by Esi Edugyan
“Well. Things are progressing so well with my cutter,” said Titch, tipping back the last of his wine.
“Indeed?” The master drew out the word, and it was impossible to say what he thought of the matter. He turned abruptly, his bright eyes seeking me out. He studied me a long moment, then turned very slowly back to the table. “What did he do, anyway, for you to punish him so?”
“It was an accident, brother.”
The master made a gesture of concession. “It is difficult to hold one’s temper in check when dealing with them. I know it myself.”
Titch stared irritably across at Mister Philip. “Philip was present. Why do you not ask him?”
Mister Philip was absorbed in running a finger along his empty plate to lick. “What?”
“The accident. The boy’s face.”
“Oh, yes. Quite. Damn shame, that.”
“Tell me,” the master continued, “in his state, what is the point of your keeping him?”
“And what would you have me do?” said Titch.
Mister Philip set down his fork. “Very well, very well,” he said quickly, and he wiped his oily fingers on a fold of the tablecloth, leaning back in his chair. “Christopher. Erasmus. There is something I would speak to you both about.”
Titch turned to Mister Philip in mild surprise, and I could not help but do so myself. Was he truly going to lay bare his role in my disfigurement?
Mister Philip glanced down at his plate, as though steeling himself. “It concerns your father.” He made a nervous clearing of the throat. “Your father,” he repeated, then fell silent.
“Yes, well, out with it,” the master said sourly. “What of him?”
Mister Philip glanced down again, as if all he wished to say were scripted on the dull patina of his dinner knife. The tall, maimed, grey-haired slave began refilling his glass, and he gestured sharply for her to stop. She melted at once back to the wall.
“What is it?” said Titch.
Mister Philip hitched back his lips. “Your father has, I fear, passed away.”
I shifted my heels soundlessly on the floor, I stood up straighter.
The master was frowning at his cousin. “Passed away.”
“I regret to tell you, yes. There was an accident, at his outpost in the Arctic. I do not know the particulars.”
Titch was blinking very quickly. He seemed to be searching for words. “I do not understand.” He glanced in perplexity at the master, turned once again to Mister Philip. “You are telling us our father is deceased?”
“I am sorry,” Mister Philip said with a look of anguish. “Indeed, it is the very reason for my visit. I bring a letter from Granbourne. Your mother has written all the details. I shall fetch it for you after the last course.”
Titch and the master looked silently at each other. The master’s face, already sunken with illness, had turned a deathly pallor.
For some moments the only sound in the room was the dry rag of the slave woman wiping down the sideboard.
“Five weeks,” said Titch in a voice so pale he was barely audible. He lifted his drained face. “Five weeks you have been here. Eating my food. Taking my leisure.”
“I meant to inform you at once. I did.” Mister Philip hesitated. “But I thought it wrong to tell you, Titch, without also telling Erasmus.” He turned to the master. “But you were from home when I first arrived. And then, when you returned, you were so ill you would allow no visitors until this night. This is the first opportunity I’ve had.”
“You withheld this deliberately,” snapped the master. “You vengeful, duplicitous bastard. You are getting your revenge. You are worse than a dog. You are shit.”
How strange to hear the master damn a white man so. I lowered my face, did not dare look at him.
“It was not deliberate, cousin. You cannot imagine how it has oppressed me, not being able to speak it.”
“My pity for you is boundless,” the master hissed.
“I only meant that—” Mister Philip stopped, dropping his gaze to his hands. “I am very sorry for you both. It is hard news indeed. And I do sympathize with your fate—having to leave Faith when you are only just settled. How dispiriting.”
“Leave Faith?” said Titch.
“Naturally, Erasmus will have to leave Faith.” Mister Philip glanced uneasily across at the master. “You are needed in Hampshire, Erasmus, to sort out your father’s affairs, to run Granbourne on site for some time, I imagine. A year. Two. Until such time as everything is settled. Your mother has written it all in her letter, I am sure. She gave me to understand that you are to return with me. Indeed, your passage has already been booked.”
The master turned a harsh eye upon his cousin, but some of his rage had eased. He seemed to be weighing the sudden reprieve of a return to England.
Titch stared without expression at the tablecloth, his skin drained of all colour in the yellow candlelight. Behind his chair, the slaves flitted back and forth like vapours.
“But what of Faith, in my absence?” said the master, his voice calm.
“Well, Christopher is here, what. Your mother thought that perhaps he might manage things in your absence. What a blessing, said she, that he has run to precisely where he is needed. It is God’s hand. Erasmus will return and sort out Sir James’s affairs. Faith, said she, might be passably run for two or three years by Christopher. Hopefully he can do it profitably; we have no doubt you can do it profitably, cousin. In any case, Erasmus will untangle any messes upon his eventual return.”
The master was evidently mulling this over. “It is an idea,” he said.
“It is all in the letter,” said Mister Philip.
Very quietly, Titch backed his chair out, causing the child slave to scurry out of the way. With his mouth set very tight and his eyes distant, Titch took the napkin from his lap and placed it on his gravy-stained plate. Without looking at anyone, he started for the door.
“Oh come, brother,” called the master. “Please come back. Such grave news, Christopher, we must weather together. Let us comfort one another.”
But Titch did not turn. We all watched him go, the slaves with their heads gently bowed, Mister Philip looking solemn and remorseful. When Titch passed me, I lifted my head, but he did not look at me.
He left the door standing wide.
I felt I should follow, but did not want to draw the master’s attention. I watched the old grey-haired slave turn, and meeting her powerful golden eyes I was suddenly flooded with pain, horrified and confused.
It was Big Kit.
* * *
—
HOW COULD I not have known her? Had I not all these months prayed for her deliverance each night, imagined for her a life beyond the blood-blackened fields of Faith? When I had first come to live with Titch, it was Kit’s iron nail that had kept me from despair; waking into darkness after the gas explosion, it was Kit I had believed at my bedside, her hand on my brow.
She was much changed, it was true, maimed terribly, grown thinner, the hair at her temples silver as flies’ wings. Aged, now, as though decades had separated us. But I was the more changed; that was the uglier truth.
I gripped anxiously at my hands, staring at Kit’s tall figure. How solicitous she was with the boy. I saw now how she kept a careful eye on his posture, his manners. I knew instinctively what this meant, the great angry love she held that boy inside, like a fist. I tried to imagine what he might be like. He could not have been older than six or seven years, I thought. I wondered at the sudden pain coming up in me.
The master and Mister Philip stood from the table; Mister Philip placed a steadying hand on his cousin’s cowed shoulders. He instructed Gaius that they would take their port and pipes in the drawing room. I tried to catch Kit’s eye, but by then she had been instructed to leave, and so I watched her retrieve
a fork from the sideboard and turn, slouching from the room with the boy following.
I stared after her diminished form, a dryness in my throat, feeling desperate.
Just then there fell a twisting grip on my collarbone, and I glanced up at the veiny, shifting eyes of the master.
“You are still here, nigger?” said he. I could see deep into his wet scarlet mouth, and felt very afraid. “My brother is gone. Off with you, boy, go on.”
11
I FLED.
When I returned to Titch’s residence, I found the rooms dark, not a candle burning. But under the closed door of Titch’s study I saw a crack of candlelight. I paused there in the hallway, listening, but there was no sound from within. I left him to his grief. I knew from what he had told me that his father had been everything to him, the very heart of his life.
I left him there and, making my way through the darkness, undressed and went to bed in silence.
In the morning I rose early. In the quiet of the house I collected a bucket and went out to fill it with water. I walked to Mister Philip’s door and left the usual porcelain bowl of water and clean towels on the pier table in the hall. Then I went to Titch’s bedroom and did the same. When I opened his door, though, I found his room empty, the bedding untouched.
I found him at last in his study, slouched over the mahogany desk, his chin smeared with fixative dust. I was met with the chemical smell of ink and damp skin. The room was silent and heavy; the drapes had been drawn crookedly shut. There was the soft tapping of a moth stunning itself against the locked window. A tower of pages lay piled by Titch’s elbow, the paper warped with ink and sticking in waves against each other like French pastry. What he had been writing I did not know; I trusted it had to do with his father. I set a soft hand on his shoulder and he gave a start. Raising his head, he turned to me in tight-browed grief.
“Wash,” said he.
“You fell asleep,” I said. “It is morning.”
He was in his shirtsleeves, and he drew the cuff of his left wrist across his mouth.
“Can I fetch you anything?” I said.
He shook his head. “Such a person, such a mind. I still cannot believe it. I simply cannot fathom it. Gone, truly? I—” He shook his head, glancing sadly at me. “He did not have the opportunity to see my Cloud-cutter.”
“He would have been very proud,” I ventured.
“And to stay on and run Faith?” He shook his head, his expression faintly contemptuous. “They must know it is madness.” He ran a nervous hand through his dark hair, and with his skin drawn slightly back like that, the white string of his scar was visible, like a harness rising from either side of his mouth. “Much as I love my mother, she is of difficult temperament. She really is too ecstatic. As a child, I found my father always from home, and I did not understand his constant absences.” He shook his head.
I said nothing, stood quietly there.
He frowned softly. “But it would seem I have no choice in the matter.”
I was silent some moments more, not knowing what to say. “I must begin preparing the breakfast.”
“Philip will be hungry,” he said, his voice edged with contempt. Then he seemed to check himself, shook his head. “It is not Philip’s fault. None of this is his doing.”
I was surprised he should be so forgiving of his cousin’s concealment of such news.
“I am sorry, Titch. About your father.”
He looked suddenly fragile, fear and resignation in his face. “Well.”
I began to move towards the door, feeling somehow disturbed. I feared I had overstepped my place, perhaps. But Titch called to me before I reached the hall. When I turned, he gestured me back to his side.
“I wanted to show you this,” he said.
He squared the sheets before him. I leaned into the plank of light falling across his desk. There were three blackening banana peels piled by his inkwell, folded neatly. I squinted at the page. Preliminary Remarks Regarding the Theory and Practice of Hydrogen-Powered Aerostation in the West Indies.
I made a noise of surprise. “It is finished, then? But that is wonderful, Titch.”
“Look closer.”
Then something caught my eye. Beneath the title, in a clean, fine hand, he had written, Authored by Christopher Wilde, Esq., & Illustrated by George Washington Black.
I glanced up at him, uncertain.
Titch gave me a sad, weary smile. “You are a man of science now, Wash. Or so you shall be, when this paper reaches the Royal Society.” He paused. “That was your Big Kit last night, at dinner. Looking very poorly, it’s true. But it was she, right there before us. Did you see her?”
I felt the blood rise to my face; I did not wish to tell Titch that I had not recognized her, nor that when I did, I was horrified to find her so disfigured and ill-used. I did not wish to tell him of the other boy, of the hurt I felt seeing them so close.
I must have looked startled, for he placed a gentle hand upon my shoulder, softened his expression. “Our science is not the sum of my work here,” he said quietly. Thumbing through his papers, he drew from beneath our treatise a thick sheaf. I leaned in: Catalogue of the Injustices and Cruelties Borne Upon the Persons and Minds of the Enslaved Negroes on a Barbadoes Plantation in the West Indies. I looked at him in some alarm.
“I did not simply run away,” said he. “Well, yes, it’s true, I did run away, but not for need of personal freedom.” He glanced in caution at the door. “My dearest friend Samuel, in London, he said if there is any possibility of your travelling to your family plantation, do so. He asked me frankly to make notes on all I saw. You see, we have colleagues, Wash, many of them, greatly interested in seeing an end to all this, in seeing you, your people, free. A group of us are gathering notes, recording each and every cruelty we observe. These reports we will eventually hand over to a very influential friend in Parliament.” He paused to measure my expression, then with his long, jointed fingers flipped through the pages to the end. “Look, see here. I have just this evening added your Kit to my notes. Her wretched condition will not fail to move. I also expect your own scientific work will prove useful.”
I did not speak, so surprised was I. I could not fathom when he had had the time to make his observations, never mind to record them.
The skin around his eyes tightened. He shook his head. “Negroes are God’s creatures also, with all due rights and freedoms. Slavery is a moral stain against us. If anything will keep white men from their heaven, it is this.”
Only years later would his phrasing strike me. In that moment I only thought with horror of the master’s discovery of these reports.
“I shall ask my brother to release you permanently,” said he, weighing my expression. “Does that please you?”
I made no answer, so shocked was I.
“You would rather remain the property of my brother?”
“Oh, no, Titch, I would rather be your property,” said I, eagerly. I did not understand the pained look that crossed his face.
“Well,” said he. “Well. We shall talk more on it again, Wash. Yes.”
But he seemed troubled, somehow, and in my innocence I could make no sense of it. I had thought I was saying what he wished to hear.
* * *
—
“YOU ARE JOKING, brother. Look at the creature. He is a monstrosity.”
The master raised his long pheasant gun to his shoulder and, squinting his right eye shut, let off a shot, grey smoke rolling from the barrel. “Damn,” he said, scowling. He lowered the gun, massaged his shoulder, glanced back at Mister Philip and Titch. They were the three of them out shooting that day in the scrub and hills at the base of Corvus Peak.
A full week had passed since Mister Philip’s announcement. In those grim days Titch had kept firmly to his rooms, only emerging to dine alone in the evenings long
after Mister Philip had retired. Then one morning the master arrived at the house, and in my fear I rushed to fetch Titch, who consented, finally, to sitting down with his brother.
They spent an afternoon out on the verandah, talking over glasses of warm rum I replenished by the hour. In those sad hours of reminiscence some healing seemed to take place. Mister Philip wandered out to join them, and the three sat gently laughing over the escapades of the late Mister Wilde, his eccentricities and brilliances.
The next day they decided to go hunting, and it was here that we found ourselves, deep into the scrub under Corvus Peak.
“No, it would be cruel to remove him to England,” the master continued. Recognizing that his father’s death would allow him to return home, he had been in the brightest of moods, as though some well-thought-of dog, not a father, had died. “What good would come of it? In any case, it is I, not you, who will return to England. And I certainly have no use for him there.”
I felt a heat rise to my cheeks. Titch had not mentioned the possibility of England to me.
Titch hesitated. “Events do not have to unfold as Philip dictates. It makes far more sense for you to stay here and look after Faith, while I return to Granbourne. Think of it. It is this plantation that affords the other homes their luxuries. What if something were to go wrong?”
“It is your mother who dictates, not I,” said Mister Philip.
But the master was not finished. “A nigger slave at Granbourne.” He levelled his pale eyes on Titch. “Come now, man. The proper servants would eat the poor creature alive. They are rather proud, you know.”
“Which servants, exactly?”
The master raised his weapon. “A position at Granbourne, at Hawksworth, Sanderley—all are positions of stature, such as they are. You must know this.”
“I think you are rather more familiar with servants than we,” said Mister Philip, smiling.
“Erasmus is a great collector of knowledge,” said Titch tartly.
“Knowledge about certain servants, perhaps. Maids and such.”
