Page 56 of A Fire in Their Hearts

I ’M COMPILING A LIST OF items that have to be obtained and it’s already more than four pages.

Everyone comes to me, from the carpenter wanting a particular timber to Tamar, who says we’re currently short of linen, wool, candles and a dozen other items. I also have to hire a wheelwright and I’m supposed to find someone to fix the longcase clock, which hasn’t worked for nearly a year.

Drummond has only noticed recently. I looked inside and the cogs have rusted.

It’s as he once said, everything rusts or rots.

I add rat poison . The apothecary in Bridgetown supplies it and at the moment the rats around the house are winning.

Sometimes they do so much damage to the sugar canes that Drummond orders the entire field to be burnt.

You hear them. In those last few moments, when the flames reach the centre and the seething mass of furious brown fur, they scream so loudly.

I lean back in the leather armchair and add up a column of figures relating to the output of sugar for July, which I’ll later check against last year.

The fortunes created by the sugar cane plantations are so vast that Barbados has become the richest British colony in the world. To some owners, money is meaningless.

When I took over the accounts, I also took over Drummond’s beautiful ebony desk. At great expense, he had an identical one shipped from England. Sometimes we sit for hours engrossed in our work, a few feet apart yet separated by a distance that can never be crossed.

I hear him enter the study, so different now to the man who gave us the first of what would be hundreds of speeches from his ridiculous pulpit.

He doesn’t have it any more. The local ants ate it.

I’ve got my back to him and finish the calculation I’m working on before turning around. He waits until I’m ready.

‘I want you to write a letter.’

I remain silent. These days he’s slow and often takes a few moments to gather his thoughts before speaking.

Twice a year he receives a letter from his wife in Edinburgh and he always writes back to her soon afterwards.

I know money is sent regularly and assume she lives a very comfortable life so far from the one she knew with her husband.

‘It’s to my brother’s son .?.?. my nephew, Mathew. He’s twenty-one and it’s time he came here and learnt the sugar trade.’

‘Does he want to?’

‘What’s that got to do with it?’ he grumbles. ‘I’ve been paying for his expensive education for years. It’s time he paid me back, so he needs to come to Barbados and help run the business.’

I take a clean sheet of paper and prepare to write down his words. ‘What do you want me to say?’

‘Oh, you write it. You’ll phrase it better. Just give it to me to sign when it’s done.’ He turns to leave but then stops. ‘You’ll join me later.’

‘If you wish,’ I say.

For years Drummond has insisted that I join him once a week for an evening meal.

Now Tamar is a young woman she also has to eat with us on these occasions.

So we sit at one end of the enormous dining-room table, like forgotten guests at a long-finished party, and he talks about the plantation and his earlier life and I wonder what on earth he thinks we are . .?. a pretend family?

He goes then and I listen to his steps walking along the hallway, unsure, unsteady. What will this young man find? So much has changed around the plantation since I arrived and yet so much is the same.

The voluntary indentured servants have all gone, having completed their period of servitude and gained their freedom.

Drummond honoured the original agreements and gave each of them the money he owed – not that he had much choice, by law.

Forced indentured servants have continued to arrive in Barbados, including Covenanters, sent here by King James, who has no more love for us than his dead brother King Charles.

These days labour is provided almost entirely by slaves from Africa.

The beatings and whippings, tortures and rapes continue without end.

I stay in the big house when a slave is going to be punished.

Yet there are many in power who don’t hear the screams or pleas for mercy.

These are such a common sound around the plantations that they merge into the other noises of everyday life, like hens clucking and mules braying, and simply go unnoticed.

Now I’m faced with the task of writing to a complete stranger to tell him that his entire life is to change and he is ordered to become a part of a world that may be the most hideous and repulsive he can imagine.

Well, many of us have been on that journey.

I pick up a quill and realise that I need to add ink to the list.

*?*?*

It’s mid-afternoon a couple of weeks into the start of the year sixteen-ninety when Tamar and I walk around the mahogany table in the dining room, marvelling at the display of cut-crystal glasses nestling amongst the large array of solid silver cutlery.

Fresh beeswax candles have been put in all the candelabras and wall sconces and as more of these are lit the items on the embroidered tablecloth glint and sparkle.

Drummond is hosting a dinner party as it’s his turn amongst the local plantation owners and there is a rigid rota that only death excuses one from.

When he’s the host, he insists that I’m present even though I have no duties and generally try to be unnoticed.

People know that I’m his bookkeeper, but no one is certain quite what else (neither am I for that matter) and so to avoid potential offence visitors usually ignore me.

This enormous social occasion has resulted in Talitha the cook being in a panic all week, working late into the evenings and overseeing five people who have been brought into the kitchen to provide extra help.

I’ve seen the menu and I doubt that the King of Scotland would have such fare upon his table.

Slaves are rarely given meat and the amount available for a table of thirty-six guests is obscene.

There will be boiled chicken and suckling pig, collops of a leg of pork, a shoulder of young goat, a loin of veal, mutton plus several birds including turkeys, hens, ducklings and doves.

It’s almost as if Drummond wants guests to have the option of sampling any living creature on Barbados.

‘How can people need so much?’ asks Tamar, whose beautiful eyes are as round as miniature porcelain dishes at the sight before us.

‘They don’t need it, they just want it.’

‘Why?’

She often reminds me of Calum when he was younger, always asking ‘why’.

‘Because they hope to find happiness by eating and drinking in a way that shows they’re successful.

They don’t know what it’s like to lie amongst heather on a Scottish moor with someone who loves you so much they will never tire of capturing your image. That’s happiness.’

‘Who’s Heather?’

I laugh at this. It’s a rare sound. ‘I’ll explain later.’

Tamar and I share a large bedroom designed and furnished for guests who never stay.

Talitha sleeps in the kitchen and Isaac either sleeps on a mattress near Drummond’s bed or he returns to the slave quarters.

Other than that, the house is basically empty.

Most owners have significant numbers of house slaves and servants, but Drummond is unusual in this manner to the extreme.

It’s not long before a display of wealth starts to appear in front of the house that is beyond staggering; one after the other ornate carriages arrive, pulled by beautiful horses decorated almost as richly as the two slave drivers who are always in attendance at such outings.

Drummond chooses the most handsome of his slaves and has them dressed in identical uniforms that make them look as though they should be serving the grandest nobility in Europe.

Only Tamar is different, wearing a simple dress that Drummond had made for her in Bridgetown.

Everyone knows their duties and the instant guests walk into the entrance hall they are waited upon like kings and queens.

And so they come, men with their frilly wives or mistresses, men alone, men with friends.

Mister Greig, the lawyer from Bridgetown, is included.

He handles the legal business of several plantations.

He’s the only person who speaks to me. His father emigrated from Ayr, so we often have what might be considered pleasant conversions about Ayrshire.

I’ve never told him I was present when seven men were hanged in the town by their fellow Covenanter as I suspect this might bring our pleasant conversations to an end.

Guests are shown into the dining room and gradually they sit at the table.

I stand near the door and observe. A few speeches are given and then the gorging and drinking begins.

The best of imported red and white wines from France and Spain are available, along with sherry, brandy, Madeira, whisky and spirits I’ve never heard of before coming to Barbados.

There’s also the all-too-familiar Kill-Devil.

I feel sick watching the scene before me.

Slaves stand around the room in their golden uniforms like marble statues, but now and again I see their eyes flicker to the table.

I can almost hear their empty stomachs grumbling above the noise of those eating.

The evening gets noisier, drunker and messier until Drummond stands and those around the table go quiet.

‘It is my great pleasure to entertain you all, for you are not just my friends but my family.’ This results in much cheering, clapping and banging on the table.

‘And families should take care of each other, rejoicing in good times and helping out in the bad. My nephew, Matthew Drummond’ – there are great cheers for this – ‘is making plans to come here from Scotland and take over the running of my plantation so that I may enjoy your company even more.’