Joseph Knight

by James Robertson

  I trembld to hear this. You do not believe in God I askd. No he said thats not what I ment. I mean that Papa was not seeing God or angels. He was staring at me. A stranger. It did not matter who I was he fixd his eyes on me. I am sure he did not recognise me. It was life he saw that he stared at so hard. He did not wish to go even then after what they had done to him. He did not wish to be taken from this world.

  You can not know that I said. How can you know that?

  He said, because I have seen it since.

  Archibald Jamieson was surprised at the abruptness with which the journal ended. He came out of it as if rudely awakened. Those last lines ran down to the bottom of a right-hand page, and half the book still remained. He turned the leaf expecting more of Sandy’s increasingly morbid ramblings – there was nothing! Nothing but blank, mottled space. Jamieson felt cheated by it, abandoned by Alexander Wedderburn, and he felt a further great emptiness – the absence of Joseph Knight. The boy abused by the invalid man – defying him, but then vanishing, as Sandy Wedderburn himself vanished with the last of the entries. It was as if the ending of the journal deprived them both of life.

  Susan’s note had led him to believe that the journal contained a clue as to Knight’s whereabouts, but he saw now that that was impossible. How could something written by a dead man years before Knight even arrived in Scotland reveal him in the present? Nevertheless … Jamieson turned the pages quickly, just in case. Nothing, nothing, nothing – until the final page, where in the same laboured hand he saw the following:

  Sure, ’tis a serious thing to die! my soul!

  What a strange moment must it be, when near

  Thy journey’s end thou hast the gulf in view.

  More of the death poem. God, somebody should have rescued him from that! Jamieson looked again at Susan’s note: We always understood it was yellow fever killed uncle A. but it was not that alone – what do you think? Suicide? Perhaps the journal ended so suddenly because Sandy killed himself. But Jamieson didn’t think so. Suicide required a special kind of courage – the courage of slaves, perhaps, the courage of despair – and Sandy had not been endowed with courage of any sort. A sneevilling kind of creature altogether. No, he would have let the fever eat him away sooner than injure himself. He would probably have decided to kill himself only when he was too feeble to accomplish it. Then he would have had something else to complain about.

  Jamieson was surprised at his own cynicism. He realised that he had become very angry, reading this inadequate document composed by an inadequate man when he himself was a mere bairn. Had it made Susan angry? Or had she just wanted the thing out of the house?

  It took Archibald Jamieson the rest of the day to pinpoint the cause of his anger. When his boys kissed him goodnight on their way to bed, he understood. It was not the insipid, petty nastiness of Sandy Wedderburn that enraged him. It was the negligence, the poverty of emotion of all the Wedderburns. He was silently furious on behalf of the boy Joseph who, if he still lived, would now be a man five or six years older than himself. What kind of man would such neglect have made? But Archibald Jamieson did not really see the man. He kept seeing the boy. He loved children. He detested the thought of a child being treated with such – indifference.

  Ballindean, June 1802

  Inveresk Lodge

  Midlothian

  Sunday, 20th June

  Dear Brother

  Thank you for yours of the 15th. You do not mention your health, but from Isabella who has had a letter from Alicia I gather that it remains middling at best, which grieves me. I hoped this warmer weather had eased your bones and calmed your mind. I fear my news may do little to alleviate what suffering you may have.

  Do not distress yourself concerning the future of the plantations. Though the abolitionists now make a mighty noise and I do not doubt in time will succeed in their aims, that time is some long way off, certainly beyond the span that remains to you and me. The plantations were established by practice and commerce not on a moral whim, and it is commerce not whining morality that will bring about future changes, including perhaps a general but gradual manumission. Do not write too intemperately to London, you will only aggravate the spirits of those in high places who sympathise with the meddlers. Our best argument is the current disaster in San Domingo – dreadful stories emanating now of the savage cruelties inflicted on white and black alike. How strange that one’s hopes in that quarter should rest with Bonaparte! The one thing that may be said in his favour is that his own despotic designs will surely not tolerate those of Toussaint L’Ouverture, and that he will attempt to restore order to that sorry colony.

  Should our own colonies be inflamed in like manner, not only would their prosperity and stability and the mother country’s trade with them be destroyed, but so too would the lives of thousands of Negroes, who would be slaughtered or die of starvation. Tell that to the zealots who call for black ‘freedom’! Let Wilberforce and his friends spout, there are men of better sense who know what would be the inevitable outcome of their schemes. But I know I need not preach this at you, John. In any case, this peace with France cannot last long, and when the war recommences the claims of patriotism will subdue the fervour for making all men equal regardless of property, creed or colour.

  You write to ask if by chance I took away Alexander’s pocket book or journal of his last years on this earth. I think you must be confused, John. That object I’m sure was destroyed many years since. We both felt it was a dishonour to his memory and ours, the wanderings of a diseased brain. I am almost certain we together consigned it to the flames one day at Ballindean, or at least we agreed that you would burn it. I trust you did. Remember we said, a little sadly, that the painting was a better memorial to him since he was not in it. Do not upset yourself on this matter. The journal is gone, and you are only deceived by the passage of time.

  But I must also tell you that I too am visited by a ghost from our West Indian days. You will remember at the time of your trouble in the courts how we got word of the arrival of Robert Wedderburn (so styled) in this country, and how, some short time after, he reached Edinburgh and came chapping at my door. I sent him off smartly enough on that occasion, but he has surfaced again, making importunate applications on account of our relationship, and, what enrages me more, making them not to me but to my son Andrew in London, who has been plagued by his effrontery. I know I need expect no sympathy from you on this matter, John, since you always disapproved. The villain, not content with being a freeman, as he was made at birth, continues to crave assistance on the strength of his name though he is a fit and bold fellow well able to turn a day’s work, but you know how they never like to do that if it can be avoided. Of course I will deny all his claims. I write you this only as a warning that he may approach Ballindean, by letter I mean, as he seems from Andrew’s account to have a special regard for you as one who may be sympathetic, based on spurious legends passed to him by his people about your taking in his mother &c. He is devious and may not deal directly with you but with your family. Be on your guard against him!

  I hope and trust that it will come to nothing, and that once rebuffed firmly on all fronts he will go back to being a tailor or to preaching, in which I understand he engages in a ranting style having turned Methodist. Is not all this miserably predictable? But I felt it only right to forewarn you, far though you are from the metropolitan clamour.

  We are all well here. I may come north before the summer is over, and hope you are in better health when you receive a visit from

  Your affectionate brother,

  James

  Sir John Wedderburn observed the shake of his hand as he let the paper fall into his lap. He was sitting at the fireplace, and while he did not feel cold, he was not hot either. The weather had gone off since James had written his letter. Today was damp and cloudy; they had lit a fire for him. Crouched over a fire at midsummer – what was he coming to? He grued at that: knew precisely what he was coming to. The End – like one of
the lassies’ damned novelles. He lifted the letter again, scanned it. Too many words. His brother’s writing was getting hard to read. So James did not have the journal. It had been a long shot. Maybe James was right. Maybe they had burnt it. He hoped so. When was the last time he had actually looked at it, rather than just thought of looking at it? But it had been in that drawer, surely it had. Nobody else could have taken it. Nobody else would have known it was there, or cared what it was. Only he cared any more about Sandy.

  Terrible it had been, leaving Sandy bedridden when he had sailed on the Mary in ’63. If Sandy could have been got home then, things might have been different. The physical wasting of him had been bad enough, but the sapping of his spirit had been still more distressing. James had done his best but then grown impatient. John himself had been unable to trust Sandy with any responsibility. It had been easier just to leave him be, leave him to his jottings and sketchings and complaints. James, Peter and he had come to the same conclusion as Sandy himself: Scotland was the only place for him. But getting him there had proved impossible. In the flurry of last-minute arrangements, they had even forgotten about packing up the painting.

  Arriving home, John had of course had to calm Mama’s worries about Sandy – yes, he had been ill, and this had prevented his return, but he was also working hard, was needed on the plantations. That was untrue, but then John discovered quickly that there were many aspects of life in Jamaica that, back in Scotland, were better disguised, glossed over or suppressed. The plantations became like places in a dream almost before he stepped ashore. When asked, he found it hard to recall even quite simple facts about them.

  Apart from the failure to take Sandy and his picture with him, the trip to Scotland had been a success. One of his main tasks was to make sure that his mother and sisters were properly established in Dundee. He also had a number of legal documents drawn up on behalf of himself and the brothers, and travelled a good deal – to Edinburgh, to Aberdeen, and extensively throughout Forfarshire and Perthshire. He had not intended to buy on this occasion, nor did he, but he surveyed the land knowing that somewhere between Dundee and Perth, among his old childhood haunts, he would find a suitable place to settle.

  In Edinburgh he found a few old comrades whose Jacobitism was forgiven though not forgotten, but apart from memories he had little in common with them. He trod warily between the firmly Hanoverian establishment and the relics of the cause, and found that a great many other folk did the same, and were none the worse for it. He avoided any meeting that had even a whiff of conspiracy about it. Not that there was much of that. Most of the gatherings he attended were social ones – balls, soirées, oyster suppers. Edinburgh was loud not with the march of a Highland army and the din of bagpipes, but with ideas.

  The Caledonian Mercury was full of announcements of new treatises by historians, agriculturists, philosophers: Kames’s Elements of Criticism was an astonishing best-seller; Hume’s History of England was just out, as was A Critical Dissertation on the Works of Ossian by Hugh Blair, the minister of the High Kirk at St Giles and Professor of Rhetoric at the University. Arguments over the authenticity of those heroic Gaelic poems were raging in the taverns and coffee shops – if duels were not actually being fought in defence of their honour, challenges were certainly being thumped on table-tops. The magistrates had ordered the draining of the Nor’ Loch, and a new bridge was to be built over it, leading to an as yet imaginary new town on the north side. The world John Wedderburn had fled from in ’46 was changing. Plainly, by the time he came back in a few more years, it would have all but gone.

  Returning to Jamaica, he had the sense of re-entering a place much less likely to alter in the coming years. Year in, year out, the cane fields produced their riches, the gangs swung their way through them, slaves were bought, seasoned, used up, replaced. Planters would go on making improvements to their great houses, to methods of production, and yes, to the conditions in which their slaves lived and worked, because it was in their interests to do so. But fundamentally the structure of life and of society did not change – whereas in Scotland everything was being upturned, and much of it for the good. It was almost as if, in leaving Scotland and going back, then leaving again, John Wedderburn was stepping through a magic glass into an unreal world. It was not always clear which world was which. The glass inverted the old and the new. If he went back through it one more time, he would find himself in a place that was strangely familiar, that was different and yet was home.

  A number of things pushed him towards that final sea voyage. There was the letter from his sister Katherine, gently and without alarm reminding him that their mother was now entering on her sixties, and becoming a little frail. There were the immense profits of the years of war against the French which meant a rapid reduction in what he owed to his creditors and consequently less need for him to stay managing the plantations. And there was Sandy’s death.

  Sandy never acclimatised, never became immune to the various sicknesses and fevers that from time to time swept through the island. In May of 1764, not more than three months after John’s return, he was brought down with yellow fever. First he burned up with it, then he became almost comatose, his pulse barely detectable. His eyes enlarged and the whites turned a grimy parchment colour, his skin jaundiced. He awoke, vomited and voided till there was nothing left to come out. Then he lay still, and cooler, and it seemed as though he might make a recovery. But it was only a brief remission. They made him drink as much water as he could but it came through him thick and viscose as if he were a sugar factory, and his stools were like tar. He puked up blood. He became delirious, shouting one minute about hellfire, the next about being caught in a snowstorm. He went into a fit of hiccups that were devastating to watch, that convulsed his chest and twisted his mouth into a horrible grimace. When things reached this stage, John left James to do what he could. Davie Fyfe came, but it was hopeless.

  ‘Even if we were better doctors than we are, we could not save him,’ said James. ‘Davie cannot save him. Nobody can save him …’ It was as if he had not finished the sentence, as if he meant to add ‘from himself’.

  ‘It is my fault,’ John said. ‘I should have tried harder to get him home.’

  ‘You would only have killed him sooner,’ James said. ‘It is nobody’s fault.’

  They found the journal, and first John, then James, read it through. They never showed it to Peter. It made an extra bond between the two elder brothers. They debated burning it even then, but decided against it. ‘We’ll keep it as a kind of warning,’ John said. They understood each other: the journal was a symbol of weakness, of the destructive power of weakness. Sandy was what they must never become.

  Once he was dead and buried, the settled, rhythmic Jamaican world re-established itself, continued to turn as if nothing had happened, just as it continued whether you lost two or twenty slaves in a year. What was death to this place, one white death, a hundred black deaths? They were nothing. John’s desire to get back to Scotland increased.

  Then in October 1766 there was a small but deadly slave rising on a neighbouring estate which spread to some of his own Coromantees: a bookkeeper and three or four other whites, and a number of slaves who refused to join the rebels, were killed. The revolt was quickly put down, and those involved either shot in the fighting or executed later. For a brief moment, there was a danger that the great house at Glen Isla would be attacked, that John Wedderburn’s own life was at risk. It seemed like a throwback to another age, a re-enactment of events that should have been consigned to history. He was thirty-seven years old. He felt he should no longer have to face such unpleasantness. He did not want to die a violent death. Nor did he want to die like Sandy. He wanted to die old and grey, surrounded by his children. It was time, finally and permanently, to go home.

  But like the hero in a fairy tale, he could not pass from the unreal to the real (if that was where he was going) without taking with him a token. It would serve as a reminder of where he h
ad been, and what had happened there. It would mark the source of the riches that would continue to flow across the Atlantic and feed his third life.

  The token, Joseph Knight, had turned in a few years from boy to man, had become a tall, handsome, affable youth of eighteen or so. Sir John remembered Joseph’s complete lack of enthusiasm for the journey. ‘But I will show you things that will astonish and amaze you,’ he had told him. ‘I will show you a country that you cannot even dream of. Joseph, we are going home.’ And then Joseph had smiled slightly, as if he were already making an effort to imagine the place.

  Sir John Wedderburn looked at his brother James’s letter lying in his lap. He glanced over it again. There was nothing in it he liked – plantation worries, bothersome Negroes, Sandy’s sad ravings. He felt an urge to get rid of it.

  With sudden determination, thinking of the lost journal, he leant forward and thrust the letter into the fire.

  III

  Enlightenment

  MUIRTON IN PERTHSHIRE JUNE 3RD 1768

  RUN AWAY from Captain Oliphant Kinloch, a NEGRO SLAVE, a stout lad, well made, 17 years of age, five feet seven inches high, had on a dark coloured thickset coat and vest, buckskin breeches, a blue surtout coat, with a crimson velvet collar, and done round the edges with crimson velvet, a black velvet cap, and answers to the name of LONDON. Any person apprehending the said NEGRO SLAVE, and lodging him in any of his Majesty’s gaols, by applying to Mr James Smyth, writer to the Signet, Edinburgh, or the proprietor at Muirton, shall receive twenty shillings sterl. besides their expences. He, among other things, carried off a silver Watch, which he offers to sale, it is hoped will be stopt for the proprietor, a fellow servant’s behoof.