Dangerous Freedom E-Book

Lawrence Scott

• Herausgeber: Papillote Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 462

Beschreibung

'They tell you one thing but you are not free.' London in 1802 is a dangerous place for black people, unsure of their legal status and threatened by slave catchers. Elizabeth d'Aviniere, the mixed race great-niece of the Lord Chief Justice, who had spent her childhood in his home, now fears for her own children's safety and yearns for her mother, an African-born enslaved woman. Why did she no longer write? Was she dead? Had she been recaptured? Dangerous Freedom weaves fact with fiction to reveal 'the great deception' exercised by the powerful on the child known as Dido as seen through the eyes of the adult Elizabeth. This magnificent and radical portrayal of a known historical character adds to our understanding of a trauma that continues to exist just below the surface of contemporary life.

Leseprobe

Praise for Lawrence Scott

‘A really accomplished writer.’Derek Walcott

‘Rare and magical.’Sam Selvon

‘An extremely gifted writer. Moral dilemmas underpin much of his fiction.’Bernardine Evaristo (The Guardian)

‘Impressively written work, subtle but compelling.’Wilson Harris (Wasafiri)

‘The prose is economical and beautifully veined… Scott’s writing is full of light and promise.’Robin Blake (The Independent)

‘Mighty impressive.’(The Literary Review)

‘An author in control of his form.’Carl MacDougall (The Scotsman)

First published by Papillote Press 2020 in Great Britain

© Lawrence Scott 2020

The moral right of Lawrence Scott to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designer and Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

The historical names, characters, places and events in Dangerous Freedom are used for a fiction.

Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YYBook design by Andy Dark

ISBN: 978-1-9997768-6-2

ePub ISBN: 978-1-9997768-8-6

Papillote Press23 Rozel Road,London SW4 0EY,United KingdomAnd Trafalgar, Dominicwww.papillotepress.co.uk

For Jenny

By the same author

NOVELS

Light Falling on Bamboo

Night Calypso

Aelred’s Sin

Witchbroom

SHORT STORIES

Leaving by Plane Swimming back Underwater

Ballad for the New World

NON-FICTION

Golconda, Our Voices Our Lives

“it was not enough to be for abolition

while the spirit of the masters

flickered in the abolitionist’s heart

it was not enough to name ourselves anew

while the spirit of the masters

calls the freedwoman to forget the slave…”

‘The Spirit of Place’,

A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far,

Adrienne Rich

1

AT THIS TIME of her life Elizabeth d’Aviniere was living in a modest house on Ranelagh Street. It was the winter of 1802 and the last of autumn lingered in the fallen leaves. Another war was stirring. She felt that she was in a fortunate state, though not with all her freedoms. Many of those had been threatened or never given. But, nevertheless, she was satisfied now with her husband and her sons, and mostly occupied with her memories, which on evenings came gently, as evenings could.

She recalled when she was a small girl swaying in a hammock in a different climate with its brief sunset, her mother telling her the story of her life. Is four years since you born on your father ship. We up and down the islands. Remember the year, child, 1761. You go have to write it down one day. The ribbons of light then were mixed with the shadows on the pitch-pine floor of the porch. They swung to and fro in a silence filled with the breaking of the waves on the nearby shore and the scratching sound of palm branches in the breeze; a long long time ago, as her mother would say in her singsong voice. That was in Pensacola, the British port in Florida. It was a geography her father had taught Elizabeth with his maps, pointing to where he had bought her mother from the auction block and then put her in his house, which was on the front with the tall ships moored between the shore and Santa Rosa Island.

Light was different here on Ranelagh Street, not far from the banks of the River Thames where the creeks, water meadows and marshes lay just beyond the streets of Pimlico, choked in spring and summer with nettles. It had been her home for these last eight years. What was even more different now was her name, that she was called Elizabeth, or Lizzie, by her husband, John. He would keep to formalities in public, calling her Mrs d’Aviniere. But he called her Lizzie when he greeted her with kisses and cuddles, whispering, Lizzie, Lizzie, Lizzie darling, like a young lover. How sweet it was now to have his name in marriage, a proper surname, a real name, a free name, not that silly name, Dido, not that slave name. Her sons called her Mama. She was fortunate, she had to keep telling herself, despite the loss of her mother. Was she like Mr Olaudah Equiano, the African, a particular favourite of Heaven as that author’s narrative so elegantly described his circumstances? She hoped that her pen would work a similar magic in the telling of her tale.

Her mother’s voice was talking of rivers as Elizabeth settled down to write her story: far over there and so long. She traced the distances on her father’s map, which he had given her during one of his last visits, long ago when she was a child in London. She pressed out the creases where it lay upon the table, travelling with her fingers from the hinterland of the large continent to the coast where they had lived at that time. Is an eternity they take, oui, girl. She remembered her mother teaching her to pronounce the name Mis sis sip pi.

Elizabeth’s tongue had been straightened out to fit into England though she always felt that she had never quite achieved what was expected. People still turned and looked at her, even now, and sometimes asked her origin, though they could always see it plainly, she thought. This left her feeling uneasy.

Some of her more gentle memories and her mother’s stories of Pensacola were filled with names, just sounds now, like those of the birds that sang in the trees, Creek and Chickasaw, Choctaw and the name that made them laugh aloud, almost falling out of the hammock, Chief Cowkeeper. Her mother would go on to talk to her of the rivers: Apalachicola, Yazoo, Matanzas forming thoroughfares to reach the north by ship and canoe, paddling on and on. Far, far away, they say, her mother said. She had once asked her father if she might ever go there on a canoe. He had smiled as he often did, shaking his head, No, my pet, his favourite expression when talking to her then.

Elizabeth listened more intently when her mother started to tell a harder story.

We find them people here when we reach by boat and they drop the anchor in the harbour, we so exhausted, so starved and thirsty and not daring to think that we might step upon land again, them chains such a part of we limbs that not to have them shackled to each other, to our ankles and to the boards, don’t seem usual and ordinary at all when we come to stand upon the dry ground and have to walk, stumbling like we accustom on the deck of that terrible ship.

Elizabeth enjoyed making up her mother’s voice. She wrote it as she heard her speak. To find her on her tongue was to keep her close, to try it on the page was to keep her even closer and not to lose her, ever.

She had promised to keep on writing and to send for her. Elizabeth never found out why her mother had stopped writing, after only one letter, despite all the letters she herself had written: Dearest Mammy… Had she been recaptured? It remained a mystery, despite the many inquiries Elizabeth had made over the years. When she had asked her father on his infrequent visits he always answered, Soon, my pet. Then she had asked her Master the Lord Mansfield, and his wife Lady Betty, and then, above all, Beth, her Master’s great-niece, her sometime childhood companion. They had all evaded her questions.

Elizabeth used to wonder if they — to whom her father had given her on arriving in England — had ever really understood her and her loss. For while she grew up seeming so obliging and grateful, as they said she was, of such an amiable disposition and so accomplished, as they saw it, gaining her Master’s highest respect and that of his relations and visitors to the house, they, nevertheless, were always so surprised, eyes growing larger, eyebrows so raised. There was no knowing what they had really expected to see. She is so black, they would say in consternation. What had they imagined? What had they been told about her? At the same time, she kept the loss and the sadness hidden. While it had not destroyed her, maybe even made her who she had become, her whole mind and body were still filled with longing, her longing for her mother.

Time will not wait for me now, she said to herself. How much longer did she have? She pondered this question more than ever, her illness being so unpredictable as Dr Featherstone would say. Would her mother ever write after all this time, Elizabeth not writing either? Where was she now? The world was constantly being altered with the changing geography and boundaries of countries belonging to this one here and then to another there, people in their thousands captured and transported each day from one place to another.

Where Elizabeth sat looking through the French windows she was already anticipating the first intimations of the spring with the snowdrops, looking forward to the crocuses and the other bulbs that she had planted with the bluebells. Christmas, a quiet one for her, had come and gone so quickly. Her illness had forced the lack of celebrations at home. Mr d’Aviniere had taken the boys to his twin sister, Martha, at Isledon, where she lived near the wells. She did not have children of her own. Poor Martha, with all she had gone through with her brother, was pleased to have the twins and William Thomas; twins ran in the family, it seemed. With her they had enjoyed the jugglers and other circus acts. Then no sooner was the festive season over than it was January with February approaching. Where was her time disappearing?

She drifted off to the sound of Lydia’s sweeping; Lydia who had come with her from Caen Wood, her Master’s residence. Elizabeth was imagining the yellow of the increasing sunshine which would get filtered through the willows and eventually light up all the new colours: the fresh green of the weeping silver birch, the patchwork of her different plants so well looked after by Seamus, Lydia’s brother and their new lodger.

Lydia now called her Ma’am. That was very different from long ago when she had called her, Miss Dido. There she was, a good ten years older than herself, a kind of mother once, a kind of nurse, walking along the garden path after sweeping up the leaves, still with flame in her hair, now tied into a bun and constantly doing everything in the house and looking after the boys. She looked up from her sweeping and waved to Elizabeth, smiling with that broad smile which so often broke into laughter and a story, making the most ordinary things extraordinary.

In warmer weather Elizabeth would sit outside constantly following the sun’s journey to find the strategic warm patches around her garden — the rose-covered arbour was her favourite spot outside for writing, once it was not too cold — till eventually the evening brought the shadows to her sequestered spot. She would sit there with her sloping, Japanned writing-box with its lacquered inlays. It had been a gift from her Master when she had begun in earnest to do his secretarial work, reading to him and writing his letters. You are my amanuensis, he had said then, such a long time ago.

Elizabeth knew that she had to reconcile herself to the truth that she had not heard her mother’s voice for the last twenty-eight years. How old would her mother be now? Fifty-seven? Would that be correct? She counted. She had hardly been a girl of sixteen when she had given birth, she had told her. She must have been fourteen or fifteen when Elizabeth’s father bought her off the auction block. They called her Belle and at some point that became her name, Maria Belle. Did she not have another name? Belle, a pretty name for dirty work, she had once told her daughter. Belle of a great house and then of the street. Elizabeth had listened as a little girl and had hardly understood then what she had meant by that description. Many of those cruel things that had been done to her were done to her as a child and as a young girl, sold and resold, captured, runaway and recaptured. She had had to become a woman long before her proper time.

During these last years, with Elizabeth herself becoming a wife and a mother, she felt the longing for her own mother even more. Her suckling of her own children at her breast, before she was obliged to pass on one of the twins, Johnny, to Mrs Halifax, a wet nurse down the street, gave her a greater sense of loss. She had not made sufficient milk for both her babies. Johnny had been so little, coming after Charles. She could still see John with the baby, a small bundle in his arms, going off to Mrs Halifax. He was so excited by his sons, two of them all at once. Martha had come to help, allowing Lydia more time for the household chores while looking after the twins. Her husband had been so patient with her worry and with Johnny’s slower growth, trying always to give both boys equal attention. What if they lost them? It was their constant thought; Charles their black son and Johnny so much fairer. Her mother would say when she saw a black child like him in the street, That child so fair, and watch them eyes, I sure he mix up with something. He go sell good if they catch hold of him. She had laughed ironically when she said that, pinching her daughter’s chin, and saying, There’s your father in you, sweetheart, but you have plenty of me. When she said that her mother drifted off into a world of her own.

The very earliest of Elizabeth’s own memories were of her father’s estate, El Paso de Arroyo Ingles. Is to the plantation they going, her mother had told her when she peeped through the jalousies at the coffle passing in the road, shackles round the ankles, chained each to the other, some with iron masks, others with bits weighed upon their tongues to keep them from screaming, and always the sound of the lash of the whip upon their backs. She remembered a young African girl her father had bought to work in the house, such a contrast and contradiction of things. Her mother reminded her of this when she wanted to impress on her daughter that at times she herself had been a kind of mistress of the house and that she had not liked her father making eyes at the young girl. This was when her father yet again would insist that he could not make her mother a lady at home. Here she could be his woman, he had said. Nothing more. Is which one you want? Is me or them, you know? He had turned his back on her and walked away when she spoke with that tone. But she was not always so brave to say that. She heard her again one day, the things I have to do to keep myself and my pickney alive.

Elizabeth could still see her father, her fair captain in his uniform of white and navy blue with gold braid; his blond hair tied at the nape of his neck, his sharp features, his raddled cheeks. He looked down at her, smiling and reaching to pull his slender fingers through her hair, while tying her plaits. She came to understand that he remained in her mother’s imagination that young man with those hazel eyes who had chosen her off the auction block, a Scotsman who could not resist her nakedness, her fourteen-fifteen-year-old breasts, even in that awful place when he was forced to prod and poke her to please the merchant slaver and assure him that he was inspecting the merchandise properly. That she had been able to fall for his beauty in that moment of her ordeal was to Elizabeth a marvel, a desperate leap for freedom. Anyway, she thought now her mother had not had a choice. She had been bought. Is fall, fall, fall… child, your mother had to do to save she self.

Her mother was such a contrast to that Scotsman John Lindsay. Her skin shone with blackness and where it was not injured, broken by beatings, it was fine and smooth. It was bumpy only where the welts had healed on her back and legs. There was the scar upon her brow, another bump, which Elizabeth stroked with her fingers as she looked up into her face while she sucked her thumb and comforted herself, and knew not then what to comfort her mother for or with. Her father described her mother as pretty, a slight word for a beauty much more sumptuous. Her black eyes were luminous. Her mother could look so sad at times and so solemn even at such a young age. Her father used to say, You look as if you are going to cry at any moment. She smiled at him and came back from some place far away, some journey, which she had survived. That story was hard for Elizabeth to tell. For now, she was trying to keep to fond memories.

She wished that she did not all the time get caught up in the story of their departure from Pensacola in 1765, then later her mother’s departure from England in 1774. The dates were indelibly seared on her mind, spoken by her mother. She had never really recovered from those early departures, those comings and goings to and from her mother, those leavings when she had felt abandoned. She kept anticipating departure. To be left only for a short while seemed like forever.

Not to have heard from her all these years; this more than preoccupied her mind, particularly now, when she felt that she did not have much time remaining.

2

‘LYDIA! IS THAT you at the door? Billy?’ Elizabeth was awakened, having nodded off, dropping her pen and pages onto the floor, coughing herself out of sleep. Was it just tiredness or her tinctures of laudanum? One did not always help the other. She knew this yet she could not resist the comfort of the opiate medication prescribed by Dr Featherstone.

William Thomas, their Billy, Elizabeth’s and John’s third boy, was shooting up fast, catching up with his older brothers and particularly imitating eight-year-old Charles. Billy was four years old and already he was his own person, a little man his mother called him. He was named William, after her Master, William Murray, and Thomas for her husband’s foster father, Thomas d’Aviniere, but he was their Billy. He was a mixture, her child, of course he was. She might never know his entire ancestry. But in this last of her children she saw the evidence of her father. He was a handsome boy with the fairest skin in the household and already he had the silver-tongued eloquence of her Master.

The front door slammed. That would be him, his excitement bursting out to tell her of his afternoon’s adventure with Lydia beyond Ranelagh Gardens, and no doubt close to the river bank with its many excitements and dangers.

‘Lydia, is that you?’

‘Yes, Ma’am. Sorry. We’re late.’ She was speaking from the hall, telling of Billy’s adventures, climbing trees, falling out of them. ‘Almost breaking their necks. Don’t you worry, Ma’am, don’t you worry. It was a grand time.’ Lydia was laughing and tearing off her coat, bundling her long red hair to the top of her head.

‘I thought you were both lost.’

Billy bounded into the room, ‘The fish jumped all over the grass till it was stunned…’

‘Stunned, was it? Maybe Papa will take you fishing. Your father loves fishing when he can get a chance. You get your pull-horse to play with now and give Mama a chance to talk to Johnny. Where’s Johnny, though…?’

‘He’s here, Ma’am. Johnny’s fine, a little slow, aren’t you laddie? He’s having a drink. He’s a grand boy, no problems with him this morning.’

Elizabeth was concerned about the boys dawdling. ‘You know how it was in our day, Lydia, with the leash.’

‘Of course, Ma’am, couldn’t keep either of them on a leash.’ Lydia was helping Johnny out of his coat. She was tired out and hoped that her mistress would manage the boys while she caught her breath and she got some time upstairs in her own room. She knew that she had to wait to see how the boys settled.

‘Johnny come. You know I can’t be getting up easily. What should we do? A story? The Latin exercise that Charles brought back yesterday?’

Johnny was tired out, but more from having to cope with the boisterous Billy than the actual walk and adventure on the river. He got out his extracts of Virgil.

Mr d’Aviniere had recently decided to keep Johnny away from school after Charles had reported his brother’s disappearance on their way home one afternoon. The boys’ journey from the new development in Belgravia took them over the marshes, then past Locke’s Asylum and Jenny’s Whim, a notorious inn known for attracting sinister characters. Charles had arrived home without his brother. Lydia had had to go looking for the boy because Mr d’Aviniere had not yet returned from Holborn where he was a steward at one of the large houses on Gough Square. It was late that evening when Johnny was found, disorientated, having lost himself on one of the many paths across the water meadows. It was still a mystery. He had dropped behind his brother and had quite suddenly found himself alone. Charles had gone on ahead, not noticing his brother’s absence — he often wandered off — till it was too late and he had thought it better to get home and report Johnny’s disappearance rather than go looking for him and himself get lost.

The incident had become a lesson to all the family. Their father had spoken to the boys, but had got very little from them. The episode encouraged Elizabeth’s anxiety that she herself had had since she was a girl; being lost was the worst fear. There had always been talk that she must not get lost. What they had really wanted to say was that she must not get captured. She had been told of the gangs that roamed the city to pick up boys and girls either to sell by advertisement in the shops or by deporting them back to Jamaica or the Carolinas.

‘Mama, Mama.’

‘Billy, please, please. You’re so heavy now.’

‘I’ll take him, Ma’am.’

‘You must get your break, Lydia. Is that Charles by the door? Everyone’s back at the same time today. Come, tell me what you did in class.’

Billy, suddenly quiet and pensive, looked up at his mother and asked, ‘Have you slept well, Mama, or was it you I heard coughing in the night?’

‘Probably, probably. You don’t miss a thing, do you?’ She marvelled at the composition of his sentences, the directness of his questions. She worried particularly that the twins and Billy might hear her coughing. She knew that it was inevitable because of the nearness of the rooms. She did not want her illness in their minds.

‘Johnny coughs at night as well,’ Billy piped up.

‘I don’t…’

‘Boys…’

‘We lie awake and whisper in the dark, don’t we?’ Charles spoke up, commanding the attention of his younger brother with a story of a horse galloping by in the night. ‘I caught a glimpse of the rider.’

Elizabeth had noticed since Johnny’s disappearance that her boys had been talking and playing at getting lost and having to survive on very little food. They had created an adventure about a mysterious man on horseback who went about capturing little black boys and girls, making them vanish.

‘I never disappeared. I can’t disappear. I’m not going to disappear.’ Johnny was not convinced by the game.

Billy was pulling his horse across the room with an awful screeching noise.

Elizabeth did find Lydia was a little vague about this matter of getting lost. She seemed at times not to take her anxiety seriously.

‘I parted the curtains when I heard the horse,’ Charles continued with his story. ‘I peeped through the window. But he was gone in a flash. Festina.’ Charles was proud of his knowledge of Latin.

‘I saw him too,’ Billy screamed.

‘Billy!’ Charles shouted, silencing William Thomas.

‘Lydia, can you help? Charles, can you?’

‘It’s from one thing to another at this time of day,’ Lydia complained, as she entered the room, not yet able to take her rest, wiping her hands on her apron. ‘Come on boys,’ she commanded, ‘your mother wants you to play gently. Charles, you can stop Billy pestering to blow bubbles. And let Johnny have your most recent work from school. I’m going upstairs and I don’t want to have to come down for at least an hour.’ This announcement was as much for Elizabeth who had had most of her day to herself and her writing. The boys knew Lydia did not threaten without consequences. They watched her leave the room and then they looked at their mother, understanding that her illness was something they had to cope with. They found that difficult, a mother with an illness which required quiet. At last, peace reigned.

Charles had always been strong and alert from birth, the first into the world, screaming his head off and startling the midwife Mrs R with his black skin as she passed him over to Lydia to cut his umbilical cord. ‘My Lord,’ she had cried out, ‘another son. Twins! What’s this?’ She turned to help Johnny, with his sandy, crinkly hair and his bright green eyes. ‘My dear, he’s your child, no doubt, and some of his father thrown in. What will the parish make of these two coming from the same mother? They’re your children, my love, no doubt sweetheart,’ the midwife talked all the while to Elizabeth as she cut Johnny’s umbilical cord and the babies were bathed and bundled up and placed in her arms where she lay, exhausted. Lydia cleaned up the mess, reaching for damp linen to soothe her brow with lemon balm. Charles was immediately at her breast while Johnny was less eager. Elizabeth and her husband always joked that there was no more milk left for Johnny once Charles was replete.

William Thomas, coming four years later, was an altogether different experience. Her white child, she called him. Elizabeth saw in him the ancestral connection to her Master and her own father’s looks, fairer skin and eyes, almost hazel and, above all, he had her Master’s adventurous personality.

That very morning she had found one of Billy’s small shirts hanging over the back of a chair and it moved her while she handled it and folded it, the small arms and the little collar, so tiny. She remembered that his birth had been so much calmer than that of the twins. Elizabeth had told her husband not to worry when he left for work that morning. ‘When you return, my sweet, there’ll be a new boy or girl,’ she had said to him. ‘You must not stay.’ The fire had been lit, new kindling and coals brought in by Lydia, delivered the day before by Seamus. She remembered Lydia’s gentle hands, so soothing. She had already once examined her, so gently entering to be assured that all was well with the baby’s passage. It was Lydia’s hands that she trusted most, with Mrs R to supervise.

John d’Aviniere had returned to the sight of his new baby. He held him and cried as he lifted him out in front of him, examining the smallest fingers and the littlest mouth, which he imagined smiled at him with eyes that blinked in the light. ‘You look like your mother’s Master,’ he had said. ‘How ironic, my white child, my son.’

Elizabeth sat back and enjoyed the brief tranquillity of her boys, thanks to Lydia settling them down before going for her rest. She could now get on with her writing in one of her favourite spots. Her garden was her solace when the weather permitted or when she felt that she could not stroll through Ranelagh Gardens to view the river and the visitors to the Rotunda, which had faded since its great days when the boy Mozart had played there and Canaletto had painted its ornamental lakes. She remembered her Master’s oil by the same artist, which had been hung at Caen Wood. Those had been the grand days when the crowds used to come to visit the murals and the Chinese architecture, the illuminations and the fireworks, when the crowds drank syllabubs, ate cakes and listened to Mr Handel’s music.

It was still like that when she and her new husband had walked hand in hand in their freedom and passion after they had first moved to Pimlico in 1793. Before the twins were born, they loved to enjoy the delight of the Gardens. They were still like a courting couple. So much had been a secret when they had first begun their romance and her Master was still alive. Marriage became their unfettered freedom from that bondage.

The simplest of his words had excited Elizabeth on that first encounter at the Shoreditch Meeting House. The weight of John d’Aviniere’s presence pressed upon her in the narrow passage between the boxed pews. The meeting start in ten minutes, Miss. She had felt him overwhelming her with the ordinary words of information, which he spoke in an accent that had her curious as to his origins. It was an inflection she had not heard since her mother’s tongue, that French patois, as he spoke his name, d’Aviniere. I am Mr d’Aviniere the son of the Elder, Thomas d’Aviniere. There had not been any further declaration of anything deeper, not then, not that first morning. She had kept smiling at the dip and rise of his voice. She had glimpsed him once before, where he sat in front of her, his black hair crinkled into tight curls on the nape of his neck. She found that she looked out for him after that meeting asking herself if she might arrange a rendezvous, a tryst, as Beth would call such a meeting. She found that she was allowing herself these fantasies on the way back in the carriage to Caen Wood.

She had, after that day, planned to arrive earlier than she needed for meetings, to linger in the porch for his arrival with Martha. She was later introduced to the white gentleman, his foster father. She concealed yet garnered the details of the passion that she felt rising in herself in such small, almost indiscernible ways, feelings she had not had for anyone else before. She fed herself in this way, to hold within her the smell of him, which she inhaled as they made room for each other on the tread of the stairs to an upper room after the meeting where the congregation met for refreshments and informal conversation. She once brushed against his sleeve, and on another occasion when he had hung his jacket upon a hook in the porch, she pressed her face into its collar to breathe him in. She allowed herself this passion. It shocked her that she searched for those stolen moments in this vicarious way. She recognised her hunger with wonder and felt a little embarrassed at herself that she should fall beyond herself and not know how she might get back to feel ordinary again. She wondered what prospects there were for the fulfilment of those inner desires.

It surprised Elizabeth that she now conjured her husband in this way, on this strangely warm January day on Ranelagh Street, a storm brewing as black as purple over the pastures of Pimlico behind the house. The river would be turbulent with waves, the barges crashing against each other, churned beyond its level, brimful to overflowing into the water meadows. Her husband would soon be home for tea.

She never forgot that first day in the porch of the Shoreditch Meeting House. It had earlier become the place of her education on abolition, taken there by her mother. She remembered her mother’s instructions when she was a girl: They is your people, child, look out for them, talking about the black people her mother had met in Shoreditch and Camden who had been enslaved or set free by their masters but still fearful of capture.

She had also noticed the stares when John d’Aviniere first entered the housekeeper’s room the day he came calling at Caen Wood. She had heard the whispered words behind raised palms among the girls as he came through the pantry. Another nigger? Two of them! That was the new girl from Finsbury. What minute evidence they worked on, skin not as dark as hers, hair not as woolly, as they called it, but his speech, foreign in its accent, lilting a little like hers, all not yet quite straightened out.

As he stood in the doorway that day, she saw how his dark eyes welled up with expectation. Had he known that he had enveloped her with a kind of pity as she noticed the rejection of others in their stares and their cruel whispers? Did she know that that was what it was at first, piercing and opening her heart to his love? She had slept each night with his face close to her own in her mind’s eye, so real. Could it become more than a dream? She pretended to touch and trace the contours of his face with her fingers, and draw him towards her, to place her lips upon his. Almost inaudibly, she whispered words to conjure him, words she herself hardly wanted to hear, stifled into her pillow.

There was another day when she had been called to the front door at Caen Wood by the bell, wondering why it was not being answered by one of the maids, its repeated toll clattering throughout the house. It was then that she found him standing at the door, the snow falling, and his hair the texture of her own, sprinkled with white flakes. She stretched out her arms to him. You must come in from the cold, she had pleaded. But this encounter got swallowed up in the bustle of the time, the preoccupations of duties, the service of her Master, in those last days at Caen Wood having to minister to the grieving widower. Mr d’Aviniere sat there for her Master’s inspection, the most powerful man under the king. Their courtship moments had had to be stolen and kept secret; her Master had insisted on discretion.

Lydia entered the room to announce that supper was ready.

Elizabeth continued to express her anxiety. ‘You know we’re plagued with the sharpers and the pickpockets in the Five Fields. We still don’t have Johnny’s full story. Such a mystery, Lydia.’

‘You must trust me, Ma’am.’ Lydia could get exasperated with her mistress. Their relationship was at times a conundrum to sort out; the little black girl brought into the household, neither fish nor fowl nor good red herring, they kept saying in the kitchens and then the seeming favourite of the master of the house, which grew into nasty rumours, his little black girl for his use. So much had changed.

‘I do. But I can’t help my anxiety. It’s my own terrible memory.’

‘It doesn’t help to constantly relive it. I do remember the frightening episode when you were a girl.’

‘All sorts visit the area. There’s the hospital near Pimlico and Locke’s Asylum in the marshes, which gives the passersby the jitters. We can hear the cries of the lunatics, poor souls. What did really happen to Johnny?’

‘Trust me, Ma’am. I do know how to look after children, as you are well aware. My mother had a multitude.’

‘Lydia, of course I know.’

Elizabeth enjoyed her boys’ company as Lydia served their supper. Charles and Johnny were still at their books, Charles helping his brother. How would others describe them, the gentlemen who used to visit her Master’s drawing room with their strange talk, those odd words to describe the mixture of blood, of breeds, as if they were newly discovered animals: mulatto, quadroon, marabou, sacatra and octoroon and all the rest, weighing on scales that hung in their minds the percentages of black and white. Is this how they would describe her small sandy-haired, green-eyed boy, her hazel-eyed, black-eyed lamb, her bête noire as someone had once called her, addressing Lady Betty? She’s your bête noire. All those fractions of colour! What did it all mean? She had once in a fit of madness thought she should put white powder on Charles’ face to make him less conspicuous. What would the world make of them when she had gone and they had to find themselves out there? Where would they find themselves in the world in what her father used to call our empire?

After supper, Billy continued to blow his bubbles, translucent orbs that hung momentarily in the air, catching the light, and then dissolving. He was looking more and more like her Master and her own father.

With the children in bed, Elizabeth got out her writing box and laid out her pens. In the quiet, before her husband’s return from Gough Square, there would be some time for her story. The very earliest days of her childhood were continuing to come back to her in fragments.

3

WHEN IT WAS daytime back there, it had been a white blinding light, and the heat, ‘like a desert,’ Dido’s father said. He was that hazel-eyed, blond-curls-on-the-nape-of-his-neck gentleman, the captain, up on deck, directing everything. He spoke of the extremes there could be at the different ends of the earth. ‘We’re almost on the equator,’ he said to her mother, explaining the fiery circle that encompassed the earth, as he put it then, his ship just off the coast of Trinidad, travelling towards Cartagena. He talked of rations with alarm. Were there enough rations of water? ‘Let me explain the geography.’ He laid his maps out on a trestle table, his fingers pointing. ‘Let me first explain longitude.’ Dido was lifted up into his arms so that she could see above the edge of the table. When he talked to her mother of these serious matters he laughed and smiled and called her pretty things, ‘My sweet, my darling,’ stroking her cheeks, and resting his lips upon hers in the privacy of their cabin, with the maps of their journey, their voyage, all laid out upon the table. He would turn from kissing her mother and wink at the child, Dido.

Her mother would say she did not understand such matters, but then added, ‘You must teach the child.’

Dido carried the word, longitude, spoken by her father. It stuck in her mind. Its sound, if not its meaning, always meant that she thought of her father up on the deck, spying, pointing, gesticulating and talking of what he had discovered on his voyages and travels. And, of course, he tried to explain the magical clock that had been on his ship Tartar on the trip to Barbados with Mr Harrison in 1764. He returned home in Pensacola from that voyage in time for her third birthday. ‘You is three, child. And is you father ship I see in the harbour.’ If the Harrison clock worked, he explained to her mother and herself, the trade would be safe. No more would His Majesty’s ships founder on the hidden shoals and rocks. All the wealth of those precious cargoes from Guinea to the Americas and the islands spreading like an arc between north and south upon which an empire depended would be saved, no longer lost or wasted. Such wasted cargo, such wasted fortunes and investments, such wasted property and returns when the longitude was not known. Since a boy of twelve or thirteen, he had been at sea serving His Majesty. There were other ships that he had captained and spoke of, often with pride: Trent, Cambridge, Temple and Devonshire.

Dido’s mother doted on this talk, of her Scotsman who would not make her a lady. For Dido it was a language that she kept and she made of it what she wanted to imagine. She learned of doldrums and trade winds.

THE FOLLOWING EVENING Lydia and Billy had gone out with Charles to play in the Gardens before dark. Johnny had stayed behind with Elizabeth. He was the one whom she talked to most intimately. He liked to get down her chestnut box and open it up for her to tell him the stories attached to its contents. Charles had inherited her proficiency with the Latin and Greek she had learned from her Master.

It was Johnny who had her feelings for the stories of the past. ‘Sweetheart, do you want your tea now? You’ve done a lot today. You’re ready for bed. The others are still out and will be back soon. Bread and butter? What’s Lydia got here, something in pastry? There you go.’

She sat at the table with him after his supper where he preferred to arrange and rearrange the mementoes from her chestnut box, her mother’s blue kerchief folded over and over, and to hear his mother talk of his grandmother as she told of her dancing on the deck of the ship. She told him of the wide ocean and all the voices which came up from the sea. Johnny held the kerchief to his face to inhale the past his mother talked about, to smell his grandmother, to imagine her dancing. ‘Can I do that?’ He looked up at his mother and smiled. He knew it was a fancy and that he was being silly. She pulled her fingers through his hair as he played with the gold earrings, holding them against his skin, hearing how his grandmother had pierced his mother’s ears with African gold she had sewn into the hem of her cloth for the journey across the ocean.

‘You’re not feeling well, are you? Not quite right?’

‘I’m not hungry.’

‘You go on up. Let’s put Mama’s things away. I’ll be up later to tuck you in.’

Elizabeth had to guard against these moments with her small children, that she did not indulge her own anxieties at the expense of any morbidity in their young lives. Johnny’s attentions always affected her with greater intensity because of his soft intimacies, which appealed to her secret longing for a daughter, though she knew that a girl child might not survive as well as the boys with their father when she had gone. It had been the wet nurse that had saved Johnny, trying him slowly with arrowroot, which thankfully he managed to consume. But he had never been strong. It was a wonder that he was alive at birth.

Charles and Billy, ravenously hungry, were consuming their supper while listening to their mother and their nurse. The pairs of eyes moving between the two women, back and forth, ears as alert as foxes.

Charles was particularly attentive. ‘I think I saw that gentleman that Johnny talked about when he got lost.’

‘You’ve never said that before.’

‘I wasn’t sure.’

‘What was he like?’

‘Who are you talking about?’ Billy asked, with bread and butter still stuffed in his mouth and holding one of Lydia’s small pies.

‘Charles, that’s enough. I’ll talk to you later. But…’

‘Just an ordinary gentleman, you know…’

‘Charles, I said, that’s enough.’ When Billy was not paying attention, she whispered, ‘Why do you think he was the same man?’

‘Johnny told me later that he had a scar on his cheek.’

‘Why haven’t you boys told us this before? Why didn’t you tell your father when he spoke to you?’

‘Johnny was scared. Anyway what can the man do? What are you afraid of him doing?’

Elizabeth looked at Lydia, her eyes questioning and askng, should we talk about this now, just before bedtime, with Billy all ears? ‘It’s time for bed. We’ll talk to your father about this tomorrow.’

The boys went upstairs to their room. Elizabeth waited for her husband. Lydia cleared up and went off to her room in the loft.

Elizabeth’s mother had been insistent in reminding her daughter of where she had come from, no matter her very young age. Moments alone with her mother accounted for her memories of that beginning time. There were the smells of her mother, tastes, snatches of her words, the music of her voice. She wanted to capture this in the pages of her story. She still felt the touch of her hand as she stroked her on her arm or when she kissed her cheek. She wanted her back. What she remembered were her stories of caution, her constant reminders to take care of gentlemen talking to her in the street. Her mother told her what she herself was in England, a black and a slave. That is you too my child, black and a slave, no matter John Lindsay blood running in your veins.

THE FIRST TIME Dido heard her father’s name called was by his lieutenant, second in command upon the ship, in a relaxed moment at the door of the cabin in which she and her mother were sequestered. ‘Lindsay.’ In another moment of intimacy she heard his other name, ‘John.’

Her mother told her, ‘He’s your father.’

Dido absorbed these facts: John Lindsay is your father. Maria Belle is your mother. Belle, what a funny name. She remembered her mother telling her it was a name for dirty work.

Dido knew she was everything to her young mother, and she thought it was the same to him, her father.

‘You must not go further than,’ then he pointed, ‘my pet,’ he said, resting his hand upon her head in a kind of blessing, or at least an affection. He pointed hardly yards from the cabin door to the deck above, where she must not go without supervision; that square of light, that glimpse of sky, that noisy thoroughfare above deck. When she climbed out of the cabin she was stunned by the expanse of the sea.

Her mother told her that she cried out, ‘Look!’ pointing to the sea. ‘The sea, the sea. Water, water.’ She learned the word ocean. At three going on four it was immeasurable to her. She was that young when she first beheld that wonder from the deck of her father’s ship. She stared and stared and pointed, ‘Look.’

Up on deck, her mother strolled arm in arm with her father. The sailors stared, their captain and the black woman. He and her mother at sea were different to being at home.

‘I cannot be seen with you at home,’ he told Dido’s mother. She would not, could not be taken for a lady, ever. ‘No matter our love,’ he said to her mother.

Dido lay awake listening to their romance and their kisses in the dark, the silences that followed, their sighs drowned by the wind which drove the ship, the wind and the sea all around them, travelling up and down the islands, then the long crossing of the ocean, the Atlantic ocean, which was another geography lesson from her father as they spotted the Azores in the distance. They stopped there to increase their rations of water. She remembered the islands as blue and purple. Her mother once told her it was because of the flowers. She later learned their name, hydrangeas, a purple and blue haze over the hills as they departed in the evening, staring from the stern of the ship till the islands were black dots and then no more.

Then it was the worry of her mother still being ill upon the bunk, forever coughing, not ever coming up on to the deck for the sea air. ‘You must come up for the air, my darling.’ Dido’s father spoke to her in that way, darling. It was reassuring to hear him speak to her like that. They had travelled over many days and nights, weeks, her father said, to get this far. Dido did not like to think how long and how far, for would that not be the great expanse which would lie between herself and her mother, between Pensacola and England, which her father called home? She had heard them talking of the voyage back her mother would have to make. ‘You go send me back?’ her mother asked. ‘And what about the child?’

When she looked at the sea it seemed very lonely — the Atlantic ocean — a faint blue on her father’s map. She was allowed to look over the railings from the deck, holding tight, a black sea below. The ocean moaned. Her mother said it wailed and called to her with voices. She learned later why her mother turned away from the deep swells which were hollowed out in that wide expanse of water, swelling and crashing against the sides of the ship as it ploughed with its sharp prow.

‘It swallowed them so quick,’ her mother described. ‘One moment they on the deck, screaming and fighting, the next that glimpse when them was forced to jump over the side of the ship. They was gone.’ She told Dido that there was one, just one, she saw struggling, calling out, a small voice, waving her arm. ‘She get smaller and smaller as the ship speed on with the sails like big bellies. We stand and look and look. I knew her. I uses to talk to her.’

Her mother and the rest were then taken back down into the holds, shackled to the floor and to each other so that the women turned away as they were put in their quarters from where they saw men reach for each other and comfort themselves with each other in the darkness, grasping for forgetfulness; up on deck, just lonely on their own, gazing at the open breasts and legs of women, daughters with their mothers and sisters in that naked state. She told Dido: ‘So many dead on the passage almost each day a burying as they call it, pitching the body into the sea. Worse when they alive, pushed over or jumping themselves to the comfort of the ocean rather than stay on that terrible ship.’

Her mother talked as if to herself, staring into the sea, Dido listening without understanding.

THE FOLLOWING DAY Elizabeth was in the house on her own. ‘Is someone at the door?’ she called but there was no answer. She caught herself looking up from her writing out into the garden from the upstairs back window. She had forgotten for a moment that she had come upstairs to the box room. Was it the laudanum playing tricks with her mind?

‘We’re back!’ It was Charles shouting in the hall. Billy was running after him and Lydia came in last with Johnny closing the front door behind him.

‘He gave me a fright,’ Lydia said to Elizabeth quietly, not wanting to

alarm the boys.

‘Who did?’

Lydia explained that the boys had been dawdling behind and she was pressing ahead because they were late.

‘Dawdling! How many times, Lydia…’

‘Ma’am…’ She began to explain in whispers that he was a very respectable-looking gentleman. He was dressed unusually for the district, respectable, but sort of roguish. His coat had a reddish colour. His hat was pulled over his eyes. He had stopped them politely and pointed to the children.

‘Who, Lydia?’

‘He appeared suddenly. I did not see where he had come from. He asked… I cannot say it, Ma’am. He had such a unique way of talking.’

‘What, Lydia?’

‘He said…’

‘What, Lydia, spit it out…’

‘I don’t think the children heard…’

‘What?’

‘He said, “They’re a fine pair. I expect they might fetch you quite a good price if you knew the right people to do business with.” He rested his hand on Johnny’s head saying, “This one…”’

Lydia looked terrified. Elizabeth felt sick.

‘I did tell you…’

‘I thought you were fussing unnecessarily, Ma’am…’

‘You do remember what happened to me when I was a girl…’

‘Of course, I remember.’ Elizabeth and Lydia recalled her distraught face, a girl, shaking, banging on the front door of the Mansfield house in Bloomsbury Square. She had been uncontrollable, screaming, convulsed. Lydia had taken her straight into Lady Betty in the drawing room. ‘You threw yourself on the floor, breathless. Lady Betty administered a tincture of laudanum to still your spirits, Ma’am.’

Charles, despite the whispers, was alert to the conversation between his mother and Lydia.

‘It may’ve been the same man that made Johnny get lost in the marshes.’

‘Well, it’s a good lesson. Two scares.’

‘He didn’t look like a catcher, Ma’am, but he might employ one.’

‘Quite so, they’re not isolated individuals, but organised. Let’s have tea and then bed. Charles you’ve homework, haven’t you? I’ll talk with you and Johnny tomorrow. I don’t want you to frighten Billy with your talk. Straight off to sleep tonight when you’re in bed.’

‘Can’t I wait up for Papa?’

‘Not tonight.’

Mr d’Aviniere was late that evening. Elizabeth told Lydia to have an early night. She then pulled herself up the stairs to supervise bedtime. She read one of Aesop’s fables: The Fox and the Cat. Without saying anything directly about the afternoon’s events, she repeated the moral of Aesop’s tale as she turned down the lamp: ‘Good to have one sure way to deal with difficulty. I think coming straight home is the best way to avoid any dangers. Sleep well, my pets.’

They lay on their backs, their large eyes turning from the ceiling to their mother at the door.

‘Mama…’

‘William Thomas, not another word.’

Elizabeth had never told her boys about slavery. Her sons were free. She did not have any proof. It certainly was not in the colour of their skin. It was not written down anywhere. She had no papers to show if they were ever apprehended or carted off. Whenever she had got close to the story of the trade with Johnny, playing with the bits and pieces of her mother’s life kept in the chestnut box, she had closed the lid on that past.