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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 (#ulink_a976ffc4-57fe-5d25-afad-d2f4cd080175)
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 (#ulink_29d3c5c2-cd37-512c-9081-5057a7d1f935)
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 (#ulink_e28df445-4a49-5b6c-ae2b-8afaccbb4179)
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 (#ulink_9cb9c02a-8a12-5477-b19b-7ef6e16bee58)
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 (#ulink_7c4525eb-355f-5c0c-80c2-948eccac4680)
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.
