Testimony of an Irish Slave Girl (9 page)

“I did so. Paudi Iasc sprang from the rafters to a bale on the ground, for the glory of being in his prime no doubt. Also it was that Jenks might whip the men until they bled, but his joints would still nevermore be vigorous enough to let him leap down from a loft. I was beckoned along with them, out under the awning. The ground lay littered with golden tobacco leaves, already souring from the damp.

“I do not know what Paudi Iasc expected. Some arduous task, perhaps. When Master bade me tell him get his things out of the cabin he shared with the others, the girl began to whimper, and the color rose on Paudi Iasc. He had a fine head of ginger curls, had Paudi. Redheaded folk color up like October apples.

“Paudi Iasc began to wave his arms. He pushed his face right up to Jenks and shouted in our tongue, ‘Arra, leave the girl alone, or stick her yerself, you ould hoorson! I’m a married man already, with a babe by now. I’ve made my sacraments!’

“With my eyes down I told them Paudi Iasc could not go with the Scots girl for he already had a babe and bride. But Master laughed. He waved his cuff at Paudi. ‘ ’Tis proof that he’s apt stud.’

“Jenks then grasped Paudi Iasc by the neck, pushing him toward the cabin for his kit, and saying, ‘Ye thick bustard! He’s a thick bustard, sire; a child off him mought be born an eejit …’ Then there broke out a little scuffle. Paudi Iasc pushed Jenks’s arm away with his tilted fist, and the overseer almost toppled in the dust. For that they clapped Paud in the stocks and doled out thirty lashes, to be administered after the Scots girl had caught, but before the busy season. For Paudi Iasc was a man who worked hard just for the pleasure of feeling his muscles stretch; that was why they chose him for the breeding, and why they could not harm him with crop time ahead.”

A shaft of sunlight strikes the pewter tray Coote’s meal rests upon as the slave comes through the doorway. The napkin tented across the dishes is the same blue as her wrapped headscarf. Coote sands the paper he’s been writing on as soon as she appears, piling his supplies quickly at the top corner of the escritoire. He rubs his hands together and sighs with anticipation and exhaustion. “Rest,” he instructs the prisoner. “Lucy will come for you when I am ready for more testimony.” The two women file slowly from the room as he takes fork in hand. Under the napkin lies the purplish slab of meat; also cassava cake and pickled okra.

After the heavy meal, Coote retires to his private chambers. He removes breeches, waistcoat, and his one remaining good Irish linen shirt, donning an older one, frayed impossibly along the neck and cuffs. He uses this as a nightshirt. As soon as he slips below the mosquito net onto his cot he sinks into a deep and drooling sleep. A shutter banging at the window awakens him. The storm’s already passing, leaving a cool current of air to lave the middle of the room. Peter feels almost drunk from his greasy meal and viscous sleep. But once he washes in the fine porcelain bowl his mood shifts again: much better, almost hearty. He pulls on his hose, feeling the darning at the heels when he tugs on his snug breeches and slides on his shoes. Then he draws the good shirt over his head. As he raises his arms to tie once more the jabot, he notes, in dismay, his cuffs.

Stitched of fine Irish lace and linen, both are grimy-gray along the edges of the hem. Now Coote notices two smears of ink on the right one, tiny blobs until dragged across the desk as he scripted. “God’s bloody teeth,” he curses tightly, feeling the undercurrent of rage and frustration which has been swelling for fifteen years now, in the tropics. A freed woman in the village has been recommended as a seamstress. Coote has ordered two shirts made on account, based on his rank as the Governor’s commissar. But higher ranks and commissions must be satisfied first: the seamstress has been finishing the bridal ensemble for the wedding of the daughter of Newton House. And now, for the Governor’s banquet tomorrow evening, a complete new set of table linens is being hemmed and embroidered with the crest of State by a circle of mop-capped skivvies, under the seamstress’s sharp eye. The apprenticed slatterns seem able enough to Coote, but she herself would embellish the emblem of government on every napkin with cloth-of-gold thread; would embroider the plantation daughter’s sleeves herself with silver. Only between times has she begun to wind fragile ivory threads between tiny pins pegged to a board, fashioning the lace for Peter Coote’s new shirts.

Friday week, she’d said, or if not, surely Saturday. But spreading the sheer cuffs of his soiled shirt between thumb and forefinger, Coote is distressed. He is invited to the Governor’s banquet, which will occur tomorrow night. A newcomer to their circle, an unknown among the famous planters and senators, the shippers and slavers and merchants also on the guest list. Stede will be waiting for an update on the Irish investigation. They’ll bend together in close counsel. He imagines the Governor taking his arm and bending to listen or chuckle, and … and himself in tatters! He lifts the small bell he carries everywhere at the gaol, and rings it too vigorously. “Get the prisoner,” he orders abruptly when Lucy appears. He lifts his waistcoat and drapes it over a chair back. Why should he dress himself like a lord for Africans and criminals this muggy afternoon? Instead, he hangs the dove-gray surcoat over a ladder-back, buttoning it to block its form in the soggy air.

He brushes it, considering. It looks fresh enough. On a waft of breeze his spirits lift and tilt toward optimism. Dinner is late in the tropics. By candlelight, or strolling His Excellency’s grounds in the shadows of flowering vines, who will notice old cuffs? They’ll look passable, no doubt; and by the weekend the new shirts will be done. He carries the small bell with him to the office where the Irishwoman should be waiting by now. It jangles faintly once in the corridor, although he does not shake it.

“The mistress came home to Arlington after my third harvest. Christmas had passed, then Easter. I recall this because I had a new canvas petticoat, and I had painted on it with those red beans in the long pods which the Africans used to decorate their loincloths. Little flowers I’d wrought, like vetch—so simple in design, all along the hem: I was standing in my father’s open surcoat in the yard, feeding fowl from a palm shell, when we heard the carriage coming.

“It was a rosy evening. Lovely. Ardiss and I were chasing the pigs. The sows had littered, and wandered the plantation with yokes nailed around their necks to stop them from rooting up the pigeon peas and seedling cotton. Behind them trotted their piglets, squealing for the teat. Dora had come up to us with orders for the Scots girl, too big with child to do the work of first gang in her last weeks, when the fine red carriage with the Orkney crest thundered into the yard. We scuttled onto the grass, Ardiss and myself, but Dora pushed the wisps beneath her cap and stepped forward. Jenks was running toward us from his cottage up the yard by the time the driver stood down, opened the carriage door, and placed a foot-stool in the dust. When Master Plackler had alighted in his deep plum coat, he held up his arm. A woman’s cuff and long white fingertips slid onto his sleeve. It clung there as a swish of gray silk skirts stepped uncertainly onto the stool. Our mistress looked around—at the sighing trees which fringed the fields, the evening swallows darting through the pinkening skies, the poor-kempt flowerbeds by the steps before her, and finally past Dora and myself, to linger in a blank way on Ardiss. ‘Cover her shame,’ she said to her husband. ‘My dear?’ he asked. ‘That young thing, where is her bodice?’ the mistress said pointing at me although her eyes were still on Ardiss. ‘Ah, ’tis just the child I bought to serve you as lady’s maid,’ he smiled absently. The mistress had already turned, clutching her skirts to ascend the steps to her door, when Jenks caught up, crying ‘Sir, I was told you would come Sunday week, I had no notice, the house is not aired.’

“But the master only replied tiredly, ‘You must do the best you can for the night, but have them fall to it on the morrow, for my lady has come to stay.’ They went inside. The groom began to un-lash three large trunks strapped across the ceiling of the coach. Jenks had moved to help him when we espied another shoe, another knee, pushing skirts of dark blue calico through the open coach doors. ‘Mary?’ the mistress called from somewhere in the house; and her voice raised at the end with a note both querulous and sharp, like a mad child playing with a razor.

“ ‘Comin Mawdam,’ was the reply, and I drew in my breath. For the woman who stood now in the ruddy lane had the rich sound of home. I stared into her face, and she smiled and winked at me as she gathered up small cases, hatboxes, a fan, and hastened toward the stairs. ‘Will one of ye not help me?’ she invited. But the bar wench in the Donkey and the Tankard had smiled and winked kindly, so I hung back while Dora simpered forward.”

“I take it,” Coote interjects, “this ‘lady’ you speak of was Mary Dove, she who was executed after you revealed her plot to your master.”

Suddenly the prisoner cries out hoarsely, burying her face in dirty gnarled knuckles. Meanwhile Coote records his words as if they have been her admission. “May God forgive me, for sometimes I cannot forgive myself,”she sobs. This is her first real breakdown of composure. The room grows utterly silent but for her jagged weeping. Coote finds himself disconcerted: even after floggings and now the likelihood of worse, the prisoner’s loyalties seem to lie with the fomenters of sedition, dead now for many years. He pours himself water and drinks.

“Eugenia Plackler never set foot again beyond the Spanish tiles of Arlington’s patio from the time she alighted from that coach, until her husband died,” Cot Quashey continues in a bit. “Arlington was the holding her father the Earl settled on her at the birth of their firstborn son. But that son, Mary told me, had perished just weeks beyond his third year, and none of the mistress’s other eight issue had survived more than a week beyond the womb. Eugenia Plackler had retained a surgeon in Bridgetown to help her bring forth an heir. But now that her husband had lost their property in Bridgetown at the gaming, she had only Mary and me to help her build the strength to attempt the ordeal again. From the beginning the mistress hated to look upon Ardiss’s comely belly, but my own swaybacked childishness drew her watery smile. She sent for me to train under Mary as lady’s and nursery maid.

“And Mistress Plackler’s first orders to me were delightful! She herself gave me two lengths of blue calico, and set me to cutting a skirt, a bodice, and a cap much like Mary’s. I was to sleep on a pallet, my father’s old coat with the pipe in the pocket to pillow my head, and a patched linen sheet to cover me. This pallet was placed outside the boudoir when the master visited her, but at the foot of her bed when she slept alone. For then, almost always, ghoulish dreams of wailing babes would wake her. It was my task then to bring the sleeping cup Mary had brewed, and sit by her side as her pale nails dug red crescents into my hands. How she babbled in terror at the darkness, repeating their names. I remember some of those names to this day; the ghostlings that had followed her from Bridgetown cemetery to this desolate plantation where her husband’s dicing excesses had exiled her.

“But in the beginning every day was a joy to me in the Big House. I arose before dawn to help Mary set cook fires in the fieldstone kitchen. As the biscuit baked we spoke our own language, blessing the hearth and asking for redemption, to mark our own day inside the day that owned us. My Mary came from a townland up around Slieve League, and had been parted from her seven children and their father, a great rebel chief.”

A sort of tingle floods through Coote as his prisoner lauds the rebel as “great.” It is a detail which will pleasure the Governor; which will suit
his
point of view, fulfill
his
expectations. But also this admission holds something for Coote himself, if he can remember to jot the idea down in the book which contains his hypothesis: recalcitrance seems bred into the blood of certain races, while others are much more sensible and resilient… . But ponder that later, for now she is musing, “… and no African ever set foot in that house, nor fertile Ardiss, nor jealous Dora; and the groom went back to Bridgetown to deliver the horses and himself to the winner-at-cards. So you see, we were there alone with the mistress, and sometimes the master, and it was easy for me to pretend childishly that the house was mine: Mary’s and mine. And would we not be safe, inside what was our own?

“How the senses delighted as I knelt upon the floor, my new skirts spread around me to admire as I polished sun motes into the planks. The scent of citrus oil and tallow, the proud cold swell of a porcelain vase as I dusted on hot afternoons, the wink of the haughty brass lion-headed knob that emerged from my cloth as I shone his cheeks and nose … all these brought alive again something that had been stunted that Wren’s Day when I entered the Donkey and Tankard,” she says. And stops, seeming puzzled. Then she mutters, “Beauty. It was beauty.”

“I do not take your meaning,” Coote frowns. But the words she speaks next somehow create a small diorama for him, and he too envisions a maid, sprouting winsome from lanky childhood as the seasons move past. Unaware, as she crosses the yard on an errand in her blue uniform with hair and skin scrubbed clean every Sabbath to please her mistress’s nose, of narrowing eyes which measure her figure, now rounding on rich table scraps. Eyes noting the blush which rises to her cheeks, the sometimes mirthful, sparkling young eyes. These are the colors, the sparks, of too much ease, clean satiny floors below bare toes, uninjured fingers culling ripe fruits and sweet flowers from the overgrown tangle surrounding the house.

“The mistress,” Cot tells Coote, “had me adorn her bedchamber every morning with flowers. A vase of them must be placed at the side of the glass where we made her toilette, washing away the nightmare sweats and poppied sleep. I would comb out her hair, sometimes rinsing it with cedar bark boiled in ale for the burnish. Oh, she was worn to the bone by the time I met her: stringy from fallen health and pallid with grief for all those lost babies. Mary, who had been purchased as a slave for life by the mistress’s father …”