7

THE D’AVINIERE family buried Johnny at Tyburn on the first day of May, a week before his and Charles’ tenth birthday.

Mr d’Aviniere was allowed some leave from his stewardship. He was spending a lot more of his time with his sons. Billy’s birthday was also that month. Lydia made a cake for the birthday and the boys had one or two of their friends from the Belgravia House School.

Charles had to be kept back from school. He was the one most affected by his twin’s death. Billy had been quite matter of fact about it, interested in all the details and asking questions. It had made Charles ill.

The weeks passed, measured by since Johnny’s death. The spring was opposite to the family’s melancholy, then gradually encouraging them into life and stories by which they remembered Johnny.

Billy continued to ask when his brother would return. He was persistent with his question. ‘Will he come back when he’s well?’ He asked his question with logic. Johnny had to die because he was unwell but he might get better and then return.

‘Don’t be silly, he’s dead,’ Charles said as he left the room.

‘Will you answer my questions when I’m at your school?’ Billy shouted after him. ‘At least he can’t be captured. He won’t get lost on the marshes anymore.’

Elizabeth and John looked at one another. That threat was still alive.

Charles listening at the door came back into the room. ‘But you and I, Billy, can be captured if we aren’t careful. You better keep close to me on the road when you begin to come to school with me.’

One of her mother’s stories came back to Elizabeth, the one about the woman who had preferred to lose her child to death than have her taken into slavery. She had killed her own child rather than have her captured.

‘I think we’re all aware that there are some dangerous people in the district. We need to keep our eyes and ears open and not wander off the main road when returning from school. Charles is quite right. Just remember what your father and I’ve told you. Charles will keep you on the straight and narrow, William Thomas.’

‘Your mother is absolutely right. Enough talk of capture, now. Who is for an afternoon walk to the river?’

‘I am,’ Charles and Billy shouted together.

Elizabeth had postponed Beth’s visit. She had sent her the account of Johnny’s death and a report on her own diminishing health. Beth promised to find another date and deliver what she had been promising. Elizabeth wondered what on earth Beth could have to deliver. She was even less prepared than ever to have Beth visit.

Elizabeth returned to that world that they had shared as both friends and rivals. She wondered what that would now mean to them both. She could not see what they might share now. They had lived in a bubble and that was now burst. Her thoughts took her back to her writing after a period of mourning Johnny’s death.

THE-TUG-OF-WAR had started. Dido moved constantly between the small house with the lace curtains at the window, which she parted for a view of the river, on the narrow lane at Greenwich, and the house of her Master, the Lord Chief Justice of England, as her father had explained to her again and again. She was never allowed to forget how powerful her Master was esteemed.

Beth and Dido were caught up in the fantasy of their guardians. They learned that two girls growing up so quickly were certainly not something that had been part of Lady Betty’s original idea for herself and her busy husband when they thought it would be charming to refurbish Caen Wood as somewhere to escape to from the stench of town and the traffic of Holborn.

It was the way that Lady Betty spoke. Her words stayed with Dido. Dido loved the escape to better air and the fragrance of the countryside in the hills above London. There was more space for her to wander than at the house in town. There were far less restrictions and she was given her role to play in the household, working on the farm and in the poultry. There was also, and not least, less danger of catchers. Or, so everyone thought.

The girls lived in their own fantasies as Lady Betty and her husband had their own dream and told their story to the girls. Dido felt that she was being invented anew as part of what her Master and Lady Betty were planning. She could feel herself changing. It was not just her clothes that were being kept under control. ‘That hair of yours.’ Was Lady Betty complaining again when she had not plaited it and tucked it away, but had it, as she put it, in an unruly state?

‘We seized the opportunity, absolument!’ Often a French flourish embroidered her remarks. ‘Nous sommes absolument enchantés par ces formidable nouvelles, I had told Monsieur Bute when we heard that the sale was settled.’

They hoped their villa might grow to become even more beautiful and spacious under the careful and artful supervision of Mr Robert Adam with his brother James in attendance in transforming the Jacobean brick into something which they could only call Adam so unique were his ideas.

Dido listened attentively to every word, following Lady Betty around, standing and noticing everything. There was such urgency with the way Lady Betty spoke and Dido’s Master acquiesced in these affairs and became her accomplice in their common venture. ‘We could not resist the view, already so wonderful.’ They looked at the way the lawns sloped to the ponds where the swans paddled in their own shadows, coupled there, as it were, each in their own reflection.

Dido’s Master and Lady Betty saw immediately that Caen Wood Park was open to improvement and landscaping, as her Master elaborated. They saw the possibilities if they planted cedars and created openings for vistas and perspectives, having some rows of trees pleached, other designs with careful pruning and pollarding carried out among the tall beeches.

Dido’s Master was overwhelmed by his excitement for the idea. ‘This should create more than a glimpse of St Paul’s with Mr Wren’s genius of a dome, Greenwich beyond, and the Thames in the foreground.’

Her Master’s voice raced ahead, tumbling forth with his inimitable eloquence. He had once told Dido the story of how he had had elocution lessons, the teacher getting him to look into a mirror so that he could see how he was to form his words by the shape of his lips, rounding his vowels, making emphasis of the syllables in the correct place, keeping the stresses so different to his native Perthshire. He continued to encourage her to check the pronunciation of her vowels.

Dido and Beth were dragged along over the park, made to stand in awe, as their guardians talked, one answering to the enthusiasm of the other. The girls followed their stories and gesticulations as they pointed to the fields beneath, sloping like lawns down towards Kentish Town into the valley of the Fleet River, past Fitzroy Farm and the marshes of Brookfield.

‘Isn’t it an idyll?’ Dido’s Master asked his wife.

‘But it can be improved,’ Lady Betty quickly added.

‘Yes, it can.’

Beth and Dido followed and got to know each other, never fully understanding at first what was their actual relationship; but as they got older they grew fond of each other in their play.

‘How are we connected?’ Beth questioned.

‘Connected?’

‘Related. Aren’t we blood relatives?’

‘Our fathers are first cousins.’

‘That’s close.’

‘Yes, but…’

‘But there’s the problem of your mother…’

‘My mother? What about my mother? What about your mother?’

‘She was Polish.’

‘My mother was from Africa.’

‘That’s the problem, not the geography, but…’

‘But, what?’

Beth could be so final. She looked at Dido not knowing how to describe.

Dido was almost in tears, but refused to cry because she knew the answer.

‘Her skin, her hair…what she is, where she’s from…’ Beth ran away with her list. ‘Come and find me. I’m going to hide in the wood.’

Dido stood and stared as Beth ran down towards the Thousand Pound Pond and the woods beyond.

‘Dido, Dido, Dido, come and find me,’ she shrieked.

Dido turned back to the house. The day was spoilt. She’s never even seen my mother, Dido thought angrily.

When she complained to her father on one of his infrequent visits, he would repeat the facts about her Master to impress upon her the safe place in which she now lived with ‘the most powerful man in the realm, my pet.’

While visiting her mother she explained her father’s intentions. ‘They’re noble. He wants me to be free. He’s arranging all that is necessary to give me my freedom. He promised me…’

‘He promised you?’

‘Yes. He’s not all bad…’

‘Child…’

‘You must listen to me some of the time…’

‘Eh eh! You have spirit in you. Good.’

‘You must believe him. I have to believe him.’

Dido’s mother looked at her daughter and drew her close. ‘You’re right. You will need him, and that master you talk about.’

Dido felt that her mother was preparing her for that departure to Pensacola which she had always known about but did not ever want to think was going to happen. But she knew in her heart the day would certainly come. She dreamt of that ship and the ocean it would cross.

‘MY BOY! BREAD and butter! Has Lydia given you those slices? Yes, you eat them up. Have you been running over the meadow with Lydia?’ Billy’s eyes grew larger, engrossed in his eating.

Charles was late back from school. ‘You’ll get him tea, won’t you, Lydia? He’ll be starving. I wish he would not be late. He knows that it worries me.’

‘Come and sit by me, pet.’ Elizabeth was giving all her attention to Billy.

The presence of her two remaining sons gave her joy, but they also brought back the loss of Johnny. Billy climbed onto her lap. ‘You’re far too big for this…’

‘Let me, Ma’am…’

‘No, you have a rest. I’ll call when he becomes impossible.’

‘My treasure. Give Mama a big hug and a kiss. Your cheeks are so red. Have you been running all the way back from the river? I mustn’t lose another, must I Lydia?’

‘Ma’am? He’s such a healthy boy. You’ve nothing to fear.’

‘Do you really think that?’

‘He looks the picture of health.’

‘You know what I mean. Run along now. Too heavy for Mama.’

‘Come along Billy, see what we can find as a treat.’

Lydia left Elizabeth to her worry.

‘Charles’s very late back?’

It was still all over the papers, the children for sale, the padlocks and the manacles you could buy for a good price. There were still the criers along the pavements: Black Boy for sale! What a world? Years on from Jonathan Strong and James Sommersett. So many continued to be deported after her Master’s so-called narrow judgment. What had it changed?

Elizabeth was more nervous now on her own. It was that question of her mother’s. You hear of the woman who would rather have her child dead than delivered into the bondage of slavery? It was part of her mother’s logic to leave her where she thought she would be safer, rather than living in some frontier town in the Americas. I will send for you in time. Since she had left, Elizabeth had repeated that promise to herself almost every day.

Where was her mother? She would have to recreate her.

‘DIDO, CHILD, YES, he make you a Christian. Right there in that beautiful church in St George’s, Bloomsbury, so I know the house they take you to that morning on the square afterwards, that bleak late November day, 20th 1766. Is so it state on the certificate. How I go forget? All the family, and you my black pickney lost among them in that paid for pew, and me not at the front with his family. You father allow me to be there, to stand at the back and witness your forehead poured with water at the font. And my name upon the document: Maria Belle, Mother.

‘He think that go save you? Baptism doth not bestow freedom. You hear what I say? That’s their law. Don’t let him fool you. Like that other lie that because we breathing English air we go be free. And you breathe sufficient? You free?

‘And look where we is in this secret place that your father must come at dark of night, don’t dare bring the carriage down this lane, but walk furtively looking behind him to visit his two niggers. He bring me so far for this? And you, a prisoner in some big house? He show you any papers? Any deed? Manumission, they call it. You well know that. You must put your hands on that piece of paper. Is not dressing up in these pretty clothes that will make you free. You must be your own self, free. Dress up in pretty clothes is easy, easy that way to be a belle.’

Her mother’s tongue was running all that day with rage. Yes, there were rages, her father’s too. She let that secret out. When he seemed not himself, he used her as his property and not his darling. Smitten by her beauty was how he spoke to his uncle and his aunt. But he might smite her, blow on blow, as was his right, he said. She was his property.

Dido thought of her mother as a soft person. But she could be so angry sometimes. She had not known all the promises her father had made to her mother, though she knew that he had said that he could not make her a lady, and yet she was his darling. The two did not seem to fit together. Or, did they? She heard him call her that again and again, darling. So where did that leave her? But once her mother had started with her rage it was hard for her to stop, as she continued that afternoon when her father had taken Dido from the house at Bloomsbury and brought her down river to Greenwich.

There was the heaving water with the tide coming in and the tall forest of ships at Deptford rocked by the waves and her father’s arms tight around her shoulders. He embraced her and protected her from the world. ‘Don’t look there,’ he said, as they came down from the ship onto the dock at Greenwich. But she did look where there were three young black men in chains, like in a coffle in Pensacola. She had seen young men like that as a small child from the window, passing on their way to the plantation. She had glimpsed them in a hold on her father’s ship.

‘Is only last year, oui.’ Her mother had a way with French intonations because she had had a French mistress once in Martinique, before she arrived on the block on Pensacola’s harbour.

‘It was the year before your own baptism. Is a story people tell me since I living here. It concern a man called Jonathan Strong. A young fella, eighteen years old. He baptise. Let me see if I remember exactly, yes, on 22 July at St Leonard, Shoreditch. The lady at the bottom of the street, self, that tell me the story, call him a blackamoor.’ She laughed. It was not for joy. Her mother laughed a lot with her tongue in her cheek. It was when she had a knowledge to impart. ‘He come from Barbados to London. He baptise in order to escape from his master a Mister Lisle. Make himself free with the holy water. I remember the whole story because it frighten me. I not going to tell you that story now. He get beat with a pistol across his head, the same swollen, nearly blinded, young Jonathan Strong. Unable to walk, abandon in the street, by his master Mr Lisle. His name was Strong, but all the strength leave him on that lane in Shoreditch where they find him.’

CHARLES HAD GOT back safely, but had missed his father before bed. John and Elizabeth were alone together after supper. Lydia was off earlier than usual.

‘Lizzie, darling? You look tired and sad.’

‘I’ve had a day with my mother and stories of Jonathan Strong. Earlier it was Beth. I’ve written to her about Johnny. She’s in my mind a lot, what with her impending visit. But I do enjoy making up my mother’s voice as I remember it.’

‘Let me distract you over supper with stories I’ve heard…’

‘What stories are those?’ She flung her arms around his neck. ‘Tell me.’ She kissed him on both cheeks and on his mouth.

‘Is this what laudanum does?’ He teased.

She continued kissing him. ‘Don’t tease me about that. I do try to measure it exactly.’

‘Well. Listen to this…’

‘Charles is still coming back from school late…’

‘I’ll talk to him.’

‘Promise? You know time is running out.’

‘Sweetheart. Lizzie. Stop. I don’t want to spend our time just looking forward to your death. We’ve got to live now.’

‘We need to make Charles and Billy safe.’

‘I’ll have a little more claret. It’s doing me good.’ John needed to relax. He could do without Elizabeth’s anxieties at times.

‘Beth has not given me a date… her visit…’

‘Oh, not Lady Beth Finch-Hatton…’

‘John…’

‘Can’t we just have ourselves back, like it used to be.’

Elizabeth knew what John meant. Her illness could at times alter their intimacy. ‘Yes, we can, I’m sorry. What was that story? Remember our hands entangled, standing among the pews in the Meeting House in Shoreditch. Do you remember that day when a quiet rage had burst from me? I would have been heard from one side of the park to the next. All of London would’ve heard me. But you saved me from my rage. Do you remember? You kissed me.’

‘Of course I remember. Better to rage than give in to obsessions. Better to kiss.’ John leant over and took his wife by the hand. ‘Let’s to bed.’

Elizabeth woke early, having dreamt of her mother as she used to be, her voice in her head with the story of Jonathan Strong running wild.

‘YOU KNOW, BECAUSE I tell you enough, Dido, since that time on the ship when we leave Pensacola to come to this place, that he will send me back and that you must stay here. Is not you, child. Is not you. Is not he. Is not me. Is the time we living in that make things so. Yes, he have some power, but the man that have the real power is the man who you call your Master. The same blood that flowing in your father veins is the same blood in his and in yours. You right to call him Master. One day I trust he will leave to you papers that have it mark that you is free. You must wait for that and when you get that, maybe then you will choose and come to me. Choose to leave that master. Is the same piece of paper I must get from your father. For I am his slave in law. He can’t send me back without it.

‘The story I didn’t tell you. That boy Strong find his way to Mincing Lane. There was a surgeon there, William Sharp, a good man who served the poor of the city. Sharp had a brother. You tell me you hear his name mentioned in Bloomsbury? Granville is his brother.’

‘My Master don’t like the sound of his name.’

‘I sure he don’t. But let me tell you how it go for that young man. Strong get admit to St Bartholomew’s. He get fix up and Mr Sharp so kind he get him a job in Fenchurch Street with a Mr Brown who was lucky to be an apothecary.’

‘Master call Mr Sharp a confounded man. Always complaining.’

‘You listen to what I say. I telling you this story so you go understand. You hearing too much talk from one side only. Two years later, that same Lisle, the scoundrel, see Strong in the street. He follow him to his house and then employ catchers to capture him and sell him for £30. They keep him in Poultry Compter, the prison in the City till they hear of a ship to the West Indies.’

‘Master says I might get captured if I walk in the street.’

‘He better protect you.’

‘I mustn’t walk in the Square or to Holborn.’

‘Listen what I tell you. These people think they have the run of the world and that there is no law or law that people must obey. Strong get a letter to Granville Sharp and he bring the case to court.’

‘That is what Master complains about. Mr Sharp always bringing things before him in the court.’

‘You sounding just like them. Listen how you speaking. You listen to your mother. That man so great. Is in Mansion House that Strong get discharge. They say Strong not guilty of anything, no offence, and therefore he at liberty to go. They have bad men about these streets, but there is some good men too, that judge and Mr Granville Sharp. They say that even in the court the captain of the ship try to seize Strong. But there is a bad end to this tale. The Jamaican planter who buy Strong sue the Sharps and they lose because the judge say that Strong did not become free because he come to England.’

Dido listened with open mouth. She kept thinking of her own fate.

‘Hear what I tell you. He not free because he breathing English air. I tell you so before. He not free because he baptise. Is the same thing I tell you before. He quote some judgment by other judges from long time. They say Sharp not leaving it so. He go follow it up. He go appeal. We have to listen out.’

Dido began to lose her mother’s speech with all the details. She listened at times to her mother and she also listened to her father. She needed her mother to bring things down to earth for her. When she told her what her father had said, her mother replied, ‘You think he tell you everything? You mustn’t believe every sweet thing that sweet man pour into your ear.’

THE FAMILY VISITED Johnny’s grave at Tyburn that afternoon. It was not too long a journey to the Bayswater District. Elizabeth was rested, having had, unusually, a whole night of sleep.

They stood at the side of the small grave and watched the stonemason fix the headstone with an angel in relief. Billy was fascinated by the mason’s tools, his use of the chisel, hammer and trowel. He knelt to inspect and then to play with the spirit level, balancing it on his knees trying to find the equilibrium; the mason, a young man from the district, smiled and humoured Billy. Charles stood without moving, staring as if into nothing. He might have been reading the inscription on the stone, Johnny’s name and the dates of his birth and death and the sentiments: A Beloved Son and Brother. Lydia put her arms around Charles’s shoulders, but he flinched and moved away. Elizabeth stood holding her husband’s hand letting her thoughts wander, as they were all absorbed in the stonemason’s work until the angel in relief upon the stone was a resplendent presence hovering over the grave.

Elizabeth saw Seamus offering to help with cleaning up afterwards. Billy joined in. Mr d’Aviniere settled the payment with the mason. Everyone seemed to be content that the practicalities were carried out. They were a distraction from their individual sorrows. Mrs Halifax wiped a tear away with her kerchief. Lydia took her arm in hers as they both began to walk away with Mrs R through the yew trees.

Elizabeth whispered to her husband, ‘We must not lose another child…’

‘No, we mustn’t.’

They gathered up their two boys for their journey back home.