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  He could not tell how long they had been sailing, but when they came on deck to dance, there were more limp bodies thrown overboard and there were fewer who could dance each time. Mehuru looked around idly for the children, the little ones who had been loaded on the ship as round as berries and as dark and shiny as the sacred wood of the iroko tree. They were thinner, and many of them were sick, but worst of all was the way the bright life was draining from them. They no longer cried like desperate fledglings for their mothers; they were lost children. Whether they lived or died, there would be a gap in their spirits that nothing would ever replace. How would they respect their fathers and how love children of their own, if their most powerful memory was being abandoned to despair?

  He thought that about forty had died, and two crewmen as well, when the sound of the ship changed one night. Then came urgent noises of running on the deck overhead, and abrupt commands and anxious shouts, and then the great rolling yaw of the ship ceased, ceased at last, and he heard the roar as the anchor chain sped out through the housing and the ship thrust a claw into the ocean bed and dragged herself to a standstill. They were brought up on deck as if to be ready for dancing, but then they were manacled, arms to legs, and chained from one neck to another. The captain, even whiter than before and thinner from the voyage, looked at each shivering black man or woman or little child before he waved them into the line and had them locked onto the chain. A few, a very few, he waved to one side under guard of a sailor who held a musket easily at their heads. Mehuru thought of the unreliability of the muskets on sale in Africa and thought it might be worth taking the chance and rushing the man. But when he looked around to see where he might run, he felt sicker than he had felt in the whole long voyage. For they were not off the coast of Africa anymore. Wherever they had come to, it was a land he had never seen before.

  The last of his courage went out of him then, and when the captain waved him to the little group, he went as weakly as the children who were already chosen. The last time he saw Siko was when the boy hobbled obediently to the long chain and bowed his neck to the collar. Mehuru tried to find a voice to call to him, to wish him well, to promise to return to find him if he possibly could. He was dumb. Siko looked at him, a long look of reproach and despair, and Mehuru could find no words at all. He dropped his gaze and turned away, and when they were ordered back down into the hold, he went without looking back. When they chained him back on a strangely empty shelf, he held his hands out for the manacles on his wrists like a foolish, trusting child.

  A great longing for his home, so painful that he thought he would die of it, sickened him to his very core. He lay in the darkness, refusing to open his eyes, refusing to take food. The little group was kept together in the hold, twenty of them. Two other men were manacled with leg irons like himself chained on the shelf, and five women with neck irons and long chains so that they could move more freely but not reach the men. The smallest children were allowed to go free; two of them could barely walk. The other children aged from four years to adolescence wore light chains from wrist to wrist and ankle to ankle.

  One of the women called to Mehuru to eat, but he turned his head from her and closed his eyes. The smallest toddler struggled through the slurry that washed around the floor to bring him a bowl. Mehuru saw fresh fruit—the first he had seen in the long two months of the voyage—but he did not allow himself desire. He would not eat. He had been robbed of his home, he had been robbed of his people. He had been robbed of his servant and robbed of his duty to provide for him. He had been robbed of his life. He would live no more.

  Days passed, and still the ship did not sail. They were ordered on deck and made to build a little shelter against the sun. They were kept there like hens in a pen, lying on straw. They labored below to clean out the mess of two hundred men, stalled like animals for nearly sixty days. They baled out the excrement and the filth, and then the master of the ship went below with his handkerchief over his face and lit pastilles of camphor, which smoked all day and all night and still could not drown the stench.

  Mehuru would not speak. He ate a little rice every day and drank some of the fresh, sweet water. When the women asked his name or the men touched his hand in companionship and shared mourning, he turned his head away. Nothing should tie him to life.

  The sailors lived on board and worked during the day, loading the ship and making it ready for another voyage. They had long idle periods when they came and took the women away. The women came back bruised and sometimes bloodstained, with their heads in their hands. Mehuru, chained hand and foot, turned his head from the horror in their faces.

  One woman did not come back at all, and after that the sailors were forbidden to touch them. The small children missed her; she had played with them and fed them and sung them songs. Without her they were a bit more lost. One little girl sat beside Mehuru for the greater part of every day and banged her head gently against the deck. Mehuru lay with his eyes shut, the deck echoing beneath his head like a drum to the steady thud of the girl’s head against the planks.

  The master came back on board, and the ship was ready to sail, only half loaded with large kegs of sugar and rum. The little girl disappeared; they took her away one day, but still Mehuru could hear the thud thud thud of her head on wood. It beat like a heart, it drummed like an accusation.

  He closed his eyes and refused to eat rice. He drank only water. He felt himself floating away. There was none of the right things that an obalawa should have around him, and he could not warn his fathers that he would need their help in crossing over. He thought his tree that held his spirit had bent in some storm and was perhaps breaking, and he prayed for it to fall so that his spirit might flow out of it and he might die.

  Mehuru readied himself to join the ones who had to die sitting down with their eyes staring out into the darkness. He feared he would not find his fathers, dying thus. Only the god Snake had seen him, with his huge, shiny eyes, and would know where his son had been stolen far away across the great seas.

  CHAPTER

  4

  JOSIAH CAME INTO HIS house for a pint of porter and a slice of pie at midday, and Frances was waiting for him at the top of the stairs.

  “I should like to go out for a walk,” she said. “But Brown cannot escort me in the mornings.”

  Josiah was absorbed in business, a missing hogshead of tobacco—a great round barrel packed with whole, sweet-smelling, dried leaves—and he looked at her as if she were an interruption, a nuisance. “I meant to get you a carriage,” he said absently. “You cannot walk along the dockside.”

  “So I understand,” Frances said. “But I wish to go out.”

  He sighed, his mind still on the Rose and the question of missing cargo. “Perhaps we can hire a carriage.”

  “Today?”

  “I am very busy,” he replied. “And troubled over this ship. There is an entire hogshead of tobacco unaccounted for, and the captain can give me no satisfactory explanation. I shall have to pay excise tax on it as if I had it safe in my bond, as well as carrying the loss.”

  “I am sorry to hear that,” Frances said politely. “Where would I hire a carriage?”

  Josiah broke off with a sudden, short bark of laughter. “You are persistent, Mrs. Cole!”

  Frances flushed at his use of her new name. “I am sorry,” she said. “At home I always walked in the gardens in the morning. My health is not very strong, as you know, and the day is fine, and I wanted to go out.”

  “No, it is I who am at fault. I have not provided for you as I should have done,” Josiah apologized. “I will hire a carriage for you myself, and I will drive with you this afternoon and show you the sights you should see.”

  “If it is no trouble . . .”

  “It is an interruption to my work,” he said frankly. “But I should have provided you with some amusement. Can you not do sewing or painting or something of that nature?”

  “Not all day.”

  “No, I suppose n