Eating Crow

by Jay Rayner

  I would feel the same way about it now, I’m sure, were it not for the file that Jennie had placed on my desk in my lovely corner office while I was slacking off in the Matterhorn Café, the file that contained a new story about the Lady Bountiful. The one about its part in the bloody slaughter of 265 men, women, and children.

  Seventeen

  If I have committed a crime it is not one of ignorance or stupidity. It is one of accident of birth. Not that this makes me feel any better about the detail of the story. Some of what I had known was true. I did have an ancestor called William Welton-Smith and he was a merchant, of sorts, but although he did own a great three-masted ship called the Lady Bountiful, that was not its original name: it had been launched at Nantes on the French Atlantic coast in 1783 as Le Zéphyr, a pretty name for a ship with an ugly purpose, for it was, of course, a slaver.

  Welton-Smith purchased the 157-ton négrier, as the French called their slave ships, in 1791, eager for the extra “cargo capacity” that the larger French vessels afforded over their English counterparts. He quickly changed its name to the Lady Bountiful, a choice which, according to Francis Wilson from Historical and Verification, who had compiled the file that Jennie gave me, was as good a measure of the man as “any we could hope for.” The Lady Bountiful was a character in George Farquar’s popular eighteenth-century play The Beaux’ Stratagem, a grotesque woman determined to make as much public play of her charitable acts as possible. It was the perfect choice for a man like Welton-Smith, who had once described charity as “the foulest vice of the indolent rich.” His Lady Bountiful was not intended to be bountiful in any way, at least not to those carried in its hold.

  In the late spring of 1794 she collected a cargo of 368 African slaves from the port of Cacheu on the coast of Guinea-Bissau, 34 of whom were dead of disease and malnutrition by the time she arrived off the Eastern seaboard of the United States in September of that year. The remaining 334 were carried onward toward the port of Charleston, South Carolina, where Welton-Smith was awaiting their arrival. The ship never made it. On the seventeenth of the month they ran into what was called, at the time, a “fearsome tempest,” what we would call a hurricane. Remarkably the Lady Bountiful survived intact, having been swept onto a sandbank early in the storm. The crew’s control of the vessel’s cargo was less robust. At the height of the storm a group of African men broke free from their chains and, having released their fellows, took control, chasing those crewmen who did not die in the revolt away into the lifeboats. The Africans’ mistake was to delay escaping onto dry land in the hope of being able to refloat the ship.

  Welton-Smith, who against all advice had spent the darkest hours of the tempest in a rackety boathouse just outside the town, the better to watch the estuary for any sight of his ship and its precious cargo, only found out what had happened two days later, when half a dozen of the crew made it ashore. Welton-Smith was so outraged by the news that he immediately toured Charleston’s taverns and inns offering a month’s pay to any man who would come with him to take back his vessel, which proposition met with instant approval; there was no shortage of violent, restless men willing to take his shilling from among the wretched and scabrous hordes that were the feature of any American port in the late eighteenth century.

  It took twelve hours for the flotilla of fishermen’s yawls and skiffs to make it along the estuary and out to the sandbank off Sullivan’s Island where the Lady Bountiful lay beached, its masts broken, its hull leaning into the sodden ground as if putting its shoulder to the shore. Favoring the blade over the unpredictability of the musket, it took the horde just two more hours to finish the job, although their enthusiasm undermined the intended outcome, preserving neither vessel nor cargo. Stories were later written of that day. According to the many lurid quotes which Francis Wilson had excavated, the Lady Bountiful was, by day’s end, awash with “blood that did course upon the decks” and the remains of “the children slaughtered still in their mothers’ grip.”

  It seems the narrative became infected with a certain hyperbole, as so many of these eighteenth-century seafaring tales did, in the journey from eyewitness to professional storytellers. We know from Welton-Smith’s own business accounts, for example, that later in the month he sold 69 slaves, all of them presumably survivors of the rebellion on the Lady Bountiful. Still, that means at least 265 men, women, and children died on the deck of the ship and that they died by the blade.

  According to the record, Welton-Smith boarded her just once more after that to “ascertain whether it might be salvageable, and reassuring himself that it was not, to remove a number of personal effects.” It did not say what those personal effects were but I had a pretty good idea what one of them was. Did he wash the blood from the pieces of oak that he cut from the deck that day? I suspect not. William Welton-Smith was not the kind of man to fear an ugly stain. I imagine he relished it, this dark slick of human blood soaked deep into the wood’s tight grain; I can just see him enjoying the detail of the story as he explained to the carpenter how it came by its unique markings. Now if anybody ever questioned his resolve he need only show them the oak box that had been made from those pieces of wood and tell them of the day he fought to take back what was his.

  He had good reason to keep a memento of the Lady Bountiful because it proved more valuable to him as a wreck than it did in one piece, so fully was it insured. He did not buy another ship but instead used his money to invest wisely in the ventures of others, and became so wealthy that he was able to found a bank which he later handed over to two of his sons. In the 1820s, in a successful attempt to mitigate their Englishness, the boys shortened their surname to Welton and moved their interests to Louisiana. There they invested heavily in the newly emergent cotton crop, establishing the Welton-Oaks plantation at St. Francis ville on the eastern bank of the Mississippi, its great house approached along an avenue planted with fine saplings which, as they reached maturity, gave the plantation its name. For the next century the Welton family occupied a pivotal position in the public life of Louisiana not merely as slave owners and businessmen—although they were certainly that—but on the bench and in the statehouse and, when necessary, in the Confederate forces. They were the politicians who opposed slavery’s abolition and the justices who enforced the law, and the officers who fought the Civil War in its defense. And even after slavery was abolished they were there as arch segregationists. Were there Weltons in the Klan? It is hard to imagine any self-respecting Klan meeting east of the Louisiana Mississippi that would not have had one of the Welton boys in attendance, warming his hands at the friendly glow of a burning cross.

  In 1821 William Welton-Smith returned home to London from Charleston a wealthy man. He died a few years later, and his legacy—money, title to property, and that damn box—began its journey down the root and branch of the Welton-Smith family tree until it landed on our mantelpiece, the aroma of fresh blood replaced by the sweet confectionary smell of sugar and cream and cocoa beans.

  I place the file on my desk, lean back in my chair, close my eyes, and at some point, I suppose, begin to doze. Into my mind, unbidden, comes the image of myself when young. Before me is the box, held on my mother’s lap. She lifts the lid and I reach inside. The contents are no longer Civilian-grade stuff. This is quality product: fine ganaches and properly dipped centers and hefty bars of Manjari. My hand does not hesitate inside the box. I take out one rectangular soft center, the surface almost ebony in darkness and with a distinct shine. I place it in my mouth and feel the exquisite tempered shell crack against the force of my tongue. And then into my mouth rushes a liquid center that is hot and metallic; it is a burst of something very human and unwanted. I wake up suddenly and involuntarily swallow. The taste is gone.

  * * *

  Although Professor Schenke devotes thirty pages of his book to the “maintenance of shared illusion in the penitential process,” he still fails to offer anything of use on the practical aspects of saying sorry. At one point, clearl
y straining to manufacture something, he announces that “Making an apology is like plucking a chicken: it requires love, determination, and attention to detail,” which is both clumsy and false. Committing bestial acts upon a chicken may require determination and attention to detail and, if you’re really emotionally involved, a certain amount of love, but plucking one demands none of those things. All it requires is stamina and a non-allergenic response to feathers.

  Even so, in the first hours after reading the file, I was sorely tempted to send one of my security detail out to the Ely Live Poultry Market over on Delancey Street to get me a feathers-on bird in the hope that a bit of plucking would give me inspiration. (I admit I also liked the image of Franky, with his Special Services buzz cut, struggling through the subway, a dead chicken under his arm and that take-no-prisoners look upon his face.) I abandoned the idea when I realized I was merely looking for a displacement activity. Still, I held fast to the notion that I needed a vehicle for the apology. For Marcia Harris I had made the soup. For Miss Barrington it had been the soufflé. Harry Brennan had received his in the coffee shop over cake, even if he hadn’t eaten any. And the founding apology to Fiona Hestridge had taken place within the logical surroundings of her late husband’s restaurant. The unifying principle here was that I knew these people or, at least, understood who they were and the context within which I was saying sorry to them. I knew nothing about Lewis Jeffries III beyond his role as a figurehead for the great African-American hurt. The one thing I knew for sure was that I felt really bad: about the massacre on the Lady Bountiful, about my family’s complicity in the crimes of slavery, about the box and the chocolates and my ignorant hunger for them. I didn’t want to say sorry. I needed to say sorry.

  “Well, that’s a good thing,” Jennie said, when she stopped by my office the same morning I read the file. And then: “Have you been crying?”

  “Oh, I just get a bit, you know—it’s heavy stuff.”

  “Should I go get Francine? Wasn’t she eager to see you emoting or something?”

  “Jennie!”

  “Sorry. How about one of these to cheer you up instead?” She pulled a dinky oval box from a bag at her feet. “They’re Garrison Chocolates from the Chocolate Loft down on West Twenty-third. Have you been there yet? Very good. The Madagascar Vanilla is particularly special.”

  I ran my tongue about my teeth as if searching for the residue of the taste just gone.

  “I won’t, thanks.”

  “Wow. You really have got it bad.”

  “Perhaps it’s time I went to see Professor Schenke?” I said suddenly. “Just to talk through what’s expected of me?”

  She chose a chocolate and popped it into her mouth. “Don’t worry about Schenke,” she said, studying the confectionery as if deciding whether to take another. “He’d only distract you.”

  “From what? I haven’t got a clue how to do this apology. Maybe he could help me. Maybe he could …”

  She tipped the chocolates toward me so that the contents shone in the light. “Are you sure you won’t?”

  I shook my head. I thought of explaining to her all the things that weren’t in the file, about the box and the Basset family traditions, but I couldn’t.

  “What have I got myself into, Jennie?”

  “Marc, trust me. You’re the right man for the job. Sleep on it for twenty-four hours, and if you don’t feel you’re getting anywhere, we’ll pull the team together to help you out.”

  The next day they pulled the team together. Francis Wilson came up from Historical and Verification on the fourteenth floor, in the same ill-fitting jacket and ill-tied tie he had been wearing the day I met him at the Foreign Office in London, to deliver stuttering lectures on slave trading in the Carolinas in the eighteenth century. Will Masters and Satesh Panjabi together gave me an account of the negotiations so far, which amounted to a series of conferences in various grand historical buildings across the Southern US, all of which had ended in a communiqué declaring a commitment to keep having more roundtables.

  “And which grand historical building is going to host my meeting?”

  Satesh glanced down at the sheet in front of him. “The Welton-Oaks Plantation House in St. Francisville, Louisiana.”

  I scoffed. “Welton-Oaks? Oh right. Very cute. Very nice. Who came up with that one—the United Nations Office of Clumsy Symbolism and Photo Ops?”

  “Marc,” Jennie said soothingly, “it’s Lewis Jeffries’ home. He’s lived there for over a decade. You’re just going round to his place to say sorry.”

  “Which also just happens to be my family’s ancestral home?”

  “I told you, Marc. You weren’t chosen for this job by accident. The whole Welton-Oaks connection is key to the apology.”

  “Very good. Excellent. Welton-Oaks it is, then. Perfect.” I was holding a small pad of paper and I tried to look severe and statesmanlike as I scribbled a few notes. “Who else will be there with him?”

  Satesh shrugged. “No one. It’s just you and him.”

  “Really? No other members of the Slavery Reparations Committee? No media?”

  “You want your moment in the sun?”

  “No, no. I just assumed Jeffries and the committee would want as much publicity as possible.”

  “The news media will be at the bottom of the drive waiting for the announcement,” Jennie said. “If we allow them in there’s a risk they’ll contaminate the apologibility zone.”

  I nodded sagely. Until that moment I hadn’t known there was such a thing as an apologibility zone, let alone that it could be contaminated.

  “As for Jeffries being by himself, they’ve invoked their right under Schenke’s third sub-law to nominate their own representative.”

  “And that’s Jeffries?”

  “He’s chair of the committee so it makes sense. They’ve specifically said they didn’t want it turning into a circus with big delegations on both sides. They want the apology one-on-one, you and Jeffries, no one else, and that’s what we’re doing.”

  I scribbled more notes on my pad. “I really think I ought to go see Schenke, you know. To get his thoughts on how to approach this. And to pay my respects.”

  There was a sharp intake of breath from the group, which made me look up.

  “Bad idea,” said Satesh, too quickly.

  “Really no need,” said Jennie.

  “A waste of your time,” Satesh added.

  I looked from one to the other and back again. They smiled reassuringly at me and then, uneasily, at each other. I placed my notepad down on the table in front of me. “I need a little time to think on my own,” I said, and I slipped my pen into my inside jacket pocket. The meeting was over.

  Eighteen

  I heard the Professor’s house before I saw it. He lived outside the town of Olivebridge on the edge of the Catskills, a couple of hours’ drive north of Manhattan, and as I approached the address my secretary had obtained for me from his publishers, the narrow wooded lane echoed with the sound of breaking glass and over-revving car engine. I was so distracted by the noise that as I turned into the drive, I almost went bumper to bumper with another car coming out. A middle-aged woman, graying red hair pulled back into a ragged ponytail, her lips pursed, wound down her window to talk to me. I leaned out of my own open window toward her.

  “You going in there?” she said. She looked tired and seemed eager to get away.

  “I was planning to, if it’s the home of Professor Thomas Schenke.”

  She looked back over her shoulder as if to remind herself of where she’d come from. “Oh sure, you’ve found the place.” She turned to me and said quickly, “Listen, honey, do yourself a favor. Turn the car around. Go home. Be kind to yourself.”

  I looked up the sloping gravel drive at the wooden house with its shady veranda and view out over the treetops. An old plum-colored Cadillac was parked up next to a tightly packed store of logs. It looked peaceful.

  “I think I’ll pop in for a mo
ment,” I said. “I’ve driven a long way to get here.”

  “If you take my advice, you’ll drive even further to get away from this place.” She blinked and let her fingertips tap lightly on the steering wheel.

  “I’ll back up so you can get out,” I said, and she nodded gratefully.

  “Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” she said, and she turned out of the drive so fast her wheels screeched on the tarmac. I parked up next to the other car, stepped around the remains of two smashed beer bottles on the front path, and climbed the steps to the front door. I pulled on a chain mounted by the door that rang a small bell above my head. There was silence.

  I called out his name. Still nothing, save for a creak from behind the solid wooden door. I squatted down so I was level with the letter slot and said his name again, quietly. “Professor Schenke …?”

  “Has the bitch gone?” The voice was harsh, as if its owner had been shouting. He seemed to be sitting on the other side of the letter slot.

  I looked back at the empty drive. “The lady who was here?”

  “Lady? She’s a witch.”

  “She’s gone.”

  “Good.”

  “Professor, my name is—”

  “What are you doing here? Another fucking apology groupie? Here for absolution?”

  “Absolution? No. I’m—”

  “You want to hear me say sorry, don’t you? That’s what they all want.”

  “I’m Marc Basset, Professor. We spoke briefly yesterday.”

  “Basset? Basset?” He paused. “The shyster UN-patsy Basset? That Basset?”

  “You told me to come.” I was still hunched down by his letter slot and my knees were beginning to ache from the strain.

  He said, “I did?” and sounded genuinely surprised.