Joseph Knight

From then on she learned to use the library at times when her father was out or away from home. She started to use the books as none of her sisters did, to find things out. And when she was alone she would stand for long minutes in front of the painting, gazing at the porch where Joseph Knight had been – where the outline of him still was if you were wise to it. She would close her eyes and see him running through the trees. He was naked. He was young. He was extremely handsome.

Right from the start she had known she must not mention him to her father. The servants did not even have to warn her, she knew it from their hushed tones. She understood it from the bitterness that sometimes seeped out of Maister MacRoy. She wanted to ask somebody about the figure in the painting, but she did not dare. It was a secret. If her father found out that she knew it, he would be angry. He might take the painting away. She must do nothing to provoke that.

So Joseph Knight remained at Ballindean yet was always missing, visible yet invisible, present yet absent in all the real and imagined conversations she had ever had. That was part of the thrill of hearing him named by Mr Jamieson. It made him seem alive, even though as she had told Jamieson she thought he must be dead. For years she had sensed Knight’s ghost in the library: in the books themselves, in old letters folded and forgotten inside the books, in every nook and on every shelf. He was there but not there. Jamieson had been so close and yet had not spotted Knight in the painting, because he had not known to look. But she had known. And now she knew she would have to look again; that there must be more of Joseph Knight somewhere in that room.

Alone again, Sir John Wedderburn briefly regretted being so sharp with Jamieson. But then, the man had been presumptuous – and a sycophant when his presumption met resistance. Sir John stood and went to inspect the picture of himself, James and Peter. Not a good painting. Its amateurishness had always annoyed him. He should take it down, put it somewhere else or get rid of it all together. But he knew he would not. He had been having this argument with himself for thirty years. The painting mattered. It was one of only two things that survived of his brother Sandy. He went back to the table.

Jamieson’s suggestion that he was some mere branch of the Wedderburn tree had irritated him. Just because cousin Loughborough had been in the public eye! Even against somebody as insignificant as Jamieson it was necessary to defend the family name against incursions, especially when they involved a plotter and trimmer like Loughborough, whose whole history had been one of eliminating any Scottish traits – accent, acquaintances, principles – that might have hindered his political progress in England. Sir John, though he spoke good English, still sounded Scotch enough, and that was with twenty years in the West Indies, where the whites generally turned to speaking like their slaves. Lord Loughborough, on the other hand, had taken lessons in his youth from some Irish speech pedlar, had planed out his vowels and Scotticisms till nobody would laugh at him in London. Ah well, Loughborough was at an end now. They all were, their generation – redding up their affairs as best they could.

Aeneas’s quiet knock came again and he slid in, closing the door behind him. ‘He’s awa,’ he said.

‘Good.’

‘Is there onything ye want done?’

‘No.’ The question seemed innocent enough, but the implication was, did anything need to be done about him? Jamieson. Aeneas watched out for his master like an old dog. With his grizzled, unsmiling loyalty he might have been better suited for a soldier than a schoolmaster. Might have been. Wedderburn smiled – there was a whole other life in that phrase.

‘You know what day it is tomorrow, Aeneas?’

‘Aye. The sixteenth.’

‘Fifty-six years,’ Sir John said.

‘Aye, Sir John.’

April the sixteenth. The date never escaped them. There were anniversaries scattered through the calendar that Sir John always observed with a sombre heart: so far this year there had been the martyrdom of Charles I, at the end of January, and the death of his first, dear wife Margaret in March; and late in November he would mourn, yet again, his father. But tomorrow it was Culloden.

‘You’ll come and drink a toast with me?’

‘Jist oorsels?’ MacRoy asked.

‘Of course.’ It was never anyone but themselves. Everybody else was too young, or dead.

‘Nearly sixty years, damn it,’ Sir John said. ‘A lifetime away, a world away. Dear God, somebody will be writing a novelle about it next!’

‘It’ll no tell the truth, a novelle,’ Aeneas said.

‘No, it won’t. The women will love it. But we’re still here. We know the truth.’

‘Aye.’

‘What a life, Aeneas, eh?’ Sir John said. ‘What a life! Out in ’45 – there’s not many left that can say that! And you, too. We were out together.’

Out. What a tiny, enormous word. At sixteen Sir John had marched to Derby. At seventeen – Susan’s age – he had been at Culloden. At eighteen he had been an exile in Jamaica.

Life, the poets said, was a splashing mountain burn becoming a deep, smooth river flowing to the sea. Sir John did not see it like that. For him life was a broken expanse of land without design or cultivation, patchworked with bog and rocky outcrops. A trackless moor covered by low cloud – or by smoke. What connected one memory to another, this moment to that moment? You turned around and lost sight of someone, your bearings went astray, you could only dimly see what you had thought was a certain landmark.

What had a frightened boy on a battlefield to do with an aged laird in Perthshire, putting his affairs in order, folding away his years? What had a boy on the run called John Thomson to do with an old man called John Wedderburn? What had a black boy with some impossible name, chasing birds in an unknown village in Africa, to do with a man called Joseph Knight, sitting in a courtroom in Edinburgh? What had these lives to do with each other? They seemed quite distinct. Separate people. There was no continuous stream, only a torn, faded, incomplete map of wilderness.

He shook his head. He must have dozed. Some time had passed – the clock said half-past eleven – and Aeneas had gone away again; if he had actually been there and not part of a dream. Sir John was disturbed by this idea. Recently he had been having sensations of doubt like that all the time: was he awake or dreaming? It was very unmanly. And he didn’t really believe that idle nonsense anyway, about the trackless moor. It made everything so pointless. Better to think of God, and, God willing, a place in heaven. There was the stream of life, there was the eternal sea into which all must flow. He had been hirpling about just now like some kind of atheist! Like the infidel Hume on his deathbed teasing Boswell about oblivion – knowing full well that Bozzy would just have to tell everybody about it. Hume who had been so terribly intelligent that he could imagine himself unable to imagine! Think himself insentient! Deny the very stirrings of his soul! Idiot Hume, too clever for his own salvation, telling Boswell, ‘If there were a future state, I think I could give as good an account of my life as most people.’ A risky hypothesis to put before God, but then again, Sir John had lately been thinking the same.

He, of course, was no atheist. When the day came, he would be able to give a fair account of himself. He had always tried to do things right. He had not wilfully done evil. Honour, courage, Christian decency – he believed in these things, had lived his life according to such standards. You were put here in this life and all you could do was get through it as well as you were able, and that was what he had done.

Reminded of Boswell, Sir John stood up and wandered his shelves, identifying the spines of the Life of Dr Johnson. He had never been able to fight his way through the whole of that work, but there were passages that he knew almost by heart. ‘I cannot too highly praise the speech which Mr Henry Dundas generously contributed to the cause of the sooty stranger.’ That was one. He had read that a dozen times, never got beyond it to the next page. It just made him angry.

Changed times. Dundas had spent the 1790s stalling the parliamentary efforts of Mr William Wilberforce to abolish the slave trade, conscious then of the detrimental effect abolition would have on the West Indian plantations, Sir John’s among them. Yet he had shown only disdain for the Wedderburn interests when he had spoken for the ‘sooty stranger’ in that courtroom in 1778.

It was all politics of course: Dundas had told Parliament that he wanted to end slavery when the economic conditions were right. He had meant the political conditions. But now he was out of office, resigned as His Majesty’s Secretary for War along with the rest of Pitt’s Government. Even Harry Dundas had to come to an end eventually.

‘Changed times.’ Sir John said the words out loud, as if to remind himself of the present, and his presence in it. It didn’t do to dwell too much on the past. But increasingly, that was what he did – dwelt on the past, or in it, or tried to shore it up against the tide. For the last twelve months Sir John had been firing off letters to various persons in the Government, imploring them not to listen to Wilberforce and his abolitionist cronies who seized on every reported brutality, exaggerated it tenfold and then claimed it as the norm in the plantations. As if one bad master made an argument against the entire system. Was a fornicating minister an argument against religion, a drunken laird a reason to abolish property? Few of these meddlers had even been in the West Indies. None of them had ever tried to rid Negroes of indolence, deceit and stupidity, to instil decency and honesty in them and raise them above the animals. Everybody could see what happened when Negroes got loose. A Toussaint L’Ouverture appeared, wielding a machete.

This, Sir John told himself, was one reason he had wanted Joseph Knight found. Nothing to do with money, or setting up a meeting. He had wanted to know if Knight still existed. He had wanted an example.

Joseph Knight – a Negro who had had the best advantages and opportunities, the best master, who had been instructed and baptised in the Christian religion, and who, even in these circumstances, had turned out a knave, an impostor, a traitor. If he still lived, by now he would undoubtedly have sunk into obscurity, destitution, superstition and depravity. He had been heading down that road even before the court case was over. If he could have been found, if he could have been held up as evidence …

But there had been another reason to find him. Again, to see if he still existed, although this time it was not about the public interest. It was about locating a missing, personal landmark. Joseph Knight was missing from his life, had been these last two dozen years. Once he had always been there, quiet, reliable (so it seemed), an unmistakable, visible sign of Wedderburn’s success, of his return from exile, of his triumph over adversity. Even now, in spite of everything, Sir John would have enjoyed being able to say, ‘That one was mine.’

With an effort Sir John turned in his chair to the wall behind the table, where there was a small etching of his father, the 5th Baronet of Blackness. His neck and shoulders protested, and he shuffled the chair round. When he looked at the etching, he sometimes thought the likeness very good, sometimes poor (unlike the Jamaica painting, which always looked poor). This was because for so long now the portrait of his father had been more real than the man: these days it was a question of asking how good a likeness his father would have been of it. It was a thin, horsy, straight face, with large worried eyes and a broad forehead capped with a neat curled wig. The etching had been done from memory by a female cousin, after the execution. His father had been forty-two when he died. Sometimes when Sir John stared at the etching he imagined his father alive again, and ageing, becoming more like him. What a strange thing – that he should have become his father’s father.

The pinprick of a tear started in one eye, and he stabbed it dry with his forefinger.

He could not be bothered now with the letter he had started. He had been going to write to James down at Inveresk – something about the guardianship – but it could wait. Invariably, thinking of Joseph and Jamaica made him think of James too, his only surviving sibling. Their eldest brother had died at the age of five, leaving John heir to their father’s baronetcy. Three other brothers were long dead, two of them in Jamaica, and dead also were their four sisters. John and James were all that survived of the seed of their father. With James he had shared more of the adventures of his life than with any of the others, yet in character they remained utterly different. They seldom saw each other now. To or from Inveresk, which lay across two firths and down the coast beyond Edinburgh, was a long journey for old men.

He got up and went over to the window again. The east wind was still biting at the leafless branches of the trees beyond the small oval loch. Better to be inside looking out, on a day like this, than outside looking in. Ballindean, for all its fine south-facing location, was not the bonniest of houses anyway. Sir John had made many improvements since buying it in 1769, but more than once he had wondered how much one could really do with an old house. If he were forty again, perhaps he would knock it all down and start anew.

Being stuck inside made him restless. He went towards the writing-table, paused. Somewhere in there, deep in one of the drawers, beneath a jumble of old letters and papers, lay a small calf-bound book, a journal, now beginning to crumble at the edges. For years he had meant to destroy it – James and he, after long discussion, had determined that this was the proper thing to do – but the journal was, apart from the painting, the only surviving memento of his young brother Alexander, who had kept it, sporadically, for four years in Jamaica. Apart from James and himself, the three brothers who had survived to adulthood had all died within a few years of one another, back in the 1760s; Peter and Alexander in the Indies; David, whom he had never really known, in London. But it was Sandy he regretted most.

Dead at what? – twenty-four, twenty-five? Peter had lasted well into his thirties, had at least settled in the Indies, was making a success of things there when the yellow fever carried him off. But poor Sandy had never settled. And the way he had died – Sir John could not bear to think about it. If Sandy could have held on just a few years more, he might have come home safe like James and himself. Or if he had come back with him in ’63, John’s first return – that would have saved him. Now all that was left of him was the journal and the painting. Typical Sandy, to do one thing inadequately, and another thing worse. The picture was poor, but the journal was awful.

The painting was saved by its sentimental value. It was crude and clumsy – the sky was too thick, the faces too flat – but it captured something of the house in Jamaica, and its naïve execution was Sandy through and through. It was also the only image he had of Peter. And it was part of the family’s story.

The journal’s contents were a quite different matter. They were certainly not for the gentle eyes of his wife and daughters. What Sandy had written was weak, febrile, disgusting. It left a vile taste in the mouth. But it, too, was Sandy. John Wedderburn kept it for that reason, but it stayed buried in the drawer.

It was the record of a life cut short, wasted. Sir John did not like waste of any kind. He looked at the inviting armchairs by the hearth, and decided against getting out the journal. One day soon, perhaps, a last glance – then into the fire with it. Right now, he wanted to sleep.

II Darkness

RUN AWAY

From Rosend-House, near Burntisland, 23d Nov. 1772 A NEGRO LAD called CAESAR, belonging to Murdoch Campbell of Rosend, and carried off several things belonging to his Master. – It is hoped no person will harbour or employ him, and that no shipmaster will carry him off the country, as his master is resolved to prosecute in terms of law.

The above Negro (called Caesar) is about five feet eight inches high, and eighteen years of age: He had on, when he eloped, a mixed cloth coat and vestcoat with plain yellow buttons, shamoy breeks, and a blue surtout coat.—Whoever will secure him in any gaol, or give information so as he may be secured to his master, or to Mr David Erskine writer to the signet, shall be handsomely rewarded.

EDINBURGH EVENING COURANT, 25 NOVEMBER 1772

FOR JAMAICA

The ship Nancy, John Steele Master, now lying at Greenock, will be clear to sail for Savannah-la-mar, by the 15th February 1776.

For freight or passage, apply to Sommervel, Gordon and co. in Glasgow, or the Master in Greenock. The Nancy is a fine new vessel, and commodiously fitted up for passengers.

CALEDONIAN MERCURY, 17 JANUARY 1776

Drummossie Moor, 16 April 1746

Sir John Wedderburn, 5th Baronet of Blackness, forty-two years of age and feeling sixty, spoke to his son side-mouthed and out of the hearing of the troops drawn up a few paces in front. ‘The men are dead on their feet. I fear this may be the end, John.’

His caution was hardly necessary: most of them, though not yet dead, were half asleep, heads bowed, bonnets scrugged down against the wind and wet. The army stretched in thin grey lines across the sodden moor. Opposite them the Government forces waited in solid red blocks.

‘We are cold and hungry and exhausted,’ the father said. ‘Cumberland’s men are fat and rested and twice our number. It is not a happy meeting.’

‘We have won against the odds before,’ the son said. ‘And they are not desperate like us.’ Making a virtue out of desperation had turned his lips blue. He was shivering uncontrollably, and as he spoke another squall of sleet, colder and more vicious than snow, battered over the moor and hit him full on the face, forcing him to turn away from his father.

Two months before, he had celebrated, if that was the word, his seventeenth birthday by toasting the Jacobite army’s capture of Inverness. But even then it had been obvious that Prince Charles Edward Stewart and his Council were divided and running out of options. Even then, all young John Wedderburn had wanted was to go home. And now this. A shattered, sullen remnant of at most five thousand men, aching from a stumbling, useless march through the night – a failed attempt to surprise Cumberland’s camp with a dawn attack – and a misty afternoon laced with sleet and bitter wind. It was April, but felt more like midwinter.

Sir John put his arm around his son’s shoulders, pulling him close. An observer might have thought he was simply trying to rub warmth into him. He spoke urgently into his ear. ‘John, when this starts the outcome will be clear in a matter of minutes. If we take the fight to them perhaps we have a chance. But the MacDonalds have no belly for it on the left. They are nursing their injured pride, and without them this army has no backbone.’

‘We are its backbone,’ the boy said, sweeping his arm at the two battalions of Lord Ogilvy’s regiment formed up in front of them: Angus men, drawn from the glens of Isla, Clova and Prosen; from the Sidlaws, Forfar and Dundee. Hard, silent cottars from lands straddling the Highland-Lowland divide, they had marched without complaint the hundreds of miles to Derby, then back to Scotland and all the way to this bleak northern moor. Some had been killed, others had slipped away to Inverness in search of food, a few had deserted and headed back south to their homes, but nearly five hundred remained, relatively well armed with musket and sword, still maintaining the discipline which had begun to break down among the northern clansmen.

Because of his social position, young John Wedderburn was a captain in the Glen Prosen company raised by his uncle Robert. To him was given the honour of carrying the colours, which were snapping and billowing angrily a few yards away, kept upright for the time being, and with great difficulty, by a tiny drummer boy jacked between the staff and the wet ground; and though Wedderburn was too young to lead troops into battle, and acted more as an aide de camp to Lord Ogilvy, he felt it his duty to hold out some hope of success. ‘We are the army’s backbone,’ he said again, trying to convince himself.

His father shook his head. Hopelessness was all over his face.

Poverty was what had led Sir John to throw in his lot with the Prince. Although he had inherited the title Baronet of Blackness on the death of his father, it had come without land, since one of the 4th Baronet’s last acts had been to sell the estate, on the edge of Dundee, in a desperate attempt to make ends meet. Since then, the family had been living on a run-down farm at Newtyle, a few miles to the north-west of the town. Lured by the prospect of reward into what had not then seemed a mad and impossible enterprise, the new Baronet had allowed himself to be persuaded to accept an appointment as collector of excise for the Prince, and now he feared all those receipts held by the merchants and magistrates of Perth and Dundee – receipts which bore his signature. They had been signs of his diligence. Now they were paper witnesses to his complicity.

‘Listen to me,’ he urged. ‘If it goes badly, do not wait for the end. Ride away before it is too late.’

‘Leave my men, sir? Desert the colours? How can I do that?’

‘We are being held in reserve here. Your men may not even be called upon to engage. If it comes to a retreat, you’ll only be a step ahead of them. In a way you’ll be leading them.’

The boy blinked at the ground, as if dazed by the lameness of this reasoning. ‘And you?’ he mumbled. ‘What about you?’

‘I’ll not be far behind you. I’ll stay with my Lord Ogilvy as long as I can, but I’ll not wait to be killed if that’s all there is to be had from the affair. Nor, I doubt, will he. Don’t look affronted, lad. There’s no shame in this, no disgrace. Better to live for another day, if there’s to be one, than be butchered in a bog.’ He looked around quickly, as if expecting the Prince to walk by and accuse him of treachery. ‘John, I am your father. Do you love me?’

‘Yes, Papa, of course.’

‘Then honour and obey me.’

A thin series of cheers went up in front as Lord Ogilvy and the Duke of Perth rode along the line, waving their hats. Ogilvy’s regiment was in the second line of the army. To the right, seventy yards ahead, and only three hundred from the red coats of the Government forces, were the men of Atholl, who had been given the place usually taken by the MacDonalds, who felt insulted as a result. In return for this privilege, the Atholl men were up to their shins in bog, and crowded together by a dyke running along their right between them and the river Nairn. Across the moor Cumberland’s drums were rattling away like hailstones. Shouts from the Highland officers drifted up into the heavy air. Men began to stamp their feet, check their powder and muskets. It was just after one o’clock.

‘I must get back to Lord Ogilvy,’ said Sir John, ‘and you must take your position.’ Their horses were being held by a servant twenty yards away, and they started towards them. As they went, there was a roar from the left: the Jacobites’ paltry collection of artillery had begun firing at the enemy.

A minute later the response came from Cumberland’s three-pounders and mortars. Roundshot whistled overhead, thudding into the ground just behind the waiting Jacobite troops. Mud and heather showered up and splattered down again. Somebody screamed in agony. The enemy artillery had found the range at the first attempt.