The Lorimer Legacy (16 page)

As well as a garden, there was a building. ‘That's Bristow Great House,' said Brinsley, noticing that his aunt was staring at it.

Margaret could not help laughing at the grandiloquence
of the name – and not just because it was a roofless ruin now. Surely, she thought, it could never have been particularly imposing. There were only two storeys, raised from the ground to allow a dark storehouse underneath, and only three rooms on each floor. Brinsley was able to provide an explanation.

‘It wasn't called a Great House because it was specially great,' he said. ‘The main house of every plantation was called that. They were never built high, because of the danger from hurricanes. And they never had many rooms, because the people who lived there spent almost all their time outside.'

Margaret could see that the verandahs which encircled the building on both levels must once have been cool and attractive places, although by now the wood had rotted and the whole area was fouled by bird droppings. She was curious enough to walk towards the stone steps.

‘There were other buildings separate from the house,' Brinsley told her. ‘The slave quarters on one side and the kitchen quarters on the other. My best friend lives there, in the old kitchen. And there was a bakehouse and a laundry, although they've fallen down now.'

By this time Margaret had gone up the steps and picked her way carefully across the crumbling floor of the verandah. Inside the house and so protected from the weather, the rooms on the lower storey were in good condition. What must have been the drawing room was of a noble size. It was possible, with a little imagination, to furnish it with polished wood and gleaming silver and people it with the rich plantation owners of a century earlier, gossiping and flirting with all the formal style of a closed society.

A slave based society, Margaret reminded herself, refusing to admit sentimentality. She moved into a smaller room, and stopped in surprise. Brinsley, she realized,
was watching her reaction with a pride which made clear what had happened.

The room – once perhaps a study – had been cleaned and furnished. The furnishings were shabby and unsafe -a rug that had probably been thrown out by Lydia as being too disgracefully threadbare, and tables which had almost certainly been made by Brinsley himself with an inexpert touch. But the floor and the fluted panelling of the walls had been polished until they shone with a red richness.

‘It's the thing about mahogany,' said Brinsley behind her. ‘You can let it get damp and dirty for years and years, but then all you have to do is to rub hard and it looks like this. This is our room, Kate's and mine. We don't tell anyone about it.'

He was giving her a warning, but Margaret had no intention of betraying secrets. She examined more closely the designs carved into the doorposts. There was no doubt at all, now that she could see them clearly, that the pattern was the same as that used in the building of Brinsley House in Bristol. Margaret had recognized the name of Bristow as soon as Lydia first mentioned it, and this small detail of construction confirmed her belief that she was standing in the house which Samuel Lorimer's younger brother, Matthew, had built at the end of the eighteenth century.

‘Did your parents ever consider coming to live here?' she asked.

Brinsley shook his head. ‘It wouldn't have done,' he said. ‘I mean, I never asked them, but I could see why they wouldn't want to. No one's lived here since Massa Matty died, because the plantation was run by overseers after that. Massa Matty seems to have been quite decent, from the stories the old ladies tell about him; but all the same, he was a slave-owner. It wouldn't be right for a
pastor to live like a slave-owner. That's really why Kate and I don't talk about this room when we're at home, in case Father feels he has to stop us coming. I think he tries to pretend that the house isn't really here at all. That's why he's let a strip of jungle grow up all round it, when everywhere else it's been cut down.'

There was still a good deal that Margaret did not understand about the situation. Had John Junius Lorimer managed to conceal this part of his possessions in the same way that he had concealed the rubies, and with the same intention – to provide a legacy for one of his children who was still a minor at the time of his ruin? Well, it was a question which should be put to Ralph, not to Brinsley, who from the tone of his remarks appeared to have no suspicion that any member of the Lorimer family had ever owned property so near to Hope Valley. She returned instead to the subject which had originally brought them on this tour of inspection.

‘Where do you play your cricket?' she asked.

Brinsley led the way outside again, and round to the side of the house. A young man who had been sitting in the shade of an ackee tree rose to his feet as they approached. Older than Brinsley, and more powerfully built, his face displayed the same kind of alert intelligence as did the white boy's. He was very much lighter in skin than most of the inhabitants of Hope Valley, but his smile was just as broad and cheerful as theirs when Brinsley introduced them.

‘Aunt Margaret, this is my friend Duke Mattison. Father taught him to play cricket at the same time as me, and he's a rattling good bowler. He can spin the ball and make it break any way he chooses. Show her, Duke.'

They had constructed a practice net, levelling the ground and weaving palm leaves together into screens which would prevent the ball from travelling too far when
it was hit. She watched the demonstration for a few moments, smiling at the energy with which the two boys defied the oppressive atmosphere. All their concentration was on the practice, so that they hardly noticed when she said goodbye, assuring them that she could find her own way back. And Margaret herself was thoughtful as she passed through the frontier strip of jungle and into the cultivated part of the old plantation. How had it happened, she wondered, that the Bristow estate had once more come under the control of a Lorimer?

Direct questions provoke direct answers, but not necessarily truthful ones.

‘Tell me how the Bristow plantation came into your hands,' Margaret asked her brother when they were next alone together. ‘I have been very puzzled, trying to think what could have happened, for I can't remember Papa ever mentioning it at all.'

‘He can hardly have been aware that he had any claim on it,' said Ralph, ‘Certainly in those last troubled months, when he had so many other worries, he would not have given it a thought. I've seen some of the old papers relating to the finances of the plantation. The overseer wrote several times to our grandfather, Alexander, who inherited it from his uncle Matthew, to point out that the land was no longer profitable – that instead of money being sent back to England, it was necessary for the owner to supply more capital in order that new crops might be planted and more efficient methods of working developed. It appears that Alexander never answered the letters. With the bank and the shipping line
to occupy his time, I can see that he would have little interest in a property so far away which threatened only to drain his resources.'

‘If Papa knew so little about it, how did it descend to you? Does William know? And the Receiver who had to satisfy the creditors after the collapse of the bank – was he aware that Papa had this asset?'

‘You are describing a plantation which has been well cultivated for twenty years when you talk about an asset, Margaret. When I first came out here and saw it, I can assure you it was only a liability. It could not have been sold because no one would have bought it. It was a wilderness, requiring an investment of much time and labour before any reward could be expected. If our community has succeeded in turning it into a profitable venture, it's because they gave their labour free in the beginning, expecting no payment until harvest time.'

‘But even so –'

Ralph interrupted her with a laugh. ‘It's all a coincidence, Margaret. I'm sorry if it makes the story seem untidy, but it's only the position of the Bristow estate which has led by accident to this new connection with the Lorimers. It could just as easily have been the property of some other family which lay abandoned here, and I should still have applied for it because it lay beside our own boundary. So much good land was neglected, and for so many years, that in the end the government took powers to reallocate it. So this plantation was taken away from the Lorimers because they had ceased to fulfil the obligations of owners. It's by chance, not by inheritance, that it has fallen into the hands of another Lorimer. You can imagine that I have no wish to be associated with the reputation of a slave-owner, so I'm sure I may count on your discretion in that respect. I've never described the past history of the plantation even to Lydia or the
children – and it seems that our great-great-uncle has been remembered here solely as Massa Matty, so that my name is not a problem.'

‘Does Bristow then belong to you personally, or to the Hope Valley community as a whole?'

Until that moment Margaret had had no reason to doubt anything Ralph had told her, surprising though she might find it. Was it her imagination now that made her suspect a reluctance on her brother's part to answer this last question?

‘The deeds legally are in my name. That is a formality, an administrative convenience. It's easier for the authorities to deal with one owner, just as it's easier for one owner to manage an estate with the greatest efficiency. But all the profits of our crops –'

He was repeating now what Lydia had already told her, and Margaret allowed her attention to wander. She was remembering a conversation a good many years ago, when Alexa had asked what legacies John Junius Lorimer had left to his children. Margaret's answer then had been an honest one; it was true that her father had no power to bequeath anything to anyone in his will, for at the moment of his death all his known possessions had been sequestered. And yet now, twenty-six years later, William owned a shipping line, Ralph controlled a large plantation, and waiting in England for Alexa to collect was a fortune in rubies. The children of the rich, it seemed, were not always as effectively ruined by disaster as the children of the poor. Only Margaret herself lacked any visible sign that she had been brought up as the daughter of a wealthy man, and she wasted no time on pitying herself for that. The capital from which she drew her livelihood was her professional qualification, and she felt all the more pride in it for having achieved her success without help.

That evening, just before sunset, it began to rain with a noise and unexpectedness which drew Margaret on to the verandah to watch. Even the worst thunderstorm she could remember in England had never been as forceful as this – the water seemed to be not so much falling to the ground as propelled to it under pressure. As densely as fog it obliterated the hills; as viciously as a bad-tempered child it bent the leaves of trees and climbing vines downwards and battered their blossoms to the ground. It drummed on the roof of the verandah and poured off it in a cascade to flood the ground below. It turned the main track along the valley into a river and surged down it like a tidal wave. Margaret found the sight frightening until she realized that the people of Hope Valley had had years enough to learn what precautions to take. This was why the church stood on its raised platform. This was why every house, from the meanest to the most substantial, was lifted from the ground on piles of bricks or rocks. This was why each one had a steeply pitched roof of corrugated iron to divert any cloudburst to the ground.

The sound of the beating rain softened for a moment as though the downpour had exhausted its energy. But then for a second time it hurled itself downwards, this time splashing into the verandah so that Margaret was forced to step backwards. Marvelling that Ralph and Lydia should not find such violence extraordinary, she went back into the house and, long after the rain had stopped, lay awake listening to the dripping of water off leaves and roofs. Yet next morning she awoke to sunshine again. The ground was steaming and the humidity so high that each breath seemed an effort; but the new day's blossoms were as bright as though there had been no massacre in the darkness and the trees and shrubs were bright with health. The valley had used the rain and already had forgotten it. A new day had begun.

Sun after storm; it was a contrast typical of the island. Margaret felt something of the same guilt which had prompted Ralph to devote his life to these people whose ancestors had been chained by early Lorimers and their captains into the reeking holds of the Middle Passage. To find the people of the valley still sullen and resentful in their dealings with white men would not have surprised but rather satisfied her, giving her the excuse to feel vicariously apologetic. But men and women alike were friendly, always smiling. Ralph criticized them for laziness, but to Margaret it was a miracle that they should be happy against the heritage of their history. She was as little able as Lydia to share Ralph's dogmatic beliefs, but if the Christian faith were responsible for this sunny contentment of spirit, the pastor had reason to be satisfied with his work.

On her first Sunday in the village Margaret put on her best clothes for church and found that everyone else had done the same. The number of men in the congregation was not great, but every woman in the valley must have been there, each wearing a severe straw hat and a cotton jacket and skirt laundered to crisp cleanliness. The children, too, had been scrubbed until they shone. Small boys who tumbled about all week almost naked were transformed by shirts and shorts into little black angels, whilst their sisters wore frilly white dresses and sashes, with ribbons in their frizzy hair. The hymn tunes were new to Margaret, although the words were in many cases familiar, but they were sung so beautifully that she was content to listen and to marvel at the sweet sadness of the harmonies.

To hear Ralph preach was another surprise. In England she had known him best in his moments of doubt and unhappiness. But the confidence which he felt in his life here tumbled out in words which were shouted rather
than spoken. Margaret remembered that Lydia had recognized in her husband the man who might have been a businessman like his father, but she herself was suddenly reminded of the way in which John Junius, at the time of family prayers, had been accustomed to give God his orders for the day. Ralph – though ostensibly acting as a channel in the other direction, transmitting the word of the Lord to his hearers – was his father's son in this way as well.