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 him 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 himself, 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 sudden strong urge to pat him sympathetically on the back.
Instead, 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 at first-hand 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 sent two more on before, 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, looking up abruptly from the cup of gunpowder tea Corporal Sansom had handed him. Sansom looked startled, too, and looked 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 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 said so, politely. Mrs Abernathy merely smirked at that, 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 sharpening. She made him repeat the story of his encounter with the thing in his room, asking sharp 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 as matter-of-factly as though she had been telling him her private receipt for apple pan-dowdy or treacle-cake. Weirdly enough, that steadied him, and he was able to speak past his revulsion, calmly.
‘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 off-hand.
‘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.’