Bathsheba Miller, the Rain Chile, had loved Gideón Brazos for as long as she could remember. There was always something special about him. The colour of his skin – the same colour as the weak babies that Diana said died of jaundice or yellow fever. She had noticed it when she was very little. Like cane-leaf, or the bark of the birches Mama used to take her walking to, before most of them were fed into the crushing machines. It made more of an impression on her than the gleaming black of Gola’s face. There were plenty of black-skinned people around – working in the fields, passing through to collect the massecuite and crushed cane, out in the roads when mama or grannie took her strolling. She used to worry, when she learned about the yellow-skinned babies, that Gideón might suddenly die too.
Her chattel-house was the last one in the huddle of shacks, closest to the factory. The Millers were Gideón and Gola’s nearest neighbours, and she used to play with their little girl, Roseta, though sometimes big people and other girls told her off for it. When her mother and grandmother were working, she helped out up at the factory. Gola had made her a brush out of sticks, a little replica of the one she used herself, and Bathsheba would sweep happily alongside her. Gideón let her roam safe parts of the factory. Especially when it was too hot outside to play. She could come in and make dolls out of broken pieces of cane, or play at sword-fighting with one of his sons. Gola brought them jugs of home-made mauby, or lemonade of her own concoction, flavoured with pineapples or mangoes she took from the diminishing forest behind her home. There was always plenty of sugar. From time to time they even fed the little girl along with their own. They never told her not to tell anyone, but she knew somehow it was better not to.
Mister Gideón was gentle and tolerant with all the children. With them, he smiled a lot and played, though with older people he looked serious and fell quiet. When she was about ten, Bathsheba started working in his factory. Simple tasks, undertaken alongside Roseta and the boys, and Sarah and Junior and her cousins – bringing water to the adults, or ale, or mauby. Clearing up messes. Carting little bundles out to the repository where the carters from the port used to arrive every morning to take away the previous day’s work. Or taking rubbish to the dump. Sweeping she had become expert at.
Bathsheba liked her world. She liked helping in the fields, working alongside mama and grannie and all the women who were kind to her, and made her laugh. She liked Lady Elspeth coaxing tunes out of her big booming piano, and learning all those lines – none of which she understood, but they sounded big and important and she could shout them out. Diana was nice, too, and Bathsheba knew she was good with numbers and words, remembering a lot from the ones Elspeth made her read. But most of all, she liked being with Gideón and Gola.
Then came her accident, and her world changed. Not because of her hair. She knew it was different the moment it began growing in, but she thought little of it. She had no memory of getting caught up in the pistons. She had been cleaning a machine – she loved polishing the sleek metal, either shiny bright or strong and black – and then she was in a bed in the big house, feeling sore and sad.
Her world changed further because Gideón and Gola had saved her, but no one wanted them to. She realised there were divisions in her little world. Some people wouldn’t talk to others, and they got annoyed if she did. Not Nan or Mary – nobody in her own family. But even Diana got nervous when Gola tried to look after her. And some of the men and boys, like Junior who had been her friend, became angry.
By the time her wounds had healed and her hair had grown in differently, her world changed yet again. She realised she loved Gideón in a different way. Or rather, the old Mr. Gideón had gone, and a new one had taken his place. This one, she suddenly saw, was younger than the previous one, the Gideón she’d known since infancy. Much younger she realised than his own wife, Gola. Bathsheba had been frightened when she was ill and, much as Diana and her sisters and Nan had tried, only Golondrina Segunda made her feel safe; made her believe she would get better. She loved the feel of the woman’s strong fingers – black on the back and pink on her palms, like a pair of salmon darting in and out of the water-shadows of her hair. But it was Gideón who coloured her world a protective amber. His voice had the myrrh of Diana’s Bible readings in it – an elixitive balm; his amethyst eyes spoke of the hope she needed.
She listened to him talking to Golondrina, fascinated by the spiky phrasing of his Spanish, the breeziness of his Cuban words. She learned phrases they repeated over and over between them. “No importa.” “Te cuido yo.” “Amiga.” Later she learned what they meant: “Don’t worry.” “I will look after you.” “My friend.” Bathsheba thought it nice that husband and wife should call each other friends. But she felt little pangs of anger, too.
“You have jealousy, niña?” Gola laughed, and Bathsheba turned away to hide her rising colour and her irritation.
Just before the accident, she started her bleeding – later than all her friends. She had always been encased in gowns and shifts that covered everything but her hands and feet and face, because of her special condition. Diana had warned her not to loosen her robe even when Golondrina was putting the oils on her scalp. But Gola loosened it anyway. Maybe her condition wasn’t as bad as Diana and her mama and grannie thought, for Gola said nothing But, even swaddled like that, her new woman’s body must have been obvious to all. Gola spoke about it directly.
“Your tetties growing good, chile,” she’d say, and even pat them. She also spotted how Bathsheba looked at Gideón. “He’s guapo, you think?” She knew what guapo meant, for they often called her guapa when she was in a clean shift.
“I don’t know!”
“Course you do, chile!”
Then one day, not long before the big concert, Golondrina sat down with her on the sand in the cove.
“Gideón is my brother.”
“He’s your husband. How can a husband be a brother?”
Gola laughed loud, little squeals drifting out over the ocean. “He not a brother in that way. Nor neither a husband.”
She explained how both of them had been bought in Cuba where slavery was still legal. How she had her own husband back there, but was taken away from him and given to Gideón Brazos. Bathsheba sat in silence.
“Gideón is a good man. I like him right from start, and he like me too. We made our babies and they all fine, fine. But we do not belong here. And we do not belong for each other.”
“Why don’t you leave?”
“I got my chillen.”
“Take them with you.”
“To where, chile? No money to get to Cuba. Don’t want stay anywhere else in B’ados. Here is good enough. But, ay, I want to see my husban’, my proper husban’, and the chillen they take me away from, one time before I die.”
“When will you go?”
“Never. Probably never.”
“Why doesn’t Gideón leave? Get a job somewhere. Make money to take you all home? They want him to leave. I’ve heard people say so. Junior and his father and Bessy and even the Captain.”
“He can’t go.”
“Why not? Because of you and Roseta and the boys?”
“Partly, sí. But more, because of you.”
“Me?”
“He love you, chile!” she laughed. “He always love you. He love his own chillen better. But he love you in a differen’ way. More and more.”
Bathsheba got up and ran as fast as she could along the beach, towards the rock stairs, stumbling up them, while Golondrina Segunda sat on the sand, still laughing.
Later, in their cabin, the younger boys in bed, Roseta eating with the Edmondsons, Bathsheba shared Gideón and Gola’s eggs and coocoo mash.
“You take him, el cabrón,” Golondrina said when Gideón hugged her. “He too young for me. Wear the hell out o’ me. I got to save somethin’ for my husband.”
Gideón was more shocked than Bathsheba. His cinnemon skin turned dark as though cooked from the inside out. He looked at his wife, astonished. “Cállate, santa. Que está la niña.”
Bathsheba understood: he was angry because Gola had raised the subject when Bathsheba was present. But it broke the dam that had separated them. Looking at Gola, the girl saw a kind of love she never knew existed. Not between a man and his woman. She had grown up amongst many strange families. Children of one woman and two, even three, fathers. One wife and two husbands – but that always led to ructions, and she agreed with Diana who fretted about such arrangements. Even if Golondrina and Gideón had been thrown together against their will, to happily push her husband towards another woman, a girl, was outlandish. Yet still the Cuban wife looked at her husband with deep affection. Gideón, when Gola found a reason to leave him alone with Bathsheba, tried to explain.
“She has been good to me. But every night, every minute, she miss her proper man. She love our chillen plenty, but think all the time of how her other chillen are now. Every night, when she is with me – she tell me, fair and honest – that she think of him.”
From that night on, Bathsheba, saying she was practising the Lady of the Lake, went out walking with Gideón Brazos.
They loved each other. But they would not make love. Lying down together, despite all of Diana’s efforts, was commonplace in Roseneythe. All her friends had done so already. Some had babies at fifteen. Some were married over a year – and some already sundered. But Gideón told her he would not touch her until she was of a suitable age and they had been properly wed – though that was unthinkable.
He was infuriated by being thrown together with women chosen for him by masters and owners, and he swore to Bathsheba that one day he would marry her as a properly respected man should. Bathsheba, with the hot-headedness of youth, had wanted to tell the whole world of their love, and let those who despised them be damned. Gideón argued that could only cause torment for them both, and for others. At best, they would be banished from Roseneythe. She would have to leave her mother and grandmother and all her friends. He would have to abandon Golondrina, and he had sworn that he would leave this place together with Gola and their children.
The Cuban took great risks stealing away from his shack to meet the Rain Chile, Roseneythe’s chosen girl, each of them taking different routes through thick copses of fig, palm and jacarandas, meeting in a secluded glade behind the old birch trees whose pale trunks looked like the skin of lovers entwined. From there they walked together, skipping through sea-grape bushes and ginger-lilies, stepping over silver-silk agave, always talking, discovering more about each other, sometimes arguing. She was shocked by her mild lover’s undisguised hatred of Shaw, of Coak and the whole Estate. She argued that her mother and the women and their children were not his enemies. As they talked, they slipped together unseen through lianas and scuttled down gullies. When they reached the shore they walked along the sand, safely hidden on the other side of the little islet. Climbing up again, then descending onto the cove, they made their farewells in the cave at the back of the beach.
He introduced new thoughts to her head, questions she had never asked herself. Why was it that the most wretched of men from all over the island were attracted to set up house under Coak’s and Shaw’s regime? What was it that drew them to Roseneythe? Why did the women feel it impossible to leave, either to return home or seek employment elsewhere in the colonies? Bathsheba contended it was simply because they had made their home here. Gideon countered that they were not free to leave – they owed Lord Coak and his factor debts they would never be able to repay. The system of paying less than you loaned for food and shelter had a name in his land. Enganche: the “hook” from which a person could never release himself. He looked out to sea and spoke of the children who were said to be cast out there at Shaw and Diana’s whim: a subject about which Bathsheba’s thoughts were too entangled for her to respond.
At the heart of the lovers’ variance were the twin figures of Lady Elspeth and Diana Moore, and Bathsheba could not get her feelings to correspond with his. He recognised that both were sympathetic women, each capable at times of kindnesses and possessing a certain kind of loyalty. A compliance that they profited by. “Who am I to condemn them?” he said, sitting in the cave, looking out at the sun. “I am as weak as they.”
On their last walk together before the grand concert, they talked avidly and more urgently than ever coming down through the gully to the shore, along towards their cave. Gideón was worried: Bathsheba was being reckless all of a sudden. In the things she was saying, proposing to him. The concert and the rehearsal were aggravating her, but he was worried, too, that he was to blame for this new impulsiveness.
“We’re not ready yet, Ba’sheba. Las cosas are not at their height.”
He spoke in a mix of Spanish and English and phrases of Golondrina’s translated from the African. Bathsheba followed him in language as she had tried to in everything else.
“What height, amor?”
For months they had been planning their escape. They would steal a boat. Better still, they would commandeer one. The best to be found in Carlisle Bay: they’d creep up in the night, storm it – an army of them! All the Millers and the Fairweather girls and Alexanders, the Edmondsons, Gideón’s boys and Roseta, old blind Mary. They’d overpower the crew and set sail for an island where only gentle natives lived.
More seriously, they would find help in Bridgetown. A lawman to win back her mother’s and aunts’ earnings. They could present themselves at the Colonial Governor’s palace, make their case. Or, like the runaways of legend, lose themselves in a hidden glen. Now, before the recital for Lord Coak, they had to take real decisions, make proper plans.
“Ahora no! Too early. You must refuse.”
She was tired arguing. Not only with him, but with mama and grannie and – fretting more than either of them – Diana Moore. She couldn’t think more today. She got up from the floor of the cave where they had been sitting close together in the dark. Water dropped on her from the cave’s ceiling, making her shiver and revealing the pattern of her skin through her wet gown. She took the gown off, the evening sun crouching down to spy inside their secret grotto. Until now, Gideón had always remained seated, marvelling at the beauty of her body, but resisting touching her while she was naked. Now he reached up for her, and brought her to him.
Her lovemaking was urgent and though he tried to slow her down, all the desire for her that he had kept violently in check for so long came flooding out. When they broke apart, glistening, struck dumb, the sun had still not set. They sat against the hard rock, momentarily robbed of their senses, as if God had given them one transcendent moment, then confiscated their powers of speech, hearing and reason. To each the entire world was filled only with the other. When their hearing returned it was the breathing of the other they heard; when their vision became unblurred it contained nothing but each other’s nakedness. They tried to speak but couldn’t find words. Only a new ache between her legs, and the sweat cooling on her skin brought Bathsheba round.
“What about your promises of marriage?”
He shrugged sleepily and smiled, “I told you. I’m weak.”
Shaw would be looking for Brazos, and Lady Elspeth would be sending out for Bathsheba. They had no choice but to return to the problem they had still not solved. The rehearsal for the grand concert would take place the following night and Bathsheba still insisted on doing whatever was asked of her; Gideón tried again to dissuade her.
“What can I do? Hide?”
“You were right, before. We go now. Find fishermen along the east coast to help us.”
“No, Gideón. You were right. What about my mother? Gola? Your children?”
Their discussions had gone round and round like this for days, getting them nowhere. Bathsheba got up and sighed, stepped out of the cave, cooling the heat of the evening by stepping into it. Gideón brought out her gown and cowl, to cover up that beautiful, mutinous body. They shared a last kiss under the capitulating sun. So rapt were they by the salt and tang of each others’ lips they didn’t see the children in the trees, spying on them. Not staring at the preposterousness of the naked Bathsheba, not scandalised or afraid of her, but giggling at the lovers’ embrace.
They felt the eyes on them, and broke their kiss. Gideón flinched, ready to run for cover. But Bathsheba held him tight. A girl – one of the Glovers – stepped out, then another girl, next a boy, then one of Bess’s grandsons. The children stood and stared until finally the smallest of them smiled. Gideón smiled too, even though this display must mean the end of all their plans. The children stood on the sands, sniggering at the woman’s nakedness, and at their cove being blessed by something as ordinary as a kiss.
Elspeth watched Bathsheba return from the cove. She had looked out for her pupil most days, since she’d taken to practising out in the grounds. She had even tried to follow her, hoping to surprise her, on the far side of the hill, or down on the beach. Hold her in her arms, the way she used to when Bathsheba was small, and tell her she was her own daughter. Now Elspeth noticed something different in her gait. Worry, perhaps, at the concert ahead. She remembered how, when George wasn’t with her, she herself used to wander the Overtons’ gardens at Savannah, imagining her big day, forgetting even the first lines of her recital, panicking, and calming herself, over and over.
Bathsheba was too locked up in herself. It was obvious from the way her head hung down, her feet trailed, how she nervously wrung her fingers. It was a defect in her performances too. Not only in front of an audience, but rehearsing, or in the schoolroom with Diana – a part of her was always held back. Experience would teach her to open up – Elspeth was sure of it. She tried to tell her the wonder of it – the exhilaration an actress feels when her very soul is laid bare before the public. How it cleansed you, cleared away the clutter of the mind, leaving only the role, the words, your presence.
“No one here can understand, Bathsheba,” she spoke out loud to herself, watching the girl stumbling in the dark towards the porch below, going in to help prepare dinner. “But you will.” You will feel alive. Feel the blood in your veins, your urgent heart. Like a wild beast who has no use for thoughts. Just simply being. There, in front of people, who might as well be all the people on earth. Every hair on your head, every eyelash, each tiny movement of your wrists, legs, lips witnessed, recorded, remembered. The rest of your life you’re sleeping; the world hides behind a muslin drape. Then the curtain opens and, suddenly, completely, inescapably, you’re alive.
The night before the concert, the big house was in an uproar of preparation. In the kitchen, Susan Millar and Bessy Riddoch tippled as they worked alongside Moira Campbell, Mary Riach, several daughters and two granddaughters. Young men and girls put the large hall in order and set the room up for the concert. The strongest men, under Elspeth’s supervision, hung the old heavy cloth at the back of the room.
At eight o’clock the men left the house, as they had done every year, to drink together outside, so that Lady Elspeth could show the women the dress she was intending to wear. She was no longer as tall and slim as she once had been, but everyone agreed she could still carry herself. She had not grown in girth like most of the other older women. Bess and Mary Miller and Martha and the Marys had swollen in the sun like breadfruit swells on the branch. Elspeth, rather, had diminished a little.
This year there were two new costumes on show: Elspeth’s and Bathsheba’s. Lord Coak had offered to order Bathsheba a new dress, but Elspeth preferred to gift the young debutante an old but never-worn dress she had intended to wear on her first night at the Lyric. A present from George Lisle, it had lain untouched in its original box ever since. Nan and Diana nipped and tucked and remodelled the material – so fine it was apt to tear at the approach of a needle – until it fitted the contours of a woman of an entirely different shape: Bathsheba, taller than even the young Elspeth, less buxom but sturdier at the hips and broader in the shoulder.
This was to be the largest gathering of Roseneythians in their history, invitations being extended to day-labourers, ex- workers, children, and one or two factor friends of Shaw’s from neighbouring lands. They would number over two hundred, itself cause for celebration, even if they had not increased quite as much as Captain Shaw had predicted. Second and third generation Rosies were everywhere to be seen – cooking, hammering, lugging furniture, hanging the old cloth.
It was traditional that, after the house had been prepared for the following evening and Lady Elspeth had displayed her costume, a round of mauby with rum was set up for the women. Elspeth would join them all for a glass, every year finding new ways of toasting the women and girls from the hoard of poems and dramatic lines she knew:
“Here’s to the maid with a bosom of snow,
Now to her that’s as brown as a berry;
Here’s to the wife with a face full of woe;
And now to the damsel that’s merry!”
Or, with a mischievous grin and a wink: “To a penniless lass wi’ a lang pedigree!”
She would then retire to join Albert upstairs. This year, however, as their drinks were being poured and Elspeth raised her cup, every mind was more concerned at how Bathsheba’s first rehearsal would be conducted.
Half past eight o’clock came and went without the girl appearing in the house. As darkness grew, however, and just before the clock in the hallway struck nine, Bathsheba stepped in. She was not wearing Elspeth’s dress, but one of her daily work-gowns. She looked simple and clean and fresh; had washed and tied up her hair, the curls kept in place by a splinter of polished driftwood, the sweet smell of cochineal and frangipani around her. She wore earrings and a necklace, gifted her by Elspeth, and bangles made by Golondrina Segunda from cherry stones and petals of dried hibiscus.
She curtsied to Elspeth, but all those present could feel the older woman’s disappointment. Why had the girl not worn the dress? Quickly, the guests slipped away, keeping their silence till they were outside the house, where their rumours and theories immediately thickened the blackening night. Diana and Nan left, too – Diana to her chattel-house, Nan to her room below the kitchen – both of them fearful but unable to affect any longer the outcome of the night. Elspeth left behind them, having given Bathsheba a cup of lemonade.
“Finish your drink, my dear. Come when you’re ready.”
“I’ll be there shortly.”
Bathsheba remained sitting for a moment, saying her lines quietly to herself before giving herself up for final examination.
While they waited for her to arrive, Albert patted his bed, inviting Elspeth to sit near him. He took her hand, and, though his fingers were dry and crooked, she took pleasure in the fatherly warmth of his weakened grip. He told her that, no matter how proficient this young lass might be in her presentation, no one could ever match the depth and beauty of her own.
“It will sound sweeter on a young woman’s lips.”
“It will have nothing of the depth. Your art has matured and improved every day of your life, my dear.” He sighed, “It’ll be like starting all over again – and with nothing like the same certainty of outcome.”
Elspeth smiled and kissed his forehead, hearing Bathsheba’s footstep in the hall below. He tightened his grasp and asked if Elspeth would be so kind, after the child had finished her attempt, to repeat the ballad for him, alone.
Bathsheba bounded up the stairs, a surprising heaviness in the stride of such a young person. Her knock was gentler and Elspeth called out for her to enter. The older woman was still puzzled that Bathsheba had elected to wear a plain gown instead of the costume that had such symbolic value. The deep pang of rejection she had felt on first seeing her downstairs had subsided a little now, but in its place came an uneasy feeling that Bathsheba’s decision had some mysterious implication of its own. Bathsheba closed the door behind her, curtsied, looking a little flushed despite Golondrina’s cosmetic skill, her eyes betraying a childish excitement. Albert asked after her health and Bathsheba replied she was well. He inquired if she was apprehensive about tomorrow’s performance.
“Maybe a little nervous, yes.”
Elspeth plumped up Albert’s pillows, then sat in her seat by the window. The old man signalled for the girl to begin. Bathsheba looked lost for a moment, as though the first lines of the long poem had already escaped her memory. Then she stepped back from the bedstead, raised her right arm, and recited in a strong if shaky voice.
“Harp of the North! that mouldering long hast hung
On the witch-elm that shades Saint Philip’s spring…”
Elspeth, with a wave of her hand, stopped her before she had scarcely begun.
“Saint Fillan, not Saint Philip, Bathsheba. You know that.”
The old man in bed explained that the poet sir Walter Scott was referring to was a Celtic missionary who had converted Scotland to Christianity. St. Philip, on the other hand, is a parish of Barbados. Bathsheba apologised for the fault, but Elspeth remained worried by it – it seemed too simple a mistake, and committed so early in the poem. She wondered if Bathsheba, though seeming contrite, had not intended some deep suggestion by it.
The girl continued, her intonation clear and her delivery so strong and sweet that Elspeth couldn’t criticise her. Yet she was aware of wanting to find fault. Bathsheba had learned the entire poem but selected different verses from those traditionally chosen by Elspeth, and she had found her own rhythm and accent, quite contrary to the way she had been taught. In all this Elspeth thought she detected artfulness – hidden messages in the narration of the ballad. The phrase “envious ivy” was given more prominence than it needed, and “to teach a maid to weep” made overly dramatic. His lordship, however, nodded and smiled and closed his eyes, revelling in the music of the words.
“Not thus, in ancient days of Caledon,
Was thy voice mute amid the festal crowd,
When lay of hopeless love, or glory won,
Aroused the fearful or subdued the proud.”
Despite Bathsheba’s little eccentricities in delivery and movement, there was no doubt that Elspeth had chosen her successor well. At certain turns of her head and in particular gestures she saw with clarity the shadow of George when she laughed; and when she was whispering softer lines her expression reminded Elspeth of the young man’s serious face as he sat on the shelf beside her the night of the storm. She was all the more convinced that, in a magic beyond her ken, her lover and true husband had somehow entered Bathsheba’s soul. Yet still, something in the recitation disturbed the older woman – maternal pride mixed with bitterer emotions of jealousy and loss.
“The wizard note has not been touched in vain.
Then silent be no more! Enchantress, wake again!”
Elspeth allowed Bathsheba a few more verses and then raised her hand to put a halt to the recital. Bathsheba carried on for a line or two, compelling Elspeth to raise her hand higher still and stare directly into the girl’s eyes. When Bathsheba finally fell quiet, her mentor congratulated her and told her she could go. An early night and a long sleep were now the best preparation for her. The girl did not turn to leave, however, but looked towards Coak who lay in his bed, glancing from Elspeth to Bathsheba. She asked if there was not something more he required? Coak appeared confused for a moment, and then he blanched, and looked in panic at Elspeth. Bathsheba put her hand to the ribbon around her neck, and he held his hand in front of his face. Elspeth cried out, “Stop! Leave at once!”
Bathsheba looked as if she were about to speak again and continued to loosen the ribbon at her throat, but then fell silent, and turned to leave.
Once she had left the room, Elspeth sat stunned. When it had occurred to her that people might have known of her private performances she had laughed. Was proud, even, that they knew that someone still liked to gaze upon her. Now she felt foolish and squalid. But what had impelled Bathsheba to provoke the matter, and allude so bluntly to it? Had the girl actually wanted the old man to agree to her nakedness? With just that merest motion of putting her hand to the ribbon at her neck the impudent lass had shone a piercing light on the void that had always marooned husband and wife one from the other.
All their lives Elspeth had considered her presentation of herself to Albert elegant. For the only time in forty years she saw shame in a ritual that had pleased them both. She wondered if Albert had suffered her vanity just to humour her. Only a few moments ago she had felt graceful and strong; still charming despite her years. As she pulled herself up from her window seat and made for the door, she thought of herself differently: used and pitiable. She had not only lost flesh, but sinew and bone, her once young, strong body had shrunk and hardened – not through age but from being imprisoned in her chrysalis – to a nutmeg seed. Albert turned his head away in the bed, mortified by the exposure of both of them.
Elspeth fled downstairs, and out into the night. The air was cool and the breeze light, but the storm that had torn her from her promised future nearly half a century ago still raged around her. It had never stopped raging: the wind and thunder had lodged themselves in her heart and mind. She felt that gale on her face even now; the rain lashing, though the night was mild, as she made her way instinctively down the driveway, towards Roseneythe’s gates and Captain Shaw’s little stone house. The only way of containing the hurricane was to drive it deeper and deeper inside herself, until it blew and rumbled in the small, hard nut of her soul.
The children’s games began at noon. Ropes were attached to cabbage palms and the youngest swung and shouted to their hearts’ content. Teenagers, bored by the all the talk of Bathsheba and Lady Elspeth and Captain Shaw, played in the water, using shaddocks and watermelons in perilous ball games of their own invention. Aunts, uncles and older cousins busied themselves in the kitchen, whispers passing between them that Elspeth had been seen entering the factor’s home and only returning at dawn. Others said they had heard Bathsheba talk all night in Gideón and Golondrina’s hut, and was joined there by her mother. Several parties argued that the girl had been asked to strip off but had refused; that she had acquiesced; that she showed no shame, or was mortified; or that nothing of the sort ever happened.
At nine o’clock Elspeth struck the gong in the hallway of the big house announcing that the evening’s entertainment was about to start. She appeared tired and perhaps a little stern, but said nothing that told of any argument or mishap the previous evening. Captain Shaw was nowhere to be seen and the rumours of his rendezvous with Lady Coak had all but died away during the day.
She wore a heavy brocade dress of dark colours, as worn by ladies a little younger in town. Within moments of her disappearing back inside the house people arrived from all directions. They stood outside in groups, talking quietly, until Diana Moore arrived and led the way in. They sat down at tables laden with bowls of fried breadfruit and fresh-cut mango, jugs of mauby and ale, specially brought in for the occasion, sliced eddoes, cakes made by Martha Glover’s girls. For the second night in a row all waited with bated breath for Bathsheba Miller to arrive. Lord Coak was brought into the room, supported on one side by Elspeth, Moira Campbell’s son taking his other arm. Elspeth lit the candles on the birthday cake when it was brought out from the kitchen to the usual applause. Seven candles, one for each decade. Elspeth had only reached the fifth candle when the door opened. Everyone turned, expecting Bathsheba, but instead watched Captain Shaw and Nathanial Wycombe enter and take seats at the back of the room.
Shaw had never attended these ceremonies, and his presence could only mean turmoil ahead, but there was nothing to be done except to proceed with the concert. Diana, who had always been Mistress of Ceremonies, stood in front of the Lyric’s backcloth and announced the evening’s proceedings to have begun.
“Take your glasses and rest your feet. There’s fine food on its way and entertainment until, as ever, we reach claro clarum!”
Everyone cheered and helped themselves liberally to jugs of ale while Diana introduced each act. Mary Fairweather’s daughter, Grace, gave her rendition of “Long, Long the Night”, as taught to her by her departed mother. Her sister Sarah recited Lady Macbeth’s “Out, damn spot!” soliloquy. A group of children performed infantile songs, “Draw a Bucket o’ Water” and “Jessamine”. Diana gave a rendition of Burns’ “The Cottar’s Saturday Night”, and Jane Alexander, blushing, “The Flower o’ Dumblane”:
“She’s modest as ony and blithe as she’s bonnie,
For guileless simplicity marks her its ain….”
Bessy Riddoch each year suggested ruder verses, never with success, being made to speak some poem in a more respectable vein.
“I’m o’er young to marry yet
I’m o’er young – t’wad be a sin
To tak me frae my mammy yet.”
Robert Butcher entertained the room with his whistle-playing. This year he had recruited James, son of Jean Morton and Ben McGeoch, and two of the newer men, to accompany him on an assortment of home-made drums, and together they managed to lift everyone’s spirits with their lively versions of sea shanties and schottisches.
During the band’s performance, Bathsheba entered quietly. Those nearest the door caught a glimpse of Golondrina and Gideón taking their leave of her and continuing to stand outside as the door closed. The girl had a long, woollen shawl draped round her shoulders, clasped tightly at the neck, but under it – to everyone’s relief – they could glimpse Elspeth’s precious old dress. Everyone relaxed a little, stamping their feet to “The 24th May” and “Want One Shilling” in time to the drums and penny-whistle. Diana introduced Errol Sarjant who sang the same wassail songs he sang every year, but he did it in such a deep and melodic voice that nobody minded. By the time Bathsheba was called to take her place before them all of the ale had been drunk and Shaw had allowed the last of the flagons of special rum to be opened.
Walking to the front, her eyes met Elspeth’s, and each of them gave the other a little smile. The trick of wearing her dress, but covering herself with the shawl – its subtle tawny and silver hues extracted by Nan and Mary from lily and agave leaves matching the ivory of the Parisian muslin – placated Elspeth. As ever, she had managed to obliterate the memory of a rough night with Shaw from her mind but, also as ever, was left feeling agitated. The incident with Bathsheba and Coak she had calculated, after much thought, was a trifle. The girl had merely loosened her neck ties a little because she was nervous and hot. Now Elspeth just wanted Bathsheba’s recital – however she performed it – to be over. If she had criticisms to make they could wait for a day or two until all the excitement had died down.
After a faltering start, Bathsheba found her rhythm and voice and recited her poem admirably.
“Bonnets and spears and bended bows;
On right, on left, above, below,
Sprung up at once the lurking foe.”
Her voice raised and dipped, and she strode from side to side. The older women smiled at her accent – Scottish names mispronounced, phrases sung with Colonial languor.
“From Vennachar in silver breaks,
Sweeps through the plain, and ceaseless mines
On Bochastle the mouldering lines,
Where Rome, the Empress of the world,
Of yore her eagle wings unfurl’d.”
Vennachar came out as Venyacuh, Bochastle became Bucyastelle. Some of her definite articles were pronounced “de” in the local way. Her staccato vowels and cadenced consonants gave a whole new tempo and fascination to the tale. The story itself had never been of great relevance to the audience, not even those born in Scotland, speaking as it did of people unknown and events unclear to them. It had always been Elspeth’s performance they had enjoyed – how she strutted and clutched her breast, became apparently genuinely distressed, and then exultant, whispering one moment, roaring the next. Bathsheba’s dramatic interpretation could not approach the trained actress’s, yet it lulled them into a story that seemed more personal and closer to them all.
“Like dew on de mountain,
Foam on de river,
Like bubble of de fountain,
Thou ar’ gone, and fuh ever!”
She finished on a long, quiet note, and the audience responded in kind – a moment’s lull before their applause. Not the same clamour and shouts, the accolades that greeted Elspeth’s performances, but a long, steady clapping. Tears of sentiment welled in the eyes of the audience while Bathsheba smiled and bowed. Elspeth beamed warmly at her. Whatever expectations there had been of disruption and infighting were forgotten as the community relaxed into the conviviality of the night. Shaw’s presence had come to nothing. Bathsheba’s performance had righted any simmering wrongs. The Captain himself filled folks’ cups and glasses with large measures of rum and the hall sung with chatter and laughter while the elder women of the tribe went to the kitchen to prepare the main meal.
The number of original immigrants who traditionally cooked and served the meal had been reduced from twenty to fifteen – Mary Murray, Jean Malcolm and Mary Lloyd, in 1851, ’53 and ’67, had joined their deceased sisters, by way of rheums and dropsies, but left behind a gaggle of children and grandchildren. Fifteen could fit into the kitchen more easily than twenty had before. Normally, Elspeth helped too, but this year it was felt that Bathsheba should maintain the tradition of the Lady of the Lake preparing and serving the meal.
The door was always bolted against the revellers outside, for the ladies shed the best dresses they wore for the party and worked in the hot kitchen in their shifts to avoid any staining. The older they had grown the more bawdy their humour had become – even Diana had let her standards fall and laughed at the jokes her colleagues made at one another’s expense.
“Is it ony wunner Malcolm will na come near me till he’s fou? It’s only when he sees double he thinks he has hands enough to gang round me.”
“Away wi’ you, Jeannie. You’re no sae hefty, an’ onyway you’ve still a coggie under your jupes. It’s a’ they care about.”
“I’d fondle ye myself, Jean, if I buttoned up different.”
Nan handed Bathsheba an apron to put on over Elspeth’s fine dress and her fresh-washed shawl. Margaret Lloyd, her tumbler filled by Susan Millar, started up with a bawdy song from the old country.
“John Anderson, my jo, John
When first that ye began
Ye had a good tail-tree as ony other man.”
The women’s laughter crashed around her as loud as the old pistons from the closed-down factory.
“But now it’s waxen wan, John,
and wrinkles to and fro.”
Bessy banged her spoon against the side of the bubbling pot of coocoo mash in time with the song. Susan – her flaxen hair of old turned to white and her angular face thinner than ever – sniggered into the oven where trays of salt-bread were toasting. Mary Fairweather’s hair was near as orange as it had ever been, but her plain face wrinkled like dried mango. Mary Riach, blinder than ever now, peered towards the source of the voices and waved her butter-pat in the air. Diana shook her head in disapproval, but couldn’t help from smiling, nor stop herself from joining in with the rest of them on the last line:
“I’m twa-gae-ups for ae gae-down
John Anderson, my jo!”
When the laughter had died down, Diana tried to put the company in a higher frame of mind, chanting – for she had little voice for music – as metrically as she could, Burns’ toast to the lasses:
“There’s nocht a care on ev’ry han’
In ev’ry hour that passes-O
What signifies the life o’ man,
’Twere na for the lasses-O?”
But Bessy had another lyric to accompany the same melody.
“Green grow the rashes O
Green grow the rashes O
The lasses they hae wimble bores,
The widows they hae gashes O.”
The women laid down their ashets of roasted eddoes and sweet potatoes, pulled themselves up to their full height – in their bare soles and shifts, not much taller than they were wide – and a contest broke out between the differing versions of the song. Nothing personal or angry about the competition, each side trying to outsing the other. Diana’s version, however, did not lend itself to fulllunged bellowing, whereas the coarser edition most certainly did. One by one her followers ran for cover under the all-out attack of their opponents, betrayed the cause and – with a whoop and a rise in lusty loudness – joined the enemy. Diana valiantly struggled on for a stanza or two before seeing the battle lost and with great good humour crossing the divide herself, mumbling the vulgar words, keeping a tolerant smile on her face.
“My heart play’d duntie, duntie O
an’ ceremony laid aside
I fairly fun’ her cuntie O!”
Bathsheba, at the back of the room, laid down the apron her mother had given her, and began to undo the buttons on her shawl. It took a moment for Nan to notice but when she did, she let the dishes she was stacking drop back on the table and rushed to her. No one noticed, for Bessy had begun yet another song – “Duncan he cam here again” – and twelve voices joined in:
“Ha ha, the girdin’ o’ it!”
Their hair wet with sweat, necks bare and shoulders shining with steam from the pots and heat from the ovens, they worked to a quick rhythm. With all the banging of ladles and slamming of oven doors, singing and running from one side of the kitchen to another, no one saw or heard the struggle going on between Nan and her daughter who continued to loosen her shawl.
“He kissed my butt, he kissed my ben
He banged his thing against my wame….”
Nan stood in front of Bathsheba, still pleading with her, her words lost in the din, and holding the now discarded shawl in front of her. But the daughter ignored her mother, and stepped out from behind long woollen mantle.
“And, wow, I got the girdin’ o’ it!”
The entire crew shouted out the final line and the room was full of the squeal of laughter. But only for a moment. One by one, the women felt the merriment die on their lips. They stepped back from Bathsheba and stared, astonished.
The girl stood before them in Elspeth’s dress – no more than a petticoat, as translucent as a wisp of summer cloud, chosen by George Lisle for what it would reveal, not conceal. The women were struck dumb, not because of the girl’s near nakedness – with the sweat pasting their own shifts to swollen bellies and heavy breasts, they were every bit as exposed as she – but at the curious pattern on the Bathsheba’s skin.
All their lives they had been told it was Bathsheba’s sensitive fairness that obliged her to wear clothes covering nearly every part of her. And indeed those parts of her skin that were white had the delicate hue of fresh-plucked lemon. Now they saw the truth. Across her right shoulder, like the leather strap of a carrying-basket, ran a deep black stain. It continued widening down to her breast, over most of her belly, covering her entire left thigh.
Bathsheba held her head up, looking directly ahead, and slowly turned her back to them. The same discolouring, beginning in a light brown but darkening as it drew out, descended from the small of her back across her waist, most of her backside smeared with it. For a moment, the women thought the pattern was on Lady Elspeth’s gossamer dress. Perhaps the girl was confessing to ruining it.
“What happened?” Blind Mary broke the silence.
Susan Millar replied that Bathsheba was half nigger.
“Since when?” replied Mary, staring through half-dead eyes.
Between them all, the women had seen or heard of every kind of unnatural birthings – white daughters with pronounced negro features, tightly curled hair set in unblemished skin, or coal-coloured sons with shocks of blond hair. Fully black offspring born to white couples, babes mottled and daubed in various ways. Few of these children had survived. Bairns with pronounced birthmarks had them treated with coconut milk and akkie juice, often successfully. Toddlers with hair deemed too woolly were shaved and their scalps bathed in a shampoo of seaweed, aloe and birch-bark; in a passable percentage the hair grew back in a little straighter. Jenny Campbell was one of the few who rejected all advice and ran off with her lover – a freed slave named Joshua – to Speightstown, and never made contact with the estate again, and was never spoken of.
Bathsheba turned and got on with stirring a pot. The women’s stares soon turned from Bathsheba to Nan. Nan of all people – daughter of Mary Miller, with Diana Lady Elspeth’s closest associate – had lain with a blackie and kept the debauchery secret all these years! There were a thousand questions to be asked. Was Lady Elspeth herself a co-conspirator? Did Shaw and Lord Coak know? Everyone was too startled to voice the questions. What explanation, if any, had been offered to Bathsheba herself? Who was the father?
“All of you kenned and liked him,” said Nan, unable to control the quiver in her voice.
“Did he force himself ’pon ye?”
She said she wished she had had the courage to stand by him and present their child to the world as a wedded couple. “But I seen what happen to ither women and their bairns. My lass might never have been born, or lived past weaning. Her faither tried to get me to fly, but we couldn’t think where we might go. He agreed to keep his silence and watched his chile grow from nearhand but in secret.”
Nan spoke quietly, as if she were talking to herself and not to fifteen gawking women. Bathsheba’s father, she said, never relinquished hope that she and their daughter might one day leave with him and start their lives anew. But Nan couldn’t leave the people she had grown up with and loved.
“Ye could hae talked wi’ us afore the birthing,” came a voice from amongst the women.
“She spoke to me.”
All eyes turned now to Diana Moore. Diana – the midwife who ministered potions to stained babies, who mixed concoctions that brought on miscarriages and stillbirths – an abettor to this most unexpected of crimes! She who had worked so closely with Captain Shaw to ensure the health, vitality and purity of Roseneythe; the champion of Shaw’s “Method”. The enforcer of rules to ensure there’d be offspring aplenty of a strong, white, Christian ilk. The woman who spent her life proselytising on behalf of the factor’s ideology, who had trumpeted Bathsheba’s purity of body, mind and soul, since the very night the babe was born.
“’Twas a long confinement and painful, during which time Nan influenced me with her arguments. I argued back, saying that, no matter the rights or wrongs of the thing, such a large untruth wasn’t possible to hide. Nan swore it was only for a few months until she decided what to do. You’ll all remember it was rainy the night Bathsheba was born and the few of you who came near I shooed away. The lass made her way into the world and gave a good healthy scream. She had the face of one of God’s favoured angels. When I saw the unfortunate aspect of the rest of her, and Nan’s frail state of mind, I agreed to keep the secret for the duration of one month.”
That month came and went and soon even Diana became convinced that their trespass might go undetected. “The child entered my heart in some way.”
Nan looked over at Diana, with tears in her eyes. “I’ve thanked you ever’ day in my prayers syne that night, Diana Moore.”
Bessy Riddoch stepped forward.
“Ye never tholed my dochter’s bairn sae kindly, Diana Moore.” Rhona Douglas, seldom heard to speak, did so now: “Nor my ain wee boy.”
“Nor my grandbabby’s neither, Mistress.”
Almost half the women stared at her, anger and hurt aching in their look. Diana looked around them all, and tried to keep her voice steady. So many families she had tried to help – and never sure her assistance was welcome, beneficial or even Christian. Nan drew the looks of the women away from the ashen-faced midwife.
“I was aye frightened by Captain Shaw,” she said. “He only has tae look at me, pass my door, glance o’er at me through the cane, and my heart’d tremble near to stopping.”
She looked around the assembled women. Susan Miller and Jean Malcolm’s faces hardened. Mary’s blind eyes moistened. A few other women looked away, or kept peering at Nan as if some explanation of her words could be found in the lines of her face or the nervous movement of her hands.
In the excitement of the evening and the extra alcohol provided by Shaw, the women had forgotten to bolt the door behind them in the customary manner. No one had noticed the door opening, and it was only when Nan proclaimed again that, more than her fear of Captain Shaw, what had kept her at home was her love for all those present, and her respect for Lady Elspeth, that a little gasp was heard. Everyone turned to see Elspeth herself standing there.
All except Bessy who kept her glare on Diana. “Perhaps ye’ll inform us now, Mistress Moore, where ye’ve planked the remains of our babbies?”
There was a pause long enough to hear footsteps coming slowly towards the door. Dogged, insistent steps. Nan quickly threw the shawl over her daughter’s shoulders. Shaw entered without knocking.
“What?” he glared at them, his eyes shifting, suspicious and scared. “What secret y’all keepin’ here?”
Bathsheba stepped out from behind Nan and spoke out confidently. “Ent no secret here, Captain.”
Shaw stood a few steps in from the open door. Behind him, Nathanial and Junior Wycombe, and several more of Shaw’s cohort, stared into the kitchen. Bathsheba in her muslin shift stood in the centre, still as a statue. Elspeth was hidden behind the open door, watching, transfixed. She had not understood anything since stepping into the kitchen. The women angry when she expected them to be gay; their backs to stove and pots when they should have been working over them. She heard the words they said but couldn’t understand them. Least of all could she make sense of Bathsheba. How different she looked! Not only the peculiar marks on her dress or skin, but the look on her face. She had seen that look before. Last night, as the girl loosened her neck ties in front of Albert.
“Jesus. Look at the state o’ yuh,” the Captain managed at last.
Elspeth saw him lean towards Bathsheba as though his feet were stuck fast to the floor.
“Away to your house. Wait there for me.” He turned to her mother and grandmother, each holding the other’s arm. “You two take her back and…’ He never finished his sentence. Bathsheba interrupted him – a thing not known in nearly forty years of exile.
“I am leaving. With Gideón Brazos and Golondrina Segunda.”
“Leaving?” Shaw repeated, as if it were a word in a foreign language.
“Nan and Mary are coming with me.” Her mother and grandmother showed no reaction to the statement. Bathsheba looked around the room: at Margaret Lloyd and Sarah and Mary Alexander. “Who else will come with us?” Her eyes turned to Jean MacNeill. Jean Homes. Young Janet Alexander who cowered near Elspeth by the door.
Moira Campbell kept her head hung low. Mary Fairweather blanched and stared back at her. Eliza and Rhona screwed up their eyes, the better to understand her. Susan and Bess looked at one another. Bathsheba stared into blind Mary’s eyes.
“Nobody’s going anywhere except you to your house,” said the factor quietly. Then he turned and gave out a bellow that no one flinched at, except Elspeth. “Nathanial!”
Elspeth heard movement in the room behind her as Nathanial Wycombe made his way through the bodies there, all standing now in a silent ovation. She watched Shaw turn his head back round, swivelling on his neck, like a puppet’s.
“Brazos?” he asked Bathsheba in a tone of mild interest. “You’re fucking wi’ the Cuban slave?”
“Gideón is my husband.”
Then Elspeth felt it: a spasm in her innards. The spear again. She saw her chosen child stained and soiled. Corrupt. Not a smidgeon of George in her after all. Just another peasant; the bidie-in of a stupid, uncultured half-caste. Daughter of some black unknown creature.
“Hoor,” she said softly, and no one answered. Nobody moved. Nobody spoke.
“Elspeth,” Bathsheba finally pleaded. “Please.”
Elspeth broke the stare between them, and looked to Captain Shaw. And she spoke again – in the stage whisper she had perfected for Cleopatra’s speech, so that even the back pews would feel their weight.
“Punish them,” she said.