Twenty-three years after George was blown away in the Storm, Elspeth finally gazed on the chestnut-bright eyes and mild countenance of a newborn girl, and recognised at once the combined spirit of George Lisle and her own blithe, younger self. She couldn’t quite say why but perhaps because the rain was heavy that night and the wind powerful, because the child was one of the Miller clan who reminded Elspeth of her own sisters and father and aunts, she felt this child was going to be special to her. Or perhaps it was because the colours that night in her dreams – while Bathsheba was being born in a chattel-house – were especially intense and fast-moving. And then, in the morning, when she first saw her, she seemed to know her already. Bathsheba Miller she was christened, but it was Elspeth herself who gave her her pet name, the Rain Child.
The birth followed another great event, less than a year before, in 1853, the grand opening of Lord Coak’s magnificent Sugar Manufactory. It had been twenty-five years in planning, taken fifteen years to build and four more to achieve its full, astonishing, potential. Of the most modern design, it produced an extra ton of semi-processed sugar per acre than any Barbadian plantation had managed before. It recovered three-quarters more sucrose and muscovado, and a higher grade of massecuite. It could single crush, double crush, and triple dilute if necessary. Whatever the market demanded. The whole process was overseen by Gideón Brazos, under Mr. Shaw’s authority.
Brazos was brought from Cuba, procured together with the machinery design. He was a Spanish-speaking quadroon – neither of which circumstances was agreeable to Captain Shaw. Quadroons were confused and above themselves, and the Spanish language brought elements of Popery and slothfulness. Brazos showed signs of having Hausa blood, an arrogant tribe. The planter assured his factor that Brazos was a slave from a country which still respected the old traditions, and would be transferred to Barbados on the basis of indenture. They needed someone who knew how to run a refinery, who understood the modern techniques so novel to Lord Coak and Captain Shaw. To Gideón Brazos, such crafts were as familiar as the palms of his cinnamon hands.
They also bought a woman in Cuba to be his mate. Shaw instructed Coak how to choose such a companion with care, sending him detailed notes on physical and mental signs to look out for, and questions to ask owners concerning the women’s personal history and records. Coak finally selected Golondrina Segunda, a woman in her settled mid-thirties, of reasonably pure Whydah blood. Nearly a decade older than Brazos, a mother already and therefore schooled in the ways of the world. It was decided not to have her accompanied by her issue as they would take up too much of her time, and interfere with her relationship with Brazos.
Since the launch of the factory Elspeth’s nights had been disturbed by sudden releases of hissing steam, the distant trundle of carts in the morning, men shouting in English and Spanish, women in Scots. Her days were rearranged to suit the new production. Mealtimes were shorter, concerts truncated or cancelled, and the house during all daylight hours, it seemed, emptied of people. The silence was made all the more intense by the clatter and rumble echoing down the driveway.
The factory brought a renewed sense of industry and increased prosperity to Roseneythe. The pistons pumped away from early in the morning till late at night, eating up wood at a tremendous rate. Carts and drays hauled trunks of trees up the driveway. Coak and Shaw saw to it that all the supplies needed to feed the monster were furnished by the estate itself – Coak’s lands bordering a gully thickly wooded with mahogany, fig and jacaranda trees, and what was left of the old Scots birches – freeing Roseneythe almost completely from dependency on the rest of the island. Only the shippers’ agents arrived at the gates in the mornings after harvest to transport product to the ports around Bridgetown.
In the time of the factory, Elspeth had less to do while everybody else worked doubly hard. Mary and Diana still referred to her in matters of import, but were adept now at running the big house and the women’s lives by themselves. The extra labour created by adding sugar refining to the estate’s interests meant that, for a while, the workforce was at full complement. Lord Coak would not hear of his wife taking anything to do with the dusty and dangerous operations that went on in the new building, positioned at the other side of the driveway from the house, near to the estate gates. Lady Elspeth only ever saw the decayed interior of the factory many years after its closure.
The Rain Chile’s maturing coincided with the time of the factory. Born when her mother – Nan, the robust but unruly daughter of Mary Miller – was yet to reach sixteen, Bathsheba was prematurely condemned while still in the womb. However, the combined circumstances of the new factory, the clean smir on the night of her birth, and the girl’s own delicate beauty, obliterated all previous omens. Nan was accepted back into the community and her daughter quickly became a favourite.
The rain that night fell golden from the evening sky: cold, sparkling drops the colour of fine tawny rum. The great storm had blown everything that Elspeth Baillie had loved – George, the Lyric, her career, her home in Garrison – up into the heavens, where for twenty-three years they had tumbled and spun. Now, in 1854, her hopes and dreams could be glimpsed again in the bright brown eyes of this girl, and heard in the chime of her laugh. Bathsheba was Nan’s, conceived of an unknown father, but she was also Elspeth’s and George’s, a girl who would become, under her ladyship’s care, a true grand blanc. The rain-child who would lead them all home, restore the natural hierarchy of things, dropped as silkily from Nan’s womb as the rain shower fell from the cloudless sky. A slippery, cold wet child that Diana, who assisted at the delivery, declared was utterly without blemish. Even the afterbirth poured clear and fresh and colourless.
That her father was unidentified was not a cause of much disquiet: Bathsheba was hardly alone in the circumstance and, anyway, no one ledgered fathers anymore. Diana baptised the girl in the traditional way, and spread the word of her exceptional fairness. From the day after her birth everyone helped to protect their girl from the prying eye of the sun. Nan and Diana swaddled her as a babe, then later, dressed her in the lightest of fabrics. Linen, cotton, taffeta. Materials unfamiliar to their own skins, but brought by Lord Coak for his wife from Europe – silk of the finest denier, satin adapted from Elspeth’s old costumes. Diana cared for the child as if she were her own. For years after the stillbirth of her own bairn, Diana Moore had lived like a slave-woman: doing all that was expected of her, but joylessly, as one goes about a compulsory task, disinterested. Her deep faith and the kindness and loyalty of Robert Butcher helped her recovery, but it was Bathsheba who returned her to her old, bustling self. The girl had the innate capacity of turning all around her into surrogate mothers, brothers, sisters. Nan was delighted to share her child. The grandmother, Mary, took special care of her darling; Sarah Alexander sang to her and Sarah Fairweather told stories; Bessy Riddoch taught her tricks, Mary Riach helped with numbers. Elspeth’s life changed, nurturing her towards her future vocation. Even Lord Coak took a shine to the lass.
His lordship had shipped a piano from Germany some six years earlier to enhance the evening concerts. It was a beautiful if fantastic-looking contraption, so solid and heavy it took six men, taking shifts over an entire afternoon, to haul it from the porch to the hall. Made of mahogany with rosewood inlay and intricate scrollwork, no one had ever seen such an instrument before. Those who had seen any kind of piano expected it to be as long and flat as a dining table with keys attached. But this creature was twice as tall as it was long and, despite its weight, shorn off abruptly at the back.
“It’s an Upright,” Coak informed them. “Listen to the sound it makes.”
Elspeth, who had learned to play concertina on stage as a child, tried it out. It was as loud and metallic-sounding as the factory, making the window casements rattle and bringing people in from fields a quarter of a mile away. Albert had also brought tuition books for her to learn and, while the rest of the community were cutting cane or crushing it in the factory, she worked hard at her lessons – with the sole intention of teaching young Bathsheba. The girl began to learn when she was only five, her small fingers and nervousness at such a massive machine coaxing a sweeter sound out of it than anyone else had managed.
“Look!” cried Elspeth one day, bringing Albert in to hear the girl after only a few months of preparation. “My father would’ve called her a musicker!”
Albert smiled and patted Bathsheba’s brown, tousled hair. “She’s no Mozart, let us not be overly indulgent. But she does produce a warmth in her simple melodies.”
Elspeth and Bathsheba would spend an hour most evenings, sitting side by side on two dining chairs, making up chords and sequences for which they had no name. They soon gave up on the tuition books and devised their own way of making the upright sing, the little girl sometimes laughing and getting whole runs of notes to sound right, sometimes tiring, refusing to play, or making an incoherent mess of a tune. The woman sat patiently with her, learning alongside her, varying her education by reading her Melville’s Moby Dick which had entranced Elspeth herself, Captain Ahab a wild admixture of herself and, bizarrely, Shaw. Albert and Diana warned her that the child was too young for such fictions, but Elspeth read it to the end, though often Bathsheba slept through half the narration. Then she would lift the child to the door, calling on Nan or Mary to take her home.
Albert was Elspeth’s only calendar during that happy epoch. She had grown used to the cycle of rainy months and long periods of dry heat, within them the pauses for celebrations. The old celebrations of Christmas and Easter merited nothing more than an extra prayer at mealtimes and a bigger jug of rum and mauby; in their stead came the monthly concerts and birthday parties for Albert, and now for Bathsheba. The triple harvests wheeled around her and, like smaller cogs in a perpetual machine, the regular production of refined sugar products, and their weekly delivery to Carlisle Bay. Albert’s gradual weakening went barely noticed, shoulders hunching and legs stiffening. His paunch never diminished or expanded, but fell more flaccidly lower on his frame. His hair had thinned, but its colour changed so little, from damp to dry sand. Only his face marked the passing of time. Like an antique looking glass it whitened and dimmed, the reflection from it growing duller. Like the sun at the end of a long afternoon that seems to retreat from the world. She would look round at him when he spoke and, every once in a while, become aware they were both ageing.
On Bathsheba’s fifth birthday, he was sixty-three years old. On her tenth, in 1864, sixty-eight. No birthday was ever celebrated for Elspeth, only each tenth anniversary of her arrival. Her parents had never observed her birthdays, presumably because they were in transit or on stage anywhere between Dundee and Ayr. She could only roughly work out her own years. Twenty fewer than Albert. Or perhaps less. Before Bathsheba came, she was in too much of a lacuna, a chasm in time, for age to mean anything. The Scots women seemed to age more rapidly than her: contemporaries became like aunts, nieces like sisters, and then suddenly they were middle-aged, while Elspeth remained less touched – ignored – by time. After Bathsheba, she was too busy to bother with counting. Forty-five-ish passed. Then fiftyish.
Not only Albert’s face grew dimmer, but his presence. He travelled less and less, yet was less and less noticed in residence. Captain Shaw, with his lordship always at the ready, hidden away in his office, or near enough in town, seemed more substantial. A midway point between Albert and Elspeth, he was one of those men who got stronger, thicker, more gnarled with age. Handsomer, even, Bess and Susan said. Albert drifted into the background, his energies conducted into the firmament of the factor.
Before she was quite twelve, Diana had begun utilising Bathsheba Miller’s abilities in the schoolroom, as an assistant teacher. Equally, the lass was proficient in the kitchen of the big house, and a good worker in the fields and the factory. The women fretted for her health – her slight build and delicate fair skin were not designed to thole the heat and work. So Nan sewed her garments – high collars, low hems and long-sleeved – so tight that not even the heated air could reach her body, let alone the burn of the sun. Despite the girl’s leanness, by the time she was fourteen proper she was tall and strong, and sang all day in the fields to her workmates, still cutting and gathering at a rate commended by Captain Shaw himself.
She learned all the tales from the old country that her aunts could remember. She mastered the accounts of hoodies and selkies and the one about the daughters of the sky who returned to their father in his silver palace of cloud. She knew bits and pieces of stories such as the Island of Women and the House of Lir. She sang songs – Want One Shilling and Jock o’ Hazeldean – and learned every line of the Lady of the Lake, as taught to her by Elspeth Baillie herself.
Bathsheba stretched and grew until she was as tall and narrow as caneshoot, as brilliant in hue as honey. Her nut-brown hair grew long and thickly. Shaw remarked that she had classic Celtic features. Coak concurred: acorn eyes, skin pale as Rivine daughter of Conor, hazel hair like Loch Morar at dusk. They named her Bathsheba for the town that most had only heard tell of, several miles down the rugged east coast, where dark waves break in dazzling torrents on a slender ribbon of sand. Diana spent extra time on her reading, Bathsheba having shown a lively intelligence from an early age. She liked to draw, and did so with a neat and accurate hand. Lady Elspeth trained her in the ways of the theatre, and the middle-aged lady even began to dream again of the stages of Bridgetown. Perhaps a girl of Baillie family training would yet play to the gentry of the New World.
“Nurse, where’s my daughter? Call her forth to me.” Elspeth and Mary Fairweather’s daughter, Sarah, a nimble and artistic-enough woman in her twenties, would dress in as appropriate costumes as they could muster from the chest of guises in Elspeth’s room. Bathsheba would lurk in the kitchen, by the door, waiting to be called.
“Juliet!” cried Sarah, in the role of Nurse. Bathsheba would come running in – always too quickly. If she faulted in any way, Elspeth continuously reminded her, it was in overenthusiasm. A little delay in entering tantalised an audience.
“How now, who calls?”
“Your mother.”
Bathsheba would curtsy formally then, although Mr. Shakespeare did not in fact stipulate it, and take hold of Elspeth’s hand. Dressed from throat to ankle in soft, creamy muslin, the girl looked like a cloth dolly. Her hands, head and feet popped out of tightly sewed seams and cuffs, her brown hair all the darker for the contrast.
“Madam I am here. What is your will?”
“Nurse, give leave awhile,
We must talk in secret.”
Sarah took her turn behind the kitchen door, Bathsheba and Elspeth moving slowly around each other as the maestra taught and the pupil learned. When the Nurse needed to be called to enter again, Sarah was directed simply to open the door and talk from there.
“Thou knowest my daughter’s of a pretty age.”
“I can tell her age unto an hour.”
“She’s not fourteen.”
The trio had been rehearsing the scenes since Bathsheba was nine. By the time her fourteenth year was in sight – a magical eternity and the blink of an eye – the prentice, as Nan cried her, was much improved.
“’Tis since the earthquake now eleven years;
And she was wean’d – I never shall forget it –
Of all the days of the year, upon that day:”
Although the little scholar’s movements were graceful enough, she made too many of them, not quite losing Bathsheba and not quite finding Juliet. She would stroke the piano, mid-scene, or lift up a candlestick, as though she were whiling away an hour of playtime. Elspeth, with only a look, checked her, and her full attention would return to the task in hand.
“Tell me, daughter Juliet,
How stands your disposition to be married?”
“It is an honour that I dream not of.”
Elspeth had sworn to herself, since their very first sessions when the lass was no more than four years old, that she would never teach the way her mother had taught her. She would feel none of the jealousy of the older actress towards the promising debutant; would not be a Mrs. Bartleby to this fresh new talent. Rather, she would wonder at and conspire with the girl’s growing confidence and expertise. She would encourage daring, applaud inventiveness, push for the girl to take up the whole stage, the entire attention of her public. If anything, Bathsheba was too demure: either not aware enough of the eyes upon her when she sang or recited in front of the whole community, or else embarrassed by their stares. She was still young – the urge to play and display for the world would come yet.
Sarah, never a virtuoso herself, but solid, sure of her lines and moves, made a good third participant in many songs, scenes and little home-written comedy sketches. Her hair was not as brilliant orange as her mother’s – a subtler colour of pale stone, the result of a mixture with her English-born father’s fairness, nor was her face as unattractive. She spoke out strongly, and her features, if not remarkable, were pleasing enough in front of the sparkling backcloth.
“A man, young lady! Lady, such a man
As all the world – why he’s a man of wax.”