‘Oh, don’t you worry, Bogle. They manage. A fellow might be married like a sultan at Stowe – have twelve wives and still never set eyes on a one of them! You’ll see.’

  18.

  A Very Big House

  The next morning the skies darkened, then opened. On the long, stormy approach through the grounds, Bogle had his first glimpse of a house like no other, into which Tichborne Park could be fitted perhaps twenty times. A pair of soaking footmen ran down the front steps and directed the carriage to the bad weather entrance. Tichborne and his page stepped bone-dry straight into an underground cavern, fashioned from white stone. Here the walls sloped inward and the ceiling was low. Two ghoulish creatures – half cat, half woman – lay in wait for them at the bottom of some stairs that led who knew where. Everything was stony white, cold to the touch. Engravings of bird-headed men lined the wall. Startled, Bogle turned quickly, stumbling against a stone casket large enough for a dead child. Tichborne laughed; Bogle was afraid. Whose ancestors were these?

  Out of nowhere, a manservant in livery appeared – ‘The Duke is glad you are here, and that you have arrived through the Egyptian Hall. It is a recent addition. He is very proud of it’ – and led them out of the ghastly chamber and into a vast underground tunnel, like a long, covered street, lined on both sides with racks of guns. It seemed to Bogle that they walked a long time. Turning right, then left, then right again. Sometimes servants hurried past. The tunnel branched off into other tunnels. Here the smell of something baking. There the sound of struck metal. A house like a city, with an armoury to defend it.

  * * *

  *

  Then they were upstairs. Light streamed through giant windowpanes. Bogle had not thought it possible to walk so far and still be inside. A great round room with a circle of glass in the roof. A long thin room like a train station, filled with books. A room of musical instruments. A room of statues. A room decorated with little decapitated heads on pikes, painted straight onto the walls. On the way out of this room, Bogle looked again: the pikes were in fact green vines set off with yellow bows, and all the heads were pink and smiling. A room full of couches. A room like a trash house: it would have taken the cane from ten pieces piled horizontally to fill it. Another barn of a room, with River Mumma’s golden table stretching from one end to the other. Then another, with a ceiling of gold. More stairs. A glimpse of a bed, big as a boat, robed in velvet. This house wore silk and gold and velvet like a woman. No room was naked, no wall bare.

  They came to a hallway, domed like a church, with a curved staircase winding up. Here the walls seemed, to Bogle, to be painted with scenes from home. At least, he felt he recognized the palms and cedars, the forested hills, the sparkling blue-green water. Here and there, in the groves, someone had whimsically added little groups of naked, unmurdered Indians, as if anything was left of them besides their moaning laments in the conch shells. Climbing the stairs, he turned back, seeking Kingston, and almost collided with two young lads in aprons with brushes in hand. They slopped white paint over a bay at sunset. ‘We have more paintings to be hung than wall space to hang them.’ The servant explained this with peculiar pride, as if the house were his own property: ‘Space must therefore be made.’ Bogle watched a cascading waterfall disappear under a fresh coat of white. ‘The Rembrandt Room,’ announced the servant, and opened a door.

  19.

  A Young Negro Archer

  Tichborne was caught off guard. He hadn’t expected to find the couple together: he was used to playing them off against each other. The Duke sat at a card table by the fire, the Duchess in a far corner by a window, with a snoring pug dog in her arms. Tichborne took a deep breath and began upon his unhappy speech. Bogle walked over to the Duke, placed the sheaf of relevant papers before him, undid the purple ribbon, stepped back, and stood silently by the door. Bad harvests were in that sheaf, and hurricanes, and too many dead babies, severed arms, cases of the Yaws, interfering Baptists and sickly old saltwaters who would never now be replaced by new ones. As Tichborne spoke, the Duke groaned, and paced up and down. The Duchess stayed where she was at the window. Bogle found a golden spiral in the wallpaper and followed its repeated path across the room.

  ‘Enough, enough – it’s no use, Tichborne. You can talk of soil and hurricanes till the cows come home: it’s only a matter of time. Not even on Saint-Domingue were the poor French outnumbered as we are. Parliament is the only possible route, but we need cool heads, and at this moment the West Indian Interest are in a state of extreme anxiety. Who can blame them? Abolitionists and Whigs in one ear, a lot of damned Baptists and Methodists in the other. The situation is extremely combustible. I have reason to hope that I have their trust, and that they believe I will serve their interests – not least because they are also my own. But you must understand: the name of “Grenville” can hardly be pleasant to them. No fellow in Jamaica dreams of making his fortune any more – only of preserving what little profit he makes – and we know who we have to thank for that . . . Between Hope and the other place – Middleton! – it truly is a wonder we survive. But my wife finds all of this terribly ironical.’

  Tichborne feigned innocence: ‘Oh? In what sense?’

  No one answered this. The Duchess walked to the next window. What was the point of having had a Prime Minister for an uncle if this same uncle then worked against the family interest? Tichborne watched the Duke leaf through the papers on his desk, as if the answer to this conundrum might be found there. Silence. There was only Mimi the pug, snoring. Since coming to England, Bogle had grown used to silence, and to standing like a statue, eyes straight ahead. He found ways to occupy himself. The patterns in wallpaper. The sconces round lamps. The carvings on a fireplace. The paintings on walls. If there was a negro face in a corner of any painting, anywhere in a room, he prided himself on finding it in a moment – he supposed he was homesick. Yet only now did he notice the boy archer, on the opposite wall. It was not a small portrait, and maybe that in itself was the cause of the delay, for he was accustomed to finding such faces in the corner of canvases, or buried in a crowd. This boy took up the whole frame. Bogle liked him very much. He had a bow in hand and a quiver on his back, and looked just like Ellis by the side of Mr Macintosh, off to hunt wild pig. Only, this young archer was not carrying anything for anybody. These were his own bow and arrow, and he hunted on his own behalf. Bogle felt a throb of sadness welling in his throat, and swallowed hard. How he looks like Ellis! Oh, how homesick I am!

  20.

  The Order of Things

  In the afternoon, the wind and rain relented, and the sun emerged. Tichborne walked out through the southern doors to wait for their driver. Bogle watched him flop defeated onto a stone bench under some dying orange blossom. Bogle, given no direction, stayed where he was, between the doors that opened onto a ‘North Loggia’ and another set that led to the South. A private country in front, another behind, both stretching to the horizon.

  He looked about him. To his left, four naked men on a pedestal wrestled a snake. The stone was black. The men did not seem to be. Bogle did not know why they were naked or wrestling a snake. They did not interest him; he turned away. To his right, above his head, more stone people surged from the walls. This group were suspended in mid-air, like duppies, but there was no reason to be frightened, no, they did not move, and there was no magic involved, only craft, as when you carve a figure in a cottonwood tree. He took a step closer. The tableau was fashioned from white stone, and it seemed to tell the story of a great man – a king of some sort. Below him, a woman knelt, preparing to pass over a crown. Soldiers and onlookers and children were gathered all about this pair, reminding Bogle of the nosy old women of Hope, leaning on their fences. Watchful. Curious about power. Finally, on the ground, naked, at the king’s feet – craven as a dog at the heel of his master – was a black man, just like himself.

  Bogle did not know how a house came to be as big as a city, with two private countries either side. He did not know why men might wrestle snakes. He did not know in what world a boy like Ellis would be free to hunt on his own behalf. But this tableau in white he understood from top to bottom – it was as familiar to him as his own name. The order of things. On Hope it was his job to put the order of things into neat columns, in a clear hand, into the General List, as it had been his father’s job before him. But mere ink and paper were beneath such a place as this. Here you wrote it in stone.

  21.

  In the Event of Universal War

  On their first night back in London, Bogle surprised himself. He said: ‘Wait.’ It was not easy to collect his things in the darkness, he was not practised at it, as Jack was, and he tried his new friend’s patience during the search for some shoes. But then he was ready and following Jack through the window and out into the night. The lights and the glass made unpredictable shapes and shadows in the darkness, revealing people and places in odd flashes. He walked quickly past all the Soho women, trying not to look too green, too surprised. Then, on Hopkins Street, at the door of the chapel, a red-haired girl said it would be a shilling. For this you got a ticket with a printed head upon it – Jack already had one – and admission into ‘any debate, and the Sunday Lectures besides’. Half-relieved, Bogle turned to go, but Jack kicked up a fuss: ‘Now, are we for the poor and ill-used or ain’t we?’ The red-haired girl scowled: ‘You’ve a big mouth, Jack, we know that much by now.’ But then sighed, and stepped aside: ‘If it’s just the once, a penny will do.’

  The chapel was a makeshift thing. You walked up a narrow wooden staircase until you arrived at something like a hayloft, where perhaps a hundred people stood, facing a ‘chairman’ at a desk. They were late, the first speaker was just finishing, and now the chairman stood and repeated the proposal under debate: ‘In the event of universal war, which of the two Parties are likely to be victorious: the Rich or the Poor?’ The second speaker rose to a chorus of emphatic whoops, Jack’s amongst them. Bogle felt himself clapped on the back: ‘Your man’s up next – Wedderburn!’

  His man? The hair was rather flat, and he was closer to Roger’s colouring than his own. He had a pug’s nose and a disputatious face. The only truly familiar thing about him was the name – it had an air of home about it – but before Bogle had time to consider this last point more closely, the man was on his feet and had begun. He had a thrilling way of speaking. The familiar lilt of the islands combined with the fervour of the Soho barrow boys. He drove each point home with his hands – grasping the air as if wringing the neck of some invisible government agent – and he was full of questions. There were but two classes of people in England, the very rich and very poor, and how did this happen? The crowd did not know but bellowed enthusiastically. Why was the land held by four hundred families alone who took special care to marry only each other? No more did Bogle know but found himself cheering with the rest, and thought of Ellis, who would have been amazed at the scene. Could this truly be the son of a slave? Every eye was upon him, and every ear. He held the very soul of the crowd in his palm, and Bogle realized that he had always thought of this commanding spirit as a feminine gift, because of the Johannas. But this man’s hate likewise stalked him everywhere. It flamed: you felt its warmth just being near him. He was just as enraged by ‘Peterloo’ as Jack, and listening to him now, Bogle realized how many of his young friend’s striking ideas and phrases were, in fact, borrowed. Cut from this brown man’s cloth:

  My motto is assassinate!

  God gave the world to the children of men as their inheritance – and they have been fleeced out of it!

  I am with Thomas Spence: any person calling a piece of land his own private property is a criminal.

  The 16th of August was a glorious day for the blood spilt on that day has cemented our union.

  Could blood be glorious? All around a cheer went up, confirming the glory. And what had happened in France was to happen here, and all the Lords and Ladies were fleeing abroad, because by now they knew that the starving poor were determined not to put up with their base condition a moment longer. Various men Bogle had never heard of would lose their heads and the Prince Regent, whom he had heard of, was a fat-faced fool, a drunk and a whoremonger. ‘He don’t care a damn about the people’s sufferings!’ Here Wedderburn strangled the air, and the crowd echoed him, like those strange puppet shows Bogle sometimes spied in Covent Garden: HE DON’T CARE A DAMN! For a long moment, no more speech was possible. The crowd was just too loud. The chairman banged the table, seeking order. Wedderburn unlocked his strangling hands and pointed ominously out of the only window:

  ‘And they tell us to be quiet like that bloody spooney Jesus Christ who like a bloody fool tells us when we get a slap on one side of the face turn gently round and ask them to smack the other! But I like jolly old St Peter! Give me a rusty sword, for they have declared war against the people! They burn Carlyle’s printing of the rights of man – but they can’t burn it out of my head! Not even if they hang me! Glory be to Thomas Paine!’ A roar went through the loft like a hurricane through the trash house. Bogle turned to Jack to ask him a question but the boy had his arm raised, clutching St Peter’s sword, and now he rattled the invisible thing in the air, and roared with the rest, spit flying from his mouth.

  * * *

  *

  On the way home, Bogle got to ask his question. Jack frowned. It seemed to Bogle that Jack liked to talk but not to be questioned.

  ‘How d’you spell it? P-A-I-N, I expect! And Thomas Spence is him who looked up the matter in the Bible of all places and rat-ifi-cated once and for all that the land ain’t owned by no one, for it was given by God to every man! And Thomas Pain . . . Well, he was him who said all men have rights and that, if you must know, young Bogle, is who Pain is.’

  But why Pain had been saddled with such an unfortunate name Jack could not say. Then Jack asked Bogle what he had made of it all and Bogle said he had hoped to hear more about the slaves and Jack said what did he mean was he stupid that was the whole point of the thing for without their rights weren’t all men slaves? Bogle said nothing. They walked in silence to Shaftesbury Avenue where Jack in far too loud a voice asked if he would come to Hopkins Street again, and Bogle, mindful of spies, said he would not.

  22.

  Bitter Harvests

  To miss jonkonnu, for Bogle, was an ominous feeling, but Tichborne insisted on Christmas at Tichborne Park, and then New Year at his Doughty cousins’ house, in Dorset. Finally, on the third of January, his page was sent back to Jamaica, alone. A month later, the first person Bogle saw as he stepped off the boat at Falmouth was Ellis, dressed in black, clutching a hat to his chest.

  Peachey swore that Myra ‘jes lay down quiet pon de ground and died’. But Peachey still thought of him as a boy, and had always tried to protect him. By ‘the ground’ she meant the sticky floor of the boiling house, although who had put his mother to work there, and why, nobody seemed to know or would dare tell. Only Johanna could comfort him, and she was nowhere to be found. She had taken the shape of a wild horse and run for the hills, or else her soul had migrated into a cotton tree, or she was with old Obboney himself, cursing them all from the other side. It was planting season and Bogle was meant to be overseeing the ratooning. Instead he went up to the Main House to get the truth about Johanna’s location from Ellis, who looked at him pleadingly. The truth would only add-up pain to pain: why should he be the deliverer of it? Reluctantly, he opened the drawer of the armoire and passed Bogle a copy of the letter that had started the trouble. It was from Macintosh to the attorneys:

  She is forever predicting the end of the world. Both our world on Hope and the world itself.

  It was true enough that Johanna had been seen walking under the windows of the Main House, speechifying, singing, and threatening Roger – but she had always done these things. The mystery was why Mr Macintosh was of such a nervous disposition:

  She is perhaps under the influence of a congregation: we have seen much baptizing of negroes of late. She recites certain troubling verses from Leviticus, which are easily misunderstood by the others and surely intended as a form of incitement to rebellion or riot. She has a millenarian cast of mind.

  This last was hard to understand. But on the next page Mr Macintosh had taken the trouble of writing out clarifying examples:

  And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout all the land, unto all the inhabitants thereof: It shall be a Jubilee unto you, and ye shall return every man unto his possession, and ye shall return every man unto his family.

  The land shall not be sold for ever: for the land is mine, for ye were strangers and sojourners with me.

  And if thy brother that dwelleth by thee be waxen poor, and be sold unto thee, thou shalt not compel him to serve as a bond servant.

  The attorneys, frightened by so many recent outbreaks of rebellion across the island, referred the matter to the Justice of the Peace. Little Johanna was sentenced to three months’ correction on a treadmill in Kingston Prison.

  23.

  Automaton

  For a period after hearing this, Bogle found he couldn’t feel anything. Whenever someone tried to hurt or deceive or get the better of him in some way he was only confused. Why did they think that he was even in there, and could still be hurt? If Ol’ Higue herself had come to suck the life out of him, she would have found him already empty. He discovered you could live in this way: like an empty skin after a visit by a soucouyant. Nobody noticed. In fact, in the view of Mr Macintosh, his efficiency only improved, and he was entrusted with more tasks, some of which came with little freedoms that he could not feel and no longer cared about. On Sundays, he drove Macintosh’s wife to church and sat beside her throughout the service. On Mondays, he rode to Kingston for letters from England and whatever copies of The Times had come off the boats.