by Sara Collins
He was sipping his usual brew of gunpowder tea, toying with his snuff. The same fingers that had put the egg to her mouth. When I came in, he handed me a paper. The Case for Reform: Black River, Antigua.
‘Slavery,’ he said. Spat the word as if he couldn’t bear to keep it in his mouth. ‘Everybody’s scratching about for a solution. Either one thing or the next. Deciding which side will win. Forgetting Solomon’s wisdom. The best way to solve a conflict is to give both sides what they want.’
‘Didn’t Solomon offer each woman half an infant,’ I said, ‘knowing they each preferred it whole?’
He threw back his head, laughed. Oh, he always found me amusing, perhaps because he thought he had created me himself.
But only a man would think splitting a baby in two was a solution rather than a problem, just like only a white man would consider slavery a difficult question. Women focus on what they lack, men on what they want. In all those Bible stories, it’s always the women who look back, who eat the forbidden fruit, who weep over hollow wombs, and fruitful ones. Yearning is always a woman’s sin. The men never turn around, nor ever think twice about taking a knife – or a cross – to their own longed-for sons.
‘That is a paper I am writing on the topic,’ he said, taking a sip of his tea. ‘In support of proposals that will ensure the welfare of West India workers, while assuring planters of their livelihoods.’
He went on to explain that Black River was his own experiment, his family’s Antigua estate, which his brother allowed him to run. He ran it like an English tenant farm, he said. His workers received religious instruction, holidays, their own little patches of land to plant. He believed the solution to keeping slaves was legislation that would ensure their fair treatment and guarantee everybody’s happiness, including theirs, and that the key was to convince the planters to do it themselves. ‘The guiding principle at Black River is virtue, and benevolence, and therefore affection is not only possible but mutual. My Negroes call me Mister, never Master.’
I had to bite my lip, so I wouldn’t laugh. ‘And you call them your Negroes and not your slaves?’
He flexed his jaw. ‘I’m interested in your opinion, girl.’
Anybody who wants a former slave’s opinion is looking to find either a happy slave, or a stricken one. The former doesn’t exist, and as for the latter, you already know my thoughts. I saw that part of Benham’s interest in Paradise was to set his own methods in opposition to Langton’s, and that was why he needed me. His object: not to abolish, but to preserve.
I found I could not hold my tongue. ‘About what happened this morning.’
‘This morning?’
‘At breakfast.’
Surprise crawled onto his face. ‘Nothing happened at breakfast.’
‘You were harsh with Madame.’
His hands flew off the desk; he pushed to his feet. ‘You speak out of turn, about matters that don’t concern you. A piece of advice. In this house, you’re better off taking your cues from me.’
I looked down at his sheet of paper, thin as a slip between my fingers. Weightless. White as nothing. I felt a springing anger. ‘I don’t know the first thing about running a West India estate,’ I said.
‘All I want is the truth.’
Truth had never set a foot between us.
You own me, I thought. You own her. You own all of us. Where is the virtue in that?
I decided to be frank. ‘It is a waste of time,’ I said, handing him back his paper.
His head jerked. ‘How so?’
‘There’s no reforming what’s already rotten.’
There’s wickedness in all men. The ones we call good are the ones who care to hide it. And George Benham knew that the surest way to hide your sins is to write your own account.
Langton pretended Negroes didn’t have the same red blood as his, but Benham turned his blind eye on his own estate. Even the way they’d trained me seemed to have been their same old nonsense science, very little rhyme or reason. I asked Benham about it, once, when I found him in a talking mood. They’d both been curious about the limits of a mulatta’s intelligence, Benham convinced Negroes could be taught to some extent, and that a greater capacity for learning might result after the mixing of white lymph with black. Was Langton eager by then to give him whatever he wanted, so long as the money came back? Benham wanted a mulatta to be educated, so that was what Benham got. In any event, Langton had only finished what Miss-bella had started, though it was just like him to cut the truth in half. And the other truth was that I was the only mulatta he’d kept on that entire estate.
It was my own sins Benham thought to write about for all that they were tangled up with theirs. Which is why three weeks later, seeing my chance when he’d gone out to his gentleman’s club, I stole his journal, tucked it into the lining of my pallet. Those pages are still there for all I know – though it’s possible Linux has already scrubbed out every inch of me that was left behind.
I suppose you’ll go looking for them, or someone else will. Just remember not to believe everything you read.
I should have stolen Madame’s journals too, if I’d thought of it, if I had known our days were numbered. They would have been more useful to me. A way to keep her. Which was what I wanted most of all. The pair of us trapped together, pinned like butterflies under glass.
As soon as I went back up, she drew me close, and the smell of her flooded me. The very bones slid out of me. La petite mort, she called it. A little death. Benham forgotten. When she kissed me, I tasted myself. Like the sea, like salt. Like tears. We slipped together into her bath, which she filled herself. That was a sight, more water spilling on the floor than in the tub. She poured water like she knew she wouldn’t be the one to mop it up. But for the span of that afternoon, I was the one being waited on. Tended. She made me feel like a queen. She took my damp hair in her hands and gathered it off my brow and peppered me there with kisses and, after we’d settled in the water, her back to my front, she said, ‘Read to me,’ and rested her head on her knees to listen. Steam rose in wet curls, and her hair fell likewise. I held the book away from me. The water lapped quietly. Beside us, the candle flickered to a stub. The door stayed safely on its latch.
How can I describe it?
I was a knot, untangled. The weight of all my memories was gone.
Night came, to strip another day from whatever tally we had. We blew out the candles, turned over the pillows, and laid our heads together on them, for sleep.
We were happy, no matter what is said about it now, no matter that they’re saying it was me who broke her happiness, and broke her. As soon as I write that, as soon as I even think it, my hand trembles. I must stop here. I fear I’ll dig this nib through the paper, to keep from turning it on myself.
Chapter Twenty-Five
At a ladies’ gaming parlour she went to with Hep Elliot, she and I managed to find ourselves alone in the withdrawing room, behind one of the screens. I’d brought along her little travelling pot, which she called a bourdaloue. It was yellow as piss itself, but painted with gay dancing maids in blue bonnets to trick you that a lady might travel with one in case struck by a sudden craving for soup or blancmange wherever she might be. She had stretched herself out on the bench, her body pressed against the window, gazing out at the brick wall of the next-door building. I knelt and fitted myself to her, fingers to ankles, forehead to knees. She looked down and saw my intention, my fingers on her thighs, her skirts wagging like tails, then looked up at the door.
‘Do you do this with him?’
‘Mr Benham?’
‘Who else?’
I could not bear to think of it.
She looked down at me. ‘When would I? You are always with me, so you know he is not.’ She hesitated. ‘Besides . . . he does not want children.’
Good, I thought, though I’d never come across a man who didn’t want children, especially one as pleased with his own image as Benham was.
But the questi
on nagged at me, drove me to seek out Pru in the scullery next wash-day, to ask what she knew. ‘Only bits I picked up here and there,’ she said. ‘Madame wasn’t considered first water when she came out. Pretty, yes. But French. Nothing she could do to change that. And too eccentric as well, I suppose. Came with too much gossip. Most people will say she was lucky to nab him.’ She swilled one of Benham’s cravats in the rice-water. ‘There was a time I didn’t know who to be sorrier for, out of the pair of them. I overheard them once, arguing. Her saying he was only wealthy on the surface, him saying that must make them a match since that was the only place she was pretty.’
The following week Madame told me part of the story herself. Her mother had said she was lucky to have an offer: eccentric Meg Delacroix, still on the shelf after four Seasons. Benham heard the rumours about her only after they were married, when it was too late. Divorce would have tainted him as well as her, which made it out of the question. He blamed her for that, too, as if he’d been the victim of some trick. The worst of it, she said, was how he’d played husband all this time, in public or where any of the servants might see. How he made her play wife. The appearance of marriage with none of its effects, save the roof over her head.
The year after her wedding, her mother had died, leaving her truly alone.
Madame announced that she intended to form a committee to plan a debate. For many of those ladies, time trickled through their hands. They might as well make themselves feel pious and useful with it. Though pious is hardly ever useful. Nevertheless, I helped. I copied out the proposed motion into her letters. What is the purpose of variety in the species of humankind?
‘What do you think?’ she said.
I thought she was turning Langton’s and Benham’s very own question against them, and said the pair of them would find it instructive to hear sensible opinions on it, for a change.
The anti-slaving business lifted her spirits, and when she was happy so was I. Her friends pressed her to join the boycott. Even if she’d had any say at all in that household, which it seemed she didn’t, I couldn’t see what good it would do to refuse to buy sugar with all that sugar money. In any event, she was too fond of her sweetened chocolate to go that far.
It was a gasp of rebellion, pitting herself against him, and she knew it. She decided she’d plan first and ask him later. Put the cart before the horse, so to speak. In the meantime, the meetings would be social affairs. In that way, when she announced her intention, he’d be unable to refuse without it becoming a public spectacle. There was nothing he hated more than that.
One day, she was too low for hosting, or for gadding about in the park, and said we’d have to make do with the garden. It was very hot, coming towards the start of June. The flowers were out at Levenhall, and I decided to fetch a basket from the scullery, and asked Pru if I could borrow her pearl-handled dressmaker’s scissors to snip some for Madame’s mantelpiece. I found her unpicking silk rosettes from the hem of an evening gown. Poor Pru could have done with a day in the garden herself. Her eyes and cheeks were red and raw, no doubt stung by lye, and her shoulders drooped. ‘I’m fine, Fran,’ she said, when I asked how she was. ‘You know how it is, or perhaps you’ve forgot already. There’s enough work to kill an ox.’
In the kitchen, Linux had a goose splayed out on the table for plucking. I went carefully around her, wrapped some slices of bread and cheese and a pat of butter I’d brought from the larder. When I set the basket on the table, she stared hard at the scissors, which were peeking up over the rim. ‘What is it you think you want with those?’
I wanted nothing with them, I said, but Madame had asked me to snip some of the flowers in the garden so that I might fill her vase. My nerves were all over the place in those days, so I am sure my voice shook. I was lying about that one thing, which I fear now made everything I said sound like a lie. She looked at me askance. The truth was that I was full of some of the savage intents she had suspected of me all along. Lust, chief among them. The truth was that by then I was a threat to the master of the house. I wanted what he had. There were too many things I wanted. I can hardly confess them all. There isn’t paper enough, or time.
Linux folded her arms and tried to bar my way, but I held my ground and asked, did she want to keep Madame waiting?
It would be me keeping Madame waiting, she replied, unless I handed those scissors over. Her hands were cloaked with blood and feathers. But then Benham’s bell rang, and she had to answer it herself, with Pru busy in the laundry. She cast me a hard look as she went, but said no more about the scissors.
The garden was hemmed in by high walls. The pond lay at the end, and the gate that led to the mews. The sun was high. Light spilled like lamp oil over the new grass, and made the air hazy. I set the blanket out under the ash tree and laid the food atop a piece of oilskin. She arranged herself under the tree, opened her book – a small volume of poetry – and read aloud. Her voice drifted like a bee between the flowers. The scissors shook in my hand as I clicked at the roses. I decided to thread some of them through her fringe, and so came behind her with the scissors still in my hand. She gave a start, and looked up towards the house, nervous. Her hair was damp and had started to curl and I had to smooth it out between my fingers. By the time I’d finished, several of the petals lay around us, smashed into the blanket by my knees, and the smell rose heavy into the air.
She drummed her fingers on the book, sang some tune she was always singing. ‘It’s called Chanson pour Marguerite,’ she would say. ‘One of my papa’s.’ It was the most drear thing you ever heard, the same repeating, whining notes, but she loved it the way a mother loves an ugly child.
A lather of fear came upon me.
There’s the same lather of fear upon me now. Not just the terror of any woman in my situation. It’s the fear of the teeming brain. That I might cease to be before I can finish setting it down. I find myself scribbling furiously. As if I must finish it, or look up and discover that none of it happened at all. While I write it, I can still believe it did.
I steadied my fingers, kept them brushing through her hair. Before I knew it, I blurted: ‘Is this love, between us?’
She tipped her head back into the silence. ‘Oh, there are many ways to be mad,’ she said. ‘Love’s the surest one.’
It was so close to my own fears, it made my heart thud.
A thud came from behind us as well. A sudden bang that wrenched my head up. I looked towards the house. A figure in one of the upstairs windows. Linux. Black as a moth, her mouth twisting. She had slapped the window, and stood gurning down at us. Even from so far away I could see her eyes, and the scars that leaped across her cheek and her pale palm smeared across the glass. She shook her head, drew her shoulders back, and moved away down the passage. Madame jerked the basket towards her, shoving in book and food and blanket. Cramming everything atop the flowers. ‘We must go in,’ she said. She blinked around at the garden as if she’d never seen it before.
I felt again that same pricking of fear, the cold wash of terror, which I couldn’t quite explain.
EXAMINATION OF EUSTACIA LINUX BY MR JESSOP, continued
A. Some weeks before the prisoner was turned out, there was the incident with the scissors.
Q. What incident?
A. There was a pair of dressmaker’s scissors, kept in the scullery. I found the prisoner attempting to take them outside, hidden in a basket. I challenged her, and she said she’d been asked to fetch them for Madame. When I questioned the mistress later, I discovered that to have been a lie. That same afternoon, I’d seen the prisoner in the garden, holding the scissors very near to Madame Benham’s neck. It appeared to me that she was threatening her with them. But when I asked the mistress about that, she said she had not been threatened. I believe by that time she was afraid of the prisoner and did not want to speak of it for that reason. The prisoner had some hold over her by then. And the scissors were not seen again after that afternoon.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Now I come to Olaudah Cambridge. And if anyone has questions to answer, it is him. Though there’ll be no way of getting answers, seeing as Olaudah Cambridge has not been seen since the night of her soirée.
This I know for certain. If Madame hadn’t seen him again, she’d still be alive. And she wouldn’t have seen him again if we hadn’t gone to the Cambridge lecture.
She wanted to go. It was her idea. The anti-slavery cause was all her excitement, then, and she’d read about the forthcoming speech in the Morning Chronicle, and then talked about nothing else for two whole days. Her little Laddie, all grown up. In the carriage, she twisted and turned and her eyes darted with excitement. She drew the window-shades, though I wanted to lift them and look out at the ash-dark streets, the domes and spires. Feel that I was a small part of it, at last. Maybe not the apple in the bowl, but one of the grapes.
The hall was near Bloomsbury Square, long and wide, panelled in dark, gleaming wood. They crowded the room, some of the women with arms linked, the men talking only with each other. All of them dressed in brown or grey. Anti-slavery people, mainly. Upholstered chairs lined an aisle as neat as a hair parting. It was dim in spite of the sconces flocking the papered walls.
Laddie walked in with the snap of a sail in high wind, and they took their seats. He wore a black jacket, shiny at the elbows, and, when he lifted his hands, he flashed crooked fingers and mashed knuckles.
He brought one hand down on the lectern, kept the other raised, cast his head slowly around. You couldn’t help but stare back. He had the body of a prime buck, but the face of a man who’d rather be dead than owned.
He worked his mouth into a grin. ‘Gentlemen,’ he began, voice hard as rope. ‘When Mr Macaulay asked me to speak here tonight, I wondered what I should speak about. Something that would make me more than your pet nigger, more than your entertainment. Just some black you managed to get up onto his hind legs to play tricks.’
