Redlegs (3 page)

She had heard tales of desperate voyages to the Americas. Reports of mountainous seas and sad, cold drownings. Of disease and slave ships, and pirates and mutinies and death by drinking the sea’s brine. From the girls who would later follow her, she heard more complaint. Cold nights and burning days, the sadness of leaving mother and father and family, a whole world, behind. But when Elspeth Baillie stood on board her ship her hand was raised, not to wave a tearful farewell, but to push that damned, wet,
disappointing
land away from her. If they had made her row the boat
single-handed
to the West Indies, by God she would have done it.

Elspeth Baillie’s journey was not cold, or wet or frightening, and it was not nearly long enough. She learned the wisdom in the old dictum of her father’s, that anticipation is preferable to arrival. (“Ye’re as weel t’ gang as t’ get there.”) The journeys she had been in the habit of making were not ones anyone would wish to prolong – manky drudges through bog and rain, forty miles for one night’s show at the cattle tryst, thirty more to a rabble of drunks in the brawling western ports. Father drinking too much, mother on her last legs, brothers and sisters and people she called aunts and
cousins
bickering and whining in the cold and the mirk and the smir. All for a few moments’ begrudged applause, and not enough money to feed half the Company. Such was her juvenile certainty of the voyage she was undertaking that she dared in her mind to change the words and sense even of Mister Shakespeare’s Tempest: “Nor would I give a thousand furlongs of sea for an acre of barren ground, long heath, brown furze, any thing!”

Lord Coak delivered her from all that. He had seen the colour of her petal, understood she was a genus cultivated in the wrong climate. He unearthed her, set her on the high seas to blow away
her impurities before replanting his precious bloom by the lapping lazuli of the Caribbean Sea.

Miss Elspeth Baillie’s Return to Greenock had the ring of a
strathspey
about it – perhaps one day in the future, when her name was celebrated across the globe, a fiddler or piper would compose the tune, a bard pen words to it, and plans would be made to perform it for her homecoming, though they would wait long enough for she swore never to set foot in this nation again. From the moment she stepped on to the quayside, her schooner sitting majestically in dock, sails billowing, her expedition had all the tumult and drama of a penny romance. There were stevedores and cargo, mainsails and harbour hubbub, and the smell of tar and sea and sweat, and masts stirring the very clouds.

Elspeth re-entered Greenock just a little over three weeks after her performance as Cleopatra and the Shepherd Lass o’ Aberlour, alone in a new dress and crinoline, with a trunkful more – of
pilot-cloth
and silks, with bustles and pelerines, tiered skirts, and satin, button and Balmoral boots to match – waiting for her on the ship Lord Coak had chartered. This time, her voyage would last weeks, enough time to shuck off the old Elspeth and let the seeds of the new one germinate.

At the far side of the world there waited a new theatre for her. Her patron had described the Lyric – an arena as grand as the Lyceum, more modern than anything London itself had to offer, already staffed with writers and designers, actors and seamstresses, all standing ready, waiting for her to add the Promethean spark to set their dramas ablaze. It had been built specially for her – her actual name unknown until now, but she was the one, chosen from all the companies of Europe, fated to be its star.

As if to mark the momentousness of the occasion, a man died moments before her ship broke from land. The captain of the Alba – to Elspeth’s eyes a rude, salt-cured and imperious fellow – was nevertheless a Jacobin and a Democrat. News had just arrived of the July Revolution in France, and the abdication and expulsion of King Charles. Captain Douglas ordered the firing of a salute, and not one shot but two, to celebrate the success of the insurrection. He explained to her that even trade ships must arm themselves
against over-enthusiastic privateering. He had a sailor set the guns high enough to make sure the wadding would clear the sheds, while Elspeth and the captain and crew stood in line along the deck, and the folk on the quay fell silent, eagerly awaiting the blasts. The first volley shot cleanly enough, causing the ship to bounce on the agitated waters, prompting squeals of delight from the land-bound onlookers. The able seaman sponged out the gun, but the wadding must have ignited the second charge prematurely, for the man’s right hand came flying off and sailed over the heads of the crowds like a bird heading south. His leg dropped into the sea a moment before the rest of him hit the water’s surface with a dull, dead thud.

The captain showed no sense of loss. He ordered the sailor’s remains to be fetched from the water and handed over to the port authorities for disposal. He brooked no argument, and the boat set sail before the one o’clock gun sounded. Elspeth felt no sadness. She had never met the dead man and his demise was so sudden and strange that grief was not possible. This, after all, was the port from which the notorious Captain Kidd first set out, and such barbarities were to be expected. Elspeth stood on the deck, wind funnelling upriver and through her hair, like a pirate captain scanning the horizon for adventures to come. The death of the unknown sailor felt like a sacrifice, the end of his days marking new life for her.

She was the only passenger, the captain’s guest on the elegant, fast-moving trading ship, carrying goods back to the Indies, in exchange for American tobacco and sugar and rum, the last of which the deck and the hull still reeked, as though the entire vessel had been tempered in distilled spirit. The mahogany furniture in the captain’s dining room and the ash-wood of her own quarters were impregnated with molasses, the sweet hopeful scent of sugar.

The bonny ship the Alba cut through the waves as if the Atlantic Ocean were silk of the finest denier. It took Elspeth one or two days to find her sea legs, but even the nausea she felt from time to time was welcome, purging the old Elspeth from the new. When, after a brace of days, the last of the British Isles was finally cast adrift, she waved again, her arm like an oar in the air, propelling her beautiful boat and manly crew away, yonder, beyond. For the next few weeks
she would play the part of intrepid sailor – throwing her cap as she would hang it on the horns o’ the moon! She stood on deck as the evening sun melted, and calculated that the Baillie Family Itinerant Players, famous at every fair, assizes and cattle show from Falkirk to Dumfries, were about to take the stage at Perth for the first of three nights’ performance. Not one of them had come to wish her bon voyage. Mr. Baillie had not tried to restrain her – Lord Coak had ensured that her departure was economically indisputable – but he guaranteed to the assembled company that his wayward oldest daughter would become little more than a “weel-travelled,
widespread
hoor”.

But here was Elspeth, upon the wide ocean. A girl drowned for nineteen years by Scotland’s rains that quenched her, its fogs and haar dimmed her, bogs and quags pulling her down. But the sea! – now quiet as a lamb, mild and shy; now restless and pitching, full of business and scurry. By day, singing a gentle lullaby, and on the night following, swirling, tossing, muttering, annoyed, to itself. Then under the evening sun she caught glimpses of its underwear in the deep coral and seaflowers, and she thought of the woman she might become. The shadow of her form rippled on the surface, constantly changing shape. How could a single entity be so many things? Elspeth talked so confidently to the captain and his crew about her future life but, truthfully, she could not picture the world she was heading for, nor her place in it. Possible future Elspeth Baillies were just as multiple as the sea’s moods. Already she was Cleopatra and Ophelia, Queen of the Night and Lady of the Lake. She was Clarinda and the Shepherdess o’ Aberlour.

The crew of the Alba were as perplexed as she was. Each day they waited to see who it was they were dealing with – Anne Bonny, the Irish lady pirate, lady-in-waiting to a Lord of the Realm, fearful Scots lassie far from home. Elspeth herself didn’t know whether she would be douce or voluble, a sea-sick maiden or tomboy
mucker-in
, until she had uttered her first words of the day. She kept the crew, and herself, waiting for three full weeks to discover if she preferred the power of the captain or the more polished first mate. For another month she played merry hell with their expectations and cravings, until finally they landed at Bridgetown.

The image of herself stepping off the ship – greeted by a small party headed by Lord Coak – burned itself indelibly on Elspeth’s mind. It would hang there for the rest of her life, like a portrait or a
daguerreotype
on a wall, seldom acknowledged but always on show. And there was, truly, something photographic about the event: as if time had stopped and only Elspeth moved through a suspended world. Behind her, Captain Douglas and his superior officers stood rooted to the deck. Before her, Coak and some gentlemen and ladies she was yet to know, stared, hands held up in mid-wave, jackets and shawls rippling gently in the breeze. She inched towards them as if giving a portraitist time to capture the scene: the sea beneath the gangplank murmuring but still; little fish, impossibly colourful, ogled her, lulled by the moment. She alone moved, and her
movement
arrested the rest of the world’s.

The spell was broken by the first words she heard in her new land. The General Manager of the Lyric Theatre – a Mr. Philbrick, she discovered later – addressed his lordship, but kept his eyes on Elspeth.

“Your valuation, Albert, is as ever quite faultless.”

She had chosen to disembark in a simple white dress, without parasol or shawl. The correct choice as the scene was already
bursting
with colour. A late afternoon sun, itself a yellow polka-dot in a powerfully blue sky, amplified all the hues below it. The green sea, pink stone harbour, creamy white houses beyond the port. The group come to welcome her was a little patchwork of pink and grey hats, striped skirts and blue knee-breeches. No sight imaginable could be so different from the port she had left behind.

Philbrick, in indigo waistcoat and high starched collar, glowed with practiced wonder at her. She knew his type at once: a
professional
of the theatre who had long since ceased to marvel at any production, actor or performance, but whose function was to smile when required. She would have trouble with him. Not a minute off the boat and the perfect path to success she had daydreamed of across the Atlantic already had an obstacle. Lord Coak stepped away from the lady by his side – older than Elspeth, rouged to hide
a natural plainness – and spoke as he approached. Elspeth thought she heard a note of doubt in his words.

“Miss Baillie more than lives up to my remembrance.”

He looked different to her. The balding head and little pot belly were the same, and he remained the authoritative figure in the group, but he seemed more businesslike, even as he smiled and reached out for her hand, taken up perhaps with the little worries of everyday life. He introduced her to the rest of the party. While she curtsied and smiled at the embellished Miss Constance Sturges, bowed to Mr. Overton and his wife. The formalities completed, the party walked in twos and threes towards carriages waiting for them. Mrs. Overton and her sister took up each side of the
newcomer
; Coak fell in behind and spoke quietly to Philbrick. Elspeth recounted tales of her journey to Mrs. Overton and Miss Sturges. She was startled by her own accent, in contrast to the other ladies’ plainer English, stabbed though it was with a hint of a more
metallic
, cruder sound. Elspeth liked the difference. Her own voice sounded clear and vivacious – soft watery vowels running over the sharp pebbles of consonants.

“Frightening? Not at all! A wee bit exciting at times, yes. But, oh, when you’re alone on deck with nothing but sky and sea, you’re mistress of the entire world. Especially with a dram of rum in you.”

She made only limited use of Scots words, but gave her Western Scots free reign. They entered the carriages, and the drivers were instructed to make for the Overtons’ – not, she noted, the
residence
of Lord Coak. The dust they kicked up rained back down in ochres and reds like fireworks. The air was warm, even at this late hour. The houses they passed gleamed white and imposing, as if they would be hot to the touch. Most astonishing of all was the encroaching night’s music.

“Frogs,” laughed Constance Sturges, seeing Elspeth listen with wonder. “They sing all night long. In no time you won’t even notice them.”

“And cicadas,” said Mrs. Overton, with a shudder. Elspeth had never heard of a cicada, but could not believe anything terrible could make such a sweet sound or be the cause of such a shudder.
At the impromptu celebration organised in her honour at Teddy Overton’s town house, everyone scurried around her.