Redlegs (4 page)

“You are most welcome, my dear,” said portly ladies. “Everything we have heard about you is true,” offered portlier gents, though few, it seemed, could remember her name, if they had ever been told it. Lord Coak himself was as much a focus of attention as she was.

“Northpoint isn’t in the habit of throwing parties,” Mrs. Overton’s sister whispered to her. Northpoint, Elspeth gathered, was the name of Coak’s sugar plantation, too far from town to be a locus for social gatherings. Everyone showed polite interest in the new arrival, however, promising to show her around, give her the benefit of their advice and, of course, attend her future performances.

“I know you will be very happy here, my dear.”

“So long as you manage a trip away once or twice a year. Mr. Thomson and I simply could not get by without returning to London every season.”

Elspeth nodded and smiled and curtsied. These society people would have interested her more – after all, she was now at the heart of a gathering she had only glimpsed before through windows – were it not for the servant girls. They were not the first darkies she had seen: Macumbo the Witch Doctor had been a regular at circuses and country fairs where the Baillie Family had performed on the same bill; Daurama the African Queen had regaled audiences with her stories of rain-dances and bloody wars, bewitching them with her dark eyes and bright robes. The girls who proffered trays of snacks and glasses of planter’s punch, therefore, struck Elspeth as dull in comparison. They wore ordinary servants’ clothes – not a tiger’s tooth or a leopard’s paw between them. The male servants at each of the doors of the grand house had no face-paint or scars on their faces. Yet still she was fascinated by them all. They seemed turned in on themselves, their eyes looking at the guests but
refusing
to see them; the girls’ spiky hair like hedgehogs, bristling.

There were two interruptions to the evening’s proceedings, both in the form of unexpected arrivals. The first was a tall and stately gentleman to whom everyone deferred in subtle ways: hunching their shoulders a little; greeting him and quickly moving back again. The second was quite the opposite, a roughly dressed man,
as tall as the first, but so thin that his lack of breadth nullified his height. Whiskered, and with that shadow of ingrained earth that those who labour in the elements can never wash away.

The first gentleman was introduced to her: Mr. Reginald Lisle. He smiled at her amiably enough, but said little. In his eyes,
however
, she saw the customary desire she inspired in certain men.

“Lisle’s about the richest man you and me’ll ever come across.” With a few rums taken, Constance – or Nonie, as her fellow actress insisted Elspeth call her – betrayed her Irish roots. The West Indian twang gave way every second word to relatively recent Dublin brogue. “Puts money into the Lyric, so he does.”

“He puts money into everything,” added Christian Bloom, the young man to whom she had first been introduced at the Careenage and, she now realised, was Nonie’s beau. “It’s an insurance policy: he wants a bit of everything, just in case.”

“And anyway, he only invests because of Georgie.”

“Georgie,” Christian explained “is his son.”

“Now wait till you meet him, Ellie,” laughed the Irish girl.

The look she received from the thin, whiskered man, had that hint of desire too. It was the yen that all older men hold for young women, but there was a childish shame there too, in the
recognition
of it: a kind of huffiness. She was not introduced to him, nor even discovered who he was. Plainly, he was not a guest, but had come to see Lord Coak on some matter of business, for he spoke to no one else. Nor did anyone mention him, though Elspeth felt that all were aware of him. Perhaps even frightened of him. She couldn’t see why – he was of inferior caste and, apart from his gauntness, unimposing. Yet, when he turned to leave, his business with Coak quickly concluded, the room seemed to lighten and gaiety return.

After the excitement of the day, Elspeth began to wilt. She was led, by Mrs. Overton and Lord Coak, to her chamber, and she roused again at the sight of a four-postered bed in a
magnificent
room. She walked around, touching the heavy drapes on the windows and bed, feeling the sturdy, bright wood. Coak and Mrs. Overton watched her wordlessly, as if in a swoon themselves.

As she drifted off to sleep on the largest and softest bed she had ever known, the faint echo of a billowing sea at her window, an
entrancing lullaby of cicadas and frogs from the gardens, Elspeth considered that she had not merely changed localities, but the very nature of life itself. In this heat, a person could not possibly stay the same. These new faces and accents and sounds and sensations belonged to a different realm. The old laws of her old world would not apply here. Nothing she had understood until now had any meaning. In this place, life could only unfold in unexpected and dreamlike ways.

The first week passed like hours, minutes. It seemed she skipped off the Alba and struck her new life into flame like a Lucifer match.

The Coak plantation was somewhere north of Bridgetown – a day’s uncomfortable journey, inconveniently far from town and the Lyric. The planter saw no reason for Elspeth even to visit such an incommodious place, much less reside there when she would be needed on a daily basis at the theatre. It was agreed that she stay at the Overtons’ for the time being, though not in the grand room they had given her on her first night. Instead, she was lodged at the back of the house in a suite of rooms designed, most likely, for a major-domo or a steward, or some other domestic assistant. Lord Coak agreed with Mr. and Mrs. Overton that a suite of rooms, cut off from the rest of the house and thus ensuring a degree of privacy would, in the long term, be more agreeable to Elspeth’s needs. But with the flurry of activities and duties that descended upon her from the first day in Bridgetown, Elspeth scarcely noticed her new quarters.

Nor did she see much of her patron, who had business to attend to at his Northpoint estate, returning to town only when he was directly needed. Before he left, however, he sent a brougham to the Overtons to collect her in order to show her round the Lyric Theatre. She passed through an elegant arch and rode alongside the Careenage – bustling, noisy and exhilarating, with men of many races and all classes shouting and working, and smells as pungent as they were unidentifiable. The buildings in this part of Bridgetown were grand and bright and weightless-looking in the sunny light. At the far end of a broad street sat the Lyric – as large a playhouse as Elspeth had ever seen. Its bright new stone, smooth and silvery, glinted like steel in the sun, a dark-windowed dome crowning the
whole. The entrance looked like those she had seen in drawings of London theatres: pillared and stately, the gateway to a better organised and more exciting world.

Coak was waiting for her on the street outside, accompanied by Mr. Philbrick. The owner welcomed her and rushed inside, like a child eager to show off his new toy. The company manager sniffed to her, when Coak was out of eashot. “Lord Albert is quite the expert on poetics but not, regrettably, an authority on architecture.”

“I like it,” replied Elspeth firmly.

“Good for you, dearie.”

Inside, stage and stalls and ceilings were painted in every colour imaginable – dark greens and indigo, scarlet, crimson and maroon – with depictions of King George riding in a carriage over the sea, Arthur and Excalibur, Henry V at Agincourt. The seats were leather-upholstered and even the curtain and backcloths were sumptuous and enchanting, embroidered in gold and silver thread with seahorses, stars, snowflakes, sugar crystals, and birds of
paradise
. Coak watched his new recruit run from stage to stalls, up onto the balcony, and back down through the wings into the dressing-rooms, her childishness a joy to witness.

Lord Coak left that first afternoon. At the stage door of the Lyric, where a gang of slaves en route to somewhere Elspeth could not imagine sat heavily eating fruit doled out by a gaffer, he doffed his hat at Elspeth, like he might to a stranger in the street. “I shall be back Friday to see how your initiation is going. Until then, my dear, all you need do is watch, listen, learn and enjoy.”

Elspeth attended her first performance at the Lyric with Mr. Philbrick and Mrs. Overton. Some nonsense cobbled together by Philbrick himself and Frederick Denholm – the Lyric’s leading man and budding writer – on the theme of colonial childhood. Nonie struggled in her part as a girl clearly a decade younger than herself. Elspeth genuinely marvelled at the production’s professionalism and the sophistication of its theatrical engineering. The play itself mattered less to her than the audience. The performance was not full, yet there must still have been nearly five hundred people in that hall. The rough trade in the stalls seemed aristocracy
compared
to the rabble who used to congregate in front of her in Falkirk
and Glasgow. Stevedores, shop attendants and even agricultural workers they may have been, but they didn’t bay and curse like the Scots, and were very smartly turned out. The balcony and box seats were occupied by the island’s bejewelled, well-fed, if slightly sleepy, upper crust. The play itself made hardly any impact on her, but the beauty of the new costumes, the sheer size of the cast, and the effect of modern stage-lighting – gas-pumped! – were a wonder to her. She was not so overawed, however, that she felt the need to keep her criticisms to herself in the lounge after the curtain came down.

“I wondered if there couldn’t a bit more movement about it. Everyone stood around a lot.”

Mrs. Bartleby – who topped the bill alongside Mr. Denholm – paled at the impudence. “I think you’ll find, my dear, our public prefer to mull over a drama’s significance undistracted by clumping and dashing around.”

Nonie rescued her from a dressing-down at the hands of Mrs. Bartleby, flanked and supported on either side by the Misters Denholm and Philbrick, and took her off to a room behind the prop store which the younger members of the cast had made their hideaway. Christian Bloom made coffee on a little open range, and laced it with rum. As the three of them sipped – Nonie and Christian still in costume as sixteen-year-olds but, in the
lamplight
, actually looking ten years older than their true selves – other members of the cast popped in and out, shook Elspeth’s hand, downed drams of straight rum, laughed and swore, and went out again. The names of these visitors were thrown at her – in the gloom, each caller indistinguishable from the next – snippets of advice were given her, and more spirit was added to her coffee. At the end of the night, Nonie took her back to her actress’s
lodgings
in a dark and noisy street somewhere behind the city’s main thoroughfares.

“Baxter’s Road. I don’t know the part of the world that you come from, Ellie, but I imagine you’ll feel more at home here than
anywhere
else.”
Nonie was right: the smell of cheap food and alcohol, the shadows and muffled noises, clandestine activities being played out up side
streets and beyond the doors of rowdie-houses took her back to Greenock, Glasgow and Leith. In a way, she was glad to be reminded that life everywhere has its givens and constants; yet at the same time she was disheartened that every part of her new world was not utterly different and contrary to the life she’d left behind. Nonie’s lodgings were akin to those Elspeth had suffered in countless towns from Dumfries to Dundee: a single room, filled with the sickly smell of tallow candle, an awkward landlady and boisterous neighbours. Sleep was made all the more difficult by the heat that lay on her like a heavy blanket. But the excitement of the day, a shared cup of rum with Nonie, and an hour or two’s whispered chattering soon saw both ladies unconscious for the night.

The next three days followed the pattern set down on the first. Rehearsals in the morning, lunch at the Lyric with Mr. Philbrick and the senior cast, a stroll round Bridgetown in the afternoon – the shiny new town and steady hot sun reviving her. She helped stagehands rearrange scenery before the next performance, sorted scripts with prompters, and assisted Nonie into her costume, before sitting through the show again.

Elspeth followed Philbrick, Denholm or Mrs. Bartleby around, like a five-year-old too uncomprehending to do much more. Inwardly, however, she made her judgements on the Lyric Company. Its
superintendence
– comprised of Philbrick, and Denholm and Bartleby as the senior players – disappointed her. Coak himself, who had shown such acumen and taste in Greenock, was much less involved in the venture than she had hoped. Philbrick, despite his puffed-up English, reminded her of her father: stale brandy ill-concealed by lavender water; yoked to a frustrated career that made him critical of all around him. Their artistic vision was limited and – in the opinion of a young lady who had never entered even an Edinburgh playhouse – provincial in the extreme. Their playbill for the coming season consisted of tired old renderings of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and indifferent plays scribed by Mr. Denholm. As actors, both he and Mrs. Bartleby struck Elspeth as less than compelling. Neither was of a particularly attractive bearing – Mr. Denholm was still just young enough to grace a stage, but slight and mousy and
with a girny, whimpering voice, while Mrs. Bartleby was far too old and bulky to be playing the parts she was given.

“Yuh mus’n fret over them. They’ll not be of much hindrance to you, Ellie,” Nonie assured her at the end of the second
performance
. Constance Veronica Sturges – the Primrose of Tyrone, as the play-bills described her – would not be a hindrance herself either. She had been performing around Bridgetown for nearly a decade and had hardly become a sensation. In the candlelight of the Lyric, Nonie could look quite glamorous and fierce, but
up-close
, in daylight, the pockmarks of some childhood illness defaced her. On stage, she feigned a low, breathy voice that sounded neither Irish nor Colonial, but which adequately maintained the
attention
of the audience. Off stage, she veered between her natural Hibernian tones – especially after a rum or two – and attempting to sound, inexplicably, like a darkie servant girl.

“Neither of ’em have a following in the town. Denholm come here when nobody in London waste their shillins on him any more. Mrs. Bartleby, she from Jamaica, and afore then, Virginia. She say she was in music-hall, but I heerd she was a five-nickel dancer in saloon bars. Don’ yuh pay either of ’em any mind.”

Laughing at the deficiencies of their senior actors, Elspeth and Nonie quickly became co-conspirators against Mr. Philbrick’s little regime. Bartleby and Philbrick, Nonie informed her, were secretly compromised – a circumstance which prejudiced the Manager’s casting decisions.

“You have to hand it to Mrs. Philbrick and poor old Edmund Bartleby,” said Christian. “Either they’re touchingly immune to all gossip, or relieved to have their spouses off their hands. They’re the only two people in all Barbados apparently unaware of what’s going on.”

Despite what it might mean for Elspeth’s career, the fact that the relationship between the general manager and the leading lady was widely known and casually commented upon – even though both parties were married and their spouses close by – amazed and delighted Elspeth. The West Indies seemed to her at once quaintly old-fashioned and remarkably freethinking. On the one hand, there was all the silly pomp and circumstance of the old order; social
gatherings on the island were like scenes from plays authored a hundred years ago, ridiculous in their etiquette. On the other hand she and her fellow thespians behaved like spirited children far from home, without parent or nanny, King or Government, to check them. There was a laxness about their morals – lambasted and deplored daily in the town’s Gazette – that agreed with Elspeth’s natural temperament.

In this nook of the newly emerging world, it seemed, a lowly player could live the risqué life she thought available only to
aristocratic
artists – the Lord Byrons and Mr. Shelleys of this world. The junior members of the cast joyfully imitated the style and panache of the great Romantics. Before her first week was out, Elspeth was learning how to dress, talk and act like a freethinking artisan. She was not so well read as she would have liked, but now, instead of spending days and nights walking over bogs and peat land, she could devote time to reading. Or better still, glean the gist of great texts from conversations with her colleagues.

The theatre itself, while grander than any house she had ever seen, let alone played in, still possessed something of the ambience of the penny gaff. The auditorium was of no great size, yet the
company
retained a group of equestrian actors and a menagerie of
animals
. In the least likely of dramas, a horse might be ridden down the narrow aisle to dance on stage. Trained dogs performed tricks between acts. Melodramas and pantomime stories had been
delivered
, in recent months, by actors standing on the backs of horses cantering around the stage. The playbill for the Lyric’s next
production
– Rob Roy McGregor – proudly announced the spectacle of “Bailie Nicol Jarvie on Horseback!”

By the fourth day – although still in a kind of Limbo, the strength and health she felt building inside her having no outlet in her role as novice – Elspeth began to distinguish the colleagues of her own generation one from the other. The young ladies of the company hailed from all parts of the world: Nonie, from Ireland; Virginie from France. Isabella claimed her dark beauty was Spanish, though it was rumoured that she was a quadroon of Venezuelan farmers’ blood mixed with African. Some had no memory of where they originated. Their conversation was shockingly direct and their ways
of speaking and turns of phrase comical and artless. The young men lacked the dullness and baseness than the rustics back home, but weren’t nearly so sickly and pernickety as the gentry whom Elspeth had encountered in Scotland. The sun had darkened the lads’ and lasses’ skin and brightened their eyes. The entire company, with all its attendants and spouses and aficionados, was tall, confident and deliciously disreputable. Elspeth could have kissed each and every one of them out of sheer gratitude for their existence – excepting, of course, Mr. Philbrick and Mrs. Bartleby.

Many people – even those born and bred in the West Indies – complained of the heat, but not Elspeth Baillie. The light fell on her skin like angels’ kisses, the sun wrapped its warmth around her like a passionate lover’s embrace. The climate entirely suited her constitution. She had never felt so healthy in all her life, and even the slight scrofulous wheeze that had pestered her since childhood vanished within days of disembarking from the Alba. Her hair grew faster and thicker, its colour in reality unchanged but, under the intense light of the Barbados sky, glowing with a vibrant chestnut sheen – a deep, dusty, cherry colour, like the cinnamon she saw in the slaves’ and freemen’s markets. She felt her neck growing longer, more slender. The damage of so many years of bending and
crooking
against driving rain and whistling winds on trudges between fairs and trysts over sodden heaths was quickly undone. For the first time in her life she could walk to her full height, broaden her
shoulders
, and strip away layers of shawls and coats and underskirts. She felt half her true weight and twice as quick and wondered if a sea breeze wouldn’t one day lift her off her feet.