Читать книгу Joseph Knight - James Robertson - Страница 12

A dozen miles north and west of Savanna-la-Mar, the main town and port of Westmoreland, the westernmost parish of Jamaica, the soil-rich plain of the Cabarita river gave way to the lower slopes of the mountains. Here, a rough road curled up into the hills, and the landscape took on a wilder aspect than that of the sugar-growing flat land that stretched down to the sea. Wilder, and yet somehow comfortingly familiar. Up in the hills the heat was less intense, less humid. If you discounted the size and abundance of the vegetation, you could almost believe yourself to be in a Scottish glen.

This was what John Wedderburn had thought when he had first inspected the area with a view to buying property, two or three years after his arrival in Jamaica. A further ten years had passed, and the place was now his home. The refuge-like feel of it had led him to name it Glen Isla.

It had been a time of constant, grinding, back-breaking labour. The Wedderburns had become rich. These two facts were connected, indirectly. The labour had been overseen by them, but actually carried out by slaves. Not that they had been idle: they had worked, first as doctors, then as planters, as hard as any other white gentlemen in Jamaica, but they had also had a large helping of luck – of the kind that really involves no luck at all, but only patience till somebody dies. In 1751, John had come into a substantial inheritance left by a great-uncle in Perthshire, and this they had used to purchase two parcels of land. The first, Bluecastle, was down near the coast, a few miles west of Savanna, an old-established cane plantation in need of new management. James had taken that on. The second was Glen Isla.

The house at Glen Isla was situated in an elevated position just over the crest of the escarpment that rose from the sugar plain. An area two hundred yards in width had been cleared of trees all around the house, so that it had unobstructed views of all the approaches – highly necessary in times of slave unrest. Where the rough parkland created by the tree-felling ended, the track to the house joined the public south – north road that twisted across the mountains into Hanover parish, eventually reaching Montego Bay twenty arduous miles away on the north coast.

A quarter mile in the other direction, there was a viewpoint on the escarpment from which one could look out over the plain as far as the sea, and take in the entire estate – the hardwood forest still thick on the hills, the cane fields, the Chocho river snaking through them to join the Cabarita, the mill and storehouses, and the slave huts laid out in rows close to the produce-growing fields.

It was Good Friday, early in April. James had come over the previous night, and after breakfast the two brothers rode out to the viewpoint to watch the last of the cane being cut and brought in for crushing. It had been an excellent crop, both at Glen Isla and at Bluecastle, where the work was all but done. Already the sun was blazing. The Wedderburns dismounted and let the horses loose to stand in the shade. Down below, the plantation looked like a toy, a model of a plantation. They could see one group of slaves harvesting the cane, another line coming behind them piling it on to ox-drawn carts. Further back, women were carrying loads of cane on their heads into the mill, from which came the faint, repetitive clank of machinery. Elsewhere a handful of children were herding cattle by the river, and a couple of men were stripping the branches off a fallen tree, preparing to clear it from the water. Since the sugar crop was almost in, other slaves had been diverted to the fields kept for growing provisions, and were making the ground ready for yams and cabbages. It was as picturesque and peaceful a scene as any planter could hope to look upon. There was something almost unreal about its perfection. Everywhere was a sense of industry, fertility, domesticity, prosperity. By the end of the week the sugar would be drying, the hogsheads waiting to be filled. Another season over.

These were the thoughts going through John Wedderburn’s mind when his brother said, ‘We have come a long way since London, have we not?’

‘I was just thinking that. Aye, we have. It’s not the road we expected to take, but …’

‘… but it’s been paved with gold, eh?’

‘Now, perhaps,’ John said. ‘Not at first. As you said, we have come a long way.’

‘Do you remember what it was like breaking in some of this land? And how little we got out of it in the first year?’

‘I do,’ John said. ‘You were angry with me. You said we’d moved too soon, should have stuck with ginger and indigo for another season or two.’

‘Aye, well, you were right. The sugar price shot up. You’re a better farmer than me, I don’t deny it. But I was always the better doctor.’

They spoke like middle-aged men, contentedly competitive with each other, looking back on decades, but John was not long turned thirty-one, James still only twenty-nine, and both still had plenty of ambitions left. Chief among these was to make enough money to go home; to see their mother and sisters again; to convert some of their wealth into Scottish land, while still leaving enough in Jamaica to go on multiplying. Their two younger brothers, Peter and Alexander, had joined them some years before, and might in due course be left to manage things on the plantations. Back in Scotland, their politics were fast becoming not only forgiven but positively romantic. Another few years would wash the slate quite clean, turn their Jacobite past into an asset. And they would still be young enough to wed, to seed their own Scots sons and daughters.

The desire to get home was what kept them going, squeezing as much out of the plantations and the slaves as possible without jeopardising the whole enterprise. It was this that differentiated them from planters like Underwood, whom they still saw from time to time, although they had long overtaken him in wealth and social prestige. All Underwood’s loud talk about knowing his Negroes and getting rich quick was a front for bumbling inefficiency and absence of resolve. He still sweated like a pig. He had never got used to Jamaica because he had never made up his mind to escape.

Some of his information, though, had been useful. He had been right, for example, about the Coromantees: they were the best slaves you could get, and the Wedderburns had made a point of buying only them. They had developed good connections with certain shipping companies and their captains, and had looked for preferential treatment at the markets, since they were prepared to pay the best prices.

What exactly a Coromantee was, however, was less certain. It had become clear to the Wedderburns very quickly that they were not dealing with a distinct tribe or race when they demanded Coromantees: they would buy a dozen and find four different languages spoken among them. John tried to discover more about the designation. The traders at Savanna were not sure, but thought it derived from an old settlement on the Gold Coast, Kromantine, the site of the first English slave station a century before. It was, in other words, little more than an export stamp.

‘What does it matter?’ James had said, when John told him what he had learned. ‘I don’t give a damn what they’re called, so long as nobody sells us a bad one.’

As for Underwood’s faith in the abilities of Scotch doctors, it was shared by many planters, which was both gratifying and useful, but largely misconceived. The brothers knew this because, with minimal training, they had both practised as Scotch doctors these last thirteen years, though only James still did much in that line. His claim that he was a better doctor was based on a bolder and more cold-blooded approach than John would ever be capable of. Davie Fyfe had given them a basic knowledge. The rest, as James had divined at sixteen, was a crude mix of guesswork, trial and error, and common sense.

Bleeding, blistering and purging: these were the basic cures most doctors relied on. Release the blood, scorch the skin, sluice out the bowels, and you might, just might, remove whatever the sickness was. The Wedderburns had learned the application of leeches and of the scalpel, the preparation of emetics, the uses of fire, steam, nitre, tartar, mercury; any number of potions, powders and pills patented in Europe or America by medical men whose names were attached to them but who could never be held accountable for their inefficacy. Mercury for the pox; opium to quell pain; ‘tapping’ to relieve dropsy; for dysentery – the bloody flux – bleeding, purging, puking, sweating, anything to cleanse the body of a condition which carried off more slaves than any other. Doctoring was a chancy business, a gamble. There was, of course, an inexhaustible supply of patients on whom to try out new methods, but this was itself part of the problem. Whenever they thought they were on top of some outbreak of illness, thousands more Africans arrived in the island after months at sea in filthy, disease-ridden holds, bringing new strains of tropical ailments with them.

The Wedderburns had often discussed slave health with other doctors and planters. There were soft fools like Underwood who thought they knew their slaves but paid more attention to the quacks who spouted medical jargon and charged exorbitant fees for the privilege of hearing it. There were hard fools who treated every African wound as self-inflicted, every sign of lethargy as malingering, every desperate fever as one more indicator of the degraded racial origins of their slaves. And then there were the calculating, thoughtful, observant ones – like the Wedderburns – who saw each dead or debilitated slave as a loss of fifty or sixty pounds sterling, each sound and working one as the same sum spread over ten, twenty or thirty years. One school of thought argued that it was good economy to extract the maximum labour for the least expense from your slaves, use them up and start again. Another school, to which the Wedderburns subscribed, believed the opposite: that it paid to keep your Negroes in reasonable health. Nobody, however, could be accused of getting things out of proportion. Whatever your thinking, it was not in the end about slave welfare. It was about money.

Now John and James Wedderburn were looking down from Glen Isla on the source of that money. ‘Half a life,’ said James. ‘Or not much less, anyway. That’s how long we’ve been here.’ Then he began to laugh.

‘What?’ John asked. ‘What’s so amusing?’

‘Just that I was thinking, our father was the fifth Baronet of Blackness, whereas you have become the first Baronet of Blackness.’

‘Very good, James.’

‘But think of it, John. In ’45, Papa took only you as his retinue. Were the opportunity to arise again, you could bring four dozen Coromantees to the Prince’s standard. That’s a whole Highland glen.’

‘And you could bring a company of your own black bairns.’ In the last year, James had delivered two of the girls that kept house at Bluecastle of babies which he freely admitted were his own. Boys, both thriving. ‘We may soon be able to count them in dozens also.’

‘Well, and what of it?’ James was still grinning at his brother, who was staring steadfastly ahead.

‘You know how little Papa would have approved of that … miscegenation of which you are so fond.’

‘I’m not sure I do. I never spoke to him about matters of the flesh, even though we had that time together in the prison.’ This was a dig at John, a reminder of his exclusion from those visits. ‘But in any event you are not him, and Abba and Jenny are not yours. Well, I suppose you have a part share in them. Not that you make any claim on it – not that I’d object if you did. For all practical purposes they’re mine to do with what I like.’

‘That’s evident. I hope you’ll not live to regret it.’

‘I’ll not. And nor will the lassies, if the bairns live.’ A challenge had entered James’s voice. ‘I’ve told you before, I’m going to set them free, mothers and bairns, if they reach ten years. I’ve told them too.’

‘It’ll be throwing money away.’

‘Perhaps. But I’ll not have my own blood chained for life.’

‘That’s very noble of you.’

‘Ach, John, you should learn to relax. You’re so cold. Are you never tempted yourself?’

‘I intend to marry a Scotswoman whenever I return home.’

‘As do I. A good, clean, virginal, white Scotswoman. Or maybe a rich widow. Marriage is a different matter altogether. But I could not tolerate this heat and this life without the black lassies to relieve my passion. It keeps the fever out of me.’

‘You really do think that, don’t you?’

‘Well, look at me. Fit and healthy. Mind you, so are you.’

‘We are different.’

‘Aye, hot and cold. I’m rum and you’re ice. Perhaps that’s just our different ways of surviving here. But I can’t be like you.’

‘Nor I like you. We’ve always been different. But we complement one another.’

‘We do here. We’ve had to. It was not always like that. I’d have been too hot for Scotland in ’45. If I’d been allowed to come with you, I’d probably have concluded my life at Culloden, or with Papa in London.’

‘Well, you should thank God you did not. Think what you’d have missed. And thank Him that those days are by with, James. I may never warm to a German king but I’ll live under one readily enough when I go home.’

‘You’d not come out for Charles, if he came again?’

‘No, and nor would you and well you know it. I’d not offer my sword to a Stewart now, even if there were one worthy of it. There’s too much to lose.’ They looked again at the wealth creation going on below. ‘Half a lifetime, James, as you say. We were boys then, both of us. Just the eighteen months between us, but I, you’ll mind, was sixteen and thus old enough to die for a cause. Not now. Now I am old enough not to die for a cause. There is only one cause – one’s own self and one’s family –’

‘Which you don’t yet have –’

‘You forget Mama and our sisters. One’s self, one’s family, and the prosperity of these. Nothing else matters.’

‘And the relief of passion,’ said James. ‘That matters to me a great deal.’

They remounted and rode downhill, threading in and out of the shade until the road levelled out, then struck off towards the mill. Wilson, the bookkeeper, was managing operations. There were other white overseers in the fields, but the three of them were the only white men in the mill – the distiller, boilerman, packers, coopers and other skilled workers were all black. The place was a clammy hive of activity. The noise and heat and sweet stench of the crushed cane were oppressive and heady. After a few minutes the Wedderburns left Wilson and his men to it, and rode back to the coolness of the house.

Within a fortnight, the rest of the cane was in, cut and crushed. From the mill’s boilers vast quantities of liquid had been run off to make low wines for the slaves and rum for the mother country; the remaining juice had been cooled, allowed to granulate, and packed into hogsheads. The fields lay slashed and brown, ready to be planted for the next season. The field gangs were exhausted, the mill slaves hardly less so. Crop Over: a holiday for all of them. From their hut village down on the plain, the noise of their singing and drumming drifted up.

The Wedderburns were tolerant of it: the sounds, hesitating almost deferentially at the open windows, enhanced their own sense of superiority, of being proprietors. John imagined a big house in Scotland where the lowing of cattle beside a bright splashing burn might have the same effect. Such a house would be far more substantial and imposing than the wood, clay and brick edifice he had here, grand though this was in comparison with the accommodations of his white overseers, let alone the slaves’ huts. There would be a tree-lined avenue, perhaps, leading up to the porticoed entrance; stone columns and balconies instead of the wooden porch; enormous, roaring fireplaces in carpeted drawing room and oak-panelled dining room. Not these sweating uneven walls that were home to a multitude of scurrying beetles, cockroaches and green lizards. On evenings when he was by himself, John Wedderburn walked the rooms of that imagined house: sometimes he walked them alone; sometimes with a graceful, lily-white lady on his arm.

For Crop Over he had granted the slaves a few goats to slaughter, and made presents of some bolts of Lancashire coloured cotton for the women to turn into gaudy holiday clothes – a gesture, he was pleased to think, that far exceeded the annual suit of working clothes island law obliged him to provide each slave. Not that anyone ever checked – which made his provision still nobler. Who was going to check? His neighbours? The magistrates from Savanna? And who, more to the point, was going to complain?

He had worked out a few years ago that if he could keep one in every three acres of the estate under cane, and from them produce around a ton of sugar for each slave, at current prices he would achieve a very acceptable profit. Another third of the land he devoted to animal grazing and provision-growing for the house and workforce, and the final portion – mostly on the hills – was woodland, from which he was gradually extracting some excellent timber. This year, by a combination of working the blacks hard and storm-free weather, the sugar crop had been excellent. Although his calculations were not complete, he estimated it at nearly one and a half tons per slave. Furthermore, Britain and France were at war, struggling for territorial control of North America and economic mastery of India, and occasionally attacking some of each other’s smaller Caribbean islands. The war had driven the London sugar price up to thirty-five shillings a hundredweight. He had every reason to feel thankful to Providence, and therefore generous to his workforce.

James was over from Bluecastle for an extended dinner. Their younger brothers Peter and Alexander were also there. Peter was twenty-four, Sandy a year younger. They divided their time between the two estates, depending on where they were most needed. Neither of them had responded well to the climate when they first arrived, but Peter had gradually acquired some strength, and his natural enthusiasm had helped him overcome bouts of illness. He was not particularly clever or imaginative, but went along with whatever plans John and James proposed. John thought that in many ways these were the best characteristics for surviving in the West Indies.

Sandy was a different case. He had been sick as a dog on the passage out, and swore he would never get in a boat again. Six years on, he was still weak and liable to come down with fever at any time. John had considered sending him back home but the thought of the journey appalled Sandy so much that he was stirred to try to keep up with Peter. The strain and anxiety never really left his face, however, and it did not take much to throw him into a depression. James, though he indulged Sandy when he was trying to be manful, was also less patient than John when he was not, and as a result Sandy spent as much time as he could at Glen Isla, where fewer demands were made of him.

George Kinloch, now a successful planter in his own right, was expected for dinner. Davie Fyfe, the thriving doctor, also now in the west, had come in the company of Charles Hodge, a Savanna merchant who had supplied most of the furnishings for the house. In the absence of a wife John Wedderburn had depended on Mr Hodge to fit him out from the shipments that came in from London and Boston. Hodge, he understood, depended in turn on Mrs Hodge’s taste, and judging by the sumptuous decor of their own town house on Great George Street she knew what she liked. But she was also sensible: she realised that an unmarried planter was looking for comfort, not necessarily extravagance; for practicality, but then again not austerity; that such a man was not over concerned with fashion, but equally did not wish his friends to think him a primitive. So she had taught her husband how to navigate these tricky waters, cultivate the confidence of the planters, encourage them to spend wisely yet often, and thus bring the Hodges’ own money-making vessel safely into port.

The only slaves at Glen Isla not yet celebrating Crop Over were the domestics: the cooks, maids, butler and footman required to prepare, serve and remove the long parade of dishes their master and his guests would work their way through over the duration of a three-hour dinner. But as their daily tasks were much lighter than those of the field and mill workers, they could hardly expect to be released so readily. There were, in any case, not that many of them. Three maids, Mary, Peach and Bess, doubled up as kitchen hands helping Naomi the cook. Two men, Jacob and Julius, acted as butler and footman, but of this pair it was not quite certain where the duties of one ended and of the other began.

Unlike some of the really fabulously wealthy planters, for whom such details were a reflection of their prestige, John Wedderburn did not care much about this casual attitude to job demarcation. It did not seem important in a place that, even though he had spent his entire adult life there, he still regarded as only a temporary home. When he went back to Scotland it would be different. He would want to do things right there: in Scotland, doing things right would matter. And with this in mind he intended, some day soon, to begin to train up a slave to take home with him as his personal servant. Not Jacob or Julius: they were too set in their ways. Someone younger, more pliant, who could look after his clothes and toilet, be a faithful companion, a memento of his Jamaican days to be admired by neighbours, friends and guests.

By and large, the domestic work at Glen Isla did get done, for all six domestics were aware that they could be relegated to field labour in an instant. They were also kept on their toes by the tongue-lashings and occasional blows of John Wedderburn’s housekeeper, Phoebe.

He could hardly think of Phoebe without prefixing her name, as James jokingly once had, with the word ‘formidable’. She was a creole who had come with the estate at Bluecastle, but James had quickly taken a dislike to her exacting sense of what was proper, and packed her off to work for his brother. Tall and thin, her face pitted with the marks of childhood smallpox, she was no beauty; but she had a head for economy and a nose for discovering theft or laziness, and though Jacob and Julius drove her to distraction at times, she managed them and the others well.

Between her and John Wedderburn there was little affection, certainly no intimacy, only a mutual respect for each other’s cool style. The other slaves feared her, and she despised them: she had cut herself off from them, and did not join in their social life. She had learnt to read, and pored endlessly over an old Bible her master had given her, fancying herself a Christian, although she had never asked for instruction in the faith. She had a room to herself in the house, and probably expected to be given her freedom one day. John expected that one day he would probably give it to her. But if or when that day came, he knew she would not leap for joy, pack her bag and turn her back on the plantation. Where could she go? She would go on running the house, as though she had been free to leave all along but had chosen not to.

The white men lounged in the porch for an hour, drinking Madeira to work up an appetite. Hodge, the only one of them tolerating a wig in the afternoon heat, had brought some books for John Wedderburn: two for him to borrow – Observations in Husbandry by Edward Lisle, and The Gardener’s Dictionary edited by Philip Miller – and one that he had ordered to buy, the shorter, octavo edition of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary, which, though not five years old, was already famous. The work was passed around, definitions read out and admired or disputed. Mr Hodge observed that it was a book all the more remarkable because its author, so he had it on good authority, was a slovenly brute who went for weeks without changing his shirt and was given to physical violence against any who offended him.

George Kinloch arrived with some even more interesting literature: two rampant Parisian novelles – seized from a French ship captured sailing from San Domingo to Florida – which, from their ragged state, seemed already to have been read by a good proportion of both the French and British plantocracy. An etching on the title page of one, of a semi-naked courtesan spread over some cushions, looking invitingly over her shoulder and pointing her voluptuous derrière in the reader’s direction, showed what to expect; the other’s title page had been torn out. Peter gleefully seized the one with the picture; Sandy, although his French was rudimentary, made a show of licking his lips over the text of the other.

James smiled at them smugly: ‘Those that can, do. Those that canna, read.’

‘Or they read and then do, wi a swollen imagination,’ Kinloch said.

They sat down to eat at two. The marathon began with stewed snook and ketchup sauce. There was a dish of boiled crabs, a tureen full of mangrove oysters, the juices to be soaked up with cassava bread, and all to be chased with great pitchers of porter. Then came boiled salt beef with rice, spinach-like callaloo, green peas and yams; four varieties of bird – snipe, coot, teal and squab – shot by the Wedderburns and roasted en masse; a plum pudding; three kinds of cheese; plantains, pawpaws, oranges, pineapple, watermelon in honey, chocolate sauce. There was some excellent claret, also taken from the French vessel, which Mr Hodge had bought at the knockdown price of five pounds the hogshead and which he was bottling and selling to the Savanna taverns at five pounds a dozen; but he had generously supplied the present party with three dozen at cost. And John produced a very acceptable punch made up of rum, Madeira, claret and wild cinnamon.

The courses merged into one another and by four o’clock the table was piled with half-empty plates and the debris of demolished wildfowl, fruit skins, stones and unfinished pudding. The maids removed what they thought was done with, and were bellowed at if they lifted a glass or a dish too soon. Eventually, having first ensured that there was plenty of drink still available, John dismissed them.

‘There’s one bonnie and two passable there, John,’ Peter said. ‘Peach is a peach. I suppose you’ll have sent her to wait for you in your bed.’

‘You know I have not,’ John said. ‘I told them they could go down to the dancing, and redd up in the morning.’

‘I can’t believe you keep her only for decoration.’

‘I don’t. I keep her to work, nothing more.’ There was irritation in John’s voice. He knew that Peter was needling him, and that James was enjoying seeing him look uncomfortable.

‘If we were at Bluecastle,’ Peter insisted, ‘James would have packed them off to bed the minute they’d finished waiting table.’

‘You had better take your dinner there, then, if I’m failing you as a host.’

‘If we were at Bluecastle,’ James said, ‘we might have fucked them on the table. But we must respect our elder brother’s sense of decorum, Peter.’

George Kinloch roared with laughter. ‘I’m wi James on this matter, John, but of course I bow to your wishes. It’s not as if we canna restrain oorsels once in a while.’

Mr Hodge coughed and squirmed in his seat. He was looking pale and sweaty. ‘I keep only the ugliest female negers about the house,’ he said. ‘I’m not like you fellows, I can’t afford to yield to temptation. Mrs Hodge wouldn’t stand for it.’

‘Well, sir,’ said Kinloch, ‘you are in the happy state of not requiring to be tempted. For a fellow without matrimonial ties in this climate, it’s a necessity. It’s simply unreasonable to expect him to behave himsel when he’s surrounded by half-clothed sable bitches like thae.’

‘Brother John behaves,’ Alexander said quietly, as if he were not quite sure whether he wanted to be part of the discussion. John looked at him sharply. Sandy was performing in his usual manner, trailing along in the wake of others.

‘Oh, why’s that?’ Kinloch demanded.

‘B-because he has the dignity of the family name to uphold.’

‘Do you not indulge yourself at all, sir?’ Hodge asked. ‘I’m certain, if it were I –’

‘No, I do not,’ John interrupted him, giving Sandy a thin smile. He was well used to this from his brothers, but he had no wish to explain himself to Hodge. James and Peter in particular, and Sandy increasingly, could not understand his abstinence. All the planters did it – took the best-looking slave women for themselves: there was no shame and little discretion about it, as the clusters of mulatto bairns running around every plantation proved. You took them willing or not, gently or by force, and that was all there was to it. But John had no interest in coupling with slaves he might be whipping the next day. In fact, the thought revolted him. How, though, did you explain this to your three brothers, who were sometimes to be heard comparing notes on the performance of a girl they had each had at different times?

It was Davie Fyfe, the doctor, who came to his rescue: ‘Frankly, I am sick of treating half the population in this island for the clap. There’s nothing like drawing a discharge of pus from another man’s member to encourage you to keep to the straight and narrow.’ He looked round the table, but was careful that his gaze did not linger on any one face. A few seconds’ silence proved too much for Sandy, though.

‘Who else here has been syringed by Davie?’ he said. It came out almost as a shout. John shook his head in exasperation.

‘Oh, Sandy!’ James said. ‘That’s the last time I congress with any of your past bedfellows.’

‘It’s no secret, is it?’ Sandy said. ‘We all get the clap sooner or later.’

‘Not I,’ John said.

‘The later ye are, the mair chance,’ Kinloch said.

‘It depends on who’s been there before you,’ James said. ‘Eh, Sandy?’

‘That’s why I always like to get in first,’ Sandy said.

Again, John winced at his youngest brother’s forced bravado. He worried for him – that in his efforts to keep up with the pace set by James and Peter, he would burn himself out.

‘I hear Mr Collins flogged a girl almost to death for clapping him,’ said Peter. ‘But who’s to say she did not catch it from him, if Davie’s not pulling our legs. That would seem a trifle unfair.’

‘I never fash mysel wi the fairness or otherwise of another man’s use o the whip,’ Kinloch said. ‘Ye never ken all the circumstances. Ye see some neger greeting in the bilboes, or knocked senseless by her master, and ye feel it’s cruel. Then ye discover she was stealing, or feigning illness, or she wouldna do as she was tellt, in bed or oot o it. Mr Collins doubtless had another grievance forby the clap.’

‘There’s some men I would not have at my table, though,’ said John, ‘on account of the manner they treat their slaves.’

‘Such as?’ Kinloch sounded touchy.

‘Well, Tom Irvine.’

‘Auld Tom?’ said Kinloch. ‘What’s Tom done to upset ye, man?’

‘He’s a rough and ready kind of man,’ said Hodge, ‘fierce at times I’m sure, but he doesn’t strike me as anything out of the ordinary.’ The merchant suddenly pulled off his wig and swiped at a mosquito, then laid the wig in his lap. His bald head gleamed with rivulets of sweat.

‘He degrades himself,’ said John. ‘He does not care if the blacks see him as a brute. In fact he revels in it.’

‘Then Mr Hodge’s observation is correct,’ said Davie Fyfe. ‘There’s plenty like him.’

‘Sometimes it’s necessary,’ said Kinloch.

‘No,’ said John, ‘it is necessary to be strict, to punish where punishment is due. Of course we can all agree on that. But Irvine – no, I’d not have him at my table.’ He made a rasping sound in his throat.

‘What on earth is it he’s done?’ Hodge asked.

‘We were down there three weeks ago,’ James explained. ‘His crop was all in – you know he hasn’t as much land, and what he has is poor, badly drained – and we thought we might hire some of his slaves to help finish ours. But they were in such a miserable, wasted condition we’d never have got the work out of them to make it worthwhile. We went to see him and he was wandering about in just his shirt. Said he’d lost his breeks and couldn’t be bothered to look for them. The place was stinking. One of his lassies had asked if she could go to tend her garden as there was nothing to be done in the house, so he shat in the hall and told her to clean that up.’

‘Maybe he is demented,’ said Kinloch. ‘The heat, Mr Hodge.’ But Mr Hodge had gone rather quiet, and did not seem to hear.

‘Is Mr Collins demented?’ asked Fyfe.

‘Collins? Of course not. Why?’

‘I heard if he catches a slave eating cane, he flogs him and has another slave shit in his mouth. Then he gags him for a few hours. Or he has one slave piss on the face of another. Is that the behaviour of a sane man?’

‘It may not be pleasant,’ said Kinloch, ‘but it’s no mad. If it was him doing the shitting and pissing, I grant that might suggest an unbalanced mind. But he instructs another neger to do it. He maintains his ain dignity.’

‘For God’s sake,’ John Wedderburn said. There was a round of more or less revolted laughter from the others, which he at last joined in. The story was neither new nor particularly shocking. They might not have stooped quite to good old Tom Irvine’s level, or Collins’s, or at least if they had they were not saying, but they had done other things – dripped hot wax into wounds opened by whipping, rubbed salt or hot peppers in them. Or, more to the point, they had not actually done these things: they had had others do them – white employees, other slaves – and watched. Or not watched. Like Collins, they had kept their distance, and thus their dignity.

‘In any case,’ Kinloch added, ‘eating shit is just a step frae eating dirt. I suppose some of them don’t mind it much.’

There was silence around the table as they all considered this. Dirt-eating was one of the great mysteries of the plantations. Some slaves had a craving for the ground, clay in particular. Nothing was more likely to send a white man into a fit of revulsion than the sight of an African grovelling in the field, stuffing his face with soil. Nothing brought down the lash so fiercely. It was like watching some wild beast sniffing and scraping at a midden. It seemed to mark the distinction between the races more clearly than anything.

‘We have a case of that just now,’ said John, passing round a new bottle of claret. ‘A boy called Plato. We’ve had to strap him to a board to keep him from it. Did you see him today, James?’

‘On my way up. I’ve put him in a hut away from the others. He has a sore breaking out on his face that I fear may be the start of the yaws. I’ve told that old witch Peggy to look after him – nothing kills her, and her herbs and potions will not hurt him – may even be of help. I looked in his mouth. He has worms there.’

‘From the dirt, nae doubt,’ said Kinloch.

‘I’m not so sure,’ James said. ‘Davie and I have been giving this some thought. I begin to wonder if it’s not the other way round – if the dirt does not come from the worms.’

Kinloch snorted. ‘That’s ridiculous!’

‘Well,’ said Fyfe, ‘why should the soil which gives us our good crops cause so many ailments among the slaves? A dirt-eater comes down with everything: the flux, dropsy, fatigue, stupidity –’

‘And there ye pit your finger on the nub,’ said Kinloch. ‘Idleness and idiocy. The only thing that will cure thae ills is a thrashing. A good sound Negro never came doun wi dirt-eating.’

‘But George,’ said James, ‘suppose for a moment that a good sound Negro did. What would be the cause of it? Suppose, for example, that he got the ground itch – you’ll agree any Negro can get that between his toes?’

‘We’d get it if we didna wear shoes. Ye’re no wanting to gie them all shoes, are ye?’

‘The ground itch is caused by hook worms,’ said James, ignoring the question. ‘You clean out the scabs, bathe the feet, and with time the itch is gone. But suppose the worms – some of them – get under the skin, and into the blood. Where do they go? They go through the blood to the lungs. Your good Negro coughs to clear his lungs. This brings the worms to his mouth. He takes a drink. The worms are carried into his gut. They feed there. The slave, consequently, is constantly hungry. He has a craving for whatever will fill his belly. The cane, or the ground it grows on. The worms grow inside him. They lay their eggs. The good Negro shits in the cane field. His shit is full of eggs. Need I go on?’

‘I see,’ said Kinloch. ‘Ye mean getting one slave to shit in another’s mouth may spread the worms?’

‘For God’s sake, man,’ said Fyfe, ‘forget about that. The ground is covered in hook worms. All we’re saying is, if Plato is infested with worms, maybe that’s the cause of his dirt-eating. Not the other way round.’

‘It’s the same with the yaws,’ James went on. ‘It never seems to come on its own. And you’ll grant that not even the most devious malingerer can feign it.’

‘He’d be a magician if he could,’ said John. ‘And mad.’ The raspberry-like sores and eruptions on face and body, the weeping tubercules and ulcers, the swellings and blisters on soles of feet and palms of hand, the obvious and intense pain caused by all this – nobody could, or would want to, fake the yaws.

‘It’s their foul habits,’ Kinloch said decisively, reaching for a third slice of cold plum pudding. ‘If they didna live such filthy lives we wouldna lose so many o them. Ye never see a white person wi the yaws.’

‘Perhaps that’s because our houses are bigger, airier,’ said Fyfe. ‘We die of all the other things they have, though. Yellow fever, the flux, dropsy. And then we have our own diseases: I never saw a Negro with the gout, or the dry belly-ache.’

‘Ye’re contradicting yoursels,’ said Kinloch. ‘First ye say that we’re like them, then that we’re no. I ken where I stand. I’m as like a neger as a – as a thoroughbred horse is like an Arab’s camel.’

‘I only wonder,’ said Fyfe, ‘if we exchanged places with them, if we’d exchange diseases too. As you said yourself, if we took off our shoes …’

Charles Hodge, who had been sitting, eyes closed, trying to contain a growing disagreement between his stomach and either the oysters or the topic under discussion, suddenly startled everyone with a drawling laugh. ‘Haw! Exchange places, sir? Haw! Take off our shoes! That’s the kind of metaphysical … perprosal you’d expect from a Scotchman. It’s a impossibility. Mr Kinloch is right. We are horses, not camels!’

He stood up, knocking his chair over, and swayed out of the room to be sick. The others watched him go, only vaguely interested in seeing if he made it outdoors. If he did not, it would just be one more mess for the maids to clear up in the morning.

‘All Davie is saying,’ said John, ‘is we should take more care of them. That’s Christian if nothing else.’

‘Oh man, dinna let them near Christ!’ Kinloch exploded. ‘Christ and kindness are troublemakers on a plantation. If ye gie them a sniff at Christ, they’ll say they’re saved and that makes them as good as ony white man. Treat them wi kindness and they’ll repay ye wi idleness, complaints, grievances. It’s but a step frae there to resentment and plotting.’

‘Kindness doesn’t enter into it,’ said James Wedderburn. ‘And I’m not interested in saving their souls either. I want as much work out of my slaves as you. I want as much money out of the crop. The best way to get that is healthy slaves. How much does a slave cost? A good one, a young, fit, Africa-born Coromantee?’

‘Fifty pound,’ said Kinloch.

‘Sixty,’ said James.

‘Ye’re being robbed.’

‘Well, give or leave the ten pounds, it’s a high price. I want that slave to last ten years at least. Perhaps twenty.’

‘Away!’

‘I have to season him for a year –’

‘Six months.’

‘– feed him and clothe him while he lives. I want him free of worms, yellow fever, the flux, poxes, consumption, the yaws – anything that stops him working. If I whip him every time he is ill, that is more time lost while he mends. Whip a slave for theft, or insolence, or running away, or refusing to work – of course. But let’s be sure we whip them for the right things. Oh, and I want him to make me a lot more slave bairns too. I don’t practise kindness, George. I practise economy.’

Except when it comes to your own slave bairns, John thought, but he said nothing.

‘I prefer common sense. If ye treat a black soft, ye soften yoursel. Then ye think ye’ll ease their labour a bit, gie them better hooses. The next thing ye’re beginning to doubt the haill institution.’

‘You’re over-harsh, George,’ said John. ‘We are not tyrants.’

‘Aye we are,’ said Kinloch. ‘We maist certainly are. We hae to be. It’s the only honest way. If ye look at the thing true, ye’ll agree.’

Later, long after Hodge had been put to bed with a bucket beside his head, and Kinloch and Fyfe, blazing drunk and barely able to stand, had somehow mounted their horses and trotted off homeward, the four Wedderburns played a few rather listless hands of rummy. They were all staying the night at Glen Isla. In the darkness the singing and drumming from the slave huts rose and faded on a light breeze.

James kept lifting his head, as if trying to catch something of the songs, almost as if he were envious of a better party. Peter pulled out his dirty book and, between turns, studied the pages for salacious passages, silently mouthing the French as he read. Alexander yawned constantly. Only John was concentrating much on the cards.

At last James flung down his hand. ‘Damn it, John, Peter was right. I could devour that Peach just now. Or any of them. Let’s go down for them.’

John shook his head. ‘That, I think, even George Kinloch would think unwise at this time of night.’

‘Well, can we not send for them?’

‘No one to send. Unless you want to ask the formidable Phoebe. No? You’ll just have to suffer alone then. Drink some more wine.’

Sandy stood up. ‘I’m for my bed,’ he said. He sidled out, clutching the other French book.

‘Don’t be up all night now,’ Peter called after him, but this drew no response.

‘He’s writing a novelle himself, I think,’ Peter told the others.

‘What?’ James frowned at him.

‘He’s writing something anyway. He’s been scribbling away in a book since Christmas. But he keeps it hidden and he denies it if you ask.’

‘Between that and his sketches, he’s becoming quite an artist,’ James said derisively.

‘Leave him alone,’ said John. ‘We’ve all little enough privacy here as it is. Let him be.’

James yawned. ‘I’m for my bed, too. By the way, Geordie Kinloch was right about one thing.’

‘What?’ John asked.

‘About us being tyrants. Benevolent we may be, but tyrants is what we are.’

‘James, you’re not surely feeling guilty?’

‘Not a bit of it. And it’s not madness either. It’s a natural state of affairs. It has to be. God’s providence. What other reason for such a distinction between the races? So we may as well make the best of it.’

‘But,’ John said, ‘it behooves us to behave like civilised men. A lass like Peach – whip her if she’s troublesome, but why mistreat her if she is a good girl? That is my view, and will continue to be.’

‘No shitting in the hall for you, then,’ James said. It was hard to tell if he was mocking John again. There was a trace of laughter in his voice, in the brightness of his eyes, but his mouth was unsmiling. He stood up, drank off the last of his wine.

‘By God, though, a night like this, does it not make you yearn for a wife?’

‘There’s Mrs Hodge in Savanna unoccupied,’ said Peter, glancing up. ‘You should have ridden off with the others.’

This did finally produce a laugh from James. ‘You are trespassing on the bounds of propriety, Peter. Be sensible. Why would I want all the trouble of seducing a white woman? In a country like this? And as for a wife, well, I was jesting. I don’t have the patience for that. Not yet, at least.’