The newcomer was a pockmarked young man with spectacles and an old-fashioned curly wig. Although Sir George and the older men still wore wigs, younger men did so rarely, and Jay never did. “Reverend Mr. York sends his apologies,” said Mr. Cheshire.
“Not at all, not at all,” said Sir George, turning away: he was not interested in obscure young clergymen.
They went in to dinner. The smell of food mingled with a damp odor that came from the heavy old curtains. The long table was laid with an elaborate spread: joints of venison, beef, and ham; a whole roast salmon; and several different pies. But Jay could hardly eat. Would Father give him the Barbados property? If not, what else? It was hard to sit still and eat venison when your entire future was about to be decided.
In some ways he hardly knew his father. Although they lived together, at the family house in Grosvenor Square, Sir George was always at the warehouse with Robert. Jay spent the day with his regiment. They sometimes met briefly at breakfast, and occasionally at supper—but Sir George often ate supper in his study while looking over some papers. Jay could not guess what his father would do. So he toyed with his food and waited.
Mr. Cheshire proved mildly embarrassing. He belched loudly two or three times and spilled his claret, and Jay noticed him staring rather obviously into the cleavage of the woman sitting next to him.
They had sat down at three o’clock and, by the time the ladies withdrew, the winter afternoon was darkening into evening. As soon as they had gone Sir George shifted on his seat and farted volcanically. “That’s better,” he said.
A servant brought a bottle of port, a drum of tobacco and a box of clay pipes. The young clergyman filled a pipe and said: “Lady Jamisson’s a damn fine woman, Sir George, if I may say so. Damn fine.”
He seemed drunk, but even so such a remark could not be allowed to pass. Jay came to his mother’s defense. “I’ll thank you to say no more about Lady Jamisson, sir,” he said frostily.
The clergyman put a taper to his pipe, inhaled, and began to cough. He had obviously never smoked before. Tears came to his eyes, and he gasped and spluttered and coughed again. The coughs shook him so hard that his wig and spectacles fell off—and Jay saw immediately that this was no clergyman.
He began to laugh. The others looked at him curiously. They had not seen it yet. “Look!” he said. “Don’t you see who it is?”
Robert was the first to realize. “Good God, it’s Miss Hallim in disguise!” he said.
There was a moment of startled silence. Then Sir George began to laugh. The other men, seeing that he was going to take it as a joke, laughed too.
Lizzie took a drink of water and coughed some more. As she recovered, Jay admired her costume. The spectacles had hidden her flashing dark eyes, and the side-curls of the wig had partly obscured her pretty profile. A white linen stock thickened her neck and covered the smooth feminine skin of her throat. She had used charcoal or something to give her cheeks the pockmarked look, and she had drawn a few wispy hairs on her chin like the beard of a young man who did not yet shave every day. In the gloomy rooms of the castle, on a dull winter’s afternoon in Scotland, no one had seen through her disguise.
“Well, you’ve proved you can pass for a man,” said Sir George when she had stopped coughing. “But you still can’t go down the pit. Go and fetch the other ladies, and we’ll give Jay his birthday present.”
For a few minutes Jay had forgotten his anxiety, but now it came back with a thump.
They met up with the women in the hall. Jay’s mother and Lizzie were laughing fit to bust: Alicia had obviously been in on the plot, which accounted for her secretive grin before dinner. Lizzie’s mother had not known about it, and she was looking frosty.
Sir George led the way out through the main doors. It was dusk. The snow had stopped. “Here,” said Sir George. “This is your birthday present.”
In front of the house a groom held the most beautiful horse Jay had ever seen. It was a white stallion about two years old, with the lean lines of an Arab. The crowd made it nervous, and it skipped sideways, forcing the groom to tug on its bridle to keep it still. There was a wild look in its eyes, and Jay knew instantly it would go like the wind.
He was lost in admiration, but his mother’s voice cut through his thoughts like a knife. “Is that all?” she said.
Father said: “Now, Alicia, I hope you aren’t going to be ungracious—”
“Is that all?” she repeated, and Jay saw that her face was twisted into a mask of rage.
“Yes,” he admitted.
It had not occurred to Jay that this present was being given to him instead of the Barbados property. He stared at his parents as the news sank in. He felt so bitter that he could not speak.
His mother spoke for him. He had never seen her so angry. “This is your son!” she said, her voice shrill with fury. “He is twenty-one years old—he’s entitled to his portion in life … and you give him a horse?”
The guests looked on, fascinated but horrified.
Sir George reddened. “Nobody gave me anything when I was twenty-one!” he said angrily. “I never inherited so much as a pair of shoes—”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she said contemptuously. “We’ve all heard how your father died when you were fourteen and you worked in a mill to keep your sisters—that’s no reason to inflict poverty on your own son, is it?”
“Poverty?” He spread his hands to indicate the castle, the estate, and the life that went with it. “What poverty?”
“He needs his independence—for God’s sake give him the Barbados property.”
Robert protested: “That’s mine!”
Jay’s jaw became unlocked, and at last he found his voice. “The plantation has never been properly administered,” he said. “I thought I would run it more like a regiment, get the niggers working harder and so on, and make it more remunerative.”
“Do you really think you could do that?” said his father.
Jay’s heart leaped: perhaps Father would change his mind. “I do!” he said eagerly.
“Well, I don’t,” Father said harshly.
Jay felt as if he had been punched in the stomach.
“I don’t believe you have an inkling how to run a plantation or any other enterprise,” Sir George grated. “I think you’re better off in the army where you’re told what to do.”
Jay was stunned. He looked at the beautiful white stallion. “I’ll never ride that horse,” he said. “Take it away.”
Alicia spoke to Sir George. “Robert’s getting the castle and the coal mines and the ships and everything else—does he have to have the plantation too?”
“He’s the elder son.”
“Jay is younger, but he’s not nothing. Why does Robert have to get everything?”
“For the sake of his mother,” Sir George said.
Alicia stared at Sir George, and Jay realized that she hated him. And I do too, he thought. I hate my father.
“Damn you, then,” she said, to shocked gasps from the guests. “Damn you to hell.” And she turned around and went back into the house.
5
THE MCASH TWINS LIVED IN A ONE-ROOM HOUSE FIFTEEN feet square, with a fireplace on one side and two curtained alcoves for beds on the other. The front door opened onto a muddy track that ran downhill from the pit to the bottom of the glen where it met the road that led to the church, the castle and the outside world. The water supply was a mountain stream at the back of the row of houses.
All the way home Mack had been agonizing over what had happened in the church, but he said nothing, and Esther tactfully asked him no questions. Earlier that morning, before leaving for church, they had put a piece of bacon on the fire to boil, and when they returned home the smell of it filled the house and made Mack’s mouth water, lifting his spirits. Esther shredded a cabbage into the pot while Mack went across the road to Mrs. Wheighel’s for a jug of ale. The two of them ate with the gargantuan appetites of physical laborers. When the food and the beer were gone, Esther belched and said: “Well, what will you do?”