February weather drove us down to the kitchen like rats to a hole. Two Saturdays after I arrived, Linux made a fruit cake with raisins for Benham and allowed us a small piece each, and then Mr Casterwick said he would bring his fiddle out, and Pru and Charles set a row of lighted candles down the table, which made it seem festive, though we were just as worn from that day’s labours as any other, and the room was musty and dim, and still reeked of salt and old mutton fat. The cake made up for it. Golden and sweet, and no matter that I knew only too well how the sugar was made, I couldn’t resist it. I’d drawn my own chair near the door, where I could watch Charles and Pru bicker and carry on, and I let a raisin melt sweet on my tongue, rested my head against the wall. I felt that small measure of ease you get from music, the same as from reading, and the flames flickered low under the stove, giving off a good warmth.
Then, Mr Casterwick’s bow scuffled, came to a stop. When I looked up, I saw Madame, hands flat on the door frame on either side.
‘Mr Casterwick, you play? I didn’t know. I didn’t know.’ The French way she said it sounded like, No. I didn’t no. No, no, no.
Linux thumped down her sherry. ‘Were we disturbing you, Madame?’
‘Oh, no! Non. Not at all! Not at all! It’s . . . My father . . . he plays the violin. Played. Please.’
‘I’m sure I won’t be playing what you’re accustomed to, marm,’ said Mr Casterwick.
‘It’s the violin, Mr Casterwick! Whatever you play will be a lament.’
Some of the cheer left the room, for a mistress among her servants is like a fox among hens: no one knew whether to sit or stand, and even the cat slid out from under the table, shook its backside and nosed out through the open door. Mr Casterwick kept glancing up and losing his place, violin clipped between shoulder and jaw. Linux got up, poured another glass of sherry, cut a slice of the cake. She brought both across the room and set them on the table, swooping her hands above the plate like sea-birds.
‘Where is Mr Benham, Madame?’ she said.
Madame ignored her, gazing about as if she’d never seen the room before, and perhaps she hadn’t: the lady of a house like that never has cause to visit her own kitchen.
‘The master, Madame?’ Linux repeated.
She laughed and shook her head. ‘That is a very good question, Mrs Linux. I suppose you know as well as I do.’
Linux straightened, dusted her hands. ‘Well. Here’s a bit of cake. Shall I send Pru with it, upstairs?’
Madame crossed the room to where the bellows hung on the wall beside the dresser, bent to peer into the baskets of turnips and onions that Linux lined up below the work-bench, and the locked drawers of knives she kept there. Linux watched her, then went back to her place and clamped her hands together in her lap, all the while casting suspicious looks at the rest of us as if we were the ones responsible for disturbing her peace.
Madame returned to the table, forked up a bite of cake. ‘Delicious! But that goes without saying, Mrs Linux.’ She spoke brightly, though she appeared unwell, hair clinging to her brow. She didn’t look at any of us, but closed her eyes and took up another bite, and we all gawped at her, the music suddenly too slow and too loud in the close room. When it seemed that she would chew for ever, she suddenly clattered fork to plate, and clapped her hands together. ‘We should be dancing!’ Pru and Charles blinked in confusion, as if she was speaking Turkish, but she waved them onto their feet anyway, swept them into the cleared space, then came towards me and held out her hand. ‘Frances? It seems we are a man short. You or I must play the breeches role.’
I jerked backwards.
Kiii, it was like being slapped. First, a moment of nothing, then the lightning inside. I remember worrying about the sticky damp that prickled under my arms from beating rugs out against the hawthorn all afternoon, whether I’d smell sour with it; worrying about my calluses that would no doubt feel rough as sackcloth to her, and about where to put my eyes. But then there wasn’t time to puzzle about any of it, for she took my arm and pulled me into the cleared space, and Mr Casterwick tapped his feet and made his bow sing. There wasn’t space for more than a hop and a gallop between table and dresser, and there was nothing in me but held breath. My chest was tight with it. Our knees bounced the table and jostled the chairs. When Pru happened to knock one over she shook with laughter, and that made the rest of them laugh too, and Madame smiled around at everyone and looked pleased.
We latched hands, and I kept my eyes down, watched their feet, copied what they did. It was some English music the rest of them knew, and they stepped together, touched hands, made bow, then curtsy, then bow, like they were speaking some language I didn’t understand, and left me always stumbling two steps behind.
Linux sat tall and straight, flicking her eyes over each of us in turn. Now and then she took small, sucking sips from her glass, twisting her face like a squeezed-out rag. Not even that could dampen my mood. I felt my ribs swelling as if they’d split my chest. Music spilled around us, and the floor was loud under our feet, and we laughed and danced. The four of us forgot ourselves, if only for that hour. No one at Paradise had spoken to me much, let alone asked me to dance. So that was a measure of happiness, being part of their dancing. Forgetting time, forgetting the house, empty and silent above us ‒ forgetting all notions of who we were supposed to be to each other. Four people, dancing.
Langton once told me that when the English soldiers rounded up the obeah men in Jamaica, after Tacky’s rebellion, they experimented on them. Tied them with shackles, prodded them with electric machines and magic lanterns, gave them all manner of jolts and shocks. It must have felt like thunder going through their bones, or pops of lightning cleaving their skulls. When they could no longer stand it, they were forced to admit that the white man’s magic was stronger. The white man is the measure of all things, and of all things the measure is the white man.
That was how I felt when we latched arms.
Oh.
No matter what any moment holds, memory makes of it either nothing at all, or unending terror, or ceaseless grief. All I have left of that night are flashes of her diamond ear-bobs, the swells of her moving against me like tides, the feel of her, like a taste I couldn’t get out of my mouth.