Redlegs (23 page)

“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.”

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 took 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.

No further doctors were brought in – for everyone dreaded a diagnosis would confirm their worst fears. All they could do was wait. And that was something Elspeth had become adept at. Her
life, it seemed, was lived out like a dance: a series of steps, sudden spins, followed by slow glides, like a Dashing White Sergeant she was one moment in the centre of the piece, the next relegated to the line, clapping on others’ frenzy. The world around her would suddenly accelerate for a while – whole months, years, flying past in a kaleidoscope of colours and activity. And followed, always, by interminable, empty days, and nights with slow, shifting colours.

Every morning at sunrise, Bathsheba went with Golondrina to bathe in the cove – Elspeth watching her go from her window – to wash the oils from her head. The saltwater stung maliciously, before the older woman applied her cures. There were still no signs of her recovery. Tongues began to wag, rumouring that Golondrina was an Obeah and a witch.

Then, one day in the fields, a little under a year since her calamity, Bathsheba, carrying a heavy bundle, tripped over and fell. The cloth swaddling her head unravelled, and every cane cutter in the field stopped and held their breath. Not only had Bathsheba’s head healed, but the hair had grown back in, and black now instead of brown.

The girl got up from the ground, brushed herself down, replaced her African headdress, and got back to work. Her aunts and
cousins
, however, and even the menfolk, laid down their machetes and scythes. They stood and stared, and then burst into applause. Her bandanna had unwound itself again and her mother and the girl’s closest friends crowded around her, laughing and crying and
touching
the short strands of black hair that covered her crown in crisp, inky curls.

The commotion reached the attention of the domestic staff, who came running out to see the miracle. Mary Miller, Bathsheba’s grandmother, hobbling in recent years, came out from the
kitchens
and crossed the fields, her vision blurred by tears. Behind her came Lady Elspeth, still strong and quick of stride. Bathsheba was being led towards them from the field, surrounded by jumping, dancing friends, hardly knowing what had happened or where she was being taken. Elspeth caught sight of her and her heart
stopped a beat. The girl, her headdress round her ears and chin, and buttoned up to neck, wrist and ankle in coarse, grey
fieldlinen
, enclosed in a circle of shouting youths, looked like a saint from an old painting.

“It’s a miracle!” shouted Mary, as she took her granddaughter in her arms.

The light was back in Bathsheba’s eyes and that, more than the tousled, curling locks on her head, breathed life back into Elspeth, too. Nan, Mary and the girls stood back to let their Lady through and greet the recovered patient.

“Bathsheba,” was all she could say. And she stroked the girl’s cheek and took hold of her hand.

From the field behind, Gideón Brazos and Golondrina Segunda approached. Then, as was their custom, they halted a little short of the joyous group. The two smallest of their four children stood between them, gleaming dark and mystified by all the activity. Bathsheba went and took a hold of Golondrina’s hand, pulling her into the circle. She motioned for Brazos to follow, but he merely nodded and stayed where he was.

“Gola saved me,” said Bathsheba to Elspeth. The two older women looked at each other for a moment, a shadow crossing Elspeth’s face. The negress looked back at her young, white friend, and Elspeth, following her eyes, smiled again, too.

“Thank you, Golondrina,” she said, before escorting the girl into the house.

“It would have happened anyway,” Albert said, lying on his bed that night, while Elspeth sat on the window seat looking out into the dark. She was counting her years, wondering how a
seemingly
single long day and longer night had turned into nearly forty years. She was fifty-five years old – older, much older, than her own mother had been when she left her home country. She didn’t look her age – everyone agreed. Elspeth agreed, too. When she looked in the mirror she saw a mature woman, but not an old woman. She didn’t feel any different – not in her limbs or in her mind – than she had when she first came to the plantation. Her body was proof that no time had passed at all.

Albert, meanwhile, seemed to be in a race with time. His eyes looked white like a statue’s and on the odd occasion when he asked Elspeth to dance or recite for him, he had to use a glass and peer intensely at her. He had developed a marked limp in his left leg, using a stick for a couple of years now. He slept later and retired earlier, keeping mainly to his study during the day, spending only short spells with anyone, even Shaw and Elspeth. Tonight he did not look at her where she sat, but lay staring down towards the end of the bed and the dressing table at the far wall. “I’ve always said that local knowledge of plants is useful. They cure nothing, of course, but they may speed recovery a little.”

“I should have taken care of it myself,” Elspeth replied.

“Why should you? She’s a fine girl, but she’s Nan Miller’s duty, not yours.”

“It wasn’t Nan who nursed her.”

“She must have trusted the black woman.”

Elspeth nodded and walked to the door, ready to sleep herself. She was annoyed with herself, however, that she had not acted when her favourite child needed her most, leaving it instead to an indentured slave she scarcely knew.

I would have been an unsatisfactory mother, she thought as she undressed. Fate has never given me the chance to do
anything
. It took away my stage just when I was ready for it. My husband died before he could marry me. His child must have known that I was untried, and that is why she fled. For the first time, she did feel old. Fifty-five years of age, and untested; yet to start a proper life.

Over the next few months Bathsheba’s hair grew – but not in the same manner as before. If anything, the matted blackness of those miraculous little stumps darkened further. Instead of the strong straight strands of her childish locks, her hair began to twist and loop around her neck and face in vigorous, dancing curls. What had been her finest feature – her nut-brown hair falling like the sheer face of Ben Mhor – now made her truly magnificent. It was further proof to the doting Elspeth that this child did indeed have something of both herself and George Lisle in her. Elspeth’s
own hair was darker than Bathsheba’s original tone, and George’s curled round his temple like Lord Byron’s. The convalesced girl left off wearing Golondrina’s headdresses, and tied her unruly
winding
locks behind her head for all to admire. She still, from time to time, suffered aches in her neck and scalp, and so continued with Golondrina’s cure of oils. She went on spending evenings with Gideón and his family while receiving her treatment. In time, even the pain disappeared. Some people held Golondrina Segunda in higher esteem than they had before, for the nursing she had so
successfully
given Nan’s daughter. Others spoke more spitefully than ever of wizardry and voodoo.

The wood for the factory was depleted to a dangerous level. The clatter and clunking were heard only once or twice a month now, when wood was brought in, expensively, from neighbouring
colonies
. The menfolk once more had to seek employment in towns or other plantations. Bathsheba, like everyone else, spent less time in the fields and the factory, dividing her time between the
schoolroom
, taking walks by herself down at the cove, and being tutored by Lady Elspeth.

The mistress of the house was preparing Bathsheba for her future role as Mother of Roseneythe. No formal decision had been taken, either by the plantation as a whole, or in private with Albert or Shaw. It was simply accepted that Bathsheba –fiercely loyal, friend to everyone, intelligent and respected – had all the right qualities for the role. Shaw, in recent years had spoken often of the new
generation
and the generations yet to come and, despite, or perhaps due to, the difficulties in business matters, everyone looked to the future. With such a jewel of a girl beside her – trained and tutored under her own hand – Elspeth’s thoughts of withdrawing slowly from centre stage at Roseneythe were less painful. The girl could take the burden of her duties from her and her own life would open up again.