Redlegs

by Chris Dolan

  The rain that night fell golden from the evening sky: cold, sparkling drops the colour of fine tawny rum. The great storm had blown everything that Elspeth Baillie had loved – George, the Lyric, her career, her home in Garrison – up into the heavens, where for twenty-three years they had tumbled and spun. Now, in 1854, her hopes and dreams could be glimpsed again in the bright brown eyes of this girl, and heard in the chime of her laugh. Bathsheba was Nan’s, conceived of an unknown father, but she was also Elspeth’s and George’s, a girl who would become, under her ladyship’s care, a true grand blanc. The rain-child who would lead them all home, restore the natural hierarchy of things, dropped as silkily from Nan’s womb as the rain shower fell from the cloudless sky. A slippery, cold wet child that Diana, who assisted at the delivery, declared was utterly without blemish. Even the afterbirth poured clear and fresh and colourless.

  That her father was unidentified was not a cause of much disquiet: Bathsheba was hardly alone in the circumstance and, anyway, no one ledgered fathers anymore. Diana baptised the girl in the traditional way, and spread the word of her exceptional fairness. From the day after her birth everyone helped to protect their girl from the prying eye of the sun. Nan and Diana swaddled her as a babe, then later, dressed her in the lightest of fabrics. Linen, cotton, taffeta. Materials unfamiliar to their own skins, but brought by Lord Coak for his wife from Europe – silk of the finest denier, satin adapted from Elspeth’s old costumes. Diana cared for the child as if she were her own. For years after the stillbirth of her own bairn, Diana Moore had lived like a slave-woman: doing all that was expected of her, but joylessly, as one goes about a compulsory task, disinterested. Her deep faith and the kindness and loyalty of Robert Butcher helped her recovery, but it was Bathsheba who returned her to her old, bustling self. The girl had the innate capacity of turning all around her into surrogate mothers, brothers, sisters. Nan was delighted to share her child. The grandmother, Mary, took special care of her darling; Sarah Alexander sang to her and Sarah Fairweather told stories; Bessy Riddoch taught her tricks, Mary Riach helped with numbers. Elspeth’s life changed, nurturing her towards her future vocation. Even Lord Coak took a shine to the lass.

  His lordship had shipped a piano from Germany some six years earlier to enhance the evening concerts. It was a beautiful if fantastic-looking contraption, so solid and heavy it took six men, taking shifts over an entire afternoon, to haul it from the porch to the hall. Made of mahogany with rosewood inlay and intricate scrollwork, no one had ever seen such an instrument before. Those who had seen any kind of piano expected it to be as long and flat as a dining table with keys attached. But this creature was twice as tall as it was long and, despite its weight, shorn off abruptly at the back.

  “It’s an Upright,” Coak informed them. “Listen to the sound it makes.”

  Elspeth, who had learned to play concertina on stage as a child, tried it out. It was as loud and metallic-sounding as the factory, making the window casements rattle and bringing people in from fields a quarter of a mile away. Albert had also brought tuition books for her to learn and, while the rest of the community were cutting cane or crushing it in the factory, she worked hard at her lessons – with the sole intention of teaching young Bathsheba. The girl began to learn when she was only five, her small fingers and nervousness at such a massive machine coaxing a sweeter sound out of it than anyone else had managed.

  “Look!” cried Elspeth one day, bringing Albert in to hear the girl after only a few months of preparation. “My father would’ve called her a musicker!”

  Albert smiled and patted Bathsheba’s brown, tousled hair. “She’s no Mozart, let us not be overly indulgent. But she does produce a warmth in her simple melodies.”

  Elspeth and Bathsheba would spend an hour most evenings, sitting side by side on two dining chairs, making up chords and sequences for which they had no name. They soon gave up on the tuition books and devised their own way of making the upright sing, the little girl sometimes laughing and getting whole runs of notes to sound right, sometimes tiring, refusing to play, or making an incoherent mess of a tune. The woman sat patiently with her, learning alongside her, varying her education by reading her Melville’s Moby Dick which had entranced Elspeth herself, Captain Ahab a wild admixture of herself and, bizarrely, Shaw. Albert and Diana warned her that the child was too young for such fictions, but Elspeth read it to the end, though often Bathsheba slept through half the narration. Then she would lift the child to the door, calling on Nan or Mary to take her home.

  Albert was Elspeth’s only calendar during that happy epoch. She had grown used to the cycle of rainy months and long periods of dry heat, within them the pauses for celebrations. The old celebrations of Christmas and Easter merited nothing more than an extra prayer at mealtimes and a bigger jug of rum and mauby; in their stead came the monthly concerts and birthday parties for Albert, and now for Bathsheba. The triple harvests wheeled around her and, like smaller cogs in a perpetual machine, the regular production of refined sugar products, and their weekly delivery to Carlisle Bay. Albert’s gradual weakening went barely noticed, shoulders hunching and legs stiffening. His paunch never diminished or expanded, but fell more flaccidly lower on his frame. His hair had thinned, but its colour changed so little, from damp to dry sand. Only his face marked the passing of time. Like an antique looking glass it whitened and dimmed, the reflection from it growing duller. Like the sun at the end of a long afternoon that seems to retreat from the world. She would look round at him when he spoke and, every once in a while, become aware they were both ageing.

  On Bathsheba’s fifth birthday, he was sixty-three years old. On her tenth, in 1864, sixty-eight. No birthday was ever celebrated for Elspeth, only each tenth anniversary of her arrival. Her parents had never observed her birthdays, presumably because they were in transit or on stage anywhere between Dundee and Ayr. She could only roughly work out her own years. Twenty fewer than Albert. Or perhaps less. Before Bathsheba came, she was in too much of a lacuna, a chasm in time, for age to mean anything. The Scots women seemed to age more rapidly than her: contemporaries became like aunts, nieces like sisters, and then suddenly they were middle-aged, while Elspeth remained less touched – ignored – by time. After Bathsheba, she was too busy to bother with counting. Forty-five-ish passed. Then fiftyish.

  Not only Albert’s face grew dimmer, but his presence. He travelled less and less, yet was less and less noticed in residence. Captain Shaw, with his lordship always at the ready, hidden away in his office, or near enough in town, seemed more substantial. A midway point between Albert and Elspeth, he was one of those men who got stronger, thicker, more gnarled with age. Handsomer, even, Bess and Susan said. Albert drifted into the background, his energies conducted into the firmament of the factor.

  Before she was quite twelve, Diana had begun utilising Bathsheba Miller’s abilities in the schoolroom, as an assistant teacher. Equally, the lass was proficient in the kitchen of the big house, and a good worker in the fields and the factory. The women fretted for her health – her slight build and delicate fair skin were not designed to thole the heat and work. So Nan sewed her garments – high collars, low hems and long-sleeved – so tight that not even the heated air could reach her body, let alone the burn of the sun. Despite the girl’s leanness, by the time she was fourteen proper she was tall and strong, and sang all day in the fields to her workmates, still cutting and gathering at a rate commended by Captain Shaw himself.

  She learned all the tales from the old country that her aunts could remember. She mastered the accounts of hoodies and selkies and the one about the daughters of the sky who returned to their father in his silver palace of cloud. She knew bits and pieces of stories such as the Island of Women and the House of Lir. She sang songs – Want One Shilling and Jock o’ Hazeldean – and learned every line of the Lady of the Lake, as taught to her by Elspeth Baillie herself.

  Bathsheba stretched and grew until she was as tall and narrow as caneshoot, as bri
lliant in hue as honey. Her nut-brown hair grew long and thickly. Shaw remarked that she had classic Celtic features. Coak concurred: acorn eyes, skin pale as Rivine daughter of Conor, hazel hair like Loch Morar at dusk. They named her Bathsheba for the town that most had only heard tell of, several miles down the rugged east coast, where dark waves break in dazzling torrents on a slender ribbon of sand. Diana spent extra time on her reading, Bathsheba having shown a lively intelligence from an early age. She liked to draw, and did so with a neat and accurate hand. Lady Elspeth trained her in the ways of the theatre, and the middle-aged lady even began to dream again of the stages of Bridgetown. Perhaps a girl of Baillie family training would yet play to the gentry of the New World.

  “Nurse, where’s my daughter? Call her forth to me.” Elspeth and Mary Fairweather’s daughter, Sarah, a nimble and artistic-enough woman in her twenties, would dress in as appropriate costumes as they could muster from the chest of guises in Elspeth’s room. Bathsheba would lurk in the kitchen, by the door, waiting to be called.

  “Juliet!” cried Sarah, in the role of Nurse. Bathsheba would come running in – always too quickly. If she faulted in any way, Elspeth continuously reminded her, it was in overenthusiasm. A little delay in entering tantalised an audience.

  “How now, who calls?”

  “Your mother.”

  Bathsheba would curtsy formally then, although Mr. Shakespeare did not in fact stipulate it, and take hold of Elspeth’s hand. Dressed from throat to ankle in soft, creamy muslin, the girl looked like a cloth dolly. Her hands, head and feet popped out of tightly sewed seams and cuffs, her brown hair all the darker for the contrast.

  “Madam I am here. What is your will?”

  “Nurse, give leave awhile,

  We must talk in secret.”

  Sarah took her turn behind the kitchen door, Bathsheba and Elspeth moving slowly around each other as the maestra taught and the pupil learned. When the Nurse needed to be called to enter again, Sarah was directed simply to open the door and talk from there.

  “Thou knowest my daughter’s of a pretty age.”

  “I can tell her age unto an hour.”

  “She’s not fourteen.”

  The trio had been rehearsing the scenes since Bathsheba was nine. By the time her fourteenth year was in sight – a magical eternity and the blink of an eye – the prentice, as Nan cried her, was much improved.

  “’Tis since the earthquake now eleven years;

  And she was wean’d – I never shall forget it –

  Of all the days of the year, upon that day:”

  Although the little scholar’s movements were graceful enough, she made too many of them, not quite losing Bathsheba and not quite finding Juliet. She would stroke the piano, mid-scene, or lift up a candlestick, as though she were whiling away an hour of playtime. Elspeth, with only a look, checked her, and her full attention would return to the task in hand.

  “Tell me, daughter Juliet,

  How stands your disposition to be married?”

  “It is an honour that I dream not of.”

  Elspeth had sworn to herself, since their very first sessions when the lass was no more than four years old, that she would never teach the way her mother had taught her. She would feel none of the jealousy of the older actress towards the promising debutant; would not be a Mrs. Bartleby to this fresh new talent. Rather, she would wonder at and conspire with the girl’s growing confidence and expertise. She would encourage daring, applaud inventiveness, push for the girl to take up the whole stage, the entire attention of her public. If anything, Bathsheba was too demure: either not aware enough of the eyes upon her when she sang or recited in front of the whole community, or else embarrassed by their stares. She was still young – the urge to play and display for the world would come yet.

  Sarah, never a virtuoso herself, but solid, sure of her lines and moves, made a good third participant in many songs, scenes and little home-written comedy sketches. Her hair was not as brilliant orange as her mother’s – a subtler colour of pale stone, the result of a mixture with her English-born father’s fairness, nor was her face as unattractive. She spoke out strongly, and her features, if not remarkable, were pleasing enough in front of the sparkling backcloth.

  “A man, young lady! Lady, such a man

  As all the world – why he’s a man of wax.”

  XI

  It was the factory that nearly killed the special child. At the start of her fifteenth year, the end of a muggy March in 1868, she was doing her duties in the evening – helping Golondrina keep the workshop floor clear, dispensing water and mauby to the women, planters’ punch to the men, hosing down the pan that boiled sugar into massecuite – when her long, straight hair became entangled in a piston. There were screams and yells of panic, as Bathsheba tried to pull her hair out of the machine. Nan took her excruciated daughter by the shoulders and ripped her savagely free. A moment later and her skull would have been crushed.

  The pistons had torn each and every one of her silky strands of hair, mangling them into the muscovado sugar dust. Everyone crowded round the fallen Bathsheba, lying on the floor, haloed in blood and syrup. They carried her to the big house and to Lady Elspeth who wept and shouted curses.

  “How often have I said it – she shouldn’t be let near those muckle great machines!”

  “She wouldna listen, Mistress. She liked to help Gideon and Golondrina.”

  “What has she to do with them? Tell them to keep away from her!”

  Albert – ever since his factory had been up and running, away far less than before – tried to console his wife.

  “I’m sure the girl will be fine. Come away now. I’ll call a doctor.”

  There could have been no stronger signal of the seriousness of the accident than calling in a physician. Not in all the years that Elspeth had been at Northpoint had such an extreme measure been taken. Not when she herself was ailing on her arrival, nor to the deathbeds of Jean Malcolm or Elizabeth Johnstone, or to any of the women’s pregnancies, stillbirths or the demise of their children. These cases, and field accidents involving blades and broken bones, were treated by Diana and Shaw and some of the second generation girls who been initiated in such arts by them. In part, no doctor was ever called because there were none between Northpoint and Speightstown. The nearest, Shaw declared, were worse drinkers than the ministers – charlatans, shams, witch-doctors to a man. “You’d be better off with an obeah woman chanting voodoo.”

  But on this calamitous day a medical man was given access to the Roseneythe Estate. He went about his work quietly and professionally, but lugubriously, and giving little encouragement or hope. He stitched and bandaged the girl but proclaimed it unlikely she could survive such a vicious lacerating. Even if she did, she would be bald, and damaged – in who knows how many ways? – for the rest of her life.

  The devouring of Bathsheba’s hair had also heralded the end of the Plantation’s glory years. Their factory was still the most efficient on the island, but it consumed too much wood – in short supply on the colony – and provoked the envy of other producers who formed a coalition against them, forcing prices down. For twenty years Lord Coak and Captain Shaw had crusaded against the ignorance and fear of their competitors, willing, even, to assist them in modernising their own businesses. The offer was never taken up. By the time of Bathsheba’s accident, Coak and Shaw had come to understand their fellows-planters’ warnings – scarcity of wood and uncompetitive prices were beginning to take their toll.

  The whole of Roseneythe lived for months on tenterhooks praying for Bathsheba to recover. When she finally did get back on her feet, her head was a mass of stitches and scars, deep black bruising, some few hairs growing in ugly little clumps. She wore a headdress like Golondrina Segunda’s – brightly coloured sashes – at all times, but soon was insisting on working in the sugar factory again, where the Cuban slave-woman took special care of her, massaging balms made from roots and berries into her wounds. Bathsheba to
ok up her duties, but went about them taciturn and melancholic.

  That melancholia seeped into the world around her. The early excitement of the factory had given way to humdrum work and long hours, and with the downturn in the market came a return to harder times. In those months while Bathsheba was silent – exempted from classes, no melodies on the piano or recitations to be heard any more – and still clearly in pain, more letters were written home to old Roseneath by the first generation than had been written in a decade, though no one even hoped for a reply any longer. The games around the chattel-houses, if played at all, were hushed and lethargic affairs; groups of girls seldom walked down to the cove any longer to splash or paddle or swim. With bated breath, everyone waited to see if Bathsheba’s quietness was a sign of deeper problems: if she had lost all her talents, all her joy. If, even, her mind had gone completely. Certainly, the girl worked like an automaton, and at meals, although she would answer politely if spoken to, she never initiated conversation. Diana fretted that everything the poor mite once knew had been torn out of her with her locks.

  Only Golondrina was optimistic. That lady’s English had only begun to make sense in the last few years, partly because she kept her distance from the Scots women, and they from her. She and Gideón Brazos, when not working, kept to their chattel hut, built at the back of the factory. Having her wounds treated there, Bathsheba spent more and more time with the Cubans. In other circumstances the habit would have been decried, but no one wished to upset the girl, and she seemed happy enough in that strange company.

  “Let her the time,” Golondrina said, in her own version of English. “She will return to herself soon.”

  Elspeth missed the girl dreadfully. The days became long and unfillable. She still worked and sang with Sarah Fairweather and a few other girls, but she would end her lessons early, or suddenly call a halt to a scene or a song when they were only halfway through.