Redlegs (6 page)

Lord Coak, during the two days before his boat sailed for Cuba, called on her at her rooms, where they discussed theatre, Elspeth’s great future in the Indies, and her eventual triumph in the whole of the Americas. He told her that he spent only a couple of months of each year on the island, the rest of his time being spent in Europe inspecting sugar refineries, negotiating shipments, and visiting the great theatres of France, Italy, and Germany. For the foreseeable future – for reasons to do with the sugar business – he would be more often visiting Havana.

“As a result, my dear, I will not be here for your first performance. You will not be angry at me?”

No, she would not. Though it was Coak’s agency which had led her to this unexpected point in her life, his significance beyond financial support had already decreased. Nonie’s, George’s and her colleagues’ influence were now more important to her; the opinions of the Philbricks, Denholms and Bartlebys unwelcome, but more crucial now than Coak’s. “Think of me. It’s all I ask.”

“I do little else, my child.”

The Ocean View was a small hotel on the outskirts of town, run by an American couple from the city of New York. They had fashioned the establishment in classic New World style: simple wooden
furniture
within a plain, stern wooden structure perched on an outcrop of rock. Sitting on the view’s balcony was like being on the prow of a new-built ship. The Börgmanns had “set the place up”, they said, “for commercial opportunists, salesmen and speculators”. It seemed to Elspeth that it housed only gamblers and drinkers.

Of the latter, the Lyric’s players, when George Lisle was in town and spending, were the mainstay. The rooms above the balcony were used by the gamblers, Americans in the main who sat over endless hands of cards, their play interrupted occasionally by
shouting
, swearing or even out-and-out fisticuffs. The owners were never in the least dismayed by these outbursts. Mr. Börgmann could be seen on a morning calmly fixing broken furniture in the breeze of the hotel’s porch; Mrs. Börgmann inside sweeping up glass, coins and even blood, singing some old German song to herself. The
proprietors
never raised an eyebrow at the potions mixed by Virginie, Isabella and George on their premises.

“You’ve never had a Dalby’s Turbo! What kind of a tomb is this Scotland of yours?” Virginie handed Elspeth a muddy-coloured liquid. “Loathsome-looking, n’est ce pas? Believe me, there’s naught better in the whole world.”

Elspeth raised the cracked glass to her lips, the brew’s caustic smell almost causing her to sneeze, and what looked like skelfs of wood making her wonder if she were the butt of a practical joke.

“Course it should be mixed with sarsaparilla, but this dump of an island is as free of sarsaparilla as it is of any other civilised thing.”

“We make it with bark from the mauby tree,” said George. “Drink up, and you’ll see just how the eye can be deceived.”

The first sip was shocking, due to the sharpness of the mauby sap, but quickly turning fresh on the palate, perfectly invigorating for a warm evening. Two sips more and Elspeth agreed it was one of the finest things she had ever tasted.

“What else has it?”

Virginie, proud to be reckoned the best mixer of Dalby’s Turbo, listed the vital elements. “Tonight’s particular mix, ma’am, includes fine Italian gin imported by our illustrious Lord Coak, a phial of pure bush rum lovingly and illegally distilled by the Belle Estate
slave-gang
and procured by Derrick here, a dousing of Mrs. Börgmann’s own mauby, a little juice extracted from the cactus plant – and some few drops of the elixir of which the poet said, ‘The poet’s eye in his tipsy hour hath a magnifying power.’”

Elspeth had no idea who the poet in question was, or what the elixir was he was praising, but soon felt the promised effects in Virginie’s Dalby’s Turbo Calmative. The Caribbean breeze that wafted their balcony became gentler, cooler but still warm and
nurturing
, as if the dark velvet sky were exhaling perfumed breath. The tartness of the mauby electrified and enlivened her bones while relaxing her flesh and making her arms and legs buoyant, as though she were floating on the sea. The draught even seemed to improve her eyesight: as night closed softly around them, the features of Virginie and Isabella, Nonie and Christian, Mr. Denholm’s
understudy
Derrick, and George, all darkened and, in contrast, their eyes brightened. She felt surrounded by stars, gleaming gazes and
flashing
glances, white teeth sparkling between ruby, kissable lips.

“We are pilgrims of the soul, don’t you think George?” Isabella lounged over the balcony rail, black hair loose and trailing over her cheeks and neck. “We come from everywhere and, in our work, become everyone.”

“And thus no one in particular,” said Christian, his arm hung limply around Nonie’s shoulder.

“Precisely! Don’t Mohammedans believe that truth resides in nothingness?”

Elspeth had never heard such conversations before. Words skimmed freely like stones across water, and she watched them jump from Isabella to Derrick to George. It was a game she knew she could play: “I imagine,” she ventured, “in the case of Mrs. Bartleby, whoever she is supposed to become, becomes her. She’d turn Cordelia into the Wife of Bath.”

“Juliet the Procuress!”

“Jeanne d’Arc as played by La Celestina!”

It seemed whatever Elspeth said – whatever, as her mother would have said, “came up her hump” – was perfectly acceptable to these people. She felt knowledgeable; found she could pursue an
argument
, never thought of before, and end in unexpected places. If she could recall to mind only half a speech, or a fragment of a verse, miscalled an historical event or mistook one writer for another, no one cared. The words and thoughts themselves were enough, emancipated from the dull Scotch addiction to common sense and gravity. Only the style in which a thing was said was of any import. Language was all, if you were draped over a chair sipping on Dolby’s Turbo.

“It is the followers of the Buddha, I think, who follow the path to nothingness,” George gently informed the company. “Fools like Bartleby and Denholm are clay statues – on stage and off. Too rooted, heavy, nailed-down on their little plinths. For you – true artists – on nights like these you are the children of everythingness. Pure sensation. Your power is being of the world, not denying it.”

Elspeth was the first to laugh. She didn’t know why, only that George’s seriousness struck her as funny. The others fell silent for a moment, looking at her, but she couldn’t stop herself. At last Nonie joined in, then Derrick, and finally George, his laughter the most raucous, as he had been the cause of it.

“Thank the good Christ!” he cried, “for Elspeth Baillie, or I’d have carried on all night talking…”

“…Die Kacke!” cried Elspeth, easily imitating the
American-accented
German of Mr. Börgmann, and causing more laughter.

And yet Elspeth’s intention had not been to inhibit their talk. Whether it was truly clever and learned or not made no
difference
to her. The experience was new, and free, and open to her. She could heedlessly follow the peculiarities of her mind and speak them out loud. If admiration or laughter followed, so much the better. In the lull that followed the laughing, she looked towards the dark horizon, at the other side of which she thought Scotland might lie. “At this very moment my sisters and cousins are singing ballads in some Lowland fair…”

“Not at this moment, quite. It’s afternoon in the mother country.”

“And a Mohammedan somewhere is praying on his mat…”

“While we fly on ours.”

“…and that Buddha fellow circles the earth.”

The mention of ballads inspired Nonie to sing an old Irish air, Christian humming and thumping his chair in accompaniment.

“I’m a roving young blade

I’m a piper by trade

And there’s many the tunes I can play.”

Virginie suggested a swim. They drank down the dreamy
concoction
in gulps and filed down wooden steps to a patch of sand in front of a treacle sea, Nonie and Christian singing in duet.

“So come fill up your glass

With brandy and wine

Whatever the cost, I will pay.”

George led the way, tearing off jacket and boots. Derrick stripped down to his breeches, Nonie to her shift. Elspeth kicked her shoes far across the sand and ran, frightened, having never swum in the sea at night before, when it seemed like a deep crevice from which you might never emerge.

“So be easy and free

when you’re drinking with me

I’m a man you don’t meet every day!”

They splashed and yelled and squeaked. Derrick baptised them each in turn, immersing them wholly in water that felt thick like cream. When it came Elspeth’s turn she sank deep under the warm blackness, the slow tide sticking her garments to her skin here,
billowing
them there. She could see up through the dark ocean, her friends undulating noiselessly above her.

“I baptise thee Elspeth, young Princess of the Lyric and Queen of the Song!” shouted Derrick as she splashed back up, catching her breath. They fought in the water together, hand-cupping the precious black liquid, hurling it from one to another. Nonie’s hair covering her face, George’s breeches contouring his broad thighs and – Elspeth was sure – swollen sex. Isabella, naked to the waist, turned around and around in a private trance that might have been Buddhist or Mohammedan, her brown breasts sailing. A distant moon turned their bodies to gold and the empty night sucked their shouts and laughter up into the sky.

On the Tuesday night, after a day of watching the rehearsal she had now seen countless times, the same group set off towards the Ocean View to continue Monday’s festivities. After only a single glass of Dalby’s, however, Mrs. Börgmann brought her a note from Lord Coak, informing her that he was leaving the next day and would very much like her company at the Overtons’ that evening.

He was waiting for her, not in the drawing room with Mr. and Mrs. Overton as she expected, but in the little anteroom next to her chamber in her servants’ quarters. “I hope you don’t mind me preventing your enjoyment of a companionable evening?”

There would be plenty more of those. Isabella’s draught had relaxed her, and the walk through Garrison Savannah invigorated her. “It would be an ungracious girl who denied you a little time and company.”

“I should tell you, Elspeth, that when I leave tomorrow, I will be gone for some time. Three months at least, perhaps more.”

Elspeth responded with what she hoped was an acceptable mix of sorrow and consternation, only a little of both she actually felt. She had made friends here now, had gained confidence that she could make her own way, and would soon enough succeed well at the Lyric, even without Coak’s presence. Still, he was her mentor and protector, and the prospect of losing him for so long a period made her feel a little vulnerable.

“I have spoken to Philbrick, and we have agreed that you should make your debut in two weeks’ time.”

“Two weeks! In what part?”

“We agreed that your first venture ought to be an interval
performance
, while the best role for you is being found. A short piece – perhaps a song, or a recitation. I think your Lady of the Lake would go down rather well.”

Elspeth was delighted with the notion. She needn’t learn any new lines, would have the stage to herself, and was sure a West Indian audience would be most affected by that ballad. Bring off a startling performance, excite a standing ovation, and her next appearance would surely be in a leading part. Without waiting to be
asked – if he had any intention of doing so – she immediately began to rehearse for him.

“Huntsman, rest; thy chase is done,

Think not of the rising sun.”

Isabella’s tincture had chosen the verse for her. She felt suffused with a dreamy calm, but with no hint of sleepiness. She spoke the lines slower than usual, until that feeling she had had on stepping down from the boat onto her magical isle returned: either she was moving slower through the world, or the world had slowed around her. She turned her arms as if they were still in last night’s black water, her body and head gliding, Scott’s words floating on the air.