Joseph Knight Page 3

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Books are full of them. But this was a real one. Joseph Knight won the heart of the woman Aeneas wanted. That’s why he hated him. More for that than because he was a Negro. How could you hate someone just for their colour?’

  Jamieson had had enough. He swung himself up into the saddle. ‘It’s easy, miss. Folk dinna need muckle o an excuse, believe me, for love or hate. Ye’ll find that oot for yoursel.’

  ‘Leave love alone,’ Susan said, with a bluntness Jamieson was certain she would not use to a man of her own class, though she might to one of her sisters. ‘Love’s not at fault. You old men are all the same. You’re like my father. You don’t believe in love, or goodness of any kind.’

  Jamieson was rather shocked. He felt old when she said it. He was only forty-six; Sir John Wedderburn could easily be his father.

  ‘Na,’ he said, ‘I dinna. And I dout Joseph Knight didna either. And nor would you if you were him. Ye’d best get inside, miss, afore ye catch cauld and I catch the blame.’

  She looked disappointed, either in him or the fact that he was leaving. ‘Well, au revoir, Monsieur Jamieson,’ she said, following him out and slapping the horse’s rump. ‘And if ever you find him, be sure and let us know, father and me.’

  Conversations tended to continue in Susan Wedderburn’s imagination long after they had ended in reality. Especially conversations that, like books, took her outwith the policies of Ballindean. But such conversations were rare. Her full sisters, though she was fond of them, were too childish, too lightheaded or infatuated with marriage to give her what she needed. Her half-sister Margaret, twelve years older, was too dull. Her mother was too protective, saw serious or heated discussion as a threat either to her own domestic tranquillity or to her daughters’ prospects of safe, suitable unions. Maister MacRoy’s mind seldom strayed beyond the set lessons of the schoolroom. Susan felt starved of adventures but had no idea what form those adventures might take.

  Her father had had adventures at her age. She knew his stories of the Forty-five inside out. They had once thrilled her, but lately she could not separate them from the brooding presence of the dominie, who had been at Culloden too, but who was about as romantic as a goat. All that Jacobite passion belonged in another age, it had nothing to do with her. The Forty-five might have been tragic and stirring but it was also hopeless and useless and ancient. What she wanted was an adventure that was happening now, that touched her, one that was not yet over.

  Round, balding but mysterious Mr Jamieson from Dundee had therefore been immediately interesting to her. When, outside the library door, she had heard the forbidden name Joseph Knight mentioned, Jamieson had become almost exotic, an emissary from a distant kingdom. In the stable, she had told Jamieson that he should think about slavery, but he had shrugged her off. Now she heard that conversation go off in a different direction, Jamieson challenging her challenge: why should he think about slavery? He was not the one living off the proceeds of Jamaican plantations. He was not the child of a planter. What was slavery to him but a distant, vague fact of life? Whereas to her …

  What was it to her? She talked of anti-slavery societies but she knew nothing about them, and no one who belonged to one. She read occasionally of such people in the weekly papers. They seemed mostly to be evangelicals and seceders – non-conformists at the opposite end of the religious spectrum from the Episcopalian Wedderburns – or, worse, radicals and revolutionaries. Almost all of her knowledge of slavery had come from her father, and from the books in his library.

  Her head was full of other conversations: the ones she had teased out of her father over the years. Nowadays he refused to be drawn, but there had been times when he had seemed to enjoy her questions – but only if they were safe questions.

  ‘Is it like this in Jamaica, Papa?’

  ‘Is it like what, Susan?’ They were walking in the woods above the house. She must have been eleven or twelve. It was late spring, the ground was thick with bluebells, the trees were putting on their new leaves.

  ‘Like this. Are the trees and flowers like this?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Bigger, and greener and brighter by far. You never saw trees the like of them. So tall you often cannot see the tops. But when you can, there are great red flowers growing out of them. And further down, other plants grow up the trunks – creepers and climbing things bursting with flowers, and with leaves the size of dinner plates; in fact sometimes they are used for dinner plates. And everything lush and green – greens of every shade you can imagine. And that is in the winter, though the seasons hardly exist. Winter there is like our summer only hotter. You think you will be shrivelled away by the heat and then the rain comes and everything becomes still more green – darker and yet brilliant too. And always hot, hot, hot. I cannot describe it.’

  But he could, and she knew he was describing a picture in his head that he was happy should be in hers too. He would tell her of huge butterflies, flying beetles the size of small birds; birds that could hover in one place by beating their wings so fast they were a blur and made a droning sound like bees while their long thin beaks drank from flowers; rag-winged crows as big as buzzards, wheeling over the fields in sixes, eights, dozens; multi-coloured parrots, big-chinned pelicans, prim white egrets that rode on the backs of the cattle; insects that drove you mad at night with their incessant chirping, whistling frogs, spiders that could build webs big enough to catch small birds; crocodiles that lived in the swamps, mosquitoes that fed on you year in, year out, and that you never got used to. Coconut trees, banana trees, trees laden with strange fruits never seen in Scotland. It was, her father said, like a huge, hot, overgrown garden.

  ‘Like the Garden of Eden?’ she asked.

  ‘He laughed. ‘In a way, yes.’

  ‘Is there a serpent, then?’

  ‘Only you would ask that, my dear. Yes, there are snakes, but not dangerous ones.’

  Then came the questions that were closer to home. What was the house like, she wanted to know. Was it smaller or bigger than Ballindean? How many rooms were there? Was there a view? Was there a town nearby? And what about the people?

  ‘Well, there was me, and your uncle James, and your other uncles that you never knew. We had many Scotsmen for our neighbours. There are many there still.’

  ‘But the people who grew the sugar?’

  ‘We grew the sugar

  ‘No, who grew it, cut it …’

  ‘You mean the Negroes?’

  She felt her pulse quicken. Yes, yes, yes, the Negroes. She thought of them flitting through the shady jungle, mysterious, dangerous, beautiful as the blood-red flowers on the trees. One minute you would see them, the next they’d be gone. They were beyond her. But her father had known them.

  At first she had thought he was reluctant to talk of them. Later she felt that he just had very little to say about them, as if somehow he had noticed them less than he had the land and its creatures. Some Negroes were black and some were brown, he said, some were not far from white. They were lazy or hard-working, they were weak or strong, they were mostly foolish and childlike. She grew to believe that he did not find them very interesting.

  So she read what she could in Mr Long’s book on Jamaica, and in other books she found on the higher shelves in the library. And though all that she read in these books confirmed what her father told her, they said more too: about the brutishness, the immorality, the craftiness of Negroes. Because of their nature, she read, it was necessary to control them, to punish the lazy and the wicked, to crush them lest they try to rebel. All this seemed sensible, though sordid. But the more she read, the more she began to glimpse an argument that the books always sought, with wonderful plausibility, to dismiss. The argument was never properly articulated. It was mentioned only to be ridiculed as ignorant, ill-informed, malicious, naïve. Thumbing through these volumes, she lost sight of the flitting figures in the red-flowered jungle; felt instead a growing sense of unease, a sense that things were being kept f
rom her.

  ‘Why do they have to bring so many in the slave ships?’

  He said calmly, ‘Because there are more needed than could possibly be raised on the island.’

  ‘But why are they treated so cruelly?’ She felt anxious and unhappy asking the question: she knew her father would hate it.

  ‘It is not cruel, Susan,’ he said. ‘How else could they be brought?’

  ‘But it is cruel. It is horrible to think of children being torn from their mothers and fathers, husbands from wives, sisters from brothers, and carried off to a land so far from their home, and made to work so hard. It must be cruel.’

  ‘Susan, I do not know where you find such ideas but you should believe them no more than you believe fairy tales. Some people are cruel. That is true the world over. Some people are cruel here in Scotland. In Africa people are horribly cruel. But we were not cruel to the slaves. They were treated kindly when they behaved, and chastised only when it was necessary. That is how it is there still. That is how your Papa is with you, child. Sometimes I have to be angry with you. That does not mean I do not love you.’

  ‘Did you love the slaves?’

  She saw the shock in his eyes.

  ‘Of course not. They were not my children. But it was our Christian duty to look after them.’

  ‘Is it Christian to keep them as slaves?’

  ‘I do not wish to discuss this further,’ her father said. ‘But I will say this, since you speak of what is or is not Christian. The Negroes are not Christians. They are different from us in many ways, not just in their colour. They are not quite human in the way that we are. It has been tried and found impossible to teach them to be refined and civil like us. They can do so much, and no more. That is their nature.’

  ‘But we are Christians. And don’t some of them come to be baptised and make very good Christians?’

  ‘Most make very bad ones. Susan, we will not talk any more about this. You are a child. You have no idea what it is like in the Indies, let alone in Africa. Believe me, I am your father. There never was a race of people constitutionally better suited – better created – to be the property of others.’

  But she did not – quite – believe him. She read the books again. She overheard disturbing snatches of conversation when her uncle James came to visit. And she heard stories from the older servants about Joseph Knight, the slave her father had brought back with him to Ballindean.

  Then, in the library one day, when she was about fourteen, the sunlight caught the painting above the fireplace in such a way that she suddenly glimpsed a new figure in the gloom. Uncle Sandy’s picture. She had looked at it so often that the shock of what she saw now made her gasp, as if she had seen a ghost. There was no one else in the room. She stood as close as she could, peered at the painting straight on, from the left, from the right. The oil gleamed back at her. Behind the oil was a leg, a shoulder, a face. A man.

  From then on she learned to use the library at times when her father was out or away from home. She started to use the books as none of her sisters did, to find things out. And when she was alone she would stand for long minutes in front of the painting, gazing at the porch where Joseph Knight had been – where the outline of him still was if you were wise to it. She would close her eyes and see him running through the trees. He was naked. He was young. He was extremely handsome.

  Right from the start she had known she must not mention him to her father. The servants did not even have to warn her, she knew it from their hushed tones. She understood it from the bitterness that sometimes seeped out of Maister MacRoy. She wanted to ask somebody about the figure in the painting, but she did not dare. It was a secret. If her father found out that she knew it, he would be angry. He might take the painting away. She must do nothing to provoke that.

  So Joseph Knight remained at Ballindean yet was always missing, visible yet invisible, present yet absent in all the real and imagined conversations she had ever had. That was part of the thrill of hearing him named by Mr Jamieson. It made him seem alive, even though as she had told Jamieson she thought he must be dead. For years she had sensed Knight’s ghost in the library: in the books themselves, in old letters folded and forgotten inside the books, in every nook and on every shelf. He was there but not there. Jamieson had been so close and yet had not spotted Knight in the painting, because he had not known to look. But she had known. And now she knew she would have to look again; that there must be more of Joseph Knight somewhere in that room.

  Alone again, Sir John Wedderburn briefly regretted being so sharp with Jamieson. But then, the man had been presumptuous – and a sycophant when his presumption met resistance. Sir John stood and went to inspect the picture of himself, James and Peter. Not a good painting. Its amateurishness had always annoyed him. He should take it down, put it somewhere else or get rid of it all together. But he knew he would not. He had been having this argument with himself for thirty years. The painting mattered. It was one of only two things that survived of his brother Sandy. He went back to the table.

  Jamieson’s suggestion that he was some mere branch of the Wedderburn tree had irritated him. Just because cousin Loughborough had been in the public eye! Even against somebody as insignificant as Jamieson it was necessary to defend the family name against incursions, especially when they involved a plotter and trimmer like Loughborough, whose whole history had been one of eliminating any Scottish traits – accent, acquaintances, principles – that might have hindered his political progress in England. Sir John, though he spoke good English, still sounded Scotch enough, and that was with twenty years in the West Indies, where the whites generally turned to speaking like their slaves. Lord Loughborough, on the other hand, had taken lessons in his youth from some Irish speech pedlar, had planed out his vowels and Scotticisms till nobody would laugh at him in London. Ah well, Loughborough was at an end now. They all were, their generation – redding up their affairs as best they could.

  Aeneas’s quiet knock came again and he slid in, closing the door behind him. ‘He’s awa,’ he said.

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Is there onything ye want done?’

  ‘No.’ The question seemed innocent enough, but the implication was, did anything need to be done about him? Jamieson. Aeneas watched out for his master like an old dog. With his grizzled, unsmiling loyalty he might have been better suited for a soldier than a schoolmaster. Might have been. Wedderburn smiled – there was a whole other life in that phrase.

  ‘You know what day it is tomorrow, Aeneas?’

  ‘Aye. The sixteenth.’

  ‘Fifty-six years,’ Sir John said.

  ‘Aye, Sir John.’

  April the sixteenth. The date never escaped them. There were anniversaries scattered through the calendar that Sir John always observed with a sombre heart: so far this year there had been the martyrdom of Charles I, at the end of January, and the death of his first, dear wife Margaret in March; and late in November he would mourn, yet again, his father. But tomorrow it was Culloden.

  ‘You’ll come and drink a toast with me?’

  ‘Jist oorsels?’ MacRoy asked.

  ‘Of course.’ It was never anyone but themselves. Everybody else was too young, or dead.

  ‘Nearly sixty years, damn it,’ Sir John said. ‘A lifetime away, a world away. Dear God, somebody will be writing a novelle about it next!’

  ‘It’ll no tell the truth, a novelle,’ Aeneas said.

  ‘No, it won’t. The women will love it. But we’re still here. We know the truth.’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘What a life, Aeneas, eh?’ Sir John said. ‘What a life! Out in ’45 – there’s not many left that can say that! And you, too. We were out together.’

  Out. What a tiny, enormous word. At sixteen Sir John had marched to Derby. At seventeen – Susan’s age – he had been at Culloden. At eighteen he had been an exile in Jamaica.

  Life, the poets said, was a splashing mountain burn becoming a deep, smooth river flowing
to the sea. Sir John did not see it like that. For him life was a broken expanse of land without design or cultivation, patchworked with bog and rocky outcrops. A trackless moor covered by low cloud – or by smoke. What connected one memory to another, this moment to that moment? You turned around and lost sight of someone, your bearings went astray, you could only dimly see what you had thought was a certain landmark.

  What had a frightened boy on a battlefield to do with an aged laird in Perthshire, putting his affairs in order, folding away his years? What had a boy on the run called John Thomson to do with an old man called John Wedderburn? What had a black boy with some impossible name, chasing birds in an unknown village in Africa, to do with a man called Joseph Knight, sitting in a courtroom in Edinburgh? What had these lives to do with each other? They seemed quite distinct. Separate people. There was no continuous stream, only a torn, faded, incomplete map of wilderness.

  He shook his head. He must have dozed. Some time had passed – the clock said half-past eleven – and Aeneas had gone away again; if he had actually been there and not part of a dream. Sir John was disturbed by this idea. Recently he had been having sensations of doubt like that all the time: was he awake or dreaming? It was very unmanly. And he didn’t really believe that idle nonsense anyway, about the trackless moor. It made everything so pointless. Better to think of God, and, God willing, a place in heaven. There was the stream of life, there was the eternal sea into which all must flow. He had been hirpling about just now like some kind of atheist! Like the infidel Hume on his deathbed teasing Boswell about oblivion – knowing full well that Bozzy would just have to tell everybody about it. Hume who had been so terribly intelligent that he could imagine himself unable to imagine! Think himself insentient! Deny the very stirrings of his soul! Idiot Hume, too clever for his own salvation, telling Boswell, ‘If there were a future state, I think I could give as good an account of my life as most people.’ A risky hypothesis to put before God, but then again, Sir John had lately been thinking the same.