Redlegs (11 page)

Nancy had informed me that should the Law find in my favour she would bow to it. Yet all the while she was slyly engaging solicitors of her own & of that kind who succumb to Wilberforce’s lunatic way of thinking. Her brat had heard that I had talked with some comrades of applying the Law directly & Hanging him as he Deserved. It seems he was not content with this arrangement & told me so all the while waggling a blade at me.

I had seen – at Mr. Barclays plantation – sensible & civilised castigations that corrected unacceptable behaviour - & could I have done so I would have proscribed & enacted one now. Lashings & starvations & incarcerations have their place but I was never a man – nor ne’er became one – who deals punishment greater than is required. Mr. Barclay employed one particular lenient penalty – a preferred approach in the prime years of mastership – that impressed me. Could I have enacted it now – stopped up the muck spouting from the cretins mouth & replaced it with muck of my own – could I have seized him & prised open his bulbous lips & shited in his throat as I had seen done to good effect – I would have done so. But that is a task for two or more men.

I had a rifle on my shoulder but it was not loaded. There was nothing I could do. I did not run. I turned my back on the mongrel popgun – no brother of mine – black as he was as the Earl o’ Hell.

For several days & nights I kept to my lodgings at Bridgetown, boiling in my own anger & shame, not even attending drill. Subsequently I was refused promotion to Captain though the title had run three generations in our family. I drank for various days & then ceased. Once the anger had gone a little out of me I read my Bible & some books & papers that had been loaned to me concerning the New Jerusalem. Amongst them was a tome of Scientific work by one Alexander Kinmont. A countryman of my ancestors, this great Philosopher understood the Biology of the races & it was a wonder to me to see in print many ideas of which I had experienced the reality.

In this new light I reconsidered my whole life – & saw that the
land I had been cheated of was in any case worthless. Even if I were to spend the greater part of my time & mental energy on regaining what was mine it would never provide me with a satisfactory income – so degraded had it become under my Father’s rule. Nor could such a life meet my restless Nature & intelligence.

Land had been the undoing of our Pedigree – making those that had it greedy & those without it debased. Custodianship of crop is not the only way to serve the Lord. I became sensitive to the divisions in this Colony that others could not & still cannot see.

Reading the Book of Kinmont I mark as the Birth and Baptism of my own Great Work. I enlisted myself in the twin camps of Gods footsoldiers – no greater rank do I claim – & Human Science. My labours beckon me. There is little time for reflection & composing when there is so much of Importance & Urgency to be done. The lessons taught me by Mr. Barclay will have to wait for another night. As will the Revelation granted unto me by an unsuspecting lady. Poor flibbertigibbet! How could she possibly comprehend that she has been used as a vessel to convey a message from powers beyond her ken! From the moment I cast eyes on her – half dead half blind & crazed she was – I knew the girl to be marked out – & paid special Attention to her. 

The glorious era of Bridgetown and the Lyceum had lasted scarcely a month. Everything had changed, but not quite enough. She had been a common kail-worm until the New World became her
chrysalis
. But before she could emerge with full-grown wings, ready to climb and soar, the pupa had been blown off the branch, halting her metamorphosis. A full year later she could only still wonder what kind of butterfly she was destined to become. Whether a
swallowtail
, or an admiral, or even a painted lady. Any would do, rather than remained imprisoned in her cocoon.

It was as if time were a mysterious fabric that could shrink or expand itself according to some unknown law. No matter how Elspeth, trapped inside, semi-formed, kicked and struggled against it, time thrust her forward, then yanked her back. In Northpoint the fabric was being stretched beyond endurance.

Of the journey from Bridgetown, she could remember little. Strangers as dazed as she had given her fare to eat – as to what kind, her memory failed – and water to drink. But she remembered, perfectly lucidly, reaching the estate of Lord Coak. There was a gate. A pathway curled back from it, like a childhood memory. An unclear expectation arose with each bend but, in the end, nothing was revealed. Just another unkempt track, leading to a plantation house like others she had seen in and around town.

Lord Coak’s house was built of the brightest Barbadian coral stone, gleaming like a pearl against the wild woods that lapped against it. It looked like it had been thrown up, perfectly formed, by some movement in the earth’s surface. A man was waiting on the porch, as though Elspeth had been expected. She walked towards him, roots bulging under her feet, thick foliage of grapefruit trees and akkie bushes forking out, scratching her face. The heat was
intense and wet, like a botanical glasshouse. She imagined that if she stood still long enough the vegetation would burgeon before her eyes and bury both the house and the man. She stumbled as she approached him. He caught her, steadied her, then let go and walked away, disappearing inside the house. She managed to follow him in. Inside, large winged beetles lumbered from room to room as if looking for something they had mislaid. She found the
stranger
sitting in the largest chamber, in a broad band of sunlight, two glasses and a jar in front of him.

“Yuh must be Baillie.”

“Pleased to meet you, sir.”

Then an elderly black woman appeared, just in time to catch Elspeth before she fell.

It took her several weeks to recover from the arduousness of her journey and the shock of the storm. She was in a bed, in a
spacious
room, sparsely furnished. She knew that she had been visited regularly: her water was changed, her face washed. Faint memories of her head being held and a woman’s voice encouraging her to drink. After some time – God knows how much – she became alert enough to identify the old black lady who had caught her on her arrival. Once she managed to sit up and throw her legs over the side of the bed, she saw out the window: a bluff rose up steeply and on its far side was a pleasant little cove.

“How long since I arrived here?”

“Be a while now.”

“This is Lord Coak’s estate, isn’t it?”

“It is.”

“I’m sorry. I’ve forgotten your name.”

“Annie Oyo. Not that you’re in need o’ a second name. I answer to Annie.”

At times, especially in the darkness, when the woodwork creaked or some sound crept in through her window, she felt again the
hammering
of the storm and had to find her chamber pot to vomit from fear and disgust. If a male voice from elsewhere in the house –
perhaps
the man who had been waiting for her at the porch, and of whom she had seen nothing since – reached her ears, her heart rose in joy, thinking it was George. Then she would fall into sweaty
slumber again, seeing nothing but dark, shifting colours.

When she felt well enough to venture into the world beyond her chamber, she instructed Annie to dress her and take her to her master.

“Lord Coak has not returned yet, has he?”

Annie shook her head.

“Then I will speak to – forgive me, I have forgotten the name of the gentleman.”

“Cap’n Shaw.”

Annie helped her down the polished wooden stairs of a house perhaps smaller but nearly as impressive as the Overtons’. Walking for the first time since her arrival, she found she had developed a stabbing pain somewhere unidentifiable deep in her torso.

“You are feeling improved now, I hope?”

Shaw was so tall and thin he appeared to walk on stilts. She recognised him now as the man who had visited Lord Coak at the Overtons’ the night of Elspeth’s arrival in the Colony. He might have been made entirely out of wood: the stiff, jerky stride of his legs as he walked towards her and a face streaked with ginger hairs that seemed to be carved onto his cheeks combined to make him look like a puppet controlled by invisible strings. He was dressed for work: a white open-necked shirt and fustian breeks, both garments earth-soiled.

“You must forgive me for imposing on your kindness like this.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Thank heaven his lordship made mention of me, otherwise you might have turned me out into the wild. I must have looked like a vagabond.”

“I am unsusceptible to the facade of dress, Miss Baillie.”

“When will Lord Albert be home?”

She had never referred to Coak by his first name before, not even with the title attached to it. But this “Captain” clearly had some position of authority here, so it was important that she show him she had a measure of influence.

“I don’t expect him before a month.”

“A month!”

Shaw sat and observed as she feared for a moment that she might
faint again in front of him. “I promise I shall not trouble you as long as a month,” she managed to say. “In a day or two I should be well enough to travel back to town – if some transport could be arranged for me.”

“You shall be staying here, I fear, Miss.”

He looked at her coolly. There was that hint of lust that most men tried and failed to hide, and Elspeth recognised Shaw’s
particular
strain of it: more concealed from himself than from her and tinged with acrimony. “The city is in a state of chaos. There is disease, lootings, all manner of tribulations that would not befit a young woman. I have written to his lordship and informed him of your arrival here, but dispatches to Havana are slow. I must insist that you wait here until his return.”

At the mention of the effects of the storm, Elspeth felt again the stabbing in her back or side – she could not tell exactly where.

The loss of George and the violence of the storm engulfed her as the days – so slow in a humid, remote place like this – went by until Lord Coak’s return. The nights continued to pass in a kind of fever, as if the air was saturated with Virginie’s potion. The heat throbbed in time to the pulse of the cicadas and frogs, the distant but
interminable
lapping of the waves. In the mornings, she barely noticed the sea, nor the constantly hot whipping wind. She spent much of her day confined to her room, but took walks whenever she felt strong and bold enough, and when there was air enough to make exertion possible. She thought she detected an uneasy atmosphere among her new neighbours, but paid it little mind. Northpoint was not to be her home for long.

What consumed her thoughts was this stabbing pain, as if the splinter that had speared George was now lodged in her. And though that felt fitting, it did not ease the physical pain. For weeks Elspeth looked inward rather than outward, listening to and
concentrating
on her own body, all her attention taken up with
detecting
any little change that might be taking place. She had not, so far as she knew, bled since before the storm, and the constrictions and aches she had suffered in her belly ever since, she began to realise, might have had a different source.

George and she reunited; her lover regenerating himself in her womb. Yet the idea seemed too remote, too unlikely. It hadn’t occurred to her, on either of those two sudden, delectable nights, to take care of this possibility. A child could not possibly result from a woman like her and a man like him: a medical contradiction. She did not seek advice from any other quarter – though who she might turn to in this foreign place she could not imagine – but vaguely decided that, if indeed she were pregnant, and when her time came, she would have Lord Coak transfer her to Bridgetown or even London for her confinement. A baby would delay still
further
her return to the stage but, with proper lodgings in town and staff to assist her, it should not present an enduring problem. How Coak would react, if it turned out she was expecting a child, she had no notion.

She would have to wait – waiting being a skill she was beginning to learn – longer to find out. Uncertain and unconfirmed news of Lord Coak’s expected arrival finally reached Northpoint in March 1832. Nobody came for Elspeth Baillie in all that time. Each day lasted a month, every week a year, as she waited, expecting some word from the Lyric. She implored Captain Shaw to let her visit Bridgetown, to find her old friends.

“That is not my place, Mistress Baillie,” he insisted, though Elspeth felt that he considered it very much was. Lord Coak had written to him requesting that he look after their house-guest, and to dissuade her from returning to town until he himself had returned. He wrote to Elspeth herself in a similar vein. The Lyric had been utterly lost in the storm and his plans to reconstruct it would need some time to mature. There was no other theatre in Bridgetown to embrace her many talents. Indeed there was – he knew from regular dispatches he received in Havana – no
theatrical
life whatsoever in the aftermath of the calamity. He hinted at other reasons, too, for her to avoid travelling to town, then
sweetened
the warning with apologies for his absence, a fanfare of
compliments
, promises to return at the earliest date and exhortations to look after her own wellbeing: “A period of rest and restoration can only benefit you. We will return to our project as soon as is possible, and in a climate more fruitful for our ambitions.”

He was right: she was still in turmoil – all the more so since
suspecting
she might be pregnant. Northpoint was not the worst place, she reflected, despite its remoteness and the ennui it produced in her, to regain some peace of mind. If indeed she was carrying George’s child, there was nowhere better for her to be until she was certain. She never ventured far from the house, preferring to walk round it than away from it. In every direction she was obstructed. She could walk a little down the drive but, as the trees at either side grew thicker and the path became like a tunnel, she had to turn back. The hill behind the house was too tangled with overgrown thickets to allow walking; it was also alive with the tics and buzzes of insects and other life, some of which, for all she knew, might bite, and fatally. The canefields hindered exploration on the south-west side of the house, though she stood at their fringe sometimes and watched black men and women perform mysterious tasks,
involving
cutting long, gangly stalks of cane, shearing their leaves, and tying and carrying bundles of trimmed cane. They seemed to work all hours. At dawn and dusk their shadows repeated their
mechanical
motions.

Still, the place was pleasant and quiet enough. A return to the city could only illustrate too vividly what she had lost. Whatever remained of its streets would be empty of her old companions and their laughter; the hole where the Lyric once stood would
contain
only the echo of the applause she had anticipated; Garrison a vacuum without George Lisle’s caresses and smiles. The worry that Lord Coak had implanted in her mind of darker threats,
constrained
her too. “I will explain on my return but there are other factors that would make it most inadvisable for you to enter the city.” She approached Captain Shaw on the matter.

“Mr. Lisle. Senior. He’s after your blood, as I hear it.”

The shock of hearing George’s name uttered for the first time since his death dismayed her for a moment.

“The Lisle clan lost not only their heir, George, with whom I gather you were acquainted, but also his younger sister, Clara.”

“I had no idea,” Elspeth breathed.

“Sir Reginald was caught on his estates during the storm, leaving his wife and daughter alone in their town residence to cope. He had
believed that Master George would have been there to take charge of the situation but, unfortunately, the young man was not at home on the night in question.”

She tried to feel for this Clara, but could not. Clara was only a name to her and one that, on the very few occasions he had uttered it, George had done so without, she remembered, much warmth.

“Sir Reginald has been attributing to all and sundry his family’s tragedy to a strumpet. I use the wording I was given, Mistress.”

The wooden Captain, Elspeth reckoned, agreed with Sir Reginald’s opinion. But she was not the son’s strumpet – even if she had set out to be. They had found some love together: real love, tender and bold. George had risked his name and fortune for her. He had protected her, and died by her side. And perhaps now he had given her his child. She was George’s widow in all but name.

“Does he know where I am?”

“He knows all right. And so long as you’re here, under our
protection
, you’re safe.”

“What could he do?”

“Powerful man like that? Have you deported, at the very least.”

Despite the misfortunes that had recently occurred to her, Elspeth still could not conceive of a more terrible fate. Whatever she would become, she would become in this new world. To return to the old would be nothing but defeat.

When Lord Coak eventually arrived at Northpoint, she waited for him at the porch, just as Captain Shaw had waited for her. The little pudgy, bald man drawing up in a hired brougham was as
welcome
and grand a sight as Mark Antony surrounded by phalanxes of gladiators and blaring horns. She ran down to meet him, not waiting for him to alight, but jumping into the carriage and only just managing not to throw her arms around him and kiss him.