Joseph Knight
James Robertson

Dedication

For Marianne

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

I: Wedderburn

Ballindean, 15 April 1802

II: Darkness

Drummossie Moor, 16 April 1746

Edinburgh, May 1746

London, June – November 1746

Kingston, January – March 1747

Glen Isla, 1760

Dundee, May 1802

Ballindean, May 1802 / Jamaica, 1760

Dundee, May 1802

Jamaica, 1762

Dundee, May 1802 / Jamaica, 1763

Ballindean, June 1802

III: Enlightenment

Edinburgh, 17 August 1773

Ballindean, August 1773

Dundee, 16 November 1773

Edinburgh, December 1773

Dundee, June 1802

Edinburgh, 30 August 1776

Dundee and Ballindean, October 1802

Ballindean, 28 November 1802

Dundee, 15 January 1803 / Edinburgh, 15 January 1778

From Mr Peter Burnet of Paisley

IV: Knight

Dundee, 24 June 1803

Wemyss, 26 June 1803

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

I Wedderburn

TO BE SOLD

A BLACK BOY, about 16 years of age, healthy, strong, and well made, has had the Measles and small pox, can shave and dress a little, and has been for these several years accustomed to serve a single Gentleman, both abroad and at home.

For further particulars inquire at Mr Gordon bookseller in the Parliament-close, Edinburgh, who has full powers to conclude a bargain.

This advertisement not to be repeated.

EDINBURGH EVENING COURANT, 28 JANUARY 1769

FOR KINGSTON IN JAMAICA

The ship MARY, JOHN MURRAY Master, now in Leith Harbour, will be ready to take in goods by the 20th September, and clear to sail by the fifth October.

For freight or passage apply to Alexander Scott Merchant in Edinburgh, or to the Master at Mrs Ritchie’s on the Shore of Leith.

EDINBURGH EVENING COURANT, 2 SEPTEMBER 1769

Ballindean, 15 April 1802

Sir John Wedderburn, tall but somewhat stooped with age, stood at the windows of his library, enjoying – as he felt he should every morning he was given grace to do so – the view to the Carse of Gowrie and the Firth of Tay. Ballindean’s policies stretched out before him: the lawn in front of the house, the little loch, then the parkland dotted with black cattle, sun-haloed sheep and their impossibly white lambs. Thick ranks of sycamore, birch and pine enclosed the house and its immediate grounds. Beyond the trees, smoke rose from the lums of estate cottages and the village of Inchture and was immediately scattered by a breeze from the east.

Had he ventured outside, Sir John could have looked behind the house, to the north, where the woods thinned out and the land rose to the sheltering Braes of the Carse. But on this morning John Wedderburn was not going anywhere – not while that wind was blowing. The view from the library was, for the time being, all he required. There might have been more majestic landscapes in Scotland, but none that could have pleased him more.

He was seventy-three, thin and angular but with rounded shoulders and a nodding, lantern-jawed face that gave him the appearance of a disgruntled horse leaning over a dyke. Strands of grey hair swept back from his forehead and curled thinly behind his ears. His brow was tanned and his cheeks weathered and taut, as if he had lived most of his life outdoors, but his hands – slender-fingered and soft – belonged more in a room such as the library.

Sunlight shafted in through the window from a watery sky. A huge fire roared and cracked in the grate at one end of the room. There were two armchairs, one on either side of the fire, and a few feet further away – close enough to get the benefit, not so close as to hurt the wood – a heavy writing-table of finest Jamaican mahogany. Near the door a wag-at-the-wa, which had just clanged out ten o’clock, ticked heavily. But it was the rows of books that dominated the room.

Bookshelves ran along two-thirds of the length of the wall behind the table, and reached almost to the ceiling. The volumes were well bound, neatly arranged, and free of dust: biography, history, philosophy, verse, those often rather too delicate creations novelles … So many books, and so little inclination left to read them. Sir John thought this without turning from the window. He felt them massing behind his back, picked them off in his mind: The Works of Ossian, heroic and Highland, whatever Dr Johnson might have said of their authenticity; Edward Long’s History of Jamaica; Lord Monboddo’s six volumes on The Origin and Progress of Language (tedious, eccentric – Sir John had given up after half a volume); Smollett’s novels – he remembered heavy, sweltering West Indian Sundays much relieved by Peregrine Pickle and Roderick Random; the poetical works of the ploughman poet Burns and ‘the Scotch Milkmaid’, Janet Little – little doubt already which of those would last the pace; collections of sermons, treatises on agriculture, political economy, science … And two copies of Henry Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling, because the lassies liked it so much. Sir John had once tried this book and had thrown it down in disgust – grown men bursting into tears over nothing on every third page. ‘That is not the point, Papa,’ his daughter Maria had insisted, ‘you are too matter-of-fact!’ But that was the point. There wasn’t a hard bit of fact in the entire book.

The fact was, Sir John no longer read much himself, but he subscribed to many publications, and took the lists of the Edinburgh booksellers, mainly for the benefit of his wife Alicia and his daughters. They were all there in the room too, around the fireplace, a series of silhouettes done five or six years before: Alicia, fair and delicate at forty-three; Margaret (child of his first wife – after whom she was named – now nearly thirty and so long neglected by suitors that Sir John had almost given up worrying about it); Maria, Susan, Louisa and Anne (all in their teens). Great readers, every one of them, especially of novelles and poetry. Sir John was quietly pleased that his four sons – represented in various individual and group portraits on the opposite wall, and all but the youngest sent out into the world to work – showed little inclination for reading, and none at all for novelles.

The library’s most recent acquisition, delivered the previous week, was a collection of Border ballads in two volumes, compiled by Walter Scott, Sheriff Depute of Selkirkshire. How appropriate, Sir John had thought as he cut the pages, that so many thieves and ruffians should be rounded up by a sheriff. But there was nothing really wicked in the ballads – nothing that was not safely in the rusted, misty half-dream that was Scotland’s past, nothing dangerous to the minds of his daughters. Susan was the one most easily swayed by history, romance and poor taste. But then she was female and seventeen, it was to be expected. She would grow out of it. Books might have some bad in them, but there were, after all, worse things in the world.

The last fifteen years in France had demonstrated that, but Sir John had known it much longer – since, in fact, he was Susan’s age. The French had gone quite mad, and now the world was paying for the madness. Two men born of the Revolution strode across the Wedderburn imagination, the one threatening to become a monster, the other already monstrous. Napoleon Bonaparte was the first, a brilliant Corsican soldier, who had temporarily made peace with Britain at Amiens but whose ambitions clearly pointed to further and more devastating campaigns. But worse, far worse, was the second man, the black Bonaparte, Toussaint L’Ouverture, the barbarous savage who had turned the French island colony of San Domingo – once the sugar jewel, the sparkling diadem of the West Indies – into a ten-year bloodbath. Toussaint L’Ouverture: the name passed like a cloud over the ruffled, sparkling Tay, and Sir John shuddered.

From the Paris Jacobins this slave had learned the slogans liberté, egalité and fraternité, and had the outrageous idea of applying them to Negroes. He had massacred or expelled the French planters, devastated their plantations, defeated the armies of France, Spain and Britain – forty thousand dead British troops in three years! – and left San Domingo like a weeping scab in the middle of the Caribbean, barely a hundred miles from Jamaica, with Toussaint himself, drunk on power, emperor of the wreckage. Yet in Jamaica, it seemed, his exploits had made him a hero to the blacks. God help them all then, Sir John thought, white and black alike, if they should follow his example.

There was a tap at the door of the library and it opened just wide enough to admit a dark-suited, dark-jowled bullet of a man, whose lined face suggested that he was almost as old as Sir John himself – this despite a thick crop of hair so black that it looked suspiciously like a wig. But these days wigs, even among elderly men, were something of a rarity.

‘There’s a man Jamieson here frae Dundee, Sir John. He says he has business wi ye.’

Sir John frowned, did not turn. ‘What day is it, Aeneas?’

‘Thursday.’

‘Is it? Well, show him in, then.’ He remained at the window.

He had forgotten about Jamieson. These last few weeks his head had been full of other business. First, there had been correspondence with his brother James, whom he had appointed guardian to his children. Although James was only a year and a half younger, he was in better health – fatter, sleeker – and likely to last a few more winters, whereas Sir John had found this last one sorely trying. The cold had scored deep into his flesh, seized up his knee and finger joints, and had him longing for the Caribbean. The thought of more snow and ice was not just depressing, it made him fearful. James might have had his faults in the past, but he surely would not misuse his nephews and nieces.

Then there had been fine-tuning his will. His eldest surviving son, David, who lived in London and managed much of the family’s West Indian business from there, would inherit Ballindean, but, steady though David was, Sir John was not willing to let the future hang on the whim of one individual. It had taken too much trouble restoring the family to Perthshire, after the difficulties of more than half a century ago, to permit the work to be undone in a moment. So he had made an entail of all his property, establishing a complex chain of succession tying Ballindean to future generations of the family, and the family to Ballindean. And not just Ballindean, but also Sir John’s portions of the estates in Jamaica. David could enjoy his own, and after him so could his children, but neither he nor they would be at liberty to sell off the Wedderburn property: it would, barring financial disaster, stay in the family now and for ever. If Sir John wanted to be sure of one thing before he died, it was this: the Wedderburns were back in Scotland for good.

The matter Jamieson had come about had slipped his mind. No – it had been sitting in the dark of his mind, a locked kist in the attic. Perhaps Jamieson had brought the key to it from Dundee?

‘Good morning, Sir John.’

Still facing the window, Sir John tried to assess the man from his voice. It was not a deep voice – it almost squeaked. Jamieson had been recommended by the family lawyer – indeed, Mr Duncan had appointed him, and this would be the first time Sir John had clapped eyes on him. What was he? A kind of drudge, a solicitor’s devil, a sniffer in middens and other dank places, howking out missing persons and persons one might wish to know about but not be known by. A ferret. Yes, his voice was the squeaking, bitter voice of a ferret.

Sir John turned from the outside light. He was surprised by what he saw. Jamieson was a small, balding man in his forties, wearing ill-fitting black clothes that were so crumpled it was a fair wager he had slept in them. Then again, he had just travelled nine miles on horseback, and although the new turnpike between Dundee and Perth was a vast improvement on what had passed for a road before, this might have been cause enough for his dishevelment. He seemed rather portly and careworn, more like a mole than a ferret. Sir John noted that he was carrying nothing – no leather case, no sheaf of papers, no casket of evidence. This was not encouraging. But then, what had he expected him to bring?

‘Good morning, sir. Is it cold out?’

‘A wee thing chilly, Sir John. That east wind is aye blawin.’

‘Very well. There is the fire if you wish to warm yourself.’

Jamieson hotched awkwardly near the door. Sir John kept up his sour face, but inwardly he smiled. Perhaps the man thought it would be impertinent to come between a laird and his hearth just to warm one’s backside. Perhaps he suspected that the laird was toying with him. Well, he was entitled to his suspicions. It was his job.

When it became clear that Wedderburn was not going to speak, Jamieson coughed and filled the silence himself.

‘Aboot the, eh, maitter I was instructed tae inquire intae, Sir John. I received the commission at the end o January and I hae been workin awa diligently ever since. I hae sent oot numerous letters, checked parish records, questioned shipping agents, mill overseers, members o the criminal classes … I regret tae say that I am unable tae gie ye ony satisfactory report.’

‘Is that so? Why then are you here?’

‘It was intimated tae me that the maitter was of some … was tae be conducted wi the ootmaist discretion. I felt it only richt I should bring ye this disappointin news mysel.’

Wedderburn sucked in his cheeks till it seemed his whole face was about to collapse. ‘It is disappointing, sir. Can you report nothing at all?’

‘Extensive inquiry has been made, and no jist in Dundee. I had hoped for information frae the agent in Perth that first worked on the person’s behalf, a Mr Davidson …’

Wedderburn glowered. ‘Ah, yes, I mind that name.’

‘… but he has been very ill and unable tae see me. I hae been in Edinburgh, Kinross, Fife, Angus – but withoot ony success. In short, nae trace o the person has been uncovered.’

‘Let us not be shy, sir. His name is Knight. Joseph Knight.’

‘Aye, sir.’

‘He cannot simply have disappeared.’

‘Wi respect, Sir John, there’s ony number o things micht hae happened. He micht be deid.’

‘What makes you think that?’ Wedderburn said sharply.

‘I’m no sayin I dae. But it micht be possible. For aw that, he micht be in London. Or America. Africa even.’

‘I hardly think so.’ Now Wedderburn was beginning to suspect Jamieson of toying with him. ‘Mr Jamieson, I do not doubt that you cannot find the man, but no trace of him? Not a word? Nobody with a memory? A man like that surely does not just disappear.’

‘That’s whit he seems tae hae done, sir. Disappeared.’ Jamieson coughed. ‘And his wife wi him.’

‘You mean his wife as well?’

‘Aye, sir, of course. As we’ve no found either o them, we dinna ken if she’s yet wi him.’

Sir John thought of the wife. The Thomson woman. She would long since have lost any charms she once had. He had a sudden, startling image of her, a twisted, witch-like hag, clinging to the back of Joseph Knight like a curse. He gave his head a shake, moved towards the fire.’ ‘It’s odd. It is not as if he is inconspicuous.’

‘Which is why I say,’ Jamieson said, following. ‘were he yet in Dundee, I would hae discovered it. A black man in Dundee is a kenspeckle body. But as soon as ye reach tae Edinburgh, or the west, it’s a different proposition.’

‘He’s still a black man. He must stand out.’

‘There’s mair o them in Scotland than ye micht imagine. Maistly in Glasgow and roond aboot. Wi the trade tae the Indies, ye ken. It’s no like Bristol or Liverpool, sir, whaur I’m tellt they are very numerous, but there’s mair here than ye’d think.’

‘Is that so?’ Sir John was irritated by the suggestion that this man knew more about Negroes than he.

‘In the west, aye. There’s a line or twa I pit oot in that airt that I’ve no reeled in yet. No that I’m ower hopeful, but …’

Wedderburn tilted a furrowed brow at him: explain further what you mean.

Jamieson coughed again. ‘Ye’ll be aware o the present revolutionary spirit that’s rife amang certain trades, sir? Weavers and spinners and the like. There’s a secret society brewin up discontent, ye’ll maybe hae heard o it? The United Scotsmen, as they cry themsels.’

Wedderburn found himself getting annoyed. Jamieson seemed incapable of coming at a point directly. He always wheedled and sneaked his way up to it. ‘Why should they interest me? I am not a political man.’

‘Nor I, sir.’

‘But they interest you?’

‘It’s my work.’

‘You are a spy.’

Jamieson blinked, mole-like. ‘Weel …’

‘You are a spy. You turn men’s coats. You buy men and their secrets. Am I right?’

‘It’s why ye employed me,’ Jamieson said flatly.

‘Mr Duncan employed you. Never mind. Go on with your United Scotsmen.’

Jamieson paused, as if recollecting something he had memorised earlier. ‘In pursuin a certain line o inquiry intae the activities o this combination,’ he said, ‘on behalf o some gentlemen wi considerable interests in the linen manufactories in Dundee and Fife, I had occasion tae make contact wi some o the weavers o Paisley. There is a black man in that toun – no oor black man – a respectable and loyal subject – and as it appears there is a web o contacts no jist amang the weavers but amang the Negroes o the west, I thocht something micht come back by way o him. But there’s been naething thus far.’

‘This loyal Negro,’ Wedderburn said, stretching out the phrase as if to test if it would snap, ‘what is his name?’

‘Peter Burnet. A weaver.’

‘You met him?’

‘No. I wrote tae him.’

‘And you expect a reply?’

‘I dinna ken.’

Sir John snorted. ‘Well, well, if that is all, that is all. Knight may be furth of Scotland altogether, as you say.’

‘I could appoint agents in London, sir. Time would be a factor, but if ye were willin …’

Something in Wedderburn’s eyes brought Jamieson to a halt. There was a deep thought turning in there, an assessment. Then Wedderburn shook his head, as if ridding himself of the thought. Later, Jamieson would curse himself for not paying more attention, for not seeing it as a warning signal. He had seen the same head-shaking gesture earlier, when Knight’s wife had been mentioned. As if there were something in Wedderburn’s mind that he couldn’t get out.

Wedderburn said, ‘No. It’s not important.’

If it was not important, Jamieson thought, why had he been traipsing around the countryside for two months? Not that he was going to complain, since the fee was substantial, but in his experience even wealthy gentlemen – especially them – did not hire him for trivialities.

He ventured an opinion. ‘Tae reach further afield, sir, we could try a discreet advertisement in ane o the newspapers. “Information regarding the whereaboots of the following individual … a small reward offered” – that kind o thing. If he disna read the papers, somebody that kens him micht.’

‘Oh, he reads the papers, Mr Jamieson, be assured of that. He is a very thorough reader.’

‘Weel, then …’ Again, Jamieson saw that struggle in Wedderburn’s eyes. Hot, then cold. Anger? Guilt? Something old but still raw. And behind Wedderburn, above the fire, he saw something else: flanked by several smaller silhouettes, a large painting in which three men posed on a kind of wooden porch. Their clothes were old-fashioned – from forty or fifty years back, perhaps – and the painting was no masterpiece, but they were unmistakably Wedderburns. All three had Sir John’s high brow and long jaw. The porch was attached to a house, and was partly in shadow. Bright green, foreign-looking shrubs and an absurdly blue sky provided a crude contrast to the shade and to the unsmiling faces of the men. The scene must be Jamaica. One of the men – probably the one in the middle, Jamieson thought – had to be Sir John.

‘No, I do not wish it,’ Wedderburn said. Jamieson dragged his attention back to the old laird. ‘I believe you are right when you say he is no longer here. And in any case, the nature of these Negroes … Put such a notice in the press, there would be dozens of them thigging and sorning at my gates. No, we’ll not pursue that line.’

‘I only thocht, if it’s a maitter o compensation …’

Sir John drew himself up, squaring his shoulders against their stoop. ‘Compensation? What do you mean by that, sir?’

Jamieson thought of a dog with its birse up, but the image did not quite fit. It was more as if the raw thing in Wedderburn had suddenly manifested itself on his skin, like a disease. Jamieson took a couple of steps back towards the door. ‘Jist that … weel … for Joseph Knight. The case is auld enough noo … Time saftens sair herts. I presumed …’

‘Well, don’t!’ The word shot from Wedderburn’s mouth like a dog after a cat. Jamieson retreated further. ‘Your presumption is not what I hired you for – nor your couthy proverbs. Your task was to find Joseph Knight, nothing more. And you have failed. You presumed that I seek him out to pay him some money? To make amends of some kind? I pay him compensation? Oh, you have read me very wrong, sir!’

‘I see that, I see that,’ Jamieson said, though what he was most clearly seeing was his fee floating down the Tay. ‘No whit I meant at all, Sir John. I beg your pardon – oomph!’

A further detonation from Wedderburn was forestalled by this minor one from Jamieson, triggered by the opening of the library door, the handle of which had dunted him sharply in the small of the back. A tall, dark-haired girl in a white muslin dress entered.

‘Oh, I am sorry.’ It was not clear if she was addressing Jamieson, now rubbing his kidneys and screwing up his face, or her father.

‘What is it, Susan?’ Sir John said. ‘It is not yet noon.’

‘I forgot, Papa. I came for a book.’ She had her father’s serious, thin face, and an adolescent awkwardness of posture.

‘You will have to come back for it, then.’ Wedderburn turned to Jamieson. He made a sudden stab at joviality. ‘My daughter, sir, reads books as a sheep eats grass, incessantly, and as you have discovered she lets nobody stand in her way. I make it a rule that this room is mine, and mine alone, every morning, or I’d have no peace. But I don’t have it anyway. My dear, you must find something else to occupy you for an hour and a half. Should you not be at your task?’

‘I’ve finished my task, and now I’ve to read a book while Maister MacRoy helps Anne with hers. Could I not …?’

Sir John held up a finger. ‘We are discussing business matters. Your book will have to wait. Do some sums. Now – away with you!’ He half shouted this, half laughed it. Jamieson could see the intention: Wedderburn assumed that the lassie had overheard him roaring at Jamieson, and wanted her to think that that had been all light-hearted too. Sounding ever more conciliatory for her benefit, he moved over to the writing-table, saying, ‘I thank you for your efforts, Mr Jamieson. I imagine it’s tedious work. Off you go, miss.’

‘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.

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.

‘God help us!’ said Sir John. He seized his son’s arm again. ‘I beg you, do not ride for Inverness. If the battle’s lost Inverness will be lost too, and they will show no mercy to those they find there.’ A mortar shell screamed overhead and exploded thirty yards away. ‘Turn south as soon as you can, and get back to the lands you know. Get into Badenoch, past Ruthven, and keep riding. Lose yourself in the mountains. Take the Lairig Ghru or one of the other passes, and keep moving till you come in above the Dee. You’ll know where you are from there?’

‘Of course. There’s no need for all this, Papa.’

They were shouting at each other now as the roundshot crashed around them. Smoke was blowing thickly across the field, but already their own guns were firing only sporadically, while the Government bombardment intensified.

‘There’s every need. I wish it were not so. A hard time is coming on us all.’ Another volley flew so low overhead that they fell to the ground, flattened by the turbulence, and when they rose they were both streaked from chest to knee in black mud and scraps of heather. Their horses were panicking, the servant struggling to control them. As they mounted, Sir John bellowed his last instructions. ‘Get across the Dee and over the hills again, by the Monega Road, till you come into Glen Isla. Seek out Mr Arthur, the minister. He got the living from your uncle Robert, who vouches for him. He will give you shelter till I can come up with you.’

‘If you’re only just behind me, we’ll meet long before Glen Isla.’

‘Aye, that’s right, John. But you’re not to wait on me, do you understand?’

A band of smoke mixed with driving rain half obscured father from son. When it cleared a little, young John turned his horse to join his troops, lifting the colours as he went from the numb hands of the drummer boy, who promptly collapsed, covered his head with his arms and started to scream.

The men of Angus were standing firm against the bombardment; so far the shot had either gone over their heads or fallen short. In front of them, though, it was a different story. As the enemy guns shortened their range, the iron balls drove great lanes through the ranks of shivering Highlanders. They tore off limbs like rags, punched holes that removed entire guts from men who were still standing, and left others dead or beyond repair on the freezing wet ground among their comrades. MacLeans, Maclachlans, Frasers, Camerons, the roundshot slaughtered them with perfect indifference. But even through the steady crack and thud of cannon fire young John Wedderburn could hear the frantic cries of the Highland officers: ‘Dùinibh a-steach! Dùinibh a-steach!’ Close up! Close up!

Runners were scurrying, back and forth between the front line and the commanders at the rear, yet nobody seemed to be in control. Wedderburn watched with rising horror. ‘Dùinibh a-steach!’ he heard again. But tightening the ranks only made them more vulnerable. Why were the men not ordered to advance? Were they all to die without striking a blow?

The Jacobite artillery had now ceased firing entirely. Briefly the enemy’s guns also fell silent. But then they began again, this time loaded with grapeshot, withering sprays of lead pellets that ripped through the clans like scythes through a field of oats. To stand and take this, after everything else, was intolerable. First the MacLeans, then all the Highlanders still surviving in the centre and right, threw off their plaids, gripped their claymores and staggered forward through the bog, screaming into the grapeshot gale as they went. They left behind them a carpet of bodies and body parts. When they were halfway across the moor the Government infantry’s muskets opened up on them.

The Angus men waited in reserve, helplessly watching the carnage. Young John Wedderburn’s terrified mare was stamping and snorting, and in bringing her under control he let her run a few paces. He glanced back through the drifting lines of smoke to see if he could spot his father. A hundred yards away a group of horsemen seemed to be moving away from the battle. John Wedderburn screwed his eyes against the smoke. He could see, he thought, the Prince among them, but not his father. He could not see him anywhere at all.

There followed a dream of flight, stretching over days. The retreat his father had hinted at did not exist, only a stream of men and horses fleeing south in total disorder. John Wedderburn was carried along by this current. Shame barely crossed his mind: his only thought was to get away. He saw many of his own Glen Prosen company running in the same direction, showing not the least concern for his ignoble behaviour. This did not relieve the sickness in his stomach. Somewhere in the last minutes of the battle he had let go the colours and had not seen them since, but the sickness was not guilt, it was fear. By the time he reached Moy the men were straggled for miles along the road, some barely able to keep moving, others asleep where they had sat down for a minute’s respite. The ground was littered with discarded weapons and uniforms, forgotten bonnets, broken shoes. John paused to rest his horse, which was lathered and unsteady from being ridden too hard. He knew he should let her walk unburdened for a while, but when more riders came up and reported that the redcoats were slaughtering any male they caught – fit, wounded, young, old, armed or weaponless – he remounted and whipped the beast south again.

Twenty miles on, as night fell, he found himself alone. Fording the pounding, numbing Spey, the mare collapsed in midstream and John had to abandon her, then fight his way across on legs like blocks of stone, bawling out animal noises of rage and exhaustion. He had not eaten since dawn, was completely drenched, frozen, shattered, frightened, friendless, and now without a horse.

He stumbled on through the gloom towards the great hulks of the Cairngorms; knew he must stop and find shelter. Not far from the river he came across a huddle of houses crouched low as dogs and every one in darkness. He knocked at the first. He was sure there were people inside but there was no answer. He pushed; the door was barred. He tried the next one: the same. At the last house, despairing, he did not knock but leant against the door, and it opened under his weight. He stepped inside, closed the door behind him.

A woman’s voice said, ‘Cò tha siud?’ – Who’s there? – and something else fast and challenging, he could not make out what: ‘Ma ’s ann a thoirt an èiginn orm a thàinig thu, tha mi cho cruaidh ri cloich; ma ’s ann dha mo spùinneadh, chan eil càil agam ach seann phoit.’ ‘Tha mi le Teàrlach,’ he said, not caring any more. I am for Charles. The voice muttered something else; it was coming from a recess at one end of the room and sounded like an acceptance, if not exactly an invitation. The room was warm, the air thick with the smell of peat, and as his eyes adjusted he saw a bank of glowing red a few feet away. He went towards it, dripping at every step, and lay down in front of the fire. In a minute, he thought, I will take off my wet things, but just for now … Seconds later he was asleep.

He woke, his joints seized, still stretched on the dirt floor of the house. The fire was blazing now; steam poured from his clothes like hill mist. Stiff and shivery, he slowly pulled himself upright, began to feel the blood in him again. There was a bed set into one wall, and in it, watching him intently, was a very old woman.

John Wedderburn’s Gaelic was sparse – learned on the march to Derby from soldiers who had laughed good-naturedly at his efforts while appreciating the fact that he made them – and the woman had a rapid and almost impenetrable intonation. By slowing her down, he gathered that he had slept the better part of a day, that she was too old now to get out of bed except to feed the fire, which she had done before he woke up, and that so long as he fetched more peats from behind the house he was welcome to eat what little food she had, as she would die before him. He went out for the peats – there was not a flicker of life in the other houses – brought in several loads and stacked them in a corner, as if by prolonging the fire he could prolong the woman’s life and thus maybe his own, but there appeared to be nothing to eat in any case. He took off his boots and stuck them almost in the fire to dry them out, hung his tunic over the back of the one wooden chair in the place. When he tentatively asked about food, the woman signalled him nearer, and pulled from beneath the bedding a small poke, at the bottom of which were a few handfuls of oatmeal. He shook his head – not if that was all she had – but she insisted, again saying that she would die before him. Then she laughed, a toothless rasp, and added something that he had to get her to repeat three times. By the time he understood, there was no joke left in it: she would probably die before him, unless the redcoats arrived before he left.

He mixed some of the meal with water in her one blackened pot and put it on the fire. She would not take any of the porridge when it was ready, so he ate it all: a dozen mouthfuls. Nor was she interested in the money he offered her – one or two of the few coins he had in a purse slung round his neck beneath his shirt – but she did gesture to him to pass his tunic over to her. He laid it across her lap as she sat up in bed, and she felt the brass buttons with crooked fingers. Then she indicated to him to look under the bed.

There was an old wooden kist there. Opening it, the first item he came upon was a grey shepherd’s plaid, filthy and matted as a sheep’s winter coat. She nodded eagerly, apparently having given up trying to speak to him: he was to take it. She proceeded to pull the buttons of his tunic with surprising strength, and they disappeared under the blankets to join the meal poke. She signed that he must throw the tunic on the fire. He did so, watched it smoulder, then catch and blaze. With a stick he stabbed at it, a cuff, a sleeve, the collar, till the evidence of his visit was all gone. He put on more peats. Knowing it was time to move on, not wishing to go, wishing somehow he could stay in the cottage for years, he sat staring into the flames for a while, then stood and turned to the old woman still sitting in the bed. ‘Tapadh leibh,’ he said. She nodded. ‘Tapadh leibhse.’ Thank you. He put on his boots, hot and white-stained, wrapped the plaid around himself, and stepped back out into the world.

Nothing after that but walking and sleeping. That first night he managed perhaps six miles before stopping, not wanting to get deep into the mountains without seeing roughly where he was. He slept in the plaid among the roots of a huge pine tree, and the night, though cold, was at least dry. Early next morning, hungry again, he followed a track that headed south-east, rising steeply alongside a burn in spate. By instinct rather than knowledge he believed this to be the northern end of the pass known as the Lairig Ghru. He had stood at the other end, more than twenty miles away, while his father pointed out the route, but he had never walked it. Part of him feared travelling in daylight, but the ache in his belly told him he must risk it: it would take a day, and beyond it he still had another full day at least, probably two, to get into Glen Isla. If he travelled only at night, hunger would beat him. Also, the morning was sunny and dry, but the weather might change at any moment. He fixed his mind on the Reverend Arthur, and pressed on.

Huge, bleak, snow-covered hills rose on either side of him. The path faded and often disappeared altogether. The sun vanished behind clouds. Sleet, heavy rain and brief patches of sunlight succeeded one another. As he climbed higher, he entered the cloud itself, and the moisture enveloped him, lying greasily on the plaid. If he heard a sound that might be another traveller, he left the path and hunkered behind a rock. But nobody came. There were others in these hills, he could sense them, but they were all moving as discreetly as he, and all in much the same direction. He wondered if his father was one of them.

On Deeside there were more people in evidence, country folk going about their daily business, also many ragged men, of varying ages but all in some kind of distress, on their way to somewhere. The atmosphere was oppressive. It was as if a veil of some indefinable material had been dropped over the Highlands, clinging invisibly to everything: everybody knew what had happened; everybody knew that, whether they had been involved or not, they would suffer for it.

The cottars were wary but not unkind. John got half a thick oatcake from one wife, an egg from another. Information about the battle was cautiously sought in return: nothing so direct as ‘Were you there?’ – although it was obvious that he and the other men had sprung from somewhere – but what news he might have heard about this or that person who seemed against their will to have got caught up in that affair in the north. He could not help them, thanked them for the food, wandered on. Soon his boots cracked and split: they had been wet too often, and dried too fast. The sole of each foot was a mass of blisters. He crossed the Clunie Water, limped into Glen Shee, met a shepherd who pointed out to him the drovers’ track known as the Monega Road over the next set of hills, and started to climb. The weather turned foul again. He slipped on mud and rock, dragged himself through wet, treacherous snow, nearly fell off a cliff, screamed his despair to the relentless sky. He found the path, lost it again, walked through the night because it was too cold to stop, and in the morning came like a ghost to the head of lovely Glen Isla. There he sat down and he wept. There were still several miles to go before he reached the manse, but at last he was in a place he recognised.

Edinburgh, May 1746

To say that the Reverend William Arthur was nervous would be something of an understatement. He was terrified. A respectable, law-abiding man of the cloth – admittedly from an Angus parish full of Episcopalians, a fact which placed him in a proximity to the rebels that many of his kirk brethren found disagreeable if not downright suspect – here he was in Edinburgh, at the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland as by law Established, not a month after the crushing of those same rebels, in the company of a young man who had been, who still was, out! He was, in short, harbouring a criminal, a boy who had been present at Culloden and the earlier engagements, and whose unhappy father was languishing in custody at Inverness, or perhaps by this time even in London, awaiting trial. Should it be revealed that John Thomson, the minister’s footman, was not John Thomson at all – and was that not too obvious, too ordinary, a name for a footman? – Glen Isla would be deprived of its pastor and the pastor of his living, if not his life.

The Reverend Arthur did not take pleasure from rubbing shoulders with trouble. He had obligations to the family, of course; he sympathised, even, but he had been thinking uncharitable thoughts about the Wedderburns all week. Between times he had been praying hard: for forgiveness if he had done wrong; for strength if he was doing right; but most of all, he was praying that John Thomson would quickly leave his service, go to London, and never come chapping at the door of his manse again.

The spectral figure, in an astonishingly filthy shepherd’s plaid, had barely been able to speak when it appeared just before dinner on that chilly April day. Young John had managed only a few words about the battle, his uncle Robert Wedderburn, and his hope of sanctuary. By the time Mrs Arthur and a maid had bundled the lad indoors, stripped him, bathed him and put him to bed in the attic, away from prying eyes, dinner had been quite spoiled. An urgent discussion had ensued about what to do with him, always supposing he did not die of his ordeal.

It had been Mrs Arthur, more moved than her husband, more seduced by emotion, who had thought of the General Assembly, which would be taking place in little over a fortnight. The Reverend would be setting out early, as he had other business in the capital. He would not normally go to Edinburgh without a servant, but old Tam Tosh, who might have accompanied him, was so arthritic these days that he dropped anything heavier than a comb: now here was a young fellow ready made, and quite plain-looking too. Busy Edinburgh would be safer for the boy than these glens into which inquisitive soldiers would soon be marching. Reluctantly, Mr Arthur had agreed. On the road between Angus and the capital, John Wedderburn had been lost and John Thomson born.

They were lodged in the Canongate, and when the minister went out he preferred it if John Thomson went too. This was because the lad would not stay in their room alone, but wandered the streets speaking to God knew who. Worse, he wrote letters to his mother in a clumsy code that a spy would crack on the first page, asking for news of his father, and rounding off with requests that she, Lady Wedderburn, send him, John Thomson, more clothes, and that she remember him to his aunt! Mr Arthur felt it necessary to regulate his servant’s supply of paper and ink, and to keep him by his side as much as possible.

The only consolation was that Edinburgh, which barely half a year earlier had been swooning at the feet of the Chevalier, was now so fervently back in the Hanoverian fold that nobody thought any rebels in the town – for of course everybody understood that plenty were there – posed any great threat to national security. How conveniently, for example, certain non-combative poets and booksellers, famed for their Jacobite sympathies, had absented themselves from the capital during the occupation, and how easily they had returned to resume a peaceful life and, tentatively at first, to write songs of heroism and betrayal.

In spite of this, Mr Arthur was less inclined to break out in a cold sweat if he could keep John Thomson under his close personal observation. He had him attend him to St Giles’ for the General Assembly, which venerable body humbly composed a thank-you letter to His Royal Highness, the Duke of Cumberland. The letter praised the Duke’s generous resolution in delivering the Scottish Church and Nation from the Jacobite army; acknowledged the many fatigues he had endured and the alarming dangers he had run in pursuing that ungrateful and rebellious crew; expressed the Church’s great joy in the complete victory he had now obtained by the bravery of his Royal Father’s troops, led on by his own wise conduct and animated by his heroic example; and, finally, prayed that the Lord of Hosts, Who had hitherto covered his head in the day of battle, might yet guard his precious life, and crown him with the same glorious success, and that his illustrious name might be transmitted with still greater glory to latest posterity. This was approved, applauded and dispatched by His Royal Highness’s most obliged, most obedient and most humble servants, the ministers and elders of the Kirk: a letter so nauseatingly obsequious that it made Mr Arthur feel quite ill as he voted for it.

Fortunately for the minister, his purgatory did not extend beyond the duration of the General Assembly. John Thomson, a half-hysterical, frozen, wasted child a fortnight past, had come back to life in the miraculous way of youth, and intended to set off at once for London. There, according to information contained in a note from his brother James to their mother, and communicated by her to the minister (a paper trail that made Mr Arthur shudder), a ship had docked bearing such prize captives as the Earl of Kilmarnock, the Lords Balmerino and Cromartie, Sir James Kinloch and Sir John Wedderburn. The prisoners had been distributed to jails as yet unknown, to await the gathering of evidence against them. Clearly, the eldest unincarcerated male Wedderburn’s place was at his father’s side, or as close to it as he could get without being detected and put there literally. Greatly relieved, the Reverend Arthur returned alone to Glen Isla. John Thomson boarded a vessel at Leith, and worked his passage south to the English capital.

London, June – November 1746

In London young John, now neither Thomson nor Wedderburn, was given safe lodging and subsistence by a relative, a Mr Paterson, through whom he was also reunited with his brother. James, just fifteen years old, as one who had not been out, was at liberty to travel where he wanted throughout the kingdom. As soon as he had heard of his father’s capture he had mounted his favourite pony and headed south, putting up in byres and stables on the way. Anger and the snorting of cattle had kept him awake most nights: anger at not having been at Culloden, anger at his father’s capture, at his father for having been captured, at John for not having been; this burning rage had driven him all the way to London. There he had found that his father was in the new jail at Southwark along with a number of other Jacobite gentlemen. They were being treated, all things considered, with the courtesy their social status demanded. In the Highlands, meanwhile, poor men were being shot on sight, their wives and daugters raped, their cottages burnt and their cattle slaughtered. Large numbers of destitute peasants, brought out on pain of death by their chiefs, were being condemned to transportation. Now, with John’s arrival, James’s anger began to settle like the bed of a fire, his character to harden into something new and purposeful.

James looked like a Wedderburn but he was darker-haired, softer-skinned, more lightly built than his brother. He had been making women fall for him since before he was conscious of his own charms. As a bairn he had had a smile and an eye that could melt most female hearts, and in London it was no different, except that now he was aware of his power. John used to watch him, and was envious of the ease with which he attracted women, the way he toyed with them, the disdain with which he dismissed them.

James seemed also to take a certain satisfaction from being the only connection between his older brother and their father. He was allowed regular access to the prison, bringing Sir John fresh linen, soap, books, tobacco and a few other luxuries. James and young John spent much time together, and too much money, in coffee houses and taverns. This earned a rebuke or two from the father, which James took almost as a mark of appreciation. In August he turned sixteen. He bought himself an interesting present: a whore in Covent Garden.

In Southwark jail Sir John Wedderburn kept good heart: he was glad to have one son near him; glad, too, to hear that John was, for the moment, out of harm’s way. He wrote to his wife, and heard back from her how, with his other children, she now lived in straitened circumstances in Dundee, having been ejected from the farm at Newtyle. This was a sore blow, but they had never had much money anyway. He would find a way to make amends.

He was confident that the longer he was held at Southwark, the more the Government’s attitude to minor players like himself would soften. After all, he had not actually killed anybody. He would be tried, no doubt; found guilty, certainly; but the bloodletting that had lasted all summer would surely satisfy even the Duke of Cumberland’s desire for vengeance. Banishment, for a spell, that surely was the most likely outcome. They would go to France. Life would begin again.

He was, however, anxious about John, whose name was on the lists of wanted rebels, with the designation ‘Where Now. Not Known’ next to it. The lad could not stay in London indefinitely. The Wedderburns were a far-flung family, with enterprising cousins scattered across the globe. Mr Paterson, for example, had considerable interests in the West Indies. Arrangements were made to spirit John out of the country. John was reluctant to fall in with them but his father, via James, insisted. By the end of September, he was gone.

When the trial came on in November, the Crown presented its evidence with ferocity. Receipts from Dundee and Perth, bearing the Baronet’s signature, showing how those towns had been forcibly relieved of duties and other monies for the Prince’s service, were thrust under the jurors’ noses. Witnesses swore to his presence in arms at Culloden, Prestonpans and Derby (a place he had never been, never having left Scotland). None of this was unexpected, but the prosecutors’ outraged zeal was, and the jurors were infected by it.

They did not even leave the courtroom to find him guilty of high treason, whereupon the court, having asked Sir John if he had anything to say for himself, and receiving no reply, proceeded to pronounce judgment and award execution against him: ‘that the said Sir John do return to the Jail from whence he came and from thence be drawn to the place of Execution and when he cometh there that he be hanged by the Neck but not till he be dead and that he be therefore cut down alive and that his Bowels be then taken out and burnt before his Face and that his Head be then severed from his Body and that his Body be divided into four Quarters and that those be at the Disposal of our said present Sovereign Lord the King’.

This was on 15 November. The sentence was shared by several other gentlemen who now, perhaps, wished that they had been peasants after all. Various appeals and entreaties were made, but to no avail. Cumberland himself insisted on the sentences being carried out in full: ‘Good God,’ he spluttered, juice cascading over his chins as he worked his way through a bucket of oysters, ‘did we gather all these miscreants up in order to let them go again? No, no. Examples must be made.’

But of all this the 5th Baronet of Blackness’s eldest son and heir was quite ignorant. Before the end of summer John had left London, and had crossed the ocean: another stage on the dream-like flight that had begun on Drummossie Moor, and from which he did not know when he would come to rest.

Kingston, January – March 1747

John Wedderburn slowly came awake again, and found himself, as his eighteenth birthday approached, no longer a boy. He had been in Jamaica for half a year, acclimatising, or being ‘seasoned’, as the term was. Europeans, it was said, needed this period of adjustment, preferably twice as long, even more than Africans, though it was the latter who would eventually be toiling all day under the Caribbean sun. But while the Africans were not allowed to be idle in their first months in the island, but were given light tasks such as weeding or cattle-minding, or indoor work, John Wedderburn was expected to do almost nothing. He was kept at his relative Mr Paterson’s expense, and grew increasingly bored.

Company was not hard to find, but, to begin with, he avoided it. He felt like an exile, not yet a West Indian but a Scot, on the run from England. He kept himself to himself. Riding from one part of the island to another on a borrowed horse, he inspected some plantations, their great white houses and simple slave villages, watched the slaves at work in the cane fields, saw the sugar being processed in the mills, learned the difference between creoles and Africa-born blacks and the obsessive gradations of blood-mix that lay between black and white: sambo, mulatto, quadroon, octaroon, musteefino. These designations also taught him an important lesson: there were no gradations of whiteness. In the purity of your race, if you were white, lay your salvation.

As his own skin became burnt by the sun, he thought of this, and determined to keep himself pure. He wanted to save himself. He thought of home and its whiteness, something to which he had never before given any consideration. Now, surrounded by black people, he saw in his mind the overwhelming whiteness of Scotland.

In Kingston, he spent these lone months wandering the grim, gaudy streets, taking in their odd mixture of dust and humidity, of squalor and sweat, of crudeness and finery. He got caught time and again in astonishing downpours. A baking hot sky would be transformed in mid-afternoon, in a matter of minutes, into something dark and menacing. Then the rain would come, vertical sheets of warm, sweet-smelling water, quite unlike the insidious, creeping drizzle of Scotland. Half an hour later the sky would be clear again and the ground bone-dry.

Compared with London, Kingston was a village but it lacked the quaintness of a village. The streets were lined with wooden shacks and larger wood- and brick-built houses, the latter often with shaded porches along their entire front where white men and women sat and observed the world. The few really substantial buildings were used by the island’s administration or by the wealthiest merchants and planters. King Street, the wide main thoroughfare, was always busy with carts and carriages. There were stores with the latest fashions, furnishings and domestic supplies imported from Europe. Inns and boarding houses, rough-looking drinking shops and slightly more genteel coffee rooms filled the gaps. It was a male town faced in some quarters with a chipped female veneer.

At first sight, it was a place where blacks and whites seemed to mingle on equal terms. But this was a false picture. Most of the apparently free blacks were slaves employed in various trades – coopers, carriers, carpenters, blacksmiths, seamstresses, laundresses. If they were not working for their own master they were working for someone else’s, charging a fee, some of which they were permitted to keep. These men and women existed in a halfway state between slavery and freedom, and their whole manner, their better clothes, their sprightliness and the speed at which they worked, all seemed to suggest to John Wedderburn that they had somehow been ‘improved’ beyond the condition of those labouring on the plantations. This he found interesting.

Ships arrived daily from Britain, Guinea and the American colonies. Down at the waterfront John watched vast quantities of goods being offloaded and tried to calculate what they must be worth. A miserable, foul-smelling guardhouse was there too, and a gibbet, on which were suspended cages containing the remnants of slaves who had committed some crime or other.

A man passing by, seeing him standing there, asked him what he was staring at. Embarrassed, John Wedderburn waved an arm widely. ‘Everything,’ he said. ‘It’s all so busy.’

‘No,’ the man said, ‘you were looking at something, not everything. You were looking at that.’ He was smoking a pipe, and pointed at the gibbet with it.

John began to speak, but the man interrupted him.

‘And you’re as well to look at it, lad. Because without that, everything is nothing.’ He spat on the ground. ‘We’re at war.’

John looked again at the carcasses in the cages. ‘The French?’ he asked. ‘Were they in league with the French?’

‘Bugger the French. We’re at war with them.’ He sucked on his pipe again. ‘You’ll see if I’m not right,’ he said.

Months after his arrival, a letter reached John via Mr Paterson’s business. The letter had been weeks on board a ship crossing the Atlantic. It was written in his father’s hand. He opened it eagerly, forgetting how much time must have passed since its composition. It was very brief, a few lines only:

27 November 1746

Dear John,

Today I got notice that I am to be executed tomorrow.

The paper swam before his vision, his heart doubled its pace. With an effort he focused on the writing again.

I was proved reviewed by the Prince at Edinburgh with a small sword and pair of pistols when you know I was not in arms there, the injustice and untruth of which with a great many other things I designed to have expatiated more fully upon if I had time. I hear that while you stayed here you parted too easily from your money which will not do, I need not tell you to take care and please Mr Paterson.

Damn Mr Paterson! Mr Paterson was in London! He, John Wedderburn, was stuck in the Indies, and all his father could do – had been able to do – was complain about untruths and tell him to curb his spending. Take care. Take care of what, his empty purse? His browning skin? O God, Papa was dead! What had they done to him? They had wiped him clean away. As if to emphasise that awful fact, the letter was not even signed.

He tried to persuade himself that there might have been a reprieve, but he knew it could not be. A week, a month passed: no joyous, God-praising letter in the same hand arrived. Instead, in January, came his brother James to confirm the news.

The boys spent a week getting drunk together, which would not have pleased Mr Paterson if he had got to hear, but he did not, since Mr Paterson’s representatives were often to be found joining in the sessions. When they were on their own, the brothers tried to make sense of what had happened, where and who they now were.

‘Are you the sixth Baronet of Blackness, then?’ James wanted to know. ‘Now that Papa is dead.’

‘I don’t see how I can be. We lost Blackness years ago. We’ve even lost the farm at Newtyle.’

‘But Papa kept the title, did he not?’

‘I think it will be taken anyway, James, on account of our being out. At the moment I don’t care, I don’t feel like a baronet.’

James looked angry. ‘Well, if you don’t want the title I’ll have it. You dishonour Papa talking like that. He was strong right to the end.’

Then James told John of their father’s last night alive. To pre-empt last-minute applications for mercy it had been intended to keep the date of execution a secret from those about to die. On the evening of 27 November, James had been allowed in to see him. Sir John had been in the middle of a game of backgammon, and James had sat down beside him to watch. A few minutes later, a jailer had approached and whispered something in the father’s ear. Sir John had paused, his finger resting on one of the stones, as if contemplating what move to make. ‘Friend,’ he had said to the jailer, ‘would you kindly stand out of the light till I finish this game?’ Then, having played it out, he had put his arm around James and called for wine. When the men around him all had glasses, he told them the news: ‘I regret to tell you that I am to be executed tomorrow. There is no time for an appeal. I therefore ask you to join me in a farewell toast and then to indulge me with some solitude. My son is here, and I have letters to write.’

After the wine was drunk, he and James were given space alone. Sir John wrote half a dozen brief letters: one to his wife; one to John in Jamaica; three to relatives in Scotland entreating them to look after his family; and one to His Royal Highness, Prince Charles Edward Stewart.

‘He showed me that one,’ James said. ‘He wanted me to see that he remained loyal even after what had happened. He said we were all poor and he hoped the Prince would protect us. He sealed it up and gave it to me with the others, to give to Mr Paterson.’

‘Will the Prince protect us?’ John asked.

‘Of course he won’t. How can he? He’s away to France and he’ll not be back. I doubt Papa expected much from that quarter. The point is, though, he never wavered. And we must never waver. If we do, we will vanish.’

As Papa had vanished, John thought, but he said nothing. Perhaps James also felt the irony of his own remark. In the prison, even at that late stage, he had tried to persuade their father to do something to save himself. Ever since the sentence there had been a steady flow of visitors at night, including assorted vendors of ale and port, barbers, tailors and whores, all of whom anticipated doing some kind of business. Men condemned to death, after all, might as well spend what money they had left, either to look their best before the gallows crowd, catch the pox or drink themselves into oblivion. James had proposed that they pay one of the whores to lose some of her clothes – on a permanent basis – and get his father out in them. Sir John had dismissed this scheme: ‘Do you know how many hairy big-boned women are stopped leaving prisons on occasions like this, James? I do not wish to be discovered in such circumstances and ill-used on my last night on earth. I’m as well dying now as twenty years hence.’ Then he had blessed the boy, embraced him and sent him away. ‘Do not come here tomorrow. There will be nothing more to say. You will only make it harder for me to die.’

‘And did you obey him?’ John asked.

‘Aye. I did not see him at the prison again.’ James closed his eyes. He was shaking. John put his hand on his brother’s arm. James opened his eyes again. ‘I saw him later,’ he said. ‘At Kennington.’

But it would be a long time before he would say what he had seen there.

John had finally adjusted to the climate. James appeared to need no seasoning. His energy and curiosity were astonishing. Kingston veterans marvelled at him. He had a hundred schemes to make the best of their situation: to make money, lots of it; to work hard and live hard; and one day, to go back to Scotland.

John concurred with all of these propositions, especially the last one. He was more cautious, less certain that they would succeed, but he would put his back to the wheel and make it turn. His father’s reproach about the money rankled: it would rankle for twenty years. The last thing he had thought to say to him: you parted too easily from your money which will not do. Very well then: he would amass wealth. He would not squander it. He would not be the prodigal son. He would be the 6th Baronet. He would go home to enjoy his own again.

He was not the only one thinking along these lines. The island was something of a Jacobite refuge. Every boat, from America or Europe, disgorged another young or middle-aged man who found it expedient to sojourn in the sun for a few years. Some only lasted a few weeks: the sun was no friendlier than Butcher Cumberland. Those who ignored the dire warnings of old hands about the wrong food and drink, yellow fever and mosquitoes, the importance of clean water and the dangers of dirty cuts and grazes, dropped by the dozen. But the Wedderburns survived, working for one or other of Mr Paterson’s enterprises – he had stores in Kingston, and his agents acted on behalf of a number of plantations across the island. Another Jacobite exile and one of their old Perthshire friends, George Kinloch, had been made overseer of a small plantation in the west, near the port of Savanna-la-Mar. They were pleased for George, and when they went to visit him they liked what they saw of that end of the island. ‘There are opportunities here,’ James said. ‘There are great opportunities.’

One afternoon, John found his brother downing rum in a Kingston grog shop with two men of very different physical appearance. One was yet another Scot, not much older, black-haired, clean-shaven, neatly dressed. In his white linen shirt and light, black short coat he seemed to be coping well with the heat. His whole air was one of self-assurance. This was David Fyfe, a medical graduate of Edinburgh who had been in Jamaica eight months. The other man was huge, sixtyish, bulb-nosed and florid. A once white, now tobacco-yellow peruke, in a style that might have been fashionable under Queen Anne, was crammed on his wrinkled forehead, and this, together with the combined weight of a thick brown coat and ornately brocaded waistcoat, was causing him to sweat like a fountain.

James shouted John over and called for another chair, another glass and another bottle of rum. It was both hard and easy to believe he was still only sixteen.

‘Davie, James,’ John greeted them, taking the seat.

‘This,’ said James to the fat man, ‘is my esteemed elder brother John Wedderburn, late of Scotland, now a colonist like the rest of us. John, it is my pleasure and so forth to introduce Mr Thomas Underwood of – where did you say again?’

‘Amity Plantation, sir, in the parish of Westmoreland, county of Cornwall. My pleasure, sir, and an honour. Always an honour to meet another Scotchman. Not that it’s difficult here. You’re almost as numerous as the negers. No offence, naturally.’

He spoke with a mild Yorkshire accent, the words interspersed with heavy rasping breaths and much wiping of the brow. His unsuitable dress, clearly the chief source of his discomfort, seemed to indicate a newcomer. In fact Mr Underwood had been on the island nearly thirty years, but would never get used to the heat. He had small eyes made smaller by the encroaching folds of his cheeks. He tipped his fleshy head at John.

‘Now, sir, it’s all one to me, I assure you, but were you out?’

John had an idea that Mr Underwood, through James, already knew the answer. He drew himself up proudly: ‘That, sir, is not a question one gentleman expects to be asked by another.’

Underwood shrugged. ‘I’ll take that as an aye. No, no, don’t be offended, Mr Wedderburn, I don’t care a bit, and you’ll find very few folk as do. We’re an island of tolerance – we’re only here to get rich after all, and you can’t hold that against nobody. I only ask on account of you Scotchmen are such a curious breed. You’ll murder each other over crowns and creeds at home, but here the loyalest of you falls on his rebel compatriot like a brother. The sun does something to you it don’t do to Englishmen: it seems to dry up all your grudges.’

‘Mr Underwood’s plantation,’ James said, ‘is not far from where George Kinloch is. Mr Underwood knows George quite well.’

‘Indeed I do,’ Underwood said. ‘Not a grudge on that gentleman’s person.’

‘And what brings you to Kingston, sir?’ John asked.

‘A scramble, sir,’ Underwood said. ‘Tomorrow morning. I’m hoping to pick up some cheap slaves to replace half a dozen I lost at Christmas to the flux.’

‘But there’s a regular market at Savanna-la-Mar,’ John said. ‘Surely it’s a long and hazardous trip to come all this way for slaves?’

‘Oh, dreadful hazardous,’ Underwood agreed with enthusiasm. ‘A hundred miles and more on roads that would shake the teeth out of many men – not that you can call them roads, in some parts. But I’ve been visiting friends here, you see, and they’ve given me some fine heavy bits of furniture which I intend to ship home along with the new slaves, if I can get some. Are you in the market for slaves yourself, Mr Wedderburn?’ he asked John.

‘Not yet,’ said John.

‘But we will be,’ said James.

‘You should come along with me in the morning. I can show you what to look out for when you’re buying them up cheap. In a scramble, I mean.’

‘What,’ says James, ‘is a scramble?’

‘Just what it sounds like. The shipmasters have sorted their negers out by the time they get here, they’ve decided which ones they can sell at premium, which ones are ailing, which ones are feeble-minded, that kind of thing. They sell the best to folk as know what they want and have money to pay for it, they auction the weakest for whatever they can get, which is precious little, and them that’s left, the middling sort you might say, are put to a scramble. A set price is fixed beforehand, same for each slave, so if you’ve a good eye you can pick up an excellent bargain. Oh, but you have to be quick on your feet to beat t’others. Come along with me in the morning and I’ll show you how it’s done.’

‘We’ll be there,’ James said at once. ‘How about yourself, Davie?’

‘No, I’ll be seeing enough Negroes as it is. I’ve a long day tomorrow. Three plantations and a hundred and fifty slaves to inspect.’

‘Ill?’ Underwood said. ‘Not a contagion, I hope?’

‘No, a routine visit. A stitch in time, you’ll understand, or more likely a poultice or an incision, may save nine. Nine slaves, that is,’ he explained to the Wedderburns, ‘for which a master may have paid a great deal of money.’

‘How’s your master, Davie?’ John asked. ‘Still alive?’

‘Very sickly,’ said Davie Fyfe with a wide grin.

‘Excellent,’ said James. ‘You’ll be a rich man soon.’

‘What d’you mean?’ Underwood asked.

‘The surgeon Davie works for,’ James said, ‘has been ill for months. If he doesn’t want to expire here he’ll have to go back to England.’

‘In which case he’ll be dead before the Azores,’ Fyfe said.

‘So whatever happens,’ James said, ‘Davie will inherit the business, and probably at a knockdown price, won’t you, Davie?’

‘I’m hoping so. If you can stay fit yourself, there’s a fortune to be made here from doctoring.’

‘Oh, you needn’t tell me that, sir,’ said Underwood. ‘The bills I pay for doctoring! They would keep a lord and his castle back in England! I’m not complaining, mind you – if you get a surgeon in quick, he can save you far more in slaves than what he’ll charge you for his time. He can spot a fever before it turns into a forest fire, the flux before it becomes a flood, if you understand me. Negers go down in parties, Mr Wedderburn. One gets a fever, they all get it. But a good surgeon – and I’ll say this, a good surgeon’s nearly always a Scotch surgeon, begging your master’s pardon, Mr Fyfe – a good surgeon will nip that fever in the bud, and kill it. He might in the process kill the slave as has it, which is a loss to be borne of course, but I warrant you, it makes t’others get better quick. Am I right, sir?’

Davie Fyfe acknowledged that he was quite right. ‘Except,’ he added, ‘that a good surgeon never kills his patient, though the patient might unavoidably die of the attempt to make him well.’

‘A slip of the tongue, sir,’ said Underwood, slipping his own round another shot of rum. ‘And of course it depends on the illness. And the slave. There’s some negers can withstand any amount of fever, but will go down in a day with the yaws. There’s other negers live with the yaws like it’s their mother, but give them a touch of fever, they’re dead before morning. Am I right, Mr Fyfe?’

‘Quite right.’

‘I have seen the yaws,’ said James. ‘What causes it?’

‘Seen it?’ Underwood exploded. ‘I should think you have! You can’t be very long here without seeing the yaws! Oh, but you don’t want to know about it, young man. Do he, Mr Fyfe? Very nasty, very nasty. But you have to know about it, to know Negroes. Mr Fyfe will tell you about the yaws. Makes me shudder just to think on it.’

Davie Fyfe opened his mouth to explain the yaws, but Underwood had hit on a favourite theme, and rolled on unstoppably.

‘I take a great pride,’ he said, ‘in knowing my Negroes. I’m a fair man, and I don’t believe in mistreating them. Punishment, yes, but that’s not mistreating them if they deserve it, that’s treating them same as you’d treat anything in your charge, black, white or beast of the field. There’s men I know,’ he went on, shaking his head and in the process showering the table with sweat, ‘as have no respect for your African at all. They forget that he’s a human being. A bad planter don’t break them in as he should, he don’t season them over a twelvemonth, he puts them out in the field far too early, and then he wonders why they die on him and he’s wasted his money. That’s almost like murder, in my book. You can pay a terrible price for a fine Coromantee, a terrible price, but if you don’t look after him, well, you may as well have put your money on a horse with three legs. No, a good planter, such as I believe I am, knows his Negroes, and if you, Mr Wedderburn, and your young brother here, are to flourish in Jamaica, I’d advise you to know your Negroes too. Come along to the scramble with me tomorrow, and you can make a start. Truth of the matter is, you can’t prosper here without keeping slaves, and if you want to keep them you have to understand them, the different types of them. Do you follow me?’

‘You must tell us more, sir,’ James said, signalling for more rum and winking at John. ‘How many types of them are there?’

‘Oh, limitless, limitless,’ said Underwood. ‘Guinea, you see, where they come from, is bigger than, oh, England and Scotland and France put together. Far bigger. And what is Guinea? Is it a great kingdom, like France, like England? A fine country like your Scotland, sirs? No, it’s a jumble of little kingdoms and tribes and desert and swamp and forest, all mixed up together. That’s where your neger comes from, and there’s many of them very glad to get out of it, though they don’t think so at the time they’re taken, which is understandable. But if they stayed, chances are they’d be eaten by savage lions, or by other negers, or they’d be killed by them, or they’d starve, or die of thirst – there’s a hundred ways of dying in Guinea, Mr Wedderburn, and none of them’s nice. Or they’d be made slaves of by the Moors, which you may be sure is a sight worse than being a slave here in the Indies. A great deal worse. Am I right, Mr Fyfe?’

Mr Fyfe opined that he might well be, but as he had never been to Guinea he could not tell.

‘Nor I,’ said Underwood, ‘but there’s plenty as has. All the captains of the slave ships, they have, and I talk to them as part of my policy of knowing my Negroes. Anyway, as to types, Mr Wedderburn, there’s your creoles of course, to begin with – that’s them that’s born here in the Indies and has forgotten whatever African tribe they once was. Then, of the Africans, the full-blooded freshly imported slaves, well, I’d say there’s four types, speaking in a general kind of way. First, there’s your Eboes. They come mostly from Benin, that’s the underbelly part of Guinea. They’re the least useful, in my opinion, though they fetch them over in droves. A very timid type, and rather prone to killing themselves of despair, I’m sorry to say. You’ll see a lot of them in the scramble tomorrow, I don’t doubt. Then there’s your Pawpaws and your Nagoes, from a bit further north. Now these are very excellent Negroes if they’ll live, very docile and well-disposed creatures, and never the least trouble, but they die off easy from a lack of character – am I going too fast, sir?’ He asked this of James, who had produced a pocket book and stub of blacklead pencil and was taking rapid notes. James waved him on. ‘The third type is your Mandingo. He’s a clever fellow, too clever in fact, he can learn to read and write and do his sums very quick, but he’s lazy, and much given to theft. And then,’ said the fat planter grandly, as if announcing a prize bull, ‘there’s your Coromantee, from the Gold Coast. He’s the cream of Africans, stands head and shoulders above the rest. Firm of body, firm of mind, brave, strong, extraordinary powerful worker in the field – but proud too, stubborn, and ferocious when roused. You have to watch Coromantees like a hawk, gentlemen, but you’ll get more work out of one of them in a week than you’ll get out of six Eboes. Am I not correct, Mr Fyfe?’ he finished, by way of variation.

‘Indeed you are, sir,’ said Davie Fyfe, ‘and to what you’ve said I’ll add that, being of a strong constitution, they don’t get so sick as the others.’

‘We should have some Coromantees then,’ said James to his brother, ‘when we are planters. They sound like the negers for us.’

‘And how,’ said John, ‘do you intend that we pay for them?’

James did not answer that question then. Nor did he address it the following day, when they went to the scramble with Underwood and saw him in action picking up bargains. A large wooden pen had been filled with a couple of hundred Africans. Once a set price had been agreed, a drum sounded, the gates were opened and in rushed the planters or their overseers, each carrying a coil of rope identified by a couple of handkerchiefs tied to it.

Underwood, sweat lashing off him and his wig toppling on his head like a skein of yellow knitting, moved with amazing speed, grabbing at the arms of terrified Africans, quickly inserting a thumb into some of their mouths to check the state of their teeth, slipping his hand between their buttocks (it was known for ships’ surgeons to stop slaves’ anuses with oakum, to disguise the fact that they had the flux), pummelling and punching at their legs to test them for strength, and all the while playing out the rope, the loose end of which James had offered to hold.

‘Bring it round, sir, enclose them, that one, that one there, sir, the big bullish one,’ Underwood roared, making himself heard above a similar racket issuing from the mouth of every other white man in the scrum. James darted after Underwood like an elf behind an ogre. Every few seconds he turned back to John, who was following at a distance and doing his best to avoid bodily contact with anyone. There was an appalled look in James’s eyes, but he was also laughing uproariously. He began to wave the rope-end in black faces, and when they cowered or shied away his laugh got louder. It was as if, having decided to do something distasteful, he discovered that he quite enjoyed it.

In less than a quarter of an hour, Underwood had got himself seven new slaves, corralled by the rope like unwilling participants in some grotesque parlour game, and was settling up with the slave-ship captains.

That evening, long after Underwood had loaded his new purchases on board ship for Westmoreland, the brothers discussed the scramble over supper in their lodgings.

‘It was disgusting,’ John said.

‘You mean it offended you?’ James asked. ‘Your moral sensibilities?’

‘No, I mean it disgusted me. The noise and sweat and brutishness of it.’

‘It was impressive, too, though,’ James said. ‘Not Underwood – he’s a buffoon. But the fact that a man like that has such power over others.’

‘He certainly had no compunction about checking his wares.’ John had an image of the fat planter’s fingers running over black skin.

‘You’ll have to do the same,’ James said, ‘so you’d better get used to it. And you will. It doesn’t have to be so uncivilised.’ A sly look came over his face and he leaned forward. ‘Listen, John, here’s what I propose. We’ll be planters, and we’ll be better than the likes of Underwood, far better. But first we’ll be surgeons. I’ve been thinking about it all day. Davie’ll teach us, he’ll take us on as apprentices when he gets the business, he’ll not have to pay us much, not till we learn a little anyway. Well, you needn’t look so gloomy, you must have seen a fair display of wounds, quite a pack of sick men, in the last year or two.’

‘It’s true. But all those black bodies crushed together. It unnerved me.’

‘Well, treating them’s only common sense, surely, and luck, and having a strong belly. After what you’ve been through it’ll be bairn’s play; and if you can manage it, I can. And we’ll use our fees to buy slaves. We’ll do it right, though, not like that madness this forenoon. We’ll go direct to the slave ships, and buy us some Coromantees.’

‘But we’ve no qualifications,’ John protested. ‘The island is awash with surgeons, real surgeons.’

‘Ah, but we’re Scotch, which Mr Underwood seems to consider as fine a qualification as any. And how many of these real surgeons you speak of have ever been challenged to produce their degrees? We studied in Glasgow, or Aberdeen, or Edinburgh, it doesn’t matter which, none of the medical men here are young enough to say it’s odd how they never met us in the dissecting room – except Davie, and he’ll not betray us. And if we’re lacking our papers it’s because of our political indiscretions, which obliged us to leave a wee bit hurriedly. Nobody will care, if only we’re competent. There’s to be an amnesty soon anyway, they’re saying, for folk like you that were out. So we must practise, and get competence, and Davie’s the man that will help us to get it. And in any event it’ll only be practising on slaves, so we can afford a few minor mistakes. A few major ones, even.’

‘We’d need land, too,’ said John. ‘No point in having slaves if we’ve nowhere to work them.’

‘There’s land a-plenty here. But we’ll keep an eye out for what’s already been reclaimed and planted. Buy a share in a small plantation, buy the whole of it, and build it up.’

‘Maybe to leeward,’ John said, ‘in the west, where Underwood and George Kinloch are. Westmoreland’s the youngest parish, it’s not so congested as this end.’

‘Aye,’ James said, ‘we’ll get over to leeward in a while. But first we’ll be doctors. What do you say?’

John Wedderburn thought of touching black flesh, cutting into it, gangrenous rot, infestations, flux, fever. He remembered the limb-scattered field of Culloden. Surely he could steel himself. Surely he could.

He smiled at his brother. ‘You’re a scoundrel, James. I say we shall be doctors.’

Glen Isla, 1760

A dozen miles north and west of Savanna-la-Mar, the main town and port of Westmoreland, the westernmost parish of Jamaica, the soil-rich plain of the Cabarita river gave way to the lower slopes of the mountains. Here, a rough road curled up into the hills, and the landscape took on a wilder aspect than that of the sugar-growing flat land that stretched down to the sea. Wilder, and yet somehow comfortingly familiar. Up in the hills the heat was less intense, less humid. If you discounted the size and abundance of the vegetation, you could almost believe yourself to be in a Scottish glen.

This was what John Wedderburn had thought when he had first inspected the area with a view to buying property, two or three years after his arrival in Jamaica. A further ten years had passed, and the place was now his home. The refuge-like feel of it had led him to name it Glen Isla.

It had been a time of constant, grinding, back-breaking labour. The Wedderburns had become rich. These two facts were connected, indirectly. The labour had been overseen by them, but actually carried out by slaves. Not that they had been idle: they had worked, first as doctors, then as planters, as hard as any other white gentlemen in Jamaica, but they had also had a large helping of luck – of the kind that really involves no luck at all, but only patience till somebody dies. In 1751, John had come into a substantial inheritance left by a great-uncle in Perthshire, and this they had used to purchase two parcels of land. The first, Bluecastle, was down near the coast, a few miles west of Savanna, an old-established cane plantation in need of new management. James had taken that on. The second was Glen Isla.

The house at Glen Isla was situated in an elevated position just over the crest of the escarpment that rose from the sugar plain. An area two hundred yards in width had been cleared of trees all around the house, so that it had unobstructed views of all the approaches – highly necessary in times of slave unrest. Where the rough parkland created by the tree-felling ended, the track to the house joined the public south – north road that twisted across the mountains into Hanover parish, eventually reaching Montego Bay twenty arduous miles away on the north coast.

A quarter mile in the other direction, there was a viewpoint on the escarpment from which one could look out over the plain as far as the sea, and take in the entire estate – the hardwood forest still thick on the hills, the cane fields, the Chocho river snaking through them to join the Cabarita, the mill and storehouses, and the slave huts laid out in rows close to the produce-growing fields.

It was Good Friday, early in April. James had come over the previous night, and after breakfast the two brothers rode out to the viewpoint to watch the last of the cane being cut and brought in for crushing. It had been an excellent crop, both at Glen Isla and at Bluecastle, where the work was all but done. Already the sun was blazing. The Wedderburns dismounted and let the horses loose to stand in the shade. Down below, the plantation looked like a toy, a model of a plantation. They could see one group of slaves harvesting the cane, another line coming behind them piling it on to ox-drawn carts. Further back, women were carrying loads of cane on their heads into the mill, from which came the faint, repetitive clank of machinery. Elsewhere a handful of children were herding cattle by the river, and a couple of men were stripping the branches off a fallen tree, preparing to clear it from the water. Since the sugar crop was almost in, other slaves had been diverted to the fields kept for growing provisions, and were making the ground ready for yams and cabbages. It was as picturesque and peaceful a scene as any planter could hope to look upon. There was something almost unreal about its perfection. Everywhere was a sense of industry, fertility, domesticity, prosperity. By the end of the week the sugar would be drying, the hogsheads waiting to be filled. Another season over.

These were the thoughts going through John Wedderburn’s mind when his brother said, ‘We have come a long way since London, have we not?’

‘I was just thinking that. Aye, we have. It’s not the road we expected to take, but …’

‘… but it’s been paved with gold, eh?’

‘Now, perhaps,’ John said. ‘Not at first. As you said, we have come a long way.’

‘Do you remember what it was like breaking in some of this land? And how little we got out of it in the first year?’

‘I do,’ John said. ‘You were angry with me. You said we’d moved too soon, should have stuck with ginger and indigo for another season or two.’

‘Aye, well, you were right. The sugar price shot up. You’re a better farmer than me, I don’t deny it. But I was always the better doctor.’

They spoke like middle-aged men, contentedly competitive with each other, looking back on decades, but John was not long turned thirty-one, James still only twenty-nine, and both still had plenty of ambitions left. Chief among these was to make enough money to go home; to see their mother and sisters again; to convert some of their wealth into Scottish land, while still leaving enough in Jamaica to go on multiplying. Their two younger brothers, Peter and Alexander, had joined them some years before, and might in due course be left to manage things on the plantations. Back in Scotland, their politics were fast becoming not only forgiven but positively romantic. Another few years would wash the slate quite clean, turn their Jacobite past into an asset. And they would still be young enough to wed, to seed their own Scots sons and daughters.

The desire to get home was what kept them going, squeezing as much out of the plantations and the slaves as possible without jeopardising the whole enterprise. It was this that differentiated them from planters like Underwood, whom they still saw from time to time, although they had long overtaken him in wealth and social prestige. All Underwood’s loud talk about knowing his Negroes and getting rich quick was a front for bumbling inefficiency and absence of resolve. He still sweated like a pig. He had never got used to Jamaica because he had never made up his mind to escape.

Some of his information, though, had been useful. He had been right, for example, about the Coromantees: they were the best slaves you could get, and the Wedderburns had made a point of buying only them. They had developed good connections with certain shipping companies and their captains, and had looked for preferential treatment at the markets, since they were prepared to pay the best prices.

What exactly a Coromantee was, however, was less certain. It had become clear to the Wedderburns very quickly that they were not dealing with a distinct tribe or race when they demanded Coromantees: they would buy a dozen and find four different languages spoken among them. John tried to discover more about the designation. The traders at Savanna were not sure, but thought it derived from an old settlement on the Gold Coast, Kromantine, the site of the first English slave station a century before. It was, in other words, little more than an export stamp.

‘What does it matter?’ James had said, when John told him what he had learned. ‘I don’t give a damn what they’re called, so long as nobody sells us a bad one.’

As for Underwood’s faith in the abilities of Scotch doctors, it was shared by many planters, which was both gratifying and useful, but largely misconceived. The brothers knew this because, with minimal training, they had both practised as Scotch doctors these last thirteen years, though only James still did much in that line. His claim that he was a better doctor was based on a bolder and more cold-blooded approach than John would ever be capable of. Davie Fyfe had given them a basic knowledge. The rest, as James had divined at sixteen, was a crude mix of guesswork, trial and error, and common sense.

Bleeding, blistering and purging: these were the basic cures most doctors relied on. Release the blood, scorch the skin, sluice out the bowels, and you might, just might, remove whatever the sickness was. The Wedderburns had learned the application of leeches and of the scalpel, the preparation of emetics, the uses of fire, steam, nitre, tartar, mercury; any number of potions, powders and pills patented in Europe or America by medical men whose names were attached to them but who could never be held accountable for their inefficacy. Mercury for the pox; opium to quell pain; ‘tapping’ to relieve dropsy; for dysentery – the bloody flux – bleeding, purging, puking, sweating, anything to cleanse the body of a condition which carried off more slaves than any other. Doctoring was a chancy business, a gamble. There was, of course, an inexhaustible supply of patients on whom to try out new methods, but this was itself part of the problem. Whenever they thought they were on top of some outbreak of illness, thousands more Africans arrived in the island after months at sea in filthy, disease-ridden holds, bringing new strains of tropical ailments with them.

The Wedderburns had often discussed slave health with other doctors and planters. There were soft fools like Underwood who thought they knew their slaves but paid more attention to the quacks who spouted medical jargon and charged exorbitant fees for the privilege of hearing it. There were hard fools who treated every African wound as self-inflicted, every sign of lethargy as malingering, every desperate fever as one more indicator of the degraded racial origins of their slaves. And then there were the calculating, thoughtful, observant ones – like the Wedderburns – who saw each dead or debilitated slave as a loss of fifty or sixty pounds sterling, each sound and working one as the same sum spread over ten, twenty or thirty years. One school of thought argued that it was good economy to extract the maximum labour for the least expense from your slaves, use them up and start again. Another school, to which the Wedderburns subscribed, believed the opposite: that it paid to keep your Negroes in reasonable health. Nobody, however, could be accused of getting things out of proportion. Whatever your thinking, it was not in the end about slave welfare. It was about money.

Now John and James Wedderburn were looking down from Glen Isla on the source of that money. ‘Half a life,’ said James. ‘Or not much less, anyway. That’s how long we’ve been here.’ Then he began to laugh.

‘What?’ John asked. ‘What’s so amusing?’

‘Just that I was thinking, our father was the fifth Baronet of Blackness, whereas you have become the first Baronet of Blackness.’

‘Very good, James.’

‘But think of it, John. In ’45, Papa took only you as his retinue. Were the opportunity to arise again, you could bring four dozen Coromantees to the Prince’s standard. That’s a whole Highland glen.’

‘And you could bring a company of your own black bairns.’ In the last year, James had delivered two of the girls that kept house at Bluecastle of babies which he freely admitted were his own. Boys, both thriving. ‘We may soon be able to count them in dozens also.’

‘Well, and what of it?’ James was still grinning at his brother, who was staring steadfastly ahead.

‘You know how little Papa would have approved of that … miscegenation of which you are so fond.’

‘I’m not sure I do. I never spoke to him about matters of the flesh, even though we had that time together in the prison.’ This was a dig at John, a reminder of his exclusion from those visits. ‘But in any event you are not him, and Abba and Jenny are not yours. Well, I suppose you have a part share in them. Not that you make any claim on it – not that I’d object if you did. For all practical purposes they’re mine to do with what I like.’

‘That’s evident. I hope you’ll not live to regret it.’

‘I’ll not. And nor will the lassies, if the bairns live.’ A challenge had entered James’s voice. ‘I’ve told you before, I’m going to set them free, mothers and bairns, if they reach ten years. I’ve told them too.’

‘It’ll be throwing money away.’

‘Perhaps. But I’ll not have my own blood chained for life.’

‘That’s very noble of you.’

‘Ach, John, you should learn to relax. You’re so cold. Are you never tempted yourself?’

‘I intend to marry a Scotswoman whenever I return home.’

‘As do I. A good, clean, virginal, white Scotswoman. Or maybe a rich widow. Marriage is a different matter altogether. But I could not tolerate this heat and this life without the black lassies to relieve my passion. It keeps the fever out of me.’

‘You really do think that, don’t you?’

‘Well, look at me. Fit and healthy. Mind you, so are you.’

‘We are different.’

‘Aye, hot and cold. I’m rum and you’re ice. Perhaps that’s just our different ways of surviving here. But I can’t be like you.’

‘Nor I like you. We’ve always been different. But we complement one another.’

‘We do here. We’ve had to. It was not always like that. I’d have been too hot for Scotland in ’45. If I’d been allowed to come with you, I’d probably have concluded my life at Culloden, or with Papa in London.’

‘Well, you should thank God you did not. Think what you’d have missed. And thank Him that those days are by with, James. I may never warm to a German king but I’ll live under one readily enough when I go home.’

‘You’d not come out for Charles, if he came again?’

‘No, and nor would you and well you know it. I’d not offer my sword to a Stewart now, even if there were one worthy of it. There’s too much to lose.’ They looked again at the wealth creation going on below. ‘Half a lifetime, James, as you say. We were boys then, both of us. Just the eighteen months between us, but I, you’ll mind, was sixteen and thus old enough to die for a cause. Not now. Now I am old enough not to die for a cause. There is only one cause – one’s own self and one’s family –’

‘Which you don’t yet have –’

‘You forget Mama and our sisters. One’s self, one’s family, and the prosperity of these. Nothing else matters.’

‘And the relief of passion,’ said James. ‘That matters to me a great deal.’

They remounted and rode downhill, threading in and out of the shade until the road levelled out, then struck off towards the mill. Wilson, the bookkeeper, was managing operations. There were other white overseers in the fields, but the three of them were the only white men in the mill – the distiller, boilerman, packers, coopers and other skilled workers were all black. The place was a clammy hive of activity. The noise and heat and sweet stench of the crushed cane were oppressive and heady. After a few minutes the Wedderburns left Wilson and his men to it, and rode back to the coolness of the house.

Within a fortnight, the rest of the cane was in, cut and crushed. From the mill’s boilers vast quantities of liquid had been run off to make low wines for the slaves and rum for the mother country; the remaining juice had been cooled, allowed to granulate, and packed into hogsheads. The fields lay slashed and brown, ready to be planted for the next season. The field gangs were exhausted, the mill slaves hardly less so. Crop Over: a holiday for all of them. From their hut village down on the plain, the noise of their singing and drumming drifted up.

The Wedderburns were tolerant of it: the sounds, hesitating almost deferentially at the open windows, enhanced their own sense of superiority, of being proprietors. John imagined a big house in Scotland where the lowing of cattle beside a bright splashing burn might have the same effect. Such a house would be far more substantial and imposing than the wood, clay and brick edifice he had here, grand though this was in comparison with the accommodations of his white overseers, let alone the slaves’ huts. There would be a tree-lined avenue, perhaps, leading up to the porticoed entrance; stone columns and balconies instead of the wooden porch; enormous, roaring fireplaces in carpeted drawing room and oak-panelled dining room. Not these sweating uneven walls that were home to a multitude of scurrying beetles, cockroaches and green lizards. On evenings when he was by himself, John Wedderburn walked the rooms of that imagined house: sometimes he walked them alone; sometimes with a graceful, lily-white lady on his arm.

For Crop Over he had granted the slaves a few goats to slaughter, and made presents of some bolts of Lancashire coloured cotton for the women to turn into gaudy holiday clothes – a gesture, he was pleased to think, that far exceeded the annual suit of working clothes island law obliged him to provide each slave. Not that anyone ever checked – which made his provision still nobler. Who was going to check? His neighbours? The magistrates from Savanna? And who, more to the point, was going to complain?

He had worked out a few years ago that if he could keep one in every three acres of the estate under cane, and from them produce around a ton of sugar for each slave, at current prices he would achieve a very acceptable profit. Another third of the land he devoted to animal grazing and provision-growing for the house and workforce, and the final portion – mostly on the hills – was woodland, from which he was gradually extracting some excellent timber. This year, by a combination of working the blacks hard and storm-free weather, the sugar crop had been excellent. Although his calculations were not complete, he estimated it at nearly one and a half tons per slave. Furthermore, Britain and France were at war, struggling for territorial control of North America and economic mastery of India, and occasionally attacking some of each other’s smaller Caribbean islands. The war had driven the London sugar price up to thirty-five shillings a hundredweight. He had every reason to feel thankful to Providence, and therefore generous to his workforce.

James was over from Bluecastle for an extended dinner. Their younger brothers Peter and Alexander were also there. Peter was twenty-four, Sandy a year younger. They divided their time between the two estates, depending on where they were most needed. Neither of them had responded well to the climate when they first arrived, but Peter had gradually acquired some strength, and his natural enthusiasm had helped him overcome bouts of illness. He was not particularly clever or imaginative, but went along with whatever plans John and James proposed. John thought that in many ways these were the best characteristics for surviving in the West Indies.

Sandy was a different case. He had been sick as a dog on the passage out, and swore he would never get in a boat again. Six years on, he was still weak and liable to come down with fever at any time. John had considered sending him back home but the thought of the journey appalled Sandy so much that he was stirred to try to keep up with Peter. The strain and anxiety never really left his face, however, and it did not take much to throw him into a depression. James, though he indulged Sandy when he was trying to be manful, was also less patient than John when he was not, and as a result Sandy spent as much time as he could at Glen Isla, where fewer demands were made of him.

George Kinloch, now a successful planter in his own right, was expected for dinner. Davie Fyfe, the thriving doctor, also now in the west, had come in the company of Charles Hodge, a Savanna merchant who had supplied most of the furnishings for the house. In the absence of a wife John Wedderburn had depended on Mr Hodge to fit him out from the shipments that came in from London and Boston. Hodge, he understood, depended in turn on Mrs Hodge’s taste, and judging by the sumptuous decor of their own town house on Great George Street she knew what she liked. But she was also sensible: she realised that an unmarried planter was looking for comfort, not necessarily extravagance; for practicality, but then again not austerity; that such a man was not over concerned with fashion, but equally did not wish his friends to think him a primitive. So she had taught her husband how to navigate these tricky waters, cultivate the confidence of the planters, encourage them to spend wisely yet often, and thus bring the Hodges’ own money-making vessel safely into port.

The only slaves at Glen Isla not yet celebrating Crop Over were the domestics: the cooks, maids, butler and footman required to prepare, serve and remove the long parade of dishes their master and his guests would work their way through over the duration of a three-hour dinner. But as their daily tasks were much lighter than those of the field and mill workers, they could hardly expect to be released so readily. There were, in any case, not that many of them. Three maids, Mary, Peach and Bess, doubled up as kitchen hands helping Naomi the cook. Two men, Jacob and Julius, acted as butler and footman, but of this pair it was not quite certain where the duties of one ended and of the other began.

Unlike some of the really fabulously wealthy planters, for whom such details were a reflection of their prestige, John Wedderburn did not care much about this casual attitude to job demarcation. It did not seem important in a place that, even though he had spent his entire adult life there, he still regarded as only a temporary home. When he went back to Scotland it would be different. He would want to do things right there: in Scotland, doing things right would matter. And with this in mind he intended, some day soon, to begin to train up a slave to take home with him as his personal servant. Not Jacob or Julius: they were too set in their ways. Someone younger, more pliant, who could look after his clothes and toilet, be a faithful companion, a memento of his Jamaican days to be admired by neighbours, friends and guests.

By and large, the domestic work at Glen Isla did get done, for all six domestics were aware that they could be relegated to field labour in an instant. They were also kept on their toes by the tongue-lashings and occasional blows of John Wedderburn’s housekeeper, Phoebe.

He could hardly think of Phoebe without prefixing her name, as James jokingly once had, with the word ‘formidable’. She was a creole who had come with the estate at Bluecastle, but James had quickly taken a dislike to her exacting sense of what was proper, and packed her off to work for his brother. Tall and thin, her face pitted with the marks of childhood smallpox, she was no beauty; but she had a head for economy and a nose for discovering theft or laziness, and though Jacob and Julius drove her to distraction at times, she managed them and the others well.

Between her and John Wedderburn there was little affection, certainly no intimacy, only a mutual respect for each other’s cool style. The other slaves feared her, and she despised them: she had cut herself off from them, and did not join in their social life. She had learnt to read, and pored endlessly over an old Bible her master had given her, fancying herself a Christian, although she had never asked for instruction in the faith. She had a room to herself in the house, and probably expected to be given her freedom one day. John expected that one day he would probably give it to her. But if or when that day came, he knew she would not leap for joy, pack her bag and turn her back on the plantation. Where could she go? She would go on running the house, as though she had been free to leave all along but had chosen not to.

The white men lounged in the porch for an hour, drinking Madeira to work up an appetite. Hodge, the only one of them tolerating a wig in the afternoon heat, had brought some books for John Wedderburn: two for him to borrow – Observations in Husbandry by Edward Lisle, and The Gardener’s Dictionary edited by Philip Miller – and one that he had ordered to buy, the shorter, octavo edition of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary, which, though not five years old, was already famous. The work was passed around, definitions read out and admired or disputed. Mr Hodge observed that it was a book all the more remarkable because its author, so he had it on good authority, was a slovenly brute who went for weeks without changing his shirt and was given to physical violence against any who offended him.

George Kinloch arrived with some even more interesting literature: two rampant Parisian novelles – seized from a French ship captured sailing from San Domingo to Florida – which, from their ragged state, seemed already to have been read by a good proportion of both the French and British plantocracy. An etching on the title page of one, of a semi-naked courtesan spread over some cushions, looking invitingly over her shoulder and pointing her voluptuous derrière in the reader’s direction, showed what to expect; the other’s title page had been torn out. Peter gleefully seized the one with the picture; Sandy, although his French was rudimentary, made a show of licking his lips over the text of the other.

James smiled at them smugly: ‘Those that can, do. Those that canna, read.’

‘Or they read and then do, wi a swollen imagination,’ Kinloch said.

They sat down to eat at two. The marathon began with stewed snook and ketchup sauce. There was a dish of boiled crabs, a tureen full of mangrove oysters, the juices to be soaked up with cassava bread, and all to be chased with great pitchers of porter. Then came boiled salt beef with rice, spinach-like callaloo, green peas and yams; four varieties of bird – snipe, coot, teal and squab – shot by the Wedderburns and roasted en masse; a plum pudding; three kinds of cheese; plantains, pawpaws, oranges, pineapple, watermelon in honey, chocolate sauce. There was some excellent claret, also taken from the French vessel, which Mr Hodge had bought at the knockdown price of five pounds the hogshead and which he was bottling and selling to the Savanna taverns at five pounds a dozen; but he had generously supplied the present party with three dozen at cost. And John produced a very acceptable punch made up of rum, Madeira, claret and wild cinnamon.

The courses merged into one another and by four o’clock the table was piled with half-empty plates and the debris of demolished wildfowl, fruit skins, stones and unfinished pudding. The maids removed what they thought was done with, and were bellowed at if they lifted a glass or a dish too soon. Eventually, having first ensured that there was plenty of drink still available, John dismissed them.

‘There’s one bonnie and two passable there, John,’ Peter said. ‘Peach is a peach. I suppose you’ll have sent her to wait for you in your bed.’

‘You know I have not,’ John said. ‘I told them they could go down to the dancing, and redd up in the morning.’

‘I can’t believe you keep her only for decoration.’

‘I don’t. I keep her to work, nothing more.’ There was irritation in John’s voice. He knew that Peter was needling him, and that James was enjoying seeing him look uncomfortable.

‘If we were at Bluecastle,’ Peter insisted, ‘James would have packed them off to bed the minute they’d finished waiting table.’

‘You had better take your dinner there, then, if I’m failing you as a host.’

‘If we were at Bluecastle,’ James said, ‘we might have fucked them on the table. But we must respect our elder brother’s sense of decorum, Peter.’

George Kinloch roared with laughter. ‘I’m wi James on this matter, John, but of course I bow to your wishes. It’s not as if we canna restrain oorsels once in a while.’

Mr Hodge coughed and squirmed in his seat. He was looking pale and sweaty. ‘I keep only the ugliest female negers about the house,’ he said. ‘I’m not like you fellows, I can’t afford to yield to temptation. Mrs Hodge wouldn’t stand for it.’

‘Well, sir,’ said Kinloch, ‘you are in the happy state of not requiring to be tempted. For a fellow without matrimonial ties in this climate, it’s a necessity. It’s simply unreasonable to expect him to behave himsel when he’s surrounded by half-clothed sable bitches like thae.’

‘Brother John behaves,’ Alexander said quietly, as if he were not quite sure whether he wanted to be part of the discussion. John looked at him sharply. Sandy was performing in his usual manner, trailing along in the wake of others.

‘Oh, why’s that?’ Kinloch demanded.

‘B-because he has the dignity of the family name to uphold.’

‘Do you not indulge yourself at all, sir?’ Hodge asked. ‘I’m certain, if it were I –’

‘No, I do not,’ John interrupted him, giving Sandy a thin smile. He was well used to this from his brothers, but he had no wish to explain himself to Hodge. James and Peter in particular, and Sandy increasingly, could not understand his abstinence. All the planters did it – took the best-looking slave women for themselves: there was no shame and little discretion about it, as the clusters of mulatto bairns running around every plantation proved. You took them willing or not, gently or by force, and that was all there was to it. But John had no interest in coupling with slaves he might be whipping the next day. In fact, the thought revolted him. How, though, did you explain this to your three brothers, who were sometimes to be heard comparing notes on the performance of a girl they had each had at different times?

It was Davie Fyfe, the doctor, who came to his rescue: ‘Frankly, I am sick of treating half the population in this island for the clap. There’s nothing like drawing a discharge of pus from another man’s member to encourage you to keep to the straight and narrow.’ He looked round the table, but was careful that his gaze did not linger on any one face. A few seconds’ silence proved too much for Sandy, though.

‘Who else here has been syringed by Davie?’ he said. It came out almost as a shout. John shook his head in exasperation.

‘Oh, Sandy!’ James said. ‘That’s the last time I congress with any of your past bedfellows.’

‘It’s no secret, is it?’ Sandy said. ‘We all get the clap sooner or later.’

‘Not I,’ John said.

‘The later ye are, the mair chance,’ Kinloch said.

‘It depends on who’s been there before you,’ James said. ‘Eh, Sandy?’

‘That’s why I always like to get in first,’ Sandy said.

Again, John winced at his youngest brother’s forced bravado. He worried for him – that in his efforts to keep up with the pace set by James and Peter, he would burn himself out.

‘I hear Mr Collins flogged a girl almost to death for clapping him,’ said Peter. ‘But who’s to say she did not catch it from him, if Davie’s not pulling our legs. That would seem a trifle unfair.’

‘I never fash mysel wi the fairness or otherwise of another man’s use o the whip,’ Kinloch said. ‘Ye never ken all the circumstances. Ye see some neger greeting in the bilboes, or knocked senseless by her master, and ye feel it’s cruel. Then ye discover she was stealing, or feigning illness, or she wouldna do as she was tellt, in bed or oot o it. Mr Collins doubtless had another grievance forby the clap.’

‘There’s some men I would not have at my table, though,’ said John, ‘on account of the manner they treat their slaves.’

‘Such as?’ Kinloch sounded touchy.

‘Well, Tom Irvine.’

‘Auld Tom?’ said Kinloch. ‘What’s Tom done to upset ye, man?’

‘He’s a rough and ready kind of man,’ said Hodge, ‘fierce at times I’m sure, but he doesn’t strike me as anything out of the ordinary.’ The merchant suddenly pulled off his wig and swiped at a mosquito, then laid the wig in his lap. His bald head gleamed with rivulets of sweat.

‘He degrades himself,’ said John. ‘He does not care if the blacks see him as a brute. In fact he revels in it.’

‘Then Mr Hodge’s observation is correct,’ said Davie Fyfe. ‘There’s plenty like him.’

‘Sometimes it’s necessary,’ said Kinloch.

‘No,’ said John, ‘it is necessary to be strict, to punish where punishment is due. Of course we can all agree on that. But Irvine – no, I’d not have him at my table.’ He made a rasping sound in his throat.

‘What on earth is it he’s done?’ Hodge asked.

‘We were down there three weeks ago,’ James explained. ‘His crop was all in – you know he hasn’t as much land, and what he has is poor, badly drained – and we thought we might hire some of his slaves to help finish ours. But they were in such a miserable, wasted condition we’d never have got the work out of them to make it worthwhile. We went to see him and he was wandering about in just his shirt. Said he’d lost his breeks and couldn’t be bothered to look for them. The place was stinking. One of his lassies had asked if she could go to tend her garden as there was nothing to be done in the house, so he shat in the hall and told her to clean that up.’

‘Maybe he is demented,’ said Kinloch. ‘The heat, Mr Hodge.’ But Mr Hodge had gone rather quiet, and did not seem to hear.

‘Is Mr Collins demented?’ asked Fyfe.

‘Collins? Of course not. Why?’

‘I heard if he catches a slave eating cane, he flogs him and has another slave shit in his mouth. Then he gags him for a few hours. Or he has one slave piss on the face of another. Is that the behaviour of a sane man?’

‘It may not be pleasant,’ said Kinloch, ‘but it’s no mad. If it was him doing the shitting and pissing, I grant that might suggest an unbalanced mind. But he instructs another neger to do it. He maintains his ain dignity.’

‘For God’s sake,’ John Wedderburn said. There was a round of more or less revolted laughter from the others, which he at last joined in. The story was neither new nor particularly shocking. They might not have stooped quite to good old Tom Irvine’s level, or Collins’s, or at least if they had they were not saying, but they had done other things – dripped hot wax into wounds opened by whipping, rubbed salt or hot peppers in them. Or, more to the point, they had not actually done these things: they had had others do them – white employees, other slaves – and watched. Or not watched. Like Collins, they had kept their distance, and thus their dignity.

‘In any case,’ Kinloch added, ‘eating shit is just a step frae eating dirt. I suppose some of them don’t mind it much.’

There was silence around the table as they all considered this. Dirt-eating was one of the great mysteries of the plantations. Some slaves had a craving for the ground, clay in particular. Nothing was more likely to send a white man into a fit of revulsion than the sight of an African grovelling in the field, stuffing his face with soil. Nothing brought down the lash so fiercely. It was like watching some wild beast sniffing and scraping at a midden. It seemed to mark the distinction between the races more clearly than anything.

‘We have a case of that just now,’ said John, passing round a new bottle of claret. ‘A boy called Plato. We’ve had to strap him to a board to keep him from it. Did you see him today, James?’

‘On my way up. I’ve put him in a hut away from the others. He has a sore breaking out on his face that I fear may be the start of the yaws. I’ve told that old witch Peggy to look after him – nothing kills her, and her herbs and potions will not hurt him – may even be of help. I looked in his mouth. He has worms there.’

‘From the dirt, nae doubt,’ said Kinloch.

‘I’m not so sure,’ James said. ‘Davie and I have been giving this some thought. I begin to wonder if it’s not the other way round – if the dirt does not come from the worms.’

Kinloch snorted. ‘That’s ridiculous!’

‘Well,’ said Fyfe, ‘why should the soil which gives us our good crops cause so many ailments among the slaves? A dirt-eater comes down with everything: the flux, dropsy, fatigue, stupidity –’

‘And there ye pit your finger on the nub,’ said Kinloch. ‘Idleness and idiocy. The only thing that will cure thae ills is a thrashing. A good sound Negro never came doun wi dirt-eating.’

‘But George,’ said James, ‘suppose for a moment that a good sound Negro did. What would be the cause of it? Suppose, for example, that he got the ground itch – you’ll agree any Negro can get that between his toes?’

‘We’d get it if we didna wear shoes. Ye’re no wanting to gie them all shoes, are ye?’

‘The ground itch is caused by hook worms,’ said James, ignoring the question. ‘You clean out the scabs, bathe the feet, and with time the itch is gone. But suppose the worms – some of them – get under the skin, and into the blood. Where do they go? They go through the blood to the lungs. Your good Negro coughs to clear his lungs. This brings the worms to his mouth. He takes a drink. The worms are carried into his gut. They feed there. The slave, consequently, is constantly hungry. He has a craving for whatever will fill his belly. The cane, or the ground it grows on. The worms grow inside him. They lay their eggs. The good Negro shits in the cane field. His shit is full of eggs. Need I go on?’

‘I see,’ said Kinloch. ‘Ye mean getting one slave to shit in another’s mouth may spread the worms?’

‘For God’s sake, man,’ said Fyfe, ‘forget about that. The ground is covered in hook worms. All we’re saying is, if Plato is infested with worms, maybe that’s the cause of his dirt-eating. Not the other way round.’

‘It’s the same with the yaws,’ James went on. ‘It never seems to come on its own. And you’ll grant that not even the most devious malingerer can feign it.’

‘He’d be a magician if he could,’ said John. ‘And mad.’ The raspberry-like sores and eruptions on face and body, the weeping tubercules and ulcers, the swellings and blisters on soles of feet and palms of hand, the obvious and intense pain caused by all this – nobody could, or would want to, fake the yaws.

‘It’s their foul habits,’ Kinloch said decisively, reaching for a third slice of cold plum pudding. ‘If they didna live such filthy lives we wouldna lose so many o them. Ye never see a white person wi the yaws.’

‘Perhaps that’s because our houses are bigger, airier,’ said Fyfe. ‘We die of all the other things they have, though. Yellow fever, the flux, dropsy. And then we have our own diseases: I never saw a Negro with the gout, or the dry belly-ache.’

‘Ye’re contradicting yoursels,’ said Kinloch. ‘First ye say that we’re like them, then that we’re no. I ken where I stand. I’m as like a neger as a – as a thoroughbred horse is like an Arab’s camel.’

‘I only wonder,’ said Fyfe, ‘if we exchanged places with them, if we’d exchange diseases too. As you said yourself, if we took off our shoes …’

Charles Hodge, who had been sitting, eyes closed, trying to contain a growing disagreement between his stomach and either the oysters or the topic under discussion, suddenly startled everyone with a drawling laugh. ‘Haw! Exchange places, sir? Haw! Take off our shoes! That’s the kind of metaphysical … perprosal you’d expect from a Scotchman. It’s a impossibility. Mr Kinloch is right. We are horses, not camels!’

He stood up, knocking his chair over, and swayed out of the room to be sick. The others watched him go, only vaguely interested in seeing if he made it outdoors. If he did not, it would just be one more mess for the maids to clear up in the morning.

‘All Davie is saying,’ said John, ‘is we should take more care of them. That’s Christian if nothing else.’

‘Oh man, dinna let them near Christ!’ Kinloch exploded. ‘Christ and kindness are troublemakers on a plantation. If ye gie them a sniff at Christ, they’ll say they’re saved and that makes them as good as ony white man. Treat them wi kindness and they’ll repay ye wi idleness, complaints, grievances. It’s but a step frae there to resentment and plotting.’

‘Kindness doesn’t enter into it,’ said James Wedderburn. ‘And I’m not interested in saving their souls either. I want as much work out of my slaves as you. I want as much money out of the crop. The best way to get that is healthy slaves. How much does a slave cost? A good one, a young, fit, Africa-born Coromantee?’

‘Fifty pound,’ said Kinloch.

‘Sixty,’ said James.

‘Ye’re being robbed.’

‘Well, give or leave the ten pounds, it’s a high price. I want that slave to last ten years at least. Perhaps twenty.’

‘Away!’

‘I have to season him for a year –’

‘Six months.’

‘– feed him and clothe him while he lives. I want him free of worms, yellow fever, the flux, poxes, consumption, the yaws – anything that stops him working. If I whip him every time he is ill, that is more time lost while he mends. Whip a slave for theft, or insolence, or running away, or refusing to work – of course. But let’s be sure we whip them for the right things. Oh, and I want him to make me a lot more slave bairns too. I don’t practise kindness, George. I practise economy.’

Except when it comes to your own slave bairns, John thought, but he said nothing.

‘I prefer common sense. If ye treat a black soft, ye soften yoursel. Then ye think ye’ll ease their labour a bit, gie them better hooses. The next thing ye’re beginning to doubt the haill institution.’

‘You’re over-harsh, George,’ said John. ‘We are not tyrants.’

‘Aye we are,’ said Kinloch. ‘We maist certainly are. We hae to be. It’s the only honest way. If ye look at the thing true, ye’ll agree.’

Later, long after Hodge had been put to bed with a bucket beside his head, and Kinloch and Fyfe, blazing drunk and barely able to stand, had somehow mounted their horses and trotted off homeward, the four Wedderburns played a few rather listless hands of rummy. They were all staying the night at Glen Isla. In the darkness the singing and drumming from the slave huts rose and faded on a light breeze.

James kept lifting his head, as if trying to catch something of the songs, almost as if he were envious of a better party. Peter pulled out his dirty book and, between turns, studied the pages for salacious passages, silently mouthing the French as he read. Alexander yawned constantly. Only John was concentrating much on the cards.

At last James flung down his hand. ‘Damn it, John, Peter was right. I could devour that Peach just now. Or any of them. Let’s go down for them.’

John shook his head. ‘That, I think, even George Kinloch would think unwise at this time of night.’

‘Well, can we not send for them?’

‘No one to send. Unless you want to ask the formidable Phoebe. No? You’ll just have to suffer alone then. Drink some more wine.’

Sandy stood up. ‘I’m for my bed,’ he said. He sidled out, clutching the other French book.

‘Don’t be up all night now,’ Peter called after him, but this drew no response.

‘He’s writing a novelle himself, I think,’ Peter told the others.

‘What?’ James frowned at him.

‘He’s writing something anyway. He’s been scribbling away in a book since Christmas. But he keeps it hidden and he denies it if you ask.’

‘Between that and his sketches, he’s becoming quite an artist,’ James said derisively.

‘Leave him alone,’ said John. ‘We’ve all little enough privacy here as it is. Let him be.’

James yawned. ‘I’m for my bed, too. By the way, Geordie Kinloch was right about one thing.’

‘What?’ John asked.

‘About us being tyrants. Benevolent we may be, but tyrants is what we are.’

‘James, you’re not surely feeling guilty?’

‘Not a bit of it. And it’s not madness either. It’s a natural state of affairs. It has to be. God’s providence. What other reason for such a distinction between the races? So we may as well make the best of it.’

‘But,’ John said, ‘it behooves us to behave like civilised men. A lass like Peach – whip her if she’s troublesome, but why mistreat her if she is a good girl? That is my view, and will continue to be.’

‘No shitting in the hall for you, then,’ James said. It was hard to tell if he was mocking John again. There was a trace of laughter in his voice, in the brightness of his eyes, but his mouth was unsmiling. He stood up, drank off the last of his wine.

‘By God, though, a night like this, does it not make you yearn for a wife?’

‘There’s Mrs Hodge in Savanna unoccupied,’ said Peter, glancing up. ‘You should have ridden off with the others.’

This did finally produce a laugh from James. ‘You are trespassing on the bounds of propriety, Peter. Be sensible. Why would I want all the trouble of seducing a white woman? In a country like this? And as for a wife, well, I was jesting. I don’t have the patience for that. Not yet, at least.’

Dundee, May 1802

The weather had finally turned, it was warm and sunny, and the four younger Wedderburn girls were in town. They were in high spirits at the prospect of a day in Dundee. Their half-sister Margaret had avoided having to chaperone them by pointing out that there was not room inside the carriage for them all, and that she had no desire to go. So Aeneas MacRoy was accompanying them, sitting up with the stableman, William Wicks, who was at the reins. At the old West Port the girls decanted, and MacRoy, after telling Wicks to drive to the shore where the horses could feed and rest before the return journey, got down stiff-legged from his seat and followed them at a discreet distance. He had been instructed by Lady Wedderburn, who was in bed with a cold, to keep an eye on her girls: Dundee could be rough, even in daylight, and MacRoy’s task was to make sure the lassies did not wander away from the main streets and into trouble.

MacRoy reckoned they were safe enough, with or without his assistance. Generally speaking, the poor and desperate robbed and bludgeoned one another, not their social betters. There was less risk involved. The fact that it was he – a man of sixty-eight, and hirpling somewhat these days – who had been entrusted with the girls’ protection, suggested that not even their mother anticipated any difficulty. What could she be expecting? A band of brigands to carry them off to Araby? And what, in such an eventuality, could an aged dominie do to stop them? Then again, it would be a bold brigand who would cross Aeneas MacRoy. Small and ancient he might be, but he was still a force to be reckoned with when roused. Tough as knotted wood and fierce as a wildcat, especially if the Wedderburn honour was at stake. Lady Alicia had known him twenty years. She did not really understand him, but because her husband trusted him, so did she.

The sisters intended to visit Madame Bouchonne’s in the Overgait, as she had recently advertised a large consignment of materials and designs newly arrived from London and the Continent. They wanted – or at least three of them wanted – to promenade up and down the Nethergait and High Street, to see what else might be new, and of course to be seen: the Wedderburn name was embedded in Dundee history – merchants, ministers, landowners, lawyers, burgesses, soldiers – and everybody knew who they were. Perhaps they would run into other ladies in from the country. They would almost certainly meet a cousin or two. They would, take tea at the New Inn, where who knew what interesting persons might also be passing the afternoon? A gallant young captain from the Forfar Militia perhaps, or better still a major in the Perthshire Regiment. And after all else, there would be the elephant. Fourteen-year-old Annie very badly wanted to see the elephant.

Aeneas MacRoy planned to watch them for a few minutes, then slip off to one of a number of dram shops he knew, and while away an hour before meeting them at the inn.

Susan, lingering in the wake of her sisters, had come to town in a mood of ambivalence. It was not that she did not want to be here – there was, after all, so much to see compared with the fine but too peaceful surroundings of Ballindean. Dundee was thriving, noisy, its narrow central area a constant mêlée of vehicles and hurrying people. It had a population approaching twenty-five thousand, which made it bigger than Perth and almost as big as Paisley. Dundee’s spinners and weavers had something of a reputation for radicalism, which appealed to Susan as much as it appalled her mother. There were, apparently, some truly dreadful backstreets and wynds, inhabited by characters who would, according to Aeneas MacRoy, stab you with a look. The thought of these dangerous places and people sent a thrill through her.

The huge new steam-driven flax mills built on the burns running down from Lochee might seem monstrous, but she could not help but be impressed by their power. Likewise the bustling harbour – with its intoxicating mix of foreign-looking sailors and merchants, and its hubbub of strange tongues; its ships carrying grain and linen to England and Holland; barrels of salted herring to the Indies (herring, she’d read, was a staple of the slaves’ diet), to Danzig and Riga, and bringing in iron, copper, tar and pine boards from Sweden and Norway – the harbour both intimidated and exhilarated her. And Dundee’s main streets and fine location below the Law, overlooking the gleaming firth, were gracious and charming. All this Susan saw and understood – much more so, she felt certain, than her sisters; and that was the source of her ambivalence. She would rather be here on her own, in disguise perhaps, able to walk the streets unnoticed and in her own time, not as part of a Wedderburn parade.

She was looking forward to fussy Madame Bouchonne only for the opportunity to laugh secretly at her and her claims of aristocratic blood and narrow escape from Madame Guillotine. Her outrageous accent could not possibly be Parisian, as she maintained, but was surely grafted on to something closer to home – Ayrshire, perhaps, or Dumfries – and her name bore an uncanny resemblance to Buchan or Buchanan. Madame Bouchonne might be a rare and exotic flower which her sisters would be loath to see wither, but Susan would rather have browsed for hours in the booksellers’ at the Cross, without Annie tugging at her sleeve. She wanted to go into the mills, see the men and women working there in their strange new crowded way, like a nest of ants. She wanted to talk to the weavers at their looms. She wanted to wander without sisters or chaperone, to sit by the harbour and drink in its sights and smells. But she could not do these things: she was hemmed in by her skirts and stays and family name. She wanted to be – for a day, or a week, or a year – a boy of seventeen.

She was beginning to feel that she had put enough yards between herself and her sisters almost to be not counted as one of them, when a man suddenly stepped from a close in front of her. She put out her hand in fright, but disappointingly he did not try to stab her with a look or any other implement. He stopped abruptly to avoid bumping into her, and made a short bow of apology.

‘Mr Jamieson!’ she said.

The plumpish man in his crumpled black clothes looked startled, then broke into a smile, friendly yet slightly awkward, even humble. It was enough to renew in Susan the confidence that came with being a Wedderburn. What she most disliked about herself was also one of her strongest attributes.

‘Miss Wedderburn. Ye’ve come tae shed licht on oor dark toun.’

She looked up at the blue sky, then at the busy street. ‘That’s hardly necessary.’ Then, peering into the close from which he had emerged: ‘Although down there, perhaps … Is that where you stay?’

‘Na, na,’ he said. ‘I was, em, looking for someone.’

‘Not Joseph Knight still?’ she asked. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to laugh. Glancing ahead she saw her sisters slowing, becoming aware of her absence. She stepped quickly into the close mouth, cleeking Jamieson by the elbow and taking him with her.

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