by Chris Dolan
The evening repast that night was a sombre affair. The pregnant Diana read longer from the Bible than usual, recalling God’s command to Abraham to sacrifice his only son. Even Shaw was visibly moved and had kind words for the devastated Moira and Bernhard. He let the entire workforce sit on longer than their allotted forty-five minutes’ eating time, signalling to Robert Butcher to bring out a flagon of rum, so they could all drown their sorrows.
The Captain stayed on drinking unusually late, in the company of Robert Butcher, Malcolm Baxter and Nathanial Wycombe. Robert retired when Diana finished her chores. Nathanial and Malcolm went off with a flagon of rum in search of Bernhard, reported to be wandering down by the cove. Still Shaw sat on, letting the candles and lamps gutter out around him.
Elspeth remained awake in the upstairs library, reading and talking to Mary and Diana about the day’s sad events. The clock had already struck ten when Mary came in to bid her goodnight. “The captain is still below stairs, Ma’m.”
“Is he drunk?”
“I’ve ne’er seen him fu’, so I wouldna know. I dinna think so. Still, I’m feart o’ spierin’ him to leave.”
“I’ll go down, Mary. Thank you.”
By the time she had closed her book, doused the lamps and went downstairs, Shaw had gone. Only recently, however, for she could still smell him in the musty air of the night. She had been aware of his smell at Roseneythe for as long as she could remember: an unexpected sweetness. Like any plantation-dweller, he smelled of sugar cane, but coupled with a balmy flavour, like children’s candy, that might originate in the treacly cheroots he sucked on. Neither pleasant nor objectionable, it was Shaw’s unmistakable mark, and served as a warning signal of his approach.
She followed this sugary trail out onto the porch. There he stood in the middle of the herb garden smoking a last cheroot and staring up into the sky, its contents of stars and moon buried under thick cloud. The night throbbed with insects, heat and frogs, like an aching head. The factor was only ten years her elder, but Elspeth had to remind herself of the fact – the authority of his demeanour and the thick veins that gnarled his neck and arms always put her in mind of the ancient fig trees around the estate. He had thickened out a little since she first saw him – that skeletal puppet that had bellowed at her now had the hide of an old horse.
“Poor Bernhard. Do you think he will recover from the blow?”
“He’s not too old. Time yet to father another son.”
“Can one son replace another?”
The Captain looked into the darkness of front of him. “Better a replacement than no son at all.”
He walked a little towards the drive, and Elspeth, realising how little she knew of this man, followed.
“Did you ever have a child yourself, Captain?”
He shook his head slowly and answered as though giving his opinion on an agricultural matter. “I made a covenant many years ago to dedicate myself solely to my work. I was once a lustier man than the one you see before you. I hope the thought doesn’t offend you.”
She laughed – the notion of a lusty Captain Shaw was comical and yes, perhaps a little offensive – but also at the idea that anyone could suspect her of primness. “If once there was a lustier man here, Mr. Shaw, then there was also once a more forthright woman.”
He nodded his assent, as if he had always known the fact.
“There was a time, sir, when I was known in this island for my bluntness. Perhaps too much.”
They began walking towards the drive where his quarters lay, the Captain, thanks to the rum, speaking openly and relaxed.
“So I’ve heard.”
“Though naturally I am ashamed of it.”
She was not ashamed. She felt not the slightest tinge of remorse for anything she had done or said in those glorious days. She found herself giggling in front of this severe man – as though she were the girlish debutante of old – and being rewarded with a rare smile. They walked on down the driveway towards his home. She had often seen him at the end of the day walking in the direction of the gates, or marching up between the twin lines of trees in the morning, but had never discovered where his house actually stood. If they kept on walking, she would have to turn back – the bend before the last stretch of drive to the gates was her limit.
“Were they very dreadful, these stories of me?” Why was she doing this? It had never occurred to her to trifle with the Captain. He was much too austere, and too injured. Moreover, she knew he had little time for her. Perhaps it was a need for release from the day’s tension and sorrow that triggered a devil-may-care mood within her. He, too, was in a lighter temper. She walked jauntily, as though she were at George’s side again and the trees at either side of them ranks of soldiers saluting them.
“Such matters don’t trouble me the way they do others.”
“The tomfoolery of silly young actresses?”
Were it not for the baggy plainness of his work clothes, the captain would not have seemed quite such the peasant countryman. He would never be handsome, but he might scrub up respectably enough. She smiled at the thought – what airs and graces she had acquired since becoming a Lady! The upstart libertine of the Lyric was an act she had calculated to play; the colonial planter’s lady had grown in her without her noticing it. “Thank heaven for you and Diana, captain. You keep us all on the straight and narrow. But I know you are a little scandalised by the easy virtue of the artisan class?”
She was playing her old self again, revelling in piquant conversation. She felt a spring in her step for the first time in an age. But Shaw was incapable of social gaiety. “I have important work here,” was all he could say. His brow furrowed to emphasise the gravity of his words, but he forced a smile, creasing the skin between beard and mouth. In that costly gesture, she detected something she hadn’t noticed before: complicity. Shaw regarded Elspeth as one of his own followers! Another Diana; a Nathanial Wycombe, even. How long had the distant, evasive Captain considered her a friend? They had worked together effectively enough in the past, it was true. But as enforced colleagues. What was it the taciturn, gnarled factor felt he had in common with a supercilious actress, the usurper of his patron’s time and attention?
Bitterness. A hidden distress. The feeling of being blown somewhere you were never meant to be. Was that it? Shaw talked on as they strayed further from the lights of the house behind them, deeper into the driveway. The darkness, making the path unrecognisable, made it safer: there was nothing round the next bend; not the gates, not the road behind them, just more black night, as though the dark had hollowed out a cavity in the world for them. The blitheness she had felt just moments ago left her. Shaw and her alone in the midnight; two iron nuggets of equal magnetic field; each hammered by uninvited hands into new and unnatural shapes. A feeling of recklessness overcame her – like it used to in front of coarse audiences; against the oak tree with Thomas; the morning she kissed the perspiration off Francie Edmonson’s brow. Lines and passages from plays filled her ears. And, Demetrius, the more you beat me, I will fawn upon you. In the gloom – thickening with every step – she lost sight of the path below her feet and the man walking next to her. Instead she saw a picture of herself, lying down, without warning, on the path before his feet. Use me as your spaniel, spurn me, strike me, neglect me, lose me. The feeling was akin to the abandon she had experienced with George – perhaps more powerful: the need to strip away layers of herself that had accumulated silently over a decade and more. The veneer of false pedigree, the film of unlooked-for and unwarranted dignity. She felt tree-roots and stones stabbing painfully into her back; caught her breath at the notion of her pulling up her skirts, feeling the dust and grime on her thighs, dirt on her breasts. She was overwhelmed with a craving to show herself to a man who cared nothing for her, have him lay his wooden weight on her. The simplicity and directness of it! No preludes or preambles. No parading or reciting. The freedom that was once gifted her with the help of Dalby’s calmative and the sea. Sh
e had been withered by the ghostly caresses of an old man’s eyes; the cleanliness of fingers that refused to touch her. Rejected by the lowliest of black boys, deserted by her dead lover. She needed the fierce feel of skin and hair, the ache of rocks beneath her, branches scouring her. She caught her breath, and could not fill her lungs again.
How could she be mother to such perverse desires? “What worser place can I beg in your love – than to be used as you use your dog?” She became aware, through the raw fog in her mind, that Shaw must have asked her a question, for he stood gazing expectantly at her. As she leaned in towards him she saw the astonishment in his eyes. He let her kiss him and push her body into his. He put his arm on her shoulder and turned her around. For a moment she thought he was about to escort her back to her house. Instead, he led her into the trees. Without a word, he helped her over clumps of shrub and boulders and she, assuming he was searching for a clearing, looked avidly around too. She might be walking to her doom. He would have her, and expose her for the debauch that she was. If that were to be her fate, so be it. When her life was being properly lived, chance grabbed her at unexpected moments and altered her. His sickly-sweet smell, sharper now than ever before, the grip of his fingers, and the ocean that surged under her dress, were all that drove her on at this moment.
He did not take her deeper into the wood, but steered her towards his house. The closing of the door behind her was like a breath snuffing out the flame of her lust. She had wanted to be nowhere, with no one, just her body in the wilderness, unfastened from her life. Now, in the room where he lit the lamps, there was too much of this man. His writing desk – a solid rich mahogany, gleaming inappropriately in the mean room, on which were neatly set out bundles of papers, quills, a Bible. The chair was home-made, and the couch on which he sat and beckoned her to him was a hard, homespun pallet. There were pages from Scripture pinned to his wall, alongside other writings, all in his own hand. Sheets of paper with the names of Roseneythe’s women and men, and a tally of their owings and their offspring. Hanging on a peg on the door was his militia suit which she had seen him wear, hunting down the maroons.
She sat beside him, but keeping her distance, the hot urges she had felt only a moment ago completely supplanted by a cold dread. Not of him directly – he looked too taut and heavy to make any lunge at her – but at herself; at the degradation she was capable of. She could see by his loose-fitting trews that he was erect, and the sight revolted her, and seemed to revolt him too, for he strained his head upwards as though trying to uncouple his upper from his lower half. He took out a cheroot and began to smoke.
Shaw could only have chosen to live so meanly: Albert would surely have lodged him better had he so wished. Sitting there, in silence, she knew she had never sunk so low in all her life. From the gaiety of the theatre and the finery and wit of George, she had fallen to the level of seducing a Christian man in his slave-hut. The glittering prospects of her days in Bridgetown had been reduced to a vulgar fumbling in the woods: she was the girl again, with her back to a tree after a show at a mean penny-gaff. Another woman would weep, she thought. But her eyes remained dry. Tears would come later, once she was safely home and confessing to George, her true husband, and their waiting child, who must be looking down now at her disgrace.
“I forgot myself.”
He nodded. His grey eyes blank, as though he, too, had forgotten who he was. A man as grey as a loch at dusk, and as sad as the memory of it.
“Do you ever think of going home?” he asked.
Home. The word sounded different on his lips. Not the nostalgia of women riven from their hearths; no echo of soft spring and leafy dell. Something harder, more distant, but more real. She knew what he meant, and yes, every aching moment of her life, all she had ever wanted was home.
Elspeth prayed that no one knew of her infrequent lapses. Those few shameful liaisons that happened out of the blue over the next few years, and which were banished from her mind no sooner than they had occurred.
How could she possibly have explained – even to herself – that, at these junctures of her life, she simply could not think clearly; found herself in the midst of ill-advised actions, without ever having decided to embark upon them? The women around her could not know of her need for the touch of a man’s fingers, not just the brush of his eyes. None – certainly not Diana or Mary Miller, not even the intemperate Susan or the drunkard Margaret Lloyd – could have understood what happened between Elspeth and Shaw.
On that first of their meetings, they sat apart from each other all night until, with the first blur of dawn, he escorted her to the house. They exchanged not a word as she hurried ahead of him, the light bringing the gates and the outside world back into existence and chasing her back to the big house. They bid each other a hasty, formal farewell at the porch. In the days and months that followed, he acted as if nothing had changed between them, treating her in the same formal manner he always had.
When finally they fell together onto his pallet bunk – nigh on two years after that first encounter – she was, as before, in a fevered and detached state. George had made love with a joy and inspiration; even the farmboy of her youth tackled and worked at her with a greater doggedness than Shaw. Yet, despite his deficiencies in energy, she found an unexpected gentleness in his touch. His milky sugar-scent anaesthetised her. At first she had tried imagining she was with George, but the mental transition was too great. George’s skin had been soft, nearly hairless, and responded with a pulsing or goose-fleshing at her every touch; Shaw’s hide was taut and hirsute, his movements edgy. But his gradual entering of her – so tentative as though he feared he might break her – rendered her dazed and drowsy.
Three or four more times they fell together – exactly how many she couldn’t say, as each encounter was immediately obliterated from her memory. The drowsiness that overcame her when she was with the factor was only a magnification of the torpor she fell into generally. She continued to organise the concerts, oversee the work of Mary Miller, Annie and Dainty, dance for Albert on the fewer and fewer occasions that he came home – but all of it she felt she was doing in a mild trance.
For her neighbours in Roseneythe these were exciting times, full of work, weddings, births. Dramas now happened only in other people’s lives: Diana losing her babe; Mary’s girl, Nan, growing faster and more noisily than the rest of her generation; Martha Glover’s death. The building of the Manufactory. Like the spectacles she now found she had to use to read the smaller text in books, the world was clear, but separated from her.
On the other hand, the dream of colours and shifting shapes that had seldom left her sleeping mind in all those years, seemed closer, intimate. She began to recognise the shapes as people, crossing to and fro, and the soft red glow as fire, or light. A memory of early childhood perhaps. Or a childhood promised but never lived. Elspeth, keeping the dream alive in her head when she woke, letting the colours drift and flow around her as she went about her mundane tasks, wondered if she had the power to remember events that had never actually happened.
In the same year as Elspeth’s first fall into the arms of Shaw, Diana Moore was accused of murder. Martha Glover publicly claimed the midwife had stolen her baby from her side, and killed it.
Martha had problems from the earliest stages of her pregnancy and Diana had nursed her, as she had always done with all the women, successfully bringing her to full term. The night of the delivery, however, had been excruciating for the mother-to-be, resulting in her passing out as Diana cut the umbilical cord of her little boy. When Martha awoke both Diana and her baby had vanished.
No one else was present at the time, so it was Diana’s word against Martha’s, and the two descriptions of the evening were in every respect dissimilar. Martha admitted she had fainted, but only for the briefest of moments, and claimed that she had heard the healthy cries of her infant boy. Diana maintained that complications had set in early; that Martha – an elderly first-time mother, at forty-two –
had drifted in and out of consciousness for several hours. She had woken briefly only when the child was being pulled from her, and was quite insensible again immediately after. The sad fact – and one which a woman who had waited so long for a child understandably could not endure – was that the boy was born malformed and lifeless.
Diana never said it directly, but everyone understood from the language she used that the child was also tarnished. Martha vigorously denied the rumour – but could not, or would not, name the father. She was an unlikely one, to be fair, to tumble with a darkie, but then, equally, she was desperate for a child, and perhaps her standards had dropped accordingly.
“Bring me the boy’s body and I’ll show you he was not only fair, but strong and healthy, too!” cried Martha to anyone who would listen. Elspeth, Mary and Nan Miller, as well as the less powerful women, all felt for her. But they trusted Diana’s expertise – not to mention her piety. Mistress Moore was of a kind that shuddered at even the hint of a little white lie. And the idea of digging a child’s body up was distasteful. When Diana refused to reveal the whereabouts of the child’s remains, many took it as proof that she sent them out on the water in the direction of Scotland – another little Moses in a sailing crib.
Martha persevered for months, demanding that Captain Shaw take some action. Along with Susan Millar and Bessy Riddoch, Martha was one of the few women who had managed to strike up relations with the distant factor. She was friendly, too, with his deputy, Nathanial Wycombe, so alone amongst the women she had some purchase to pursue her case. For a week or two, all Roseneythe held its breath, waiting for Shaw’s reaction.
“The mannie’s in a swither,” Bessy Riddoch said. “On the one haun’ he has to bide by his complouter Moore, whae does hauf his work for him but whose sermonising he cannae thole. On the ither, Martha’s a proper freen’, and a freen’ o’ his Billie Wycombe.”