Redlegs

by Chris Dolan

  By the following morning chatter was rife around Roseneythe. “Aul’ Coak’ll want the Rain Chile t’ birl bare nakit.”

  Bess, coming into the kitchens mid-morning with Mary Riach, the two of them covered from head to foot in cane and dust, pressed Diana on the question. “Is that it, Diana? D’ye think Coak’s hopin’ for a keek at the lassie’s erse?”

  “Your mouth, Bessy Riddoch, is fouler than the cutters’ latrine.”

  “What if he does? He’ll no’ find onything differen’ frae the rest o’ us.”

  “Some of us have a modicum of modesty.”

  Bess laughed, drank a cup of water from the bowl, and made for the door. “Sure, Bathsheba’s been trained in the dramatic airts. Is that no’ what the whale jing-bang’s for? Gettin’ a leuk up lassies’ skirts for a peep o’ their coggies? Settle yersel, Diana. It’s no the end o’ the worl’.”

  Dainty, passing, laughed at Dina’s stern face. “T’ink we pot ent got no cover?” Laughing, she carried on her way: “Old men like to see young monkey tail – and the monkey have fun wining fuh him!”

  Out in the fields, Bathsheba herself was being given unasked-for advice. Victoria Johnstone reckoned it was all a lot of nonsense – Coak and Baillie were decent folk who had never acted out of turn in the past. Sarah Fairweather and her mother were appalled at the very idea – Bathsheba should refuse to go anywhere near the man: rich men have forever used poor young girls in despicable ways. Poor Elspeth would be beside herself with rage, they said, if she weren’t too innocent to suspect the truth. Some women and more men stuck up for Albert Coak.

  “The aul’ coof hardly knows us!” answered Mary Fairweather. “First he was away tourin’ the world while we worked ourselves half to death. Noo he lies in his bed. He couldna even name the half o’ us.”

  Susan shook her head and wondered what all the excitement was about. “Gie the mannie a last wee present afore he drops doon deid.” What harm could it do? But Bathsheba was in no mood for humour, or for receiving advice. She hardly lifted her head from her work, nor responded in any way to the wise words of cousins, cutters, friends and jokers. When work stopped for a midday break, she did not sit with her group as usual, but scurried off with her mother and grandmother. When she failed to come back on time, Victoria sneaked off in search of her, and came back half an hour later saying the three women were ensconced in the chattel-house of Brazos and Segunda!

  What was it in her announcement – a statement Elspeth never thought for a moment would receive anything but a smile or a clap from the around the dinner table – that had so offended Diana and Mary? She was hardly close to either woman, though they were the nearest things to companions she had. Of course, in the day-to-day governance of a house and estate they had had their little run-ins, but nothing prolonged or serious – and nothing she could connect to Bathsheba’s rehearsing for Albert.

  She looked for a connection with her terrible lapses with Shaw, but could see none. So adept was she at wiping them entirely from her mind, that such unlikely trysts seemed ludicrous rumours even to her own mind. It couldn’t be that. What else, then?

  Surely no one knew of her recitations for the planter? That their marriage was a little unconventional compared to the lives of the women she had not thought problematic. They must know that gentlemen and ladies often maintained separate bedrooms, and the difference in age between Albert and her would clearly indicate – especially in recent years – that both would need their own privacies. They would know that she visited nightly, sometimes staying for a matter of minutes, sometimes for half the night. But they couldn’t have guessed how their lord and lady spent their time. She’d always made sure the drapes were drawn and doors closed. Had there been an occasion where she had forgotten? Even if that were the case, and she had been glimpsed – embarrassing and vexing as the situation might be – what had it to do with Bathsheba?

  Surely they couldn’t believe that the sixteen year old would be expected to perform that particular duty! The idea made her laugh. It was ridiculous to think she’d let a child disrobe in front of an old man! Poor Albert – he would be horrified. She had been, she reminded herself, not much older than Bathsheba when he first asked her to recite naked. And even then she had thought him an old man. She reflected, too, on Albert’s upbringing, surrounded by Salammbo, Anne Bonny and the Empress Catherine at the Royal Naval Hotel. But she herself – Elspeth – was all of those to him. Not that he had the power or desire in him much these last years to have her play those parts.

  But it wasn’t even his idea. She herself had made the suggestion that Bathsheba rehearse for him. She had wanted to give him his place. It seemed fitting, after all these years of her own Lady of the Lake, that Bathsheba should stand before the man who had begun the tradition – and who she truly believed was still the best judge – and earn his blessing. Becalmed, she felt sleep coming on, the drifting colours appearing behind her closed eyelids. Let the silly women gossip and imagine all they liked, if it kept them entertained. Bathsheba would recite, just as she had trained her, and the concert would be a great success. Thereafter, they could find something else to get their rustic tongues wagging.

  XII

  Bathsheba Miller, the Rain Chile, had loved Gideón Brazos for as long as she could remember. There was always something special about him. The colour of his skin – the same colour as the weak babies that Diana said died of jaundice or yellow fever. She had noticed it when she was very little. Like cane-leaf, or the bark of the birches Mama used to take her walking to, before most of them were fed into the crushing machines. It made more of an impression on her than the gleaming black of Gola’s face. There were plenty of black-skinned people around – working in the fields, passing through to collect the massecuite and crushed cane, out in the roads when mama or grannie took her strolling. She used to worry, when she learned about the yellow-skinned babies, that Gideón might suddenly die too.

  Her chattel-house was the last one in the huddle of shacks, closest to the factory. The Millers were Gideón and Gola’s nearest neighbours, and she used to play with their little girl, Roseta, though sometimes big people and other girls told her off for it. When her mother and grandmother were working, she helped out up at the factory. Gola had made her a brush out of sticks, a little replica of the one she used herself, and Bathsheba would sweep happily alongside her. Gideón let her roam safe parts of the factory. Especially when it was too hot outside to play. She could come in and make dolls out of broken pieces of cane, or play at sword-fighting with one of his sons. Gola brought them jugs of home-made mauby, or lemonade of her own concoction, flavoured with pineapples or mangoes she took from the diminishing forest behind her home. There was always plenty of sugar. From time to time they even fed the little girl along with their own. They never told her not to tell anyone, but she knew somehow it was better not to.

  Mister Gideón was gentle and tolerant with all the children. With them, he smiled a lot and played, though with older people he looked serious and fell quiet. When she was about ten, Bathsheba started working in his factory. Simple tasks, undertaken alongside Roseta and the boys, and Sarah and Junior and her cousins – bringing water to the adults, or ale, or mauby. Clearing up messes. Carting little bundles out to the repository where the carters from the port used to arrive every morning to take away the previous day’s work. Or taking rubbish to the dump. Sweeping she had become expert at.

  Bathsheba liked her world. She liked helping in the fields, working alongside mama and grannie and all the women who were kind to her, and made her laugh. She liked Lady Elspeth coaxing tunes out of her big booming piano, and learning all those lines – none of which she understood, but they sounded big and important and she could shout them out. Diana was nice, too, and Bathsheba knew she was good with numbers and words, remembering a lot from the ones Elspeth made her read. But most of all, she liked being with Gideón and Gola.

  Then came her accident, and her world changed. Not because of
her hair. She knew it was different the moment it began growing in, but she thought little of it. She had no memory of getting caught up in the pistons. She had been cleaning a machine – she loved polishing the sleek metal, either shiny bright or strong and black – and then she was in a bed in the big house, feeling sore and sad.

  Her world changed further because Gideón and Gola had saved her, but no one wanted them to. She realised there were divisions in her little world. Some people wouldn’t talk to others, and they got annoyed if she did. Not Nan or Mary – nobody in her own family. But even Diana got nervous when Gola tried to look after her. And some of the men and boys, like Junior who had been her friend, became angry.

  By the time her wounds had healed and her hair had grown in differently, her world changed yet again. She realised she loved Gideón in a different way. Or rather, the old Mr. Gideón had gone, and a new one had taken his place. This one, she suddenly saw, was younger than the previous one, the Gideón she’d known since infancy. Much younger she realised than his own wife, Gola. Bathsheba had been frightened when she was ill and, much as Diana and her sisters and Nan had tried, only Golondrina Segunda made her feel safe; made her believe she would get better. She loved the feel of the woman’s strong fingers – black on the back and pink on her palms, like a pair of salmon darting in and out of the water-shadows of her hair. But it was Gideón who coloured her world a protective amber. His voice had the myrrh of Diana’s Bible readings in it – an elixitive balm; his amethyst eyes spoke of the hope she needed.

  She listened to him talking to Golondrina, fascinated by the spiky phrasing of his Spanish, the breeziness of his Cuban words. She learned phrases they repeated over and over between them. “No importa.” “Te cuido yo.” “Amiga.” Later she learned what they meant: “Don’t worry.” “I will look after you.” “My friend.” Bathsheba thought it nice that husband and wife should call each other friends. But she felt little pangs of anger, too.

  “You have jealousy, niña?” Gola laughed, and Bathsheba turned away to hide her rising colour and her irritation.

  Just before the accident, she started her bleeding – later than all her friends. She had always been encased in gowns and shifts that covered everything but her hands and feet and face, because of her special condition. Diana had warned her not to loosen her robe even when Golondrina was putting the oils on her scalp. But Gola loosened it anyway. Maybe her condition wasn’t as bad as Diana and her mama and grannie thought, for Gola said nothing But, even swaddled like that, her new woman’s body must have been obvious to all. Gola spoke about it directly.

  “Your tetties growing good, chile,” she’d say, and even pat them. She also spotted how Bathsheba looked at Gideón. “He’s guapo, you think?” She knew what guapo meant, for they often called her guapa when she was in a clean shift.

  “I don’t know!”

  “Course you do, chile!”

  Then one day, not long before the big concert, Golondrina sat down with her on the sand in the cove.

  “Gideón is my brother.”

  “He’s your husband. How can a husband be a brother?”

  Gola laughed loud, little squeals drifting out over the ocean. “He not a brother in that way. Nor neither a husband.”

  She explained how both of them had been bought in Cuba where slavery was still legal. How she had her own husband back there, but was taken away from him and given to Gideón Brazos. Bathsheba sat in silence.

  “Gideón is a good man. I like him right from start, and he like me too. We made our babies and they all fine, fine. But we do not belong here. And we do not belong for each other.”

  “Why don’t you leave?”

  “I got my chillen.”

  “Take them with you.”

  “To where, chile? No money to get to Cuba. Don’t want stay anywhere else in B’ados. Here is good enough. But, ay, I want to see my husban’, my proper husban’, and the chillen they take me away from, one time before I die.”

  “When will you go?”

  “Never. Probably never.”

  “Why doesn’t Gideón leave? Get a job somewhere. Make money to take you all home? They want him to leave. I’ve heard people say so. Junior and his father and Bessy and even the Captain.”

  “He can’t go.”

  “Why not? Because of you and Roseta and the boys?”

  “Partly, sí. But more, because of you.”

  “Me?”

  “He love you, chile!” she laughed. “He always love you. He love his own chillen better. But he love you in a differen’ way. More and more.”

  Bathsheba got up and ran as fast as she could along the beach, towards the rock stairs, stumbling up them, while Golondrina Segunda sat on the sand, still laughing.

  Later, in their cabin, the younger boys in bed, Roseta eating with the Edmondsons, Bathsheba shared Gideón and Gola’s eggs and coocoo mash.

  “You take him, el cabrón,” Golondrina said when Gideón hugged her. “He too young for me. Wear the hell out o’ me. I got to save somethin’ for my husband.”

  Gideón was more shocked than Bathsheba. His cinnemon skin turned dark as though cooked from the inside out. He looked at his wife, astonished. “Cállate, santa. Que está la niña.”

  Bathsheba understood: he was angry because Gola had raised the subject when Bathsheba was present. But it broke the dam that had separated them. Looking at Gola, the girl saw a kind of love she never knew existed. Not between a man and his woman. She had grown up amongst many strange families. Children of one woman and two, even three, fathers. One wife and two husbands – but that always led to ructions, and she agreed with Diana who fretted about such arrangements. Even if Golondrina and Gideón had been thrown together against their will, to happily push her husband towards another woman, a girl, was outlandish. Yet still the Cuban wife looked at her husband with deep affection. Gideón, when Gola found a reason to leave him alone with Bathsheba, tried to explain.

  “She has been good to me. But every night, every minute, she miss her proper man. She love our chillen plenty, but think all the time of how her other chillen are now. Every night, when she is with me – she tell me, fair and honest – that she think of him.”

  From that night on, Bathsheba, saying she was practising the Lady of the Lake, went out walking with Gideón Brazos.

  They loved each other. But they would not make love. Lying down together, despite all of Diana’s efforts, was commonplace in Roseneythe. All her friends had done so already. Some had babies at fifteen. Some were married over a year – and some already sundered. But Gideón told her he would not touch her until she was of a suitable age and they had been properly wed – though that was unthinkable.

  He was infuriated by being thrown together with women chosen for him by masters and owners, and he swore to Bathsheba that one day he would marry her as a properly respected man should. Bathsheba, with the hot-headedness of youth, had wanted to tell the whole world of their love, and let those who despised them be damned. Gideón argued that could only cause torment for them both, and for others. At best, they would be banished from Roseneythe. She would have to leave her mother and grandmother and all her friends. He would have to abandon Golondrina, and he had sworn that he would leave this place together with Gola and their children.

  The Cuban took great risks stealing away from his shack to meet the Rain Chile, Roseneythe’s chosen girl, each of them taking different routes through thick copses of fig, palm and jacarandas, meeting in a secluded glade behind the old birch trees whose pale trunks looked like the skin of lovers entwined. From there they walked together, skipping through sea-grape bushes and ginger-lilies, stepping over silver-silk agave, always talking, discovering more about each other, sometimes arguing. She was shocked by her mild lover’s undisguised hatred of Shaw, of Coak and the whole Estate. She argued that her mother and the women and their children were not his enemies. As they talked, they slipped together unseen through lianas and scuttled down gullies. When they reac
hed the shore they walked along the sand, safely hidden on the other side of the little islet. Climbing up again, then descending onto the cove, they made their farewells in the cave at the back of the beach.

  He introduced new thoughts to her head, questions she had never asked herself. Why was it that the most wretched of men from all over the island were attracted to set up house under Coak’s and Shaw’s regime? What was it that drew them to Roseneythe? Why did the women feel it impossible to leave, either to return home or seek employment elsewhere in the colonies? Bathsheba contended it was simply because they had made their home here. Gideon countered that they were not free to leave – they owed Lord Coak and his factor debts they would never be able to repay. The system of paying less than you loaned for food and shelter had a name in his land. Enganche: the “hook” from which a person could never release himself. He looked out to sea and spoke of the children who were said to be cast out there at Shaw and Diana’s whim: a subject about which Bathsheba’s thoughts were too entangled for her to respond.

  At the heart of the lovers’ variance were the twin figures of Lady Elspeth and Diana Moore, and Bathsheba could not get her feelings to correspond with his. He recognised that both were sympathetic women, each capable at times of kindnesses and possessing a certain kind of loyalty. A compliance that they profited by. “Who am I to condemn them?” he said, sitting in the cave, looking out at the sun. “I am as weak as they.”