Season of Light (22 page)

‘Very few people own entire ships,’ said Mrs Shackleford, ‘but we used to have substantial shares in one or two. My husband loved the sea. Nothing would keep him at home, not even Compton Wyatt. He maintained that wherever his seamen had to go, he would go first. That’s why he died, Miss Ardleigh, in the service of others.’

‘Father and son both died on board ship,’ put in Susan Shackleford suddenly.

‘Oh Lord,’ said Warren, ‘I’ve been dying to know what of. Not the dreaded scurvy.’

Mrs Shackleford beckoned to Mrs Foster, who had travelled from Compton Wyatt with the other servants and now produced a handkerchief. ‘I have been spared the details. Needless to say it was just like my husband to die, as it were, in harness.’

‘So what was he doing on board ship in the first place? Where was he bound? Ain’t there some kind of mystery attached to it all?’ said Warren, who, kitted out in a pale blue coat and the affectation of no less than two waistcoats, one ivory, one yellow, had already quaffed a couple of glasses of wine.

Mrs Shackleford hid her face and murmured: ‘My son, my lovely boy.’

Shackleford stood at Asa’s shoulder. ‘Down there is the port where we have our offices, and high up over there, the glassworks and bottling factory. Can you see the smoke?’

‘The times I’ve sat up here with my dear husband and watched our ships come in or stood above the gorge and seen our brave vessels, at high tide, setting sail for wonderful places that trip off the tongue, such as Calabar and Ashanti. And now it all belongs to Harry, who has so much to learn because he never took an interest when he might have done …’ Mrs Shackleford held out her quivering hand to her son.

‘You told me I ought to be a clergyman, Mama,’ he said mildly.

‘But in the event you did not train for anything. I really don’t see how we are to manage. Your father and your brother had a feel for business. They never flinched from a hard decision if it was the right decision. Whereas you …’

‘
Chère madame
,’ murmured Madame de Rusigneux, who had transformed herself, chameleon-like, into an elegant French widow-friend, expertly straddling the divide between deference and equality as she offered Mrs Shackleford a plate of leek tarts. ‘You must eat to maintain your strength. These places full of memory, how we torment ourselves …’

‘The flies,’ muttered Susan, ‘I can’t stand them.’ She got up and walked away.

‘What am I to do with her?’ wailed Mrs Shackleford when her daughter-in-law was almost out of earshot. ‘Someone tell me, do. She’s so miserable. I don’t know what she wants.’

‘She’s young to be a widow,’ commented Georgina.

‘There is never a good age to be a widow, believe me,’ said Mrs Shackleford, spreading her black silks. ‘One is so vulnerable, so at the whim of others. But madame, sit beside me and tell me how you find Bristol, while Harry fetches you a glass of something. How do we compare with a French city?’

The sun was so hot that Georgina retreated into deeper shade, drawing Warren out of reach of the bottle. Asa muttered something about a desire to explore further and set off uphill in the opposite direction to Susan Shackleford. At the summit she perched on a broken stone wall and took off her hat. When Shackleford appeared, as she had suspected he might, she did not leap up and walk away but looked directly at him.

‘It’s thought there was once a well up here or possibly a chapel,’ he said. ‘This area is full of springs.’ Shielding his eyes, he stared over the city. ‘I have left my mother and Madame de Rusigneux deep in a conversation about the rival merits of French and English cuisine. I find Madame very intriguing, I must say. I can’t help thinking there is rather more to her than meets the eye.’

‘I hope that’s true of most of us, Mr Shackleford.’

‘I remember a village called Frenelle in the north-east of France …’ He glanced at Asa, who in turn looked angrily away. ‘Forgive me. You’re unhappy. What troubles you, Miss Ardleigh?’

‘I’m grateful for your concern but I doubt you could help.’

‘Perhaps you could try me out.’

‘All right, then: being at Compton Wyatt troubles me. Bristol troubles me. And Mr Shackleford, you trouble me most of all. You say you want to help. Then could you please tell me, once and for all, what you want from me?’

He drew a deep breath, even closed his eyes for a moment. ‘Isn’t it obvious? Hasn’t it been so from the first time I met you? I tried to tell you that time in the Palais Royal. I have always wanted … as I’ve said before, your friendship, at least.’

Of all things she felt affronted by so tentative a suggestion. ‘How can I possibly be your friend when I flinch each time my foot sinks into one of your precious Turkish rugs? When you came to Ardleigh you talked of wanting me to understand you. I believe I do, only too well, and in turn I’m quite sure you have no trouble understanding me, Mr Shackleford.’

‘My understanding of you, my sense of what you are, has been like a bell striking inside me from the very first day I met you.’

‘Goodness. I’m surprised you remember.’

‘At Madame de Genlis’s salon you were wearing green and white and you were a little nervous, though your chin was up, as it is now. You were ready to take on anyone, except me, of course. But then I behaved like a fool. I allowed myself to be influenced by your brother-in-law, who convinced me from the outset that you were bound to look upon me favourably, given your attachment to Ardleigh.’

With his back to the sun, even his black mourning jacket had an aura of dusty light. When he took her hand and kissed it she was so startled that she allowed him to kiss her fingers again.

She had not been this close to him before or studied the texture of his skin, the apparently smooth lines of cheek and brow that could be transformed when he smiled into most unnerving complexity. ‘Will you please listen to me without running away?’ he said, and kissed her fingertip yet again, as if for courage. ‘I realise that of all the charges you might lay against me, weakness is the most damning. And you’d be right.’

She withdrew her hand and her body a few inches but did not leave.

‘When I was eleven years old my father took me to Jamaica for the first and only time. Usually it was Tom who accompanied him. Father said he wouldn’t risk us both going on the same voyage for fear of accidents. At the time I felt excluded, believing he favoured Tom more than me, but in the long run his strategy was proved right, of course. We travelled on a passenger vessel, not a slave ship – my father had more sense than to subject me to that – so I arrived in Jamaica dazed by a long sea voyage, the heat, the brilliance of the colour out there. As a plantation owner, my father was a great success. He managed his slaves well, paid for them to have medical attention, never worked them too hard and allowed them time off for holidays and festivals. Most of them were deferential to him and treated me like a little prince. He was a consummate businessman, you see, and knew how to get the best out of people. I was encouraged to talk to whoever I wished and soon I felt proud of being a Shackleford. I admired my father all the more and was jealous of Tom, that he would inherit so much, although Father insisted that I could have a plantation of my own one day.

‘But if you take a child to a place like Jamaica it’s hard to shield him from every unpleasantness. Some of my father’s friends were less enlightened than he. A rebel slave had been insolent to his master, got into an argument and struck him, almost killing him. As you might imagine, the threat of insurrection is very real so insubordination, especially when violent, is punished severely. I was not supposed to be there, but I had become very confident and went exploring by myself. I came across a silent gathering in a clearing of fifty or so slaves, shackled, and a handful of white men. And in their midst was a naked slave, lacerated by a whipping which must have ended a few minutes previously. His wounds were still frothing blood. They’d dug a hollow and filled it with kindling and laid a grill of metal bars across it. They forced the man to lie down on his wounded back, tied him to the bars and lit the fire beneath. They didn’t notice me until I started to scream, and then I was bundled away.’

They sat side by side, hands flat on the warm stones of the wall, looking into the blue sky. Asa thought of another young boy, her clear-eyed nephew at Morton Hall, picking an armful of daffodils for his mother; his plump, eager legs as they gripped the banister on a forbidden slide to the ground floor.

‘I dreamed about him for years,’ said Shackleford, ‘though I tried to run away from my dreams. I couldn’t exorcise the image even with drink, even with, forgive me, Miss Ardleigh, women, or travel or gambling. When I was sent to Oxford every word I read was a reproach so I abandoned my studies. However, I did meet Thomas Clarkson, having read his essay on slavery and commerce, and he in turn introduced me to Brissot at a meeting of the Anti-Slavery Society in London. I felt too much of a fraud to join them – I had no income of my own so I was living off my father. My God, how poor spirited this must seem to you. The truth is I was lost, Miss Ardleigh. That man, the tortured man – even now I cannot name him or bring myself to describe his face – inhabits my soul. But I did not protest. I never said a word to my father. Instead I hid.’

Asa was within a breath of walking away. Or of stretching her little finger to touch his, where it lay on the wall inches from her own. Instead she waited.

‘When I was in Paris a year later,’ he said, ‘I met Brissot again. And he in turn had me invited to the salon of Madame de Genlis. She’s something of a snob, Brissot told me, and in a very dubious relationship with her so-called employer, the Duc D’Orléans, but you’ll meet some interesting people. I arrived quite late and was at once overcome by the old feeling of being an impostor. I shouldn’t be amid all those people who talked so eloquently of liberty, I thought. If they knew what I’d witnessed, what I’d been condoning all those years by accepting my father’s money …

‘But I saw a girl standing by herself at the window. She was very young with nut-brown hair and the brightest eyes I had ever seen. And then, miraculously, your brother-in-law introduced himself and pointed you out as Thomasina Ardleigh, my cousin, and he added, by way of apology, that I mustn’t mind you being a bit strange. You’d been brought up in the country and had all kinds of ideas about abolition and suchlike.

‘Miss Ardleigh, from the very first, I saw you as my salvation. You see, I didn’t know how to shake off the ties. I still don’t. But I thought, with your purity, your verve, with such a woman as my wife, I could finally do something. Of course, I never dreamed then that Tom would die. I imagined that I would be free to remain an outsider.’

Asa recognised his proposal as something akin to the yellow and red butterfly that flickered over buttercups and dandelions; an indirect and tentative offer of marriage with no mention of love.

‘The point is you were mistaken,’ she said. ‘I’m not pure. I wasn’t then, when I met you. You may carry the guilt of a dead slave but don’t imagine that I am any less culpable. Even my birth had disastrous consequences for my mother – I have felt guilty from the start. Mr Lambert has shown me the worst possible forms of injustice yet I have been as passive as you. Earlier today Madame de Rusigneux accused me of doing nothing and she’s quite right. I play at life. Oh yes, I visit prisons and I write letters. But I do nothing truly useful.’

‘That’s not what I see. I see – have always seen – a woman who might change everything.’

She couldn’t help laughing. ‘Dear me, Mr Shackleford, you expect a great deal. But I can’t help blaming you for bringing me to Compton Wyatt, like a lamb to the slaughter, without discussing any of this with me.’

‘I wanted you to know all about me. Then you would understand the full extent of my burden and what you would be taking on.’

‘But I haven’t seen the worst of it, have I, Mr Shackleford? Your burden, as you call it, also exists thousands of miles away from here. And I really don’t see that I can do anything more than you could on your own. What have you done to disentangle yourself from it all thus far?’

‘Not much. Written a few letters. Asked questions. Held meetings. It is not straightforward, taking care of all those people. I’ve scarcely found out where to begin. I’ve considered selling the plantations in Jamaica but of course there’s a good chance they’d fall into worse hands than my own. I can free the slaves but it is a dangerous procedure unless done with infinite care for their welfare and protection. I thought that together, you and I – with your inspiration …’

Asa’s head pounded with confusion. At any moment Didier might send for her. But Madame had also thrown down a gauntlet. Asa might sit in parlours sipping tea for years and make not one difference to the life of a single slave, yet as Shackleford’s wife anything was possible. At last she said: ‘You seem to imply that I might become your wife for the sake of doing good. In my book, the only reason to marry is for love.’

Shackleford did not answer for so long that other sounds seemed too loud; a couple of birds exchanged piercing calls in a nearby oak and far below the city wheezed and rumbled. ‘I took it as read that you wouldn’t marry me for love,’ he said. ‘I thought the challenge might attract you, or the potential of what we might do together.’

‘I am of course honoured that you think I might make a difference. Georgina complains that I have too many ideals, Mr Shackleford. Those ideals, I know, can be problematic. But of one thing I’m certain: if I do marry, it will be for love.’

After watching her for a moment longer he smiled and touched her cheek with the back of his index finger. The delicacy of that touch, the yearning in his eyes, left her in no doubt of his feelings for her. Why doesn’t he fight for me, if he loves me? she thought. Instead he folded his arms and his head went down.

‘You too,’ she said softly. ‘You, Mr Shackleford, I believe would not contemplate a marriage where there was not love on both sides.’

When he didn’t look at her she walked quickly away, thinking really she’d had quite enough emotional encounters for one day; that she would find Georgina, plead a headache and ask to sit with her in the shade. Instead she missed her path and stumbled across Susan Shackleford walking towards her, arms clutched across her chest.