The Confessions of Frannie Langton

by Sara Collins

  When Langton’s quill slipped for the first time, I was twelve or thirteen. He reared his head back, looked at it as if it had bitten him. Weakness started in his hands, went through him quick as water. By the next January, he had a hard time to keep hold of a pen at all. I was stirring at a vat of indigo, lifting my dolly-stick, watching the blue drips fall back into the tin bucket. His hand tap-tapped at the table, like someone knocking. His face went dark when he looked down at it, then he threw himself to his feet, as suddenly as if he were casting part of his own body away from him. ‘Girl,’ he bellowed. ‘Come here.’

  There was nothing he didn’t try. Strychnine, mercury ointments, sweat baths, bleeding. His body a question mark over the pot, his stools snicking into it, small and hard as those long-ago peas. Around that same time, the Surgeon died, leaving me with Langton. And, if an invalid is lucky enough to outstrip his own doctor, that is news that’s both good and bad.

  What can I tell you about the years that followed? I made them dark for so long, sometimes it’s as if I truly can’t remember. Langton needed a scribe. I was there, I could be taught, and I cost him nothing, which was all he could afford. For a long time, I thought that was the bargain we’d struck.

  His brain; my hands. That’s how the work got done.

  There were times in that coach-house all I saw was my own hands, floating, when the very floor seemed washed in blood. When I went outside myself. First black, then nothing. It was the same that awful morning, when Linux woke me in Madame’s bed. I remember how the constable stared and stared, saying they were both dead, Madame too. And me thinking, I couldn’t have done it. I loved her. But having to hear them telling me I had.

  Miss-bella asked me about the coach-house only once, the year after I became Langton’s scribe.

  ‘I want you to tell me what my husband is doing in that place.’

  ‘You must ask him, please, missus.’ I hesitated. ‘They only wanting me to clean.’

  She looked me up and down, struck her palm flat against the porch railing. She laughed, no mirth in it. ‘He does nothing but play God! He’s a charlatan. Playing at being a scientist.’

  Her face twisted, and I turned mine away so she couldn’t see what was printed on it. She looked away, also, and lifted her hip flask. The teapot had smashed, long ago, knocked off the table while she was stumbling out of the chair. She kept one hand on the railing, one on the flask, and I could hear her muttering, under her breath, ‘They are monsters, because this place makes monsters.’

  I remembered then all the stories Phibbah had told me. About the teapot. About the dancing girls. There must have been a time when Miss-bella dreamed her husband would come to her, lift her chemise over her head, bare his teeth like an animal, turn her to face a mirror, take her by surprise. There must have been a time when she hoped he would frighten her, when her heart beat for that very thing.

  By then, what she knew about me, and what I knew about her, was hidden deep down where we couldn’t find it, in the same place we kept any sympathy we might feel for each other.

  It was not until the following year that I started performing my other duties.

  I was fourteen or fifteen, then, a woman. My own traitorous body had dragged me fast towards that state, the speed at which such things happen on a West India estate. One night, I carried in a flagon of rum, saw the way he looked up at me, and surprised myself by laughing out loud. He was at his table, sitting on his stool, fingers knotted together like newborn mice. The quake in his hands rattled his dissecting tools. I put the flagon down beside them, moved briskly around the room. My usual tasks. Snicked the latch shut, tidied his papers, lit candles. Light spilled onto the table. I couldn’t keep down the bubbles of laughter, like hiccups. Felt my sides cracking, as if I was a peeny-wally knocking against the sides of a jar. I kept him right in the corner of my eye, felt his on me. After he’d drunk some, sloshing rum over the lip of the glass, he looked up. ‘What’s so funny?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Then why you laughing?’

  ‘I don’t know why I’m laughing.’

  ‘You don’t know why you’re laughing.’ He wiggled his jaw.

  My head jerked. Laughs shook out of me hard and fast.

  ‘Stop,’ he said. I did. Put my arms around myself, trying to slow my own thoughts. Then I went over to the table, wiped up the spilled rum, the smell of it sweet and rotting as a drunkard’s breath. ‘I wonder,’ he said, eyeing me. ‘Must be frightening out there alone at night.’

  Let me tell you how I felt then. Relieved. Plain and simple. My head smacked empty by it. I’d known it was coming, I wasn’t a fool. There were times I’d tried to hurry it along myself, truth be told. Pulled my dress low, smeared oil to get a glisten on my skin. Like washing stones from a cut knee, or cutting the head off a hen, some things you just have to do without thinking or they’ll never be done.

  Now it would be done. And you can find ways to shut things out after they’ve happened, but not when you’re worrying about whether they will.

  He gawped at me. I stood wondering was I to unhook my own dress, pull down my own shift.

  ‘Must be,’ he said. And I lifted a hand, reached up to my collar, felt my way to my top button. I wanted him to stop talking and he did. He sat back, watched. I told myself to turn around, to flee. I told myself to close my eyes. Get on with it.

  All of a sudden he shook his head, lurched forward, and before I could say or do anything he’d spewed all the rum he’d just drunk onto the floor.

  I started, nearly jumped out of my skin.

  The only clean thing in the cupboard was packing straw, so I threw some onto the floor, wiped his mouth and chin with the rest of it. ‘Was it the rum?’ I asked. A curdled smell rose off him.

  I didn’t know the whole of it then. After I did, I knew it was his own self that had frightened him, coming face to face with just how far he’d go, and how low, which might not have been a thing he’d known until he put his toe across the border. No one knows the worst thing they’re capable of until they do it.

  That night is just one of the things that leaps to mind when I think of all the reasons they’d be right to hang me now, and when I think of all the reasons why I should have cut Langton’s throat with a dull blade and a cold heart. But, looking back now, I see that your own life can be a story you tell yourself, that you can be both the person reading and the thing being read.

  That was the sum of my luck. That he’d waited so long. That nobody else had dared. That he allowed us both to think I had a choice, that it was a bargain we made.

  And that health doesn’t last for anybody, not even for men who own the world. And Langton’s health was turning for the worse.

  I know what’s said now about what he and I were to each other. The Times called it an unnatural suit. No one in their right mind could have described it as a suit, but some of what they’ve printed is true. Which is rare for newspapers, for we both know they travel some distance to the rear of truth. I lived then in a dark place, and maybe it was trying to kill all of us. Maybe you had to have some of the savage about you to survive it. And when Miss-bella threw me away, maybe I would have thought to make him drink rum, and lie with him, if he hadn’t thought to do it first.

  Chapter Seven

  Fire on a West India estate means conch shells bellow, shock you out of sleep.

  I stumbled out of my little room, the smell of barbecue clogging my throat, so thick in the air for a moment it seemed Phibbah might be back, working her grill. I heard Miss-bella, coughing, screaming for Manso, but smoke was pouring in from outside, coming in through the windows black and thick. I felt for her along the wall, but she slapped my hands off, her voice puffed up and quivering. ‘Don’t touch me! Don’t touch me. Get away!’ I left her, and got myself out, down the stairs and out into a night so black it looked like something stuck in a throat, spitting silver. Cattle screaming, turning to beef in their shed. Flecks of light bobbed beside the cane-piece
as fire wheezed and tore through the stalks, smoke running behind it.

  The field bucks had come down, carrying torches, to fill buckets at the river and the well. Some of them gripped their skulls and moaned. ‘Oh, Lawd, Massa, now what to do?’ No way to tell which was real alarm and which was feigned. Bells ringing and conches blowing all over the place by then. Too late.

  First thing I did was look for Langton. I spied him some distance away, over by the boundary wall, and staggered over, coughing. I stood at his side without speaking for several minutes, working what I should say to him through my stomach and my throat. ‘Fire in the cane,’ he said, at last, before I thought of anything. It hardly needed saying, since the fields were burning gold all around us, black clouds billowing.

  ‘Everybody accounted for,’ Langton muttered. I knew what he meant. If the fire-starter had run, it would have been easier to pick him out, hunt him down. Now, he’d have to scatter his wrath rather than aim it. Worse for all, except the guilty ones. No one knew who had started it. But it was plain to see where. The coach-house stood testament, blackened and destroyed. With the soil dry as tinder and heaps of cane trash blowing, the fire had started in the coach-house, leaped across dry grass left to grow too high, tripped over to the first field, then the next. Now it scrambled in terrible, crashing waves, outrun by cane-rats. The only mystery was why the house had been spared.

  The way he whispered beside me made me feel it was a shared problem, and I was on the right side of it. I felt his fist worrying at my thigh, through my shift, then he grabbed my hand, clutched it to still the trembling in his own, and I let him, thinking no one would be staring at us, not then, with them all so busy with the fire. Fighting it, or staring at it. What did it matter anyway, if they saw? They’d stared all my life. Because I was the only mulatta on the estate, and a house-nigger. Because of the coach-house. Because they all thought they knew what I was to him.

  Miss-bella had made her way out onto the road, and stood on her own. Our eyes met over the wall, hers small and dark and hard as peppercorns. There was such a smile on her face, you’d have thought she started that fire herself. To flush me out of her house, like one of those cane-rats. I turned back to Langton.

  ‘Can any of it be saved?’ I asked, careful, as I always was, to polish out each word. I was eighteen by then, and had cast off many things. The old slave talk had been the first to go.

  He shrugged. ‘Might burn off the green, could still save the stalks.’

  I nodded. ‘Get it under control?’

  Out at the cane-piece, field gangs sloshed river water from their pails, keeping along the boundary, limping across hot earth. But I saw that Langton had turned away from them, towards the coach-house, or what was left of it. He gave a hoarse cough. ‘Idiot,’ he said, narrowing his eyes. ‘Not a single thing on this fucking estate is under control now.’

  Cane gone, coach-house gone, but the house still standing. Ash and smoke blew through for weeks, streaking faces, walls, clothes. Salting the food, leaving a bitter taste, grit on the tongue. Miss-bella ordered Manso to shutter the windows, steeping all the rooms in a dark, perishing heat.

  In the end, the fire cleared the whole of Langton’s expected harvest. It wasn’t even possible to save the stalks. No crop meant no guineas. Jamaica was a sum: men, cane, guineas. One part missing meant the rest would no longer add up, and a man would no longer be a man. Langton wrote Miss-bella’s father, who, it later became clear, had given him the loans that paid for all of it, and who still held the notes. The great house, the windmills, the barns, the new stone bridge: all of it had been funded by him. The sum Langton owed him was vast. He asked for forgiveness of debts: I know, sir, that your wishes will match my own, chief among those being your daughter’s welfare.

  But what he got instead was a letter from her father’s secretary, informing him the man himself was dead: Struck by apoplexy, I’m afraid, at the very moment when your letter must have been en route. Mrs Langton informed by separate communication, enclosed herewith.

  Turned out Miss-bella hadn’t needed her father to see sense, only to die. Thereafter all the notes he’d held on Langton’s Paradise passed to his son, Captain William Adams, who suggested a different bargain from the one Langton had in mind. Langton would leave Paradise, leave them in peace, and in return receive a stipend. They’d put it about that Miss-bella was suffering from ill health, having to stay in Jamaica while Langton travelled, with her blessing, to pursue his long-held scientific ambitions.

  So it came to pass that Miss-bella managed to lose her husband but keep his assets. And chose to stay in the place she hated, with the brother she loved. Langton learned that blood is thicker than marriage, and I learned I was the only thing Langton hadn’t mortgaged, so no one thought it strange when he fled to England, or that the luggage he took with him included me.

  I saw Paradise for the last time on 4 January 1825, twisting in the cart for one more look at the coach-house before it vanished, a thick slump of bricks and foundation stones atop the ash and mud.

  John Langton and his mulatta were a common enough sight in Montego Bay that no one looked twice, even when we took a room at an inn near the shore. We were an old story. All that night the sea churned with the same boiling energy I felt inside, and whisked itself into the pale rocks. Langton leaned against the sill while I cleaned travel dust from his hands with a damp cloth, and squinted at me, as if simply to look at me made him sour as lemons. Through the window came the sound of the sea, making me wish I could go out and walk beside it, see if that would calm my nerves. I could feel that his hands shook, could see that, in his head, he ran over the same old tally. Short, now. The sum of what he owned: Crania, his manuscript that he’d been working on for five years, which was worth nothing; and Frances Langton, who the law had told him was worth the same.

  The next morning, we sailed for London.

  There are those in London – even though I was a housemaid here too, and had lost one buckra massa only to gain an English mister in his place – who say to me, Frances Langton, you were stripped of your free choice by all that happened to you on that plantation, but I don’t know how to answer. Freedom can’t be bought with anything a woman like me has to spend, but there are numberless choices between lying down or putting up a fight.

  Miss-bella and I had that in common, too, save that I never let myself forget and she seldom let herself remember.

  London, February 1825

  Chapter Eight

  Somewhere through the Gulf of Florida, sea air tasting like salt-fish and clouds white as bolls of cotton, I’d dared to ask, ‘Will I be free there?’

  ‘Where?’ He pretended impatience but he knew full well. Every nigger in Jamaica, whether driver, carpenter, seamstress, cook or buck, could tell you. It’s why I asked.

  Soon as any man breathe English air, he free.

  ‘London.’ First time I’d let myself say the word out loud.

  He’d sniggered. ‘You will be under my jurisdiction. There, as anywhere. That’s all you need to know.’

  Jamaica was a sum, a calculation. His life, and mine, had been built on the same. What is the yield in guineas of a tally of Africans, plus cane seeds plus overseers, added to God-given dirt and water and sun? Freedom was a sum, too, one that yields as many answers as men who’ve set their minds to it. I puzzled over it. I went sick to my stomach thinking about it. I’ll confess it.

  By the time ropes swarmed the decks, and the order came to drop anchor, freedom was my biggest fear.

  How well I remember stepping off the ship at the West India docks, like the shock of stepping into a river, cold water coming over your head.

  I’d never seen my own breath before. Hanging off my lips, thick and white as the clouds. Just one of many things I could hardly credit. The rain on my face, for instance, light as feathers. English rain weighs nothing. It’s the air that’s heavy, and always has the seep of water in it. The streets were wet, and seemed to be tumbling under so
me giant peggy-stick. I stood there amid the dizzying clatter of hammers and scaffolds and barrows moving piles of bricks that were either crumbling out of buildings or being plastered into them, so it seemed to be a city building itself and eating itself at the same time. Waiting carriages lined up along the high wall, horses shying under the dark bulk of warehouses. A crossing-sweeper was knocked down and the line of foot passengers just curved around him, like a river around a rock.

  Everything seemed within reach. I lifted one gloved hand, held it out, palm forward. Then jerked it back in. Stupid. There I was, queasy and ship-stale, lost in my own thoughts, the wind slicing my ankles. But inside I felt warm as coals, and my heart swelled like a sail. For I’d done what no other house-girl at Paradise had ever done. I’d improved myself.

  Arms and elbows crashed into me, swaying me off my feet.

  ‘You new come?’ said a gruff voice close to my ear. I spun around, straight into an old seaman. Swollen, wishbone knees, and a greasy, sun-blackened nose. It was plain to see what he thought I was, rubbing one hand down the placket of his breeches. I almost dropped my eyes, but lifted my chin instead. Gave him a cold shoulder. A white man! Such a peculiar feeling brewed up in my chest, then. Unease and happiness, mixed into one.

  Then we were clattering along in our own hired carriage. Sweat-stains ran dark against the leather, the stink of all the bodies who’d been there before. On the bench opposite, Langton fretted his fingers along the neck-cloth I’d smoothed on for him that morning, asked for the third time: ‘You have it?’

  ‘I have it.’ I patted the papers next to my hip. ‘All seven copies.’

  My own little portmanteau lay alongside. Two twill dresses, my own copies of Moll and Robinson Crusoe, the black shawl around my shoulders, with Vandyke edging and a pattern of vines and hummingbirds in bright mustard. Everything I owned.