SCOTS Project - www.scottishcorpus.ac.uk

Document : 520
Title    : Joseph Knight (extract 1)
Author(s): James Robertson

Copyright holder(s): Fourth Estate Publishers: With thanks to HarperCollins
Publishers Ltd. © James Robertson 2003
                     James Robertson

Text

Dundee, 16th November 1773
 
Ann Thomson’s sister Peggy was away home, and Ann was alone with her
daughter at last. She felt the silence cover her like the shawl that was
across her shoulders. She was sitting in one of two old chairs drawn up
opposite each other at the ingle. Outside the one-roomed cottage –
nothing; nobody going by the gable end on the muddy road, no voices
filtering through from the neighbouring buildings. Inside – just the
steady clicking of the fire. The spinning-wheels were pushed away for the
night. Her mother had gone to the box-bed set in the recess at the far end
of the room, closing the doors against draughts. Even the bairn was quiet,
giving out none of the tiny murmurs and squeaks that sometimes punctuated
her sleep; so quiet, in fact, that it made Ann nervous. She had brought the
crib in beside her, close to the fire where she knew never to leave it
unattended in case of spitting coals. It was good when the bairn slept so
well, but at least when she cried she demonstrated that she was without
question, alive. Ann had lost one child already, and could not bear the
thought of losing this one.

The cottage was in the Hilltown – a poor part of Dundee north and east of
the High Street – a seemingly indiscriminate scattering of narrow, one-
and two-roomed houses among a confusion of gardens and kailyards. All but a
very few of the roofs were thatched with straw or laid with turf divots,
and the stone lums poked through the thatch like ancient markers in a
kirkyard. On a windless night such as this, the reek of peat and coal which
they puffed out hung in the air like a shroud. 

In the cottage lived in by Ann, her mother and her child, tiny
thick-glassed windows admitted a minimum of light during the brief winter
days, and at night gave out only the faintest flickering indications of
life within. The floor was of trodden clay, damp and cold at this time of
year. The hearth, built of stone flags, was where their waking life was
centred. When the fire faded, Ann would bank it up with dross, then creep
into the box-bed with her mother, taking the bairn as well. On the two
nights Joseph had been here, Ann and he had made up another rough bed in
front of the fire, of plaids and blankets and all the clothes they could
fling on top, and had wrapped themselves together against the cold.

But Joseph was not here tonight. They had taken him away yesterday, back to
Ballindean. He had gone quietly enough, and Ann herself was calm now,
although her calmness surprised her. Yesterday she had been a raging
harridan, fighting to keep Joseph when the town constable, Sandy Pullar,
came with the warrant. In the Hilltown, officers of the law did not stand
on ceremony. Sandy Pullar had been squeezing his enormous bulk past the
door even as his knuckles rapped on it. The space behind him had been
filled by another two men.

‘Noo, lass,’ Pullar said, ‘let’s no hae ony bather. I’m here for
your man. It’s his name wrote here clear as ye can see, and if there’s
anither runawa Negro in Scotland cried Joseph Knight I’d like tae see ye
produce him.’

She leapt from her spinning-wheel at the other end of the room and planted
herself in front of Pullar, hands on hips, her head no higher than the
middle of his chest. ‘And I’d like tae see ye produce the piece o paper
that says ye can tak him awa,’ she said. ‘Shame on ye, Sandy, tae
sinder a man frae his wife and bairn! Shame on ye when he’s done naething
wrang. All he wants is tae be let alane. What has he done tae ye, that ye
come tae tak him awa like this?’

‘I am jist daein my duty,’ said Pullar, but she could see he did not
like it, and would have preferred a case of robbery or assault, where the
miscreants he came for tried to fight their way out and he could set his
men on them. But here there was no hint of a battle to come: only Ann’s
mother, hardly pausing at the wheel, as if, half-blind and hard of hearing
as she was, she did not understand the gravity of what was happening; and
Joseph standing behind her with the weak light of the window at his back,
cradling the bairn in his arms, saying to Ann he would go with them, there
was no sense in bones being broken since he would have to go willing or
unwilling. Ann saw Pullar fumbling in his tunic for the document, and she
waited till it was in his hand and then snatched it from him, while still
barring the way to him and his two brutes.

‘Noo, lass – ’ Pullar said again, but she cut him off with a scream.

‘Dinna you noo lass me, Sandy Pullar. Ye’ve kent me since we were
bairns. Ye’ll jist need tae bide whaur ye are till I read this oot –
this warrant, as it cries itsel. Hae ye read it yoursel? Dae ye ken the
filth ye’ve been cairryin in yer pooch? Weel, I’m a guid reader, Sandy,
sae I’ll mak it plain tae ye. “Sir John Wedderburn of Ballindean” –
a fine title for a man that sends ithers tae dae his dirty work –
“claims that Joseph Knight, whom he has hitherto entertained in the same
manner as he does his other servants” – aye, that’ll be the anes he
pays – “and means to continue to do so” – ha! – “and humbly
presumes that the law will not disappoint him of his service during life,
and the said Joseph Knight having within these two days past packed up his
clothes and threatened to absent himself from his service, although the
petitioner never gave him manumission or promised to release him from his
slavery, the petitioner prays that the Justices of Peace of Perthshire
grant warrant to apprehend the person of the said Joseph Knight and bring
him before them for examination upon the facts as set forth” – God save
us, whit facts, Sandy? There’s nae facts here, it’s aw clash and
claivers. It’s a pack o lees.’

Sandy moved to the right to get past her. She blocked his way.

‘My man has as muckle right as ony man tae leave his maister’s
service,’ she said. ‘Mair right, since he was forced intae it.’

‘Annie…’ Pullar and Joseph both said it simultaneously. She ignored
them both.

‘Whit kind o country is this that ye can come and tak a man back intae
bondage, awa frae his family, even awa frae Scotland if Sir John Wedderburn
wants tae send him back tae Jamaica?’

‘That’s no for me tae say, lass,’ Sandy said, stepping to the left.
She blocked him again, turned to the signatures at the foot of the
warrant.

‘Weel, I’ll tell ye,’ she said. ‘It’s a country whaur big glaikit
chiels like you dae whit they’re tellt by the justices, and the justices
that sign warrants are nane but Sir John Wedderburn’s cronies and fellow
slave drivers. Justices! Their notion o justice is jist whitever will keep
them fat and rich on the sweat and blood o ithers. Here, ye can tak back
your trash.’

She thrust the warrant at the constable and stood daring him to shift her.
But then she became aware that Sandy was no longer looking at her, and she
turned, and Joseph had come up beside them and was holding the bairn to her
saying she must be strong, he would have to go, she knew what they had to
do, they had discussed it often and she would see him again soon enough.
And he kissed the bairn and put her into Ann’s arms and then he kissed
Ann on both cheeks and once on her mouth and turned to Pullar and his men
and stepped between them and out of the door. And all the fight went from
her and she clutched the bairn to her and followed them out, tears
streaming down her face, and she shouted down the road at him, ‘Come
back, Joseph Knight!’ And the neighbours at their doors were hissing at
the procession, and though most of them hissed at Sandy Pullar, some, she
knew, hissed at Joseph Knight, and Joseph turned and raised his hand,
without a smile, and called, “Be strong, Annie,” and then he was
walking again between the constables, and turned the end of the street and
was out of sight. And when she went back into the house, her mother’s
wheel was clacking away as ever, and without looking up she said, ‘Annie,
I’m wae for ye and Joseph, and nae man should be treated in that way, but
ye mairrit on a black man and ye maun thole the consequences. Sit ye back
doun, and we’ll spin a way for tae get him back.’ And Ann, her face
still wet and her tongue unable to speak, put the bairn in the crib, and
took her place at her own wheel.

The room was dark except by the fire. Ann had had candles lit earlier, but
after her sister Peggy had left she had put them out, and now the fire’s
red glow was enough for her thoughts. Peggy had been there until half an
hour ago. It was she who had said, when the first bairn died, that it was
better, if they were to go, that they went sooner and not later. ‘That
way ye dinna hae time tae grow ower fond o them.’ She had said this as
one who should know, having lost three of her own, but Ann believed it was
not the bereaved mother who spoke but something outside, beyond grief: the
need to keep despair at bay. For how could you grow more fond of a bairn
than you were when it first slid out of you, mewling and peching and bloody
and hungry for life? How could you love it more than the first time you
took it to your breast and it sucked the milk from you? Impossible – and
yet you did. The love became something solid and immovable, it grew with
the tiny life, and so Peggy was right also, in a way. Yet there was not a
day went by, not an hour when she held her new bairn, that Ann did not
mourn the dead one, that was born and died at Ballindean.

Except for that other one, the new bairn was bonnier than any Ann had ever
seen: a wee white lassie with a flat nose and full lips and an astonishing
shock of curly black hair. They had called her Sarah, but Ann seldom named
her; thought of her as a small unknowable being still to grow into herself,
still to be sure of an identity. She had noticed at once how, even when
they had agreed on the name, Joseph had shied away from using it, and now
she had caught that habit. A name, she understood, was something most
people took for granted; but for Joseph a name, the very act of naming,
carried a strange and ponderous weight.

Peggy was away back to the man that had given her the three sick bairns,
the man that would not come into this house because of the ‘blackie’.
Peggy’s man Chae was a big glaik from Forfar, often half drunk and always
wholly daft. He harboured the suspicion that the blackie was ‘unco, no
chancy’, and he did not have the manners or sense to keep it to himself.
‘Auld Clootie!’ Ann had spat at him, a while back. ‘The Deil! How no
jist come oot and say it if that’s whit ye think? Dae ye want tae see his
cloven foot? Awa an hide ahint a dyke if ye’re feart frae him. But dinna
come here when he’s awa –’ she had paused significantly ‘– for he
kens when ye hae been and he can pit a curse on ye whether he’s here or
no.’ Chae had not been near them since.

Ann’s mother was strong-minded but physically wearing out. For years,
since before her husband’s early death, she had been at the
flax-spinning, and now, though her eyesight was failing, she spun with a
thrawn determination, as if her life depended on it. But she spun not for
herself but for Annie and her bairn. All day, the two women sat at their
wheels with piles of flax beside them, spinning it into yarn, and every
week the yarn merchant’s agent came with more flax, and took their
spindles away to market. The agent, a Fife man called Thomas Ritchie,
weighed the flax he brought and the yarn he took away, and made sure, as he
did with all his spinners, that his master was getting back what he gave
out, allowing for a certain amount of necessary wastage. He entered the
figures in a ledger, and each week he handed over what the women were due
for their labours. It was never very much.

The yarn merchant was also the landlord, and he deducted the rent of the
cottage from what he paid them. Ritchie could also give them credit to buy
cheese, coals, oatmeal and so forth from certain traders, and this debt
diminished at a painfully slow rate and was always topped up before it was
cleared. The tick system was what enabled them to eat and stay warm, but it
also bound them to Ritchie and his master, especially at a time, as now,
when linen prices were depressed.

Ritchie was not an unkind man, and he had known Mrs Thomson for thirty
years, but, as he reminded them when the quality of her yarn was not as it
should be, but uneven and knotty, his master was not much interested in
charity. In her best days, ten or twenty years ago, Mrs Thomson had earned
as much as four shillings a week, but the effects of old age and the fall
in prices meant that they now struggled to bring in that amount between
them. Ann’s mother had been spinning all her life, and would die at the
wheel if not in her bed, and sometimes it seemed to Ann that she herself
would be spinning into eternity.

Peggy came by two or three times a week. The sisters had had a good laugh
at the spell Joseph cast over Chae. ‘He’s a fool,’ said Peggy of her
husband. ‘It maks it easy tae rule him but there’s nae muckle company
tae be had frae a man like thon.’ Peggy was not afraid of Joseph and it
was clear that on these visits to Ann she was happy to get away from Chae
and girn about him. This night, she had claimed to come out of sisterly
concern in their time of trial. But whatever she said, it was never long
before she turned the conversation round to her own woes: Chae’s
drinking, his stupidity, the long hours they both laboured, she at the
spinning, Chae at his handloom weaving coarse linen from her yarn. She
complained about their lack of money, though with no family they were
better off than many, or would have been if Chae had not poured most of his
earnings down his thrapple. And though Peggy always brought something when
she came – a poke of tea, a lump of cheese, a pint of gin – she brought
only what she could get a good portion of back again before she left. Never
a blanket or a bonnet for the bairn, and never siller.

Ann tried not to resent her sister’s resentment. It was hard for her, to
see the bairn healthy and growing when she had none of her own. But her
situation was common – even among the gentry as many bairns died as
lived. Tonight, with the trouble over Joseph, Ann had felt doubly oppressed
by Peggy’s constant moaning. The silence of the night was a blessed
relief. How peaceful it was to be alone with the bairn, leaning into the
warmth of the fire, and thinking of Joseph nine miles away at Ballindean.

Oh, she could be fierce when she chose, the women of Dundee were famous for
it, she could rant and roar with the best of them. But the thing that had
fuelled her rage most, the need to protect her family, was also perhaps
what now brought her calm. She could hear Joseph’s voice, against the
hiss of the coals in the fire: ‘Be strong, Annie.’ It was not what she
had wanted to hear. She loved him. She had wanted to hear his love, but she
knew how hard it was for Joseph to give his feelings up to her. Still, she
trusted him. She always had. But sometimes she wondered, did he trust her?

He had told her many times what he would do when this time came. He had
worked it out long before he took off from Ballindean. He would act the way
the Wedderburns expected him to act, but when he did run, he would run not
to hide, but to be found. More than a year ago he had read in the paper
about Somerset, the slave in England, and how the judge there had said he
could not be forced to go back to Virginia against his will. Somerset
therefore had become free, and the onlooking blacks of London packed into
the public gallery had celebrated that freedom with cheers and handshakes
all round, and later had held a great dinner at which they had drunk the
health of Lord Mansfield. But Joseph had read the reports carefully and
repeatedly and had seen that it was only the master’s right to take
Somerset out of the country that had been overthrown, and that if the
master had not being going back to America himself the case would not have
arisen.

Ann had said, ‘Whit use is it if Wedderburn canna send ye awa but he can
keep ye frae me?’ So Joseph had read again, and he had talked to some of
the servants about the case, and from them he had heard of something that
had occurred, right there in Perthshire, only a year or so earlier. A slave
woman had run away from her master, and when the master had sought to have
her apprehended, the sheriff depute of the county had thrown out the
petition. Joseph had latched on to this information like a terrier. This
was judgment of a different order. The Sheriff Depute of Perthshire was a
man called John Swinton, and it was around him that Joseph had built his
hopes.

Since then they had learned enough about the machinery of the law to know
what would happen next. Joseph would be brought before the justices and be
given a chance to state his case against the petition of his master. The
justices, being the friends and accomplices of Wedderburn, would find
against him. But – and this Ann had discovered by careful inquiry in
Dundee – they would have to make a statement of their decision, and they
would have to supply a copy of it to Joseph. With that in his possession,
he could then make his own petition against what they had ‘decerned’.
And the man to whom he could appeal was the sheriff depute of the county,
John Swinton.

But all that was in the future. How long Joseph must remain at Ballindean,
how long before the sheriff heard their petition, these were questions to
which she had no answer. She had the name of a lawyer in Perth, a Mr Andrew
Davidson, who could draw up the document for them, but she had no means of
paying him. Joseph had sixpence a week in ‘pocket money’ from
Wedderburn, and had been saving what he could of it for months, but this
amounted to no more than a pound or two. The work done by Ann and her
mother was barely enough to cover their weekly needs, and most of what they
earned came in the form of tick. She had to hope that the lawyer would see
the rightness of their cause, and work for a nominal fee, or for promise of
future payment. If he did not, she did not see how they could reach to the
ear of John Swinton.

She wondered again why she was so calm. It was not in her nature to be
passive, to accept fate. Even when she had got the place at Ballindean,
through a series of interviews that led her from Mr Ritchie, who had put in
a word for her, to a dressmaker cousin of Mr Ritchie’s master, and from
her to Lady Wedderburn’s housekeeper (‘Can ye spin, lass? The mistress
is maist particular, and I agree wi her, that the maids here shall spin
when the rest o the day’s darg is done.’) – even then she had not
reckoned, as other young women in her position might have, that she had
arrived, that she only had to do what she was told and life would be a more
than tolerable burden ever after. A burden was a burden and she didn’t
believe a body should ever grow to like it, though it might have to be
borne. And then she had first got sight of Joseph, and she had known why
she had come to the big house out on the Perth road: she had come for him.

The other maids, those that weren’t feared of him at least, also tipped
their eyes at him and she knew she had to stay ahead of them. There was
talk of wild neger lust and the prodigious attributes of African men, but
none of that fitted with what she saw. She saw a quiet, deep, thoughtful
man, not coarse at all; handsome, clean, soft-voiced and smooth, but with
power in the way his body moved; a man whose first line of defence was
solemnity, who did not readily open himself to anyone; whose self-reliance
seemed a sign of both strength and vulnerability.

Maybe she was also attracted just because he was so different from some of
the other menservants, who were crude and leering around the maids when
they got a chance, always trying for a fondle or a kiss, whereas Joseph
stood off and was cool almost to the point of rudeness, making out that he
was not interested in their favours. But surely, she thought, any healthy
man would be interested in bonnie Annie Thomson – unless, as somebody
whispered once, he was his master’s very personal servant.

Half the lassies didn’t understand that insinuation. Ann understood but
didn’t believe it – not of Joseph, not of John Wedderburn. The whisper
was there, she was sure, only because there was a mystery in Joseph, in his
blackness, in his history, in his unique standing in the house, which made
him both less and more than the other servants, both closer to and more
utterly removed from his master. Ann saw all these things in him, but she
also something else that made her want to touch him: she saw an aching
loneliness.

The story was that he had been plucked from ignorance and savagery by Sir
John, had been hand-picked to be raised from field bondage to a position of
trust and safety. But Ann, never having benefited from charity, had an
ingrained suspicion of such tales. She did not believe that many people,
least of all the rich, did things out of the goodness of their hearts. If
Joseph had been plucked from anything, it was not from ignorance but from
his home, not from savagery but from his family. She understood this
because the gentry used the same kind of terms to describe people like
her.

The fire was dying away. She should not waste any more coals, but she
reached for a couple more and – quietly, in case her mother was still
awake – laid them on to coax a little more heat into the room. The bairn
would wake soon anyway, hungry; she’d be as well sitting up a while
longer, to feed her, and then the pair of them would slip into the
box-bed.

She thought again of Joseph, how she had played her own game for him. While
the others fluttered and flirted around him, or were offended by his
aloofness, she made herself be serious and quietly friendly. She found ways
of getting him to help her with this or that task, asked his opinion and
acted on it, did him small acts of kindness without seeming to expect
thanks. Gradually she began to win his confidence. Once, as she was walking
to Inchture on an errand for the housekeeper, Joseph appeared on the road
behind her, caught up and escorted her there and back. They said very
little then, but she recognised the statement that his silent company
represented.

After that, when they could not be away from the house, they tried to find
secluded corners of it where they could talk. There was little time for
servants to be at leisure – certainly none was allowed for in the pages
of Lady Wedderburn’s household book – but they would sit together at
night for a few minutes, before bed, and he would tell her things about
Jamaica; things about Sir John and his brothers, and the terrible cruelties
he had seen, and the kind, harsh, feeble, strong, miserable, humorous,
brave, bitter people that the slaves were. They were people just like all
of them there at Ballindean, he said, good and bad in unequal, changeable
portions, leading lives that the white people in the great houses never
even knew about. That, too, was like Ballindean, like anywhere – there
were the great and rich and there was the rest of the world and a gulf like
the ocean lay between the two.

Joseph told her about that also, the ocean he had crossed two times in his
life, once when he was brought to Scotland and the other, earlier time when
he was taken from Africa in the slave ship. She had heard of slave ships
but nothing prepared her for what he described. She listened, appalled, and
her hand went out to his and held it while he spoke, and at the end of that
long speech it happened, the thing she had longed for, he reached across
and kissed her, and she felt a surge of something – love perhaps,
happiness, even, but now she thought it was mainly triumph. She, Annie
Thomson, had reached Joseph Knight. But that was only part of it. There was
fear in there too. She felt that she was doing something both right and
wrong, both good and dangerous: she knew that to act in any way that set
herself in conflict with the rich and powerful could destroy her, and that
she was about to condemn herself to years, perhaps a lifetime, of trouble.
For she knew that her intention to make Joseph hers would mean having to
take him away from the Wedderburns.

And there was another obstacle: MacRoy, the dominie from Dundee, who came
to give Joseph lessons and who seemed, for a man as unlikely as the one she
had opened the door to that first New Year’s Day, to have a remarkable
skill at keeping in with Sir John. Aeneas MacRoy tilted his bullet head at
her and all but pawed the ground in his demonstrations of affection, and
she recognised his power, and that she should not fall foul of him. She did
not encourage him but she did not discourage him either, and that was how
he fell into his delusions, that she might be his, and that was how the
three of them were all through the summer of ’72, jostling and testing
and swarming with desires and jealousies.

That was the summer, too, that Joseph read of Somerset, the English slave,
in the newspaper, and began to fix his mind on becoming a Scottish
Somerset. And then one day it became clear that the time for prevarication
was over, for Ann fell pregnant and Joseph went to John Wedderburn and told
him the bairn was his, and he wished to marry Ann. All the faces in the
house shifted as if a wind had blown across them. John Wedderburn looked
outraged and Lady Margaret, also pregnant, looked pale, and Aeneas
MacRoy’s face seemed to go darker than Joseph’s, thunder dark. Ann
thought he might roar out of the house and never come back. She hoped that
would happen but it did not – the reverse happened, MacRoy spoke at
length to Sir John and soon was winding down his school and had a room to
himself at Ballindean and Lady Margaret began to bring forth the bairns of
her own that would, in a few years, populate a schoolroom presided over by
the dour Maister MacRoy. Meanwhile Ann grew bigger and John Wedderburn,
since it was his slave that had put her into that condition, decided that
he was under an obligation not to cast her out, at least not till she had
had the child. But he could not and did not sanction a marriage to make
good what could not be undone, and this he made clear to both her and to
Joseph. They wondered about this, since Joseph was now made into a
Christian, and she, being a Scotswoman from birth, was already one – they
wondered what it was that made John Wedderburn set himself against their
becoming man and wife. Now, though, looking back from the fireside, Ann
could see quite clearly that John Wedderburn understood what she was about.
She saw that he understood the feud that existed between them, that they
were engaged in a struggle over the possession of his slave.

And then the bairn came, and it was half Joseph and half her, and she
thought that the Wedderburns would have to let them marry, for the bairn
was such complete evidence of their union, but it died within a day. John
Wedderburn extended his sense of obligation to providing a coffin and a
funeral for their bairn, thus neatly disposing of the evidence, and then
– and she detected the hand of Lady Margaret here – she herself was
disposed of, given the wages due to her to the end of the year and sent on
the back of a carrier’s cart home to her mother in Dundee.

In this the Wedderburns showed how little they estimated poor folk like
her, if they thought that by dismissing her they had heard the last of her.
For Joseph had by then become a reader and a writer, and she too had those
skills, so there was an exchange of notes between them, and then a meeting
in the woods at the back of Ballindean, followed, as winter set in, by more
in Dundee, where Joseph had managed to persuade his master to send him for
training with a barber. She saw now the interpretation that the Wedderburns
were bound to place on these liaisons, which at first went undetected in
spite of the suspicions of Aeneas MacRoy – how inevitably they confirmed
Sir John and his lady in their view that Ann Thomson was a person of no
breeding, indecent passions and habitual deceit. What other kind of woman
could so take advantage of Joseph as to persuade him to go with her to
Edinburgh, where in March they were joined in matrimonial union by a
seceder clergyman of Leith? What else could this be but a pretext on her
part, a scheme for making herself comfortable for life?

And the proof of that, for the Wedderburns, came in what happened next.
Back came Joseph to Ballindean, without apology for his absence, now
claiming that he had a wife to support who should be brought back into
their service, or at least that Joseph should get a cottage on the estate
where they might live as one as God had joined them together. And John
Wedderburn was affronted by the hypocrisy and treachery of his slave, and
refused to countenance the idea.

Joseph, Ann thought, might just have had a chance of success had John
Wedderburn alone had the decision. But behind Wedderburn stood his wife,
with whom he discussed all matters that were not strictly about the
plantations or other business. The Lady Margaret would have settled it. Ann
detested her. She detested her because she was only two or three years
older than herself yet behaved as if she had been born to be mistress of a
house like Ballindean. Which, of course, she had. She was fine-looking,
soft-spoken, beautifully dressed and always correct. Ann’s hands were
already coarse, the hands of a spinner, a skivvy, a scudge. Her bonnie,
unpainted face would soon begin to acquire care lines and her body would
start to crumble from hard and ceaseless toil. Ann’s own mother was not
much over fifty, but she was an old, done woman, worn out by decades of
work. At fifty, Lady Margaret would still be carrying herself like a queen.
Ann’s daughter Sarah would grow up to be haggard before her time, but the
Wedderburns’ daughters would be roses, they would bloom in the presence
of rich suitors and go off to be the mistresses of great houses of their
own. It was not right, it was not fair. And she, meanwhile, was not even
allowed to keep the man she had chosen.

She spat into the fire. It gave an answering spit, and she spat at it
again. She loathed the Wedderburns and everything about them. Behind their
every seemingly charitable or upright deed she saw a twisted, hateful
motive. Even Joseph seemed to think less badly of them than she. She had
had as little time for the idea of her going back, of making herself
beholden to them, as they had. She had been willing to go along with
Joseph’s request, but only because she was sure it would be rejected. She
had known with a certain fatal feeling in the depths of her, that was both
despair and contentment, that their options were narrowing and narrowing,
till only two would be available to them: either that she and Joseph must
part as if they had never met, never loved, never made a bairn, never
married; or that he must walk away from his slavery. It was only a matter
of time because, weeks before their marriage in Leith, she had known she
was pregnant again.

And it was that, the bairn, alive and with her now, that made her calm.
Rage and madness would not help the bairn to keep her father. The forces
ranged against them were too strong for rage, too rational for madness. She
had to be calm. She had to be patient.


This work is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

The SCOTS Project and the University of Glasgow do not necessarily endorse,
support or recommend the views expressed in this document.

Information about document and author:

Text
Text audience
Adults (18+): General public: Males: Females: Audience size: N/A

Text details
Method of composition: Wordprocessed
Year of composition: 2002
Word count: 5946

Text medium
Book: 
Text publication details
Published: Publisher: Fourth Estate
Publication year: 2003
Place of publication: London
ISBN/ISSN: 0-00-715024-5
Edition: First
Part of larger text: Contained in: Joseph Knight, by James Robertson - Extract
Page numbers: 203-216

Text setting
Leisure/entertainment: 
Text type
Novel: 

Author
Author details
Author id: 105
Forenames: James
Surname: Robertson
Gender: Male
Decade of birth: 1950
Educational attainment: University
Age left school: 17
Upbringing/religious beliefs: Protestantism
Occupation: Writer
Place of birth: Sevenoaks
Region of birth: Kent
Country of birth: England
Place of residence: Newtyle
Region of residence: W Angus
Residence CSD dialect area: Ags
Country of residence: Scotland
Father's occupation: Sales Director
Father's place of birth: London
Father's country of birth: England
Mother's occupation: Primary Teacher
Mother's place of birth: Leatherhead
Mother's region of birth: Surrey
Mother's country of birth: England

Languages:
Language: English
Speak: Yes
Read: Yes
Write: Yes
Understand: Yes
Circumstances: General use, work and home
Language: French
Speak: Yes
Read: Yes
Write: No
Understand: Yes
Circumstances: Occasional use, work and leisure (holidays)
Language: Gaelic; Scottish Gaelic
Speak: No
Read: Yes
Write: No
Understand: No
Circumstances: Academic, creative
Language: Scots
Speak: Yes
Read: Yes
Write: Yes
Understand: Yes
Circumstances: General use, work and home