ferret and the former a block of wood—but both were extremely competent and well liked by the men.

There was little conversation to begin with; the three soldiers had been eating ship’s biscuit and salt beef for weeks. They settled down to the feast before them with the single-minded attention of ants presented with a loaf of bread; the magnitude of the challenge had no effect upon their earnest willingness. As the courses gradually slowed, though, Grey began to instigate conversation—his prerogative, as senior guest and commanding officer.

“Mr. Dawes explained to me the position of superintendent,” he said, keeping his attitude superficially pleasant. “How long has Captain Cresswell held this position, sir?”

“For approximately six months, Colonel,” the governor replied, wiping crumbs from his lips with a linen napkin. The governor was quite composed, but Grey had Dawes in the corner of his eye and thought the secretary stiffened a little. That was interesting; he must get Dawes alone again and go into this matter of superintendents more thoroughly.

“And was there a superintendent before Captain Cresswell?”

“Yes…in fact, there were two of them, were there not, Mr. Dawes?”

“Yes, sir. Captain Ludgate and Captain Perriman.” Dawes was assiduously not meeting Grey’s eye.

“I should like very much to speak with those gentlemen,” Grey said pleasantly.

Dawes jerked as though someone had run a hatpin into his buttock. The governor finished chewing a grape, swallowed, and said, “I’m so sorry, Colonel. Both Ludgate and Perriman have left their offices.”

“Why?” John Fettes asked bluntly. The governor hadn’t been expecting that, and blinked.

“I expect Major Fettes wishes to know whether they were replaced in their offices because of some peculation or corruption,” Bob Cherry put in chummily. “And if that be the case, were they allowed to leave the island rather than face prosecution? And if so—”

“Why?” Fettes put in neatly.

Grey repressed a smile. Should peace break out on a wide scale and an army career fail them, Fettes and Cherry could easily make a living as a music-hall knockabout cross-talk act. As interrogators, they could reduce almost any suspect to incoherence, confusion, and confession in nothing flat.

Governor Warren, though, appeared to be made of tougher stuff than the usual regimental miscreant. Either that or he had nothing to hide, Grey considered, listening to him explain with tired patience that Ludgate had retired because of ill health and that Perriman had inherited money and gone back to England.

No. He watched the governor’s hand twitch and hover indecisively over the fruit bowl. He’s got something to hide. And so does Dawes. Is it the same thing, though? And has it got anything to do with the present trouble?

The governor could easily be hiding some peculation or corruption of his own—and likely was, Grey thought dispassionately, taking in the lavish display of silver on the sideboard. Such corruption was—within limits—considered more or less a perquisite of office. But if that were the case, it was not Grey’s concern—unless it was in some way connected to the maroons and their rebellion.

Entertaining as it was to watch Fettes and Cherry at their work, he cut them off with a brief nod and turned the conversation firmly back to the rebellion.

“What communications have you had from the rebels, sir?” he asked the governor. “For I believe that, in these cases, rebellion arises usually from some distinct source of grievance. What is it?”

Warren looked at him, jaw agape. He closed his mouth, slowly, and hesitated for a moment before replying. Grey surmised he was considering how much Grey might discover from other avenues of inquiry.

Everything I bloody can, Grey thought, assuming an expression of neutral interest.

“Why, as to that, sir…the incident that began the…um…the difficulties…was the arrest of two young maroons, accused of stealing from a warehouse in Kingston.” The two had been whipped in the town square and committed to prison, after which—

“Following a trial?” Grey interrupted.

The governor’s gaze rested on him, red-rimmed but cool. “No, Colonel. They had no right to a trial.”

“You had them whipped and imprisoned on the word of…whom? The affronted merchant?”

Warren drew himself up a little and lifted his chin. Grey saw that he had been shaved, but a patch of black whisker had been overlooked; it showed in the hollow of his cheek like a blemish, a hairy mole.

“I did not, no, sir,” he said coldly. “The sentence was imposed by the magistrate in Kingston.”

“Who is?”

Dawes had closed his eyes with a small grimace.

“Judge Samuel Peters.”

Grey nodded thanks.

“Captain Cherry will visit Mr. Judge Peters tomorrow,” he said pleasantly. “And the prisoners, as well. I take it they are still in custody?”

“No, they aren’t,” Mr. Dawes put in, suddenly emerging from his impersonation of a dormouse. “They escaped, within a week of their capture.”

The governor shot a brief, irritated glance at his secretary but nodded reluctantly. With further prodding, it was admitted that the maroons had sent a protest at the treatment of the prisoners, via Captain Cresswell. The prisoners having escaped before the protest was received, though, it had not seemed necessary to do anything about it.

Grey wondered briefly whose patronage had got Warren his position but dismissed the thought in favour of further explorations. The first violence had come without warning, he was told, with the burning of cane fields on a remote plantation. Word of it had reached Spanish Town several days later, by which time another plantation had suffered similar depredation.

“Captain Cresswell rode at once to investigate the matter, of course,” Warren said, lips tight.

“And?”

“He didn’t return. The maroons have not demanded ransom for him, nor have they sent word that he is dead. He may be with them; he may not. We simply don’t know.”

Grey could not help looking at Dawes, who appeared unhappy but gave the ghost of a shrug. It wasn’t his place to tell more than the governor wanted told, was it?

“Let me understand you, sir,” Grey said, not bothering to hide the edge in his voice. “You have had no communication with the rebels since their initial protest? And you have taken no action to achieve any?”

Warren seemed to swell slightly but replied in an even tone.

“In fact, Colonel, I have. I sent for you.” He smiled, very slightly, and reached for the decanter.

THE EVENING AIR hung damp and viscid, trembling with distant thunder. Unable to bear the stifling confines of his uniform any longer, Grey flung it off, not waiting for Tom’s ministrations, and stood naked in the middle of the room, eyes closed, enjoying the touch of air from the terrace on his bare skin.

There was something remarkable about the air. Warm as it was, it had a silken touch that spoke of the sea and clear blue water, even indoors. He couldn’t see the water from his room; even had it been visible from Spanish Town, his room faced a hillside covered with jungle. He could feel it, though, and had a sudden longing to wade out through surf and immerse himself in the clean coolness of the ocean. The sun had nearly set now, and the cries of parrots and other birds were growing intermittent.

He peered underneath the bed but didn’t see the snake. Perhaps it was far back in the shadows; perhaps it had gone off in search of more ham. He straightened, stretched luxuriously, then shook himself and stood blinking, feeling stupid from too much wine and food and lack of sleep—he had slept barely three hours out of the preceding four-and-twenty, what with the arrival, disembarkation, and the journey to King’s House.

His mind appeared to have taken French leave for the moment; no matter; it would be back shortly. Meanwhile, though, its abdication had left his body in charge—not at all a responsible course of action.

He felt exhausted, but restless, and scratched idly at his chest. The wounds there were solidly healed, slightly raised pink weals under his fingers, crisscrossing through the blond hair. One had passed within an inch of his left nipple; he’d been lucky not to lose it.

An immense pile of gauze cloth lay upon his bed. This must be the mosquito netting described to him by Mr. Dawes at dinner—a draped contraption meant to enclose the entire bed, thus protecting its occupant from the depredations of bloodthirsty insects.

He’d spent some time with Fettes and Cherry after dinner, laying plans for the morrow. Cherry would call upon Judge Peters and obtain details of the maroons who had been captured. Fettes would send men into Kingston in a search for the location of the retired Mr. Ludgate, erstwhile superintendent; if Ludgate could be found, Grey would like to know this gentleman’s opinion of his successor. As for that successor—if Dawes did not manage to unearth Captain Cresswell by the end of tomorrow…Grey yawned involuntarily, then shook his head, blinking. Enough.

The troops would all be billeted by now, some granted their first liberty in months. He spared a glance at the small sheaf of maps and reports he had extracted from Mr. Dawes earlier, but those could wait till morning, and better light. He’d think more clearly after a good night’s sleep.

He leaned against the frame of the open door, after a quick glance down the terrace showed him that the rooms nearby seemed unoccupied. Clouds were beginning to drift in from the sea, and he remembered what Rodrigo had said about the rain at night. He thought perhaps he could feel a slight coolness in the air, whether from rain or oncoming night, and the hair on his body prickled and rose.

From here he could see nothing but the deep green of a jungle-clad hill, glowing like a sombre emerald in the twilight. From the other side of the house, though, as he left dinner, he’d seen the sprawl of Spanish Town below, a puzzle of narrow, aromatic streets. The taverns and the brothels would be doing a remarkable business tonight, he imagined.

The thought brought with it a rare feeling of something that wasn’t quite resentment. Any one of the soldiers he’d brought, from the lowliest private soldier to Fettes himself, could walk into any brothel in Spanish Town—and there were a good many, Cherry had told him—and relieve the stresses caused by a long voyage without the slightest comment or even the slightest attention. Not him.

His hand had dropped lower as he watched the light fade, idly kneading his flesh. There were accommodations for men such as himself in London, but it had been many years since he’d had recourse to such a place.

He had lost one lover to death, another to betrayal. The third…His lips tightened. Could you call a man who would never touch you—would recoil from the very thought of touching you—your lover? No. But at the same time, what would you call a man whose mind touched yours, whose prickly friendship was a gift, whose character, whose very existence, helped to define your own?

Not for the first time—and surely not for the last—he wished briefly that Jamie Fraser were dead. It was an automatic wish, though, at once dismissed from mind. The colour of the jungle had died to ash, and insects were beginning to whine past his ears.

He went in and began to worry the folds of the gauze on his bed, until Tom came in to take it away from him, hang the mosquito netting, and ready him for the night.

HE COULDN’T SLEEP. Whether it was the heavy meal, the unaccustomed place, or simply the worry of his new and so-far-unknown command, his mind refused to settle, and so did his body. He didn’t waste time in useless thrashing, though; he’d brought several books. Reading a bit of The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling would distract his mind and let sleep steal in upon him.

The French doors were covered with sheer muslin curtains, but the moon was nearly full, and there was enough light by which to find his tinderbox, striker, and candlestick. The candle was good beeswax, and the flame rose pure and bright—and instantly attracted a small cloud of inquisitive gnats, mosquitoes, and tiny moths. He picked it up, intending to take it to bed with him, but then thought better.

Was it preferable to be gnawed by mosquitoes or to be incinerated? Grey debated the point for all of three seconds, then set the lit candlestick back on the desk. The gauze netting would go up in a flash if the candle fell over in bed.

Still, he needn’t face death by bloodletting or be covered in itching bumps simply because his valet didn’t like the smell of bear grease. He wouldn’t get it on his clothes, in any case.

He flung off his nightshirt and knelt to rummage in his trunk, with a guilty look over his shoulder. Tom, though, was safely tucked up somewhere amid the attics or outbuildings of King’s House and almost certainly sound asleep. Tom suffered badly with seasickness, and the voyage had been hard on him.

The heat of the Indies hadn’t done the battered tin of bear grease any good, either; the rancid fat nearly overpowered the scent of the peppermint and other herbs mixed into it. Still, he reasoned, if it repelled him, how much more a mosquito, and he rubbed it into as much of his flesh as he could reach. Despite the stink, he found it not unpleasant. There was enough of the original smell left as to remind him of his usage of the stuff in Canada. Enough to remind him of Manoke, who had given it to him. Anointed him with it, in a cool blue evening on a deserted sandy isle in the St. Lawrence River.

Finished, he put down the tin and touched his rising prick. He didn’t suppose he’d ever see Manoke again. But he did remember. Vividly.

A little later, he lay gasping on the bed under his netting, heart thumping slowly in counterpoint to the echoes of his flesh. He opened his eyes, feeling pleasantly relaxed, his head finally clear. The room was close; the servants had shut the windows, of course, to keep out the dangerous night air, and sweat misted his body. He felt too slack to get up and open the French doors onto the terrace, though; in a moment would do.

He closed his eyes again—then opened them abruptly and leapt out of bed, reaching for the dagger he’d laid on the table. The servant called Rodrigo stood pressed against the door, the whites of his eyes showing in his black face.

“What do you want?” Grey put the dagger down but kept his hand on it, his heart still racing.

“I have a message for you, sah,” the young man said. He swallowed audibly.

“Yes? Come into the light, where I can see you.” Grey reached for his banyan and slid into it, still keeping an eye on the man.

Rodrigo peeled himself off the door with evident reluctance, but he’d come to say something, and say it he would. He advanced into the dim circle of candlelight, hands at his sides, nervously clutching air.

“Do you know, sah, what an Obeah man is?”

“No.”

That disconcerted Rodrigo visibly. He blinked and twisted his lips, obviously at a loss as how to describe this entity. Finally, he shrugged his shoulders helplessly and gave up.

“He says to you, beware.”

“Does he?” Grey said dryly. “Of anything specific?”

That seemed to help; Rodrigo nodded vigorously.

“You don’t be close to the governor. Stay right away, as far as you can. He’s going to—I mean…something bad might happen. Soon. He—” The servant broke off, apparently realising that he could be dismissed—if not worse—for talking about the governor in this loose fashion. Grey was more than curious, though, and sat down, motioning to Rodrigo to take the stool, which he did with obvious reluctance.

Whatever an Obeah man was, Grey thought, he clearly had considerable power, to force Rodrigo to do something he so plainly didn’t want to do. The young man’s face shone with sweat, and his hands clenched mindlessly on the fabric of his coat.

“Tell me what the Obeah man said,” Grey said, leaning forward, intent. “I promise you, I will tell no one.”

Rodrigo gulped but nodded. He bent his head, looking at the table as though he might find the right words written in the grain of the wood.

“Zombie,” he muttered, almost inaudibly. “The zombie come for him. For the governor.”

Grey had no notion what a zombie might be, but the word was spoken in such a tone as to make a chill flicker over his skin, sudden as distant lightning.

“Zombie,” he said carefully. Mindful of the governor’s reaction earlier, he asked, “Is a zombie perhaps a snake of some kind?”

Rodrigo gasped but then seemed to relax a little.

“No, sah,” he said seriously. “Zombie are dead people.” He stood up then, bowed abruptly, and left, his message delivered.

NOT SURPRISINGLY, Grey did not fall asleep immediately in the wake of this visit.

Having encountered German night-hags, Indian ghosts, and having spent a year or two in the Scottish Highlands, he had more acquaintance than most with picaresque superstition. While he wasn’t inclined to give instant credence to local custom and belief, neither was he inclined to discount such belief out of hand. Belief made people do things that they otherwise wouldn’t—and whether the belief had substance or not, the consequent actions certainly did.

Obeah men and zombies notwithstanding, plainly there was some threat to Governor Warren—and Grey rather thought the governor knew what it was.

How exigent was the threat, though? He pinched out the candle flame and sat in darkness for a moment, letting his eyes adjust, then rose and went soft-footed to the French doors, through which Rodrigo had vanished.

The guest bedchambers of King’s House were merely a string of boxes, all facing the long terrace and each opening directly onto it through a pair of French doors. Grey paused for a moment, hand on the muslin drape; if anyone was watching his room, they would see the curtain being drawn aside.

Instead, he turned and went to the inner door of the room. This opened onto a narrow service corridor, completely dark at the moment—and completely empty, if his senses could be trusted. He closed the door quietly, glancing over his shoulder at the French doors. It was interesting, he thought, that Rodrigo had come to the front door, so to speak, when he could have approached Grey unseen.

But Rodrigo had said the Obeah man sent him. Plainly he wanted it to be seen that he had obeyed his order. Which in turn meant that someone was likely watching to see that he had.

The logical conclusion would be that the same someone—or someones—was watching to see what Grey might do next.

His body had reached its own conclusions already and was reaching for breeches and shirt before he had quite decided that if something were about to happen to Warren, it was clearly his duty to stop it, zombies or not. He stepped out of the French doors onto the terrace, moving quite openly.

There was an infantryman posted at either end of the terrace, as he’d expected; Robert Cherry was nothing if not meticulous. On the other hand, the bloody sentries had plainly not seen Rodrigo entering his room, and he wasn’t at all pleased about that. Recriminations could wait, though; the nearer sentry saw him and challenged him with a sharp “Who goes there?”

“It’s me,” Grey said briefly, and, without ceremony, dispatched the sentry with orders to alert the other soldiers posted around the house, then send two men into the house, where they should wait in the hall until summoned.

Grey then went back into his room, through the inner door, and down the dark service corridor. He found a dozing black servant behind a door at the end of it, minding the fire under the row of huge coppers that supplied hot water to the household.

The man blinked and stared when shaken awake but eventually nodded in response to Grey’s demand to be taken to the governor’s bedchamber. He led Grey into the main part of the house and up a darkened stair lit only by the moonlight streaming through the tall casements. Everything was quiet on the upper floor save for slow, regular snoring coming from what the slave said was the governor’s room.

The man was swaying with weariness; Grey dismissed him, with orders to let in and send up the soldiers who should now be at the door. The man yawned hugely, and Grey watched him stumble down the stairs into the murk of the hall below, hoping he would not fall and break his neck. The house was very quiet. He was beginning to feel somewhat foolish. And yet…

The house seemed to breathe around him, almost as though it were a sentient thing and aware of him. He found the fancy unsettling.

Ought he to wake Warren? he wondered. Warn him? Question him? No, he decided. There was no point in disturbing the man’s rest. Questions could wait for the morning.

The sound of feet coming up the stair dispelled his sense of uneasiness, and he gave his orders quietly. The sentries were to keep guard on this door until relieved in the morning; at any sound of disturbance within, they were to enter at once. Otherwise…

“Stay alert. If you see or hear anything, I wish to know about it.”

He paused, but Warren continued to snore, so he shrugged and made his way downstairs, out into the silken night, and back to his own room.

He smelled it first. For an instant he thought he had left the tin of bear-grease ointment uncovered—and then the reek of sweet decay took him by the throat, followed instantly by a pair of hands that came out of the dark and fastened on said throat.

He fought back in blind panic, striking and kicking wildly, but the grip on his windpipe didn’t loosen, and bright lights began to flicker at the corners of what would have been his vision if he’d had any. With a tremendous effort of will, he made himself go limp. The sudden weight surprised his assailant and jerked Grey free of the throttling grasp as he fell. He hit the floor and rolled.

Bloody hell, where was the man? If it was a man. For even as his mind reasserted its claim to reason, his more-visceral faculties were recalling Rodrigo’s parting statement: ‘Zombie are dead people.’ And whatever was here in the dark with him seemed to have been dead for several days, judging from its smell.

He could hear the rustling of something moving quietly toward him. Was it breathing? He couldn’t tell for the rasp of his own breath, harsh in his throat, and the blood-thick hammering of his heart in his ears.

He was lying at the foot of a wall, his legs half under the dressing table’s bench. There was light in the room, now that his eyes were accustomed; the French doors were pale rectangles in the dark, and he could make out the shape of the thing that was hunting him. It was man-shaped but oddly hunched and swung its head and shoulders from side to side, almost as though it meant to smell him out. Which wouldn’t take it more than two more seconds, at most.

He sat up abruptly, seized the small padded bench, and threw it as hard as he could at the thing’s legs. It made a startled oof! noise that was undeniably human, then it staggered, waving its arms for balance. The noise reassured Grey, and he rolled up onto one knee and launched himself at the creature, bellowing incoherent abuse.

He butted it around chest height, felt it fall backwards, then lunged for the pool of shadow where he thought the table was. It was there and, feeling frantically over the surface, he found his dagger, still where he’d left it. He snatched it up and turned just in time to face the thing, which closed on him at once, reeking and making a disagreeable gobbling noise. He slashed at it and felt his knife skitter down the creature’s forearm, bouncing off bone. It screamed, releasing a blast of foul breath directly into his face, then turned and rushed for the French doors, bursting through them in a shower of glass and flying muslin.

Grey charged after it, onto the terrace, shouting for the sentries. But the sentries, as he recalled belatedly, were in the main house, keeping watch over the governor, lest that worthy’s rest be disturbed by…whatever sort of thing this was. Zombie?

Whatever it was, it was gone.

He sat down abruptly on the stones of the terrace, shaking with reaction. No one had come out in response to the noise. Surely no one could have slept through that; perhaps no one else was housed on this side of the mansion.

He felt ill and breathless and rested his head for a moment on his knees, before jerking it up to look round, lest something else be stealing up on him. But the night was still and balmy. The only noise was an agitated rustling of leaves in a nearby tree, which for a shocked second he thought might be the creature, climbing from branch to branch in search of refuge. Then he heard soft chitterings and hissing squeaks. Bats, said the calmly rational part of his mind—what was left of it.

He gulped and breathed, trying to get clean air into his lungs to replace the disgusting stench of the creature. He’d been a soldier most of his life; he’d seen the dead on battlefields, and smelled them, too. Had buried fallen comrades in trenches and burned the bodies of his enemies. He knew what graves and rotting flesh smelled like. And the thing that had had its hands round his throat had almost certainly come from a recent grave.

He was shivering violently, despite the warmth of the night. He rubbed a hand over his left arm, which ached from the struggle; he had been badly wounded three years before, at Crefeld, and had nearly lost the arm. It worked but was still a good deal weaker than he’d like. Glancing at it, though, he was startled. Dark smears befouled the pale sleeve of his banyan, and, turning over his right hand, he found it wet and sticky.

“Jesus,” he murmured, and brought it gingerly to his nose. No mistaking that smell, even overlaid as it was by grave reek and the incongruous scent of night-blooming jasmine from the vines that grew in tubs by the terrace. Rain was beginning to fall, pungent and sweet—but even that could not obliterate the smell.

Blood. Fresh blood. Not his, either.

He rubbed the rest of the blood from his hand with the hem of his banyan, and the cold horror of the last few minutes faded into a glowing coal of anger, hot in the pit of his stomach.

He’d been a soldier most of his life; he’d killed. He’d seen the dead on battlefields. And one thing he knew for a fact. Dead men don’t bleed.

FETTES AND CHERRY had to know, of course. So did Tom, as the wreckage of his room couldn’t be explained as the result of a nightmare. The four of them gathered in Grey’s room, conferring by candlelight as Tom went about tidying the damage, white to the lips.

“You’ve never heard of zombie—or zombies? I have no idea whether the term is plural or not.” Heads were shaken all round. A large square bottle of excellent Scotch whisky had survived the rigours of the voyage in the bottom of his trunk, and he poured generous tots of this, including Tom in the distribution.

“Tom—will you ask among the servants tomorrow? Carefully, of course. Drink that; it will do you good.”

“Oh, I’ll be careful, me lord,” Tom assured him fervently. He took an obedient gulp of the whisky before Grey could warn him. His eyes bulged and he made a noise like a bull that has sat on a bumblebee, but managed somehow to swallow the mouthful, after which he stood still, opening and closing his mouth in a stunned sort of way.

Bob Cherry’s mouth twitched, but Fettes maintained his usual stolid imperturbability.

“Why the attack upon you, sir, do you suppose?”

“If the servant who warned me about the Obeah man was correct, I can only suppose that it was a consequence of my posting sentries to keep guard upon the governor. But you’re right.” He nodded at Fettes’s implication. “That means that whoever was responsible for this”—he waved a hand to indicate the disorder of his chamber, which still smelled of its recent intruder, despite the rain-scented wind that came through the shattered doors and the burnt-honey smell of the whisky—“either was watching the house closely, or—”

“Or lives here,” Fettes said, and took a meditative sip. “Dawes, perhaps?”

Grey’s eyebrows rose. That small, tubby, genial man? And yet he’d known a number of small, wicked men.

“Well,” he said slowly, “it was not he who attacked me; I can tell you that much. Whoever it was was taller than I am and of a very lean build—not corpulent at all.”

Tom made a hesitant noise, indicating that he had had a thought, and Grey nodded at him, giving permission to speak.

“You’re quite sure, me lord, as the man who went for you…er…wasn’t dead? Because by the smell of him, he’s been buried for a week, at least.”

A reflexive shudder went through all of them, but Grey shook his head.

“I am positive,” he said, as firmly as he could. “It was a live man—though certainly a peculiar one,” he added, frowning.

“Ought we to search the house, sir?” Cherry suggested.

Grey shook his head reluctantly.

“He—or it—went away into the garden. He left discernible footmarks.” He did not add that there had been sufficient time for the servants—if they were involved—to hide any traces of the creature by now. If there was involvement, he thought, the servant Rodrigo was his best avenue of inquiry—and it would not serve his purposes to alarm the house and focus attention on the young man ahead of time.

“Tom,” he said, turning to his valet. “Does Rodrigo appear to be approachable?”

“Oh, yes, me lord. He was friendly to me over supper,” Tom assured him, brush in hand. “D’ye want me to talk to him?”

“Yes, if you will. Beyond that…” He rubbed a hand over his face, feeling the sprouting beard-stubble on his jaw. “I think we will proceed with the plans for tomorrow. But, Captain Cherry, will you also find time to question Mr. Dawes? You may tell him what transpired here tonight; I should find his response to that most interesting.”

“Yes, sir.” Cherry finished his whisky, coughed, and sat blinking for a moment, then cleared his throat. “The, um, the governor, sir…?”

“I’ll speak to him myself,” Grey said. “And then I propose to ride up into the hills, to pay a visit to a couple of plantations, with an eye to defensive postings. For we must be seen to be taking prompt and decisive action. If there’s offensive action to be taken against the maroons, it will wait until we see what we’re up against.” Fettes and Cherry nodded; lifelong soldiers, they had no urgent desire to rush into combat.

The meeting dismissed, Grey sat down with a fresh glass of whisky, sipping it as Tom finished his work in silence.

“You’re sure as you want to sleep in this room tonight, me lord?” he said, putting the dressing-table bench neatly back in its spot. “I could find you another place, I’m sure.”

Grey smiled at him with affection.

“I’m sure you could, Tom. But so could our recent friend, I expect. No, Captain Cherry will post a double guard on the terrace, as well as inside the house. It will be perfectly safe.” And even if it wasn’t, the thought of hiding, skulking away from whatever the thing was that had visited him…No. He wouldn’t allow them—whoever they were—to think they had shaken his nerve.

Tom sighed and shook his head but reached into his shirt and drew out a small cross, woven of wheat stalks and somewhat battered, suspended on a bit of leather string.

“All right, me lord. But you’ll wear this, at least.”

“What is it?”

“A charm, me lord. Ilsa gave it to me, in Germany. She said it would protect me against evil—and so it has.”

“Oh, no, Tom—surely you must keep—”

Mouth set in an expression of obstinacy that Grey knew well, Tom leaned forward and put the leather string over Grey’s head. The mouth relaxed.

“There, me lord. Now I can sleep, at least.”

GREY’S PLAN TO speak to the governor at breakfast was foiled, as that gentleman sent word that he was indisposed. Grey, Cherry, and Fettes all exchanged looks across the breakfast table, but Grey said merely, “Fettes? And you, Captain Cherry, please.” They nodded, a look of subdued satisfaction passing between them. He hid a smile; they loved questioning people.

The secretary, Dawes, was present at breakfast but said little, giving all his attention to the eggs and toast on his plate. Grey inspected him carefully, but he showed no sign, either of nocturnal excursions or of clandestine knowledge. Grey gave Cherry an eye. Both Fettes and Cherry brightened perceptibly.

For the moment, though, his own path lay clear. He needed to make a public appearance, as soon as possible, and to take such action as would make it apparent to the public that the situation was under control—and would make it apparent to the maroons that attention was being paid and that their destructive activities would no longer be allowed to pass unchallenged.

He summoned one of his other captains after breakfast and arranged for an escort. Twelve men should make enough of a show, he decided.

“And where will you be going, sir?” Captain Lossey asked, squinting as he made mental calculations regarding horses, pack mules, and supplies.

Grey took a deep breath and grasped the nettle.

“A plantation called Twelvetrees,” he said. “Twenty miles or so into the uplands above Kingston.”

PHILIP TWELVETREES was young, perhaps in his mid-twenties, and good-looking in a sturdy sort of way. He didn’t stir Grey personally, but nonetheless Grey felt a tightness through his body as he shook hands with the man, studying his face carefully for any sign that Twelvetrees recognised his name or attributed any importance to his presence beyond the present political situation.

Not a flicker of unease or suspicion crossed Twelvetrees’s face, and Grey relaxed a little, accepting the offer of a cooling drink. This turned out to be a mixture of fruit juices and wine, tart but refreshing.

“It’s called sangria,” Twelvetrees remarked, holding up his glass so the soft light fell glowing through it. “Blood, it means. In Spanish.”

Grey did not speak much Spanish but did know that. However, blood seemed as good a point d’appui as any, concerning his business.

“So you think we might be next?” Twelvetrees paled noticeably beneath his tan. He hastily swallowed a gulp of sangria and straightened his shoulders, though. “No, no. I’m sure we’ll be all right. Our slaves are loyal, I’d swear to that.”

“How many have you? And do you trust them with arms?”

“One hundred and sixteen,” Twelvetrees replied automatically. Plainly he was contemplating the expense and danger of arming some fifty men—for at least half his slaves must be women or children—and setting them essentially at liberty upon his property. Not to mention the vision of an unknown number of maroons, also armed, coming suddenly out of the night with torches. He drank a little more sangria. “Perhaps…what did you have in mind?” he asked abruptly, setting down his glass.

Grey had just finished laying out his suggested plans, which called for the posting of two companies of infantry at the plantation, when a flutter of muslin at the door made him lift his eyes.

“Oh, Nan!” Philip put a hand over the papers Grey had spread out on the table and shot Grey a quick warning look. “Here’s Colonel Grey come to call. Colonel, my sister, Nancy.”

“Miss Twelvetrees.” Grey had risen at once and now took two or three steps toward her, bowing over her hand. Behind him, he heard the rustle as Twelvetrees hastily shuffled maps and diagrams together.

Nancy Twelvetrees shared her brother’s genial sturdiness. Not pretty in the least, she had intelligent dark eyes—and these sharpened noticeably at her brother’s introduction.

“Colonel Grey,” she said, waving him gracefully back to his seat as she took her own. “Would you be connected with the Greys of Ilford, in Sussex? Or perhaps your family are from the London branch…?”

“My brother has an estate in Sussex, yes,” he said hastily. Forbearing to add that it was his half-brother Paul, who was not in fact a Grey, having been born of his mother’s first marriage. Forbearing also to mention that his elder full brother was the Duke of Pardloe, and the man who had shot one Nathaniel Twelvetrees twenty years before. Which would logically expose the fact that Grey himself…

Philip Twelvetrees rather obviously did not want his sister alarmed by any mention of the present situation. Grey gave him the faintest of nods in acknowledgement, and Twelvetrees relaxed visibly, settling down to exchange polite social conversation.

“And what it is that brings you to Jamaica, Colonel Grey?” Miss Twelvetrees asked eventually. Knowing this was coming, Grey had devised an answer of careful vagueness, having to do with the Crown’s concern for shipping. Halfway through this taradiddle, though, Miss Twelvetrees gave him a very direct look and demanded, “Are you here because of the governor?”

“Nan!” said her brother, shocked.

“Are you?” she repeated, ignoring her brother. Her eyes were very bright, and her cheeks flushed.

Grey smiled at her.

“What makes you think that that might be the case, may I ask, ma’am?”

“Because if you haven’t come to remove Derwent Warren from his office, then someone should!”

“Nancy!” Philip was nearly as flushed as his sister. He leaned forward, grasping her wrist. “Nancy, please!”

She made as though to pull away, but then, seeing his pleading face, contented herself with a simple “Hmph!” and sat back in her chair, mouth set in a thin line.

Grey would dearly have liked to know what lay behind Miss Twelvetrees’s animosity toward the governor, but he couldn’t well inquire directly. Instead, he guided the conversation smoothly away, inquiring of Philip regarding the operations of the plantation and of Miss Twelvetrees regarding the natural history of Jamaica, for which she seemed to have some feeling, judging by the rather good watercolours of plants and animals that hung about the room, all neatly signed N. T.

Gradually, the sense of tension in the room relaxed, and Grey became aware that Miss Twelvetrees was focusing her attentions upon him. Not quite flirting—she was not built for flirtation—but definitely going out of her way to make him aware of her as a woman. He didn’t quite know what she had in mind—he was presentable enough but didn’t think she was truly attracted to him. Still, he made no move to stop her; if Philip should leave them alone together, he might be able to find out why she had said that about Governor Warren.

A quarter hour later, a mulatto man in a well-made suit put his head in at the door to the drawing room and asked if he might speak with Philip. He cast a curious eye toward Grey, but Twelvetrees made no move to introduce them, instead excusing himself and taking the visitor—who, Grey conceived, must be an overseer of some kind—to the far end of the large, airy room, where they conferred in low voices.

He at once seized the opportunity to fix his attention on Miss Nancy, in hopes of turning the conversation to his own ends.

“I collect you are acquainted with the governor, Miss Twelvetrees?” he asked, to which she gave a short laugh.

“Better than I might wish, sir.”

“Really?” he said, in as inviting a tone as possible.

“Really,” she said, and smiled unpleasantly. “But let us not waste time in discussing a…a person of such low character.” The smile altered, and she leaned towards him, touching his hand, which surprised him. “Tell me, Colonel, does your wife accompany you? Or does she remain in London, from fear of fevers and slave uprisings?”

“Alas, I am unmarried, ma’am,” he said, thinking that she likely knew a good deal more than her brother wished her to.

“Really,” she said again, in an altogether different tone.

Her touch lingered on his hand, a fraction of a moment too long. Not long enough to be blatant, but long enough for a normal man to perceive it—and Grey’s reflexes in such matters were much better developed than a normal man’s, from necessity.

He barely thought consciously but smiled at her, then glanced at her brother, then back, with the tiniest of regretful shrugs. He forbore to add the lingering smile that would have said, “Later.”

She sucked her lower lip in for a moment, then released it, wet and reddened, and gave him a look under lowered lids that said, “Later,” and a good deal more. He coughed, and out of the sheer need to say something completely free of suggestion asked abruptly, “Do you by chance know what an Obeah man is, Miss Twelvetrees?”

Her eyes sprang wide, and she lifted her hand from his arm. He managed to move out of her easy reach without actually appearing to shove his chair backwards and thought she didn’t notice; she was still looking at him with great attention, but the nature of that attention had changed. The sharp vertical lines between her brows deepened into a harsh eleven.

“Where did you encounter that term, Colonel, may I ask?” Her voice was quite normal, her tone light—but she also glanced at her brother’s turned back, and she spoke quietly.

“One of the governor’s servants mentioned it. I see you are familiar with the term—I collect it is to do with Africans?”

“Yes.” Now she was biting her upper lip, but the intent was not sexual. “The Koromantyn slaves—you know what those are?”

“No.”

“Negroes from the Gold Coast,” she said, and putting her hand once more on his sleeve, pulled him up and drew him a little away, toward the far end of the room. “Most planters want them, because they’re big and strong and usually very well formed.” Was it—no, he decided, it was not his imagination; the tip of her tongue had darted out and touched her lip in the fraction of an instant before she’d said “well formed.” He thought Philip Twelvetrees had best find his sister a husband, and quickly.

“Do you have Koromantyn slaves here?”

“A few. The thing is, Koromantyns tend to be intractable. Very aggressive and hard to control.”

“Not a desirable trait in a slave, I collect,” he said, making an effort to keep any edge out of his tone.

“Well, it can be,” she said, surprising him. She smiled briefly. “If your slaves are loyal—and ours are, I’d swear it—then you don’t mind them being a bit bloody-minded toward…anyone who might want to come and cause trouble.”

He was sufficiently shocked at her language that it took him a moment to absorb her meaning. The tongue tip flickered out again, and had she had dimples, she would certainly have employed them.

“I see,” he said carefully. “But you were about to tell me what an Obeah man is. Some figure of authority, I take it, among the Koromantyns?”

The flirtatiousness vanished abruptly, and she frowned again.

“Yes. Obi is what they call their…religion, I suppose one must call it. Though from what little I know of it, no minister or priest would allow it that name.”

Loud screams came from the garden below, and Grey glanced out, to see a flock of small, brightly coloured parrots swooping in and out of a big, lacy tree with yellowish fruit. Like clockwork, two small black children, naked as eggs, shot out of the shrubbery and aimed slingshots at the birds. Rocks spattered harmless among the branches, but the birds rose in a feathery vortex of agitation and flapped off, shrieking their complaints.

Miss Twelvetrees ignored the interruption, resuming her explanation directly the noise subsided.

“An Obeah man talks to the spirits. He, or she—there are Obeah women, too—is the person that one goes to, to…arrange things.”

“What sorts of things?”

A faint hint of her former flirtatiousness reappeared.

“Oh…to make someone fall in love with you. To get with child. To get without child”—and here she looked to see whether she had shocked him again, but he merely nodded—“or to curse someone. To cause them ill luck or ill health. Or death.”

This was promising.

“And how is this done, may I ask? Causing illness or death?”

Here, however, she shook her head.

“I don’t know. It’s really not safe to ask,” she added, lowering her voice still further, and now her eyes were serious. “Tell me—the servant who spoke to you, what did he say?”

Aware of just how quickly gossip spreads in rural places, Grey wasn’t about to reveal that threats had been made against Governor Warren. Instead, he asked, “Have you ever heard of zombies?”

She went quite white.

“No,” she said abruptly.

It was a risk, but he took her hand to keep her from turning away.

“I cannot tell you why I need to know,” he said, very low-voiced, “but please believe me, Miss Twelvetrees—Nancy.” Callously, he pressed her hand. “It’s extremely important. Any help that you can give me would be…well, I should appreciate it extremely.”

Her hand was warm; the fingers moved a little in his, and not in an effort to pull away. Her colour was coming back.

“I truly don’t know much,” she said, equally low-voiced. “Only that zombies are dead people who have been raised by magic to do the bidding of the person who made them.”

“The person who made them—this would be an Obeah man?”

“Oh! No,” she said, surprised. “The Koromantyns don’t make zombies. In fact, they think it quite an unclean practice.”

“I’m entirely of one mind with them,” he assured her. “Who does make zombies?”

“Nancy!” Philip had concluded his conversation with the overseer and was coming toward them, a hospitable smile on his broad, perspiring face. “I say, can we not have something to eat? I’m sure the colonel must be famished, and I’m most extraordinarily clemmed myself.”

“Yes, of course,” Miss Twelvetrees said, with a quick warning glance at Grey. “I’ll tell Cook.” Grey tightened his grip momentarily on her fingers, and she smiled at him.

“As I was saying, Colonel, you must call on Mrs. Abernathy at Rose Hall. She would be the person best equipped to inform you.”

“Inform you?” Twelvetrees, curse him, chose this moment to become inquisitive. “About what?”

“Customs and beliefs among the Ashanti, my dear,” his sister said blandly. “Colonel Grey has a particular interest in such things.”

Twelvetrees snorted briefly.

“Ashanti, my left foot! Ibo, Fulani, Koromantyn—baptise ’em all proper Christians and let’s hear no more about what heathen beliefs they may have brought with ’em. From the little I know, you don’t want to hear about that sort of thing, Colonel. Though if you do, of course,” he added hastily, recalling that it was not his place to tell the lieutenant-colonel who would be protecting Twelvetrees’s life and property his business, “then my sister’s quite right—Mrs. Abernathy would be best placed to advise you. Almost all her slaves are Ashanti. She…er…she’s said to…um…take an interest.”

To Grey’s own interest, Twelvetrees’s face went a deep red, and he hastily changed the subject, asking Grey fussy questions about the exact disposition of his troops. Grey evaded direct answers, beyond assuring Twelvetrees that two companies of infantry would be dispatched to his plantation as soon as word could be sent to Spanish Town.

He wished to leave at once, for various reasons, but was obliged to remain for tea, an uncomfortable meal of heavy, stodgy food, eaten under the heated gaze of Miss Twelvetrees. For the most part, he thought he had handled her with tact and delicacy, but toward the end of the meal she began to give him little pursed-mouth jabs. Nothing one could—or should—overtly notice, but he saw Philip blink at her once or twice in frowning bewilderment.

“Of course, I could not pose as an authority regarding any aspect of life on Jamaica,” she said, fixing Grey with an unreadable look. “We have lived here barely six months.”

“Indeed,” he said politely, a wodge of undigested Savoy cake settling heavily in his stomach. “You seem very much at home—and a very lovely home it is, Miss Twelvetrees. I perceive your most harmonious touch throughout.”

This belated attempt at flattery was met with the scorn it deserved; the eleven was back, hardening her brow.

“My brother inherited the plantation from his cousin, Edward Twelvetrees. Edward lived in London himself.” She levelled a look like the barrel of a musket at him. “Did you know him, Colonel?”

And just what would the bloody woman do if he told her the truth? he wondered. Clearly, she thought she knew something, but…No, he thought, watching her closely. She couldn’t know the truth but had heard some rumour. So this poking at him was an attempt—and a clumsy one—to get him to say more.

“I know several Twelvetrees casually,” he said very amiably. “But if I met your cousin, I do not think I had the pleasure of speaking with him at any great length.” You bloody murderer! and Fucking sodomite! not really constituting conversation, if you asked Grey.

Miss Twelvetrees blinked at him, surprised, and he realised what he should have seen much earlier. She was drunk. He had found the sangria light, refreshing—but had drunk only one glass himself. He had not noticed her refill her own, and yet the pitcher stood nearly empty.

“My dear,” said Philip, very kindly. “It is warm, is it not? You look a trifle pale and indisposed.” In fact, she was flushed, her hair beginning to come down behind her rather large ears—but she did indeed look indisposed. Philip rang the bell, rising to his feet, and nodded to the black maid who came in.

“I am not indisposed,” Nancy Twelvetrees said, with some dignity. “I’m—I simply—that is—” But the black maid, evidently used to this office, was already hauling Miss Twelvetrees toward the door, though with sufficient skill as to make it look as though she merely assisted her mistress.

Grey rose, perforce, and took Miss Nancy’s hand, bowing over it.

“Your servant, Miss Twelvetrees,” he said. “I hope—”

“We know,” she said, staring at him from large, suddenly tear-filled eyes. “Do you hear me? We know.” Then she was gone, the sound of her unsteady steps a ragged drumbeat on the parquet floor.

There was a brief, awkward silence between the two men. Grey cleared his throat just as Philip Twelvetrees coughed.

“Didn’t really like cousin Edward,” he said.

“Oh,” said Grey.

They walked together to the yard, where Grey’s horse browsed under a tree, its sides streaked with parrot droppings.

“Don’t mind Nancy, will you?” Twelvetrees said quietly, not looking at him. “She had…a disappointment, in London. I thought she might get over it more easily here, but—well, I made a mistake, and it’s not easy to unmake.” He sighed, and Grey had a strong urge to pat him sympathetically on the back.

In lieu of that, he made an indeterminate noise in his throat, nodded, and mounted.

“The troops will be here the day after tomorrow, sir,” he said. “You have my word upon it.”

GREY HAD INTENDED to return to Spanish Town, but instead paused on the road, pulled out the chart Dawes had given him, and calculated the distance to Rose Hall. It would mean camping on the mountain overnight, but they were prepared for that—and beyond the desirability of hearing firsthand the details of a maroon attack, he was now more than curious to speak with Mrs. Abernathy regarding zombies.

He called his aide, wrote out instructions for the dispatch of troops to Twelvetrees, then sent two men back to Spanish Town with the message and two more on ahead to discover a good campsite. They reached this as the sun was beginning to sink, glowing like a flaming pearl in a soft pink sky.

“What is that?” he asked, glancing up abruptly from the cup of gunpowder tea Corporal Sansom had handed him. Sansom looked startled, too, and stared up the slope where the sound had come from.

“Don’t know, sir,” he said. “It sounds like a horn of some kind.”

It did. Not a trumpet or anything of a standard military nature. Definitely a sound of human origin, though. The men stood quiet, waiting. A moment or two, and the sound came again.

“That’s a different one,” Sansom said, sounding alarmed. “It came from over there”—pointing up the slope—“didn’t it?”

“Yes, it did,” Grey said absently. “Hush!”

The first horn sounded again, a plaintive bleat almost lost in the noises of the birds settling for the night, and then fell silent.

Grey’s skin tingled, his senses alert. They were not alone in the jungle. Someone—someones—were out there in the oncoming night, signalling to each other. Quietly, he gave orders for the building of a hasty fortification, and the camp fell at once into the work of organising defence. The men with him were mostly veterans and, while wary, not at all panicked. Within a very short time, a redoubt of stone and brush had been thrown up, sentries were posted in pairs around camp, and every man’s weapon was loaded and primed, ready for an attack.

Nothing came, though, and while the men lay on their arms all night, there was no further sign of human presence. Such presence was there, though; Grey could feel it. Them. Watching.

He ate his supper and sat with his back against an outcrop of rock, dagger in his belt and loaded musket to hand. Waiting.

But nothing happened, and the sun rose. They broke camp in an orderly fashion, and if horns sounded in the jungle, the sound was lost in the shriek and chatter of the birds.

HE HAD NEVER been in the presence of anyone who repelled him so acutely. He wondered why that was; there was nothing overtly ill-favoured or ugly about her. If anything, she was a handsome Scotchwoman of middle age, fair-haired and buxom. And yet the widow Abernathy chilled him, despite the warmth of the air on the terrace where she had chosen to receive him at Rose Hall.

She was not dressed in mourning, he saw, nor did she make any obvious acknowledgement of the recent death of her husband. She wore white muslin, embroidered in blue about the hems and cuffs.

“I understand that I must congratulate you upon your survival, madam,” he said, taking the seat she gestured him to. It was a somewhat callous thing to say, but she looked hard as nails; he didn’t think it would upset her, and he was right.

“Thank you,” she said, leaning back in her own wicker chair and looking him frankly up and down in a way that he found unsettling. “It was bloody cold in that spring, I’ll tell ye that for nothing. Like to died myself, frozen right through.”

He inclined his head courteously.

“I trust you suffered no lingering ill effects from the experience? Beyond, of course, the lamentable death of your husband,” he hurried to add.

She laughed coarsely.

“Glad to get shot o’ the wicked sod.”

At a loss how to reply to this, Grey coughed and changed the subject.

“I am told, madam, that you have an interest in some of the rituals practised by slaves.”

Her somewhat bleared green glance sharpened at that.

“Who told you that?”

“Miss Nancy Twelvetrees.” There was no reason to keep the identity of his informant secret, after all.

“Oh, wee Nancy, was it?” She seemed amused by that, and shot him a sideways look. “I expect she liked you, no?”

He couldn’t see what Miss Twelvetrees’s opinion of him might have to do with the matter, and politely said so.

Mrs. Abernathy merely smirked, waving a hand. “Aye, well. What is it ye want to know, then?”

“I want to know how zombies are made.”

Shock wiped the smirk off her face, and she blinked at him stupidly for a moment before picking up her glass and draining it.

“Zombies,” she said, and looked at him with a certain wary interest. “Why?”

He told her. From careless amusement, her attitude changed, interest piqued. She made him repeat the story of his encounter with the thing in his room, asking pointed questions regarding its smell particularly.

“Decayed flesh,” she said. “Ye’d ken what that smells like, would ye?”

It must have been her accent that brought back the battlefield at Culloden and the stench of burning corpses. He shuddered, unable to stop himself.

“Yes,” he said abruptly. “Why?”

She pursed her lips in thought.

“There are different ways to go about it, aye? One way is to give the afile powder to the person, wait until they drop, and then bury them atop a recent corpse. Ye just spread the earth lightly over them,” she explained, catching his look. “And make sure to put leaves and sticks over the face afore sprinkling the earth, so as the person can still breathe. When the poison dissipates enough for them to move again and sense things, they see they’re buried, they smell the reek, and so they ken they must be dead.” She spoke matter-of-factly, as though she had been telling him her private recipe for apple pandowdy or treacle cake. Weirdly enough, that steadied him, and he was able to speak calmly past his revulsion.

“Poison. That would be the afile powder? What sort of poison is it, do you know?”

Seeing the spark in her eye, he thanked the impulse that had led him to add “do you know?” to that question—for if not for pride, he thought, she might not have told him. As it was, she shrugged and answered offhand.

“Oh…herbs. Ground bones—bits o’ other things. But the main thing, the one thing ye must have, is the liver of a fugu fish.”

He shook his head, not recognising the name. “Describe it, if you please.” She did; from her description, he thought it must be one of the odd puffer fish that blew themselves up like bladders if disturbed. He made a silent resolve never to eat one. In the course of the conversation, though, something was becoming apparent to him.

“But what you are telling me—your pardon, madam—is that in fact a zombie is not a dead person at all? That they are merely drugged?”

Her lips curved; they were still plump and red, he saw, younger than her face would suggest. “What good would a dead person be to anyone?”

“But plainly the widespread belief is that zombies are dead.”

“Aye, of course. The zombies think they’re dead, and so does everyone else. It’s not true, but it’s effective. Scares folk rigid. As for ‘merely drugged,’ though…” She shook her head. “They don’t come back from it, ye ken. The poison damages their brains and their nervous systems. They can follow simple instructions, but they’ve no real capacity for thought anymore—and they mostly move stiff and slow.”

“Do they?” he murmured. The creature—well, the man, he was now sure of that—who had attacked him had not been stiff and slow, by any means. Ergo…

“I’m told, madam, that most of your slaves are Ashanti. Would any of them know more about this process?”

“No,” she said abruptly, sitting up a little. “I learnt what I ken from a houngan—that would be a sort of…practitioner, I suppose ye’d say. He wasna one of my slaves, though.”

“A practitioner of what, exactly?”

Her tongue passed slowly over the tips of her sharp teeth, yellowed but still sound.

“Of magic,” she said, and laughed softly, as though to herself. “Aye, magic. African magic. Slave magic.”

“You believe in magic?” He asked it as much from curiosity as anything else.

“Don’t you?” Her brows rose, but he shook his head.

“I do not. And from what you have just told me yourself, the process of creating—if that’s the word—a zombie is not in fact magic but merely the administration of poison over a period of time, added to the power of suggestion.” Another thought struck him. “Can a person recover from such poisoning? You say it does not kill them.”

She shook her head.

“The poison doesn’t, no. But they always die. They starve, for one thing. They lose all notion of will and canna do anything save what the houngan tells them to do. Gradually they waste away to nothing, and—” Her fingers snapped silently.

“Even were they to survive,” she went on practically, “the people would kill them. Once a person’s been made a zombie, there’s nay way back.”

Throughout the conversation, Grey had become aware that Mrs. Abernathy spoke from what seemed a much closer acquaintance with the notion than one might acquire from an idle interest in natural philosophy. He wanted to get away from her but obliged himself to sit still and ask one more question.

“Do you know of any particular significance attributed to snakes, madam? In African magic, I mean.”

She blinked, somewhat taken aback by that.

“Snakes,” she repeated slowly. “Aye. Well…snakes ha’ wisdom, they say. And some o’ the loas are snakes.”

“Loas?”

She rubbed absently at her forehead, and he saw, with a small prickle of revulsion, the faint stippling of a rash. He’d seen that before: the sign of advanced syphilitic infection.

“I suppose ye’d call them spirits,” she said, and eyed him appraisingly. “D’ye see snakes in your dreams, Colonel?”

“Do I—no. I don’t.” He didn’t, but the suggestion was unspeakably disturbing. She smiled.

“A loa rides a person, aye? Speaks through them. And I see a great huge snake lyin’ on your shoulders, Colonel.” She heaved herself abruptly to her feet.

“I’d be careful what ye eat, Colonel Grey.”

THEY RETURNED TO Spanish Town two days later. The ride back gave Grey time for thought, from which he drew certain conclusions. Among these conclusions was the conviction that maroons had not, in fact, attacked Rose Hall. He had spoken to Mrs. Abernathy’s overseer, who seemed reluctant and shifty, very vague on the details of the presumed attack. And later…

After his conversations with the overseer and several slaves, he had gone back to the house to take formal leave of Mrs. Abernathy. No one had answered his knock, and he had walked round the house in search of a servant. What he had found instead was a path leading downward from the house, with a glimpse of water at the bottom.

Out of curiosity, he had followed this path and found the infamous spring in which Mrs. Abernathy had presumably sought refuge from the murdering intruders. Mrs. Abernathy was in the spring, naked, swimming with slow composure from one side to the other, white-streaked fair hair streaming out behind her.

The water was crystalline; he could see the fleshy pumping of her buttocks, moving like a bellows that propelled her movements—and glimpsed the purplish hollow of her sex, exposed by the flexion. There were no banks of concealing reeds or other vegetation; no one could have failed to see the woman if she’d been in the spring—and, plainly, the temperature of the water was no dissuasion to her.

So she’d lied about the maroons. He had a cold certainty that Mrs. Abernathy had murdered her husband, or arranged it—but there was little he was equipped to do with that conclusion. Arrest her? There were no witnesses—or none who could legally testify against her, even if they wanted to. And he rather thought that none of her slaves would want to; those he had spoken with had displayed extreme reticence with regard to their mistress. Whether that was the result of loyalty or fear, the effect would be the same.

What the conclusion did mean to him was that the maroons were in fact likely not guilty of murder, and that was important. So far, all reports of mischief involved only property damage—and that, only to fields and equipment. No houses had been burned, and while several plantation owners had claimed that their slaves had been taken, there was no proof of this; the slaves in question might simply have taken advantage of the chaos of an attack to run.

This spoke to him of a certain amount of care on the part of whoever led the maroons. Who did? he wondered. What sort of man? The impression he was gaining was not that of a rebellion—there had been no declaration, and he would have expected that—but of the boiling over of a long-simmering frustration. He had to speak with Captain Cresswell. And he hoped that bloody secretary had managed to find the superintendent by the time he reached King’s House.

IN THE EVENT, he reached King’s House long after dark and was informed by the governor’s butler—appearing like a black ghost in his nightshirt—that the household were asleep.

“All right,” he said wearily. “Call my valet, if you will. And tell the governor’s servant in the morning that I will require to speak to His Excellency after breakfast, no matter what his state of health may be.”

Tom was sufficiently pleased to see Grey in one piece as to make no protest at being awakened and had him washed, nightshirted, and tucked up beneath his mosquito netting before the church bells of Spanish Town tolled midnight. The doors of his room had been repaired, but Grey made Tom leave the window open and fell asleep with a silken wind caressing his cheeks and no thought of what the morning might bring.

He was roused from an unusually vivid erotic dream by an agitated banging. He pulled his head out from under the pillow, the feel of rasping red hairs still rough on his lips, and shook his head violently, trying to reorient himself in space and time. Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang! Bloody hell…? Oh. Door.

“What? Come in, for God’s sake! What the devil—oh. Wait a moment, then.” He struggled out of the tangle of bedclothes and discarded nightshirt—good Christ, had he really been doing what he’d been dreaming about doing?—and flung his banyan over his rapidly detumescing flesh.

“What?” he demanded, finally getting the door open. To his surprise, Tom stood there, saucer-eyed and trembling, next to Major Fettes.

“Are you all right, me lord?” Tom burst out, cutting off Major Fettes’s first words.

“Do I appear to be spurting blood or missing any necessary appendages?” Grey demanded, rather irritably. “What’s happened, Fettes?”

Now that he’d got his eyes properly open, he saw that Fettes looked almost as disturbed as Tom. The major—veteran of a dozen major campaigns, decorated for valour, and known for his coolness—swallowed visibly and braced his shoulders.

“It’s the governor, sir. I think you’d best come and see.”

“WHERE ARE THE MEN who were assigned to guard him?” Grey asked calmly, stepping out of the governor’s bedroom and closing the door gently behind him. The doorknob slid out of his fingers, slick under his hand. He knew the slickness was his own sweat, and not blood, but his stomach gave a lurch and he rubbed his fingers convulsively against the leg of his breeches.

“They’re gone, sir.” Fettes had got his voice, if not quite his face, back under control. “I’ve sent men to search the grounds.”

“Good. Would you please call the servants together? I’ll need to question them.”

Fettes took a deep breath.

“They’re gone, too.”

“What? All of them?”

“Yes, sir.”

He took a deep breath himself—and let it out again, fast. Even outside the room, the stench was gagging. He could feel the smell, thick on his skin, and rubbed his fingers on his breeches once again, hard. He swallowed and, holding his breath, jerked his head to Fettes—and to Cherry, who had joined them, shaking his head mutely in answer to Grey’s raised brow. No sign of the vanished sentries, then. God damn it; a search would have to be made for their bodies. The thought made him cold, despite the growing warmth of the morning.

He went down the stairs, his officers only too glad to follow. By the time he reached the foot, he had decided where to begin, at least. He stopped and turned to Fettes and Cherry.

“Right. The island is under military law as of this moment. Notify the officers, but tell them there is to be no public announcement yet. And don’t tell them why.” Given the flight of the servants, it was more than likely that news of the governor’s death would reach the inhabitants of Spanish Town within hours—if it hadn’t already. But if there was the slightest chance that the populace might remain in ignorance of the fact that Governor Warren had been killed and partially devoured in his own residence, while under the guard of His Majesty’s army, Grey was taking it.

“What about the secretary?” he asked abruptly, suddenly remembering. “Dawes. Is he gone, too? Or dead?”

Fettes and Cherry exchanged a guilty look.

“Don’t know, sir,” Cherry said gruffly. “I’ll go and look.”

“Do that, if you please.”

He nodded in return to their salutes and went outside, shuddering in relief at the touch of the sun on his face, the warmth of it through the thin linen of his shirt. He walked slowly around the terrace toward his room, where Tom had doubtless already managed to assemble and clean his uniform.

Now what? Dawes, if the man was still alive—and he hoped to God he was…A surge of saliva choked him, and he spat several times on the terrace, unable to swallow for the memory of that throat-clenching smell.

“Tom,” he said urgently, coming into the room. “Did you have an opportunity to speak to the other servants? To Rodrigo?”

“Yes, me lord.” Tom waved him onto the stool and knelt to put his stockings on. “They all knew about zombies—said they were dead people, just like Rodrigo said. A houngan—that’s a…well, I don’t quite know, but folk are right scared of ’em. Anyway, one of those who takes against somebody—or what’s paid to do so, I reckon—will take the somebody and kill them, then raise ’em up again to be his servant, and that’s a zombie. They were all dead scared of the notion, me lord,” he said earnestly, looking up.

“I don’t blame them in the slightest. Did any of them know about my visitor?”

Tom shook his head.

“They said not, but I think they did, me lord. They weren’t a-going to say. I got Rodrigo off by himself and he admitted he knew about it, but he said he didn’t think it was a zombie what came after you, because I told him how you fought it and what a mess it made of your room.” He narrowed his eyes at the dressing table, with its cracked mirror.

“Really? What did he think it was?”

“He wouldn’t quite say, but I pestered him a bit, and he finally let on as it might have been a houngan, just pretending to be a zombie.”

Grey digested that possibility for a moment. Had the creature who attacked him meant to kill him? If so, why? But if not, the attack might only have been meant to pave the way for what had now happened, by making it seem that there were zombies lurking about King’s House in some profusion. That made a certain amount of sense, save for the fact…

“But I’m told that zombies are slow and stiff in their movements. Could one of them have done what…was done to the governor?” He swallowed.

“I dunno, me lord. Never met one.” Tom grinned briefly at him, rising from fastening his knee buckles. It was a nervous grin, but Grey smiled back, heartened by it.

“I suppose I will have to go and look at the body again,” he said, rising. “Will you come with me, Tom?” His valet was very observant, especially in matters pertaining to the body, and had been of help to him before in interpreting postmortem phenomena.

Tom paled noticeably but gulped and nodded and, squaring his shoulders, followed Lord John out onto the terrace.

On their way to the governor’s room, they met Major Fettes, gloomily eating a slice of pineapple scavenged from the kitchen.

“Come with me, Major,” Grey ordered. “You can tell me what discoveries you and Cherry have made in my absence.”

“I can tell you one such, sir,” Fettes said, putting down the pineapple and wiping his hands on his waistcoat. “Judge Peters has gone to Eleuthera.”

“What the devil for?” That was a nuisance; he’d been hoping to discover more about the original incident that had incited the rebellion, and as he was obviously not going to learn anything from Warren…He waved a hand at Fettes; it hardly mattered why Peters had gone.

“Right. Well, then—” Breathing through his mouth as much as possible, Grey pushed open the door. Tom, behind him, made an involuntary sound but then stepped carefully up and squatted beside the body.

Grey squatted beside him. He could hear thickened breathing behind him.

“Major,” he said, without turning round. “If Captain Cherry has found Mr. Dawes, would you be so kind as to fetch him in here?”

THEY WERE HARD at it when Dawes came in, accompanied by both Fettes and Cherry, and Grey ignored all of them.

“The bite marks are human?” he asked, carefully turning one of Warren’s lower legs toward the light from the window. Tom nodded, wiping the back of his hand across his mouth.

“Sure of it, me lord. I been bitten by dogs—nothing like this. Besides—” He inserted his forearm into his mouth and bit down fiercely, then displayed the results to Grey. “See, me lord? The teeth go in a circle, like.”

“No doubt of it.” Grey straightened and turned to Dawes, who was sagging at the knees to such an extent that Captain Cherry was obliged to hold him up. “Do sit down, please, Mr. Dawes, and give me your opinion of matters here.”

Dawes’s round face was blotched, his lips pale. He shook his head and tried to back away but was prevented by Cherry’s grip on his arm.

“I know nothing, sir,” he gasped. “Nothing at all. Please, may I go? I, I…really, sir, I grow faint!”

“That’s all right,” Grey said pleasantly. “You can lie down on the bed if you can’t stand up.”

Dawes glanced at the bed, went white, and sat down heavily on the floor. Saw what was on the floor beside him and scrambled hurriedly to his feet, where he stood swaying and gulping.

Grey nodded at a stool, and Cherry propelled the little secretary, not ungently, onto it.

“What’s he told you, Fettes?” Grey asked, turning back toward the bed. “Tom, we’re going to wrap Mr. Warren up in the counterpane, then lay him on the floor and roll him up in the carpet. To prevent leakage.”

“Right, me lord.” Tom and Captain Cherry set gingerly about this process, while Grey walked over and stood looking down at Dawes.

“Pled ignorance, for the most part,” Fettes said, joining Grey and giving Dawes a speculative look. “He did tell us that Derwent Warren had seduced a woman called Nancy Twelvetrees, in London. Threw her over, though, and married the heiress to the Atherton fortune.”

“Who had better sense than to accompany her husband to the West Indies, I take it? Yes. Did he know that Miss Twelvetrees and her brother had inherited a plantation on Jamaica and were proposing to emigrate here?”

“No, sir.” Dawes’s voice was little more than a croak. He cleared his throat and spoke more firmly. “He was entirely surprised to meet the Twelvetrees at his first assembly.”

“I daresay. Was the surprise mutual?”

“It was. Miss Twelvetrees went white, then red, then removed her shoe and set about the governor with the heel of it.”

“I wish I’d seen that,” Grey said, with real regret. “Right. Well, as you can see, the governor is no longer in need of your discretion. I, on the other hand, am in need of your loquacity. You can start by telling me why he was afraid of snakes.”

“Oh.” Dawes gnawed his lower lip. “I cannot be sure, you understand—”

“Speak up, you lump,” growled Fettes, leaning menacingly over Dawes, who recoiled.

“I—I—” he stammered. “Truly, I don’t know the details. But it—it had to do with a young woman. A young black woman. He—the governor, that is—women were something of a weakness for him…”

“And?” Grey prodded.

The young woman, it appeared, was a slave in the household. And not disposed to accept the governor’s attentions. The governor was not accustomed to take “no” for an answer—and didn’t. The young woman had vanished the next day, run away, and had not been recaptured as yet. But the day after, a black man in a turban and loincloth had come to King’s House and had requested audience.

“He wasn’t admitted, of course. But he wouldn’t go away, either.” Dawes shrugged. “Just squatted at the foot of the front steps and waited.”

When Warren had at length emerged, the man had risen, stepped forward, and in formal tones informed the governor that he was herewith cursed.

“Cursed?” said Grey, interested. “How?”

“Well, now, there my knowledge reaches its limits, sir,” Dawes replied. He had recovered some of his self-confidence by now and straightened up a little. “For, having pronounced the fact, he then proceeded to speak in an unfamiliar tongue—I think some of it may have been Spanish, though it wasn’t all like that. I must suppose that he was, er, administering the curse, so to speak?”

“I’m sure I don’t know.” By now Tom and Captain Cherry had completed their disagreeable task, and the governor reposed in an innocuous cocoon of carpeting. “I’m sorry, gentlemen, but there are no servants to assist us. We’re going to take him down to the garden shed. Come, Mr. Dawes; you can be assistant pallbearer. And tell us on the way where the snakes come into it.”

Panting and groaning, with the occasional near slip, they manhandled the unwieldy bundle down the stairs. Mr. Dawes, making ineffectual grabs at the carpeting, was prodded by Captain Cherry into further discourse.

“Well, I thought that I caught the word ‘snake’ in the man’s tirade,” he said. “And then…the snakes began to come.”

Small snakes, large snakes. A snake was found in the governor’s bath. Another appeared under the dining table, to the horror of a merchant’s lady who was dining with the governor and who had hysterics all over the dining room before fainting heavily across the table. Mr. Dawes appeared to find something amusing in this, and Grey, perspiring heavily, gave him a glare that returned him more soberly to his account.

“Every day, it seemed, and in different places. We had the house searched, repeatedly. But no one could—or would, perhaps—detect the source of the reptiles. And while no one was bitten, still the nervous strain of not knowing whether you would turn back your coverlet to discover something writhing amongst your bedding…”

“Quite. Ugh!” They paused and set down their burden. Grey wiped his forehead on his sleeve. “And how did you make the connection, Mr. Dawes, between this plague of snakes and Mr. Warren’s mistreatment of the slave girl?”

Dawes looked surprised and pushed his spectacles back up his sweating nose.

“Oh, did I not say? The man—I was told later that he was an Obeah man, whatever that may be—spoke her name, in the midst of his denunciation. Azeel, it was.”

“I see. All right, ready? One, two, three—up!”

Dawes had given up any pretence of helping but scampered down the garden path ahead of them to open the shed door. He had quite lost any lingering reticence and seemed anxious to provide any information he could.

“He did not tell me directly, but I believe he had begun to dream of snakes and of the girl.”

“How do—you know?” Grey grunted. “That’s my foot, Major!”

“I heard him…er…speaking to himself. He had begun to drink rather heavily, you see. Quite understandable under the circumstances, don’t you think?”

Grey wished he could drink heavily but had no breath left with which to say so.

There was a sudden cry of startlement from Tom, who had gone in to clear space in the shed, and all three officers dropped the carpet with a thump, reaching for nonexistent weapons.

“Me lord, me lord! Look who I found, a-hiding in the shed!” Tom was leaping up the path toward Grey, face abeam with happiness, the youth Rodrigo coming warily behind him. Grey’s heart leapt at the sight, and he felt a most unaccustomed smile touch his face.

“Your servant, sah.” Rodrigo, very timid, made a deep bow.

“I’m very pleased to see you, Rodrigo. Tell me—did you see anything of what passed here last night?”

The young man shuddered and turned his face away.

“No, sah,” he said, so low-voiced Grey could barely hear him. “It was zombies. They…eat people. I heard them, but I know better than to look. I ran down into the garden and hid myself.”

“You heard them?” Grey said sharply. “What did you hear, exactly?”

Rodrigo swallowed, and if it had been possible for a green tinge to show on skin such as his, he would undoubtedly have turned the shade of a sea turtle.

“Feet, sah,” he said. “Bare feet. But they don’t walk, step-step, like a person. They only shuffle, sh-sh, sh-sh.” He made small pushing motions with his hands in illustration, and Grey felt a slight lifting of the hairs on the back of his neck.

“Could you tell how many…men…there were?”

Rodrigo shook his head. “More than two, from the sound.”

Tom pushed a little forward, round face intent. “Was there anybody else with ’em, d’you think? Somebody with a regular step, I mean?”

Rodrigo looked startled and then horrified.

“You mean a houngan? I don’t know.” He shrugged. “Maybe. I didn’t hear shoes. But…”

“Oh. Because—” Tom stopped abruptly, glanced at Grey, and coughed. “Oh.”

Despite more questions, this was all that Rodrigo could contribute, and so the carpet was picked up again—this time, with the servant helping—and bestowed in its temporary resting place. Fettes and Cherry chipped away a bit more at Dawes, but the secretary was unable to offer any further information regarding the governor’s activities, let alone speculate as to what malign force had brought about his demise.

“Have you heard of zombies before, Mr. Dawes?” Grey inquired, mopping his face with the remains of his handkerchief.

“Er…yes,” the secretary replied cautiously. “But surely you don’t believe what the servant…Oh, surely not!” He cast an appalled glance at the shed.

“Are zombies in fact reputed to devour human flesh?”

Dawes resumed his sickly pallor.

“Well, yes. But…oh, dear!”

“Sums it up nicely,” muttered Cherry, under his breath. “I take it you don’t mean to make a public announcement of the governor’s demise, then, sir?”

“You are correct, Captain. I don’t want public panic over a plague of zombies at large in Spanish Town, whether that is actually the case or not. Mr. Dawes, I believe we need trouble you no more for the moment; you are excused.” He watched the secretary stumble off, before beckoning his officers closer. Tom moved a little away, discreet as always, and took Rodrigo with him.

“Have you discovered anything else that might have bearing on the present circumstance?”

They glanced at each other, and Fettes, wheezing gently, nodded to Cherry. Cherry strongly resembled that eponymous fruit, but, being younger and more slender than Fettes, had more breath than his superior.

“Yes, sir. I went looking for Ludgate, the old superintendent. Didn’t find him—he’s buggered off to Canada, they said—but I got a right earful concerning the present superintendent.”

Grey groped for a moment for the name.

“Cresswell?”

“That’s him.”

“Peculation or corruption” appeared to sum up the subject of Captain Cresswell’s tenure as superintendent very well, according to Cherry’s informants in Spanish Town and Kingston. Amongst other abuses, he had arranged trade between the maroons on the uplands and the merchants below, in the form of bird skins, snakeskins, and other exotica, timber from the upland forests, and so on—but had, by report, accepted payment on behalf of the maroons but failed to deliver it.

“Had he any part in the arrest of the two young maroons accused of theft?”

Cherry’s teeth flashed in a grin.

“Odd you should ask, sir. Yes, they said—well, some of them did—that the two young men had come down to complain about Cresswell’s behaviour, but the governor wouldn’t see them. They were heard to declare they would take back their goods by force—so when a substantial chunk of the contents of one warehouse went missing, it was assumed that was what they’d done. They—the maroons—insisted they hadn’t touched the stuff, but Cresswell seized the opportunity and had them arrested for theft.”

Grey closed his eyes, enjoying the momentary coolness of a breeze from the sea.

“The governor wouldn’t see the young men, you said. Is there any suggestion of an improper connection between the governor and Captain Cresswell?”

“Oh, yes,” said Fettes, rolling his eyes. “No proof yet—but we haven’t been looking long, either.”

“I see. And we still do not know the whereabouts of Captain Cresswell?”

Cherry and Fettes shook their heads in unison.

“The general conclusion is that Accompong scragged him,” Cherry said.

“Who?”

“Oh. Sorry, sir,” Cherry apologised. “That’s the name of the maroon’s headman, so they say. Captain Accompong, he calls himself, if you please.” Cherry’s lips twisted a little.

Grey sighed. “All right. No reports of any further depredations by the maroons, by whatever name?”

“Not unless you count murdering the governor,” said Fettes.

“Actually,” Grey said slowly, “I don’t think that the maroons are responsible for this particular death.” He was somewhat surprised to hear himself say so, in truth—and yet he found that he did think it.

Fettes blinked, this being as close to an expression of astonishment as he ever got, and Cherry looked openly sceptical. Grey did not choose to go into the matter of Mrs. Abernathy nor yet to explain his conclusions about the maroons’ disinclination for violence. Strange, he thought. He had heard Captain Accompong’s name only moments before, but with that name his thoughts began to coalesce around a shadowy figure. Suddenly there was a mind out there, someone with whom he might engage.

In battle, the personality and temperament of the commanding officer was nearly as important as the number of troops he commanded. So. He needed to know more about Captain Accompong, but that could wait for the moment.

He nodded to Tom, who approached respectfully, Rodrigo behind him.

“Tell them what you discovered, Tom.”

Tom cleared his throat and folded his hands at his waist.

“Well, we…er…disrobed the governor”—Fettes flinched, and Tom cleared his throat again before going on—“and had a close look. And the long and the short of it, sir, and sir,” he added, with a nod to Cherry, “is that Governor Warren was stabbed in the back.”

Both officers looked blank.

“But…the place is covered with blood and filth and nastiness,” Cherry protested. “It smells like that place where they put the bloaters they drag out of the Thames!”

“Footprints,” Fettes said, giving Tom a faintly accusing look. “There were footprints. Big, bloody, bare footprints.”

“I do not deny that something objectionable was present in that room,” Grey said dryly. “But whoever—or whatever—gnawed the governor probably did not kill him. He was almost certainly dead when the…er…subsequent damage occurred.”

Rodrigo’s eyes were huge. Fettes was heard to observe under his breath that he would be damned, but both Fettes and Cherry were good men and did not argue with Grey’s conclusions, any more than they had taken issue with his order to hide Warren’s body: they could plainly perceive the desirability of suppressing rumour of a plague of zombies.

“The point, gentlemen, is that after several months of incident, there has been nothing for the last month. Perhaps Mr. Warren’s death is meant to be incitement, but if it was not the work of the maroons, then the question is…what are the maroons waiting for?”

Tom lifted his head, eyes wide.

“Why, me lord, I’d say—they’re waiting for you. What else?”

WHAT ELSE, INDEED. Why had he not seen that at once? Of course Tom was right. The maroons’ protest had gone unanswered, their complaint unremedied. So they had set out to attract attention in the most noticeable—if not the best—way open to them. Time had passed, nothing was done in response, and then they had heard that soldiers were coming. Lieutenant-Colonel Grey had now appeared. Naturally they were waiting to see what he would do.

What had he done so far? Sent troops to guard the plantations that were the most likely targets of a fresh attack. That was not likely to encourage the maroons to abandon their present plan of action, though it might cause them to direct their efforts elsewhere.

He walked to and fro in the wilderness of the King’s House garden, thinking, but there were few alternatives.

He summoned Fettes and informed him that he, Fettes, was, until further notice, acting governor of the island of Jamaica.

Fettes looked more like a block of wood than usual.

“Yes, sir,” he said. “If I might ask, sir…where are you going?”

“I’m going to talk to Captain Accompong.”

“ALONE, SIR?” Fettes was appalled. “Surely you cannot mean to go up there alone!”

“I won’t be,” Grey assured him. “I’m taking my valet and the servant boy. I’ll need someone who can translate for me, if necessary.”

Seeing the mulish cast settling upon Fettes’s brow, he sighed.

“To go there in force, Major, is to invite battle, and that is not what I want.”

“No, sir,” Fettes said dubiously, “but surely a proper escort…!”

“No, Major.” Grey was courteous but firm. “I wish to make it clear that I am coming to speak with Captain Accompong, and nothing more. I go alone.”

“Yes, sir.” Fettes was beginning to look like a block of wood that someone had set about with a hammer and chisel.

“As you wish, sir.”

Grey nodded and turned to go into the house, but then paused and turned back.

“Oh, there is one thing that you might do for me, Major.”

Fettes brightened slightly.

“Yes, sir?”

“Find me a particularly excellent hat, would you? With gold lace, if possible.”

THEY RODE FOR nearly two days before they heard the first of the horns. A high, melancholy sound in the twilight, it seemed far away, and only a sort of metallic note made Grey sure that it was not in fact the cry of some large exotic bird.

“Maroons,” Rodrigo said under his breath, and crouched a little, as though trying to avoid notice, even in the saddle. “That’s how they talk to one another. Every group has a horn; they all sound different.”

Another long, mournful falling note. Was it the same horn? Grey wondered. Or a second, answering the first?

“Talk to one another, you say. Can you tell what they’re saying?”

Rodrigo had straightened up a bit in his saddle, putting a hand automatically behind him to steady the leather box that held the most ostentatious hat available in Spanish Town.

“Yes, sah. They’re telling one another we’re here.”

Tom muttered something under his own breath, which sounded like, “Could have told you that meself for free,” but declined to repeat or expand upon his sentiment when invited to do so.

They camped for the night under the shelter of a tree, so tired that they merely sat in silence as they ate, watching the nightly rainstorm come in over the sea, then crawled into the canvas tent Grey had brought. The young men fell asleep instantly to the pattering of rain above them.

Grey lay awake for a little, fighting tiredness, his mind reaching upwards. He had worn uniform, though not full dress, so that his identity would be apparent. And his gambit so far had been accepted; they had not been challenged, let alone attacked. Apparently Captain Accompong would receive him.

Then what? He wasn’t sure. He did hope that he might recover his men—the two sentries who had disappeared on the night of Governor Warren’s murder. Their bodies had not been discovered, nor had any of their uniform or equipment turned up—and Captain Cherry had had the whole of Spanish Town and Kingston turned over in the search. If they had been taken alive, though, that reinforced his impression of Accompong—and gave him some hope that this rebellion might be resolved in some manner not involving a prolonged military campaign fought through jungles and rocks and ending in chains and executions. But if…Sleep overcame him, and he lapsed into incongruous dreams of bright birds, whose feathers brushed his cheeks as they flew silently past.

Grey woke in the morning to the feel of sun on his face. He blinked for a moment, confused, and then sat up. He was alone. Truly alone.

He scrambled to his feet, heart thumping, reaching for his dagger. It was there in his belt, but that was the only thing still where it should be. His horse—all the horses—were gone. So was his tent. So was the pack mule and its panniers. And so were Tom and Rodrigo.

He saw this at once—the blankets in which they’d lain the night before were still there, tumbled into the bushes—but he called for them anyway, again and again, until his throat was raw with shouting.

From somewhere high above him, he heard one of the horns, a long-drawn-out hoot that sounded mocking to his ears.

He understood the present message instantly. You took two of ours; we have taken two of yours.

“And you don’t think I’ll come and get them?” he shouted upwards into the dizzying sea of swaying green. “Tell Captain Accompong I’m coming! I’ll have my young men back, and back safe—or I’ll have his head!”

Blood rose in his face, and he thought he might burst but had better sense than to punch something, which was his very strong urge. He was alone; he couldn’t afford to damage himself. He had to arrive among the maroons with everything that still remained to him, if he meant to rescue Tom and resolve the rebellion—and he did mean to rescue Tom, no matter what. It didn’t matter that this might be a trap; he was going.

He calmed himself with an effort of will, stamping round in a circle in his stockinged feet until he had worked off most of his anger. That’s when he saw them, sitting neatly side by side under a thorny bush.

They’d left him his boots. They did expect him to come.

HE WALKED FOR three days. He didn’t bother trying to follow a trail; he wasn’t a particularly skilled tracker, and finding any trace among the rocks and dense growth was a vain hope in any case. He simply climbed and listened for the horns.

The maroons hadn’t left him any supplies, but that didn’t matter. There were numerous small streams and pools, and while he was hungry, he didn’t starve. Here and there he found trees of the sort he had seen at Twelvetrees, festooned with small yellowish fruits. If the parrots ate them, he reasoned, the fruits must be at least minimally comestible. They were mouth-puckeringly sour, but they didn’t poison him.

The horns had increased in frequency since dawn. There were now three or four of them, signaling back and forth. Clearly, he was getting close. To what, he didn’t know, but close.

He paused, looking up. The ground had begun to level out here; there were open spots in the jungle, and in one of these small clearings he saw what were plainly crops: mounds of curling vines that might be yams, beanpoles, the big yellow flowers of squash or gourds. At the far edge of the field, a tiny curl of smoke rose against the green. Close.

He took off the crude hat he had woven from palm leaves against the strong sun and wiped his face on the tail of his shirt. That was as much preparation as it was possible to make. The gaudy gold-laced hat he’d brought was presumably still in its box—wherever that was. He put his palm-leaf hat back on and limped toward the curl of smoke.

As he walked, he became aware of people fading slowly into view. Dark-skinned people, dressed in ragged clothing, coming out of the jungle to watch him with big, curious eyes. He’d found the maroons.

A SMALL GROUP of men took him further upwards. It was just before sunset, and the sunlight slanted gold and lavender through the trees when they led him into a large clearing, where there was a compound consisting of a number of huts. One of the men accompanying Grey shouted, and from the largest hut emerged a man who announced himself with no particular ceremony as Captain Accompong.

Captain Accompong was a surprise. He was very short, very fat, and hunchbacked, his body so distorted that he did not so much walk as proceed by a sort of sideways lurching. He was attired in the remnants of a splendid coat, now buttonless and with its gold lace half missing, the cuffs filthy with wear.

He peered from under the drooping brim of a ragged felt hat, eyes bright in its shadow. His face was round and much creased, lacking a good many teeth—but giving the impression of great shrewdness and perhaps good humor. Grey hoped so.

“Who are you?” Accompong asked, peering up at Grey like a toad under a rock.

Everyone in the clearing very plainly knew his identity; they shifted from foot to foot and nudged one another, grinning. He paid no attention to them, though, and bowed very correctly to Accompong.

“I am the man responsible for the two young men who were taken on the mountain. I have come to get them back—along with my soldiers.”

A certain amount of scornful hooting ensued, and Accompong let it go on for a few moments before lifting his hand. He sat down, carefully, sighing as he settled.

“You say so? Why you think I have anything to do with these young men?”

“I do not say that you do. But I know a great leader when I see one—and I know that you can help me to find my young men. If you will.”

“Phu!” Accompong’s face creased into a gap-toothed smile. “You think you flatter me and I help?”

Grey could feel some of the smaller children stealing up behind him; he heard muffled giggles but didn’t turn round.

“I ask for your help. But I do not offer you only my good opinion in return.”

A small hand reached under his coat and rudely tweaked his buttock. There was an explosion of laughter and mad scampering behind him. He didn’t move.

Accompong chewed slowly at something in the back of his capacious mouth, one eye narrowed.

“Yes? What do you offer, then? Gold?” One corner of his thick lips turned up.

“Do you have any need of gold?” Grey asked. The children were whispering and giggling again behind him, but he also heard shushing noises from some of the women—they were getting interested. Maybe.

Accompong thought for a moment, then shook his head.

“No. What else you offer?”

“What do you want?” Grey parried.

“Captain Cresswell’s head!” said a woman’s voice, very clearly. There was a shuffle and smack, a man’s voice rebuking in Spanish, a heated crackle of women’s voices in return. Accompong let it go on for a minute or two, then raised one hand. Silence fell abruptly.

It lengthened. Grey could feel the pulse beating in his temples, slow and labouring. Ought he to speak? He came as a suppliant already; to speak now would be to lose face, as the Chinese put it. He waited.

“The governor is dead?” Accompong asked at last.

“Yes. How do you know of it?”

“You mean did I kill him?” The bulbous yellowed eyes creased.

“No,” Grey said patiently. “I mean do you know how he died?”

“The zombies kill him.” The answer came readily—and seriously. There was no hint of humor in those eyes now.

“Do you know who made the zombies?”

A most extraordinary shudder ran through Accompong, from his ragged hat to the horny soles of his bare feet.

“You do know,” Grey said softly, raising a hand to prevent the automatic denial. “But it wasn’t you, was it? Tell me.”

The captain shifted uneasily from one buttock to the other but didn’t reply. His eyes darted toward one of the huts, and after a moment he raised his voice, calling something in the maroons’ patois, wherein Grey thought he caught the word “Azeel.” He was puzzled momentarily, finding the word familiar but not knowing why. Then the young woman emerged from the hut, ducking under the low doorway, and he remembered.

Azeel. The young slave woman whom the governor had taken and misused, whose flight from King’s House had presaged the plague of serpents.

Seeing her as she came forward, he couldn’t help but see what had inspired the governor’s lust, though it was not a beauty that spoke to him. She was small but not inconsequential. Perfectly proportioned, she stood like a queen, and her eyes burned as she turned her face to Grey. There was anger in her face—but also something like a terrible despair.

“Captain Accompong says that I will tell you what I know—what happened.”

Grey bowed to her.

“I should be most grateful to hear it, madam.”

She looked hard at him, obviously suspecting mockery, but he’d meant it, and she saw that. She gave a brief, nearly imperceptible nod.

“Well, then. You know that beast”—she spat neatly on the ground—“forced me? And I left his house?”

“Yes. Whereupon you sought out an Obeah man, who invoked a curse of snakes upon Governor Warren, am I correct?”

She glared at him and gave a short nod. “The snake is wisdom, and that man had none. None!”

“I think you’re quite right about that. But the zombies?”

There was a general intake of breath among the crowd. Fear, distaste—and something else. The girl’s lips pressed together, and tears glimmered in her large dark eyes.

“Rodrigo,” she said, and choked on the name. “He—and I—” Her jaw clamped hard; she couldn’t speak without weeping and would not weep in front of him. He cast down his gaze to the ground, to give her what privacy he could. He could hear her breathing through her nose, a soft, snuffling noise. Finally, she heaved a deep breath.

“He was not satisfied. He went to a houngan. The Obeah man warned him, but—” Her entire face contorted with the effort to hold in her feelings. “The houngan. He had zombies. Rodrigo paid him to kill the beast.”

Grey felt as though he had been punched in the chest. Rodrigo. Rodrigo, hiding in the garden shed at the sound of shuffling bare feet in the night—or Rodrigo, warning his fellow servants to leave, then unbolting the doors, following a silent horde of ruined men in clotted rags up the stairs…or running up before them, in apparent alarm, summoning the sentries, drawing them outside, where they could be taken.

“And where is Rodrigo now?” Grey asked sharply. There was a deep silence in the clearing. None of the people even glanced at one another; every eye was fixed on the ground. He took a step toward Accompong. “Captain?”

Accompong stirred. He raised his misshapen face to Grey and a hand toward one of the huts.

“We do not like zombies, Colonel,” he said. “They are unclean. And to kill a man using them…this is a great wrong. You understand this?”

“I do, yes.”

“This man, Rodrigo…” Accompong hesitated, searching out words. “He is not one of us. He comes from Hispaniola. They…do such things there.”

“Such things as make zombies? But presumably it happens here, as well.” Grey spoke automatically; his mind was working furiously in light of these revelations. The thing that had attacked him in his room—it would be no great trick for a man to smear himself with grave dirt and wear rotted clothing…

“Not among us,” Accompong said very firmly. “Before I say more, my colonel—do you believe what you have heard so far? Do you believe that we—that I—had nothing to do with the death of your governor?”

Grey considered that one for a moment. There was no evidence, only the story of the slave girl. Still…he did have evidence. The evidence of his own observations and conclusions regarding the nature of the man who sat before him.

“Yes,” he said abruptly. “So?”

“Will your king believe it?”

Well, not as baldly stated, no, Grey thought. The matter would need a little tactful handling…

Accompong snorted faintly, seeing the thoughts cross Grey’s face.

“This man, Rodrigo. He has done us great harm by taking his private revenge in a way that…that…” Accompong groped for the word.

“That incriminates you,” Grey finished for him. “Yes, I see that. What have you done with him?”

“I cannot give this man to you,” Accompong said at last. His thick lips pressed together briefly, but he met Grey’s eye. “He is dead.”

The shock hit Grey like a musket ball, a thump that knocked him off-balance and the sickening knowledge of irrevocable damage done.

“How?” he said, short and sharp. “What happened to him?”

The clearing was still silent. Accompong stared at the ground in front of him. After a long moment, a sigh, a whisper, drifted from the crowd.

“Zombie.”

“Where?” he barked. “Where is he? Bring him to me. Now!”

The crowd shrank away from the hut, and a sort of moan ran through them. Women snatched up their children, pushed back so hastily that they stepped on the feet of their companions. The door opened.

“Anda!” said a voice from inside. Walk, it meant, in Spanish. Grey’s numbed mind had barely registered this when the darkness inside the hut changed and a form appeared at the door.

It was Rodrigo. But then again—it wasn’t. The glowing skin had gone pale and muddy, almost waxen. The firm, soft mouth hung loose, and the eyes—oh, God, the eyes! They were sunken, glassy, and showed no comprehension, no movement, not the least sense of awareness. They were a dead man’s eyes. And yet…he walked.

This was the worst of all. Gone was every trace of Rodrigo’s springy grace, his elegance. This creature moved stiffly, shambling, feet dragging, almost lurching from foot to foot. Its clothing hung upon its bones like a scarecrow’s rags, smeared with clay and stained with dreadful liquids. The odour of putrefaction reached Grey’s nostrils, and he gagged.

“Alto,” said the voice softly, and Rodrigo stopped abruptly, arms hanging like a marionette’s. Grey looked up then at the hut. A tall, dark man stood in the doorway, burning eyes fixed on Grey.

The sun was all but down; the clearing lay in deep shadow, and Grey felt a convulsive shiver go through him. He lifted his chin and, ignoring the horrid thing standing stiff before him, addressed the tall man.

“Who are you, sir?”

“Call me Ishmael,” said the man, in an odd, lilting accent. He stepped out of the hut, and Grey was conscious of a general shrinking, everyone pulling away from the man, as though he suffered from some deadly contagion. Grey wanted to step back, too, but didn’t.

“You did…this?” Grey asked, flicking a hand at the remnant of Rodrigo.

“I was paid to do it, yes.” Ishmael’s eyes flicked toward Accompong, then back to Grey.

“And Governor Warren—you were paid to kill him, as well, were you? By this man?” A brief nod at Rodrigo; he could not bear to look directly at him.

“The zombies think they’re dead, and so does everyone else.”

A frown drew Ishmael’s brows together, and with the change of expression, Grey noticed that the man’s faced was scarred, with apparent deliberation, long channels cut in cheeks and forehead. He shook his head.

“No. This”—he nodded at Rodrigo—“paid me to bring my zombies. He says to me that he wishes to terrify a man. And zombies will do that,” he added, with a wolfish smile. “But when I brought them into the room and the buckra turned to flee, this one”—the flick of a hand toward Rodrigo—“sprang upon him and stabbed him. The man fell dead, and Rodrigo then ordered me”—his tone of voice made it clear what he thought of anyone ordering him to do anything—“to make my zombies feed upon him. And I did,” he ended abruptly.

Grey swung round to Captain Accompong, who had sat silently through this testimony.

“And then you paid this…this—”

“Houngan,” Ishmael put in helpfully.

“—to do that?!” He pointed at Rodrigo, and his voice shook with outraged horror.

“Justice,” said Accompong, with simple dignity. “Don’t you think so?”

Grey found himself temporarily bereft of speech. While he groped for something possible to say, the headman turned to a lieutenant and said, “Bring the other one.”

“The other—” Grey began, but before he could speak further, there was another stir among the crowd, and from one of the huts a maroon emerged, leading another man by a rope around his neck. The man was wild-eyed and filthy, his hands bound behind him, but his clothes had originally been very fine. Grey shook his head, trying to dispel the remnants of horror that clung to his mind.

“Captain Cresswell, I presume?” he said.

“Save me!” the man panted, and collapsed on his knees at Grey’s feet. “I beg you, sir—whoever you are—save me!”

Grey rubbed a hand wearily over his face and looked down at the erstwhile superintendent, then at Accompong.

“Does he need saving?” he asked. “I don’t want to—I know what he’s done—but it is my duty.”

Accompong pursed his lips, thinking.

“You know what he is, you say. If I give him to you, what would you do with him?”

At least there was an answer to that one.

“Charge him with his crimes and send him to England for trial. If he is convicted, he would be imprisoned—or possibly hanged. What would happen to him here?” he asked curiously.

Accompong turned his head, looking thoughtfully at the houngan, who grinned unpleasantly.

“No!” gasped Cresswell. “No, please! Don’t let him take me! I can’t—I can’t—oh, GOD!” He glanced, appalled, at the stiff figure of Rodrigo, then fell face-first onto the ground at Grey’s feet, weeping convulsively.

Numbed with shock, Grey thought for an instant that it would probably resolve the rebellion…but no. Cresswell couldn’t countenance the possibility of being handed over to Ishmael, and neither could Grey.

“Right,” said Grey, and swallowed before turning to Accompong. “He is an Englishman, and, as I said, it’s my duty to see that he’s subject to English laws. I must therefore ask that you give him into my custody and take my word that I will see he receives justice. Our sort of justice,” he added, giving the evil look back to the houngan.

“And if I don’t?” Accompong asked, blinking genially at him.

“Well, I suppose I’ll have to fight you for him,” Grey said. “But I’m bloody tired and I really don’t want to.” Accompong laughed at this, and Grey followed swiftly up with “I will, of course, appoint a new superintendent—and, given the importance of the office, I will bring the new superintendent here so that you may meet him and approve of him.”

“If I don’t approve?”

“There are a bloody lot of Englishmen on Jamaica,” Grey said, impatient. “You’re bound to like one of them.”

Accompong laughed out loud, his little round belly jiggling under his coat.

“I like you, Colonel,” he said. “You want to be superintendent?”

Grey suppressed the natural answer to this and instead said, “Alas, I have a duty to the army which prevents my accepting the offer, amazingly generous though it is.” He coughed. “You have my word that I will find you a suitable candidate, though.”

The tall lieutenant who stood behind Captain Accompong lifted his voice and said something sceptical in a patois that Grey didn’t understand—but from the man’s attitude, his glance at Cresswell, and the murmur of agreement that greeted his remark, Grey had no trouble in deducing what had been said.

What is the word of an Englishman worth?

Grey gave Cresswell, grovelling and snivelling at his feet, a look of profound disfavour. It would serve the man right if—then he caught the faint reek of corruption wafting from Rodrigo’s still form, and shuddered. No, nobody deserved that.

Putting aside the question of Cresswell’s fate for the moment, Grey turned to the question that had been in the forefront of his mind since he’d come in sight of that first curl of smoke.

“My men,” he said. “I want to see my men. Bring them out to me, please. At once.” He didn’t raise his voice, but he knew how to make a command sound like one.

Accompong tilted his head a little to one side, as though considering, but then waved a hand casually. There was a stirring in the crowd, an expectation. A turning of heads, then bodies, and Grey looked toward the rocks where their focus lay. An explosion of shouts, catcalls, and laughter, and the two soldiers and Tom Byrd came out of the defile. They were roped together by the necks, their ankles hobbled and hands tied in front of them, and they shuffled awkwardly, bumping into one another, turning their heads to and fro like chickens, in a vain effort to avoid the spitting and the small clods of earth thrown at them.

Grey’s outrage at this treatment was overwhelmed by his relief at seeing Tom and his young soldiers, all plainly scared but uninjured. He stepped forward at once so they could see him, and his heart was wrung by the pathetic relief that lighted their faces.

“Now, then,” he said, smiling. “You didn’t think I would leave you, surely?”

“I didn’t, me lord,” Tom said stoutly, already yanking at the rope about his neck. “I told ’em you’d be right along, the minute you got your boots on!” He glared at the little boys, naked but for shirts, who were dancing round him and the soldiers, shouting, “Buckra! Buckra!” and making not-quite-pretend jabs at the men’s genitals with sticks. “Can you make ’em leave off that filthy row, me lord? They been at it ever since we got here.”

Grey looked at Accompong and politely raised his brows. The headman barked a few words of something not quite Spanish, and the boys reluctantly fell back, though they continued to make faces and rude arm-pumping gestures.

Captain Accompong put out a hand to his lieutenant, who hauled the fat little headman to his feet. He dusted fastidiously at the skirts of his coat, then walked slowly around the small group of prisoners, stopping at Cresswell. He contemplated the man, who had now curled himself into a ball, then looked up at Grey.

“Do you know what a loa is, my colonel?” he asked quietly.

“I do, yes,” Grey replied warily. “Why?”

“There is a spring, quite close. It comes from deep in the earth, where the loas live, and sometimes they will come forth and speak. If you will have back your men—I ask you to go there and speak with whatever loa may find you. Thus we will have truth, and I can decide.”

Grey stood for a moment, looking back and forth from the fat old man to Cresswell, whose back heaved with silent sobs, to the young girl Azeel, who had turned her head to hide the hot tears coursing down her cheeks. He didn’t look at Tom. There didn’t seem much choice.

“All right,” he said, turning back to Accompong. “Let me go now, then.”

Accompong shook his head.

“In the morning,” he said. “You do not want to go there at night.”

“Yes, I do,” Grey said. “Now.”

“QUITE CLOSE” was a relative term, apparently. Grey thought it must be near midnight by the time they arrived at the spring—Grey, the houngan Ishmael, and four maroons bearing torches and armed with the long cane knives called machetes.

Accompong hadn’t told him it was a hot spring. There was a rocky overhang and what looked like a cavern beneath it, from which steam drifted out like dragon’s breath. His attendants—or guards, as one chose to look at it—halted as one, a safe distance away. He glanced at them for instruction, but they were silent.

He’d been wondering what the houngan’s role in this peculiar undertaking was. The man was carrying a battered canteen; now he uncorked this and handed it to Grey. It smelled hot, though the tin of the heavy canteen was cool in his hands. Raw rum, he thought, from the sweetly searing smell of it—and doubtless a few other things.

“…Herbs. Ground bones—bits o’ other things. But the main thing, the one thing ye must have, is the liver of a fugu fish…They don’t come back from it, ye ken. The poison damages their brains…”

“Now we drink,” Ishmael said. “And we enter the cave.”

“Both of us?”

“Yes. I will summon the loa. I am a priest of Damballa.” The man spoke seriously, with none of the hostility or smirking he had displayed earlier. Grey noticed, though, that their escort kept a safe distance from the houngan, and a wary eye upon him.

“I see,” said Grey, though he didn’t. “This…Damballa. He, or she—”

“Damballa is the great serpent,” Ishmael said, and smiled, teeth flashing briefly in the torchlight. “I am told that snakes speak to you.” He nodded at the canteen. “Drink.”

Repressing the urge to say, “You first,” Grey raised the canteen to his lips and drank slowly. It was very raw rum, with a strange taste, sweetly acrid, rather like the taste of fruit ripened to the edge of rot. He tried to keep any thought of Mrs. Abernathy’s casual description of afile powder out of mind—she hadn’t, after all, mentioned how the stuff might taste. And surely Ishmael wouldn’t simply poison him…? He hoped not.

He sipped the liquid until a slight shift of the houngan’s posture told him it was enough, then he handed the canteen to Ishmael, who drank from it without hesitation. Grey supposed he should find this comforting, but his head was beginning to swim in an unpleasant manner, his heartbeat throbbing audibly in his ears, and something odd was happening to his vision: it went intermittently dark, then returned with a brief flash of light, and when he looked at one of the torches, it had a halo of coloured rings around it.

He barely heard the clunk of the canteen, dropped on the ground, and watched, blinking, as the houngan’s white-clad back wavered before him. A dark blur of face as Ishmael turned to him.

“Come.” The man disappeared into the veil of water.

“Right,” he muttered. “Well, then…” He removed his boots, unbuckled the knee bands of his breeches, and peeled off his stockings. Then Grey shucked his coat and stepped cautiously into the steaming water.

It was hot enough to make him gasp, but within a few moments he had got used to the temperature and made his way across a shallow, steaming pool toward the mouth of the cavern, shifting gravel hard under his bare feet. He heard whispering from his guards, but no one offered any alternative suggestions.

Water poured from the overhang but not in the manner of a true waterfall—slender streams, like jagged teeth. The guards had pegged the torches into the ground at the edge of the spring; the flames danced like rainbows in the drizzle of the falling water as he passed beneath the overhang.

The hot, wet air pressed his lungs and made it hard to breathe. After a short while he couldn’t feel any difference between his skin and the moist air through which he walked; it was as though he had melted into the darkness of the cavern.

And it was dark. Completely. A faint glow came from behind him, but he could see nothing at all before him and was obliged to feel his way, one hand on the rough rock wall. The sound of falling water grew fainter, replaced by the heavy thump of his own heartbeat, struggling against the pressure on his chest. Once he stopped and pressed his fingers against his eyelids, taking comfort in the coloured patterns that appeared there; he wasn’t blind, then. When he opened his eyes again, though, the darkness was still complete.

He thought the walls were narrowing—he could touch them on both sides by stretching out his arms—and had a nightmare moment when he seemed to feel them drawing in upon him. He forced himself to breathe, a deep, explosive gasp, and forced the illusion back.

“Stop there.” The voice was a whisper. He stopped.

There was silence for what felt like a long time.

“Come forward,” said the whisper, sounding suddenly quite near him. “There is dry land, just before you.”

He shuffled forward, felt the floor of the cave rise beneath him, and stepped out carefully onto bare rock. Walked slowly forward until again the voice bade him stop.

Silence. He thought he could make out breathing but wasn’t sure; the sound of the water was still faintly audible in the distance. All right, he thought. Come along, then.

It hadn’t been precisely an invitation, but what came into his mind was Mrs. Abernathy’s intent green eyes, staring at him as she said, “I see a great, huge snake lyin’ on your shoulders, Colonel.”

With a convulsive shudder, he realised that he felt a weight on his shoulders. Not a dead weight but something live. It moved, just barely.

“Jesus,” he whispered, and thought he heard the ghost of a laugh from somewhere in the cave. He stiffened and fought back against the mental image, for surely this was nothing more than imagination, fuelled by rum. Sure enough, the illusion of green eyes vanished—but the weight rested on him still, though he couldn’t tell whether it lay upon his shoulders or his mind.

“So,” said the low voice, sounding surprised. “The loa has come already. The snakes do like you, buckra.”

“And if they do?” he asked. He spoke in a normal tone of voice; his words echoed from the walls around him.

The voice chuckled briefly, and he felt rather than heard movement nearby, the rustle of limbs and a soft thump as something struck the floor near his right foot. His head felt immense, throbbing with rum, and waves of heat pulsed through him, though the depths of the cave were cool.

“See if this snake likes you, buckra,” the voice invited. “Pick it up.”

He couldn’t see a thing but slowly moved his foot, feeling his way over the silty floor. His toes touched something and he stopped. Whatever he had touched moved abruptly, recoiling from him. Then he felt the tiny flicker of a snake’s tongue on his toe, tasting him.

Oddly, the sensation steadied him. Surely this wasn’t his friend, the tiny yellow constrictor—but it was a serpent much like that one in general size, so far as he could tell. Nothing to fear from that.

“Pick it up,” the voice invited again. “The krait will tell us if you speak the truth.”

“Will he, indeed?” Grey said dryly. “How?”

The voice laughed, and he thought he heard two or three more chuckling behind it—but perhaps it was only echoes.

“If you die…you lied.”

Grey gave a small, contemptuous snort. There were no venomous snakes on Jamaica. He cupped his hand and bent at the knee, but hesitated. He had an instinctive aversion to being bitten by a snake, venomous or not. And how did he know how the man—or men—sitting in the shadows would take it if the thing did bite him?

“I trust this snake,” said the voice softly. “Krait comes with me from Africa. Long time now.”

Grey’s knees straightened abruptly. Africa! Now he placed the name, and cold sweat broke out on his face. Krait. A fucking African krait. Gwynne had had one. Small, no bigger than the circumference of a man’s little finger. “Bloody deadly,” Gwynne had crooned, stroking the thing’s back with the tip of a goose quill—an attention to which the snake, a slender, nondescript brown thing, had seemed oblivious.

This one was squirming languorously over the top of Grey’s foot; he had to restrain a strong urge to kick it away and stamp on it. What the devil was it about him that attracted snakes, of all ungodly things? He supposed it could be worse; it might be cockroaches. Instantly he felt a hideous crawling sensation upon his forearms and rubbed them hard reflexively, seeing—yes, he bloody saw them, here in the dark—thorny jointed legs and wriggling, inquisitive antennae brushing his skin.

He might have cried out. Someone laughed.

If he thought at all, he wouldn’t be able to do it. He stooped and snatched the thing and, rising, hurled it into the darkness. There was a yelp and a scrabbling, then a brief, shocked scream.

He stood panting and trembling from reaction, checking and rechecking his hand—but felt no pain, could find no puncture wounds. The scream had been succeeded by a low stream of unintelligible curses, punctuated by the deep gasps of a man in terror. The voice of the houngan—if that’s who it was—came urgently, followed by another voice, doubtful, fearful. Behind him, before him? He had no sense of direction anymore.

Something brushed past him, the heaviness of a body, and he fell against the wall of the cave, scraping his arm. He welcomed the pain; it was something to cling to, something real.

More urgency in the depths of the cave, sudden silence. And then a swishing thunk! as something struck hard into flesh, and the sheared-copper smell of fresh blood came strong over the scent of hot rock and rushing water. No further sound.

He was sitting on the muddy floor of the cave; he could feel the cool dirt under him. He pressed his hands flat against it, getting his bearings. After a moment, he heaved himself to his feet and stood, swaying and dizzy.

“I don’t lie,” he said, into the dark. “And I will have my men.”

Dripping with sweat and water, he turned back, toward the rainbows.

THE SUN HAD barely risen when he came back into the mountain compound. The smoke of cooking fires hung among the huts, and the smell of food made his stomach clench painfully, but all that could wait. He strode as well as he might—his feet were so badly blistered that he hadn’t been able to get his boots back on and had walked back barefoot, over rocks and thorns—to the largest hut, where Captain Accompong sat placidly waiting for him.

Tom and the soldiers were there, too, no longer roped together but still bound, kneeling by the fire. And Cresswell, a little way apart, appearing wretched but at least upright.

Accompong looked at one of his lieutenants, who stepped forward with a big cane knife and cut the prisoners’ bonds with a series of casual but fortunately accurate swipes.

“Your men, my colonel,” he said magnanimously, flipping one fat hand in their direction. “I give them back to you.”

“I am deeply obliged to you, sir.” Grey bowed. “There is one missing, though. Where is Rodrigo?”

There was a sudden silence. Even the shouting children hushed instantly, melting back behind their mothers. Grey could hear the trickling of water down the distant rock face and the pulse beating in his ears.

“The zombie?” Accompong said at last. He spoke mildly, but Grey sensed some unease in his voice. “He is not yours.”

“Yes,” Grey said firmly. “He is. He came to the mountain under my protection—and he will leave the same way. It is my duty.”

The squatty headman’s expression was hard to interpret. None of the crowd moved or murmured, though Grey caught glimpses from the corner of his eyes of the faint turning of heads, as folk asked silent questions of one another.

“It is my duty,” Grey repeated. “I cannot go without him.” He carefully omitted any suggestion that it might not be his choice whether to go or not. Still, why would Accompong return the white men to him if he planned to kill or imprison Grey?

The headman pursed fleshy lips, then turned his head and said something questioning. Movement in the hut where Ishmael had emerged the night before. There was a considerable pause, but, once more, the houngan came out.

His face was pale, and one of his feet was wrapped in a bloodstained wad of fabric, bound tightly. Amputation, Grey thought with interest, recalling the metallic thunk that had seemed to echo through his own flesh in the cave. It was the only sure way to keep a snake’s venom from spreading through the body.

“Ah,” said Grey, voice light. “So the krait liked me better, did he?”

He thought Accompong laughed under his breath, but he didn’t really pay attention. The houngan’s eyes flashed hate at him, and Grey regretted his wit, fearing that it might cost Rodrigo more than had already been taken from him.

Despite his shock and horror, though, he clung to what Mrs. Abernathy had told him. The young man was not truly dead. He swallowed. Could Rodrigo perhaps be restored? The Scotchwoman had said not—but perhaps she was wrong. Clearly Rodrigo had not been a zombie for more than a few days. And she did say that the drug dissipated over time. Perhaps…

Accompong spoke sharply, and the houngan lowered his head.

“Anda,” he said sullenly. There was stumbling movement in the hut, and he stepped aside, half-pushing Rodrigo out into the light, where he came to a stop, staring vacantly at the ground, mouth open.

“You want this?” Accompong waved a hand at Rodrigo. “What for? He’s no good to you surely? Unless you want to take him to bed—he won’t say no to you!”

Everyone thought that very funny; the clearing rocked with laughter. Grey waited it out. From the corner of his eye, he saw the girl Azeel watching him with something like a fearful hope in her eyes.

“He is under my protection,” he repeated. “Yes, I want him.”

Accompong nodded and took a deep breath, sniffing appreciatively at the mingled scents of cassava porridge, fried plantain, and frying pig meat.

“Sit down, Colonel,” he said, “and eat with me.”

Grey sank slowly down beside him, weariness throbbing through his legs. Looking around, he saw Cresswell dragged roughly off but left sitting on the ground against a hut, unmolested. Tom and the two soldiers, looking dazed, were being fed at one of the cook fires. Then he saw Rodrigo, still standing like a scarecrow, and struggled to his feet.

He took the young man’s tattered sleeve and said, “Come with me.” Rather to his surprise, Rodrigo did, turning like an automaton. He led the young man through the staring crowd to the girl Azeel, and said, “Stop.” He lifted Rodrigo’s hand and offered it to the girl, who, after a moment’s hesitation, took firmly hold of it.

“Look after him, please,” Grey said to her. Only as he turned away did it register upon him that the arm he had held was wrapped with a bandage. Ah. Dead men don’t bleed.

Returning to Accompong’s fire, he found a wooden platter of steaming food awaiting him. He sank down gratefully upon the ground again and closed his eyes—then opened them, startled, as he felt something descend upon his head and found himself peering out from under the drooping felt brim of the headman’s ragged hat.

“Oh,” he said. “Thank you.” He hesitated, looking round, either for the leather hatbox or for his ragged palm-frond hat, but didn’t see either one.

“Never mind,” said Accompong, and, leaning forward, slid his hands carefully over Grey’s shoulders, palms up, as though lifting something heavy. “I will take your snake, instead. You have carried him long enough, I think.”