The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits (21 page)

I folded the letter up small and put it in my dress. Faintly I heard my name being called in the Ante-Room. "Dido! Dido!" Not a real name, of course, but a play one. I had been baptised Elizabeth, but when my cousin Elizabeth came to live at Kenwood, I became Dido—nicknamed for an African queen, I was told, who was once abandoned on a shore.

"I must go out, Elizabeth," I told my pink-cheeked cousin as I brushed past her in the Hall.

"Out?" she repeated, disconcerted. "Out where, Dido? For a walk?"

"An urgent message has come for his Lordship. I shall need the carriage—"

"But he's taken the carriage into town himself, silly."

Of course he had. "Then"—my heart pounding as if I was running a race—"I shall tell John to saddle the old roan to the little curricle."

"But Dido, dear—"

"I tell you, it can't wait."

I ran upstairs to fetch my shawl, before she could stop me. I had never behaved like this in my life. I was Dido Bell, known to the family and visitors as a sometimes pert but amiable girl. What was I doing? Was I a fool, or had I been a fool all my life till today? The walls of my room were covered in China papers; little people in strange draperies and pointed hats walked up and down. I remembered Mr. Adam telling me that Chinese figures were best for bedchambers, as they were conducive to dreaming. But I was not dreaming now.

Out in the coach house, I overrode Johns protests; I looked him square in the eye and told him that his Lordship had made me swear to bring him any message received today. In a quarter of an hour, the curricle was wheeling out the front gate and heading straight for the City.

The journey was a short one; it all went by me in a blur of stink and noise. I did not even know we had reached the Inner Temple till John pointed at the gate with his whip. As he was helping me jump down, a passing girl squealed "Look at that dirty blackamoor got up like a lady!"

Shock stopped my breath. I had never been spoken to that way in my life. My heart was stuck in my throat like a piece of gristle. What was I? I asked myself now. Blackamoor or lady? A terrible mixture. Neither fish nor flesh nor fowl.

I asked John to escort me in, but he set his jaw and said he had to stay with the horse and curricle or they would be stolen in a blink. So I marched in the gate myself. Pale men and red-faced ones pushed past me in long robes; I avoided their stares. My great-uncle's chambers were on King's Bench Walk, I knew that much. At the top of the steps I cleared my throat and asked to see Lord Mansfield. The porter did not hear me the first time, so I had to repeat myself.

He stared back with hostility. "About the Somerset case, is it? There's been dozens of you here already this week, plaguing his Lordship. I could report you for trying to pervert the course of justice, so I could. Who's your master?"

"I have none," I said through my teeth.

"Runaway rabbit, are you, then?" he said with a dirty grin. "Who's paying for those fine frills?" He pulled at my polonaise.

I could not bear to explain myself to him. "Kindly let me in. Lord Mansfield will wish to see me at once."

"That's what they all say, sweetheart!" But the porter stood back just enough to let me squeeze past him.

In the warren of chambers, I had to ask my way three times. I was on the verge of tears when I burst into my great-uncle's office at last.

"Dido?" He looked up, appalled.

The younger gentleman beside him looked me up and down in amusement. "I didn't know you'd any yourself, Mansfield."

There was a silence; I waited, sucking on my lip. Finally my great-uncle said, "Miss Bell is a close relation."

"Relation?" repeated his colleague. Then, "Pardon me, I'm sure," and he sauntered out of the room.

When we were alone I saw how angry my great-uncle was; there were red spots high on his wrinkled cheeks. "Why do you disturb me here?"

I wanted to burst into tears. Instead I stepped up to him and pulled Somerset's letter out of my bosom. I waited to be sure he recognised it, and then I said, "Am I your property, sir?"

"No, Dido. What nonsense. You're—"

"Am I your great-niece, just as Elizabeth is?" I cut in.

"Of course," he said, bewildered.

"Do you love me like her?"

"Rather more, if the truth be told," he said through his teeth.

This startled me a little. I sat down in a velvet chair, without being asked. After a minute, I said, "The porter seemed to think I was your slave."

"Well, he was mistaken."

I lifted my chin. "How are people to know I'm free, if my skin says otherwise?"

My great-uncle struggled for words. He opened his hands, at last. "It's an imperfect world. What would you have of me, Dido?"

He meant it rhetorically, I knew, but all of a sudden I felt like the girl in the fairy tale, who demanded three wishes. "The first thing I want," I improvised, "is a piece of paper stating that I am a free person."

He shrugged. "Certainly. But there's no need—"

"No need? What if you're not here, next time? What if the porter decides to presume that I've stolen your chaise, stolen this dress, even?" I plucked at my skirts. "What if I end up in gaol or on a ship in the Thames, seized as
lost property?
"

"I'll do it, then. I'll write a declaration of your freedom this minute," his Lordship said crossly, reaching for a pen.

"And I want a salary," I added.

His brow creased. "What fit of sulks is this, Dido? You're one of the family."

"Am I, though? Am I not the dairy-maid, and the poultry-keeper?"

He sighed. "Your position at Kenwood—"

"When you have guests," I interrupted him, "I'm not asked in till dinner's over."

My great-uncle squirmed. "Why, you know what guests can be like. The English were famed for their prejudice against foreigners. Why I myself, for instance, as a Scot—"

"I was born in England," I interrupted him.

"Well, Dido," he said miserably, "you must come in to dinner in future. Truly, I never knew you minded."

"I didn't, till today," I said. "Till I knew what it meant. Now I see why you've kept me hidden away at Kenwood."

"The country air is much more wholesome for you, and for all my family," he insisted, putting his hand over mine.

His skin was as soft as chicken feathers, and spotted with age; I pulled away. "Did you take me in as an unpaid companion for Lady Elizabeth, was that it?" I asked, searching his face. "One little motherless girl to amuse the other. A black face in the painting, as a foil for the white!"

"You are most precious to your cousin, to us all," he said, his throat working. "I thought you understood that."

I steeled myself against him. "What about my salary?"

"It's not money I grudge you, my dear," he said painfully; "don't I often give you presents in silver? But a salary—that has such a cold ring to it."

"Call it a quarterly allowance, then," I said.

He sighed heavily and began sharpening his pen.

A third wish, I thought, there has to be a third. And then I remembered what began it all. "One last thing. James Somerset," I said. "Let him go."

"Ah, now, my dear," said my great-uncle grimly, "that's a complicated matter."

"Don't I know it?"

"You meddle in what doesn't concern you."

Rage, like ink, spilled across my eyes. "Whom does it concern more than me," I shouted, "whose mother was a slave, your nephew's slave and whore? I wonder, did he free her before she died? Did he take the shackles off when she was giving birth to me?" Now I did not care if I could be heard all through the Inner Temple. "Whom should such matters
concern
more than me, your little dusky plaything?"

Lord Mansfield bent across the desk and seized me, then, enclosed me in his arms. I could smell the dust and sourness of his old robes. "Dido," he sobbed, "Dido Bell, my sweet girl, how can you say such things?"

I rested in his embrace for a few seconds, then pulled away. "Let James Somerset go free."

"But don't you see, my dear," he said, straightening his spectacles with one shaky hand, "I mustn't be swayed by personal loyalties.
Faithful to Virtue Alone,
don't you know."

"What virtue has a man with no loyalties?"

He winced. "But I have many. The very fact that I am known to have in my family—to be bound by every tender tie, to, to—"

"A mulatto."

"—to
you,
Dido, makes it all the more imperative that I should be seen to maintain objectivity in this most controversial case."

"I'm not asking a favour for myself," I told him coldly. "I ask justice for Somerset."

The old man breathed heavily. Finally he said, "I have always called American slavery an odious institution."

I waited.

"But the fact is, its effects are woven through our whole social fabric. To rule that a master mayn't put his own slave on a ship—well, it could bring on ruin."

"For whom?"

"For everyone, Dido. Agriculture, trade, the economies of many nations ... the consequences ... if misunderstood, if too widely interpreted," he said, almost babbling, seizing my hand, "such a ruling could lead to fifteen thousand slaves casting off their yokes in the morning! If no man may own and control another in England, some will argue, how may he do so elsewhere?"

I felt power like sugar in my mouth.

"At the end of an honourable career, Dido," the old judge said, clinging to my fingers, "I might stand accused of having brought down chaos on us all."

"Should I take my leave, then?" I asked him, at the end of a long silence. "Is it time for us to part?"

His mouth moved, but he could not speak.

"Are we not family, then, after all?"

He wept. He nodded. He called for the carriage to take us home.

Dido Bell, aka Dido Elizabeth Belle, aka Elizabeth Dido Lindsay, was born in England to an African slave woman who had been on a Spanish ship captured by Sir John Lindsay (one of Lord Mansfield's nephews) in the West Indies.

My sources for "Dido " include the diary of Thomas Hutchinson (published 1886), who visited Kenwood on 29 August 1779. Zoffany's portrait of Dido and Lady Elizabeth Murray hangs in Scone Palace. I found much conflicting information on her in Gretchen Gerzina,
Black England;
James Shyllon,
Black Slaves in Britain;
Julius Bryant,
The Iveagh Bequest, Kenwood;
and Gene Adams, "Dido Elizabeth Belle: A Black Girl at Kenwood,
" Camden History Review
12 (1984).

On 22 June 1772 Lord Mansfield finally delivered what became known as the Somerset Ruling, which said that no master was to be allowed to take a slave abroad by force. Many abolitionists interpreted it broadly to mean that slavery was now illegal in Britain, and thousands of slaves left their masters or demanded wages. But black people continued to be bought, sold, bunted, and kidnapped in England, and sometimes shipped back to the West Indies, for many decades to come. It is not clear what age Dido was in 1772, or whether she bad any influence on Mansfield's decision, but Thomas Hutchinson quoted a Jamaican planter who said of Somerset, "He will be set free, for Lord Mansfield keeps a Black in bis house which governs him and the whole family.
"

Lindsay and Mansfield both left Dido substantial sums of money, and Mansfield took the precaution of confirming in his will that she was free. After his death she left Kenwood and probably married a Frenchman, because in 1794 she was listed in the family accounts at Hoare's Bank as Mrs. Dido Elizabeth Davinier.

Adrift in a boat made of butter on a sweet milk sea, she glimpses a castle on the horizon, a stately palace built of cheese and ornamented with curds of whey...

Margery Starre wakes from a dream of fat. Her mouth is as dry as a sack. Late afternoon sun prises the shutters apart.

For the first time in her forty-seven years it occurs to her not to get up. June fifteenth, a Saturday, a working day like any other and the Widow Starre was only having half an hour's shut-eye but now she's inclined to press her face back into her mattress and wait for the old straw to tickle her back to sleep. Let her neighbours on Bridge Street think she's fallen sick; let the Cam flow green and sluggish below her window; let this day, out of the too many days she has laboured through on this earth, wind into evening without her.

She scratches a bite on her hip. No, it's not straw she can smell, it's trouble. There's been whispering at corners and proclamations against unlawful assemblies. The peasants' army has crossed the Thames, or so they say. Kent's risen against the poll tax, and Essex too; Bury St. Edmunds, St. Albans, and Norwich, even. Troubles on its way across the Fens like a flood of brine. She can hear it coming now outside her window in the hiss of geese being driven across the bridge after market, and the wooden soles of the goose maid, in the clop of a horse and the complaining wheels of the cart it pulls, in the banging of Ned Smith's hammer three houses up the hill, in the mewing of the new baby two floors above the room where Margery Starre lies, facedown, wishing this long afternoon over. Trouble has got into her own head, too. There's a treasonous rhyme going round; she picked it up this morning in the Market where she was buying a pig's trotter for her dinner:

When Adam delved and Eve span,
Who was then a gentleman?

But she gets up and goes about the last business of the day, of course. The Widow Starre wouldn't have lasted forty-seven years and outlived most of the people she's ever known if she was in the habit of forgetting her business and opening her door to trouble.

Five o'clock. She sips the ale and lets it linger on her tongue; faintly sour, or is her mouth still full of sleep? For supper she eats old cheese and onions off a trencher of dark stale bread. Licking her knife clean, she puts it back into the sheath that hangs from her girdle.

Then Margery goes into the back room. Edgy, she checks everything twice. She rakes her fingers through the barley, oats, wheat, and malt, looking out for weevils or worms, peering into the barrels in the angular light. She sniffs at the pungent mash vat, checks the coolers and the rudders and the great copper kettle that's big enough for a woman to climb in and lie down. She's promised this batch of ale to the owner of the Pig and Parrot for Wednesday; a halfpenny a gallon she'll get for it.