ELIZABETH STARED OUT into her garden.IT WAS A babble in Dido’s ears, the arguments and debates back and forth while the country waited, the world waited, it seemed, for her Master’s judgment as she read in The Advertiser.
‘That confounded man does pester and persist.’
Her Master’s irritation in his courtroom overflowed into the drawing room. Dido was under no illusion that he could be as stern, cold and forceful in his court. A glass of port fuelled the rising thrust of argument in the evening at home.
‘Who’s that dear?’ Lady Betty asked. ‘Who pesters you and persists, and with what?’
‘I’m surprised my dear wife asks…’
‘Granville Sharp, no doubt, must be that confounded man.’
‘Those Sharps should confine themselves to their barge upon the Thames and to their music at one of their concerts.’
Dido’s thimble fell to the floor. She pricked her finger with her sewing needle.
Beth was nodding over her novel, something Lady Betty was encouraging her to read dropped from her lap. She was no doubt dreaming of her horse-riding with her great-uncle.
If it had not been for her visits to her mother at that time, Dido would have learned very little from all those actors, politicians and artists who came to sit in her Master’s drawing room, to drink coffee with lots of sugar and smoke tobacco, filling the room like a coffee house. They discussed the affairs of the King’s realm and the trade upon which the success of the economy depended.
When she was only a little girl, much of it had passed over her, though some got lodged and was now becoming more meaningful. As she got older, she could not wait to be part of the company in the drawing room. She knew her place in the corner on a stool with her book, preferring that to sewing or working her pattern as Lady Betty would have wanted. She was more intent to please her Master by showing him that she was getting on with her reading, though she did have one ear cocked for what the gentlemen discussed. She tried not to be too visible, too inquisitive in her attention. She kept her eyes lowered on her book and followed the voices, once she had sorted out who was sitting where.
She would have formed a negative opinion of Granville Sharp and his family if she had not had the stories of her mother, had her talk of the streets; if she had not had the newspapers, if she had not gone with her mother to the Quaker Meeting House in Shoreditch and heard the abolitionists’ talk. It was not always approved that she should be allowed the papers. It was very good that her Master had allowed and arranged for her to continue attending the Shoreditch Meeting House. He surprised her and contradicted himself at times, allowing her different influences.
‘I’ve tried to prevail upon the godparents, if such they are, they who brought the habeas corpus to purchase the man themselves and solve the whole darn thing. Or, for that matter, Stewart, the owner, to offer to sell the wretched man.’
Dido could not believe what she was hearing from her Master. It was his tone that shocked her. She understood that neither side would budge. Her Master wanted rid of the whole thing. He wished to be relieved of making the judgment. The repeated postponement of the final judgment increased the anticipation on all sides for a verdict, which would vindicate their position.
The papers made much of her Master’s postponements. They lit the fire beneath each of these positions, making the judgment much more important than it should have become. It was a narrow judgment, her Master kept saying. But the world wanted to hear something larger and more definitive on the question of slavery and its trade. They wanted to hear the rightness of it all. The papers wanted the big story. He did his job along the narrow lanes of the law. The system was odious. He meant the trade in live cargo, the commerce, the business of the property, and said it would need law to support it. But he would not intentionally lead the way to change that law.
This was an early education for Dido in who her Master really was, and in how she could both admire and learn from him through her reading and writing. But now she began to know that he would not be the one to free what her mother called their people whom she met at night at the Meeting House.
‘We cannot run the country on emotion, but only on law. And I dare say, only on commerce. What would I say to his Majesty if I believed in it any other way? What if we lost the trade with some so-called principled moral reform in this matter? The world would come to a standstill.’
He explained to the company that different people would draw different conclusions from his judgments. ‘What best furthers their cause and feathers their nest.’ He explained again that he would keep to the business before the court. ‘I’m not launching some abolition crusade. I won’t be responsible for the collapse of trade and the economy of the realm.’
Dido found herself staring at her Master.
His mellifluous arguments continued with explaining the working of the West Indian lobby, those on plantations in Virginia who wanted the matter legislated for in law. ‘They want to boost what goes on there.’
Molly came in with more coffee.
‘What is legal in the colonies is one thing but not on this soil.’ He sipped on his coffee adding two lumps of sugar. ‘I would tell you friends that I would rather avoid it altogether. I wish the owners would be happy to think their slaves were free men and their slaves to think of them as their natural masters. A much more peaceful life would ensue for me.’
Dido noticed her Master glance in her direction with a benign countenance. Is that what he thought was their arrangement, or, rather what was his arrangement, and that she had little choice in the matter? She was always so amenable and had to be so grateful to him.
‘You don’t want to set precedent, Mansfield.’ That was Lord Southampton.
‘Quite so. One judgment can indeed overturn the other as we have seen with Yorke and Talbot.’
‘Too many interpretations being bandied about when what we need is clarity and order.’
‘Quite so.’ Dido’s Master nodded his approval to all the company.
She raised her eyes to catch Beth’s. She was nodding again, unmoved by these conversations..
Dido put her book down. She could not concentrate to read. In the silence of her embroidering fingers, she travelled far across the countryside, hiding in ditches, escaping into the kindnesses of people in small towns in an effort to free James Sommersett, and thinking whether she could walk the streets of London and not be captured for transportation to the Americas or to Jamaica.
Master must free him, she insisted to herself, her needle almost pricking her finger, her thimble falling to the floor.
In bed, that night, she closed her eyes and listened to the wind on Fir Hill. She dreamt of her mother waving from a ship caught in a storm.
The days at Caen Wood were too short. Monday morning, and they returned to Bloomsbury Square. Mr French had prepared a nosegay for Dido that morning. He was growing fond of her, no longer a little savage. He had come to the Bloomsbury house to advise about some new plantings there that Lady Betty wanted.
Dido remembered how once when she had visited her mother at Greenwich, before she had left for Pensacola, she had told her what she had overheard at Caen Wood and she had replied in that inimitable way, ‘Is more than rumour, child, along the lanes of Greenwich and Deptford, or up Saint Giles. It spreading across the wealds and moors, up and down dales.’
There was such a geography of clamour for a verdict, her mother told her. It stretched across the ocean and found its voice in the hills of Virginia and in the ports of Boston and the Carolinas. If only her mother could have a voice in the court, her poetry would move the world.
Dido was torn between her mother and her Master.
‘That James Sommersett might as well set sail for Jamaica,’ her mother said, ‘and see if the sea breeze do him any good. Is not the air of England or the holy waters of their baptism go free him.’ This was her repeated joke.
She explained that her people were crowding into the courtroom to listen and to hope. ‘Even we people believe that man, who you call your Master, has the words of freedom on his tongue.’ Then she laughed. Her mother could laugh so much. She too laughed and they went out to find some amusement in the streets down by the river.
Dido asked if she was going to leave her.
She stood and looked out on the river and did not answer her question. Then she said, ‘You think there are easy answers for my predicament, child.’
That was a different answer to her promise from before.
Her mother kept saying, ‘He thinking of you and how any Tom, Dick or Harry catcher could sweep you up outside Bloomsbury Square, bind your pretty wrists and ankles in irons and put you on a boat bound for Kingston. That is a place more dangerous than hell for a strong blackamoor as they call the fellas, so imagine a pretty child like you in that forsaken place. Just there on Holborn you find the devil in his hell.’
Dido believed her mother, and believed her more when she raised her dress over her shoulders and showed her laddered back of welts that told the story of when she was a child. ‘I don’t want this for you,’ she said, looking over her shoulder at Dido as she fixed back her dress. ‘I don’t want you in some sugarcane field under the burning sun. I don’t want you become some belle for no gentleman, nor have your head down picking cotton and tobacco.’
‘We must remember that we do need these necessary implements, the free labour, I mean, if we are going to continue with the commercial success of the realm. The colonies need the labour. Jeopardise that with talk of abolition or stopping the trade and all will be lost. How could we compensate the planters for their loss if that ridiculous situation was ever to come about?’
Dido saw it was the planter who had arrived that evening with his little pageboy, just before supper was served upstairs. He was full of himself. The child had been put to sit in the pantry.
‘You’re quite right, how are we to get that necessary spoonful of sugar into our dish of coffee, tea, or even chocolate?’ That was that poet. She had missed his name.
There was laughter. Dido’s Master’s friends loved this kind of talk.
‘Quite so, quite so,’ they all murmured.
‘What do they say in Liverpool? Straw for bricks, negroes for sugar.’ The poet was now trying to be comic. There was some consternation at his last remark.
Beth was again nodding. Dido was going to have to take her arm and walk her out onto the terrace to get some air. But she was too enthralled, so shocked that she pricked her finger again and almost smudged her pattern with her blood, As she moved towards Beth and took her arm to stir her she was detained further by what she then heard. She stooped near the fire as if to rearrange the dwindling embers, to stoke the flames. She shook the scuttle. What world did she see there? As a small child, Lady Betty had said she should look for a world of legends in the flames.
‘I’ve heard it said that the bricks in that city on the banks of the Mersey, crowded with the ships especially constructed for the cargo, are cemented with the negro’s blood. They say the very mortar is a negro’s blood.’ The poet repeated his lurid descriptions.
The shock around the room was now more marked. All did not think alike. Dido’s Master cast his eyes upon her at that remark. Lady Betty offered more coffee.
It was only later that Dido thought it might have been a metaphor, the purpose of that figure of speech was recently learned with Beth in the schoolroom.
There was silence then, and Lady Betty coughed and Molly was at the door with some more coffee for the gentlemen, and Dido thought, yes, a spoonful or more of sugar.
That she was allowed to overhear these debates, the evening chat, was perplexing. If she had told her mother stories like these she would have howled the place down. Hers was a laughter of pain, a riot in my belly, as she once told her. Laugh and dance, my child. Her dances were always for freedom, she had said, Even though it might never come I stamp my feet for freedom. I click my maracas in the ears of gentlemen for freedom. I laugh for freedom. Watch my stamping feet, my flamenco, learn from the Spanish. Come come dance your feet. See the African drum in my hips. She was indomitable. It made her feel better to say the words.
‘Stories of blood will feed the cause of Granville Sharp and he won’t be silenced. We cannot condone murder. There’s law to govern the behaviour on the slavers. Is it kept? That’s another matter.’ Her Master was wishing to return the conversation to some sobriety. It was the talk of blood cementing bricks that he thought odious. He did not
think that way.
But Dido learned again and again he was a man of law above all.
‘Let us get back to the judgment, my Lord.’ One of his lawyer guests was pressing him.
‘What will the consequences be if the owners in general, and all at once particularly, were to lose their property?’
‘Quite so. Quite so.’ The murmurs around the room echoed his words and sentiments.
‘Planters in America not to mention the West Indian lobby want a ruling. I repeat myself. They want the legislation in black and white, I am not joking, no irony intended in my choice of words, and so does Mr Sharp as you say. He wants a precedent.’
‘But there are…what is the latest estimate? Fifteen thousand blacks in the country at the moment. A total of £800,000. That is a lot of property, what is it? What are the consequences if that is lost?’
Dido could not distinguish the speakers.
‘It would be most disagreeable if that were to happen. What will you do?’ The voices of this opinion were in unison; each one singly stated, and then all together, in agreement.
‘I will keep my counsel, gentlemen, as you know I must. I have adjourned the sitting of the court to give them all time to think. Let us sup, my dear, do lead the way.’ Dido’s Master rose to leave the room.
She caught Lady Betty looking at her. She thought she was telling her to go off to bed at that moment. Dido was ignoring her. She wanted to hear more. There was a philosopher in their midst. He was elaborating the views of Mr John Locke who said, ‘That estate of man is most vile and miserable.’ Dido agreed with the philosopher that ‘It is opposite to the generous temper and courage of our nation. It is difficult to conceive how an Englishman much less a gentleman could argue for it.’
And they, those gentlemen, when they had arrived all smiles, were even bearing small gifts for their ‘Little Dido’. Some had come to the house many times.
They talked and laughed with such a roar that the blood rushed to her cheeks.
‘Little Dido, dear little Dido.’ She had had to protect herself from one gentleman with his wandering hands in the corridors and on the stairs. ‘Do you actually read?’ he asked. He carried sweets in his pocket and used them as an enticement.
In the pantry she met the pageboy she had seen at the beginning of the evening. His name was Caesar, he told her, and he had accompanied his master from Barbados to be his valet in England.
‘I was a birthday present from his wife.’
‘Indeed.’ Dido was shocked. She reached out to the child and touched his head affectionately. The extraordinary things that happen, she thought.
He said that he enjoyed his master’s country house in the West Country rather than his house in town. He asked what she was doing at Caen Wood. But, by then, she had served him a slice of beef with some dripping and bread and left him to his meal. She had wanted to talk further but thought she should return to the drawing room. He told her, as she was leaving the pantry, that he was ten years old. She wondered how he would survive as he got older.
‘I know the company you keeping in your pretty clothes. Is a new bonnet they should give you,’ her mother had once said to Dido.
When she said that, she tidied up Dido’s hair on the nape of her neck. Dido had told her once that she had overheard a gentleman, one of her Master’s friends, commenting that her woolly hair was escaping from under her bonnet.
‘Woolly! What a thing. You is some sheep? What business of his? Scoundrel. That so important to mention? We hair always seem to scandalise them. It not prevent them, though, wanting to interfere with we body.’
She looked knowingly at Dido, something she thought she should remember.
ELIZABETH STARED OUT into her garden.
Maybe, Lord Mansfield, the Chief Justice, her Master, had thought of her, that girl Dido, as he pondered his judgment. Had he thought he could not risk that his grand-niece, legally his nephew’s slave, his for safe keeping, his indeed, could be captured and deported? Elizabeth reflected on this from the distance of time and place. If that were so, she had not changed his mind about the larger question. It took ten more years for him to write down a statement to grant Dido her own freedom. His judgment on Sommersett never stopped the catchers. They carried on more than ever that year and the years immediately following as Elizabeth learned from the charming Mr Equiano. He spoke so eloquently and wrote so elegantly of those matters in his narrative.
It shocked her now how she had felt that it was impossible to leave her Master. It terrified her now to put it in so many words. Still she thought of him as her Master. It had been as if each night she locked herself in under lock and key. Then she discovered in a letter to her mother how she once did try to run away. She was found forlorn not far off in Kentish Town, her dress and apron torn with brambles where she had tried to hide in hedges. That she forgot that? Did she? Miss Dido where will you run to my girl? You a runaway? That was Hal who had seen her escaping under Sherrick Hole and then along Swain’s Lane, trying to avoid the farmhands. He marched her back to the house, straight to the kitchen door where he delivered her to Mrs Burns.
Hot August and the lawn was parched. Her mouth was dry. Elizabeth had waited and waited for these letters. As she opened the box this time, the bundles burst from the constrictions of their ribbons, tumbling out onto the floor. The ribbons were old and faded, each parcel having been secured before being stuffed into a drawer and hidden away. Who had been the ones to spy on her mother and herself over the years, knowing all their feelings and all their plans: Lady Betty, Miss Anne, her Master himself?
She swept them up into her arms, and pressed them to her bosom. She was brave today as she opened the first parcel and smoothed it out on her lap.
Dearest Daughter… Elizabeth’s eyes ran down the page… I still waiting… She chose another letter. She heard her voice and could not continue. Her tears were flowing down her cheeks. She returned to a former letter. She saw the words through a mist:
is weeks — months I not hear anything yet from you daughter. What do you child that you keep so silent — you forget your mother. I preparing to bring you. You must believe that. I will send for you when I feel it safe for you to come. Your father send me with a letter stating I is free. I have that letter. I don’t believe that letter is proper manumission just his arrogance and presumption. I must secure my own freedom here. I must get that money together to buy my freedom. I can’t have you here with me until I know I is free. Or some catcher hold me and take me to sell upon a plantation. $200 I must pay for my manumission. No matter the freedom your father think he bestow upon me. So I then have to start collect more money to bring you. Before I leave London your father secure that I have a piece of land. But he also demand that I build a house on that land. I don’t know where you father think I getting money to build house. But I must build because I must keep this land. Is good land right here at the front of the town — right there by the sea. But that house where we used to live when you was a small small child have to come down. The wood rotten — the windows and shutters hanging off their hinges. When them storm come you mother get soak…
There was repetition in her letters; her need and her terror, insisting that her daughter knew what she was experiencing.
Elizabeth’s tears ceased as she read and imagined her struggle. She saw at once why such a letter was not delivered to the girl, Dido. She remembered her young self. She would have been in constant expectation to leave England to travel to meet her mother. She would be running away all the time to find a ship on the Thames, some madness like that. They must have thought her mother’s condition was squalid. Is that why her Master, Lady Betty and her father wanted to keep her in England? Her father had satisfied himself that her mother had her freedom, legally.
Elizabeth’s anger swelled up. It was not as if her father cared for her. She had hardly ever seen him for years. He was not a constant man in the end. His own ambitions took him round the world and into battle, that young boy still who had once joined the navy.
Where were Lydia and the boys? Elizabeth sat among her roses and her mother’s voice flooded the air and her mind. ‘My children.’ She woke in a panic, crying out for them. Was it that tincture of laudanum again? It was getting dark. It was almost time for her husband to be back.
She heard the front door slam.