Sir John Wedderburn and Aeneas MacRoy had been for a walk around the loch. Sir John was surprised at how tired it had made him – it was barely a half-mile circuit, yet his legs felt shaky and his head light. Now they were back in the library. He was seated at his writing-table and MacRoy was updating him on the girls’ progress at their lessons, but Sir John had other things on his mind and interrupted him.
‘What do you think of that painting?’
MacRoy followed his glance. ‘The big ane? You and your brithers in Jamaica?’
‘Yes. What do you make of it?’
MacRoy shrugged. ‘It’s a fine big painting.’
‘I was thinking of taking it down.’
‘Aye, weel …’
‘It irritates me.’
‘It’s been there a lang time.’
‘Yes, that’s why it irritates me. I feel like a change.’
‘We could hae it doun in a minute. But whit would ye pit in its place?’
‘I don’t know. There are plenty of other paintings in the house. A landscape, perhaps. Something more Scottish.’ He paused. ‘But I would feel disloyal to my dead brothers if I removed it. I’ve told you one of them painted it?’
‘Aye, Sir John.’ MacRoy looked bored. They had discussed the painting in this manner often in the past.
‘Loyalty, Aeneas. That’s an item in short supply these days.’
MacRoy’s eyes narrowed. ‘Hae I displeased ye in onything?’
‘You? No, not at all. I was speaking in a general way. I was thinking about the younger people today. Do you think they would come out for a cause as we did?’
‘No. But the world is changed. We baith ken that.’
‘Yes, I suppose so.’ He sighed. ‘Well, anyway, I have some letters to write. I’m sure you’re doing a fine job with my daughters’ education. If there’s nothing giving you cause for concern …’
‘Everything is under control.’
‘Good. That’ll be all then, Aeneas, for now.’
‘Very weel, Sir John.’
MacRoy slid out. Sir John felt only slightly guilty about his lack of interest in the girls’ French verbs. Likewise, his letters: though he did have some to write, they were not urgent. Nothing much seemed urgent any more. He simply liked to be alone. Of late even MacRoy’s formerly tolerable presence was becoming oppressive. The outside world made Sir John feel not only exhausted but nervous, as if it conspired against him. In here, among his books and papers, he felt its threat less acutely.
Funny how MacRoy had taken his remark about loyalty personally. Loyalty was a tricky concept, complex and yet fundamentally simple. Sir John had been loyal to the Stewart cause as a youth. Now, because his allegiance was to the Crown, it was also to the house of Hanover, and yet he did not feel like a traitor. Something had shifted but he did not feel compromised. Did Aeneas feel the same? Did he care? In a way, they were like the ‘loyalists’ back in the American Revolution. Many who had previously been Jacobites had steadfastly refused to become rebels against the mother country. But then, loyalty was not about revolution or rebellion. It was about honour.
This was why even now, so many years after it, he was always punctilious in describing the Forty-five as a rising. To call it a rebellion was to debase the cause and its motives, to make it sound like something quite different. He had never been a rebel; nor had his father. When he thought of rebels, he thought of slaves. He thought of Joseph Knight. He thought of Tacky.
In Jamaica, around Easter of 1760, he had begun to feel uneasy even as he surveyed yet another successful season for his plantations. He would wake in the night and listen for something beyond the chirking of the cicadas and the whine of mosquitoes. He could not identify the source of his disquiet. The fear of rebellion had always been there, like the night sounds. The words of the man on the Kingston waterfront would come back to him from time to time: ‘We’re at war with them.’ But in 1760 the unease had been something more than habit. It had worried away at him like a touch of fever.
And yes, looking back from safe, cool Perthshire, he did associate rebellion with heat, as if it came from the heat, from tropical storms. Was that how it had been – an indefinable substance boiling up in clouds, seeping through the air as the rains approached? Or had he heard it in the conch-shell call that roused the slaves to work before dawn but that might also be a call to revolt? Had he smelt it in the sweat glistening on black backs; seen it flashing in the eyes of young men who would hesitate a second before carrying out some task; felt it in the sullenness of the young women? Had that been its sound rattling through the ripening cane fields, grumbling among the slave huts, whispering over the house roof at night?
There had been more visible signs. One morning, on the road to Savanna-la-Mar, he saw two slaves belonging to a neighbour, men known to him by sight, who had shaved their heads clean. Over the next few days, he saw others who had done the same. Women, too. This was something definite, something one could get hold of and worry about. There was some debate among the planters as to what it meant; talk of a cult or a conspiracy, of witchcraft, of obeah men concocting magic to ward off bullets, of strange rituals performed at night while the masters slept. Concerns were expressed about the preponderance of Coromantees in the district: they were powerful workers, but that made them dangerous too. Someone, possibly Underwood, made a remark that circulated with the unease: trouble among the slaves, wherever and whenever it broke out, started not in Jamaica, but in Africa.
There had been a kind of general delusion among the planters, Sir John thought. It was easy to see it from Ballindean, forty years on, especially after the business with Knight. Underwood had thought he knew his slaves. In a quite different way, John Wedderburn had thought he knew his. They had all thought it. But the truth was, slaves were unknowable. The so-called Coromantees were named after a place neither they nor their masters had ever been to. The Africa-born slaves had names and languages that ran like subterranean rivers beneath the surface names and the new language they acquired. They wore their faces like masks. How could they have been anything but unknowable?
Sir John remembered James making a joke in very bad taste one day, at a gathering of planters in Savanna – a meal at an inn to mark some occasion or other. What would that have been? The king’s birthday perhaps? Yes, that was it, and James stood up and toasted ‘The king over the water’, and when some bullish English idiot challenged him – to be a Jacobite was still thought to incline a man to France – James very coolly said, ‘But he is over the water, is he not? Surely we’d have heard if he was coming to Sav?’ Everybody else laughed and eventually, after some muttering, the English bull did too. But that wasn’t the real faux pas. It was later that James overreached himself.
The talk had turned to slave names. Somebody facetiously claimed to have the holiest plantation, because so many of his slaves – Abraham, Job, Ruth, Hannah, Moses – had Biblical names. And somebody else said he then must have the noblest, for all his slaves had Roman names. And a third man said that it didn’t matter what polish you put on them, all the slaves had African names underneath, which meant, though the planters might think they were in the British West Indies, they must in fact all be planters in Dahomey. And James said, filling his glass: ‘All those classical names we give them – Achilles, Hector, Nero, Plato –’
‘Cato, Cassius,’ a voice chipped in helpfully.
‘Brutus.’
‘Hannibal.’
‘Dido.’
‘Silvia.’
‘Sibyl.’
‘Quite.’ James nodded his thanks for the contributions. ‘Strange that the one name you never hear is the one that might fit best.’
‘What’s that? Stupidus?’
‘Spartacus,’ said James.
There was a gaping silence. Somebody knocked over a glass. James tapped cigar ash on to a plate, looked around with an innocent smile. He caught John shaking his head at him. Others were doing the same.
‘I apologise, gentlemen,’ he said at last, but still smiling serenely. ‘It was just a thought.’
That was James through and through: always testing, pushing, upsetting people. The Jacobite toast might have led to a fight, but the Spartacus quip, invoking the name of the rebel slave who had almost destroyed ancient Rome, was far too serious for white men to scuffle over. A stranger hearing James on that occasion might have taken him for some kind of abolitionist, or a planter with a bad conscience at least. But no, James was beyond all such considerations. That was why he could come out with such a remark – the implications did not bother him at all. It was the others, some of them anyway, who had bad consciences.
Communication from one end of the island to the other was slow in 1760. It might take four days over land to Kingston, more in the wet season. Strange, then, to think that the Wedderburns’ slaves knew something was afoot before their masters did. Or maybe not so strange. After all, they had a network between plantations and towns – between lovers, relatives, journeying craftsmen, runners of errands, children – that the whites had no access to.
Things were pretty slack in the days before the explosion. Slaves came and went with remarkable liberty. Some were like dogs, absenting themselves for a few days, knowing they would get a thrashing for it when they returned, but considering it worth it. Like dogs they almost scorned their punishments, severe though they were. How different, thinking back, everything was from how the planters thought it: yes, they held the slaves in bondage, yes, they controlled their lives – but under the surface, even in the unshaded light of day, it was the black population that ran the place. A hundred and sixty thousand slaves on the island, and barely sixteen thousand whites: how could it be otherwise? Nothing could function without them.
This had been the source of John Wedderburn’s fear, that year when Tacky’s war broke out: the knowledge that at all times, every hour of every season, day and night, only a hair’s breadth separated the planters’ immense prosperity from its utter destruction.
There were three big young men in the great gang at Glen Isla – Mungo, Cuffy and Charlie. John Wedderburn had bought them two years before and seasoned them with care, put them to work only when they were ready. They were a team, fine glistening men with an easy strength that seemed to eat up whatever task they were given. John admired them and liked to think that they admired him. Usually they were open-faced and cheerful, often singing at their work, but two weeks after Easter they appeared one morning with heads clean-shaven and mouths set tight, silent, refusing to look the Wedderburns in the eye. Sandy was at Glen Isla at the time, recuperating from one of his many bouts of sickness. John tried to coax the slaves out of their mood.
‘What’s the matter, Charlie? Why you shave your head?’
‘Me not know, massa.’
This seemed such a foolish answer that it made John and Sandy laugh.
‘You not know? You did it and you don’t know why?’
‘Me not do it, massa.’
‘Who, then?’
‘Me do it.’ This was Mungo. ‘Then Charlie do Cuffy, Cuffy do me.’
‘But why?’
‘It mek mi hat fit,’ said Charlie unconvincingly, and put his wide-brimmed hat on to prove the point.
‘Then why no smile? What’s the matter?’
Charlie looked at the ground. Sandy turned to the others. ‘Why is he not smiling?’
Mungo looked at Cuffy. Cuffy half shrugged. Neither spoke.
John said, ‘If I give him a whipping, then I’ll find out why. You want a whipping, Charlie?’
‘No, massa.’
‘Then why you not smile?’
‘Not feel well.’
‘You not feel well either, Mungo? Cuffy? You all sick?’
Cuffy nodded his head very slowly. ‘Yes, massa, we all sick,’ he said. ‘We all sick and we all tired.’
Sandy exchanged a glance with John and laughed. ‘Is that all?’
Silence.
‘They’re just idle,’ Sandy said. There was no response.
‘Well, Crop Over soon come,’ John said, not wishing to prolong matters. ‘Then you all get rest. Now go to work.’
The three men ambled off to join the rest of the gang.
Sandy grinned at John. ‘Imbeciles.’
‘Aye,’ said John. ‘Let’s hope so anyway.’ He felt almost sorry for Charlie. The others seemed to be leading him on. Charlie reminded him of somebody. He couldn’t think who for a minute, until he realised that it was Sandy, always waiting for a cue, always looking for approval. John was shocked – that his own brother should have any resemblance to a black man.
That was the day the first news filtered in from St Mary’s parish, eighty miles to the north-east. Mr Hodge rode up from Savanna in a lather, having spent the morning listening to a man who had come from the capital, Spanish Town, with the most incredible story. Hodge told it to John and Sandy on the porch of the house at Glen Isla. A few days after Easter a hundred Coromantees on two estates in St Mary had risen up, headed for Port Maria and broken into the arsenal there, killing the sentinel. Armed with guns and ammunition, they had moved from one plantation to another, firing the cane and buildings, and killing anyone, white or black, who tried to stop them. Other slaves, in groups of a dozen, twenty, thirty, had joined them. Their leader was a Gold Coast man called Tacky.
Hodge was short on hard facts but replete with horror stories. Overseers and owners were being slaughtered by the score, their hearts cut out and eaten, their blood drunk. Loyal slaves were being horribly beaten, mutilated and dismembered, white women were being raped fifty times before having their throats slit. The merchant’s eyes popped at the thought. John Wedderburn filled him with rum.
‘And this Spanish Town man, he witnessed all this?’
‘No, no,’ said Hodge. ‘But he had it from the survivors. The whole parish is ablaze.’
Sandy Wedderburn had turned pale. ‘And the militia?’ he asked. ‘The regular troops? Where are they? Are they not engaging them?’
John made a calming motion with his hand.
‘Yes, indeed,’ said Hodge breathlessly. ‘They are out after them now. As soon as word got to Spanish Town, the Council met in emergency session. An infantry detachment set off for St Mary’s by way of Archer’s Ridge, another was sent from Port Royal, and a third from Kingston. Martial law is declared – the militia is out too, yes, indeed. And they’ve sent for the Maroons of that district. They’re a cowardly lot but they know better than to side with the slaves.’
‘The Maroons are not cowards,’ Sandy said, with sudden vehemence. ‘Are they, John?’
‘No,’ said John, ‘they are not. You should know better, Mr Hodge.’
The Maroons represented something difficult and contradictory in Jamaican life: blacks who were free – symbolic to the slaves, defiant of whites, but distinct from both and careful to maintain the distinction. They had fought the British to a standstill in the thirties and established their independence and freedom in the mountain areas by formal treaty. In return they had agreed not to accept runaway slaves into their towns, and to support the British in defending the island against invasion or slave rebellion.
Hodge turned pink and swallowed more rum. ‘The fact is,’ he said sulkily, ‘that the island is turned upside down because of this Tacky and his rabble.’
‘I suspect there’s little to fash about,’ John said. ‘Eh, Sandy? It has taken ten days for this news to reach us. In all probability the worst of it is already over, and the ringleaders are dead or in irons.’
Hodge was disappointed by this cool reaction. ‘But Savanna is in an uproar,’ he insisted. ‘The militia is to be called out at once, all absent slaves notified to the authorities, all landowners to report –’
‘Wait, wait, wait,’ John said. ‘Where is the policy in uproar? If we panic, we’ll encourage any hotheads who might be thinking of trouble. If life goes on as normal, they will hear rumours but before they know whether to act on them they will hear a certainty – that the revolt is crushed.’
‘I do think these are more than rumours, sir,’ Hodge said. ‘I have heard them myself. And in any event, surely a show of strength –’
‘Go back to Mrs Hodge,’ said John. ‘She is doubtless much exercised by what she has heard. Give her your show of strength. And our regards, sir. You should be at her side.’
‘Yes, yes, well, perhaps you’re right.’ Hodge brightened again at the prospect of a frantic dash home to his wife. There was something heroic in galloping to and fro. And what news he would bring of the state of unpreparedness he had found up country! The Wedderburns virtually asking to be butchered in their beds! He knocked back the last of his rum. ‘I shall set off at once. There’s an hour yet before dark.’
Once he was gone, John turned to his brother. ‘Now, Sandy, this doesn’t alter what I’ve just said to Mr Hodge, but I want you to ride down to Bluecastle and tell James what we have heard. Leave out the hysterics, but have him see if any of his slaves are missing. I’ll do the same here. Tell him to make certain of all his guns. We’re as well to be safe as not.’
But both plantations were quiet. For the next few weeks the rebellion touched them only in the form of more tales of thousands of slaves rampaging through the windward parishes, of Maroon hunting parties retreating under heavy fire, of British troops ambushed and cut to ribbons. The name Tacky grew like a thundercloud over these stories.
The Westmoreland planters gathered in the last of their sugar crop against the impending rainy season. The first of the downpours turned the naked cane fields into mud. John Wedderburn was still confident, with each passing day, that the revolt would not spread to leeward. Then, in the week of Whitsun, Hodge’s lurid nightmares came true.
Sandy was still at Glen Isla. He was making sketches of different aspects of the plantation – the house, the factory, the slave village, the gangs at work in the fields. His draughtsmanship was competent but lifeless, but John was happy to leave him to it. It would be a record of a kind, and at least gave Sandy a role that nobody else claimed. The trouble was, he believed himself much better than he was. He wanted John to sit for his portrait.
The two Wedderburns were got out of their beds one night by a partly furious, partly frightened Phoebe. She had heard gunfire in the distance. The three of them stepped out on to the porch. Over westward, rising from the plains, a red glow fringed the edge of the hills. John sniffed. ‘What is that?’
They all stood sniffing. Faint at first, but growing stronger every minute, a thick, rich, sweet smell. It became pungent and overwhelming. It was the smell of burning sugar.
They sat up till morning, waiting for something to happen.
At dawn a party of soldiers rode up to the house. Phoebe supplied them with breakfast washed down with rum and water grog. They had been out all night. Some miles away, a Captain Forrest’s slaves had risen: they had killed Forrest’s attorney and overseer while they were at their supper. Whole barns packed with barrels of sugar had been torched. Slaves from three more plantations had also taken off, looting, setting buildings alight and arming themselves with guns and machetes. A different detachment of troops had been attacked. One man had been badly chopped, two others had had narrow escapes. The soldiers drank all the grog, then their officer announced that they had to get back to Savanna, to prepare for another night on patrol.
There was something almost comic about the way the whites took to careering around the countryside. Half of them were full of bravado, half of them of fear, and nearly all of them were drunk. Some days, Peter joined in, taking Sandy with him. Peter was in his element: he was a good horseman, and a fair marksman. Sandy was far from happy, but, urged on by Peter, he went anyway. The older brothers thought that it might do him good. He was so nervy, so frail, so easily brought down by the heat, so seldom confident in his dealings with the blacks. Perhaps dashing about with Peter would toughen him up.
John and James remained on the plantations. Over the next day or two, it became clear that the situation was serious. Smoke drifted across their land. A dozen white people had been killed in the vicinity, and several hundred slaves were reported out. Some planters were forced to abandon their property and take refuge with neighbours. Tom Irvine’s entire workforce ransacked his house and destroyed it. He escaped into the woods and was found by militiamen next day, minus his trousers, his feet cut to ribbons. The men who brought him in thought he had gone insane. But he had not. He was simply in pain, and incandescent with rage that his slaves had ruined his life.
At Glen Isla at this time, apart from whichever Wedderburns were present, there were only two white men left – the others had been called up by the militia. The two were Wilson, the bookkeeper, and Brownlee, who oversaw the gangs and supervised the black slave-drivers. Phoebe could also be trusted, but Jacob and Julius would be no match for the field slaves, and the house lassies could not be depended upon – they were always in an intrigue with some man or other. It seemed a very thin line of defence.
‘And yet we have gone for years turning our backs on men armed with knives and axes,’ John said to James, who had come up from Bluecastle to discuss the situation. ‘I’ve taken a couple of them shooting, shown them how to prime and fire a gun. We let them come and go freely enough. We are fair masters. We only punish them when they are bad. Why should they turn on us now?’
‘Old Underwood would say – no, not him, he’s too soft – Geordie Kinloch would say, that you have just volunteered yourself to be slaughtered. Why should they turn on us now? For the very reason that you have asked the question – your guard is down. You don’t believe them capable of rising against you? That is treating them as men like yourself. A fatal error, brother. So George Kinloch would tell you.’
‘What do you think?’
‘You know me. I have no sentiment when it comes to negers. It is a matter of economy. I’m inclined to agree with George, but I will say this: you know your own negers better than he does.’
‘That’s what I was thinking. I’m going to put it to the test. I intend to arm the best men I have here, and have them protect us and themselves from destruction.’
James nodded. ‘Well, you’ll not be the only one. Which slaves do you have in mind?’
‘Mungo, Cuffy, Charlie. Some others.’
‘Fine boys, fine boys. But they’re still negers after all. Keep a spare loaded musket in your closet, John.’
James headed back to Bluecastle. In the evening John summoned Brownlee, opened a bottle of rum for him, and told him his plans. Brownlee was a decent man, strict but not malicious to the slaves. He was not keen at first – thought it very risky in the current atmosphere. The entire plantation was talking about the revolt. John pressed his case. It was precisely for this reason that they had to seize the initiative. What were their options? Four white men, however well organised, could not stay awake for ever, could not fend off forty or fifty Coromantees if it came to that. Arm eight of the best slaves, divide the watch among John, Sandy, Brownlee and Wilson with two negers apiece, offer them rewards for their loyalty and remind them of the terrible punishments that would, sooner or later, be the lot of the rebels. It was the surest way to keep the place calm and undamaged and themselves alive. John Wedderburn had no intention of seeing all his industry go, like Tom Irvine’s, up in smoke. Brownlee at last agreed that he might be right.
‘We’ll start in the morning,’ John said. ‘My brother is due back from patrol this evening. He and I will get the guns ready. Tomorrow, have the gangs go out as usual, but we’ll bring the men we want up here to the house. I want Mungo, Cuffy and Charlie – we’ll turn their coats before they think of it themselves. I’ll write down some other names. You’ll have some ideas yourself, I expect.’
In the end, the experiment was never tried, for two reasons. When Sandy rode in an hour later, the first story he told was of a planter over by Broughton, who had had the same idea two days before. He had paraded twenty of his best slaves in front of his house, given them a speech along the lines outlined by John to Brownlee, and armed them with muskets, whereupon they had had a brief discussion among themselves, assured him they meant him no harm, thanked him for the weaponry, saluted him with a wave of their hats and marched off to join their rebel brothers. At Savanna a decree had been issued, with immediate effect, that no slaves were to be given guns, and that none was to be permitted off a plantation without a valid ticket from his master explaining the reason for his journey. Any slave found without a ticket would be taken into custody and the owner fined.
The second reason was that, in the morning, John’s three Coromantees, and another dozen slaves, all men, were discovered to have left Glen Isla during the night.
Brownlee and Wilson now went about their duties permanently armed. Sandy rode up the road into the hills and reported it busy with parties of mounted militia and foot soldiers, cautiously probing north towards Montego Bay. Others were escorting miserable-looking batches of captured rebels south to Savanna. Jolting laboriously in the same direction were wagons loaded with the prize possessions (and the wives and children if they had them) of shocked planters, bound for the relative safety of the town. Sandy went with the northbound troops for a few miles, saw several burnt-out planters’ houses, counted fourteen black corpses hanging from trees at the roadside. These ones had been summarily executed and strung up as a warning. Those taken prisoner could expect less merciful treatment.
At the end of May a man-of-war was in the roadstead at Savanna, and offloaded a hundred and twenty men of His Majesty’s 49th Regiment. They joined a company of the 74th, a fairly full complement of the Westmoreland Militia, and two detachments of Maroons. Troops had also arrived to bolster the militia on the north coast, at Lucea and Montego Bay. These forces now began to move inland, sweeping the country before them, driving the rebels back into the central highlands and forests. All four Wedderburns now took turns out with the militia. It was, John thought, their duty to do so.
The rebels were hard to dislodge from their bolt-holes in the woods and hills. They were well organised and well armed. This was ‘look behind’ country, where a man could easily give pursuers the slip among trees and through gullies. When the fight was taken to the rebels, they either melted away or put up such resistance that the troops withdrew. Colonel Cudjoe, the Maroon leader, made the best progress, a fact which was galling to the white officers. This went on throughout June and July. But gradually the number of slaves still out was being whittled down. It was increasingly hard for them to get provisions, and they were using up their ammunition hunting for food. Each day now, parties of them were found hanging in the woods, having taken their own lives rather than surrender. Sometimes bloody heaps of women and children were found on the ground in the same places, slaughtered by their men. The white soldiers considered this a mark of African bestiality.
Very few slaves gave themselves up voluntarily. One by one, the missing Glen Isla men were accounted for. Mungo was found hanged. Soon only Charlie and Cuffy were still out there, either free or dead.
In the east of the island, normality had all but been restored. The mighty Tacky had been run down and shot by a Maroon. His head was displayed on a pole on the highway to Spanish Town. In the west, another rebel leader – called Wager by his white master, Apongo by his black comrades – was wounded in a skirmish on the Cabarita river, and taken to Savanna for trial.
There, retribution was already underway. Slow-burning and hanging in chains were among the recommended methods of punishment. Both were ordered for Apongo, reputedly once a prince in his homeland, now a parcel of meat for the executioner: three days of hanging, then burning from the feet up. He was, in a sense, lucky: he died of his wounds on the second day, before they could take him down.
Every day during most of July, Savanna was the scene of such spectacles. A few townsfolk complained – about the smell. The outlying white population made visits to the square where the executions took place: it was not enough that justice was done, it had to be seen to be done. Some brought slaves to watch, knowing that they would tell their friends what they had witnessed.
In August, the Wedderburns got word that their Cuffy was taken, along with another three men. John and James travelled down to Savanna. There was no question of trying to save him, even had they wished to. No question either that he would be found guilty and condemned to death. But it was customary for a master to exchange farewells with one of his slaves before execution. It was a necessary end to a relationship that had gone wrong. Closure. And the slave might have a last request, or wish to apologise, or simply be glad to see a familiar face. Never let it be said that the system was without a measure of humanity.
Likewise it was customary to provide the condemned man with a good meal. This was to give him sustenance for his long days on the gibbet. Cuffy and two of his comrades were not known to have killed anyone, nor were they leaders, so they were spared the fire. The fourth man, found guilty of inciting others to rebel and of killing a soldier, was to be burnt.
The gibbet was shaped like a huge H on a platform. From the crossbeam were suspended three contraptions like seven-foot-high birdcages. Cuffy and the other two were given some bread and cheese and a mug of grog each, then they were strung up in chains within these cages and hoisted above the crowd. There they were to hang, without further food or water, naked except for loincloths, through the blazing days and the humid, mosquito-thick nights, until they died.
On the second day the Wedderburns stood beneath the gibbet and called up.
‘Cuffy!’
‘Why did you do it, Cuffy?’
Cuffy craned his head down towards their voices. His eyes were puffed and weeping, barely open at all. His tongue was swollen, which made it hard for them to understand him.
‘That you, massa?’
‘It’s me, Cuffy. Why did you do it?’
‘I tole you, massa … I tole you back then. Me sick, me tired.’
John shouted back. ‘No, not your head, you fool. Why did you go out?’
‘The same. Me sick, me tired. Go out, get better.’
On the third day they brought out the man who was to be burnt. He was stapled to the ground by a series of hoops hammered in over his arms and legs, till he was quite unable to move anything but his head. A couple of silent, hooded men built a fire near the man’s feet. Then they applied brands to his left foot. It twitched, began to blister and to give off a greasy smoke. The man’s head twisted back and forth, but he did not utter a sound. Cuffy and one of the other men on the gibbet called encouragingly to him in words the white people did not understand. The third one hung motionless, head on chest, oblivious to the proceedings, to anything but his own suffering.
John was keen to get back to Glen Isla. It was James who had insisted that they wait another day, to see if Cuffy survived till morning, to see the start of the burning. They had spent the night in a Savanna tavern. John’s head was sore. The sun was making him dizzy. The executioners, unable to bear the heat, had long since removed their hoods. They were brutal-looking men, white ex-convicts who had traded their own deaths to become butchers of slaves.
‘What you saying now, Cuffy?’ James asked.
‘Me tell mi brudder, this day he be in Africa. That’s where I be gwan, that’s where we all be gwan.’
John turned away. ‘I’ve had enough,’ he said to James. ‘Are you coming with me?’
‘You go on,’ said James quietly. ‘I’ll come later. I’ll stay with Cuffy a while.’
But he was not looking at Cuffy. He was staring at the staked-out man, who still had neither spoken nor cried out, whose left foot was now a charred stump. James hunkered down, watching intently. His face displayed no emotion. John walked away.
The plantation was like a grave that evening. Brownlee and Wilson were sitting on the porch of the great house, muskets primed and within easy reach, drinking porter and swatting at mosquitoes. John was exhausted. He exchanged a few words with them, said they were welcome to sleep at the house till things were back to normal. Then he went inside to bed.
James did not return the next day, nor the next. It was only at the end of the fifth day since Cuffy had been put up on the gibbet that he appeared, grimy with dust and looking as though he had not slept all week. This was not far from the truth.
‘He’s gone,’ he said. He and John were sitting out where Brownlee and Wilson had been two nights before, drinking again. Sometimes it seemed drink was the only thing that was a constant in their lives; that without it they would cease to exist. ‘He died this afternoon. One of the others is still alive, just. Their courage is almost equal to their stupidity.’
‘I could not thole it,’ said John. ‘I am sick of this slaughter.’
‘They brought it on themselves. I have no sympathy for them. They know that too. We have had no trouble at Bluecastle.’ He gave John a glance, briefly critical. ‘But I do admire their courage. The one they burnt never uttered a word.’
John shook his head. He did not want to hear about it, but in the gloom James did not see the gesture, or chose not to.
‘I watched them burn their way up both his legs and one half of one arm, over the course of an hour or two. He never groaned or spoke at all, yet they kept him conscious all the while, with water and spirits. I would not have believed it had I not seen it. Then one of them got too close. Somehow he got his remaining hand free, snatched at the brand the fellow was holding and threw it at his face.’ He gave a short, dry laugh of amazement. ‘We all applauded him, those of us still there, and they strangled him. It was almost as if he had won.’
‘I cannot think how you could bear to watch it.’
‘I have seen worse,’ said James.
Silence, except for the ceaseless cicadas. John thought about what he had just heard. He knew they were both thinking of the same thing, their father’s death.
‘Was it really worse than that?’ he asked.
James said, ‘This was only a neger.’ Then, his voice suddenly weak with fatigue, he went on, ‘If it’s all the same to you, I’ll not go back to Bluecastle tonight. It’s been quite an ordeal. I’ll stop here if I may.’
‘You are welcome. You know you are always welcome.’
In the morning, over a late breakfast, James was much recovered. He had borrowed a razor and shaved, washed most of the dirt off his face. He was, John knew, easily the more handsome of the pair of them.
‘Now,’ James said. ‘Business again. There is ground to be made up. You must restock.’
‘What?’
‘You must restock with the greatest speed and the least cost. How many have you lost?’
‘Slaves, you mean?’
‘Of course.’
‘Twelve.’
‘You’ll be due compensation, for those that did not kill themselves that is. You must get your claim in early, ahead of the rush. The St Mary’s people will already be lodging their petitions. There’s a loss, of course, bound to be – I doubt the Assembly will pay more than forty pound a head for an executed slave – but it’s better than nothing, and will help when you buy fresh. I never thought of it, but a crushed rebellion must be good for the slave ships, must quicken the market.’
‘James, you never fail to astonish me. I have not thought so far ahead.’
‘It is not far at all. If you buy now, you’ll not be able to use the new negers fully till they’re seasoned. That’s next year. You’re short of twelve Coromantees. That’s a serious deficiency.’
‘Eleven, till Charlie’s found.’
‘Ah, Charlie, yes. Do you know, are there any of the slaves executed so far whose owners are not known?’
‘Not that I am aware.’
‘You could put in a claim if we were certain of them. Well, perhaps not. You had better not risk it. But Charlie is another matter.’
‘He’s dead, I should think. Rotting on a tree somewhere.’
‘Well, if that’s the case, let’s be clear it was not his own doing, but that he was hanged on the spot. Sandy can vouch for it – saw the militia or the Maroons do it. Then, if Charlie should come back, and assuming you’ve not declared him as absent – you’ve not, have you? –’
‘I never thought Charlie would rebel. It was against his character. The others urged him to it, I’m sure …’ Again he caught that sharp look that James had given him the night before. ‘No, I’ve not declared him.’
‘Then the price of Charlie staying alive, which he is sure to accept, is that he ceases to be Charlie. Give him a new name when they call for a full registration. That’s coming too, John, when this is over – the island has had a grievous shock. That way you may get forty pound for the old Charlie, and a life of labour from the new one.’
‘It’s somewhat irregular …’
James burst out laughing. ‘This rebellion is irregular! For God’s sake, John, Jamaica is irregular, this whole life is irregular! Do you think you’ll be the only one making false returns? Were you not already considering it, by not listing Charlie as an absentee? Or were you going soft on him?’
‘Not soft, no. But I believe he went against his will.’
‘Take that to its logical conclusion, John, and there’s an end to slavery tomorrow. We must let them all go home to Africa, because they went from there against their will. Suppress your qualms, brother. You’ve done your duty in this affair, you’ve been out with the militia, we all have. You’re a respected man, nobody will dare question your returns. For one slave? You could put in for a further dozen and nobody would challenge you.’
‘Well, we shall see.’
James stood up to go. ‘Do it, John,’ he said. ‘Do not waver. I can read you like a book. If you waver, you will lose everything.’
Late in August Charlie did come back, as John Wedderburn had guessed he would, as he had even hoped. He slunk in one night and in the morning tried to join the great gang as if nothing had happened, as if he had been there throughout those three months. Brownlee immediately threw him in fetters and sent word to the house.
Sir John, in his library at Ballindean, safe from the outside world, could remember seeing Charlie prostrate in the mud, the irons on his strong ankles and wrists, fear on his face. ‘Are you sorry?’ he had asked him. And a string of other questions: ‘What am I going to do with you? Where have you been? What have you done? Have you hurt anyone? Killed anyone? Stolen anything? Do you know what will happen to you if I hand you in? Do you know what should happen to you?’ And on and on. To each question, Charlie made apologetic, humble replies. He had to. He understood, they both understood, that he had no choice. The mere fact that his master was bothering to ask the questions …
Brownlee was against it. The other slaves knew who he was, knew he had been out. It would set a bad example. It would show too much leniency for the worst of crimes.
But there was leniency and leniency. ‘I do not intend to make this easy for him,’ John Wedderburn told Brownlee. He felt that he should not have to justify himself to the overseer.
His brother’s words were still in his ears. James’s motivation for saving Charlie was purely financial – it was, literally, about saving money. But for John there was more. Charlie did not remind him only of Sandy: he reminded him of himself. A man went out for a while, and came back to find that the world had changed for ever.
‘Your name is Newman,’ John told Charlie. ‘You hear me? Your name is Newman. I never want to hear of Charlie again. I hear of Charlie, I find Charlie. I turn him in. You understand? You are Newman now. Understand?’
Newman understood.
Then John said to Brownlee, ‘This Newman is a bad fellow. I want the badness flogged out of him. Fifty stripes, salt in the wounds. Today. The same next week. Every week till he has had five hundred stripes. He’ll not be a bad example. He’ll be a good one.’
Sir John remembered seeing the neger quail. His lips moved, as if he wanted to say something. John Wedderburn cut him off: ‘You are lucky to be allowed to live.’
Sometimes the library was not so safe. It contained shadows. The books seemed to move on the shelves. Outside was warm and bright, with a fine southerly breeze blowing. It would be better to be outside, walking without a purpose. But his legs wouldn’t take it. He couldn’t get round the loch without several rests. Come the winter, he would be stuck where he was, in a room full of ghosts and pictures.
And there was worse. Lately, Sir John had been finding himself forgetting the things he intended to do. It was deeply disturbing, like coming into a room and finding yourself already there. Or expecting to see someone who had been long dead, then remembering their death, then seeing them anyway. And there was something, what was it, something he had been meaning to do for weeks. Something connected with Jamaica, with Charlie …
Sandy. Poor Sandy had been appalled by what he had learned from John and James of the executions in Savanna. He had hated the details, but had wanted them over and over. And James had given them to him, fed Sandy’s fascination. A bad sign. Sir John wished he had spotted it. But he had not read Sandy’s journal till it was far, far too late.
He opened the third drawer down on the left of the writing-table, rummaged among the papers there, his fingers seeking for the familiar shape, the soft calf cover of his dead brother’s journal. After a minute, exasperated at his own slowness, he pulled the entire drawer out and emptied the contents on to the table. His hands pushed aside accounts, letters, a magnifying glass, a memorandum book, visiting cards – clearing a path through the accretions of his life to Sandy’s journal.
It was not there.