by Esi Edugyan
I could feel the master’s pale eyes on me.
“Boy,” he barked.
I did not lift my face. “Yes, sir.”
The master made a flustered noise, as if my answer did not please. “My point is, without a little grit, I will have mayhem. My task, Christopher, is to contribute to the grit. I care nothing of your science, so long as it does not interfere with my running of the estate.”
“How near are we to Haiti?” the brother asked, distractedly scraping at his plate. “The first lighter-than-air craft was launched from there—the first launch of such a craft in the Americas, I believe.”
The master paused, frowning. “Do you imagine this is how I wanted to pass my life? Fussing after niggers’ filth, stinking of sugar all day? I did not seek the responsibility out, but it found me all the same. Unlike you, I am not Father’s favourite and cannot simply roam about the world dreaming up silly contraptions. I must actually do what family duty demands.”
“You are the eldest,” the man Christopher said. “It does fall to you, brother.”
“At breakfast”—the master narrowed his eyes—“something you said then…it comes to me. Tell me—does Mother know you’re here?”
The brother paused, and stared steadily across at the master.
“You know she will go out of her wits, don’t you? All this time we have been together, and you have said nothing. All this time. Well, you simply cannot keep disappearing on her like this. Where does she think you are?”
“How can I presume to know anything that woman thinks?” The brother shrugged. “Paris, perhaps. London. I might have mentioned something about visiting Grosvenor.”
The master faintly shook his head, laughed in disgust.
“She would have poisoned me off the idea, wouldn’t she?”
“And so you thought you’d simply catch me at Liverpool and sail out? Just like that? No word of notice at all?”
“Sometimes one needs to disappear a little. It is good for the soul.”
“Whose soul?”
“Mine, presumably.”
“All this suffering, just for your damned flying rag.”
The man gave the master a level look. “It is not a rag, Erasmus. It is a Cloud-cutter.”
“And what purpose does it serve? Will it cure mankind of its ills? Will it release me from the bounds of this godforsaken island?” Big Kit was still dabbing at the stain on the tablecloth, her eyes carefully averted, and now the master noticed her. “Leave off with that,” he snapped.
Big Kit, nervous, took a few last swipes at the stain.
“I said leave off!” The master reached for his plate and, half-standing, struck Big Kit full in the face with it.
A tremendous crack rang out, blood and shards of china everywhere.
My bones jumped up in me, and I just caught the water urn before it slipped from my fingers. I stared at the master’s hands, the fresh blood on his thumb. I wanted to rush to Kit’s side but only stood gripping the jug, the lemon seeds inside clicking like teeth.
“Oh hell, I have cut myself,” said the master, swiping his hands on the tablecloth. Dropping the broken plate, he turned and strode from the room. “Maria! Maria! Heaven’s sake, where are you?”
The silence was terrible. I could hear the blood dripping through Big Kit’s fingers, where she held her face.
The second man, the brother, hesitated. At last he stood and came over to Kit, his napkin held out before him. “Here, lower your hands.”
Big Kit lowered her hands.
“Turn your head. There. Like so.”
The man was taller than any white man I had seen, as tall as Big Kit herself, and I felt his eyes pass over me as he dabbed at Kit’s face. “What is your name?” he said to me.
I glanced helplessly at Kit, met her steady, dark eyes, glanced back.
I heard rustling in the doorway, and I dropped to my knees and began picking up the bloody shards of plate. I kept my eyes on the mess on the parquet.
“For heaven’s sake, Christopher, leave it,” the master said. “Don’t make a mess of yourself. They’ll clean it up. It’s what they do.” He sounded almost pleased now, relaxed. “Listen, the custard and tansies will be along shortly. I have some hope that they will be passable. Come, man, sit down.”
* * *
—
BIG KIT’S NOSE was broken.
I did not cry. Together we mopped up her blood in silence, my eyes on the floor, listening to the master absently scrape his shoes over the parquet to clean the mess off them.
The custards appeared in a warm, sugary glow. While the master ate heartily, his brother pushed his plate away, requesting instead another glass of claret. Night deepened at the windows, and I glanced up to see our reflections there, illuminated and clear, as if some other slaves stood miserable and stone-faced across from us. I searched for my eyes but could not recognize them in the boy who stood in my place, white-gloved, still. When at last the master and his brother had retired, and we had helped scrub out the enormous vats down in the scullery and stacked the steaming dishes to dry, Gaius allowed us to pick through the half-eaten food scraped onto a large platter. I had lost my enthusiasm for it, but Big Kit threw me a furious glance and then began eating fast, scooping the food with two forked-out fingers and chewing crookedly with one side of her mouth. She would wince as she did so, then open her eyes in angry surprise, then lean forward again to scoop up more food. I tasted little. I stared at her nose, refusing to forget.
Only later, as Big Kit and I descended through the blare of moonlight to the huts, did she start to talk. “Don’t you never not take what yours,” she hissed. “You was promised that food. So you take it.”
“He shouldn’t have hit you, Kit.”
“This?” She lifted her face. The nose was bleeding again. “I thought he throw us in the scullery fire for trying to get back to Dahomey. This, this nothing, boy. You never seen a bit of blood?”
Of course I had. We had lived in blood for years, my entire life. But something about that evening—the gleaming beauty of the master’s house, the refinements, the lazy elegance—made me feel a profound, unsettling sense of despair. It was not only William’s mutilation that day, knowing his head stared out over the fields even now, in the darkness. What I felt at that moment, though I then lacked the language for it, was the raw, violent injustice of it all.
“Is that it, then?” I said in a rough voice. I turned to look up at her in the moonlight. “We don’t get to go to Dahomey together?”
She paused and looked at me, very still.
“Kit? We just give in, then?”
“That’s right,” she said. “And you forget I ever said anything. Put it out your mind.”
I nodded, confused by her anger, feeling I had done something wrong. “Our shirts is a mess, Kit,” I said miserably. “We going to get in some trouble for it.”
It was then we heard, at the same moment, a rustling along the path behind us. We turned as one, Big Kit stepping slightly in front of me.
But it was only Gaius, still dressed in his fine service clothes, making his stiff way uncertainly down in the dark. When he saw us, he gave a quick, polite nod, his face unreadable.
“Gaius,” Big Kit muttered. “Don’t tell me they is sitting down to eat again?”
He shook his head. “The master has retired. He is inebriated.” When we stared at him blankly, he added, “Drunk. Master Erasmus is quite drunk. How is your nose, Catherine?”
“Still attach to my face.”
“Yes.”
A moment passed. Big Kit said, “You ain’t come down here to ask after my nose. You lost now?” She ran a tired hand over her neck, her shoulder.
“Ah. No. You should go on to sleep now, Catherine. Your night is finished.”
She started to turn a
way, and I with her. Then, setting a big hand on my shoulder, she turned back. “My night finish? Wash’s night ain’t?”
Gaius gave me his strange, cold, unreadable stare. “It would seem not.”
“Meaning?”
“Mister Wilde has asked for him. He has asked you to attend to him in his rooms, Washington. This evening. Now. Do you understand?”
I did not. “The master?” I said, staring up in fear. What could he want with me?
“Not the master,” Gaius said calmly, “the master’s brother, Mister Wilde. The other man at table this evening, the dark-haired one. He wishes for you to go out to his quarters.”
“You tell him the boy is sleeping, Gaius,” Big Kit said sharply. “You say you never did find him.”
Gaius wet his lips. “I can’t do that, Catherine. You know I can’t.”
She stepped forward. “He ain’t goin’ up.”
She stared at Gaius, but he did not flinch, only looked coolly up into her face, waiting. At last he said, softly, “It isn’t for us to stop, Catherine. I’ll be needed back at the house, but you make sure Washington comes up.” And then to me he did something most strange: pinching up his fine trousers, he squatted on his haunches to look me square in the face. “Don’t keep Mister Wilde waiting, Washington. He is the master’s brother. You do not want him unhappy with you.”
“I never give him no reason to be.”
“Very good.”
“What do he want of him?” said Kit.
“What do they ever want?” Gaius said softly, bitterly. “He wants him to do what he says and not ask why.” He rose and started to go, but then he looked back at Big Kit and said, mysteriously, “It’s an opportunity, Catherine. The boy has a chance to find safe harbour. If Mister Wilde grows fond of him—”
“Don’t you even finish that thought,” Kit said, but her voice was low, pinched.
“It gives the boy a chance,” Gaius said. His face was lost in shadow, and though I could not be certain, he sounded rather sad.
“Just get, Gaius,” Kit said. She took a threatening step towards him. “You just get now.”
The man left.
I stood a long while beside Big Kit in the bright light of the moon. At last we started walking. She seemed distressed, and I thought she must be angry because of her nose, because she did not want me to be struck also. To ease her fears I said, “Don’t you worry, Kit. He hit my nose, I won’t cry or nothing. I be just like you. You see.”
But this did not seem to help. In the water barrel behind the huts, I splashed my face and arms, rubbed at my hair, felt the fine coolness of the night-chilled water on my skin. When I opened my eyes, I saw Kit, looming up in the darkness of the hut’s shadow. She stepped forward.
“He try to touch you, Wash,” she whispered, “you put this through his eye and just keep on pushing.”
I felt her press something into my palm. I looked down. It was a nail. A long, thick, heavy iron nail hammered out in the smithy. I stood with my hand open, the nail on it warm from the heat of her fist. I glanced up at Kit, but she was already turning away.
* * *
—
I CARRIED THAT nail like a shard of darkness in my fist. I carried it like a secret, like a crack through which some impossible future might be glimpsed. I carried it like a key.
I walked slowly, my heart pounding. I knew what Big Kit would have me do, but the thought of it terrified me. The path led around to the back field of Wilde Hall and into the unlit waste there at the edge of the trees. The master’s brother had taken up residence in an old overseers’ quarters—a long, low wooden building with a deep cellar that had been used for storing goods and had not been inhabited for many years. Some of the slaves would tell stories of past horrors there. Some said on moonless nights cries could be heard from that cellar still.
I was shaking. Lanterns had been lit at the edge of the verandah, and I stopped in the open doorway, peering in, hesitant, afraid to call out. No servant came to greet me. I gripped that nail tightly, staring. In the large whitewashed rooms beyond, not an uncluttered surface was to be found. On every table, on every inch of floor space, in piles, sat strange stick-like contraptions, long-spined scopes with legs like grasshoppers, plates hanging from chains.
At last, when nothing happened, I knocked softly, my hand trembling. A moth battered against one of the lanterns hanging from the ceiling.
“Who is it?” a voice called sharply. “Is that you, boy? Come. Come in here.”
I took a hesitant step in. And then I saw him, Mister Wilde, standing at the far window of the long room. He was not facing me; he was bent double, his shoulders hunched. I let my eyes take in the strangeness of his house, the windowsills strewn with velvet-lined boxes, their lids flipped open, gleaming instruments laid out within. Some held wooden cylinders with lenses at each end, like the spyglass used by the old ship’s captain who had worked as an overseer for a time—but these were stranger, different. As I passed a dining table, I saw vials of seeds, jars of ordinary dirt, powders in spills across the mahogany. The floor creaked under me as I approached, papers strewn everywhere.
“Mister, sir?” said I.
My fist clamped tight around the iron nail.
And it was this Mister Wilde saw, at once. He nodded from his terrible height. “What is it you have there? A blade? A nail?” He frowned down at me.
I started to tremble. Of course he knew. The masters knew everything.
“Well, set it down and approach. Set it there.” He pointed to a stack of papers on the floor beside me.
What could I do? I set the nail down. Knowing the fact of it, there, undeniable, was worth my life.
“Closer,” he said, impatient. “Here, hold this steady, like so. We haven’t much time.”
He try to touch you, Wash, Big Kit’s voice came back to me. Through his eye. Just keep on pushing.
I wanted to run. But he had already turned his attention back to whatever was before him.
“Make haste,” he called. “Tell me, child, have you ever witnessed a harvest moon through a reflector scope?”
My voice seemed to stick to my ribs.
He looked up from his labours and his green eyes fixed me in place. “You must see it to believe it. The moon is not as we think it to be. Here.” He shifted to one side. On a golden stand sat a long wooden cylinder angled out the window. The near end was tipped in glass.
“Set your eye here.”
I did as I was told. What I saw was a terrible blackness. Kit had explained, as I had readied myself to come here, the unspeakable acts done to boys by the overseers; and as I bent down and set my eye against the cold brass rim of the object, I felt exposed, terrified. I did not know what ugliness must follow, but I understood what Big Kit did not—that I could not fight this man, who was so much bigger than I, that violence was not in my blood. I shut my eyes, and waited.
I felt his breath, soft, near to my ear. He said, “Do you see it, boy?”
What could I say? I did not know his meaning.
“Yes, Mister Wilde, sir,” said I.
“Stunning, is it not?”
“Oh, yes, Mister Wilde, sir,” said I.
He made a noise of pleasure. “Do you see the markings? The craters? It is an entire planet, son, hanging in our field of gravity. Imagine walking that ground, pacing the edges of those craters. No foot has walked that ground before us, ever. It is innocent of all we are.”
He tapped my shoulder then, that I should step back, and squinted his own eye against the eyepiece. And then the strange man laughed.
“But you have seen nothing,” he said.
His face was still screwed to the contraption, and now he reached around to a small dial and began to turn it with the tips of his fingers. “It is a reflector scope,” he said, “of my own design. Based, of cou
rse, on the fine Dutch models of the sixteenth century. But rather more compact, I think. Now, there,” he said, stepping back. “Have a look now.”
Oh, what I saw then. The moon was huge, as orange as the yolk of a goose egg. And clearly etched upon it were deep craters and ridges, just as Mister Wilde had said. It was, I would later think, a land without tree or shrub or lake, a land without people. An earth before the good Lord began to fill it, an earth of the third day.
I could not stop myself, and breathed a sigh of amazement.
Again Mister Wilde laughed, this time pleased. “Now, boy, tell me. Why does a harvest moon rise thirty minutes later each day, as opposed to the fifty we are accustomed to seeing at other times of the year?”
He regarded me, expressionless.
“Tell me, do you think it is because its orbit is parallel to the horizon at this time of year, so that the earth does not have to turn as far?” said he.
I stared at him, anxious. I sensed that very gently, very faintly, he was mocking me.
“Ah,” he went on. “But what a conundrum.”
We were both still standing at the open window, but now he turned and began to write very quickly in a large open ledger on a stand at his elbow. He was silent a moment, and then, with his hand still scribbling, he said, “What is your name, boy?”
I lowered my face. “Wash, sir.”
“Wash?”
“Washington. George Washington Black, sir.”
He looked up from his ledger. “I had an uncle ransomed by the Americans when they were fighting for their republic. Came to quite admire them, he did. Well, young George Washington, shall we cross our Delaware?”
When I continued to stare at him, uncomprehending, he made some further notes in his ledger, chuckling to himself. “Our Delaware,” he mumbled happily. He double-checked the positioning of the dial on his scope and wrote something else. He raised his eyes again. “Christopher Wilde,” he said, offering, I understood, his own name. “But you will call me Titch. It is what I am called by those closest to me. I was ill as a boy, you see, and became very tiny for a period—in any case, the name stuck. Over the years I have grown to embrace it. It will be strange to you at first, I am sure, but it is a fine sight more fitting than Mister Wilde. Mister Wilde is my father. And, as I have been constantly reminded by my mother, I am not he. Have you brought your things? Are they still on the porch?”
