Redlegs (28 page)

“My heart play’d duntie, duntie O

an’ ceremony laid aside

I fairly fun’ her cuntie O!”

Bathsheba, at the back of the room, laid down the apron her mother had given her, and began to undo the buttons on her shawl.
It took a moment for Nan to notice but when she did, she let the dishes she was stacking drop back on the table and rushed to her. No one noticed, for Bessy had begun yet another song – “Duncan he cam here again” – and twelve voices joined in:

“Ha ha, the girdin’ o’ it!”

Their hair wet with sweat, necks bare and shoulders shining with steam from the pots and heat from the ovens, they worked to a quick rhythm. With all the banging of ladles and slamming of oven doors, singing and running from one side of the kitchen to another, no one saw or heard the struggle going on between Nan and her daughter who continued to loosen her shawl.

“He kissed my butt, he kissed my ben

He banged his thing against my wame….”

Nan stood in front of Bathsheba, still pleading with her, her words lost in the din, and holding the now discarded shawl in front of her. But the daughter ignored her mother, and stepped out from behind long woollen mantle.

“And, wow, I got the girdin’ o’ it!”

The entire crew shouted out the final line and the room was full of the squeal of laughter. But only for a moment. One by one, the women felt the merriment die on their lips. They stepped back from Bathsheba and stared, astonished.

The girl stood before them in Elspeth’s dress – no more than a petticoat, as translucent as a wisp of summer cloud, chosen by George Lisle for what it would reveal, not conceal. The women were struck dumb, not because of the girl’s near nakedness – with the sweat pasting their own shifts to swollen bellies and heavy breasts, they were every bit as exposed as she – but at the curious pattern on the Bathsheba’s skin.

All their lives they had been told it was Bathsheba’s sensitive
fairness
that obliged her to wear clothes covering nearly every part of her. And indeed those parts of her skin that were white had the delicate hue of fresh-plucked lemon. Now they saw the truth. Across her right shoulder, like the leather strap of a carrying-basket, ran a deep black stain. It continued widening down to her breast, over most of her belly, covering her entire left thigh.

Bathsheba held her head up, looking directly ahead, and slowly turned her back to them. The same discolouring, beginning in a light brown but darkening as it drew out, descended from the small of her back across her waist, most of her backside smeared with it. For a moment, the women thought the pattern was on Lady Elspeth’s gossamer dress. Perhaps the girl was confessing to ruining it.

“What happened?” Blind Mary broke the silence.

Susan Millar replied that Bathsheba was half nigger.

“Since when?” replied Mary, staring through half-dead eyes.

Between them all, the women had seen or heard of every kind of unnatural birthings – white daughters with pronounced negro features, tightly curled hair set in unblemished skin, or coal-
coloured
sons with shocks of blond hair. Fully black offspring born to white couples, babes mottled and daubed in various ways. Few of these children had survived. Bairns with pronounced birthmarks had them treated with coconut milk and akkie juice, often
successfully
. Toddlers with hair deemed too woolly were shaved and their scalps bathed in a shampoo of seaweed, aloe and birch-bark; in a passable percentage the hair grew back in a little straighter. Jenny Campbell was one of the few who rejected all advice and ran off with her lover – a freed slave named Joshua – to Speightstown, and never made contact with the estate again, and was never spoken of.

Bathsheba turned and got on with stirring a pot. The women’s stares soon turned from Bathsheba to Nan. Nan of all people – daughter of Mary Miller, with Diana Lady Elspeth’s closest
associate
– had lain with a blackie and kept the debauchery secret all these years! There were a thousand questions to be asked. Was Lady Elspeth herself a co-conspirator? Did Shaw and Lord Coak know? Everyone was too startled to voice the questions. What explanation, if any, had been offered to Bathsheba herself? Who was the father?

“All of you kenned and liked him,” said Nan, unable to control the quiver in her voice.

“Did he force himself ’pon ye?”

“He did not.”

She said she wished she had had the courage to stand by him and present their child to the world as a wedded couple. “But I seen what happen to ither women and their bairns. My lass might never have been born, or lived past weaning. Her faither tried to get me to fly, but we couldn’t think where we might go. He agreed to keep his silence and watched his chile grow from nearhand but in secret.”

Nan spoke quietly, as if she were talking to herself and not to fifteen gawking women. Bathsheba’s father, she said, never
relinquished
hope that she and their daughter might one day leave with him and start their lives anew. But Nan couldn’t leave the people she had grown up with and loved.

“Ye could hae talked wi’ us afore the birthing,” came a voice from amongst the women.

“She spoke to me.”

All eyes turned now to Diana Moore. Diana – the midwife who ministered potions to stained babies, who mixed concoctions that brought on miscarriages and stillbirths – an abettor to this most unexpected of crimes! She who had worked so closely with Captain Shaw to ensure the health, vitality and purity of Roseneythe; the champion of Shaw’s “Method”. The enforcer of rules to ensure there’d be offspring aplenty of a strong, white, Christian ilk. The woman who spent her life proselytising on behalf of the factor’s ideology, who had trumpeted Bathsheba’s purity of body, mind and soul, since the very night the babe was born.

“’Twas a long confinement and painful, during which time Nan influenced me with her arguments. I argued back, saying that, no matter the rights or wrongs of the thing, such a large untruth wasn’t possible to hide. Nan swore it was only for a few months until she decided what to do. You’ll all remember it was rainy the night Bathsheba was born and the few of you who came near I shooed away. The lass made her way into the world and gave a good healthy scream. She had the face of one of God’s favoured angels. When I saw the unfortunate aspect of the rest of her, and Nan’s frail state of mind, I agreed to keep the secret for the duration of one month.”

That month came and went and soon even Diana became
convinced
that their trespass might go undetected. “The child entered my heart in some way.”

Nan looked over at Diana, with tears in her eyes. “I’ve thanked you ever’ day in my prayers syne that night, Diana Moore.”

Bessy Riddoch stepped forward.

“Ye never tholed my dochter’s bairn sae kindly, Diana Moore.” Rhona Douglas, seldom heard to speak, did so now: “Nor my ain wee boy.”

“Nor my grandbabby’s neither, Mistress.”

Almost half the women stared at her, anger and hurt aching in their look. Diana looked around them all, and tried to keep her voice steady. So many families she had tried to help – and never sure her assistance was welcome, beneficial or even Christian. Nan drew the looks of the women away from the ashen-faced midwife.

“I was aye frightened by Captain Shaw,” she said. “He only has tae look at me, pass my door, glance o’er at me through the cane, and my heart’d tremble near to stopping.”

She looked around the assembled women. Susan Miller and Jean Malcolm’s faces hardened. Mary’s blind eyes moistened. A few other women looked away, or kept peering at Nan as if some
explanation
of her words could be found in the lines of her face or the nervous movement of her hands.

In the excitement of the evening and the extra alcohol provided by Shaw, the women had forgotten to bolt the door behind them in the customary manner. No one had noticed the door opening, and it was only when Nan proclaimed again that, more than her fear of Captain Shaw, what had kept her at home was her love for all those present, and her respect for Lady Elspeth, that a little gasp was heard. Everyone turned to see Elspeth herself standing there.

All except Bessy who kept her glare on Diana. “Perhaps ye’ll inform us now, Mistress Moore, where ye’ve planked the remains of our babbies?”

There was a pause long enough to hear footsteps coming slowly towards the door. Dogged, insistent steps. Nan quickly threw the shawl over her daughter’s shoulders. Shaw entered without
knocking.

“What?” he glared at them, his eyes shifting, suspicious and scared. “What secret y’all keepin’ here?”

Bathsheba stepped out from behind Nan and spoke out
confidently
. “Ent no secret here, Captain.”

Shaw stood a few steps in from the open door. Behind him, Nathanial and Junior Wycombe, and several more of Shaw’s cohort, stared into the kitchen. Bathsheba in her muslin shift stood in the centre, still as a statue. Elspeth was hidden behind the open door,
watching
, transfixed. She had not understood anything since stepping into the kitchen. The women angry when she expected them to be gay; their backs to stove and pots when they should have been working over them. She heard the words they said but couldn’t understand them. Least of all could she make sense of Bathsheba. How different she looked! Not only the peculiar marks on her dress or skin, but the look on her face. She had seen that look before. Last night, as the girl loosened her neck ties in front of Albert.

“Jesus. Look at the state o’ yuh,” the Captain managed at last.

Elspeth saw him lean towards Bathsheba as though his feet were stuck fast to the floor.

“Away to your house. Wait there for me.” He turned to her mother and grandmother, each holding the other’s arm. “You two take her back and…’ He never finished his sentence. Bathsheba interrupted him – a thing not known in nearly forty years of exile.

“I am leaving. With Gideón Brazos and Golondrina Segunda.”

“Leaving?” Shaw repeated, as if it were a word in a foreign language.

“Nan and Mary are coming with me.” Her mother and
grandmother
showed no reaction to the statement. Bathsheba looked around the room: at Margaret Lloyd and Sarah and Mary Alexander. “Who else will come with us?” Her eyes turned to Jean MacNeill. Jean Homes. Young Janet Alexander who cowered near Elspeth by the door.

Moira Campbell kept her head hung low. Mary Fairweather blanched and stared back at her. Eliza and Rhona screwed up their eyes, the better to understand her. Susan and Bess looked at one
another. Bathsheba stared into blind Mary’s eyes.

“Nobody’s going anywhere except you to your house,” said the factor quietly. Then he turned and gave out a bellow that no one flinched at, except Elspeth. “Nathanial!”

Elspeth heard movement in the room behind her as Nathanial Wycombe made his way through the bodies there, all standing now in a silent ovation. She watched Shaw turn his head back round, swivelling on his neck, like a puppet’s.

“Brazos?” he asked Bathsheba in a tone of mild interest. “You’re fucking wi’ the Cuban slave?”

“Gideón is my husband.”

Then Elspeth felt it: a spasm in her innards. The spear again. She saw her chosen child stained and soiled. Corrupt. Not a
smidgeon
of George in her after all. Just another peasant; the bidie-in of a stupid, uncultured half-caste. Daughter of some black unknown creature.

“Hoor,” she said softly, and no one answered. Nobody moved. Nobody spoke.

“Elspeth,” Bathsheba finally pleaded. “Please.”

Elspeth broke the stare between them, and looked to Captain Shaw. And she spoke again – in the stage whisper she had perfected for Cleopatra’s speech, so that even the back pews would feel their weight.

“Punish them,” she said.

For forty years Elspeth Baillie had not put foot outside the plantation gates; in her mind the rest of the island was still a place devastated by rain and wind and a black, angry sun. For all she knew the ground was still exploding, had never stopped exploding. The western seas still stretching out trying to snatch at her. Now the storm had punctured Roseneythe itself. There was no George this time to carry her to safety; no Henry to place her out of danger on a shelf like a child’s doll.

Elspeth hardly knew Brazos. He was one of Shaw’s and her
husband
’s workers. She must leave them to deal with him as they saw fit. She was the last to leave the house. “All of you loyal to this estate now has a duty to perform.” She heard, but couldn’t see, Captain Shaw. There were puddles of dim light spattered around – men with lamps, flambeaux staved into the ground. Several circled the centre of the action: naked flames placed around Brazos, where men surrounded him doing something with quiet concentration.

Shaw stepped into view, his face ghostly in the glaur. He walked amongst the shadows, handing out birch-twigs, like palms at Easter. He went on talking – about the need to protect their plantation, their daughters and their way of life. He walked casually back to Brazos and the men who had Elspeth now saw had been pinning his arms and feet to the staves which others pounded into the ground. Shaw was left with the last cane in his hand. He brought it down viciously on the prisoner’s back.

Other men followed his lead and Elspeth flinched at what she saw – the slow rhythmic slash of canes – the earnest, deliberate torturing of a silent man – yet she urged them on; could hear her own voice hissing between taut lips. Beat him. Beat them all. If the tormentors had turned on each other, if the shadows around her
had leapt into action, attacked one another, mayhem breaking out, it would have been right and fitting. Elspeth longed for crescendo.

Elspeth watched migrant fieldhands, militia men and ex-slaves beat the factory foreman, sluggishly as if their limbs were being worked by some slow invisible machine. Around her in the dark, staring towards the side of the bluff where the strange event was taking place, stood shadows whose faces she couldn’t make out. No one raised a voice in complaint. Nathanial Wycombe, she thought, was there, and his son Junior. Perhaps the pleasant young James Baxter. There were women too, following their factor’s lead. They stepped up, well-practised in the art of chopping cane, the report of their blows echoing a moment after their strike. Her fellow
onlookers
stood as if cast in stone, spellbound, arms and hands petrified in the last movement they had been conscious of making.

The thrashing didn’t last long. Shaw held up his hand and the beaters stopped beating. The last to stop was a free black man who had been on the plantation since before Elspeth’s time, a man she’d barely noticed before. A man like Henry, serenely carrying out his duty. Shaw had to remove the rod from his hand. He gave up his weapon indifferently. Shaw leaned over Brazos and spoke softly to him. Then he straightened up and with a sudden yell, louder and more startling than any of the blows, called out, “Bathsheba Miller!”

No one looked up when Bathsheba’s cries came from
somewhere
behind in the dark. Bathsheba was forced forward, and screamed when she saw Gideón. Shaw said some words which only those closest to the scene could hear. One of the men who held Bathsheba pushed her head up, forcing her to look to her Captain, as he stepped one leg over Brazos’ body so that he was straddling the captive between his feet.

“There is a war raging in the heavens, and we each have our part to play on earth!”

As he spoke he loosened the buckles of his braces, like a man preparing to fight hand to hand with a foe. Perhaps that was what was expected of the two men: bare-fisted, bare-chested combat, a direct settling of their quarrel. Shaw spoke again, pulling the braces from his shoulders. “The Enemy was always there to beguile and
sully us. This is a great day! He has shown his face, and now we can demonstrate our contempt for him.”

He sank to his knees, Gideón still unmoving below him. Elspeth could not fathom what Shaw was doing. He looked like a man squatting lazily in the middle of a quiet afternoon. One of his cohorts next to him untied the scarf he wore around his neck, and handed it to his Captain.

“This man here is a slave. Where he comes from the old
disciplines
still apply. So we castigate him in the old manner.”

Shaw made some motion and heads in front of Elspeth craned to see what was happening, obstructing her view. He gave out a low grunt, then a yelp. Bathsheba screamed; a general gasp went up. When the bodies before her shuffled again, she saw Shaw, still in his shirt but his trews at his ankles, teetering over Gideón and straining. Then the smell of massacuite hit her; the bitter
saccharine
smell of the dross left after the third pressing; the stench of Shaw refined and distilled to its sickliest. She knew what he had done. She had heard of the punishment before, a common penalty performed by slaver on slave that she had thought was only hearsay. Shaw took his scarf and, like a parent tending a child, cleaned his victim’s face.

“What’s he doing?” she heard Martha Glover, close by, ask.

A young woman’s voice responded: “Tying the gravat roun’ his mout’.”

“Why?”

“So the nigger mus’ swallow the shite.”

Shaw stepped off the wriggling, thrusting Brazos and gestured to the tall ex-slave who had undertaken his beating duties so
diligently
. As he stepped forward, Bathsheba’s captors pushed her to the ground. One of them held her head while the other forced open her jaw. Shaw himself undid the buckles on the black fieldhand’s braces. It took the briefest of moments for the crowd to understand what was about to happen. One half moved swiftly to prevent the sacrilege, and the other to ensure its success.

The commotion thrilled Elspeth. The looming battle – one group squaring up to another, the insults, the leery dance that precedes a clash – sparked a nostalgia in her. The penny-gaffs and
inns of Glasgow and Dundee, the brawling lawlessness – they had always roused her. She used to push against her mother and father as they pulled her away. She listened again now to oaths and curses, watched faces contorted with rage and spite; followed the
trajectory
of missiles flying over heads, sticks jabbing. The thunder. That deep and dreadful organ-pipe.

As with those dogfights and stouries of old, the posturing resulted in very little. A punch was thrown and parried. Lines of women and men stepped forward, their opposite number fell back. The slurs and affronts grew fiercer as the likelihood of violence receded. It took a goodly time for both factions to tire and wane of their
feigning
and threatening, disengage one from the other and open up between them an area of neutral ground. Bathsheba’s enemies had lost her to her supporters, and therefore the punishment Shaw had intended remained undelivered. His loyal fieldhand stood, braces loosened, trews hanging loose around his thighs.

Bathsheba stepped past him, and wasn’t obstructed. She moved towards Golondrina Segunda who stood at the head of her
supporters
. A man stepped out from behind them, walked over to Gideón and untied him. Gideón got up to his feet, but fell immediately back on his knees, vomiting. Elspeth could not make out more of the identities of either group. All she knew was that Roseneythe had been divided roughly in half, Shaw’s group having perhaps the slight majority. He and Golondrina were shouting accusations and blasphemies, the factor’s sharp consonants cutting through the Cuban woman’s deep, dense vowels, each exhorting the other to leave Roseneythe and never return.

“Tek yuh black-hearted idiocy away from us – before I set the Yeomanry on yuh.”

“Ent no law here we breaked. You the criminal, cabrón.”

In the penumbra between the bluff and the figs, where only the edges of light from flames and lamps fell, a third group was
forming
. People aligning themselves with neither Shaw nor the Negress. Five elderly women – blind Mary, fidgeting and nervous, unsure of what was happening; Martha Turner, the tall woman who had been standing by Elspeth’s side before the feud had broken out; Moira Campbell, staring at her grandson who stood with Shaw’s
company; and, at the edge of the little group, Diana Moore. Again Shaw ordered the rebels to pack up and be gone by morning. Moira Riddoch spoke up for them, saying that they were the residents of Roseneythe; that Captain Shaw was no more than a hired hand. He and his cronies were the ones who must be gone before dawn. This exchange seemed to clarify matters for old Mary, who stepped away from Diana and followed the sound of Moira’s voice to stand between her and Bathsheba.

Elspeth heard a scraping noise behind her, and turned to see Albert shuffling out onto the porch. He had propped himself between two chairs, leaning heavily on their backs, dragging their legs as improvised walking sticks. The fighting and the smoke from the torches had smudged everyone out in the yard, but Lord Coak was still spruce from the concert. Shaw broke away from his clan and marched towards the house until he stood next to Elspeth and in front of Coak. He was about to speak when the old man held up his hand to stop him. Coak announced that he had heard what had been happening. He spoke in as loud a voice as he could muster, but his thin words snapped in the open air like falling twigs.

“Captain Shaw is my agent and factor. We all owe to him a great deal. His judgement has been sound all the long years he has devoted to the improvement of this plantation and our lives.”

Those who disobeyed his superintendency, the planter said, could not remain at Roseneythe. Shaw nodded his gratitude, and began to move off in the direction of his house – the last word on the schism having been uttered. The immediate threat to Bathsheba was over. Coak instructed everyone to return to their houses, too, and think deeply on the decision before them. Regardless of what had happened tonight, there was still a home on his estate for those who submitted to the Captain’s authority and his own. There might even be a way for them to parley their differences and come to an accord.

But Bathsheba did not wait for him to finish. She, too, walked up to the porch, then turned her back on Coak to address the
company
. The sight of such a young woman – elegant gown and pretty shawl ragged and torn by ruffians – presuming to hold forth in front of the entire clan, stopped Shaw in his tracks. Coak attempted
to speak over her, but she easily drowned out his voice. “There’s no home for anyone here. And there’s no going home from here. You’ve seen this stinking wretch do his worst. Now it’s over.”

Shaw shouted back that the girl was a whore and half a nigger – she had no right to address anyone. She was the concubine of a Cuban quadroon, the crony of a black witch. He moved towards her, but Bathsheba didn’t flinch as he made to rip away the dress that barely covered the secret of her body. So much younger, defter and quicker than he, she merely stepped aside. Nan, however, afraid he would repeat his attack, ran forwards, shouting.

“Dinna lay one finger on her!”

Nan screamed that Shaw was evil. The de’il himself. Other voices joined her, denouncing the Captain. Shaw yelled back that their mouths were as full of shite as Gideón Brazos’.

“Yuh all have a choice to make. Either follow idiot blacks and half-breeds and traitors, or remain loyal servants of the Crown and Roseneythe.”

Bathsheba spoke again. “There is no Roseneythe. There is no home. Not here. Out there, there’s a whole world.”

“Follow the bitch if you’re dolts. Those that do – leave at first light and follow the road of vagrancy and confusion. The nigger whore and her dupes’ll lead ya’ll into chaos. But if you or your chillen wish to see the fruits of our work, reject this band of mutineers!”

Bathsheba waited until he had finished. When she raised her hand to brush back the hair that fell and curled over her face, the black markings on her skin glowed on her underarm in the
tapering
torchlight. “Stay here and you’ll never see anywhere you can call home. This plantation will be your prison. Shaw and Coak and those that follow them will work you till you drop, and keep you mistrusting one another. You’ve seen tonight what to expect of our bold captain.”

She turned and held her hand out to Gideón, standing with her band of followers, head hung in shame, shaking with revulsion. “Down that drive and beyond those gates there are people like us. More and more every day.” Gideón, with the help of Golondrina and Nan, came over to her side. She took his head in her hands and kissed his forehead. “Mary. Sarah. Robert. Janet. Bill. Martha. We
haven’t any estate, or money, not even plans. But we can find lives for ourselves somewhere beyond those gates.”

One by one her supporters came and stood behind her. Chastity Murray. Erasmus Lloyd. Jack Edmondson. The young Mary Fairweather. Even some of the fieldhands who had not been long at Roseneythe dropped their sticks and lined up behind Bathsheba, Gideón, Nan and Golondrina. Elspeth Johnstone, trembling in fear. Jean MacNeill’s entire family, and Mary Alexander’s; the
illegitimate
son of Martha Glover. Robert Butcher, Diana’s husband.

Susan Millar walked up to this newly enlarged group, looked directly into Bathsheba’s face, and spat on the ground. She left and stood by Shaw’s side. Margaret Lloyd, stumbling with drink, took her place next to her. The diligent black man who had beaten Gideón went and stood behind them. The Wycombes – father and son – were already in place. Mary Murray shuffled over, hiding
herself
behind a group of militia men and fieldhands loyal to Shaw. Bessy Riddoch took a hold of her Captain’s arm. Her daughter, Emma, standing by Golondrina, stared at her as if she had seen her mother for the first time. Bess looked to her, appealing, and said, loud enough for Diana Moore and everyone else to hear:

“Some of us want to bide by the side of our stolen chillen.”