Redlegs (15 page)

Susan, Bessy, Rhona Douglas and Eliza Morton walked in a group around Dainty.

“D’ye see in colour, Dainty?”

“Course I do.”

“Can I touch your hair? You can touch mine.”

“I’ve touched mo’ white ladies’ hair then ever I wanted to.”

“Is it just as spikey down there, Dainty?”

“Wheesht, Bessy. You’re richt bonnie, Dainty. Did ye ken that?”

“I can’ mek yuh out, what yuh aksin’?”

“Whit?”

Captain Shaw had a good eye for which lass would settle well with which man, and permitted some minutes dallying during the working day to allow them to become acquainted each with the other. Conversely, whenever he saw an association being struck up between two parties wholly inimical to each other, he intervened, and saw to it that their shifts and duties did not coincide. Slowly, some good liaisons were founded. But not without a little
heartbreak
and one or two catastrophes along the way. The process, to Diana’s sorrow, was hindered by the absence of a minister – and the distressingly little time spent on matters religious generally.

It was Diana who had the idea of communal evening eating. Allowing simple labourers and maids into the big house for
reasons
other than cleaning or mending was at first preposterous to Captain Shaw, and not much less so to Elspeth herself. Diana insisted that it would allow the Captain to address his workforce on a daily basis.

“And wouldn’t it give our girls a chance to talk civilly with the better class of hinds and orramen, allow them to meet respectably and pursue compatibilities? All under supervision, in full view of the community.”

Such gatherings would also allow for vigilance over those
romantic
alliances that could only end in disaster. The factor was not
completely
convinced of her arguments, but Elspeth saw the sense in Diana’s idea, and the evening teas that were to last for a generation were begun within the month. Every night, all those not deployed in duties elsewhere, sat around a large square table, specially made by Robert Butcher and his men, from the birch trees Albert’s father had apparently planted seventy years before behind the wild little forest running along the northern coast. Elspeth sat at one end of the sturdy table; Shaw at the other. Annie and Dainty, with the help of the Scots scullery lasses, prepared a meal of eddoes, coo-coo mash, chicken when there was enough to go round, and mauby.
The Captain timed the meal, ensuring it lasted no more than
forty-five
minutes.

Shaw used the events for the purpose Diana had suggested. He perceived who was fiery of spirit and would settle better with a meeker partner. He predicted – in terms that gave Diana cause to blush – which men were likely to be productive of seed, and which women physically capable of bearing and weaning numerous offspring. He lectured Diana on the merits of matching males of Germanic origin with women who had some Gaelic in their past. The efficient and the spiritual would make for a peaceful marriage, and balanced progeny. So too, those men of English stock would fare better with women whose names suggested a more northerly east-coast ancestry – both were reliable but would complement each other in matters of fidelity, and in times of difficulty.

“The Scots Lowlander is prone to sulkiness. The Englishman is least affected by such tempers. He’ll compensate for her trace of Irish.”

“But what if the parties find no attraction in each other?”

“Don’t vex me, Miss Moore, with the whims of your romantic poets. Never in your ladies’ lives has the age-old process of
selecting
an economically advantageous husband not been imposed upon them.”

“And if they are wholly adverse to each other?”

“You and I, Diana, are
in loco parentis
. If we do our work well, we will choose a better spouse for your friends than they could
themselves
. A winning smile and mirthful wit and – let me speak plainly – a bosom made for the squeezing and a ripe apple for a tail-piece do not necessarily make for happy and enduring associations. Bear with it, and you will see how we shall all enjoy the fruits of our work.”

Elspeth observed, impressed, as Diana bore the extra work levied on her by Captain Shaw. Beyond her daily duties in house and field, she was tutor, scribe, and now matchmaker. After a matter of months she changed from reluctant matron into a bustling dynamic woman; it fatigued Elspeth just watching her. Her energies were still fuelled by a staunch Presbyterian ethic that felt to Elspeth like a language she once spoke but had now all but forgotten. Diana
acted in accordance with the rule of the estate and within the law of God as she saw it, safe in the knowledge that God would take her into His fold – but not before returning her first to the land of her birth, her constant prayer.

Diana took to tying her hair back so tightly that it stretched her eyes narrow and tautened the skin around the temples. She made efforts to appear freshly washed and laundered every day, skirts rustling crisply in even the hottest of afternoons. She had trained herself to be better spoken than her true education had allowed, borrowing phrases and pronunciations from Elspeth and Coak. She was held by the other women in the kind of respect due to the daughter of a landed family, or the manse, though her stock was as humble as any of theirs.

When, in just under a year, the first baby arrived – a son, to Jean Homes and Obadiah Wilson, an elderly drayman who had worked one season a year at Northpoint for two decades – it was Diana who was called upon to perform the duties of midwife. Her grandmother, she told Elspeth, had been howdie-wife to the Parish of Roseneath, and Diana had heard many stories of birthings; had even assisted as a young girl, so she knew all about hot water and screams and the cutting of cords. She applied herself to this new role as assiduously as she did to all her other duties, requesting Shaw to bring books and advice back from his trips to town. When the Homes boy, before even a name could be allotted to him, took fever and sickened, she nursed him too. And when he died, Diana was appointed the chief mourner and officiator of funeral prayers.

“I cannot do that, Captain.” Diana was the only woman who Shaw allowed to upbraid him – though he permitted
good-hearted
joking from Susan and Bess. Shaw, however, was not often upbraided successfully. “There’s not a minister I’d have within two miles of Northpoint, mistress. Half of them are bishop-kissers, and the other half screeching half-caste fire-worshippers. There’s a Presbyterian fellow down in the Parish of St. Thomas, but he’s drunk most of the time.”

He convinced her that it was in keeping with proper reforms and covenants that the people themselves intercede with their Maker at such times. So an hour was given to a ceremony before dinner,
Obadiah carrying the child in a cloth to the cemetery behind the old mill, where Shaw read from the Bible, Diana leading the
congregation’s
response and striking up Psalm one hundred and thirty – “Out of the Depths I cry to Thee O Lord.”

Elspeth was impressed and humbled by Diana. The woman was a true stoic: not the blood and mess of childbirth, nor the daily moans and complaints, nor the shortcomings of Coak and Shaw’s rule, discouraged or quietened her. “A proper Scots lass,” she was fond of telling everyone, “rolls up her sleeves and gets on with the job. We don’t stand on ceremony or expect praise for doing what is required of us.” She was tender with women in any kind of pain, be it physical, emotional or spiritual, but cajoled them into
remembering
there is little to commend complaining. God in His wisdom can be relied upon to confer suffering and solace in equal measure. “Our duty is to follow and accept.”

Diana and the captain would not have been taken – even by themselves – as natural associates: he, crude of expression and
toilette
, uncongenial in his relations, while Diana set much store by mannerliness and sympathy. Yet she agreed with much of what he did and said. He was, like her father, a practical man, and learned above his station. Such erudition could only have been attained by dint of effort at some personal cost. Self-education was another good Scots trait in Diana’s mind, so Shaw – despite his strange colonial accent and unpolished ways – had something of the old tradition in him. He was as loyal as a clansman, and she detected perspicacity in his philosophies and his reading of men’s souls. Diana, also, had observed keen differences between people from diverse backgrounds; she was as convinced as he was that no good came of mixing apples with pears.

One night, in circumstances similar to the evening when he had inducted Elspeth in the facts of his life and the contents of his thoughts, Shaw, with Elspeth on his left and Diana on his right, brought out a jug of rum and the sheaf of parchments, handling it as though it were a Holy Book, and continued the story he had left off many months ago. These evenings were to be repeated over the weeks that followed, as he expounded on the lessons he had learned from his experiences and how they could be applied to
everyday situations: a philosophy finally put to good use in building this new colony-within-the-colony. Diana, Elspeth deduced, was the true chosen disciple of his schooling.

“I found myself paying-work for a while on the estate of the admirable Mister Barclay,” he said. “A great planter who had deeper interests than simply sugar and crop.” This Barclay, it seemed, had made a deal of money from trading in slaves when that profession was still permitted. But his great innovation was to create on the island of Barbuda what he termed a Propagation Manufactory. At that point, Shaw broke off for the evening, favouring staring into his cup to speaking. When next the three were assembled he started again, but at a different point.

He told the story of how he came to meet Lord Albert Coak and became his trusted factor and partner. “I had long since
relinquished
ambitions to own a plantation or business of my own. I know now that I was destined to a greater cause.”

As he talked of the younger Albert, Elspeth’s mind wandered. She preferred listening, inside her head, to his lordship’s story than to the Captain’s. Salammbo, putting kohl on her eyes. Lady Obeah and her incantations. In her mind each one of them had become associated with her friends from the Lyric. Virginie as Empress Catherine; Nonie the Obeah witch-lady; Isabella, La Guacha. As Anne Bonny she saw herself. Just as she had done when she dreamed her way across the Atlantic on her elegant schooner infused with rum. Not a word of this, naturally, did she reveal to Diana. That lady would not have understood the beauty and the bravery of those fine, fallen women.

When she awoke from her reverie, Shaw had his finger in the air and was looking sternly at Diana: “Over many years Mr. Barclay had come to learn which African tribes worked harder, which were stronger, and which more compliant.”

Diana felt it necessary, and summoned the courage, to ask the Captain if the African, of whatever nation, was not a creation of the Almighty just as we ourselves are. Shaw nodded slowly, as though the hinges of his wooden neck were in need of oil. He did not, he assured the good lady, despise the negro. “The meek shall inherit the Earth. I take the words of the Good Book as they are
written undiluted. But the African’s time has not yet come. His ascension will undoubtedly take place in the Last Age. Some time off yet, I trust. Meanwhile, we have work to do.”

Elspeth saw that Diana was fashed, as she put it herself but not to Elspeth, by Shaw. He was her superior and paymaster, he put his trust in her and, although he was stringent, he was
scrupulous
. On the other hand he had doctrines that troubled her and manners she tolerated in nobody else. Elspeth picked this up from Diana’s expressions and her habit of squirming in her seat when she was perturbed. But also from snippets of overheard conversations between the women when they were in the house, or thought she couldn’t hear when she was working her little herb garden. Diana had plenty of souls to whom she could unburden herself. Elspeth made no attempt to become another. For one thing she had a
position
in this community to maintain – all the more delicately, given its ambivalent condition. She was merely here first, though the closest to Lord Coak himself – and for another, she did not wish to become too close to these neighbours as some day soon she would be leaving.

As time went by she watched as Diana found another confidant. Robert Butcher, like the captain, had Scots blood in his paternal line, but Calvinist Swedish on his mother’s side. He was a colonial in patterns of speech and in attitude and had been a stalwart of Northpoint Plantation for many years, returning season after season until finally settling here. He was as religious as Diana. Ten years her senior, Robert was ideally suited to be a friend and comrade to her. More and more, as time passed, it was to Robert that Diana would confide her troubles. Especially when she had to deliver a child conceived out of wedlock – a service she was not sure was a permitted Christian act – or when she had to watch helplessly as a baby wilted and died.