Redlegs (30 page)

The next morning she got up and dressed in front of the mirror. Tarnished and skewed as it was, its silvering faded, Elspeth
reckoned
she could still recognise the shape she remembered. Her belly had distended, but only a little. Her breasts hung only marginally lower than they had done. The autumn leaf of her sex had the first frostings of a Galloway November. Her shoulders – though it was hard to tell in the bulging reflection – appeared straight enough. The hair on her head matched her crotch, its colour untouched by the cochineal and seaweed dyes other women of her age needed. She washed herself, dressed, put on a brocade coat, picked up a bundle of the letters she had taken the night before, went
downstairs
, and walked down the driveway beyond the porch.

She reckoned it could be no later than five o’clock of the
morning
. No one had seen her leave. A fresh wind blew off the sea. The ground was damp underfoot. She was glad she’d had the sense to put on the coat and her nut-brown boots. She needed to walk. That was all she knew.

Putting one foot after another, not thinking of where she might be bound, she kept at first to the path curling beneath its umbrella of jacarandas. As she went, rhythmically, the letters secured in an inside pocket of her coat, she looked over towards the fig trees which she now knew were secretly tunnelling their way under the entire estate. Coming up the bluff, she stopped and looked out to sea. It was a fresh morning. The waves churning up the surface; a strong sea-breeze keening in and long, billowing clouds scudding fast overhead. Rain in the air, snell, like old memories.

Just over the brow of the hill a smaller, coarser path left of the main one headed downwards, roughly towards the bay below. From her bedroom window she had often seen Diana disappear over
the hill and, with only her head visible for a few seconds more, turn right. This must be the path she took. Elspeth was in no rush; detours and bylanes were welcome. Earlier than she expected to she felt the splash of sea-spray on her face and hands. There was a fair old wind coming off that ocean this morning. Getting nearer still the spray became colder, its drops bigger. More like smir than sea-mist. The path became ever more irregular and hard to
negotiate
even in those sturdy boots. Once or twice she went over on an ankle, or lodged her toe in a hollow. As she approached its end, the path coming to a halt at the rocky side of the inlet, she discovered another even smaller track. Not really a track at all, just a ragged line where feet, or perhaps wildlife, had left a mark. She ventured a little up it, her boots already soaked through. Still it was a path, of sorts, and she was in no hurry.

There must have been a high tide last night. Elspeth knew
nothing
of such things, though she had, from time to time, seen the sea, from her window, come in further than usual. That must be why the spray was so cold. And why, too, the ground so gouged up and
muddied
. Among the guddle of sand and mud and wet, loose earth, her eye caught a little mound of white. She took one more step. Skulls and bones. Muddied and broken, lying next to coconut husks and plump, burst breadfruit. Scores of bones; little skulls in the glaur. Diana Moore and Shaw’s secret graveyard. She was aware only of the thud of the tide and the hiss of the wind. Then the ground around her feet began to whiten. She felt the smir turning harder, striking her skin like hailstones.

She stared into the open grave. The sea-spray and drizzle played in front of her eyes like moving shadows; like dew rising from damp heath. They curled around in the ditch and she thought she could see blank faces, wide empty eyes, glimmering through the mist and puddles, like fog trapped between Scottish hills. Little hands. Ripping themselves one by one from their tomb into the dull air. Crying out into the ocean and dissolving into the morning haze.

The distance from Roseneythe to Bridgetown, she had heard say, is over twenty miles. How long had it taken her to walk that distance, coming in the other direction? She had never known. In her ruined
boots, paper scratching at her from inside her coat, she climbed back up the track and took whichever road presented itself to her. Did she have to circumvallate the entire island or cut through its centre? No matter: she was a winter damson-leaf, fluttering red and ruddy on the breeze. She walked away from Roseneythe every bit as insensible as she had walked once to Northpoint. The road below her feet, and the neighbourhoods and countryside around, trundled past unnoticed. She combatted the pain in her feet, the leadenness of her step, by trying to calculate her age. No calculus, however, could lead her to an outcome of under sixty. She walked for no more than what she judged half an hour at a time, resting against trees, or sitting on stones, between whiles.

The air warmed under the risen sun and lightened her footsteps. She was out beyond the gates before she had realised it. On a solid, hard road and climbing slowly up a broader, gentler hill she looked down again at the sea, much further below now. The sea had calmed itself. Looking inland, there were fields and houses and woods on all sides. Barbados appeared huge. In her mind she had thought there was nothing, just Roseneythe and Bridgetown, connected by a ghostly thread of road, strung over a clutter of destruction. But the cane was green, nodding sympathetically in the breeze; the houses were solid, safe. Little roads led off into mysterious lives. Thawed now, her limbs looser from the exercise, her spirits rose, and she walked proudly, draped in her red ensign. She saw other travellers along the way, surfacing to view like they were emerging from the sea. Blacks, in the main, and shades of brown. At each meeting agreement was quickly reached as to what a wonderful morning it was turning out after all. She accelerated her pace, coming down through a place signed Greenridge, past Archer’s Bay and Stroud Point. When she was tired or hungry she knocked on doors and asked for food and drink. As often as not she was offered both. Poor people, quiet people or talkative; some white, most black, nearly everyone opened their doors to the mad old woman in red, in too heavy a coat, free of baggage for a journey.

As she sauntered down around the west coast, by Nesfield and Boscobelle, then back to Fustic and Littlegood Harbour, she recited to herself:

“Harp of the North! that mouldering long hast hung

On the witch-elm that shades Saint Fillan’s spring!”

Or sang: “I’m twa-gae-ups for ae gae-down

John Anderson, my jo!”

She was offered lifts – to the next town, to the city itself – on the backs of carts, in white men’s fancy carriages, on the tops of piles of beetroot – but refused them all. She spent two nights sitting,
sleeping
under fulsome trees, and one night accepting the hospitality of strangers.

From them and from wayfarers whom she fell in with along the road, Elspeth heard different views on abolition and emancipation; different memories to Shaw’s of slave revolts. As a woman alone, never offering any explanation for her travels, she was offered plenty of advice and warnings. Be careful down by St. Philip’s – there’s been disturbances there. Folks exchanged news and blather. A family called Edmondson set up farm not so long back just over there. A Miss McNeil is offering piano lessons in Baxter’s Road – and cheap too. Some fella called Prescod was radicalising the whole island. If she’s passing she should stop in at Campbell’s rumshop just by Speightstown. Had she heard there was a lady now writing for
The Liberal
newspaper? Jean Alexander it says here, in black and white. They say she’s from abroad. “An’ what I say to that is, higher monkey climb, the mo’ she show tail.” Elspeth harkened to none of them, remembering her father’s advice: “Dinna put your shovel in if you’ve nae dirt tae lift.”

When she was finally left in peace Elspeth spoke – the sun plunging into the sea, dousing its fire – to George. She asked him – directly, business-like – if he really would have married her? If he would have thrown away his fortune and his name, for love. There was never any answer. She never expected one. George would not have wedded her. Better, he’d have set her up in a fine house in Garrison. She would have pursued her career – with his help instead of Albert’s. She would have received her lover on clandestine visits and laughed at his stuffy life in St. Michael, at his plain and
tiresome
, gentle-born wife, while she gadded about Bridgetown, took trips to the theatrical cities of the New World. She would have had other lovers. And still, despite it all, she would have ended up
attired in red, walking somewhere. More away than towards.

In the morning, a young girl – a quadroon, Elspeth reckoned – companioned her a bit of the road, talking incessantly. About her work as a domestic, the good plantations and the bad. Halfway through her ramblings Elspeth became aware that she was telling the tale of a man from a town called Castries who told of another man, from Barbados, who had arrived in an island called St. Lucia. “They say he had two wives,” the coloured girl blethered, “one black, one white, and a family of one girl, two boys, and a
babein-arms
.” Elspeth had no idea why the girl started telling this story – she didn’t seem to care if it interested Elspeth or not. She only looked to Elspeth when she came to the point of her story. “The white wife, well the fella from Castries say he saw her suckle the babby.” And here the girl cupped her breasts and her laughter pealed through the morning air. “Yuh know what she had? One white pap and one black.”

At Freshwater Bay she had her first glimpse of Bridgetown – just a few roofs and spires from atop a little incline. It had not been her intended destination but she supposed, like Rome, all roads lead to Bridgetown. There was a main road that would take her directly to the heart of the city. But there was a smaller one that seemed to hug the coast but must surely take her to town eventually. She felt the papers in her pocket and remembered that her expedition did have a purpose.

She took the seaward road, looking out at the water the Alba had once slipped through. When she thought she was within an hour of town she sat down with mangoes she had picked up from the ground and a loaf of bread a stranger had gifted her, and took out the letters that had curled and dampened next to her breast.

Elspeth Baillie recognised nothing of her city of dreams.

This must be the sea she frolicked in with Virginie and Isabella and Derrick and George. Across its waves, beyond the corpse of a sailor sacrificed for her, lay Greenock and mountains and
moorland
, and perhaps yet still, a troupe of Family Players pinching a living.

Somewhere, over there, the Ocean View had stood. The
gamblers
would still be gambling in one of the newer establishments of the foreign city in front of her that veiled the old one she had known. Where the Lyric had stood, or Savannah had been, she had no clue. Nonie’s lodgings were at the back of the town, furthest from the coast, but the streets laid out before her made no sense. She had paid so little attention to the town that should have been her home, had taken no notice of what ships were in the port and how the buildings were or the lie of the land. But she remembered the heat in the air, the power of the light, and how the sun prickled gently on her cheeks, unhunching her.