Redlegs (12 page)

“Well, you’ve lost none of your energies, my dear.”

“How long it’s been!”

Here he was – her magician, the alchemist who could turn stone back into gold. She felt her skin tingle the way it had when she first came to this island. She could swear her hair was thickening again right before his eyes. Lord Coak was her sun – not that burning
ball in the sky that hurt her eyes, that made her skin clammy and her clothes stain like she was a common farm girl. Over the next few days, Lord and guest walked together in the grounds, and she realised for the first time how extensive his plantation was. He explained to her that his was the only agricultural estate this far north in the island. From the top of the little bluff he showed her its boundaries, embraced between hills and ocean.

“The climatic and geological conditions give our sugar a
particular
quality that is highly praised by the distillers of rum. There is a sharp, fresh salty tang to it. Though I’m a claret man myself.”

She had already seen, on the few outings she had braved in his absence, the gang of black workers who cultivated his lands and cut his cane. Now they passed her – men and women alike in pursuit of mysterious tasks – nodding vaguely in their direction. Even up close, they still seemed distant, as cattle do in fields adjacent to country lanes. Lord Coak mumbled something about them being part of his present worries. Many were leaving, or threatening to, now that they could work elsewhere. He spoke of “manumission’ – a word Elspeth had never heard before and did not understand. The problem seemed to persist whether or not these people stayed or went:

“Either way, you get little out of them these days.” He was not criticising them. Albert Coak was simply stating a fact and
ruminating
on the problems it caused him.

From that hill over the cove Coak pointed towards Florida and Havana, and beyond to the Pacific and San Francisco. In the
company
of a rich, cultured planter, this far-northern settlement seemed not quite so isolated, and Elspeth less forgotten. They made plans together, discussed new plays he had seen, and pored over the texts he had brought back. He spoke of his ambitions to resurrect his destroyed theatre. Such a project would take time. First to
recuperate
the investment he had lost, and then to begin rebuilding not only bricks and mortar, but a company of players and
administrators
equal to the talents of Elspeth Baillie.

But that was for the future. “All my plans depend on the success of a venture on which I have speculated everything. This colony is in dire need of mechanisation and I seem to be the only planter
prepared to sit down with the future. But it will require some patience on your part.”

Old man Lisle, Coak told her, was determined to avenge his losses. He was making it known that there would be a proper
theatrical
life now – in the forms of a Gentlemen’s Arts Club and a Ladies’ Society – bringing decent and moral plays from New York where, it so happened, he did much of his business. There would be no more performances of dubious morality. Exemplary and virtuous theatre was all the more necessary now that the twin disasters of the great storm and abolition were testing the steel of the
province
to its core. There was no place in the present metropolitan climate for the talents of the likes of Miss Elspeth Baillie. In the meantime, Coak proposed that she settle for a few months more at Northpoint: enjoy the clean breeze and restorative silence and sun.

“There is a plot of land, by the north wall of the house. I imagine you could fashion a little herb garden there for your own
enjoyment
, and for the general profit of the estate.”

From the planter and from passing visitors and the pages of newspapers she learned a little about the goings-on in town. Mrs. Bartleby and Mr. Philbrick, it was rumoured, had absconded together to America, leaving spouses and children behind. Nonie and Christy had both survived the storm and had sailed for England together. Isabella had gone to Venezuela. Of Virginie she heard nothing. Derrick had taken employment in a hotel – in what
capacity
she didn’t know. Although Coak was sceptical, she read articles about the reconstruction of Bridgetown and the building of grand residences more magnificent than those they replaced. She heard second-hand of the building of civic establishments, hotels de luxe, extravagant government palaces. The
Gazette
trumpeted the
excellence
of refurbished and newly fabricated theatrical venues, every one of them associated with Mr. Reginald Lisle.

In less than two weeks Albert Coak had gone again. Elspeth’s belly had swollen during his stay and though she had hidden it as best she could in unfashionable cloaks and wraps, it amazed her that he hadn’t noticed. She had worried that he might request a repeat performance of her Greenock audition. Nothing but
business
, however, seemed to occupy his mind.

He would be gone this time for a month or so. Only a week into it she lay on her bed in her meagrely furnished upstairs room, swathes of colours, like lugubrious Northern Lights, coating her dreams more thickly than ever, interrupted regularly by the terror of being speared and emptied out. With the first stirrings of dawn, a murkiness outside her window like a Scottish morning, she came to properly and cooried down into the warmth of her sheets. But the warmth turned quickly to a cold dampness. She screamed when she saw the mess of her bedclothes: brown liquid, like mauby,
smelling
even bitterer, soaked every inch. She was lying in a sea of black blood. Shouting for Annie, for Lord Coak, George, her mother, and gasping for breath, she scrambled manically in the mess looking for her baby.

She never spoke again about her baby. The terrible night of her miscarriage was almost worse than that of the storm. Annie had tried to calm her, but Elspeth just kept on shouting at her: “Find her! Find my baby. She’s in here somewhere. We have to find her!”

Whether or not a little barely formed body had been found, she never discovered. She must have blacked out, for she had no memory of the event beyond the blood and her own screaming at Annie. But she knew there had been a change somewhere in her innards. Not an emptiness, but as if the baby – the girl, she was sure it was a girl – had burrowed further inside her.

She began to reinterpret the great events of her life in a different light. Lord Coak’s spiriting her away; the death of the sailor as her ship broke from the old land; the storm that had reached its zenith on the very eve of her First Night. Waking in the pitch of night, far from city lights and sounds, Elspeth berated herself for not seeing from the beginning how it all pointed to disaster. Life had raised her up and struck her down, and all in little more than a single rotation of the earth around the sun.

The Coak Estate – for over a generation economically sound enough – had begun, along with most other plantations, to trade very successfully indeed. Though destructive in its immediate
aftermath
, the great storm was not wholly injurious in its consequences; it proved, even, to have beneficial aspects. The seasons became
more favourable and the vegetation more active. Elspeth, as much through boredom as any active interest, noticed the air of industry everywhere around the estate. No matter when she looked out her window, or embarked on one of her short walks, there were men scurrying to and fro, carrying implements for digging or cutting or carrying. Women bore bundles of cane on their backs in the fields, and the crops themselves appeared to be undergoing one long single harvest. The health of the farm workers – she read in the
Gazette
– men and women still in slavery, and freemen and citizens in general, were all improving.

As her old hopes faded, other responsibilities filled up the spaces in her life. She began to order the house according to her liking. She laid the foundations, as Coak had suggested, for a herb garden, as well as a little policy of plants and shrubs at its eastern end. She instructed Annie Oyo and the few black servant girls in the kitchen to change the tedious pattern of meals, introducing chicken and other fowl, sugar-topped milk and rice puddings and other
innovations
. She reprimanded Coak, during his brief reappearances, and Shaw for having settled so long for slave food – an endless round of potatoes, sticky messes Annie called coocoo, tasteless boiled husks from the breadfruit tree.

The piecework and tatty-howking that was part and parcel of a troupe of family players in Scotland, she had thought had gone forever. Yet here she was – put back out to work. Naturally she was not expected to labour amongst the biting insects of the canefields, but, as house servants were needed to replace absent cutters and bearers, her domestic chores increased. To her surprise, she rather enjoyed them. She thought of herself as Miranda, mistress of her own little world. Merrily, merrily shall I live now, under the blossom that hangs on the bough. The petunias and blue lumbagos sang in crisp maiden’s hues around her; match-me-nots sprang to attention at her touch, every bloom a different colour from its neighbour.

Coak spent weeks at a time in Bridgetown. In the few intervening days he was busy in his study writing, and mealtimes were taken up with agricultural matters with Shaw. Not long before the
anniversary
of the great storm, he found a little more time for her. He had received a box of plays, chapbooks and novels from London. He
read aloud to her, and in French, the opening chapters of
Victor-Marie
Hugo’s
Notre Dame de Paris
, translating a paragraph at a time. At night, she took a bundle of penny dreadfuls, recently
published
in London to bed. She learned lines from volumes of poems: Spenser’s
Faery Queen
, and Keats’s Odes. By the time of his next return, Elspeth had learned the entire part of
Hamlet
’s Ophelia,

“Up! be bold!

Vanquish fatigue by energy of mind!

For not on plumes, or canopied in state,

The soul wins fame!”

There was no commemoration of the previous year’s storm in the summer of 1832. Elspeth herself lost track of time, unable to follow the seasons in this land. The sun seemed equally hot throughout the year, and rain could fall unexpectedly at any time. Each time it did, she suffered her own memorial for George. When, in the November of 1832, Coak returned for a longer stay, his meetings in private with Shaw took on a more urgent air and lasted longer, prevailing throughout all their shared meals. Elspeth listened and began to understand some of the debate: an upturn in production and an increase in prices had coincided with a problem of labour shortage. Many freedmen were taking advantage of the economic climate and the British parliament’s anti-slavery legislation, to leave and start up their own small sugar fields or grow other crops elsewhere on the island. With full emancipation on the horizon, the estate – despite trading well – was facing a looming crisis. The need to implement mechanisation was pressing.

During these conversations Elspeth learned the histories of the two men with whom she now shared her life, such as it was. In the case of Captain Shaw she did not so much learn as was instructed. From time to time over a meal he would break off from
conversation
with the planter to illuminate a particular point for her,
illustrating
it with edifying examples from his own life and philosophy. Then, one night, having taken more brandy than usual, Lord Coak having retired to bed, Shaw decided the time was right to explain himself fully to her. He did so in the form of a lecture, like some script he had learned by heart. Indeed, as the night wore on, he
produced a sheaf of handwritten notes and referred to them as he spoke. “There is a War going on in the heavens and until it is
triumphed
, War will be waged on earth.”

He began his story four generations back, which forewarned Elspeth that this was going to be a long, perhaps a fatiguing, epic. Her attention waned often as the night wore on, but she caught, she hoped, the gist of the thing. His great-great-grandfather, she gathered, was the first Shaw in Barbados. While she baulked at the wooden man’s priggishness, Elspeth found herself drawn in by his tale and his eccentric beliefs, though at times unnecessary details lost her again. But it was a story after all and Elspeth lived for
stories
. And words – not as racy or as much fun as her old friends’, but extravagant in parts all the same.

“His name was Robert and he fought one Tudor King in the cause of a Stewart one.” She knew something of this – Jacobites who had been Barbado’ed over a century ago. By the time of the Captain’s great-grandfather the family property had increased considerably, though she missed exactly how that had come to pass. By the time of his grandfather – another Robert, confusing Elspeth – they kept a gang of slaves.

Shaw’s father, it seemed, was a drinker and a womaniser. He looked at Elspeth intently at this revelation, judging her response. But the actress knew how to keep her expression inscrutable. Not that she was scandalised anyway. The liaisons of tenant-farmers were not so different in the old country, and the free-thinking that George and her Bohemians had prompted in her made Shaw
senior’s
peccadilloes a mere trifle.

“He had a son of her,” and Shaw leaned further in towards her so that she might understand the utmost gravity of that matter. She didn’t really. Father and son became ever more estranged. The younger joined the militia, a family tradition that the elder had rejected.

At points he thought crucial in the narrative, Shaw stopped and drank, and stared at the wall as if he were considering where next to take his story. There was clearly no such decision to be made – Elspeth was all the more convinced he had learned the piece by rote. But during those breaks Elspeth lost the drift a little. She
would catch a sentence or so – at one point wondering if he hadn’t just said that he was not, in fact, a militia captain at all? When she picked up the general thread again, Shaw was waxing lyrical – or as lyrical as an oaken man can – about discoveries he had made in the Bible, and some tome of scientific work by a man called Alan or Alexander Kinmont. A Scotsman apparently who taught him great things about physiology, and perhaps physical science, or something, and Life in general. Precisely what the Captain – if he was, indeed a captain – learned of these matters, Elspeth was left to guess. Shaw drained his glass, stood, turned, and walked out on her without so much as a goodnight. There was not to be another history lesson for several months to come.