Joseph Knight Page 4

  He, of course, was no atheist. When the day came, he would be able to give a fair account of himself. He had always tried to do things right. He had not wilfully done evil. Honour, courage, Christian decency – he believed in these things, had lived his life according to such standards. You were put here in this life and all you could do was get through it as well as you were able, and that was what he had done.

  Reminded of Boswell, Sir John stood up and wandered his shelves, identifying the spines of the Life of Dr Johnson. He had never been able to fight his way through the whole of that work, but there were passages that he knew almost by heart. ‘I cannot too highly praise the speech which Mr Henry Dundas generously contributed to the cause of the sooty stranger.’ That was one. He had read that a dozen times, never got beyond it to the next page. It just made him angry.

  Changed times. Dundas had spent the 1790s stalling the parliamentary efforts of Mr William Wilberforce to abolish the slave trade, conscious then of the detrimental effect abolition would have on the West Indian plantations, Sir John’s among them. Yet he had shown only disdain for the Wedderburn interests when he had spoken for the ‘sooty stranger’ in that courtroom in 1778.

  It was all politics of course: Dundas had told Parliament that he wanted to end slavery when the economic conditions were right. He had meant the political conditions. But now he was out of office, resigned as His Majesty’s Secretary for War along with the rest of Pitt’s Government. Even Harry Dundas had to come to an end eventually.

  ‘Changed times.’ Sir John said the words out loud, as if to remind himself of the present, and his presence in it. It didn’t do to dwell too much on the past. But increasingly, that was what he did – dwelt on the past, or in it, or tried to shore it up against the tide. For the last twelve months Sir John had been firing off letters to various persons in the Government, imploring them not to listen to Wilberforce and his abolitionist cronies who seized on every reported brutality, exaggerated it tenfold and then claimed it as the norm in the plantations. As if one bad master made an argument against the entire system. Was a fornicating minister an argument against religion, a drunken laird a reason to abolish property? Few of these meddlers had even been in the West Indies. None of them had ever tried to rid Negroes of indolence, deceit and stupidity, to instil decency and honesty in them and raise them above the animals. Everybody could see what happened when Negroes got loose. A Toussaint L’Ouverture appeared, wielding a machete.

  This, Sir John told himself, was one reason he had wanted Joseph Knight found. Nothing to do with money, or setting up a meeting. He had wanted to know if Knight still existed. He had wanted an example.

  Joseph Knight – a Negro who had had the best advantages and opportunities, the best master, who had been instructed and baptised in the Christian religion, and who, even in these circumstances, had turned out a knave, an impostor, a traitor. If he still lived, by now he would undoubtedly have sunk into obscurity, destitution, superstition and depravity. He had been heading down that road even before the court case was over. If he could have been found, if he could have been held up as evidence …

  But there had been another reason to find him. Again, to see if he still existed, although this time it was not about the public interest. It was about locating a missing, personal landmark. Joseph Knight was missing from his life, had been these last two dozen years. Once he had always been there, quiet, reliable (so it seemed), an unmistakable, visible sign of Wedderburn’s success, of his return from exile, of his triumph over adversity. Even now, in spite of everything, Sir John would have enjoyed being able to say, ‘That one was mine.’

  With an effort Sir John turned in his chair to the wall behind the table, where there was a small etching of his father, the 5th Baronet of Blackness. His neck and shoulders protested, and he shuffled the chair round. When he looked at the etching, he sometimes thought the likeness very good, sometimes poor (unlike the Jamaica painting, which always looked poor). This was because for so long now the portrait of his father had been more real than the man: these days it was a question of asking how good a likeness his father would have been of it. It was a thin, horsy, straight face, with large worried eyes and a broad forehead capped with a neat curled wig. The etching had been done from memory by a female cousin, after the execution. His father had been forty-two when he died. Sometimes when Sir John stared at the etching he imagined his father alive again, and ageing, becoming more like him. What a strange thing – that he should have become his father’s father.

  The pinprick of a tear started in one eye, and he stabbed it dry with his forefinger.

  He could not be bothered now with the letter he had started. He had been going to write to James down at Inveresk – something about the guardianship – but it could wait. Invariably, thinking of Joseph and Jamaica made him think of James too, his only surviving sibling. Their eldest brother had died at the age of five, leaving John heir to their father’s baronetcy. Three other brothers were long dead, two of them in Jamaica, and dead also were their four sisters. John and James were all that survived of the seed of their father. With James he had shared more of the adventures of his life than with any of the others, yet in character they remained utterly different. They seldom saw each other now. To or from Inveresk, which lay across two firths and down the coast beyond Edinburgh, was a long journey for old men.

  He got up and went over to the window again. The east wind was still biting at the leafless branches of the trees beyond the small oval loch. Better to be inside looking out, on a day like this, than outside looking in. Ballindean, for all its fine south-facing location, was not the bonniest of houses anyway. Sir John had made many improvements since buying it in 1769, but more than once he had wondered how much one could really do with an old house. If he were forty again, perhaps he would knock it all down and start anew.

  Being stuck inside made him restless. He went towards the writing-table, paused. Somewhere in there, deep in one of the drawers, beneath a jumble of old letters and papers, lay a small calf-bound book, a journal, now beginning to crumble at the edges. For years he had meant to destroy it – James and he, after long discussion, had determined that this was the proper thing to do – but the journal was, apart from the painting, the only surviving memento of his young brother Alexander, who had kept it, sporadically, for four years in Jamaica. Apart from James and himself, the three brothers who had survived to adulthood had all died within a few years of one another, back in the 1760s; Peter and Alexander in the Indies; David, whom he had never really known, in London. But it was Sandy he regretted most.

  Dead at what? – twenty-four, twenty-five? Peter had lasted well into his thirties, had at least settled in the Indies, was making a success of things there when the yellow fever carried him off. But poor Sandy had never settled. And the way he had died – Sir John could not bear to think about it. If Sandy could have held on just a few years more, he might have come home safe like James and himself. Or if he had come back with him in ’63, John’s first return – that would have saved him. Now all that was left of him was the journal and the painting. Typical Sandy, to do one thing inadequately, and another thing worse. The picture was poor, but the journal was awful.

  The painting was saved by its sentimental value. It was crude and clumsy – the sky was too thick, the faces too flat – but it captured something of the house in Jamaica, and its naïve execution was Sandy through and through. It was also the only image he had of Peter. And it was part of the family’s story.

  The journal’s contents were a quite different matter. They were certainly not for the gentle eyes of his wife and daughters. What Sandy had written was weak, febrile, disgusting. It left a vile taste in the mouth. But it, too, was Sandy. John Wedderburn kept it for that reason, but it stayed buried in the drawer.

  It was the record of a life cut short, wasted. Sir John did not like waste of any kind. He looked at the inviting armchairs by the hearth, and decided against getting out the journal. On
e day soon, perhaps, a last glance – then into the fire with it. Right now, he wanted to sleep.

  II

  Darkness

  RUN AWAY

  From Rosend-House, near Burntisland, 23d Nov. 1772 A NEGRO LAD called CAESAR, belonging to Murdoch Campbell of Rosend, and carried off several things belonging to his Master. – It is hoped no person will harbour or employ him, and that no shipmaster will carry him off the country, as his master is resolved to prosecute in terms of law.

  The above Negro (called Caesar) is about five feet eight inches high, and eighteen years of age: He had on, when he eloped, a mixed cloth coat and vestcoat with plain yellow buttons, shamoy breeks, and a blue surtout coat.—Whoever will secure him in any gaol, or give information so as he may be secured to his master, or to Mr David Erskine writer to the signet, shall be handsomely rewarded.

  EDINBURGH EVENING COURANT, 25 NOVEMBER 1772

  FOR JAMAICA

  The ship Nancy, John Steele Master, now lying at Greenock, will be clear to sail for Savannah-la-mar, by the 15th February 1776.

  For freight or passage, apply to Sommervel, Gordon and co. in Glasgow, or the Master in Greenock. The Nancy is a fine new vessel, and commodiously fitted up for passengers.

  CALEDONIAN MERCURY, 17 JANUARY 1776

  Drummossie Moor, 16 April 1746

  Sir John Wedderburn, 5th Baronet of Blackness, forty-two years of age and feeling sixty, spoke to his son side-mouthed and out of the hearing of the troops drawn up a few paces in front. ‘The men are dead on their feet. I fear this may be the end, John.’

  His caution was hardly necessary: most of them, though not yet dead, were half asleep, heads bowed, bonnets scrugged down against the wind and wet. The army stretched in thin grey lines across the sodden moor. Opposite them the Government forces waited in solid red blocks.

  ‘We are cold and hungry and exhausted,’ the father said. ‘Cumberland’s men are fat and rested and twice our number. It is not a happy meeting.’

  ‘We have won against the odds before,’ the son said. ‘And they are not desperate like us.’ Making a virtue out of desperation had turned his lips blue. He was shivering uncontrollably, and as he spoke another squall of sleet, colder and more vicious than snow, battered over the moor and hit him full on the face, forcing him to turn away from his father.

  Two months before, he had celebrated, if that was the word, his seventeenth birthday by toasting the Jacobite army’s capture of Inverness. But even then it had been obvious that Prince Charles Edward Stewart and his Council were divided and running out of options. Even then, all young John Wedderburn had wanted was to go home. And now this. A shattered, sullen remnant of at most five thousand men, aching from a stumbling, useless march through the night – a failed attempt to surprise Cumberland’s camp with a dawn attack – and a misty afternoon laced with sleet and bitter wind. It was April, but felt more like midwinter.

  Sir John put his arm around his son’s shoulders, pulling him close. An observer might have thought he was simply trying to rub warmth into him. He spoke urgently into his ear. ‘John, when this starts the outcome will be clear in a matter of minutes. If we take the fight to them perhaps we have a chance. But the MacDonalds have no belly for it on the left. They are nursing their injured pride, and without them this army has no backbone.’

  ‘We are its backbone,’ the boy said, sweeping his arm at the two battalions of Lord Ogilvy’s regiment formed up in front of them: Angus men, drawn from the glens of Isla, Clova and Prosen; from the Sidlaws, Forfar and Dundee. Hard, silent cottars from lands straddling the Highland-Lowland divide, they had marched without complaint the hundreds of miles to Derby, then back to Scotland and all the way to this bleak northern moor. Some had been killed, others had slipped away to Inverness in search of food, a few had deserted and headed back south to their homes, but nearly five hundred remained, relatively well armed with musket and sword, still maintaining the discipline which had begun to break down among the northern clansmen.

  Because of his social position, young John Wedderburn was a captain in the Glen Prosen company raised by his uncle Robert. To him was given the honour of carrying the colours, which were snapping and billowing angrily a few yards away, kept upright for the time being, and with great difficulty, by a tiny drummer boy jacked between the staff and the wet ground; and though Wedderburn was too young to lead troops into battle, and acted more as an aide de camp to Lord Ogilvy, he felt it his duty to hold out some hope of success. ‘We are the army’s backbone,’ he said again, trying to convince himself.

  His father shook his head. Hopelessness was all over his face.

  Poverty was what had led Sir John to throw in his lot with the Prince. Although he had inherited the title Baronet of Blackness on the death of his father, it had come without land, since one of the 4th Baronet’s last acts had been to sell the estate, on the edge of Dundee, in a desperate attempt to make ends meet. Since then, the family had been living on a run-down farm at Newtyle, a few miles to the north-west of the town. Lured by the prospect of reward into what had not then seemed a mad and impossible enterprise, the new Baronet had allowed himself to be persuaded to accept an appointment as collector of excise for the Prince, and now he feared all those receipts held by the merchants and magistrates of Perth and Dundee – receipts which bore his signature. They had been signs of his diligence. Now they were paper witnesses to his complicity.

  ‘Listen to me,’ he urged. ‘If it goes badly, do not wait for the end. Ride away before it is too late.’

  ‘Leave my men, sir? Desert the colours? How can I do that?’

  ‘We are being held in reserve here. Your men may not even be called upon to engage. If it comes to a retreat, you’ll only be a step ahead of them. In a way you’ll be leading them.’

  The boy blinked at the ground, as if dazed by the lameness of this reasoning. ‘And you?’ he mumbled. ‘What about you?’

  ‘I’ll not be far behind you. I’ll stay with my Lord Ogilvy as long as I can, but I’ll not wait to be killed if that’s all there is to be had from the affair. Nor, I doubt, will he. Don’t look affronted, lad. There’s no shame in this, no disgrace. Better to live for another day, if there’s to be one, than be butchered in a bog.’ He looked around quickly, as if expecting the Prince to walk by and accuse him of treachery. ‘John, I am your father. Do you love me?’

  ‘Yes, Papa, of course.’

  ‘Then honour and obey me.’

  A thin series of cheers went up in front as Lord Ogilvy and the Duke of Perth rode along the line, waving their hats. Ogilvy’s regiment was in the second line of the army. To the right, seventy yards ahead, and only three hundred from the red coats of the Government forces, were the men of Atholl, who had been given the place usually taken by the MacDonalds, who felt insulted as a result. In return for this privilege, the Atholl men were up to their shins in bog, and crowded together by a dyke running along their right between them and the river Nairn. Across the moor Cumberland’s drums were rattling away like hailstones. Shouts from the Highland officers drifted up into the heavy air. Men began to stamp their feet, check their powder and muskets. It was just after one o’clock.

  ‘I must get back to Lord Ogilvy,’ said Sir John, ‘and you must take your position.’ Their horses were being held by a servant twenty yards away, and they started towards them. As they went, there was a roar from the left: the Jacobites’ paltry collection of artillery had begun firing at the enemy.

  A minute later the response came from Cumberland’s three-pounders and mortars. Roundshot whistled overhead, thudding into the ground just behind the waiting Jacobite troops. Mud and heather showered up and splattered down again. Somebody screamed in agony. The enemy artillery had found the range at the first attempt.

  ‘God help us!’ said Sir John. He seized his son’s arm again. ‘I beg you, do not ride for Inverness. If the battle’s lost Inverness will be lost too, and they will show no mercy to those they find there.’ A mortar shell scr
eamed overhead and exploded thirty yards away. ‘Turn south as soon as you can, and get back to the lands you know. Get into Badenoch, past Ruthven, and keep riding. Lose yourself in the mountains. Take the Lairig Ghru or one of the other passes, and keep moving till you come in above the Dee. You’ll know where you are from there?’

  ‘Of course. There’s no need for all this, Papa.’

  They were shouting at each other now as the roundshot crashed around them. Smoke was blowing thickly across the field, but already their own guns were firing only sporadically, while the Government bombardment intensified.

  ‘There’s every need. I wish it were not so. A hard time is coming on us all.’ Another volley flew so low overhead that they fell to the ground, flattened by the turbulence, and when they rose they were both streaked from chest to knee in black mud and scraps of heather. Their horses were panicking, the servant struggling to control them. As they mounted, Sir John bellowed his last instructions. ‘Get across the Dee and over the hills again, by the Monega Road, till you come into Glen Isla. Seek out Mr Arthur, the minister. He got the living from your uncle Robert, who vouches for him. He will give you shelter till I can come up with you.’

  ‘If you’re only just behind me, we’ll meet long before Glen Isla.’

  ‘Aye, that’s right, John. But you’re not to wait on me, do you understand?’

  A band of smoke mixed with driving rain half obscured father from son. When it cleared a little, young John turned his horse to join his troops, lifting the colours as he went from the numb hands of the drummer boy, who promptly collapsed, covered his head with his arms and started to scream.

  The men of Angus were standing firm against the bombardment; so far the shot had either gone over their heads or fallen short. In front of them, though, it was a different story. As the enemy guns shortened their range, the iron balls drove great lanes through the ranks of shivering Highlanders. They tore off limbs like rags, punched holes that removed entire guts from men who were still standing, and left others dead or beyond repair on the freezing wet ground among their comrades. MacLeans, Maclachlans, Frasers, Camerons, the roundshot slaughtered them with perfect indifference. But even through the steady crack and thud of cannon fire young John Wedderburn could hear the frantic cries of the Highland officers: ‘Dùinibh a-steach! Dùinibh a-steach!’ Close up! Close up!