Redlegs (9 page)

“Don’t ye have a hame t’ gang to, my jo?”

The rustic talk was meant to cover her anxiety – after all, their love-vocabulary included the bawdiest of vulgar Scots. Words which young George Lisle was quick to learn. But immediately she had done so, she feared that, rather than impress him with her
talented
mimicry, she had shown her true, low-born self. George did not appear to notice. He simply shrugged and said, “They’re used to me being out all night.”

The look on her face was enough to betray an additional
anxiety
– but George assured her, between caresses, that his absences had not been with other women, but those nights carousing and gambling at the Ocean View. They ate the last of the fruit the maids had left for them, feeding one another papaya, mango and orange, sharing the escaping juices.

Then, quite literally out of the blue – there was not a rain cloud in the sky that they could see, only wisps of scarlet trailing high in the sky – it began to rain. After the intense, oppressive heat of the long day, the shower was like a blessing, as if the heavens were reassuring them that their sin – if sin it was – was being washed away. They leaned out of the window and let the water fall on their hair and cool their skin. The coconut and banana trees swayed and bowed outside in the grounds, and as the shower became heavier, the drops began to fall fast, straight as a die, a curtain of sparkling steel, dense as mail, severing them from the rest of the world. Elspeth prayed that the weather would imprison them, if not
forever
, then at least up to the last moment before her heralded entrée at the Lyric theatre. The wind rose, and fell, then built again. The sun had all but dropped into the ocean, blood-red and surrounded by a halo of black. George had never witnessed this particular
pattern
of natural events before.

“You have the profoundest effect upon the world, Ellie. To change me was a good trick – but to change the aspect of the sun itself!”

“Perhaps there’s a real storm brewing.”

“Then let it last for a century!”

It was unwise for George to take to the road, and they were fated to spend a second night together. The constant low grumbling of thunder grew steadily more ferocious. George strained to peer out the window, looking south along the coast.

“Perhaps the storm’s on the other side of the island.”

They dressed – enough for modesty – and Elspeth called out for one of the servants. Dainty told them that a storm was indeed raging, and not so very far from them. Housemaids of the Overtons had just returned from town, having seen the wildness of the sea playing havoc with ships at Carlisle Bay.

By nightfall, the rain had abated but the winds were worse. They went back to bed and he cradled her in his arms, looked deeply and long into her eyes, and told her he loved her. He said it with such sadness, as if he knew the loss implicit in his words. And she believed him; began to feel that perhaps, she too, was capable of real love for this man. She lay awake hours into the night listening to the trees being blown about, and her gentleman’s soft, regular, breaths. She rehearsed in her head the Lady of the Lake for
tomorrow’s
first performance, while stroking her lover’s brow.

“Each purple peak, each flinty spire,

Was bathed in floods of living fire.

But not a setting beam could glow

Within the dark ravines below…”

This storm was no accident. Like the sailor sacrificed at her departure, here was a further sign of things to come. The sea whipped itself into a frenzy and Elspeth shivered with delight at the sweeping away of the past, and the advent of further pleasures and accolades to come.

She awoke to the shaking of the stone around her; opened her eyes to see a turret of the great mansion drop outside her window,
crumbling
like a sugar column. It exploded somewhere unseen below a moment later, a grey dense cloud rising in its wake. George jumped up with a shout, stared in amazement first at the night outside – the gale howling, timbers groaning – and then at her. The floor beneath them rose up, as if a beast below were breaking the surface of the sea, tossing a boat a fraction of its size out of its way.

He cried, “Jesus!” and Elspeth flinched at the blasphemy. Cursed herself for their many sins that had brought hell’s hand from out of the depths.

George took hold of her and marched her – the two of them near naked – through the bedroom door, down the shuddering stairs, out into the fury of the night. He drove her on through the
gardens
. Where to, she couldn’t imagine. Rain like she had never seen before spewed from the sky. Long freezing spears hurled by some demented spirit. The noise of the wind: stone cracking, wood
buckling
. Figures darting here and there, silhouettes from other broken wings of the house flying past, all in such confusion that Elspeth could make no sense of anything. By the time they had put a little distance between themselves and the house, half of it had been torn away, brick and plaster dissolving in floodwaters. They waded through slough and mud where the garden had been only hours before.

George shouted angrily at her, “Get a move on!” As if the storm were of her making. A trap to lead him to his death.

Then, abruptly, the storm stalled. Simply stopped, like a candle blown out. Not a bird sang, nor a tree moved. The silhouettes faded into the night, falling stones poised mid-air, and trees, half-felled,
swayed, as if wondering what force had bent them into this
position
. The world holding its breath, petrified at the sky’s hatred. She saw then where George was leading her, and she tried to pull back. He hauled her towards Henry’s feeble chattel-house. If the bulk and strength of the great stone mansion had not been enough to protect them, what chance would they have in the flimsy little hut of the gardener’s?

“Wood bends with the wind. It doesn’t collapse.”

They were surrounded by massive trees blown over like skittles. Roots had torn up the earth, waving gutlessly in the air, over the deep wounds they had made in the gardens. She followed, pulled along by her stumbling protector. Henry opened his door and ran towards them, lumbering through water and wreckage. A dull red light began to gleam as if the heavens were opening a bloodshot eye to look on the catastrophe they were causing. The gardener wore no shirt and his breeches had been torn and rolled up at the calf, just like her image of him as Frankenstein’s Creature. The brutal embodiment of the storm itself. She reviled his blackness; wished hopelessly for the calming wisdom of a Lord Coak, an Overton, a superior white man from a steadfast castle; an elder who would know how to deal with Nature’s stupid temper.

Henry made straight for Elspeth and lifted her at the waist, held her above the water as though she were a mucky child. She hung on to George’s hand, as he stumbled along beside them, pale and shocked. Henry strode more steadily, stronger than George, more used to physical exertion. The rain began again, and a wind gently whistled. The night’s orange light gave Henry’s and George’s eyes a lost, ghostly look.

Inside Henry’s house his wife and children – more of them than she had realised – were huddling on the bedstead, keeping their feet curled around them, above the waterline. The gardener sat Elspeth down on a high shelf that ran along one side of the house. To make more space for her he cleared, with one lunge of his
massive
arm, all the cooking utensils and gardening tools and
knick-knacks
, letting them fall into the water and float or sink along with the rest of the debris. He repositioned her and then turned away as though he had just put an old doll of his daughter’s out of reach.
George tried to clamber up beside her, but fell back down with a little cry of pain. Henry came to his aid, and the two men spoke. She could not understand what they said. Not because she couldn’t hear them – the hut was as quiet as the grave, the sky still inhaling – but her brain could not organise the sounds into any meaning. Even words, her old allies, failed her. Henry helped George up and sat him beside her, then bounced the shelf up and down to demonstrate its strength, proud that his workmanship was of value in calamitous circumstances.

“You be safe up here. That mantel take any weight and you a li’l elfy ting, Mistress.”

Everything Henry did he did merely in the way of duty. His face betrayed no real emotion. He had gone out to round them up as a shepherd might gather in his landlord’s sheep. The hard fact struck Elspeth like a falling stone. All of them – the smiling maids and servants, the skivvies at the theatres – they all giggled or nodded, assented to everything, because duty demanded it. His chores done, Henry turned back to his family, pulled two of the older children in towards him on the tabletop. His wife and younger daughters remained sitting on the bedstead, placid and staring into space, glancing at their visitors, clumped together in the soaked, muddied bedclothes.

The last thing Elspeth could remember was the sound of the wind getting its second terrifying breath, and thinking she would never sleep again. She laid her head on George’s shoulder; he raised his hand to stroke her but could not reach out far enough. He gave another cry of pain. She lowered her head onto his lap and he stroked her hair with his other hand. Then, miraculously, sleep came after all. She drifted into the safety and calm of inner darkness, George whispering in the distance, “Be over soon. Rest now.”

Now it was calm, the light peeking in the windows fresh and clear, sparkling like a rock pool in the early morning. She had regained partial wakefulness often enough during the night to know that the storm had built to at least one more riotous climax. She had dreamt that she was back on the Alba, the wind and rain pitching Henry’s hut more than the Atlantic ocean had ever shaken her cabin. She
would have chosen the terrors of the high seas any day to the reality of this morn – calm and untroubled as it deceitfully was.

The air was distilled and sweet; the world weightless, her body like a feather. The birds sang and the sea in the distance swished calm and regular. The echoes of last night’s howling wind and
crashing
trees and stone and bricks now murmured only softly in her ears. George’s judgement had proved correct – the chattel-house still stood steady. The water level had risen and pots and pans and loose articles had been tossed around. But the cast of human
characters
remained unchanged. Everyone was where they were when she had fallen asleep, all open-eyed, like a chorus required to hold their positions. Statues of loss and confusion. Henry and the two youths on the table, his wife and smaller children on the bed. The gardener woke a little after Elspeth and gently lifted the two boys he had been supporting, setting them down on the crowded bed with hardly a motion on their part. His legs, as he swung round to alight from the table, sank into the flood up to his thighs. He slushed through the water and the floating remains of his
livelihood
, and pulled the door open. The water from outside met the water within and created a little eddy around his bare legs. Looking out the open door, Elspeth saw the full extent of the damage.

The sea had leapt unaccountably from its bed. The sky had cracked and crumbled, and everything that ever was, was ripped up by its roots. The gods, she thought, are children who leave a
shameful
guddle behind their pranks and games. How on earth could such a supernatural mess be cleared by mere mortals? The day ahead would be different from the one she had been expecting – the day of her debut, the day she had been working towards and planning for months. She nursed the idea for a moment that things might be put back in order for her recital tonight, and nearly smiled at such a foolish hope.

Where does one start to tidy a clutter like that? Pick up that tree? Sort out the walls of the house from the roof? See if there is anyone buried under the rubble? Look for things left whole and undestroyed, pile them to one side? Wake up George now, or let him sleep?

None of these were matters for a woman like Elspeth to decide.
Her father had ever railed against her for being “haunless, daft and yissless”. She had claimed, to him and inwardly to herself, that, when a true crisis came, she would rise to the challenge. Her daily ineffectiveness – striking sets and camp, loading carts – would be overcome and she would find within herself an heroic capacity. Well, here was a crisis beyond her worst expectations, and no
heroism
stirred.

What they must do, she and George, was find people to help them. Henry was strong, but not strong enough to do the work of twenty, forty men. How many would it take to rebuild this little corner of the world? Henry had his own house to put in order, and then his duty was to his own master at the mansion. His wife and children stared dumbly at him as if at any moment he would turn around and smile, lift all the chaos away with his huge arms, drain the water and clear the mud, turn the day into one like any other. They followed his every move – fishing out a passing joist, plucking it from the water, then throwing it back again. It chilled Elspeth’s heart to think that even a functional and instinctive being like Henry was at a loss.

She had to get down from this shelf. George had to call on the resources of his father’s house. People, servants, maids, slave-gangs who could get a good day’s work done, construct somewhere for them to be this evening. The first task was to wake him and send him off to muster helpers, bring tea and food, set about putting things in order. She dreeped down from her shelf, slipping into the warm sludge, stretched and took a hold of George’s hand. It was cold from the wet and wind. She looked back out through the door, getting a broader view than from atop the shelf. Her vision was unobstructed for miles. Nothing stood to impede the view. The ground was strewn as far as the eye could see with rafters, planks, tabletops, chair legs – like a Glasgow barroom after a brawl – bricks and stones, blue porch tiles, red roof beams, chimneys, felled palms and grapefruit trees, single plantains and coconuts, everything higgelty-piggelty. Sugar canes, snapped up and thrown from fields miles away, floated past the chattel shack, leaving a tang of
sweetness
in the air.

George was huddled into his coat, face towards her, calm and
calming, as he had been throughout the worst of it, protecting his mistress chivalrously throughout the storm, finding this sanctuary for them to survive the night. She shook him.

“George,” she said, soothingly. “Georgie.”

His body juddered to her touch instead of rocking or waking. Henry watched her trying to rouse him, and made his way back through the deluge towards her. George slumped forward and she saw the splinter of mahogany protrude from his side.

“Had that in him last night. Didn’t want to pull it out. Save him bleeding.”

Elspeth nodded. The spear must have struck him on the way out of the house, or in the gardens where bits of the world flew about animated by the force of the storm. This complicated matters. In the midst of this catastrophe George’s death felt matter-of-course to her: another little piece of an enormous mess that would
somehow
have to be dealt with. As she dragged her legs, entangled in her muddied robe, she felt sorry for him. What a price to pay for two nights of gentleman’s pleasure! If only he had had the sense to go home, he would not now be sitting, cowped on a shelf, like a broken mannequin. Pleasure is a wanton curse. Drink it and ye’ll find him out. She paddled towards the door, out into the fresh, bleached day.

Elspeth Baillie lost in her land of dreams. The water at her feet raced away at her step, and she walked forward with the sure step she had learned from years of tramping through peat-bogs and
lowland
marshes. The sun sparkled and the air was sharp and
diamond-bright
, but her head was slumped low again, her shoulders huddled, as if she were battling against the old bluster and sleet. She had nowhere to go; no one to go to. No father or mother. No Lord Coak or Nonie. No Dainty or Tuesday to be seen. No George Lisle.

She walked and she walked, thoughts tumbling like blown leaves: George naked, George dead, the wailing Creature, Henry her saviour. Lines from roles and songs and poems. Gin a body kiss a body, need a body cry? Past the chasm where the house she had slept in with her lover had stood only hours earlier. With effort, she raised her head and looked out from Savannah, scanned the
horizon. Half of Bridgetown had vanished. People in the distance wandered as she did, in ones and twos, dazed and aimless. There was weeping in the breeze; there were gaps in the world, whole neighbourhoods vanquished. Between the Garrison and Trafalgar an immense hole, like the fascinating cavity of a pulled tooth. The Synagogue was gone. The barracks were crushed. Fort Charles no longer protected anything, its saluting soldiers swept away. The Lyric Theatre, and with it all her plans, had been picked up and hurled into the sea – the smug sea that lay before her, calm,
smiling
, unconcerned. She walked on, automatically heading back towards town. Like one that on a lonesome road, doth walk in fear and dread.

Her nerves and mind jangling with wild self-accusations: had she herself caused this dreadful trespass? Her obscene fornicating, her seduction and corruption of a finely educated young gentleman had resulted in his death, had brought on the greater obscenity of the storm. She passed a house, buckled on its knees. A door opened and out filed a line of black people. They passed her without a word. She let her head drop again and kept on walking, walking.

Slowly, like Scottish drizzle that appears from nowhere, the notion grew that George Lisle had loved her. Loved her more than she knew, than she had given him credit for. He had been speared and wounded, conducting her out of an exploding house, ushering her to safety instead of saving himself. He had cradled her as he lay dying, making no mention or complaint of his predicament. One day she will cry for him, her tears will flow and gush for years; she may never be dry-eyed again. But at this moment tears were of no use to either him or her; there was enough water to deal with.