Joseph Knight

by James Robertson

  Maclaurin moved to the door, opened it. ‘This interview is over. It should never have taken place. Good morning, Mr Wedderburn.’

  But Sir John was now unstoppable. ‘Your father scuttled around organising the defences of Edinburgh, which opened its gates as soon as the white cockade approached its walls, and now you take up paper weaponry on behalf of a deceitful African. I had thought better of you than that, sir.’

  ‘I dout ye’ve never gien me muckle thocht at aw, Mr Wedderburn, so I amna distressed. But keep my faither’s name clear o this, if ye will. He was a better man than ye’ll ever be, and he stood in a better cause tae. He stood against tyranny, however gallant it seemed and however bonnie it looked wi its cockades and plaids. It was on accoont o tyranny, sir, that the Pretender’s grandfaither lost his throne. But it seems tyranny is alive and weel, and needs tae be cowpit again. Noo, please leave my hoose.’

  Sir John stalked past him. ‘We will settle this before the Fifteen,’ he said. Seconds later he was back out on the street, filling his lungs with icy air. Furious, he marched towards the High Street. He would collect his belongings and go straight to the ferry. At that moment he would happily have seen all Scots law and all Edinburgh lawyers swallowed up by England. They were a self-satisfied club and they owed their first allegiance to that club. Maclaurin was a prig and Cullen was duplicitous. He felt almost like forgetting the whole business.

  But he could not. He could not then, and he could not now, a quarter-century later. Sir John felt his pulse beating hard, as if the rage of that day – further fuelled in the coach to Queensferry by the shock of remembering what day it was – had never dispersed, as if there was still a quantity of it running about in his veins. The rage of all his days, of his impotence. Knight was like Culloden – a knot in time that he could not untie but could not leave alone. Why must he always be looking back, and not forward?

  Because there was no future. He was seventy-three and winter was upon him. He felt the absence of a future with horrible, chilling intensity. And yet there might yet be one. For, from somewhere, he had gathered into his mind the news that the French had captured Toussaint L’Ouverture and shipped him over to Europe, and that Bonaparte had him in a prison high up in the mountains where he could cause no more trouble. With Toussaint out of the way, there was a chance of the French armies regaining control of San Domingo, though God knows what there was left to control after years of bloodshed and destruction. If that happened, the revolutionary threat to Jamaica would recede, and Glen Isla and Bluecastle would continue to prosper, to shore up the Wedderburn fortunes.

  Meanwhile, here at home his daughters were queuing up to be married in the New Year. An expensive business, but better married than be old maids, so long as they did not marry schoolmasters! One to a soldier, scion of a noble family, the other to a Dundas. By God, the Wedderburns had come home with a vengeance! How they had come home! They were joining with the greatest families in the land. Even that family! He had done what he had set out to do.

  Yet the weddings would be quiet affairs, here at Ballindean. Sir John did not want too much fuss, or too many guests. In particular, when Margaret wed Philip Dundas he did not want Uncle Harry turning up.

  On the Wedderburn side, as far as uncles went, there would be only James. A shame, that. Uncle James was popular with the girls, a handsome charmer, but still it would have been good if they had known Peter, or Sandy. Sandy would have been in his sixties now. Good God. He’d be quite rotted away out there.

  A future then, of sorts. But not for him. He was fading away. His daughters would outlast him. His second wife would outlast him. His father’s portrait would outlast him. James would outlast him. Sandy’s picture of Peter and James and himself in Jamaica would outlast him. They all would. All except Sandy, who was not in the picture, and Joseph Knight, who had been, but was no longer.

  He remembered the journal. He had always meant to destroy it. James had told him to. Had they not burnt it together? He recalled doing so. Or did he? He struggled over to the mahogany writing-table. It had always been in there, in one of the drawers on the left. He clawed at the handles and pulled the drawers open one by one, feeling with his good right hand for the familiar calf covers. He clawed and clawed and clawed. Yes, there it was. He pulled it out. But he had burnt it before, he was certain, almost certain … He had burnt something. Well, he must burn it again.

  He dropped it on to the table and adopted an awkward leaning posture, holding one corner in place with the weight of his left hand while his right roughly opened the book for one last look. He was trying to decipher the scrawled lines on the final page, when the wag-at-the-wa began to whirr as it prepared to strike twelve. This induced an odd sense of urgency in him, as if somebody was coming, as if all the years in Jamaica, long since ticked away, were contained in Sandy’s journal and he must consign them to the flames before the twelfth chime, before whoever was coming could prevent him. And so he did not read it. He let it fall shut and, lifting it in his right hand, shuffled back to the fire, and cast it from him with a sudden jerk, as if a large spider had suddenly scuttled out of it. But the action was less a throw than a drop. The book fell short, a foot from the fire. Now he would have to bend to retrieve it. He would have to think his legs through the motions.

  Before he could manage this there was a rustling sound, a figure beside him was swooping down on the book, and a familiar voice was saying, ‘What are you doing, Papa? Please sit down. There is something we need to discuss.’

  Dundee, 15 January 1803 / Edinburgh, 15 January 1778

  Archibald Jamieson sat at his wife’s bedside on a Saturday evening, holding her pale hand, and feeling the great empty wound in his chest which, when he spoke, made his voice hoarse and breathless. Janet was propped up against four pillows, smiling bravely at him. It was the smile that had opened Archie’s wound. It kept doing it, whether he was in her presence or out of it, when he woke in the still heart of the night and when his mind drifted at unexpected moments of the day: she smiled, he saw it or thought of it, and was torn apart again. It never ceased to surprise him how much it hurt.

  The new Mrs Jamieson had, in the space of just a few months, become the auld Mrs Jamieson, the cancerous, the faded, the dying Mrs Jamieson. And yet not once since she became ill had she complained about anything. She had simply, day by day, got weaker, thinner, paler, and her face had become more drawn with pain. The doctor – a younger, more sympathetic doctor than the last – came regularly to check on her condition: not to make her well, for he admitted frankly that he could not do that, but to ease her illness. He gave her a variety of drugs to help her sleep and to dull the pain, and he showed Archibald Jamieson how to administer them: laudanum draughts, essence of guaiacum, Dover’s Powder. There were days which she passed in a kind of trance, breathing short breaths but at least not in agony. There were other days when the pain seemed to mock the drugs, and she made Jamieson and Betty and everybody else stay out of the room so that they could not see her distress. And then there were evenings like this one, when it was as if the pain had got bored with tormenting her and had gone to sulk for a while, and she was left, exhausted but pleased to see him, and smiling.

  Sometimes he read to her, sometimes they talked about trivial matters, and sometimes they said nothing. Once, a week or two ago, she had said it was like a courtship, and he had laughed and agreed that it was, and then apologised because their real courtship had not taken half as long or involved nearly as many conversations, or silences. Janet had shaken her head. ‘It’s aw richt, Archie. We’re makkin up for it noo.’

  Tonight, she had an unusual request. ‘Tell me something aboot your work, Archie. Whit work hae ye had lately?’ And he was astonished, because she had never asked such a question before. But as he had spent the last few weeks taking on as much writing and copying as possible, to pay for the doctor and keep a good fire in her room and also to keep himself in Dundee so that he could be home every night, there was nothing
of any great interest to tell her about his work. There was something, though, work-related. He had it with him, as he thought it might entertain her. More than that, he wanted to tell her about it.

  ‘A letter has come,’ he said. He had it on the floor by his chair-leg, and picked it up and showed it to her.

  ‘Guidsakes, that is a letter,’ Janet said. ‘It looks mair like a book withoot boards.’

  Archie was again struck with guilt. How could he have failed to appreciate her sense of humour? But then, perhaps she had never shown it when she was well. Certainly he had no memory of it.

  ‘Weel, are ye gaun tae read it tae me?’

  ‘Aye, I thocht I would. It’s frae a man in Paisley. I wrote him nearly a year past. I had gien up ony expectation o hearin frae him. In fact, he’d gane oot o my mind completely.’

  ‘Whit is it aboot?’

  ‘It’s a lang, lang story, Janet. I would need tae tell ye so much afore I read ye the letter.’

  ‘Weel,’ she said, ‘I’m bidin whaur I am for the present, if you are.’

  ‘It’s odd it should hae arrived this day,’ he said. ‘Today is exactly twenty-five year since it happened.’

  ‘Since whit happened?’

  ‘A court case, my dear. It was a gey important case in its day, though I think maist folk hae clean forgot it since. It concerned a Negro slave that had left his maister, and whether he could be kept a slave here in Scotland. The maister was John Wedderburn oot at Inchture.’

  ‘The case o Joseph Knight, ye mean?’ Janet said.

  Archie almost dropped the letter. ‘Ye’ve heard o it?’

  ‘Och, Archie, I mind them aw speakin aboot it. I was only a lassie, but it was in the weekly papers, and I aye mind the name because my faither made a pun aboot his coat being as black as Knight. It was the Dundee connection that gart them speak aboot it, I dout – what wi the Wedderburns, and then of course the Negro was bidin in the toun at the time. But he gaed awa soon efter.’

  ‘I suppose,’ Archie asked cautiously, ‘ye dinna mind whaur he gaed tae?’

  ‘How would I mind that? I was only aboot fourteen, nae mair. But I’m no sure if onybody kent. What hae you tae dae wi aw that, onywey? That’s a lifetime awa.’

  ‘I had a commission,’ he said, ‘aboot a year ago, tae find him. Frae the maister, Wedderburn.’

  ‘Whit for did he want tae find him?’

  ‘I dinna ken.’

  ‘But ye werena successful?’

  ‘Na. It made me tak an interest in the case though. When I was in Edinburgh last summer, I had ane o the advocates I ken look up some o the details in their library. And this day is twenty-five years since the case was decided. Would ye … I would be happy tae tell ye aboot it. As I see it in my heid, that is. But it micht tak a while.’

  ‘Archie,’ she said, ‘we hae aw nicht.’

  How did he see it? He knew that he would have to take Janet into the Parliament House, where the courts sat. She had never been to Edinburgh, and, until he was there in the summer, Parliament House was a place he himself had never been inside.

  From previous visits to the capital he was familiar enough with the immediate surroundings, the jostling throng of Parliament Close. This was a square enclosed by St Giles’ Kirk on the north side, by the Parliament House and Goldsmiths’ Hall on the west, by the merchants’ Exchange on the south and by tall tenements on the east. On a stone plinth in the middle was a lead statue of King Charles II on his horse, the latter disrespectfully pointing its rump at the Great Door of the Parliament, over which statues of Mercy and Justice stood sentinel. The Parliament building was austere and forbidding. Its ashlar walls were broken by the door and a number of ornamented windows, and topped by a broken parapet and several turrets. All along the side of St Giles’ was a row of two-storey shops, which continued, at ground level only, for the length of the east side below the tenements. There were goldsmiths, clockmakers, printers, booksellers, engravers, vintners, tobacconists and coffee houses, and the Close was a constantly shifting mass of people going about their business. When the Session was sitting, only at the Cross on the High Street was there more activity.

  Archie led Janet through the Great Door and into a large square room, the walls of which were lined with yet more stalls or ‘krames’ selling books, cutlery, hats, toys and jewellery, and a coffee house owned by the famous kidnap victim ‘Indian Peter’ Williamson. They went on through a partition into the huge hammerbeam-roofed hall, where in a previous age the Parliament had sat, and here a new world was presented to them. It was a vast, draughty expanse, its walls decorated only with a few dark oil paintings of pale kings and stern nobility. Down one side, set back in plain, raised niches, were chairs where the Lords Ordinary – individual judges dispatched from their inner den to converse with the outside world – sat and heard pleadings, like so many oracles perched in birdcages. The hall was filled with advocates in wigs and black gowns, and other men with them, the solicitors or agents of their clients, arguing or agreeing, protesting or instructing, and all the time walking the length of the hall, turning and retracing their steps without a pause. Most mornings, the vast roof echoed with these dozens of conversations, while those advocates who were actually addressing the judges in their alcoves strove more vociferously to make themselves heard above the din.

  This was the Outer House of the Court of Session, where preliminary hearings took place, or where, in cases not requiring the attentions of the entire Bench, an individual judge might dispense justice as the Session’s representative. But for matters of greater complexity or moment, the ‘haill Fifteen’, the full quorum of the Session, met to deliberate and vote. They did this in the Inner House, a room off to the left at the far end of the hall, a sanctum into which few women, least of all a casual tourist such as Janet Jamieson, ever ventured.

  It was a square room divided by the Bar, the line separating the advocates from the Lords of Session – or more properly, the Senators of the College of Justice – themselves. On the advocates’ side there was little space and less dignity. All kinds of persons, including those whose cases were to be heard but also others – lawyers, would-be lawyers, know-alls and busybodies – who were not directly involved but curious to watch the proceedings, crowded into the room, or into the gallery suspended over it. This gallery extended quite far out, and was barely six and a half feet above the floor, so that the crush of bodies had a lid as well as walls to contain it. Here, on this half-lit January morning, preparing their speeches amidst the general babble for what would be the first case of the day, were the counsel for Joseph Knight and the counsel for John Wedderburn.

  On the judges’ side of the Bar, the atmosphere was more sedate. There was a high, semi-circular bench, of dark unpolished wood, with seats for the Fifteen. In the well of this hemisphere was a table for the clerks of court. Behind the Bench was an enormous fireplace: a miserable pile of wheezing sticks and coal in the grate sneaked an inadequate heat up the backs of their lordships’ seats. In wooden frames, one on either side of the fire, picked out in gold thread on a black velvet background, were the Lord’s Prayer and the Ten Commandments. They looked as though they had been made, and positioned, a long, long time ago. The whole room was layered with dust and grime, and littered with the marks and detritus of many hearings – ink-stains, idle scratchings in the wood, scraps of paper, stray hairs from venerable wigs, lost buttons, crumbs dropped from hastily consumed snacks, the dried-out extractions of a thousand nose-pickings. It was like a cobwebbed cave into which a light had been unexpectedly shone, and the Lords of Session, entering through a side door from another room where they had put on their dark-blue robes lined with crimson, seemed like a family of disgruntled, winter-coated bears awakened by the intrusion.

  In they came, preceded by a court officer carrying a large silver mace: the Senators of the College of Justice, the Fifteen (although in fact they were only fourteen, Lord Alva being indisposed). The whole court rose to receive them. First, the
Lord President, coarse old Robert Dundas of Arniston, half-brother of Harry Dundas but, being twenty-eight years his senior, more like an uncle to him. He deposited himself in the centre of the Bench, right in front of the smoky fire. Then there was Lord Kames, a man born in the seventeenth century and, at eighty-two, the oldest member of the Session: irreverent in speech, sharp of tongue – ‘bitch’ was his favourite epithet, applied without discrimination to man, woman, beast and inanimate object – sharp of thought, tall, long-nosed and disdainful of youth. Ten years his junior was James Boswell’s father, Lord Auchinleck, gouty, terse, Calvinistic but humane. There was Lord Justice-Clerk Barskimming, an Ayrshire neighbour of Auchinleck’s, an astute listener, scrupulous in the letter of the law; Lord Kennet, quiet and unassuming, who had been the judge charged with summarising and reporting the case to his colleagues; Lord Hailes, English-sounding bibliophile and man of taste; Lord Gardenstone, the genial pig-fancier, whose conversation was noted both for its liveliness and for its quavering, stammering delivery, a pleasant, ugly man with a nose empurpled by excessive drink and enlarged by the inhalation of vast quantities of snuff; amiable Lord Elliock, with a grin so fixed on his face it was as if he had forgotten it was ever there; Lord Braxfield, a bullish, florid man with a flicker of humour in his eyes and a fiercely Scots tongue in his mouth, with which he could crack a joke in the first half of a sentence and send a man to Botany Bay in the second; Lord Covington, as old as the century, raised to the Bench three years before at the grand old age of seventy-five when everybody had thought he would die as he lived, an extremely wealthy advocate; and Lords Ankerville, Stonefield and Westhall, of whom it could be said that they made up the numbers. (Lord Westhall had only in the last few months been elevated to the Bench, replacing the recently deceased Lord Pitfour.) Finally, five feet tall and bustling like a maid, Lord Monboddo entered, darted round the end of the Bench and took a seat alongside the clerks at their great table. He habitually sat in this place: it was rumoured that this was because he liked to keep a distance from the other judges, some of whom he disliked; but the truth was he was growing deaf and did not like to miss anything.