Washington Black: A Novel

by Esi Edugyan

  A silver band in the distance began to widen, to glisten. An artificial pond. Crystalline pins winked across its pale blue surface, so that it seemed to have some alarming sentience, like the eye of a blind man.

  I remembered then something Titch had once said, during one of his rare quiet tirades against his mother—that she had no tolerance for anything not English. That, despite her having lived an unconventional life with Mister Wilde, and been herself an unconventional young woman, her sense of the world was old and rigid and unforgiving.

  Would I actually find him here, behind these crumbling, moss-strewn walls? The grounds had a feeling of plenitude, of growth and richness, but there was also a sense of vacancy, as though the place had been abandoned not only by its people but by progress itself. One felt great age, and a silence like a held pause; it was as though everything that could happen here had already occurred, as though you were wading into an aftermath.

  I sighed and brought my head to rest on Tanna’s shoulder, feeling the pulse of the wheels clattering on the gravel under us. For nights I had thought of what I might say to Titch; staring now upon the grey fields, my mind grew empty, hazy. Tanna gently took my hand, but there was a hardness in her eyes as she gazed upon the acres of dead grass.

  We slipped from under a canopy of bare branches, and it was then I glimpsed it: the grand, forbidding, illustrious old house, the great manor of Granbourne. I saw its several unlit wings, I saw the ancient scars of weather and wars upon its facade. It was this from which the Wilde men had fled. The pillars and pediments were crumbling, the pavilion choked with moss. I could smell, on the surrounding air, the bitter, offal-like stench of dead garden beds.

  The facade was black with cold ivy. The stonework was incut with unwashed, green-tinted, leaded windows. As our carriage approached, the landscape rose up watery and ethereal in them.

  All at once the doors were opened and an old manservant stepped out onto the high landing. I could not see his face, but he clasped his hands behind him and became absolutely still. He was of average stature, slightly corpulent, but the stillness of his bearing, as if he were sucking all the surrounding silence into himself, gave him a natural authority. He looked very much as I imagined a parent might look to an infant from the depths of his crib.

  We were shown into the high-ceilinged reception hall, where Tanna stood rubbing her hands together, as though she could not get warm, as though the weather had followed us inside. The air smelled of wet tea leaves and dust, of burnt wood. I peered at a large, unlit stone hearth, the intricate scrollwork overhanging it. No fire had been lit.

  * * *

  —

  THE MANSERVANT LED US through darkened corridors, then out onto a great terrace of weathered chairs and large, cracked stone pots grey with long-dead roses. I looked to the sky; the birds appeared like shreds of cloth, distant, faint. The air felt very cold, the sky strewn with clouds so thin in the atmosphere they could barely be seen. And yet they seemed to block out all warmth; I could feel Tanna shivering beside me, and I rubbed at her back, its fine, hard bones. Yet for all this cold, the air still felt much warmer than inside the house, as if the years of Hampshire winters had accumulated in the old stone walls.

  The servant stood unspeaking near the doorway, waiting.

  Tanna hesitated; we looked nervously at one another. Finally she leaned forward and said, “Is Mister Wilde currently in residence?”

  The servant appeared at first not to hear her. Then, very slowly, he gave a grave shake of the head. The vagueness of her question made his answer unclear—which Mister Wilde was from home?—but it was obvious that even to shake his head caused this man great strain, and that we should tax him no further. How very old he was. He had likely been a fixture in this house for decades—indeed, the manor might have been built around him. He had a wrecked, creviced face, and the stiffness of his carriage appeared to pain him. He would, I thought, have been witness to Titch’s earliest days here, and I longed to ask him about them.

  There came a rustling from inside the house, and a woman appeared from the darkness, magisterially tall in her damp riding dress, her hem muddy. She paused at the threshold, blinking at us. Her stature was extravagant—nearly Titch’s height—with just the faintest curve in her upper spine, a soft hump between her shoulder blades. Her face looked waxen but for a stain-like flush across her broad nose. She clasped her hands before her, the forefingers adorned with heavy, identical jade rings; and I remembered Titch’s hands, the emerald rings poised just above his knuckles.

  She stared a long while. “Mister Black?” she said finally, and it was less a welcome than a statement of disappointment, as though she had expected another man. And yet in my letter I had explained all to her: that I had once been a slave on her plantation, had been stolen away by her youngest son and journeyed north with him. I had even warned her of my disfigurement, in case it should startle her.

  Sparing Tanna no glance, Mrs. Wilde said, with great forbearance, “You are very welcome.”

  “Mrs. Wilde,” said I with a bow. “What a pleasure to make your acquaintance, finally. I have heard much about you.”

  She looked me slowly over, her eyes resting on my burns. She said nothing.

  I continued to smile, but it was as though the weather had entered my bones.

  With no word more she crossed the wind-pitted terrace, its leaves skittering across the tiles, and stationed herself on a bench at a vast stone table. She said nothing, made no gesture that we should join her, merely sat looking over the far-ranging greyness of all she owned. Tanna gave me an irritable look, but together we went to her, brushing at the dirt on the cold bench across from her to sit.

  With her light-brown eyes Mrs. Wilde studied us. There was a faint wheezing in her chest from the morning’s ride, but even this seemed less a weakness than some mark of privilege.

  “My man here cautions me against riding,” said she, gesturing vaguely at the manservant still at the door. “Idleness is the worse danger at my age, as far as I am concerned. What is a broken bone?”

  “Exercise is beneficial, at any age,” offered Tanna.

  Mrs. Wilde frowned faintly and did not look at her. “The weather has been most uncooperative of late.”

  The manservant stepped forward and, taking a white woollen shawl from a far-off chair, settled it across Mrs. Wilde’s shoulders.

  “I do hope you managed to have something to eat before travelling all this way,” said she, and I thought this surprising, given her invitation to tea. “I would have offered a lunch, but I did not know if you enjoyed English food.” Her eyes roamed vaguely about the terrace as if determined not to rest on anything. “I certainly know that when I am abroad I suffer much.”

  “I am English,” Tanna said.

  For the first time Mrs. Wilde allowed her eyes to settle on Tanna. She gave a faint smile.

  “My father is Geoffrey Michael Goff, the marine zoologist.”

  She studied Tanna, her smile still vague. “My husband was somewhat interested in all that. I care nothing for the subjects.”

  “Mister Goff has made major achievements in the field,” I said, though I felt a twinge as I spoke. “He is a fellow of the Royal Society, as I believe your late husband was?”

  Mrs. Wilde clasped her jewelled hands upon the table, her expression unchanged.

  “We have come in search of your son, Christopher Wilde,” said Tanna, having exhausted her pleasantries. “Is he here?”

  Something entered Mrs. Wilde’s face then, some indefinable hardness, and I could not say whether we were its source, or Titch. “I have not seen my son these three years.”

  Three years. Three. Willard had not lied: Titch had survived. He had walked through a pane of snow into an open, free life. I sat numbly, absorbing the news. It still did not strike me as true.

  “How long did he stay?” Tan
na asked. “Where did he go?”

  Mrs. Wilde let her eyes drift over my face. I seemed, despite her better impulses, to compel her. “We no longer have the plantation. It is no longer in the family. It has been sold.”

  We sat some moments in silence as this new detail sunk in.

  “And what happened to the slaves there?” said I, thinking painfully of Big Kit, of Gaius. “Surely they were not sold off with the property?”

  Mrs. Wilde frowned. “Sold? But they were no longer slaves to sell. They had not been slaves many a year. They were apprentices, workers. Paid to do some grounds-work. Paid handsomely, I might add. They were even given lodgings for free. But it was never enough for them.”

  I could feel Tanna stiffen at this, but she made no remark.

  “What happened to them?” I said again.

  Mrs. Wilde sat back and breathed lightly out, her eyes roaming. “They were there of their own volition—they left of their own volition too, I imagine. Went on to other work, elsewhere.”

  “Is your son here in England?” said Tanna. I could see she was growing impatient.

  Mrs. Wilde paused. She pressed the palms of her hands deliberately together, and turned her eyes on me. “You were with my husband when he died, yes?”

  I paused. “I was.”

  She moistened her wrinkled lips, hesitating, and in that moment I understood why I had been invited here. It was nothing to do with Titch; as she’d said, she had not seen him in years. She wanted to know all about her husband’s death—his last hours on the cold, lustrous plains of ice, among races of men unimaginable to her and therefore inhuman. She wanted to ask the question that had unsettled her these long years. She wanted to know, I believe, about Peter House.

  But the longer she did not ask it, the more she became unable to. We sat in the long silence of her indecision, the leaves rattling across the terrace, the patter of rain starting in the distant trees. I was aware of the manservant slowly nearing her chair, watching her every gesture for signs he should intervene.

  “Your son Christopher is most definitely still alive?” asked Tanna.

  Mrs. Wilde paused, her smile full of strained patience. “Last I saw him, he was. But as I say, it has been years. No one, however, has written me to tell me otherwise.” She cleared her throat. “I shall certainly let him know you are looking for him, if I do hear from him.” She turned to me, expressionless. “In the meantime, perhaps you might try him at Grosvenor.” She gave a raise of the eyebrow, as if feigning innocence. “At his cousin Philip’s house. Philip’s mother lives there still. Alone.”

  I understood then that she knew it all—my witness to Philip’s death, my possible hand in it. I said nothing, felt Tanna grip my fist under the stone table.

  “And do you mean to stay long in England?” Mrs. Wilde rose slowly from the bench. The manservant slid her falling shawl back onto her shoulders.

  I glanced at Tanna. “Forever, perhaps. Certainly a good long while. Miss Goff and myself are helping her father with the new exhibition going into Regent’s Park. Perhaps you have heard of it—Ocean House? It is a display of living aquatic organisms.”

  Mrs. Wilde gave her faint smile. “Well, I do hope you will get to see some of the city while you are here, Mister Black. This is your first excursion in London?”

  “It is.”

  “Regent’s Park,” she said, frowning. “The Zoo is there, is it not? I daresay you should feel quite at home.” Again, she smiled. “In London, that is.”

  * * *

  —

  WE HAD PASSED BACK through the house and were descending the grand staircase to our carriage when the manservant came out to us.

  He stood against the wind as though it would fold him in half, clutching at the stone banister. We glanced up in alarm, and watched him take the stairs deliberately and one at a time, like a child learning to walk.

  “You will catch cold, sir,” I said with concern.

  He pulled his coat about him and placed a steadying hand on the banister. “Christopher was here some two years ago, or less.”

  I was surprised, and showed it.

  “He left quite upset,” the manservant continued. “But then it was always so, between Mrs. Wilde and her sons. I do not know what troubled him. But I understand he meant to sail out of Liverpool on behalf of the Anti-Slavery Society. What for, I do not know. But he was always at their offices, always at their behest, desiring to aid them any way he could. He had placed the plantation’s papers there, after poor Erasmus’s death. And so he went daily there to help with the sorting of them.” He glanced over his shoulder, but not nervously. “I am not certain if he actually managed to sail out—I do know he had some apprehension of doing so. But he did not return to Granbourne, and we heard no more of him. You might do well, I think, to inquire at the Society as to his whereabouts—they must certainly have some information.”

  “Oh, bless you,” breathed Tanna. “Where would we find their offices?”

  As he explained the location to Tanna, I thought of Titch having the wherewithal to place Faith’s papers securely in London, and was somewhat disturbed. After hearing Willard’s story of him mumbling in the street, a part of me had believed him half-mad.

  “You have been most helpful,” said I.

  And he smiled, a down-turned, crooked smile that showed his surprisingly strong white teeth.

  4

  THE MANSERVANT HAD GOT the name wrong: it was the Abolitionist Society for the Betterment and Integration of Former Slaves. And on the morning we were to visit its offices, the octopus fell sick.

  She was a new and unknown genus, and we were thrilled to be able to name her, and to put her on display in all her rareness. But she was growing sicker with the days, more lethargic, so that death even seemed a possibility. When I circulated her waters, she no longer playfully grasped the stick. I lowered fresh prawns into her tank by the cords of their seed-like eyes; I might have been placing rocks in there, for all her interest. She lay curled in a pale ball in the corner, one arm tepidly fingering the surface.

  As I stared into the makeshift tank, watching her, a strangeness came over me: I began to feel that everything I put my hand to ended just this way, in ashes. I had been a slave, I had been a fugitive, I had been extravagantly abandoned in the Arctic as though trapped in some strange primal dream, and I had survived it only to let the best of my creations be taken from me, the gallery of aquatic life. And I felt then a sudden urge to reject it, to cast all of this away, as if the great effort it was taking, and the knowledge that it would never in the end be mine, obliterated its worth. I looked at the octopus, and I saw not the miraculous animal but my own slow, relentless extinction.

  Tanna was staring at me; I had missed something.

  She gestured again at the tank. “What do you suppose ails her?”

  I squatted down, studying the softly boiling form behind the distorted glass. “God forbid she’s been exposed to copper in her water,” I murmured, feeling still unsettled, not quite in my skin. “We’ll get to the bottom of it.”

  But I stared at the grey knot of her body, and was convinced of nothing.

  5

  “OH, MISS GOFF, lovely, wonderful. And this must be Mister Black. We have already pulled the documents. You have use of the room until noon.”

  I was slightly taken aback; I had not asked for any documents to be pulled. I was about to object when Tanna placed a hand on my wrist.

  “Excellent,” she said, “thank you.”

  She did not seem surprised and I understood then that she had made arrangements.

  “Do let me know if you are in need of anything further.” The woman smiled, and it was as though she had suddenly passed a window, so dazzlingly did it illuminate her tired face. Behind her the gallery of dark rooms buzzed with men scratching at papers and voices calling out and footsteps shuf
fling. The building had once been a printing shop, and even now there were faded splashes of ink on the concrete floors, once black and now aged to a lustreless grey. The rooms smelled heavily of wet paper, like a library in winter.

  Tanna put a hand on the woman’s arm. “We did mean to ask you—we are also looking for Christopher Wilde. His brother was Erasmus Wilde, the last owner of Faith Plantation in Barbados. We understand Mister Wilde was to sail out of Liverpool on behalf of your organization.” She hesitated. “Perhaps you might tell us where he was going? What was the mission?”

  The woman frowned. “I know of no such mission. Indeed, such an excursion would be beyond the reach of our mandate, I’d think. I do recall Mister Wilde’s being here, two or so years ago, to drop off Faith’s records, help organize them. But I know nothing more beyond that. Mister Solander would certainly be able to help you.” She paused. “He is not in for another hour. If you are still here, perhaps I might send him in? He was a great supporter of Mister Wilde’s.”

  “Oh yes, do,” said Tanna.

  Glancing behind her to the short, dark corridor we had just come from, the woman explained that the organization was not just a repository of records but was in fact still very much engaged in combatting slavery, even after Emancipation in the Indies. “America is still an area of darkness,” said she. “It is unrelenting.”

  I stared into the room before us. There, upon a wood table whitened by old water stains, sat a large wooden box of bound records.

  “I realize they are many,” said the woman, hesitating. “As I said, you have use of the room until noon.” Then she turned and left us.

  Was I shocked to find that the world of my childhood could be contained in a single crate? It was not easy to accept. I stared uneasily at it, glanced at Tanna.