Joseph Knight

‘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.