The Mercy Grace struck the reef a little before first light, in the year of our Lord 1687, two leagues off the leeward shore of Barbados. The sea did not ask the passengers their names. It took the carpenter, the boy from Bristol who had lied about his years to ship as cook’s mate, three indentured men, and the captain’s locked box of letters. What it spat onto the black sand below Speightstown were fewer souls than had prayed the night before.
Edmund Hale crawled out of the surf on his hands and knees at four-and-twenty years of age, salt in his teeth, a split across his brow, and his father’s ring still on the chain at his throat. He was a man grown: broad through the shoulder from three years of merchant work between London and the islands, dark-haired, already used to rum and the heat that made English cloth a punishment. He found his mother first.
Catherine Hale was forty-two, a widow of five years, and she sat on a broken spar with her soaked gown plastered to her and her hair down like a girl. She had been handsome in London. On the sand, with the morning coming up copper over the cane, she looked like something the island had decided to keep. Behind her, wringing seawater from a ruined petticoat, stood her younger sister.
Prudence Vane was thirty-eight and had never been anyone’s idea of a quiet woman. Even shipwrecked she had her mouth half-open on a curse, and when she saw Edmund alive she laughed once, sharp and glad, and then looked at him in a way aunts were not meant to look at the men they had bounced on their knees fifteen years gone.
“There you are,” Prudence said. “I told Cath the sea hadn’t the taste for you. You’re too stubborn to drown.”
Catherine reached for him. Edmund went to his knees in the wet sand and put his face against her shoulder. She smelled of salt and the orris she kept in her trunk, which was now somewhere on the bottom. Her arms were strong. Her bodice had torn at the lace and the swell of her breast showed through the linen, nipple dark with cold. She did not seem to know it. Prudence knew it. Prudence’s eyes stayed there a second too long and then rose to Edmund’s mouth.
They were not alone on the strand. An old man watched from the palms.
Silas Crowe was sixty if he was a day, burnt the color of rum-barrel oak, one ear notched by a Spanish knife, and he lived in a wattle house above the cove because the planters in Speightstown had grown tired of his stories and his debts. He had been a privateer when the Crown still smiled on such work. Now he sold a little rum, a little news, and, when the African women from the yards would sell it to him, a little of the island’s other medicine.
He came down the sand with a cracked jug and no hurry.
“English wreck,” he said, as if announcing the weather. “The reef eats one or two a season. You’ll want shade before the sun finds its manners. I’ve a floor and a cistern. And if you’ve coin at the bottom of a pocket, I’ve better than rainwater.”
Catherine, who still believed in the decencies, would have refused a strange man’s roof. Prudence looked at the empty beach, at her nephew’s split head, at her sister’s torn gown, and said they would come.
Silas’s house sat on posts above the ant-line, with a porch that faced the water and a single room that held a rope bed, a bench, a sea-chest, and a shelf of bottles the color of pond water. He gave them dry osnaburg to wear—plantation stuff, rough as a cat’s tongue—and turned his back with a pirate’s idea of courtesy while the women stripped.
Edmund did not turn his back.
He told himself it was concern. His mother’s body, when the soaked wool peeled away, was not the body he remembered from childhood hearths. Widowhood and the voyage had left her full in the hip and heavy in the breast, pale where the sun had not yet reached, a dark thatch between her thighs when she stepped out of the last of the linen. She caught him looking and colored and pulled the osnaburg down hard.
Prudence did not color. She dropped her gown in a heap and stood on Silas’s porch boards in nothing but the heat, water still running from her hair down the knobs of her spine, over the round of her backside, into the cleft of her. She had brown nipples that had tightened in the breeze off the water. She stretched, shameless as a cat, and only then reached for the dry cloth.
“If we are to die on this rock,” she said, “I’ll not do it wrapped like a corpse.”
Silas, who had not turned quite far enough, made a sound in his ruined throat that might have been a laugh.
That first day they slept in snatches and drank rainwater and rum. The wreckage that came in on the tide was crates, a chair, a drowned hen, no trunk of Catherine’s modest jewels. By afternoon the heat was a hand on the back of the neck. Prudence walked down to the cove to wash the salt off and did not take the osnaburg with her.
Edmund followed because someone had to watch for sharks and men. That was the story he gave himself.
She stood thigh-deep in the green water with her back to the island and her hair piled in one fist, washing her breasts with the other. A fishing canoe passed at a distance. The men in it looked. Prudence lifted her chin and did not cover herself. Nude in public, on a Christian island that whipped whores in Bridgetown, and she only turned enough for Edmund to see the wet thatch of her, the soft hang of her belly, the way the water sheeted off her when she waded in.
“Come in, nephew,” she called. “Your mother is asleep and the old wolf is counting his bottles. The sea has already had our dignity. It may as well have the rest.”
He went in in his breeches and then, because the canvas dragged like sin, he shucked them on the sand. He was hard before the water reached his waist. Prudence looked at that with frank interest.
“Lord,” she said softly. “You’ve your father’s length and none of his shame. Come here.”
It was a quickie because there was no time for anything else. She put her back to a rock that jutted from the shallows, hooked one leg around him, and guided him in with a hand that knew exactly what it wanted. She was already slick. The sea made it messy and easy at once. Edmund thrust up into his aunt with his mouth on her throat and her nails in his shoulder and the canoe a dark comma far out on the glare.
“That’s it,” Prudence whispered. “Quick, before Cath wakes. Fill me. I’ve thought of this since you came back from your first voyage with hair on your chest like a man. Do it. Do it now.”
He last six or seven hard strokes and spent in her with a groan he bit off against her skin. She clenched around him and shook through her own little finish, quiet and greedy, and then pushed him back and ducked under to let the sea take the evidence.
“Again tonight,” she said, wringing her hair. “If the old man sleeps. If your mother sleeps. If the island doesn’t burn.”
Catherine did not sleep as well as they hoped.
The second day Silas brought them flying fish and a mash of plantain and, after sundown, a small clay bottle stoppered with wax.
“Island work,” he said. “The women in the yards call it sweet-water. Puts love where the heat already started it. I don’t ask questions of wrecked gentry. I only say the nights here are long, and kin under one roof have done stranger than pray.”
Catherine said they would not touch heathen slop. Prudence took the bottle when Catherine had gone to the cistern. She tasted it, grimaced, and then smiled the way she had smiled in London when a married man sent wine.
“It tastes like rum and flowers and something that ought not be in a Christian mouth,” she said to Edmund. “Two swallows. Then you go to your mother with your mouth wet and see if she is only grief.”
“She’s my mother.”
“She’s a widow on a pirate shore with her gown in the sea and her son looking at her like a starving man. Don’t play the choirboy with me, Ned. I still have you running out of me from the cove.”
He drank because the wreck had taken the part of him that knew how to refuse. The stuff was sweet and then hot. It did not remove his will. It took the lock off the will he already had.
Catherine was on the porch in the osnaburg, watching the night boats. The cloth had stuck to her with sweat. Edmund sat beside her. His shoulder touched hers. She did not move away. Down the beach a drunken song started and stopped. Bridgetown was a rumor of lights to the south. Speightstown slept with one eye open, as all pirate-era ports did, on smugglers and Spanish sails and men who had no parish.
“I thought you dead,” Catherine said. “In the water I called for you and for your father both. A wicked thing, to call for a dead husband and a living son in the same breath.”
“I’m here.”
“You’re here and you look at me as Prudence looks at you.” Her voice was very low. “I am not blind, Edmund. I have been a wife. I know the look.”
The potion made the air thick. Or the heat did. Or the fact that she had said it aloud. Edmund put his hand on her knee under the coarse cloth. She breathed in and did not stop him. His hand slid higher, to the soft inside of her thigh, to the damp heat there that had nothing to do with the climate.
“Ned—”
“Tell me to go inside.”
She did not. She opened her knees an inch. He found her with his fingers, the slick seam of her, the bud that made her hips jerk when he rubbed it. Catherine Hale, church-widow, bit her own wrist to keep from making a sound Silas would hear. Edmund went to his knees on the porch boards between his mother’s legs and pushed the osnaburg up to her waist.
She was wet. She was a grown woman in her forties with a dark, abundant thatch and inner lips that had gone full. He put his mouth on her. Catherine’s hand landed in his hair hard enough to hurt and then held him there. She came against his tongue with a broken, astonished cry she smothered in her other wrist, shaking, thighs clamped on his ears.
Prudence’s voice came from the dark of the doorway, amused and raw.
“That’s my sister. God forgive us all. Bring her in before the whole cove learns the Hales’ new prayers.”
They used Silas’s rope bed because the old man had taken his jug down to the sand to “watch the wreck for chests,” which meant he knew exactly what his sweet-water had bought and wanted the porch to himself.
Catherine lasted as far as the mattress and then pulled her son on top of her with a violence that shocked them both. Edmund pushed into his mother in one long slide. She was tighter than Prudence and hotter, and she wept while she hooked her heels in the small of his back and told him not to stop. Incest on a borrowed bed in Barbados, with the surf hitting the reef that had tried to kill them, and Aunt Prudence sitting on the sea-chest with her hand between her own legs, watching her nephew breed her sister.
“Look at you,” Prudence whispered. “In her. Your own dam. That’s it, Cath. Take him. You’ve wanted a man since Robert went into the ground. Take the one who already belongs to you.”
Catherine came again with Edmund buried to the hilt. The clench of her pulled him over. He spent in his mother in thick pulses, groaning into her neck, filling her until it slicked out around his cock and onto Silas’s blanket. A creampie in 1687 did not have that name. It had the fact of it: a widow’s cunt dripping her son’s seed while her sister crossed the room, threw a leg over Catherine’s face, and sat down so Edmund could see both women at once.
“Lick,” Prudence told her sister. “You had his mouth. I want yours while he hardens again.”
Catherine, wrecked and shining and past the country of refusal, did as she was told. Edmund watched his mother’s tongue work his aunt and felt himself stiffen still half inside her. He started to move again, fucking the sloppy heat he had left, while Prudence ground on Catherine’s mouth and reached back to rub where mother and son joined.
Silas came back at some hour when the moon was high and the room smelled like sex and rum. He stood in the doorway with the jug and looked at the three of them the way a man looks at a prize taken under a letter of marque.
“Aye,” he said. “That’s the island. That’s all the potion does: show you the thing you already packed in the trunk.” He drank. “I’ve used worse nights than watching gentry ruin themselves. Carry on. If the watch comes up from Speightstown I’ll say you’re fevered.”
They carried on.
The days that followed had no London clock in them. They washed in the cove at noon, sometimes clothed, sometimes not. Nude in public became a habit the wreck had taught them: Prudence walking the black sand with a rag on her head and nothing else when the heat broke her patience; Catherine, slower to it, finally standing in the shallows with her son’s spend still leaking down her thigh while a sloop tacked far out and could not be sure what it saw. Quickies became the grammar of the place.
Edmund took Prudence against the cistern post while Catherine slept, six strokes and a hand over her mouth. He took his mother on her hands and knees on the porch at dusk, her breasts hanging, Silas smoking a pipe at the other rail as if they were cattle he had an interest in. Once, when a pair of buccaneers beached a longboat to beg water, Prudence went down to them bare-legged and bare-breasted under a shawl she did not bother to close, and the men forgot what they had meant to steal.
The old neighbor did more than watch. On the fourth night Prudence, drunk and glittering, pulled Silas’s scarred hand to her breast and told Edmund to see what a pirate’s fingers felt like next to a nephew’s. Silas was thick and slow and smelled of tar. He fucked Prudence on the bench while Edmund was in Catherine on the bed, the two rhythms staggering against each other, the house posting like a ship. Afterward Silas, panting, said he had not had a woman that loud since Port Royal cracked.
“Love potion,” Catherine murmured once, lying on her side with her son still in her, lazy and filthy. “There was no potion in London that could have made me ask for this. The wreck did it. The heat did it. You did it, looking at me on that sand as if I were not your mother.”
“You are my mother,” Edmund said, and pushed deeper, and she moaned like a girl.
“Yes. And you will do it again.”
They did it again. They did it until the osnaburg was stiff with salt and spend and the rope bed needed burning. They did it when a Dutch trader anchored off the point and the three of them stood on the porch as decent as church, Catherine’s hair pinned, Prudence’s mouth swollen, Edmund’s wrist marked by his mother’s teeth, and nobody on the trader knew that the respectable English family waving from the cove had spent the morning as a single animal.
On the seventh day a cutter from Bridgetown came looking for survivors of the Mercy Grace. There would be papers. There would be a parish. There would be a story about a widow, her sister, and her grown son, housed by an old privateer until passage could be found.
Prudence, pinning her hair with a fishbone, looked at Edmund in the doorway and smiled her wreck-smile.
“Let them come,” she said. “We’ll be clothed. We’ll be grateful. And tonight, before we remember our names, you’ll have your mother on her back and me on your mouth, and Silas can keep his bottle. The island already did the work.”
Catherine, who had been a wife and a churchwoman and was now something the reef had made, put her hand on her son’s belt where the cutter could not see it.
“Quickly,” she whispered, which had become their word for everything. “Before they land. One more. In me. I want to stand on that beach with you running down my leg under the skirt and no one the wiser.”
He took her standing against the inner wall, a true quickie, Prudence keeping watch at the slit of the shutter. Catherine came silently, clenching, and he followed, pumping her full one last time before the King’s men set a boot on the sand. When they stepped out into the glare, decent and blinking, the old neighbor raised his jug as if in toast.
The cutter’s lieutenant saw a widow, an aunt, a son, and a ruined privateer. He did not see the rest.
The rest stayed in the house, in the cove, in the sweet-water bottle on the shelf, and in the way Catherine’s walk betrayed her for the first dozen steps down to the official boat.
Barbados in that year had worse secrets than a shipwrecked family. It also had this one: a grown son’s seed in his mother, an aunt who would not stop smiling, an old pirate who knew exactly what his porch had held, and a reef out there still chewing timber, as if the sea itself had only meant to strip them to the skin and leave them to the heat.
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