Redlegs (18 page)

From time to time, Elspeth would take a candle at night and slip between the two skins, so that she could be alone with the
beautiful
backdrop that never saw her perform. After all this time, and all that had befallen her, she could not shake off the feeling that some kind of slow change was taking place inside her. The Storm of ’31 had merely shaken things around, like a river disturbed by a thrown rock, disrupting the natural flow of things. Her promised life and true husband had been propelled elsewhere; her girl-child washed up in the womb of another. Over the years, as the Scots girls produced more and more children, Elspeth kept a keen eye on the progress of the mothers, and quickly, after the birthing of a female, inspected it for any telltale characteristics of George Lisle.

It wasn’t Bessy or Susan, or Mary Miller, or even Jean Malcolm – a good-natured, sentimental girl who tried Captain Shaw’s patience on account of her laziness and foolishness – but Rhona Douglas who provoked the first great scandal.

Back in old Roseneath, those who knew Rhona thought her an excitable, muddle-headed lassie, forever chattering and incapable of keeping still. Perhaps it was a response to her home life, where she had lived with her mother and grandmother. There had been an air of gloom in that cottage. Passing it, even on a Saturday night, not a sound was heard. Grannie, minnie and daughter could be glimpsed sitting round the hearth, heads bowed in prayer and over the sewing from which they scraped a living. Rhona, when she was set free, on Church mornings and market days to sell her drab shawls and hodden dresses, made up for the silence by talking twenty to the dozen. She spoke about nothing in particular. Small talk about stitching and mending, about pictures she had seen in the flames of her peat fire, an allusion or two to Bible stories, and half-cocked versions of gossip she had heard from other market girls.

Rhona was plain in the truest sense of the word. She was not unattractive: her hair had a nice brown sheen to it; her eyes were clear if speckled; the lass was plain to the point of fading into the blank hills of Roseneath. She was fair like a day without too much rain.

Rhona had arrived at the Coak Plantation as silent as if she were still sewing with her minnie and grannie. The blether and jabber of market days never returned to her in her new world. Most of the women had gone through an initial period of clamming up, as they got used to the heat of the island. They all wilted a little, lungs so full of broiling air they could hardly breathe let alone speak.
They became listless; their bones felt as if they had been replaced by sludge, and their flesh turned to porridge. One by one, however, they accustomed themselves to the heat. But no amount of time, no loose-fitting shift or straw hat could acclimatise Rhona Douglas to the sun and humidity.

Jean Malcolm’s sloth was stubborn and willed, which stoked the factor’s ire. Rhona’s, by contrast, he hardly even noticed. She got through less work than any of the girls, but the effort she put into it seemed greater. Her skin reddened a little like all the others’ but not to the point of losing its natural transparency. In the vibrant light of the West Indies her complexion still managed to fade into the background: the glare of hibiscus and petunia blotted her out. Yet Rhona Douglas it was who gave birth to the first black baby.

There had been other unnatural births, but the offspring had either been stillborn, or languished within days, before rumours of their colour had been divulged or confirmed. Mary Lloyd, whose eyesight had been afflicted since the day she stepped into the Barbadian sun, was given the benefit of the doubt: she had thought it was Tomas Gaustadt, the suitor she had stood next to at Mr. Galloway’s service, that she’d lain with, though that gentleman had denied it. Mary Malcolm – never so unindustrious as her sister, Jean – had blamed some corrupting influence of the sun and the air in this godforsaken land for the contamination of her child. Such reasoning received nods of understanding from all around: hadn’t they all experienced unnatural effects of the climate? Hair fried by the heat, crackling into negro curls; skin burnished and flaking so that they hardly recognised themselves; and – though spoken of less openly – a magnification of their baser urges.

It was generally felt that Captain Shaw was right about the impossibility of white and black successfully multiplying. A
survivor
offspring of such a coupling could only be a freak of nature. If it could happen at all, it would be as hail or snow falling in the tropics, or the moon eclipsing the sun: deviations from the norm that carried frightening omens. Diana, in her delicate and
roundabout
manner, had instructed that intimacy between a Negro and a European was not possible for a normal man or woman. “There are terrible tales of those who, losing sight of their God and their pride,
fell into misguided unions. The poor girls were torn terribly – for our dimensions are quite unsuited – and, if they didn’t die, were unable to bear children by natural means, and every moment of the remainder of their lives tortured by pain.”

“Did ony o’ them no’ say it was worth it, but?”

“This is no subject for entertainment, Susan. Please be more respectful in such matters. If I may continue – the poor black man, whether inveigled into the sin or imposing himself on the victim, finds too that his virility has been throttled and likewise ends up barren.”

Diana was proud of the way she could tackle these delicate issues openly – her experience as a midwife and as a scribe, committing to paper details of a very personal nature, had inured her to silly embarrassments. There being no doctor for miles around, and none prepared to travel so far north, Diana assumed the professional, detached voice of a physician. “On the rare occasion that a child has been produced from such a calamity, it generally dies quickly.”

After the birth of Rhona’s child, however – a noisy, hefty boy, fleshy as a pineapple – Diana’s theories faltered. Voices were raised for the immediate expulsion of Rhona Douglas and her bastard. They should be driven out in the middle of the night and left to fend for themselves in the byways amongst brigands, runaways and the dark folk she had elected over her own race. Others called for mother and child to be separated: the boy given to a plantation to be reared, Rhona shunned for all time. Some women felt for Rhona but agreed that such behaviour needed to be nipped in the bud. Jean Homes and Moira Campbell stood firm in their convictions, erect in the pride of ladies who had lived faultlessly. Even Mary Malcolm, who narrowly escaped Rhona’s fate, her bairn being stillborn, joined in with the condemners. Captain Shaw listened to these and other solutions, arbitrating which was most suitable.

Susan Millar and Bessy Riddoch argued, for the first time ever, at least in public, over the affair. Bess supported the factor’s party, keen to make an example of Rhona, Susan taking a more
charitable
stance on the issue. Mary Fairweather and Mary Miller led the counter-attack on Rhona’s behalf. Throughout the weeks of
argument and schism, Rhona Douglas uttered not a single word in her own defence.

Dainty took the side of the pardoners, Annie Oyo the more
punitive
stance, though the views of neither were sought. Some of the men came down on the side of charity, including Robert Butcher, Diana’s husband.

Elspeth felt keenly the disadvantage of her title and position: Diana and Mary urged her to intervene, to make a judgement on the issue. She was petitioned by all parties to join their particular side of the debate. Shaw never addressed her specifically on the question, quite content with his own experience and prudence in such breaches, but made it clear that her endorsement of his position was only to be expected. With Lord Coak in New York, Elspeth’s loyalty at this time was rightly to him.

“An announcement from you,” pleaded Mary Miller, “might just see the lassie safe.”

Retreating to her rooms as often and for as long as she could
without
too much remark being made of her absence, she implored the ghost of George Lisle to help her. What would he – Emancipist and Liberal on the one hand, heir to a sugar fortune and pragmatist on the other – have done? Failing to detect any reply from his spirit, other than a faint gurgling in her bowels, she turned to the heroines whose words she knew by heart. What would Cleopatra advise? The only line that would come to her was “Be it known that we, the greatest, are misthought for things that others do, and when we fall, we answer others’ merits in our name, and are therefore to be pitied.”

She searched through books that Albert had given her, but
whatever
she found seemed only to worsen her dilemma: how dreadful it is when the right judge judges wrong!

What you cannot enforce, do not command. After two days’ thought, she found a moment when Diana and Mary were together in the kitchens, and Captain Shaw standing at the door, supping a mid-morning mauby.

“I bear Rhona no ill will, and can’t find reason to do more than rebuke the lass. But it must be admitted that she was in
contradiction
of our rules. I think compassion at this time might benefit us all.”

She herself thought the speech pretty enough, but it satisfied no one. Shaw nodded, as if taking note of her position.

As the next days went by, she felt he must have taken her
counsel
aboard, for no action was taken yet against Rhona. Shaw let Diana nurse child and mother, encouraging the former’s appetite and suck, applying balms to the latter. Shaw continued to rail about the dangers of Rhona’s behaviour, but said nothing of banishment, separation, or shunnings. He reminded them all that, if they truly wished to construct their New Caledonia, fornication with lowly beings must be seen as the deepest infringement. But for the time being at least, he restricted himself to words.

After a fortnight, Rhona was having ever more difficulty feeding her child; the energy required for producing milk beyond such a lethargic woman. The boy waned. Diana, discussing the situation over evening meals, surmised that the milk of neither black nor white woman could help his hybrid soul. What had started out as a healthy life, dulled and sagged. The boy died before the month was out.

On the night of his death, Diana nursed him and soothed Rhona. Strangely, the very child that the mother had hardly the strength to hold while he was alive, took on a sudden powerful attraction for her, dead. Rhona Douglas snatched his body from Diana, squeezed it to her breast, and lamented over it. The midwife and
apothecary
, slowly, speaking words of condolence and succour, managed to prise the little cadaver back, and went out into the night, to rid Roseneythe of the poor, lost soul. The following week, Rhona appeared back in the fields, as ashen, silent and ineffective as she had been since the day she arrived.

At the last harvest of 1841 Lord Coak gave his permission for a triple celebration. There was an abundant crop that year and, more importantly for the future, the building of the sugar manufactory had been completed, though its extensive machinery had still to be installed. But the main cause for merriment was the
commemoration
of Lady Elspeth’s ten years on the plantation. A gala
concert
was organised at which, all who could, played, recited, sang or danced. Elspeth offered a shortened Lady of the Lake to make
room for an extra piece: All hail, great master! Albert responded by reciting himself – for the first and only time in public – with a complementary text from
The Tempest.
I have done nothing but in care of thee.

Elspeth was thirty-one years old and, though a certain maturity had settled on her features, it served only to enhance her comeliness. She had kept out of the sun as much as possible to preserve her skin from turning dark or as red as the Scots women’s
complexions
. But, ten years! Ten years that seemed shorter than the ten months that found her in Greenock, and left her storm tossed in Northpoint.

She made an inventory of the successes and failures of her life to date: a vocation wiped out by the whims of weather, the loss of her true love, exile. But also, survival and marriage to a gentleman who had made a lady and a matriarch of her. The prospects of
rebuilding
the Lyric had hardly been mentioned for three whole years, and when they were, her role in it was unclear. She still could not venture more than halfway down the drive, or two hundred yards in any direction from the porch without being seized by panic. The stabbing wound in her side returned only infrequently now, and the nightmare of being punctured and gouged had all but desisted. She more often submitted to slumber under the dark but soft
drifting
shades and the mysterious, but welcoming, shadows. She had maintained her position in this new family with decorum, and was treated with respect – saving the likes of Bessy’s and Susan’s
impolite
manners – by all. Fate, she decided, had not so much
abandoned
as lost interest in her.

She still felt, from time to time, movement in her belly. Some twelve girls had been born and, though she continued to inspect each new arrival, the hope that she would find something of her old self and George in the produce of another woman’s womb became a madness she hid even from herself.

The concert finished in the wee hours and, the next day,
everyone
had been granted a late start by Captain Shaw. Elspeth, who had not slept after sun-up for several years, was up before everyone and walked round her herb garden enjoying the freshness of the morning. She loved to watch the West Indian sun pop up out of the
sea, like a black boy shimmying a palm. Returning, she came across the only other soul awake – one of the Edmondson boys. She hardly knew the family. Mr. Edmondson had been a slave of Albert’s before emancipation, and he and his family, living somewhere just beyond the cane fields, were always pleasant and respectful. She had seen the boy grow up, without ever discovering his name. Stumbling upon him this morning, she was shocked to feel her skin tingle and the hairs on her body unexpectedly bristle.

He was handsome, with large eyes, broad shoulders and narrow hips. There was something gentle about him, despite the harsh work and long hours he endured. From time to time she had
occasion
to speak directly with him and he was polite without being submissive. Shaw, she knew, had no time for him, nor any of the Edmondson family. “In the old days I would have sold him,” he had told her. “The braggart has a mutinous look to him.”

He was milking the small flock of black-belly sheep, which Elspeth herself had been rearing to provide cheese and meat for the estate. She smiled at him and he returned her greeting in kind. The morning getting hotter, Elspeth brought out a jug of water with arrowroot for him.