She paused, to clear her throat, and Pyke waited for her to continue.
‘I could see what was going to happen. It was all so predictable. Silas neglected Bonella terribly. During planting and harvesting, he would spend most of his time out on the estate. He was very active in that respect; he liked to get his hands dirty. Meanwhile Phillip would spend time with Bonella. So during the day, when Silas was away from the house, you could hear the two of them laughing; it was a joyful, happy sound, and when I think about those days now, they still lift my heart. But Phillip was also a terrible philanderer, just like his father, and his interest in Bonella was never innocent. She was a beautiful woman and he wanted to bed her. The fact that she was his brother’s wife only made her more attractive in his eyes. I don’t think he loved her; I don’t think he loved anyone, not really. But I think, in the end, she loved him. I also think if Silas had merely caught the two of them in bed, he mightn’t have reacted in the way he did; if it had just been the one time and hadn’t meant anything. But it went on for years, or at least two years, and finally Bonella went to Silas and told him about the affair; she told him she loved Phillip and wanted to be with him. I don’t know if Phillip knew she was going to do this. I don’t think he did. He hated confrontations and he feared and worshipped his brother in equal measures.’
‘And that’s when Silas killed her?’
‘To this day, I don’t know whether Silas meant to kill her or not. We were downstairs in the kitchen. We could hear them arguing and then we heard a terrible crash. I ran to the hall and saw her, Bonella, there on the floor. Then I looked up and saw him. I’ll never forget his face: the fury, the terror and the sadness. Like I said, even then, I didn’t think he was a bad man.’
‘So what changed your mind?’
‘After the funeral we were all sent away. No one knew why. Everyone, that is, except for Phillip.’ She paused and bit her lip. ‘But Phillip didn’t want to face his brother on his own; he didn’t know how much Bonella had told Silas before she died. So he asked me to stay. I think you can probably guess why he asked me, rather than anyone else.’
‘You were in love with him?’
This time she laughed. ‘Love? How can a poor black slave ever hope to love a wealthy white man?’
‘I thought Silas was the wealthy one.’
Bertha smiled. ‘I suppose I did love Phillip, in a way.’ Her smiled faded. ‘But that night put an end to everything. I don’t even know why Phillip didn’t just leave; I think he wanted the chance to explain himself to Silas, to beg for his brother’s forgiveness. From the veranda, I watched him walk across the lawn to the counting house. That’s where Silas was waiting for him. I could hear them talking and for a while I thought everything might go back to how it was. Then the screaming started. Phillip’s screams. I’d never heard a sound like it and I hope I never do again. I couldn’t sit and do nothing, so I crept over there and I climbed those stone steps and I peered into that room through the open door.’ Bertha paused; her eyes had suddenly filled with tears and her hands were trembling. She looked at Pyke and offered a brave smile. ‘This is hard for me. I’ve tried not to think about it for a very long time.’
Pyke returned the smile. He hated himself for putting her through this but he had to know. He’d come too far not to know.
‘Silas was standing there in front of Phillip. He’d bound his brother’s wrists and ankles to a chair.’
Pyke just nodded; his mouth was dry.
‘Silas had these enormous hands, twice the size of yours. I remember looking at them, looking at his thumbs, wondering why they were dripping with blood. At first, I thought he’d cut himself.’ She hesitated and then closed and opened her eyes. ‘Then Silas stepped aside and I saw Phillip’s face. I think I must have gasped because he looked around and he saw me. Silas, that is. All I could look at were those two thumbs, wet with Phillip’s blood. Of course, Phillip couldn’t see me. Where his eyes had been there were just two bloody slits.’
Queasy at the thought of what she’d described, Pyke waited until he thought she might be ready then asked, ‘What did you do?’
‘What did I do? What could I do? I turned and ran. I went back to my hut and gathered everything I could carry and I left Ginger Hill for the mountains. Later, I heard that Silas had offered a reward of ten pounds for my capture. After all, I was a runaway slave and in the eyes of the law I was his property. I walked for many, many days; I ate what I could find and I slept under the stars. Oddly enough it was the first time I’d ever felt free. I’d heard about this place and eventually I found it. I don’t know if Silas knew I’d made it this far or that I’ve been here for the past twenty years. In recent years I’ve tried to stop thinking about him.’
Pyke nodded but didn’t speak for a moment. ‘And did you ever see Phillip again?’
Bertha looked exhausted. ‘No. That was the last time I saw him; his eyes gouged out, tied to a chair in the counting house.’
‘And you never heard what became of him?’
Her expression hardened. ‘He’s dead,’ she said emphatically. ‘I’m guessing he died shortly after Silas blinded him.’
‘But do you know this for a fact?’
‘I know it in here.’ She tapped her chest and then her head. ‘Just like Mary, his spirit has come back home as well.’ She stared at him proudly as though expecting to be challenged.
‘But this was never his home,’ Pyke said, trying to determine whether she really believed what she was saying. ‘And Phillip was a white man.’
That seemed to amuse her. ‘Phillip was white because his daddy said so; likewise Mary was black because I was black. But he was darker than some black folk and she could pass as white. Black and white doesn’t mean a thing apart from what those with money and power want them to mean.’
Pyke smiled at the truth of what she’d just said. Suddenly he knew what she’d perhaps been hinting at. ‘Phillip was Mary’s father, wasn’t he?’
‘How did you know that?’ Her voice was tense.
‘I didn’t,’ he said, trying to keep any trace of gloating from his voice. ‘At least, not until just now.’
‘You’re a clever man,’ she said, rocking back and forth in the chair. ‘Clever and arrogant. I imagine it brings its own rewards, and its hardships.’
‘Did Phillip know he was Mary’s father?’
Bertha shook her head.
‘And what about Mary? Did she know that this white man - Silas’s brother - was in fact her father?’
‘Mary and I weren’t what you’d call close. A product of circumstances, more than anything else.’
Pyke remained silent and waited for her to continue.
‘What I’m trying to say is that after I left Ginger Hill, I never saw my daughter again.’ Bertha’s voice was quivering. ‘She was five years of age at the time.’
Pyke didn’t try to hide his scepticism. ‘You mean she never came looking for you and you never sent word to her about your whereabouts?’
‘Initially I was terrified about the prospect of her trying to follow me here. Silas knew Mary was my daughter and even though she was barely five at the time, he made her one of his house slaves, to keep her close. If she ever tried to run away, he would have caught and punished her, in order to punish me. So I didn’t contact her or send word to her; after a while, it became normal and, much later, even after Silas had left for England, I just thought I’d left it too long.’ Bertha dabbed her eyes, unconvincingly, Pyke thought. ‘Of course, I’d hear things about her from time to time; I always craved to hear any piece of news about her, however small or trivial.’
‘Even bad news?’ Pyke asked, still not convinced by this part of the old woman’s tale. Even taking into account the debilitating effects of slavery and its aftermath, how likely was it that a mother and daughter wouldn’t make any effort to see one another during all this time?
‘Is there any other kind of news for black folk on this island?’
&nbs
p; ‘So what did you think when you heard that your daughter had agreed to marry the son of the man you despised?’
‘What do you think I thought?’ Bertha shook her head, as though the question were a stupid one.
‘And yet you still did nothing; you didn’t write to your daughter, to try to persuade her she was making a mistake?’
‘A mistake? A rich white man who by all accounts loved her? Why on earth would I tell her not to marry him?’
‘But they’re cousins.’
For a while Bertha sat very still, her eyes tightly shut and her face composed. Then she smiled. ‘You’ll have to forgive me, sir. I’m no longer a young woman. Too much talking tires me out. I don’t wish to be rude and I’d like you to stay here in the village tonight - as our guest. But I need to rest so I’m going to have to ask you to leave.’
‘What if Phillip isn’t dead?’ Pyke persisted. ‘What if he lived and at some point travelled to London?’ He was thinking about the blind mudlark who’d been seen talking with Arthur Sobers on the Ratcliff Highway. Was it simply coincidence that Phillip Malvern and this man were both blind?
‘Phillip died a long time ago. I told you that already.’
‘But you don’t know that for a fact, do you?’
This time she stared at him with something approaching hostility and refused to answer the question.
‘Did you know Mary had sailed for London?’
‘I heard about it after she’d left.’
‘And what did you think?’
‘I’ve told you, I am tired and need a rest. Now I’m going to have to insist upon it.’ She went to stand up and Pyke handed her the bamboo cane.
‘Would you have supported her decision, if you’d known about it?’
This time she turned to face him. ‘You mean, would I have sent her to her death?’
‘You knew she was going to die?’
‘I’m what folk here called a myal woman. The spirits visit me. I have certain powers of intuition.’ She shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t expect you to believe me but I foresaw that Mary would die a very long way from home.’
‘Mary had those powers, too, didn’t she?’ Pyke thought about what McQuillan had told him. ‘Do you think she foresaw her death as well?’
But Bertha had clearly had enough and, without saying another word, she began to shuffle down the hill towards her hut.
That night, the villagers ate barbecued pork, drank rum and danced to the beat of their jam-jams and kitty-katties under the stars. It was a balmy night, and as Pyke watched the revellers shake their bodies in time to the music, he thought about his conversation with the old woman, unable to reconcile the different elements of what she had told him. Did she really believe that Phillip was long dead, and had Mary been entirely ignorant of her own parentage? Later in the evening, Bertha performed what he guessed was a traditional ritual: having sprinkled powder on her volunteer and fed him rum, she stood back while her assistant, a much younger man, danced in time to the drumbeats until the volunteer fell to the ground, apparently dead. While the beat of the jam-jams and kitty-katties echoed across the mountain, Bertha sprinkled herbs on to the ‘corpse’, squeezed juice into his mouth, touched his eyes with the tips of her fingers and chanted into the air. As the ring of revellers tightened around her, and the stamping and drumming became louder, she suddenly clapped her hands together and the volunteer came back to life.
It should have been easy for Pyke to dismiss the whole spectacle as nonsense, as other white men before him had done. Generally he wasn’t a superstitious man, preferring to put his faith in the rigours of science and reason. But as he sat there taking it all in - the warm air, the strange sounds and smells, the fiery rum warming his stomach - Pyke found himself curiously affected by the spectacle. This hadn’t been a performance for him or even for those who’d participated in it but rather for family and friends who’d suffered and died during slavery, and especially for Mary Edgar, who had been buried alone and unloved in a faraway city. This was her farewell, and as the dance broke up and the revellers fell to the ground, exhausted, Pyke caught the old woman’s eye. She looked at him, puzzled at first, and then broke into a smile, as if to suggest her long-lost daughter had finally come home.
Later that night they came for him. Six or seven men crept up to his hut and pushed open the door. Pyke watched them from the trees on the other side of the clearing. Shortly afterwards they emerged from the hut, talking and gesticulating to one another. They looked around, not knowing what to do. Pyke withdrew behind the line of trees and stared up at the branches rustling overhead. Pyke didn’t doubt that, had he stayed in the hut, he would be dead by now; there was something he’d asked the old woman about, something he’d said, something he knew that made him a threat. Harper had been the same.
Earlier, before the celebration had started, he had hidden his horse a long way from the village and had already planned his escape route. He would wait for the men to disperse and then try to retrieve his mare. By that time the sun would be up and he would start the long two-day trek towards Kingston and the steamer.
Part of him wanted to have another talk with the old woman, hold a knife to her throat and force the whole truth from her. But some of the men had congregated outside her hut, and Pyke knew he wouldn’t get within fifty feet of her.
To go anywhere near her was to take a risk that he wasn’t prepared to take because, right at that moment, more than anything, Pyke wanted to take Felix in his arms and hold him. It was time to go home.
PART III
*
London
AUGUST 1840
TWENTY
Every seat in the cavernous room had been filled, which meant that Pyke had to stand at the back of the hall and could barely see, let alone hear, the figures on the stage. He moved down the aisle through the mass of bodies and eventually found a spot just to the left of the stage.
Exeter Hall was synonymous with a loosely connected group of anti-slavery, temperance and religious movements and was hosting the first Anti-Slavery Society World Convention. As Pyke surveyed the solemn faces in the crowd, listening earnestly to the sober pronouncements of the speaker, he thought about the unforgiving doctrine that many of them subscribed to - that God helped only those who helped themselves. He wanted to take each and every one of them a few streets to the north or south, to St Giles or Alsatia, and show them the conditions that many people had to endure through no fault of their own. It wasn’t their views he objected to as much as their holier-than-thou attitudes, as though God had personally selected them for his mission on earth while leaving the undeserving multitude to beg for their guidance or rot in the gutters. Emily had once tried to help other people, without a trace of the smugness and self-aggrandisement displayed by the Christian missionaries, and Pyke didn’t doubt she too would have despised most of the men in this room.
A new speaker had just taken to the stage and someone next to Pyke identified the man as Reverend William Knibb - ‘pastor of the Baptist mission in Falmouth, Jamaica’. Knibb was a small, unprepossessing man in his late thirties or early forties but he spoke in a loud, confident voice and soon had the rapt attention of his audience. He started his address by denouncing the popular views circulating in the colonial and metropolitan newspapers, put forward by the planters’ lobby, that emancipation had created a lazy and rebellious breed of negro. Knibb went on to suggest quite the opposite; that the free villages built on land purchased as a result of the generosity of congregations in Britain had fostered godliness, morality, domestic happiness and social order. ‘A place,’ he added, ‘of noble free peasantry where the man goes out to work and the woman, released from proper toil, tends to the home, and where there is a new Bible on every table.’
That got a thunderous ovation.
Given what Pyke had seen for himself in the mountains above Falmouth, it was hard to disagree with Knibb’s argument: that former slaves lived a better life freed from the shackles of slavery, and that
owning their homes and tending their own plots fostered self-sufficiency and, in turn, contentment. But he also thought about John Harper’s damning indictment of the Baptists’ mission in Jamaica - that, in essence, it represented another form of colonialism since its goal was to turn former slaves into versions of themselves. To amuse himself, he wondered what Knibb and others would think if he took the floor and told them about what had really happened at Ginger Hill.
Still, Pyke held his tongue and waited patiently for the reason he’d come to the meeting in the first place. It came towards the end of Knibb’s address.
‘To show their respect for that esteemed man Joseph Sturge,’ Knibb said to a deafening cheer, ‘a town was set up that bore his honoured name. As we speak a new community named after my own birthplace, Kettering, is being settled and very soon a village called Malvern will be established.’ Knibb waited as Silas Malvern, perched on top of his high-chair, was carried onstage by two burly men. ‘It is my very great pleasure, and honour, to present to you Mr Silas Malvern. Mr Malvern is now a resident of London but until recently he owned one of the largest sugar plantations in the western part of Jamaica.’ A hushed silence fell over the room; this was the enemy right there in their midst. ‘My friends, please, I can perhaps guess what you’re thinking but before you rush to judgement, hear me out. Ill health prevents my brother, Mr Malvern, from addressing you in person but he wishes it to be known that he now regrets his role in the slave trade and by way of restitution he has committed to donating land to our mission for the purpose of establishing two new free villages in the parish of Trelawny, Jamaica.’
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