Redlegs

by Chris Dolan

  “The Scots Lowlander is prone to sulkiness. The Englishman is least affected by such tempers. He’ll compensate for her trace of Irish.”

  “But what if the parties find no attraction in each other?”

  “Don’t vex me, Miss Moore, with the whims of your romantic poets. Never in your ladies’ lives has the age-old process of selecting an economically advantageous husband not been imposed upon them.”

  “And if they are wholly adverse to each other?”

  “You and I, Diana, are in loco parentis. If we do our work well, we will choose a better spouse for your friends than they could themselves. A winning smile and mirthful wit and – let me speak plainly – a bosom made for the squeezing and a ripe apple for a tail-piece do not necessarily make for happy and enduring associations. Bear with it, and you will see how we shall all enjoy the fruits of our work.”

  Elspeth observed, impressed, as Diana bore the extra work levied on her by Captain Shaw. Beyond her daily duties in house and field, she was tutor, scribe, and now matchmaker. After a matter of months she changed from reluctant matron into a bustling dynamic woman; it fatigued Elspeth just watching her. Her energies were still fuelled by a staunch Presbyterian ethic that felt to Elspeth like a language she once spoke but had now all but forgotten. Diana acted in accordance with the rule of the estate and within the law of God as she saw it, safe in the knowledge that God would take her into His fold – but not before returning her first to the land of her birth, her constant prayer.

  Diana took to tying her hair back so tightly that it stretched her eyes narrow and tautened the skin around the temples. She made efforts to appear freshly washed and laundered every day, skirts rustling crisply in even the hottest of afternoons. She had trained herself to be better spoken than her true education had allowed, borrowing phrases and pronunciations from Elspeth and Coak. She was held by the other women in the kind of respect due to the daughter of a landed family, or the manse, though her stock was as humble as any of theirs.

  When, in just under a year, the first baby arrived – a son, to Jean Homes and Obadiah Wilson, an elderly drayman who had worked one season a year at Northpoint for two decades – it was Diana who was called upon to perform the duties of midwife. Her grandmother, she told Elspeth, had been howdie-wife to the Parish of Roseneath, and Diana had heard many stories of birthings; had even assisted as a young girl, so she knew all about hot water and screams and the cutting of cords. She applied herself to this new role as assiduously as she did to all her other duties, requesting Shaw to bring books and advice back from his trips to town. When the Homes boy, before even a name could be allotted to him, took fever and sickened, she nursed him too. And when he died, Diana was appointed the chief mourner and officiator of funeral prayers.

  “I cannot do that, Captain.” Diana was the only woman who Shaw allowed to upbraid him – though he permitted good-hearted joking from Susan and Bess. Shaw, however, was not often upbraided successfully. “There’s not a minister I’d have within two miles of Northpoint, mistress. Half of them are bishop-kissers, and the other half screeching half-caste fire-worshippers. There’s a Presbyterian fellow down in the Parish of St. Thomas, but he’s drunk most of the time.”

  He convinced her that it was in keeping with proper reforms and covenants that the people themselves intercede with their Maker at such times. So an hour was given to a ceremony before dinner, Obadiah carrying the child in a cloth to the cemetery behind the old mill, where Shaw read from the Bible, Diana leading the congregation’s response and striking up Psalm one hundred and thirty – “Out of the Depths I cry to Thee O Lord.”

  Elspeth was impressed and humbled by Diana. The woman was a true stoic: not the blood and mess of childbirth, nor the daily moans and complaints, nor the shortcomings of Coak and Shaw’s rule, discouraged or quietened her. “A proper Scots lass,” she was fond of telling everyone, “rolls up her sleeves and gets on with the job. We don’t stand on ceremony or expect praise for doing what is required of us.” She was tender with women in any kind of pain, be it physical, emotional or spiritual, but cajoled them into remembering there is little to commend complaining. God in His wisdom can be relied upon to confer suffering and solace in equal measure. “Our duty is to follow and accept.”

  Diana and the captain would not have been taken – even by themselves – as natural associates: he, crude of expression and toilette, uncongenial in his relations, while Diana set much store by mannerliness and sympathy. Yet she agreed with much of what he did and said. He was, like her father, a practical man, and learned above his station. Such erudition could only have been attained by dint of effort at some personal cost. Self-education was another good Scots trait in Diana’s mind, so Shaw – despite his strange colonial accent and unpolished ways – had something of the old tradition in him. He was as loyal as a clansman, and she detected perspicacity in his philosophies and his reading of men’s souls. Diana, also, had observed keen differences between people from diverse backgrounds; she was as convinced as he was that no good came of mixing apples with pears.

  One night, in circumstances similar to the evening when he had inducted Elspeth in the facts of his life and the contents of his thoughts, Shaw, with Elspeth on his left and Diana on his right, brought out a jug of rum and the sheaf of parchments, handling it as though it were a Holy Book, and continued the story he had left off many months ago. These evenings were to be repeated over the weeks that followed, as he expounded on the lessons he had learned from his experiences and how they could be applied to everyday situations: a philosophy finally put to good use in building this new colony-within-the-colony. Diana, Elspeth deduced, was the true chosen disciple of his schooling.

  “I found myself paying-work for a while on the estate of the admirable Mister Barclay,” he said. “A great planter who had deeper interests than simply sugar and crop.” This Barclay, it seemed, had made a deal of money from trading in slaves when that profession was still permitted. But his great innovation was to create on the island of Barbuda what he termed a Propagation Manufactory. At that point, Shaw broke off for the evening, favouring staring into his cup to speaking. When next the three were assembled he started again, but at a different point.

  He told the story of how he came to meet Lord Albert Coak and became his trusted factor and partner. “I had long since relinquished ambitions to own a plantation or business of my own. I know now that I was destined to a greater cause.”

  As he talked of the younger Albert, Elspeth’s mind wandered. She preferred listening, inside her head, to his lordship’s story than to the Captain’s. Salammbo, putting kohl on her eyes. Lady Obeah and her incantations. In her mind each one of them had become associated with her friends from the Lyric. Virginie as Empress Catherine; Nonie the Obeah witch-lady; Isabella, La Guacha. As Anne Bonny she saw herself. Just as she had done when she dreamed her way across the Atlantic on her elegant schooner infused with rum. Not a word of this, naturally, did she reveal to Diana. That lady would not have understood the beauty and the bravery of those fine, fallen women.

  When she awoke from her reverie, Shaw had his finger in the air and was looking sternly at Diana: “Over many years Mr. Barclay had come to learn which African tribes worked harder, which were stronger, and which more compliant.”

  Diana felt it necessary, and summoned the courage, to ask the Captain if the African, of whatever nation, was not a creation of the Almighty just as we ourselves are. Shaw nodded slowly, as though the hinges of his wooden neck were in need of oil. He did not, he assured the good lady, despise the negro. “The meek shall inherit the Earth. I take the words of the Good Book as they are written undiluted. But the African’s time has not yet come. His ascension will undoubtedly take place in the Last Age. Some time off yet, I trust. Meanwhile, we have work to do.”

  Elspeth saw that Diana was fashed, as she put it herself but not to Elspeth, by Shaw. He was her superior and paymaster, he put his trust in her and, although he was stringent, he wa
s scrupulous. On the other hand he had doctrines that troubled her and manners she tolerated in nobody else. Elspeth picked this up from Diana’s expressions and her habit of squirming in her seat when she was perturbed. But also from snippets of overheard conversations between the women when they were in the house, or thought she couldn’t hear when she was working her little herb garden. Diana had plenty of souls to whom she could unburden herself. Elspeth made no attempt to become another. For one thing she had a position in this community to maintain – all the more delicately, given its ambivalent condition. She was merely here first, though the closest to Lord Coak himself – and for another, she did not wish to become too close to these neighbours as some day soon she would be leaving.

  As time went by she watched as Diana found another confidant. Robert Butcher, like the captain, had Scots blood in his paternal line, but Calvinist Swedish on his mother’s side. He was a colonial in patterns of speech and in attitude and had been a stalwart of Northpoint Plantation for many years, returning season after season until finally settling here. He was as religious as Diana. Ten years her senior, Robert was ideally suited to be a friend and comrade to her. More and more, as time passed, it was to Robert that Diana would confide her troubles. Especially when she had to deliver a child conceived out of wedlock – a service she was not sure was a permitted Christian act – or when she had to watch helplessly as a baby wilted and died.

  Barbados

  Winter 1839

  Our dearest families.

  Well over a year we have been here and still we have not heard from you. Communication between this world and yours is so very slow. Yet his lordship has sailed twice across the Atlantic in the same time. We know you will have responded and have not forgotten us.

  We are still all well. Times have been hard for the manufacturers of sugar in recent years. It is doubtful any of us will make our fortunes here. We each of us have a hundred expenses we never dreamed of. We are obliged to buy our bedsteads at a cost of 20 dollars. There is not a bit of furniture in our chattel-houses, which is how they call our pretty little homes. We have no coinage ourselves, naturally, but Captain Shaw is happy to exchange our expenses for work, a system of months and years indenture per item.

  Lord Coak’s Estate is very remote and, though beautiful between hills, woods and sea, lacks some fundamental amenities. Not least, there is no Kirk (of any denomination – though my own father would prefer even an Episcoplian chapel, so long as the worshipper’s mind is clean, than none whatsoever), nor minister to attend our spiritual needs. I have appealed and remonstrated often with our factor here to take steps to correct the situation, but he insists there are not enough men learned in Divinity even for the big towns on the island. Thankfully, we have our Bibles.

  Please answer our letters soon. There are many questions I have to ask you. Of your own lives, certainly, but also some counsel on the work Captain Shaw has me undertake, and on new dilemmas all of us have to face.

  We pray God you are well, and thinking on us.

  Diana Moore.

  On behalf of

  Sarah and Mary Alexander. Mary and Margaret Lloyd. Jean and Mary Malcolm. Bessy Riddoch. Susan Millar. Moira Campbell. Mary Fairweather. Rhona Douglas. Mary Miller. (All others have either written independently, or send their warmest regards.)

  VIII

  A little over two years after the girls’ arrival, there was a local disturbance. The Emancipation Act had been passed in 1833, but it took some time for its repercussions to be felt in the north. Rumours spread by itinerant labourers of skirmishes in Bridgetown, Oistins and plantations far to the south were barely noted by the inhabitants of Northpoint. In February 1836 – the hottest month the new recruits had yet experienced in the West Indies – the troubles came closer to home. A group of ex-slaves, believing that they were free now legally to go wherever and do whatever they wished, upped tools and belongings, and headed for the hills of the Scotland district, as the north-west of the island was known.

  Mary Fairweather had sworn she had seen, while working in the field, a band of shadows pass across the hilltop to the east of them.

  “Marooners!” cried Mary Miller, excited.

  “We’ll tak them up some meal and put-by,” Bessy Riddoch suggested.

  Nathanial Wycombe, a cutter with a house made of three old slave-huts bridged together with runners and boards, painted up like a miniature plantation house – and deputy in all but name to the Captain – reckoned they could only be runaways.

  “They’re free men now, Mister Wycombe,” Bessy protested, “makin’ their way in the world.”

  “They’re savages and layabouts. If you give ’em victuals, you’d have a harder time getting rid of rats or crows.”

  But Bessy, with Mary Miller and Mary Fairweather and Susan, went ahead secretly with their plans to take bowls of coocoo and eddoe mash up to the men, whose bonfires they had seen in the middle of the night lighting up the sky.

  “Whit if they attack us?” Susan suddenly asked in the kitchen while they mashed the food.

  Dainty and Annie Oyo winked to one another. “I heerd they alreadys cut the throat o’ two white folk,” Annie said.

  “Eddy eddy white mice, put ’em de pot and cook ’em like rice!” laughed Dainty.

  “Dainty, is it no’ a wonder a’body’s able to onerstan’ onything ye say.”

  Mary Fairweather squealed in fright. “What if they kidnap us?”

  “Christ, woman, ye’re a hell of a hopeful.”

  The idea of helping a group of runaway blacks was less an act of kindness than an adventure to break the boredom of working life. Mary Fairweather, however, remained the most tremulous of the gang.

  “If Captain Shaw gets wind ae it, we’ll a’ be shunned.”

  Ostracism – from meals and from socialising in the fields – was Shaw’s favoured punishment for the women. On the committing of a transgression he would sentence the offender to a day’s, a week’s or even a month’s shunning, depending on the seriousness of the misdemeanour. Nobody could talk to the penitent at any time of day, nor help her with work or domestic chores. She had to eat in her own hut and remain silent throughout her sentence. The punishment of men took the form of confiscation of rum, snuff and cheroots, and the occasional smack across the lug.

  “A week wi’ oot hearing you wifies’ blether’d be a blessin’.”

  It took a full month to hunt the runaways down. News reached Northpoint of a settlement in the hills, where men and women danced – in some accounts, naked – and lived like the children of Adam and Eve on the abundant fruits of the West Indian wildlands. When Shaw went off for a day or two in search of the miscreants – amazing how people could hide themselves for so long in such a tiny island! – some of the girls, usually headed up by Bess or Mary Miller, took to walking outside the plantation limits, in the hope of catching a glimpse of the gypsy rebels. Thus started the custom of escaping the confines of the estate indulged in by several of the women. Elspeth often spied their lights through the fig trees, the glimmer heading off down the drive at ungodly hours. Stories soon circulated of the adventures they met out there. Of travellers, wild animals, impromptu parties by the roadside with itinerant workers, and even freed coloureds. What became of the runaways, nothing was ever reported.

  Albert had compensated Elspeth for the long interruption in her career by making sure she was still dressed in the most elegant of Paris fashions and that her boudoir was prettily adorned. Still only twenty-six years old in 1837 but, with the help of her attire, and the weight of a great love and a lost child, she walked the plantation with an air of deserved gravitas. Her gleaming, lustrous hair she kept tied behind her head and, when out in the grounds overseeing some task or other, she wore a straw hat that shaded her face and neck. Her body was still strong and straight. In her own mind, long gone was the girl who flirted and giggled with friends from the theatre, the seductress of young noblemen. Her expression became every day more serious, and her arms
and legs sturdier than those required of an actress.

  On his visits home, Elspeth shared her room with Albert for half the night. He never touched her, but she basked in his unrelenting gaze. The slightest, most common activities were enough to entrance him: washing her face, changing her shoes, eating at dinner. His treatment of her – as a child might stare in wonder at clouds, or an exotic beast – was enough to sustain her through his long absences.

  Mailing her from Havana, London and Panama, he encouraged her to recite and sing in the evenings to the house staff. Within a brace of years she had established the custom of monthly concerts in which any woman brave enough to do so would perform properly rehearsed party pieces for the assembled company. Albert, three years after the coming of the women, returned home with the backcloths of the old Lyric Theatre which he had discovered in an auction house at Speightstown. Seeing those stars and crystals and a still-gleaming moon, despite some staining and water damage, Elspeth suffered a confusion of emotions. Albert felt for her, and wondered if he should have left the cloths to rot.

  “My dear child, I should have thought that they would upset you. Forgive me. I still haven’t the means to further our plans for a theatre – even if Lisle would allow it. The manufactory is taking longer, and using up more of my resources than I expected.”

  She knew he wasn’t lying: for the past year there had been a steady stream of surveyors, government officials, advisers, running through the estate. Foundations for a vast new building had been laid, on the site of a disused canefield somewhere near the copse at the estate’s border. She had heard enough of Albert’s conversations with Shaw over dinner to know that his fortune was stretched to the limit.