Read Online The King's Exile (Thomas Hill Trilogy 2) by Andrew Swanston - Free Book Online Page A

here?’
    ‘That will not be necessary. For now you will stay here and continue as before. Let it be known that your brother is dead. I have men in Romsey and you will be watched at all times. Any attempt to disobey my orders or to run away will be fatal. For all of you. Do you understand?’
    Margaret nodded. ‘Will you tell Thomas we are well?’
    Rush smirked. ‘I might.’
    It had been as delicious as he had hoped. As he walked back to the inn, Tobias Rush swung his cane and replayed the encounter in his mind. Delicious.

C HAPTER 8

    USING THE KNIFE taken from the kitchen, Thomas had scored a horizontal line through each group of nine notches on the table. When he scored through the fourth group, forty days had passed. Forty days in the kitchen, of making entries in the ledgers, of agonizing about Margaret and the girls, of solitude and anguish.
    On his trips with the Gibbes to the market he had not met Patrick again and he knew little more about the island than he had when he first stepped ashore. His knowledge of its geography was limited to the road from Oistins to Speightstown. The Gibbes spoke to him only to give orders or make threats and neither the planters nor the traders ever addressed him.
    Forty days of watching carts pulled by teams of slaves trundling backwards and forwards up the path towards the mill, empty on their way there, loaded with pots of sugar on their way back. Forty nights of nightmares, demons and biting insects.
    Forty days and nights with not even Montaigne for company – his old friend had deserted him again just when he was neededmost. Strangely, in the absence of Montaigne, the Franciscan friar Simon de Pointz had often come to mind. That unusual man, who had twice saved Thomas’s life in Oxford, had tempered his faith with what he called ‘pragmatism and humour’ – two most unfriarly qualities. Determined to survive whatever the brutes threw at him, Thomas found pragmatism straightforward; humour, however, well nigh impossible. Oh for Simon’s company in this distant, lonely prison.
    Thomas had occupied himself with the ledgers and in cleaning out the kitchen and yard. He had dug a deep hole in the trees behind the hovel in which he had buried hundreds of empty bottles and mounds of rotting waste, and a second hole was already filling up. The yard was still home to legions of ants and cockroaches and used daily by the dogs, but he shovelled up the muck and kept it as clean as he could. He swept the kitchen floor whenever he was in there and protected the meat from the worst of the flies by covering it with linen cloths he had found stuffed in a barrel and had washed in rainwater. Bookkeeper to the brutes was bad enough; cook, cleaner and housekeeper, much worse.
    In the forty days the weather had become hotter and wetter. Storm clouds now swept in from the Atlantic, bringing rain that turned hard earth into mud within minutes and filled the holes and ruts on the path with brown water; the winds that blew in the rain could fell a tree or lift a roof. Thomas struggled to plug the leaks in the roof of his hut, using whatever he could find to do the job. Palm fronds, branches, planks from old carts – all were pressed into service.
    He had dug himself a privy behind the hut – at least the rain washed the muck away down the hill – and unless it wasraining he cooked his meals on an open fire outside his door. He helped himself from the brutes’ kitchen and drank water from the well.
    He had also experimented with the fruits that grew abundantly around the estate. Not knowing their local names, he had christened them himself. There were a greenish-yellow fruit in the shape of a hand –
the finger fruit
; a yellow-skinned fruit in the shape of a crescent moon, which hung in big clumps from the branches of its tree –
the crescent fruit
, and small green fruits which grew on bushes protected by spikes sharp enough to draw blood at the slightest touch, which he knew were limes.