There is something eerie in the fact that I finished writing this narrative today, 14 July 1717, the eleventh anniversary of Aunt Effie’s murder.
I set down the last sentence an hour ago and then added a postscript for James. Yet I’m still sitting here, at the desk in my study where I’ve sat so often in these last twelve months, writing on.
Partly, I suppose I’ve got used to writing; it has been a way of keeping my mind away from the pain in my leg when I couldn’t sleep. And partly, I am filling in the time until midnight. Just in case there should be a recurrence of those strange and unsettling events that took place in this house a year ago. If Aunt Effie should want to repeat her performance, I want to be awake to contend it.
So far, thank God, it has been as contented a day as all the others that make up my life now. Even more contented. A proud day. Squire Narracott rode by, ostensibly to inquire after my health and drink my Madeira. Towards the end of the conversation, he asked casually whether he could borrow my seed drill when it comes to the winter sowing.
Bare-faced impertinence, of course. Last spring he was bruiting it about the village that I was mad. Drilling with a machine? Couldn’t I be satisfied with the time-honoured method? What did a common – very common – soldier know about farming? Was I not flying in the face of God Himself?
But I noticed he often rides past the fields down by the river where. I’ve done my drilling and can see for himself that by sowing in neat lines the weeds can be kept down and the ground made friable more easily than if crops are allowed to come up anywhere, as they do by broadcasting.
‘Use much seed to an acre, that machine of yours?’ he asked. He booms like a bittern.
‘Two pounds.’
It shook him. He uses nine or ten pounds to the acre and still has a large proportion of ground unplanted, while the rest grows so thick it doesn’t prosper.
It was gall and wormwood for him – asking me for a favour. His disapproval of the way I run my household wasn’t improved when Lady Millet and the Earl of Cullen came galloping through the hall, hallooing, dragging a miniature cart containing my baby daughter, with Livia running alongside and whacking them with a ribbon whip.
‘It’s my younger daughter’s birthday,’ I told him. I snatched Aimée from the cart as it went by and carried her to the door to say goodbye to Narracott and heap some coals on his head. ‘I shall be most happy for you to borrow the Millet Drill, squire.’
I stood on the steps, enjoying the sunshine and kissing Aimée’s fat cheeks, until he’d passed out of sight beyond the oak that was blasted a year ago – we’ve planted honeysuckle round the stump.
When the roisterers came back, we were joined on the lawn by Barty Bates’s boys and the Nutley children for cake and a toast to Aimée’s continued good health in lemonade. The youngest Nutley, who’s six, said, ‘Pa says Aimée is an odd name. Heathen French, Pa says.’
A typical old-fashioned Dissenter, Will. And if I’d imposed Bless-the-Day and Lord-be-Praised as given names on my children, I’d be chary about criticizing anybody else’s choice. But he’s entitled to his opinion.
Asa matter of fact, we did have difficulty naming the child at first. I suggested Morgan Le Fay, but Bratchet said it was the name of a girl who’d been a bloody clinchpoop then and wasn’t any more. She suggested Brilliana, but no child of mine’s going to be called after a goat, however fetching. Eventually we decided on Aimée because it’s Bratchet’s true first name, though she won’t use it. ‘Bratchet’ is good enough for her, she says, and affronts the Narracotts.
She’d made some drop scones – the boys were gallant enough to try one each. Despite the months with Licky in the galley, Bratchet’s a dreadful cook.
‘What’s the matter with ’em?’ she asked suspiciously.
‘I think you dropped them too far,’ James told her.
Luckily, Mrs Nutley had made the cake.
So it’s been a golden day. No sign of Effie Sly – so far. The house was restful, its old bones still basking in the day’s heat, when I retired to my study to finish the manuscript after everyone had gone to bed. It still is.
As I sit here, waiting for midnight, I can smell the honeysuckle round the poor oak. There’s a barn owl perched on the stump. For me, writing the tale for James has laid most of its ghosts. I wish Bratchet would read it so it could do as much for her, but she’s set her mind against remembering. ‘I’m staying in the here and now, where I’m happy,’ she says, ‘and no bugger’s going to take me back. Not even you.’ There’s a lot of Puddle Court still in the Bratchet.
It isn’t as easy as that, of course. Now and then she has nightmares, though she won’t say what happens in them. I’d do a great deal to stop them for her, but the only thing that can do that is time. I only have one nightmare, awake and sleeping. I’m standing on the balcony above Queen Anne’s antechamber watching Bratchet face Mary Read, her back to the drop. Time won’t take that away.
It was a relief when they fished Mary’s body out of the Pool of London a few days later. Superstition, I know, but when I finished copying out extracts from her journal for James, I burnt the thing. She may have been hardly done by, but she turned evil. I left out some of the worst bits.
I left out another thing I know. That Livia is my child. She looks like me, poor little thing, apart from her hair which is as blonde as her mother’s. Mrs Defoe says she’s my image. Bratchet has never said so. After all, Kilsyth died for her and that child and she’s a woman who pays her debts. It’s too late to pay him mine, but if our next child’s a boy I’m going to call him Livingstone.
Bratchet came in an hour ago to ask when I’m coming to bed. ‘Still scribbling?’ she asked, ‘You don’t finish that bloody book soon James’ll be too old to read it.’ She looked at the pile of papers which make up the manuscript. ‘Won’t be able to lift it, neither.’
I made her come in and at least read the postscript which I’ve penned to our ward. She leaned her chin on my head while she did it, her finger moving along the lines of the page.
‘“Dear James, I see now that I didn’t write down this narrative so much for you as for me. Old men forget, Shakespeare said, and I suppose I wanted to remember. Writing it down helped me to bring it back, good, bad, stinks, sights, sounds, things you don’t really need to know but which are precious to me because I shared them with Bratchet.”’
She kissed the top of my head. ‘Bit sentimental, ain’t it?’
‘I’m a sentimental man,’ I told her.
‘“What you really needed to know from me can be put into a few sentences. It may be that you are the son of a black man called Joshua. If not, your father was a pirate, Jack Rackham. Your mother was either Anne Bonny, who had royal blood in her veins and died in prison in Spanish Town, Jamaica. Or she was Mary Read, whose dead body was taken out of the Pool of London two days after Queen Anne died.
‘“You have to know this, James, because there is a possibility that you or your children will have a black child.”’
Bratchet clicked her tongue. ‘You might dress it up a bit for the boy.’
‘How? He’s got to know.’
She read on. ‘“I hope you will love it. If anybody ever says to you that blood is thicker than water, tell them they’re wrong.
‘“I said to you once that we couldn’t love you more if you were our own. It’s still true, just as I love Livia as my own daughter. Who begets whom doesn’t matter. When we sat beside your bed during your bout of scarlet fever last year, when Livia fell out of the apple tree and bumped her head and I carried her home, those were moments when I knew I couldn’t do without either of you. It’s the loving that counts, and the dependency on each other.
‘“Anyway, I don’t think black blood in the nobility would do it any harm. Joshua, who may or not have been your father, was the brother of the man we knew as Licky, who is as royal as any man I’ve ever met and still, as far as we know, rules over the kingdom of a free people. His blood is as good as the Stuarts’ any day.”’
‘That’s a fact,’ Bratchet said, wiping her eyes. ‘Better than the Hanoverians’ and all.’
‘I don’t think George is doing so badly,’ I said, ‘considering everything.’
She put her chin back on my head while she finished the letter. ‘“I know which I’d be prouder of. James II was a limited man. So is his son, the Pretender. In fact, all the Stuarts, as Daniel Defoe says, were a unchancy crew. Except Queen Anne, bless her. She was the best of them. And she’s dead.”’
Bratchet stopped breathing on my head. ‘That’s nice,’ she said, ‘Bit pompous Sir Martin here and there, but it’s nice.’ She sat down in the chair by my side. ‘It’s not going to be easy for him, though, is it?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘Or his wife, when he gets one.’
‘No.’
‘But it’s right about Licky’s blood. He was a royal man.’ She brightened. ‘If he does father a black baby and can’t keep it, perhaps he could give it to us.’
‘Always room for one more.’
She got up. ‘Well, finish it and come to bed. How you going to sign it?’
‘“Your loving guardian?”’
‘“Your loving guardian and father,”’ she said. ‘Don’t stay up too late.’
Now she’s gone, I’ve opened the little brass-bound box that Anne Bonny Bard brought with her to England ready to put the manuscript in. I burned the papers that were in it.
Down in the screen passage that leads to the hall, the grandfather clock is beginning to wheeze, ready to chime midnight. It doesn’t look as if Effie Sly is going to do her haunting this year. Perhaps she never did.
I’m strangely reluctant to lock the manuscript away. It’s a form of goodbye to all the people in it. Some I’m glad to lock up, but there’s others I’d like to see again. The only one I will is Daniel Defoe – he’s coming to stay next week. Some trouble over a debt, I gather.
There’s the twelfth strike. Time to finish the postscript to James and go to bed.
May God have you in his keeping, James, my son
Your loving guardian and father,
Martin Millet