The Sugar Planter's Daughter Read Free

wedding should never have taken place. It was an abomination. I could not believe that my sister, my shy, soft-spoken big sister, she who had always deferred to me, would actually go through with it, but she did. I had given her my opinion on this farce of a wedding but she did not heed me, and rather than create a scandal, with my opposition to it out in the open, and make my family the laughing stock of British Guiana society, I played along, pretending to have been swayed by her never-ending love for her so charming darkie groom.
    I’ve never believed in romance. I’m as romantic as an old potato. Romance is a silly notion that infects most women, the silliest kind of women. I’m a married woman myself, and I know what men want, and it’s not romance. I know what makes them fall to their knees before a woman, what can sway even the strongest man. That is the weakness of men, and all Winnie did was find a man who was easy to conquer. It was unbelievable. You don’t marry a man for that!
    Of course, there’s no dearth of single English males hungry for wives in the colony, but hardly any of them are marriageable. Either they are Booker men – whom a Cox girl may not marry, for political reasons; or else they are ageing, or else they are, well, simply horrid. Yet does a lady need to stoop that low? As the elder of us, Winnie could have had the cream of the cake: my Clarence. Yet she rejected Clarence in favour of this George, this darkie postboy, and so Clarence is mine.

    I married him soon after my father’s trial; a small, inconspicuous wedding. I married him for two reasons:
    One: So that I could take over management of the estate. Even as a sixteen-year-old I correctly assessed him as weak of character, and easy for a woman to control.
    Two: to produce sons.
    Promised Land must remain stable and strong far into the future, and the only way is to raise young men whose hearts and blood are wedded to the plantation – young men with sugar in the blood, young men whose hearts would race at the pungent smell of the burning of the trash, young men who can walk through the towering canes and know: this is my home. I will protect it with my last breath.
    I don’t care much for babies and young children but I suppose you can’t have young men without them. Anyway, there are servants to deal with that problem.
    And so, after my wedding all my energies went towards, firstly, training Clarence to know that I was the power behind the throne and, secondly, him impregnating me as soon as possible.
    The first of those goals came easily enough; with my striking looks and even more striking character I soon held him in the palm of my hand. He is a foppish fellow, completely unsuited to plantation life; that he is here at all was the result of negotiations between Papa, or rather, Papa’s solicitor in London, and Clarence’s father Lord Smedley, who was anxious to see him removed from the dissolute life he was leading in London. So Clarence was imported to the colony by Papa, a surrogate son. He was supposed to invest in our struggling plantation, inherit it and marry one of the daughters, and as the elder sister remaining (our eldest, Kathleen, had left us for England years before), Winnie was the allotted one. But she rejected his advances, and so he turned to me. I was still only sixteen at the time, and needed Papa’s permission, which he readily gave. After all, Clarence was now to manage the plantation, and we needed him firmly attached to the family by way of marriage.
    Clarence, of course, was rejected by his own father, who got rid of him by sending him to us with a small fortune. He was a spoilt lounge lizard with a penchant for loose women, drink and gambling. Easy enough to braid into my hair; I needed him only for the position and the sons to come. And so Clarence was installed as heir to Plantation Promised Land, and in return invested the much-needed money for a sugar