Honolulu, 1894

We’re traitors, Father and I, though these soldiers have no sense of it.

They feign being love-struck as my carriage approaches, their arms outstretched in exaggerated bows. Bored young men made giddy by the sight of an American girl, even one dressed to the neck in black, curls pinned severely back in her mother’s whalebone combs. I keep my eyes low, as modest as my missionary grandfather could have hoped. But I watch them in their untested uniforms, amazed they have no hint of what’s coming. What I’m actually here to do for the Queen.

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Only once was I stopped as Kepa brought the carriage up to Washington Place.
“No flowers today?” a soldier asked. “Sadly not,” I said, trying to keep the blanket around my baby daughter’s kicking feet. I smiled and pulled her up against my chest, tucking the blanket tightly under her.

My father is funding the impending rebellion against these soldiers, against the government they prop up. He gives me messages written on sheets of newspaper wrapped around ginger or gardenias from our garden, and I deliver these to the Queen’s household. Lili‘uokalani is now a prisoner in her former Kingdom. We sit in her garden while government troops watch us from Central Union’s bell tower. The Queen sings a hymn, tapping the time out on her armrest, waving her fan decorated with ferns. We discuss her tarot cards. We wonder if it will ever be safe for Princess Ka‘iulani, her niece, my best childhood friend, to come home. We do not talk about the messages, or the heavy bundle of cash I hid in Clarice’s blanket and was sure the soldier would discover as she thrashed unhappily in my arms. Instead, the soldier soothed my daughter with a silly face, fingers pulling at the side of his mouth. He let us pass.

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These moments of fear and relief are my connection to Samuel now, my revenge for what Abram did to us, for what he does to my home still. Abram Malveaux is now as feared across O‘ahu as he was by me on Moloka‘i; he fosters terror wherever he can sow its seeds.

Abram tried to buy my father’s plantation when the other planters turned against us; instead my father offloaded his harvest at a loss, sold his plantation and put his money into shipping. His vessels now crisscross the Pacific, and money flows into his home and out toward people and purchases, the details of which are scrawled on the newspapers I take to Washington Place. These soldiers who watch the Queen should turn their binoculars toward the ocean. They should walk the beach at night when Hawaiian men, Kepa among them, offload weapons from one of Father’s ships near Waikīkī, burying them in the shoreline until the time comes.

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This may end with us in prison at the Reef. Abram is jailing Hawaiians rumored to have spoken in favor of the Queen. He’s arresting organists, teachers, innocents. Yet he’s never had these men search my newspaper-wrapped flowers, or the blanket of my golden-haired child. His soldiers do not see who I truly am. I am a good American wife. I am a plantation heiress. I am the granddaughter of a Calvinist missionary who came to this pagan land before it was conquered by Christianity, then sugar, then America.

I am the perfect traitor to the privilege of my birth.
I am the ideal rebel messenger.

Eliza Dawson