“I asked him later. He said Miss McLurie was right: he wasn’t a colonel. He had called himself that after he had come to the island; he had military ambitions and was looking for an opening somewhere. I said he had misled me, and this could have been damaging. I had suffered enough from the Leander people, who had thought that service with me was only a matter of rations and plunder. My venture was likely to have its desperate passages. After my recent reverses I needed men not only with military experience but also with a record of proven luck: he should have known that.
“He hung his head and said he was sorry. But he didn’t think he had done worse than other people I knew, and no one criticized them. It was well known, for instance, that Archibald Gloster, the local attorney-general — another person I keep meeting all the time in various houses — wasn’t a lawyer. He had simply bought a lawyer’s licence from the Council secretary in the time of the first British governor, Picton.
“Bernard later told me it was true about Gloster. It was no secret that the attorney-general wasn’t a lawyer at all. And there was a further story about that, Bernard said. It came out during the enquiry into the slave rebellion that had nearly happened.
“Gloster had a personal servant called Scipio. People here often give their Negroes the better-known classical names — Hercules, Hector, Cupid, Caesar, Pompey, Agrippa, Cato, Scipio. At night — this was in the months during the preparing of the rebellion — Gloster’s Scipio would leave his quarters at the back of Gloster’s yard in the town, and go the five or six miles to the seaside village of Carenage. The Negro known as King Edward had his court at Carenage, and Scipio’s loyalty at night was to the convoi or regiment of King Edward. Edward’s courtiers had wooden swords painted white and green.
“When Scipio first joined the regiment, King Edward offered him a sword and a title: ‘My Lord St. John.’ Everybody who joined a regiment got a title which he had to use at night. Scipio said no, he didn’t want to be My Lord St. John. It didn’t mean anything. He wanted to be attorney-general, like his master. Edward said that wasn’t a proper title for a courtier in his regiment. In the end they decided that Scipio was to be clerk and secretary — the job Bernard now has in real life — and at night, at Carenage, while King Edward’s dauphins and dauphines and princes and princesses drank white rum and sang and danced and ate things that had been cooked for the party in the various estate kitchens during the day, Scipio sat in the light of a flambeau and turned over the pages of one of Gloster’s lawbooks and then for ten or fifteen minutes at a time made a pretence of writing. As secretary, though, he had a serious enough job: he became one of the organizers of the rebellion. He was one of those who got a hundred lashes and lost their ears.
“After he told me this story Bernard said, ‘Somebody out there is studying me. And somebody is studying you as well, I’m sure. At one time I used to think it was harmless. After what nearly happened to all of us, the mockery seems horrible.’
“So the world shrinks around me while I wait, Sally. I no longer want to go out. There is very little to go out for. I have heard everything they all have to say. I feel that, as the world around me gets smaller, I dwindle with it. I hope I don’t have to wait here much longer, and I hope the waiting has been worthwhile. I cannot hold on to large ideas in this setting. My instinct now, my passion, is to get away, just as it was in Caracas in 1770, thirty-seven years ago. It’s as if after half a lifetime I have made a circular journey back to what I was — though I do not remember Caracas being as small as this. The people cannot be blamed. The merchants mix only with their fellows in the very small town, and people like Bernard are tied to their estates. And it is Bernard now who, after his Council meetings, comes back in his calash with news of the bigger world both for his wife and for me.
“At one end of the front verandah of the estate house there is a projecting room, jalousied on three sides. On hot days Bernard’s wife moves there for the air, from her inner room, and she gets a girl to sit with her. As I read and write in the verandah — decorated down the length of its inner wall with a simple, bright pattern of flowers and curling ribbons, the work no doubt of the pastrycook who did the coat of arms on the calash — I sometimes hear Bernard’s wife talking to the girl with her.
“I hear intonations rather than words, the intonations of someone lying on her back. She is really trying to talk herself asleep, and the girl with her regularly says a few words to show that she is still there. The girl’s words are clearer, because she is sitting, and the girls — there are different ones — are amazingly affectionate. It isn’t always madame. It can be mamselle, mama, dou-dou, ma ’mie, mon enfant, ma petite. It is very strange and lulling, and on a hot day, in the wine-cask smell of sweating cocoa beans, I can listen to the rhythms of the talk and watch the long-tailed cornbirds weaving the long, sock-like pouches of their nests on the samaan or immortelle trees. Often the girl falls asleep before the mistress.
“One day I thought, This is practically all the society Bernard’s wife has.’
“Every day before nightfall, at about six or just before, Bernard goes and locks the mule sheds. He doesn’t want the Negroes to go wandering about on the mules at night, as they did before. And often, even after this, he gets a feeling that things are not right outside. It’s just a feeling, but it eventually makes him go and check the mule sheds and the Negro houses. He has said more than once to me, There are so many of them, and there are only two of us.’
“In the morning he is up very early, to check the yard and the houses and the stores and the kitchen, and to unlock the mule sheds. After morning tea — there are three estate meals: tea, breakfast, dinner — he has to give out the work in the cocoa sheds and cocoa woods, and after breakfast he has to go and check the work, and he often has to show how everything is to be done, because some of the people who did a job quite well the day before will now say they have forgotten how to do it. The recently arrived Africans, or new Negroes, as they are known here, are especially difficult that way. They believe that if they do their tasks badly often enough they won’t have to do them at all, and might somehow even be sent back home.
“So Bernard is as tied as any Negro to his estate. If he didn’t have the secretaryship of the Council he would be quite immured here.
“After the recent trouble he can take nothing for granted. Every morning when he makes his round he is hoping he isn’t going to find a corpse — a poisoning or a suicide. Even while I have been here Negroes have been poisoned or have committed suicide on estates quite close by. There have been a number of suicides on the La Chancellerie estate, which is another estate owned by a woman, Rose de Gannes de la Chancellerie, Marquise de Chaurras. They commit suicide by eating dirt over many days. The eating of dirt is something the new Negroes rather than the creoles do, and those suicides come in batches. They give encouragement to one another.
“When something like that happens, or when news of it comes to Bernard, I can see it on his face. He doesn’t like talking about it. He would prefer to keep it from his wife, but he knows that it’s something she will hear about from the girls when they go to sit with her in the room with the jalousies on three sides. Perhaps something has even happened here in the last few months. If it has, Bernard wouldn’t want me to know. When I hear the women talk, I hear only maman or madame or whatever, and the rhythm of their patois. Perhaps without knowing it I have been hearing the women talk about a death in one of the little houses.