Joseph Knight

by James Robertson

  She looked at the stone in front of them. The dates of the second Mrs Jamieson, beloved wife of Archibald, were freshly cut below those of the first.

  ‘Oh,’ Susan said, ‘I see. You have suffered a loss too. A very recent loss.’

  ‘Aye, weel. How are ye?’

  ‘I am tired,’ she said. She turned to see if anyone was watching them. ‘It was not, of course, unexpected, but so much has happened of late. I am desperately tired.’

  ‘I ken,’ he said. ‘But it will get better.’

  ‘I am sorry for you,’ she said, indicating the stone.

  ‘Dinna be, miss. I am perfectly fine.’

  They stood together looking at the grave. It occurred to Jamieson that seen from a distance they could be father and daughter.

  ‘I didna think you or your sisters would be here,’ he said. ‘It isna usual.’

  ‘We insisted,’ she said. ‘Along with Mama, so they could not refuse us.’

  ‘Whit did ye dae, in the end, wi thon book?’ he asked after a while.

  ‘In the end?’ she said. ‘In the end I did what I said I would do. I burnt it.’ He sighed. Before he could make a comment she went on, ‘But I also did what you advised. I put it back where I had found it.’

  ‘Then ye changed your mind again?’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘not really. Papa and I destroyed it together.’

  ‘I dinna understand.’

  ‘I found him with it a few weeks after I put it back. He was very ill by then. He had been about to throw it on the fire but he did not have the strength. I made him sit down and we talked about it. I told him I had read it.’

  ‘He must hae been furious.’

  ‘No, he was beyond fury by then. At first I thought he was going to weep. I had never seen him weep. But he did not. He asked me to forgive him.’

  ‘For whit? For whit he did tae Joseph Knight?’

  She frowned. ‘No, no. He had no remorse for Joseph Knight. He was sorry that he had not told me about my poor uncle Sandy.’

  ‘Poor Uncle Sandy whase journal sae disgusted ye?’

  ‘He said I must not feel disgust for Sandy. It was not Sandy’s fault that he was weak and sick. Jamaica was a cruel and hard place. They were bairns out there, my father said, all of them, and they behaved in their own different ways, and some survived and some did not. My father said if he had not fixed his mind on coming home he would have been like Sandy. “I saw myself in him,” he said, “and him in me. If I had weakened, none of us would be here now.” His speech was not very clear but that was what he was telling me.’

  ‘That he felt guilty about their lives in Jamaica?’

  ‘No.’ She sounded surprised, as if he had completely misunderstood. ‘That he had made the best of a bad situation, and come through it.’

  ‘And ye believed him? Ye accepted whit he said?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I did. And I do. He was my father. I felt that I had no right to judge him. We took the journal between us and consigned it to the flames.’

  ‘Ye’ve changed your tune, miss. There was a time no lang syne ye believed in goodness.’

  ‘If you remember, you told me that that was because I did not know the world. Perhaps I know it better now. Or have you become less wise?’ He was aware of a growing coolness between them, even though they remained just two feet apart. There seemed to be resentment on both sides.

  ‘Then ye dinna think Joseph Knight is sae heroic ony mair?’ He heard the jibe in his voice, was surprised at its force. She heard it too.

  ‘He cannot be heroic. He is dead. Do you know why my father employed you to search for him?’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘To make certain. He did not expect you to find Mr Knight. He wanted to be sure that he had outlasted him.’

  ‘So that he could think that he had beaten him efter aw?’

  ‘To know that he had beaten him.’

  She spoke in such a flat tone that Jamieson could not tell whether she was reporting what her father had actually told her or simply voicing her own opinion. He turned to catch her eye, but was distracted by a movement beyond her. ‘We are observed,’ he said.

  Susan turned too. Aeneas MacRoy, standing alone among the graves, was staring at them, and though he was some way off his face was dark with anger. Susan stared back impassively, then turned away from him. Archie saw MacRoy walk stiffly over towards the white-haired old man, who was talking to one of Susan’s sisters.

  ‘Would you really have been here anyway?’ Susan asked. ‘Or were you expecting …him?’

  ‘I come here maist days,’ Jamieson said. ‘But aye, I did wonder if he micht appear.’

  ‘He is dead,’ she said again. ‘I am sure of it.’

  Jamieson stopped himself from replying. He could see that whether he thought Knight was alive or not did not matter to her. Her father was dead and therefore so must Knight be. He saw that Joseph had only ever lived, in her mind, because of her father.

  ‘What is happening now?’ she asked, seeing him look past her again. Aeneas MacRoy, pointing in their direction, had said something to the older man, who had turned his gaze towards them. MacRoy said something else and set off, but had taken only a few paces when he was called back. Slowly, the white-haired man began to stroll towards them, alone.

  ‘I am tae be investigated, I think,’ Jamieson said.

  ‘How novel for you,’ Susan said. She glanced behind her. ‘My uncle James.’

  ‘You are merely paying your respects, as am I,’ Jamieson said.

  ‘Quite. Do you not think he is very distinguished looking?’

  ‘He looks better than he did in that picture in the library.’

  She raised her eyebrows, as if to indicate that his remark was in poor taste. ‘I discovered the truth about that, too,’ she said. ‘It was not my father who had Joseph Knight taken out of the painting. It was Uncle Sandy. He took an aversion to Joseph near the end, and removed him. Papa said it was the best thing he ever did to that painting. He said he would certainly not have kept it there if Knight had still been in it.’

  ‘The mystery is solved, then,’ Jamieson said. He felt a thousand miles from her now. He was tempted just to walk away, but he was standing in front of Mary and Janet’s grave and he did not wish to move. ‘Here is your uncle now.’

  She did not take the hint and go. ‘I may go to live with him,’ she said. ‘At Inveresk. My brother David won’t want two spinster sisters haunting Ballindean for ever.’

  She sounded very definite about that number. ‘Two?’ he asked.

  ‘Maria and I. Louisa married Sir John Hope in February – I told you that was to happen. And Margaret married Philip Dundas just a month past. But the strangest thing is, Anne is to be married soon also. She is to marry Sir John Hope too, just as the spaewife said she would.’

  He frowned. ‘How can that be?’

  ‘Another Sir John Hope – of Pinkie. He is a neighbour of our uncle’s. So it seems neither of my sisters was telling a lie.’

  Now that she was talking of these other family matters, she seemed more animated. Safe matters, Jamieson thought: she has settled for safety. Had it been a game for her all along?

  James Wedderburn, unsmiling, approached them, his cane tapping dryly on the stones of the path. ‘Susan, we shall be leaving in a moment. Who is this person?’

  Archie inclined his head slightly, feeling distinctly hypocritical. ‘Archibald Jamieson, sir. My sympathies tae your faimly.’

  ‘Mr Jamieson has recently lost his wife,’ Susan said, as if they had just met. ‘We were exchanging condolences.’

  Wedderburn glanced at the headstone, seemed satisfied. ‘Very well. But you must take your leave of him now, my dear. Give me your arm back to the carriage.’

  ‘One moment, Uncle.’ He nodded, glanced curiously at Jamieson, then stepped away a few yards. Whatever MacRoy had said, Jamieson must have seemed to pose no great danger to his niece.

  Susan put out her
gloved hand and Archie took it in farewell. ‘Goodbye,’ she said. ‘We shall not meet again.’ Then, almost in a whisper, but very precisely, as though she needed his answer also to be precise, the truth, she added, ‘Did you love her?’

  Archibald Jamieson had come a long way in the last few months. He could not dissemble in front of Janet, dead though she was. ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘I did. I didna think I did, but I loved her greatly.’

  ‘I loved my father,’ she said. ‘That is all that matters, isn’t it?’

  He felt as though she had somehow made him an accomplice in something he did not agree with. Before he could object, she had let go his hand and was walking to her uncle. She put her arm through his. Together they set off towards the waiting carriages.

  ‘Goodbye,’ Archie said, but Susan Wedderburn was already too far away to hear.

  Wemyss, 26 June 1803

  He woke and lay for a minute, panicking and alone, until the sounds inside and outside his head sorted themselves, and he knew he was not alone after all. Outside: Ann, breathing regularly beside him; a brief skelter of a mouse in the wall; Andrew, his son, coughing in the other room. Inside: animal screeches; sailors talking in strange tongues; some men arguing; another weeping. When he identified this last sound he bit his lip, put fingers to his face, found it wet. Again. Always, again. This was how it was with him.

  It must have been two, three o’clock. A wee laddie had said to him yesterday, ‘Man, ye’re black as the howe o the nicht.’ He had laughed and said, ‘Ah, but whaur does the coal stop and me stert?’ And now here he was, in the howe o the nicht, and it was as black as himself coming home from the pit. It made no difference whether he had his eyes shut or open. Pit-mirk, and silent as a kirkyard.

  He thought ahead to the day that would soon come. Again. Always. Years and years of howking away at the rock. As if somehow it would reveal something buried, hidden by other years, thousands and thousands of them. Down there where there was no light, the coal sometimes gleamed with a brightness that could be paradise breaking through clouds.

  Paradise. Lots of the people in Jamaica, they believed when they died they would be going back to Africa. They said they wouldn’t mind dying. They looked forward to it, they’d welcome it. A good end to their bad story; going home again.

  His story was different. He had no idea where he would be going when he died. That was another thing that had been taken from him – the end. Just as the beginning had been taken.

  Just lately he had been getting glimpses of a beginning. Away back, another place. Dream sightings that woke him in the night, sudden flashes in the middle of the day; in the depths of the coal-dark day. There were huts with gardens, and low clay walls that separated them; fields where a boy stood scaring off birds; a hot dry wind huffing over grassland; a green river sliding through great trees thick with the screams of … birds, monkeys? He didn’t know, didn’t remember. For this was the beginning of a story that had never happened, that had come to a sudden and complete stop.

  There was a woman who he understood must have been his mother. But he could not see her face, and that blindness coiled a deep pain in his belly, left him breathless with regret. His father was not there at all. He had often thought that his father must have gone the same road before him, the road that he himself was taken on. Because why else could he not remember the least thing about him?

  But he would never know. His father was an empty space.

  Africa. These glimpses, these dreams, sometimes woke him less gently than tonight. They could cause him to moan and thrash and shake with grief. He would come to with Ann leaning over him, trying to calm him. Africa was repossessing him after more than forty years. But he had no distinct sense of what Africa was like. For years he had had to lean on the memories of others, people taken when they were older than he had been. Now, away from them, he had only dreams.

  This was what he thought: that place – home, whatever he’d have called it – could not have been too far from the coast. Far enough that he had never seen the sea until he saw it, but not so far that he, a young boy, could not be made to walk there. How many hours’ or days’ travel? He did not know. He had no recollection of making that journey – whether it started with him in a sack, whether he tried to run away, whether he was chained to others, whether he was beaten or starved or threatened with murder. The thing he did remember was the sea, and the ship like a great bony bird out on the water, the feathers of its many wings wrapped tight on the bones. Hot golden sand, and a boat that carried him out to the ship. But even this … he was not sure. Maybe he was not remembering at all. Maybe he thought he recalled these things because of all he had since heard and read.

  Ann said he did not remember because he chose not to. It was blanked out of himself because what had happened to a boy of ten or eleven was too appalling for the mind to hold. She was maybe right, except that it was never a question of choosing, and except that others had not forgotten. Memory was not about choice. That was the time when choice was taken from him, from all of them, seemingly for ever.

  And it was the time when life split for a while, between pictures and sounds. In his head, thinking back there, the pictures were disjoined from the sounds. He saw people speak but he did not hear what they said. White men. It was noise; noise that he had to make sense of by watching, guessing, by the interpreting and making of gestures. Many of the Africans were from different parts, different communities and peoples, and he could only understand a little of what they said. Most of them did not say much. It was the white men, whether they shouted or said nothing, who were in charge. When he imagined them now, he could hear the things they must have said.

  One night recently he had had a very bad dream and Ann had been there to comfort him when he woke; then he could not sleep again. He had sat up in bed, calmed by the lie of her head on his shoulder, her hair greying but still fine, and the tiny kiss she had given to his collarbone before she drifted off. He felt that kiss there like a butterfly at rest. But even that, and her presence, had set him wondering: he loved her, he could not imagine having found his way to where he was without her, but would he have loved a black woman more? Or differently? This was a puzzle, something he thought about all the time. It made him feel guilty, and the guilt enraged him. That he should be made to feel guilty …

  ‘I love you,’ she had said, another night when the tears came. She said it often. ‘Ye ken that. I’ll never betray ye. I’ll never dae ye hairm. But ye’ve tae be strang for me tae, Joseph.’

  ‘I am strang for ye,’ he had said. He had heard his voice in his chest, the words that had once been new and were now old and familiar, that he had made his, that he spoke in his own distinctive way. ‘Hae I no been strang for ye thirty year? Jist in the nicht though, like noo, I dinna aye need tae be strang, div I?’

  ‘No, lad, no,’ she had said. ‘Greet awa. Greet aw ye want. Ye’re safe noo.’

  ‘It’s no jist me. It’s aw the ithers.’

  ‘I ken,’ she had said, holding him tight.

  She was strong too; he could not fault her; sometimes he wished he could. Sometimes he wished she would burst out at him, ‘Dae ye think it’s been easy for me? Dae ye think I hinna suffered?’ Because ye’re a neger. And I stood by ye in spite o it. If she had flung that in his face just once, he might have got an answer to his puzzle. But she never had. Not ever.

  A picture. The ship had moved further along the coast, and had lain at anchor in one place for weeks, along with two more ships, while more and more people were held in a stockade at the mouth of a river. White men rowed back and forth between the stockade and the ships, bringing boatloads of prisoners out to them. Two men in each longboat sat with guns trained on their passengers.

  The black men were shackled together, and put below deck. He saw himself, a boy alone, and he saw the men going down through the hatch in awkward stumbling couples, then brought up again during the day, still in chains, and made to jump and stretch their limbs. The sun beat
down relentlessly on the bright reflective sea and the blistering wooden ship. The women were kept apart from the men, both below and above deck, and were not shackled in the daytime, and any children went with the women. But there were few women and fewer children, and for a long time no other boys of his age. He was small for his years: had he been any bigger, or had there been more boys to cause trouble as a group, he would have been put with the men.

  Overwhelmingly this was a world of adult males, of shouts, curses, blows, the surface brutality of the white men, the submerged threat of retaliation of the black men. The whole ship trembled with anger.

  The sailors let the boy – in the picture it was him and yet not him – move around fairly freely in the daytime, so long as he did not go near the edge of the ship. Once he did this and looked over at the sea below and a sailor yelled at him, thinking that he was about to go overboard. This had happened before – pairs of men with such weight of misery on them that they would let the chains sink them to the bottom of the sea, rather than live in them. The boy did not want to die, nor did he want to live on the ship. But he could not swim. The water was too far down, the shore too far away, and his home too far from the shore. Only the ship was where he could be.

  There was a white man who was old enough to be one of his grandfathers – two more people he did not remember. This white sailor was tall, thin, red-eyed, his mouth half hidden by a straggle of grey, coarse beard. He always carried a short, solid, leather-sheathed cosh, attached by a strap to his right wrist. He was indifferent to the boy, seemed hardly to notice him. His mind was on other things as he and a younger crewman approached the section of the deck where the two dozen women huddled, separated from the men by a wooden barrier. The older sailor had something in his left hand which he offered to one of the women, a young one, beckoning her over. She watched cautiously, drew a little closer, and so did the watching boy. One of the other women said something and the one the sailor wanted stopped, lowered herself and looked away.

  The sailor spoke. What did he say? What had he, would he have said? Forty years on, Joseph heard the fleetching, coaxing voice. He imagined the words. ‘You come wi me, my darlin. It’ll be better for ye on the trip ye’re gaun, I swear.’ She did not move, stared down at the wooden planks on which she was squatting. His words to her were a jumble of sounds. His left hand opened and was full of colours, shining things. She crept a little closer, within reach, and the sailor smiled, leant over and let the colours fall into her lap while, quite gently, he cupped the hand under her breast. She started away and his other hand, dangling the cosh, came over and seized her shoulder. ‘Come, nae need tae be like that noo. You be nice wi me and I’ll be nice wi you. You needna fear naething frae me.’