Читать книгу Joseph Knight - James Robertson - Страница 6

Sir John Wedderburn, tall but somewhat stooped with age, stood at the windows of his library, enjoying – as he felt he should every morning he was given grace to do so – the view to the Carse of Gowrie and the Firth of Tay. Ballindean’s policies stretched out before him: the lawn in front of the house, the little loch, then the parkland dotted with black cattle, sun-haloed sheep and their impossibly white lambs. Thick ranks of sycamore, birch and pine enclosed the house and its immediate grounds. Beyond the trees, smoke rose from the lums of estate cottages and the village of Inchture and was immediately scattered by a breeze from the east.

Had he ventured outside, Sir John could have looked behind the house, to the north, where the woods thinned out and the land rose to the sheltering Braes of the Carse. But on this morning John Wedderburn was not going anywhere – not while that wind was blowing. The view from the library was, for the time being, all he required. There might have been more majestic landscapes in Scotland, but none that could have pleased him more.

He was seventy-three, thin and angular but with rounded shoulders and a nodding, lantern-jawed face that gave him the appearance of a disgruntled horse leaning over a dyke. Strands of grey hair swept back from his forehead and curled thinly behind his ears. His brow was tanned and his cheeks weathered and taut, as if he had lived most of his life outdoors, but his hands – slender-fingered and soft – belonged more in a room such as the library.

Sunlight shafted in through the window from a watery sky. A huge fire roared and cracked in the grate at one end of the room. There were two armchairs, one on either side of the fire, and a few feet further away – close enough to get the benefit, not so close as to hurt the wood – a heavy writing-table of finest Jamaican mahogany. Near the door a wag-at-the-wa, which had just clanged out ten o’clock, ticked heavily. But it was the rows of books that dominated the room.

Bookshelves ran along two-thirds of the length of the wall behind the table, and reached almost to the ceiling. The volumes were well bound, neatly arranged, and free of dust: biography, history, philosophy, verse, those often rather too delicate creations novelles … So many books, and so little inclination left to read them. Sir John thought this without turning from the window. He felt them massing behind his back, picked them off in his mind: The Works of Ossian, heroic and Highland, whatever Dr Johnson might have said of their authenticity; Edward Long’s History of Jamaica; Lord Monboddo’s six volumes on The Origin and Progress of Language (tedious, eccentric – Sir John had given up after half a volume); Smollett’s novels – he remembered heavy, sweltering West Indian Sundays much relieved by Peregrine Pickle and Roderick Random; the poetical works of the ploughman poet Burns and ‘the Scotch Milkmaid’, Janet Little – little doubt already which of those would last the pace; collections of sermons, treatises on agriculture, political economy, science … And two copies of Henry Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling, because the lassies liked it so much. Sir John had once tried this book and had thrown it down in disgust – grown men bursting into tears over nothing on every third page. ‘That is not the point, Papa,’ his daughter Maria had insisted, ‘you are too matter-of-fact!’ But that was the point. There wasn’t a hard bit of fact in the entire book.

The fact was, Sir John no longer read much himself, but he subscribed to many publications, and took the lists of the Edinburgh booksellers, mainly for the benefit of his wife Alicia and his daughters. They were all there in the room too, around the fireplace, a series of silhouettes done five or six years before: Alicia, fair and delicate at forty-three; Margaret (child of his first wife – after whom she was named – now nearly thirty and so long neglected by suitors that Sir John had almost given up worrying about it); Maria, Susan, Louisa and Anne (all in their teens). Great readers, every one of them, especially of novelles and poetry. Sir John was quietly pleased that his four sons – represented in various individual and group portraits on the opposite wall, and all but the youngest sent out into the world to work – showed little inclination for reading, and none at all for novelles.

The library’s most recent acquisition, delivered the previous week, was a collection of Border ballads in two volumes, compiled by Walter Scott, Sheriff Depute of Selkirkshire. How appropriate, Sir John had thought as he cut the pages, that so many thieves and ruffians should be rounded up by a sheriff. But there was nothing really wicked in the ballads – nothing that was not safely in the rusted, misty half-dream that was Scotland’s past, nothing dangerous to the minds of his daughters. Susan was the one most easily swayed by history, romance and poor taste. But then she was female and seventeen, it was to be expected. She would grow out of it. Books might have some bad in them, but there were, after all, worse things in the world.

The last fifteen years in France had demonstrated that, but Sir John had known it much longer – since, in fact, he was Susan’s age. The French had gone quite mad, and now the world was paying for the madness. Two men born of the Revolution strode across the Wedderburn imagination, the one threatening to become a monster, the other already monstrous. Napoleon Bonaparte was the first, a brilliant Corsican soldier, who had temporarily made peace with Britain at Amiens but whose ambitions clearly pointed to further and more devastating campaigns. But worse, far worse, was the second man, the black Bonaparte, Toussaint L’Ouverture, the barbarous savage who had turned the French island colony of San Domingo – once the sugar jewel, the sparkling diadem of the West Indies – into a ten-year bloodbath. Toussaint L’Ouverture: the name passed like a cloud over the ruffled, sparkling Tay, and Sir John shuddered.

From the Paris Jacobins this slave had learned the slogans liberté, egalité and fraternité, and had the outrageous idea of applying them to Negroes. He had massacred or expelled the French planters, devastated their plantations, defeated the armies of France, Spain and Britain – forty thousand dead British troops in three years! – and left San Domingo like a weeping scab in the middle of the Caribbean, barely a hundred miles from Jamaica, with Toussaint himself, drunk on power, emperor of the wreckage. Yet in Jamaica, it seemed, his exploits had made him a hero to the blacks. God help them all then, Sir John thought, white and black alike, if they should follow his example.

There was a tap at the door of the library and it opened just wide enough to admit a dark-suited, dark-jowled bullet of a man, whose lined face suggested that he was almost as old as Sir John himself – this despite a thick crop of hair so black that it looked suspiciously like a wig. But these days wigs, even among elderly men, were something of a rarity.

‘There’s a man Jamieson here frae Dundee, Sir John. He says he has business wi ye.’

Sir John frowned, did not turn. ‘What day is it, Aeneas?’

‘Thursday.’

‘Is it? Well, show him in, then.’ He remained at the window.

He had forgotten about Jamieson. These last few weeks his head had been full of other business. First, there had been correspondence with his brother James, whom he had appointed guardian to his children. Although James was only a year and a half younger, he was in better health – fatter, sleeker – and likely to last a few more winters, whereas Sir John had found this last one sorely trying. The cold had scored deep into his flesh, seized up his knee and finger joints, and had him longing for the Caribbean. The thought of more snow and ice was not just depressing, it made him fearful. James might have had his faults in the past, but he surely would not misuse his nephews and nieces.

Then there had been fine-tuning his will. His eldest surviving son, David, who lived in London and managed much of the family’s West Indian business from there, would inherit Ballindean, but, steady though David was, Sir John was not willing to let the future hang on the whim of one individual. It had taken too much trouble restoring the family to Perthshire, after the difficulties of more than half a century ago, to permit the work to be undone in a moment. So he had made an entail of all his property, establishing a complex chain of succession tying Ballindean to future generations of the family, and the family to Ballindean. And not just Ballindean, but also Sir John’s portions of the estates in Jamaica. David could enjoy his own, and after him so could his children, but neither he nor they would be at liberty to sell off the Wedderburn property: it would, barring financial disaster, stay in the family now and for ever. If Sir John wanted to be sure of one thing before he died, it was this: the Wedderburns were back in Scotland for good.

The matter Jamieson had come about had slipped his mind. No – it had been sitting in the dark of his mind, a locked kist in the attic. Perhaps Jamieson had brought the key to it from Dundee?

‘Good morning, Sir John.’

Still facing the window, Sir John tried to assess the man from his voice. It was not a deep voice – it almost squeaked. Jamieson had been recommended by the family lawyer – indeed, Mr Duncan had appointed him, and this would be the first time Sir John had clapped eyes on him. What was he? A kind of drudge, a solicitor’s devil, a sniffer in middens and other dank places, howking out missing persons and persons one might wish to know about but not be known by. A ferret. Yes, his voice was the squeaking, bitter voice of a ferret.

Sir John turned from the outside light. He was surprised by what he saw. Jamieson was a small, balding man in his forties, wearing ill-fitting black clothes that were so crumpled it was a fair wager he had slept in them. Then again, he had just travelled nine miles on horseback, and although the new turnpike between Dundee and Perth was a vast improvement on what had passed for a road before, this might have been cause enough for his dishevelment. He seemed rather portly and careworn, more like a mole than a ferret. Sir John noted that he was carrying nothing – no leather case, no sheaf of papers, no casket of evidence. This was not encouraging. But then, what had he expected him to bring?

‘Good morning, sir. Is it cold out?’

‘A wee thing chilly, Sir John. That east wind is aye blawin.’

‘Very well. There is the fire if you wish to warm yourself.’

Jamieson hotched awkwardly near the door. Sir John kept up his sour face, but inwardly he smiled. Perhaps the man thought it would be impertinent to come between a laird and his hearth just to warm one’s backside. Perhaps he suspected that the laird was toying with him. Well, he was entitled to his suspicions. It was his job.

When it became clear that Wedderburn was not going to speak, Jamieson coughed and filled the silence himself.

‘Aboot the, eh, maitter I was instructed tae inquire intae, Sir John. I received the commission at the end o January and I hae been workin awa diligently ever since. I hae sent oot numerous letters, checked parish records, questioned shipping agents, mill overseers, members o the criminal classes … I regret tae say that I am unable tae gie ye ony satisfactory report.’

‘Is that so? Why then are you here?’

‘It was intimated tae me that the maitter was of some … was tae be conducted wi the ootmaist discretion. I felt it only richt I should bring ye this disappointin news mysel.’

Wedderburn sucked in his cheeks till it seemed his whole face was about to collapse. ‘It is disappointing, sir. Can you report nothing at all?’

‘Extensive inquiry has been made, and no jist in Dundee. I had hoped for information frae the agent in Perth that first worked on the person’s behalf, a Mr Davidson …’

Wedderburn glowered. ‘Ah, yes, I mind that name.’

‘… but he has been very ill and unable tae see me. I hae been in Edinburgh, Kinross, Fife, Angus – but withoot ony success. In short, nae trace o the person has been uncovered.’

‘Let us not be shy, sir. His name is Knight. Joseph Knight.’

‘Aye, sir.’

‘He cannot simply have disappeared.’

‘Wi respect, Sir John, there’s ony number o things micht hae happened. He micht be deid.’

‘What makes you think that?’ Wedderburn said sharply.

‘I’m no sayin I dae. But it micht be possible. For aw that, he micht be in London. Or America. Africa even.’

‘I hardly think so.’ Now Wedderburn was beginning to suspect Jamieson of toying with him. ‘Mr Jamieson, I do not doubt that you cannot find the man, but no trace of him? Not a word? Nobody with a memory? A man like that surely does not just disappear.’

‘That’s whit he seems tae hae done, sir. Disappeared.’ Jamieson coughed. ‘And his wife wi him.’

‘You mean his wife as well?’

‘Aye, sir, of course. As we’ve no found either o them, we dinna ken if she’s yet wi him.’

Sir John thought of the wife. The Thomson woman. She would long since have lost any charms she once had. He had a sudden, startling image of her, a twisted, witch-like hag, clinging to the back of Joseph Knight like a curse. He gave his head a shake, moved towards the fire.’ ‘It’s odd. It is not as if he is inconspicuous.’

‘Which is why I say,’ Jamieson said, following. ‘were he yet in Dundee, I would hae discovered it. A black man in Dundee is a kenspeckle body. But as soon as ye reach tae Edinburgh, or the west, it’s a different proposition.’

‘He’s still a black man. He must stand out.’

‘There’s mair o them in Scotland than ye micht imagine. Maistly in Glasgow and roond aboot. Wi the trade tae the Indies, ye ken. It’s no like Bristol or Liverpool, sir, whaur I’m tellt they are very numerous, but there’s mair here than ye’d think.’

‘Is that so?’ Sir John was irritated by the suggestion that this man knew more about Negroes than he.

‘In the west, aye. There’s a line or twa I pit oot in that airt that I’ve no reeled in yet. No that I’m ower hopeful, but …’

Wedderburn tilted a furrowed brow at him: explain further what you mean.

Jamieson coughed again. ‘Ye’ll be aware o the present revolutionary spirit that’s rife amang certain trades, sir? Weavers and spinners and the like. There’s a secret society brewin up discontent, ye’ll maybe hae heard o it? The United Scotsmen, as they cry themsels.’

Wedderburn found himself getting annoyed. Jamieson seemed incapable of coming at a point directly. He always wheedled and sneaked his way up to it. ‘Why should they interest me? I am not a political man.’

‘Nor I, sir.’

‘But they interest you?’

‘It’s my work.’

‘You are a spy.’

Jamieson blinked, mole-like. ‘Weel …’

‘You are a spy. You turn men’s coats. You buy men and their secrets. Am I right?’

‘It’s why ye employed me,’ Jamieson said flatly.

‘Mr Duncan employed you. Never mind. Go on with your United Scotsmen.’

Jamieson paused, as if recollecting something he had memorised earlier. ‘In pursuin a certain line o inquiry intae the activities o this combination,’ he said, ‘on behalf o some gentlemen wi considerable interests in the linen manufactories in Dundee and Fife, I had occasion tae make contact wi some o the weavers o Paisley. There is a black man in that toun – no oor black man – a respectable and loyal subject – and as it appears there is a web o contacts no jist amang the weavers but amang the Negroes o the west, I thocht something micht come back by way o him. But there’s been naething thus far.’

‘This loyal Negro,’ Wedderburn said, stretching out the phrase as if to test if it would snap, ‘what is his name?’

‘Peter Burnet. A weaver.’

‘You met him?’

‘No. I wrote tae him.’

‘And you expect a reply?’

‘I dinna ken.’

Sir John snorted. ‘Well, well, if that is all, that is all. Knight may be furth of Scotland altogether, as you say.’

‘I could appoint agents in London, sir. Time would be a factor, but if ye were willin …’

Something in Wedderburn’s eyes brought Jamieson to a halt. There was a deep thought turning in there, an assessment. Then Wedderburn shook his head, as if ridding himself of the thought. Later, Jamieson would curse himself for not paying more attention, for not seeing it as a warning signal. He had seen the same head-shaking gesture earlier, when Knight’s wife had been mentioned. As if there were something in Wedderburn’s mind that he couldn’t get out.

Wedderburn said, ‘No. It’s not important.’

If it was not important, Jamieson thought, why had he been traipsing around the countryside for two months? Not that he was going to complain, since the fee was substantial, but in his experience even wealthy gentlemen – especially them – did not hire him for trivialities.

He ventured an opinion. ‘Tae reach further afield, sir, we could try a discreet advertisement in ane o the newspapers. “Information regarding the whereaboots of the following individual … a small reward offered” – that kind o thing. If he disna read the papers, somebody that kens him micht.’

‘Oh, he reads the papers, Mr Jamieson, be assured of that. He is a very thorough reader.’

‘Weel, then …’ Again, Jamieson saw that struggle in Wedderburn’s eyes. Hot, then cold. Anger? Guilt? Something old but still raw. And behind Wedderburn, above the fire, he saw something else: flanked by several smaller silhouettes, a large painting in which three men posed on a kind of wooden porch. Their clothes were old-fashioned – from forty or fifty years back, perhaps – and the painting was no masterpiece, but they were unmistakably Wedderburns. All three had Sir John’s high brow and long jaw. The porch was attached to a house, and was partly in shadow. Bright green, foreign-looking shrubs and an absurdly blue sky provided a crude contrast to the shade and to the unsmiling faces of the men. The scene must be Jamaica. One of the men – probably the one in the middle, Jamieson thought – had to be Sir John.

‘No, I do not wish it,’ Wedderburn said. Jamieson dragged his attention back to the old laird. ‘I believe you are right when you say he is no longer here. And in any case, the nature of these Negroes … Put such a notice in the press, there would be dozens of them thigging and sorning at my gates. No, we’ll not pursue that line.’

‘I only thocht, if it’s a maitter o compensation …’

Sir John drew himself up, squaring his shoulders against their stoop. ‘Compensation? What do you mean by that, sir?’

Jamieson thought of a dog with its birse up, but the image did not quite fit. It was more as if the raw thing in Wedderburn had suddenly manifested itself on his skin, like a disease. Jamieson took a couple of steps back towards the door. ‘Jist that … weel … for Joseph Knight. The case is auld enough noo … Time saftens sair herts. I presumed …’

‘Well, don’t!’ The word shot from Wedderburn’s mouth like a dog after a cat. Jamieson retreated further. ‘Your presumption is not what I hired you for – nor your couthy proverbs. Your task was to find Joseph Knight, nothing more. And you have failed. You presumed that I seek him out to pay him some money? To make amends of some kind? I pay him compensation? Oh, you have read me very wrong, sir!’

‘I see that, I see that,’ Jamieson said, though what he was most clearly seeing was his fee floating down the Tay. ‘No whit I meant at all, Sir John. I beg your pardon – oomph!’

A further detonation from Wedderburn was forestalled by this minor one from Jamieson, triggered by the opening of the library door, the handle of which had dunted him sharply in the small of the back. A tall, dark-haired girl in a white muslin dress entered.

‘Oh, I am sorry.’ It was not clear if she was addressing Jamieson, now rubbing his kidneys and screwing up his face, or her father.

‘What is it, Susan?’ Sir John said. ‘It is not yet noon.’

‘I forgot, Papa. I came for a book.’ She had her father’s serious, thin face, and an adolescent awkwardness of posture.

‘You will have to come back for it, then.’ Wedderburn turned to Jamieson. He made a sudden stab at joviality. ‘My daughter, sir, reads books as a sheep eats grass, incessantly, and as you have discovered she lets nobody stand in her way. I make it a rule that this room is mine, and mine alone, every morning, or I’d have no peace. But I don’t have it anyway. My dear, you must find something else to occupy you for an hour and a half. Should you not be at your task?’

‘I’ve finished my task, and now I’ve to read a book while Maister MacRoy helps Anne with hers. Could I not …?’

Sir John held up a finger. ‘We are discussing business matters. Your book will have to wait. Do some sums. Now – away with you!’ He half shouted this, half laughed it. Jamieson could see the intention: Wedderburn assumed that the lassie had overheard him roaring at Jamieson, and wanted her to think that that had been all light-hearted too. Sounding ever more conciliatory for her benefit, he moved over to the writing-table, saying, ‘I thank you for your efforts, Mr Jamieson. I imagine it’s tedious work. Off you go, miss.’

‘I thole it, sir, I thole it,’ Jamieson said, as the door closed behind Susan. He was content to play along with her father’s pretence. He had had no idea, when approached by the lawyer to carry out a search, that Wedderburn would still be so sore. Twenty-four years had passed since the case was decided: Jamieson had had two wives and eight children in that time, and his eldest three were all grown and flown from the nest. Although most folk had forgotten the case – Joseph Knight, a Negro of Africa v. John Wedderburn of Ballindean – obviously Wedderburn … But obviously what? Jamieson’s curiosity, which had been professional until this moment, suddenly became more personal.

Not that it was his concern if the old laird still nursed a grievance – if he did not, there would not, presumably, have been any work for Archibald Jamieson – but seeing it exposed in that way, then hastily concealed from the daughter … Jamieson was impressed, intrigued even. He looked again at the Jamaican painting. The men in it were young, in their twenties or thirties. If it was John Wedderburn in the middle, the other two must be his brothers. Jamieson wondered if Knight had already become a possession when the painting was done.

Wedderburn was now seated, setting out paper, ink and pen. ‘I think our business is concluded,’ he said, glancing up. ‘You’ll send your bill to Mr Duncan? He’ll expect a full account of your activities.’

This was it? The matter sealed? What was Wedderburn trying to do?

‘Aye, certainly, Sir John,’ Jamieson heard himself say. ‘Thank ye. It’s an honour tae hae been o service, sir. Tae a gentleman such as yoursel.’ He took a chance. ‘That, eh, painting. If I micht …’ He advanced towards it. ‘Is that yoursel in the middle, Sir John?’

Wedderburn glowered at him. ‘It is.’

‘It’s very fine,’ Jamieson said, peering closer. ‘A very fine likeness.’

Wedderburn half rose from his chair. ‘No it is not. It’s poorly executed. The artist … well, one had to settle for what one could get out there. Now –’ He gestured at the door, sat down again, began to write.

‘Of course.’ Jamieson, still contemplating the painting, stepped away from it. But he could not resist touching Wedderburn’s wound one more time.

‘Ye’ll be, I dout … ye’ll be ane o the great Wedderburns? Like Lord Loughborough, the Chancellor o England? Ye’ll be o his faimly, sir?’

Sir John Wedderburn stopped writing, looked at Jamieson as if at a worm. ‘No, sir. Lord Loughborough is of mine. Good day.’

Jamieson turned and hurried from the library.

In the hallway he paused to catch his breath, half disgusted at his own sycophancy, half pleased at its effect. Almost at once he became aware of a shadow hovering on the stairs above him. It was Aeneas MacRoy, the sneering creature who had inspected him like a school laddie before announcing his arrival to Wedderburn. MacRoy descended without a word. His deep-set dark brown eyes flickered to a silver salver that sat on a nearby half-moon table, as if he expected Jamieson to try to steal it. He led him out the way he had come in, past the kitchen and the wash-house, down a freezing stone passage and across to the stables where his horse was tethered. Only then did MacRoy speak.

‘That didna tak lang, did it?’

‘No.’

‘And it’s a fair ride back tae Dundee.’ The implication was that Jamieson had wasted everybody’s time, including his own. Jamieson was half inclined to agree, but did not want to admit it.

‘Aye.’

‘Wi this wind ye’ll likely hae a face as hard as a kirk door by the time ye win hame.’ Without waiting for a further response, MacRoy hurried back into the house.

Jamieson, pondering the probable accuracy of the prediction and the grim satisfaction with which MacRoy had uttered it, warmed himself for a minute at the horse’s flank. It was a long trip for a twenty-minute interview. He could, of course, have made his report to Mr Duncan, Wedderburn’s lawyer, but he had wanted to see Ballindean and its laird for himself. Jamieson had spied on unfaithful wives and husbands, eavesdropped on radicals, hunted down cheats, thieves, eloping daughters and dissolute sons, but he had never had to search for a black man before. He had been curious to see the master who was still chasing a runaway slave after twenty-four years. And now, having seen him, he was even more puzzled. Wedderburn’s sudden burst of bad temper had been counter-balanced by apparent indifference as to Knight’s fate. What was Wedderburn’s motivation? Jamieson could not figure it out. He wondered if he was losing his touch.

Yet why should he think that? He’d not performed badly over the United Scotsmen, an affair that had involved much discreet inquiry and cultivation of dubious acquaintances, and a little danger. He had attended, in disguise, a meeting of radicals at Cupar, narrowly avoided a severe beating in the back streets of Dundee, and helped the authorities chase a notable agitator out of the country. This kind of work was paid for by the proprietors of the new manufactories that were going up everywhere, changing the face of the country. Jamieson did it because it was there, and because it paid better than his other work, copying documents. He liked the owners neither more nor less than he liked the weavers. As he had told Wedderburn, he did not consider himself political.

He was about to mount up when he realised he was not the only human being in the stable. The lassie, Susan, emerged from one of the stalls, herself and the white dress now protected from dirt and cold by a black cloak clutched close about her.

‘I know the matter you were here to see my father about,’ she said.

‘Oh aye?’

‘Oh aye,’ she echoed. ‘I heard at the door.’

Jamieson considered the combination of her directness of speech and her hunched, uneasy stance. He said cautiously, ‘I dout your faither wouldna be best pleased aboot that. Or aboot ye waitin oot here on such a mornin.’

‘Ma faither disna ken aboot either,’ she retorted, a perfect mimic. ‘And I wasna waitin on you. Since I hadna a book tae read, and nae task either, I cam oot tae see the horses.’

He could not help smiling. ‘But ye kent I would be here sooner or later.’

‘And I ken aboot Joseph Knight,’ she said. Then, reverting to English: ‘Don’t you think it’s an interesting name?’

‘Is it?’

‘Biblical,’ she said, ‘but chivalric too, and mysterious. The Black Knight. I think of him as a chevalier of darkness.’

‘Aye, weel,’ Jamieson said, ‘your faither disna share that view.’

‘Papa never mentions him. But we all know about him, it’s hardly a secret. My sisters and I. And Mama too, although she wasn’t married to Papa when it happened. My other brothers and sisters – the old, half ones – even they were too young to remember much about it now, but we all know.’

‘How’s that?’

‘The servants, of course – the older ones. And Aeneas MacRoy with a drink in him.’

‘Him that convoyed me in and oot? Aye, whit sort o a man is that? Some kind o major-domo?’

‘He thinks he is, though it’s Mama that runs the household. Aeneas is our schoolmaster.’

‘The times are tolerant, when lassies cry their dominie by his Christian name.’

She laughed. ‘Only behind his back. In the schoolroom he’s strictly Maister MacRoy.’

‘It’s a queer dominie that gangs aboot like a servant, showin folk in tae his maister. He must leave aff teachin ye as aften as he taks it up.’

‘Aeneas has been here so long nobody is concerned about what it’s fitting for him to do or not do. He and Papa are old comrades – from the Forty-five. I don’t think Papa notices any more whether Aeneas is tutoring us or skulking in a corner or chewing his dinner thirty-two times to aid the digestion – he does that, you know.’

‘Frae the thrawn look on him, it disna work.’ Jamieson was gratified to see a smile break over Susan’s face. ‘Onywey, whit does he ken aboot Joseph Knight?’

‘Oh, this and that. He doesn’t say much about him, and then only when he’s drunk, but you can tell it’s deep in him yet. And my uncle James, he doesn’t mind speaking about it – the case I mean.’

‘Is he in the picture wi your faither?’

‘The one above the fire? Yes, on the left. The roguish-looking one. He was a rogue then, apparently.’

‘Faith, whit way is that tae speak aboot your uncle?’

‘It’s only what my father says. He doesn’t mean it harshly. But you can see him curl up inside if the plantations are mentioned when my uncle visits. Papa always stamps out the first few words that might blow in Joseph Knight’s direction. I know, I’ve watched for it. Did Papa tell you who painted that picture?’

‘He didna, na.’

‘My uncle Alexander. He died not long after he painted it. Do you know who else is in it?’

‘Anither uncle o yours.’

‘That’s right. Uncle Peter. He died in Jamaica too. But not just him.’

Jamieson frowned. The lassie was haivering. ‘There’s jist the three o them,’ he said.

‘You didn’t look closely enough. It’s very dark on that porch. Yet it’s the middle of the day.’

‘Whit are ye sayin, miss?’

She took a step back, and he realised his question had come out quite fiercely.

‘Joseph Knight is there too. Or he was once. Papa had him painted out after the court case.’

‘How dae ye ken that?’

‘Because I do. I must have looked at that painting a thousand times. There’s somebody there under that heavy shadow. You can just make him out. And I’m sure he’s black. Who else could it be?’

Jamieson shrugged. Now he wanted to go back into the library. The lassie seemed to have a lively imagination, but why would she come up with such a story? Then again, why would Wedderburn go to that trouble? Why not just take the painting down, destroy it?

‘If your faither had that done, it was lang afore ye were born. Did he tell ye that was whit happened?’

‘No, but it’s obvious, isn’t it? I think Papa was ashamed. He thinks the court case was a great stain on the family, and of course it was, but not for the reasons he thinks.’

‘Whit dae you think?’

‘That Joseph Knight must have been very brave. And right.’

And clad in shining armour, Jamieson added into himself. He said: ‘Ye dinna approve o slavery?’

‘Do you?’

‘I dinna think muckle aboot it.’ It existed. It was a fact of life. That was what he thought.

‘Well, you should.’

‘You dinna like it, then?’

‘How could I? How can anybody? It makes me ill to think of it. There are associations formed to abolish it. I’m going to join one and fight it.’

‘There’s associations formed tae fecht aw kinds o things. That disna mak them richt. It’s slavery that biggit this fine hoose, and bocht aw thae books ye read.’

‘That’s not my fault. Nobody should be a slave. That’s what it was all about, wasn’t it, the court case? Whether you could be, in Scotland. What I don’t understand is why Papa wants to find him now, after all this time?’

‘I dinna ken.’

‘Not because he’s had a change of heart, anyway. You thought that, and he nearly took your head off.’

‘Ye’ve sherp lugs, miss. Whit was the book ye wanted?’

‘Oh, I hadn’t one in mind. I’ll devour anything. Like a sheep.’ She bleated and he laughed. ‘It’s strange work you have,’ she said.

‘I work tae eat, like maist folk. I dae whit I dae.’

‘Look for people?’

‘That. And this, and thon.’

‘What’s your horse’s name?’

‘I dinna ken. I hired it. I dinna keep a horse.’

She clapped the horse’s neck. ‘Imagine not knowing her name. What if she wouldn’t do as she was bid, or something feared her?’

Jamieson smiled. ‘Miss, this is the maist biddable horse I was ever on. It jist gangs whaur ye nidge it wi your knees. If I spoke tae it I would probably fleg the puir beast.’

‘Do you think he’s still alive? Knight, I mean.’

‘I dinna ken.’

‘Ye dinna ken much. I think he’s dead. We’d have heard otherwise. There’s not much news goes by Ballindean, one way or the other. Either from visitors, or newspapers, or the servants.’

‘The world’s a bigger place than Ballindean,’ Jamieson said. ‘He could be onywhaur in it.’ He made to leave.

‘Old Aeneas hated him,’ she said, as if desperate to keep him a minute longer.

‘Whit gars ye say that?’

‘Aeneas hates everything. No, that’s not fair. He likes my sister Annie. But he hated Knight. It was an affaire de coeur,’ she added pointedly.

Jamieson was interested, but pretended he was not; adjusted a saddle-strap. He was torn between believing her and dismissing her. He said, ‘Ye’re gey young tae ken aboot such things, are ye no?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Books are full of them. But this was a real one. Joseph Knight won the heart of the woman Aeneas wanted. That’s why he hated him. More for that than because he was a Negro. How could you hate someone just for their colour?’

Jamieson had had enough. He swung himself up into the saddle. ‘It’s easy, miss. Folk dinna need muckle o an excuse, believe me, for love or hate. Ye’ll find that oot for yoursel.’

‘Leave love alone,’ Susan said, with a bluntness Jamieson was certain she would not use to a man of her own class, though she might to one of her sisters. ‘Love’s not at fault. You old men are all the same. You’re like my father. You don’t believe in love, or goodness of any kind.’

Jamieson was rather shocked. He felt old when she said it. He was only forty-six; Sir John Wedderburn could easily be his father.

‘Na,’ he said, ‘I dinna. And I dout Joseph Knight didna either. And nor would you if you were him. Ye’d best get inside, miss, afore ye catch cauld and I catch the blame.’

She looked disappointed, either in him or the fact that he was leaving. ‘Well, au revoir, Monsieur Jamieson,’ she said, following him out and slapping the horse’s rump. ‘And if ever you find him, be sure and let us know, father and me.’

Conversations tended to continue in Susan Wedderburn’s imagination long after they had ended in reality. Especially conversations that, like books, took her outwith the policies of Ballindean. But such conversations were rare. Her full sisters, though she was fond of them, were too childish, too lightheaded or infatuated with marriage to give her what she needed. Her half-sister Margaret, twelve years older, was too dull. Her mother was too protective, saw serious or heated discussion as a threat either to her own domestic tranquillity or to her daughters’ prospects of safe, suitable unions. Maister MacRoy’s mind seldom strayed beyond the set lessons of the schoolroom. Susan felt starved of adventures but had no idea what form those adventures might take.

Her father had had adventures at her age. She knew his stories of the Forty-five inside out. They had once thrilled her, but lately she could not separate them from the brooding presence of the dominie, who had been at Culloden too, but who was about as romantic as a goat. All that Jacobite passion belonged in another age, it had nothing to do with her. The Forty-five might have been tragic and stirring but it was also hopeless and useless and ancient. What she wanted was an adventure that was happening now, that touched her, one that was not yet over.

Round, balding but mysterious Mr Jamieson from Dundee had therefore been immediately interesting to her. When, outside the library door, she had heard the forbidden name Joseph Knight mentioned, Jamieson had become almost exotic, an emissary from a distant kingdom. In the stable, she had told Jamieson that he should think about slavery, but he had shrugged her off. Now she heard that conversation go off in a different direction, Jamieson challenging her challenge: why should he think about slavery? He was not the one living off the proceeds of Jamaican plantations. He was not the child of a planter. What was slavery to him but a distant, vague fact of life? Whereas to her …

What was it to her? She talked of anti-slavery societies but she knew nothing about them, and no one who belonged to one. She read occasionally of such people in the weekly papers. They seemed mostly to be evangelicals and seceders – non-conformists at the opposite end of the religious spectrum from the Episcopalian Wedderburns – or, worse, radicals and revolutionaries. Almost all of her knowledge of slavery had come from her father, and from the books in his library.

Her head was full of other conversations: the ones she had teased out of her father over the years. Nowadays he refused to be drawn, but there had been times when he had seemed to enjoy her questions – but only if they were safe questions.

‘Is it like this in Jamaica, Papa?’

‘Is it like what, Susan?’ They were walking in the woods above the house. She must have been eleven or twelve. It was late spring, the ground was thick with bluebells, the trees were putting on their new leaves.

‘Like this. Are the trees and flowers like this?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Bigger, and greener and brighter by far. You never saw trees the like of them. So tall you often cannot see the tops. But when you can, there are great red flowers growing out of them. And further down, other plants grow up the trunks – creepers and climbing things bursting with flowers, and with leaves the size of dinner plates; in fact sometimes they are used for dinner plates. And everything lush and green – greens of every shade you can imagine. And that is in the winter, though the seasons hardly exist. Winter there is like our summer only hotter. You think you will be shrivelled away by the heat and then the rain comes and everything becomes still more green – darker and yet brilliant too. And always hot, hot, hot. I cannot describe it.’

But he could, and she knew he was describing a picture in his head that he was happy should be in hers too. He would tell her of huge butterflies, flying beetles the size of small birds; birds that could hover in one place by beating their wings so fast they were a blur and made a droning sound like bees while their long thin beaks drank from flowers; rag-winged crows as big as buzzards, wheeling over the fields in sixes, eights, dozens; multi-coloured parrots, big-chinned pelicans, prim white egrets that rode on the backs of the cattle; insects that drove you mad at night with their incessant chirping, whistling frogs, spiders that could build webs big enough to catch small birds; crocodiles that lived in the swamps, mosquitoes that fed on you year in, year out, and that you never got used to. Coconut trees, banana trees, trees laden with strange fruits never seen in Scotland. It was, her father said, like a huge, hot, overgrown garden.

‘Like the Garden of Eden?’ she asked.

‘He laughed. ‘In a way, yes.’

‘Is there a serpent, then?’

‘Only you would ask that, my dear. Yes, there are snakes, but not dangerous ones.’

Then came the questions that were closer to home. What was the house like, she wanted to know. Was it smaller or bigger than Ballindean? How many rooms were there? Was there a view? Was there a town nearby? And what about the people?

‘Well, there was me, and your uncle James, and your other uncles that you never knew. We had many Scotsmen for our neighbours. There are many there still.’

‘But the people who grew the sugar?’

‘We grew the sugar

‘No, who grew it, cut it …’

‘You mean the Negroes?’

She felt her pulse quicken. Yes, yes, yes, the Negroes. She thought of them flitting through the shady jungle, mysterious, dangerous, beautiful as the blood-red flowers on the trees. One minute you would see them, the next they’d be gone. They were beyond her. But her father had known them.

At first she had thought he was reluctant to talk of them. Later she felt that he just had very little to say about them, as if somehow he had noticed them less than he had the land and its creatures. Some Negroes were black and some were brown, he said, some were not far from white. They were lazy or hard-working, they were weak or strong, they were mostly foolish and childlike. She grew to believe that he did not find them very interesting.

So she read what she could in Mr Long’s book on Jamaica, and in other books she found on the higher shelves in the library. And though all that she read in these books confirmed what her father told her, they said more too: about the brutishness, the immorality, the craftiness of Negroes. Because of their nature, she read, it was necessary to control them, to punish the lazy and the wicked, to crush them lest they try to rebel. All this seemed sensible, though sordid. But the more she read, the more she began to glimpse an argument that the books always sought, with wonderful plausibility, to dismiss. The argument was never properly articulated. It was mentioned only to be ridiculed as ignorant, ill-informed, malicious, naïve. Thumbing through these volumes, she lost sight of the flitting figures in the red-flowered jungle; felt instead a growing sense of unease, a sense that things were being kept from her.

‘Why do they have to bring so many in the slave ships?’

He said calmly, ‘Because there are more needed than could possibly be raised on the island.’

‘But why are they treated so cruelly?’ She felt anxious and unhappy asking the question: she knew her father would hate it.

‘It is not cruel, Susan,’ he said. ‘How else could they be brought?’

‘But it is cruel. It is horrible to think of children being torn from their mothers and fathers, husbands from wives, sisters from brothers, and carried off to a land so far from their home, and made to work so hard. It must be cruel.’

‘Susan, I do not know where you find such ideas but you should believe them no more than you believe fairy tales. Some people are cruel. That is true the world over. Some people are cruel here in Scotland. In Africa people are horribly cruel. But we were not cruel to the slaves. They were treated kindly when they behaved, and chastised only when it was necessary. That is how it is there still. That is how your Papa is with you, child. Sometimes I have to be angry with you. That does not mean I do not love you.’

‘Did you love the slaves?’

She saw the shock in his eyes.

‘Of course not. They were not my children. But it was our Christian duty to look after them.’

‘Is it Christian to keep them as slaves?’

‘I do not wish to discuss this further,’ her father said. ‘But I will say this, since you speak of what is or is not Christian. The Negroes are not Christians. They are different from us in many ways, not just in their colour. They are not quite human in the way that we are. It has been tried and found impossible to teach them to be refined and civil like us. They can do so much, and no more. That is their nature.’

‘But we are Christians. And don’t some of them come to be baptised and make very good Christians?’

‘Most make very bad ones. Susan, we will not talk any more about this. You are a child. You have no idea what it is like in the Indies, let alone in Africa. Believe me, I am your father. There never was a race of people constitutionally better suited – better created – to be the property of others.’

But she did not – quite – believe him. She read the books again. She overheard disturbing snatches of conversation when her uncle James came to visit. And she heard stories from the older servants about Joseph Knight, the slave her father had brought back with him to Ballindean.

Then, in the library one day, when she was about fourteen, the sunlight caught the painting above the fireplace in such a way that she suddenly glimpsed a new figure in the gloom. Uncle Sandy’s picture. She had looked at it so often that the shock of what she saw now made her gasp, as if she had seen a ghost. There was no one else in the room. She stood as close as she could, peered at the painting straight on, from the left, from the right. The oil gleamed back at her. Behind the oil was a leg, a shoulder, a face. A man.

From then on she learned to use the library at times when her father was out or away from home. She started to use the books as none of her sisters did, to find things out. And when she was alone she would stand for long minutes in front of the painting, gazing at the porch where Joseph Knight had been – where the outline of him still was if you were wise to it. She would close her eyes and see him running through the trees. He was naked. He was young. He was extremely handsome.

Right from the start she had known she must not mention him to her father. The servants did not even have to warn her, she knew it from their hushed tones. She understood it from the bitterness that sometimes seeped out of Maister MacRoy. She wanted to ask somebody about the figure in the painting, but she did not dare. It was a secret. If her father found out that she knew it, he would be angry. He might take the painting away. She must do nothing to provoke that.

So Joseph Knight remained at Ballindean yet was always missing, visible yet invisible, present yet absent in all the real and imagined conversations she had ever had. That was part of the thrill of hearing him named by Mr Jamieson. It made him seem alive, even though as she had told Jamieson she thought he must be dead. For years she had sensed Knight’s ghost in the library: in the books themselves, in old letters folded and forgotten inside the books, in every nook and on every shelf. He was there but not there. Jamieson had been so close and yet had not spotted Knight in the painting, because he had not known to look. But she had known. And now she knew she would have to look again; that there must be more of Joseph Knight somewhere in that room.

Alone again, Sir John Wedderburn briefly regretted being so sharp with Jamieson. But then, the man had been presumptuous – and a sycophant when his presumption met resistance. Sir John stood and went to inspect the picture of himself, James and Peter. Not a good painting. Its amateurishness had always annoyed him. He should take it down, put it somewhere else or get rid of it all together. But he knew he would not. He had been having this argument with himself for thirty years. The painting mattered. It was one of only two things that survived of his brother Sandy. He went back to the table.

Jamieson’s suggestion that he was some mere branch of the Wedderburn tree had irritated him. Just because cousin Loughborough had been in the public eye! Even against somebody as insignificant as Jamieson it was necessary to defend the family name against incursions, especially when they involved a plotter and trimmer like Loughborough, whose whole history had been one of eliminating any Scottish traits – accent, acquaintances, principles – that might have hindered his political progress in England. Sir John, though he spoke good English, still sounded Scotch enough, and that was with twenty years in the West Indies, where the whites generally turned to speaking like their slaves. Lord Loughborough, on the other hand, had taken lessons in his youth from some Irish speech pedlar, had planed out his vowels and Scotticisms till nobody would laugh at him in London. Ah well, Loughborough was at an end now. They all were, their generation – redding up their affairs as best they could.

Aeneas’s quiet knock came again and he slid in, closing the door behind him. ‘He’s awa,’ he said.

‘Good.’

‘Is there onything ye want done?’

‘No.’ The question seemed innocent enough, but the implication was, did anything need to be done about him? Jamieson. Aeneas watched out for his master like an old dog. With his grizzled, unsmiling loyalty he might have been better suited for a soldier than a schoolmaster. Might have been. Wedderburn smiled – there was a whole other life in that phrase.

‘You know what day it is tomorrow, Aeneas?’

‘Aye. The sixteenth.’

‘Fifty-six years,’ Sir John said.

‘Aye, Sir John.’

April the sixteenth. The date never escaped them. There were anniversaries scattered through the calendar that Sir John always observed with a sombre heart: so far this year there had been the martyrdom of Charles I, at the end of January, and the death of his first, dear wife Margaret in March; and late in November he would mourn, yet again, his father. But tomorrow it was Culloden.

‘You’ll come and drink a toast with me?’

‘Jist oorsels?’ MacRoy asked.

‘Of course.’ It was never anyone but themselves. Everybody else was too young, or dead.

‘Nearly sixty years, damn it,’ Sir John said. ‘A lifetime away, a world away. Dear God, somebody will be writing a novelle about it next!’

‘It’ll no tell the truth, a novelle,’ Aeneas said.

‘No, it won’t. The women will love it. But we’re still here. We know the truth.’

‘Aye.’

‘What a life, Aeneas, eh?’ Sir John said. ‘What a life! Out in ’45 – there’s not many left that can say that! And you, too. We were out together.’

Out. What a tiny, enormous word. At sixteen Sir John had marched to Derby. At seventeen – Susan’s age – he had been at Culloden. At eighteen he had been an exile in Jamaica.

Life, the poets said, was a splashing mountain burn becoming a deep, smooth river flowing to the sea. Sir John did not see it like that. For him life was a broken expanse of land without design or cultivation, patchworked with bog and rocky outcrops. A trackless moor covered by low cloud – or by smoke. What connected one memory to another, this moment to that moment? You turned around and lost sight of someone, your bearings went astray, you could only dimly see what you had thought was a certain landmark.

What had a frightened boy on a battlefield to do with an aged laird in Perthshire, putting his affairs in order, folding away his years? What had a boy on the run called John Thomson to do with an old man called John Wedderburn? What had a black boy with some impossible name, chasing birds in an unknown village in Africa, to do with a man called Joseph Knight, sitting in a courtroom in Edinburgh? What had these lives to do with each other? They seemed quite distinct. Separate people. There was no continuous stream, only a torn, faded, incomplete map of wilderness.

He shook his head. He must have dozed. Some time had passed – the clock said half-past eleven – and Aeneas had gone away again; if he had actually been there and not part of a dream. Sir John was disturbed by this idea. Recently he had been having sensations of doubt like that all the time: was he awake or dreaming? It was very unmanly. And he didn’t really believe that idle nonsense anyway, about the trackless moor. It made everything so pointless. Better to think of God, and, God willing, a place in heaven. There was the stream of life, there was the eternal sea into which all must flow. He had been hirpling about just now like some kind of atheist! Like the infidel Hume on his deathbed teasing Boswell about oblivion – knowing full well that Bozzy would just have to tell everybody about it. Hume who had been so terribly intelligent that he could imagine himself unable to imagine! Think himself insentient! Deny the very stirrings of his soul! Idiot Hume, too clever for his own salvation, telling Boswell, ‘If there were a future state, I think I could give as good an account of my life as most people.’ A risky hypothesis to put before God, but then again, Sir John had lately been thinking the same.

He, of course, was no atheist. When the day came, he would be able to give a fair account of himself. He had always tried to do things right. He had not wilfully done evil. Honour, courage, Christian decency – he believed in these things, had lived his life according to such standards. You were put here in this life and all you could do was get through it as well as you were able, and that was what he had done.

Reminded of Boswell, Sir John stood up and wandered his shelves, identifying the spines of the Life of Dr Johnson. He had never been able to fight his way through the whole of that work, but there were passages that he knew almost by heart. ‘I cannot too highly praise the speech which Mr Henry Dundas generously contributed to the cause of the sooty stranger.’ That was one. He had read that a dozen times, never got beyond it to the next page. It just made him angry.

Changed times. Dundas had spent the 1790s stalling the parliamentary efforts of Mr William Wilberforce to abolish the slave trade, conscious then of the detrimental effect abolition would have on the West Indian plantations, Sir John’s among them. Yet he had shown only disdain for the Wedderburn interests when he had spoken for the ‘sooty stranger’ in that courtroom in 1778.

It was all politics of course: Dundas had told Parliament that he wanted to end slavery when the economic conditions were right. He had meant the political conditions. But now he was out of office, resigned as His Majesty’s Secretary for War along with the rest of Pitt’s Government. Even Harry Dundas had to come to an end eventually.

‘Changed times.’ Sir John said the words out loud, as if to remind himself of the present, and his presence in it. It didn’t do to dwell too much on the past. But increasingly, that was what he did – dwelt on the past, or in it, or tried to shore it up against the tide. For the last twelve months Sir John had been firing off letters to various persons in the Government, imploring them not to listen to Wilberforce and his abolitionist cronies who seized on every reported brutality, exaggerated it tenfold and then claimed it as the norm in the plantations. As if one bad master made an argument against the entire system. Was a fornicating minister an argument against religion, a drunken laird a reason to abolish property? Few of these meddlers had even been in the West Indies. None of them had ever tried to rid Negroes of indolence, deceit and stupidity, to instil decency and honesty in them and raise them above the animals. Everybody could see what happened when Negroes got loose. A Toussaint L’Ouverture appeared, wielding a machete.

This, Sir John told himself, was one reason he had wanted Joseph Knight found. Nothing to do with money, or setting up a meeting. He had wanted to know if Knight still existed. He had wanted an example.

Joseph Knight – a Negro who had had the best advantages and opportunities, the best master, who had been instructed and baptised in the Christian religion, and who, even in these circumstances, had turned out a knave, an impostor, a traitor. If he still lived, by now he would undoubtedly have sunk into obscurity, destitution, superstition and depravity. He had been heading down that road even before the court case was over. If he could have been found, if he could have been held up as evidence …

But there had been another reason to find him. Again, to see if he still existed, although this time it was not about the public interest. It was about locating a missing, personal landmark. Joseph Knight was missing from his life, had been these last two dozen years. Once he had always been there, quiet, reliable (so it seemed), an unmistakable, visible sign of Wedderburn’s success, of his return from exile, of his triumph over adversity. Even now, in spite of everything, Sir John would have enjoyed being able to say, ‘That one was mine.’

With an effort Sir John turned in his chair to the wall behind the table, where there was a small etching of his father, the 5th Baronet of Blackness. His neck and shoulders protested, and he shuffled the chair round. When he looked at the etching, he sometimes thought the likeness very good, sometimes poor (unlike the Jamaica painting, which always looked poor). This was because for so long now the portrait of his father had been more real than the man: these days it was a question of asking how good a likeness his father would have been of it. It was a thin, horsy, straight face, with large worried eyes and a broad forehead capped with a neat curled wig. The etching had been done from memory by a female cousin, after the execution. His father had been forty-two when he died. Sometimes when Sir John stared at the etching he imagined his father alive again, and ageing, becoming more like him. What a strange thing – that he should have become his father’s father.

The pinprick of a tear started in one eye, and he stabbed it dry with his forefinger.

He could not be bothered now with the letter he had started. He had been going to write to James down at Inveresk – something about the guardianship – but it could wait. Invariably, thinking of Joseph and Jamaica made him think of James too, his only surviving sibling. Their eldest brother had died at the age of five, leaving John heir to their father’s baronetcy. Three other brothers were long dead, two of them in Jamaica, and dead also were their four sisters. John and James were all that survived of the seed of their father. With James he had shared more of the adventures of his life than with any of the others, yet in character they remained utterly different. They seldom saw each other now. To or from Inveresk, which lay across two firths and down the coast beyond Edinburgh, was a long journey for old men.

He got up and went over to the window again. The east wind was still biting at the leafless branches of the trees beyond the small oval loch. Better to be inside looking out, on a day like this, than outside looking in. Ballindean, for all its fine south-facing location, was not the bonniest of houses anyway. Sir John had made many improvements since buying it in 1769, but more than once he had wondered how much one could really do with an old house. If he were forty again, perhaps he would knock it all down and start anew.

Being stuck inside made him restless. He went towards the writing-table, paused. Somewhere in there, deep in one of the drawers, beneath a jumble of old letters and papers, lay a small calf-bound book, a journal, now beginning to crumble at the edges. For years he had meant to destroy it – James and he, after long discussion, had determined that this was the proper thing to do – but the journal was, apart from the painting, the only surviving memento of his young brother Alexander, who had kept it, sporadically, for four years in Jamaica. Apart from James and himself, the three brothers who had survived to adulthood had all died within a few years of one another, back in the 1760s; Peter and Alexander in the Indies; David, whom he had never really known, in London. But it was Sandy he regretted most.

Dead at what? – twenty-four, twenty-five? Peter had lasted well into his thirties, had at least settled in the Indies, was making a success of things there when the yellow fever carried him off. But poor Sandy had never settled. And the way he had died – Sir John could not bear to think about it. If Sandy could have held on just a few years more, he might have come home safe like James and himself. Or if he had come back with him in ’63, John’s first return – that would have saved him. Now all that was left of him was the journal and the painting. Typical Sandy, to do one thing inadequately, and another thing worse. The picture was poor, but the journal was awful.

The painting was saved by its sentimental value. It was crude and clumsy – the sky was too thick, the faces too flat – but it captured something of the house in Jamaica, and its naïve execution was Sandy through and through. It was also the only image he had of Peter. And it was part of the family’s story.

The journal’s contents were a quite different matter. They were certainly not for the gentle eyes of his wife and daughters. What Sandy had written was weak, febrile, disgusting. It left a vile taste in the mouth. But it, too, was Sandy. John Wedderburn kept it for that reason, but it stayed buried in the drawer.

It was the record of a life cut short, wasted. Sir John did not like waste of any kind. He looked at the inviting armchairs by the hearth, and decided against getting out the journal. One day soon, perhaps, a last glance – then into the fire with it. Right now, he wanted to sleep.