stop showing off, John,’ while her other hand grips, fearful, at the side of the gig to steady herself.
Caroline Mortimer has been residing at the great house of the plantation with her brother and his young wife, Agnes, for two weeks, yet already the heat from the Jamaican sun only makes her floppy as a kitten for the hottest part of the day. Twenty-three summers Caroline has lived upon this earth, all of them, until now, spent in the dappled shade of an apple tree by the edge of an English lawn, where the hottest part of the day brought small beads of fragrant sweat to trespass upon her forehead. The ship she travelled in to Jamaica had bucked and rolled her across the ocean so cruelly that, upon her arrival, she had complained to her brother that being strapped to a whale’s back would have been no less arduous a journey. In fact, she repeated this lamentation so often that although at first it raised mirth in her brother, after its considerable tellings it merely caused him to exclaim loudly, ‘Yes, well, you’re here now.’
Her appetite, which she had feared she would never regain after the ravaging voyage—where no food man prepared could stay in her stomach long enough to give any of the required sustenance—was now returning. And fresh and adventurous it was too. Why, she thought the mango the loveliest of fruit—juicy and sweet. True, it did have the taste of a peach dipped in turpentine, and a texture so stringy that she was required to pull at the little threads caught in her teeth for many an hour after, but she was not a timid person, too scared to try these new experiences. And the preserves, what a delight. Everyone knows West Indian preserves are the best in the world. Guava, ginger, sorrel, even green lime. Quite the most delicious she had ever tasted.
‘You’ll prefer strawberry jam from England soon as we all do,’ her brother said.
‘Never, never, never!’ Caroline laughed. ‘May we have punch?’ she requested, and when told, ‘It’s no longer drunk much here,’ she stamped her pink satin slippered foot upon the ground to protest, ‘Why ever not!’
‘It’s not the fashion,’ her brother told her and regretted it almost at once when her voice, rising shrill as the squeal from the hinge on a loose shutter, said, ‘What should we care for fashion. Everyone in England talks of Jamaican punch and I should like to try it. And besides, the rum and water here is milled far too weak.’
Whilst watching pomegranate, paw-paw, naseberry, and sour sop being pushed into her eager mouth by her stout, sticky fingers for most hours of the day, her brother warned, ‘You are eating too much fruit, Caroline. It’s not good for the constitution in this climate.’ He suggested she might consider, until she was a little stronger after her journey, eating more pork instead.
‘Pork! Oh, John, one can eat pork anywhere,’ Caroline twittered. No, his sister said, she was ready, in perhaps a day or two, to try a little turtle. Why not? It looked delightful served in its upturned shell. For did she not eat rabbit, tripe, and pigs’ heads at home? She told her brother, ‘If turtle is considered fine food in this foreign place then I must taste it, even if only the once.’ She wanted to try everything—oh yes, everything. Although not long out of widow’s weeds, she was keen to experience the curious, no matter who counselled against it. Bring on the duck, guinea birds and jack fish, for Mrs Caroline Mortimer was eager to nibble upon their bones. Even breadfruit that was destined for the slaves’ table. ‘Why should I not try it too?’ she asked her brother, who replied sternly that several of his slaves had been whipped for eating dirt—did she propose to try that delicacy also?
Caroline was blessed of a long, pointed nose that, while giving her silhouette a fine distinction from across a dim-lit room, was nevertheless unable to feel what was happening at its tip. Consequently there was often something stuck upon the end of it, of which she was totally unaware; the yellow stain of pollen from the hibiscus she was admiring; a white daub of cream from some milk she was drinking; even a drop of snot from a nasal chill could, like a rain drop caught upon the tip of a leaf, remain dangling and swaying for quite some time. And it was