‘Me teach em to read word of good God Lard Jesus Christ,’ I say. Leaving blue chamber I curtsey.
I step out onto front verandah. My nails pierce closed palm of my hand. Palms bristle. Old Simeon’s shadow drags across front lawn. Jancra’s slanted shadow glances across wooded slopes glowing orange-gold. Clouds grow red faintly, pouring pink light over blue sea. Clouds I’ve known since I was a little pickney. Nothing’s changed. Each day’s clouded by misery.
Quietly shutting Mister Sam’s door behind him, Minister Waddell yells, ‘Ensure Friday, that house-boy, Kaydia, has lit the cook-fires.’ Loneliness is walking into fire, or sinking to sea’s bed, swallowed; drowned. Alone.
Chapter Seven
Elizabeth
TORQUAY
12 June 1839
Sam moves across the window before a golden sun. I am on the sofa immediately before the open window which is, I dare say, much the same as being outdoors. Shadows lie beneath Sam’s eyes. He looks at me quickly. Where is the white skin, the smooth neatly combed hair? The contours of his gaunt dark body seem ungainly; his face tanned to a tawny yellow; his expression, spiritless.
He places a purple vine on the arm of the sofa near my headrest, a host of magenta flowers entwine with a scent – a passionate poison – too powerful, too intoxicating.
‘Sam!’ I exclaim, overjoyed to see him. I stretch up open arms to draw his bowed form against my breast.
He leans over to kiss me, eyes tightly screwed. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says, pulling back from my embrace. ‘If I could . . .’
I say, ‘Could what?’
Cigar smoke has left its acrid trace on his new damask jacket. His skin becomes mottled, purple and red sneaking up his neck. He slowly shakes his head. I tell him I will be unable to sleep if he refuses to explain.
‘I don’t believe you.’ He hesitates. ‘You’re sick, aren’t you?’ The ends of his lips curl up as he turns his eyes from mine. It is extremely peculiar. ‘I’ve not been well myself.’ He coughs. ‘I can’t sleep either.’
Wanting to hold him close again I reach out. Lo! he steps back and away. Marooned, estranged, on my bed, I long to hug him now. Sam seats himself before the window fidgeting with his jacket lapel, though the view of sea before him lies beautiful and uninterrupted.
A figure rises from a time when clouds reflected in the lake and I, clad as Byron’s page, was convinced I would succeed as a poet if I could but live in the world of men. Sam, the little angel, stood no higher than the door-knob then. But it was impossible for my fanciful speculations to persist when Sam, laughing at my attire, gambolled across the garden to be at my side. Happiness, lit by his wit, would leap into my heart. I try to throw a lifeline through these thoughts. Does he feel the first thought’s touch? Does my well-loved brother remember his clowning, his jokes, and my face ablaze with laughter? His face gleamed with inquisitive joy, open and fresh like the yellow-hearted buttercups and daisies spotting the lawns in summer months. Small posies I would pick, thread, loop about his neck; this enchanting child, the subject of many of my early poems, decked in bright blue breeches and jacket, his head crowned with laurel wreaths.
Sam’s eyes narrow. They speak a different language. Why, I know not. Does he remember all Papa’s preaching before a captive audience – the family warmth; and my own sermons when we played church in the nursery; did he not kneel before our home-made altar? No, hiding himself in the rich velvety folds of curtains he swathed himself in soft blushing red; has that colour drained from those ruddy cheeks, never to return?
He avoided Holy Communion – why? What heavy cross does he bear? Sam, a grinning infant with four milk teeth missing, once clung to my skirts. He was always the dandy, even back then. Who tore sweet little Sam from me?
It seems he can do naught but stare me out. I pray for God to restore my faith in his humanity.
Does he hear my sighs? Although he is seated not a yard away we have never been this far apart. When I speak in my small whisper, he looks up with stark blue eyes completely impoverished and destitute. I ask him how he is. Was he happy in Jamaica? Has he missed me? Will he stay the whole summer with us in Torquay? His demeanour of condemnation does not lighten. His answers are brief and none are in the definitive.
Dressing up with Henrietta for the plays I wrote, grandly Sam paraded about the drawing-room. Inside the cape in which he was wrapped he had concealed the much-adored doll, with its pretty fur cap and a cloth coat night-gown Grandmother Moulton had sent me. Little judge Georgie reprimanded Sam sharply. I now can’t help smiling inside, yet with eleven of us, dear Mama couldn’t control Sam. Another memory comes to mind, though only vaguely, of a poem Sam wrote many years ago for Papa’s birthday . . . the happiest day of the year, I’ll swig to pass the time away. Surely Sam hasn’t behaved unreasonably under the influence of Jamaican rum?
Having barely said hello he heads for the drawing-room. Yet my room is twice as pleasant. My windows seem to hang over the bay, the balcony cuts the sea into a myriad of sparkling stars. And, as strong pillars of dust-laden light brighten and dim across my coverlet, the smells, the many discordant and strident summer sounds, muffled and softened by the distance of this floor from the ground, all fall with a certain difference now: laughter; screaming babies; the sharp shriek of children dashing in and out of waves; the resonant rattle of fashionable four-wheeled cabs on cobbled streets; the sonorous bellow of a donkey. Indeed, Sam says with a faint-hearted smile before turning from the landing, that should I be here during the Torquay August regatta, I could let out sittings upstairs.
Salt on the window-panes filters out the sun’s harsh rays.
My dear Lady Margaret,
. . . since October I have never walked without support, & since January never in any way. Indeed at that time & afterwards the state of debility, induced not merely by the complaint on the chest but by the incidental & unaccountable attack of jaundice, was excessive. No baby could be more helpless – only – my voice having quite sunk away to a whisper – I had not the baby’s privilege of screaming . . .
. . . I have been dumb with my pen almost all the winter – & even now am under an awful medical ban in regard to any sort of composition. Books too have been ordered away, but they, being faithful friends, wouldn’t go – so that now Dr. Barry restricts his disapprobation to a shaking of the head when he happens to see one larger than usual. I am about to, in spite of the ban, to contribute again to Finden’s Tableaux – a vow having been vowed to that effect months ago, to my dear friend Miss Mitford, in the case of her retaining the editorship. There will be three other poets – I mean besides me – and Miss Mitford will write the whole of the prose. What my subject is, I have no imagination of yet – & am only today beginning to expect a suggestive sketch . . .
15 June 1839
Sealed off and shut up as I am, how could Papa have withheld this engraving portraying a sleeping child surrounded by nuns and monks? To prevent me writing poetry? Dear Miss Mitford sent the engraving to illustrate my next ballad, with a request for it to be forwarded to Torquay. I have waited for too long. What else does he keep from me? I fear I must let Miss Mitford know that my ballad for Finden’s Tableaux will be delayed for this reason only. And I shall send Papa a savage letter explaining how hurried and frustrated I shall be in my writing of the ballad and that he should have, if for that reason alone, sent the illustration immediately it was delivered to Wimpole Street. I am in two minds as to the title: ‘Lenora,’ or ‘The Legend of the Brown Rosary’?
19 June 1839
I am not one for gossip yet I do find the suspense of lying on this bed, waiting for mail, almost kills me.
Sam, Bro and Sette vanished after luncheon to I know not where, for it is neither the season for hunting, nor shooting, and they can’t walk on the beach in this rain – Sam’s and Sette’s London coiffures are almost too fashionable for any outdoors.
Seated at my bedside before luncheon was served, with sounds of summer laughter washing
over everything, and his face flushed with the now familiar blush from too much pink champagne, Sam advised me that he, Papa and Sette may shortly depart for London. He assured me he will return to Torquay within one month.
I suspect that were Bro to journey with them he would be returned, coercively, to Jamaica to manage the family interests. Bro is safe as long as he remains within my sight. There is no separating Brozie from me. He so dreads returning to plantation life. Papa has not the audacity to tear him from my bedside; I have pleaded and begged until too weak to speak. ‘We have a tyrant for a father,’ Bro said when I consulted him.
I long to bring back the sweet Sam I once knew, and am wondering, as I twiddle the crucifix on a chain Bro earlier fastened round my neck, how I might appeal to him. I often feel shattered, and fear some dreadful disaster is about to befall us all.
The total abolition of slavery in the West Indies passed over all Papa did like a sombre cloud – this threat became a reality, and one which cost beloved Papa dearly – I grew into girlhood against this turbulent backdrop. Nevertheless, it did not strike me as strange that dark-skinned people lived and ate with us under the same Hope End roof.
There is a racket of window sashes rattling from the approaching tempest. Thunder booms, splitting the air with rumbling crashes, taking me back to a clear virtually cloudless day when lightning shot from blue sky. Hope End’s cast-iron domelets and spires attracted thunderstorms. During one such summer storm an exceptionally loud thunderclap caused Mama’s black manservant, Junius, to drop a tray of white-and-blue willow-patterned teacups, and one of our finest Barrett-crested crockery jugs, decorated with the griffin in deep red. Remarkably that didn’t smash, but many cup handles broke clean off. Startled by another appalling crash, I ran up to my bedroom and from the window witnessed lightning strike a tree. The bark torn from the top to bottom . . . rent and ripped into long ribbons by dreadful fiery hands, and dashed about into the air, leaving twisted branches shredded, as a flower picked by a child might be. But worse, I later discovered four people were killed. Two of them, girls, picnicking on Pinnacle Hill, had tried to shelter in an iron-roofed shack. Their breasts were sliced by lightning; killed in an instant no doubt. Terror sweeps through me whenever a thunderstorm strikes.
Trippy, a Creole orphan, grew up with Papa at Cinnamon Hill great house and later came to work with Mama. She is now a motherly figure in my life and the lives of my siblings. Little Sam would crawl in and out of her legs whilst she crocheted the yellow shawl I wear. Her pudgy, pasty-brown face was to me, as a small child, an unobliging sight – quick eyes and thick West Indian accent. I hid from her chiding tones by slipping away to my menagerie of pets where clove-scented gillyflowers tumbled fragrant white and pink down bricks of the walled garden. Yet she covered the expense of my first publication, An Essay on Mind with fourteen shorter poems.
Trippy was not opposed to slavery. In fact, she sketched a pretty scene of how happily the Negroes lived when the sugar estates were in their prime. Like Papa, she described an idyllic Jamaican childhood. Thinking further on this, how she loved my great-grandfather, Edward of Cinnamon Hill, is easily understood, for although he flogged his slaves like a divinity – that was the standard phrase the family used to describe Grandpapa – he adopted Trippy, and afforded her great luxuries.
I saw the open slave markets of Montego Bay Trippy painted with words when I was a girl, as many as fifty men, women and children were purchased at any one time and branded as cattle. The most beautiful mulatto girls wore brightly patterned turbans; their skin was bleached with chalk and lemon juice to increase the price. These children of African and European mix commanded some of the highest bids. Auctioned as part of a lot were goats, chickens, pigs, whilst scents spicy and exotic – cinnamon, cloves, a faint hint of oranges – wafted from the many busy stalls. The English traders had a multitude of categories for variations in the shade of skin within the ‘brown-skinned’ group – mulatto being the most sought after, true black and pure albino the least; but between these were mustees, mustaphinos, quarteroons or quadroons, octoroons, and Sambos (children of mulatto and African mix). These names have a strange poetry in their sounds. There are Barretts who are mulattos, mustees, mustaphinos, octoroons. Mountains of problems have resulted from these illegitimate offspring.
Thomas Peters, one of my great-grandfather’s illegitimate grandsons, was a quadroon, a brown-skinned man, tall as a palm tree and living in a district near the Thames; Walworth I think it was. He was appointed executor and trustee of one of the Jamaican estates and had wished, in his youth, to buy a commission in a British Army regiment. I discovered a truth which casts a shadow over Papa, and put us in grave financial danger. It was a truth I could barely face, and one which when reflected upon keeps me lying perfectly still. The legal case with Richard Barrett, Papa’s illegitimate white Jamaican cousin, and Thomas Peters. A large sum – over six thousands pounds – was due to Thomas as a legacy. The case contested Papa’s grandfather’s will and was partly responsible for bringing about our huge financial downfall: this interminable family lawsuit, which cost Papa our Hope End home and continues to draw from him much strength. I was shocked to discover all this.
I went straight to my room at the top of the house. Many tearful hours passed. It was unusually cold in my room. I didn’t care. Overwrought with confusion and distress, conflicts between my commitment to justice and my loyalty to Papa wrangled and festered within my heart. I am deeply divided to this day. I never talked of this to Bro, and for some days, because Papa was in such trouble, avoided speaking to anyone.
Divisions within me reigned to such an extent I finished crocheting a shawl. I wished for a while that I were dead. How much I loved and cherished Papa! I must help, I thought. I couldn’t tell him face to face because when I tried to voice what I felt it sounded foolish. I lay on the bed and even practised cross stitch, hoping Papa loved me as I loved him.
A lively pop-thwack! of a flying cork hits the ceiling below, followed in quick pursuit by the gushing fizz of champagne. Peals of Sam’s reckless laughter lance up through the floorboards.
Sam, the hard-drinking fool – it is seldom now that he mentions the estates. Must I live with the monster little Sam has become? As the eldest brother, Bro should rightly set sail for Jamaica. It would be preferable if Sam sailed back in place of him. The extent of the discomfort I feel is not measurable – the tension between us is mounting – I sense Sam hides deviant folly and erroneous deeds.
20 June 1839
June has kept Sam safely in Torquay for eight days.
After yesterday’s party to celebrate Stormie’s arrival, Sam said that whilst in London he prevailed on Trippy to present him with my picture, ‘with a few alterations for which Arabella sat’; he added, ‘Trippy succeeded in obtaining a likeness’, and I glimpsed the sweet Sam of yesteryear. He told me he will value my portrait as much as a companion if he returns to Jamaica.
This morning he was in fine spirits, and after breakfasting told me a dreadful tale which I think he had considered would gladden my heart.
It seems that before Uncle Samuel died in Jamaica over a year ago he altered his will three times to benefit a black female servant attendant, one Rebecca Laslie, declaring finally that a legacy should be payable to the servant upon his death only if his executors considered her conduct and attention during his illness to have merited such a mark of his approval. Whether Rebecca Laslie should or should not be bequeathed the grand sum of one hundred Jamaican pounds, Uncle Samuel could not himself decide. Sam, the executor, cannot decide either. He claims that to allow the duties of a devoted servant to go unrewarded in the West Indies will never do. Sam’s situation is delicate, he said. He asked me what he should do. If I could assist him in some even small way, I would. He swore rumours of improprieties between this servant and Uncle Samuel will spread like fire across Jamaica if she does receive the legacy. Well!
The sky is almost dark. Sam has brought two letters with hi
m from our cousin, Samuel Goodin Barrett in Jamaica, which he now takes the trouble to read. Our cousin is quite recovered from an attack of fever caught, he says, by his own impudence for not changing wet shoes for dry after descending the Blue Mountain peak. With regard to Papa’s properties, little or no labour has been obtained. Cane-cutters at Cinnamon Hill have staged a strike for higher pay and the overseer obliged to stop work – this news duly brings unease to Sam’s voice as he reads on.
‘Sam! Sam!’ Bro calls from the dining-room. ‘We need you here for dinner. Hurry up, by Jove!’
Before I know it, and with the strangest smile, Sam is gone.
A shadow slopes across the landing threatening my doorway. ‘Now Papa has reconsidered Uncle’s will,’ it says in a thick drunken brawl, chin dropping to chest, the neck too weak to hold up the head, ‘I’m more than certain I’ll be granted attorneyship of our Jamaican estates when I return.’ I cannot understand the meaning of the words sliding from thin lips into dusky air.
A mask has slipped. The Sam-who-is-no-longer-Sam stands aloof on the threshold of my chamber. Dubiously his head shakes; he appears to be speaking to the chair adjacent to my bed. ‘One Sunday morning, shortly after arriving in Jamaica two years ago, and whilst still becoming acquainted with Papa’s estates, I was riding.’ Stoop-shouldered, he props his torso against the door-frame, his hand muzzles a yawn. ‘I was riding down Cinnamon Hill plantation path, when I knocked heavily filled market baskets from slaves’ heads, thus forcing, forcing Negro women to dash about, grovelling on the ground, chasing rolling mangoes all over the place.’ Glancing at me he sniggers and, from a small silver twin case, singles out a cigar, lights it, eyes flickering, and exhales a tube of blue smoke into the room. In him I see a selfish, brutal, indulged man.
Strange Music Page 13