by Chris Dolan
Apart from Lord Coak – sitting now on his chair on the porch – the only individuals who had not made up their minds were Errol Braithewaite and Errol Sarjant, Elspeth, Diana Moore and her husband Robert Butcher. The two Errols hesitated, but finally took sides with Bathsheba. Robert pulled Diana towards the same group, but she stood rooted to the spot. He stroked her hair to alleviate her ordeal. Diana and Elspeth stood alone in the centre of the yard. Bathsheba held her hand out to Elspeth.
“You were always our mother.”
“She’s mother to us all!” cried out Albert. He turned to her, held his arms out for her to come to him. Shaw spoke out her name. Bathsheba’s arm was still extended. But Elspeth turned to neither group, nor to her husband. She kept her eyes on Diana’s face, and saw that her oldest friend, Roseneythe’s most respected woman, their teacher and scribe, looked lovingly towards Bathsheba’s party. But it was Elspeth she stepped towards, and spoke. “Go to them, Elspeth. If I were free, I wouldn’t hesitate.”
She stepped back again, moved slowly away from Bathsheba towards Shaw’s company. Robert – already deep in the ranks of the breakaway group – howled. “Diana!”
His wife, her eyes filled with tears, couldn’t look in his direction. “Robert. Who was it concocted all those potions? Who administered the Captain’s medicines? Me. Diana Moore. Who wrote up the lists of who should partner who? It was I. I’ve watched children die. I’ve watched my sisters bleed and part with their bairns. When the babbies screamed with the burning of the whitening ointments, I kept on rubbing.”
There was nowhere for her to live any more, she said, outside Roseneythe. Voices were raised in argument: Nan told her all that was forgiven; Golondrina assured her that she had dispensed as much good medicine as bad. Diana just kept shaking her head. “Do you know why I did it? Because I thought it the surest way home. Not an hour has passed that I haven’t thought of the morn I left, my mither and faither too ashamed to bid me fareweel. I’ve known for years that both of them maun be dead, and our hometown gone forever, yet still I slavishly trod that bitter road.” She spoke in the language of her childhood, in the words she’d had before the dominie taught her newer, better ones. She asked her husband to be happy, to forgive her, and she took the final steps to stand by Shaw.
Only Elspeth was left now, her mind numb, shivering as she had not shivered since she had marched through bogs and hail on the way to the cattle trysts of her youth. It was not that she could not make up her mind, but rather that her mind had failed her totally, like an understudy on stage who had forgotten her lines and stood gaping at her audience, unable to move or to think. She heard Lord Coak’s voice:
“The boat has touched this silver strand
Just as the Hunter leaves his stand,
And stands concealed amid the brake,
To view his Lady of the Lake.”
Bathsheba, her hand still held out towards her mistress, interrupted him and continued the poem.
“A chieftain’s daughter seemed the maid;
Her satin snood, her silken plaid,
Her golden brooch, such birth betrayed!”
When Bathsheba stopped, Albert leaned towards Elspeth, so far that it looked as if he might fall from his perch. This house was her stage, he told her in a quiet voice. He was her only true audience. Out there was nothing but poverty. Her father’s words might still come true – she could yet be reduced to a whore. Worse, an ancient whore. In this house she would always be beautiful. Always feted, her name remembered for generations.
At the back of her mind she knew that a crucial, simple action was required of her. A crossing of the stage at a climactic moment; a word, a gesture, to gratify an audience. Choose Capulet or Montague; Life or Death. The arguments of the drama had all now been made – follow the mutineers, or keep faith with the king and the prince. But she was unsure of the part she was playing. She felt like the chorus, the narrator of an epilogue, not the heroine.
The two flanks parted without her having made a move. She watched them move off in different directions. Shaw, his hand gentle on the small of her back, guided her the few paces towards her husband. Albert put his trembling hand on her shoulder. Thus escorted on either side, she was led towards the door, footsteps fading behind her.
Our revels now are ended. The words came to her, out of the past. These our actors, as I had foretold you, were all spirits, and are melted into air, into thin air. In the light of the hallway she moved towards the staircase, at the top of which she thought she saw a figure; a dark silhouette, beckoning her. We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep. It took her eyes a moment to adjust to the light, to see the spectre clearly: handsome young George Lisle, untouched by age and toils, his wound miraculously healed, waiting for her, welcoming her home.
XIV
They left in the heat of the day.
Golondrina and Gideón, their boys and Roseta, helped Mary and Chastity Murray muster a breakfast for sixty or more, of salt-bread and tea and porridge and eddoes. Sandy Glover, four Alexander and five MacNeill brothers and sisters, twelve Morton, Millar and Miller cousins, Börgmann lads with both father and mother, their neighbours the Englund family, Jean Arthur, née Homes, replete with her entire clan, a single Douglas girl, Moira Riddoch and Moira Campbell, the younger Mary Fairweather, Erasmus Lloyd and Samuel Malcolm, old Eliza Morton, Victoria and Bartholomew Johnstone, the Edmondsons, Dainty, Martha Turner, all sat around a blanket spread on the factory floor. Five fieldhands defected from Shaw’s faction and joined them before sun-up.
There was a great fervour that they should all stay together as a family. They had grown up, or grown old, together; faced life’s advantages and disadvantages as one, and could not imagine being divided. Not again, having been already sundered from half their family. As the morning wore on, however, the impracticability of the plan became clear. One cutter might find work in one plantation, one in another; a woman could enter service in one of the great houses, or be fortunate enough to be engaged as a lady’s companion, and a girl could get a governess’s position if she were lucky. They could go to Bridgetown or Holetown, where one or two might find employment in stores or businesses, or to Oistins where a man might find work around the harbour and a woman gut fish. But there was no place large enough for them all.
The MacNeills had cousins on their father’s side working on the Oughterson plantation; Eliza’s estranged husband might find a place for her with planters in the Parish of St. Thomas. Jenny Campbell’s cousins could go to her in Speightstown where it was rumoured she had a shop and might be able to take some of them on. The fieldhands knew of employers who were hiring in various places around the island. Dainty had had her fill of maid-work, and stated she’d try her luck in Bridgetown. It was eventually agreed, with much sadness and some tears, that they had no choice but to go their separate ways. Great plans and promises were made to never lose sight of themselves as a single family who would one day reunite. The young women and men, filled with ambition, and excited at the idea of making their own way in life, swore blind that they would become successful and own a house one day large enough to accommodate them all.
Gideón spoke of sailing away to an island where people like them could venture deep into the mountains and establish a home where they would be safe from the Shaws and Coaks of this world. The Caribbean sea was full of islands. He had heard of such places from the slaves in Cuba. It was agreed that, should he ever find such a haven, he would summon every last one of his fellow rebels. Bathsheba looked lovingly at him when he spoke this way, but did not add her voice to the devising of the plan. Errol Braithewaite found his tongue when Chastity Murray argued that Roseneythe was their rightful home and, while there was little that could be done in the immediate future, they swore to return one day to oust Shaw.
Gola and Nan let them all make their plans, but quietly went round every individual to make sure they had a realistic destination to aim for that day. Everyo
ne had some notion of a plan – except for themselves. The Brazos family and the Miller family had no idea of where they might be sleeping that night. Golondrina Segunda had no other objective in mind than to join her true husband and first family in Cuba, though none could advise her on how such an immense journey could be accomplished.
By midday everyone, having collected their belongings, reassembled at the factory. None of the loyalists attempted to stop them or interfere with their flitting. They were allowed to dismantle chattel-houses, load crates and carts, and even take three ponies from the stables without impediment. Seventeen entire houses had been taken apart and were now borne on the backs of ponies and on the shoulders of men and women. Others bore little more than two or three sheets tied and filled with the bare essentials for starting a new life.
A few had dressed in their cleanest clothes and held their heads high. Most set out in their daily work clothes, dejection and fear on their faces. It was agreed they would walk as one to the gates where they would make their final farewells. The younger children pleaded to go back to say goodbye to their friends who had ended up on the other side of the breach. Their parents told them to hush. Bathsheba led the exodus out to the top of the driveway. There they stopped and took one last look back at their homes – or the gaps where their homes had stood – and over to the big house.
A group of around twenty had assembled there to watch the sissenters depart. The two factions looked over at one another – sadness, anger and incomprehension disturbing the hot and heavy air between them. At last one young girl, Jenny Millar’s eldest, sitting on the step of the porch, raised her arm in farewell. Several followed her example, holding their hands straight up in the air, motionless. As Bathsheba turned to conduct the party down to the gates, Elspeth Baillie herself appeared at her upstairs window and watched. Robert Butcher was the last to leave. He gave one last desperate call of “Diana!” waited several moments, then turned and trudged slowly out of Roseneythe. A woman mumbled sadly as she turned away from the big house that now they would never know what had been done with their poor little chiles that died. “They were sailed out t’ sea, Missy,” Robert Butcher said. “You know that.”
Less than a mile along the way there was a crossroads and there the rebel party split for the last time. Fifteen or sixteen stood at the head of the road south, about the same number at the western path, the largest group looking mournfully at the hill that would take them towards Speightstown. They kissed and wept and embraced one another, but did not tarry long before setting off along their separate ways. Bathsheba went round each and every one of them, saying it was not too late to go back if they thought that was the best option for their families. As she went, she loosed the hat ribbons of each child – the children who had seen her and Gideón in their embrace on the cove – and kissed their heads. Dark hair and fair, locks that eddied as energetically as her own, and tresses that poured as straight as thatch. She kissed cheeks reddened by sun and toughened by work; pale cheeks, dark skin, some with markings betraying a new mix akin to her own. They looked on her as if they saw a saint, hung onto her clothes as she moved onto the next child. In the silence of the noon sun, the rebels dragged themselves and their belongings in every direction away from Roseneythe Plantation.
Nothing ever dies here. Albert should have crumbled into his grave many moons ago. Shaw still patrols the plantation, or what’s left of it, though his bones creak and his arms are too brittle even to snap a dried cane stalk. Diana has been condemned to a dotage of solitary prayer, like a whimpering Romish nun. There are black-belly sheep, running wild since Francie stopped shepherding them, that should have fallen hooves-up years ago. Looking out her window, Elspeth spends her days watching the loyals struggle vainly against wild, insurgent cane. She feels she herself has become a wretch like the obeah women whisper of: dead, but walking. The figs have stretched their bony fingers all the way up to the big house, and scratch at her windowpane in the night. If things go on like this, she and Albert and Shaw and Diana will live to as be old as them, their fingers as skeletal, hair like fig-beard, immortally stranded.
She had taken to wearing red. Two years after the Disruption, she ransacked her wardrobes and cupboards, the linen stores below stairs that Mary and Nan used to regulate, and rid herself of anything in another colour – India shawls, jackets, shoes, bodices, camisoles and knickerbockers, corsets, hose, stockings and petticoats; she separated out all the pinks, blush hues, damask, cerise, even purples and puce, every shade from peach to the deepest crimson, and had Annie Oyo burn the rest. The yellows and saffrons, blacks and navy, royal and saltire blues. The cream-tinted clothes that Lord Coak had loved to see her wear and divest herself of – magnolias, ivories, the exquisite oyster-shaded Irish underlinen she used to love most. Nothing but a sunset-sky of reds. From time to time – maybe twice a year – Albert would ask her to come and perform for him. She never went. She hardly saw the man from one month to the next. He lay in his bed or, with Junior’s help, hobbled to his study to sit at his desk and write business letters that were never sent. On one occasion she returned to the arms of Shaw – this time in her own room, next door to Albert, where he must have heard them toil breathlessly to throttle some life out of Shaw’s old body and her lethargic soul.
Annie Oyo, now very elderly and nearly bent double, saw Shaw come out of her Ladyship’s room in the morning. She waited until he had clumped down the stairs and said at the open door to her mistress: “When yuh ent got horse, yuh mus’ ride cow.” Since that morning, Elspeth’s and the Captain’s paths seldom crossed.
Diana, as busy as ever, she saw frequently around the house. Elspeth spoke to her as little as possible. There were still a few births – a new clutch of Jeans and Marys, Alberts and Roberts. New names, too: a Flor, a Susannah, a boy baptised Turner; a Preston. More often, she counted down the dead: Susan Millar and Nathanial Wycombe of Yellow Jack. Martha Morton. Eliza Riach, at only two years old. The stillbirths and miscarriages. Bessy Riddoch left one morning, four years after the rebels, with an American salesman, who had been on the plantation for a morning only.
Once, dressed in her ruby pelisse, pink skirt and nut-brown demi-broquins, none of which matched or even fitted, she passed Albert’s office, the door of which was left ajar. He sat at his locked escritoire, peered out at her through thickening spectacles and cataracts, and asked: “Why do you dress this way?”
“So that the Devil or God might see me. One of them has forgotten to kill us.”
She never ventured beyond the porch, instead she wandered around the now endlessly quiet house. On the other hand, the dream of colours and shifting shapes that had seldom left her sleeping mind in all those years, seemed closer, intimate. Anyway, sleep evaded her; when she did, finally, nod off she was awake again within an hour or two. Walking up and down stairs, only Coak wheezing in his room, pacing round the big rooms downstairs and the kitchens, she sang to herself and remembered old lines and songs. On one of these rambles she discovered a door she had never seen before. A latch, on the floor, at the back of the largest pantry. Elspeth pulled it open and found stairs leading down into the basement. A dunnie. It hadn’t even occurred to Elspeth that such a place might exist.
The following night she took two candles, lit one, and descended wooden steps that looked as if they had barely been touched by any feet. The sight that greeted her was extraordinary. She touched, and recoiled from, damp, slithery tubers which, she realised, must be the roots and lianas of the fig trees that grew in the grounds above. They had managed, over years, to creep down into the building’s foundations, forcing their way through four-foot thick walls. They plunged right through the ceiling and down into the earthen floor, lodging themselves firmly in the ground, and seemed now to be growing upwards again. The crypt of Roseneythe was a subterranean forest. Elspeth wondered if these growths and limbs were the only things keeping the house standing. Apart from them the dunnie was empty, and seemed never to have been used, though she
wondered if it wouldn’t have been the natural place for people to have hidden during the great storm.
It became her favourite place to roam when she could not sleep. The basement was like a shadow of the house above, the shapes of the hallway, kitchen, dining hall and rooms etched in wet stone walls. A photographic negative of the living house above. One night, some months after she first discovered this new haven, she turned a corner into a small enclave, though she couldn’t think which room above it mirrored. But someone had been in this underworld before after all – for there, in the corner, was an old cupboard, its wood damp with rot and the door hanging off its hinges. She pulled the door open. Inside, a jumble of broken nibs and torn sheets of paper. They tumbled all over the many shelves and out through a hole in the back, the cupboard having been eaten away by damp. She picked the papers up and they felt like yesterday’s porridge in her hand. Most, she saw now, were sealed documents. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of letters.
All were addressed to Roseneath Parish, or thereabouts, in Scotland. She rummaged through the heap at her feet: the majority were in Diana’s neat hand. Others were scrawled in first attempts at scribing; some had no address at all but had been carefully and lovingly sealed. She pulled at another tottering column of clammy envelopes. These were written in hands she did not recognise. Elspeth found one that was dry enough to survive the breaking of the crude seal.
