by Esi Edugyan
“I thought you might like to know,” she said softly. “Of course, we do not have to go through them, if you’d prefer not to. I just wanted to give you the possibility.”
I stepped into the small room, into its hushed glow. Three gleaming lanterns blazed on the table before the crate, alongside two steaming cups of tea. Clearly, some pains had been taken to ensure our comfort here, and seeing this, I felt suddenly drained, ill again. The books in the crate were brown with age, the pages warped. I imagined I could smell stale water in the paper, the scent of decay. The table was flooded with yellow light, and I walked slowly into the illumination to take a volume from the crate, the wood creaking faintly at my touch.
I pulled back a chair, sensing Tanna take the chair opposite. I did not see her, felt only my hands on the crusted paper, the fragility of it, as if the lives described here might break apart in my clumsy fingers; as if I would destroy these people’s sole commemoration, however awful it was.
I turned slowly through the records, the pages gaping away from the binding. Dust rose invisibly; I sneezed once, twice. I set it down, then picked up a kind of scrapbook, yellow with old newspaper notices. The notices related to slaves lost, slaves for sale, cotillion balls on neighbouring plantations. I ran my eyes nervously along the clippings. And then I saw it: the advertisement Titch and I had seen posted in Virginia.
A Reward of One Thousand Pounds will be paid for the capture of GEORGE WASHINGTON BLACK, a Negro Boy of small stature, his countenance marked with Burns; a Slave for life. His Clothing is a new Felt Hat, black Cotton Frockcoat and Breeches, and new Stockings and Shoes. He may be travelling alongside an Abolitionist White Man not his lawful owner, with Green Eyes and Black Hair, of tall stature. Whoever secures the Murderous Slave so that I get him Dead or Alive shall have ONE THOUSAND POUNDS Reward.
JOHN FRANCIS WILLARD, acting agent for ERASMUS WILDE
Faith Plantation, Barbadoes, British West India
I shivered softly. How strange to see it again, with the knowledge now of how everything had ended. I had been so frightened then; these words had reduced my boyhood to a further terror. The memory of that fear entered me now like a shadow. I had been nothing but an object to Erasmus Wilde, nothing but an expression of his wealth in the world. My escape was his diminishment; I understood what he had lost was respect—that is, power.
The lamplight passed in flickers across my hands. When I raised my eyes, Tanna was staring anxiously at me.
I gestured for her to slide across the volumes she held.
The first was a log of apprentices, detailing those men still working on the plantation after Emancipation; it was a list of their names and death dates. I stared a long while at its cover, and that black certainty that had been in me since leaving Faith, the knowledge that Kit was dead, entered me sharply. I opened to the page Tanna had marked, running my eyes down the columns, but I did not find her name, neither the true one she had been born with, Nawi, nor the new one she’d been given upon her arrival in the Indies. Then all at once I caught sight of it, her death date inscribed in a fine hand. Slowly I set the book down, and was silent.
I had always known it; she had been old even before I first met her. Her field work had not lessened in apprenticeship, and if she’d still had that boy in her care, she would have been completing some of his work too, to spare him the brutality of so long a labour. And yet to see her name logged so plainly here, as if it were a list of stored goods I looked at, or weekly sugar yields—it was peculiarly agonizing. I felt the wrongness, the disgustingness of the life granted her; I imagined her body taken from the fields with no more ceremony than would be given a dead plough horse. And I wanted to smash something with my fists, to destroy everything around me. I sensed Tanna’s eyes on me, and in that moment I hated her presence, hated this foolish attempt to give me back my past, as if the blackness of it could simply be boxed back up and left behind in this cold room with no more thought.
With trembling hands I opened the second book. On the marked page was a very tidily kept log, penned in the hand of my first master, Titch’s uncle, Richard Black. His writing was difficult to decipher, the letters like sutures stitched into the page. I squinted at the words.
Catherine MacCauley.
Kit.
Big Kit had been my mother.
All the light seemed to leave the room. I stared at the table, the white rings left by cups, my hands dark and calm upon them.
For years she had ignored me, until I had turned up suddenly in her hut, and then with a ferocity that terrified she’d fought off all who would cause me harm. She had cared for me and cursed me and cracked my ribs and clutched me so tight in her love that I thought she might break them again. She’d damned my father as cruel and my mother as foolish, and when I said she could know nothing of their natures she struck me hard in the face. When I got up the courage to again muse about who they might be, she would cackle furiously and tell me I had been born of a goat and a god, of a sheep and a chicken, of the good strong winds and the blackness that dropped swiftly across the crops in the cold season. She told me I was born of stupidity, that it must be blood-deep, and also that I was brilliant, that there would never again be a mind like mine. She loved me with a viciousness that kept me from ever feeling complacent, with the reminder that nothing was permanent, that we would one day be lost to each other. She loved me with the terror of separation, as someone who had lost all the riches of a scorched life. She loved me in spite of those past losses, as if to say, I will not surrender this time, you will not take this from me.
She had been born one person on the far side of Africa, and had walked out of the wretched hold of the slaver’s boat a second person, an alien on the white sand shores of an alien land. What had she seen on that terrible journey; what had she survived? I saw the cool monsoon morning, Kit captured in a dusty yard under a windy sky. I saw her long walk of weeks, months, to the coast. The stories she told herself along the way, stories of birds turning into men, of men turning into trees, of anthills devouring goats whole. The memory of a grandmother who’d come to her hut two years after she died, to tell her she had grown too thin.
Perhaps the bright ocean frightened her, its endless light, the white roll of the breakers far out on the sandbars. Perhaps she was terrified at the sight of the vicious pink men, hollering, drinking, sprawled out sweating in the sand. And when she was penned downstairs, darkness gathering in her crowded cell, perhaps she did not cry, had no tears left by then.
In my mind I saw the awfulness of the officers at the fort, their savagery, their casual violence. How they spat in her face, or dumped scraps on her scalp, beat and raped her for sport. I saw her selected to wash the corpses of the officers who died, how at night she talked to these men on the wrong side of life, how they spoke back to her. Does my wife know I have passed? Will any write to her? Does my father know I have passed?
And the horrors of the crossing, when it came? The stench of the holds, all of them roiling naked and ill in the dark stomach of the barquentine. The urine and excrement and vomit, men clawing their own throats open with ragged fingernails, bloodied women leaping the deck rail into waters sharp with the fins of sharks. I saw the dozens who had died on the way to Barbados, and I saw those who died once ashore. I saw my Kit grow sick, fattened on rich, strange food, and only just recover. And I saw how I left her behind to the cane and the punishing sun, in favour of Titch, and began gradually to forget her face, the sound of her voice.
I felt then Tanna’s warm hand on my shoulder, and I realized I was crying.
6
WHEN TANNA PULLED away, I raised my head, touching a sleeve to my eyes. A man was standing in the doorway, hesitant.
“Forgive the intrusion,” he said, his eyes shifting uncomfortably about the room. “Forgive me.” He slowly, almost unwillingly, stepped forward, and I became conscious of my burns. “Robert Solander. I was told you sou
ght information on Christopher Wilde?”
He was a balding, red-faced man of minute stature. I tried to picture him alongside Titch, dwarfed in that man’s shadow.
I cleared my throat, collected myself. “His mother mentioned you might have knowledge of his whereabouts.”
“I have not seen him recently,” said Solander, with an odd wince of apology. His was a small, square face in which the bones sat high and prominent, and the gesture seemed to thrust his skull to the very surface of his brow. “Though I do suppose it depends on what you would consider recent. He appeared here some two years ago, with records from his family plantation, which had been sold. The sale had taken place just months earlier—I believe his brother had just died. He worked tirelessly, helped us to catalogue everything.”
“He must still have been in mourning,” said Tanna.
“Indeed.” Solander paused. “Though outwardly he was his usual self—amiable, smiling, full of jokes. I do not mean to suggest he was not saddened—certainly there were moments when he was less excitable, melancholy. But still we had a riotous time. He is excellent company, as you must yourself know.” Solander’s smile sat awkwardly on his face, as though a mask had been overlaid there. “He had been recently to France, to Cormeilles-en-Parisis, to visit a friend there. They had apparently spent the months fussing about with camera obscura. Mister Wilde—well, he has the gift of being both scrupulous and funny. He tried to explain the science to me, and I did not understand a word of it. But it was all still extremely diverting.”
My mind was still half on Big Kit; in my distraction the description of Titch as funny struck me as not right, as though he were speaking of a different man entirely. I gave a hard smile. “Is there anything else you might tell us, Mister Solander?”
Solander shook his head no. Then he paused, his brow furrowing. “Yes,” he said, “yes.” He cleared his throat, uncertain.
We looked expectantly at him.
He hesitated. “As I said, his brother had recently passed away, and so I put it all down to mourning. But near the end of Mister Wilde’s time here, his dress became increasingly peculiar. He is a tall man and, as you know, slender, slim. And yet in those last weeks, his attire appeared much too small for him—his wrists sticking out of the cuffs, his trouser hems much too high.” He gave a nervous shrug. “It was odd.”
Tanna and I exchanged a glance.
“He was wearing another man’s clothes?” said I.
“No. It seemed they were his, somehow. And yet they did not fit him.”
“As if he had grown taller?” said Tanna.
“No,” said Solander. He struggled to arrive at the right words. Finally he said again, “No.”
“As if what, then?” Tanna said.
Solander only shook his head.
“Did you question him about it?” I asked.
“I was disinclined to. I did not wish to embarrass him. As I said, he was in mourning.”
“And he was otherwise himself?” said I.
“Yes,” said Solander. “Entirely.”
“And you did not see him again after that?”
Solander pulled from his pocket a neatly folded envelope, its paper pristine. “I received this some fifteen months ago.”
Tanna accepted the envelope, parting it with her delicate fingers. “The letter itself is lost?”
Solander flushed. “When last I saw him, I had been having problems of a personal nature. Of a marital nature. Mister Wilde remembered this, and he wrote to me some advice.” He gave a smile like a grimace. “Things were put to me in that letter that are not for strangers’ eyes. You understand, I hope?”
“Of course,” I said, though I longed to see the letter. I glanced over Tanna’s shoulder, observing the postmark of fifteen months past. I saw Titch’s beautiful penmanship, and then I saw the return address, and was startled. It had been posted from a home in Amsterdam, care of a Mister Peter Haas.
Tanna noticed almost in the same moment. She glanced up at me. “Peter Haas. Is this not your man from the Arctic—Mister Wilde’s assistant?” She furrowed her brow at the address penned there. “I thought he was House.”
“House,” I murmured. “Haas.” Perhaps in my naivety I had got it wrong. It did strike me as unlikely that Titch would know both a Peter House and a Peter Haas. Though it was not impossible.
“Amsterdam,” said Tanna thoughtfully.
“You are welcome to keep that,” said Solander, apparently relieved to have something concrete to give us. “I am sorry I could not be of more help.”
I gripped the envelope, the warmth of Tanna’s hand still in the paper’s folds.
7
THE NEXT WEEKS PASSED painfully, with the confirmation of Kit’s death still weighing on me, the acceptance that she was my mother. Tanna was overwhelmed in her concern for me; and her eagerness to heal me, to never let me alone, annoyed and distressed me. We fought bitterly all the next week, so that she began to avoid spending time in my cottage. I did not seek her out, knowing that any gesture begun in love inevitably turned to poison; every good speech, every clean overture, died on the air. I thought constantly of Amsterdam, but I was blind to myself; only a full week after speaking to Mister Solander did I realize I longed to write to Mister Haas, to seek him out—that indeed I was irritable precisely because I knew I needed to.
And so, one evening, after a full day’s work at Ocean House, I sat at my creaking desk and wrote out a long, searching letter. I posted it the next morning and still weeks later had received no response. And so I wrote again, following it quickly with a third letter—and again, nothing came. How disappointed I was, how shaken. I was desperate to speak of it, but did not feel I could confide in Tanna; I knew she would criticize me for putting so much effort into seeking out a man who after all might have been a ghost. Her contempt for Titch was obvious, though she had never met him. Her displeasure at my need to see him again was really her displeasure at what she perceived to be the worst of my faults: my habit of expending my energies on those things and people least worthy of them—herself and her father exempted. In my desperation to find Titch she saw a fear of accepting my own power, a mindless surrender. It disgusted her, though she never spoke so.
But then, gradually, miraculously, things began to clear between us. We were able to speak as we’d once done, with great love and little calculation. We began to go almost daily into the city together, to inspect new specimens or pieces of equipment. We sourced Portland and Roman cement to build artificial rocks, and purchased Thames river sand from a stone wharf to line the tanks’ bottoms. We sought out annelids and crabs; we talked constantly of light, its shifting properties throughout the seasons. The windows of Ocean House were very large and poorly blown, and we feared what the summer months would bring, when the solar rays would energize the plants but lay waste to the animals.
And finally the tanks for the main floor were completed, and we were invited to go to Wolcott and Sons to examine them. On our way there, we passed damp stone buildings abutting the road, the facades black with last night’s rain. As we entered Guilford Street, I finally spoke of my failure to reach Haas.
I steeled myself for Tanna’s disapproval. Instead she hesitated, and with some reluctance, as if she’d been hiding a secret, said, “Father has a distant colleague in Amsterdam, in Jordaan—Kees Visser. Some months ago Mister Visser wrote with news of a specimen he thought perfect for Ocean House but did not entrust to the post. He could not bring it himself, being permanently confined to a Bath chair. But he said he would cold-store it, in the hopes that Father might have a chance to go and collect it.” She peered warily at me. “If I’m only mentioning it now, Wash, it’s because Father had no notion of going. We do not know Mister Visser well, whether he is trustworthy or not. But the nature of his claim, it’s so unlikely. We get many such claims, as you know.”
I paused, absorbing this news. She stood before me nervous, as though expecting a dressing-down. Very calmly I said, “What does he say he has?”
“A two-headed cetacean.”
“Born live?”
“Stillborn.”
“It would be a triumph to display such a thing.”
“I myself do not believe him.”
“Conjoined twins do exist in nature, Tanna, though admittedly they are rare.”
“He says it is a beast of two heads yet one brain, with the limbic system divided perfectly between them.”
“Astounding.”
She made no reply, kept walking.
We continued some paces, a spit of rain now in the air. I was not angry with her for withholding this information; I understood the great risk she took in telling me. For here was what I had been awaiting, in my bones—a tangible, feasible reason to visit Amsterdam, something more concrete than the rumour of a lost man.
We shoved open the grimy door of Wolcott and Sons, the bell ringing tinnily. Wood shavings scuttled across the floor, pale as gull’s feathers. Almost instantly Mister Saunders stepped from behind the dark curtain, his hair flecked with lathe shavings, a smile on his pocked face. He was Wolcott’s son-in-law, a tall, lanky redhead from Midlothian, and though he spoke with no trace of accent, one had a sense of his difference. With a boyish wave of the hand he bid us pass through the curtains and led us mumbling to the workshop in back. In this large room stinking of burnt glue, its tables strewn with bottles of paste and great cement plates, a small, begrimed man in a black apron squinted quietly at his work.
“Good morning, Mister Wolcott,” Tanna called out.
Wolcott grunted but did not glance up. Yet we both saw the strong blush cross his cheeks, and were careful not to look at each other. The old man admired Tanna desperately, and in her presence he became abashed, abrupt. I had seen him once socially among only men and he was quite lively then, and talkative.
