by Esi Edugyan
The master frowned at the teasing. “It is a privilege to serve a great family.”
“A great family’s cock,” said Mister Philip.
Titch smiled despite himself. “I’d think they would care more about fine treatment and solid pay than position.”
“Erasmus does all the positions,” said Mister Philip.
“Oh, don’t be so naive, Christopher,” snapped the master. “Everyone cares about their station.”
“I do not,” said Titch.
“Because you do not need to. No, I will not let you have the boy. You may continue to borrow him for the duration of your stay here. Then, upon my return, if he is still alive, you will give me back my worker.” He shook out his trigger hand. “Tell me, have you had a chance to examine the ledgers I had sent over? You will have to understand how to read them, eventually.”
Titch frowned across at Mister Philip.
“I understand you will have much studying to do, Christopher,” said Mister Philip.
“I have not yet decided,” said Titch. “If I will take over the running of Faith, that is.”
“You speak as though there is another option,” said Mister Philip.
“My mother can manage perfectly well. Indeed, what recourse has she had in your absence, brother? Surely there are trustworthy tenants. Solicitors. Accountants. Others she can rely on.”
“Mother is old, Christopher.” The master lowered his gun and, setting the stock on the rocky ground at their feet, held out his hand for a flask of wine. I hurried forward. “It is one thing to engage others for a period, and quite another to rely upon them indefinitely after a master’s death. It must be stressed to all the tenants that order still reigns at Granbourne. I must go. I cannot allow you to go in my stead. You will make a shambles of it.”
“You cannot allow it?”
“No.”
Titch laughed a sharp, angry laugh. I had not heard such a sound from him before. I looked quickly up, but he was staring out at the sky and I could not see his face.
“Erasmus’s passage is already booked,” said Mister Philip, and there was something beseeching in his voice. “We will return at month’s end. Before the wrathful winds begin in earnest.”
“One may wait five weeks to mention a death,” said Titch, “but time is now of the essence.”
The master shook his head. “I do not understand your sharp tone, Christopher. We shall not disrespect Mother’s wishes, that is the end of it.”
Now Mister Philip stepped forward and for the first time, seeing him and Titch together, I noticed the startling physical disparity between the two. There was a power to Mister Philip’s broad shoulders, a strength that dwarfed my master. Mister Philip set a thick hand on Titch’s shoulder, and it struck me as somehow threatening.
“I promised your mother I would bring him back,” Mister Philip said. “It is my honour on the line here also, cousin. Think of me in this.”
“Ah, yes,” said Titch. “I should not wish to sully your name.”
The master was blinking. “Do not think for a minute that I do not share in this grief, Christopher. He was my father too. You mustn’t take it out on me. I am only concerned for the future of the estates, as should you be.”
Mister Philip crouched, resting his knee against a slab of yellow stone. He raised his gun and fired. The air shuddered with a great, violent punch, and we all glanced out at the bleached sky. The brown silhouette of a grouse clapped onwards, its wings beating, untouched.
“Damn it all,” Mister Philip muttered.
“Is that how you are taught to shoot in London, cousin?” laughed the master. “And for a man who takes such prodigious care of his gun…” He shook his head.
“Your bag is as empty as mine,” said Mister Philip. “Only Christopher has had any luck.”
“It is the trained eye of the man of science,” said the master. “Luck, nothing.”
Titch looked away.
Mister Philip coughed, spat a long yellow thread into the grass. He squinted against the sun at Titch. “Think of your mother, man. She is quite vulnerable now—every cheat will try and take advantage. If only on a practical level, it is dearly pressing for Erasmus to return. Just until arrangements for the estate might be made.”
Titch did not answer.
“He is cross that I do not make the burnt creature a gift,” said the master. “Look how sullen he is become.”
Mister Philip smiled. “Why do you not buy the creature from Erasmus?” He turned to the master. “What would you sell the boy for?”
“Let us leave it be,” said Titch quietly.
“Why is he of such value to my brother?” the master mused. “You do not imagine he has formed an unsavoury attachment?” The master paused, feigning shock, then looked over at me and called, “Is he unnatural with you, boy? Do you make the beast with two backs?”
“Leave him be, Erasmus,” said Titch.
Mister Philip tsked. “Oh, just sell him the boy and be done with it. If it will bring him peace of mind—”
“I think not,” interrupted the master. “No.”
“He is of no worth to you. Look at him.”
“Rather the contrary.” The master folded his long, thin fingers over the mouth of his gun, shrugging. “Titch has taught the creature to make fine illustrations, and that is of enormous use. Dr. Quinn will come from Liverpool this year. For a heavy sum I’ve promised him access to ten of my slaves for his experiments. Putrid fever, you see. He’s trying to invent an inoculation against it. Surely he will be in need of faithful diagrams.”
Suddenly Mister Philip dropped to one knee and, swinging his gun to his shoulder, fired, letting off a second powerful thunder and the stench of metal, a cloud of ghostly brown smoke. In the distance a smudge plummeted from the sky.
The dogs were loosed, disappearing into the brush at once, barking in frenzy.
“There, that is how it is done,” cried Mister Philip, beginning to laugh. He swung his gun down and rose heavily, turning to his cousins. “Did you see? A fine shot indeed. A London shot, I should call it. A London shot.”
* * *
—
THE VERY NEXT DAY the weather turned.
The sky blackened, went dark as tea. But then the afternoon passed without rain, and the clouds drifted gently out to sea. The following day was the same. All this Titch watched with a judging eye, making the long trek up to the Cloud-cutter most mornings. I dutifully recorded his anxious observations as best I could, in my rudimentary language.
The men and women laboured here and there all across the peak, their pale clothes grass-stained at the knees, calling to each other in our pidgin tongue. I stared at the cutter, the immense punctured lung of it, the netted rubberized skin hanging from it. It was, I knew, a thing of wonder and beauty. It was true that the season was coming to an end, true that the hurricane days would soon be upon us. But Titch did not want to accept this.
“Can you not put a tarp over it during the bad season?” I said. “It will be an enormous labour to have it all brought down again, only to have to carry it back up after the storms pass.”
He gave me a curious look then, and I understood he was surprised that even I had condemned him to stay here into next winter.
Still, it was a kind of relief, for me, to observe Titch animated again, moved by his own work, absorbed in its problems. In the immediate days following the news of his father he had gone into a grey stupor, wanting to talk neither of his father’s death nor of England. Now he was at least interested, though still quite worried about how to manage under the insistent pressure from his family. He kept mumbling how devastated he felt that his father would never see this, the work of his life, their shared passion for flight made whole by his own hands.
“Do you know what should be done?” he said, his ey
es wide and distant-looking. “Some commemoration should be made for my father at his place of rest, in the Arctic. Someone ought to travel out there and erect a marker for him. Peter, his assistant, is his only companion up there, and Peter is not a man given to sentimental gestures. My father did so much to enlighten men about the world. Can it really be that he will pass from it without so much as a shudder?” He glanced at me. “It is not natural. It is not right.”
Without awaiting an answer, he bent again to his measurements, and we passed the morning in silent work. Some hours in, I thought I heard a cry in the distance—hoarse, resigned, like some final expiration. I raised my face, squinting down into the roiling cane.
These cries had been a feature of my life in the field; how shocked I was to realize how rarely I now heard them. My face flushed with the pain and shame of it, the half-healed skin throbbing.
Titch lifted his face to the sky, and decided then we would go down early. We did not speak, but drifted down through the dry yellow grass, disappointed, tired.
* * *
—
TITCH AND I HAD nearly reached the base of Corvus Peak when we caught sight of a silhouette shivering in the bleached afternoon light. Titch paused, placed a hand on my chest to stop me walking. We squinted at the figures, the woman’s dress fluttering against her skinny calves, the bow-legged child beside her, their faces cancelled in shadow.
Yes, there was the white scar across the face. Esther. She trudged stolidly forward in her starched kitchen whites, gripping the child by the shoulder, a viciousness to her mouth despite her expressionless eyes. The boy I did not know; he walked beside her, wiry and thin. He was chewing on a strand of sargassum weed, which he spat nervously out as he reached us.
“Esther. You will be looking for me, I trust.” Titch studied the boy. “Good morning, son.”
“Sir,” came the response, the boy’s face trained on his shoes.
His shoes had been polished to a high shine and looked two sizes too large. He moved in them awkwardly, like a creature trapped in mud.
“Well? What is it?” Titch held his hat in place in the soft wind. “What has happened?”
Esther stood before him, blinking. “Master Erasmus is sent over your new boy, sir.” Her voice was beautiful, I realized suddenly, low-pitched, musical.
The darkening clouds were moving past us overhead. Titch stood frowning against the warm wind. “But I have not asked for a new boy,” he said slowly.
“Yes, sir.”
“Do inform your master that I am quite satisfied with my present boy.”
She lowered her face but did not move.
“Esther? Did you not hear me?”
“Master Erasmus gives you this boy in exchange for that one,” she said stubbornly. “He wants the burnt one back, Master Wilde, sir.”
I turned quickly, glanced at Titch.
Titch appeared unruffled. “That I had already understood. This is a discussion for your master and myself to continue. He ought not to have involved you, Esther.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You may tell him to expect me in the coming days. We will discuss it further.”
Glaring at the ground, sounding now almost frustrated, Esther said, “Master Erasmus was quite insistent, sir, if you will. He will not have this boy back. He orders you to send over the burnt boy at once.”
“Orders me, does he?” A tightness had crept into Titch’s voice. “Does he also state the consequences of my non-compliance?”
Esther said nothing, just raised her hard face with its passionless eyes, its white earthworm scar. I knew the master would beat her if she returned with Titch’s message. I watched but said nothing.
Titch too seemed to understand. He sighed, taking the boy by the shoulder. “Let us go now to Wilde Hall, then. Esther, you will return with Wash.” He handed me his sack of instruments. “Please take these back to the house, Wash, and begin preparations for lunch.” He looked warily at the boy, who kept his head bowed. “And what is your name, son?”
A pause, then in a whisper: “Eugenio, sir.”
“Eugenio. Let us go back to Wilde Hall.”
They set off in the direction of the master’s house. Watching them go, I thought they looked very much how Titch and I must appear together, two awkward forms pouring through the darkened fields like shadows.
* * *
—
HOW DO I explain the events that followed? I have weighed that afternoon in my mind these seven years and found myself unable to give a clean accounting of it. I was young and terrified and confused, it is true. But it is also true that the nature of what happened isn’t fixed; it shifts and warps with the years.
I do not know how long Esther and I trod through the brush, only that the late afternoon air was cooling pleasantly, and that we did not speak. She seemed neither preoccupied nor uneasy; her silence was marked by a held-in rage that I have only now, several years later, come to understand as the suppression of will. For she was a ferociously intelligent woman, and it strained her to have to conceal it. She sometimes spoke as no slave should speak; the scar on her face was some testament to this. In Titch’s household she found tolerance and a patient ear, though even he sometimes grew irritated and urged her to remember her place.
She kept her face forward, breathing softly with the exercise, the hem of her dress snagging on passing weeds. Occasionally her damp arm would brush mine, but she did not move away. Above us, the birds wheeled blackly in the starched light. I stopped to clutch a fistful of wildflowers, the petals crumbling with a satisfying reek like burnt parsley. I was trying to still my mind, trying not to dwell on the master’s alarming request to have me returned to him. A fine shiver went through me.
Then, as from nowhere, a voice called out.
“Boy! You! Boy!”
We paused, turning in the blanched light to see him striding full towards us. We did not look at each other. I watched instead the glint in his thick hands, the freshly oiled steel that had been engineered to survive every destruction, dark and blunt and final. Mister Philip and his gun. He moved sluggishly in his beautiful clothes, the gun in his red-knuckled fingers, an intensity to his eyes despite his calm expression. I paused, awaiting his approach, my heart thudding.
He reached us breathing heavily. His voice, when he’d called out, had sounded threatening. Now, pausing before us, he appeared blurred, rundown, diminished, as if a soft grey air had settled upon him. His black hair was matted across his forehead, and fine blue veins stood out at his temples.
He studied Esther a long while, so that it became uncomfortable. “Run along with you now,” he said finally, but with no force.
She tipped her chin back, surveying him without expression, her white scar like a string tied about her face. Without looking at me, she turned and continued alone back to the house.
I glanced quickly past Mister Philip; Titch was very far now, so that I could no longer see him. I peered nervously up at Mister Philip. He was frowning, his eyes glassy and reddened as with drink.
Terror cut through me; I swallowed it down. “Titch has bade me return to the house, sir. If you go that way yourself, sir, I can bring some refreshments out to you on the verandah, if you please.”
Mister Philip was staring behind me at the distant scrub as though he had not heard. I turned; there was nothing to see, only the dry yellow grass rattling in the dusty air, Esther’s fading silhouette. Slowly, he looked down at me, smiling in a tight grimace. “Here, boy. Gather this up.”
Nervously, I reached for the provisions he held out. “This may not be the weather for a hunt, sir,” I said, thinking perhaps I might disrupt whatever plan he had in mind, though I knew it was too forward of me to speak it. “Titch believes it will rain.”
His face darkened. “You have some audacity to address me so.”
I lowered my face, awaiting a blow.
He merely gestured for me to follow him, mumbling. “When the slaves forget they are slaves…” He shook his head.
We walked in silence, me following his lope through the fields towards the scrublands fringing Corvus Peak, the hunting grounds. I was terrified; I could scarcely walk for the fear. What did he mean by all this? If he intended to hunt, where were the hounds? I only hoped Esther would alert Titch to what had happened and that he would come in search of me. Mister Philip’s provisions were heavy, and though I did not dare set them down, I would lower my head every few paces to take the good cool air on my neck. I would raise my face and stare out to the scrublands, trying not to look at his gun.
* * *
—
“PERHAPS IT IS easier for you.”
I looked warily across at him. “Sir?”
Mister Philip did not answer, merely sat heavily on an outcropping at the base of the mountain, awkwardly balancing his gun on his round thighs.
Less than an hour had passed, though it felt a lifetime, and we sat in the scree at the base of Corvus Peak, the crickets already creaking in the darkening air. All this time he had not taken a single shot, not even raised his gun. His stride had slowed and slowed, his wide shoulders rounding, his eyes growing hazier, more distant. He was pensive, grave, and the few glances he spared me seemed nearly apologetic, as if he regretted the outing. He carried his gun low at his thigh, and every time he changed hands I would stare uneasily at his fingers, then look away and count the blades of grass under my breath.
By the time we had settled in the rocky outcrop, I was beyond frightened. I could barely hear his voice, which in any case was quiet and thoughtful, hollowed out almost, as though he were thirsty. An unnatural stillness had come over me, like an extension of fear. The rock on which I sat bored painfully into my thighs. I could smell the wild lemongrass in the last of the day’s heat, feel the bite of mosquitoes on my shins.
