The Sugar Planter's Daughter Read Online Free PDF Page B

homes for the coolies. There’s certainly land enough – those fallow fields beyond the back-dam, for instance.’
    â€˜Those fallow fields,’ I retorted, ‘are not going to be fallow for much longer. There’s a new strain of sugar cane we’re going to plant there; with almost twice the yield!’
    She said nothing to that, but only stared at me.
    â€˜You’ve changed, Yoyo,’ she said mildly after a while. ‘Very well then. If not that field then another, after the harvest. We’ll just clear one of the present fields and build houses on it.’
    She refused to understand, but it wasn’t just the impracticality of her proposals that strained our relationship; there was that undercurrent of mistrust. How could I ever trust my sister again, she who had betrayed us all and dragged the Cox name through the mud? And so, though we argued about housing, the real issue was another, and sooner or later it was bound to come out, and it did.
    â€˜Why did you come back here at all?’ I said after an hour of futile arguing, that first day. ‘You’re not wanted on Promised Land. Go and stay with your darkie lover!’
    â€˜You know I can’t do that,’ she said. ‘We’re not married. And this is my home as well as yours. I have every right to be here. And my opinion on the running of it is as valid as yours.’
    â€˜That’s where you’re wrong! Clarence is the estate manager and he has the last word, and I’m his fiancée. And besides – everyone hates you up here.’
    â€˜Including you?’ She reached out her hands to me then, in a gesture of supplication. Winnie could not abide such ugly emotions as hatred; but she should have thought about that earlier. Yet I could not use the word hate towards her. She was still my sister. But not the sister I had grown up with, the one I once knew so well. She was now a stranger.
    â€˜I’m furious with you and you know why!’ If my eyes could have shot poison darts, they would have. Already my voice was raised to an unladylike level – as Papa would have called it – and I longed to let go; to scream at her, to tear out her hair, to scratch that calmly smiling face of hers that refused to reflect my rage. But I held back. She would find out, one way or another, that I’m not the kind of person who takes kindly to betrayal. If not for Winnie’s witness statement Papa would have left the court a free man. I still could not believe what she had done. Betrayed not only her own father, her whole family, but the entire English community. She would always be a pariah now.
    â€˜I did the right thing, Yoyo,’ is all she said. ‘I had to do it. And if you will only let me I can help you with the running of the plantation. I know I don’t know much about business. But I know about people. I know the workers, and what they need. They trust me. Now is the time to really change things; we could work with the labourers, instead of against them!’
    See, that was just the kind of romantic notion Winnie was wont to entertain; always this talk of appeasement and goodwill, but you can’t run a plantation on love and peace, and that was why I thought she should go. But she stayed, a thorn in my side, constantly nagging me about this and that, and though that first argument fizzled out more arguments followed and by the time Mama arrived I was ready to throw Winnie out – on her backside, to put it crudely. But I didn’t need to, because she married her little darkie lover George.

    T he worst of it is that Mama has taken Winnie’s side. The two of them, against me! By the time Mama returned from Austria, Winnie and I had each dug our heels in on our respective positions. Luckily for me, Papa passed power of attorney on to Clarence, not Winnie, and so I was on the winning side; nothing need be done. But Winnie seemed to think herself the voice of