Daniel Page 11

  Our sleeping quarters had been swept clean and tidied up, and I lay down contentedly on my mattress. I could hear a nightingale singing among the thick trees beyond the stables.

  However, I had not hitherto understood how deeply Fahdah had been injured. Twice during the night she woke screaming and we could only get her to lie down again with her brother’s arm round her. Even so, she babbled continually in her own tongue, and I was driven to wonder whether she ever slept soundly at all.

  “Is she always like this?” I asked the boys.

  “Yer. She ’fraid Mr. Grench come while she sleep.”

  In the morning, both the boys went into the kitchen for their breakfast, and I brought Fahdah’s out to her in the yard. Dexter, the apothecary, arrived soon afterwards, thoroughly examined both boys and made up a liniment for their wrists and ankles, which had been painfully inflamed by Grench’s chains. Apart from this, he said, he could find little the matter with them that could not be put right by plenty of good food, exercise and sleep. He thought that perhaps some light work might be helpful, by way of building up their morale and self-esteem.

  When he came to look at Fahdah (whom Lady Penelope persuaded to undress) he was as deeply shocked as we all were. Having very gently felt her back, he said that no bones were broken, although her muscles were terribly damaged. Her kidneys, too, he thought, were probably affected, but only time could put this right. Told about her troubled sleep, he said that it was only to be expected and made up a soporific medicine, emphasising that the dose at bedtime must on no account be exceeded.

  “She’s in a bad state, your ladyship,” he said. “I’ll call again in a week’s time to see how she’s getting on. Meanwhile, she ought not to do anything at all strenuous or demanding.”

  After he had gone, Lady Penelope said to me, “I’ll keep Fahdah with me today, Daniel. Take the boys into the garden and see whether Bennett has any little jobs they can usefully do.”

  “Certainly, my lady. But first of all, if you agree, I’ll see whether Mr. Hodges can help me to find some clothes for them.”

  I found Hodges in the stables. “What yer after now, Darkie?” he asked. “Want something else for yer black riffraff, I suppose, do yer?”

  “They won’t be riffraff by the time I’m through with them, Mr. Hodges. Lady Penelope wants me to put them on light work in the garden. Come to that, I can put them on anything you want done here. I’ve thrown away the clothes they had on when they came here, and about time too. I was wondering whether you might possibly have any old stuff they could wear. Just rough stuff, of course; only the boys. Mr. Dexter thinks the girl’s in a bad way and Lady Penelope says she’ll look after her for the present.”

  To my surprise, Hodges was quite forthcoming.

  “Well, if they’re going to do some honest work, that’s different. I dare say there might be some old shirts and breeches what were going to the rag-and-bone man. I’ll ’ave a look.”

  I wondered whether even the rag-and-bone man would want the things he came up with, but the two boys made no objection when I said they were to put them on. At least they were reasonably clean and fitted after a fashion.

  “Well,” said Hodges, looking them over with a semblance of approval, “now they can clean out the stables. The horses can be turned out into the paddock while they get on with it. There’s the brooms, over there.”

  Although they had plainly never seen a broom in their lives, the boys were willing enough. I turned to and worked with them, and after an hour we had got on pretty well. They were ready enough to work, provided I was with them and they knew exactly what they were expected to do. Their only handicap was their ignorance of English, which made communication difficult. When we went in to the kitchen for midday dinner I told this to Lady Penelope, who said that I should give them some instruction every day. Fahdah she had put to bed in a room adjoining her own, and had apparently sat beside her all the morning, comforting her and answering her questions about what she had to expect in her new home. The great thing, said Lady Penelope, was that she now had a motive for recovering and taking a place in the household. From what little Fahdah had been able to tell, Lady Penelope thought that she and her brothers had probably been taken from the Bight of Biafra to be sold, but she had not pressed her to tell more, since the memories were so distressing to her.

  In the afternoon the boys and I, instructed by Mr. Bennett, the head gardener, did some jobs in the garden, cooling off by plunging into the pool at the bottom of the big meadow. Then, as we sat in the sun, I did my best to help them to memorise the words for various familiar objects — gate, pump, stones, trees, hedge and so on. I turned it into a sort of game by making a “centre” of pebbles, from which each boy could draw one every time he remembered a word correctly. They made it into a competition and after half an hour the younger boy roared with laughter on finding that he had more pebbles than his brother, who took it in tolerably good part. They would have continued longer, but I thought it best not to overtax them and called a halt with a promise to do more tomorrow.

  During the following weeks they made quite good progress in adapting to civilised ways, although there were features which they grasped only with difficulty and after some time. Chief of these was the ownership of private property. As far as I could make out, they had never had a notion of this. If they needed something for their work — an axe, say, or a knife or a gimlet — they would help themselves without asking anyone and as often as not forget to return it. This failing — though no failing in their eyes — applied not only to needful objects of utility, but also to more-or-less anything which took their fancy. Once, the whole household was in a great taking over the disappearance of a gold snuffbox, formerly a cherished possession of Sir James Marston, which had its place, together with a few other ornaments, on an occasional table in the drawing-room. It was some time before it was traced to one of the African lads. He had had no idea of appropriating it permanently for himself; he had pocketed it simply because it had taken his fancy. As soon as he was asked about it he readily restored it, with no sense of guilt and supposing that it must be needed for some sort of use elsewhere. As the boys had no possessions of their own, it was difficult to inculcate any idea of “mine not yours”, and I’m not at all sure that they ever did grasp it entirely.

  The servants treated them with detachment, largely on account of their ignorance of English. They all knew, of course, that they were protégés of Lady Penelope and on this account stopped short of showing impatience or irritation. Like most working-class people, however, they didn’t care for “foreigners”, and none of them — not even Mrs. Beddoes — showed any attempt to make friends with them. Surprisingly, the exception was Hodges, who came round to them by slow degrees once they had convinced him that they could work hard. (I never put them on any work in the house.) As they became more practised and proficient, he became positively avuncular and was even, now and then, not above a few scant words of praise. Meanwhile Fahdah, with Lady Penelope’s comfort and daily reassurance, made good progress, lost much of her obsessive fear and was beginning to feel more secure. Her improvement decided Lady Penelope to fulfil an engagement she had made some months before to pay a two-day visit to Cirencester, leaving Hodges in charge of the lads and Mrs. Beddoes to look after Fahdah.

  It was Hodges, soon after our return, who put forward the notion that the lads and I might take on some local jobs beyond home ground and get paid for them. He had now, he said, got enough confidence in our work to make the suggestion. Lady Penelope approved of the idea, and a day or two later we found ourselves repairing fences for a farmer in the next village. This turned out a success, but the lads, who had never had any money in their lives, at first had no idea how to make use of their earnings. There was not, in truth, much that they needed; but at least they soon learned how to buy sweets at the village shop. I kept their money for them and doled it out on request. Later in the year they found that they had enough to buy clasp knives, and
Hodges made sure that they understood that this was a just reward of honest toil.

  I have nothing but happy recollections of the latter months of that year. The summer weather remained as fine as any of us could remember. Everything – so it seems in memory – went well for us, everybody, from Lady Penelope down to Jack, the backhouse boy. It was in September, as I recall, that two gentlemen came down from London to inform Lady Penelope that certain of her investments had proved highly profitable and had gained for her an unexpectedly large capital sum. Typically, her first step was to raise the wages of everyone in the household, while her next was to enlarge and improve the village school. It was at about this time that Lister left us, to take over from his father their small family business. His replacement, a young man named Paul Chester, was one of the most likeable and good-humoured people that I have ever known. We became friends and his company added a great deal to my contentment. Throughout these months — as was to be expected — Fahdah and her brothers became reasonably fluent in English and consequently much happier in their daily lives. Paul Chester was friendly towards them as though it had never occurred to him to be anything else.

  One morning in February of the following year, I had just placed a bunch of snowdrops and aconites on Lady Penelope’s desk when she came into the room and admired them as she sat down. Then, after a pause and with a kind of hesitation — almost uncertainty – she said, “Daniel, you’ve served me very well for a long time and worked hard. I shall always remember it.” She broke off, fumbled with a drawer and took out, for no apparent purpose, a box of writing paper.

  I hardly knew what to reply, but after a few moments I said, “That’s very kind of you, your ladyship. I’ve been only too happy in your service.”

  “A page,” she went on, “a page is — is a boy, Daniel. I’m sure no one can have been a better pageboy than you. But — but you’re no longer a boy. You’re a young man and tall for your age.” She smiled. “Whatever that is.”

  I caught her drift now and waited in silence.

  “I can’t tell you how sorry I am to say this, Daniel, but I can’t employ you as a page any longer. You see, you’re well past the usual age and as tall as quite a lot of grown men. It wouldn’t be — well, it wouldn’t be fitting.” She reached forward and took my hand. “I’m very sorry.”

  “So – so this job’s at an end, your ladyship?” There was a catch in my voice.

  She bit her lip and nodded, looking down at the box of writing paper.

  “Daniel, you don’t have to leave the household if you don’t want to. You can certainly continue in employment here. I’m not sure in what capacity, but I expect we could make an arrangement.”

  “You’re very kind, your ladyship. May I think about it for a little while and tell you later?”

  “Of course.” She stood up, and went across to the window, looking out at the rain. “Now tell Fahdah to come here.”

  I went out, told Fahdah and then took a turn up the wet gravel slope, to collect my thoughts. The fact was — and at first I felt rather ashamed of it — that I would be glad not to continue as a page. It hadn’t felt right for some time, but I hadn’t recognised, hadn’t admitted to myself, that this was so. What Lady Penelope had said was perfectly correct, I wasn’t a boy now; I was a tall young man, and if I continued attendant on a good-looking widow like Lady Penelope, people would be bound to think nasty things. She’d avoided saying this, but it was the truth, nevertheless.

  The next question was, did I want to remain in the household? The fact of the matter was that I didn’t. I had always nursed the aspiration that one day, when I was old enough, I would enter upon the world and make money, would come to live on equal terms with white people. England offered a far likelier society for this than America, which offered nothing at all. So when was I going to start?

  When coincidences occur, those to whom they happen often entertain a superstitious idea that they are somehow “meant”; that they are attributable to Providence or to some vaguely imagined transcendent power. Opportunities not infrequently seem to follow from coincidences. On the whole, people feel favourably about them. They are generally thought of as lucky rather than unlucky.

  I left my thoughts in abeyance and said nothing to anyone — not even to Paul Chester — about what Lady Penelope had said.

  It so happened that on the following day I was required to go to Bristol (driven by one of the stable-boys) to fulfil a number of commissions; in particular, to give an order to the wine merchants who had been favoured by Sir James and retained ever since.

  I formed another purpose, one that I kept to myself. The trip seemed to offer an opportunity to find a profitable job — one that would constitute the beginning of my new, independent life. It occurred to me to confide in Lady Penelope, but upon consideration I decided to leave this until I had actually achieved what I was after.

  Having finished what I had been told to do, and arranged with Boynton to meet him in the late afternoon for the return journey, I set off on my search. My idea was to offer my services to anyone who was ready to take me on. After four hours I found myself facing total disappointment. Butchers I had tried, fruit merchants, grocers, haberdashers, builders, corn chandlers, dealers in exports and three or four agents for rich, capitalist employers. None was ready to employ me at more than a starvation wage. I even approached a firm of moneylenders but they, naturally enough, wouldn’t begin to consider me. Ingenuous as I was, it had not occurred to me to think about what I had to offer. I had no experience and no trained skill or vocation. The only reference I could provide was that of Lady Penelope Marston - whatever her social standing, no woman of business. I had no capital to contribute. Above all – no one said this but I could infer it – I was black. “Why don’t you go to sea?” said one man. “That’s a job you could be sure of getting and it offers opportunities.”

  It was a severe blow. I could not even make a start, so it seemed. For the time being I would have to remain with Lady Penelope. No doubt she would be glad to find me a situation, but in all probability it would only be in service, and it was this way of life from which I wanted to sever myself.

  I was drinking a disconsolate pint in the same tavern to which I had once gone with Mr. Miles, when I felt a hand on my shoulder and, turning, found myself face to face with a stranger, a rough-looking but plainly self-confident man, aged perhaps forty-five. For all his coarse features he was smartly, even expensively dressed. Whatever his purpose with me, it was plainly not to beg.

  “I’d like to talk to you,” said this personage. “Kindly do me the honour of buying you a drink.”

  It so happened that the barmaid was standing more-or-less opposite, and before I could reply he had ordered two double whiskies, one of which he handed to me.

  “We’ll go over here,” he said, and led the way to an empty table by the further wall. I found myself following him, and sat down.

  “My name’s Hawkshot,” he said. “Captain Hawkshot, if you like. I don’t know whether you’re in work at present or not, but if you’ll work for me for the next few months, when the job’s done I’ll pay you —” and he named a sum which took my breath away; a sum, in fact, which I could not credit. But he repeated it and added, “I’ll write that down and sign it, if you like.”

  To me there seemed only one possible explanation.

  “Is it criminal?” I asked. “Illegal?”

  “It is entirely legal,” he replied, “though it’s certainly hard work. I shall be glad to take you on.”

  “In this country or abroad?”

  “It’s a commercial voyage,” he said. “My ship’s going to West Africa for slaves, then across to Jamaica to sell them and then back here. That’s the full extent of the voyage, for which I’ll pay you.”

  “How long will it take?” I asked.

  “It might be twelve months or it might be more. One reason why you’d be useful to me is that you’re black. You’d have a natural advantage in dealing wit
h the slaves.”

  As I paused, he went on, “I already know something about you. I recognised you when you came in, but if you hadn’t, I would have come over to Clepton to talk to you.”

  Rather startled, I asked, “Why, what do you know about me?”

  “I know you’ve worked hard for some time as a personal servant to Lady Penelope Marston and apparently earned her approval. I happen to be acquainted with her coachman, Hodges, and he’s told me enough about you to make me think you’d probably suit me.”

  At this time I knew nothing whatever about the African slave trade for, as I have recounted, Reynolds seldom or never bought slaves straight off the ships. He could afford acclimatised slaves. Even the field hands on his estate were mostly American-born, as I was myself. Hawkshot’s offer of this very large — indeed, capital – sum, enough to set me up in business, was a true coincidence, being made to me at the very moment when my present job had come to an end. It seemed providential.

  “This offer you’re making,” I said, temporising. “It’s a large sum.”

  “Well, as I say, it’s hard work,” answered Hawkshot. “I’m not pretending it isn’t. It’s work that doesn’t suit everybody. I pay well to attract capable people. What I’m offering you is the rate for the job.”

  As I still deliberated, he said, “Well, do you want it or not?”

  “How soon would you want me?”

  “We’re sailing on Friday. I should want you aboard by Thursday afternoon at the latest.”

  “I’ll take it.” We shook hands, and he told me where to find the ship.

  Scarcely able to believe what had happened, I made my way through the streets to rejoin Boynton, who had been waiting an hour and more.