LADY BETTY’S DRESSING room had been newly decorated after the taking down of the rather horrid, old green paper and the putting up of the new linen with the Chinese border that Dido loved to look at in what had now become the blue room.‘SO, AN AFTERNOON of extraordinary surprises Lydia tells me.’
‘I’m so glad you’re back. Lydia? I still need to talk to her.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I need to know who knew…’
‘What exactly? Tell me.’
Elizabeth related to her husband the afternoon’s events from the very beginning of Beth’s arrival with her children, her refusal to get her to change from calling her Dido.
‘She wouldn’t call you Elizabeth?’
‘She did in the end, reluctantly. She said that’s who I always would be, Dido.’
‘That woman!’ John d’Aviniere remembered the first time he came calling at the Caen Wood to see Dido. ‘So haughty. She never allowed us time on our own. How would I have been able to be polite?’
‘You would’ve been for my sake. But that’s not all.’
When Elizabeth came to Miss Marjory’s legacy, she handed him the legal papers. John listened carefully as he read the document and looked at the deed for one hundred pounds. ‘You always said she was the kinder of the women…’
‘Yes, but given what then followed I think it’s most revealing. I’ve been thinking…’
‘Revealing?’
Elizabeth then told her husband of how her mother’s letters were given to her and the shock of seeing her own and the realisation of how she had been betrayed.
‘None of my letters had been posted.’ She placed the bundles in her husband’s hands.
‘Mon dieu! These people! Beth, did she always know? That they kept the letters. Why?’
‘Can you imagine my mother’s hurt, her puzzlement, her sense of betrayal? How was she to bring me to her?’ Elizabeth choked on her words.
John embraced his wife. ‘I can’t believe this.’
‘You’re going to have to help me.’
‘This is so intolerable. So intolerable.’ John began to pace up and down the room. ‘How was this secret kept? Accomplices?’
‘Miss Anne lives in Brighton. What can I say to her? Beth must know more. She needs to answer my questions. She would not answer this afternoon. I just wanted her to leave.’
Elizabeth could see her husband’s outrage on his face.
‘Watch your health, darling. We must bear this together.’
‘I must read all the letters. I must write to her. You have to help me find her.’
John began reading and the tears came quickly. ‘This is your mother.’
‘Sweetheart.’ Elizabeth held on to her husband.
As they eventually began to plan they realised that the task ahead of contacting her mother was going to be more difficult than they had immediately thought, the world changing all the time with countries changing hands. After all these years?
‘Darling…’
‘Can you imagine how betrayed she must have been feeling all this time…still must…’
‘Be realistic. Your health, our boys…’
‘We must plan right away…’
‘My employers in Gough Square may be able to help. They own ships. They’ll know the best way.’
Later that evening, once the boys were in bed, John and Elizabeth stayed up to talk.
‘You seem far away.’ Elizabeth reached out her hand to touch John’s arm.
‘It’s the story of the letters, keeping you away from your mother. It brings it all back. As you know my father didn’t allow my mother into the house at Coulibri, didn’t allow me to know who my mother was. She was just there, down in the yard, in the huts at the edge of the sugarcane. A woman working in my father’s house told me that. She said she would bring me to her. I thought I knew which woman it was. Martha thought she knew. I used to stare at different women who came up from the estate to work in the yard. Could that one be my mother I would ask myself? I could never be absolutely sure. Can you imagine her sacrifice? She knew who I was, who we were, her twins. She must’ve had no choice. I was not allowed my father’s name and I was not allowed to know my mother. Think of Martha. Once I went searching all over the estate. I would ask women, are you my mother? All of we is mothers, all of you is sons, one woman told me. When I returned to the house, my father beat me. He had a tamarind switch for his beatings.’
‘John, dearest, you know I know that story as if it’s my own…’
‘The stories keep repeating themselves. Can I ever leave them behind? I wanted to kill him.’
‘Rage…yes, when will we be able to leave those stories behind?’
‘Yes, we were saved and lost all at once, Martha and myself. Saved by Thomas d’Aviniere when he found us in the port at Bordeaux after that terrible ship…’
‘Lost and found…’
‘It’s why we’ve found each other. It’s sad that Martha has not found anyone and our foster father so very old now.’
They held on to each other, the boys in the next room, Lydia shuffling about in the room above.
Her mother’s letters took Elizabeth back to the room where she remembered delivering her post.
LADY BETTY’S DRESSING room had been newly decorated after the taking down of the rather horrid, old green paper and the putting up of the new linen with the Chinese border that Dido loved to look at in what had now become the blue room.
‘Is this another letter for your mother, Dido? Let me see.’
Lady Betty took it from her hand and, looking at the way she had folded it and addressed the front of the little parcel, she deposited it in the side drawer of her desk.
‘You’re a good girl, Dido, to keep writing to your mother.’ Then she allowed her to admire her new room. They talked about some task that she needed done in her dairy. ‘We must make sure our butter is better this year than Lady Southhampton’s.’ She smiled then. Dido felt honoured to be part of her confidence.
‘Is there another letter from my mother? She promised to write. I’ve only heard from her once since she left England.’
Lady Betty continued smiling as she kept on with what she was writing at her desk as if not paying attention to Dido’s question, and then said, almost nonchalantly, ‘No, Dido, no. It’s the other side of the world, you know.’ She said this, not looking at Dido.
Dido stood her ground that day and said that she did understand the geography of the world, that it was the first thing that her father had taught her with his maps and she did consult the globe in the library at Bloomsbury. At this, Lady Betty lifted her eyes and turned towards Dido. She looked as if she did not know her, searching in her head for an answer to what she had been asking.
‘Indeed, you do, Dido, indeed, and so you above all should understand how long it takes for letters to cross the ocean.’
Dido still stood her ground and said, ‘But Lady Betty, it would take as long going the other way from here to there. It’s the same distance that my letter has to travel as my mother’s. Isn’t it, wouldn’t you say?’
‘Dido, what do you want me to say…?’
‘One would not fall off the edge of the world would one, not anymore, surely? My letters must be getting there? Except I haven’t heard…’
‘That’s enough, Dido. Hurry on now, I must finish my own letter. This one has only to get to Hertfordshire. And this last, I’m about to write has to get to cousin Susan in Bath.’
HAD THERE BEEN a flicker of doubt on Lady Betty’s face to suggest the hoard in her desk, accumulating there for years, hidden just there in that right-hand drawer? Elizabeth did not remember any sign. It had never crossed her mind that such a thing was possible.
Sweetest Mama
I must still work each day at supervising the milking in the dairy and collecting eggs at the poultry at the end of the week at Caen Wood. I have a new entertainment which is learning and that I do in the library when I take down very heavy tomes, as they are called, from the shelves and read there stories of ancients — there are the Greeks and the Romans with their gods — you would be proud of my reading aloud and as you can see my sentences are coming on. My Master wants me to write for him, to copy for him. He dictates to me. The library I talk of is at Bloomsbury because the library at Caen Wood is not yet in order and all the books from Bloomsbury must be transported to that place. Master indulges this entertainment which he himself calls learning. I want to be with you. I am sure we could have some books in Pensacola to read together. When are you sending for me? I know I continue to ask this, but you have not given an answer and my father does not seem to visit his uncle and aunt so I do not see him to ask him for that information. I want to ask him why I have not heard from you…
They had not prevented her from writing. They must have thought it good that she wrote out her feelings. They must have read them to get to know her innermost thoughts. It was a way to keep a check on her. It was part of her capture, her bondage. It was a clever way as well to keep an eye on her mother. Above all, it worked to keep mother and daughter apart forever.
Which was more distressing, the voice of the young girl writing to her mother, or, the young mother writing to her daughter? Elizabeth did not possess the scales to weigh up such a contrast. She took one of her own letters out and then put it back. She was unable to read another. The things she discovered: Mammy I cry all night…send for me. My father has abandoned me. He does not write.
Elizabeth let the lid fall on the letters. Instead, she wrote to Beth.
Dear Beth
I keep reading the letters. I must write to you for I am sure there is more you can tell me.
Was it the plan by the original creators of this archive to gift it to me later in my life? Was it that after Lady Betty’s illness and death my Master forgot all about the letters? Lady Betty’s plan might’ve been: allow her this till she is an older woman and can cope with the separation and then she will see the benefits of it. Did I once hear something like that and not know what was being referred to by those words? I keep imagining things I think I remember hearing. You must fill in the blanks even though you tell me you do not remember much of our past. But you did remember when we began talking. I need to know the truth. My father’s reason for not allowing me to see my mother’s letters is one thing, But not a thought about the effects on my mother? Could he not have explained it to her? She kept on writing. What faith, what love.
You know what it was like at Caen Wood. There were whispers both at Bloomsbury and then at Caen Wood, houses full of whispers, a door ajar, along a corridor, under a train of satins on the stairs, lingering on the banisters of honeysuckle. You must think I’m going mad, speaking like this. Well, I am going mad, raging within myself with the deep injustice done both to me and to my mother, and ask myself now, who will take responsibility? Who can take responsibility with almost everyone dead now? You were given this terrible task, but is that all your part in this stratagem? My mother promised that she would send for me. She promised. Did you know that? She will want to know why I didn’t respond to her. Anger, when you think it has been stilled, rises unannounced. It rages at the injustice. My mother’s endeavours and her concern to keep in touch from the beginning, even though she received only one of my letters in return, tells me how much she continued to love me. Where’s my mother in this changing world? I think of the territories exchanged. Where’s my mother in all of this? Where is she? Dear Beth, for the sake of whatever little sympathy you may still have for me, please tell me what you know, what and who can help me find my mother. You must’ve known about this. When did you first learn? Why didn’t you tell me?
Excuse my ramblings, it is my anger and my broken heart.
Write to me.
Elizabeth
Elizabeth could see from the letters that at 13, in 1774, when she was Dido, she was not behaving herself. Her temper was beyond control. This was her contribution to the bargaining that went on between her parents. Elizabeth read of her own rage. After her mother had departed, she had told her mother everything folded into those small parcels. She now got to read her autobiography in the epistolary accounts. She related to her mother what she once overheard.
Dear Mammy
I overhear them in the kitchen. They say I must be beaten to be controlled. For she knows no better, little savage, they say…
Elizabeth felt she should surely have remembered such a deed. But it was there in her letter to her mother. They beat me, Mammy, they beat me. Her child’s voice sprang from her letters. She cannot not now imagine either Lady Betty or her Master performing such an act; neither her father, who was so intermittently at Caen Wood itself or at Bloomsbury. But the letter confirmed it in her child’s hand. They tie me up and beat me.
Was it a child’s exaggeration? Possibly this had been a voice overheard from downstairs, Mrs Burns, Mr Way, or Mr French, reacting to what they had heard of her tantrums. Maybe, it was something like, she needs a good beating. Something they might have said about their own children. Keep her on the leash. Spare the rod and spoil the child. Elizabeth had heard it said that men did it to their wives, but the stick they used could not be larger than the circumference of their thumbs. Did men all have the same size of thumb? She felt herself fortunate. Her husband was a tender man.
She had heard her father’s lash before she saw him strike her mother across her face in the enclosure of the cabin of his ship. But later that day her mother was in his arms and being called my darling. It was the way of some men. They beat and then they had remorse. She was bound by that bondage.
She should be reading without stopping to make up for the time that she had not had her mother. She snatched at some letters, and left others unopened, or opened if she construed that they were everyday details — though these particularly could fill her eyes with tears, not to have known just the ordinary things of her life, her business in the market, her having to secure a fence that had fallen down, the white picket fence that she remembered and that her mother reminded her of, trying to bring her closer, include her in her present life.
Darling daughter — that was how she began almost every time so that she would be able to revive in her daughter her belief in her mother. On nights alone, Elizabeth could not imagine why she had stopped writing to her. Had she thought that she had died?
She wondered whether she should be mourning or pining.
Darling Daughter
I don’t know what is best — to have you here with me or to know you safe where you is in that big house with them powerful people. Some mothers deliver their children beyond this life to make them safe from this terrible dark thing which labours free — free labouring — shackled and constrained — haltered and harnessed in the coffle passing in front of the house every day. Each of the wretched of this earth with iron on their tongue — iron pressing the head to look neither right nor left but straight down on the furrow — a straight line with the hoe, be it in the sugar or in the tobacco or among the cotton fields like snow fall even though it hot like hell. This is the south very different from the north. Even with the manumission papers they can capture you and take you back and sell you another time. Them does tear up the papers. I haves the manumission your father give. I has those papers — and since news reach me that he dead I think upon the fact that all I have is his signature write on the paper — John Lindsay. To see it so is to think upon you and know that whatever happen you is the best fruit off that tree the best from that seed he sow inside of me — no other — the best fruit of what we do. You must be twenty-seven years of age and I wonder if you marry — if you free and marry and have children self — have my grandchildren. I wonder about these things. I keep writing just in case one day I hear you get these letters. The miracle would be to receive back one from you my girl telling how you must be now. All else is well if I keep myself quiet on the land your father settle on me. You remember the white picket fence — I plant so much garden so much ground provision that I does sell. Any pretty flowers growing wild I let them be…
Elizabeth began to doubt her plan to write to her mother. Mr d’Aviniere had still to find out about the ships and post. Would her mother still be there? Would she herself be able to bear the expectation and the disappointment if she could not find her mother? She had this wild hope plaited in her heart to see her again and for her to meet the children.
‘But Ma’am, for sure I remember very well letters coming to the house for you off and on over the years when you were younger, or letters sometimes being left on Lady Betty’s desk in her dressing room addressed to you. You must’ve received those letters?’
‘No, Lydia, that’s just the point. Apart from the very first letter that my mother wrote to me, I’ve only now seen the others. Likewise, the letters I wrote to her were never posted, except the very first.’
‘What a terrible state of affairs, Ma’am.’
‘I’ve not yet recovered from the shock…’
‘I understand Ma’am. What can you do now?’
‘No idea, Lydia, but you’re telling me that you knew nothing of this plan. Was there never any talk? Are you sure it was not an open secret?’
‘No, Ma’am, not among the servants, Ma’am. You must not let this take you over Ma’am. It’s so much more important for you to look to your boys. You need your energy for that and for your own health. You must not risk getting ill.’
‘You’re right. I must not let this spoil my time with my boys and my husband. How much time have I got left? Yet I must try to get in touch with my mother if she’s alive and living there still in Pensacola.’
‘You’ve got time Ma’am. I’ll be here. You call on me. We must see what can be done.’
Elizabeth reached out to her.
‘I do understand your loss, Ma’am.’
‘Yes, your own mother still back in Ireland.’
‘Yes, for sure. Will I get back there? She’s very old now.’
I remember daughter the time when we first arrive in that England and it was snowing. I teach you about snow, remember. You so little then. I imagine is snow by you now and you coming to that time Christmas and I wondering if this reach you and if this time I get a reply to make your mother happy. I keep on with the letter — the writing of the letters help me to have you in my mind and to make me believe I and you still speaking. I can’t believe you read these words here and it not turn your heart towards me. What is it child — what is it. Woman you must be no child but a grown woman and still not a word. What prevent you…
Elizabeth could see plainly that her mother was still hoping that she would write. That was part of the last letter collected as far as she could surmise. It was the year that she had left Caen Wood, the year that she got married in the December. She could still be alive, Elizabeth worked out.