by Chris Dolan
Lord Coak delivered her from all that. He had seen the colour of her petal, understood she was a genus cultivated in the wrong climate. He unearthed her, set her on the high seas to blow away her impurities before replanting his precious bloom by the lapping lazuli of the Caribbean Sea.
Miss Elspeth Baillie’s Return to Greenock had the ring of a strathspey about it – perhaps one day in the future, when her name was celebrated across the globe, a fiddler or piper would compose the tune, a bard pen words to it, and plans would be made to perform it for her homecoming, though they would wait long enough for she swore never to set foot in this nation again. From the moment she stepped on to the quayside, her schooner sitting majestically in dock, sails billowing, her expedition had all the tumult and drama of a penny romance. There were stevedores and cargo, mainsails and harbour hubbub, and the smell of tar and sea and sweat, and masts stirring the very clouds.
Elspeth re-entered Greenock just a little over three weeks after her performance as Cleopatra and the Shepherd Lass o’ Aberlour, alone in a new dress and crinoline, with a trunkful more – of pilot-cloth and silks, with bustles and pelerines, tiered skirts, and satin, button and Balmoral boots to match – waiting for her on the ship Lord Coak had chartered. This time, her voyage would last weeks, enough time to shuck off the old Elspeth and let the seeds of the new one germinate.
At the far side of the world there waited a new theatre for her. Her patron had described the Lyric – an arena as grand as the Lyceum, more modern than anything London itself had to offer, already staffed with writers and designers, actors and seamstresses, all standing ready, waiting for her to add the Promethean spark to set their dramas ablaze. It had been built specially for her – her actual name unknown until now, but she was the one, chosen from all the companies of Europe, fated to be its star.
As if to mark the momentousness of the occasion, a man died moments before her ship broke from land. The captain of the Alba – to Elspeth’s eyes a rude, salt-cured and imperious fellow – was nevertheless a Jacobin and a Democrat. News had just arrived of the July Revolution in France, and the abdication and expulsion of King Charles. Captain Douglas ordered the firing of a salute, and not one shot but two, to celebrate the success of the insurrection. He explained to her that even trade ships must arm themselves against over-enthusiastic privateering. He had a sailor set the guns high enough to make sure the wadding would clear the sheds, while Elspeth and the captain and crew stood in line along the deck, and the folk on the quay fell silent, eagerly awaiting the blasts. The first volley shot cleanly enough, causing the ship to bounce on the agitated waters, prompting squeals of delight from the land-bound onlookers. The able seaman sponged out the gun, but the wadding must have ignited the second charge prematurely, for the man’s right hand came flying off and sailed over the heads of the crowds like a bird heading south. His leg dropped into the sea a moment before the rest of him hit the water’s surface with a dull, dead thud.
The captain showed no sense of loss. He ordered the sailor’s remains to be fetched from the water and handed over to the port authorities for disposal. He brooked no argument, and the boat set sail before the one o’clock gun sounded. Elspeth felt no sadness. She had never met the dead man and his demise was so sudden and strange that grief was not possible. This, after all, was the port from which the notorious Captain Kidd first set out, and such barbarities were to be expected. Elspeth stood on the deck, wind funnelling upriver and through her hair, like a pirate captain scanning the horizon for adventures to come. The death of the unknown sailor felt like a sacrifice, the end of his days marking new life for her.
She was the only passenger, the captain’s guest on the elegant, fast-moving trading ship, carrying goods back to the Indies, in exchange for American tobacco and sugar and rum, the last of which the deck and the hull still reeked, as though the entire vessel had been tempered in distilled spirit. The mahogany furniture in the captain’s dining room and the ash-wood of her own quarters were impregnated with molasses, the sweet hopeful scent of sugar.
The bonny ship the Alba cut through the waves as if the Atlantic Ocean were silk of the finest denier. It took Elspeth one or two days to find her sea legs, but even the nausea she felt from time to time was welcome, purging the old Elspeth from the new. When, after a brace of days, the last of the British Isles was finally cast adrift, she waved again, her arm like an oar in the air, propelling her beautiful boat and manly crew away, yonder, beyond. For the next few weeks she would play the part of intrepid sailor – throwing her cap as she would hang it on the horns o’ the moon! She stood on deck as the evening sun melted, and calculated that the Baillie Family Itinerant Players, famous at every fair, assizes and cattle show from Falkirk to Dumfries, were about to take the stage at Perth for the first of three nights’ performance. Not one of them had come to wish her bon voyage. Mr. Baillie had not tried to restrain her – Lord Coak had ensured that her departure was economically indisputable – but he guaranteed to the assembled company that his wayward oldest daughter would become little more than a “weel-travelled, widespread hoor”.
But here was Elspeth, upon the wide ocean. A girl drowned for nineteen years by Scotland’s rains that quenched her, its fogs and haar dimmed her, bogs and quags pulling her down. But the sea! – now quiet as a lamb, mild and shy; now restless and pitching, full of business and scurry. By day, singing a gentle lullaby, and on the night following, swirling, tossing, muttering, annoyed, to itself. Then under the evening sun she caught glimpses of its underwear in the deep coral and seaflowers, and she thought of the woman she might become. The shadow of her form rippled on the surface, constantly changing shape. How could a single entity be so many things? Elspeth talked so confidently to the captain and his crew about her future life but, truthfully, she could not picture the world she was heading for, nor her place in it. Possible future Elspeth Baillies were just as multiple as the sea’s moods. Already she was Cleopatra and Ophelia, Queen of the Night and Lady of the Lake. She was Clarinda and the Shepherdess o’ Aberlour.
The crew of the Alba were as perplexed as she was. Each day they waited to see who it was they were dealing with – Anne Bonny, the Irish lady pirate, lady-in-waiting to a Lord of the Realm, fearful Scots lassie far from home. Elspeth herself didn’t know whether she would be douce or voluble, a sea-sick maiden or tomboy mucker-in, until she had uttered her first words of the day. She kept the crew, and herself, waiting for three full weeks to discover if she preferred the power of the captain or the more polished first mate. For another month she played merry hell with their expectations and cravings, until finally they landed at Bridgetown.
The image of herself stepping off the ship – greeted by a small party headed by Lord Coak – burned itself indelibly on Elspeth’s mind. It would hang there for the rest of her life, like a portrait or a daguerreotype on a wall, seldom acknowledged but always on show. And there was, truly, something photographic about the event: as if time had stopped and only Elspeth moved through a suspended world. Behind her, Captain Douglas and his superior officers stood rooted to the deck. Before her, Coak and some gentlemen and ladies she was yet to know, stared, hands held up in mid-wave, jackets and shawls rippling gently in the breeze. She inched towards them as if giving a portraitist time to capture the scene: the sea beneath the gangplank murmuring but still; little fish, impossibly colourful, ogled her, lulled by the moment. She alone moved, and her movement arrested the rest of the world’s.
The spell was broken by the first words she heard in her new land. The General Manager of the Lyric Theatre – a Mr. Philbrick, she discovered later – addressed his lordship, but kept his eyes on Elspeth.
“Your valuation, Albert, is as ever quite faultless.”
She had chosen to disembark in a simple white dress, without parasol or shawl. The correct choice as the scene was already bursting with colour. A late afternoon sun, itself a yellow polka-dot in a powerfully blue sky, amplified all the hues below it. The green sea, pi
nk stone harbour, creamy white houses beyond the port. The group come to welcome her was a little patchwork of pink and grey hats, striped skirts and blue knee-breeches. No sight imaginable could be so different from the port she had left behind.
Philbrick, in indigo waistcoat and high starched collar, glowed with practiced wonder at her. She knew his type at once: a professional of the theatre who had long since ceased to marvel at any production, actor or performance, but whose function was to smile when required. She would have trouble with him. Not a minute off the boat and the perfect path to success she had daydreamed of across the Atlantic already had an obstacle. Lord Coak stepped away from the lady by his side – older than Elspeth, rouged to hide a natural plainness – and spoke as he approached. Elspeth thought she heard a note of doubt in his words.
“Miss Baillie more than lives up to my remembrance.”
He looked different to her. The balding head and little pot belly were the same, and he remained the authoritative figure in the group, but he seemed more businesslike, even as he smiled and reached out for her hand, taken up perhaps with the little worries of everyday life. He introduced her to the rest of the party. While she curtsied and smiled at the embellished Miss Constance Sturges, bowed to Mr. Overton and his wife. The formalities completed, the party walked in twos and threes towards carriages waiting for them. Mrs. Overton and her sister took up each side of the newcomer; Coak fell in behind and spoke quietly to Philbrick. Elspeth recounted tales of her journey to Mrs. Overton and Miss Sturges. She was startled by her own accent, in contrast to the other ladies’ plainer English, stabbed though it was with a hint of a more metallic, cruder sound. Elspeth liked the difference. Her own voice sounded clear and vivacious – soft watery vowels running over the sharp pebbles of consonants.
“Frightening? Not at all! A wee bit exciting at times, yes. But, oh, when you’re alone on deck with nothing but sky and sea, you’re mistress of the entire world. Especially with a dram of rum in you.”
She made only limited use of Scots words, but gave her Western Scots free reign. They entered the carriages, and the drivers were instructed to make for the Overtons’ – not, she noted, the residence of Lord Coak. The dust they kicked up rained back down in ochres and reds like fireworks. The air was warm, even at this late hour. The houses they passed gleamed white and imposing, as if they would be hot to the touch. Most astonishing of all was the encroaching night’s music.
“Frogs,” laughed Constance Sturges, seeing Elspeth listen with wonder. “They sing all night long. In no time you won’t even notice them.”
“And cicadas,” said Mrs. Overton, with a shudder. Elspeth had never heard of a cicada, but could not believe anything terrible could make such a sweet sound or be the cause of such a shudder. At the impromptu celebration organised in her honour at Teddy Overton’s town house, everyone scurried around her.
“You are most welcome, my dear,” said portly ladies. “Everything we have heard about you is true,” offered portlier gents, though few, it seemed, could remember her name, if they had ever been told it. Lord Coak himself was as much a focus of attention as she was.
“Northpoint isn’t in the habit of throwing parties,” Mrs. Overton’s sister whispered to her. Northpoint, Elspeth gathered, was the name of Coak’s sugar plantation, too far from town to be a locus for social gatherings. Everyone showed polite interest in the new arrival, however, promising to show her around, give her the benefit of their advice and, of course, attend her future performances.
“I know you will be very happy here, my dear.”
“So long as you manage a trip away once or twice a year. Mr. Thomson and I simply could not get by without returning to London every season.”
Elspeth nodded and smiled and curtsied. These society people would have interested her more – after all, she was now at the heart of a gathering she had only glimpsed before through windows – were it not for the servant girls. They were not the first darkies she had seen: Macumbo the Witch Doctor had been a regular at circuses and country fairs where the Baillie Family had performed on the same bill; Daurama the African Queen had regaled audiences with her stories of rain-dances and bloody wars, bewitching them with her dark eyes and bright robes. The girls who proffered trays of snacks and glasses of planter’s punch, therefore, struck Elspeth as dull in comparison. They wore ordinary servants’ clothes – not a tiger’s tooth or a leopard’s paw between them. The male servants at each of the doors of the grand house had no face-paint or scars on their faces. Yet still she was fascinated by them all. They seemed turned in on themselves, their eyes looking at the guests but refusing to see them; the girls’ spiky hair like hedgehogs, bristling.
There were two interruptions to the evening’s proceedings, both in the form of unexpected arrivals. The first was a tall and stately gentleman to whom everyone deferred in subtle ways: hunching their shoulders a little; greeting him and quickly moving back again. The second was quite the opposite, a roughly dressed man, as tall as the first, but so thin that his lack of breadth nullified his height. Whiskered, and with that shadow of ingrained earth that those who labour in the elements can never wash away.
The first gentleman was introduced to her: Mr. Reginald Lisle. He smiled at her amiably enough, but said little. In his eyes, however, she saw the customary desire she inspired in certain men.
“Lisle’s about the richest man you and me’ll ever come across.” With a few rums taken, Constance – or Nonie, as her fellow actress insisted Elspeth call her – betrayed her Irish roots. The West Indian twang gave way every second word to relatively recent Dublin brogue. “Puts money into the Lyric, so he does.”
“He puts money into everything,” added Christian Bloom, the young man to whom she had first been introduced at the Careenage and, she now realised, was Nonie’s beau. “It’s an insurance policy: he wants a bit of everything, just in case.”
“And anyway, he only invests because of Georgie.”
“Georgie,” Christian explained “is his son.”
“Now wait till you meet him, Ellie,” laughed the Irish girl.
The look she received from the thin, whiskered man, had that hint of desire too. It was the yen that all older men hold for young women, but there was a childish shame there too, in the recognition of it: a kind of huffiness. She was not introduced to him, nor even discovered who he was. Plainly, he was not a guest, but had come to see Lord Coak on some matter of business, for he spoke to no one else. Nor did anyone mention him, though Elspeth felt that all were aware of him. Perhaps even frightened of him. She couldn’t see why – he was of inferior caste and, apart from his gauntness, unimposing. Yet, when he turned to leave, his business with Coak quickly concluded, the room seemed to lighten and gaiety return.
After the excitement of the day, Elspeth began to wilt. She was led, by Mrs. Overton and Lord Coak, to her chamber, and she roused again at the sight of a four-postered bed in a magnificent room. She walked around, touching the heavy drapes on the windows and bed, feeling the sturdy, bright wood. Coak and Mrs. Overton watched her wordlessly, as if in a swoon themselves.
As she drifted off to sleep on the largest and softest bed she had ever known, the faint echo of a billowing sea at her window, an entrancing lullaby of cicadas and frogs from the gardens, Elspeth considered that she had not merely changed localities, but the very nature of life itself. In this heat, a person could not possibly stay the same. These new faces and accents and sounds and sensations belonged to a different realm. The old laws of her old world would not apply here. Nothing she had understood until now had any meaning. In this place, life could only unfold in unexpected and dreamlike ways.
III
The first week passed like hours, minutes. It seemed she skipped off the Alba and struck her new life into flame like a Lucifer match.
The Coak plantation was somewhere north of Bridgetown – a day’s uncomfortable journey, inconveniently far from town and the Lyric. The planter saw no reason for Elspeth even
to visit such an incommodious place, much less reside there when she would be needed on a daily basis at the theatre. It was agreed that she stay at the Overtons’ for the time being, though not in the grand room they had given her on her first night. Instead, she was lodged at the back of the house in a suite of rooms designed, most likely, for a major-domo or a steward, or some other domestic assistant. Lord Coak agreed with Mr. and Mrs. Overton that a suite of rooms, cut off from the rest of the house and thus ensuring a degree of privacy would, in the long term, be more agreeable to Elspeth’s needs. But with the flurry of activities and duties that descended upon her from the first day in Bridgetown, Elspeth scarcely noticed her new quarters.
Nor did she see much of her patron, who had business to attend to at his Northpoint estate, returning to town only when he was directly needed. Before he left, however, he sent a brougham to the Overtons to collect her in order to show her round the Lyric Theatre. She passed through an elegant arch and rode alongside the Careenage – bustling, noisy and exhilarating, with men of many races and all classes shouting and working, and smells as pungent as they were unidentifiable. The buildings in this part of Bridgetown were grand and bright and weightless-looking in the sunny light. At the far end of a broad street sat the Lyric – as large a playhouse as Elspeth had ever seen. Its bright new stone, smooth and silvery, glinted like steel in the sun, a dark-windowed dome crowning the whole. The entrance looked like those she had seen in drawings of London theatres: pillared and stately, the gateway to a better organised and more exciting world.
Coak was waiting for her on the street outside, accompanied by Mr. Philbrick. The owner welcomed her and rushed inside, like a child eager to show off his new toy. The company manager sniffed to her, when Coak was out of eashot. “Lord Albert is quite the expert on poetics but not, regrettably, an authority on architecture.”
