I’ve heard nothing from you since. But Sal came and found me this morning. How it made my heart leap to see her. I tried to give her my attention, push other thoughts aside. She hadn’t been at the trial, she said, because the old bastard’s children had come for her. They’d just appeared on the doorstep one day, bailiffs in tow. Apparently, there’s been no end of trouble for her since my trial. Everyone in London knows where the School-house is now. The old bastard’s children claimed Sal was their property, left to them in his will. Mrs Slap said she had to go, not to bring any more trouble. For six weeks she’d been a maid. Sal, a maid! I tried to picture her with bucket and soap and rags. Oh, she made me laugh, with her tales of seasoning their tea with their own piss! She’d been able to buy herself back, with all her savings from the School-house. All her lovely coins, poured out in a golden stream, right into their grasping hands.
She grinned. ‘I suppose I rather pay them than pay some lawyer to fight them. And I got my free paper now.’
She told me the broadsheets are saying that the Devil was in me and put it in my head, that I wanted to carve the Benhams and boil their bones into soup and that I do not repent of it, save that I didn’t get that chance. I didn’t want to talk to her about any of it. I asked her about Laddie, but she knew nothing. Laddie’s made himself a loose thread. I suspect he didn’t want to face their questions, or their English justice.
We held hands, we watched the candles dwindle and burn. She’d brought me food, a blanket, some paper and a pen. Added to the sheaf you had already left.
Best of all, a copy of Moll.
I won’t say more about Sal’s visit. It was like that elephant, so long ago. No matter what I write, you won’t know what it was like. She did bring one last thing, which I saved until she left. A letter. I opened it, pulled one of the candles closer. It was from Miss-bella, addressed to: ‘Frances, former housemaid and latter-day whore’, care of THE SCHOOL-HOUSE. I suppose she must have read the papers too. Perhaps it amused her to write me at the brothel rather than the gaol.
Frances,
I do hope this reaches you.
My husband is long gone and Phibbah even longer. Therefore I must write you.
I heard he gave you away as soon as you got to England, which must mean he knew how close death was for him. I believe it is also close for you.
It has outraged my brother that I am writing to you. His sister, penning a letter to her husband’s bastard! I think he saw it as the last sign, if he needed one, of how this place has rotted me like a thrown-away apple.
My husband’s bastard. Those are my words. My brother’s were not as delicate, though I don’t intend to spare your feelings in this. In fact, I intend to be as cruel as I can.
My husband’s bastard. And now my confessor.
I was the one who told you. I did that to be cruel as well. As long as I live, which will now be mercifully brief, I will be cursed to go over and over back to that porch, to your mulish answer when I asked you what you were doing in that coach-house with my husband. Cleaning, you said. Cleaning! As if anyone inside or outside that house was fooled by then into thinking you a maid. I told you he was your father. His bone and his flesh. Oh, I could see the horror on your face. You said you were going to be sick. You vomited on my rosebushes – do you remember that?
The things the two of you did were abominations, even in a place awash in abominations.
But I am not writing you about that. I am writing about your mother. You used to ask about her. Over and over. I used to hear her, when you asked, telling you to leave her alone. She was the reason he brought you to live in the Great House, you know. She is, I suppose, the reason I was kind to you at the start. I wanted to hurt her. I even made sure I was the one to name you, that she’d have not even that small serving of a mother’s joy. He was fond enough of her, in his own way. (These things are very seldom black and white, are they?) Fond enough to promise that you would never be sold away, that you could come up out of the quarters, that you would not be put in the fields. You were never to know the truth. But she’d have told you, just as I did, had she still been here. I’m sure of it. Anything to stop what the two of you were doing.
I suspect there were others before you. Babies, I mean. If there was one person on that whole estate who knew how a woman could go about saving herself from children she didn’t want, it was your mother. Before you came, Langton used to say the pair of us – she and I, I mean – were barren as a pair of shipboard hens. Ha! You proved him wrong, and then it was only me. The idiot. He was as blind as all men to anything that would suggest his own inadequacy, or a woman’s choice. Those herbs she gave me. I made a joke of it. Give me this day, my daily orangeade. The thing that saved me from having to bear his children. And for that, I am grateful to her.
I don’t understand how you slipped through your mother’s cracks. Perhaps she was tired, by then, or perhaps her usual tricks just didn’t work. However it happened, you were Langton’s only child, and I take pleasure in that.
You were born, she ran away, and then he hunted her down and dragged her back and he ordered Manso to take his chisel to her teeth. But he cut off his own nose to spite his face, as they say. She didn’t hold the same appeal after that. Oh, but he was fond of her. He made her those promises, after all, about you.
I learned the hard way that this is a place where a man keeps his concubines and his bastards in plain sight. The very woman who’d spit in your porridge in the morning could be fornicating with your husband that night.
How it destroys all of us.
I am tired. I will finish this. Where was I?
Your mother.
In the Bible, Laban gave to his daughter Rachel his handmaid Bilhah, to be her handmaid. And Rachel’s sons were the sons of Bilhah, her handmaid.
We were Rachel and Bilhah, she and I.
My husband no doubt believed that in the next life she and I will still be out on that porch, surrounded by dying English roses, me with the tea, her with the fan.
I think he is wrong.
Mrs A. Langton
My stomach clenches. I’m back in the dining room, telling Langton about the orangeade, telling myself I was only speaking the truth, forgetting how many sides the truth has. I can’t see how terrible it will be, because all I’m thinking about is me. Fear makes my mouth dry as salt. I’d seen it, of course, during the years that followed, who she was to me; there was, after all, only one woman it could have been. All those times I’d asked her, perhaps I was just waiting for her to tell me. She hated me sometimes. But I believe there was love, too.
So many things to tell her. How guilt has run through me, all this time, keeping time with my blood. How, even now, to think of it, to write of it, makes both leap in my chest. How sorry I am.
A child’s understanding is dark. Sometimes light is blinding. I shake the letter out on my lap and read it again. And then I’m on the porch. I watch Miss-bella’s slow hands reaching for the glass. Phibbah behind her with the fan. The orangeade. That’s how they managed it. Not poison, those herbs in Miss-bella’s glass, but her daily dose. Make sure she stayed barren. But in Jamaica there were two truths. One, all bush medicine is obeah if they say it is. And two, white women never take the blame.