Redlegs (13 page)

Whereas Shaw, despite that single night of outpourings, remained aloof to the point of common rudeness, as the second year at Northpoint wore on Lord Coak and Elspeth became increasingly a consolation to one another. He began, in the safety of the estate of which he was master, to confide in her. He did not make a
declaration
as Shaw had done, as though it were a last will and
testament
, but serialised his tale. And like occasional editions of a penny dreadful, Elspeth pieced together the story of her benefactor’s life, the chapters separated not by publications, but by the narrator’s silences, or longer absences.

Albert Coak, it transpired, was the eldest son of a successful
merchant
who, from early childhood, showed a weakness for frippery and diversion. His father had begun the family business in England, importing and refining sugar. Their West Indian home was initially a mere foothold in the Americas from where he hoped to advance his trade. He bought an ancient mill, still in good working order despite its age, together with this smallish but attractive enough and solid coral-stone plantation house at Northpoint and its
extensive
acreage, all sold by a bigger landlord who had found that corner of the island too salty, too windy, and too remote to merit his time and money.

“There he was mistaken. There’s no doubt this land takes energy to work, but its produce is second to none on the island.”

Coak would tell his story after dinner, a jugful of rum shared
with the Captain, and when he was at ease. Often, he would repair to his room, hinting to Elspeth that her company would be welcome. Sometimes she would recite or read for him, and then ask him questions, urging him to continue his autobiography. He would lie across his bed, while she sat at the window, often covered only with a sheet. He began his reminisces haltingly, but then, lost in the memories, he would talk quietly and lucidly, staring up at the ceiling.

The fastidious father took the mild and gentle son with him to his newly purchased plantation, and left him there. Although Albert was young, his father felt that gaining a sense of
independence
early in life, as well as learning the business from scratch, would be advantageous. His mother was not so convinced but yielded to the superior knowledge of her husband in the matters of business, the West Indies, and boys. “You might say my dear, that I was ‘barbadoed’ like a common convict. A month before my fourteenth birthday.”

Coak
père
returned to the island regularly for the next several years. A housekeeper and small house staff were added to the
plantation
gang, to look after the young man’s needs, although he was instructed always to be the authority in the house.

Elspeth nearly wept at the thought of such a lonely boyhood. Abandoned in a remote, solitary spot without friends or family, simultaneously the most senior and most junior member of the household. The more she heard of his history the more her
gratitude
to Albert merged into compassion and even warmth. Those who tended to the boy – governess, cook and maid – were women. Under his command was a work-gang of slave men. Captain Shaw was hired in the first year of the boy’s residence on the island to run the agricultural side of things and maintain order and
discipline
amongst the slaves. Inside the house, when his father was in England, his young lordship was the sole male presence, Shaw having his own residence by the gate of the plantation.

“He must have been a terrifying companion for such a
tenderhearted
boy,” said Elspeth.

“Not at all. He worked hard, kept his distance, and was always respectful.”

Whenever it was a necessity or when his father felt it would help with his apprenticeship in business, young Albert was taken into the city. “I sat through meetings, luncheons, political arguments in drawing rooms, and repellent discussions in the Nautical Club and the Assembly Club.”

In the evenings he was introduced to life as it was enjoyed then at the London Naval Hotel. But Coak hesitated to recount to Elspeth this part of his life’s history. He broke off from the story three nights before leaving for business and did not invite her back to his room until a week after his return, a full two months later. Then he explained that the London Naval was in fact a bordello. A whorehouse, run by one Mary Bella Lemon, the free coloured daughter of a Scottish engineer and a slave girl. Mary Bella and her nineteen girls became the nearest things to friends young Albert Coak ever had.

The speciality of the London Naval was the games and scenarios Mary Bella Lemon contrived. She dressed her harlots in the
costumes
of pirates, harems of the East Indies if their colour was right, African deities, Inca Queens and English governesses. They were taught songs and cameo sketches to perform, in accordance with their disguise, to whet the appetite, and open further the wallets of their wealthy clients. It was at Madame Lemon’s side, and with the Empress Catherine, Jacoba and Salammbo, that Albert found his love of theatre.

“Of course I soon knew their real names, but they preferred their
nomes de guerre
. Empress Catherine. Salammbo. Anne Bonny. Lady Obeah. La Gaucha. I miss them all.”

Elspeth saw in him the stripling lad he must have been. The older man’s eyes still retained a shadow of shyness, of fear. Those same eyes in the shivering young frame of an obedient, polite, timid lad would account for the girls permitting him into their rest rooms and dressing chambers. There, he told her, they prepared for their clients, singing songs from Ireland and Guinea and from the backstreets of Bridgetown, often conflating them all into the same chorus. His eyes, as they stared up at the ceiling, glittered in the candlelight as they moistened while he told her how those good women had tried to spare him the sight of his father – inebriated
and in the act of fornication – by taking the boy-child away and entertaining him in their quarters.

“They played games with me. A thing my mother never did. Pass the parcel which they intrigued to always finish in my hands, with a sweet wrapped up inside, or a note promising a kiss.”

They also introduced him to rum and to the opium pipe, and further promises: to acquaint him with the art of love when he was ready.

During the months when his father was in England, the lad had one of the plantation men drive him into town so that he could be with his new-found friends. Elspeth felt it indecorous to ask if indeed he himself became an initiate of Mary Bella’s
voluptuaries
, but Coak broached the matter himself. “My father’s drunken misuse of these lovely and affectionate creatures was detestable. I wanted to make up for him, restore honour to our family name. And anyway, they were my friends. I was quite satisfied by simply being in their company.”

A pleasure – Elspeth found out only after another lengthy absence of the narrator – he continued for many years, until he was no longer a boy, but a young man with business influence in the town, and a stake in the London Naval itself. He swore he still never became one of the women’s clients. He continued to take pleasure in listening to them sing and talk, watching them dress and undress and dress again.

Now Elspeth understood: her benefactor, this man who kept his distance, cowered in corners while she walked naked around him, had never been ready for initiation. She stroked his hand while he spoke, like a mother consoling a sad son.

“Did it survive the storm – this palace of pleasures?”

“Gone long before. Other, rather more repugnant institutions took its place. No doubt they thrive in the present conditions.”

“So you lost your friends?”

“Catherine died. Jacoba ran away and Anne left. Salammbo took seriously ill. Mary Bella grew old. The newer girls who replaced them complained about my presence. So too did a few paying
clients
, including that buffoon Lisle, who was as bad as my father in his conduct with those defenceless girls.”

Elspeth imagined these strutting gentlemen, glowering at Albert, too old now to be a favourite nephew, sitting among a group of semi-naked women, drinking tea while they took off their French maids’ stockings or applied Egyptian kohl to their eyes, affixed
tassels
and veils and straps. She felt a pride in her work as a performer and reader to this abused, lonely man and felt more grateful than ever to him for having chosen her. And she had something to offer in return – the reincarnation of those exotic girls at the London Naval Hotel.

Elspeth and Albert – as he wished her to call him now –
maintained
separate bedrooms, although both doors, each assured the other, were always open. Regularly, he would come to her, and she would dress in costumes inherited from Mary Bella Lemon’s girls and recite some lines of verse. Once or twice he fell asleep on her bed, but would wake in the middle of the night and return to his own room.

By day, he worked hard, then at night spoke to her of the
investigations
he had been undertaking in Cuba and the American States and his vision of himself as a pioneer of cane cultivation and sugar processing in his own little corner of the world. He had already engaged engineers in Scotland and Holland to draw up plans for a manufactory which could refine sugar at Northpoint. The problem, as ever, was labour. A larger and more efficient plantation, processing and refining its own matacuisse, needed a stable workforce. Since last year’s Emancipation Act he could depend on no cutter, carter, burner, or even housemaid, staying with him.

“I believe I have the answer to my problem, and therefore to yours too, Elspeth. An entirely new workforce, brought in
especially
for our needs. God willing, we will have you on the stage again soon.”

On Shaw’s advice he had been making enquiries via associates in Germany, England and the Low Countries for dependable and loyal workers, if not indentured at least employed for a period of five years – long enough to get his project going, though perhaps not enough to see it through. “But I have hopes that decent
working
folk from less favoured lands in Europe will put roots down here and stay loyal.”

Captain Shaw at these discussions was predisposed to North Britons. An entire and intact group of labourers – men and women, preferably already married – to populate the estate. It was Elspeth who pointed out, delicately and subtly, assuming that Shaw would disapprove of women involving themselves in commerce and
agriculture
, that the most pressing difficulty they were experiencing was keeping the menfolk they already had in their employ. A number of white men, experienced and apprenticed in their various crafts, had so far shown loyalty to the plantation, or, at the very least, had failed to find better employment elsewhere.

And so it was that Elspeth Baillie suggested that they import women only. Then set about matching them to the best of the white cane-cutters and labourers the estate could engage.

The Captain made fun of her proposition but Elspeth coolly argued her strategy, speculating that a plantation with a heavenly host of young, fresh, untainted white women must surely become a magnet, a Valhalla for strong, equally young, ambitious men. Some days after those first discussions, Shaw himself returned to the matter. The idea had obviously taken hold.

“I was merely following your line of thought, Captain,” Elspeth persisted. “There are a number of men, we could both list them by name” – although in truth she could not – “who have proved their worth and their allegiance. I imagine any offspring of theirs with decent hard-working ladies would be an investment.”

“Next you’ll suggest that we bring members of your own family.”

“One actress amongst us, I am sure you’ll agree, is plenty.”

A month later Lord Coak sailed to England, with the express objective of finding a group of women willing to emigrate to Barbados. The two men spoke of the mission as though it were of their own devising. Elspeth smiled and recited to herself: “They’ll take suggestion as a cat laps milk.”

Coak wrote two weeks later, detailing a conversation he had had with a cotton merchant in London who had only recently relocated groups of male labourers to the town of Paisley, but was unable at present to accommodate any of their womenfolk. His carding halls were already full of spinners and pieceners and apprentices. The men were currently building vast machine-rooms but it would be
a full decade before the industrialist would be ready to staff them. This owner was a man of humanitarian principles who had no wish to see another generation of women being made to adapt from rural to urban existence. A healthy outdoors life on a Colonial
plantation
would resolve the problems of the two merchants and the underemployed women at one stroke. Another month later, Coak wrote again, this time from Greenock, urging Shaw and Elspeth to make ready lodgings, rooms and chattel-houses for a group of some twenty-four women.

The coincidence of Greenock surely meant that the Fates were turning again in Elspeth favour, and she enthusiastically set about preparing for the arrival of the women. She and the factor had six months’ grace to put everything in order. Working harmoniously and energetically together, they oversaw the refurbishment of
disused
chattel-houses, allocated rooms and drew up lists of duties together, Elspeth tolerating without complaint the mulish ways of the uncouth Factor. Busy all day and exhausted at night, she put her longing to return to the stage, and her recent despair of ever doing so, to the back of her mind. Her interlude as a convalescent was coming to an end: a year, perhaps less, to welcome the lassies and see them settled, and once again she would take to the stages of the New World. The stabbing at her womb persisted, as though some furious embryo were punishing her for her failure to set it free. Her murky dreams too continued to haunt her. But she had grown accustomed to all of that, even welcoming the pain in her stomach as if a reminder of George and his child, both lost but never forgotten.