EXCERPT

PROLOGUE

Sweat poured off Yei’s face, distorted now in pain, and Bella renewed her efforts to keep her friend cool. Overhead, the yellow, wizened branches of the carat palm that formed the roof rustled and whispered in protest as the sun pounded down mercilessly. For perhaps the first time in her life, Yei was losing her stoical composure; she moaned softly, mumbling what Bella assumed were her primitive prayers.

Labor had started early that morning. Yei had been at the Spaniard’s hut, seeing to the children, when a sharp and unexpected burst of thunder had pierced the morning stillness. The great rumble, as if reverberating within her, had become a wave of pain.

It’s too soon, too soon, she had thought, sudden panic sending her heart pounding wildly like a mocking echo of the great rolling noises in the heavens. She had hurried to settle the children, calling to the old African, Tia Roma, to help her, and then left hastily. She made her way towards some huts which were not far off.

“Bella, Bella! Es la hora!” she called.

A middle-aged, brown-skinned woman appeared. She instantly realized the situation and they went hastily inside the hut. Bella quickly made everything ready for the delivery. They said very little, intuitively hiding their mutual apprehension. Only their silence, the seriousness in their eyes and the intensity of their movements betrayed their ill-ease.

For hours Yei bore the pain silently until, unable to control her fears any longer, she said, “Why now? Why now, Bella?”

“Is your first time, Yei, maybe that’s why?”

 “But I know I should go on for almost two more months.”

“Did you slip or fall? Did you get a fright?”

“No, no. You know I did not!” protested Yei, her voice hoarse and rasping.

“Amiga, I too do not understand it. So many deliveries you have helped with. You know everything even better than I. You are the one everyone looks to for help in sickness and childbirth. Do not be afraid now. All will surely be well.”

Bella’s worried expression gave the lie to her consoling words.

Yei grimaced as another wave of pain attacked her. “Oh, Bella, I don’t understand it. Everything was as it should be, but I was always afraid ... I was afraid all the time.”

“That’s because the other women kept saying how you were growing too large so quickly, but you should not have made so much of their foolish comments. Maybe you miscounted your time. That would explain it ... calm yourself, amiga. All will be well.”

Yei had been in labor for six hours now. Earlier, heavy rain had mercifully afforded her some respite from the oppressive heat, but it had stopped hours ago and the sun’s power had mounted in steady, unrelenting waves, turning the little mud hut into a veritable oven. Now, at the hottest time of the tropical day, the cramps were urgent and excruciating.

Yei felt the urge to push. “It’s time now, Bella, this time,” she gasped.

Marshalling her limited strength, she forced her daughter out into the world. Bella’s deft hands did what was necessary, and soon the air was filled with the lusty sounds of a baby’s cry.

In exhaustion and relief, Yei sank back on the rough bed and closed her eyes.

“No, no, you must not sleep as yet—the afterbirth, Yei, one last effort, amiga mia.”

Yei roused herself at Bella’s request but, as she did so, strong cramps and waves of intense pain, defying both their knowledge of this stage of delivery, engulfed her. The severity and unexpectedness of this attack, the lingering apprehension in her mind, and the exhaustion of the last six hours left her now in a state of real terror.

Gripping Bella’s hand, she screamed, “The pain! The pain comes again! What can it be? Something is wrong, Bella!”

The older woman tore her hands away from Yei’s desperate hold and, thinking to assist with the afterbirth, discovered instead to her great astonishment the round, hairy crown of another tiny head.

“Es otro, Yei, es otro! San José! Madre de Dios! Son gemelos! Gemelas!”

It was the year 1777, on the tiny neglected island of Trinidad, lost on the southern tip of the Caribbean.

Yei laughed and cried and laughed again, when Bella presented her with her twin daughters; and Bella, instantly understanding, reciprocated her mirth, using laughter to throw off the tensions and anxieties of the unusual delivery.

But the birth of the twins was after Yei had already come to be part of the Las Flores family.

In a sense, Yei’s story, and that of the twins, started one day almost two years before, during the reading lesson ...

BOOK ONE

The Wild Flower

CHAPTER 1

1

Don Diego de Las Flores, trapped and bone-weary owner of the estate of Santa Clara, irritably slapped a mosquito from his sun-baked arm as he set his mouth in a firm line and insisted that José begin again at the top of the page.

Diego was a picture of long-suffering, beleaguered frustration. He was so tired, not just from the daily battle against the persistent weeding, the watering and coaxing of his recalcitrant cocoa crop, but from years of ceaseless, pointless toil on the land, work that essentially went against his naturally indolent disposition. He frowned and pointed to the letters in the primer in his seven-year-old son’s grubby hand.

As the boy’s voice stumbled over the unfamiliar letters, Diego looked around at his lands. Named after the patron saint of his wife, Santa Clara was nestled in the foothills of a range of low mountains which ran from east to west, spanning the northern section of this, the most southerly island of the Caribbean. It was a struggling and impoverished undertaking, as was the island itself. Oh, a natural paradise it could be, he knew. The natural bounty of the country was the only reason they had survived at all, for despite its decidedly strategic location, standing as it did at the gateway to all of South America, it was a neglected and godforsaken place. Perhaps it was just too far away from Santa Fé where the seat of administration was located.

What was he to do? No ships came, the few Indians who were left after the massacres, transportations and epidemics were almost all relocated to the missions.

“What we need are slaves, strong black slaves to work the cocoa,” he sighed, inadvertently speaking his thoughts out loud.

“But, Papa, there were some strong black men in Port of Spain,” came the unexpected response of the child.

“José, I was speaking to myself, but anyway, most of them are free men,” responded Diego. “Trinidad is a refuge for anybody on the run. Slaves or no, they live just like us anyway. None of us have anything. How many of us are here? A handful of whites? And so many of us are already intermarried with Africans or Indians. My son, in a companionship of misery, there’s little room for discrimination. Now, the lesson!”

The child read on and Diego returned to his ruminations. At a time like this, when the thirteen colonies of North America were at war with Britain, making a bid for independence, and every other island in the Caribbean was prosperous with slaves working the land, who could believe that after three hundred years of Spanish rule there wasn’t even a proper town here? St. Joseph could boast only a few mud huts, a church without a roof. Then there was Port of Spain. A town that was never founded, that had no council and no real name. Port of Spain, a description, not a name, even if the Governor chose to live there now.

Half-listening to the child, he idly took up a twig and drew a rough map on the earth—a map of North and South America with the islands like a necklace flung in the Caribbean Sea, and square-shaped Trinidad at the very end, a broken-off part of the mainland, very close to Venezuela.

“What are you doing, Papa?” asked the child.

“José, pay attention to your lesson; I’ve little enough time to spare for you. Come on, read! Soon your mother will be calling you in, and we have reached nowhere as yet.”

Reluctantly José resumed his efforts but, as before, Diego’s mind drifted. He thought now of the desperation that had driven him here eight years ago and the madness that had made him allow Clara to come. Clara, who was always ill and was now going through her fifth insecure pregnancy. He thought of José whose education was so deficient. “These lessons get nowhere. What I need is a miracle, a real miracle.”

“Papa, tell me what ...”

“No José, we’ve wasted enough time today. Remember, I have no time tomorrow because I have to go again to the port. Come, now pay attention!” Diego’s voice was insistent and unyielding.

II

The next day, unbelievably, Diego got his miracle. In fact, for a while he found himself counting his blessings. Not only had he found a tutor for his son, but his crops were looking promising and his Clara at long last was safely delivered of a daughter.

After several previous miscarriages, Juanita’s birth seemed to be a real blessing.

Diego’s joy was boundless ... but short-lived. Already weakened by the delivery, Clara succumbed to an attack of yellow fever.

Her death took the heart out of him. Diego was ready to give up, to let the jungle win the battle, take over his mind and his work. But no, there was José and the poor new baby, weak and sickly. It was quite apparent that she too was dying.

Today, the baby lay in a twilight between life and death, watched over by the devoted old African. Diego could not stray far from his daughter. He walked agitatedly up and down the clearing in front of his home, his inner agony and helplessness marring his weather-beaten face. His ragged clothing and deeply sunburnt skin made him look as wretched as the humble thatched-roof dwelling from which he had just come.

In his early thirties, with dark hair and dark eyes, finely chiseled features, and a noble, determined chin, he was not an unhandsome man; but the struggle for his and his small family’s survival had made any concession to appearance impossible and irrelevant. After a while, he stopped pacing.  He stared with desperate eyes at the dominating mountains and then at the relentless jungle around; at the unending thick growth of trees, towering upwards, struggling to catch the sun; their trunks barely discernible through the tangle of shrubs and broad-leafed creepers that wound their way upwards on every available trunk or branch. The snake-like lianas that entwined everything were as determined as the trees themselves to strangle each other in their bid for survival. Here and there the brilliant color of a wild flower peeked out as if to lend some beauty, some fragrance or hope to the meaningless, menacing, tangle of foliage. His life seemed to him as tangled, as incomprehensible, his path forward, as impassable as the jungle that trapped his home on three sides.

Diego hung his head in abject despair.

“Pardon me, Señor Diego,” the tutor’s weak, almost tremulous voice said. “I know it is not a good time to disturb you, but if you will permit me a suggestion?”

Diego lifted his head slowly and looked at the young Frenchman with the wild brown hair. He was so thin that even his face seemed all bone. His nervous gray eyes were sunk in his skull; his pinched nostrils almost unusually long, while his great height exaggerated his leanness.

His story must be almost as sad as mine, mused Diego. He certainly seemed a lost, desperate soul when he had met him at the port. He was shaking, sweat-drenched, stuttering with nervousness, though in faultless Castilian, as he struggled with his two crates of books. Diego smiled as he remembered how the captain of the little boat from Grenada had introduced him.

“You need books for your son’s education? Well, ask that trembling palm tree over there; Louis Sauvage he’s called. His blasted books almost sunk the boat in the Boca. Damned Dragon was rough today,” he had said, referring, as Diego well understood, to the “Dragon’s Mouth”—  treacherous narrow passages that separate Trinidad from the Venezuelan mainland—They formed a natural defense, which partly explained why Spain had not lost the island long ago.

Diego had approached him, offering to barter for some books. He ended up taking pity on the lost young man and hiring him as tutor to his son, in exchange for food and shelter.

“About the baby, Señor,” continued the Frenchman, interrupting Diego’s thoughts. “There is a young woman whom you may not have noticed, for the overseer has only recently taken her on. I have heard that she is versed in the use of local herbs and medicines. She has quietly been helping many of your workers to overcome illness. Maybe you ought to let her see the child?”

“What do you know of this woman, Louis?”

“The woman is an Amerindian, Señor, very inscrutable. Miguel is the one who took her on to work in the cocoa. I heard that she is part African. She looks like a mature woman, but is probably no more than a girl. The natives hold her in great awe for her unusual silence and stature, as well as for her rare knowledge.”

Without hesitation Diego went in search of Miguel, the overseer who, like Bella was a half-breed Spaniard, one of several lost souls finding sanctuary at Santa Clara. He then followed Miguel to a nearby hut, and waited as the overseer roused its inhabitants. In a short while Yei appeared at the entrance.

The golden orb of the sun had moved far down in the distant western horizon, and the inflamed sky sent colors dancing gaily between the shadowy clouds in a whimsical and flamboyant farewell to the tropical day. Don Diego, hands clasped together behind his back, legs apart in his familiar stance of authority, had turned his back to the hut and was looking at the sky, wondering at the insensitivity of nature to display such mocking gaiety in the face of all his grief.

As he heard the rustle of movement behind him, he turned, taking his gaze too suddenly from the brilliance of the dying sun to the darkened doorway; and his ill-adjusted eyes alighted on what appeared to be a magnificent bronze goddess.

Tall and statuesque, of a heavy build, with smooth gold-tinged dark skin, crowned with a wealth of long, wavy black hair and draped in a loose, almost Grecian garment, the vision of Yei left him momentarily stunned. Her smooth, round, almost oriental face, placid, knowing smile and wide set almond shaped eyes completed the impression of other worldliness.

His eyes soon adjusted to the fading light, and he half-smiled to himself as he realized the illusion they had just played on him. He proceeded to explain to her, with words and gestures, that his baby daughter needed the help of her medicines.

To Diego’s immense relief, she came that very night to his hut and, taking the two-month old baby firmly in hand, banished all but Tia Roma, the old African house slave, from her presence. She then set about the mysterious processes that led finally to the recovery of the child.

III

In the weeks that followed, Diego, still recovering from the loss of his wife and the near loss of his baby, turned imperceptibly towards Louis whose frail, timid appearance concealed a powerful mind and a spirit as untamed as his name—Sauvage, the wild one. The Frenchman’s perceptions and facility for acquiring knowledge and information filled Diego with growing respect, in spite of the republican sympathies he now revealed.

It was to Louis that Diego confided his joy at Yei’s beneficial influence on the children, commenting on her strange magnetic presence and on her uncanny skill with the baby, and it was Louis who supplied him with more details of the Amerindian.

“It seems that her father was a strapping Mandingo, probably a runaway adopted by her mother’s tribe. He must have died in some disaster or epidemic. I suppose the very disaster which forced her mother to flee and live on the fringes of white settlements, until she too must have died from grief or whatever. Anyway, Yei just wandered in here one day.”

“And where do you think she learnt about medicines?” asked Diego.

 “Apparently, healing was the profession of her mother’s family.”

“Interesting ... she has a second sense, or is it simply natural intelligence? She hardly talks and moves so noiselessly.”

“It’s a characteristic of her people, I understand. In her it’s even more like a ... a natural elegance or other worldliness.”

“Well, we may never understand her, but the main thing is that she is good for the children,” concluded Diego.