Redlegs (22 page)

“From this day on Master Shaw you shall call my son Lord Coak.”

“I cannot see how I can sir,” quoth I, “unless it be the legitimate Truth.”

“Well it is & it isn’t,” said he. “This is a New World, Shaw, where what went before is of little use to us. Perchance my son is not a Lord in England but peradventure he may still be one in the Colonies. He will get his work done faster & better with that Title hanging from his hat. So I think will you.”

“I am not sure Mister Cox – if that not be too lowly a denomination for you – that I am convinced by your argument.”

“I have money, Shaw. Enough of it and made by my own wits to have less need of a sobriquet. But you, man – have you never been denied something you knew in your heart was yours by right?” I need hardly put in writing here what I answered to that!

“I have done my investigations on you, Shaw, & taken up your references. It has come to my attention that – were the world in the right order – you ought by now to be a Captain in the Colonial Militia. Then a Captain you are here – & my son a Lord.”

Then he added an afterthought that I considered most wise & proved to me the man’s intelligence. “For what,” quo he, “is a lie but the truth in masquerade?”

At once I saw the sense of his reasoning but I must confess that for nigh forty year since each time I uttered the word “lord” to that perverted English fop it stuck deep & hard in my craw.

It so happened that only weeks after my inauguration at the estate of Lord Coak – in the year eighteen hundred & fifteen – that our injudicious Assembly passed the slave registry bill – a demand that all Owners notify the government of the number – age – sex – & duties of their stock – to ensure that none were still engaging in the now illegal business of buying & selling slaves. The poor Negroes & indentured coloureds – being low in education & misinformed by Mischievous elements – mistook the purpose of this act & thought that they had been set free.

When Freedom was long in coming – though – as we are witnessing now – they have no gift for Freedom – they supposed that they had been cheated of their emancipation. A riot broke out on various Plantations – for the most part in the southern regions where I had worked with Mr. Barclay. Indeed I had met the coloured Francklyn who was one of the organisers of the insurrection & have seen at close quarters the slave Bussa.

I played my active part in the quelling of the bloodthirsty Mutiny & in the Emergency. I was permitted to re-enlist as a Militia soldier. The quelling of the slaves took no more than a few days but long enough for these half-made men living unnaturally in a foreign land to make some great destruction. After the successful subjection of the mutineers there followed several months of tracking down & testifying against the perpetrators of the crimes that were committed. I myself indicted over eighty men & some twelve women & testified at the hearings of nearly fifty. I attended as many of the Hangings as I could – not because I derived any pleasure from such woefull scenes – but because it is important that we are honest & direct in our actions & in the consequences of our actions. At each hearing I pleaded for mercy on behalf of these sad Souls & argued for their deportation to the dark Continent of Africa. That Continent will not always be dark. Once it has its children back again – & the Natural harmony of
things restored – generations in the future will look to that great yet primitive land & will see Christ’s light shining from its depths. I am not ashamed to say that I wept openly at each & every Execution. I took but one pleasure when the Field Marshals of the Militia – albeit tardily – awarded me the Title Captain and that was that; henceforth Lord Albert was the only liar at Northpoint.

Thereafter I continued to work diligently for Coak – but still managed to read & discuss great issues with like-minded people. As Nancy once said – though that sullied ethiopic concubine is the last person from whom I should take counsel – Studdiation is better than Eddication. I watched & I observed & I learned.

The cause of emancipation only got worse & worse & the very arts in which I had been trained were seemingly to become redundant. Then – on the morning of a week after the dreadfull storm – a woman stumbled half-dead onto my land & fell into my arms. She was torn & ragged – her hair a bird’s nest & her jacket & dress sundered so that she showed nearly a full breast. Had the pair of them flopped out it would have been more fitting – for this woman augured not one but two new beginnings in my life.

I can barely press on with this Disclosure for my hand shakes. At the memory of her body falling into mine – most surely – & of the gentle milky pap she displayed – surely again. But I tremble more at the memory of what she proposed to me & how the last cloud from my philosophical sky evaporated. That lady – quite unwittingly – brought all my training & experience back to life & uncovered for me the project to which I was born.

’Twas she that introduced me to my Great Work. She who proposed we bring a brood of females from Scotland & mate them with ready-leathered colonial stock. As Mr. Barclay taught me – all breeding must be undertaken through the female line. Soon I had my very own flock to cultivate at Roseneythe. A solid Lowland Scots variety on which to graft the best of the Northern Races. (The Lowlander is a dependable mongrel – he keeps a hung head & a decently lowered eye.)

Why shouldn’t the fundaments of my Science be applied to the European as much to the African? The savage it is true – being less developed – is the most easily & soonest distilled. But I have proved
the Creating & Managing of bloodlines is no less Successfull in the White race.

My greatest aggravation – as it will have been to all Men of Science & Spirit – is the waywardness of women. The bitch of the Scotch race divides her time twixt psalming & lifting a leg. I should have calculated that few of them could resist guddling tween furzy banks for a great black trout. Tupping a darkie would aye be fine sport for them. No matter. Enough will remain Loyal to my Ambitions to create their New Caledonia.

I must put this pen down – for the shaking will not stop. Trembling still at the memory of the day that body fell into mine & of the gentle milky tit. At how she made my Destiny clear. It trembles too with Anger. Were it not for the slack-pintled tinsel-Laird (ne’er indeed – & mayhaps his Father knew it – was a Cox so falsely named!) & his peering & love of recitations – the success you see around you would have been plain a generation back. The Devil take them both – the onanistic Planter & the schismatic wench Bathsheba. 

Twenty-three years after George was blown away in the Storm, Elspeth finally gazed on the chestnut-bright eyes and mild
countenance
of a newborn girl, and recognised at once the combined spirit of George Lisle and her own blithe, younger self. She couldn’t quite say why but perhaps because the rain was heavy that night and the wind powerful, because the child was one of the Miller clan who reminded Elspeth of her own sisters and father and aunts, she felt this child was going to be special to her. Or perhaps it was because the colours that night in her dreams – while Bathsheba was being born in a chattel-house – were especially intense and fast-moving. And then, in the morning, when she first saw her, she seemed to know her already. Bathsheba Miller she was christened, but it was Elspeth herself who gave her her pet name, the Rain Child.

The birth followed another great event, less than a year before, in 1853, the grand opening of Lord Coak’s magnificent Sugar Manufactory. It had been twenty-five years in planning, taken
fifteen
years to build and four more to achieve its full, astonishing, potential. Of the most modern design, it produced an extra ton of semi-processed sugar per acre than any Barbadian plantation had managed before. It recovered three-quarters more sucrose and muscovado, and a higher grade of massecuite. It could single crush, double crush, and triple dilute if necessary. Whatever the market demanded. The whole process was overseen by Gideón Brazos, under Mr. Shaw’s authority.

Brazos was brought from Cuba, procured together with the machinery design. He was a Spanish-speaking quadroon – neither of which circumstances was agreeable to Captain Shaw. Quadroons were confused and above themselves, and the Spanish language brought elements of Popery and slothfulness. Brazos showed signs
of having Hausa blood, an arrogant tribe. The planter assured his factor that Brazos was a slave from a country which still respected the old traditions, and would be transferred to Barbados on the basis of indenture. They needed someone who knew how to run a refinery, who understood the modern techniques so novel to Lord Coak and Captain Shaw. To Gideón Brazos, such crafts were as familiar as the palms of his cinnamon hands.

They also bought a woman in Cuba to be his mate. Shaw instructed Coak how to choose such a companion with care,
sending
him detailed notes on physical and mental signs to look out for, and questions to ask owners concerning the women’s personal history and records. Coak finally selected Golondrina Segunda, a woman in her settled mid-thirties, of reasonably pure Whydah blood. Nearly a decade older than Brazos, a mother already and therefore schooled in the ways of the world. It was decided not to have her accompanied by her issue as they would take up too much of her time, and interfere with her relationship with Brazos.

Since the launch of the factory Elspeth’s nights had been
disturbed
by sudden releases of hissing steam, the distant trundle of carts in the morning, men shouting in English and Spanish, women in Scots. Her days were rearranged to suit the new production. Mealtimes were shorter, concerts truncated or cancelled, and the house during all daylight hours, it seemed, emptied of people. The silence was made all the more intense by the clatter and rumble echoing down the driveway.

The factory brought a renewed sense of industry and increased prosperity to Roseneythe. The pistons pumped away from early in the morning till late at night, eating up wood at a tremendous rate. Carts and drays hauled trunks of trees up the driveway. Coak and Shaw saw to it that all the supplies needed to feed the monster were furnished by the estate itself – Coak’s lands bordering a gully thickly wooded with mahogany, fig and jacaranda trees, and what was left of the old Scots birches – freeing Roseneythe almost
completely
from dependency on the rest of the island. Only the
shippers
’ agents arrived at the gates in the mornings after harvest to transport product to the ports around Bridgetown.

In the time of the factory, Elspeth had less to do while everybody
else worked doubly hard. Mary and Diana still referred to her in matters of import, but were adept now at running the big house and the women’s lives by themselves. The extra labour created by adding sugar refining to the estate’s interests meant that, for a while, the workforce was at full complement. Lord Coak would not hear of his wife taking anything to do with the dusty and
dangerous
operations that went on in the new building, positioned at the other side of the driveway from the house, near to the estate gates. Lady Elspeth only ever saw the decayed interior of the factory many years after its closure.

The Rain Chile’s maturing coincided with the time of the factory. Born when her mother – Nan, the robust but unruly daughter of Mary Miller – was yet to reach sixteen, Bathsheba was prematurely condemned while still in the womb. However, the combined
circumstances
of the new factory, the clean smir on the night of her birth, and the girl’s own delicate beauty, obliterated all previous omens. Nan was accepted back into the community and her
daughter
quickly became a favourite.

The rain that night fell golden from the evening sky: cold,
sparkling
drops the colour of fine tawny rum. The great storm had blown everything that Elspeth Baillie had loved – George, the Lyric, her career, her home in Garrison – up into the heavens, where for twenty-three years they had tumbled and spun. Now, in 1854, her hopes and dreams could be glimpsed again in the bright brown eyes of this girl, and heard in the chime of her laugh. Bathsheba was Nan’s, conceived of an unknown father, but she was also Elspeth’s and George’s, a girl who would become, under her ladyship’s care, a true grand blanc. The rain-child who would lead them all home, restore the natural hierarchy of things, dropped as silkily from Nan’s womb as the rain shower fell from the cloudless sky. A slippery, cold wet child that Diana, who assisted at the delivery, declared was utterly without blemish. Even the afterbirth poured clear and fresh and colourless.

That her father was unidentified was not a cause of much
disquiet
: Bathsheba was hardly alone in the circumstance and, anyway, no one ledgered fathers anymore. Diana baptised the girl
in the traditional way, and spread the word of her exceptional
fairness
. From the day after her birth everyone helped to protect their girl from the prying eye of the sun. Nan and Diana swaddled her as a babe, then later, dressed her in the lightest of fabrics. Linen, cotton, taffeta. Materials unfamiliar to their own skins, but brought by Lord Coak for his wife from Europe – silk of the finest denier, satin adapted from Elspeth’s old costumes. Diana cared for the child as if she were her own. For years after the stillbirth of her own bairn, Diana Moore had lived like a slave-woman: doing all that was expected of her, but joylessly, as one goes about a
compulsory
task, disinterested. Her deep faith and the kindness and loyalty of Robert Butcher helped her recovery, but it was Bathsheba who returned her to her old, bustling self. The girl had the innate capacity of turning all around her into surrogate mothers, brothers, sisters. Nan was delighted to share her child. The grandmother, Mary, took special care of her darling; Sarah Alexander sang to her and Sarah Fairweather told stories; Bessy Riddoch taught her tricks, Mary Riach helped with numbers. Elspeth’s life changed, nurturing her towards her future vocation. Even Lord Coak took a shine to the lass.

His lordship had shipped a piano from Germany some six years earlier to enhance the evening concerts. It was a beautiful if
fantastic-looking
contraption, so solid and heavy it took six men, taking shifts over an entire afternoon, to haul it from the porch to the hall. Made of mahogany with rosewood inlay and intricate scrollwork, no one had ever seen such an instrument before. Those who had seen any kind of piano expected it to be as long and flat as a dining table with keys attached. But this creature was twice as tall as it was long and, despite its weight, shorn off abruptly at the back.

“It’s an Upright,” Coak informed them. “Listen to the sound it makes.”

Elspeth, who had learned to play concertina on stage as a child, tried it out. It was as loud and metallic-sounding as the factory, making the window casements rattle and bringing people in from fields a quarter of a mile away. Albert had also brought tuition books for her to learn and, while the rest of the community were cutting cane or crushing it in the factory, she worked hard at her
lessons – with the sole intention of teaching young Bathsheba. The girl began to learn when she was only five, her small fingers and nervousness at such a massive machine coaxing a sweeter sound out of it than anyone else had managed.

“Look!” cried Elspeth one day, bringing Albert in to hear the girl after only a few months of preparation. “My father would’ve called her a musicker!”

Albert smiled and patted Bathsheba’s brown, tousled hair. “She’s no Mozart, let us not be overly indulgent. But she does produce a warmth in her simple melodies.”

Elspeth and Bathsheba would spend an hour most evenings, sitting side by side on two dining chairs, making up chords and sequences for which they had no name. They soon gave up on the tuition books and devised their own way of making the upright sing, the little girl sometimes laughing and getting whole runs of notes to sound right, sometimes tiring, refusing to play, or making an
incoherent
mess of a tune. The woman sat patiently with her, learning alongside her, varying her education by reading her Melville’s
Moby
Dick
which had entranced Elspeth herself, Captain Ahab a wild admixture of herself and, bizarrely, Shaw. Albert and Diana warned her that the child was too young for such fictions, but Elspeth read it to the end, though often Bathsheba slept through half the
narration
. Then she would lift the child to the door, calling on Nan or Mary to take her home.

Albert was Elspeth’s only calendar during that happy epoch. She had grown used to the cycle of rainy months and long periods of dry heat, within them the pauses for celebrations. The old celebrations of Christmas and Easter merited nothing more than an extra prayer at mealtimes and a bigger jug of rum and mauby; in their stead came the monthly concerts and birthday parties for Albert, and now for Bathsheba. The triple harvests wheeled around her and, like smaller cogs in a perpetual machine, the regular production of refined sugar products, and their weekly delivery to Carlisle Bay. Albert’s gradual weakening went barely noticed, shoulders
hunching
and legs stiffening. His paunch never diminished or expanded, but fell more flaccidly lower on his frame. His hair had thinned,
but its colour changed so little, from damp to dry sand. Only his face marked the passing of time. Like an antique looking glass it whitened and dimmed, the reflection from it growing duller. Like the sun at the end of a long afternoon that seems to retreat from the world. She would look round at him when he spoke and, every once in a while, become aware they were both ageing.

On Bathsheba’s fifth birthday, he was sixty-three years old. On her tenth, in 1864, sixty-eight. No birthday was ever celebrated for Elspeth, only each tenth anniversary of her arrival. Her
parents
had never observed her birthdays, presumably because they were in transit or on stage anywhere between Dundee and Ayr. She could only roughly work out her own years. Twenty fewer than Albert. Or perhaps less. Before Bathsheba came, she was in too much of a lacuna, a chasm in time, for age to mean anything. The Scots women seemed to age more rapidly than her: contemporaries became like aunts, nieces like sisters, and then suddenly they were middle-aged, while Elspeth remained less touched – ignored – by time. After Bathsheba, she was too busy to bother with counting. Forty-five-ish passed. Then fiftyish.

Not only Albert’s face grew dimmer, but his presence. He travelled less and less, yet was less and less noticed in residence. Captain Shaw, with his lordship always at the ready, hidden away in his office, or near enough in town, seemed more substantial. A midway point between Albert and Elspeth, he was one of those men who got stronger, thicker, more gnarled with age. Handsomer, even, Bess and Susan said. Albert drifted into the background, his energies conducted into the firmament of the factor.

Before she was quite twelve, Diana had begun utilising Bathsheba Miller’s abilities in the schoolroom, as an assistant teacher. Equally, the lass was proficient in the kitchen of the big house, and a good worker in the fields and the factory. The women fretted for her health – her slight build and delicate fair skin were not designed to thole the heat and work. So Nan sewed her garments – high
collars
, low hems and long-sleeved – so tight that not even the heated air could reach her body, let alone the burn of the sun. Despite the girl’s leanness, by the time she was fourteen proper she was tall and
strong, and sang all day in the fields to her workmates, still cutting and gathering at a rate commended by Captain Shaw himself.

She learned all the tales from the old country that her aunts could remember. She mastered the accounts of hoodies and selkies and the one about the daughters of the sky who returned to their father in his silver palace of cloud. She knew bits and pieces of stories such as the Island of Women and the House of Lir. She sang songs – Want One Shilling and Jock o’ Hazeldean – and learned every line of the Lady of the Lake, as taught to her by Elspeth Baillie herself.

Bathsheba stretched and grew until she was as tall and narrow as caneshoot, as brilliant in hue as honey. Her nut-brown hair grew long and thickly. Shaw remarked that she had classic Celtic
features
. Coak concurred: acorn eyes, skin pale as Rivine daughter of Conor, hazel hair like Loch Morar at dusk. They named her Bathsheba for the town that most had only heard tell of, several miles down the rugged east coast, where dark waves break in
dazzling
torrents on a slender ribbon of sand. Diana spent extra time on her reading, Bathsheba having shown a lively intelligence from an early age. She liked to draw, and did so with a neat and
accurate
hand. Lady Elspeth trained her in the ways of the theatre, and the middle-aged lady even began to dream again of the stages of Bridgetown. Perhaps a girl of Baillie family training would yet play to the gentry of the New World.