March 2012
I gave Martha Ruddick a copy of Jean Alexander’s book the day before I left Barbados.
“An old aunt,” she said, “used to tell about something that happen when she was a chile. Be about 1910. Two women came out o’ the blue, stopped by for a few weeks. The older was white and silver-haired, the young ’un a dark-skinned picky-head, but they tell unna they was mother and daughter. Mrs. and Miss Armstrong.”
Martha said these women claimed no connection with Roseneythe, having arrived in Barbados from a distant island and choosing to pass some time here on account of the famous beauty of the place, and the solitude and serenity they found. The daughter spoke uneven English, her sentences peppered with Spanish words. The estate rarely had visitors, but it was proud of its hospitality. From the moment they arrived, the Misses Armstrong were made welcome and comfortable, and the ladies in return demonstrated a willingness to learn about their hosts. They sat and listened to stories, barely talking themselves, but nodding their heads encouragingly at anyone who spoke with them.
“Keen artists they was. Apart from one li’l suitcase between them, all they brought was easels and watercolours.” They wandered around the grounds sketching, in pencil or paint, the woods, the fields, the house, and the bay. Especially the bay. “The mother, my auntie say, drawed that cove every single day she was here.”
They also painted portraits. As people spoke to them and told them their stories they would ask permission to draw while they listened. So, while Beatrice Johnson or Jemima Lode sat talking of the old days, retelling tales about Nan Miller and Rhona Douglas, and the last sad days of Diana, and Junior Wickham spoke of Captain Shaw and Lord Coak, the women would listen and smile and nod, and paint unobtrusively.
Martha poured me a glass of mauby in the room where the portraits still hung. “These be the pictures they left behind.”
“Was the mother Bathsheba Miller?”
Martha shrugged. The strangers, according to her old aunt, built a little cairn of stones down by the cove. “It still there – least till the developers come, and rub everything out.”
I went to the window and looked out at the bay. Plans had already been made for Northpoint Bay Holiday Complex. The cove will be a water-hazard over the fifth hole of a manicured golf links. The figs and jacarandas will be gone. There’ll be luxury chalets instead of wooden chattel-houses. “I just keep a still tongue and a fuzzy eyebrow,” Martha said.
“What became of Elspeth?”
“Nobody knows. No grave marked out to her here. Some say she die in Shaw’s cabin. Some that she become a procuress down Baxter Road way. My auntie swore she die on the road ’tween here and town. Elspeth Baillie be like salt in sauce. She’s everywhere and nowhere.”
Martha joined me at the window. “We’ve had enough of this place. Everywhere you look you feel the crack o’ the factor’s whip and the taste o’ bitter planter’s punch in your mouth. Everyone wants to go home, don’t they? Like you doing today, sir. No place like home.”
I asked where home would be for her and the Rosies now. “We’re still a long way off. But folks are waiting. Cousins up by where you come from, mister. People still lookin’ for we back there.”