Redlegs

by Chris Dolan

  No further doctors were brought in – for everyone dreaded a diagnosis would confirm their worst fears. All they could do was wait. And that was something Elspeth had become adept at. Her life, it seemed, was lived out like a dance: a series of steps, sudden spins, followed by slow glides, like a Dashing White Sergeant she was one moment in the centre of the piece, the next relegated to the line, clapping on others’ frenzy. The world around her would suddenly accelerate for a while – whole months, years, flying past in a kaleidoscope of colours and activity. And followed, always, by interminable, empty days, and nights with slow, shifting colours.

  Every morning at sunrise, Bathsheba went with Golondrina to bathe in the cove – Elspeth watching her go from her window – to wash the oils from her head. The saltwater stung maliciously, before the older woman applied her cures. There were still no signs of her recovery. Tongues began to wag, rumouring that Golondrina was an Obeah and a witch.

  Then, one day in the fields, a little under a year since her calamity, Bathsheba, carrying a heavy bundle, tripped over and fell. The cloth swaddling her head unravelled, and every cane cutter in the field stopped and held their breath. Not only had Bathsheba’s head healed, but the hair had grown back in, and black now instead of brown.

  The girl got up from the ground, brushed herself down, replaced her African headdress, and got back to work. Her aunts and cousins, however, and even the menfolk, laid down their machetes and scythes. They stood and stared, and then burst into applause. Her bandanna had unwound itself again and her mother and the girl’s closest friends crowded around her, laughing and crying and touching the short strands of black hair that covered her crown in crisp, inky curls.

  The commotion reached the attention of the domestic staff, who came running out to see the miracle. Mary Miller, Bathsheba’s grandmother, hobbling in recent years, came out from the kitchens and crossed the fields, her vision blurred by tears. Behind her came Lady Elspeth, still strong and quick of stride. Bathsheba was being led towards them from the field, surrounded by jumping, dancing friends, hardly knowing what had happened or where she was being taken. Elspeth caught sight of her and her heart stopped a beat. The girl, her headdress round her ears and chin, and buttoned up to neck, wrist and ankle in coarse, grey fieldlinen, enclosed in a circle of shouting youths, looked like a saint from an old painting.

  “It’s a miracle!” shouted Mary, as she took her granddaughter in her arms.

  The light was back in Bathsheba’s eyes and that, more than the tousled, curling locks on her head, breathed life back into Elspeth, too. Nan, Mary and the girls stood back to let their Lady through and greet the recovered patient.

  “Bathsheba,” was all she could say. And she stroked the girl’s cheek and took hold of her hand.

  From the field behind, Gideón Brazos and Golondrina Segunda approached. Then, as was their custom, they halted a little short of the joyous group. The two smallest of their four children stood between them, gleaming dark and mystified by all the activity. Bathsheba went and took a hold of Golondrina’s hand, pulling her into the circle. She motioned for Brazos to follow, but he merely nodded and stayed where he was.

  “Gola saved me,” said Bathsheba to Elspeth. The two older women looked at each other for a moment, a shadow crossing Elspeth’s face. The negress looked back at her young, white friend, and Elspeth, following her eyes, smiled again, too.

  “Thank you, Golondrina,” she said, before escorting the girl into the house.

  “It would have happened anyway,” Albert said, lying on his bed that night, while Elspeth sat on the window seat looking out into the dark. She was counting her years, wondering how a seemingly single long day and longer night had turned into nearly forty years. She was fifty-five years old – older, much older, than her own mother had been when she left her home country. She didn’t look her age – everyone agreed. Elspeth agreed, too. When she looked in the mirror she saw a mature woman, but not an old woman. She didn’t feel any different – not in her limbs or in her mind – than she had when she first came to the plantation. Her body was proof that no time had passed at all.

  Albert, meanwhile, seemed to be in a race with time. His eyes looked white like a statue’s and on the odd occasion when he asked Elspeth to dance or recite for him, he had to use a glass and peer intensely at her. He had developed a marked limp in his left leg, using a stick for a couple of years now. He slept later and retired earlier, keeping mainly to his study during the day, spending only short spells with anyone, even Shaw and Elspeth. Tonight he did not look at her where she sat, but lay staring down towards the end of the bed and the dressing table at the far wall. “I’ve always said that local knowledge of plants is useful. They cure nothing, of course, but they may speed recovery a little.”

  “I should have taken care of it myself,” Elspeth replied.

  “Why should you? She’s a fine girl, but she’s Nan Miller’s duty, not yours.”

  “It wasn’t Nan who nursed her.”

  “She must have trusted the black woman.”

  Elspeth nodded and walked to the door, ready to sleep herself. She was annoyed with herself, however, that she had not acted when her favourite child needed her most, leaving it instead to an indentured slave she scarcely knew.

  I would have been an unsatisfactory mother, she thought as she undressed. Fate has never given me the chance to do anything. It took away my stage just when I was ready for it. My husband died before he could marry me. His child must have known that I was untried, and that is why she fled. For the first time, she did feel old. Fifty-five years of age, and untested; yet to start a proper life.

  Over the next few months Bathsheba’s hair grew – but not in the same manner as before. If anything, the matted blackness of those miraculous little stumps darkened further. Instead of the strong straight strands of her childish locks, her hair began to twist and loop around her neck and face in vigorous, dancing curls. What had been her finest feature – her nut-brown hair falling like the sheer face of Ben Mhor – now made her truly magnificent. It was further proof to the doting Elspeth that this child did indeed have something of both herself and George Lisle in her. Elspeth’s own hair was darker than Bathsheba’s original tone, and George’s curled round his temple like Lord Byron’s. The convalesced girl left off wearing Golondrina’s headdresses, and tied her unruly winding locks behind her head for all to admire. She still, from time to time, suffered aches in her neck and scalp, and so continued with Golondrina’s cure of oils. She went on spending evenings with Gideón and his family while receiving her treatment. In time, even the pain disappeared. Some people held Golondrina Segunda in higher esteem than they had before, for the nursing she had so successfully given Nan’s daughter. Others spoke more spitefully than ever of wizardry and voodoo.

  The wood for the factory was depleted to a dangerous level. The clatter and clunking were heard only once or twice a month now, when wood was brought in, expensively, from neighbouring colonies. The menfolk once more had to seek employment in towns or other plantations. Bathsheba, like everyone else, spent less time in the fields and the factory, dividing her time between the schoolroom, taking walks by herself down at the cove, and being tutored by Lady Elspeth.

  The mistress of the house was preparing Bathsheba for her future role as Mother of Roseneythe. No formal decision had been taken, either by the plantation as a whole, or in private with Albert or Shaw. It was simply accepted that Bathsheba –fiercely loyal, friend to everyone, intelligent and respected – had all the right qualities for the role. Shaw, in recent years had spoken often of the new generation and the generations yet to come and, despite, or perhaps due to, the difficulties in business matters, everyone looked to the future. With such a jewel of a girl beside her – trained and tutored under her own hand – Elspeth’s thoughts of withdrawing slowly from centre stage at Roseneythe were less painful. The girl could take the burden of her duties from her and her own life would open up again.

  The an
nual celebration for his lordship’s birthday in 1871 was coming up, and everyone knew that his last one must surely be soon. The old man ventured less and less out of his room or study and, when he did, he needed the assistance of either Elspeth or Captain Shaw. Everyone hoped that the concert would bolster his spirits, and ready them all for hard times ahead. Bathsheba’s first performance in front of the Lyric’s old theatre cloth was widely interpreted as the start of a new dawn for Roseneythe. Even Captain Shaw spoke of a new era. It would be exacting, he said, with less wealth than they had enjoyed of late. But they were in good shape: the community was settled, and strong children were growing up around them. Their new world had taken root.

  The prospect of hard times did not panic the growing village – over one hundred strong now and nearly a third of the younger generation male. They were well used to struggling for a living – in the older women’s cases both before and after their relocation to the West Indies. Their brief success had hardly softened them or made them rich. All that most people had noticed in the time of the factory was that there had been a good deal more work to be done and an extra leg of chicken at the end of the day. The families were all still in debt to the estate, and there were even those men – fatigued by the demands of feeding and maintaining the noisy, dusty machines – who spoke of their relief to see them silenced. The children of that era were growing up stronger and better-fed than their older brothers and sisters, and there had been an observable decrease in unwanted pregnancies and ailing infants. But in the strained eyes and drooped shoulders of their parents the mark of long hours and burdensome work was easily detected. Moiras, Jeans and Marys, who had arrived fresh and strong, if fearful, to the Coak plantation, had shrunk in stature and grown in girth, their necks and shoulders muscled and burnt.

  More worrying were the signs of a growing argument and division in their extended family, focused around the recent antipathy between Bathsheba Miller and Junior Wycombe, the eldest son of Nathanial. Until her calamity, Bathsheba had been sister to everyone: there was not a soul who spoke a word against her, nor she against them. She had been a walking balm, her very presence taking the sting out of any dispute. She and her generation were the spirit of the new age, the girls athletic and pretty, the few boys robust and fair, and all apparently deaf and blind to discord or gripe. They were proof that their elders’ struggles had finally been worth it. But after the accident and Bathsheba’s wondrous recovery – interpreted by all as a blessing from God – the aversion felt by the girl to her childhood friend, Junior, became slowly, and unaccountably, apparent.

  Bessy Riddoch was the first to notice the breach. Bathsheba was sitting alone by the side of a field, her energies still not what they used to be, when the Wycombe lad approached her in his usual way, with a smile and a joke at the ready. “Mus’ be nice fuh the women, sittin’ roun’ makin’ flower chains.”

  Bess, bundling cane nearby, had noticed how the younger generation spoke more like island natives. They still used some of the old words, and Annie and Dainty and the Edmondsons swore they still sounded incomprehensibly Scotch to them. To Bess’s ears, they could have been born in slavery, half African.

  Bathsheba did not even look up at Junior. Bess supposed she couldn’t have heard him, it was so uncharacteristic of the girl. The woman had often taught Bathsheba and the other girls how to get a rag out of the boys when they jested with them.

  “Show them ye’re as fast wi’ the mooth as they are. Say, ‘Nah nah, I’m workin’ at flattening a wee bundle o’ cane under ma erse.’ Tell them the laddies aye get a’thing cunt o’er bubbies. That’ll wheesht them!”

  Too many of them had taken her advice too enthusiastically, to the consternation of Diana Moore. Not Bathsheba.

  Junior tried again, coming closer to the girl, no doubt thinking, like Bess, that she was lost in her own thoughts and didn’t hear him. “Penny fuh them.”

  Bathsheba looked up at him and her brow fleetingly darkened – a sight unseen since the accident. She said not a word but, looking directly at Junior, got up and walked away, leaving the boy gawping. He looked over at Bess and the two of them understood that something new had entered Roseneythe.

  No specific argument was ever heard between Junior and Bathsheba. The lad once or twice tried to call her to account, but she replied she had no idea what he was talking about. Other girls began to shun Junior, and his friends kept their distance from them. Sometimes, the two groups would call bad-temperedly at one another. The parents of each side felt the division growing even between themselves, each blaming the other side for starting the bad blood.

  Most would have agreed that a fusing of Wycombe and Miller blood would be a conjoining advantageous for all. Junior was hardworking and, if at times his quipping and banter could smart a little, he was undoubtedly an honest, loyal boy. Bathsheba’s friendship with him, actively promoted by the Captain and Diana, came undone, it seemed, when she began spending so much time with Golondrina and Brazos and their family. During her recuperation this was understandable, but when she progressed into sturdy good health, people blamed the black women and coloured man for disrupting a God-given combination.

  Shaw set about trying to rid himself of the troublesome Cuban slaves, but it was not so easily done. Slavery, having been abolished by the distant English parliament with no notion of how life was lived to the benefit of all in the West Indies, meant that they could not be sold back to their original country. Roseneythe Estate had cut itself off and had too many enemies domestically to offload the family. Anyway no one had any use for a skilled refiner.

  Brazos showed no inclination to buy out his indenture – even at the reduced price Shaw offered him – and raise his family in freedom. The Captain talked openly of the inertia bred into badly propagated mulattos. “The bloodlines have been stirred with a stick. Use a blunt tool, and you end up with the likes of Brazos. Able enough at his work, I’ll admit, but too much of a dullard to make his own way in the world. Too attached to the comforts of servitude.”

  Nathanial had long been Shaw’s deputy, so the Captain was pulled into the vortex of the widening fissure between the Wycombe clan and the Millers. The factor, being an instinctive leader, made no public statements about where his loyalty fell, but he could be seen drinking in the evenings with Nathanial and Junior himself, so there was no doubt where his heart lay. The issue of Gideón and Golondrina became entangled in the silent, moody dispute, and those who remained close to Bathsheba, Nan and Mary Miller were associated with the Cubans, while the captain’s faction – including the likes of Bess and Susan as well as the majority of the men – felt it necessary to declare that Shaw had led them well over the years and, like him, they had no inclination to defend niggers and cross-breeds.

  Bathsheba, in the lead-up to the grand concert, took to disappearing for long stretches, walking along the cove and out into the byways beyond Roseneythe. She said she was learning lines Elspeth had given her.

  Everyone was relieved to see that the girl was making an effort to resume singing and play-acting again. The physical wounds had taken time to heal; the scar on her spirit would take a little longer. She worked hard with Elspeth, came back to assist Diana again, and her old easy temperament was returning. The mysterious schism with Nathanial she took steps to repair, becoming the conciliator she used to be. If she was to win back the respect of all the women, she needed to be a mediator again, not a catalyst for division. Whenever, out for a stroll, she came across Junior or a member of his cohort, she was at pains to be polite. Putting their childish spats behind her, Bathsheba set about her apprenticeship as future matriarch with dedication. She called Junior by name and bade him a good day with a gentle smile. Anyone could see the lad was still much taken with her – and that he felt the formality of her smile more keenly than he had her earlier antipathy.

  Everyone looked forward to seeing the debut of their young favourite. But then, unexpectedly, a new problem arose. After an evening meal, three days befor
e the concert, Elspeth stood up before the diners left: “His lordship has requested that Bathsheba rehearse her piece for him before she takes to the stage.” She announced it with pride, unaware that a proportion of her audience stopped dead in their steps as they made their way out the door.

  “Of course, Bathsheba, I know you’ll do wonderfully well. But Lord Coak is the best judge of performance I have ever known. Win his approval, and your debut before us all will be wonderful!”

  Only on finishing her announcement did she notice the glances between Bathsheba, Nan and Mary Miller, and a general quietness as people made their way out the hall. She said nothing, but went straight to her room, wondering and worrying about the response to a speech she had thought unimportant.

  The rumour had gone around for many years that Lady Elspeth was in the habit of rehearsing naked in front of his lordship. Men had sworn blind that, when the lamplight inside the old man’s room struck the drapes in a certain way, they could see his wife gesticulating. You could tell, some said, that she was naked. Some said that they had seen her silhouette actually disrobe. Mary Riach, many years ago, insisted that she had caught sight of the lady in the very act when the door was ajar and she upstairs cleaning. Her word wasn’t the most dependable as she had been half-blind since coming to the colony, but the story was good for gossip.

  Tittle-tattle had always flown around Roseneythe, like hummingbirds brightening up the long hard graft of the day. Quiet Errol Braithewaite had escaped England after murdering a man. Nathanial Wycombe had once stabbed a darkie. At one time or another every man on the estate had been a murderer, thief or bigamist. Bess and Susan, and the younger girls they took out on their jaunts beyond the estate, had orgies with runaways and labourers. Shaw had a secret lover – for a while she was Diana Moore, then Lady Elspeth herself, latterly Jean Malcolm’s eldest, mischievous daughter Ada. Everyone dealt in the coinage of gossip and few believed a word. That Elspeth liked to dance around in the scuddie for old Coak had been a favourite distraction for years. There wasn’t much scandal in the story. Even if it were true, their patrons were, after all, as much husband and wife as any. And theatrical types, of whom shenanigans were only to be expected.