‘Yes, continue,’ I say.
‘Then, showering the slaves with handfuls of silver coins –’
‘As some crude compensation?’
‘– I galloped away!’
Despite the confusion it has brought at a tender time of change on the West Indian estates, Sam now admits Papa ordered his return – because of this and other tales, and the latest controversy involving him which he and Papa still refuse to reveal.
Well! Although pity is poor charity I do pity poor Papa for Sam’s jests, and I am frequently visited by the disquieting notion that West Indian influences may – contrary to Papa’s readjustment plan – have corrupted Sam, morally, all the more. Were I to attempt to raise this matter with Papa I am certain he would treat me very cruelly indeed, but I never was acquainted with a young man of any mind or imagination, except, of course, dear Brozie, and Brozie believes I inhabit such high moral ground that he’ll never climb to where I stand.
I am turning over in my mind a question which has haunted me for many a long month: what are the implications of my family’s fast-diminishing wealth having been derived from others’ suffering? God chose not to grace me with Voltaire’s genius, but a likeness to one situation Voltaire and I do share, for ‘It is a dreadful bore to be here, but it is very advantageous’ for weighing up such concerns of the mind.
‘Sam,’ I inquire, ‘if one man’s greed is another man’s hunger, who paid the price for our luxuries?’
This time he grins shiftily. Crossing the room with cigar in hand he bows then kisses my forehead good-night.
No amount of denial will erase the painful truth confirmed by Sam’s silence.
I let my eyelids fall shut. Hope End rises immense, palatial, from the bosom of the Malvern Hills. Shockingly exotic with its neo-Turkish minarets, domelets and metal spires. Oriental pagoda-like architecture, flamboyant and bizarre, and as eccentric as Papa could design, it attracts much attention; the young Princess Victoria is even surveying the grounds. I can see through the dining-room, with its crimson flock wallpaper, to peacocks strutting on the terrace; the circular-ended drawing-room decorated in the Italian style; the Moorish views hanging in the billiard room; the handsomely stuccoed library; and the views across the parkland which was well stocked with doe and stags until they threatened the Spanish chestnuts, Portuguese laurels and other rarer trees.
All the splendour by which I am surrounded, all Papa has gained, comes from that bitter-sweet substance, sugar.
I have pushed this away, fought it, but like the sinister silk-black salt water stirring beneath the waxing moon, which can seep through the tiniest crack in the underbelly of a boat, or lashing rain that bleeds through a chink in a rotten window-frame, forming a pool on the sill, this fear has leaked into my thoughts.
Guilt pierces like lightning, like a truth; but unlike truth it fills me with shame. No consolations exist. How to be rid of what’s past?
How to escape a polluted family? A family of thieves who stole not only money, but lives. Who took from children what wasn’t theirs to take; who perpetuated great injustices that sanctioned rebellions. My thoughts become a garden. Too overgrown with no clear path. Prickly, riddled with tunnels leading nowhere. My faith, my belief, is nailed to emptiness. Empty thoughts. Empty words. Empty deeds.
I care little for material possessions and clothes but that last glimpse of Hope End’s domes disappearing behind trees was like being cast out of paradise. Our Hope End home in the Malvern Hills was paradise. And yet not for the all the earthly wonders would I sit in the sunlight and shade of those hills any more. It would be a travesty to live in such false glory, like the stitching back together of the torn petals of a rose. I would as soon exhume a corpse as do it. Did hope for ever end there?
What strikes me now is that not only my brother Sam, Uncle Samuel and Cousin Richard in Jamaica, but Papa, Mama – all those whom I most dearly love – each brother and sister of mine are implicated in this crime, as well as myself. Our decadence makes me sick. I lie stunned as if by a blow to the head. Why has it taken so long for this realization to form, and for me to confront the facts? Can so thin a body carry such a thick mind?
I have long known that the human race is cruel and unscrupulous. I was only thirteen when I wrote The Battle of Marathon. Papa had fifteen copies printed, distributed and circulated. Aware, all those years ago, of the powers of the ruling classes and the way that what is past and present can be manipulated as a political tool, I was a tethered bird, striving to fly beyond a narrow perspective in order to see a greater picture, a more sympathetic view of the world.
This narrow strip on which I have balanced, this journey of a woman’s soul, one whose privileges depend upon the suffering of others, seems yet more desolate, yet more bleak.
Freed from a girlhood crisis in faith – I am gladdened for that being behind me – I now cannot trust to joy. To me, wisdom lies in recognizing that all the kindness and excellences of this earth must be paid for by grief. I shall always be wary of happiness. Everything has its price.
‘You were crying out loud,’ Bro says. Looking down anxiously, he stands over my bed. ‘Was it another bad dream?’ He has brought a lighted candle; behind his shadowy head glimmers a pearl-white moon.
‘It was,’ I reply. ‘My heart is so full I can barely breathe.’ Bro smiles patiently. He comes nearer. His cheeks, though creamy-smooth, are flushed from salt-winds with a rouge which suggests roses bloom beneath the skin. His eyes hold an iridescent yellow, the pupils shine as if tiny stars sparkle within. ‘It was as if I had closed a door on the world and had shut myself up in a room of my own, shut up in darkness. The door was shut and it would not open.’
Sam, the creature I do not know, seats himself on the end of my bed.
Henrietta drifts about in the gloom. ‘Ba’s distress,’ she murmurs in Sam’s ear, ‘is due to an over-stimulated mind. Too many books.’
To Bro I turn a tear-stained face, searching his eyes for an answer. Bro’s look is increasingly troubled. I say to him, ‘In God my faith has strengthened. He is the saver of souls. He is the Supreme Being above, who delivers to man all that is true, all that is good. He is the divine grace, the powerful, beautiful, almighty one who teaches the holy principle of love.’
‘Dear Ba,’ Bro replies, kneeling at my bedside for evening prayers.
One of my favourite passages from the Holy Scriptures creeps into my mind: ‘The Lord of peace Himself give you peace always and by all means’ – it strikes upon this disquieted earth with such a foreignness of heavenly music – surely the ‘variety’, the change, is to find a silence and a calm.
25 June 1839
‘Papa has not granted Sam attorneyship of Cinnamon Hill,’ Henrietta says. She is seated on the window-sill. ‘And Papa has told me that we are going downhill so fast we shall soon reach the bottom, “the Negroes won’t work and there is no crop”.’
‘Should he have to return,’ I say, ‘Sam had better send Papa better accounts, or he will have us all in Jamaica before long.’
Henrietta’s lugubrious eyes avoid mine. I notice her face is swollen from crying. ‘Sam says the heat in Jamaica alone is enough to drive him mad.’ She turns to finish her crochet work.
‘He is not the brother I once knew,’ I add. ‘He has changed, well . . . dramatically. He was always closer to you, Henrietta, than anyone else in the family.’ Feeling Henrietta’s pain, tentatively I inquire, ‘Before leaving for London did he spend much time with you, dear?’
‘He is a man of much business,’ she replies.
Part of me longs to see Papa’s true home, for I know he thinks of Jamaica in that way. To see those majestic stone walls soaked with the sunlit shafts that stream through a lattice of lime-green leaves and drench the flagstones of the back verandah. Cinnamon Hill great house – I wonder why I should feel nostalgia for a world I never knew. I picture a long, low, rambling grey stone building looking out across the face of the ocean. Palms, in silhouette
, a burst of dark green. Banana leaves glisten on densely forested slopes hung thickly with creeper ropes. The arching sky is heavy, blue; the heat leaden with the scent of sugar. Bro said the panoramic view from the sundial opposite the steps to the piazza shows the ocean’s various shades of indigo through to turquoise, lightening to pale sapphire, blending into the hollow dome of sky. I see plantations of coconut trees, acres of guinea grasses; sugar canes; gardens ornate and exotic; plantain walks; lofty mountains; wells, pastures, ponds, lime kilns; Negro cottages, kitchens, hospitals, still-houses, mills, roads, paths and tracks, all leading to the Caribbean sea. But in regard to slavery – No. No. No. That system was monstrous for those wretched souls. Mahogany-faced Junius objected to accompanying Sam on his first journey to the West Indies because he greatly feared entering even the apprenticeship system. According to Junius it is not yet true that slavery is abolished (and Papa says he wishes to start it up again). Sam says the Jamaican lowlands are infested with biting insects. Papa’s cousin, Richard, although he did have one guide, the Lord Our Saviour, had many tales of undesirable practices, as do Sam and Brozie.
Instinctively I feel we must be open to a new age, not turn our backs on this grimness that we as a family have sustained. Walls of silence have been erected and these must be knocked down. I shall either write against the tide, or drown. I have a loyalty to liberty, to justice, to my own self. Yet to act in conformity with my moral values will outrage my beloved Papa. He is the embodiment of religious principle, a truer more devout believer could not walk this earth. To him I am a blessed one, a handmaid of the Lord’s. No one could love me better.
I am to remain confined but it is a jail of my own making for I am not a slave, and my pain cannot be compared to that of the poor Negroes. It is not through life’s privileges that I can reach the poor and deprived but through pain – and the high art of poetry. Poetry brings self and life into judgment. I have a vision of a poet. A poet’s vision.
8 July 1839
In my fingertips I take the letter Henrietta passes from the silver server. The handwriting looks familiar. Suddenly I experience a terrible sensation, and know the letter is the portent of another awful happening.
Because I cannot see for tears Henrietta proceeds. ‘Twenty-second of June, 1839.’ Pausing to wipe her own tears from the parchment, her speech stifled by whimpering, Henrietta commences again. ‘Twenty-second of June, 1839 . . . I have deeply felt my absence from you all at Torquay; but when I know how painful a parting scene would be to us all and how injurious it might be to dear Ba, I rather rejoice we have escaped it.’
Henrietta stifles a moan. She searches her pocket for a handkerchief with which to blow her congested nose. ‘My most affectionate love to dear Ba who I am sure will bear this temporary separation with patience for our sakes . . . Write to me regularly about Ba once a fortnight and commence on the first of July, you well know my anxiety and will, I am sure, not disappoint me . . . Twenty-sixth of June. Once more my own dearest Henrietta and Ba, God bless you both, we sail in two hours from this: That God in His mercy may protect and return our dear Ba is the earnest prayer of your fondly attached Sam.’
Although Henrietta has done her best to scold me out of them, I suffer horrible forebodings that Sam and Stormie’s sudden and secretive departure will serve to bring us more bad news. Sam is to reside again at Cinnamon Hill, Stormie at Cambridge Estate. Matthew Farquharson will relinquish charge of Cinnamon Hill on Sam’s return.
I feel furious for a time that Henrietta had not left my bedside to say farewell to them, but she assures me she did not know of our brothers’ departure until this woeful letter emerged. How am I to accept that it is better for me this way? I shall always be angry. Will I ever see them again? Henrietta says she is angry too.
Could their departure not have been delayed? I ask Henrietta. Well, she says, she doesn’t know. My beloved brothers, Sam and Stormie, my dear, dear Stormie who shrinks from public examination on account of the hesitation of his speech. Gone. Without farewells!
Bro says this evening that, like Henrietta and me, he received no warning of Sam and Stormie’s departure from London. ‘Preparing to partake of the Holy Sacrament might have sent Sam in quieter service into the world,’ Bro says. ‘I advised him to make the preparations.’
‘I could not agree more,’ Henrietta replies.
To Henrietta I say, ‘But the hour for that is now passed. The only consolation we all share is that Papa did not force Bro to set sail for Jamaica.’
Because I am too weakened by grief to write, I have asked Henrietta to tell Sam how we feel; that it is hard upon us indeed that during all the time he was in England he should only have spent a few short days with us in Torquay; that we wish his visit to England had been postponed until next year; that his and Stormie’s coming here was just to wish us good-bye – a very painful pleasure to be sure.
9 July 1839
Dr. Barry is suggesting I reside in Hastings or Southampton for the remainder of the summer. Unbelievable! Southampton is a fearful place, I have told Papa so.
They considered me too fatigued to wish my brothers farewell yet are prepared to drag me about the country like some sort of package when all I desire, now Sam and Stormie are gone, is my removal from this dizzying view of sea.
Uncle Hedley is still packing up books and furniture which will be removed directly to Southampton; he will then follow with the boys. Jane Hedley, Arabel – even their lovely little daughter Ibbit – are gone there. It is on account of the dampness occasioned by the wet mud of the river that I am afraid to travel to that part of coastal country. Papa has written to Bro requesting he advise Dr. Barry that my chair outings do not run on two consecutive days, on account of how tired I am becoming since Sam and Stormie left. I will write to assure Papa that at present in Torquay I am taken care of as if I were made of Venetian glass.
Bro looks decidedly more shaggy with his long veil of hair. He has spent the best part of the summer painting water-colours, fishing, smoking.
10 July 1839
An arch of light hangs yellow over the horizon. The chilled fingers of a summer sea breeze reach through cracked window-frames.
Henrietta sits and sews. A fine silver needle threads memories. Memories of Sam and Stormie etched on my mind stipple my skin with pin-pricks. Sharp pains spread through my abdomen. I slide beneath the covers. Drugged by weariness, I struggle to keep my eyes open, and feel myself falling into a pit, clawing at collapsing walls. Through the sheets I pick out a faint figure. She signals to me. A scream stabs inside my head, frightening me back to the bleak reality of being closed in, irrevocably, and of the suffocating loneliness living inside whether Henrietta, Bro, Papa, or the weird creature beside the window are with me, or after they are gone.
And feelings from memories swell in waves through my body down to my legs. Memories held in mist like the sea is early each morning in summer.
A deathly stillness encases the room. Silence pierces my ears. A great booming silence. The woman appears in the armchair, unearthly, not inhuman. A man moves towards me; he is the gentleman I saw once before. His touch ghosts across my hand. And when I sit up and lean back, thumping my head on the bedstead, causing a taste steely and bloody to seep into my mouth, they both withdraw.
To the east a medley of clouds play. I cannot see them now and yet feel them all around. The man holds me, his legs entwined with mine, his arms tangled about me.
A dazzle of sunlight breaks through the mottled marbled sea of grey-blue. The rays light up neglected anger within.
This morning Bro said he has written to Papa for my move to Southampton to be cancelled. That settles that. He also said a Presbyterian minister on the island of Jamaica definitely wrote to Papa shortly before Sam’s removal to England. Not only was Sam paying his ex-slaves a miserable pittance of a wage, but, worse, Sam had a Creole mistress and was himself in grave moral danger.
For a while words were strangled in my throat. ‘If Sam was
recalled to England by Papa,’ I eventually said, ‘why did Papa only allow him to stay here but once, paying us such a brief visit? Barely a full ten days. Given more time, we might have offered Sam the guidance and advice I now so deeply feel he needs.’
Bro covered his face with his hands, a prayer stumbled from his lips; Amens. A pause. He disappeared downstairs.
Why has Crow not brought my evening opium dose? Baleful pools of light from the burnished glass of a flickering bedside lamp float across my hands. Has Crow slipped in to turn up the flame? I am staring into its deep yellow heart. Crow should have drawn the curtains by now.
It is late. Outside the darkness scares me so. My fear is sealed in a black satin sky; the ever-changing black or blue of sea, to the grey-white shimmer of dawn. A dawn of discontent; of wandering through ruins. What will rise from them?
Look how the fire has died. I must ring for Crow.
11 July 1839
Ever dearest Miss Mitford,
. . . When the sea is calm again, I am to repeat my visits to it, not the dear sea itself, that being too sublime not to be gentle & harmless to the weak; and the intervening distance is not of many yards – not fifty, I shd. think – only the chairs have earthquakes in them . . .
. . . Oh, Miss Mitford, I am in such a ‘fuss’ (to use an expressive word, which means here however something sadder than itself) about ‘my people’ in Wimpole Street – about their coming here to spend the summer with me. George is at any rate coming next week – & my dearest Papa will, I know, do what he can about packing up the others – but nobody deals in positives & universals, & says ‘we are coming’. The end of it is, naturally, that I am in a fuss. Do you really think I can stay here until next spring – here, comparatively alone? That is proposed to me. I am told that I can’t go back to London this winter without performing a suicide! If they wd. but come, I might think temperately of these things – but indeed it is necessary to gather strength of heart from the sight of everybody, to be able to look forwards to another year of exile . . .
Strange Music Page 14