Four months after her marriage to Kilsyth, Bratchet discovered she was putting on weight.
The ladies of the circle she now moved in thought she was too, and began to hint. Mrs Chantry did more than hint. ‘Here, Bratchie,’ she said, ‘We going to hear the patter of little Scotsmen?’
Bratchet explained that she couldn’t have children. ‘I don’t have flows, Judy. I’m barren.’
Mrs Chantry, who was expecting her own baby, guffawed. ‘Don’t look like it to me. Must’ve fallen immediate.’
By the fifth month it didn’t look like it to Bratchet, either.
She went to the parish church when it was empty and sang her own, qualified form of magnificat. God had fooled her into making the greatest sacrifice of her life by letting her think she was barren. On the other hand, if she hadn’t made it He might not have given her this gift of fertility. She went home and told Kilsyth they were to have a child.
Home was Coppleston’s, the house which Sir Timothy Coppleston, the absentee owner of the estate, had built when he first came to the West Indies, before he’d made his fortune and moved into what was known as the Big House where Johnny Faa now lived.
By the time Sir Timothy had built the Big House he’d learned a thing or two about how to survive the Jamaican climate; he modelled his building on the Spanish haciendas then still to be seen in St Jago de la Vega. He gave its rooms low ceilings and a wide door at both ends to encourage a through draught, verandahs around its three storeys encircling a cool, central courtyard.
He’d learned his mistakes from Coppleston’s, his first home in Jamaica when, like most emigrants, he’d been homesick and built a house as much like an English manor as he could. He’d made it in brick with a high hall, a parlour and a carved mahogany Jacobean staircase. He’d put in large windows and glazed them. Even more disastrously, he’d distrusted ventilation as unhealthy and had shielded himself from the night air, especially the sea breeze, by putting no windows at all in the east side.
Then he’d decorated his parlour with hangings and snuggled up at nights in a curtained bed with three successive wives and, after their successive deaths, if the stories were true, with several black mistresses. Bratchet, living there, wondered not so much at his prowess with women as his stamina. The place was a sweat-house. Johnny Faa charged them a high rent for it, but Bratchet was so grateful to get away from the Big House that she’d have paid more for a mud hut.
Johnny’s attitude towards them had altered since Kilsyth’s fever, as if illness had reduced the necessity to show off to a man who had once commanded his envy and now deserved little more than contempt. It had been displayed in little things. The slim and beautiful mulatto girl whom Faa called his housekeeper began to sit at table opposite him, a position formerly given to Bratchet when they all dined together. There were no more meals concocted to tempt Kilsyth’s appetite back. If they borrowed the trap, no one was supplied to drive it which meant that, to save Kilsyth’s hands, an inept Bratchet had to take the reins.
They couldn’t complain; Johnny Faa had provided a very necessary port in their storm. These were not unreasonable straws, but the wind which blew them had a cutting edge and the couple had taken their warning.
At Coppleston’s, Bratchet disposed of the hangings, which were anyway mildewed, took out the glazed windows and replaced them with jalousies. Against all advice, she and Kilsyth made a window with shutters in the east wall and let the sea breeze do its worst. It was still a sticky place to live in but the alterations made it bearable, while its height – it was a mile into the hills from the Big House – commanded pleasant views downwards to the south, east and west.
The north was a different matter. A cellar that had once stocked sugar hogsheads extended out from beneath the house, its wooden trapdoor now covered with leaves and mosses. Here, shaded by a giant cottonwood tree, the parlour window and that of the bedrom above looked out on to a rise on which Coppleston had built his first sugar mill.
Bratchet had taken against cane the first day she saw it and nothing about turning it into sugar – a process that took place a hundred yards from her tiny garden – altered her dislike. Human suffering marked every stage, from planting between October and December to harvesting sixteen months later, between January and May.
She and Kilsyth took up residence in May when gangs of slaves, females with babies on their back among them, cut the cane with curved knives called bills, removed the outer leaves, bundled the stalks and carted them to the mill for grinding. The mill was a horror, an open contraption consisting of three vertical rollers, turned by plodding teams of oxen, into which a slave millman fed the canes to be crushed so that their dark brown juice could flow down the rollers into a trough which led through pipes to the boiling house.
Just before the newlyweds moved into Coppleston’s, a slave unwarily feeding the mill had got his fingers caught in the rollers and the rest of his body had been drawn in. Hearing about it, Bratchet learned that it wasn’t an isolated incident. ‘Oh that happens,’ her nearest white, female neighbour, Mrs Sewell, said, sighing, ‘They never get the oxen to stop in time. We lost two men like that and one of them was really valuable.’
Then there was the boiling house, adjacent to the mill. Ever after, when she heard mention of hell, into Bratchet’s mind’s eye came a picture of the Coppleston boiling house, literally a furnace on which the cane juice was boiled in successively smaller vats, the largest holding 180 gallons, gradually skimmed, evaporated and poured into the smaller vats until it became a thick, dark brown, ropy syrup.
A mistake by the slave in charge of pouring the bubbling syrup into its cooling cistern could – and had – resulted in agony to himself and anybody too close. It stuck to the flesh and couldn’t be got off.
At nights the Undertaker, blowing down from the hills, filled her rooms with the sweet smell of boiled sugar, combining it with the aroma of molasses from the distilling house on the other side of the mill to give the air a viscosity thick enough to chew.
As for rum itself, she and Kilsyth forswore it on the day they watched Johnny Faa publicly pour the contents of his chamber pot into the distillery’s vat of fermenting alcohol. Catching sight of their faces, he explained, ‘Stops the slaves frae drinking the brew.’
Walking back with her to the house, Kilsyth said, ‘Will ye credit the man exports the stuff? Lord be thanked Scotland drinks whisky.’
He himself was beginning to drink brandy fairly heavily. It dulled the pain that was distorting his feet and the knuckles of his hands. With Madeira, it was the accepted drink of the richer planter society they moved in, which regarded rum as fit only for fuddling slaves and poor whites.
Bratchet didn’t blame him. The effort he was making to alter his idea of himself from a young warrior racing into battle with his clan to raise the Stuart banner over the green moors of Scotland to that of a man old before his time, crippled in exile in a country he didn’t really like, was titanic and reduced her almost to tears. Several times she suggested they sail home, but he was adamant to stay.
‘My pride’ll not tolerate going back without I can offer my sword to my chief,’ he said, and held out his hand to her, showing it could no longer wield one.
As she kissed it, she thought that never before had she seen someone who imposed the rules of Christianity on himself rather than on other people. Until now she’d not realized that faith was anything other than a word brayed by marketplace preachers. Even Mary of Modena’s gentle Catholicism had accorded with her nature.
But for her husband to accept his loss of strength with the patience he did put up a good argument for both him and his god. Like Job, he believed he was being punished for a purpose; ‘I’ll mebbe be called on to perform a deed or two yet,’ he said, ‘We’ll see, we’ll see.’
If brandy helped him, then Bratchet was content to see him swig it – while they could afford it. But she worried about their finances, the only one of them who did. Kilsyth had no idea about money; he came from a grand, threadbare tradition. If the larder was empty you went out and shot a deer. You forgave a tenant an unpaid rent when he paid you with a salmon poached from your own stream, you kept a rabble of retainers, your personal piper doubled as a gardener, you flung your purse at a deserving cause, trusting the Lord to make up the difference. Greatest of all the commandments, you repaid hospitality. Which, Bratchet decided, was all very well and she was prepared to go along with it. Until she found she was pregnant.
Suddenly she was overwhelmed by a ferocious responsibility. She’d cheat, she’d kill if necessary, but here was one baby that would never experience Puddle Court or its like. So far their pirate loot was holding out but sooner, not later, they would have to find an income. She took advantage of Kilsyth’s euphoria at the news that he was to become a father and said, ‘Wouldn’t it be better, Livingstone, if we didn’t accept all these invitations? We only have to have the buggers back.’ A request for the pleasure of their company at a ball or dinner arrived every day.
He winked at her, ‘We’ll accept the feasts. But we’ll cut out the balls, as Martin Millet would say.’ He referred to his friend frequently. Bratchet wished he wouldn’t.
Kilsyth was a social animal. Since he now couldn’t sit astride a horse comfortably long enough to indulge his favourite Scottish pastime of hunting – anyway, the planters were not great hunters, except of runaway slaves – he responded to the sirens of billiards, shuffle-board, the local ‘clack’, eating and drinking.
Despite Bratchet’s protests, he bought a billiard table at a Spanish Town sale of bankrupt stock and installed it into the hall at Coppleston’s where, with the dining table, it took up most of the room. He didn’t mind that it was worn and scratched; it enabled him to give a return match to Sewell, Waller, Featherstone, Chantry, Faa and the others with whom he’d enjoyed ‘the grand game’ as he called it. This was his attitude to everything. That his house was shabby didn’t worry him; he wasn’t out to keep up appearances, but the food, drink and entertainment he offered must be as good and as plentiful as he’d received. And this was expensive.
The trouble was that the planters were nostalgic feeders: beer, bread and the beef of Old England was what they wanted. The local substitute for bread – cassava, corn or even plantain – wasn’t to their taste so they imported flour from Pennsylvania, salt beef and pork from Ireland and England, both at enormous cost, and drank canary, brandy or Madeira like ale.
Roasting herself and huge meat joints in the outside cabin which served as her kitchen, Bratchet used Puddle Court expressions as she totted up what entertaining her neighbours to breakfast – the main meal of the day was always ‘breakfast’ – was costing.
‘Hope it bloody chokes ’em,’ she’d say. Nearly every male guest in her hall, even the youngest, was bloated with overeating, while his complexion suggested that one more swallow, one more mouthful, would tip him into apoplexy.
‘And I wish it would,’ she’d shout through the steam at Sarcy the cook, a former slave she now employed. That ‘breakfast’ was begun at midday, the hottest time there was, contributed to her bad temper though, wonderfully, it never diminished her guests’ appetite.
‘No wonder the bastards don’t live to old age. If fever don’t put ’em in their coffins, their diet and brandy will.’
When they weren’t entertaining, she and Kilsyth ate lightly, partly from economy, but also from choice, buying corn, fruit, vegetables, salads and eggs from the estate’s slaves, who kept their own gardens and hen runs, with the occasional supplement of island turkey or duck which Kilsyth could shoot with his recently acquired, second-hand fowling pieces from Coppleston’s windows.
The staff – Sarcy – was inadequate for entertaining on any scale, pitiful at any time by planters’ standards, and the other wives offered to lend her their house servants to help with the dinners. Bratchet refused; she couldn’t bear to use slaves. She’d given forty-two-year-old Sarcy her freedom the moment she’d bought her at auction. Yet more help was needed.
She drove herself shakily in the ancient trap they’d bought, along with an equally ancient horse, to Spanish Town. When she came back Pompey, the elderly sweeper-out from the courthouse, was at the reins. He wasn’t a much better driver than she was.
‘He can help out in ever so many ways,’ she told Kilsyth.
‘Are ye sure?’ he asked, doubtfully. ‘Will he carry against a breeze?’
In fact Pompey’s health responded well to good food and a bed in the outhouse and his spirits even better to his few shillings a week salary, the first he’d ever had. He was never going to rival the tall, stately black butlers owned by the other planters but his slave-hood had been varied and he proved useful at odd jobs and serving at table.
From Bratchet’s point of view his real usefulness lay in what information he could give her about Anne and Mary and their babies, though she left the business of questioning until later, when she’d won his trust.
As the Kilsyths continued to give and receive hospitality, what irritated Bratchet as much as the expense was the boredom. Theirs was a small society; part of their welcome into it was because they were new blood to relieve the familiarity of the old.
Queen Anne’s war hardly interested the planters, except to wish it over so that freight and insurance rates could be reduced and they could recommence trading with Spain. The French had attempted an invasion of Jamaica in ’94, which had laid waste the eastern parishes, but it had been beaten back and the island heavily garrisoned. Since then France had left them alone.
So the planters talked sugar; sugar’s processing, sugar’s extracts, sugar’s export, sugar’s price, and when they got to the stage of salacious jokes, which would at least have made a change, the cloth was drawn, and the ladies had to withdraw. The gentlemen settled down to put their backs into drinking, with a trencher of pipes and tobacco and a bowl of brandy laced with sugar on the table, while the ladies sat over coffee and Madeira in the parlour.
The ladies were as boring as their husbands, all except Bratchet’s particular friend, Mrs Chantry, who was a Cockney like her husband. They’d come to Jamaica in 1707 and done so well their estate now covered 1,500 cane-growing acres of the Liguanea Plain.
Mrs Chantry was fat, friendly, unpretentious, interested in everything, interesting about everything; she could lecture on the smallest detail of household management and make it fascinating – it was thanks to her that Bratchet, an unlearned housekeeper, became adept at buying, stocking, preserving and cleaning in the Jamaican climate.
Best of all, Mrs Chantry was a gossip. She knew which planter slept with which slave, who was whose legitimate child and who wasn’t, that Lady Hamilton wore a wig and didn’t like the island, that Mrs Green, the cooper’s wife in Halfway Tree, could afford silver lace for her daughter’s wedding – a battery of information delivered with an uncensoriousness that was refreshing and caused Bratchet to wish Mrs Chantry had been in Jamaica for Anne’s and Mary’s trial.
It was a sad day when, owing to the late stages of pregnancy, Mrs Chantry had to stop visiting and being visited. ‘An’ Gawd help this one be a sticker, ducky,’ she said as Bratchet wished her good luck, ‘An’ yours likewise.’ Of the four babies she’d borne since arriving on the island only one survived.
Jamaica was hard on women and children. Males outnumbered females because women faced the hazard of childbirth on top of the usual tropical diseases like malaria and yellow fever. When a wife died a replacement was hard to find; often the widower didn’t try too hard, contenting himself with a bed-mate from among his slaves. So Mrs Chantry’s departure from the social scene left Bratchet to spend breakfast afternoons – which usually lasted into the night – with a small core usually consisting of Mrs Sewell, Mrs Riley and Miss Waller.
Mrs Sewell could have won cups for boring; once she’d gained the conversational ball she ran with it and couldn’t be stopped. Mrs Riley, presumably the sufferer of a secret sorrow, was a woman of such uncharitableness that her remarks, even when they referred to people not present, invariably left Bratchet feeling emotionally sore.
Miss Waller didn’t talk at all. She was very young, a pallid fifteen-year-old, either too shy, too stupid or too nervous to say even so much as ‘thank you’. Helyar Waller introduced her as his niece and proclaimed loudly on every occasion that he was out to find her a good husband but so far had discovered nobody good enough.
Like everybody else, Bratchet had found the girl irritating until the day that Mrs Chantry privately told her it was suspected in the community that Mary Waller was, in fact, not Helyar’s niece but his daughter by one of his slaves. ‘But she’s white,’ protested Bratchet.
‘Happens,’ said Mrs Chantry, shrugging, ‘I seen babies fair as you born to ebonies black as coal. Take after their pa, see.’
‘And what about the babies they’ll have? Are they white?’
‘Can be,’ Mrs Chantry had said, ‘but sooner or later an ebony’ll pop out into the family an’ have to be smuggled out in a Moses basket.’ She gestured Bratchet to come nearer. ‘If she’s who I think she is, Mary’s ma’s that house slave of Waller’s. The one called Juno. Never says a word to Mary in public; makes out she’s no relation. Gives Mary a chance, see. Funny old business.’
It seemed a tragic old business to Bratchet. She lost her irritation with Mary after that and tried to think more kindly of Waller himself than she had, but it wasn’t easy. He was the richest planter in the area and owned over a hundred slaves, was a member of the council, a magistrate and a colonel of the militia, a large man with a head of white-gold curls that contrasted with the brutality of his face to give him the appearance of an overfed angel gone to the bad. His manners were gross, as if success absolved him from politeness. It was his voice which could be heard coming from the room where men smoked and drank, proffering advice on the proper treatment of slaves, usually ‘starve ’em and flog ’em’.
In the parlour, discussion also centred on slaves, as in the richer households of England mistresses talked of the servant problem. There were no servants in Jamaica; it had been Anne Bonny’s misfortune that she was among the last white women to be impressed for service in an island where it was being realized that slaves were cheaper and that, while there were laws protecting the feeding, clothing and treatment of white servants, there were virtually no legal responsibilities towards slaves.
A master could be fined as much as twenty-five pounds if he wantonly killed his slave – it was more for killing somebody else’s – but since he could, and usually did, plead that the death had occurred in the course of a punishment for a misdemeanour and he hadn’t meant to do it, his sentence was rarely more than nominal, even if he was found guilty, which was rarer still.
‘The trouble with you, madam, is you’re still thinking home,’ said Mrs Riley to Bratchet, who’d expressed disapproval of a planter out at Wag Water for flogging one of his field hands to death.
‘It’s no good thinking home. They don’t respond to kindness, I can tell you now.’
Home-thinking was bad, the misdirected sentimentality of non-combatants who had no idea of what it was like at the front line where brave planters fought to keep them in sugar. ‘Ain’t you noticed their smell? You can smell a slave a mile off.’
On and on it went, with Mary Waller sitting silent beside them, looking through the parlour window to where gleaming semi-naked bodies laboured beyond the cottonwood and, in Bratchet’s view, smelled somewhat fresher than the colonists’ flesh in their perspiration-soaked worsteds and drugget.
They’re afraid, she realized. Outnumbered eight to one, the whites of Jamaica had to deny humanity to the blacks, not only to keep their economy from breaking down, but to prevent their own annihilation. Slaves had to labour from dawn until dark, had to be underfed to break their resistance; any other treatment would be dangerous.
At least Waller was honest enough to admit it. What Bratchet found so offensive about Mrs Riley, Mrs Sewell and their like was that they blamed the blacks for being what their husbands made them. Denying them Christian education, any education, they jeered at the blacks for clinging to their tribal beliefs and customs and called them stupid when the mind-numbing monotony of the slaves’ tasks was designed to stultify their intelligence.
And if it hadn’t been for Licky, she might have believed them. It was so easy to get drawn in, to begin to fear the sullen faces that she could see from her window, to find the limited vocabulary amusing, the childishness irresponsible, the promiscuity reprehensible.
‘And we don’t like you giving Pompey and Sarcy their freedom.’ Mrs Riley’s voice recalled Bratchet’s wandering mind to the present, like lemon spurting into the eye. ‘Sets a bad example. We expect loyalty from our neighbours.’
‘It was the courthouse freed Pompey,’ Bratchet said, ‘He was getting too old. They wanted rid of him.’
Mrs Riley pursed her lips. ‘Sarcy, then. You shouldn’t have done that.’
‘Waller wanted rid of her. He put her up for auction. She was getting too old as well.’
By thirty-five, a slave was past his or her usefulness as a field hand, which was what Sarcy had been, and was given less arduous tasks, like driving the gangs which did the weeding. Waller, with too many older females among his slaves, had exulted in selling the surplus Sarcy, openly telling Bratchet she’d got a bad bargain.
‘He was going to throw her out to starve.’ Bratchet remembered that Waller’s ‘niece’ was in the room and glanced at her, but the girl Mary was staring out of the window as usual, and showed no sign of either approval or offence. She added, ‘I thought she’d work better for having her freedom.’ Why’d I say that? That’s not why I did it. It’s none of the bitch’s business.
‘Seems like it,’ said Mrs Riley, with sarcasm, looking around at the partially dusted furniture, ‘You can’t train a field slave to the house.’
‘True,’ said Mrs Sewell, ‘I remember when…’ She was up and running and this time nobody stopped her.
It was undeniable that Sarcy’s vocation was not housework. Bratchet, needing help, had bought her because she was cheaper than a trained domestic, not understanding that Sarcy had never lived in anything but a hut and was as unfamiliar with the concept of dusting, polishing and cooking as a palm tree.
‘But you must have peeled a pineapple before,’ she’d said, after Sarcy’s first experience with a paring knife, as she held Sarcy’s bleeding hand under the pump.
‘Bella Moll, she the peeler for slaves,’ Sarcy had explained. Cooking communally for the gunyahs, the slave huts, was left to old women who had time for it.
Giving Sarcy her freedom had also proved more charitable than advantageous, to Bratchet’s chagrin, because she couldn’t bear the Riley woman to suppose she was right. It had taken time for Sarcy, born to slavery, to realize that she was entitled to a wage, minuscule as it was, and could walk out on the Kilsyths if she wanted. ‘Where I go?’ she’d asked suspiciously.
‘I don’t know, but you can go there if you want.’
Once the realization of her new condition had sunk in, Sarcy had become desperate to gain similar freedom for her daughter and grandchild, left behind on the Waller estate. ‘You buy ’em, missy. Dey work for you free.’
‘I can’t afford it, Sarcy. He’s asking more for her than we’ve got.’ Sarcy’s daughter, Dinnah, was a second-gang driver and therefore valuable. Her baby, only a month old, had been born with a club foot and Sarcy was terrified that Waller would sell the child away from its mother.
Fired by the previously undreamed-of possibility of happiness, Sarcy became a nagger, continually begging Bratchet to buy, or even steal, her family away from the feared Waller. Bratchet had become omniscient in Sarcy’s eyes and it was difficult to explain to somebody who had never slept in a bed before that somebody who possessed three was short of money.
Gradually, however, the household settled down. As Bratchet’s pregnancy went on she thought more and more about the two women who’d had their babies in the Spanish Town prison cell. She began to question Pompey. Getting answers was difficult, partly because his Jamaican accent was at first almost incomprehensible, secondly because the slave’s law of not volunteering anything to whitey was ingrained in him.
At first he said he didn’t remember.
‘Yes you do,’ Bratchet said, ‘There ain’t that many white women get thrown into Spanish Town gaol for piracy. Pompey, they were friends of mine. Tell me. I won’t tell nobody else.’
She was sitting on the steps of Coppleston’s, watching him curry one of the horses. They’d now acquired two. The old man was making a great business of it, his back towards her, bridle in one hand, comb in the other, hissing with effort at each long pass over the animal’s hindquarters. She wondered if he’d heard her.
‘Pompey, tell me,’ she said again.
‘Dey dead, missy. Bad births. Bubbas, ladies, all dead.’
She got herself up from the steps and swung him round by his shirt to look at her. ‘Don’t try that on me,’ she said, ‘They didn’t all die. I know. Now tell me.’
He looked blank, his lower lip protruding like a child attempting to sulk, eyes rolling.
‘Stop that I’m-a-loony-old-Negro-as-don’t-know-nuffin’ look,’ Bratchet said, ‘because you ain’t. You’re smart. You’re the oldest Negro I know so you must be smart. You wouldn’t have survived else.’
If life expectancy was short among whites, it was shorter among blacks. The number of grey-haired slaves she’d seen since taking up residence at Coppleston’s she could count on one hand. Pompey’s white frizzled cap was a badge of honour.
His lip pulled in and he smiled at her, showing fine, gapped teeth. ‘I ain’t drop down out a hollow tree,’ he said. ‘You say they friends, missy?’
‘Yes. Good friends. What happened?’
‘One die.’
‘Ah.’ Bratchet sat herself back on the steps.
When she looked up she saw Pompey staring at her. ‘I call massa, missy?’
‘No. Don’t fuss. What happened to the other one?’
‘The other one she escape. Don’ ask which. Whitey ladies look the same an’ dark night can’ see cheese from chalk.’
Two dark-haired white women in the throes of childbirth in a badly lit cell. It would have been difficult for their mothers to tell them apart.
‘How did she escape?’
He turned back to the horse, shrugging. ‘Pompey don’t know.’
‘Yes Pompey does. Did she fly? Did the fairies dig a tunnel from outside? How?’
His shoulders hunched up and down and she realized he was giggling. ‘Fairies,’ she heard him say.
She dragged him round again. ‘How?’
He wouldn’t look at her, but stared at the sky. ‘Dat one careless gaoler. He forget bolt de cell door an’ de outside gate one time. De magistrate, he very cross with that careless old gaoler.’
She considered him carefully. ‘It wasn’t a careless old cell-sweeper who unbolted the door and the gate, was it?’
His glance at her was so sharp she knew she’d been a fool ever to patronize him. ‘Cell-sweepers ain’t careless, missy, or they get whuppin’ make their skin fly.’
It had been him, she was sure of it. But the penalty for helping an escape, even one that had taken place years ago, would be so severe if the authorities discovered who the real culprit was that Pompey would never admit it.
She was amazed he’d been prepared to do it at all, if it was him. Whoever had unbolted the prison doors must have had a hellishly big incentive. Or bribe. She said, ‘But even when she got out there were sentries, guards. It’s the centre of bloody Spanish Town.’
‘They say they was riders outside waiting. She get up on one horse and they all git like the Devil ridin’ after.’
A planned escape, then. The Brotherhood? ‘The men with the horses,’ she asked, ‘were they pirates?’
‘Pirates?’ He seemed surprised, then shook his head. ‘Pompey expec’ they just the fairies.’ He’d taken to that joke.
‘What happened to the babies?’
The old face softened. She wondered if he’d watched the births. ‘One dead when it pop out,’ he said.
‘And the other?’
‘Midwife, she take it right away an’ give it to de wet nurse up river by Li’l Occa’s gunyah. But I hear later that bubby escape too.’
One baby, one mother, free. Which baby of which mother, he wouldn’t know. Perhaps even the mother hadn’t known. There’d have had to be some days, perhaps weeks, between the births and the escape, and a baby could change in that time so that the woman who’d borne it in a dark prison cell wouldn’t know if it was hers. Or care that much; the love between Anne and Mary would cherish whichever child survived.
Although she tried, Bratchet could get no more out of the old man. Eventually she gave up. As she hauled herself up the steps to go to her room, she heard him chuckle as he started grooming the horse again. ‘Fairies,’ she heard him say, ‘More like obeah.’
Shaken and tired, she lay on the double bed in the main bedroom and listened to the rattle and swish of the sugar mill as it pressed juice from the cane. It was hot. She felt the kicks of the baby in her stomach like the explosion of bubbles. ‘Anne,’ she said, ‘Mary.’
She dozed. The grief-stricken dream revolved around fairies and galloping dark figures and waterspouts. ‘Asantewa,’ she heard herself saying and woke herself up to say it again. ‘Asantewa.’ She got up from the bed, went downstairs and out into the hot afternoon. Pompey was putting the horse in the lean-to that served for a stable.
She tapped him on the shoulder. ‘It wasn’t pirates waiting outside the gaol,’ she said, ‘it was Maroons.’
She watched his hand as it paused on the latch of the half-door. It had white patches on it. ‘I don’ hear you, missy,’ he said.
She went back to the house, knowing she was right. It had come too late for one of them, but in their extreme need, Anne and Mary had called on the help of a fellow woman, their old friend the Queen of the Maroons.
She didn’t tell Kilsyth. He wouldn’t want to know. His Anne was long dead.
The news that peace had been signed with France came into Kingston on a naval cutter and was brought to the governor in Spanish Town, disseminating through the island by gallopers.
Privately, Lord Archibald told Kilsyth he was uncomfortable with its terms. ‘England has made her separate peace with Louis and deserted the Dutch, the greatest of her allies. Marlborough, her greatest general, has been forced into exile by slanders and persecution. And a Bourbon still sits on the throne of Spain. Where’s the glory in that?’
But the planters didn’t care if England had made peace with Old Nick; the trade routes were open again and Britain had gained the valuable asiento monopoly to the slave trade in Spanish America.
Helyar Waller held the breakfast of all breakfasts to celebrate, and treated half the Liguanea Plain to fourteen types of beef, eight of fowl, three of pork, three of goat, suckling pig, mutton and veal with accompanying puddings of potato, bacon, oysters, caviare, anchovies, olives, custards, cheesecakes, syllabubs, creams, puffs and fruit and a dozen varieties of liquor to wash it all down.
Gathering his guests before the meal, he made them a speech to which Bratchet didn’t bother to listen. He made another afterwards, more privately, away from listening black ears, to the male guests. The ladies could hear loud cheers coming from the direction of the house, as they rested in hammocks under the trees from the heat. They exchanged indulgent, sometimes nervous, smiles. The men were getting drunk again.
‘What was all that in the billiard room?’ asked Bratchet as Pompey drove her and Kilsyth back home up into the hills in the trap.
He roused himself, focusing with difficulty. ‘Ach, they’re after attacking the Maroons.’
‘What?’
‘Before the troops are called home. Now there’s peace the troops’ll be called home.’
‘Yes,’ she said, impatiently.
‘Before they go, there’s to be an all-out attack on the Maroons. Cannon, a’ the rest of it. Wipe them out, Waller says. Once for aye.’
‘Licky,’ she said.
He flapped his hand warningly on her knee. ‘I liked him fine, too. But ye’ll admit he’s been unco’ pestf… pestiferous these last weeks.’ He waved away a fly. ‘I’ll mebbe close my eyes a wee while.’
Licky.
The Maroons had been a thorn in the planters’ flesh lately. The attack on them by armed planters and their dogs in reprisal for sheltering runaway slaves had resulted in little more than two deaths on either side, but it had brought the Maroons out of their mountain fastnesses angrily buzzing like disturbed bees, raiding outlying estates, driving off cattle, burning cane stores.
Colly Atkinson out at Kellitts had been killed defending his coffee crop. The bounty for the capture of any of the rebels had been doubled, but the difficulty of chasing them through mountains they knew like the palm of their hand prevented anyone claiming it.
Waller was right; only an all-out assault by infantry and artillery could inflict serious damage. Bratchet shook her husband’s elbow. ‘Where?’
‘Whassit?’
‘Where are the soldiers going to attack?’
‘Wha’s heathen name of it? Nannytown.’
Licky. What the planters called Nannytown was Licky’s fortress in the Blue Mountains. Licky, who’d been brought back by his mother, the ohemmaa, the Queen of the Windward Maroons, to be their king, their ohene, because only she, the Rainmaker, who had the care of their gods, had the right of royal appointment.
Licky, whom Bratchet wouldn’t exchange for all the planters on the Plain if they were gilded and came with trumpets.
She didn’t even consider. She waited until they were back at Coppleston’s and Kilsyth had been helped indoors to his bed. Then she followed Pompey out as he went to unharness the horse.
‘Did you hear that?’
‘What dat, missy?’
‘Don’t “what dat” me. You heard. You hear everything. Send the ohene a message. Warn him they’re going to attack Nannytown with artillery.’
He put on his idiot look, head lolling, eyes blank, lower lip pendulous. ‘What dat?’
Bratchet took hold of his jacket – it was his best, one of Kilsyth’s – and slowly tugged it back and forth. ‘Pompey, you’re in touch with the Maroons, I know you are. Somebody took a message to the Maroons when Anne and Mary were in prison and it was you, it couldn’t have been nobody else. Now are you going to warn the ohene or am I going to send you to the jumper for a whipping?’
‘Yuh can’. I is a free man.’
‘Pity,’ she said. They both smiled. Such teeth as he had left were amazingly white. She unhooked her fingers from his jacket.
She still wasn’t sure he was the right man, or whether he could send a message if he was. But later, as she lay in bed, worrying, watching an enormous moon silver the hanging parasite vines on the cottonwood, the night suddenly acquired sound, like a bud bursting into spreading flower. The air reverberated with a thrumming roar.
‘Lord save us!’ Kilsyth, usually a heavy sleeper, was out of bed and reaching into the cupboard where he kept his fowling pieces. ‘They’ve risen!’
The sound was savage, sending out an impulse to run, waking race memories of blood sacrifice. It changed rhythm and became the cough of a tiger. It was a sound to reach across jungle and swampland. It was taken up by other drums farther away until the Bratchet, standing at the window with Kilsyth’s arm round her, could hear its echo spreading across the Plain, skipping up into the hills to the mountains, a reminder to puny white figures in their beds that the tigers outnumbered them.
She’d been told about drums; the colonists had forbidden them. And no wonder. She’d had no idea that hands slapping on hollowed-out logs and stretched skins could fill the universe.
It stopped. The ordinary, creaking and chiming denizens of the night took back their occupation of it. She and Kilsyth stood for a long time at the window until it was clear that no feathered spears were massing behind the hill.
‘And what d’ye think that was?’
‘I think someone was telling somebody something.’
The attack on Nannytown took place a week afterwards and was a failure. Having hauled cannon over the ravines and along goat paths into the heights of the Blue Mountains, soldiers and planters were annoyed to find that their objective had moved. Where Nannytown should have been was a large space spiked with holes that showed the roof trees of many huts had once stood there but didn’t any more.
Two weeks later the night of the drums was still a topic of edgy discussion in Spanish Town when Bratchet went in with Pompey to the market to buy vegetables. Sitting in her trap, pointing out the best buys to her housekeeper, Mrs Riley said, ‘We’ve got a beacon ready to signal the militia if the blacks attack and I advise you to have the same. And don’t buy those guavas, the higgler’s asking too much.’
She watched Bratchet finish her purchases and mount up on the horse behind Pompey. ‘It’s not decent to ride pillion with an ebony.’ Her attention was caught elsewhere, ‘Here, Quashee. Who are you?’
A large black man had wandered into the square, leading a bristle-backed boar by a rope through the ring in its nose. He knuckled his forehead and approached the Riley trap to stand docilely under Mrs Riley’s inspection. ‘I haven’t seen you before, have I? Who do you belong to?’
Dumbly the man pointed to his locked iron collar which all slaves wore and which carried the name of his owner and parish. Mrs Riley tried to read it against the glint of the sun. ‘Where are you taking that boar?’
‘Massa send he service de she-hogses over Slaney Penn.’
‘Then stop ambling about here and get on to the Slaneys’.’
Bratchet drew a deep breath to intervene, ‘Here, Quashee.’
‘Sambo, missy.’
‘Sambo, then. You can bring the boar up to Coppleston’s. I’ll send your master the service fee.’
Mrs Riley didn’t like it. ‘I didn’t know Kilsyth had hogs.’
Bratchet forced her mouth into a comic mask’s smile and wiped her sweating hands on Pompey’s back. ‘Didn’t you?’
Kilsyth had taken their only other horse over to the Big House’s smithy, and Coppleston’s was empty, apart from Sarcy who was doing something ineffectual with a duster and the shutters. Bratchet told her to go over to the slaves’ gunyahs and buy guavas.
Sarcy pointed to Bratchet’s basket. ‘Yuh got dem already.’
‘Well, I bloody want some more.’ She watched Sarcy walk off up the hill. There was nobody at the mill. It was planting time. From far off, towards the southern fields, she could hear the drivers shouting at the gangs. She went into the house and prepared some lemonade, then came back on to the porch and sat awhile. Then she went back into the house and poured a glassful of brandy into the lemonade jug, then she went out on to the porch again and watched the track.
The man came wandering up the track with the slave’s lack of haste that was an offence in itself. Once or twice, he stopped to pull some switch grass and feed it to the boar. I’ll kill him. She watched him tether the hog to the ring in the mounting block at the foot of the steps, looked around, led him into the house and hugged him. ‘You bugger. You shouldn’t have done it. You frightened me to death.’
‘Dat no way to talk to de king,’ Licky told her. ‘Dat a baby in yo’ belly?’
She patted it. ‘It is.’
He patted it as well. She handed him a glass of lemonade but he took the jug and drank every drop. There was a change in him; he looked as if he’d been honed harsher and thinner. ‘You got the message then,’ she said.
‘Yep. One thing with cane-trash huts, you can put ’em up somewhere else. No point peltin’ at de boilin’ house to hit de mill wall.’
He hadn’t changed that much then. It was lovely to see him, but she was terrified for him and kept going to the window to look out. ‘Sit,’ he told her, ‘You like game cock runnin’ roun’ de pit.’
When she sat down he squatted opposite her. ‘What you doin’ here? Din’ I tell you Jamaica kill you? One message deserve another an’ I come tell you to git.’
‘Git where? Kilsyth’s poorly and won’t go home.’
‘’F you don’ hear, bye-’n-bye you gine feel. The army plannin’ to capture me, but de navy plannin’ to capture Sam Rogers. He bin piratin’ plenty an’ the admiral don’ like it.’
‘How do you know?’
She gathered there wasn’t much happened on the island that he didn’t know. Nannytown as good as overlooked the Port of Antonio on the east coast and the Maroons were kept informed of shipping movements and plans through their network of slave spies. It had been passed on to the people in the Blue Mountains that the Brilliana was attacking too many vessels and the navy was out to capture her.
‘Even if Sam is caught, what would happen? Livingstone told the Vice-Admiral judge we were helpless victims of mutiny and piracy. Sam wouldn’t say different.’
Licky wasn’t convinced. ‘There was canvas-climbers on dat boat woul’n’t be so particular. Where dat Martin?’
‘He’s gone back to England.’
Licky looked at Bratchet sideways. ‘Yuh ent got sense to shelter yuh out de rain.’
Bridling, she said, ‘We can manage without him.’
‘Like a chicken manage de mongoose,’ he said.
She changed the subject. ‘How’s your mother?’ It sounded bizarre even to her; tea-party politeness to the most wanted man in Jamaica.
Licky rolled his eyes. ‘That great-grandma, she one troublesome woman. She wanted Nannytown to stay put so she can catch de cannon balls in her teet’ and spit ’em back at de army.’
‘She probably could. And how many wives have you got now?’
Nervousness was stultifying her conversation; the iron collar round his neck kept catching her eye and making her self-conscious of her race. She kept thinking of what would happen to him if he was caught. ‘I wish you’d go now,’ she told him after a while, ‘and don’t come again.’
‘Worrit, worrit. You worry for yo’self, girl. ’F you don’ git, Jamaica kill you.’
‘I wish we could all go. You, me, Livingstone. You away from those damn Maroons, us away from these damn planters.’
He wished they could; she could see it in his face as he put an arm round her shoulders; the attrition of constant vigilance and fear, discomfort, responsibility for a people of no homogeneity apart from their colour and dependence on him, their leader. But he said, ‘Ain’t nowhere to git.’
He became urgent. ‘You gotta git. The whiteys don’ like you, girl. You differen’ and whitey don’ like differen’.’
She said, ‘Anyway, I’d never leave here without I knew what happened to Anne’s and Mary’s baby.’ The closer she got to her own delivery, the more she thought about the prison cell in Spanish Town. She was obsessed by the idea that the surviving baby was not with its mother, but still living with the Maroons in the Blue Mountains. At nights she heard it crying.
‘Who?’ he asked. He’d forgotten.
She reminded him of who Anne and Mary were and she told him what Pompey had told her. ‘Asantewa knows what happened to that child. I think it was her took it.’
He frowned. “Fore my time, girl. I was playin’ de good Negro in Europe then.’
‘I know. But you could ask Asantewa.’
‘An’ I could marry Queen Anne if I ask her.’ He cupped her chin between his forefinger and thumb. ‘You git if she tell you?’
She lied to him for the first time. ‘Yes.’ As he went on looking at her, she said, ‘That’s how come I’m here. Trying to find out about Anne and Mary.’
‘An’ look what it got you.’ He sniffed. ‘We’ll see. What I always tell you? Ask no questions, yuh hear no lies.’
‘De longer you live, de more you hear,’ Bratchet said.
She went out first to make sure the coast was clear and then said goodbye.
He was going down the steps when he turned and came back. ‘You promise me now. Iffen I sweeten that old great-grandma into tellin’, you’ll git?’ he said.
‘I’ll git.’ He untethered the boar, kicking its rump to make it move, and marched off down the track. Through tears she watched him go. Before he disappeared from sight, she saw his gait change to the rolling, insulting amble of a slave.
Licky had warned her. ‘Whitey don’ like differen’,’ he’d said. She was incapable of seeing the danger. She’d been brought up in a country that was ostensibly one nation but consisted of uneven incomes, differing ambitions and opposing politics. Even if she’d told Kilsyth what Licky had said, which she didn’t, he couldn’t have seen it either. In Scotland, as in England, the ‘different’ could usually fit in somewhere.
But the planters of the Liguanea Plain were suspended in one stratum that was totally in agreement with itself. There was no poverty among them; their politics and their ambition were directed towards one object: to see that nothing interfered with their uniformity. Eccentricity was a threat, a leak in their dam. It couldn’t be tolerated. Their communication was more subtle than slave drums; like rooks they could smell a stranger in the nest and, like rooks, knew the necessity to turn and kill it. Bratchet didn’t laugh at the right jokes, her attitude to the slaves was wrong, she didn’t respond to advice from the other wives. She was, however, just a wife.
Ironically, it was Kilsyth who made the rooks uneasy. Unlike Bratchet, he had no conviction that slavery was wrong; he accepted it as part of the local scenery, a factor of sugar-growing. He didn’t approve of her meddling – which was why she hadn’t told him she’d warned Licky of the danger to the Maroons.
On learning that the planters were upset that she’d given Pompey and Sarcy their freedom – manumission was usually only granted to very favoured slaves in one’s will – he’d reproved her and they’d had their first quarrel. ‘We’ll abide by the custom, Bratchie.’
‘How can we? These are Licky’s people. Licky’s.’
‘Licky’s no’ a slave.’ He saw only individuals.
But because he saw only individuals, he took Pompey and Sarcy with him and Bratchet to the cathedral on Easter Sunday and didn’t notice when the entire congregation fell silent as they entered, though Bratchet did. He couldn’t even see what he’d done wrong when the officiating priest took him aside afterwards to chastise him.
‘These are souls under my roof,’ he said.
‘They have had no Christian instruction, Mr Kilsyth. They are savages.’
‘Then gi’e ’em Christian instruction, man. It’s what ye’re here for.’
But, although Pompey and Sarcy were now free, although the Jamaican Assembly had reversed its earlier decision and now allowed for slave masters to instruct and baptize ‘all such as they can make sensible of a Deity and the Christian faith’, the planters knew that doing it would spring another leak in the dam – and the planters’ tithes paid the priest’s stipend.
Efforts were made to bring Kilsyth into the fold. ‘Helyar’s offering to set me up as a planter,’ he told Bratchet, returning from a game of billiards at Waller’s house. ‘There’s grand sugar acres going beggin’ over by Charing Cross so he says, and I’ll no need to start paying him back till after the second crop.’
‘You can’t!’ She couldn’t bear that he should become one of them. ‘Anyway, you haven’t the health for it.’ Which was true; he’d recently had a bout of fever that had advanced the pain and swelling of his joints.
‘What d’ye suggest I do then?’ he shouted at her. ‘I’ll not spend the rest of my days sittin’ rocking like an auld wife. We’ve not the siller if I would.’
‘Pickles,’ she said, ‘I been thinking. Pickles. And preserves. Sophie Sewell drones on about her wonderful candied sweetmeats. And they’re good. You had some of her ginger and pickled peppers the other night. I could do that. We could make a commerce out of it. The island’s lousy with limes, mangoes, everything. Most of all, it’s got sugar. We could export them to England, we could…’
‘That’s trade, woman.’ He was appalled. ‘I’ll not become a bloody tradesman.’
‘You’re prepared to be a bloody planter.’
‘That’s, tha’s… gentlemanly occupation. D’ye not see the difference?’
She didn’t. She hadn’t been well enough brought up.
He went to bed muttering. ‘A Livingstone of Kilsyth a pickle-maker. The woman’d have me a bloody grocer.’
He’d come round to it. It was a fine scheme. He’d be miserable at first, perhaps, but he was miserable now, although he tried to hide it from her.
I shouldn’t’ve married him. I’m not his class. But she knew he’d have been worse without her. And if she’d given him nothing else, she was presenting him with a child which gave him something to live for, something for them both to live for. And work for. This baby wasn’t going to grow up in the Jamaican equivalent of Puddle Court. It wasn’t going to grow up to be a slave owner either.
There was nothing for it. They’d have to go into the pickle business.