She awoke to the shaking of the stone around her; opened her eyes to see a turret of the great mansion drop outside her window, crumbling like a sugar column. It exploded somewhere unseen below a moment later, a grey dense cloud rising in its wake. George jumped up with a shout, stared in amazement first at the night outside – the gale howling, timbers groaning – and then at her. The floor beneath them rose up, as if a beast below were breaking the surface of the sea, tossing a boat a fraction of its size out of its way.
He cried, “Jesus!” and Elspeth flinched at the blasphemy. Cursed herself for their many sins that had brought hell’s hand from out of the depths.
George took hold of her and marched her – the two of them near naked – through the bedroom door, down the shuddering stairs, out into the fury of the night. He drove her on through the gardens. Where to, she couldn’t imagine. Rain like she had never seen before spewed from the sky. Long freezing spears hurled by some demented spirit. The noise of the wind: stone cracking, wood buckling. Figures darting here and there, silhouettes from other broken wings of the house flying past, all in such confusion that Elspeth could make no sense of anything. By the time they had put a little distance between themselves and the house, half of it had been torn away, brick and plaster dissolving in floodwaters. They waded through slough and mud where the garden had been only hours before.
George shouted angrily at her, “Get a move on!” As if the storm were of her making. A trap to lead him to his death.
Then, abruptly, the storm stalled. Simply stopped, like a candle blown out. Not a bird sang, nor a tree moved. The silhouettes faded into the night, falling stones poised mid-air, and trees, half-felled, swayed, as if wondering what force had bent them into this position. The world holding its breath, petrified at the sky’s hatred. She saw then where George was leading her, and she tried to pull back. He hauled her towards Henry’s feeble chattel-house. If the bulk and strength of the great stone mansion had not been enough to protect them, what chance would they have in the flimsy little hut of the gardener’s?
“Wood bends with the wind. It doesn’t collapse.”
They were surrounded by massive trees blown over like skittles. Roots had torn up the earth, waving gutlessly in the air, over the deep wounds they had made in the gardens. She followed, pulled along by her stumbling protector. Henry opened his door and ran towards them, lumbering through water and wreckage. A dull red light began to gleam as if the heavens were opening a bloodshot eye to look on the catastrophe they were causing. The gardener wore no shirt and his breeches had been torn and rolled up at the calf, just like her image of him as Frankenstein’s Creature. The brutal embodiment of the storm itself. She reviled his blackness; wished hopelessly for the calming wisdom of a Lord Coak, an Overton, a superior white man from a steadfast castle; an elder who would know how to deal with Nature’s stupid temper.
Henry made straight for Elspeth and lifted her at the waist, held her above the water as though she were a mucky child. She hung on to George’s hand, as he stumbled along beside them, pale and shocked. Henry strode more steadily, stronger than George, more used to physical exertion. The rain began again, and a wind gently whistled. The night’s orange light gave Henry’s and George’s eyes a lost, ghostly look.
Inside Henry’s house his wife and children – more of them than she had realised – were huddling on the bedstead, keeping their feet curled around them, above the waterline. The gardener sat Elspeth down on a high shelf that ran along one side of the house. To make more space for her he cleared, with one lunge of his massive arm, all the cooking utensils and gardening tools and knick-knacks, letting them fall into the water and float or sink along with the rest of the debris. He repositioned her and then turned away as though he had just put an old doll of his daughter’s out of reach. George tried to clamber up beside her, but fell back down with a little cry of pain. Henry came to his aid, and the two men spoke. She could not understand what they said. Not because she couldn’t hear them – the hut was as quiet as the grave, the sky still inhaling – but her brain could not organise the sounds into any meaning. Even words, her old allies, failed her. Henry helped George up and sat him beside her, then bounced the shelf up and down to demonstrate its strength, proud that his workmanship was of value in calamitous circumstances.
“You be safe up here. That mantel take any weight and you a li’l elfy ting, Mistress.”
Everything Henry did he did merely in the way of duty. His face betrayed no real emotion. He had gone out to round them up as a shepherd might gather in his landlord’s sheep. The hard fact struck Elspeth like a falling stone. All of them – the smiling maids and servants, the skivvies at the theatres – they all giggled or nodded, assented to everything, because duty demanded it. His chores done, Henry turned back to his family, pulled two of the older children in towards him on the tabletop. His wife and younger daughters remained sitting on the bedstead, placid and staring into space, glancing at their visitors, clumped together in the soaked, muddied bedclothes.
The last thing Elspeth could remember was the sound of the wind getting its second terrifying breath, and thinking she would never sleep again. She laid her head on George’s shoulder; he raised his hand to stroke her but could not reach out far enough. He gave another cry of pain. She lowered her head onto his lap and he stroked her hair with his other hand. Then, miraculously, sleep came after all. She drifted into the safety and calm of inner darkness, George whispering in the distance, “Be over soon. Rest now.”
Now it was calm, the light peeking in the windows fresh and clear, sparkling like a rock pool in the early morning. She had regained partial wakefulness often enough during the night to know that the storm had built to at least one more riotous climax. She had dreamt that she was back on the Alba, the wind and rain pitching Henry’s hut more than the Atlantic ocean had ever shaken her cabin. She would have chosen the terrors of the high seas any day to the reality of this morn – calm and untroubled as it deceitfully was.
The air was distilled and sweet; the world weightless, her body like a feather. The birds sang and the sea in the distance swished calm and regular. The echoes of last night’s howling wind and crashing trees and stone and bricks now murmured only softly in her ears. George’s judgement had proved correct – the chattel-house still stood steady. The water level had risen and pots and pans and loose articles had been tossed around. But the cast of human characters remained unchanged. Everyone was where they were when she had fallen asleep, all open-eyed, like a chorus required to hold their positions. Statues of loss and confusion. Henry and the two youths on the table, his wife and smaller children on the bed. The gardener woke a little after Elspeth and gently lifted the two boys he had been supporting, setting them down on the crowded bed with hardly a motion on their part. His legs, as he swung round to alight from the table, sank into the flood up to his thighs. He slushed through the water and the floating remains of his livelihood, and pulled the door open. The water from outside met the water within and created a little eddy around his bare legs. Looking out the open door, Elspeth saw the full extent of the damage.
The sea had leapt unaccountably from its bed. The sky had cracked and crumbled, and everything that ever was, was ripped up by its roots. The gods, she thought, are children who leave a shameful guddle behind their pranks and games. How on earth could such a supernatural mess be cleared by mere mortals? The day ahead would be different from the one she had been expecting – the day of her debut, the day she had been working towards and planning for months. She nursed the idea for a moment that things might be put back in order for her recital tonight, and nearly smiled at such a foolish hope.
Where does one start to tidy a clutter like that? Pick up that tree? Sort out the walls of the house from the roof? See if there is anyone buried under the rubble? Look for things left whole and undestroyed, pile them to one side? Wake up George now, or let him sleep?
None of these were matters for a woman like Elspeth to decide. Her father had ever railed against her for being “haunless, daft and yissless”. She had claimed, to him and inwardly to herself, that, when a true crisis came, she would rise to the challenge. Her daily ineffectiveness – striking sets and camp, loading carts – would be overcome and she would find within herself an heroic capacity. Well, here was a crisis beyond her worst expectations, and no heroism stirred.
What they must do, she and George, was find people to help them. Henry was strong, but not strong enough to do the work of twenty, forty men. How many would it take to rebuild this little corner of the world? Henry had his own house to put in order, and then his duty was to his own master at the mansion. His wife and children stared dumbly at him as if at any moment he would turn around and smile, lift all the chaos away with his huge arms, drain the water and clear the mud, turn the day into one like any other. They followed his every move – fishing out a passing joist, plucking it from the water, then throwing it back again. It chilled Elspeth’s heart to think that even a functional and instinctive being like Henry was at a loss.
She had to get down from this shelf. George had to call on the resources of his father’s house. People, servants, maids, slave-gangs who could get a good day’s work done, construct somewhere for them to be this evening. The first task was to wake him and send him off to muster helpers, bring tea and food, set about putting things in order. She dreeped down from her shelf, slipping into the warm sludge, stretched and took a hold of George’s hand. It was cold from the wet and wind. She looked back out through the door, getting a broader view than from atop the shelf. Her vision was unobstructed for miles. Nothing stood to impede the view. The ground was strewn as far as the eye could see with rafters, planks, tabletops, chair legs – like a Glasgow barroom after a brawl – bricks and stones, blue porch tiles, red roof beams, chimneys, felled palms and grapefruit trees, single plantains and coconuts, everything higgelty-piggelty. Sugar canes, snapped up and thrown from fields miles away, floated past the chattel shack, leaving a tang of sweetness in the air.
George was huddled into his coat, face towards her, calm and calming, as he had been throughout the worst of it, protecting his mistress chivalrously throughout the storm, finding this sanctuary for them to survive the night. She shook him.
“George,” she said, soothingly. “Georgie.”
His body juddered to her touch instead of rocking or waking. Henry watched her trying to rouse him, and made his way back through the deluge towards her. George slumped forward and she saw the splinter of mahogany protrude from his side.
“Had that in him last night. Didn’t want to pull it out. Save him bleeding.”
Elspeth nodded. The spear must have struck him on the way out of the house, or in the gardens where bits of the world flew about animated by the force of the storm. This complicated matters. In the midst of this catastrophe George’s death felt matter-of-course to her: another little piece of an enormous mess that would somehow have to be dealt with. As she dragged her legs, entangled in her muddied robe, she felt sorry for him. What a price to pay for two nights of gentleman’s pleasure! If only he had had the sense to go home, he would not now be sitting, cowped on a shelf, like a broken mannequin. Pleasure is a wanton curse. Drink it and ye’ll find him out. She paddled towards the door, out into the fresh, bleached day.
Elspeth Baillie lost in her land of dreams. The water at her feet raced away at her step, and she walked forward with the sure step she had learned from years of tramping through peat-bogs and lowland marshes. The sun sparkled and the air was sharp and diamond-bright, but her head was slumped low again, her shoulders huddled, as if she were battling against the old bluster and sleet. She had nowhere to go; no one to go to. No father or mother. No Lord Coak or Nonie. No Dainty or Tuesday to be seen. No George Lisle.
She walked and she walked, thoughts tumbling like blown leaves: George naked, George dead, the wailing Creature, Henry her saviour. Lines from roles and songs and poems. Gin a body kiss a body, need a body cry? Past the chasm where the house she had slept in with her lover had stood only hours earlier. With effort, she raised her head and looked out from Savannah, scanned the horizon. Half of Bridgetown had vanished. People in the distance wandered as she did, in ones and twos, dazed and aimless. There was weeping in the breeze; there were gaps in the world, whole neighbourhoods vanquished. Between the Garrison and Trafalgar an immense hole, like the fascinating cavity of a pulled tooth. The Synagogue was gone. The barracks were crushed. Fort Charles no longer protected anything, its saluting soldiers swept away. The Lyric Theatre, and with it all her plans, had been picked up and hurled into the sea – the smug sea that lay before her, calm, smiling, unconcerned. She walked on, automatically heading back towards town. Like one that on a lonesome road, doth walk in fear and dread.
Her nerves and mind jangling with wild self-accusations: had she herself caused this dreadful trespass? Her obscene fornicating, her seduction and corruption of a finely educated young gentleman had resulted in his death, had brought on the greater obscenity of the storm. She passed a house, buckled on its knees. A door opened and out filed a line of black people. They passed her without a word. She let her head drop again and kept on walking, walking.
Slowly, like Scottish drizzle that appears from nowhere, the notion grew that George Lisle had loved her. Loved her more than she knew, than she had given him credit for. He had been speared and wounded, conducting her out of an exploding house, ushering her to safety instead of saving himself. He had cradled her as he lay dying, making no mention or complaint of his predicament. One day she will cry for him, her tears will flow and gush for years; she may never be dry-eyed again. But at this moment tears were of no use to either him or her; there was enough water to deal with.
Had she passed town? Or was the town not where it used to be? At forks in the road she took one or the other, without thought. Her mind was beyond all decision-making. Her body had once more taken charge. North. The only word in her mind. A memory that the Coak plantation lay somewhere North. A woman sat on a stone where a house, a street perhaps, may once have been. Her hair was soaked. Her fine robe soiled and ripped. Face powder streaked.
“North?” asked Elspeth.
The woman wasn’t much older than her, but she looked like a hag. A ghost come to haunt her. Her hair a holy mess, clothing disarrayed, one shin and one breast exposed in accusation. Raped by the wind, degraded, a reflection of Elspeth’s conscience. The idea of “north” bemused her, and she turned and looked to her right, as if a faint memory of there once being something called north lay in that direction.
Discourse & Argument
A Disclosure On Captain R. Shaw
& the Path that led to his
Discoveries & Life’s Work
Only vainglorious old scunners – with as much of interest to say as a vomiting cur – log their tedious adventures & dreary thoughts. & only those partial to pukings adjudge them profundities. Amid the dross there are but a few Scientific & Progressive Men who have committed – reluctantly as I do now – the History of their Practice to paper.
Perhaps one day I will be granted a degree of leisureliness – surely my Successes will allow me that! – to supplement these first scribblings with greater detail. For the moment the barest facts will be here recorded.
There is a War going on in the heavens & until it is triumphed War will be waged on earth. ’Tis the only way of explaining the vile state of things. I have been a soldier in that War – & a Tactician in it. I am a Christian man – though religiosity in its present guise holds little attaction for me – & I know in my bowels that the Almighty has been in trouble for some decades & still is.
My Father & my Forefather recounted to me tales of our common Progenitor – the first Shaw in this land – of his valour & struggle for Justice. He was faithfull to his Celtic blood which is of the house of Gaul. The Gallic & the Celtic are close related as is proved. They are of the same Nation & therefore share the same circumstances & Nature. I have respect for their attributes but am sensible too to their Faults.
The Celtic is the most spiritual of all the Races. Churching & psalming can be a weakness in him – put the Celt in a tight spot & it’s as likely he’ll reach for his prayer book as for his blade. In the credit column we must concede that he will take up arms in defence of Good & Right & for the deliverance of his Soul. He is not so bellicose as his Saxon cousin who in matters Political is his Superior. Sometimes these natural allies have become confused in the Battlefield. Such was the case with my Forebear who fought one Tudor King in the cause of a Stewart one. A Jacobite he called himself – but became Loyal to the King of England upon his removal to this Land once the cause he fought for was lost. It was Kingship itself that mattered – that state being a reflection of the Heavenly Order.
But a black beginning – as my father was fond of saying & indeed was himself the proof – makes a black end. They sent that first Shaw to this land in Punishment in the year seventeen sixteen & degraded him to the rank of slave. Robert – as was his Christian name – was made the Property of a fellow Scotch man – a Lowlander more civilised than the Highlander – who blamed him for his stance in the old War but was sympathetic to his Nature. This Planter – Bell by name – ensured that Robert served only the minimum of his Indenture & manumitted him after the passage of five years. Thereupon he bestowed on Robert ten acres of his own land in the parish of St. Andrew & the largest of his slave houses. Robert Shaw – as is inborn in our family – worked industriously & kept lealty to his Patron & became a faithfull servant of the Colonial Yeomanry or Militia.
By the time of his son – my great-Grandfather Jamie – our family property had increased to twenty acres & by the time of my Grandfather – Robert again – we kept a gang of Negroes. Robert Shaw II was promoted to the Rank of Captain in the Militia. His family were yet poor & no blame in that. This second Robert Shaw bequeathed his rank & acreage to my own Father who was not such a canny fellow in matters of agriculture. I was brought into this world in the year seventeen ninety-seven – while we fought the French rebels in the New World & our Militia was redoubled in strength.
My Father was a misguided unchancy beast but I believe that at bottom he was a Good Man. I say this as someone all would agree was treated most unjustly by him. His name was James & he was loved by all acquainted with him. Such love was the root of his weakness for he came to thirst for the friendship & good word of others. He saw no wrong in any man or woman & was beloved by his own Niggers – many of whom he manumitted before they were ready for such responsibility. He even gave them parts of his land – causing altercation & argument throughout the Colony. At his demise he had decreased rather than amplified our family holdings.
Whereas my Father was always for smiles & banter & the tussling of my hair my mother was strict. I am of a blend of bloods. My mother was of Norman descendancy – a haughtier people entirely. She was a lover of the Law – but more prone to material consolation than my father. She was never much of a Church-goer but solemn & righteous. My father used to joke that she needed no Kirk as she was her own bishop & priest & congregation.
She was strict with me – understanding that the Child is the apprenticeship for the Man. In my Father’s company I mirthed & played more than was good for me but with her I remained stony of expression & conduct which earned me some compliments from her. As I grew up she despaired of me, detecting traits of my Father’s character. I played with any other boy & was a leader of them all whether Christian or slave or of colour. My mother was of the opinion that I should ensure they retained a respectfull distance as one day I was to lead them in more than childish games.
Her husband took to drinking his own bush rum which caused as much disharmony between he & my mother as did his taking of a mistress. It occurs to me now that she was relieved to be rid of his rude attentions. To be free of him can be the only reason she did not cause more of an uproar than she did over Nancy – his fancy woman & slave.
It was well known that many men used these lesser mortals to expunge their baser desires but few were so open about the matter as my reckless father. James freely courted the woman in society. & a great black buxom blunderbuss of a woman was Nancy! Favoured – I’ll grant – in the light of her eye & the whoop of her laugh & the shape of her succulent rear & paps even at nigh on forty. Before I learned of her unholy partnership with my father I had fair adored the besom. She turned the dreary house into a carnival & she japed & jested with me. So it is not her I blame for the calamity but James who preyed upon her guiltless inferiority. But his greatest sin – & one that smote me to the spirit – was yet to come.
He had a son of her. In one stroke he mixed blood that should not be mixed. He made an open harlot of poor Nancy & a rejected woman of my mother. & he cheated me of my ancestral rights. Had he sold the chile to a neighbour’s plantation – in the antique & accepted style – my mother & I would not have suffered as we did. But his need for the delusion of affection made him think he loved Nancy & her bastard son more than he did my mother or me.
This was the cause of my mother’s demise & the prompting of my own rowdiness. I had just joined the Militia – the bastard Negro boy arrived in my fourteenth year – & I took my duties seriously. Yet within a year or two I was finding consolation in the cup & the jug. My mother for her part rather than rankle of affrontery had the gumption to drop dead. She did it one morning with her usual competence & lack of fuss dressed in her Sunday best right in the room where her body would be laid out.
Thereafter I took delight more in drinking & carousing with my fellows & saw my imbibing as a means of watering my mother’s grave with ruefull tears. My Father could not complain of my Rudeness & Mischief as he himself was seldom sober in his advancing years.
He had come to be a critic of the Militia – fallen as he had into the sphere of influence of Nancy who it must be said was clever. Quoth he: “The Militia is nae more than the defender of the rich planters, Robbie.”
He had taken to addressing me in the Scotch style & using other words of that land – two generations removed from him – about the same time as he had taken up with Nancy. It was part of his deterioration under the black whore. He reminisced of his own father & the earlier Robert the Jacobite. He dreamed of “guddling trouts” in broad rivers & traipsing through gloaming with lassies. There’s no fool like an old fool, as my mother used to say and – though it shames me to scribe it – he wasted his talents on rum & injudicious talk & riding his Nancy like she were a thoroughbred mare.
As to his mistrust of the Aristocracy of this colony I shared his opinion in certain measure – they cared nothing for hardworking farmers & failed to discriminate between us & Negroes. “Your Yeomanry Robbie would spend its time better defending the people they were weaned with & not wasting their time guarding the fields of those who despise us.” He was deep impressed with the philosophie of the babbling French. “There is not a man jack of us who would be welcome at the table of a Combermere or a Bell though the latter be our ain kin.”
Ain kin! Never was a man so insensible to his “ain kin”! Had he not thrown over his own wife – as Christian & white as the Saviour’s robe – in favour of a heathen African woman? My Father’s newfound devotion to kinfolk was naught more than Romanticisation. As much as he employed words of the old country he prattled in the gibberish of the Dark Continent. Among his “guddling” & “Robbie” & his “muckles” & “pickles” he gaily spoke of “unna” which is the grunt Nancy used when she meant “you, sir” & he shouted out “Bashment!” & “Rassole!” so that no educated person could make head nor tail of him.
My Father misunderstood the Struggle of his day. The Nobility had for many years betrayed us – manumitting slaves & giving them more land than we had – thus devaluing our industry. We were squeezed from above & below & black fellows who had tasted the crack of the whip comported themselves & dressed as though they were our betters. In years to come I would understand how melancholy a sight it was to see an African dressed as a London dandy. My father could not comprehend my argument that an alliance with the poor dumb slave was a worser kind of moonshine than trusting in the Landowners.
I left my father’s house at the age of seventeen meaning to return to it only when he had passed away & the land was mine. To pay him his due he did not injure me more by delaying much in perishing – only six years after the loss of my mother – when I was at nineteen years of age. Tippling at a rumshop frequented by the basest of fellows he got himself into a Discussion & the knife of a yeoman ended up in his pickled breast.
But returning to our acres for his burial I was dealt an even greater blow – one that altered my life for ever. My Father – I learned – had not bequeathed our land to me – his only son – but to his African mongrel bastard. He had made a cock-laird out of the pickaninnie & a familial cuckold of me.
The news was delivered to me as bold as you like by none other than Nancy herself. & at the funeral of my own father! She had the effrontery to be in tears & to put her arm around my shoulder & thought herself gallant in telling me it was her intention to act as a parent towards me.
A parent – Nancy! She continued that – although the deeds to my property were now in her misceginated bastard boy’s hands – if I came home I could regard the house & acreage as mine own & even tell others that that was the case to absolve me from any shame. She declared that she was content to return to her old chattel-house & that the larger of the two domains would remain to all extents & outward view my own. Even now I have not the words to express the fury that enveloped me.
Naturally I did not let the matter rest there. I at once made my way to the great Plantation House of which my father was a tenant. The squire of that land – Mr. Yorke – had a great good deal of sympathy for my plight & felt certain that my legacy would be justly restored.
For many years there had raged a debate in our country as to how much land a Negro or man of colour – the ill-begotten results of farmers & their brainless concubines – could own – if any he could own at all – & to what degree he could protect that land. My Militia friends assured me that if Courts could not settle my case sensibly & that if Nancy & her bastard child should need to be killed, I should rely upon their help. But another Law had been passed that made the Killing of a Negro a crime.
Thus I had to place my trust in Mr. Yorke & the unscientific & sophistical ways of the Courts over the return of my propertie. Months – & eventually years – went by & I wasted time conferring with big-wigged & small-spirited solicitors & juriconsults who were satisfied that nothing could be done. A few scant acres of Irish Jacobite land – as English Magistrates in their wisdom perceived my inheritance – was of little interest. Moreover my unchancy father – it seemed – knew his jurisdiction better than he did his black strumpet’s cunt. (Perhaps if I am granted liberal retirement I will polish this text. For the moment I will write as my hand directs.)
I met the mulatto who was the offspring of my Father one night while walking out from a Militia meeting. It shocked me to see him – for he was like an hourglass come to life. That bawling suckling had grown legs & arms & – though he could not have been more than twelve years of age – a grinning insult to me & reminder of years wasted – he strutted & swore already as his kind are wont to do til the end of their days. As is the temperament of his Race he waited until my comrades had gone some way off before approaching in order to inform me that he refuted his mother’s promises & that I was not welcome in my own home nor ever again would be.
Nancy had informed me that should the Law find in my favour she would bow to it. Yet all the while she was slyly engaging solicitors of her own & of that kind who succumb to Wilberforce’s lunatic way of thinking. Her brat had heard that I had talked with some comrades of applying the Law directly & Hanging him as he Deserved. It seems he was not content with this arrangement & told me so all the while waggling a blade at me.
I had seen – at Mr. Barclays plantation – sensible & civilised castigations that corrected unacceptable behaviour - & could I have done so I would have proscribed & enacted one now. Lashings & starvations & incarcerations have their place but I was never a man – nor ne’er became one – who deals punishment greater than is required. Mr. Barclay employed one particular lenient penalty – a preferred approach in the prime years of mastership – that impressed me. Could I have enacted it now – stopped up the muck spouting from the cretins mouth & replaced it with muck of my own – could I have seized him & prised open his bulbous lips & shited in his throat as I had seen done to good effect – I would have done so. But that is a task for two or more men.
I had a rifle on my shoulder but it was not loaded. There was nothing I could do. I did not run. I turned my back on the mongrel popgun – no brother of mine – black as he was as the Earl o’ Hell.
For several days & nights I kept to my lodgings at Bridgetown, boiling in my own anger & shame, not even attending drill. Subsequently I was refused promotion to Captain though the title had run three generations in our family. I drank for various days & then ceased. Once the anger had gone a little out of me I read my Bible & some books & papers that had been loaned to me concerning the New Jerusalem. Amongst them was a tome of Scientific work by one Alexander Kinmont. A countryman of my ancestors, this great Philosopher understood the Biology of the races & it was a wonder to me to see in print many ideas of which I had experienced the reality.
In this new light I reconsidered my whole life – & saw that the land I had been cheated of was in any case worthless. Even if I were to spend the greater part of my time & mental energy on regaining what was mine it would never provide me with a satisfactory income – so degraded had it become under my Father’s rule. Nor could such a life meet my restless Nature & intelligence.
Land had been the undoing of our Pedigree – making those that had it greedy & those without it debased. Custodianship of crop is not the only way to serve the Lord. I became sensitive to the divisions in this Colony that others could not & still cannot see.
Reading the Book of Kinmont I mark as the Birth and Baptism of my own Great Work. I enlisted myself in the twin camps of Gods footsoldiers – no greater rank do I claim – & Human Science. My labours beckon me. There is little time for reflection & composing when there is so much of Importance & Urgency to be done. The lessons taught me by Mr. Barclay will have to wait for another night. As will the Revelation granted unto me by an unsuspecting lady. Poor flibbertigibbet! How could she possibly comprehend that she has been used as a vessel to convey a message from powers beyond her ken! From the moment I cast eyes on her – half dead half blind & crazed she was – I knew the girl to be marked out – & paid special Attention to her.