Even when Nevis is wholly visible there is always a white cloud above her head.  As night falls it becomes evident that this soft aggravation of her beauty is but a night robe hung on high.  It is at about seven in the evening that she begins to draw down her garment of mist, but she is long in perfecting that nocturnal toilette.  Lonely and neglected, she still is a beauty, exacting and fastidious.  The cloud is tortured into many shapes before it meets her taste.  She snatches it off, redisposes it, dons and takes it off again, wraps it about her with yet more enchanting folds, until by nine o’clock it sweeps the sea; and Nevis, the proudest island of the Caribbees, has secluded herself from those cynical old neighbours who no longer bend the knee.

BOOK I

RACHAEL LEVINE

I

Nevis gave of her bounty to none more generously than to John and Mary Fawcett.  In 1685 the revocation of the Edict of Nantes had sent the Huguenots swarming to America and the West Indies.  Faucette was but a boy when the Tropics gave him shelter, and learning was hard to get; except in the matter of carving Caribs.  But he acquired the science of medicine somehow, and settled on Nevis, remodelled his name, and became a British subject.  Brilliant and able, he was not long accumulating a fortune; there were swamps near Charles Town that bred fever, and the planters lived as high and suffered as acutely as the English squires of the same period.  His wife brought him money, and in 1714 they received a joint legacy from Captain Frank Keynall; whether a relative of hers or a patient of his, the Records do not tell.

Mary Fawcett was some twenty years younger than her husband, a high-spirited creature, with much intelligence, and a will which in later years John Fawcett found himself unable to control.  But before that period, when to the disparity in time were added the irritabilities of age in the man and the imperiousness of maturity in the woman, they were happy in their children, in their rising fortunes, and, for a while, in one another.

For twenty-eight years they lived the life of the Island.  They built a Great House on their estate at Gingerland, a slope of the Island which faces Antigua, and they had their mansion in town for use when the Captain-General was abiding on Nevis.  While Mary Fawcett was bringing up and marrying her children, managing the household affairs of a large estate, and receiving and returning the visits of the other grandees of the Island, to say nothing of playing her important part in all social functions, life went well enough.  Her children, far away from the swamps of Charles Town, throve in the trade winds which temper the sun of Nevis and make it an isle of delight.  When they were not studying with their governesses, there were groves and gorges to play in, ponies to ride, and monkeys and land crabs to hunt.  Later came the gay life of the Capital, the routs at Government House, frequent even when the Chief was elsewhere, the balls at neighbouring estates, the picnics in the cool high forests, or where more tropical trees and tree ferns grew thick, the constant meeting with distinguished strangers, and the visits to other islands.