Relax into this Caribbean isle’s sleepy charm

I’m with her on that. As I follow TC through a tunnel and into what was believed to be the former “punishment pit,” a small courtyard now edged with crumbling, vine-covered walls, I can almost see the ghosts of those slaves and hear their cries. It seems suddenly and repugnantly real. I am tempted to cancel my dinner that night at Old Manor. But in any event, I’m glad I don’t. The old stone of the hotel seems softer when lit; the food good, the service friendly and not at all subservient. The waitress is sanguine about the inn’s nefarious past. “It was a bad business,” she says. “But it’s gone now, and I’ve never seen any ghosts. My grandmother’s grandmother was a slave, and I’m all right.”

Wandering around the sleepy capital of Charlestown one sunny afternoon, I pass people sitting on doorsteps listening to the faint strains of calypso just audible above the peace. The main street is lined with small shops and restaurants. There’s a pretty wooden clock tower and a handful of banks (after tourism, international banking is the island’s unlikely second-most-profitable industry). Most activity is centered at the ferry terminal where you catch the boat to Nevis’ sister island of St. Kitts (just two miles away), but even the terminal is quiet between departures.

I poke my head into several of the shops and am astounded by the apparent lack of concession to tourism. There are no tacky souvenir shops selling Bob Marley T-shirts and bottled sunshine, no British pubs or hamburger huts. Instead, there’s a hardware store with a blackboard outside on which is chalked the scripture of the day, “Thou hast proved my heart.” A rather good gallery is located in the Café des Arts, where I am tempted to buy a painting of a soursop, just one of the exotic fruits that grow wild on the island.

But before I really reach my stride, I am back where I started at the Museum of Nevis History, having walked the length and breadth of town. The museum building reputedly was constructed on the site of the childhood home of another known islander, Alexander Hamilton. Born in the 1750s just a few years before Fanny, he was the illegitimate child of a French Huguenot woman and a scion of a grand old highland family. He eventually became the United States’ first secretary of the treasury.

I get in my car and drive north on the coastal road out of Charlestown, musing at the coincidence of Alexander sharing a surname with the woman who wrecked Fanny’s marriage: Lady Emma Hamilton. Nelson fell passionately in love with her, deserting Fanny and siring his only child, Horatia. Fanny’s first marriage had also ended tragically when her husband, Dr Josiah Nisbet, fell ill and died only two years after they married. They had lived for a while in his family home on Nisbet Plantation (now Nisbet Plantation Beach Club) on the northern tip of Nevis.

Brooke Slezak The Hermitage’s cottages are nestled near Nevis Peak.

I settle into my cottage at Nisbet just a few yards from the beach and feel the past alive here, too. Many of the staff, I notice, bear the Nisbet surname, making them possible descendants of the slaves who once worked for the family. The utterly charming maitre d’, Patterson (another English name), wears only tailor-made suits with a collection of ties so extensive that even he has lost count of how many he owns. I sit on the beach before tea, watching the white-tipped waves dance across the sea.

After an early-morning horseback ride along the beach, I decide to drive back into Charlestown to explore. I see a shop I like the looks of and swing my car off the road. The first I know of the concrete block lurking under the vines is the sound of a sickening crunch. I get out to inspect the damage and let out an involuntary curse. It may as well be a gunshot for the reaction it elicits: Passers-by stop and stare, eyes wide, mouths open, their heads shaking like metronomes.

I am frozen in the spotlight of their disapproval when an old Rasta man walks by and winks. When I ask him where I can get the vehicle fixed, he introduces himself as Munto and says he’ll show me.

“You better be careful with your mouth,” he informs me politely as we drive back through town. “Swearing’s illegal on Nevis. You could get arrested for a word like that.”

The ghost of Fanny, I’m sure, can’t help but approve. Nevis, it appears, is nearly as modest now as it must have been then.

While the car is being fixed, Munto offers to take me to the hot springs on the outskirts of Charlestown below the old Bath Hotel, which now houses government buildings. What appears to be a stream runs through an overgrown patch of land. Down some steps there is a tiled “relaxing pool.” Suddenly modesty takes hold of me; not wishing to strip to my bikini with Munto there, I hitch up my skirt, take a first, confident step into the water and  immediately hop back. Munto laughs. The spring water averages 106 degrees and somehow connects to the hell fires of Mount Nevis, the vast dormant volcano that dominates the center of the island.

“Do you come in here?” I ask Munto.

“No, I bathe downstream,” he says with a chuckle. “And I don’t wear my clothes to wash myself.”

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