‘And love him too, I hope.’
‘That goes without saying.’ Lydia took her friend’s hand and they turned back towards the valley. From the moment when Margaret had first read the letter in which Ralph asked her to come, she had felt an indefinable uneasiness. But now she saw that Ralph and Lydia had created a way of life for themselves which brought them personal happiness as well as satisfaction in the work which they did for others. There was no cause for anxiety.
3
The secret lives of children are foreign territory to their parents, but an outsider often finds it easier to cross the frontier. In the first excitement of her arrival Margaret had had eyes only for her brother and her friend, but on Saturday she set herself to make friends with her niece and nephew.
Kate and Brinsley had spent only two brief furloughs in England since they were born but, although their aunt was almost a stranger, a sympathy sprang up between them immediately. At their last meeting, Kate had been a sturdy, tomboyish little girl, and the intervening years had made no change in her independence of spirit nor in the unladylike definiteness of her firm movements and long strides. Her tawny hair was tied with bedraggled ribbons into two thick bunches, but only to keep it out of her eyes – every detail of her appearance proclaimed the fact that she did not care what impression she made on anyone who saw her. The whole family, as a matter of fact, was shabbily dressed. Margaret was freer of vanity herself than most women, but even she thought it a shame that a young girl should be allowed to grow up without at least a standard of neatness to observe, and resolved to spend some time during her visit with a needle and thread, mending old clothes and perhaps even making new ones. It was too soon in the visit now, however, to criticize. Instead, joining the two children on the verandah, she asked the fourteen-year-old girl what she was studying so intently in her notebooks.
‘Some of the Valley people don’t come to Mother for help when they’re ill,’ Kate told her. ‘They have their own medicines and poultices to clean a wound or draw off a fever. They don’t like to tell Mother their recipes, but they tell me. And sometimes they let me watch when they change the poultices, so that I can see whether the mixture works or not. I’ve been making some notes, to see which recipes appear to be the most successful.’
‘Does your mother mind having such competition on her doorstep?’ asked Margaret.
‘I asked her once,’ Kate said. ‘And she just laughed. She told me that some people who fall ill get better even if a doctor never comes near them. And some will die, however good the doctor, because they are too old or too weak or because the illness is without a remedy. There will be a good many, of course, who are truly cured by the care or the medicine which a doctor gives them. But there are always a few, she says, who recover – if they do recover – mainly because of their own certainty that they will. So the remedy prescribed by a qualified doctor might not do them any good if they had no faith in it. But if they believe that a potion smuggled in by Old Emmy on the night of the new moon has a special power to cure them, then they’ll be cured.’
‘You’re learning the secrets of our profession very young,’ said Margaret, laughing in her turn. ‘And do your studies confirm what your mother told you?’
‘I think some of the old formulas work in an ordinary way,’ Kate told her earnestly. ‘I mean, if Old Emmy binds strips of papaya fruit over an infected wound, you can see that the infection is being drawn out. She’s using the same sort of medicine that Mother does, although she may have different ingredients. But then there was a woman who went nearly mad after she had a baby. She kept banging her head against walls and trees, and gabbling in a way that didn’t make sense. That time Old Emmy smeared a green ointment on the soles of the woman’s feet. It smelt foul, but I can’t think of anything in it that could really have done any good. But the woman fell asleep within an hour, and when she woke up she was well again. So yes, I do think that Mother’s right about the importance of faith. It’s the other medicines that I’m trying to study carefully, so that I can find out which of the ingredients is the one that works.’
‘I can see you’re going to be a pharmacist when you grow up,’ said Margaret, and was taken aback by the indignation in the girl’s eyes.
‘But I’m going to be a doctor, of course!’
‘Yes, of course.’ Margaret’s voice was apologetic, but her smile was full of sympathy. The certainty with which Kate expressed her ambition reminded her of her own frustrations at the same age, and the excitement with which she had seen one barrier after another fall before her determination to succeed. ‘And you, Brinsley?’ she asked, turning to her nephew.
‘I’m to be sent to school in England next year,’ said Brinsley, an energetic twelve-year-old whose eyes sparkled with liveliness. Margaret had already noticed that he had inherited not only his father’s yellow hair but also the careless gaiety which had characterized Ralph in the schoolboy days before guilt drove him to religion. It was obvious that Ralph adored his only surviving son – but at the same time seemed to feel a continual need to curb the boy’s high spirits. Margaret herself found Brinsley’s light-heartedness delightful, but perhaps her brother saw in it only a reminder of his own sinful youth, from which he had been at such pains to escape. At any rate, he had already told his sister that it was time for Brinsley to be subjected to greater discipline than was possible in a community which had spoiled him from birth.
‘Are you looking forward to that?’ she asked.
‘I wouldn’t look forward to it at all if it were to offer nothing but the diet of Latin irregular verbs which my father suggests,’ said Brinsley, making a face at the grammar which lay unopened beside him. ‘But Mother has told me something about his own schooldays – how when she first knew him his enthusiasm was only for cricket. That’s a more interesting prospect.’
‘You don’t play cricket here, I imagine.’ The houses of the Hope Valley community were built on the two steep slopes of a gorge formed by the stream which divided them; and in addition to that, the land descended sharply from the mountains to the flat coastal plains which formed the plantations; there was no room for a cricket pitch there. As for the estate which Ralph had taken over, Margaret’s tour of inspection suggested that every possible inch of land had been brought under cultivation, with nothing wasted on frivolities.
‘Don’t I just, though?’ said Brinsley. He looked at his aunt with mischief in his eyes. ‘Would you like to see, Aunt Margaret? But if you come, you mustn’t tell anyone.’
‘I’d love to see.’ Margaret was amused as well as curious. She fetched her hat and they set out together, leaving Kate to study her notes. Brinsley led the way at first along the same path which Lydia had taken towards Pastor’s Vineyard; but after a little while, looking anxiously at his aunt’s clothes as though to gauge whether she would be willing to risk spoiling them, he came to a halt beside a row of palm trees. These – in marked contrast to the rest of the tidy estate – were almost strangled by a variety of vines and creepers which had wound their way up towards the sky and then dangled down to root in the ground again. The curtain of vegetation appeared to be impenetrable, but Brinsley took hold of a huge golden-veined leaf and tugged at it, raising a flap of greenery which had been cut to provide a doorway.
‘This way,’ he said, and Margaret bent low to go through. As she straightened herself on the further side of the tangled screen, she looked round in surprise. She was standing in a garden. It was unkempt and overgrown, but there could be no possible doubt that these grounds had been laid out for pleasure rather than for profit. The steep fall of the land had been tamed into terraces, hedged with poinsettia and hibiscus: the stone steps which joined them were flanked with ornamental urns, cracked now but still imposing. Specimen trees, bright with blossom, were scattered over what had undoubtedly once been a lawn, although now the broad-leaved crab grass which had carpeted it was almost invisible beneath a smothering of weeds.
As well as a garden, there was a building. ‘Tha
t’s Bristow Great House,’ said Brinsley, noticing that his aunt was staring at it.
Margaret could not help laughing at the grandiloquence of the name – and not just because it was a roofless ruin now. Surely, she thought, it could never have been particularly imposing. There were only two storeys, raised from the ground to allow a dark storehouse underneath, and only three rooms on each floor. Brinsley was able to provide an explanation.
‘It wasn’t called a Great House because it was specially great,’ he said. ‘The main house of every plantation was called that. They were never built high, because of the danger from hurricanes. And they never had many rooms, because the people who lived there spent almost all their time outside.’
Margaret could see that the verandahs which encircled the building on both levels must once have been cool and attractive places, although by now the wood had rotted and the whole area was fouled by bird droppings. She was curious enough to walk towards the stone steps.
‘There were other buildings separate from the house,’ Brinsley told her. ‘The slave quarters on one side and the kitchen quarters on the other. My best friend lives there, in the old kitchen. And there was a bakehouse and a laundry, although they’ve fallen down now.’
By this time Margaret had gone up the steps and picked her way carefully across the crumbling floor of the verandah. Inside the house and so protected from the weather, the rooms on the lower storey were in good condition. What must have been the drawing room was of a noble size. It was possible, with a little imagination, to furnish it with polished wood and gleaming silver and people it with the rich plantation owners of a century earlier, gossiping and flirting with all the formal style of a closed society.
A slave based society, Margaret reminded herself, refusing to admit sentimentality. She moved into a smaller room, and stopped in surprise. Brinsley, she realized, was watching her reaction with a pride which made clear what had happened.
The room – once perhaps a study – had been cleaned and furnished. The furnishings were shabby and unsafe -a rug that had probably been thrown out by Lydia as being too disgracefully threadbare, and tables which had almost certainly been made by Brinsley himself with an inexpert touch. But the floor and the fluted panelling of the walls had been polished until they shone with a red richness.
‘It’s the thing about mahogany,’ said Brinsley behind her. ‘You can let it get damp and dirty for years and years, but then all you have to do is to rub hard and it looks like this. This is our room, Kate’s and mine. We don’t tell anyone about it.’
He was giving her a warning, but Margaret had no intention of betraying secrets. She examined more closely the designs carved into the doorposts. There was no doubt at all, now that she could see them clearly, that the pattern was the same as that used in the building of Brinsley House in Bristol. Margaret had recognized the name of Bristow as soon as Lydia first mentioned it, and this small detail of construction confirmed her belief that she was standing in the house which Samuel Lorimer’s younger brother, Matthew, had built at the end of the eighteenth century.
‘Did your parents ever consider coming to live here?’ she asked.
Brinsley shook his head. ‘It wouldn’t have done,’ he said. ‘I mean, I never asked them, but I could see why they wouldn’t want to. No one’s lived here since Massa Matty died, because the plantation was run by overseers after that. Massa Matty seems to have been quite decent, from the stories the old ladies tell about him; but all the same, he was a slave-owner. It wouldn’t be right for a pastor to live like a slave-owner. That’s really why Kate and I don’t talk about this room when we’re at home, in case Father feels he has to stop us coming. I think he tries to pretend that the house isn’t really here at all. That’s why he’s let a strip of jungle grow up all round it, when everywhere else it’s been cut down.’
There was still a good deal that Margaret did not understand about the situation. Had John Junius Lorimer managed to conceal this part of his possessions in the same way that he had concealed the rubies, and with the same intention – to provide a legacy for one of his children who was still a minor at the time of his ruin? Well, it was a question which should be put to Ralph, not to Brinsley, who from the tone of his remarks appeared to have no suspicion that any member of the Lorimer family had ever owned property so near to Hope Valley. She returned instead to the subject which had originally brought them on this tour of inspection.
‘Where do you play your cricket?’ she asked.
Brinsley led the way outside again, and round to the side of the house. A young man who had been sitting in the shade of an ackee tree rose to his feet as they approached. Older than Brinsley, and more powerfully built, his face displayed the same kind of alert intelligence as did the white boy’s. He was very much lighter in skin than most of the inhabitants of Hope Valley, but his smile was just as broad and cheerful as theirs when Brinsley introduced them.
‘Aunt Margaret, this is my friend Duke Mattison. Father taught him to play cricket at the same time as me, and he’s a rattling good bowler. He can spin the ball and make it break any way he chooses. Show her, Duke.’
They had constructed a practice net, levelling the ground and weaving palm leaves together into screens which would prevent the ball from travelling too far when it was hit. She watched the demonstration for a few moments, smiling at the energy with which the two boys defied the oppressive atmosphere. All their concentration was on the practice, so that they hardly noticed when she said goodbye, assuring them that she could find her own way back. And Margaret herself was thoughtful as she passed through the frontier strip of jungle and into the cultivated part of the old plantation. How had it happened, she wondered, that the Bristow estate had once more come under the control of a Lorimer?
4
Direct questions provoke direct answers, but not necessarily truthful ones.
‘Tell me how the Bristow plantation came into your hands,’ Margaret asked her brother when they were next alone together. ‘I have been very puzzled, trying to think what could have happened, for I can’t remember Papa ever mentioning it at all.’
‘He can hardly have been aware that he had any claim on it,’ said Ralph, ‘Certainly in those last troubled months, when he had so many other worries, he would not have given it a thought. I’ve seen some of the old papers relating to the finances of the plantation. The overseer wrote several times to our grandfather, Alexander, who inherited it from his uncle Matthew, to point out that the land was no longer profitable – that instead of money being sent back to England, it was necessary for the owner to supply more capital in order that new crops might be planted and more efficient methods of working developed. It appears that Alexander never answered the letters. With the bank and the shipping line to occupy his time, I can see that he would have little interest in a property so far away which threatened only to drain his resources.’
‘If Papa knew so little about it, how did it descend to you? Does William know? And the Receiver who had to satisfy the creditors after the collapse of the bank – was he aware that Papa had this asset?’
‘You are describing a plantation which has been well cultivated for twenty years when you talk about an asset, Margaret. When I first came out here and saw it, I can assure you it was only a liability. It could not have been sold because no one would have bought it. It was a wilderness, requiring an investment of much time and labour before any reward could be expected. If our community has succeeded in turning it into a profitable venture, it’s because they gave their labour free in the beginning, expecting no payment until harvest time.’
‘But even so –’
Ralph interrupted her with a laugh. ‘It’s all a coincidence, Margaret. I’m sorry if it makes the story seem untidy, but it’s only the position of the Bristow estate which has led by accident to this new connection with the Lorimers. It could just as easily have been the property of some other family which lay abandoned here, and I should still have applied for it be
cause it lay beside our own boundary. So much good land was neglected, and for so many years, that in the end the government took powers to reallocate it. So this plantation was taken away from the Lorimers because they had ceased to fulfil the obligations of owners. It’s by chance, not by inheritance, that it has fallen into the hands of another Lorimer. You can imagine that I have no wish to be associated with the reputation of a slave-owner, so I’m sure I may count on your discretion in that respect. I’ve never described the past history of the plantation even to Lydia or the children – and it seems that our great-great-uncle has been remembered here solely as Massa Matty, so that my name is not a problem.’
‘Does Bristow then belong to you personally, or to the Hope Valley community as a whole?’
Until that moment Margaret had had no reason to doubt anything Ralph had told her, surprising though she might find it. Was it her imagination now that made her suspect a reluctance on her brother’s part to answer this last question?
‘The deeds legally are in my name. That is a formality, an administrative convenience. It’s easier for the authorities to deal with one owner, just as it’s easier for one owner to manage an estate with the greatest efficiency. But all the profits of our crops –’
He was repeating now what Lydia had already told her, and Margaret allowed her attention to wander. She was remembering a conversation a good many years ago, when Alexa had asked what legacies John Junius Lorimer had left to his children. Margaret’s answer then had been an honest one; it was true that her father had no power to bequeath anything to anyone in his will, for at the moment of his death all his known possessions had been sequestered. And yet now, twenty-six years later, William owned a shipping line, Ralph controlled a large plantation, and waiting in England for Alexa to collect was a fortune in rubies. The children of the rich, it seemed, were not always as effectively ruined by disaster as the children of the poor. Only Margaret herself lacked any visible sign that she had been brought up as the daughter of a wealthy man, and she wasted no time on pitying herself for that. The capital from which she drew her livelihood was her professional qualification, and she felt all the more pride in it for having achieved her success without help.
The Lorimer Legacy Page 12
