Joseph Knight Read online

  James looked like a Wedderburn but he was darker-haired, softer-skinned, more lightly built than his brother. He had been making women fall for him since before he was conscious of his own charms. As a bairn he had had a smile and an eye that could melt most female hearts, and in London it was no different, except that now he was aware of his power. John used to watch him, and was envious of the ease with which he attracted women, the way he toyed with them, the disdain with which he dismissed them.

  James seemed also to take a certain satisfaction from being the only connection between his older brother and their father. He was allowed regular access to the prison, bringing Sir John fresh linen, soap, books, tobacco and a few other luxuries. James and young John spent much time together, and too much money, in coffee houses and taverns. This earned a rebuke or two from the father, which James took almost as a mark of appreciation. In August he turned sixteen. He bought himself an interesting present: a whore in Covent Garden.

  In Southwark jail Sir John Wedderburn kept good heart: he was glad to have one son near him; glad, too, to hear that John was, for the moment, out of harm’s way. He wrote to his wife, and heard back from her how, with his other children, she now lived in straitened circumstances in Dundee, having been ejected from the farm at Newtyle. This was a sore blow, but they had never had much money anyway. He would find a way to make amends.

  He was confident that the longer he was held at Southwark, the more the Government’s attitude to minor players like himself would soften. After all, he had not actually killed anybody. He would be tried, no doubt; found guilty, certainly; but the bloodletting that had lasted all summer would surely satisfy even the Duke of Cumberland’s desire for vengeance. Banishment, for a spell, that surely was the most likely outcome. They would go to France. Life would begin again.

  He was, however, anxious about John, whose name was on the lists of wanted rebels, with the designation ‘Where Now. Not Known’ next to it. The lad could not stay in London indefinitely. The Wedderburns were a far-flung family, with enterprising cousins scattered across the globe. Mr Paterson, for example, had considerable interests in the West Indies. Arrangements were made to spirit John out of the country. John was reluctant to fall in with them but his father, via James, insisted. By the end of September, he was gone.

  When the trial came on in November, the Crown presented its evidence with ferocity. Receipts from Dundee and Perth, bearing the Baronet’s signature, showing how those towns had been forcibly relieved of duties and other monies for the Prince’s service, were thrust under the jurors’ noses. Witnesses swore to his presence in arms at Culloden, Prestonpans and Derby (a place he had never been, never having left Scotland). None of this was unexpected, but the prosecutors’ outraged zeal was, and the jurors were infected by it.

  They did not even leave the courtroom to find him guilty of high treason, whereupon the court, having asked Sir John if he had anything to say for himself, and receiving no reply, proceeded to pronounce judgment and award execution against him: ‘that the said Sir John do return to the Jail from whence he came and from thence be drawn to the place of Execution and when he cometh there that he be hanged by the Neck but not till he be dead and that he be therefore cut down alive and that his Bowels be then taken out and burnt before his Face and that his Head be then severed from his Body and that his Body be divided into four Quarters and that those be at the Disposal of our said present Sovereign Lord the King’.

  This was on 15 November. The sentence was shared by several other gentlemen who now, perhaps, wished that they had been peasants after all. Various appeals and entreaties were made, but to no avail. Cumberland himself insisted on the sentences being carried out in full: ‘Good God,’ he spluttered, juice cascading over his chins as he worked his way through a bucket of oysters, ‘did we gather all these miscreants up in order to let them go again? No, no. Examples must be made.’

  But of all this the 5th Baronet of Blackness’s eldest son and heir was quite ignorant. Before the end of summer John had left London, and had crossed the ocean: another stage on the dream-like flight that had begun on Drummossie Moor, and from which he did not know when he would come to rest.

  Kingston, January – March 1747

  John Wedderburn slowly came awake again, and found himself, as his eighteenth birthday approached, no longer a boy. He had been in Jamaica for half a year, acclimatising, or being ‘seasoned’, as the term was. Europeans, it was said, needed this period of adjustment, preferably twice as long, even more than Africans, though it was the latter who would eventually be toiling all day under the Caribbean sun. But while the Africans were not allowed to be idle in their first months in the island, but were given light tasks such as weeding or cattle-minding, or indoor work, John Wedderburn was expected to do almost nothing. He was kept at his relative Mr Paterson’s expense, and grew increasingly bored.

  Company was not hard to find, but, to begin with, he avoided it. He felt like an exile, not yet a West Indian but a Scot, on the run from England. He kept himself to himself. Riding from one part of the island to another on a borrowed horse, he inspected some plantations, their great white houses and simple slave villages, watched the slaves at work in the cane fields, saw the sugar being processed in the mills, learned the difference between creoles and Africa-born blacks and the obsessive gradations of blood-mix that lay between black and white: sambo, mulatto, quadroon, octaroon, musteefino. These designations also taught him an important lesson: there were no gradations of whiteness. In the purity of your race, if you were white, lay your salvation.

  As his own skin became burnt by the sun, he thought of this, and determined to keep himself pure. He wanted to save himself. He thought of home and its whiteness, something to which he had never before given any consideration. Now, surrounded by black people, he saw in his mind the overwhelming whiteness of Scotland.

  In Kingston, he spent these lone months wandering the grim, gaudy streets, taking in their odd mixture of dust and humidity, of squalor and sweat, of crudeness and finery. He got caught time and again in astonishing downpours. A baking hot sky would be transformed in mid-afternoon, in a matter of minutes, into something dark and menacing. Then the rain would come, vertical sheets of warm, sweet-smelling water, quite unlike the insidious, creeping drizzle of Scotland. Half an hour later the sky would be clear again and the ground bone-dry.

  Compared with London, Kingston was a village but it lacked the quaintness of a village. The streets were lined with wooden shacks and larger wood- and brick-built houses, the latter often with shaded porches along their entire front where white men and women sat and observed the world. The few really substantial buildings were used by the island’s administration or by the wealthiest merchants and planters. King Street, the wide main thoroughfare, was always busy with carts and carriages. There were stores with the latest fashions, furnishings and domestic supplies imported from Europe. Inns and boarding houses, rough-looking drinking shops and slightly more genteel coffee rooms filled the gaps. It was a male town faced in some quarters with a chipped female veneer.

  At first sight, it was a place where blacks and whites seemed to mingle on equal terms. But this was a false picture. Most of the apparently free blacks were slaves employed in various trades – coopers, carriers, carpenters, blacksmiths, seamstresses, laundresses. If they were not working for their own master they were working for someone else’s, charging a fee, some of which they were permitted to keep. These men and women existed in a halfway state between slavery and freedom, and their whole manner, their better clothes, their sprightliness and the speed at which they worked, all seemed to suggest to John Wedderburn that they had somehow been ‘improved’ beyond the condition of those labouring on the plantations. This he found interesting.

  Ships arrived daily from Britain, Guinea and the American colonies. Down at the waterfront John watched vast quantities of goods being offloaded and tried to calculate what they must be worth. A miserable, foul-smelling guardhouse
was there too, and a gibbet, on which were suspended cages containing the remnants of slaves who had committed some crime or other.

  A man passing by, seeing him standing there, asked him what he was staring at. Embarrassed, John Wedderburn waved an arm widely. ‘Everything,’ he said. ‘It’s all so busy.’

  ‘No,’ the man said, ‘you were looking at something, not everything. You were looking at that.’ He was smoking a pipe, and pointed at the gibbet with it.

  John began to speak, but the man interrupted him.

  ‘And you’re as well to look at it, lad. Because without that, everything is nothing.’ He spat on the ground. ‘We’re at war.’

  John looked again at the carcasses in the cages. ‘The French?’ he asked. ‘Were they in league with the French?’

  ‘Bugger the French. We’re at war with them.’ He sucked on his pipe again. ‘You’ll see if I’m not right,’ he said.

  Months after his arrival, a letter reached John via Mr Paterson’s business. The letter had been weeks on board a ship crossing the Atlantic. It was written in his father’s hand. He opened it eagerly, forgetting how much time must have passed since its composition. It was very brief, a few lines only:

  27 November 1746

  Dear John,

  Today I got notice that I am to be executed tomorrow.

  The paper swam before his vision, his heart doubled its pace. With an effort he focused on the writing again.

  I was proved reviewed by the Prince at Edinburgh with a small sword and pair of pistols when you know I was not in arms there, the injustice and untruth of which with a great many other things I designed to have expatiated more fully upon if I had time. I hear that while you stayed here you parted too easily from your money which will not do, I need not tell you to take care and please Mr Paterson.

  Damn Mr Paterson! Mr Paterson was in London! He, John Wedderburn, was stuck in the Indies, and all his father could do – had been able to do – was complain about untruths and tell him to curb his spending. Take care. Take care of what, his empty purse? His browning skin? O God, Papa was dead! What had they done to him? They had wiped him clean away. As if to emphasise that awful fact, the letter was not even signed.

  He tried to persuade himself that there might have been a reprieve, but he knew it could not be. A week, a month passed: no joyous, God-praising letter in the same hand arrived. Instead, in January, came his brother James to confirm the news.

  The boys spent a week getting drunk together, which would not have pleased Mr Paterson if he had got to hear, but he did not, since Mr Paterson’s representatives were often to be found joining in the sessions. When they were on their own, the brothers tried to make sense of what had happened, where and who they now were.

  ‘Are you the sixth Baronet of Blackness, then?’ James wanted to know. ‘Now that Papa is dead.’

  ‘I don’t see how I can be. We lost Blackness years ago. We’ve even lost the farm at Newtyle.’

  ‘But Papa kept the title, did he not?’

  ‘I think it will be taken anyway, James, on account of our being out. At the moment I don’t care, I don’t feel like a baronet.’

  James looked angry. ‘Well, if you don’t want the title I’ll have it. You dishonour Papa talking like that. He was strong right to the end.’

  Then James told John of their father’s last night alive. To pre-empt last-minute applications for mercy it had been intended to keep the date of execution a secret from those about to die. On the evening of 27 November, James had been allowed in to see him. Sir John had been in the middle of a game of backgammon, and James had sat down beside him to watch. A few minutes later, a jailer had approached and whispered something in the father’s ear. Sir John had paused, his finger resting on one of the stones, as if contemplating what move to make. ‘Friend,’ he had said to the jailer, ‘would you kindly stand out of the light till I finish this game?’ Then, having played it out, he had put his arm around James and called for wine. When the men around him all had glasses, he told them the news: ‘I regret to tell you that I am to be executed tomorrow. There is no time for an appeal. I therefore ask you to join me in a farewell toast and then to indulge me with some solitude. My son is here, and I have letters to write.’

  After the wine was drunk, he and James were given space alone. Sir John wrote half a dozen brief letters: one to his wife; one to John in Jamaica; three to relatives in Scotland entreating them to look after his family; and one to His Royal Highness, Prince Charles Edward Stewart.

  ‘He showed me that one,’ James said. ‘He wanted me to see that he remained loyal even after what had happened. He said we were all poor and he hoped the Prince would protect us. He sealed it up and gave it to me with the others, to give to Mr Paterson.’

  ‘Will the Prince protect us?’ John asked.

  ‘Of course he won’t. How can he? He’s away to France and he’ll not be back. I doubt Papa expected much from that quarter. The point is, though, he never wavered. And we must never waver. If we do, we will vanish.’

  As Papa had vanished, John thought, but he said nothing. Perhaps James also felt the irony of his own remark. In the prison, even at that late stage, he had tried to persuade their father to do something to save himself. Ever since the sentence there had been a steady flow of visitors at night, including assorted vendors of ale and port, barbers, tailors and whores, all of whom anticipated doing some kind of business. Men condemned to death, after all, might as well spend what money they had left, either to look their best before the gallows crowd, catch the pox or drink themselves into oblivion. James had proposed that they pay one of the whores to lose some of her clothes – on a permanent basis – and get his father out in them. Sir John had dismissed this scheme: ‘Do you know how many hairy big-boned women are stopped leaving prisons on occasions like this, James? I do not wish to be discovered in such circumstances and ill-used on my last night on earth. I’m as well dying now as twenty years hence.’ Then he had blessed the boy, embraced him and sent him away. ‘Do not come here tomorrow. There will be nothing more to say. You will only make it harder for me to die.’

  ‘And did you obey him?’ John asked.

  ‘Aye. I did not see him at the prison again.’ James closed his eyes. He was shaking. John put his hand on his brother’s arm. James opened his eyes again. ‘I saw him later,’ he said. ‘At Kennington.’

  But it would be a long time before he would say what he had seen there.

  John had finally adjusted to the climate. James appeared to need no seasoning. His energy and curiosity were astonishing. Kingston veterans marvelled at him. He had a hundred schemes to make the best of their situation: to make money, lots of it; to work hard and live hard; and one day, to go back to Scotland.

  John concurred with all of these propositions, especially the last one. He was more cautious, less certain that they would succeed, but he would put his back to the wheel and make it turn. His father’s reproach about the money rankled: it would rankle for twenty years. The last thing he had thought to say to him: you parted too easily from your money which will not do. Very well then: he would amass wealth. He would not squander it. He would not be the prodigal son. He would be the 6th Baronet. He would go home to enjoy his own again.

  He was not the only one thinking along these lines. The island was something of a Jacobite refuge. Every boat, from America or Europe, disgorged another young or middle-aged man who found it expedient to sojourn in the sun for a few years. Some only lasted a few weeks: the sun was no friendlier than Butcher Cumberland. Those who ignored the dire warnings of old hands about the wrong food and drink, yellow fever and mosquitoes, the importance of clean water and the dangers of dirty cuts and grazes, dropped by the dozen. But the Wedderburns survived, working for one or other of Mr Paterson’s enterprises – he had stores in Kingston, and his agents acted on behalf of a number of plantations across the island. Another Jacobite exile and one of their old Perthshire friends, George Kinloch, had been made overs
eer of a small plantation in the west, near the port of Savanna-la-Mar. They were pleased for George, and when they went to visit him they liked what they saw of that end of the island. ‘There are opportunities here,’ James said. ‘There are great opportunities.’

  One afternoon, John found his brother downing rum in a Kingston grog shop with two men of very different physical appearance. One was yet another Scot, not much older, black-haired, clean-shaven, neatly dressed. In his white linen shirt and light, black short coat he seemed to be coping well with the heat. His whole air was one of self-assurance. This was David Fyfe, a medical graduate of Edinburgh who had been in Jamaica eight months. The other man was huge, sixtyish, bulb-nosed and florid. A once white, now tobacco-yellow peruke, in a style that might have been fashionable under Queen Anne, was crammed on his wrinkled forehead, and this, together with the combined weight of a thick brown coat and ornately brocaded waistcoat, was causing him to sweat like a fountain.

  James shouted John over and called for another chair, another glass and another bottle of rum. It was both hard and easy to believe he was still only sixteen.

  ‘Davie, James,’ John greeted them, taking the seat.

  ‘This,’ said James to the fat man, ‘is my esteemed elder brother John Wedderburn, late of Scotland, now a colonist like the rest of us. John, it is my pleasure and so forth to introduce Mr Thomas Underwood of – where did you say again?’

  ‘Amity Plantation, sir, in the parish of Westmoreland, county of Cornwall. My pleasure, sir, and an honour. Always an honour to meet another Scotchman. Not that it’s difficult here. You’re almost as numerous as the negers. No offence, naturally.’