20

MR D’AVINIERE HAD gone to look for a house for them that afternoon. He had told Dido of his plan on the Sunday after meeting her in Hampstead. She imagined him now as she sat by her Master’s bedside reading to him from his Cicero.

‘That piece, Dido, from de Senectute, which my learned friend says he had lately included among his other works,’ her Master chuckled. Dido had brought some of her Master’s favourite volumes up from the library to his bedroom just so he could see them there and stretch out his arm to touch their spines and run his fingers along the leather and gold leaf of their binding and illumination; not the originals, all those having been burnt in the Bloomsbury fire. He hardly ever descended at that time to the ground floor of the house or to walk along the south terrace. His health was much worse.

‘I wrote of old age as an old man to an old man.’ Dido continued reading. She enjoyed that turn of phrase. ‘Is it Cato talking in the dialogue?’

Dido was distracted in her reading as she imagined Mr d’Aviniere and his search in Pimlico. His letter was in her pocket, describing to her one of the houses he had visited the previous week, which had a good parlour and a room with a blue wainscot panelling on one of the walls. Another room was hung with paper. A house of their very own, he had called it. It seemed a dream that would never be. He wrote it in a letter that she could take out in the privacy of her room and read it over and over and so always have it, a kind of love letter, his desire for her, even though a dream, to remind herself what was going to be their reward once her Master had died and she would be free, free of the vigil that she had been keeping for eight years; her labour since a little girl, her freedom confirmed in 1783, not acted on, no piece of paper, as her mother would call it.

Their secret, Mr d’Aviniere’s and her own, was loud in her head as she continued to read from Cicero’s dialogue. His measured sentences were so much like her Master’s: ‘But my present purpose is to write to you something of old age.’ Dido had to fetch water to his dry lips. ‘A burden we have in common,’ she continued reading.

‘Indeed,’ her Master agreed.

Dido continued, ‘There must, however, of necessity, be some end, as is the case of berries on the trees and the fruits of the earth.’ Then she saw that he had dropped off.

How they got through that last winter she did not know. That morning she was so distracted. Master had opened his eyes again. ‘Carry on, Dido. Your pauses, my girl, obscure the meaning. I must look again for them in your voice so you must increase your volume, my child.’

He kept imagining her as little, always little.

She had to apologise for her lapse in attention, her voice growing weaker. And then there inevitably was some task to be performed. He had to be assisted to the commode. Then not left for long as she went from the room to empty the sewage from the bowl once he was comfortably back in bed with the pillows again rearranged and sheets straightened and clouts picked up for laundering. She was always particular to have one of Mr French’s bouquets from the walled garden arranged on a side table and to have a nosegay of lavender at the bedside. She had one for herself and one for him as he declined and as his body collapsed with odours that needed a fragrance to remove them.

How would she have survived the long evenings, the long, long days of fetching, carrying and watching his decline without the secret of her love for Mr d’Aviniere? ‘Keep it discreet,’ her Master had required from the beginning of their courting. The measured sentences of Cicero, those sentences that carried her from the house to the dairy, from the dairy to the poultry and back to the house again, a wearying treadmill, culminating with the vigil at his bedside also saved her.

Her only joy, at first, was to be taken in the arms of John d’Aviniere in the porch of the Meeting House before the other Friends arrived. He had then begun to travel back with her in the carriage that her Master had said she could have at her disposal. Then there were their meetings on the Heath. He began to walk her home along the narrow hidden paths that ran between Hampstead, Highgate and the Caen Wood estate. This freedom, trysts on the heath, allowed Dido to transcend the hours of service so as to return refreshed to make an old dying man comfortable.

ELIZABETH DOZED AND woke with a start, calling out, ‘Mammy.’ Was that her mother at the door?

She had to check that her husband had delivered her letter to Captain Richardson.

How much longer would she be able to go up and down the stairs? Mr Bridges was just finishing his lesson and she could hear the boys getting ready to burst out of the parlour. ‘Stop fighting, lads.’ Poor man. Her boys could be terrors as well as darlings. She would sit and have tea with them. She sat and waited and thought how they would be without her there. Then she heard Lydia taking charge.

‘Your mother isn’t well.’ Elizabeth heard Lydia explaining to the boys. ‘Let us go out. Wrap up. It may snow this afternoon and perhaps you may be able to go sleighing on the slopes near Belgravia. We’ll be safe,’ she said, as she patted Charles on his head.

Elizabeth scared herself with her doses of laudanum. What else could account for the memory of an experience so vivid?

It was when she was a baby, her mother’s words telling her of the bright day, the green sea, the blue sky and the burning ships sounding like a lullaby. She was a baby, her mother’s pickney. It was now a kind of hallucination, being suckled by her mother below the deck of her father’s ship.

What had she stored, hoarded in her mind, that was now manifesting itself with the expectation of her mother’s letter, her mother’s arrival? Would that be possible, a black woman travelling on her own without protection? She had not thought through the practicalities of what she was hoping for. Would she be able to enter the country? She did not know anything really of her mother’s condition. As Mr d’Aviniere had been telling her, she must be calm and await Captain Richardson’s return with some definite news.

THE WRITING OF the will was in her Master’s own hand, followed by many pencil-scribbled codicils over the years and last months and weeks, conscience and duty pursuing him to the grave, all kept in a tin box and brought out at his command. ‘Dido, Dido, fetch it down.’

She had been up all night, watching, mostly crouching on a stool at the door of his room, sometimes at the foot of his bed. She had to leave the intimate ministrations to Mistress Anne and Marjory, the intimacies that allowed them to kiss him on the cheek; but they had to sleep. He called all the time for her. ‘Where is she? Where is Dido?’

This was not to Miss Anne’s liking, positively against. ‘That girl. That he can allow her to get so close to him. It’s unnatural.’

Miss Marjory put a restraining hand upon her cousin’s arm to protect Dido. She checked what could be her sharp tongue. Dido understood, had understood from the first, and followed Miss Marjory’s cue. Dido was there to fetch and carry from the room to the corridor where one of the servants, either Flo or the young girl from Kentish Town, Susanna, recently arrived at the house, managed the back stairs with pails and slops and the emptying of the commode; something Dido was driven by necessity to do herself on occasion, swilling out and making all clean to be returned to the bedroom. Mistress Anne and Marjory had never left their uncle’s side, as they put it to guests and relatives who called and were refused an audience.

Miss Anne’s fingers counted out the pounds, shillings and pence, counted the guineas, a small fortune which Dido put away from her payment for the work in the dairy and on the farm during the last years at Caen Wood and saved for a life with Mr d’Aviniere.

This imprisonment in his sick bed had been a severe trial for her Master. Miss Fanny Burney called one day and was distressed to see his decline. She was allowed that time to ascend to the first floor for a short visit. All sickness had had to be tidied away and her Master washed and dressed for the visit, with a new nosegay brought in by Mr French. The house was in a buzz. Dido made it her business to delay her time in her Master’s room to catch a glimpse of the novelist, to hear her stories.

But apart from that exceptional visit, he had not even been able to stroll in the corridors, his custom since deciding to withdraw from his room on the ground floor and take apartments on the first floor some four years before. He could not get to the sash window which overlooked the park and his favourite view towards Lincoln’s Inn Fields and the inns of court where he had spent so much of his life.

‘I left my home at Scone on the banks of the Tay when I was a boy of fifteen.’ Dido’s Master had a way of speaking that sounded as if the sentences were written in his autobiography, or sentences handed down. His was a voice accustomed to making judgments and proclaiming truths, at least as he saw them, publicly. He spoke almost in pentameters: ‘Listen to the water rushing over the salmon beats at Scone under the willows weeping.’ Was he going mad, losing his mind? Like the King? Dido sometimes wondered.

She sat and read by candlelight, absorbing herself in her Master’s Cicero, interpreting as she heard him talk. She was torn this way and that by both the language and the assumed wisdom, the assured justice of his view, which competed with her mother’s voice, always in her head, as a satirical and cynical corrective: And he’s your Master, and he sit on the right-hand side of the monarch.

Dido could not remove herself for long periods from her post at the door because he might call from the bed, ‘Dido? Is Dido there?’ She did not always hear his voice, weaker than it had ever been. His inquiry would be conveyed to her in whispers by either Mistress Anne or Marjory, or both, each tripping over the other to be the one to most assist, or to give the impression of assisting when it was she, Dido, who had to do the chore or the errand. While one might be whispering for her attention, turning from the side of the bed, the other was whispering her Master’s inquiry, while stepping silently across the floor towards the door. It was the rustle of their skirts, which caught her attention, because she could doze or be distracted by the work of the servants further down the corridor. It could be such a bustle and a crush, with much to do, with both her Master’s nieces making towards her at the door at the same time.

‘Dido, Dido,’ he whispered. It was unnerving. Then she had to reply at once so as not to force him to repeat his inquiry,

‘Wasting his precious breath,’ Miss Anne rasped in distinct tones which were carried across the distance to her posting through the room from the curtained bed where her Master lay shrouded as it were in the very interior of a sultan’s tent, as Dido often thought of the sumptuous bed with all its drapes. Though, as Dido corrected her simile, not a good mix of metaphors because of the Chinese motifs in the wallpaper hung on Lady Betty’s instructions at the last refurbishing of the rooms; the bed, then more a couch for a reclining mandarin.

She guessed he liked to know that nothing had changed and that she was always there close by if he needed her, his amanuensis, the scribbled codicils in pencil falling off the side of the bed, distributing affections to family, trusted advisers and servants; making all right before his departure, distributing largesse for affection and duty, scribbled and then rubbed off to be amended. The things she saw when she read the letters that she replied to taught her about the world and the business of the King’s realm. They were things she read and did not think about their import. Mr d’Aviniere would tell her that it was like a steward’s job, to read and not to always comment; to know when to question and when to be silent, pondering the ways of powerful men in matters of life and death, of gifting and refusal, of condemnation and acquittal, execution and mercy. It was in these papers that she read to him that she learned of his reaction to the French king’s execution in the January of that year. He had followed the events of the previous year, the attack on the Jardins des Tuileries and the imprisonment of the royal couple in The Temple and the abolition of the monarchy, he so close to their own king. ‘Where is justice?’ he asked.

Dido pondered that question. It was a question she had often wanted to ask him herself.

Dido’s Master died that morning, 18th March in that year of 1793.

Much of the spring had forced itself out of the earth.

ELIZABETH REMEMBERED TWO magpies had appeared outside her room at Caen Wood, perched on the magnolia tree as if an omen. The memory returned as if today itself. Not a day had passed that Elizabeth did not think on it, the immediately engulfing absence, the great void made by her Master’s last breath and then the momentous opportunity which took all the breath out of her: her freedom. That afternoon she had fled to Hampstead to find Mr d’Aviniere to tell him the news. They would be able to marry.

They had respected the period of mourning for it was a complex mourning, a sorrow most peculiar, and yet her shoulders had felt so light as she walked out of the room, out of his house, leaving him dead and being attended to by Miss Anne and Miss Marjory, all because of illegitimacy and the colour of her skin. She was excluded by Miss Anne particularly, having, she supposed, always resented his affection for her and allowing her near his person.

The African in her blood, the state of the world, the construction of the mind, as her mother put it, accounted for this. Mr Way had come in and relieved her of her duty to her Master. He had been both her Master and her champion protector, an uneasy combination that was now ended.

I once was lost and now am found, John Newton’s hymn entered her mind with the many images of bodies thrown from the slaver into the Atlantic’s waves. She thought of the one man that was reported to have rescued himself from the cruel sea by pulling himself aboard the Zong.

Elizabeth thought again, whenever she thought of the Zong, that there had never been a retrial. Justice had not been done. Anyway, it was never considered murder, it was simply an insurance matter, whether it could or could not be given for the loss of property. He did not go far enough. Narrow was his word, always. He followed the narrow lanes of the law. He was not the reformer that she had wanted him to be.

Elizabeth got up and walked into the hall to look at the Van Loo portrait. Did she still want it to hang there? What would her mother think? And she still referred to him as her Master, the terrible effect of it all on her down the years. Things were going to change. Things had to change.

DIDO WORKED AT the milking on the morning after her Master’s death, many thoughts racing through her mind. She would be a free woman. The eight words in the will, he had made her read in 1783 ten years before, had now to be enacted. Make sure you get that piece of paper. You hear me, what I call it, manumission. Her mother’s words reminded her of the duty she had to perform, Get that piece of paper.

That same night she went with Mr d’Aviniere to a meeting in Camden where Mr Equiano was to speak. There was great excitement in the hall when the gentleman arrived on stage and was introduced by Mr Clarkson. His book had become a best seller. It was as exciting as the meeting in Shoreditch when Dido and John sat close together in the crowded hall as Olaudah Equiano described his recent visits to Bath and Devizes and the great following he was having all around the country for the abolition of the slave trade. His new wife was with him. The couple exuded in their closeness, sitting on the stage before he spoke, the humanitarian compassion that Dido believed in, seeing the black man with his white wife and their two daughters working together for freedom and the end of the trade. There was a hush when he rose to speak. Individuals in the crowd called for him to tell them of his travels. He spoke of the strides that had been made and that he expected that soon there would be an end to the cruel and worthless trade. But it was as he spoke and read from his narrative of his travels through the islands that Dido was taken back to her own voyages on one of her father’s ships, her memories full of her mother’s voice with tales of her own passage from the African coast.

The coincidence of the meeting with the death of Dido’s Master emboldened Dido and John with a greater sense of their own personal freedom as they left the meeting excited about their future, Mr Equiano’s words ringing in their ears. John walked Dido back to Caen Wood from Highgate. They stood out on the terrace and looked out over London in the distance and planned their future. As he left her he said, ‘The house is bought. My foster father has loaned me the money.’

‘We’ll have to see through the time of mourning and then we can announce our intentions.’

They held on to each other. ‘I’m scared. I hardly know anywhere else but here,’ Dido said.

‘Don’t be,’ he said. I’ll protect you. I’ll provide. This has been a special night for us. Think of the future Mr Equiano has spoken of that lies before us.’

Dido and John married later that year, on the 5th December, in the presence of John’s sister Martha and their friend John Coventry who had secured her husband the stewardship. It was in St George’s Church, Hanover Square.

ELIZABETH DID NOT have that piece of paper, that manumission, as her mother had insisted. She did not have papers. She thought of Lydia and her concern for her settlement. She had only those eight words I confirm to Dido Elizabeth Belle her freedom written in her Master’s will. She did not have a copy of that will. Such was the arrogance and power of the mighty. She remembered that her mother did not trust the freedom that John Lindsay was supposed to have granted her in 1774. She bought her own freedom for $200 on her return to Pensacola as her mother mentioned in one of her letters. She bought her own freedom. She did not trust his.

It was twenty years since those events which now haunted her.

After sleighing, Billy and Charles had gone to the Saint Bartholomew’s Fair with their father. The boys loved the wakes. She had felt too weak to accompany them and stayed at home with her letters and her writing.

Dearest Mammy

Is Dido. Please send for me. I feel the time is so long since you gone. Send for me now. I do not know how much longer I can stay here behaving myself the way my father want me to conduct myself with his family, the way you say I should be and not stubborn or harden as you used to say. I can hear you speaking to me. I try and try. Beth is not like me. I don’t get the clothes she gets. She has a new dress and Lady Betty say I must have the one she used to wear. The boy on the farm frighten me. The girl in the kitchen hiss at me. Send for me. I try and ask when my father coming but he does not come since you went away. He must be travelling round the world. I go in the library and spin the globe. I see where you are. There is the big sea between you and me. Please send for me.

Your dearest daughter

Dido

Is Dido

The cry of a child: they knew she was suffering. Yet how well behaved she had been.

DIDO LISTENED TO the amounts counted out in the main will and then the additional gifts in the codicils. Her Master’s will was read out in the drawing room by Lord Stormont, her Master’s nephew, the new master of Caen Wood. He was not Dido’s Master. Mistress Anne and Marjory were there, given £6,000 each and another £300 a year. Dido understood that Beth was to attend with Mr Finch-Hatton. They were held up on the way from Kent. They arrived in time for Beth to hear of her £10,000. Dido’s father, John Lindsay, had his £1,000 bequeathed to Mary Milner and to his two other children, quite illegitimate, but white, Dido thought, as she listened intently. Her father had only had illegitimate children, how odd. Yet, they carried his name. She had never carried Lindsay. So it was not only illegitimacy that prevented her getting her rights. It was this colour, the human stain they thought she had upon her skin. She did know this but it was plainer than ever now. There was an inheritance that they all, the assembled, had received on this occasion. Mr Way bowed at the announcement of his £1,000. Mr French of the nosegays, the gardener, led the retinue of the different servants, Flo, Molly, Lydia and Susanna, the cooks and all the staff of Caen Wood assembled, crowding the door. Lord Stormont read out all what was left by her Master, his gifts and legacies. Many got £50, some £100. Dido had seen these gifts stabbed out with a pencil in the codicils, the computations changing daily at the whim of her Master, at the pricks of his conscience.

Then she heard her own name called. Dido was to receive an annuity of £100 from the main will and two codicils stated two further amounts, one for £200 and another £300. She thought of Mr d’Aviniere’s house, his gift to her. That might get settled now and the loan paid back to his foster father.

Only Dido knew about the agonising rehearsals of her Master over the years as he tried to weigh on the scales hanging in his mind the balances he had conjured, the services and the favours, the rights and the wrongs as he saw them. Dido, where’s Dido? She thought she heard him calling her, a voice from the top of the house, requiring her service, as Lord Stormont read out the will. Then he added, ‘I quote from uncle’s will, I confirm to Dido Elizabeth Belle her freedom.’

The company turned to look at her. She stared ahead. The room gradually emptied.

She and Lydia stood together holding hands.

COULD THIS HAVE been another occasion on which she should have been bequeathed the letters, her mother’s letters and her own, that archive of correspondence that belonged rightfully to her, Elizabeth thought. Only now, Miss Marjory’s gift, and the letters wherever hoarded, at Miss Anne’s in Brighton or with Lord Stormont at Caen Wood. Poor Beth, only now had she been given the painful duty to bring them to her.