Authors: Chris Dolan
Redlegs
by Chris Dolan
For Moira Leven
January 2012
In an old house in the remotest corner of this island, I found the book printed here below. How I came to be interested in the Rosies is of little interest. The poor whites of the Caribbean are a vanishing people; both in the sense of diminishing numbers, and in their invisibility. If noticed at all, in the streets, or in the market or rumshop, by their countrymen or a visitor like me, they’re mistaken for bedraggled tourists perhaps after a night out before going back to their beach hotel for a change of clothes. Generally, though, they simply escape notice. But if poor whites are indistinct, blurred, the Rosies are covert and imperceptible. Partly because no one wants to see them; partly because they do not want to be seen. But their land was of value, in an island almost totally developed for tourism, which was how I came to learn of them. A group of people living, forgotten, in an obscure, nearly inaccessible, headland of Barbados.
Early in March last year I drove up a stony, overgrown lane that led to a broken-down old plantation house. Tucked away next to North Point, beyond the Scotland District, along a promontory where the land has been steadily eaten away by a powerful sea, lies Roseneythe. Over the years it had been all but cut off from the life of the island. The Rosies’ homeland was no longer viable, and it was the community itself that had invited offers for their few hundred acres of land, unprofitable cane fields and the dilapidated house.
Mrs. Martha Ruddock, a tiny elderly woman, sunburned an alarming, cancerous shade of orange, welcomed me as if I had been expected. The house was spick and span, hardly lived in. Martha, like a professional estate agent, showed me round, providing details about ownership rights, dwellings (there were twenty wooden chattel-houses on the estate, hidden by trees and a hill to the front of the main property) and potential amenities.
“Place useless for livin’ in, but worth top dollar for wheeler-dealers.”
The windows upstairs gave a good panorama of the real estate: a pretty bay lying north-east of the plantation house and a wooded area planted, apparently, a couple of hundred years back. Apart from that,
the terrain was mostly flat. Martha was right – a gift for contractors. Ideal for a five-star compound, links course, watersports. I warned her she’d never recognise the place once they’d done with it.
“They’ll strip away the fields, the houses, even that hill there – it’ll just get in the way. Take the whole place right down to the coral rock, flat as a pancake. Then they’ll build it all the way back up again. Widen the bay. Pull down the house and throw up a concrete replica. Time those guys are done you won’t know you’re on the same island.”
She took me into a large room, furnished with a mahogany table and twenty or so chairs, perfectly polished. The room was unchanged, probably, in over a century. Around the walls was a series of portraits, painted, I guessed, by an amateur hand. The subjects – all women on the side walls – were a little racily depicted, dresses and shawls pulled down to reveal pink shoulders. They ranged from late teens to early thirties, all dressed in nineteenth-century peasant women’s Sunday best. There was no artist’s signature, no dates, and no subjects’ names.
“They our ancestors, or so I was learned.”
Each of them stared directly out of the canvas, with the same blank expression. Despite the décolletés and the attempts at seductive smirks, all of them looked a little careworn: the older ones tense, the younger apprehensive. Most had been given dark brown hair, pulled back from their faces, bunched under a white cloth bonnet; one was burdened with a particularly unlikely shade of ginger hair and plain, bordering on ugly, features. Their faces were pale to the point of ghoulishness, especially those in the direct line of the sun from the window.
Martha walked me back to the opposite end of the room.
“This un’s called Lord Albert. Over there, Cap’n Shaw.” She stood in front of the middle portrait. “Elspeth Baillie, the actress.” Like I should’ve heard of her.
The titled gentleman had thick, damp lips and drooping eyelids. Maybe forty–fifty years old. His clothes seemed to date from an earlier epoch than the other subjects. The captain was thin, could’ve been any age, uniformed, riding a horse. A nag so emaciated it buckled under its rider, skinny as he was, stooping over his saddle, beard straggly and clothes soiled. The pony was being led by a young
black boy, a Huckleberry Finn character, expression full of helpless resignation.
The woman in the middle was the most successful of the collection. At least, she’d been treated to more care and greater detail. I suppose she was meant to be beautiful – the artist had favoured her over the others with shinier hair and brighter eyes. A kind of archetypal English rose. Blush cheeks, snub nose, full lips. But it hadn’t quite come off. None of these portraits would add any value to the property. Miss Baillie sat on a large, high-backed chair, in front of the window, Roseneythe cove stretching out into the distance behind her.
“She the mother of we all. Now there be a story you don’ hear often. Life like an anancy tale.”
Martha led me through to the kitchen where she opened a trapdoor in the floor. Below it extended wooden stairs leading down into a basement. It was pleasantly cooler down there and the walls had been comparatively recently replastered and painted. A little arch led into a small room, perhaps once a large closet. Inside there was an old escritoire, which Martha opened and took out two books. One of them she laid aside, but I noticed it was written by an Alexander Kinmont. The second she handed to me. There was no title on the damp, mottled leather binding, nor was there a name of any author. Opening it, the pages weren’t stitched in, but loose leaf. The manuscript inside was written in pen, in a fine hand. Martha knew nothing of its origins, only that it had been here all her life and for many years before. She allowed me to take it away. “Understand, sir. We ent quite north, and we ent quite south.”
On my return to Bridgetown I read it through at a sitting. At the very end it was signed simply “Jean Alexander”. I spent the next few weeks keying it into my laptop. When I returned it to Roseneythe, Martha put it back in the desk in the basement and said: “Small garden got bitter weed.”
There was never a happier day for Elspeth Baillie than the day she was plucked from her old life, the only life she had thought
possible
, nipped in the bud and transported across oceans to be planted again in the warmth of the sun. She had been a poor stunted
bramble
in her home ground: nineteen wearying years that felt like forty. Then, on the eve of her second decade, she was unearthed and grafted onto a new vine. The husbandry was performed by the Right Honourable Albert Lord Coak: he it was who stripped away the mildew and mould that had formed on her soul, pared her down, and restored her to youth.
That eminent person’s presence in a cantankerous port – by chance the same town which was playing host to Elspeth and her family – caused several days’ worth of muttering, suspicion and some quite splendid Scotch shrugging. They already had their own dandies of course, the good folk of Greenock, but these were homespun and old hat compared to this newcomer. The sheen of his hand-tooled suit, his blue wool over-cloak and the splash of marigold on his collar, as he weaved his way through their midst, added a watercolourist’s daintiness to the dark oil canvas of the town. The interloper journeyed between the Harbour Master’s office, shipping agents’ premises, and the sugar refinery, ending his afternoon’s travails as a guest in the grand house of a more
commonplace
, native moneybags. He then caused a considerable stir when he reappeared, at seven o’clock sharp, at the hall of the Seamen’s Mission, and took his seat for “An Evening of Sketches, Songs and Monologues Performed by Mr. Charles Baillie, his Wife Helena, daughter Elspeth, and Sundry Talented Nieces, Nephews and Cousins of the Baillie Theatrical Clan” – not least amongst the family of performers themselves, peeking out from behind their
home-made curtain. He sat alone in the theatre, patiently waiting for the show to begin, whilst the rest of the audience remained
outside
drinking and jostling until the last possible moment when they could no longer put off the entertainment.
“Who could he be?” whispered Elspeth’s mother, agitated.
“Pay him no mind,” replied her husband. “Another swaggering knab who’ll uptail and awa’ long before we’re done.”
“He seems comfortable enough in his pew,” said Elspeth. “Maybe he’s from the Edinburgh theatre.”
“We’ll ken soon enough. If he gloats at you, we can be sure he’s not.”
Elspeth pirouetted away expertly from her father: his blindness to her genius no longer offended her. She would wait till the end of the performance when, as happened after every show, she would be showered with compliments and surrounded by admirers, while her parents kept four keen eyes out for wandering hands and all ears open for impudent propositions.
The entertainment that night began, as it always did, with the players struggling to be heard above the turmoil and din of the drunken crowd. Tender verses of Gaelic-inspired poetry had to be yelled out at the top of the voice; the subtle love-lines of Messrs Shakespeare and Scott earned only lewd responses from stevedores in the front rows; carefully crafted choreographies were turned into stomps in a bid to secure a smidgeon of attention. Elspeth didn’t mind: the fine gentleman seated towards the back sat still and attentive. She knew from experience that once the evening’s repertoire reached her Cleopatra soliloquy there would be a hush throughout the house.
Helen Baillie, turbaned and tunicked, set down at the feet of her daughter the basket containing the pretty worm of the Nile that kills and pains not. Some jester in the back row cried out – as one always did in every audience from Ayr to Musselburgh – “I’ve got one of yon too!” And, as ever, the rest of Helen Baillie’s speech was drowned out by laughter. But Elspeth knew how to win them over. She stood stock still. For so long that the audience wondered if she had forgotten her lines, and they fell into silence out of curiosity. Finally she took three slow tentative steps towards the fatal casket.
She sank to her knees and spoke in a near-whisper. “Will it eat me?”
She looked up, seemingly blind but scanning the faces in front of her, checking that the gentleman was leaning forward in his seat, which he was. She knelt in front of the snake’s basket, and braved the tips of the fingers of her left hand into the deadly lair. She let slip the most restrained of yelps, but held her hand
heroically
inside, pulling it out at last, dripping with poison – in reality, soured milk. “I have immortal longings in me.” She stood up, and with her right hand loosed the laces of her shift, let one single drop fall slowly from her fingertip between the swell of her breasts. She let the communal intake of breath from the audience pass before wilting, swaying. The audience was entranced; the jokes and quarrels of a moment ago forgotten at the sight of a beautiful young queen dying, and, better still, showing a good measure of cleavage.
Through the glaur of the candle-smoke, in the penumbra of the Seaman’s Mission, she felt the visitor’s scrutiny as much as observed it. A warmth on her skin on a cold night, as if the moon had begun to heat. Men had always stared, gawked, as she tiptoed or paraded in front of them, less voluminously dressed – depending on the scene – than they were used to seeing a woman. Certainly there was lust in the fine gentleman’s eyes too: she could detect craving even in the back pews; but there was something else. Something different. Emptying. His gaze gouged at her insides, like a fishwife’s knife, leaving a drained space, ready to be filled with some new, unfamiliar element.
When she reappeared – after the applause that persisted
throughout
her exit and for a full two minutes after – to sing in duet with her father “The Shepherd Lass o’ Aberlour”, a ribald verse penned by Edward Baillie himself in his youth, the crowd were amazed to see that the beautiful queen, who only a moment before had lain piteously dead, was now transformed into an uncouth country maid. Her father, behind his greasepaint, scowled at the loosened lacings of her bodice which she had omitted to retie, and at her excessive winking and histrionics, but no one was paying him any mind. All were shouting encouragement at the shepherdess as she sang of her peccadilloes, and laughing at her indelicate turns of
phrase. But even that rude piece had its melodramatic finale, when the farmer scolds the maid for her sinful ways and she promises to be good for evermore. Elspeth found a catch in her voice, stooped her stance, and altered the story of a woman reformed to one of a woman defeated.
She did not need to wait until the company had dressed and left the hall to come face to face with the man who – the rumour had by now reached the dressing rooms – was a lord of the realm, in Greenock for sugar business, English and with money to burn. There was a time when any such personage would be immediately tracked down and pursued by her father and subjected to boasts of his talents. But Edward knew that his moment had passed and now went out his way to avoid any contact with the promise of what might have been. So when Lord Coak invited the entire family to share a jug of wine with him, he shrugged and let his family go on ahead. “You ken fine what he’s wanting,” her father shouted to Elspeth, as he struggled with Mark Antony’s chain mail shirt which no longer fitted him.
“Breeding will oot,” her mother liked to say and Coak was proof of the adage. He diligently spoke to each and every member of the company, from Aunties Jessie and Nanie, who toured with their sons and daughters and kept the company’s wardrobe in order, to Mr. Nicol of the Seaman’s Mission, thanking him profusely for opening his premises to such pleasurable and important events as theatre and song. He complimented the cast from the youngest to the oldest, saving his most exuberant praise for Mr. and Mrs. Edward Baillie themselves. He only nodded in passing to Elspeth. She didn’t fret that he was ignoring her: he was saving her up to last. She watched him as he made his rounds, bowing slightly to the most menial of those present, smiling when required, tut-tutting when it was expected, talking as little as possible about himself, making light of a lord’s presence in such a humble venue. He was a smallish man, his hair receding, a pot-belly burrowing out from under his coat like a mole searching for daylight. But his manners were cut as finely as his clothes, and his voice beguiled – the accent a mix of high English rank in its vowels and Colonial oddity in its
consonants. He was not an attractive man, yet there was attraction in him, even beyond the lure of his status. Elspeth liked the way he modestly infiltrated the company, speaking to one person at a time, as if he were the privileged party.
He spent a little too long, she thought, with her sister Peggy. Peggy made a meal of him, curtsying and laughing and stretching her head up to show off her slender neck. The gentleman patted her on the back, which Elspeth was pleased to see, it being an act of open condescension. Then he turned abruptly away from Peggy, stepping directly and unexpectedly up to Elspeth. He did not
introduce
himself. Omitted to make polite conversation. He did not even address her by name. He simply placed himself in front of her and stated bluntly, “You have a faculty for finding beauty in the commonplace.”
Elspeth was wrong-footed by the suddenness of his arrival and the directness of his compliment. She curtsied, said Thank you, reddened in the cheek, and kicked herself for being so
unprepared
. “Yours is a natural gift, my dear. One that has managed to survive whatever nonsense you’ve been taught. Will you come and see me tomorrow? Can you find a way to do so without, as yet, anyone knowing? I assure you, I wish only to speak of matters professional.”
Elspeth found herself nodding dumbly. The pretty words she had rehearsed for this interview were defunct; the practised rejections of his flattery of no use, and she stood like a child being sent an errand by a strict uncle. And yet, there was warmth in Coak’s eyes, and his bearing was amiable. If she was a child to him then it was an especially favoured one. She had received similar invitations in the past, but this was free, she reckoned, of any impropriety. As he gave her the details of his lodgings and suggested the hour of their meeting, she had that emptying feeling again. Stronger now that he was so close to her and addressing her intimately. Elspeth Baillie – the girl she had been, the young woman she was now – was being reduced, as water over a fire is boiled away, leaving her drained and ready for the life that was to come.
She turned and left the Seamen’s mission, the day turning out just as she had expected. That morning when she had risen, before
sun-up, and long before news of a Lord’s presence in town had reached her ears, she had seen through the window of the room at the inn where she shared a bed with her sister and two of her cousins, a ripple of light in the sky. Perhaps a fire somewhere
distantly
flickering, or a trace of the Northern Lights. But Elspeth recognised it as a sign. She had seen such signs before and had gone back to bed at the end of the day wondering if she had missed some covert opportunity. Not tonight. The Fates had long had her in their sights, and now she would give herself over entirely to their power.
Where was the beauty in the little scene she found herself playing now? Black rain fell from a muddy sky. Perhaps she should think of the night as smouldering embers, doused by God’s tears? The tree she was pinned against was hard and cold, its leaves, under the sickly moon, grey and damp. A proper poet would see it differently: silvery boughs danced upon by tiny elves. But even a poet would be hard pressed to make a dashing hero out of Thomas. Perhaps, if ever she were to tell the story, she could portray the grunting,
red-faced
boy as an ardent young suitor, his jupe and breeks the honest uniform of a decent, manly drover; his popping eyes, as he tried to squint inside the shift he was tearing at, aglow with passion, startled by the grace of her youthful, innocent breast.
The rarest of gifts, said his lordship. A faculty for finding beauty in the commonplace. The Fates had played kindly with Thomas tonight, too. Elspeth’s brisk exchange with a Lord had left her hankering.
The west coast ports in festivities were full to the gunwales of randy callants in second-hand flannel and hand-me-down
compliments
. Sailors whose fortune would be spent before the night was out; engineers and harbour-boys who hoped their wages would go further with an actress than in the bawdy-house. In society like that, Thomas was as reasonable a suitor as any, and she let him lead her away into the park where other unidentified couples could be heard wooing in the gloaming.
The eternal in the momentary. That’s what the gentleman had said. An actual gentleman. In clean clothes. And the subtlest whiff
of perfume – an exotic tincture, that for all Elspeth knew, might well be the natural smell of the well born. Only the best-educated could speak as he did without the aid of a script. An English Lord, travelled all the way from the Colonies, solely to find her, Elspeth Baillie, on stage at the most shambolic of penny gaffs. Judgement like that, surely, could be trusted.
Try as she might, though, she could not convert a farm-loon into a cavalier, sonsie Tam into a dashing swain. The tree felt just like a tree, and if the raindrops were tears, they weren’t God’s. Thomas’s choice of amatory words were a far cry from poetry: between grunts, he employed the only names he knew for parts of her body and his, and his intentions were described in humble, if honest enough, terms. Poor Thomas only managed to increase the hollowness she felt inside. She felt sorry for him, bringing him to the verge of his dreams only to push him back again. But this she did, and with a certain violence. The boy, surprised and convulsing dangerously, could only let out a stricken cry.
“Tom. Go see Peggy.”
“It’s no’ Peggy I want.”
The Right Honourable Albert Coak was not in the habit – at least, not lately – of attending cheap burlesques in Seamen’s Missions. He had become accustomed in recent years to more civilised and lavish spectacles at La Scala, or London’s Adelphi or Strand. But he had found himself alone on business and on his birthday, and the Baillie Family were the only show in town. After a day of
wearying
engagements – talking sugar tonnage and refining
requirements
– the prospect of rude humour and gauche performances enticed.