by Chris Dolan
At the mention of the effects of the storm, Elspeth felt again the stabbing in her back or side – she could not tell exactly where.
The loss of George and the violence of the storm engulfed her as the days – so slow in a humid, remote place like this – went by until Lord Coak’s return. The nights continued to pass in a kind of fever, as if the air was saturated with Virginie’s potion. The heat throbbed in time to the pulse of the cicadas and frogs, the distant but interminable lapping of the waves. In the mornings, she barely noticed the sea, nor the constantly hot whipping wind. She spent much of her day confined to her room, but took walks whenever she felt strong and bold enough, and when there was air enough to make exertion possible. She thought she detected an uneasy atmosphere among her new neighbours, but paid it little mind. Northpoint was not to be her home for long.
What consumed her thoughts was this stabbing pain, as if the splinter that had speared George was now lodged in her. And though that felt fitting, it did not ease the physical pain. For weeks Elspeth looked inward rather than outward, listening to and concentrating on her own body, all her attention taken up with detecting any little change that might be taking place. She had not, so far as she knew, bled since before the storm, and the constrictions and aches she had suffered in her belly ever since, she began to realise, might have had a different source.
George and she reunited; her lover regenerating himself in her womb. Yet the idea seemed too remote, too unlikely. It hadn’t occurred to her, on either of those two sudden, delectable nights, to take care of this possibility. A child could not possibly result from a woman like her and a man like him: a medical contradiction. She did not seek advice from any other quarter – though who she might turn to in this foreign place she could not imagine – but vaguely decided that, if indeed she were pregnant, and when her time came, she would have Lord Coak transfer her to Bridgetown or even London for her confinement. A baby would delay still further her return to the stage but, with proper lodgings in town and staff to assist her, it should not present an enduring problem. How Coak would react, if it turned out she was expecting a child, she had no notion.
She would have to wait – waiting being a skill she was beginning to learn – longer to find out. Uncertain and unconfirmed news of Lord Coak’s expected arrival finally reached Northpoint in March 1832. Nobody came for Elspeth Baillie in all that time. Each day lasted a month, every week a year, as she waited, expecting some word from the Lyric. She implored Captain Shaw to let her visit Bridgetown, to find her old friends.
“That is not my place, Mistress Baillie,” he insisted, though Elspeth felt that he considered it very much was. Lord Coak had written to him requesting that he look after their house-guest, and to dissuade her from returning to town until he himself had returned. He wrote to Elspeth herself in a similar vein. The Lyric had been utterly lost in the storm and his plans to reconstruct it would need some time to mature. There was no other theatre in Bridgetown to embrace her many talents. Indeed there was – he knew from regular dispatches he received in Havana – no theatrical life whatsoever in the aftermath of the calamity. He hinted at other reasons, too, for her to avoid travelling to town, then sweetened the warning with apologies for his absence, a fanfare of compliments, promises to return at the earliest date and exhortations to look after her own wellbeing: “A period of rest and restoration can only benefit you. We will return to our project as soon as is possible, and in a climate more fruitful for our ambitions.”
He was right: she was still in turmoil – all the more so since suspecting she might be pregnant. Northpoint was not the worst place, she reflected, despite its remoteness and the ennui it produced in her, to regain some peace of mind. If indeed she was carrying George’s child, there was nowhere better for her to be until she was certain. She never ventured far from the house, preferring to walk round it than away from it. In every direction she was obstructed. She could walk a little down the drive but, as the trees at either side grew thicker and the path became like a tunnel, she had to turn back. The hill behind the house was too tangled with overgrown thickets to allow walking; it was also alive with the tics and buzzes of insects and other life, some of which, for all she knew, might bite, and fatally. The canefields hindered exploration on the south-west side of the house, though she stood at their fringe sometimes and watched black men and women perform mysterious tasks, involving cutting long, gangly stalks of cane, shearing their leaves, and tying and carrying bundles of trimmed cane. They seemed to work all hours. At dawn and dusk their shadows repeated their mechanical motions.
Still, the place was pleasant and quiet enough. A return to the city could only illustrate too vividly what she had lost. Whatever remained of its streets would be empty of her old companions and their laughter; the hole where the Lyric once stood would contain only the echo of the applause she had anticipated; Garrison a vacuum without George Lisle’s caresses and smiles. The worry that Lord Coak had implanted in her mind of darker threats, constrained her too. “I will explain on my return but there are other factors that would make it most inadvisable for you to enter the city.” She approached Captain Shaw on the matter.
“Mr. Lisle. Senior. He’s after your blood, as I hear it.”
The shock of hearing George’s name uttered for the first time since his death dismayed her for a moment.
“The Lisle clan lost not only their heir, George, with whom I gather you were acquainted, but also his younger sister, Clara.”
“I had no idea,” Elspeth breathed.
“Sir Reginald was caught on his estates during the storm, leaving his wife and daughter alone in their town residence to cope. He had believed that Master George would have been there to take charge of the situation but, unfortunately, the young man was not at home on the night in question.”
She tried to feel for this Clara, but could not. Clara was only a name to her and one that, on the very few occasions he had uttered it, George had done so without, she remembered, much warmth.
“Sir Reginald has been attributing to all and sundry his family’s tragedy to a strumpet. I use the wording I was given, Mistress.”
The wooden Captain, Elspeth reckoned, agreed with Sir Reginald’s opinion. But she was not the son’s strumpet – even if she had set out to be. They had found some love together: real love, tender and bold. George had risked his name and fortune for her. He had protected her, and died by her side. And perhaps now he had given her his child. She was George’s widow in all but name.
“Does he know where I am?”
“He knows all right. And so long as you’re here, under our protection, you’re safe.”
“What could he do?”
“Powerful man like that? Have you deported, at the very least.”
Despite the misfortunes that had recently occurred to her, Elspeth still could not conceive of a more terrible fate. Whatever she would become, she would become in this new world. To return to the old would be nothing but defeat.
When Lord Coak eventually arrived at Northpoint, she waited for him at the porch, just as Captain Shaw had waited for her. The little pudgy, bald man drawing up in a hired brougham was as welcome and grand a sight as Mark Antony surrounded by phalanxes of gladiators and blaring horns. She ran down to meet him, not waiting for him to alight, but jumping into the carriage and only just managing not to throw her arms around him and kiss him.
“Well, you’ve lost none of your energies, my dear.”
“How long it’s been!”
Here he was – her magician, the alchemist who could turn stone back into gold. She felt her skin tingle the way it had when she first came to this island. She could swear her hair was thickening again right before his eyes. Lord Coak was her sun – not that burning ball in the sky that hurt her eyes, that made her skin clammy and her clothes stain like she was a common farm girl. Over the next few days, Lord and guest walked together in the grounds, and she realised for the first time how extensive his plantation was. He ex
plained to her that his was the only agricultural estate this far north in the island. From the top of the little bluff he showed her its boundaries, embraced between hills and ocean.
“The climatic and geological conditions give our sugar a particular quality that is highly praised by the distillers of rum. There is a sharp, fresh salty tang to it. Though I’m a claret man myself.”
She had already seen, on the few outings she had braved in his absence, the gang of black workers who cultivated his lands and cut his cane. Now they passed her – men and women alike in pursuit of mysterious tasks – nodding vaguely in their direction. Even up close, they still seemed distant, as cattle do in fields adjacent to country lanes. Lord Coak mumbled something about them being part of his present worries. Many were leaving, or threatening to, now that they could work elsewhere. He spoke of “manumission’ – a word Elspeth had never heard before and did not understand. The problem seemed to persist whether or not these people stayed or went:
“Either way, you get little out of them these days.” He was not criticising them. Albert Coak was simply stating a fact and ruminating on the problems it caused him.
From that hill over the cove Coak pointed towards Florida and Havana, and beyond to the Pacific and San Francisco. In the company of a rich, cultured planter, this far-northern settlement seemed not quite so isolated, and Elspeth less forgotten. They made plans together, discussed new plays he had seen, and pored over the texts he had brought back. He spoke of his ambitions to resurrect his destroyed theatre. Such a project would take time. First to recuperate the investment he had lost, and then to begin rebuilding not only bricks and mortar, but a company of players and administrators equal to the talents of Elspeth Baillie.
But that was for the future. “All my plans depend on the success of a venture on which I have speculated everything. This colony is in dire need of mechanisation and I seem to be the only planter prepared to sit down with the future. But it will require some patience on your part.”
Old man Lisle, Coak told her, was determined to avenge his losses. He was making it known that there would be a proper theatrical life now – in the forms of a Gentlemen’s Arts Club and a Ladies’ Society – bringing decent and moral plays from New York where, it so happened, he did much of his business. There would be no more performances of dubious morality. Exemplary and virtuous theatre was all the more necessary now that the twin disasters of the great storm and abolition were testing the steel of the province to its core. There was no place in the present metropolitan climate for the talents of the likes of Miss Elspeth Baillie. In the meantime, Coak proposed that she settle for a few months more at Northpoint: enjoy the clean breeze and restorative silence and sun.
“There is a plot of land, by the north wall of the house. I imagine you could fashion a little herb garden there for your own enjoyment, and for the general profit of the estate.”
From the planter and from passing visitors and the pages of newspapers she learned a little about the goings-on in town. Mrs. Bartleby and Mr. Philbrick, it was rumoured, had absconded together to America, leaving spouses and children behind. Nonie and Christy had both survived the storm and had sailed for England together. Isabella had gone to Venezuela. Of Virginie she heard nothing. Derrick had taken employment in a hotel – in what capacity she didn’t know. Although Coak was sceptical, she read articles about the reconstruction of Bridgetown and the building of grand residences more magnificent than those they replaced. She heard second-hand of the building of civic establishments, hotels de luxe, extravagant government palaces. The Gazette trumpeted the excellence of refurbished and newly fabricated theatrical venues, every one of them associated with Mr. Reginald Lisle.
In less than two weeks Albert Coak had gone again. Elspeth’s belly had swollen during his stay and though she had hidden it as best she could in unfashionable cloaks and wraps, it amazed her that he hadn’t noticed. She had worried that he might request a repeat performance of her Greenock audition. Nothing but business, however, seemed to occupy his mind.
He would be gone this time for a month or so. Only a week into it she lay on her bed in her meagrely furnished upstairs room, swathes of colours, like lugubrious Northern Lights, coating her dreams more thickly than ever, interrupted regularly by the terror of being speared and emptied out. With the first stirrings of dawn, a murkiness outside her window like a Scottish morning, she came to properly and cooried down into the warmth of her sheets. But the warmth turned quickly to a cold dampness. She screamed when she saw the mess of her bedclothes: brown liquid, like mauby, smelling even bitterer, soaked every inch. She was lying in a sea of black blood. Shouting for Annie, for Lord Coak, George, her mother, and gasping for breath, she scrambled manically in the mess looking for her baby.
She never spoke again about her baby. The terrible night of her miscarriage was almost worse than that of the storm. Annie had tried to calm her, but Elspeth just kept on shouting at her: “Find her! Find my baby. She’s in here somewhere. We have to find her!”
Whether or not a little barely formed body had been found, she never discovered. She must have blacked out, for she had no memory of the event beyond the blood and her own screaming at Annie. But she knew there had been a change somewhere in her innards. Not an emptiness, but as if the baby – the girl, she was sure it was a girl – had burrowed further inside her.
She began to reinterpret the great events of her life in a different light. Lord Coak’s spiriting her away; the death of the sailor as her ship broke from the old land; the storm that had reached its zenith on the very eve of her First Night. Waking in the pitch of night, far from city lights and sounds, Elspeth berated herself for not seeing from the beginning how it all pointed to disaster. Life had raised her up and struck her down, and all in little more than a single rotation of the earth around the sun.
The Coak Estate – for over a generation economically sound enough – had begun, along with most other plantations, to trade very successfully indeed. Though destructive in its immediate aftermath, the great storm was not wholly injurious in its consequences; it proved, even, to have beneficial aspects. The seasons became more favourable and the vegetation more active. Elspeth, as much through boredom as any active interest, noticed the air of industry everywhere around the estate. No matter when she looked out her window, or embarked on one of her short walks, there were men scurrying to and fro, carrying implements for digging or cutting or carrying. Women bore bundles of cane on their backs in the fields, and the crops themselves appeared to be undergoing one long single harvest. The health of the farm workers – she read in the Gazette – men and women still in slavery, and freemen and citizens in general, were all improving.
As her old hopes faded, other responsibilities filled up the spaces in her life. She began to order the house according to her liking. She laid the foundations, as Coak had suggested, for a herb garden, as well as a little policy of plants and shrubs at its eastern end. She instructed Annie Oyo and the few black servant girls in the kitchen to change the tedious pattern of meals, introducing chicken and other fowl, sugar-topped milk and rice puddings and other innovations. She reprimanded Coak, during his brief reappearances, and Shaw for having settled so long for slave food – an endless round of potatoes, sticky messes Annie called coocoo, tasteless boiled husks from the breadfruit tree.
The piecework and tatty-howking that was part and parcel of a troupe of family players in Scotland, she had thought had gone forever. Yet here she was – put back out to work. Naturally she was not expected to labour amongst the biting insects of the canefields, but, as house servants were needed to replace absent cutters and bearers, her domestic chores increased. To her surprise, she rather enjoyed them. She thought of herself as Miranda, mistress of her own little world. Merrily, merrily shall I live now, under the blossom that hangs on the bough. The petunias and blue lumbagos sang in crisp maiden’s hues around her; match-me-nots sprang to attention at her touch, every bloom a different colour from its n
eighbour.
Coak spent weeks at a time in Bridgetown. In the few intervening days he was busy in his study writing, and mealtimes were taken up with agricultural matters with Shaw. Not long before the anniversary of the great storm, he found a little more time for her. He had received a box of plays, chapbooks and novels from London. He read aloud to her, and in French, the opening chapters of Victor-Marie Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris, translating a paragraph at a time. At night, she took a bundle of penny dreadfuls, recently published in London to bed. She learned lines from volumes of poems: Spenser’s Faery Queen, and Keats’s Odes. By the time of his next return, Elspeth had learned the entire part of Hamlet’s Ophelia,
“Up! be bold!
Vanquish fatigue by energy of mind!
For not on plumes, or canopied in state,
The soul wins fame!”
There was no commemoration of the previous year’s storm in the summer of 1832. Elspeth herself lost track of time, unable to follow the seasons in this land. The sun seemed equally hot throughout the year, and rain could fall unexpectedly at any time. Each time it did, she suffered her own memorial for George. When, in the November of 1832, Coak returned for a longer stay, his meetings in private with Shaw took on a more urgent air and lasted longer, prevailing throughout all their shared meals. Elspeth listened and began to understand some of the debate: an upturn in production and an increase in prices had coincided with a problem of labour shortage. Many freedmen were taking advantage of the economic climate and the British parliament’s anti-slavery legislation, to leave and start up their own small sugar fields or grow other crops elsewhere on the island. With full emancipation on the horizon, the estate – despite trading well – was facing a looming crisis. The need to implement mechanisation was pressing.