Redlegs (16 page)

A little over two years after the girls’ arrival, there was a local
disturbance
. The Emancipation Act had been passed in 1833, but it took some time for its repercussions to be felt in the north. Rumours spread by itinerant labourers of skirmishes in Bridgetown, Oistins and plantations far to the south were barely noted by the
inhabitants
of Northpoint. In February 1836 – the hottest month the new recruits had yet experienced in the West Indies – the troubles came closer to home. A group of ex-slaves, believing that they were free now legally to go wherever and do whatever they wished, upped tools and belongings, and headed for the hills of the Scotland
district
, as the north-west of the island was known.

Mary Fairweather had sworn she had seen, while working in the field, a band of shadows pass across the hilltop to the east of them.

“Marooners!” cried Mary Miller, excited.

“We’ll tak them up some meal and put-by,” Bessy Riddoch suggested.

Nathanial Wycombe, a cutter with a house made of three old slave-huts bridged together with runners and boards, painted up like a miniature plantation house – and deputy in all but name to the Captain – reckoned they could only be runaways.

“They’re free men now, Mister Wycombe,” Bessy protested, “makin’ their way in the world.”

“They’re savages and layabouts. If you give ’em victuals, you’d have a harder time getting rid of rats or crows.”

But Bessy, with Mary Miller and Mary Fairweather and Susan, went ahead secretly with their plans to take bowls of coocoo and eddoe mash up to the men, whose bonfires they had seen in the middle of the night lighting up the sky.

“Whit if they attack us?” Susan suddenly asked in the kitchen while they mashed the food.

Dainty and Annie Oyo winked to one another. “I heerd they alreadys cut the throat o’ two white folk,” Annie said.

“Eddy eddy white mice, put ’em de pot and cook ’em like rice!” laughed Dainty.

“Dainty, is it no’ a wonder a’body’s able to onerstan’ onything ye say.”

Mary Fairweather squealed in fright. “What if they kidnap us?”

“Christ, woman, ye’re a hell of a hopeful.”

The idea of helping a group of runaway blacks was less an act of kindness than an adventure to break the boredom of working life. Mary Fairweather, however, remained the most tremulous of the gang.

“If Captain Shaw gets wind ae it, we’ll a’ be shunned.”

Ostracism – from meals and from socialising in the fields – was Shaw’s favoured punishment for the women. On the committing of a transgression he would sentence the offender to a day’s, a week’s or even a month’s shunning, depending on the seriousness of the misdemeanour. Nobody could talk to the penitent at any time of day, nor help her with work or domestic chores. She had to eat in her own hut and remain silent throughout her sentence. The punishment of men took the form of confiscation of rum, snuff and cheroots, and the occasional smack across the lug.

“A week wi’ oot hearing you wifies’ blether’d be a blessin’.”

It took a full month to hunt the runaways down. News reached Northpoint of a settlement in the hills, where men and women danced – in some accounts, naked – and lived like the children of Adam and Eve on the abundant fruits of the West Indian wildlands. When Shaw went off for a day or two in search of the miscreants – amazing how people could hide themselves for so long in such a tiny island! – some of the girls, usually headed up by Bess or Mary Miller, took to walking outside the plantation limits, in the hope of catching a glimpse of the gypsy rebels. Thus started the custom of escaping the confines of the estate indulged in by several of the women. Elspeth often spied their lights through the fig trees, the glimmer heading off down the drive at ungodly hours. Stories soon circulated of the adventures they met out there. Of travellers, wild animals, impromptu parties by the roadside with itinerant workers,
and even freed coloureds. What became of the runaways, nothing was ever reported.

Albert had compensated Elspeth for the long interruption in her career by making sure she was still dressed in the most elegant of Paris fashions and that her boudoir was prettily adorned. Still only twenty-six years old in 1837 but, with the help of her attire, and the weight of a great love and a lost child, she walked the plantation with an air of deserved gravitas. Her gleaming, lustrous hair she kept tied behind her head and, when out in the grounds
overseeing
some task or other, she wore a straw hat that shaded her face and neck. Her body was still strong and straight. In her own mind, long gone was the girl who flirted and giggled with friends from the theatre, the seductress of young noblemen. Her expression became every day more serious, and her arms and legs sturdier than those required of an actress.

On his visits home, Elspeth shared her room with Albert for half the night. He never touched her, but she basked in his unrelenting gaze. The slightest, most common activities were enough to entrance him: washing her face, changing her shoes, eating at dinner. His treatment of her – as a child might stare in wonder at clouds, or an exotic beast – was enough to sustain her through his long absences.

Mailing her from Havana, London and Panama, he encouraged her to recite and sing in the evenings to the house staff. Within a brace of years she had established the custom of monthly
concerts
in which any woman brave enough to do so would perform properly rehearsed party pieces for the assembled company. Albert, three years after the coming of the women, returned home with the backcloths of the old Lyric Theatre which he had discovered in an auction house at Speightstown. Seeing those stars and crystals and a still-gleaming moon, despite some staining and water damage, Elspeth suffered a confusion of emotions. Albert felt for her, and wondered if he should have left the cloths to rot.

“My dear child, I should have thought that they would upset you. Forgive me. I still haven’t the means to further our plans for a theatre – even if Lisle would allow it. The manufactory is taking longer, and using up more of my resources than I expected.”

She knew he wasn’t lying: for the past year there had been a steady stream of surveyors, government officials, advisers, running through the estate. Foundations for a vast new building had been laid, on the site of a disused canefield somewhere near the copse at the estate’s border. She had heard enough of Albert’s conversations with Shaw over dinner to know that his fortune was stretched to the limit.

“Losing you would be a blow, Elspeth. But I’ll understand if you decide to take what little I can offer and begin your craft again
elsewhere
. I have good contacts in London and Edinburgh.”

For a spell, the dilemma tormented her. To take to the stage again, perform in front of an audience, was a dream suddenly refreshed by those majestic old cloths that had been designed to be the backdrop of her grand debut. She agreed to give Albert an answer before he left again, this time to Milan. To clear her mind for the momentous decision, she set aside her plays and books, avoided Diana and Mary Miller, and walked the grounds,
considering
. Her route was always the same: coming down from the little porch, she strolled as far as the large fig tree in front of the house, turned back, walked down the west side of the house, up to the fencing of the first cane-fields, then back through her herb garden and the little copse of policy woodland, and thereby to the porch again. At every side there was an obstacle. The bluff cut her off from the cove, which the women, during the little time they had off work, used to paddle and sit and chatter. Behind the fig trees were the chattel-houses where Elspeth did not feel welcome. Right of them lay the thicket of wild woodland, whose shadows and obscure noises frightened her. Everywhere else, there was
nothing
but canefields. Sometimes she would walk a little down the drive, but the canopy created by jacarandas and cabbage palms oppressed her.

On the day before she was due to give Albert her decision, she found herself a little further down the driveway than she had ventured before. It was noon-time, and Mary Miller and Sarah Alexander were going to the gates to receive provisions from the Edmondson farm: a weekly purchase of live chickens, potatoes, eddoes and milk.

“I seldom come down here. I don’t know why, now that I am here. It’s rather lovely.”

The trees at either side shaded them from the burning sun, and whipped up a little breeze between themselves. Rays of sun danced among them, so that light and shade were in perfect harmony. Their three voices took on a different timbre: the enclosure muted and softened them, creating an atmosphere of intimacy.

“This is my favourite neuk,” Sarah said.

“Mine too,” agreed Mary. “It minds me o’ the woods down by Ochter Burn. Though it’s mair tidy like.”

Elspeth listened to their chatter about farm-folk and ministers, ploughboys and market days, as if Mary and Sarah had only come away for a day’s excursion from their homes. She enjoyed hearing the gossipy talk of her old country, but it was akin to
eavesdropping
on a conversation taking place behind a barn wall or a cottage door – her own most crucial experiences took place here in the West Indies, not the Scottish Lowlands. The three women turned a bend in the road, and she saw for the first time the remains of an old building on a rise above the tops of the trees.

“That’s where the laird’s erectin’ his manufactory,” said Mary.

“But what’s the old building?” Elspeth asked.

Mary shrugged and said it looked like an old mill, of the ancient, round type you sometimes saw east of their old parish at Roseneath. The heap of stones looked to Elspeth less like a decayed building and more like the result of some natural calamity. The stones were of a grey she had not seen on the island before and sat as though they had been petrified mid-tumble, or had pushed their way up out of the ground, poised to burst into dreadful life. She shivered at the sight, but carried on walking, the path leaning off to the left, down towards the gate. Mary and Sarah were laughing at some of the tales of the workmen – older slaves and freedmen in the main – who had been brought up from Oistins and Speightstown to work on the new factory, when Elspeth for the first time in six years caught a glimpse of the Northpoint Plantation Estate gates.

She had no memory of them. A simple, askew, set of rusted iron grilles set into sinking pillars, they could be gates to anywhere, in Scotland as much as the West Indies, yet the sight of them had a
shocking effect on Elspeth. Her two companions had walked a little ahead, unaware of the trauma being wreaked upon their mistress. She could not catch her breath, felt her skin turn to ice, and her blood scorch. She thought she might be sick or fall over, just as she had done the night she first entered the big house. Behind the gates was visible only the smallest strip of open countryside: a few yards of roadway, a slight rise of pastureland behind, and a few stunted trees. To Mary and Sarah it was a bonny enough view: a patch of the world within reach, but where the rules and endless work of Northpoint no longer applied. To Elspeth, it loomed like a barren, malicious desert. The gates, road, field and tree moved in front of her, first hurtling towards her, then pulling back, the length of road stretching taut enough to snap. She turned away from the sight and her legs, though shaking and barely able to hold her, managed a few steps of flight. Hoisting her hem, she stumbled up the road as clumsily as she had on her first entrance. Soon, she broke into a run, Mary’s and Sarah’s voices calling behind her but lost in a rush of imagined wind streaming through the open gates.

By the time she had reached the big house, she had regained, outwardly, her composure, though her heart punched loudly and erratically in her chest, and her vision was blurred. Mary came dashing up the path behind her, but Elspeth ignored her, kept going until she had entered the house and found the safety of the stairs.

At that night’s evening meal she gave Albert the conclusion he had hoped for. For the time being at least, she would stay at Northpoint.

“I think that is the right decision, Ellie. You’ve time and youth enough yet on your side. Together we’ll make Northpoint the great success only you and I and the Captain could achieve. After that, anything is possible.”

Two years at the utmost, he swore. Perhaps another one or two to erect their playhouse. She would be nearing thirty by then she calculated. But they agreed that not a single day would pass in that time that she wouldn’t rehearse, read, discover new work, and
discuss
the arts with the greatest tutor she knew – Albert himself. She would breathe life into a Lady Macbeth and – yes, whyever not! – a Lady of the Lake that would have them tremble in their seats.

She excused herself early and sat by the window of her room. What need did she have of the impoverished theatre world of Bridgetown? Without Nonie, Derrick, Isabella. Without the Ocean View, which Shaw had told her had melted into the sea as if it were made of candy-sticks. Without George. Didn’t she have a captive public here? And one more dependably appreciative would be hard to find. In a new place she would have to begin all over again, perhaps even in the chorus, competing with younger women. She was beyond that now. A woman of real experience and position. The frolics of another Nonie, the rivalry with another Virginie – it would be demeaning to return to that. Albert assured her that her star had not faded, that her time would come. A new palace would be built for her Miranda and her Ophelia; perhaps even here, at Northpoint itself. Once the manufactory was operating, Coak’s plantation would become the centre of economic activity and, on its heels, a Colonial Athens of the North. The Lady of the Lake, Cleopatra, Medea would not travel to their audience, but the
audience
to them!

In the year of the women’s arrival, the estate had had barely fifteen black labourers serving out their indenture, and only a handful of permanent whites. By 1838, the presence of new, young, European blood, together with the spreading fame of Captain Shaw’s
methods
and philosophies, was attracting men from plantations across the island. But still, experienced cutters and craftsmen were too easily tempted to move on whenever they saw a better opportunity.