collected all the candlesticks and rummaged through the kitchen drawers for stubs and matches. She set a bucket on the patio under the downspouts, and when she went back to collect it, the rain was falling harder and the wind was whipping the mango branches.
The wind squeezing through the hole in the roof created an eerie moan and sent a draft through the house. To silence the secret door’s maddening rattling, she wedged it shut with a chair. The storm’s noises were unnerving, made worse by intermittent crashes on the gallery roof that sounded like huge rocks hurled by a giant.
Though it was the darkest room, the kitchen felt the safest, so she gathered books, towels, pillows, and blankets and made a nest for herself in there. She set a pot in the storeroom for her privy. She’d found a rusty putter behind the big chair and kept it at hand in case the monkeys invaded.
Nibbling stale saltines, she wrote out a meal plan to stretch the supplies over three days, just in case. The best news was that the bar was well stocked, and she’d no aversion to drinking whisky neat.
After a tumbler of scotch, she fell into tormented dozing. Her house would be whirled away as by the tornado in The Wizard of Oz, carrying the screaming monkeys with it. Wind would rip off the roof and scatter Jack’s nude photos up the mountain. Mallo was outside, pounding the door to get in, but she hadn’t the strength to open it. She was in dark water, trapped in writhing fronds of seaweed.
A clap of thunder brought her fully awake and she felt she was on a raft, oddly stationary in a roiling sea. The closed shutters couldn’t keep out the explosions of lightning, or the thunder that followed almost immediately. Half three in the morning, dark as pitch, and the world was an undulating roar broken by earsplitting crashes and the ripping and slapping of roof shakes. A scream of wood wrenching loose, nails losing their purchase, fibers separating, then a crash of timbers on the patio.
She’d dozed off reading a history of Nevis, leaving a precious candle to burn out. Chiding herself for wasting the light, she threw off her blanket, stood up, and pawed the table for the matches and a new candle stub. Her shadow jittered on the wall until she sheltered the flame with the hurricane shade. When she shouldered the door, it moved only a few centimeters. The storm hurled itself in through the crack, and she latched the door to silence the wailing.
Door blocked. Front door and gallery windows nailed shut from the outside. She was trapped. The ceaseless noise might drive her mad, but she was curiously unafraid, trusting of the ancient house’s protection.
Without hope of further sleep, she made breakfast of rainwater tea and stale cornflakes in tinned milk and read how Nevis was dubbed Queen of the Caribees for outstripping the other islands in sugar production. A prize the British repeatedly fought the Dutch and French to retain, built on enslaved labor, its people freed to their own devices once emancipation robbed them of worth. Though trade, indenture, and fealty were woven into her family history, Els had never considered the plight of the millions of Africans wrested from their lands, families, and cultures and tossed into the furnace of greed to produce the riches of sugar, cotton, and rum. She wondered what guilt she shared and what she might owe to the people of this nation created by those who’d been dislocated and abandoned, but somehow remained unvanquished.
Mid-morning, the wind died and the sun broke through. Els pushed out the kitchen shutter and saw that the storm had thrown sections of the pergola against the building. Squinting in the rinsed daylight, she climbed out the window and over the wreckage.
The sky was cloudless, the agitated sea a deep sapphire. As Tony had warned, water cascaded through the ghaut, the mountain channeling the rain into lethal torrents and sending them barreling toward the sea. Birds fluttered and pecked in the smashed garden, and she wondered how such tiny, fragile creatures could have survived.
Under the searing sun, the garden was steaming. Smashed coconuts, the missiles that had crashed onto the gallery roof, littered the court. The monkeys emerged from the hole in the ridge, shimmied down the outdoor shower supports, and scampered into the jungle, and she wondered if they’d decamped for good or were only foraging for food and