‘I think I like your Scotch better. We’ll see. If I took you on, it would be better if you bade here. There’s room.’
‘I would hae tae close the school then.’
‘Well, one thing at a time. You’ll need to meet my lady’s approval, of course. But there are other things than teaching bairns you could help me with. And before all that, there’s this.’ He picked up the colours. ‘I’m grateful for what you did, Aeneas, and I’m glad you have come and sought me out. Do you make a gift of this to me?’
‘Aye. It was never mine.’
‘It is the past. We drank to the past, and you mentioned the future. This is the future.’ He made as if to throw the colours into the fire, watching for Aeneas’s reaction. There was none. ‘You do not flinch.’
‘It has served its purpose.’
‘You kept it all this time.’
MacRoy shrugged.
Wedderburn nodded. ‘I suppose it is still, in theory, dangerous.’ He paused. ‘You know what happened to my father?’
‘Aye, sir. Awbody kent.’
The colours were hanging from Wedderburn’s hand. ‘If I told you that I would not follow this now, what would you think?’
‘I’d think ye’d be mad tae say ony different. Things are no the same noo.’
Sir John nodded approvingly. ‘Well, then.’ He began to fold up the colours. ‘But I would never destroy it. Men died for that cause. My father died for it.’
‘I ken.’
‘My wife’s father may die an exile for it. I will make a gift of it to her, as you did to me. Things like this should not be cast away.’ He laid the cloth down on a table. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘you’d better take a look at your student. He’s keen, but he starts from a base of near total ignorance.’
‘Ah. He’s a servant?’
‘His name is Joseph Knight.’
‘The neger ye brocht hame.’
‘The very same. Let’s see where he has got to. I think you’ll find him interesting, Maister MacRoy.’
‘Maister MacRoy.’
‘Aye?’
‘Maister MacRoy!’
He came awake, found himself half standing, half leaning against a wall.
‘Are you all right?’ Annie and Louisa Wedderburn were staring anxiously at him. Behind them he could see the older girls, Maria and Susan, looking far less concerned, smiling, smirking a little even. He recovered himself as best he could.
‘There ye are. I was coming tae look for ye. But the heat … I jist needed tae rest for a minute. Did ye meet onybody?’
‘Nobody we could marry,’ Louisa said.
‘Now may we see the elephant?’ Annie asked.
‘I think we may,’ said MacRoy. ‘It’s no aften an elephant comes tae Dundee.’
A show of wild animals had been travelling from Edinburgh via Stirling and Perth, and, according to a notice in the Dundee Magazine, it was set up in the Meadows behind the Murraygait. The grass had been thinned by the passage of many feet. MacRoy handed over the entrance fee for them all – he would reclaim it from Lady Alicia – and they wandered along the cages.
MacRoy paid as much heed to the possible attentions of pursepicks as he did to the exhibits. The beasts were a sorry-looking lot in any case – a bedraggled family of lions, a skeerie pair of zebras, a threadbare tiger, a bear that paced back and forth like a madman in a cell. The cages were cramped and filthy, the smell overpowering. Even the keepers – dark, bearded men in baggy red pantaloons and big-sleeved silk shirts that had seen better days – seemed infected with sadness, as if they had journeyed one or two towns too far from home, and were not sure how to get back.
In the last enclosure was the elephant. This was not the huge, trumpeting African creature Annie had hoped for from pictures, but a tuskless, timid-looking Indian one. Here, for an extra penny, they could buy a bag of cakes and feed it. It ate with a kind of baleful indifference, its wet, snottery trunk curling out mechanically to take the food through the bars. Annie looked very disappointed.
‘They’re supposed to be exceedingly wise,’ Louisa said, trying to cheer Annie up.
‘It just looks exceedingly bored,’ Maria said.
Annie disposed of the cakes very quickly. ‘Can we go now?’ she asked. Tears were welling up in her eyes.
It was Susan’s belief that if Aeneas MacRoy had a soft spot for anybody, it was for Annie. Sometimes she would catch him looking in her own direction before making some small gesture of affection towards her youngest sister. It was as if he was seeking Susan’s approval to be kind. This was what happened now. He glanced at Susan, then lightly touched Annie’s cheek with one gnarled finger.
‘Dinna fash, child,’ he said. ‘It is a beast oot o its place and climate. If ye saw it in India it would appear a mighty creature.’
‘Poor thing. I’ll never see India, and neither will it again.’
They began to walk away. Susan saw Aeneas’s brow furrow as he thought of something.
‘Years ago,’ he said to Annie, ‘lang or even I was born, or your faither, they say anither elephant came tae Dundee. It was an ill-willed, cheatin kind o man that brocht it, and the beast was sick, and fell doun and died in the street. And the man, wha’d hoped tae mak a power o siller frae showin it, abandoned it where it fell and disappeared.’
‘Did they catch him?’
‘They didna ken whaur he was. And here was this muckle heap o stinkin flesh declinin on the street. The guid folk o Dundee held their nebs and strippit it doun tae the banes, because they’d heard an elephant was made aw o ivory, and they thocht tae reap something frae it, but then they found it was jist the twa muckle teeth that were ivory. But the provost had the surgeons o Dundee pit aw the pieces back thegither, and they made a skeleton o it again, and exhibited it. And it was a great wonder and folk cam frae far and wide tae see it.
‘Weel, the owner got tae hear o this braw skeleton and he cam back tae claim it for his ain. He said he had sellt it tae the surgeons o Edinburgh, and they cam tae tak it awa tae their toun. But the Dundee folk prevented it. They said the owner hadna the richt, for he hadna treatit the beast weel, but had taen it oot o its torrid hame country, and brocht it tae these cauld northern airts, and stervit it and beaten it and taen it in wee ferry boats and ower craigy mountain roads whaur it had nae wish tae gang. And so it stayed whaur it had died, here in Dundee.’
‘Is it here still?’ Annie asked.
‘I dinna ken, child. But if it is, I think it’s lang laid tae rest.’
‘I don’t know, Maister MacRoy,’ Susan said, ‘that that’s any better an end for an elephant than to be stuck in that cage.’
‘I don’t know either, miss,’ Aeneas MacRoy said. ‘But it maks a better story.’
It seemed to cheer Annie up slightly, at least. Then, making their way back, they passed stalls where the show people were dispensing potions and cures and had set out on red cloths displays of little wooden toys and boxes, thimbles, mirrors and cheap jewellery. Set slightly apart from these stands was a brightly coloured booth which announced itself as the residence of a gypsy spaewife. Maria and Louisa suggested they all have their fortunes told.
MacRoy looked sceptical. The lightness that had entered his voice in the telling of the elephant story disappeared. ‘That is aw superstition and trickery,’ he growled. ‘Your faither wouldna be pleased tae think I let ye spend guid siller on such trash.’
‘Then don’t tell him,’ said Susan, who suddenly thought it a good plan. ‘And we’ll not.’
‘Well, if we do it,’ Maria said, ‘we must tell nobody, not even each other. We must go in one by one, and then write down what she tells us in a letter and seal it for a time – a month, say – and see what comes. And after a month we’ll open the letters and read what was said.’
‘But nothing may happen in a month,’ Louisa said.
‘Well, two or three months then. And even then nothing may happen at all, in which case Maister MacRoy will be proved right, that it is
trash, but harmless. And if the spaewife tells something that comes true, well, it will only be a mystery how she knew, nothing more.’
MacRoy saw that they were determined, and he saw also that they had a hold on him because of his earlier lapse. ‘I canna prevent whit I dinna see,’ he said. ‘I am awa for a dander roond the Meadows tae cool my heid. I’ll see ye back at the entrance in a half-oor.’
He trudged off. His leg was hurting a good deal now. He had walked too far on it. After a few minutes he stopped and sat down under a tree. A light breeze got up. He did not sleep again. The whisky and the violence had left him, and it was pleasant to sit in the shade and take the pressure off his leg.
He thought again of his first visit to Ballindean. How, on being shown out by the same bonnie maid, he had teased her for having kept him in the cold so long. ‘Ye’ll ken tae let me in when I come again,’ he had said. She’d looked at him as if she did not care. ‘A penny like the day will aye get ye in,’ she said. ‘Oh, there’s a toll tae pay each time, is there?’ he asked. ‘And dae I get onything for my penny?’ ‘Ye micht,’ she said, with the briefest of smiles, and closed the door on him. He felt like skipping all the nine miles back to Dundee.
He wondered now, if he had been to a spaewife before then, what she would have said; if she would have been able to see him there, happy as a gowk from his successful interview with Sir John and his first sighting of Annie Thomson. Would she have warned him against her? And what if he had been to a spaewife even earlier, at ten or eleven, before he knew any better, just a year or so before Culloden? Could she have seen him screaming and shaking on the moor, drowned out by the guns; getting to his feet, stumbling away, tripping over the staff of the abandoned colours; tearing the flag off and stuffing it in his shirt, and running, running, running to Inverness? He wondered if she could have told him that all his life thereafter would be a hardening against the memory of that terrible place.
He wondered. And he saw that, whatever she might have said, it would not have changed a thing; that in any case he would never have believed her.
Ballindean, May 1802 / Jamaica, 1760
Sir John Wedderburn and Aeneas MacRoy had been for a walk around the loch. Sir John was surprised at how tired it had made him – it was barely a half-mile circuit, yet his legs felt shaky and his head light. Now they were back in the library. He was seated at his writing-table and MacRoy was updating him on the girls’ progress at their lessons, but Sir John had other things on his mind and interrupted him.
‘What do you think of that painting?’
MacRoy followed his glance. ‘The big ane? You and your brithers in Jamaica?’
‘Yes. What do you make of it?’
MacRoy shrugged. ‘It’s a fine big painting.’
‘I was thinking of taking it down.’
‘Aye, weel …’
‘It irritates me.’
‘It’s been there a lang time.’
‘Yes, that’s why it irritates me. I feel like a change.’
‘We could hae it doun in a minute. But whit would ye pit in its place?’
‘I don’t know. There are plenty of other paintings in the house. A landscape, perhaps. Something more Scottish.’ He paused. ‘But I would feel disloyal to my dead brothers if I removed it. I’ve told you one of them painted it?’
‘Aye, Sir John.’ MacRoy looked bored. They had discussed the painting in this manner often in the past.
‘Loyalty, Aeneas. That’s an item in short supply these days.’
MacRoy’s eyes narrowed. ‘Hae I displeased ye in onything?’
‘You? No, not at all. I was speaking in a general way. I was thinking about the younger people today. Do you think they would come out for a cause as we did?’
‘No. But the world is changed. We baith ken that.’
‘Yes, I suppose so.’ He sighed. ‘Well, anyway, I have some letters to write. I’m sure you’re doing a fine job with my daughters’ education. If there’s nothing giving you cause for concern …’
‘Everything is under control.’
‘Good. That’ll be all then, Aeneas, for now.’
‘Very weel, Sir John.’
MacRoy slid out. Sir John felt only slightly guilty about his lack of interest in the girls’ French verbs. Likewise, his letters: though he did have some to write, they were not urgent. Nothing much seemed urgent any more. He simply liked to be alone. Of late even MacRoy’s formerly tolerable presence was becoming oppressive. The outside world made Sir John feel not only exhausted but nervous, as if it conspired against him. In here, among his books and papers, he felt its threat less acutely.
Funny how MacRoy had taken his remark about loyalty personally. Loyalty was a tricky concept, complex and yet fundamentally simple. Sir John had been loyal to the Stewart cause as a youth. Now, because his allegiance was to the Crown, it was also to the house of Hanover, and yet he did not feel like a traitor. Something had shifted but he did not feel compromised. Did Aeneas feel the same? Did he care? In a way, they were like the ‘loyalists’ back in the American Revolution. Many who had previously been Jacobites had steadfastly refused to become rebels against the mother country. But then, loyalty was not about revolution or rebellion. It was about honour.
This was why even now, so many years after it, he was always punctilious in describing the Forty-five as a rising. To call it a rebellion was to debase the cause and its motives, to make it sound like something quite different. He had never been a rebel; nor had his father. When he thought of rebels, he thought of slaves. He thought of Joseph Knight. He thought of Tacky.
In Jamaica, around Easter of 1760, he had begun to feel uneasy even as he surveyed yet another successful season for his plantations. He would wake in the night and listen for something beyond the chirking of the cicadas and the whine of mosquitoes. He could not identify the source of his disquiet. The fear of rebellion had always been there, like the night sounds. The words of the man on the Kingston waterfront would come back to him from time to time: ‘We’re at war with them.’ But in 1760 the unease had been something more than habit. It had worried away at him like a touch of fever.
And yes, looking back from safe, cool Perthshire, he did associate rebellion with heat, as if it came from the heat, from tropical storms. Was that how it had been – an indefinable substance boiling up in clouds, seeping through the air as the rains approached? Or had he heard it in the conch-shell call that roused the slaves to work before dawn but that might also be a call to revolt? Had he smelt it in the sweat glistening on black backs; seen it flashing in the eyes of young men who would hesitate a second before carrying out some task; felt it in the sullenness of the young women? Had that been its sound rattling through the ripening cane fields, grumbling among the slave huts, whispering over the house roof at night?
There had been more visible signs. One morning, on the road to Savanna-la-Mar, he saw two slaves belonging to a neighbour, men known to him by sight, who had shaved their heads clean. Over the next few days, he saw others who had done the same. Women, too. This was something definite, something one could get hold of and worry about. There was some debate among the planters as to what it meant; talk of a cult or a conspiracy, of witchcraft, of obeah men concocting magic to ward off bullets, of strange rituals performed at night while the masters slept. Concerns were expressed about the preponderance of Coromantees in the district: they were powerful workers, but that made them dangerous too. Someone, possibly Underwood, made a remark that circulated with the unease: trouble among the slaves, wherever and whenever it broke out, started not in Jamaica, but in Africa.
There had been a kind of general delusion among the planters, Sir John thought. It was easy to see it from Ballindean, forty years on, especially after the business with Knight. Underwood had thought he knew his slaves. In a quite different way, John Wedderburn had thought he knew his. They had all thought it. But the truth was, slaves were unknowable. The so-called Coromantees were named after a place neither they n
or their masters had ever been to. The Africa-born slaves had names and languages that ran like subterranean rivers beneath the surface names and the new language they acquired. They wore their faces like masks. How could they have been anything but unknowable?
Sir John remembered James making a joke in very bad taste one day, at a gathering of planters in Savanna – a meal at an inn to mark some occasion or other. What would that have been? The king’s birthday perhaps? Yes, that was it, and James stood up and toasted ‘The king over the water’, and when some bullish English idiot challenged him – to be a Jacobite was still thought to incline a man to France – James very coolly said, ‘But he is over the water, is he not? Surely we’d have heard if he was coming to Sav?’ Everybody else laughed and eventually, after some muttering, the English bull did too. But that wasn’t the real faux pas. It was later that James overreached himself.
The talk had turned to slave names. Somebody facetiously claimed to have the holiest plantation, because so many of his slaves – Abraham, Job, Ruth, Hannah, Moses – had Biblical names. And somebody else said he then must have the noblest, for all his slaves had Roman names. And a third man said that it didn’t matter what polish you put on them, all the slaves had African names underneath, which meant, though the planters might think they were in the British West Indies, they must in fact all be planters in Dahomey. And James said, filling his glass: ‘All those classical names we give them – Achilles, Hector, Nero, Plato –’
‘Cato, Cassius,’ a voice chipped in helpfully.
‘Brutus.’
‘Hannibal.’
‘Dido.’
‘Silvia.’
‘Sibyl.’
‘Quite.’ James nodded his thanks for the contributions. ‘Strange that the one name you never hear is the one that might fit best.’
‘What’s that? Stupidus?’
‘Spartacus,’ said James.
There was a gaping silence. Somebody knocked over a glass. James tapped cigar ash on to a plate, looked around with an innocent smile. He caught John shaking his head at him. Others were doing the same.
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